Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, by Nils Gilman and Jonathan S. Blake (Stanford University Press, 326 pp., $28)
“We don’t need better publics. We need better elites.”
So declared political scientist Nils Gilman in a talk on “institutional decay” at a conference I helped organize in 2017. Since then, it’s become something of a refrain of his. Gilman argued that elites—who had cordoned themselves off from the interests of the working classes and who had eroded trust in science, democracy, the academy, and other institutions—were a bigger problem than the general public that had recently voted for Brexit and Donald Trump.
It’s notable, then, that Gilman has published a new book—Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, coauthored with his Berggruen Institute colleague Jonathan S. Blake—making the case that our civilizational problems are so big they can only be entrusted to elite institutions at the “planetary level.”
Specifically, Blake and Gilman propose “separate planetary institutions, one for the climate, one for pandemics.” Such institutions would be distinct from “hegemonic world Leviathan” bodies like the United Nations, but also from the sovereign nation-state, which they see as, at best, a historical aberration and, at worst, wholly unprepared to deal with twenty-first century challenges. Their proposed planetary institutions would be better equipped to tackle problems like decarbonization and pandemic response than national governments, which, the pair insist, have definitively failed.
But have they? Blake and Gilman began writing the book under lockdown in 2020, when mass governmental failure to respond to Covid seemed obvious to many. Millions died around the world, and there have now been hundreds of millions of confirmed cases since early 2020. Many of those who didn’t perish suffered from the loss of loved ones, social isolation, lost jobs or wages, or all of the above.
Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, there were also many positives to society’s Covid response. The mRNA and adenovirus vaccines to reduce the severity of, and mortality associated with, infection were developed in months rather than the years or decades necessary for many novel vaccines. Operation Warp Speed, a federal initiative to clear regulatory hurdles and marshal public and private scientific and industrial capacity, is today regarded as one of the most successful public industrial policies in modern history. Governments around the world provided unprecedented income replacement for shuttered businesses and lost wages.
There were, of course, major public shortcomings: extreme overcorrections like the extended public school closures and poor performance like the FDA’s inability to produce reliable at-home tests in the early months of the pandemic. The vaccines were ultimately not as effective at preventing infection as initially promised. Government spending contributed to the worst inflation experienced in decades. But, less than four years later, the world has almost entirely returned to normal, albeit with the ongoing nuisance of Covid variants we will likely never eradicate.
The real question, then, is whether national governments deserve blame for failing to prevent the pandemic in the first place. And here the conclusions are far murkier than Blake and Gilman suggest.
If, on the one hand, Covid had a natural origin, coming from a wild bat’s droppings or some other animal at a Chinese wet market, it is relatively hard to imagine how the Chinese, U.S., or other national governments could have prevented its emergence. Would a “Planetary Pandemic Agency,” as Blake and Gilman propose, monitor and prevent such zoonotic transfers better than national health agencies? Not obviously so.
If, on the other hand, Covid leaked from research at a lab in Wuhan (as Gilman, for what it’s worth, believes it probably did), then the planetary proposal rests on even shakier ground. If the lab leak theory holds, then an opaque, global network of elite scientists pursued risky gain-of-function research and then deliberately misled policymakers and the public about these activities.
Presumably, these are not the elites Gilman and Blake would appoint to their planetary pandemic response team. But if not them, who?
Climate change moves slower than a pandemic but is no less illustrative of the pitfalls of planetary project management. When global warming first emerged as a major public concern in the final decades of the twentieth century, the United Nations set out to establish a global response framework, first at the Rio Conference in 1992 and then via the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. These were decidedly not the forms that Blake and Gilman would recommend for dealing with the problem of rising carbon emissions. The United Nations, they argue, suffers from too much democratic deliberation combined with too little substantive capacity. As they are eager to point out, despite dozens of UN conferences over the past three decades, global carbon emissions have continued to climb.
Where emissions have declined, though, is at the level of individual nation-states. Including the emissions embedded in global trade, absolute emissions in wealthy countries are falling as economies dematerialize and as energy infrastructure adopts more efficient, lower-carbon alternatives.
To the extent that supranational institutions have anything to do with this progress, it is because the UN ceded emission-reduction goal-setting and clean energy policy to sovereign states. In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the negotiators abandoned long-held aspirations for a binding global emissions treaty and instead delegated decarbonization to member nations, through a tracking mechanism called the INDC, or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions—note the many qualifiers in the name.
When Paris was signed, major energy-systems modelers estimated that the INDCs put the world on an emissions trajectory that would see global temperature increases stabilize at between 3.1 and 5.2 degrees by the end of the century. Today, forecasters have narrowed their projections further, to between 2.1 and 3.4 degrees. And though that may seem like good news, it still represents failure to many elite climate researchers and advocates, who argue that “the worst consequences of climate change” lie beyond the hard threshold of 2 or even 1.5 degrees. It is with this assessment of failure in mind that Gilman and Blake demand a more assertive emissions policy.
Other experts have used these atmospheric aspirations to advance political claims in the past. Will Steffen, an architect of the influential “Planetary Boundaries” hypothesis on which these temperature targets rest, argued in 2011 that the world needs “an institution (or institutions) operating, with authority, above the level of individual countries to ensure that the planetary boundaries are respected.” Such institutions would work “to limit continued growth of the material economy on a finite planet.” More recently, the entire American environmental movement supported a lawsuit against the U.S. government on the grounds that atmospheric concentrations of carbon above 350 parts per million (today, they are approximately 423 ppm) are unconstitutional, insisting that the entire national energy system be shut down. (That lawsuit was recently dismissed.)
These round-number targets may provide superficial tentpoles on which to hang climate diplomacy and climate-impacts literature, but they are themselves profoundly unscientific. The global average surface temperature is not a physical property of the Earth, but rather a synthetic composite of local temperatures. Atmospheric concentration of carbon is real, but both its causes (ecological and anthropogenic greenhouse emissions) and its extant effects (the impacts of climate and of climate change) occur mainly at the local and regional, not the planetary, level. And there is no compelling science that suggests climate effects worsen in a stepwise fashion beyond 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, or any hard threshold. So to the extent these targets serve any institutions, they serve those espousing environmentalist ideology, not democratic governance, planetary subsidiarity, or science.
In the end, there is no escaping the necessity of democratic deliberation. The only way out is through. Even Blake and Gilman, while otherwise disparaging our current “anthropocentric” globalism, nonetheless feel confident in endowing planetary stewardship to humans—but only a certain caliber of humans. “Some people,” the pair write, “know more and understand better than others about the planetary condition, and they should be empowered to speak for the planet.” This ivory tower provocation perhaps obscures a perfectly banal truth—that expertise and knowledge should matter for our politics. And the pair are wisely, if conspicuously, agnostic on which people they would empower to speak for the planet. But on planet Earth today, it seems obvious who would claim that power once it’s available: not the “better elites” for which Blake and Gilman hope, but the secretive epidemiologists and the anti-growth earth-systems scientists already demanding global authority.
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