https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/ [locus-head] Locus Online Locus Online The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field [Transparen] Subscribe! * All Posts * News + Awards + Announcements + Publishing + New Titles & Bestsellers + Conventions + Obituaries * Reviews + Books + Short Fiction + Films + Index to Reviews * Features + Interviews o Index to Interviews + Spotlights + Commentary o Cory Doctorow o Kameron Hurley o Roundtable o SF Crossing the Gulf * Subscribe * Advertise * Donate * About + Submission Guidelines + Contact Us + Staff + History of Locus Magazine o Charles N. Brown (1937-2009) o Locus Online + FAQ + Code of Conduct + Store * Resources + Forthcoming Books + Index to Interviews + Index to Reviews + Archived Posts by Month + Directories + Science Fiction Awards Database + Conventions List + Links by Category + Store * My Account [ ] Cory Doctorow wearing "Ellsberg & Nikitin & Manning & Snowden" tshirt Commentary Cory Doctorow Features Slider Cory Doctorow: The Swerve July 4, 2022June 24, 2022 locusmag 2 Comments Cory Doctorow Cory DoctorowPhoto by Paula Mariel Salischiker We're all trapped on a bus. The bus is barreling towards a cliff. Beyond the cliff is a canyon plunge any of us will be lucky to survive. Even if we survive, none of us know how we'll climb out of that deep canyon. Some of us want to yank the wheel. The bus is going so fast that yanking the wheel could cause the bus to roll. There might be some broken bones. There might be worse than broken bones. The driver won't yank the wheel. The people in expensive front row seats agree. "Yank the wheel? Are you crazy? Someone could break a leg!" We say, "But there's a cliff! We're going to go over the cliff! We're going to die!" "Nonsense," they say. "Long before we go over the cliff, we'll have figured out how to put wings on this bus." We argue. They add, "Besides, who's to say we'll fall off the cliff? Maybe we'll be going so fast that we leap the canyon. Fonzie did it! Calm down. Hey! Keep your hands off the wheel? What are you, a terrorist? Don't you dare do that again. Someone could get really badly hurt." The climate emergency is real and we are living through it. As I write this, I've emailed some writer friends in the southwest to ask if the fires threaten them or their homes. One hasn't answered yet. The other wrote back to say they're fine, but what about the wildfires near my house? Oh, I wrote. We're fine. So far. California is in for a hell of a wildfire season. It's dry out there. It's an emergency. Officially. (It was an emergency before, but that was unofficial) We're not acting like it's an emergency. In mid-May, The Guardian reported a bombshell: a series of planned "carbon bombs" - large-scale oil and gas projects that will "shatter the 1.5C climate goal." The war in Ukraine has the world scrambling for winter heat - for sources of oil and gas, that is, not renewable alternatives. Of course not. The only way for renewables to replace Russian oil and gas this coming winter is for Europe to have retooled around sustainable heating: a mix of beefed up insulation, heat pumps, and mass power shortage. Those are long projects. We knew we'd need them decades ago, but we kicked the can down the road, and further down the road, and further. Incredibly, climate denial still festers. "There's no cliff," they insist. "This bus is on a smooth road that goes all the way to the promised land. Only a fool would swerve now." The good news is: climate denial is on the wane. The bad news is: deniers have pivoted to incrementalism: "We'll fix the climate. Give us a couple decades to phase out oil and gas. Give us a couple decades to replace the cars and retrofit the houses. Give us a couple decades to invent cool direct-air carbon capture systems, or hydrogen cars that work just like gas cars, or to replace our overland aviation routes with high speed rail, or to increase our urban density and swap out cars for subways and buses. Give us a couple decades to keep making money. We'll get there." In other words: "We're pretty sure we can get some wings on this bus before it goes over the cliff. Keep your hands off the wheel. Someone could get really badly hurt." People are already getting really badly hurt, and it's only going to get worse. We're poised to break through key planetary boundaries - loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning - whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make. These boundaries are the point of no return, the point at which it won't matter if we yank the wheel, because the bus is going over the cliff, swerve or no. Focus on the swerve. Believe it or not, the swerve is a happy ending. This is a hopeful article. Here's what I hope we can do: I hope we can swerve. A couple decades ago, the swerve might have been avoidable. It was 1977 when Exxon's own scientists concluded that their products would render the planet uninhabitable for humans. Exxon knew. They buried the research and paid for denial. George H.W. Bush came into office in 1988 as the "Environmental President." He campaigned on "conven[ing] a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese... The agenda will be clear. We will talk about global warming." By 1992, he abandoned the idea of the US retooling to avert the catastrophe. "The American way of life," he told the Rio Earth Summit, "is not up for negotiations. Period." If we'd started in 1977, we might have paid some civil engineers to build a bridge over the cliff. In 1988, it was still entirely possible. In 1992, the option was still there. Today, time has run out for bridges. All we've got left is the swerve. We've got to seize the wheel of the bus. We've got to plunge past the first-class passengers in the front rows of the bus, and we have to yank the wheel. We have to swerve. The bus will roll over. It won't be nice. We will probably have to abandon some of our most beautiful coastal cities and towns. We will probably have to retool our industries in haste, and commandeer our factories to build new energy tech instead of consumer tchotchkes - the way we ordered factories to produce vaccines and PPE last year. I don't know what the first-class passengers were thinking. Some of them will be dead of natural causes before the bus goes over the cliff, and they didn't want to sacrifice any of their material comforts to ensure that the rest of us continued to live once they passed on, I suppose. Others are just ideologically committed to traveling in a straight line. The swerve is morally bankrupt. It's communism. The only way to get over the cliff - if such a thing exists - is to floor the bus. Go as fast as possible. Leap the gorge! The Fonz did it, right? The swerve is our hopeful future. Our happy ending isn't averting the disaster. Our happy ending is surviving the disaster. Managed retreat. Emergency measures. In the swerve, we'll still have refugee crises, but we'll address them humanely, rather than building gulags and guard-towers. We'll still have wildfires, but we'll evacuate cities ahead of them, and we'll commit billions to controlled burns. We'll still have floods, but we'll relocate our cities out of floodplains. We'll still have zoonotic plagues as animals flee their disappearing habitat, but we'll apply the lessons of COVID to them. We'll still have mass extinctions, but we'll save the species we can, and we'll prioritize habit restoration as a way of preserving our horizontal brothers and sisters (as Muir called animals) and as a way of putting the climate back in balance. We'll swerve. The bus will roll. It will hurt. It will be terrible. But we won't be dead on canyon floor. We'll fix the bus. We'll make it better. We'll get it back on its wheels. We'll get a better driver, and a better destination. That's our happy ending. That's our hopeful future. We gotta get ahold of that wheel first. You ready? Let's roll. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Cory Doctorow is the author of Walkaway, Little Brother, and Information Doesn't Want to Be Free (among many others); he is the co-owner of Boing Boing, a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a visiting professor of Computer Science at the Open University and an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate. --------------------------------------------------------------------- All opinions expressed by commentators are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus. This article and more like it in the July 2022 issue of Locus. Locus Magazine, Science Fiction FantasyWhile you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field. (c)Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF. * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) * * [locus-5]- Previous Paula Guran Reviews Short Fiction: Apex #130, PodCastle, and PseudoPod * Weekly Bestsellers, 4 July 2022 Next -[butlerp] Earlier Posts of Interest... [marusek-200x300-1510607856] David Marusek: Under the Alaskan Sky November 13, 2017 locusmag 0 [feb9b_opt-200x300] Photo Story: Celebrating 90 Years of Analog February 11, 2020 locusmag 0 Launch Pad science fiction writing workshop Photo Story: Launch Pad 2018 September 27, 2018 locusmag 0 2 thoughts on "Cory Doctorow: The Swerve" * [2ec5c576e] Hyman Rosen July 5, 2022 at 7:37 am Permalink It was people like you who destroyed nuclear power; that was your "swerve" decades ago, when we could have had safe, non carbon-burning plants. You environmentalists destroy everything with your "review" processes designed to prevent anything from ever being built. I still remember the attempt to derail NASA's Cassini probe because it used plutonium batteries. Reply * [f8ab4b7ab] Gary Guss July 5, 2022 at 9:11 am Permalink Thanks for writing this, and reminding us not to give up! Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [ ] Notify me of follow-up comments by email. [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] Issue 738 Table of Contents, July 2022 Issues Issue 738 Table of Contents, July 2022 July 1, 2022 locusmag 0 Buy Current Issue: Print & Digital See All Issues Latest Posts HarperCollins Union Threatens Strike Legal News Publishing HarperCollins Union Threatens Strike July 5, 2022 locusmag 0 FantasyCon 2022 Cancelled Conventions News FantasyCon 2022 Cancelled July 5, 2022 locusmag 0 2022 Deutscher Science Fiction Preis Winners Awards News 2022 Deutscher Science Fiction Preis Winners July 5, 2022 locusmag 0 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award Finalists Awards News 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award Finalists July 5, 2022 locusmag 0 Karen Burnham Reviews Short Fiction: khoreo, Luna Station Quarterly, and Shoreline of Infinity Reviews Short Fiction Karen Burnham Reviews Short Fiction: khoreo, Luna Station Quarterly, and Shoreline of Infinity July 5, 2022 locusmag 0 Ordinary Monsters Ad Black Lives Matter Locus Merchandise Categories Announcements Archives Awards Bestsellers Blinks Blurb Books Bookstores Classic Reprints Commentary Contests Conventions Cory Doctorow Features Films Forthcoming Books Interviews Issues Kameron Hurley Legal Milestones New & Notable New Books New in Paperback News New Titles & Bestsellers Obituaries Periodicals Publishing Reviewers Reviews Roundtable Short Fiction Slider Spotlight Staff Staff Picks Support What We Do Uncategorized Workshops [INS::INS] [legalthanks] What they say Blurb Jonathan Strahan on Locus September 28, 2010 locusmag 0 "I once did a four book deal at a Locus party on the publisher's back deck. I found my agent through Locus. It connects me to the publishing world." * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) * Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) * [INS::INS] [INS::INS] Archived Posts Archived Posts [Select Month ] Categories Categories[Select Category ] All opinions expressed by commentators, guest bloggers, reviewers, and interviewees are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Locus magazine or its staff. Contact Locus SF Foundation dba Locus Publications 655 13th St. #100 Oakland CA 94612 ph. +1-510-339-9196 locus@locusmag.com Weekdays: 9-5 Pacific Time [ ] Suggestion, tips, typos? You can send news, tips, and suggestions to locus@locusmag.com. If you see problems or bugs on the site, please let us know and include the URL and also which browser you are using. Follow us! [birdie] [2000px] [Patre] [insta] Locus Magazine and Website cover science fiction, fantasy, young-adult, horror books, short fiction, anthologies, magazines, films, news, conventions, and international. Also interviews with SFF authors, editors, artists, and more. Copyright (c) 2022 Locus Publications. All rights reserved. donate now button PLEASE SUPPORT LOCUS WITH A DONATION TODAY! Locus is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and relies on donations and subscribers to stay alive. Now losing some of our last bookstores to the trials of 2020, Locus needs your support even more to keep publishing the high quality reviews, book and community news, and articles you read here. Our online readers (there are a lot of you!) could support everything Locus does, if each reader donated $5 once a year. But only 1% of our audience pitches in. Please consider making your donation today! CLOSE