Imagining green revolutions and freeing ourselves from zero-sum thinking
I read about the green revolution in Uruguay in this article in The Guardian by Sam Meadows.
Uruguay's green revolution has already happened
Phasing out fossil fuels remained an elusive goal without clear targets in COP28. In many western countries, targets to achieve net-zero are set far in the future. There is a lot of talk about how we need fossil fuels in the “transitional phase” (which seems to be lasting indefinitely).
Yet Uruguay has already transitioned to an energy budget where over 90% of their energy is generated through renewable sources. What's more, they were able to achieve this in just a decade and a half, and they were able to lift large segments of the population out of poverty in the process. You can see here the current mix of energy sources (from Our World in Data) which indicates how their increased energy consumption has been mainly met with wind and hydropower.
Uruguay's energy transition shows what possible if you have a clear plan, put experts in charge of the plan (with democratic oversight), work on clear and honest messaging, and get all layers of society to buy in. More people in Uruguay now have air conditioning than before, but this has not resulted in a huge rise in fossil fuel consumption.
There's an insidious narrative that the welfare of people in the global south and the local and global ecology and climate are a zero sum game, perhaps most clearly expressed in this quite frankly terrible article in the Atlantic entitled “The Grim Ironies of Climate Change”. The previous title “War in Congo has kept the planet cooler” is even more dreadful, but it was changed. Still, even in its current form, the article concludes that the ongoing atrocity of civil war in Congo at least made sure the rainforest is still there. But we don't need the atrocities of war and human suffering to keep a rainforest intact. Happy stewards make better custodians of the rainforest than people devastated by warfare.
Bunker-building billionaires: is life in a bunker really what you want?
Zero-sum thinking presents a fundamental obstacle to our imagination. Its sheer pervasiveness stops us from imagining better outcomes for all. This mindset and the absurdities it ultimately result in is perhaps most clearly exemplified in the super-wealthy, billionaires such as Zuckerberg, making bunkers for themselves for when it all goes belly up. “No man is an island,” as John Donne already said (and I quote the relevant excerpt from Meditation 17, because it is so gorgeous)
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee—John Donne, 17th Meditation, 1624
There's the sheer logistical challenges of keeping the bunker running in the face of societal collapse. There's the question of whether those who will serve Zuckerberg in his bunker will continue to do so in the face of societal and economic breakdown rather than turn against him. But there's a more basic question too: is this what he truly wants? Imagine if you had all the money in the world, would your first thought be: My absolute dream is to spend most of my life inside a heavily fortified bunker under the ground, and not see the sun again, or smell the grass.
The thinking behind this bunker and other initiatives, down to even at some point FTX's founder wanting to buy the island of Nauru is extremely limited, and ultimately it is not rational. As Bruno Latour argues in Down To Earth (2018), a lot of the current reluctance of elites to face climate change head on, and rather to fuel disinformation and to (as we've seen now) subvert efforts like COP is due to this very constricting mindset:
[T]he elites have been so thoroughly convinced that there would be no future life for everyone that they have decided to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible – hence deregulation; they have decided that a sort of gilded fortress would have to be built for those (a small percentage) who would be able to make it through – hence the explosion of inequalities; and they have decided that, to conceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world, they would have to reject … climate change [italics in original].—Latour, Down to Earth (2018)
Spinozist ethical egoism rooted in non-zero sum thinking
Against this mindset, Latour puts a kind of groundedness (we have to “land somewhere"/atterir). My thinking of choice is a spinozist ethical egoism (see this piece, I'm also working on some larger works on this).
The way I read Spinoza's ethical egoism is that it is rooted in his idea of self-preservation, combined with his idea of monism. Our very survival as a full human being requires the survival and wellbeing of others and those around you. So, we see numerous passages in the Ethics and to some extent also in Theologico-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise that are against zero-sum thinking, to give just two examples: contracts and promises should always benefit all parties concerned, and art, science, etc can become possible due to people working peaceably together.
The spinozist ethical egoist is not an island, but rather, recognizes his interconnection with everything, especially human society but also (here I depart a bit from Spinoza and look for inspiration in deep ecology) other non-human creatures, the soil, the air to breathe, and I am thinking particularly of this proposition:
4P38: Whatever so disposes the human Body that it can be affected in a great many ways, or renders it capable of affecting external Bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man; the more it renders the Body capable of being affected in a great many ways, or of affecting other bodies, the more useful it is; on the other hand, what renders the Body less capable of these things is harmful.
So, we not only affect but also are usefully affected by a great many things. We need to rid ourselves of the zero-sum mindset, and one way to do this is to look at proofs of concept, at places where it is happening or has happened such as Uruguay.
The colonialist mindset and its obstacles
One of the most regrettable aspects of colonialism and its fallout, exemplified in a continued colonialist mindset, is that western nations systematically ignore these success stories, also e.g., Costa Rica or the Peace Process in Colombia . As
has argued forcefully,I don’t think Colombia is the only place where extraordinary alternatives have been attempted. I know the world is filled with ambitious projects advanced by thoughtful, inventive dreamers of better worlds.
What I most marvel over, when I turn from Western discourse to the world and back again, is how small a range of options we carve out for ourselves in the West, under the self-destructive notion that if something hasn’t been tried here, with us, then clearly it hasn’t been tried anywhere, or can’t work that well after all.
And even now, as I had posted the article on Uruguay's green revolution, I received all kinds of objections. The location is uniquely well suited to hydropower that many nations cannot do. Or, it's not 100% renewable, and so it falls short.
I say these are all excuses to prevent us from actually learning from these exemplars from the Global South.
The limits of what we can do are the limits of our imagination. In order to think bigger, we must rid ourselves of the zero-sum mindset that pervades everything, whether it is the resurgent nationalism of “my country first” or the selfishness of billionaire bunker-builders, or even our own nagging feeling that any progress such as peace in Congo must mean that someone else loses out. But the world, and its interconnected nature, is much bigger and much more capable of absorbing change. We can, and must, do better.