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It is less widely recognised that some of the very features that make climate care so hard also present opportunities for making it easier. In particular, the feature that everything is connected to everything else means that climate change is exacerbated by many other challenges at the same time that our efforts to manage it must compete with those other challenges for our limited resources - political, organsiational, and economic. For example, the New Cold War is geopoliticising international relations and diverting massive resources towards rearmament (in attempts to deter hot war). The New Cold War makes climate care harder. Conversely, however, we may see that any progress we might make in returning the world to more peaceful relations would be enormously helpful for the climate care project.
Various other challenges - from the demographic transition to public health - may have the same feature. They appear to compete with climate care for our attention, but should actually be understood as complementary to the climate care project because wicked problems get easier to manage when the world gets easier.
1. The Climate Care Costs of the New Cold War
The most dramatic threat to climate care is the New Cold War between the defenders of the international order ('the West') and a loose coalition of revisionist powers ('the CRINKs: China, Russia, Iran, N. Korea). This presents an existential challenge at least as dangerous to human civilisation as climate change, and so definitely requires our attention in its own right. But the New Cold War also impacts the global struggle to manage climate change in various ways.
Most obviously, global military spending has already more than doubled from its low point in the mid-1990s: an extra 1 trillion dollars per year or so are now being spent by governments to keep themselves safe from each other, rather than to get anything constructive achieved in the world. All such projects, from public health to ending global poverty to climate care must struggle harder to compete for economic resources and political attention.
In addition we are seeing the geopoliticisation of international relations: every international treaty, organisation, and trading relationship is evaluated strategically, in terms of how it might advance or hinder each side's relative power to compel the other to its will by military or other means. There is little attention left for pursuing international agreements on global challenges, and none of the trust required for such agreements to actually succeed anyway. Moreover, progress on the Green Transition away from fossil fuels is slowed by the systematic prioritisation of national security over efficiency: Anything that might create a potential vulnerability or relative disadvantage is rejected, no matter what the potential gains (for the world). Global supply chains are needlessly duplicated; plans for international electricity grid connections get nowhere; tariffs are placed on cheap Chinese made solar panels and electric vehicles and batteries in an attempt to maintain possibly strategic domestic industries; and so on.
A further consequence of the geopoliticisation of the global economy is that the world becomes poorer than it would otherwise be, and this further reduces the economic and political space for governments to take on big challenges. Geopoliticised trade for example creates less economic value as markets fragment; technologies become state secrets; and capitalists fear for their profits. As countries become poorer thanks both to the military spending effect and the economic decline effect their governments can afford to do fewer of the things their populations would like them to do and political choices become harder and more bitterly disputed as more people must be disappointed.
In terms of climate adaptation we also get the worst case scenario of poor countries staying poor in a warming world. As in the Old Cold War, the kleptocratic regimes governing poor countries can play off the geopolitical rivalry for the resources and political space they need to maintain power, instead of having to reform themselves in the face of domestic and external pressures (as in the wave of democratisation and market liberalisation that followed the end of the Old Cold War).
However, if the New Cold War makes addressing other important challenges - like climate care - harder, then it follows that progress in restoring more peaceful global relations would make climate care easier.
More formally:
Premise 1. Managing climate change is harder because of US-China geopolitical competitionConclusion 1: Therefore, if the US and China got along better, managing climate change would be easierConclusion 2: Therefore, if you care about managing climate change, you should also care about world peace!
This doesn't make world peace itself any easier to achieve, of course, but it does reveal that efforts to address it are not competing with climate care but actually complements. Environmentalists who care about climate change should therefore also be enthusiastic supporters of political parties, organisations, and projects that seek to effectively de-escalate the New Cold War from a global conflict to something more like the peaceful global competition of 15 years ago, in which collective action can advance in many domains not seen in strategic win-lose terms. (Although note that supporting such efforts does not mean supporting fantasies of unilateral pacificism!)
2. More Possibilities for Effective Action
Besides everything being connected to everything else, another awkward feature of wicked problems is that there is no single right solution. In the case of climate change this may also be seen as an opportunity.
When evaluating policy ideas we do not have to worry about whether they would form part of the optimal plan for solving climate change. There can be no such plan. This allows us a certain freedom to pursue various climate care related policies that seem to work and make sense, and to do so in somewhat decentralised - disorganised - ways, without worrying too much about fitting in to a global optimal plan.
There are limitations to this freedom of course. For example, measures to discourage and reduce fossil fuel use in one part of the world may result only in making fossil fuels cheaper in other parts of the world (as has arguably been the main effect of Europe's carbon reduction policies so far). Subsidies for renewable energy technology development so that they can outcompete fossil fuels in their own terms make more sense (as China has been doing with solar panels and batteries, albeit for geostrategic purposes). We should also be aware that policy choices - such as for nuclear power - may commit us to certain policy paths, with attendant drawbacks and sunk costs we may later regret.
Nevertheless, leaning in to the messiness - the fundamental ungovernability - of climate change hugely expands the possibility space of projects we should consider for their contributions to climate care. Many such projects may seem very far away from environmentalists' traditional focus on fossil fuel use in energy generation, manufacturing, and transportation. However, if they are easier to achieve than more traditional projects - and if they are good in their own right or at least not bad (nuclear war would make climate care much easier, but not in the way we want) - then environmentalists should prioritise them in their political efforts.
One such unconventional climate care policy might be expanding access to the new class of semaglutide anti-obesity drugs. Not only do these drugs promise an incredible contribution to the quality of life and health for hundreds of millions of people, but they also promise a positive climate impact.
People who take the medications lose an average of 15-20% of their body weight (future iterations promise even greater reductions). This is because they are consuming dramatically fewer calories per day, meaning less food must be produced and transported to meet their improved nutritional needs. Moreover, both obesity and the ability to pay for these medicines is concentrated in the rich world. Hence the calories that would no longer be needed are rich people calories with a higher than average carbon impact: meat, air-flown out of season produce, etc. These slimmer people will also require less energy to move around in cars and planes, meaning that less fossil fuel needs to be burned without anyone having to make a personal sacrifice in the name of climate change. More indirectly, better health for hundreds of millions of people frees them to contribute more to society and frees up a lot of resources currently needed for their health care. That means more resources available for other projects - such as climate care.
Obviously even all together the positive carbon impacts of Ozempic won't add up to a solution to climate change. They would probably amount to less than the annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions (2%). But every little helps and these gains are almost 'free', since people will produce them not out of personal moral conviction for which they must be onerously persuaded one by one, nor from enforcing coercive laws that are naturally resisted for making our lives more inconvenient and expensive.
3. Economic Growth Provides More Resources for Meeting Humanity's Challenges
I have already mentioned economic growth several times as a generic expander of the resources humanity has available to address our various challenges, as well as allowing us more of the political space we need to make good decisions about them. Many environmentalists instinctively oppose economic growth because they associate it with (fossil fuel) intensive manufacturing and unnecessary - hence immorally excessive - material consumption.
The environmentalists are generally wrong on this (although there are certainly some economically rewarding activities that are terrible for the environment and should be discouraged). Economic growth in poorer countries is mostly material - food and objects that make life easier - but is focused on meeting real needs and so is not excessive. Economic growth in already rich countries is mostly in immaterial services with little to no climate impact - greenhouse gas emissions from the EU and US have been falling for decades. (Previously.)
Properly understood, economic growth is a wonderful thing that we should celebrate and encourage. It consists in expanding the set of valuable options available to ordinary people, so that we can do more of the things we want to than we could before. More vegan burgers, more holidays, more audiobooks, more philosophy lectures, more cat cafes, more medical research, more accommodations for the disabled, and so on. If it is a good thing when people can achieve some of the things they find valuable, it is even better when they can afford more. Economic growth also increases the total resources available to a society which the government can then draw from (via taxation and prescriptive laws) to organise public goods - like maintaining a human-friendly climate and adapting to already inevitable climate changes - from which everyone benefits.
Other things being equal, more economic growth is thus good for climate care since it makes it easier to do more about it. Environmentalists who claim to be concerned about climate change should therefore be in favour of economic growth, and hence generally (but not unconditionally) supportive of the institutions and infrastructure that support it. This is because economic growth is not a button that governments can press, but the outcome of the aggregate choices and agreements of many hundreds of millions of people and organisations who are able to pursue their own interests in mutually agreeable ways under circumstances where that tends to create net economic value. Hence all kinds of institutions, from the WTO promoting free trade (which has also been a victim of China-US geopolitical conflict) to reductions in barriers to economic migration (previously) to permitting new housing construction in the places where economic opportunities are concentrated should be seen as assets rather than distractions or threats to the climate care challenge.
Conclusion
The usual outcome of spending any time confronting the full difficulty of the climate change challenge is some form of evasion: despair, cynicism, fantasy, or paralysis. Let us instead draw some reason for optimism from the experience.
Some of the very features that make climate change such a difficult problem to manage may be more productively seen as opportunities for making it easier (though still never easy!). Climate change is made harder by the fact that everything is connected to everything else, but that also opens up more angles from which the problem context can be approached and improved. Anything that makes climate change harder to manage should also be seriously considered as a policy target too.
Climate change is also characterised by the impossibility of implementing a single correct solution, but that provides some justification to the empowering idea that even uncoordinated 'amateur' efforts may still make a significant positive contribution, even if only indirectly. Hence we can have more confidence to press forward with all sorts of ideas for action at very different scales and across very different domains.
