Six Popular but Wrong Notions about Climate Politics, Debunked
Why they are wrong, and what will work better
These days, it seems like there is little room for imagining a tangible way out of our climate woes. As technocrats embrace soft climate denial, increasing numbers of young people slip into “doomerism” and depression.
Why is this? And how can we turn things around?
The answers aren’t simple.
To find them, we’ll need to examine some of the mistaken notions surrounding the discourse on the climate crisis.
Hard Climate Denial
This one is a doozy right? But we shouldn’t write off the hard deniers just yet. They still exist, although their numbers have fallen in recent years.
Climate disaster is getting more and more difficult to deny, and will continue to do so. Yet we should not underestimate the potential for forms of hard denial to re-emerge.
Most people experiencing climate despair don’t compulsively try to convince others that all hope is lost. Yet, for some pathological reason, some do. This is a form of science denial, every bit as much as the other forms.
More on “doomerism” in a bit.
Soft Climate Denial
This is the approach we are watching virtually all the governments and large investors on earth pursue. It is a tortured, nonsensical combination of acknowledging that there is a severe climate crisis caused by fossil fuel use while continuing to support new fossil fuel projects and suppress opposition to them.
This path is the one being walked by the governments of the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China.
It is also embraced by financial giants such as BlackRock, BlackStone, JPMorgan Chase (aka “Chase Bank”), Bank of America, Wells Fargo, CalPers, CalSters, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse, and more.
The blatant contradictions of this approach don’t matter as long as its practitioners are in charge of the world’s most powerful institutions. They will even give Nobel Prizes to dotty economics professors who write “research” saying climate meltdown will be just fine for the economy.
We can challenge this viewpoint rhetorically, but doing anything more than that requires organizing for power.
We’re Doomed
Fighting to get the climate back to a livable concentration of C02 will never be worthless. Even if things become much, much worse than they are now, what is done in the present will continue to set a trajectory for the future.
The actions we take, or fail to take, in the present could mean the difference between billions or millions dead from climate disaster.
In the fantastic book All We Can Save, the notion that it’s too late to do anything about climate breakdown is labeled the, “first time climate guy” take. It’s not even an analogy to say these people are the new climate deniers.
Let’s be clear, “doomerism” is science denial.
It’s a photo-negative of denying that the climate crisis is real.
Like its twin, it arises mostly as a result of bad climate coverage done by corporate media outlets. Also like its twin, it is a loosely held idea for most but a deeply held psychological crutch for some. Climate denial and climate doomerism function the same on a subconscious level; they are stop-gap coping mechanisms that let people avoid the more mentally challenging aspects of taking shared responsibility for dealing with our predicament.
It’s the People’s Fault
This belief goes hand in hand with soft climate denial, but also with the idea of the need for a militant minority. Despite their diametrically opposed courses of action, these two perspectives hold one major point of agreement: the people cannot be trusted.
One common way of blaming the climate crisis on the people is saying we all just need to make “better” consumer choices. This viewpoint, that we are all equally responsible, has been promoted by corporations for years.
In reality, large corporations are sacrificing our climate for profit. Corporations externalize costs. That’s why products that are “ethically made” cost more.
In the modern world, we need heaters to survive winter cold, air conditioning to survive heat waves, stoves to cook our food, and reasonable access to healthcare and transportation. All these things require energy. Almost all of it would go away if we stopped using fossil fuels overnight.
People would die. More people than are dying already because of lack of food and healthcare, that is.
If there’s one thing any government can do to ensure the swift emergence of massive protests against them, it’s hike food and/or fuel prices. And with economies being as dependent on fossil fuels as they are, an increase in fuel prices guarantees that food prices will go up too.
So when France passes a tax on gas that hits workers hard, and riots erupt in the streets, nobody should be surprised. The government should take the blame. The Yellow Vest movement wasn’t even opposed to climate action. They were opposed to foisting the costs of a crisis that the ruling class bears responsibility for onto the working class.
Can anyone really argue that people displeased with having no paycheck after rent, food and gas costs, or no heating during a storm, are seething reactionaries who just don’t care enough about future generations?
If anyone can, it’s because they are coming from a place of instinctively looking down on others. People like this are not for climate justice, or any other kind of justice.
So how do we, the people, fight for climate justice?
We Need to Hold Our Government / Businesses Accountable
This perspective assumes too much. Corporations are openly not accountable to the public, but (ostensibly) only to shareholders. Government is different, but not that different.
Governments exert control by mediating nearly all major social relationships in our lives, from education to employment to marriage. They legitimize this by asserting that they represent the public will and/or the public good.
However, that’s a lie.
As always, the truth is more complex.
It’s common to believe that modern, “democratic” governments are built to be accountable to the public, or that there was some past “golden age” in which a government was much more accountable than it is now. However, it’s not so.
These beliefs are introduced and reinforced by the two most powerful hegemonic institutions in modern society: the school system and mass media. We’re trained to conceptualize all our social aspirations in terms of government policy. In other words, the government has trained us not to think of how to change society without government action.
Modern government exists in complete symbiosis with private corporations. In many countries, support for the “free market” or “capitalism” is associated with the political right and support for “big government” is associated with the political left. This simplistic framework is very convenient for obscuring the fact that, in practice, the two are one entity: the corporate state.
Governments being held accountable to the public is good, of course. But for that to happen, a movement needs to aim for its true objective.
The abolitionists didn’t fight for “government accountability,” they fought to abolish slavery.
The women’s liberation movement didn’t fight for “government accountability,” they fought for women’s control over their own lives.
The EZLN didn’t fight for “government accountability,” they organized and eventually built enough power to remove the Mexican government from indigenous territory.
Sometimes when we aim to win our central goals outright, we might get the government to be a bit more accountable in the process. But if we only aim to change government policy, we might do that, or we might get nothing.
If a government were fully accountable to the public rather than a ruling class, it wouldn’t really be a government at all.
A certain bearded German revolutionary put it best,
“the state is the executive committee of the ruling class.”
So does accepting this truth mean we should take up arms?
Not really.
We Need a Militant Minority to ‘Blow Up’ Fossil Fuel Infrastructure
This idea might seem radical at first. However, at the core, any approach to social change that writes off the public as being too (fill in the blank, complicit, dumb, preoccupied, etc.) is nothing but elitism.
In any direct attack on systems of oppression, there are three main strategic factors to consider ahead of time. First, effectiveness. Is it crippling the enemy? Second, perception. How will attacks be seen by the public? Consider symbolic significance, media spin, and how difficult or easy the attack is to replicate. Third, repression. What will be the response of the system to being attacked? How likely is it that insurgents will be caught and killed or imprisoned in retaliation? How should insurgent forces respond to repression and aid imprisoned comrades?
Many calls to attack fossil fuel infrastructure are only taking the first of these three factors into full account. Actions that are certain to be labeled “terrorist attacks” (accurately or not) will never become a serious threat to fossil capitalism on a global level. How could they possibly while mass media is still in the hands of the same owning class that run the fossil fuel economy?
To be clear, some clandestine attacks on fossil capital are totally consistent with, and even helpful in, mass movement building. Such actions would need to be both immediately effective but also symbolically significant.
Conclusion: What Has Worked, What Will Work
One thing the current climate justice movement is lacking is a good analysis of political power. Once we have this, we can create the next thing we need, and that’s strategy.
We will not have only one strategy, and that’s okay. But any so-called strategy not rooted in a good understanding of how to build and harness political power will not really be worthy of being called a strategy, and it will fail.
It is important to acknowledge that we are failing now.
Yes, we have won some battles, but we are losing the war.
However, we can turn it around. Every social movement has to face setbacks. There are even moments when it seems that all is lost.
The strength and strategic vision to carry on fighting is what separates the makers of history from the victims of history.
In order to win, we must generate and maintain political power.
But where does political power come from?
Political power grows out of social relationships.
The corporate state controls society by atomizing us. It makes us think of our own “success” or “failure” so that we don’t look up and see the ruling class robbing us all blind.
But more and more of us are looking up.
When we “look up” from our individual lives, dreams, careers, families, subcultures and countries, we see the need for solidarity.
So in order to generate and maintain power, we must organize and build a solidarity movement.
In order to build a solidarity movement, we must be welcoming to all except those who intentionally make others unwelcome. In other words, we must eradicate oppressive behavior within our own ranks, especially when it hides behind “single issue” thinking.
The most time-tested way of building political power for freedom is labor organizing. Many in the US are only beginning to re-awaken to this potential, but it’s been more than mere potential in most of the rest of the world for generations.
Labor organizing around climate is in its infancy, but it is growing.
In order to sustain a solidarity movement, we must maintain solidarity with those among us who are facing retaliation and repression. Current examples are Oso Blanco, Maddesyn George, Jessica Reznicek, Steve Donziger, and Marius Mason, but there are many more.
Without solidarity, there is no genuine organizing, no effective movements, no point in strategizing, no real chance for a better world to emerge.
Solidarity is loyalty to one another. It’s a refusal to be brainwashed or bought out by this corrupted world. It is not the default life path in our society.
When we fail to choose solidarity, we fail future generations.
That’s what has been happening. That’s why our movement is failing and our young people are in despair.
The more we stand by each other, in all our struggles, the more we can begin to cast away our despair.
As Greta Thunberg brilliantly put it, “hope follows action.”
Inspiration and Further Reading
The Green New Deal — From Below
No, Extinction Rebels, nonviolence is not the only way
For the love of winning: an open letter to Extinction Rebellion
The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation
The Eviction Moratorium is a Useful Lesson in How Reforms Actually Happen
Fridays for Sabotage? The strange fascination with climate Blanquism
