Evil of Banality Threatens Us All : Global Warming: 100 years ago, a Swedish scientist’s theories on carbon dioxide got a cold shoulder; we’re still temporizing.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first published scientific paper on the greenhouse effect. The author was Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and future Nobel laureate. Combining graceful prose and careful mathematics, the paper documents Arrhenius’ experimental verification of the ability of what was called “carbonic acid”--carbon dioxide-- to trap heat near Earth’s surface.
It is fitting that the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now reconfirmed the basic accuracy of Arrhenius’ calculations. It would be more fitting if we finally take seriously the implications of global heating and act decisively to stop what could turn into all-out climatic mayhem.
Yet, as evidence of ongoing global heating grows, we try ever harder to avoid the subject. We “have to put food on the table,” we’re “in denial,” we’re too terrified to think about the future and so protect ourselves through “psychic numbing,” and besides, “there’s so much else to worry about.” There is truth in these rationalizations, but rationalizations they remain. And something more abysmal is at work here: a fervid animosity to imagination, to possibility itself.
This form of hostility is one of humanity’s oldest and deepest flaws. Its ubiquity and its destructive effects are reflected in the inhospitable reception initially given the work that earned Arrhenius the Nobel Prize: a theory explaining the electrical conductivity of highly dilute solutions, or electrolysis. When Arrhenius, at the time a doctoral candidate, presented his theory of electrolysis to his professor, the latter responded: “This is very interesting. Goodbye.” Subsequently, many of his colleagues treated Arrhenius with scarcely diluted hostility, his work being too challenging to their densely parochial understandings.
We are now treating the scientific work on global heating the same way that Arrhenius and his theory of electrolysis were initially greeted: timorous disdain. For responding to the threat of climatic mayhem requires not only social change of the most fundamental kind, but hospitality to the planetary imagination, an ability to passionately and vividly imagine planetary goings-on that may not seem to have immediate effects in our lives: Things like increasing tropical deforestation, retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, the spread of disease-bearing insects and more frequent extreme--and cold--weather events.
We need to learn to listen for the acid aversion to imagination in the kinds of comments made by defenders of the fossil-fuel industrial complex. Global warming, says that chorus, is mere “speculation” or “conjecture”--”left-wing” or “doomsday fantasy”; climate change is “unproved”; we should be “skeptical” because there are so many “uncertainties” in the theory; in any case, it’s “unrealistic” or “wishful thinking” to expect societies to make needed changes and that such changes would “cost jobs.” Or if there is a problem, the most “realistic” thing is to try to adapt.
In this vapid, banal “realism,” the spirit of Arrhenius’ professor echoes. Hannah Arendt, studying the Nazi Holocaust, emphasized the everyday appearance of “the banality of evil.” We face now the evil of banality itself.
We needn’t remain on our self-destructive course. Addressing the threat of climate mayhem could offer avenues of hope and renewal everywhere. The basic changes needed to effectively limit global heating would necessarily entail a tremendous amount of hands-on labor, providing meaningful, community-based employment in areas such as the reconstruction and retrofitting of buildings for energy efficiency and solar power, the reforestation and redesign of cities, the accelerated development of high-mileage and electric cars, the nurturing of sustainable local agriculture, the construction of interlinked public transportation systems and high-speed rail networks and intensive development of renewable energy sources.
A transition to an ecologically benign civilization, proceeding industry by industry, building by building and tree by tree, could radically improve the material circumstances of most people’s lives and greatly reduce economic disparity. Bloated militaries would have to go: The need to limit global heating provides a compelling argument for massive cuts in nationalarsenals and greatly increased international cooperation. New hope for Planet Earth could supplant insipid consumption and temper our acid cynicism.
We need not remain in thrall to the mind’s machinery of animosity to the imaginative, to new possibilities, to hope itself. The sky, as Svante Arrhenius has shown, really is the limit.
