Optimism about climate change is misplaced
Steven Pinker’s encouragement that we trust in progress does disservice, say Daniel Horen Greenford and Corey Lesk.
Montreal native and McGill alumnus Steven Pinker is returning home this week to promote his latest book, Enlightenment Now.
In his previous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker argues that violence has declined globally across human history. Now, he expands this celebration of progress driven by Enlightenment values of reason and science to virtually all aspects of life, concluding with optimism for the future. Using a litany of data-driven figures and impartial reasoning, his mission is to banish what he sees as an illusion of global bleakness.
Pinker is right to draw our attention to recent worldwide victories in health and well-being. But we are dismayed to see a critical weakness in Pinker’s discussion of the most perilous downside to such progress. As members of a generation born into accelerating disruption of environmental systems, we face the possible erosion of our well-being by climate change and ecosystem collapse within our lifetimes.
As young scientists, we are eager to consider any new synthesis that is cause for hope, but find Pinker’s chapter on the environment disappointingly superficial. He is confident that new technology will allow humanity to continue its progress indefinitely by enabling economic growth with shrinking environmental impact. But he depends heavily on a small circle of commentators mainly comprising signatories of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Pinker’s enthusiasm for this message hinges on a disregard for decades of climate, sustainability and ecology research that illuminate the risks we take by not mitigating our impact immediately.
For example, Pinker argues that we are already on the path to managing climate change through technological advancement, citing the levelling-off of domestic greenhouse gas emissions in wealthy countries in recent decades. In reality, trade statistics show that these countries simply exported their emissions along with their manufacturing to countries like China, where emissions ballooned.
Pinker commends the national emissions reductions pledges of the 2015 Paris Agreement, and we applaud them as an important symbolic gesture. But virtually all scientists agree that we must limit warming to 2 degrees C to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, such as catastrophic sea-level rise and global agricultural failure. The reality is that the Paris pledges are dangerously insufficient since they set the planet on course for double the 2 degrees C limit. Pinker supposes that we can make up the gap by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and replacing it with sunreflecting aerosols. However the effectiveness and safety of these technologies are dubious.
Beyond climate change, Pinker shelves concerns about biodiversity loss and its potential to dismantle vital ecosystems like forests and marine fisheries. He overlooks the troves of science that demonstrate how diversity enhances the productivity and resilience of these systems, and how close we may be coming to mass extinction that will jeopardize the biophysical foundation of our civilization. These risks could compound with climate change in ways that we can hardly predict.
We consider it much more scientific and enlightened to deeply question the status quo defended in Enlightenment Now and seek to avoid these risks. As an influential public intellectual, Pinker has done us a grave disservice. His encouragement to trust in progress could march us off an environmental precipice.
Many thinkers are offering deeper hope than does Pinker. For example, Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, presents a model for continued improvement in global prosperity that embraces the integrity of the environment as an essential goal. Raworth sums up her motivation neatly in three sentences: “Don’t be an optimist if it makes you relax. Don’t be a pessimist if it makes you give up. Be an activist and ask, what can I do?”