Why It Doesn’t Matter if you Give in to Climate Despair
Part 1 of Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice: an Essay about Seeing Beyond Ourselves
Check out Part II
I suspect that even people who write about the issue of climate change professionally would acknowledge that our imaginative capacity to talk about it is stunted; perhaps because the story lies in the future as much as in the present, or because it’s so big, or because we’ve been subjected to a corporate-funded denialism campaign that just now is winding down.
Our reactions and emotions to it are being carefully policed by our discourse. There’s been a lot of talk these days, in places like The Washington Post, for example, about how important it is for us to not give in to “climate despair.” The reason given is that although the prognosis is bad, it will get worse if we continue to burn more fossil fuels. The greatest danger, in this narrative, is that we “throw up our hands and give up and let everything burn to the ground.” This would seem to imply that we are in control of fossil fuels and therefore can change the rate at which they are burned.
Whether it is because we’ve all secretly given in to climate despair, or for some other reason, we are still burning fossil fuels at a rate that seems entirely independent of how much sustainable or green energy we bring online. It’s as if the fossil fuels have their own logic that isn’t at the mercy of how cheap solar panels are.
There’s something that bothers me about the demand that we resist “climate despair”: The idea that what “we feel” about climate change matters. That feels disingenuous. The way in which “we” is constituted matters to some extent. If the “we” includes me, I can only laugh. Even if I became completely committed to the cause, I’m sure that all I would achieve would be my own burnout and disillusionment. I know, because I’m already disillusioned. If I were a billionaire, and therefore much more influential in society, then even still, my money would speak much more loudly than my words, and money loves cheap energy.
That this is the state of discourse around this topic of immense geohistorical importance is a victory for the climate denial campaign that only began ramping down relatively recently. Throughout the thirty years from the end of the Cold War to the beginning of this decade, the key point about global warming under debate was its cause. The fossil fuel industry paid people to argue that climate change was “not caused by humans” (ie, it’s not their fault). And so anyone who was concerned by the topic had to put their rhetorical powers to work proving that climate change was anthropogenic — caused by humans.
But climate change is actually NOT caused by humans, it is caused by burning fossil fuels, which releases gasses including carbon dioxide. The liberal climate hawk will say, “yeah, that’s what we meant. Fossil fuels burned by humans.” But no one has convincingly shown that we are using fossil fuels, rather than being used by them.
I don’t believe that, or at least I don’t believe that should be taken as a given.
To see what a more sophisticated discourse might look like, let’s back up and look at an alternate, speculative apocalypse that has been thought about endlessly, obsessed over both by storytellers and philosophers: the runaway AI scenario.
One of these, popularized by Nick Bostrom, is the “paperclip maximizer.” A paperclip company makes a machine-learning algorithm tasked to manufacture paperclips efficiently. They don’t put a limit on the number of paperclips they want, so the machine takes over the entire world and turns all matter including all people into paperclips (and paperclip making machines, I guess). At some point, unplugging the computer on which the program was running doesn’t stop it, because it can move itself via a network. This type of AI doesn’t need to be self-aware to be powerful; it just needs to iterate quickly enough to figure out how to overpower human people, the idiots who invented it.
It’s been pointed out, I think by Bostrom himself, though he doesn’t elaborate on it, that capitalism is exactly this type of algorithm. It is self-reproducing, iterative. Instead of paperclips, it’s surplus value. There were once competing social algorithms, like communism, but now capitalism is clearly dominant. It’s an algorithm, which means it’s a process, the same way a computer program is a process. Because I like Deleuze and Guattari, I like to call it a “machine,” though “program” works better right now. This is clearly simplistic, but makes more sense to me than the drivel that we usually hear.
What’s missing from the paperclip story — the thing that’s keeping it speculative rather than real — is how this machine gained such power. It would need a boost from an immense source of energy, early in its development. For capitalism, that was industrialization, which began the process of what Timothy Morton calls modernity: “The process of oil getting into everything.” Because that’s what caused the industrial revolution: fossil fuels. There may be alternative sources of energy now, but our current world was built when fossil fuels were pumped into the capitalist machine. This is petrocapitalism.
We are told that the basic drive of capitalism is to create surplus value. What if its basic drive were instead to maximize consumption of fossil fuels? If that were the case, would capitalism have unfolded any differently throughout history? I don’t think so.
We are told that the the goal of capitalism is accumulation of capital, and so to our minds, the activity of burning ancient corpse-juice seems just as arbitrary as paperclip making. But it’s not.
Since there has been so little good fiction written about climate change, I’m willing to take a turn into the speculative here.
What if there is also a dormant algorithm that can run itself on the energy of fossilized carbon? Waiting in there, within the carbon itself, to be activated by combustion. A code written in carbon chains. It could be a simple entropic imperative: to be dispersed about the atmosphere rather than concentrated under tremendous pressure underground. Why would that not be the natural tendency of that Solar energy trapped beneath the rocks? A simple energy gradient, running as a machine logic within the process of extracting and burning carbon. It doesn’t have to appreciate poetry to have agency.
Once human capitalism discovered that it could burn fossil fuels to reproduce itself, the program of the carbon found a host to release its entropic potential, its energetic load, hardware to execute upon. The human economy becomes only one piece of hardware that is mobilized by the petroleum program.
So what if fossil fuels want to be extracted and burned? In that alternate universe, where that was provably true, would history unfold any differently than it has? No. So are we in control? If not, why does it matter that we must maintain a false hope that if only we believe hard enough we’ll get a true Green New Deal or something, which would have to be a historical 180 — not impossible, but not likely.
Climate change is going to continue to be as bad as it appears it is, or worse. It will be more catastrophic than is imaginable, because it won’t be imaginary. Anyone who follows the topic can see this — it’s why we need a propaganda effort to renounce “climate despair.”
To my knowledge, the only person who has entertained this possibility on the page is Reza Negarestani, in his brilliant Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. It’s one of those books that’s ruined my life because I can’t get over it
For Negaristani, war is a subroutine of the program: oil is infected with war machines, he says. War is a necessary component of the process that allows the program to be iterative rather than linear, to be able to learn and constantly rebuild itself to be stronger, ever more stronger. Humans are instrumental to the process, but we are its instruments. We’re not even its most important component: what about the exuberant excess of ancient life that got crushed to make the goo at the beginning? And the flamboyant blossoming of life that will come after humans have been largely eliminated?
In the paperclip maximizer story, there’s a moment when the machine is just an efficient machine, and then in the next moment, it’s run out of control and become an existential threat. We will not be aware of that inflection point when it happens (or else it wouldn’t happen). In the case of capitalism, we are way, way beyond that point. The movement to challenge the ascendency of capitalism was called communism, and it was defeated, let’s just say, not by accident.
It’s not about us anymore. We, as a species, may or may not survive the coming calamities; I assume that there will be billions upon billions of deaths but that “we” will.
For now, for us, the preterite, it’s about survival, as it’s always been. And our chances for survival improve if we can somehow come together and get out of this social atomization this stage of capitalism has foisted upon us. That’s why other social movements, for economic justice, against mass incarceration and racist policing, etc., may prove more impactful in preparing for climate catastrophe than the carbon mitigation “movement” which is mostly made of concerned middle-aged white men.
