"Planetary Realism" opening plenary by Nathan Gardels

1. The Condition of Planetarity

The condition of planetarity is grounded in an awareness that we humans are not the center of it all, but only one part of the Earth’s self-regulating ecosystem of multiple intelligences that strive interdependently toward sustainable equilibrium. The climate crisis is a window into that broader condition which repositions the place of modern humans in the natural order.

This disclosure of a non-human centric logos is one consequence of the advent of artificial intelligence that, through planetary-scale computation, vastly expands the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of whole Earth systems. We are only aware of climate change in the first place in this way. As Benjamin Bratton has grasped: “Only when intelligence becomes artificial and can be scaled into massive, distributed systems beyond the narrow confines of biological organisms, can we have a knowledge of the planetary systems in which we live.”

This emergent exoskeleton of sensors, satellites, clouds and networks that span the Earth constitute the rudiments of a common cognizant sphere that LAYS THE GROUND for planetary sapience.

2. From Globalization to the Planetary.

This condition entails a shift from the concept of globalization – when markets, trade and technology crossed borders to the Planetary. In the planetary concept, the borders cross us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat.

3. Planetary Realism.

This conceptual shift, in turn, entails a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics. “Planetary realism” is the practical manifestation of these new understandings. It departs from the old “realist,” or realpolitik, school of foreign policy that regards nation-states as the principal actors on the world stage engaged in an endless struggle against others in pursuit of securing their own interests.

Reality these days dictates another kind of realism when it comes to the convergence of critical common challenges that are beyond the scope of remedy by any one nation or bloc of nations. As the Earth’s biosphere cascades toward unlivable conditions it is now incontestably evident that the security of each depends inextricably on the other.

In short, what is now called for is not nation-state Realpolitik, but planetary Gaiapolitik.

This conceptual leap, however, far from being reflected in the present political temper, is going in the other direction toward a revived nationalism.

Indeed, one of the great paradoxes of the moment is that even 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.

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.

4. Untimely meditations.

So, one may sensibly regard these Venice deliberations as “untimely meditations.” The political zeitgeist is out of sync with the planetary imperative.

Of course, this does not diminish the dissonant role of philosophy to go against the grain of political immediacy and insist on inconvenient truths. Sooner or later, those truths must unavoidably be recognized because reality demands no less. The conundrum is how to get there from here, and get there in time.

5. The politics of planetary realism.

Planetary realism here has 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.

Here is where the notions of subsidiarity, subnational networks of the willing, a partnership of rivals and multi-alignment among states that we will be discussing today come in.

To take the case I know best as a participant is California. Sen. Hertzberg will go into more detail later. California already has experience with subnational cooperation on climate during the Trump presidency last time. Despite the US pulling out of the Paris Accord, then Gov. Jerry Brown state strengthened the state’s relationship with Chinese provinces and at the level of the Chinese leadership on common de-carbonization approaches, including aligning the metrics of our cap and trade carbon trading markets so one day they could be integrated.

Earlier this year, the China-California Climate Institute, co-chaired by Jerry Brown and China’s former top climate official Xie Zhenhua, had 200 Chinese climate scientists over to SF to plot further cooperation.

California’s breed of subnational statesmen has continued with the present Governor, Gavin Newsom. Last spring, he toured China’s provinces where clean energy development and climate mitigation are most advanced. He met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and others to update already extant environmental cooperation agreements with California and initiate new ones.

For China’s part, it recognizes that the Pacific-facing Golden State with a population of 40 million is nearly a nation unto itself. As the fifth-largest economy in the world, the state’s public policies that shape its huge market set standards for the entire United States, especially when it comes to auto emission controls, electric vehicle mandates and decarbonizing technologies.

The U.S. and China may well survive the decoupling of their economies from each other. But, as Governors Brown and Newsom have understood, the world will not survive the decoupling of climate cooperation between the two largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet. “Divorce is not an option,” Newsom declared in Beijing.

Despite all other tensions between these two incommensurate political systems, what the governor called the “fundamental and foundational” climate summons must bind the two together in partnership despite rivalry in other realms. This climate cooperation manifests the idea of “a partnership of rivals.”

California is just one case among many where “translocalism can circumnavigate geopolitics.” We don’t have to wait for the nation-state as cumulative causation can move the needle forward. One saving grace of climate, if I may put it that way, is that, as a distributed reality it can be addressed in a distributed way.

There is also a case at the national or regional level for avoiding zero-sum conflict through managed trade instead of tariffs and bans that negotiate market share for Chinese EV’s the way the US did with Japan’s fuel efficient imports after the 1970s oil embargo crisis. Market share agreements can help protect jobs and maintain competitive pressure on domestic manufacturers while still encouraging the most rapid spread of affordable EVs to reduce carbon emissions in transportation.

And let’s don’t forget the role the private sector will inevitably play as climate reality literally hits peoples’ homes. The newly empowered political establishment in the U.S. may not believe in climate change, but the nerdy actuaries in the insurance companies do - whether coping with Californian and Greek wildfires, floods in Florida or Valencia. They know they are on their way to bankruptcy without climate mitigation. In some way they are a vanguard, certainly an ally.

Green Nationalism

Finally, one cannot not ignore the real-world effects of the rise of green nationalism I mentioned before. Recently Girogia Meloni argued that Italy must advance effective climate policies both as a job creator and as a key way to keep migrants from the global South trekking north as climate refugees. At the COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan, Viktor Orban touted Hungary as positioning itself for economic growth and new job creation by becoming “a significant player in electric vehicle development and electricity storage.” And, unlike the rest of the West, he intends to do so through cooperation with China to leverage its prowess in green tech development.

In the U.S. it is entirely conceivable that Elon Musk can sell the climate-denier-in-chief on the need for a robust EV industry to stay ahead of China and Big Tech, for the same reason, can sell him on a revival of the non-fossil fuel nuclear industry to power its data centers.

On the face of it, all this may seem a fatal fragmentation. But there may be another way we are compelled to look at it. We have the legitimacy framework we have – the nation-state – not the one we wish we had. To the extent proximity is legitimacy in the subsidiarity schema, green nationalism is beginning to appear, perhaps, as the most politically organic way to move forward at this historic juncture.

6. Greenlash, technolash and consumption.

Two other quick observations about the politics of planetary realism.

• First, the mounting greenlash. The new element of a greenlash, registered in the recent elections across the West, 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 framed 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-obsessed autocracies.
  
  If we don’t have policies that buffer and equalize the burden of the transition, it will stall.
  
• Within the planetary awareness there is a tension between those who see technology as part of the solution and deep ecologists who distrust technology and see it as the problem. They suspect it is a substitute for the political will to act that only sustains the addiction while deepening the underlying affliction.
  
  As I noted at the outset, this is manifestly wrong in the sense that planetary-scale computation is what allows the limited understanding of humans to grasp the working of Earth’s natural systems in the first place. Aligning human technological prowess with natural systems instead of against them is a necessary part of the equation. Anthropogensis got us into this mess and can help get us out. It portends, as some have called it, The Good Anthropocene.
  
  At the same time, technology is not a silver bullet and could easily become a crutch. The temptation to deify technology as the ultimate solution, as so-called tech accelerationists are prone to do, risks mirroring the mistake of deep ecologists who resist its promise.
  
  Any effort to repair planetary deformation through technology cannot be effective if it is solely focused on cutting downstream emissions or adapting to the consequences of climbing temperatures.
  
  Here the perspective of deep ecology still resonates. We are only buying time if we don’t also address what drives the system — the upstream overconsumption that turns every want into a need that can only be satisfied through a net increase in the use of planet-warming energy.
  
  In the end, what we don’t do is as much a part of planetary realism as what we do.