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| Published in 2019 |
If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.
This will to power over nature is the essence of modern hubris—an overweening end that is pursued by excessively rational means and driven by irrational urges. René Descartes and Francis Bacon, two of the principal authors of the modern way of life, regarded nature as a hostile power to be dominated without ruth or scruple.
To call Stalin’s rule an “alienation” seems to me a euphemism used to sweep under the rug not only facts, but the most hair-raising crimes as well. I say this to you simply to call your attention to how very much this jargon has already twisted the facts: To call something “alienation”—that is no less than a crime.
What I have in mind is not so much a different state concept as the necessity of changing this one. What we call the “state” is not much older than the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the same thing is true of the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty means, among other things, that conflicts of an international character can ultimately be settled only by war; there is no other last resort.
I’m not sure if Norman Vincent Peale ever thought in this way or that he would have necessarily appreciated the connection, but his optimism about how to deal with recalcitrant facts has a certain postmodern ring to it, and seems to fit right into our increasingly post-truth world.
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