Hope, Doomers, and the Climate Emergency
Capitalism is feeding on our "courageous" sense of optimism—as it swallows the planet whole.
I think of American political narratives as being like wayward car horns—unpleasant cacophonous noise blasting so discordantly that you still hear it after it stops. The repetition conveys a noxious habit—blaming victims and absolving the powerful. Thus, America crumbles and implodes, not from capitalist greed and institutional inequity, but from immigrant invasions.
Last week I wrote about the truly obscene and utterly weird climate narrative, often pouring from the keyboards of progressive writers—doomers have become the new deniers we are told. We have an extinction event, a potential checkout line for human evolution, and the target of our ire—the ones who fail to keep the wolf from the door are, uh.....people who have lost hope?
We live in a culture that grinds hope to smithereens, that pours its heart and soul into war, military hardware, expanded policing and fossil fuel extraction, while turning a blind eye to every form of suffering—discouragement is our national product. We have a depressed, checked out, poor population—in the tens of millions—that has aptly given up on voting. I worked for decades as an outreach mental health worker with very poor clients. Futility is the flip side of the American dream. My clients never felt that they had a shred of agency—they knew damn well that voting would never improve their lives. Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses. Our "deaths of despair" parallel the phenomenon of climate doomerism.
In the climate narrative that now envelops us, it may be that all hope is false hope.
America “the paranoid,” has a time honored habit of directing its faux righteousness in tangential fashion. Most of us have never met a real live climate doomer, but even a casual excursion to the YouTube "doomisphere" reveals that the few self -identified doomers selling their wares on social media (to a tiny handful of subscribers) offer, perhaps, the most nuanced, detailed and intelligent climate narrative available. Doomers follow the science to a fork in the road where scientists often refuse to go. Scientists tell us that it is not too late—we (whoever we are) merely have to immediately and drastically reduce fossil fuel use and be at so called "net zero" in the next decade and a half. The doomers disabuse us of fantasies of net zero. "Hello," they call out—"capitalists have no intention of slowing down the orgy of fossil fuel consumption, and the public has been declawed with tales about renewable replacements."
In some bizarre, twisted media hallucination, the doomers have come to be the proxy targets for capitalism's death wish. We are shooting the messenger, and giving the perpetrator a free pass. This brings to mind the all-time greatest act of mass murder ever perpetrated upon the human race—the tetraethyl lead apocalypse of the 20th century. You might think of WWII or the Nazi Holocaust when you think of the all-time epic mass murder—tip your hat to the public relations brilliance of capitalism. You probably barely know about the bloody deeds of leaded gasoline—acts of boundless destruction that make Hitler and Pol Pot into evil children by comparison.
Leaded gasoline unleashed an episode of unabated horror upon the entire biosphere, with no government protections for half a century. Apart from the body count—in the tens of millions conservatively, along with the cognitive destruction of children (for lead is a devastating neurotoxin)—the lead epidemic perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry also set loose an ongoing narrative assault upon inner city people. In the U.S. the pundits and politicians blame the victims as a matter of choreographed practice. The leaded gasoline mass murder event resolved into a national narrative with mass hatred directed at our poorest citizens.
When the lead dust had settled, we had the prison industrial complex, the dismantling of safety nets, the explosion of neoliberal ideology and such tomes as "The Bell Curve" promoting a new vision of eugenics.
Inner cities had been catacombed with highways designed to separate urban Black neighborhoods from white suburbs. In these communities lead gas fumes attacked the developing brains of Black children, and contributed to enormous spikes in violent crime. The urban crime wave inspired racist political narratives and kick started the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Lead exposure lowers IQ, reduces self-control and drives impulsive behavior. In America, neurological injuries from lead combined with available fire arms, poverty and lack of opportunity. These factors, in concert, drove murder rates through the roof. The U.S. murder rate reached a pinnacle in 1980 with 10.4 murders per 100,000 people—just in time for the election of Ronald "trickle down" Reagan. With the phasing out of leaded gasoline, murder rates incrementally dropped and now commonly register at a little more than half of the peak established just prior to the election of Ronald "I doubled the prison population" Reagan in 1980. Of course, even without lead poisoning from auto fumes, we are still the most violent developed nation on earth. This piece is not about American military values and the second amendment.
The prison industrial complex may seem to have little to do with climate doomers, and, indeed, the casual scapegoating of a few discouraged people who tell us that we have little hope of avoiding societal collapse may seem trivial when set beside the brutality and racism of the U.S. carceral state. But we have at least a vague parallel that is worth contemplating—in the U.S., media and politicians have a habit of pointing fingers at innocent victims.
Newspaper pundits and politicians, in the 80’s and 90’s, bloviated about "super predators." They systematically directed hatred toward the victims of tetraethyl lead. The leaded gasoline mass murder event, we now understand, was only a warm up act (pardon the pun) for the ultimate fossil fuel industry crime—the total erasure of the biosphere. And who should the public hold accountable for the probable and looming genocide of all living things? Doomers! People who tell us that the corporate empire and the elected bots that feed at donor troughs are so intent on slaughtering us that we likely cannot do anything to stop them. Once again, we find pundits intent on tangential targets to blame. People who feel hopeless have nothing to do with the source of the problem. They are, like those destroyed by leaded gas fumes, victims of a process they had no part in creating.
Here is an interview of my favorite doomer—Elliot Jacobson who tells us that hope is our enemy, hope drives our collective delusions. Jacobson references a Harvard study that suggested that activism and hope have an inverse relationship. You may not resonate with Jacobson's darkness or analysis but he projects an air of integrity that is quite rare in climate discourse.
In the climate narrative that now envelops us, it may be that all hope is false hope. I believe that any activist movement ought to proceed from the starting point that success is unlikely and catastrophe can only be reduced. Critically, capitalism must be named —there is no credible climate story that fails to trace our unwinnable predicament to the headwater of the market economy.
By the way, whatever happened to the perpetrators of the leaded gasoline mass murder event? You probably know the names of the two most culpable GM leaders who refused to use grain alcohol to make their gasoline provide a smooth ride. Grain alcohol would have worked as well as tetraethyl lead and would not have murdered countless millions and destroyed the minds of children. But GM had a patent on tetraethyl lead, and grain alcohol belonged to the public domain. In other words, GM executives knowingly committed mass murder for profit and hired credentialed academic whores to confuse the public with bullshit research. Leaded gasoline butchered millions and inspired the invention of pseudoscience (which now sustains our climate catastrophe), but the story gets even worse.
Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses. Our "deaths of despair" parallel the phenomenon of climate doomerism.
You have all heard of one of the world's great cancer research and treatment centers, The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the leaders of GM who presided over the bloodiest extermination event of the twentieth century. For that, we honor them with eternal recognition and fame. That is how capitalism works.
You might wonder what sort of massive, multi-trillion dollar reparations have been given to the millions of victims of GM’s crimes, but you probably intuitively know. The survivors and descendants of those whose minds became collateral damage to profits got nothing. They are still being fed to the carceral state. That is how capitalism works.
One small request—can we stop blaming our environmental predicament on doomers? Rather, we need to listen to them carefully.
