I just came from a talk by Michael Mann, stalwart on the front lines of the climate wars for the past two decades and author, most recently, of The Madhouse Effect. I admire his work, and his courage, whole-heartedly. His willingness not to be cowed by the forces of reaction is an example to us all. At the same time, I came away disappointed by the talk, and the message, which boiled down to “climate denialism is keeping us from embracing solutions to climate change. It’s not too late, and change can come quickly–maybe as soon as the next election.”
With due respect, and at serious risk of being misunderstood, I wanted to stand up and say: climate change is not the problem. It’s not “a” problem, and it has no solution. It is an inescapable condition. I would not say that it is an existential threat, nor a “national security threat,” as Mann suggested. It is, I would say, a threat at the scale of planetary civilization, which is at least one reason why framing it as “a problem” is inadequate. Suggesting that change could come quickly is, at the very least, glib, as Mann admitted afterwards when acknowledging the necessity of protest and post-electoral mobilization. Those who are thinking in terms of radical solutions–climate justice, revolutionary politics–have a better sense of the scale required, although their fascination with late 19C images of party-led political change constitute an imaginative safety net or straitjacket.
Climate change is not the problem. So long as “climate” is an object of scientific knowledge, it will manifest the mirage of being an object of technological manipulation and control: hence geo-engineering. Technoscience is so deeply embedded in the culture that scientists and engineers are siblings, if not joined at the hip. Construing the climate as a single object of indubitable reality, rather than (as Latour suggests) a laboriously assembled construct coordinating and allowing for commensuration between disparate research programs, forms of evidence, analytic and synthetic protocols and forms of disciplined argumentation–an evolving project of global-scale cooperation–entrenches a sense of self-righteous knowingness and cognitive superiority that is ultimately at odds with democratic logic.
“The problem”–if we have to use that term–is that there are a multitude of problems, local in specific effect and bound to inherited political orders. There is no singular “solution:” as Mann acknowledged, climate change is only one, rapidly moving dimension in the “space” of sustainability. Sustainability is the name of the game, and the size of the lifeboat–the moral order of the lifeboat–is up for debate (“problematic”). There will be–there already has been–blood.
Climate change poses a civilizational threat, not only at the level of daily life and political priorities, but at the level of institutions and imaginaries. If I had to frame it, I would say that the problem is: how can a civilization based on freedom become one that embraces justice? That “frame” is unavoidably prophetic, aimed at foundations that are not, ultimately, graspable in individual terms. What would it even mean for a civilization to “embrace” justice?