The Climate Crisis Will Require an Authoritarian Government

The reaction to COVID shows that freedom is nothing but a copout for doing nothing

(First published in July 2021)

The summer of 2021 is just the beginning. Climatologists have made dire predictions, but honestly, they don’t know how things will play out. Things have the potential to get bad — like dystopian Hollywood movies, bad and fast. The Walking Dead might actually one day soon be looked at as an instructional film on survival in our next version of America.

Most people don’t realize that the immediate danger will most likely not come from climate-related events but rather from other humans. Many people will find themselves suddenly and permanently displaced; more alarmingly, they will be void of shelter from the increasingly severe weather conditions.

A human without sustainable shelter trying to survive in 125-degree weather will do desperate things. One person can be stopped, though. The police can be called.

It becomes a problem when that one person becomes thousands, even millions. It becomes a problem when the infrastructure upon which we sit today, made many years ago and for completely different climate conditions, begins to crumble due to the severe weather events: the torrential downpours, the recording-breaking heat waves (or domes as they are called now), the hurricane-force winds and even the brutally cold and snowy winters.

Every part of the system is going to be, and in many places is, being tested. As I sit here in the US, home for the first time in two years as I had been stuck due to the pandemic, I marvel at how much of a topic of conversation weather has become for nearly everyone.

Everybody agrees that something is underway and needs to be done. Yet, the air conditioners blow at full force — my family and I, from a non-AC country, are constantly freezing!

And then, we walk out into the wall of heat and marvel at how we always feel the urge never to move. We want to sit on a couch under blankets, and when outside, we want to race back inside — although we have taken to sitting on the porch to thaw ourselves out. We watch as massive car after car drives by with windows shut — AC blasting away inside. We marvel at how despite all of the conversations about bad things happening, no one seems willing to make any sacrifices.

Hot showers abound, food from all over the country fills the supermarkets, and plastic bottles, straws, and bags are everywhere as twenty years ago. Why aren’t people incentivized to bring their cups for the morning coffee at the local corner deli or 7/11? Why aren’t towns making it safer to walk everywhere?

From where I am to the center of town, I have to cross five areas with no sidewalks, and this sends my family and me out onto the road — we haven’t even tried to rent a car yet, so we are in our Russia mode — we walk everywhere, and if we can’t walk, we catch a ride with the family.

Nothing is changing, and I honestly don’t believe it will change.

What will happen is that the shit will hit the fan, and things will get messed up. Still, the vast majority will do all it can to hold onto the comforts of our Pax-Americana lifestyle, which puts personal comfort, even to the gluttonous degree, above all else.

So addicted are we to personal comfort, to the proverbial La-Z-Boy chair, that most of America will roll the dice hoping that before climate change reaches New-Testament proportions of fire, flying frogs, and angry locusts, they will either die from old age; or be lucky enough that the airborne SUV has landed on the neighbor and not them.

Hordes of Displaced

Comfort is king, and because it is so seductive, I believe many of us will not be willing to give up on the less tangible aspects of our American life, like democracy. The cut in the body democracy has already been made. While most Americans don’t accept the fascism promoted by Trump and his followers, they also have noted that its onset has not proven to be so disruptive as often seen in the movies.

If we look at Nazi Germany, for example, or modern-day Russia under Putin, citizens become more willing to set aside the adolescent desire to be rebellious when confronted with the loss of modern conveniences. The little revolutionary inside them grows quiet as the physical body’s needs precedence.

When fighting for the rights of a group of oppressed people, many are willing to take that fight home with them, to go to sleep angry and wake up with fire-filled hearts, refreshed and ready to fight another day.

When the fight comes down, to say, swearing off all air conditioning and selling all cars to begin the slow, uphill battle to save the earth, the sleepless nights caused by sweat-soaked sheets very quickly lose revolutionary appeal. We all become the oppressed and seek cover from the elements, from the oppressor — in this case, the oppressor is the weather that greets us 24/7 — the climatic discomforts.

But those climate change refugees will be coming.

They are already moving from the south to the north; moving from the left to the right; moving from an island to a landmass; they are floating across straits and swimming to floating devices in deadly seas in the hope of reaching a more inhabitable place — for family, for friends, and for self. When fighting for survival, we all become desperate and will do almost anything to survive.

The desire, urge, and even habit of being physically comfortable will be the last thing modern, civilized society gives up. Many well-read, progressively-liberal people need more time to be ready to sweat, be cold, or be inconvenienced.

With each impending wave of climate Armageddon, the core of “us” will seek to prolong the old days of comfy-cozy, and to do that, we will accept the rise of authoritarianism if those measures extend our cold homes, comfy lifestyles and seemingly endless — but very costly — bounty of way too much stuff.

I want to think I am wrong, but I see absolutely nothing that tells me that’s the case.