Wildfires Are Devastating: But Not A Cause For Urgent Climate Action

It’s easy to observe things like the awful Dunwich Heath fire, and the recent droughts and high temperatures, and declare that this is exactly the kind of thing that should galvanise us towards more urgent climate action. But here I’ll show why that’s wrong. It’s true we can expect hotter, drier summers, and that this shapes the conditions in which fires and droughts happen. But the big miscalculation of the ‘urgent climate action’ brigade is that this isn’t a problem to fix like one cleans up some spilled milk or disentangles a knotted fishing net - it’s a natural part of the evolution of our industrial, technological, and climate story that involves prudence and careful discernment of complex trade-offs.

You see, in terms of the whole, multifaceted, interconnected picture, we couldn’t have done very much better in harnessing energy, raising living standards, and developing our industries as we have in the timescale we did. In other words, humanity didn’t recklessly choose this path, we have grown into it via the only workable route for billions of people to survive, flourish, and build the modern world. People who look at only the negative effects in a complex, multifaceted set of trade-offs and complain solely on that basis have usually not thought things through beyond their own immediate interest and reputation: they care more about how they look to others than how proficiently they deal with complex matters.

Every society in the past 200 years has faced the same challenge at different speeds – the challenge of how to lift people out of poverty, feed them, heal them, connect them, and power their lives – and the only viable means by which we’ve achieved this is by working together as a species to use coal, oil, and gas to transform our species. We used fossil fuels as primary resources because they were the best tools we had, and in most cases, still have. They were the engines of prosperity, medicine, sanitation, food security, education, and global stability. Sure, they came with costs – but they made life expectancy double; they made infant mortality collapse; and they made mass starvation the exception instead of the rule.

As I said, it wasn’t all perfect, of course – nothing ever can be – but utilising cheap energy to engender the most remarkable progression-explosion is something for which humanity should be immensely thankful and grateful, not so entitled and judgmental. A truly thankful and grateful person can say that these challenges we are now facing are really part of the consequences of that success – it’s like winning the lottery and being told a small chunk of it will have to be apportioned to cleaning up some mess after the party.

To reiterate an essential point above – I need to tell that with the right kind of analysis of just what the human collective is and has been, it really is the case that as a species we couldn’t have done this very much better than we have, if you think of it through the correct I, Pencil-type of lens (see this blog post). In fact, perhaps the biggest thing we should have done better is scaled nuclear power earlier, but ironically that is something to which most environmentalists have been opposed.

No, we’ve done just about as well as we can in this great collective effort over the past 200 years, and it’s only because we have progressed to the stage that we can tackle climate change through a continuous process of technological development that we know how to pass through this next stage of challenges. That is, a more appreciative, humble way to think of it is our transitioning from the energy that built civilisation to the energy that will sustain it. It’s a story of billions of people doing the best they could with the tools and resources they had to collaborate, and usher in the next phase of our agrarian-industrial-technological evolution.

Remember, as I’ve blogged about before, the progress we are making (and going to keep making even more rapidly) will not just dwarf today’s environmental problems, it will make future generations look back with embarrassment at how this generation was so myopic about the ratio of progression to risk, and benefit to cost.  

No, events like the Dunwich Heath fire are awful to watch – I feel it too, as Dunwich has a special place in my heart. But our story of human complexity, ingenuity, and the next chapter of human responsibility should engender gratitude and optimism, not belligerence and alarmism, as we realise that harnessing fossil fuels and the rise of cheap, abundant energy has been one of the most consequential positive material shifts in human history - and almost all of modern life’s accomplishments - longer lives, mass prosperity, global food security, scientific progress, and the liberation of billions from poverty - sits on top of it.