SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
doomerism
Hope, Doomers, and the Climate Emergency
Capitalism is feeding on our "courageous" sense of optimism—as it swallows the planet whole.
Sep 23, 2024
I think of American political narratives as being like wayward car horns—unpleasant cacophonous noise blasting so discordantly that you still hear it after it stops. The repetition conveys a noxious habit—blaming victims and absolving the powerful. Thus, America crumbles and implodes, not from capitalist greed and institutional inequity, but from immigrant invasions.
Last week I wrote about the truly obscene and utterly weird climate narrative, often pouring from the keyboards of progressive writers—doomers have become the new deniers we are told. We have an extinction event, a potential checkout line for human evolution, and the target of our ire—the ones who fail to keep the wolf from the door are, uh.....people who have lost hope?
We live in a culture that grinds hope to smithereens, that pours its heart and soul into war, military hardware, expanded policing and fossil fuel extraction, while turning a blind eye to every form of suffering—discouragement is our national product. We have a depressed, checked out, poor population—in the tens of millions—that has aptly given up on voting. I worked for decades as an outreach mental health worker with very poor clients. Futility is the flip side of the American dream. My clients never felt that they had a shred of agency—they knew damn well that voting would never improve their lives. Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses. Our "deaths of despair" parallel the phenomenon of climate doomerism.
In the climate narrative that now envelops us, it may be that all hope is false hope.
America “the paranoid,” has a time honored habit of directing its faux righteousness in tangential fashion. Most of us have never met a real live climate doomer, but even a casual excursion to the YouTube "doomisphere" reveals that the few self -identified doomers selling their wares on social media (to a tiny handful of subscribers) offer, perhaps, the most nuanced, detailed and intelligent climate narrative available. Doomers follow the science to a fork in the road where scientists often refuse to go. Scientists tell us that it is not too late—we (whoever we are) merely have to immediately and drastically reduce fossil fuel use and be at so called "net zero" in the next decade and a half. The doomers disabuse us of fantasies of net zero. "Hello," they call out—"capitalists have no intention of slowing down the orgy of fossil fuel consumption, and the public has been declawed with tales about renewable replacements."
In some bizarre, twisted media hallucination, the doomers have come to be the proxy targets for capitalism's death wish. We are shooting the messenger, and giving the perpetrator a free pass. This brings to mind the all-time greatest act of mass murder ever perpetrated upon the human race—the tetraethyl lead apocalypse of the 20th century. You might think of WWII or the Nazi Holocaust when you think of the all-time epic mass murder—tip your hat to the public relations brilliance of capitalism. You probably barely know about the bloody deeds of leaded gasoline—acts of boundless destruction that make Hitler and Pol Pot into evil children by comparison.
Leaded gasoline unleashed an episode of unabated horror upon the entire biosphere, with no government protections for half a century. Apart from the body count—in the tens of millions conservatively, along with the cognitive destruction of children (for lead is a devastating neurotoxin)—the lead epidemic perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry also set loose an ongoing narrative assault upon inner city people. In the U.S. the pundits and politicians blame the victims as a matter of choreographed practice. The leaded gasoline mass murder event resolved into a national narrative with mass hatred directed at our poorest citizens.
When the lead dust had settled, we had the prison industrial complex, the dismantling of safety nets, the explosion of neoliberal ideology and such tomes as "The Bell Curve" promoting a new vision of eugenics.
Inner cities had been catacombed with highways designed to separate urban Black neighborhoods from white suburbs. In these communities lead gas fumes attacked the developing brains of Black children, and contributed to enormous spikes in violent crime. The urban crime wave inspired racist political narratives and kick started the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Lead exposure lowers IQ, reduces self-control and drives impulsive behavior. In America, neurological injuries from lead combined with available fire arms, poverty and lack of opportunity. These factors, in concert, drove murder rates through the roof. The U.S. murder rate reached a pinnacle in 1980 with 10.4 murders per 100,000 people—just in time for the election of Ronald "trickle down" Reagan. With the phasing out of leaded gasoline, murder rates incrementally dropped and now commonly register at a little more than half of the peak established just prior to the election of Ronald "I doubled the prison population" Reagan in 1980. Of course, even without lead poisoning from auto fumes, we are still the most violent developed nation on earth. This piece is not about American military values and the second amendment.
The prison industrial complex may seem to have little to do with climate doomers, and, indeed, the casual scapegoating of a few discouraged people who tell us that we have little hope of avoiding societal collapse may seem trivial when set beside the brutality and racism of the U.S. carceral state. But we have at least a vague parallel that is worth contemplating—in the U.S., media and politicians have a habit of pointing fingers at innocent victims.
Newspaper pundits and politicians, in the 80’s and 90’s, bloviated about "super predators." They systematically directed hatred toward the victims of tetraethyl lead. The leaded gasoline mass murder event, we now understand, was only a warm up act (pardon the pun) for the ultimate fossil fuel industry crime—the total erasure of the biosphere. And who should the public hold accountable for the probable and looming genocide of all living things? Doomers! People who tell us that the corporate empire and the elected bots that feed at donor troughs are so intent on slaughtering us that we likely cannot do anything to stop them. Once again, we find pundits intent on tangential targets to blame. People who feel hopeless have nothing to do with the source of the problem. They are, like those destroyed by leaded gas fumes, victims of a process they had no part in creating.
Here is an interview of my favorite doomer—Elliot Jacobson who tells us that hope is our enemy, hope drives our collective delusions. Jacobson references a Harvard study that suggested that activism and hope have an inverse relationship. You may not resonate with Jacobson's darkness or analysis but he projects an air of integrity that is quite rare in climate discourse.
In the climate narrative that now envelops us, it may be that all hope is false hope. I believe that any activist movement ought to proceed from the starting point that success is unlikely and catastrophe can only be reduced. Critically, capitalism must be named —there is no credible climate story that fails to trace our unwinnable predicament to the headwater of the market economy.
By the way, whatever happened to the perpetrators of the leaded gasoline mass murder event? You probably know the names of the two most culpable GM leaders who refused to use grain alcohol to make their gasoline provide a smooth ride. Grain alcohol would have worked as well as tetraethyl lead and would not have murdered countless millions and destroyed the minds of children. But GM had a patent on tetraethyl lead, and grain alcohol belonged to the public domain. In other words, GM executives knowingly committed mass murder for profit and hired credentialed academic whores to confuse the public with bullshit research. Leaded gasoline butchered millions and inspired the invention of pseudoscience (which now sustains our climate catastrophe), but the story gets even worse.
Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses. Our "deaths of despair" parallel the phenomenon of climate doomerism.
You have all heard of one of the world's great cancer research and treatment centers, The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the leaders of GM who presided over the bloodiest extermination event of the twentieth century. For that, we honor them with eternal recognition and fame. That is how capitalism works.
You might wonder what sort of massive, multi-trillion dollar reparations have been given to the millions of victims of GM’s crimes, but you probably intuitively know. The survivors and descendants of those whose minds became collateral damage to profits got nothing. They are still being fed to the carceral state. That is how capitalism works.
One small request—can we stop blaming our environmental predicament on doomers? Rather, we need to listen to them carefully.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Bring on the Climate Doomers! We Need More of Them
Sure, there might be a few people who will drink from the doomer cup and curl into fetal surrender. But there will be far more who will take this message and fight back.
Sep 15, 2024
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.
- YouTubeyoutu.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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular