(No. 15, a ±6 minute read)
How does it all weigh out?
In an interesting bit of coincidental timing a dear friend and I had a conversation yesterday about, essentially, hierarchies of crises. The position I argued against was that Elon Musk’s (sorry, that guy) contribution to electrifying the American automobile fleet outweighed his status in society as a chaos actor. That argument sounds like this; Musk’s personal statements and actions relative to Twitter/X, and the normalization of extremist positions these engender, pale in contrast to his contribution to earth’s essential, existential crisis—global warming—by pushing the electrification of cars ahead when it was at best, stalled.
The coincidence of timing in our debate is Wednesday’s anniversary of Tyre Nichol’s killing at the hands of Memphis police Scorpion Task Force members who beat him to death, in spite of what appears to be a lack of resistence, and having been stopped for what looks without further evidenc to be specious reasons. Nichols was murdered—let’s call it what by all appearances and the charges indicate his death to be—on January 10, 2023. The complicating issue, maybe (but not really) in this case is that his killers were black cops.
So global warming, for all its social-economic origins, did not prove to be the existential issue for Nichols—or any of the other people of color or just flat-out poor folks—killed in interactions with police that the courts have shown to be the product of an out-of-control policing system; or those incidents that maintain this appearance even as the justice system failed to crack the thin blue line of police impunity which police unions, municipalities, and police officers themselves work to uphold (often by illegal means) with tenacity.
Here are two social problems in the United States: first, a system of policing predicated on maintaining dominence over ethnic minorites and lower social classes, while feeding individuals into an exploitive carcerial system. A system that profits on the incarceration, and labor, of minority prisoners, disproportionate to white prisoners—often even as the crimes committed by offenders are absolutely proportional.1 The second problem: our social and economic addiction to burning fossil fuels for power. I consider this a social problem because of the lack of political will to make the needed change to renewables. That compounded by the social pressures to maintain the carbon status quo by those who profit from it—their influence on and efforts to capture government, disinformation campaigns (which hinge on First Amendment rights to free speach to lie in ad campaigns, I kid you not). For good measure toss in our society’s general apparent unwillingness to move the needle on climate action in the U.S.2 Global warming, it ain’t a science problem.
Which brings us to these pictures. If you are a person on the wrong end of the first problem as Christopher DeAndre Mitchell was in Torrance, California in 2018, shot in his parked car within seconds of being approached by police, how much does global warming matter in the hierarchies of crises you and your community face? Not much. Does that lessen the urgency of the climate crisis? No. Do biased, or even racist, things Elon Musk says, and allows others to say, on his social media platform about people like you weigh more or less heavily on his electric car conributions? Or does the maintenance of the status quo, as unpalatable as it might be, trump even answering these questions? If nothing else these are photographs of a status quo trying to be maintained by those who benefit from it.
A rationalist would say fostering the sort of environment that allows and encourages hate to be directed at minorities causes less death than the failure of planetary systems and in that he’d ultimately likely be right. This is the train problem, in the extreme—save the earth itself and look the other way when one of those saviours might be contributing to the difficulty and sometimes even deaths of members of a minority population. But, can there be room for a rationalist saving the earth above all else when the earth’s complexity, diversity, and variations within species cause it to work as it does and be be as apparently unique as it evolved to be?
This is a false choice, I think, this idea of accepting even a substantial contributor to progress in addressing global warming while aquiescing to their socially corrosive behaviors. The reason I believe this to be so is because I understand global warming to be, again, a social problem. Technical advances and solutions play a part, but ultimately societal solutions will be what allow us to face our heating climate and its dangers and adapt to the changes we know we will see. If society is breaking apart because of rifts built of racism, hatred, caste, all the technologists in the world won’t save our bacon—it is cooked.
Nichols and Mitchell did not have time to wrestle with these questions while they were facing the institution of racialized, biased, and militarized policing serving to further its (and, plainly, our society’s) goals of maintaining control over young men of color in social classes given short shrift under a winner-take-all capitalist system. But in a world rapidly heating can any of us not consider both that heating and the manifest social conditions which contribute to the instability of the system that we have built ourselves and is being (and will be further) destabilized by that heating?
Simply put, do we save the climate from exceeding +2ºC and overcooking us badly and allow bad actors to raise our hatreds to a boil just as we need to be working together as a nation, and a planet, to face a world that will, by all scientific accounts, be very hard to live in without being exacerbated by the manifest shittiness people can stoop to?
I don’t know how we as a society will answer this question, my hunches aren’t great, but I hope we can both face the climate crisis and jettison the piss-poor behavior of the likes of Musk, and worse, because much worse actors are waiting in the wings. It will not be heros who save us from ourselves.
Author’s note: Relative to the fuzz, and in large part because I have been wrestling with our military’s presence here in Hawai‘i thanks to their pollution and a story I’ve been working at coming out at the end of the month here’s an observation: we are just going to have to accept that we need them—cops, and the armed forces. There will always be bad actors both at the individual level and geopolitically. It’s ours to determine their role, practices, and deployments. So far our determinations in either case, the police and the military have not been getting even mildly respectable results, for anybody concerned.
See: Any research into sentencing outcomes for crack vs. powder cocaine offenses qualified by race.
Our “general apparent unwillingness” I see in the difficulty of passing substantive climate legislation in the U.S. until last year, our achieving record levels of oil and gas exports, and record annual carbon pollution. I understand that this is complicated, that the individual American is faced with poor choices insofar as exerting their own agency goes, and that the tide may be starting to change, albeit after the hottest year on earth yet as far as humans are concerned.