In 1990, from four billion miles away, the space probe Voyager One took a photo of a barely visible pale blue dot floating in space—our planet Earth. As Carl Sagan observed in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Random House, 1994), all the heroes and villains, saints and sinners, warriors, and peacemakers of our global human history have played out on this tiny ball of stone, wrapped in land, water and air, graced by a thin mantle of life.
Over billions of years, our planet has nurtured the evolution of a marvelous array of plants and animals, including humans. Since the stable climate of the current geologic epoch of the Holocene began 10,000 years ago, humans have gradually advanced. In the last 200 years, science and technology have vastly accelerated the pace of improvement. Despite all the evils—wars, colonialism, exploitation, dictatorship, inequality, discrimination, genocide, paranoia—the benefits of human advancements have become increasingly available around the globe, as Steven Pinker points out in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Viking 2018). According to the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (HDI)—which varies from 0 to 1 based on longevity, education, and standard of living—average global development has increased greatly. For instance, India went from HDI 0.04 in 1900 to 0.38 in 2015. In the same period, China went from HDI 0.04 to 0.54. The US went from HDI 0.28 to 0.78. So, on balance, the general human condition has improved dramatically. With intelligent cooperation, we can do much more.
The Predicament
Unfortunately, the light of progress has cast a lengthening shadow. We thought the earth’s bounty to be endless; however, we are discovering that our planet has limits. The earth has a closed ecological system. When in equilibrium, the wastes produced by one species become the food for another in an endless loop. However, humans have upset the natural equilibrium. Our scientific and technological genius lets us dump natural chemicals like carbon dioxide in quantities so vast as to overload the planet’s natural absorptive capacity. We also dump invented chemicals, like plastics that don’t break down, in amounts so huge as to degrade the oceans and trap fish and birds. We are fishing out the seas and cutting down the rainforests to make way for giant cattle pastures and palm oil plantations. We are overshooting the carrying capacity and exceeding the safe operating limits of the planetary ecosystem.
In his book, Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (Bloomsbury, 2009), James Hansen, a leading climate scientist, worries that we could eventually render our planet too hot to support human and other biotic life (like Venus). Thus, climate change is an “existential” problem in that it threatens our very existence, but it is also existential in the philosophical sense—its solution demands that we rethink our very identities and purposes in being alive.
How can we get out of this trap? Like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times, can we reverse the grinding gears of climate change and return to safety? Should we go back to a preindustrial village life, living without electricity on locally grown organic food? I did this at times in the 1960s and 1970s but got bored and wanted to feel the joy of joining the larger social currents. Such yearning is common around the world. In the developed world, most people are embedded in an electrified, commodified, globalized lifestyle. Throughout the developing world, at their first chance, young people flock to cities, watch Western sitcoms on TV, grab smartphones, and surf the internet. On the mass scale, we have little hope of going backward.
We must, then, plunge forward. If we are to survive and thrive in the long run, we must comprehend our present global realities and apply our genius to create a sustainable global society in a sustainable global ecosystem. Just comprehending our current global reality, though, not to speak of transforming it, presents a daunting task.
The Need for Double Comprehension
We can understand our global material reality by studying the material flows of its socio-ecological systems through extraction, production, consumption, and waste. These flows impact on and degrade the physical environment. Comprehending our global social reality, however, is far more complex. This requires also studying the many social factors that drive our increasing material throughput and produce the barriers that divide us into unequal and hostile groupings around the planet. The better we can comprehend both the material flows and the social driving factors, the greater chance we will have of transforming them and learning to cooperate for the greater long-term good. In fostering this double comprehension and in finding ways to change, the physical and sociopsychological sciences—along with practitioners, inventors, entrepreneurs, politicians, activists, artists, and others—can make crucial contributions.
Working in the field of population ecology, Ehrlich and Holdren, in dialogue with Commoner, first introduced the IPAT formula. This formula tells us that our material Impact (I) on the physical environment is a function of the size of the Population (P), how much stuff each person buys and consumes per capita (A for affluence), and the amount of pollution emitted by the Technology (T) used to make the stuff.
On the global scale, over the last 100 years, the factors of the IPAT formula have seen rapid, enormous growth. The global human population (P) grew 400 percent, from 1.85 billion in 1900 to 7.8 billion in 2020. During the same period, the global average Gross Domestic Product per capita (A) increased 700 percent—from $2,212 in 1900 to $15,212 in 2018. That’s four times as many people each consuming seven times as much stuff—a 28-fold increase in environmental impact if technology (T) stayed the same. However, polluting technologies, such as burning coal to run electrical-generating plants, spread around the world. Electrical generation by fossil fuel combustion increased from 40,000 terawatt hours (TWh) in 1965 to 137,000 Twh in 2019. Metals production went up about 50-fold from 9 million metric tons in 1900 to 438 MMT in 2013.
Let’s consider the impact on the climate. The human burning of fossil fuels is rapidly increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the world atmosphere. This increasing concentration retains more of the sun’s warmth, heating the atmosphere and changing the climate. Since 1800, this rapid, anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has warmed the earth’s surface temperature by almost 1°C (near 1.5°F). Suppose nations rapidly reduce their carbon emissions, getting to global net zero by 2050. In that case, we might limit global warming to 1.5° or 2°C by 2100. The 2015 Paris Agreement secured Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emissions reductions from most countries. Unfortunately, most countries are not progressing rapidly enough to meet their own NDCs. But even if these NDCs were attained, they would not produce enough reductions to keep global warming below 2°C. According to projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we continue “business as usual” emissions, the planet will warm four or more degrees by 2100. Rapid ACC multiplies and intensifies floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, and coastal inundations. The more fossil fuels we burn, the worse the disasters. Addressing these disasters will require more and more of the developed countries’ resources while overwhelming the coping capacities of poorer countries.
The only way to avoid this intensifying climate catastrophe is to stop burning fossil fuels and get to net zero carbon emissions. That is, to radically change the T factor. But we will also need to reduce the A factor for the wealthy while increasing it for the poor. And eventually greatly reduce the P factor. At a European lifestyle level, the planet can only sustain a population of about 2 billion.
This admission raises the second subject, comprehending the socio-psychological factors driving increasing extraction, production, consumption, and waste and the factors setting up barriers to our global cooperation to solve this collective problem. Grasping this second subject matter will allow proceeding to the third topic, the practical method of solution. This short essay can only begin to broach these subjects.
Driving Factors
We can investigate social drivers of climate change and social barriers to solutions at two levels, the psychological (forms of individual information-processing, evaluation, and decision-making, including rationality and risk assessment) and the sociological (forms of collective action and meaning, including institutions, economics, politics, and culture). These two levels are intertwined and affect each other in much debated and still uncertain ways.
On the psychological level, it would seem rational for individuals and groups to clearly recognize the looming risks posed by climate change and try to take effective actions. However, people are not always so rational. For one thing, climate change poses a global force so massive that many people, feeling helpless, would rather not think about it. They might even deny that climate change exists to avoid cognitive dissonance, as Kari Marie Norgaard shows in Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2011). Short of outright denial, other psychological processes could interfere with constructive responses. For instance, people may use decision-making rules that prioritize a single present issue at a time, not seeing things in their multiple or future interactions. Such rules highlight more immediate personal concerns, pushing away concerns about climate change.
An individual focus on the pursuit of immediate personal benefits leads to the group overuse and destruction of free, common-property goods like clean air and water. Garrett Hardin recognized this in his article “Tragedy of the Commons” (Science 1968). In her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Elinor Ostrom pursued solutions to the tragedy in the strengthening of collective norms, receiving the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her discoveries. The need for collective norms to restrain ecological overshoot segues the discussion to the sociological level.
From a sociological perspective, solutions to global climate change will require strong collective norms that cut consumption by the wealthy while promoting green technology, eliminating carbon emissions, reducing global population, and meeting basic needs. Such norms exist in various forms. They range from formal, legal strictures enforced by coercive sanctions to informal, socially reinforced folkways and habitual or voluntary enactments. Their successful implementation will require a systematic reorganization of everyday social roles. The goal would be to make a green lifestyle easy and attractive, taking no more effort than “falling off a log,” as Tim Jackson indicates in Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Routledge, 2011).
The Role of Capitalism
Many scholars argue that such a social reorganization will not be possible. They argue that contemporary capitalism stands in the way. Capitalism necessarily imposes a demand for high return on investment. Such demands force companies to cut wages and ignore environmental protection, as modeled in Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg’s Treadmill of Production (2004). The capitalist system funnels money to owners, increasing economic inequality. The system simultaneously inculcates widespread status-signifying consumption. The wealthy elites push politicians to enact policies that enhance these problems rather than reduce them. In the U.S., fossil-fuel industries fund think tanks to produce propaganda denying climate change and accuse governmental policies that foster environmental protection of being socialistic and anti-freedom. Some scholars conclude that the only answer is the elimination of capitalism. However, the modern non-capitalist, state-socialist economies such as the Soviet Union and China have even more severely polluted their environments.
At the same time, on the positive side, genuine competitive capitalism allows entrepreneurs to invent new products and means of production that respond to or even create new societal demands. This destruction of old industries and creation of new ones means that capitalism has some capacity to transform itself. This process can introduce and spread win-win green technology, as the school of Ecological Modernization contends (Mol 2002). The international project on Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (Compon), operating since 2007, studies and compares the state-society relationships that facilitate or inhibit the green transformation. The rapid emissions reductions in Sweden, Denmark, England, and Germany demonstrate that once they attain sufficient public support for transformation, national government policymaking and governance processes can produce some greening of capitalism and society.
At the Climate Change Crossroads
One big question concerns the pace of change. Current rates of green transformation are not sufficient to avoid crossing the 2°C warming threshold, which portends terrifying consequences. To enact the needed solutions, citizens need both awareness and concern and the means and power to carry out such changes. Intensifying climate change-induced disasters are gradually transforming global awareness. For instance, the Global Warming’s Six Americas Project shows that the percent of Americans expressing alarm about global warming (the highest category) has risen from 17 percent in 2008 to 26 percent in 2020. At some point, enough people must demand green governmental leadership to transform society in ways that prevent rapid anthropogenic climate change. Someday, around the world, we must clearly realize that we are all in the same boat—Spaceship Earth —and take responsibility to manage it.
How bad will the climate disasters have to get before this realization happens? Will we continue to emit carbon gasses down to the “last ton of fossilized coal,” as Max Weber said in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Taylor and Francis, 2005, p. 123)? This species-suicidal outcome is quite possible. As Jared Diamond recounts in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin Books, 2005), clan competition drove the isolated Easter Islanders to cut down their last tree to build giant stone statues. The loss of all trees cast their society into permanent poverty and severe decline. It was the confluence of material flows and social drivers that led to this outcome. Will we eventually do the same with our whole planet? The future is in our collective hands.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
