Philosophy goes against the grain of political immediacy to insist on inconvenient truths.
Nathan Gardels, Noema Magazine Editor-in-Chief
Conceptual demolition of the outmoded paradigm of nation-state realism, however, does not erase its still firmly rooted expression in present practice. Building the centripetal momentum toward binding planetary association against the weighty centrifugal pull of tribal identity is an endeavor as fraught as it is necessary.
While technology and advancing science may foster a universal understanding of the planetary condition, politics and culture have a different logic rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind. Far from moving ahead in lock step, when they meet, they clash.
Indeed, the great paradox today is that the planetary imperative of mitigating climate change has become the province of renewed nationalism. Industrial policies designed to make the green energy transition are competing to protect and promote national self-interest instead of joining together at the level of all humanity. What we see instead is the battle of subsidies between the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the European Green New Deal, with both raising stiff tariff barriers to blunt China’s concerted conquest of core green technologies from storage batteries to electric vehicles, solar cells and their supply chains.
In short, rather than uniting as a threatened species to meet a challenge that knows no boundaries, competition has sidelined collaboration within the West while global warming has been weaponized in the new Cold War with China.
The new element of a greenlash, registered in the recent European elections, portends social resistance that is more about resentment of self-righteous Tesla-driving elites and the unequally borne costs of the energy transition than climate denial. The Diet-Coke imaginary of environmentalists — who sold climate policies as achievable without undue burdens on economies built around fossil fuels for more than a century — has been put to rest. As the heavy lift of the transition bites ever more deeply into the daily bread, we are learning the hard lesson that the future has a scarce constituency in consumer democracies as well as growth-oriented autocracies.
In this sense, “planetary realism” takes on a double meaning. It entails both a recognition of the interdependence of the planetary condition as well as a realistic grasp of what it will take to navigate through what remains a world of nations.
