Like the two-state solution for Palestine, the Paris Accords are nothing but a cruel mirage. Distant targets are set (or the political show omits them altogether), climate summits held, renewable energy is divinely favored by the free market — all of this a mirage amid a desolation of flames. 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, the once unthinkable hell the Paris Accords were meant to stop, is now not only an imminent reality but in many ways our best-case scenario. Heating to the unimaginable levels of 3 degrees is at our doorstep, but by no means does it constitute a limit.
What "Green Transition"? Renewable energy may be growing across the world, most notably in China, but it is not achieving the one thing that could save our species, which is replacing climate-incinerating fossil fuel infrastructure. Renewable energy is being built on top of an already existing base of fossil fuels: it is only increasing energy output, not supplanting it. The only thing that matters is whether we keep emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, and we are doing so at record levels.
This is because fossil fuels are so much more than an energy source: they represent a system of power. The infrastructure is so difficult to replace precisely because of the political and economic power of Big Oil. Big Oil is inextricable from Big Tech, powering the growth of data centers and surveillance capitalism, the data center fever now the largest infrastructure undertaking in the history of humanity.
Big Oil and Big Tech are inextricable from war. The war machine feeds on fossil fuels as well as the surveillance apparatus. As long as the war machine churns, it will demand the discovery and extraction of fossil fuels around the world, effectively plunging our civilization into the abyss.
The climate crisis is not only caused by fossil fuels. Deforestation transforms forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources. Industrial fishing destroys sea life already reeling from the acidification of the oceans. The great lungs of our world — plankton and forests — are eradicated in the name of profit. Monocultures, the meat industry, agribusiness — all the hideous names of the hydra that is twenty-first century capitalism. It aggressively chews off our future and paralyzes the means for an organized collective response.
The climate awakening of 2018, where we saw the largest environmental protests in history, dissipated during the Covid pandemic. Corporate media erases the most basic truths of our existence every single day, shielding the perverse logic of accumulation with Orwellian efficiency.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are right in that there is a rising ideology of End Times. An ideology that purports that if the world is going to end, might as well get rich and enjoy it while you can. Might as well use the flames as a form of mass eugenics. Better to build bunkers for the grotesquely rich than stopping the destruction. Some even liken climate disasters to the Book of Revelations.
It is of course a ridiculous, quasi-religious notion. The climate crisis is not the apocalypse. It is far worse. The apocalypse sets an end to human pain. It gives meaning to suffering in the sense that at the moment of death, a greater plane of existence will be reached.
Climate cataclysm does not end. It is the beginning of a geological epoch that spans across a length of time wholly incomprehensible to us. It extends as the farthest horizon of our personal days and the remaining history of our civilization. “Climate change” is a polite euphemism for a geological transformation of the world. The more the clock ticks, the worse it gets.
Suffering does not have meaning here. It is merely writhing, for the world goes up in flames in the name of money. Rising numbers for a handful of pricks that embody the most despicable, degenerate, and banal evil. The collapse of our imagination into numerical values is an apocalypse in itself: a desolation of the human spirit, mirrored by the hideous faces of the global neo-fascist resurgence.
We witness the end-Holocene extinction. It is not only a mass extinction of the exquisite diversity of life in our planet, a diversity wholly unique in the universe as far as we know, so beautiful it is the inexhaustible well of art and poetry — it is a mass extinction of humanity as well. Languages disappear at a rate never before seen. A perverse homogeneity eradicates cultural diversity, and in my mind constitutes the aesthetics of a dawning fascism.
Who dares call this geological epoch the Anthropocene? As though the whole of humanity is to blame for this crime. The killers, the thieves, the war-profiteers are plain to see. There is no Anthropocene. There is only their disasters that we have to live through, day after day. What we define as the climate crisis is only the climax of five hundred years of colonialism and imperialism. The dawn of European empires was nothing more than a corporate enterprise of resource extraction, the exploitation of the succulent riches of the Global South with all the horrors that entailed. The twilight of the empires, alas, is a world of loss and ruin.
This is the truth. This is what defines our species. All our thought and action and love must spring from this basic truth. Capitalism may be the cause of the destruction, but socialism alone will not save us. We must redefine ourselves beyond childish nationalism and acknowledge our survival is a fact of global interdependence. We must look beyond the family as the social nucleus, and understand that our families depend on the entire web of life of our planet, a fraternity that must extend beyond our societies and even our species. We must acknowledge that a political solution to the crisis at hand begins not at the hollow thrones of power, but in a global fight for human rights. The autonomy of Indigenous peoples across the globe, the polyphony of human expression burgeoning from their unspoiled lands, is our only path forward. We must completely reconstruct our values. We must redefine our very relationship to ourselves and our history. As the Salvage collective concludes, we must redefine our very conception of matter.
I recently read Alan Moore’s From Hell. There is a masterful scene in the comic when at the dawn of the XX century, Jack the Ripper experiences a vision of the future apocalypse. The apocalypse is actually an office building and all the people staring blankly into screens. The plastification of the human heart, the mechanization of the soul — that is the apocalypse. An alienation from beauty, spiritual indifference, and a sole commitment to profit-making: that is the greatest wasteland of the soul.
I often think how terrifying it must have been for artists in the twentieth century to witness the (false) triumph of capitalism, the so-called “End of History” stemming from the delusion of global US hegemony. I find French cinema like Umbrellas of Cherbourg (one of the best films ever made) or the visionary movies of Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard to have truly reckoned and shuddered at this possibility.
This is the one thing I am grateful for the climate crisis. That way of life can’t go on. The climate crisis may be worse than Armageddon, but it also entails a type of salvation only through such an awakening unlike any history has ever seen.