Bring on the Climate Doomers! We Need More of Them

I recently complained that public narratives about climate—those promoted on so called mainstream platforms, and featured in cryptic one-liners from Democratic Party hopefuls—boil down to evasive bullshit.

We are rather stuck with a climate narrative that offers two wrong answers, and, in its bifurcated and reductionist limitations, rather mirrors our two party system that offers two, and only two bad choices. The Republicans loudly tell us that climate overheating is an outright hoax, or some minor and wholly natural fluctuation of geological cycles. The Democrats counter this with a fetishized future of wind and solar power. Meanwhile corporate arsonists burn coal, oil and gas with ever more maniacal fervor.

I don't need to debunk Republican climate orthodoxy—it thrives on drooling acolytes who have capitulated to facile explanations. The popular Democratic Party fairytale on climate, however, may need to be examined here—many of us mindlessly accept that a future of limitless indulgence will inevitably come to pass. Wind and sunlight shine, and blow upon the faces of the rich and poor alike. Once we harvest these free gifts from creation, the collective wealth of our species will be "decoupled" from the alleged finite resources of the planet. We can all have everything we want. It will be as if we each had our own private Amazon/Walmart nirvana. The climate apocalypse has raged against a population morally and cognitively broken by false hopes.

Even if we pretend that human society will lurch into a utopian phase with no war, no overproduction and no burning of fossil fuels, it may be too late to prevent wholesale species extinction and further environmental collapse.

Many of us have been so disabled by impossible promises that we miss four enormous points: 1) Nations cannot create energy systems to harvest the unlimited wind and sunlight without exhausting planetary resources. 2) The required extracted materials to manufacture solar panels and renewable storage batteries must be stolen from the Global South. 3) Renewable energy under capitalism does not replace fossil fuels—it creates additional growth thereby expanding the need to burn even more fossil fuels. 4) The collapse of our ecosystems from greenhouse gasses and industrial poisons is so far along that massive sea level rise, heating and degradation of oceans (coral reef bleaching, anoxic waters, fish die offs) and inland desertification will inevitably continue well into the future by the sheer momentum already launched. Even if we pretend that human society will lurch into a utopian phase with no war, no overproduction and no burning of fossil fuels, it may be too late to prevent wholesale species extinction and further environmental collapse.

The climate/environmental momentum toward hell, however, is but one component that drives inevitable pessimism. Far worse is the suicidal intentions of corporations, governments, and our concomitant air of mass indifference. Most of us are not resigned from a sense of hopelessness, but disabled by unwarranted optimism, or buoyed by a delusional faith in technology and reason. Even on the left there is little narrative climate clarity—our confusion likely inspires triumphant chuckles in the private board meetings of the oil industry. One truly bizarre story told in progressive circles is that mass resistance to environmental destruction has been eroded by "doomerism."

Here, for example, is Nathan Robinson's take on climate from a piece in Current Affairs:

Writing about climate change in a way that makes people feel scared and hopeless, like they are going to die in a wildfire whether they like it or not, is, in my opinion, part of why climate coverage is such a “ratings killer.” My suspicion is not that nobody wants to confront the subject of climate change—Don’t Look Up faces the matter head-on, and is hugely popular—but that if discussion of it just feels disempowering and depressing, there is no reason for anyone to read about it. Here at Current Affairs, two of our most popular recent articles have been on climate change, but the underlying message has been about taking action rather than merely forecasting the inevitable apocalypse.) I do not think it is helpful to tell anyone to “settle into the trans-apocalypse.” No! Join the Sunrise Movement and throw political leaders who refuse to act on climate out of office.

Robinson's warnings about the dangers of large-scale pessimism echo those of Michael Mann who asserted that "Doomerism is the new denial." As an aside, I must mention that I am an admirer of both Robinson and Mann. The former is one of our most important progressive writers (and the first editor to post one of my pieces on a large platform!) while Mann has been a critically important scientist in detailing the trajectory of our climate. His "Hockey Stick" climate graphs inspired the term and popularized the concept.

But the entire construct of doomerism (as Robinson and Mann understand it) rests on a shibboleth—is inaction really founded on collective despair—or is fear of doomerism another distracting trope? Do masses of people go from understanding that corporate goons burn our world to a crisp, to tossing up their hands and saying, “Fuck it, it’s hopeless?” At some sudden moment in time do they simply come (so the story of doomerism goes) to accept that there is no point to civil disobedience? Are we truly disabled due to a vision of unstoppable, irredeemable collapse? To the contrary, perhaps pessimism inevitably accompanies an honest appraisal of our precarious environmental future.

The oil industry understands with pristine clarity that hopeless people are as likely to respond with violent rage as with passivity.

If doomerism is really the "new denial," if a brigade of fatalistic and resigned people eagerly reject hope and let the oil industry off the hook, we would expect to see screeds by Guy McPherson and Eliot Jacobson posted prominently at The Heartland Institute.

However, we see no such thing. The last thing that oil companies and fascist think tanks want to convey to the public is that corporate crimes have ruined the planet and nothing can be done to change it. The oil industry understands with pristine clarity that hopeless people are as likely to respond with violent rage as with passivity. Doomerism is not the new denial. In fact, you will never see a word of pessimism on an oil industry funded propaganda platform. The industry honchos want your brain to be infused with optimism—hope, upbeat faith in human schemes to find new and better ways serves the cause of energy profits. Here is a Chevron happy ad to prove my point.

- YouTube youtu.be

Recent Pew research shows that some 63% of US citizens feel that climate is not the most critical issue facing the country. Less than a third of U.S. adults favor phasing out fossil fuels. We are clearly not a nation beset by fatalistic resignation, and collective environmental surrender, but, rather, a country collectively neutered by Chevron-style ad campaigns.

Even our best climate narratives stumble at the point where capitalism enters the story. Many writers insert a ghostly entity known as "we," as in a superbly written piece by Priya Satia entitled, "The Way We Talk About Climate Change is Wrong."

We will not be ushered past the grim reaper by optimists.

Satia argues quite originally that the notion of time that is indispensable to the capitalist mindset—the prioritizing of the future as it exists in the concept of delayed gratification—drives the system of imperial plunder and overconsumption. But who is the "we" in Satia's narrative that talks about climate in the wrong way?

There is no we—no public that owns a unique climate narrative. "We" are all tools of industry and politicians. Our climate narratives have been injected into our heads by means of well practiced repetition. Satia argues that indigenous people have historically lived according to natural rhythms. They have, from their intimacy with the earth, developed the capacity to take pleasure in the moment (a perspective embraced by some western writers as well, such as Thoreau). The political force needed to initiate a mass movement willing to abandon capitalist addictions for a deeper happiness can only take place under the leadership and passion of people with little to lose.

Even a writer with the depth of Priya Satia reduces climate mitigation to an act of mental transformation. She understands that capitalist mindsets comprise an obstacle, but does not explicitly discuss the critical preliminary task—the overthrowing of capitalism. The leadership in such an improbable effort—if we can even imagine it—will have to come from people who conceive of their choices in the darkest terms. If we are to survive another century, doomers will be the key to an eleventh hour reprieve. We will not be ushered past the grim reaper by optimists.

Extinction Rebellion insists that governments tell the truth about climate. If this were to happen, doomerism would flood our collective mindset—most of us would be doomers. Governments know that they can only retain power by sugar coating the climate story with fantasies about solar powered utopias.

A few years ago both Jonathan Franzen and Roy Scranton wrote, in effect, that it is highly unlikely that a massive climate catastrophe can be averted. Both were attacked in intellectual circles despite the fact that neither discouraged climate activism, and neither had access to platforms affecting mass opinion. Nor were their positions illogical considering what we know about capitalist history. I believe that the real threats to climate centered civil disobedience are not pessimists from the literary world, but optimists from corporate propaganda platforms, party politicians and mainstream media. Barack Obama stated at the 2024 DNC Convention that the U.S. will "lead the way on climate." If only those espousing Pollyannaish bullshit were attacked the way that Franzen was, the climate future might be less dire.

The fiercest fighters might well be those who have no chance to succeed.

In short, we need doomers—people encouraged to use their platform to scream that we are fucked. There might be a few people who will drink from the doomer cup and curl into fetal surrender. There will be far more who will take this message and fight back.

Anyone familiar with the Nazi Holocaust recalls that prisoners confined to the Warsaw Ghetto only rebelled when all hope was lost. Hopelessness has historically been the driver of action. Perhaps Nat Turner was a doomer, John Brown as well. The fiercest fighters might well be those who have no chance to succeed. I am not saying that we have no hope to survive and maybe even flourish, but anyone who does not consider that hopelessness may be a rational response to current reality is living in a fantasy world.

Hope is a tranquilizer. The first step to mass civil disobedience involves a shared pessimism, a deep understanding that we are truly and inescapably fucked. Only then can we form a movement that has a chance. Nathan Robinson and Michael Mann are two brilliant figures but dead wrong about doomers. We need more of them—there can never be enough.