A Contributist Climate Perspective
Taking Less, Giving More — Part III
This is the third and final entry in a multi-part manifesto by the newest author to take on the Pablo Parabola name.
Taking Less, Giving More
Combating Climate Change Through Contributism
Part III
A Contributist Climate Perspective
In the digital age, and the ensuing global expansion of capitalism, we have increasingly begun to centralize production, taking away the ability for giving at the individual level, the community level, and even at the national stage. No single country can build an electric car from purely domestic resources. No city or town can feed their residents with locally grown produce. No man is an island.
Social media has further devastated our ability to give. It is impossible to compete with the emotional validation possible through millions of adoring fans, yet this pretense of community is first and foremost a means of advertising, taking our attention from our local and analog spaces.
Leveraging the work of Nadia Asparouhova, the tribes of climate change provides a framework for navigating our lives, and paths to consider as we adapt to a changing climate. [1] For the past decade the perspective du jour has been a combination of energy maximalism and climate technology, like carbon capture and sequestration.
To blindly hope for technologic miracles is naive at best, malicious at worst. Technology alone cannot resolve our climate crisis because humanity is at the core of the dysfunction. With traffic, building more lanes has induced more demand, leading to a forever escalating cycle. [2] Too much traffic? Build more lanes. Traffic dies down, people stop carpooling, and now traffic is bad again. Build even more lanes, and the time cost of public transit is too great to be a competitive choice. Just as with traffic, carbon capture and storage will likely lead to the same behavior. If it becomes safe to emit our current levels of carbon dioxide, why not do more? Unless there is an external pressure to maintain or reduce carbon emissions, whether in the form of strongly enforced legislation or grassroots behavioral change, there is no reason to believe that humanity will voluntarily reduce our total fossil fuel consumption. [3] This is not to preclude technology from being part of the solution. Indeed, renewable energies like wind and solar have likely changed the course of energy related carbon emissions permanently, and there is hope that 2024 represents the peak of energy related CO2 emissions. [4] It would be wrong to stop funding novel technologies, but it is equally incorrect to believe that technology alone can address what is fundamentally a question of gluttony. The balanced perspective is to recognize that all technologies require investment. Not just financial investment, but an investment of time and carbon emissions as well. As the parts per million of CO2 continue to increase in the atmosphere, our budget for both time and global warming gasses is dwindling, and we need to be much more targeted with how we spend the remainder.
Environmentalism and eco-globalism are the only pragmatic solutions. To self-isolate through homesteading or disaster prepping is not feasible for the vast majority of people on planet Earth, and fails to address the human need for community and the compounding strength of global corporation.
We must accept that to effectively combat climate change is to fundamentally change how human society lives. Technology is an incredible tool, maximizing or minimizing what humanity chooses, and as of now, we have clearly chosen to continue short term growth over long term security, the results of which have begun to tear at the very fabric of our societies. Contributism can subvert this “growth at all costs” paradigm by turning the attention away from materialistic consumption and towards enriching our interpersonal bonds.
The greatest failure of capitalism is that in pursuit of efficiency, humans have become liabilities, and our ability to give to one another has been relegated in order to maximize our ability to take and consume. Climate change upends this new status quo. We cannot move into the future with the same underlying assumptions as the past, because to continue this descent into hyper-individualistic consumption is unsustainable in every way. Communities that are able to support one another are resilient communities, and resilient communities will survive. Global capitalism will fail because the risk of a distributed supply chain is ever increasing, the effects of which we experienced first hand during the COVID-19 pandemic. As hurricanes grow stronger, droughts become more widespread, and ice storms more devastating, the scope of our giving must become more specific, more efficient, more effective.
In accepting slower lives, less comfortable lives, society and individuals can become richer in every way. In reclaiming our ability to give, we open ourselves to receive so much more.