Tuesday 23rd June 2026. (What are the Fafocene Diaries? See here).
It is hot. And it is one of the coolest summers of the rest of our lives.
I was in the bakery (insert joke here about it being cooler in there) and could not help myself (didn’t try) but to show the two people there my Keeling curve tattoo. They took it onboard, and asked two very reasonable questions – “what about 1976?” and “so it’s going to get hotter?” To which I replied, there are always one offs, but this is a trend and “I’m sorry, but you’ll look back in ten years and this won’t be particularly warm.”
We’re so fucked.
Which brings me to something someone sent me on Bluesky
credit – Donald McCarthy
Also on Bluesky, I wrote this.
To all the denialists, to all those who voted for a climate emergency and then for airport expansion.
To all those people with university degrees who couldn’t be bothered to learn the science (it’s really not that hard), I ask
a) hot enough for you?
b) happy with yourselves? Proud of yourselves?
But of course “when you point one finger at someone else (or, in this case, hella lotta people), you point three back at yourself.
I have been part of/adjacent to many many failed social movement organisations. I have failed to learn lessons, to implement better ways of doing things in ways that “stick.” I have innovated, sure, but nothing stuck, nothing was sustained (that’s not all my own fault – I am not neurotic. Well, not entirely). The social movements which profess a desire for radical change are hilariously (1) unwilling to change anything about the way they do things (hold meetings, film showings, rallies etc etc ETC).
Someone else on Bluesky said that they’d given up on top down change, that it would have to come ‘bottom up.;
I’ve come to believe that climate action will only come from the bottom up. For example, Biden tried to transition our auto industry to EVs, but consumers did not support it so one step forward, two steps back.
It hasn’t worked waiting for the powerful to make it easy for people to decarbonize.
I replied with the following
Will write about this – for me, it’s the in-between. (Below/around the state) and above the individual. i.e. actual funcitoning [sic] civil society (churches, trades unions, pressure groups etc etc.
But all quite academic now, I fear.
1:42 PM · Jun 23, 2026
Look, ultimately, for lots of reasons, some of them forgivable, others unforgivable “we” (including very much myself) failed to build and sustain intermediary institutions that could challenge/overcome the inertia and corruption of government (the state) and the corporates.
This was always a futile and quixotic challenge, and if I were saying it to a younger version of myself I’d say “hey, don’t beat yourself up”. But see also (1) and our inability to learn a damn thing, ever. THAT is what is humiliating.
It SHOULD have been possible. Or I need to believe that it should have been…
Anyway, there’s a passage in Marge Piercy’s astonishingly good novel Vida about burnout because of the endless (it seemed) Vietnam war. Let me see if I can dig that out.
Here we are. Page 207-8 of my 1980 Penguin edition. (near the beginning of Chapter 12).
On the train she huddled, coming down from the adrenaline rush of her speech. She was late for a meeting of The Little Red Wagon, her own collective. She was always late now – running, running, but never arriving. She never went to bed before three in the morning, and she was seldom allowed to sleep past eight. From the time she crawled out till she collapsed in her clothes, she no longer had time to read a book, bake a cake, listen to music, talk idly – and everything was empty palaver that was not about liberation, not about imperialism or racism or Third World struggle, about the war, the war, the war. If she went to the country, it was for a secret meeting or for target practice. When she ran into an old friend, she could think only what skills or contacts they had that were needed, what kind of fund raising or organizing or liaison work they could do. Yet she had no feeling of accomplishment, because every morning in the fat Times, every evening on television, the war was stronger, and she was closer to exhaustion. They had not done enough, they had not risked enough, they had not tried everything, they had not fought hard enough, they had not, because the proof was before her every morning and every evening the war went on. It was raining blood outside whether she looked out the window or not; the blood was splattering down, and the hot wind that blew across the city smelled of ashes, of burning flesh. Obviously they had not tried hard enough if the war still went on.
FOOTNOTES
- It should be funny, but it is too serious and too sinister and too horrible in its consequences)
Was this useful? If so, why? If not, why not?
What did you agree with? What did you disagree with? What have I got right, and, more importantly, what have I got wrong, misconstrued, overlooked.
What should I be reading/watching?
What do you think of ‘Fafocene’ as a term? Does it work for you? What does it miss, beyond the fact that not everyone Fucked Around the same amount?
What other topics would you like the Fafocene Diaries to cover?
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