The Climate Speech We’ll Probably Never Hear - A Biosphere Project Blog
Dear friends,
A few weeks ago, it was “Climate Week” in New York City, and last Sunday, October 11, there was a climate march in Brussels that drew an estimated 60,000 participants.
After a summer that brought record-breaking heat waves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events to large parts of the world, it is certainly necessary to remain focused on the consequences of the climate crisis (or rather, the biosphere crisis). These consequences are becoming increasingly palpable all over the world, with dramatic results. And now that summer is behind us, the temptation is once again strong to forget the difficult time we’ve endured and return to business as usual. Forgetfulness is increasingly becoming an ally of our (superficial) peace of mind. That is why events and marches like these are so crucial for keeping the spotlight on this existential crisis, which will only grow more intense.
But at the same time, something is missing from virtually all of these events—and from the broader social dialogue surrounding them (to the extent that such a dialogue even exists).
During climate marches, conferences, and “climate weeks,” there are invariably calls for far-reaching “climate measures” and “solutions.”
What those measures should actually be is specified less often. And there are good reasons for this: the measures that are actually needed are either deemed unfeasible or dismissed as too radical, and for political leaders, they are completely off the table. That political class is terrified that if they were to actually take the measures that are necessary, they wouldn’t survive a single election unscathed, and they would also lose all support from their base and donors in financial interest groups and the business community.
That is why no politician or head of government ever really tells us where we're at.
That fact prompted Nate Hagens to engage in a thought experiment (or an exercise in imagination, if you will, with a nod to Rob Hopkins).
He wrote and recorded the speech that we’ll never hear from a real head of government—but we will hear it from the fictional head of state that Nate Hagens plays here. For the occasion, he even put on a tie and suit—not exactly his usual outfit—to look more like a statesman. In other words, he’s putting on a little show—but one that matters a great deal: what is our situation really like, and why don’t our government leaders ever tell us the truth about where we stand and what we need to do?
Nate Hagens is one of the leading thinkers on the metacrisis—the convergence of all the crises that characterize our time, of which the climate crisis is just one.
I’ve already featured him in a few blog posts, notably in “The Great Simplification", a two-hour synthesis of his research on all aspects of the meta-crisis, particularly as it relates to energy. The energy issue has always been one of his pet topics, and he has built up considerable expertise in that field.
Nate Hagens (Nathan John Hagens) is co-founder and president of the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, an American nonprofit whose name says it all. He is also the host of the podcast “The Great Simplification,” where for years he has been interviewing the world’s brightest minds on a wide range of aspects of the meta-crisis—that is, the convergence of numerous crises in human society with the crises in the living ecosystems of which our society is a part.
Nate is also the host of a second podcast on YouTube, “Frankly.” He is the co-author of the books “Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures, Vol. 1” and “The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century.”
In a previous career, Nate Hagens worked in academia and in the financial world of Wall Street, but since 2003 he has shifted his full attention to a systems-theoretical approach to what is called the “meta-crisis”: the sum total of all the crises threatening our system and our global society, such as the ecological crises; economic, financial, and political instability; new and as yet unpredictable factors such as A.I.; the renewed arms race; mass migration due to climate change; the unsustainable accumulation of debt in a financial system that is essentially a glorified pyramid scheme; and so on and so forth.
His experience in academia and the financial world, combined with his years of research for The Great Simplification and the hundreds of interviews he has conducted with the world’s leading experts in the relevant fields, make Nate Hagens exceptionally well-positioned to provide a synthesis of our current situation—and, above all, to clarify why our current models of thinking will absolutely not help us turn the tide.
In this fictional speech, he summarizes in about 15 minutes why it is so difficult to respond to the challenges of the meta-crisis. What would it be like if a head of government were to actually tell it like it is?
I won’t provide a summary of these 15 minutes here, as they can already be considered a summary of The Great Simplification.
Let me just say that he discusses the issue of fossil fuels, and how they have driven our “civilization” and modernity, as well as how we are depleting that underground capital at a record pace (with no replacement in sight). He discusses the CO2 issue, but also points out that it is only part of the problem—and perhaps not even the most important or worst part (as Richard Heinberg, that other energy expert, also noted in the essay “Why Climate Change Isn’t Our Biggest Environmental Problem, and Why Technology Won’t Save Us”).
And he humbly admits that there is no simple, single solution to this challenge, which will change our world forever and beyond recognition: everything will have to change.
This also suggests that we should not expect the transformation—or the “solutions”—to come from our current political system, which is inextricably linked to the very economic system that needs to change.
To give you an idea of how far that transformation will have to go, over the coming months I’ll be featuring in this blog a few economists who outline what will be needed economically to make a transition to an ecological society possible. And when you hear these 'ecological economists' speak, you’ll understand why no government leader is currently telling us what is needed, and why no politician is delivering the “climate speech” we really need to hear. With the exception, that is, of Nate Hagens, in this fictional address to the world!
So, without further ado, "statesman" Nate Hagens with his “State of the World Address”—or the climate speech we’ll probably never hear.
Thank you for reading and watching, and until the next episode,
All the best to you,
Filip
