In the first part we have seen that the “climate” cannot be defined as a phenomenon of its own, i.e., independent of weather and its concrete manifestations. We have also seen that thinking about, discussing, modeling, simulating the climate does not mean it “exists”, i.e., it has no correspondence in reality outside of the simulations.
But is this not precisely why concepts such as climate, but also Covid, have such authority? You never want to know for sure. During the high-pitched Covid season, very few people asked whether the virus had ever been isolated. Today we know the vaccines have been developed according to a computer model of the SARS-CoV2-virus. This does not necessarily mean that the virus does not exist, but it means that people were ready to give up their fundamental rights without demanding proof of the existence of the thing which was supposed to have such an impact on our lives. Time and again I have argued that the central supposition of the Covid as well as the Climate regime is reification: social relations present themselves as “objective constraints”, “things” ultimately, according to which every aspect of social (re-)production, life, culture, and politics must be calibrated against. Covid and the Climate are the cases in point. Even more perversely, as is the case for Climate (but less for the coronavirus), this does not even require the “thing” to exist at all. It can be merely a concept without real correspondence that we sacrifice our rights to. Much in the same way as the phrase “because our God told us to”.
If the concept of “climate” is based on a mystification, however, then “climate change” becomes even more convoluted. And this is of course the rub: if Power does everything it can to divert attention away from itself and onto other sites where outrage or religious zeal can be directed to, then “Climate Change” is the perfect candidate. It seems grounded in “Science”, but it fulfills all the criteria for a religious cult, as Michael Shellenberger and Peter Boghossian have demonstrated, “complete with taboos, original sin, devils, a creation myth, The Elect, supernatural beliefs and purity rituals that have nothing whatsoever to do with science.”[1] I would even go further: belief in climate change is destroying the planet. We can note at least four phenomena rooted in the climate change-belief that are making life on earth more miserable for every human being:
1. Blaming “climate change” instead of poor infrastructure. As the Ahrtal flood catastrophe, claiming over 2000 lives in western Germany in 2021 has shown, among similar catastrophes, politicians will find a way to steer the focus on climate change instead of the fact that investments in the infrastructure of the region have been systematically undersupplied. They were, in fact, left to rot in the centre of one of the most affluent countries in Europe. Next to paying workers next to nothing, keeping constant capital cheap or avoiding replacement when wear and tear has been driven over the limit is a way to save costs, and this has been to go-to economization in this Rhineland area for decades now. Remember when the Cologne archives collapsed in 2009 – it was difficult to blame it on climate change, but the people in charge have learnt their lesson from it.[2] The Middle Ages had their “God’s revenge”, post-liberal quasi-modernity has “Climate’s revenge”.
2. Letting cultish behaviour rule over our everyday life. Symbolism, performance art, and LARPing have taken over. This is not a place to go into the mass psychology of Extinction Rebellion performance street art, or soup throwers, or Climate activists gluing themselves to motorways, bridges, and even conductor’s desks. But it makes the lives of people more miserable because there is no place we can go (museums, places of cultural heritage) or drive in which they won’t leave us the fuck alone. To be sure, their activism is meant to disturb, to incite, to stir up. You can say that Greta Thunberg’s “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis” is just clickbait for the already hypervigilant middle classes, but you can also say taking her advice is simply not very healthy for the human psyche. Who feels content, safe, and at ease when looking at Greta Thunberg? Exactly. Aside the fact that “reacting in panic to a crisis” has to my knowledge historically not always yielded the best results.
3. Neglecting the environment. While we talk about abstractions such as reducing carbon emissions to not cross the “2 degrees Celsius” (now 1.50 C) mission, the concrete world around us is dying. Clean drinking water and air quality are being shoved to the back of the queue. Affordable, clean housing, enough playgrounds, forests, animal welfare do not matter. In the UK alone, 10 to 100 000 birds die each year in the wind turbines. I am surprised that the US novelist and bird enthusiast Jonathan Franzen did not mention this as he wrote his cautious, but not overall disappointing New Yorker piece “What if we stopped pretending?” in 2019. For he makes a valuable point:
“Every renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem—the ‘green’ energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, overuse of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries—collective will is needed for these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of carbon, they’re within our power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech conservation actions (restoring forests, preserving grasslands, eating less meat) can reduce our carbon footprint as effectively as massive industrial changes.”[3]
While I’m not convinced that “eating less meat” is the solution to anything – either we eat meat or we don’t, and that should be left to the individual – he has a point. We neglect our immediate, concrete needs in favour of a statistical representation. That also means once the “statistics” are in order, there is nothing to worry about, notwithstanding dirty roads and pavements, cities drowning in litter, and toxins in the air and drinking water. We saw the latter happen in East Palestine, Ohio, but since the disaster could not be attributed to Climate Change, nobody cared (as though you needed any more proof of the political/ideological nature of the Climate Change-debate).
4. In the name of “objective constraint”, delegitimize democracy. This is the revamped Covid playbook: in the name of THE DANGEROUS THING, governments and global corporations are now allowed to do anything and can no longer to be held accountable. This famously, and as I’ve written repeatedly, included the suspension of fundamental rights and freedoms, including the violation of bodily integrity. How does humanity benefit from the suspension of democracy, of legal and financial disenfranchisement, or the curbing of even the most fundamental rights like seeing your family or friends? It does not, and that is the whole point. The vitalist reductionism of the Climate narrative belongs to the same framework as lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and the psychological and physical misery they caused. Even more, in psychoanalytical terms, like Covid, Climate is the super ego that can never be satisfied: the more you obey, the more of you it devours. You can never be masked or boosted enough; there will never be enough comforts to renounce. You have given up on meat and a car, on air travel, on your own house, but it will not be enough, because it is never enough. This is the religious aspect of the Climate Change cult. In this scenario, mass suicide is only consequential, but I’m not aware of suicides greatly improving the lives of anyone.
Climate is a technological abstraction. It has neither a function nor a substance of its own. What it does however have is an authoritarian aura. It is the perfect playground for technocrats like the UNFCCC and the IPCC to implement their mission in the wider political agenda for the restructuring of society towards disenfranchisement, a wider acceptance for the abolition of the remains of democratic civil society, and voluntary submission under the rule of an abstraction that has as much reality, or power, as a pagan idol. It is a fetish in the strict Marxian sense.
With the Climate narrative, the ruling elites make sure to consolidate their power. It will remain in its hands, with all the advantages for those few who have it and disadvantages for the many who don’t. In short: Climate is a political concept, not a “natural” phenomenon.
Understanding this – as a first step – can help us disentangle ourselves from the deliberate deceptions, the intentional mystifications, and the carefully planted convolutions, to no longer be under the sway of alien interests over ours.
Cover: video still from Les Rita Misouko, Marcia Baïla (1984)
[2] https://www.fm1today.ch/verschiedenes/wissen/grund-fuer-einsturz-von-koelner-archiv-geklaert-135025918
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
Considering Dialectic of Enlightenment, your basic argument amounts to a half-truth: "Climate" functions as an ideological reification of social relations, true, and how could it turn out differently, given how society is structured. But the other way round, real abstraction also means that capitalist production entails recreating the material world in its own image through the labour process and retroactively positing its own cause as reified, but nonetheless materially effective compulsion. In other words: that capital is second nature was never just a figure of speech, but the social process increasingly posits it as literal - society itself unfolding as a natural disaster. Stopping short of this conclusion amounts to the exact same expulsion of nature that people of your intellectual affiliation accuse postmodernism of and that Horkheimer and Adorno denounce from the beginning to the end of their work.