It currently looks like there’s a sort of climate problem eclipse going on in people’s minds. A few symptoms:
- We witnessed a COP30 in Belém where the biggest culprit behind the climate crisis didn’t even bother to show up; and where the oil, gas and coal-producing nations were given ample opportunity to prevent the setting of an end date for the use of fossil fuels. And while the Columbia summit was indeed a justified protest against the slide back into business as usual, it confirms the climate eclipse rather than removing it. Still, small comfort: there was a brief moment of relief in Belém when Al Gore, just as he did in 2006 (An Inconvenient Truth), briefly pulled back the curtain with the remark: “It is literally insane that we are allowing this to continue.”
- We are increasingly seeing multinationals, countries and regions (such as the US and the EU) backtracking on their emissions reduction targets by delaying, watering down or scaling back renewable energy projects, and relaxing regulations. See the fading of the jubilant hydrogen ambitions of a few years ago, the clouding moves with which Katherina Reiche has recently sought to shelve German climate policies, the exposure of carbon capture solutions as a high-cost gamble, the postponement of the ban on diesel engines, the watered-down EU obligation to account for climate impacts in production and imports, and the industrial and civil resistance to the EU ETS II trading system.
- The public’s concerns about climate issues also appear to be waning. This is not surprising, because those concerns sway in the breeze of doubts that arise in people when they increasingly see and hear CEOs and world leaders downplaying climate change (as a “hoax”) or no longer seeing it as a major threat, such as Gates, who is calling for a greater focus on healthcare and less on the climate. So, why should the average person continue to worry about it? Environmental sociologist Weversberg: “Middle-class people are turning away from environmental and climate protection because they realise that the necessary changes could entail sacrifices. They no longer see the ecological transition as an opportunity, but as an additional burden.”
- Climate activism is also dimming. It has become fixated on its message of extinction and no longer attracts enough supporters for large-scale actions. It has also been weakened, incidentally, by criminal prosecutions and a focus on the acute suffering in the Middle East.
- A marked sense of climate fatigue is also evident among major news providers (CNN, ABC, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.), as they have been overwhelmed by a multitude of more pressing events. After all, the unfortunate Iran war – triggered by Judeo-Christian greed – poses a significant threat to the global availability of critically important resources. Also, the rapid developments in AI and their potentially far-reaching social consequences are pushing climate issues out of their field of attention.
- And climate science? In the West, there is a significant shift away from focusing all monodisciplines on climate issues as a result of the US federal witch-hunt against all thinking, measuring and reporting on global warming at universities, institutes, companies and philanthropic organisations, and anyone who dares to collaborate with them. This witch-hunt also undermines the UN scientific body that assesses the risks of global warming and possible response options: see here how the IPCC is bogged down in procedural deadlocks and is facing a budget shortage.
Meanwhile, these cover-ups drive each other forward, of course. One cloud sows the next. The public, hooked on the new temptations that “business as usual” offers − or rather, imposes − upon them in the form of cheap travel, client-suited services, and products, thereby forces businesses and policymakers to not radically and rapidly phase out fossil-fuel-based solutions. Money, money, money.
The climate monster, of course, couldn’t care less about those cover-ups and is steadily plowing ahead. CO2 levels hit 430 ppm in April, and the global temperature in December was 1.55 degrees above the 1990–2020 average. Bad news about the Amoc, the absurdly hot oceans, severe heat waves, and atmospheric rivers seep into the media through the kitchen door and out the back door.
I watch it with a sense of foreboding. It’s like a bus that starts leaking oil, then overheats, causing the radiator to boil, which blinds the driver, causing the bus to veer off the road, blow a tire on the front right, skid further into the ditch, and start to tip over. The passengers are jostled about, clinging in fear to their seats, and lose sight of what’s going on.
Failing feedforward
This is roughly how we, as humanity, get stuck. Our highly developed core ability − namely, to anticipate the dynamics of situations through a system of mental representations by simulating those dynamics via reasoning, and thereby deducing plans (representations of actions to be taken on an imagined timeline) − has failed. That head has failed to anticipate the climate storm and calm it before it took hold. Yes, the cognitive superego, concentrating and defending itself in the laboratories of universities, institutes, and multinationals, has a very high opinion of itself. Especially the engineers and the brainiacs, full of adoration for their own gray matter. However, engineering (manipulating) the forces of nature without a strong neural connection between feelings and reason (as animals rely on) that warns you and makes you sense danger when, in your overconfidence, you’re facing risky situations and bite off more than you could chew, can unfortunately go very wrong.
“We’ll manage to mitigate that climate destabilization, don’t worry,” was the scientists’ core belief. And with that theorem, the media and the general public have been ceaselessly pulled out of their individual zones of doubt and panic, brainwashed, manipulated, and anesthetized by this elite, basking in a superior aura of self-defined intelligence. Those injections are still being administered today:
- Witness Diederik Samson’s recent ‘can-do’ trumpet blast, full of tricks to force radical sustainability (via supposedly clean energy applications produced elsewhere) down the throats of the hesitant masses in Europe.
- And in the recent alarming article on “The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory,” the observation is made: “If one element tips, it can trigger a cascade effect, pushing other systems past their thresholds. Such tipping cascades have the potential to drive self-sustaining climate change, adding to the risk of triggering a hothouse Earth trajectory.“ This is not followed by an urgent recommendation to all national governments to declare a state of emergency, but rather by a weak statement: ”Established approaches such as scaling up renewable energy and protecting carbon-storing ecosystems remain critical to limiting further global temperature increases.” In addition, they call for more intensive monitoring of tipping points and warning signs, as if such monitoring would help even for a second to prevent the triggering of tipping points that are already detonating (i.e., whose upward curves are already heading toward them as steeply as a vertical line).
So, within that cosy bubble created by the techies, people continued to fly, travel, drive and buy unnecessary things, whilst businesses and governments, like a hare, kept embracing, expanding and multiplying increasingly absurd energy-guzzling activities – such as aerospace, communications, data and distribution centres, and the arms industry. Meanwhile, the increasingly severe effects of climate change are fuelling ever more conflict and migration, causing the tone between and within countries to harden considerably, with everyone entrenching themselves in the cultivation of enemy stereotyping and a defensive stance against competitors for space and resources, thereby creating enemies rather than building cohesion to jointly and co-ordinatedly tackle the root causes.
For every person, identifying and averting life-threatening situations – for example, by braking in good time before entering a sharp bend – is a fundamental life skill; for if you do not apply that feedforward with ruthless determination, you will end up in a maelstrom or chain of acute setbacks that will sweep you away if you can no longer neutralise them through feedback controls. Due to insufficient proactivity (i.e., feedforward), people – you see this happening everywhere – frequently end up in a swamp where their vitality steadily erodes because they then have to defend themselves, applying stopgap measures, against a process whose ignition (dynamics) they have assessed too late or insufficiently.
With regard to the climate crisis: 15 years ago, we should have (a) drastically reduced global trade flows and thus made all regions largely selfsufficient in terms of food and consumer goods; (b) through land redistribution, we should have given everyone equal access to direct means of subsistence, thereby both preserving biodiversity and natural absorption capacity and minimising emissions from energy use by switching to manual labour as much as possible; and (c) overturn the core rules that currently govern relations between members of society – rules based on a liberal capitalist model, which consists of the freedom to accumulate as many reserves as one wishes and to invest those reserves wherever and however one wishes. Why that last point? Strict regulation of flows and productions – i.e. working in unison for centuries to keep emissions at a level that can be absorbed – can never succeed if well-heeled people, investors or funds continue to disrupt the central prioritisation of essential production and the central scaling back of unnecessary production through their investments.
If these three interventions in our modes of interaction had been carried out back then, there would be no problem now. What’s more, it would have been a piece of cake compared to the social and material interventions we will now have to implement just to keep our heads above water in the short term and to defuse increasing internal conflicts – even though the major crisis looming on the horizon is, incidentally, still unavoidable.
Trapped in a too-narrow representation of the situation
No, climate scientists have been saying for twenty years now, such far-reaching social change is unimaginable, and in any case cannot be implemented in time. Yes, that was true, but why was that the case? Because climate science and policy have not worked on making any kind of social change conceivable – except to some extent within the degrowth movement. When techies talk about ‘systems change’, they mean the regulation of transport systems, building structures, water supply and waste management, and not the regulation of socio-economic relations between people: i.e. the way in which we distribute work, specialise people, allocate income, and allow reserves to be formed and spent. Not only has the question of which narrow strait (of Hormuz) of equitable resource distribution humanity should navigate through to escape the current dead-end, compulsive, resource-destroying mode of behaviour not been formulated or explored within the climate debate, but there has been scarcely any dialogue with degrowth and post-growth movements (such as Clara Mattei, for example, or Robeyns, or Norberg, or Wecan), nor has there been any interest in my thoroughly theoretically grounded proposals in that direction. ‘Yes, but,’ they said, ‘do we have to completely overhaul the division of labour, specialisation, property ownership and the like?’ My answer: ‘Yes, we must, if that is necessary for humanity to continue to survive.’
For, look, they haven’t grasped for a moment that the crux of the climate problem lies in social response capacity, namely that we must get everyone aligned in order to be able to march together, and that any rapid (or even slow) reduction in emissions would only then be achievable. It was therefore about like-mindedness, not technology. In order to get people more aligned, it was therefore necessary:
- to dismantle the capitalist rat race, which consists of a lifelong race to accumulate assetts and resources at the expense of and in competition with others;
- to dismantle the specialised division of labour, as this leads to an elite of regulators (intellectuals who organize and devise, map out paths, figure out decisions, and dominate) and a mass of regulated plodders, most of whom are full of resentment, jealousy and hate, turning the actual implementation of any policy into an obstacle course.
Climate experts continued to sidestep (or failed to recognise) this issue of social response capacity, yet were meanwhile forced – out of sorrow not to provoke opposition from all those different goal-directed camps – to stretch out the emissions reduction path for as long as possible, without even realising (sensing) that in all those extremely stretched scenarios, they were playing with fire. Because in each of those scenarios, a single small unforeseen effect could be enough to prevent us becoming aware beforehand that the climate could consequently spiral out of control for good.
But you can’t really blame them. By placing this monstrous threat – global warming – in the hands of technicians from the very beginning, the chances of escaping this dead end were, in fact, minimal beforehand. Why?
Physicists, chemists, agronomists, geologists and geophysicists, meteorologists, climatologists, and engineers have received highly specialised training in the exact sciences; as a result, they generally lack socio-economic insight and therefore do not possess the conceptual tools to think outside the box, and – given that they hold well-paid positions in established institutions – are, due to their deep entanglement with the existing order and dominant culture, in no way eager to adopt a critical, oppositional stance towards that order, let alone to engage (and communicate) with the kind of radical rethinking that would have been necessary to make very substantial interventions in the socio- -economic demand for energy politically conceivable and rapidly implementable. They remained silent. They still do.
- Observe how all six ‘Enabling conditions to speed up systems transitions’ listed by H. de Coninck in her inaugural lecture at Eindhoven University of Technology involve processes (such as finance, technology, multi-level governance) which, in their current functioning, are precisely what cause the divisiveness in social relations that is the root cause of our collective inability – due to our widely divergent positions – to resolve this problem safely and in time. Her sixth enabling condition, for example, is: We need more engineers.
- This shows that: Successful people like her − because they form the core cogs (i.e. staff and line functions) of the decision-making elites’ control system, and love the fact that everyone sees them driving things forward and excelling there − understand nothing of the hatred and envy they provoke, nor of the feelings that determine why people take a stand – by, for example, simply pitching their tents en masse on roundabouts as soon as road pricing to reduce private vehicle travel becomes a parliamentary agenda item – against the regulators, the dominant figures and the powerful who hunt them down, control them, seek to steer them, and aim to rethink and reshape them. Look, it is crystal clear that it is precisely the division between ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ that has caused truly substantial environmental and climate policy worldwide to be constantly shot down, watered down and torpedoed – see the extremely paralysing influence that the obstructive stance of the USA since 1995 has had on climate analyses, reports, targets and reduction scenarios, and the spread of that influence to the stance of multinationals and political parties in all other countries.
- See also how transition specialists recently reacted to the possibility of a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Not a word about grounding aviation or halting the expansion of data centers in order to ensure sufficient oil and gas supplies for fertilisers, essential transport, and primary care. The only thing those specialists were calling for was: accelerated scaling up of renewables, battery storage capacity, and the electrification of transport.
Dedicated to meeting society’s energy needs down to their very toes, it could absolutely not be expected of those techno-geeks from the outset that they would be able or willing to provide politicians with representations of reality that transcended the existing order and had the potential to bring everyone into such a line (i.e., to instill confidence in everyone) that by jointly limiting energy demand, the climate beast could have been crushed before it could take on monstrous forms.
On top of that, their ability to grasp the real threats that have been hanging over us for 30 years now was laced with naivety (i.e., detachment of reality) – by which I mean that they resided mentally primarily in the realm of abstract arguments (texts) within specialist fields and academic contacts, and less in sensory perception and feeling of basic realities. Naivity? Yes, on the one hand, significant underestimates of the speed at which global warming would strike because they did not sense the self-reinforcing effect of huge climate turbulence, and on the other hand, a lack of understanding regarding the nefast consequences for growth conditions, and the leeway that all living species would have to adapt to changing circumstances. Louise Fresco (President of the Dutch Wageningen Agriculture University between 2014 and 2022), for example, spent years relativizing the enormous impact (as it now turns out) on growth conditions – something every farmer could have sensed intuitively but didn’t, because most agronomists told him not to worry. Furthermore, continuing along the chosen path – namely, a purely technical transition without having to tinker with existing socio-economic relationships – was also a bread-and-butter issue. A matter of securing funding for their research, in other words.
And the policymakers? They jumped on the bandwagon behind the experts, because, well, a degrowth message was a dead certain way to crash their political careers in a society where you could be lynched just for proposing a trivial little aviation tax. Caught in the headlights of technical climate solutions, with no awareness of other possibilities for safely escaping this misery, everyone therefore continued to meekly elect leaders who, precisely because they had no vision, were, in the short term, most beneficial to the thickness of everyone’s wallet and pension provision.
Conclusions:
- Despite a tremendous amount of research and worldwide deliberations, we have nevertheless landed on the current extremely dangerous path.
- In order to survive this, we need a revolution around fundamental aspects of our social interplay, and it is everyone’s responsibility to bring that about. Climate misery will activate and fuel that.
Jac Nijssen
