Martin De Ambrosio
09/03/2021 15:00
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Ideas
Updated 09/03/2021 15:00
If you only have one hammer, all you see are nails.
With that urgent look, we confronted two recent books and
discussed them, imagining Bill Gates and Naomi Klein in a face-to-face debate
.
The interlocutors, of course, did not meet, but their books were disputed.
Some firefighters observe a car dragged to the beach in Les Cases d'Alcanar (Tarragona) by torrential rain, which yesterday discharged 77 liters of water per square meter in half an hour, causing significant flooding in lowlands and streets in the Tarragona region of Montsià and the Baix Ebre, especially in the municipality of Alcanar, with no evidence of personal injury or missing persons for now.EFE / Quique García
Although Gates and Klein essentially share the same diagnosis of climate change (it was not produced by them but by a vast body of scientists),
the range of possible solutions they offer to the central problem of humanity in the 21st century is quite different
. For the engineer who created the concept of personal computer, the outputs that he raises in his book –more than correctly thought and written– are of a technical nature, including, although marginally, the highly controversial
geoengineering
. For the Canadian journalist and activist, author of
No logo
and alternative guru, the solutions are of a social nature; These require both personal constraints - actively reducing consumption, for example - and State
decisions.
strong that dictate those same prohibitions and guide.
Both Gates and Klein published their books in Spanish on this
more-than-environmental issue in the second year of the pandemic;
both seek to impact a world that sees these two tragedies - one shocking, the other urgent;
one disruptive, the other on fire no longer so slow - that seem part of the same batifondo, that of a humanity in dispute over its own destiny.
Glances
Gates' work had a few dozen collaborators, judging by the thank you pages and in it
the author also used the accumulation of knowledge generated from the work of the foundation that he shares with his new ex-wife, Melinda
, especially in Asia and Africa. Its focus belongs to the field of engineering and only a little side bets on changes in behavior and social consumption.
It is not that this look is secret, but that the author himself admits it in the opening pages, where he
also cleverly pleads guilty for moving on private flights that waste gases
and for not being, in short, the right person to lecture anyone about this issue: “I do not have the political solution to climate change (…) I aspire to focus on what it takes to achieve zero emissions (of greenhouse gases): channel the enthusiasm and scientific intelligence of the world towards solutions related to clean energies that already exist, as well as towards the invention of new ones ”.
Tablas de Daimiel National Park, on October 17, 2019, without water as a result of the dry period that affects the Iberian Peninsula and the continued decline that Aquifer 23 has been experiencing in recent years, the great store of underground water that supplies this protected space.
That basic problem of the enunciator, which could crumble the argumentative building of
How to avoid a climate disaster
, is circumvented with a battery of data and reasonable proposals that go in the sense of maintaining the same status quo that made Gates who he is.
Other searches
It is not exactly the search of the author of
Catching Fire
, who
emphasizes the process that has led to environmental collapse and suggests a radical change (more or less)
. Strictly speaking, Klein's book brings together a collection of extensive articles published in magazines such as
The Nation
and
The London Review of Books
and newspapers such as
The Guardian
, where he outlines his view, although not as coherent from the argumentative point of view as he had done in his first book on the subject, the monumental
This changes everything
(2014), in which in 700 pages he expanded on his critical vision of global capitalism.
In addition, in this collection he
highlights his position in favor of what a part of the Democratic Party of the United States defined as a “Green New Deal”
, an environmental pact that reverses Franklin's plan to get out of the crisis of 1929. D. Roosevelt (curiously a bit worn out after the inauguration of Joe Biden), and who is the pivot of the accusations made by Republicans of masking communism behind environmentalism: green is red, for a certain part of the ideological spectrum .
The truth is that
Klein is disgusted when billionaires like Gates suddenly wake up the world eager to use their accumulated capital to save the millions of dispossessed people
who live on less than a dollar a day, or who see their crops at risk because of the recurrent droughts, or that do not have a technology as simple as a vaccine.
Geoengineering
In addition to
the interests that are often hidden
.
Klein writes: “Bill Gates has injected millions of dollars into geoengineering research and has invested in Intellectual Ventures, which is developing at least two geoengineering tools: the StratoShield, a thirty-kilometer long hose suspended by air balloons. helium that would spew sulfur dioxide particles in the sky to block the sun, and a tool that supposedly has the power to reduce the force of hurricanes ”.
A female narwhal surfaces in an open area surrounded by sea ice in western Greenland on March 30, 2012. Image taken on March 30, 2012. Photo courtesy of Kristin Laidre / Handout via REUTERS
For her, then, it
is the distribution of wealth, and not gadgets and technocratic sums, that perhaps can restore a
more harmonious
channel
of and with nature. Millionaires with a conscience will not save us, nor any type of superman, but the collective effort in pursuit of a result that takes into account the rest of the living beings on the planet.
The interesting thing, of course, is the possible synthesis between the two solutions
, something that in some chaotic way is starting up (not with the speed of climate change). While there are advances in some of the requests regarding more taxes on the rich and the dirty (or polluting), the set of options known as geoengineering is analyzed in prestigious universities such as Harvard (in a group founded by Gates himself).
In between, the pressures from below due to the social consequences of climate disasters (changes of governments, mass migrations, famines) and a certain intention that a world government (the UN?) Establish measures that are finally carried out.
The one that predominates in the chaos of actions, decisions and initiatives, if anything, will mark the next few years
.
Without constraints, eh: humanity, at least as a more or less undivided whole, depends on how this complex equation turns out.
FILE PHOTO: Bill Gates arrives at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France on April 16, 2018. REUTERS / Charles Platiau / File Photo
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Bill Gates
Trad.
Carlos Abreu Fetter
Plaza & Janés
318 pp.
Naomi Klein is a Canadian journalist, writer and activist.
Naomi Klein
Trad on
fire
.
Ana Pedrero Verge and Francisco J. Ramos Mena
Paidós
383 pp.