Our leaders operate out of a delusional and obsolete paradigm of national self-interest. Xi wanting to “possess” Taiwan; Putin, Ukraine; Netanyahu, Gaza and the West Bank; Trump, yesterday Venezuela, today Greenland, tomorrow Cuba—or Canada.
The climate crisis is rendering these various ideas of empire and much else about international competition into hollowed-out abstractions. Even superiority in numbers of nuclear weapons becomes meaningless in the context of the potential environmental crisis scientists call “nuclear winter.” All this is a fabulous illustration of Einstein’s perception that “we cannot solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that created the problem.” Our leaders are dominated by an “us versus them” consciousness when what is urgently needed is an “all in the same boat” consciousness.
These leaders are fighting the wrong wars, while their real adversaries loom not only as rising temperatures and more violent fires, floods and storms, but also as ever-advancing military technologies of destruction, now including AI, that make apocalypse ever more probable. War itself is the real enemy. Putin’s conception of bringing back the greater Russian Empire becomes an absurd vanity project while the vast tundra fields of Russia thaw and spew methane skyward. Nature herself is the empire that always bats last.
Trump is stuck in the dying world of fossil fuels. The oil sector helped put him in office. His joining Israel in a war of choice with Iran has mired him in a huge oil shipment bottleneck and driven up prices, putting his own political party’s dominance at risk. His climate change denial is grotesque in its arrogant no-nothing certainty, rationalized by oil company shareholder value. The obsolescent fossil fuel paradigm seems all too closely connected to war, and has been since neocons like Dick Cheney asked the question “why is our oil under their sand?” and answered it with futile budget-busting colonial boondoggles.
Look to thinkers like Bill McKibben for a refreshing reorientation. In his optimistic book “Here Comes the Sun,” he makes the clear case that fossil fuels have become the true “alternative energy,” as the price of solar panels keeps falling and their efficiency keeps rising. Daniel Poneman, Secretary of Energy under Obama and now a director at the Nuclear Energy Institute, tries to make the case that we can’t get over the hump into a clean energy world without recourse to nuclear power. Mckibben’s realistic solar-wind-battery vision of possibility blows Poneman’s obsession with nuclear energy out of the water. For the amount of labor, money and time it takes to get a nuclear plant up and running, solar and wind combined with batteries will yield far more electricity with far less time and money—leaving aside the still-unsolved problem of nuclear waste. If AI is really going to help the species resolve its many challenges and that means data centers, why not supply the huge power needs of these centers with solar?
The invitation to reorientation is not unlike the experience to which every astronaut testifies upon their return from space: they looked down and saw no borders, only one small fragile blue planet, home to all we love and value. We can have that same experience without going into space, simply by identifying not only with our own nation, but also with the whole—not only with the whole Earth, but with the extraordinary gift of the Earth-sun relationship. We are the beneficiaries of a fusion machine, safely 93 million miles away, that turns 400 million tons of hydrogen a second into all the energy we will ever need.
Reorienting our true self-interest, far from being woo-woo and abstract, is a practical and realistic way to think about all our interrelated problems. It pulls us in the direction of diplomacy, people-to-people initiatives—and political candidates who are in tune with this changed sense of “our” survival challenges—“our” now being everyone on Earth. This fundamental shift in thinking has immense potential to put a new spin on all the millions of specific, complex, difficult, mundane (mundane—from the Spanish mundo, meaning “world”) conflicts we experience down here on the ground.
