Collapse of Western Civilization - Oreskes and Conway
APA: Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2014). The collapse of Western civilization : a view from the future. Columbia University Press. Link: https://doi.org/10.7312/ores16954
Summary (from Columbia University Press): The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and—finally—the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing account of how the children of the Enlightenment—the political and economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies—failed to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.
Chapter 2. The Frenzy of Fossil Fuels
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This "reductionist" approach, was believed to give intellectual power and vigor to investigations by focusing on singular elements of complex problems. Problems that were too large or complex to be solved in their totality were divided into smaller, more manageable elements.
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... We have come to understand the 95 percent confidence limit as a social convention rooted in scientists' desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity. Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did.
Chapter 3. Market Failure
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The thesis of this analysis is that Western civilization became trapped in the grip of two inhibiting ideologies: posivitism and market fundamentalism.
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A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels.
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... the belief that marketplaces represented distributed power. Various individuals making free choices held power in their hands, preventing its undue concentration in centralized government.
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... neoliberal thinking led to a refusal to admit the most important limit of capitalism: market failure.
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The idea of managing energy use and controlling greenhouse gas emissions was anathema to the neoliberal economists whose thinking dominated at this crucial juncture. Thus, no planning was done, no precautions taken, and the only management that finally ensued was disaster management.
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The ultimate paradox was that neoliberalism, meant to ensure individual freedom above all, led eventually to a situation that necessitated large-scale government intervention.
Lexicon of Archaic Terms
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Anthropocene: The geological period, beginning in approximately 1750 with the start of the Industrial Revolution, when humans have become geological agents whose activities effectively compete with, and begin to overwhelm, geophysical, geochemical, and biological processes.
Interview with the Authors
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[Kim Stanley] Robinson's wonderful line: "The invisible hand never picks up the check."