humans' impact on earth's geology has resulted in some scientists defining a new geologic era we are entering with global warming: the Anthropocene. there is no doubt that our current capitalist way of life will absolutely not sustain itself in the next hundred years. questions of meaning and morality are deeply shifted when we're anticipating the imminent demise of our entire civilization and species.
when humans first appeared 200,000 years ago, glaciers covered 30% of the earth's surface and oceans were 270 feet lower than they are today! over a period of warming 135,000 years ago, Earth got to about 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today. Earth has experienced such brief periods (~10,000 years) of warming every 100,000 years or so, called interglacial periods. the next interglacial period happened around 11,000 BCE, which approximately coincides with the agricultural revolution.
over the next ten thousand years, human civilization changed from a photosynthesis-based energy economy to a carbon-based energy economy, vastly increasing humans' wealth and production. there is currently more atmospheric carbon dioxide than the planet has seen in 2 million years.
the earth has shifted between "greenhouse" to "icehouse" states over the course of millions of years (not to be confused with glacial and interglacial periods, which only occur during an icehouse state and are briefer). the last greenhouse state was in the Eocene (30 million years ago): ice-free planet, oceans 300 feet higher than today, ten times as much atmospheric carbon dioxide, tropical weather at the poles, giant reptiles and dwarf mammals in lush forests. we are currently in an "icehouse" state and are likely bringing that period to a premature end.
scientists expect average temperatures to rise 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the next few generations, which will result in more extreme weather and sea levels 90 to 200 feet higher. while over the course of a day a few degrees is nothing, for a global average such a change is enormous. as ice melts, even more carbon that was trapped beneath the ice will be released into the atmosphere, and ice melt is a feedback phenomenon (as more ice melts, the rest of the ice melts more quickly).
as early as the 19th century, we began to understand the impact of carbon on earth's atmosphere and temperature, and the planet's climate history. The UN established the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, in which countries agreed to keep emissions at a safe level. but within a few years, states were not abiding by the agreement.
there are many things that make global decarbonization difficult. first, abandoning carbon would entail enormous economic austerity, which would be devastating for any single country and would quickly put a government out of favor with its people:
Any politician who honestly and frankly worked to detach her nation's economy from oil and coal would not survive in any kind of democratic or oligarchic government, because the rigorous austerity necessary to such an effort would mean either economic depression and poverty for most of her constituency, a massive redistribution of wealth, or both. Moreover, any leader who forced her country to accept the austerity and redistribution necessary to end its dependence on cheap carbon would also be forcing her country into a weak and isolated position politically, economically, and militarily. The entire world has to work together to solve global warming, yet carbon powers the world's political machinery and shapes our current form of collective life. It's coal and oil that we have to thank for connecting the many nations of the world into one tight, integrated economy. Without the information, energy, and transportation infrastructures built and sustained with carbon, there wouldn't be any civilization to try to save. (53)
on the other hand, renewable energy sources like wind and solar suffer from an unpredictable supply problem; since electricity must be created at the exact moment that it's consumed, it's almost impossible to use renewables to consistently supply all the needed energy for ever-fluctuating demand (without a different innovation like battery storage).
other innovations have their own flaws, mainly because they require large-scale infrastructural upheavals. for example, to replace all carbon energy with nuclear, we would need to build 10,000 nuclear plants around the world in the next few decades; there are similar scaling problems with carbon capture and storage. finally, there's an enforcement and measurement problem in any global system of carbon limits and taxes—carbon is very tricky to price, and in any case, who would enforce these rules when the most powerful countries in the world aren't abiding by them?
the way in which the production process of energy is divided up impacts how power is distributed. in Carbon Democracy, Timothy Mitchell argues that when global energy was coal-based, individual workers had much greater ability to block the flow of energy (the network was more dendritic, with various chokepoints throughout). this is where the power of unions and laborers came from. but "the great acceleration" in the mid-20th century, which diversified energy to oil and natural gas, resulted in a more grid-like network. now, the flow of energy was controlled by a tiny number of technicians and their corporate masters, putting power in the hands of the few and making the majority of humans consumers of energy rather than producers.
some skepticism is warranted here, e.g. in this review:
However, while Mitchell’s approach is original and rich in historical detail, there is little empirical evidence in support of his argument that the transition from coal to oil weakened workers’ political agency as a consequence of the material properties of oil and the nature of its supply networks.
describes the Climate March, the Flood Wall Street protests, the International Emissions Trading Association meeting, and the UN Climate Summit in New York in 2014, which all shared a common vacuousness, impotence, and fragmentation. everybody knows there is a problem, but everyone has different interests and different approaches for solving it, and we are all continuing to eat meat, charge our phones, and keep our lights on.
between 1877 and 1937 there were at least 30 major armed labor conflicts in the US. these were literal gunfights between striking workers and company-hired thugs and police.
The labor movement in those years was an armed fight against corporate tyranny and government repression, a fight for wages, hours, and conditions but also a fight for justice, democracy, and a more equitable form of collective life. (71)
argues that violence (or the threat of violence) was likewise a catalyzing force in the civil rights movement. in fact, violence has solved many conflicts—defeating Nazism and fascism, ending slavery, establishing American independence, overthrowing French aristocracy in 1789 and Russian aristocracy in 1917.