We're currently in the very early stages of a catastrophic climate crisis. This is so glaringly obvious, so trivially observable, and so widely accepted, that it feels stupid to even type out the words. Despite this, our cars, a significant contributor, are getting bigger. Each type of car is getting bigger, and we're also making more of the bigger types of cars. Our pickup trucks are now so big that parents are running over their own children in their driveways because the normal-sized kids are invisible from within the abnormally large vehicles.
The internet is full of articles and forum discussions about this phenomenon. The general explanation is that it's a combination of market incentives, regulatory environment, and consumer choice, but that's a pretty unsatisfying answer. You can't explain why we're doing something by showing the mechanism by which we're doing it. That's a description, not a theory.
Here's my theory: To stop the climate crisis, we have to dramatically change the way we live, and that's really scary. Making our cars smaller isn't nearly enough, so we make them bigger, because to make them smaller is to acknowledge that the problem is real. Capitalism is a cult. Like any cult, when confronted with reality, its members must instead choose to double down on fantasy. The alternative is an existential risk to the cult itself, which lives symbiotically with that human impulse to avoid hard thoughts. We've all left that email unread, or avoided opening that official-looking letter, or refused to check our bank account. Cults ease the cognitive burden of reality.
Here in the US, Republican legislators are trying to block the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing new rules that will incentivize American car manufacturers to make, and consumers to buy, electric vehicles. This milquetoast measure to gently nudge the market in a slightly less bad direction is, on its own, not an existential risk to capitalism, but its hierophants must resist it all the same, because cults can only move in one direction. This cult preaches a world where every American, or at least every real American, drives around the suburbs in a giant SUV with one of those infotainment touchscreen systems.
It doesn't matter that touchscreens are worse than knobs, which you can use safely without looking, or that, even taken on their own terms, the interfaces on those things consistently suck. The user experience isn't the point. They're a declaration of defiance. It's the cult doubling down on its fundamental promise: Every member will, one day, have access to the luxury consumer experience, powered by oil. Everything will be fine, and (or maybe because) you'll have Apple CarPlay.
For so many years, we've been told that capitalism will adapt to climate change. We've seen a constant parade of ideas promising to save the Earth, only to have them turn into empty marketing campaigns, be exposed as fundamentally flawed, or, after a successful media blitz, turn out to be plain old gimmicks. At first, these ideas were small. We were told that if we recycle and compost and buy from responsible companies, we'll save the environment. When we learned that individuals cannot make minor lifestyle changes to stop climate change, our predictions just got more fantastical. Now, researchers are going to save us with "forests of mechanical trees" that will suck greenhouse gases out of the air. That is deranged in the same way as the prediction of a cult leader who has predicted the second coming, and, in its absence, must now claim to be a god, because they've backed themselves into a corner.
As the climate crisis worsens, this theory predicts that our crises of faith will come more often, and our cult's beliefs will necessarily become increasingly unhinged. It's unclear what could possibly be more outlandish than a forest of mechanical trees cleansing the air of our sins, but, eventually, we too will be backed into a corner. The fundamental tenets of our society and our material reality will one day become irreconcilable to even the most devoted followers.
Most cults are structured around a charismatic individual, but we are not so lucky. There's no one single conspiracy that we can unravel. Instead, each of us must start believing in reality, then we must act on it. In this, we might have some good news: A majority of Americans view climate change as a "major threat."
But do they? I'm not even sure that I do. Here's an excerpt from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health (very high confidence). There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence). [...] The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years (high confidence)
The report is full of this kind of language, and they seem like the kind of people who'd be much more comfortable writing some very bland papers that people pretend to have read after only skimming the abstract. If I really believed that decisions we collectively make this decade are going to shape the next thousand fucking years, would I be living the life that I'm living? Is it even possible to work in tech and really, truly believe that climate change is real, or is the industry's existence itself a soft denialism? What should I be doing instead? Chaining myself to stuff? Throwing soup at things in museums? Blocking traffic? I genuinely don't know, but apparently I have seven years to figure it out and do it.