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#Doomer? Thread, from conversations with @_ppmv @theresphysics @kalahar1 @cosaingalway @aschmittner @ccolose @past_is_future @huntercutting @climateben @drkatemarvel et al. 1/35
My core message, consistent through my published work on climate change, is built on conclusions drawn from reports by the IPCC, IPBES, and other authoritative bodies. 2/35
We almost certainly face significant and destabilizing environmental transformation within the next several decades, which will put enormous pressure on political systems and human infrastructure worldwide. 3/35
What’s more, modern global civilization faces an existential crisis: either radically transform a social order based on endless growth, fossil fuels, and high consumption; or face irreversible, out-of-control global warming, which seems likely to destroy modern civilization. 4/35
Thus human civilization as we know it is effectively over. The best case is radical and almost certainly traumatic social transformation; the worst case in environmental catastrophe and social chaos. 5/35
I am pessimistic about whether global elites, capitalist economies, democratic politics, and contemporary institutions are in any way capable of managing this challenge. The record of failure over the past fifty years gives little cause for optimism. 6/35
Nevertheless, here we are. We need to figure out how to cope. 7/35
One might argue we should focus on mitigation rather than adaptation. Of course mitigation must form a part of any coherent response to climate change. But I believe adaptation should come first, and I believe it needs to start with accepting the extremity of our situation. 8/35
I am not convinced, and have seen no persuasive evidence, that facing up to the extremity of our situation will “cause people to give up in despair.” 9/35
It seems to me (and evidence suggests) that telling people “it’s fixable” only comforts them, letting them forget about the problem and get back to more pressing matters in their lives. 10/35
We are almost all of us deeply, existentially committed to the status quo. It’s where we build our lives and our hopes for the future. And most of us will cling desperately to the status quo for as long as we can. 11/35
Emphasizing to people that climate change can be fixed and that the experts are handling it lets them get on with their status quo lives, suicidally unsustainable though they are. 12/35
It seems to me that a different framing might be more helpful. Grief and addiction are good analogies. 13/35
Essentially, we won’t be able to do what we need to in order to save human civilization so long as we continue to believe that this civilization can be saved. Thus in order to begin thinking our way into a new worldview, we need to let go of the one we’re in. 14/35
I’ve argued this in various ways. Originally, relying on the philosophical notion of “learning to die.” https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/ 15/35
More fully in the book of that name. 16/35 http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100064510
Here, relying on Jonathan Lear’s concept of radical hope. 17/35 https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/24/1036/lessons-from-a-genocide-can-prepare-humanity-for-climate-apocalypse/
Here, relying on Samuel Scheffler’s thoughts on death and meaning. 18/35 https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/we-broke-the-world-scranton
And more recently, through the concept of “apopathic futurism.” 19/35 https://emergencemagazine.org/story/beginning-with-the-end/
Most of my critics have dismissed my argument without ever engaging with my work. They seem to see the discourse in a stark binary: either you are “fighting on our side” or you are an enemy. This is a regrettable simplification. 20/35
It’s true it sometimes seems to me that anybody who can look at the last 50 years of failure on climate change, the complexity of international politics, and contemporary trends yet still be optimistic about stopping out-of-control warming must be a goddamned fool. 21/35
But most of the time I recognize that many climate activists and climate optimists are well-meaning, informed people, who are doing their best to make the world a better place in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. 22/35
Do I get tired of the “obligatory note of hope”? Yes. Am I unconvinced that protest tactics will persuade elites? Absolutely. 23/35
Have I sometimes ungenerously criticized people who don’t seem to take into account the immense complexities and challenges we face in coping with climate change and biodiversity collapse? Regrettably, I have. I’m sorry. 24/35
Do I sometimes react poorly to being attacked as a “doomer,” an apologist for petrocapitalism, and an enemy of all that is good? I do, and understandably, it seems to me. 25/35
If we want to move forward in the conversation on climate change and ecological collapse, we need to move past this increasing hostility toward “doomers” and pessimists, and recognize that there are genuinely good reasons for believing that the odds are against us. 26/35
If climate tipping points, for instance, are “too risky to bet against,” as Lenton @jrockstrom et al. argue, then we need not only radical change now, but visionary planning for a radically changed future. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0 27/35
Figuring out how to live in the new world of the future entails letting go of the world we all grew up in, which is, in any case, already gone--irretrievably gone. 28/35
Read Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, Rachel Carson, @tempestwilliams, or @elizkolbert, to name just a few, and tell me that we’re not experiencing right now a massive global ecological catastrophe--and tremendous loss. 29/35
Such great loss must entail grief. Until we accept the end of the world we once lived in and begin to process that acceptance--which may include a period of despair--we have little hope of adapting to or even understanding the changed world in which we already live. 30/35
My argument’s premise is that we are in a crisis now, and that we must adapt. Dimississing this argument because its premise resembles that of right wing “climate realists” cedes to reactionary forces the very ground on which any wider vision of the future will form. 31/35
This is a mistake. No amount of wishful thinking will make another world possible. We must organize, fight, argue, give aid, and connect in the world we have inherited--a world changing around us--a world of precarity, loss, suffering, and existential risk. 32/35
Perhaps the #COVID19 epidemic, the current economic meltdown, and the failure of governments around the world to manage is making the vulnerabilities and incapacities of global capitalist civilization more visible, thus offering a chance to see through the cracks. 33/35
Perhaps not. Most people seem desperate for a “new normal,” which is all too often the same old normal: an unjust and suicidally unsustainable social order. 34/35
I do believe--or hope, anyway--that humanity can survive, and even maybe thrive, in the damaged world we’ve inherited. But it’s going to take a lot more than hope. The first step, it seems to me, is facing up to our situation. If that makes me a #doomer, so be it. 35/35
