Ever get the feeling nobody wants to talk about what you want to talk about? (1)
Ever get the feeling that there are herds of elephants in the room, and everyone is studiously ignoring their trumpetting, as you would if your boss/king/Prime Minister had just let rip with with a loud and evil-smelling fart?
I am not talking about climate change. Lots of people are talking about (or around, or past) climate change. You can talk about climate change ALL YOU LIKE in various subsections of the media, social media academia etc(2). As long as you slap your tribe’s favourite talking points on your screeds, you’ll be fine. The Market Will Provide. Sensible legislation and regulation Will Provide. Technology Will Provide. The Activists Must Be Released (3).
I’m talking about something adjacent to all this palaver. And as per that Dutch historian Rutger Bregman at Davos a few years back – “It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.“
Because all these palavers limned two paragraphs ago are efforts to avoid a heart-breaking, brain-breaking truth. And that is (drumroll please)… we (4) have failed to act for a generation.
We have failed to act at the scale and scope required, and now the very first consequences are beginning to bite (5). There will be more consequences. Oh so many more consequences.
If you’re feeling misanthropic/well-informed, you can date the serious climate warnings to the late 1960s. If you’re feeling generous/understanding, you can date it from 1988, the year the scientists – empowered by Ozone credibility and Villach-y science – finally broke through and forced it onto the political agenda.
Let’s feel generous. That’s a generation of failure. Of successful watering down of the initial treaty (which some wanted to have targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich nations). Of US-forced blather about carbon trading and “joint implementation” (paying companies to push poor people off land so trees could be planted to give the impression to rich Westerners that their consumption was no problem). Of technological jokes like Carbon Capture and Storage. Of Emissions trading schemes. Politicians managed the issue (but not the problem). Academics and policy-wonks built satisfying careers and got to feel important. Social movement entrepreneurs got to ride the emotacycle. All the while, the emissions climbed, and the fossil fuel infrastructure kept metastasizing (6)
We (7) have failed.
We don’t like to admit it. The entire basis of being a member of the Right Classes is to never ever admit that you made a mistake. Mistakes were made, but not by us. Failure is vulnerability. Admitting failure is a character-flaw, a worrying letting the side down. If people are willing to blame themselves, they might also be willing to blame other individuals. Where might it all end??
Yesterday I tweeted about Tim Harford, the FT author/BBC columnist. Harford is funny and smart, bordering on wise. I have learnt a lot, enjoyably, from listening to him, reading him. I’m reading one of his books at the moment. But Professor Kevin Anderson (full disclosure, a friend) absolutely demolished Harford basically ignoring climate change (while paying lipservice). It’s a terrifying read. Numbers and everything.
Here’s my tweet, btw
Which (finally) brings me to my specific point: whose failure?
Because the big failure here is the failure of rich white educated people in the West to look after “the System” that brought them those riches. By “look after” I mean to figure out not “sustainable development” (as if more than a statistically-irrelevant number of the Western elite cared!) but sustainable exploitation: of being able to keep drawing down on flows and stocks in ways that meant you could keep doing extracting into the distant future.
As soon as you start talking like that, you’re talking about limits, and the Great Accelerationists cannot abide it. They’re like enraged toddlers having the shocking realisation that they cannot make the Breast appear at will (8). And the enraged toddler screamed about “Malthus with a computer” and then later, calmer, came up with an agreed delusion about “ecological modernisation”, aka sustainable growth, aka smart growth, aka – oh, you get the idea, sprinkle the words innovation, participatory, community-led, responsive, open, whatever. Those words have incantatory power, and act as thought-terminating cliches.
Here’s the bit I will put it bold. . It. Isn’t. Just. The. “Evil”. People. Who. Run. The. System. Who. Can’t. Talk. Failure.
Everyone got their cherished illusions. For those who claim to be watchdogging the System, in “civil society” there are illusions about how the System can be made to be more responsive (with the right glossy reports, the right schmoozing of old school chums). Nobody wants to look at fifty plus years (or 35 if you’re feeling generous) of abject failure, with emissions and concentrations – and temperatures – climbing.
Because elite “civil society” is rammed full of people who, if the cards had fallen another way, if they’d made different choices, had slightly different dispositions or luck, might have ended up running The System (and indeed, it’s far more porous than the implicit binary I’ve set up suggests. There’s a fair revolting door. Sorry,revolving door. Or was I right the first time?)
Nobody wants to admit they are a good German.
And “normie” civil society – the campaign groups and inchoate/mayfly social movements? Too ignorant (wilfully) of the big (historical) picture to have this perspective. Too enraged by the violence being dished out by the System to every plant, animal and dissident on the planet to see that the tools they use, that used to sorta “work” (if you wanted to pretend) no longer do. Too scared, exhausted, angry, confused to think about it.
And perhaps they are right. Or rather, almost certainly they are right. Because the things normie civil society would have to do to slow the acceleration of the acceleration of the – whatever you want to call it – the Leviathan, the Juggernaut (as per ol’ Tony Giddens, back in the day) – are basically unimaginable. Yes, we have freedom-ish of speech, assembly, information. Ish. Yes, in theory we could use these to create sustained normie social movement organisations that were both monitory and prefigurative (9).
But who believes, that, 50 years in, we will? What are you smoking? Where can I get me some of that?
IDK
Perhaps “the System” (“man”) could never be saved from the externalities of its own operation. Perhaps “the System” (I’ll stop with the scare quotes) could never be meaningfully reformed to save itself from itself because ultimately it is built on obedience. The selection pressures for climbing within the system are so strongly geared to deference, obedience, bright-siding, and so against the Reality Prinzip, ecological thinking, that it was always going to treat its enemies as things to be surrounded, isolated and eaten (“the macrophage model of defensive institutionalist discourse”, paper not-pending).
Closing “thoughts”
First, the obligatory James Baldwin quote (AI-trained on my blogs would have used this already – “Not everything that can be faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Second, we will continue not to look into the abyss. Those who do for too long (and how long is that? YMMV) become 1000 yard -stare doomers, and enrage the elite civil society types, for not sticking with the program.
Third, as the horrors ramify, we will regress (further, if that is possible!) into all sorts of magical thinking, anger and rage. You think it’s raging now? You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet. So glad I did not breed. You breeders, what were you THINKING???
Oh, wait, who is “we”? Easier to say who we is not. We is not all the people on this planet – most of them people of colour, just trying to get by, who had no meaningful way of influencing the decision-making in their own capitals or the capitals that mattered (Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing etc). “We” is the people with educations, free-time, money (ish) in the “stable” “democracies”, who knew what was at stake (whether they could accept that, or pretend now that they never knew).
Notes
- No, my mother did not have me tested. Maybe she should have done.
- Of course, the mainstream media representation of climate changes causes and consequences is pitiful, dangerous etc. Also Hollywood. Also the business academia side of things. And social sciences. See here.
- And of course they must.
- Don’t worry, I will come back to that “we.”
- That is to say, beginning to bite rich white people, who have always imagined/presumed themselves to be on the dishing out end of the spear/blunderbuss, not the pointy/blasty end.
- Yes, I know cancer metaphors are unhelpful, because they naturalise human processes. Bite me.
- See footnote 4. And trust me.
- Yes, that is a Klein reference. No, not Naomi. Her doppleganger – Melanie…
- Monitory – keep harrying and forcing the state/corprs to be less ecocidal. Prefigurative – show that There Is A Better Way.
marchudson.net 
Marc, most of us don’t like to talk about our failings and “climate change”, is a massive failing on our part. We have not only failed to curb environmental degradation (CC), it is and will increase with GROWTH, and no one is prepared to talk about GROWTH. I am reminded of the old saying “I’m alright Jack”.