I saw this post about an NYT interviewer slowly losing his mind during an interview with Andreas Malm (nominally) about his upcoming book. The footnote to the interviewers “Can you give me a reason to live” stood out to me:
I just blurted this out. I don’t even think Malm’s pessimism is wrong, but I find it suffocating. People need hope.
Well good news for David Marchese - all he needs to do is visit the Guardian for an interview with Hannah Ritchie, author of Not the End of the World. To say there has been a media blitz behind this book is an understatement, and it seems to be part of the genre of climate optimism that exploded in the wake of the IPCC report that put us firmly on the track to 1.5 C earlier last year.
The two interviews are definitely a land of contrasts. Ritchie gets a little bit of pushback on the subject of capitalism:
Guardian: Capitalism has been a great accelerator of climate change and other environmental crises, but you don’t challenge it much in your book. Do you believe capitalism can right its wrongs? Or that it’s the best system to get us out of this mess? Ritchie I accept that there are definitely flaws with capitalism. What I would push back against is the notion that we can just dismantle capitalism and build something else. The core reason is time. We need to be acting on this problem urgently, on a large scale, in the next five to 10 years, and to me it does not seem feasible that we’re going to dismantle the system and build a new one in that time. I think capitalism does drive innovation, which is what we need to create affordable low-carbon technologies.
But both Ritchie and Malm are pushed on the subject of what people should do - Ritchie especially emphasizes that climate change pessimism can damage the individual will to act but largely doesn’t stray from the lane of individual consumer choices (veganism and heat pumps) and the optimism that continued technological progress will make it possible to live sustainably without making large sacrifices in the western standard of living.
Malm notes that he’s not going to confess to industrial sabotage to the NYT, but he also does pass the buck a little, arguing that he’s not in the right place and with the right community to pull off something major, leaving open the question of who is in such a position or how such conditions could arise.
It is without a doubt that 2 C would very much the end of the world for some - Ritchie lives in the UK and Malm in Sweden, both places that should remain petty habitable for a long time, and not Bangladesh, which is going to start experiencing dangerous wet bulb events on the regular by the late 2000’s, if not earlier, or one of the pacific nations that are slipping beneath the rising seas, and that gives Ritchie’s title a glib sheen. To her credit, it seems like she’s still wrestling with the awareness that things aren’t going well, but it seems like she resolves all of her internal conflicts with the observation that things are only bad and can be (or have been) worse.
Overall it just seems to capture how disordered and foggy our thinking is around the large scale changes that need to happen in order to make answering climate change a reality. Both Malm and Ritchie agree that technological solutions exist and are being implemented and just differ on how we should feel about the future. Malm foresees a rocky and militant transition while Ritchie wants a more peaceful meeting of the minds, but how we get either of those outcomes seems to still be a mystery.
I think the way out of the climate crisis is basically the question of what economic mode we want to inhabit, capitalism or socialism.
Countries that produce way more carbon per capita are going to need to drastically reduce their carbon outputs while at the same time allowing developing countries to raise living standards to some kind of agreed global level that is equitable and sustainable for all life on this planet. This should involve wealth transfers of huge proportions to areas of the globe that have been historically depleted (Africa, namely).
Manufacturing is going to have to be returned to sites more local to consumption. Animal agriculture, especially in the west, must be decimated. Oil and fossil fuels in particular have to go by the next twenty years, that’s not optional. Personal automobiles I would say too. Waste of all kinds must be minimised, from clothes that will need to last much longer to electronics that can be totally disassembled and recycled.
Imagine a kind of global War Communism, maybe for half a century or more. Except it would not be resisting an enemy that wants you dead, but giving life back to the only place we know where anything can live.
I’m sure all of us here could add to an eco wish list, but to cut to the heart of it is to say: socialism or barbarism is the choice. Production for exchange value can’t go on. the metastasising growth logic of capitalism must end, and with it all the long standing hierarchies and chauvinisms that it has both descended from and bred must end as well. Capitalism cannot accomplish this task, the market cannot price it’s own destruction in.
So again the question of how to emerge from the climate crisis is essentially the question of how to escape capitalism. And here I definitely side more with Malm. There is no economic mode in history that has disappeared without a world-scarring fight.
No one , especially not Marxists, can afford to be naive about it. Capitalism will kill us all unless we all kill it. Putting it extremely simply, We must organise everyone who is pissed at capitalism, and turn that into a disciplined mass organisation with international solidarity. The proletariat is the only class poised for revolution under capitalism, and that is where any real hope will lie.
Yeah, I don’t think the sorts of necessary transitions that you mentioned can happen under capitalism and that the optimist case that we can somehow maintain or enhance our standard of living while reducing emissions to a sustainable level is naive, and asking Americans to reduce their standard of living voluntarily is politically suicidal, so it will only happen under socialism or fascism. But it is interesting to see how that works itself into the press - the dominant perspective seems to be that the realist case is suffocatingly bleak and technology and capitalist markets can still win the day.
From the interviewer in the article:
Generally we teach kids that violence or breaking people’s things is bad. Do you feel you can honestly give your kids the same message?
Breaking someone’s pipeline = bad
Breaking everybody’s habitable climate = ???
This sort of moral superficiality is what leads you to hot takes like “It was bad to kill Hitler because killing people is bad!!”
I wish more people understood what the liberal political project was born out of - specifically a Europe that was wracked by (religiously-driven) civil wars where different factions were vying for political supremacy in order to impose their will on their country or region. (Well, I wish that people were more politically literate tbh and understanding the roots of liberalism is a part of this but I digress…)
In essence, liberalism was designed as a method of enfranchising all parties in an approximately equal fashion (I know, I know…) so rather than one faction gaining complete political dominance which then brings about a situation where the other faction(s) rebel and everyone is plunged into yet-another civil war until one faction gains complete political dominance and on and on it goes forever, instead people have their slapfights in the big-P political arena, nobody is happy but compromise is especially a built-in feature and there’s enough of the basics which most people largely agree upon that the endless cycle of civil war is averted. Basically it’s supposed to be a system where nobody is happy but nobody is at anyone else’s throats so we are able to get on with the important things. (Ironically this is how democratic centralism works within parties, at least when it’s not being deployed as a boogeyman term by anti-communists.)
Liberalism breaks down when a particular interest group holds the political process captive and when the majority of people are disenfranchised from the politics that affects them, and ultimately this leads to a situation where civil wars become the way that political power begins to play out once again.
What we’re seeing the very early stages of is the fundamental breakdown of liberalism and politics reverting to the use of violence/destruction to achieve political agendas because people are no longer enfranchised in a democratic system which has been completely co-opted.
The hegemony of liberal democracy is such that it’s simply presumed and it’s just the background radiation now. This means that the most staunch defenders of liberalism, outside of academia, have virtually no idea about the logic or the design of liberalism and they end up telling people who are in revolt to shut up and stop doing a hecking violence already.
Recently I heard that David Suzuki got himself in hot water for saying that, essentially, people are going to start resorting to terrorism unless we deal with climate change as an urgent priority. Liberals were chiding him over this apparently. The irony is that David Suzuki is a better defender of liberalism by warning about this reality than the people who think they’re protecting liberalism by telling David Suzuki off for even entertaining such a notion. He’s basically warning people that unless liberalism manages to mediate the political tensions that are mounting due to the abject inaction on environmental concerns, liberalism will break down and it will die - he wants to see liberalism doing better because he wants to preserve the system, hence why he’s warning about the mounting threats to it. But apparently that’s a terrible thing to do, according to most liberals.
Often in these sorts of discussions in my own life, I find that end up being the person who brings the definitions of liberalism, I refer to liberal political philosophers, and I end up making a better case for and defense of liberalism to liberals when I’m not a liberal and I’m entirely opposed to liberalism itself. Meanwhile they apparently don’t even understand the basics of the system that they claim to defend and they often make arguments that are unintentionally the antithesis of their precious political system. It’s completely maddening. There are few things I resent more than being put into that sort of situation.
(All of the stuff that I’ve mentioned above is engaging in liberalism from its own internal logic and on its own terms btw. None of it is a critical engagement from the perspective of critical race theory or postcolonialism or Marxism or feminism - you probably already know everything I would say as criticisms of liberalism and there’s not much point rehashing the same criticisms endlessly, especially when they are not matters for debate in this space because they are settled. All of this is because I believe Kwame Ture is correct in what he says in his evergreen quote about the man who hates snakes.)
