Yves here. At its foundation, our denial of the seriously-bad-and-coming-way-ahead-of-schedule impact of climate change greatly resembles our denial of death. Aside from the devoutly religious and those who have had near death experiences, most of us do not want to think about death or climate change seriously. So as readers might have inferred, I’m not big on hope.. Hope as opposed to realism too often produces in/inadequate action, like Green New Deal rainbows and unicorns.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are
—Alfred Lord TennysonAll your cryin’ don’t do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross, we can use the wood
Come on up to the house
—Tom WaitsDoes death make life less sweet?
—Yours truly
I’ve been wanting to write for a while about how we could respond to the coming climate disaster, the Jackpot, in William Gibson’s terms. Respond to that which will be, in world-historical terms, the most important global event since the birth of brains and culture that we call us.
I’ve started that project with few paragraphs here and here. But I wanted to give these thoughts a proper page.
The Push to Offer Hope
Let’s start with this, from scientist Kate Marvel:
As a climate scientist, I am often asked to talk about hope. Particularly in the current political climate, audiences want to be told that everything will be all right in the end. And, unfortunately, I have a deep-seated need to be liked and a natural tendency to optimism that leads me to accept more speaking invitations than is good for me. Climate change is bleak, the organizers always say. Tell us a happy story. Give us hope. The problem is, I don’t have any.
“Give hope” is the constant admonishment in the climate world. Consider this from Kaitlin Naughton, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, writing at The Conversation: “The conventional wisdom is that you’re supposed to give people hope: to say that there’s a disaster behind one door, but we can avoid it if only we choose a different one.”
This is more than a conventional wisdom. The strategic argument is: If you depress people with downer talk, they’ll shut down and then won’t act. We need people to act. (Implicit: Because we can still win, preserve high-energy life.)
And this become almost a moral admonition, a subject of values examination, and occasionally, of shaming. “Don’t talk of the millions lost (dollars, lives). Talk of the gains — new jobs, a greener economy. Don’t be Debbie.”
That’s all well and good. But what if it looks to you, as it looks to increasingly many, that the die has been cast? Do you lie? Perform cheerleader duty? Or acknowledge the truth (as you and your audience may see it), and offer, not hope, but something more true to the facts?
Facts on the Ground
The fact is, we’re not doing something about climate. You noticed that, right?
And you noticed, I hope, the reason: that we — by which I mean both parties — are ruled by the (gotta say it) money-mad psychopaths who have placed a lock on the whole electoral process, from debate to ballot access, making sure only a money-fed candidate can win. (Yes, Trump was a money-fed candidate in 2016.)
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. There more than enough hubris in our power-mad betters to sink the lot of us. Even if climate weren’t staring us in the face, how soon will we fix that? This decade? This century?
But climate is staring us in the face, a tsunami that almost visible to even the blind.
What do we tell people as they start waking up? What do we say when they get that there’s no going back?
We can tell them, while hope is a dream, courage is a thing they can do.
‘We Need Courage, Not Hope.’
Here’s what Kate Marvel, the aforementioned climate scientist, has recently written. First, she states the problem (my emphasis throughout):
I have lived a fortunate, charmed, loved life. This means I have infinite, gullible faith in the goodness of the individual. But I have none whatsoever in the collective. How else can it be that the sum total of so many tiny acts of kindness is a world incapable of stopping something so eminently stoppable? California burns. Islands and coastlines are smashed by hurricanes. At night the stars are washed out by city lights and the world is illuminated by the flickering ugliness of reality television. We burn coal and oil and gas, heedless of the consequences. …
There is now no weather we haven’t touched, no wilderness immune from our encroaching pressure. The world we once knew is never coming back.
This is speaking more honestly in public than most people like her will do. (In private, most know the truth. They’re freaking out.)
And the answer:
And here, the sheer scale of the problem provides a perverse comfort: we are in this together. The swiftness of the change, its scale and inevitability, binds us into one, broken hearts trapped together under a warming atmosphere.
We need courage, not hope. Grief, after all, is the cost of being alive. We are all fated to live lives shot through with sadness, and are not worth less for it. Courage is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending.
There’s Joy in Working Together
We’re in this together. The Romans have crossed the border. Our elders may escape via death (thinking of you, Charles G. Koch), but those in their thirties will see children of people like them live lives decidedly different than those like our own.
Scary things happen; they happen all the time. And just as good people pass, so do civilizations. There are miracles in the world, but we can’t call them up.
What we can do is give the best of ourselves — our wisdom, our love, the example of courageous response — to those who share our burden and our grief.
“That which we are, we are,” said Tennyson’s Ulysses. And that’s not nothing, so long as we still have life. We can do this together, deliberately joined in the task. There is joy in those acts, which we will carry inside despite the beast at the gates.
I’d rather have that, the ability to act with courage, than live in unwarranted hope. For starters, it’s better for others who may need the wood.
Thanks for this. Courage is a virtue. Hope is bullsh*t. I am aware of no exceptions.
Courage it is for me as well. Coming terms with mortality does not require hope. I have been spending a good deal of my thinking time “finding my religion”, so to speak. Here’s where we get to why I won’t cut down any trees around the house despite the fact that I and mine will surely perish by forest fire.
Terry Eagleton suggest hope without optimism. In his book, he explores the complex nature of hope, emphasizing its distinction from optimism and highlighting its deeper, more resilient qualities. Eagleton critiques the naive confidence of optimism and the superficiality of progress narratives, arguing that true hope acknowledges and confronts the world’s harsh realities.
doesn’t hope have an anchor to which it is attached? – some specificity? – perhaps the hope Eagleton expresses is really courage in the end? – hope? courage? optimism? – can only shrug my shoulders at the obvious that lays ahead – fact is not pessimism – heat wave here in Michigan – turkeys under the mulberry tree with a ground hog sharing the bounty on the ground, deer come later – pooches anxiously looking at chipmunks and squirrels from behind the door – watch birds come to the feeders – concern for my orchard trees – watching the moon move on a clear night – i find peace where it is available and can only shrug my shoulders at the obvious anymore – mumble to myself sometimes – try to balance the luck of my birth by volunteering at a food rescue operation – i do care about all life, but trying to explain anymore seems a fool’s errand –
keep hearing Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBNWkCsmqAY
Courage without hope is defiance, and sooner than you realize you’re Extinction Rebellion or some such and likely cause more harm than progress.
To clarify, the “hope” in above can be also read as “political program with achievable step-by-step goals”.
I agree and disagree. “Courage” or defiance might be what some had when trying to paint in orange the Stonehenge protesting against climate change. That kind of defiance doesn’t help very much. Agreed. At most you endanger the lichens growing on the stones. Contrast that with the “hope” that markets and carbon pricing will do the trick and take us out from the wrong path. Similarly useless. An ideologically driven (by markets) political program doesn’t take us to any achievable goal. An achievable goal might be, for instance, “no more new fossil fuel projects” but let me know how many leaders are pushing for this. Some courage, or a lot of it, is needed to push for it. As Marvel’s quote says the problem here is a collective one. Individual courage cannot do anything against collective hope. I have no hope we can make courage step up in the political ladder to the leadership bubble.
I agree with your overall idea. That form of Hope, with its social harmony agenda, steers us away from a confrontation with elites who advocate solutions that won’t disturb their well-feathered nests. In this context Courage must in some way orient to political and social combat against those elites. Any discussion of courage eliding this denies social conflicts we cannot avoid. The floundering of Extinction Rebellion, caught up on goofy attacks on cultural objects, is a good illustration of the contortions of displacement that a powerless urgency sets up.
So, “none of the above”.
A Darwinian Survival Guide : Hope for the Twenty-First Century / Daniel R. Brooks and Salvatore J. Agosta.
(Hat tip Mikerw0)
> We are saying that if humanity gets to the point of truly being concerned with survival and persistence rather than profit and power, it would be helpful to mimic the process that has allowed the diverse and amazing life on this planet to survive for 4 billion years. That long unbroken history of surival gives us hope in what many see as a dark time.
> So long as there is a mismatch between organisms and their surroundings, there is a possibility for surviving environmental perturbations. This sounds paradoxical, but it is key to survival.
> Because organisms impose themselves on the environment according to their inherited legacy, capacity will always exceed opportunity.
> Specializing in fitness space is an indicator of potential being stored, which may be deployed when conditions change. Generalizing in fitness space, by contrast, is an indicator of potential being spent in response to change.
> The key to being evolvable is being able to exploit the surroundings through metabolism, which is expensive, while maintaining the ability to explore through inheritance, which is cheap.
> From a Darwinina perspective, conflict resolution at the local community level is ecological fitting in sloppy fitness space, spending potential to cope with a problem in a way that leads to enough stability that new potential may arise. Any local community that is successful, however, will become a victim of its own success. When this happens, 10,000 years of failure should teach us to avoid consolidating in favor of making new small towns, each with their own circular economies.
> Dystopian societies are depicted as ones in which humans have lost the capacity to do more than subsist. Utopian societies are described as ones in which humans have lost all opportunity to diversify.
Before we can fight climate change, we must fight climate change denial.
Neither one for me. I am resigned to whatever fate awaits me in the future. I don’t plan on becoming a prepper, and given my background as a software engineer, I just don’t see myself making it as a farmer. I also live in East/South East Asia where most people will just laugh these things off, because their favorite deit(ies) will always provide or what have you. I plan to deal with issues as they arise and and if they turned out to be insurmountable, then I’ll just meet my maker.
And no, I am in no way depressed, rather I’ve resolved to enjoy the rest of my life including today as much as possible. Hokkaido, here I come!!!
The word ‘hope’ is spread through many saying and quotes-
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/hope
But here I am going with the one that says ‘Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.’ No weight can be put on ‘hope’ as it is akin to the word ‘wish’ and requires no deeds or actions. But you can prepare – but here I do not mean heading to the hills with several hundred tins of backed beans and braced with a bunch of shotguns. What I mean is we being able to take care of ourselves in case things go south. If there is one thing that we have learned in the past four years of the Pandemic is that you cannot depend on the government to do the right thing as they may be paying attention to other things – like the wellness of the economy instead.
Climate change is happening whether we are prepared for it or not. So whether you live in an area that will experience more heatwaves, more rains & floods, more storms or whatever, now would be a good time to give a bit of thought to what to do when any of these events happen. In case of floods, is there high ground that you can head for safely? if the power is cut for several days, would you know what you would have to do to cope? If your area is fire-prone, have you cleared away the fire loading around you house and do you have a bug-out bag ready to grab and leave? What do you need to take with you that is vital? Documents? Photo albums? Medications? As I said, now would be a good time to prepare for the worse.
IMHO, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst are two sides of the same coin. Hope and delusion are two different words in the English dictionary, and I’ve always associated the former’s meaning with some kind of action i.e. preparation.
The older I’ve gotten though, the more I’ve come to question one’s ability to prepare for the worst, because if you can really prepare for it, is whatever you are preparing for really the worst? Absent the government, presumably characters like the Immortan Joe will be riding shiny and eternal in the new world, taking whatever they want when they want, and that’s just ONE threat.
We are asking people to do something our brains are fundamentally, biologically wired not to do. Accept some pain to avoid something that appears amorphous to it sometime in the feature. Our brains spend most of their energy keeping us alive and threat assessment.
Is that a tiger behind the tree and do I need to start running?
Where will my next meal come from?
Climate change is to most a concept. Yes, they experience weather, and increasingly severe weather. But, give up Tik Tok and Facebook and AI (whatever the eff it even is), take public transit, or god forbid walk or ride a bike, to use less energy? Why? Our brains don’t function that way, consequences be damned. The elites stop flying in private planes and building multiple 40,000 sq-foot houses? Never. We must continue to have more and grow our GDP at any cost.
And, yes when the real crisis comes, and it is on the way, it will be way past too late.
Most people, especially if they are in a functioning society are capable of planning and acting for the future.
Hunter-gatherers, farmers, retail businesses, and transportation and shipping, are all dependent on planning for the various cycles that they go through. It is in a dysfunctional society such as ours that people tend to lose it.
This confusion and disorganization is not only encouraged, but imposed and has been increasingly so for several generations, which means that people increasingly do not even have examples of prudence and planning from their own family. So, of course, people are going stupidly childish all over the place.
Energy resources are property. Either wholly owned private property, leased public property (USA) or state owned (KSA). This property provides fantastic returns to their owners under business as usual. The economic system almost everywhere sanctifies private property and defends property rights with state power and sometimes violence. The commons have been fenced and taken. This is the root of the problem.
Green New Deals are prescribed self dealing by benefactors of the political class. Public resources are used to juice guaranteed returns.
Short of a complete change in the economic system (“a snowball’s chance in hell”), hopelessness is rational.
I’ve found considerable wisdom in Pema Chödrön’s view, excerpted from When Things Fall Apart:
https://pemachodronfoundation.org/product/when-things-fall-apart-book/
I burned through the anger-despair-acceptance cycle a while back. It’s clear to me that we’re going to hit the wall of reality head-on; there’s now too much momentum to prevent that.
That was the despair pill. Boy, that was a tough one to choke down; took years, but it’s down.
Then came the choice: “enjoy the last slice of pie” as one friend so eloquently put it, or “pick a place to start and dig in”? Acquiescence or FUWithYourDefeatism? *
Rev Kev and many others – Amfortas, and so forth – have picked a place to start (probably a while ago) and have done most of the digging already.
Who ever survives this mess – and we may not quite make it all the way to the environmental mess, because we may get the Nuke Jackpot first – whoever survives this will be the nimble, the courageous, and most of all the active.
Preparing is a lot of work. And yes, we have to face down our natural proclivity to defer, to respond to nearer-term “threats”, do the wash, etc. Ya.
But that doesn’t change the reality we face, and the name of the game here is “adaptation”.
Is your environment changing faster than you are?
I share Yves’ view of the “too late for most of us” situation. But it’s not (OK, “might not be”) too late for me. Why? Because I have a 30 year head-start on this: I swallowed the pills decades ago.
Is there some sort of switch in the human mind – some sort of adaptation-turbo-charger instinct? If you have such a switch …
====
* that’s self-talk; it wasn’t and isn’t directed toward anyone but me.
Self-talk or not, I just reached the end of the cycle and chose to acquiesce. You could say I’m accepting my punishment for past decisions…
Our planet is a living, self-regulating system. Highly complex, highly evolved, and possessing the inherent capability to continue to evolve. Evolution never sleeps, it is emergent, the basis of life.
My consolation as we continue to degrade living processes, in ignorance and unchecked greed, is that life will continue to go on with or without us humans.
IMHO the CO2 hysteria is misplaced – there is very little hope that the largest countries in the world, India and China, will ever curb their fossil fuel use. CO2 levels will continue to rise. However, CO2 is plant food, and the planet is greening. Plants, esp. trees, do very well with higher CO2 levels – ask any indoor pot grower who adds CO2 to his grow, it makes plants flourish. It’s basic High school chemistry – plants “inhale” CO2, retain the C to build their structures, and “exhale” the O2. More CO2 = more plant growth.
The greater harms we are doing are in the realms of chemical agriculture, which is based on false and ignorant ideas of “pest control”, much as the pharmaceutical industry focuses on mechanistic models that ignore the systems involved. Systems thinking is required and we simple humans are locked into simple mechanistic models.
And humans, being the brains of the outfit (despite much evidence to the contrary), will do as they have always done over our 2 million year history – adapt.
Except where more CO2 equal more plant-killing drought, plant killing heat-spells, phytoplankton-killing ocean acidation, etc.
Plus a big dose of luck. Don’t forget Liet Kynes’ last thought in Dune:
The current state of the world, environment, government, etal are a result of billions and billions of individuals making trillions of trillions of daily and nightly decisions and following through with them either blindly or on purpose. That in a acerbic way is how we got to today. Acerbic as it might be the most obvious lesson to be learned, if you accept that first sentence as valid and true, is the way to change “what is today” is by boringly enough billions and billions of individuals making trillions of trillions of daily and night decisions and following through with them either blindly or on purpose.
So what is the point of my blindingly boring first paragraph? Everything I read in the article and comments section demonstrates the absolute decision and follow through of the decision that woe is me there is nothing I can do but whine, give up, pontificate or to be kinder, find a convenient set of words to justify doing nothing. Absolutely nothing will change about “what is today.”
Cry babies. Look in the mirror. You can do something today yourself which will help ameliorate “what is today” if you want. Yep the one tiny small insignificant thing you do today will not change a single damn thing. You are correct in that belief. However if a billion people did that one single insignificant thing today it would change something. Billions and billions of people can do trillions and trillions of small insignificant things that can add up to gigantic change. How the hell do you think we got the spot now that the world is in? We and every last human that has existed took trillions and trillions of steps that added up to where we are. If you believe it happened any other way you are dead wrong.
Here is a simple step you could do today. I have five well made boxes in my car’s trunk. I have not needed a bag from any store for anything that I have purchased because it is wheeled to my car in a cart and then put in a box in the trunk. Get home take the box out if there are multiple items, carry it, disperse, box back to the trunk. Am I going to personally effect a single damn production of yet another paper bag? Not at all. But if a billion people did the same for a trillion times, the paper bag industry would cease to exist. Now the “smart intelligent do nothing thinkers” will criticize this as wishful thinking and thereby denigrate the concept of billions and billions of people making trillions and trillions of decisions and doing them.
Get up off your penitent knees. Stop waiting for “george” to swoop in. For God’s sake stop writing and reading the world is doomed stuff and knowingly nodding your head and agreeing to sit on your butt. You can do some insignificant thing today and tomorrow that will change “what is today.”
Billions and billions of people making trillions and trillions of decisions every moment twenty four hours of every day……which decisions are you making today?
SavingMyself: It is soooo tempting to me to say “Yay!!! Finally, someone called BS on the ‘intellectuals often use their brains to find a way to not do anything’ phenomena.”
But I won’t do that, and only because I like intellectuals; they’re far more interesting than the alternative.
I offer one minor, but significant modification to your post:
We’re going to need some significant things done, in addition to the little stuff. The little stuff is the entry point, the place where defeatism, inertia, etc. is budged out of the ice. Overcoming that inertia is the hardest part of getting the sled moving.
Right after budge-out happens, the little stuff needs to evolve into significant stuff. Even if a billion people start recycling their plastic bags tomorrow, or even 8 billion people do it … that’s not enough of a dent.
Your main concept – that this is a numbers-and-individual-decisions game – that’s a bullseye.
Thanks for the post.
“Even if a billion people start recycling their plastic bags tomorrow, or even 8 billion people do it … that’s not enough of a dent.”
Better than not having a billion people doing it. But giving into defeat “that’s not enough of a dent” is a cope out for not doing anything.
So in effect you are saying – if only a billion people did something there is no point in doing anything so hey, don’t bother doing anything.
You missed my point by your very words.
Unfortunately by education and profession I am one of those intellectuals but I have spent most of my life with “blue collars.”
Possibly you missed the point I was trying to make, let me try again.
We agree that doing _something_ is vital
We agree that numbers are significant; the scale of the problem is so big it’s only solvable if millions-to-billions engage with it
Where we seem to disagree is “are all behaviors equally valuable to the solution”. I say not.
Recycling plastic bags isn’t going to move the needle much, even if everyone on the planet does it.
On the other hand, reducing transport (high contribution to CO2) has a big impact.
Reducing the heat-transfer coefficient (resistance to heat transfer in or out) of a building envelope – if billions of people did _that_ it would make a big difference.
Does that help clarify my position relative to yours?
And just to take it one step further, I most assuredly _did not_ say:
“So in effect you are saying – if only a billion people did something there is no point in doing anything so hey, don’t bother doing anything.”
In no way shape or form did I say that. I most definitely advocate for action, even if we start by doing things that don’t matter that much.
I then went on to say “but then we need to evolve into behaviors that actually _do_ make a difference. ”
Repeat: I said “do the behaviors that are going to make a difference”.
Contrast: a billion people recycle plastic bags .vs. a billion people double the R-value of their home’s building envelope.
One makes little difference, the other a big difference.
=== separately…
Please don’t take offense at my remarks about intellectuals; they’re the ones that notice that something different needs to happen. That’s a big step in the right direction, but it only gets us to the 5-yard line, to use an American football analogy.
We still have 95 hard-fought, grueling yards to go to score the touchdown.
Intellectuals like to think; they’re good at it, and it’s enjoyable for them.
But there’s a point (well since passed) where additional thinking doesn’t change anything. We already know what to do.
What we need now is the doing, and from all quarters, intellectuals or non-intellectuals alike.
8 Billion lives in simultaneous being. This is the problem.
When I was born in the mid-1950’s the world population was around 2.5 Billion, but more importantly the average world life-expectancy was about 50 years of age. Since that time, infant mortality has sharply declined while global life expectancy is now over 70 years. Wealthier Americans can expect to live to 90.
To paraphrase an aphorism I once heard at a university climate conference: It’s real; It’s here; it’s bad; and it’s us.
If one can come to a place of acceptance that blaming others as Neuberger seems to do (be it the hierarchies of patriarchy, capitalism, socialism, Hinduism, Islam, etc) is nothing but copium, one can see that there’s no way out of this box canyon that humanity has swarmed into. Extinction of the species is nearly as inevitable as death of the individual.
We can only hope to live in ways that might ease the inevitable suffering of those around us, because Treblinka, Hiroshima, Gaza, or Jonestown are not morally acceptable solutions to the population explosion.
In the movie “Independence Day” there are scenes where all around the world people are asking what the Americans are doing and waiting from words from the US.
Nope, no words of leadership from the US. In fact, they have created the greatest gas release in history with the bombing of NS1 & NS2. They don’t mind being the first in Hell, or so it appears.
However, people like Adam Tooze are not looking any longer for the US for leadership and hope with respect to climate change mitigation. They are looking to China, while also admitting that the west in fact is sabotaging China’s efforts:
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-294-whither-china-part
Looking at the temperature graph above, I can’t help wondering when we’ll see vineyards replanted in Yorkshire, or even Vinland, aka Newfoundland.
I have no dog in the fight and am at the point where its interesting to see abrupt changes in the climate on a human timescale, not a geological one, kinda exciting don’t you think?
To watch it play out in a completely natural setting is quite something, most people are in cities and can’t see what’s going on, because most everything is artificial or introduced.
That said, my mad skills in the wilderness and living self contained, gives me a huge edge over most everybody else, I’m quite used to living by my wits.
I am impressed by the line, “Come down off the cross, we can use the wood.” It really is time to rethink what we are doing. It is also time to rethink what others are doing. Most of the 8 billion people on Earth have done little or nothing to create global warming. Those of us in advanced industrial countries have done much more. However, the billionaire elites who run the world and stage the wars have much more responsibility. CO2 billows from their decisions. Sadly, we have virtually no influence with those elites, as they use their money and influence to distort and deny even the most fervent protests. Just look at what is happening to the Free Palestine protests. The only result is AIPAC striving to primary all the progressive Democrats in Congress.
I would also suggest reading this article and comments in connection with the article on Extreme Stunt Climate Activists. With so much intentional and unintentional misinformation swirling around, it is hard for any of us to think straight. We are working through the stages of grief. We must share together to make the transition. Otherwise, we will just be like Hamlet, railing against the heavens. As the song continues, “Come on up to the house.”
Who are the primary culprits—the individuals who are mega-consumers? Can their behavior be changed?
Billionaires emit a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person, study finds
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/world/billionaires-greenhouse-gases-climate-intl/index.html