The Importance of Rescuing the Frog: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About the Climate Crisis
On September 21, 2009, at the Wollman Rink in Central Park, I participated in the Human Countdown, a climate change action prompted by the presence of the UN Climate Summit in NYC that week. Organized by Oxfam and tcktcktck, and co-sponsored by a number of other notable progressive, grassroots organizations, the action devoted itself to the message that time was running out—that the window was closing for any chance to forestall the most apocalyptic consequences of anthropogenic global warming. While I was grateful for an occasion to help publicly speak this awful truth, the event for me was finally quite disheartening. Indeed, as I hope to show, the gathering, in trying to disrupt the pervasive cultural denial of that more than inconvenient truth, replayed some of that denial's crucial elements. In this, it represented an aversion to reckoning with what kind of knowledge a meaningful response to the climate crisis might demand. This denial of what we might call traumatic knowledge is widely enacted even in culturally prominent attempts to raise the alarm, as I'll also try to show by examining the leading scientific attempt to raise that alarm, James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren, and the most prominent example of climate change activism to date, the Tar Sands Action of August, 2011.
Cheering the End
Organizers of the Human Countdown invited people to participate in a "moving human sculpture of our world in a race against time" in order to "tell world leaders that the TIME TO ACT IS RUNNING OUT." Wearing light blue ponchos, some participants formed a giant hourglass. Others, wearing either blue (the oceans) or green (land), formed a giant planet earth in the upper bell. As the sculpture/performance/photo-op started, staged for a camera perched high overhead on a crane, through the speakers came a loud, recorded "tick, tick, tick, tick." Then a pop song—"How can we dance when our earth is turning? / How do we sleep while our beds are burning?"—accompanied the earth as it flowed down into the lower bell, the greens and blues rearranging themselves there to spell "tck tck tck." Finally, everyone in the lower bell raised an arm straight up and, as the music faded, leaving only the loud, "tick tick tick," each raised arm—a clock's second hand—ticked off the final seconds. Then silence. Time had run out.
And then everyone cheered. Instructed by the director, we waved our arms above our heads and loudly cheered, a sustained celebration aimed at the camera hovering on a crane, high above.
I don't know if anyone else thought that perhaps the end of the world represented precisely the wrong moment for spirited celebration. (Nonplussed, but wanting to be a good sport, I waved my arms and raised my voice in a forlorn wail—an act of mourning I knew that to the camera would look and sound gleeful, dissolved in the festive crowd.) But I did ask several participants what they thought of this strange sequence. A few acknowledged its oddness, but even they fell back on what seemed the universal assumption: it's important to be "positive"; no one will listen and participants will feel discouraged if we're too "negative." Indeed, although the event was purportedly prompted by an existential threat, it was framed in advance in breezily "positive" terms. A "fun" event, "it's a fantastic way to spend a Sunday in the park," one message put it—"and it's great for kids." "Don't miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!" gushed another. And retrospective responses continued the cheerfulness, a typical one reporting that "the energy in the park was amazing with happy people from all walks of life." In light of the traumatic, impending catastrophe the action ostensibly represented and warned against, why were these people so happy?
This determination to remain "positive" reminded me of a paradigmatic moment in Al Gore's still hugely influential construction of the public story of the climate crisis. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore explicates the emergency with a familiar (though not biologically accurate) analogy: "a frog that jumps into a pot of boiling water . . . immediately jumps out again. The same frog, finding itself in a pot of lukewarm water that is being slowly brought to a boil, will simply stay in the water—in spite of the danger" (254). Commenting on why, as he tells the story in his lectures, he began to intervene in the frog's fate, Gore explains: "I used to recount this story . . . . with a different ending . . . : 'until the frog is boiled.' But after dozens of slide-shows were followed by at least one anguished listener . . . expressing concern for the fate of the frog, I finally learned the importance of rescuing the frog." Like the "happy people from all walks of life" enjoying "a fantastic way to spend a Sunday in the park" as they cheer the end of the world, Gore supplants the catastrophic ending with a happy one.
The Disarticulate
While it's a common refrain of those most concerned about anthropogenic climate change that we are, as a culture, "in denial," the cheer of participants in the Human Countdown—like Gore's rescue operation—seems to exemplify an important degree of denial even within how that concern itself has been represented. This phenomenon differs, I would argue, from what Ross Gelbspan has described as a fundamental failing of "the vast majority of climate groups," which "shun [political] confrontation and work instead to get people to reduce their own personal energy footprints." Gelbspan identifies in this emphasis on personal voluntarism a "mismatch between the magnitude of the problem and the seductiveness of easy—and illusory—solutions [that] reflects a degree of denial among even the most earnest advocates" (137). Framed as a response to the UN Climate Summit in NYC that week, the Human Countdown pretty clearly represented the problem as beyond the scope of voluntary changes in personal energy footprints. And, organized by grassroots groups, it differed as well from the failure of the large, inside-the-beltway environmental groups, which, as Johan Hari observes, "jet[ted] to Copenhagen" to "lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming . . . dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as 'unworkable' and 'unrealistic,' as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal." Where the denials that Gelbspan and Hari discuss masquerade as cohesive narratives of ostensibly constructive action—reducing individual carbon footprints, lobbying for "realistic" legislation—the Human Countdown enacted a denial more nakedly symptomatic, the rupture of coherence itself. We just failed to prevent the violent end of the world: whoopee!
This rupture reflects how the prevailing discourses of the climate crisis, even among climate activists, function largely to domesticate the threat to which they try to point. Framed, that is, within the dominant discourses of the public sphere, as a question of science or politics or policy or economics or journalism or activism, global warming has remained largely disarticulated from what might disrupt the figurations of knowledge and identity on which that sphere is constructed—disarticulated, that is, from the trauma it nonetheless necessarily represents. Most of the ways we publically know and speak about the climate crisis, even in ostensibly emphasizing its urgency, thus largely obscure the existential threat at its heart—the fundamental challenge it poses to the knowing and speaking subject itself. If the climate crisis represents what Leigh Glover has described as "challenges to existing systems of knowledge" (3), or constitutes what Timothy Clark calls a "happening whose trauma is to enact or entail the deconstruction of multiple frames of reference in multiple fields and modes of thought at the same time (e.g. politics, economics, ethics, cultural history)" (132), then our central formulations of the crisis, even among many of those most vocal in their concern, function largely to exclude these traumatic challenges.
We can understand this problem as to some extent a function of the way in which global warming is, as Glover proposes, "a problem of modernity itself"—a major element of the ideological context in which modern subjects come into being. Recognizing the threat, Naomi Klein argues, would "require the shredding of the free market ideology that has dominated the global economy," displacing "the central fiction on which our economic model is based, that nature is limitless." This would mean, in Bill McKibben's terms, recognizing that "the system has met its match" (Eaarth 52, his italics; see also note 5). Thus, as Ingolfur Bluhdorn puts it, our dominant ways of understanding the climate crisis have "keenly avoided touching upon the core values and principles underpinning capitalist consumer democracies" ("Locked" 1), especially the axiomatic committment to infinite economic growth. Rather, Clark suggests, these models have "sought to normalize and internalize [so-called] environmental issues into the workings of industrial capitalism" (133). As a result, global warming is figured mostly as an economic issue (either we can't afford to adequately respond to the threat, it is claimed; or, less frequently, we can't economically afford not to respond; or we can afford to respond only a little bit right now—as if, like a trading partner, nature would agree to negotiate the timing; or the crisis is really an opportunity for economic development of "green" technologies) 1; or it is figured as a partisan political "issue," meaningful largely for its role (now quite minor, but frequently evoked by the right) in electoral politics; or it is figured as a scientific question, a matter of how and what we know about the effects of greenhouse gas production (and deforestation) on a planetary climate system that has remained relatively stable for 10,000 years. None of these frameworks recognize the challenge to our knowledge systems posed by a crisis as immense as the destabilization of that climate system.
Speaking and Flapping: Hansen's Quandary
James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (2009) provides an especially telling instance of that last, scientific, figuration. There has probably been no more important scientific voice than Hansen's for making public the existence and urgency of the climate crisis, and his book compellingly entwines crucial scientific explanations with an account of his attempts to convey to powerful government officials and others the extremity of the situation. Observing that "the gap between public perception and scientific reality [of the crisis] is now enormous" (171), and dismayed at the reticence of other researchers to address that gap, Hansen concludes "I would need to speak for myself" (91) and thus finds himself confronted with a quandary: "How in the world can a situation like this be communicated credibly?" (89). On the one hand, he recognizes that (as he reticently puts it) "scientific reticence, in some cases, may hinder communication with the public" (87). But, on the other hand, he worries that "If we run around as if our hair is on fire, flapping our arms, people will not take us seriously" (74). Recognizing his rhetorical dilemma, Hansen proceeds as if scientific "clarity" itself could resolve it. He recounts how his unreticent efforts to explain "clearly" repeatedly meet resistance of various sorts, but in response he doggedly redoubles his attempts to be "clear," assuming he can credibly communicate the situation "If I do a good job of choosing and explaining the quantities that are needed to define and understand climate change" (123).
Registering the insufficiency of such a purely informational response to the representational dilemma, however, Hansen raises it again at the end of Storms, as if for the first time: "But how to portray the horror of that devastation in a way beyond graphs and numbers and phrases we have heard before, like 'climate disaster'?" (260). As his final response to that question, he sketches what he calls a "science-fiction. . .scenario"—as if popular genres like science fiction didn't by definition constitute precisely the sort of discourse "we have heard before." It's not a question of blaming Hansen for failing to transcend the familiar frameworks of either science or science fiction; indeed, his commitment to speaking troubling information publicly and clearly has been absolutely necessary. But his continued reliance on those frameworks nonetheless exemplifies that more widespread failure to reckon with the climate crisis as a fundamental challenge to the ideological frameworks that, within the culture that has produced that crisis, structure knowledge and identity. Hansen approaches but then swerves from the prospect that the "business as usual" he locates at the heart of the crisis involves not just "business as usual fossil fuel use" (the index lists that phrase as appearing on 22 pages) but also more fundamental cultural frameworks. While he very valuably details his inside knowledge of the failure of the government and industry to respond adequately to troubling scientific information about the climate, for Hansen what is at stake in such failures is not what, again, Glover calls a "problem with modernity itself," or Klein sees as "the central fiction on which our economic model is based." Rather, Hansen insists (in 2009) that " I am not blaming President Obama. On the contrary, he is still our best hope" (211) and stresses that "captains of industry must be a big part of the global warming solution, [which will] require their leadership" (115). For him, that is, the problem isn't structural but simply circumstantial, and, rather than raising challenges to the general ideological fundament, our failure to respond derives simply from what Hansen reflexively calls the "undue influence of special interests" (112), 2 precisely the sort of anodyne "phrase we have heard before" that domesticates the disruptive possibility that the crisis derives not from a narrow "special" interest but from the more general interests of ideological business as usual itself.
Hansen thus notes but responds with a benumbing practicality to evidence that, about realities that might demand a disruptive, radical response, the government itself has a vested interest in averting its eyes. When the US declines a satellite mission crucial to measuring the unknown extent of the climate forcing caused by human-produced aerosols (which have a cooling effect and thus mask the true extent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases), Hansen barely misses a beat: "little is gained by crying over spilled milk. What we can do, in the absence of adequate aerosol measurements, is look instead for a measureable signature of the net climate forcing" (100). Of course, if you really, really need that milk—if what is at stake is the possibility of "saving humanity," as Hansen's subtitle puts it—the cost-benefit decision not to cry over spillage because little would be gained might appear as itself a failure to confront the (traumatic) reality; to the extent he defines knowledge purely as information, Hansen's epistemological premises thus produce a denial of his own. Revealingly, he narrates one episode when he does cry. Driving late on the night of the presidential election of 2004, when the results were clear, Hansen and his wife hit a deer: "The deer lay motionless, apparently dead. Then, at the age of sixty-three, for the first time since childhood, I burst into tears. I am not sure if I was crying for the deer, the nation, or the planet" (111). Whatever else is going on in this complex moment, it reflects Hansen's (fantastical) presumption that John Kerry's becoming president would have likely made a significant difference, as if our taking the radical action Hansen argues is necessary to prevent catastrophe depended upon whether Democrats or Rublicans were in power. His grief, that is, can acknowledge a partisan political defeat, but not the more deeply troubling (and massive) evidence that, by constructing global warming as fundamentally a political "issue," the Democratic party, like the Republican, aims to kill his grandchildren.
Hansen's construction of the story of global warming as a story of science and information produces his level-headed framing of the rhetorical problem: "If we run around as if our hair is on fire, flapping our arms, people will not take us seriously." But what if our hair really is on fire? When your hair's on fire, one of things running around and flapping your arms does is alert others to the urgency of the situation; keeping a level-head in these circumstances amounts to a kind of madness, or at least to a species of the "irrational reticence" Hansen elsewhere decries "even among rational scientists" (87). And the ambiguity of Hansen's "as if" here encodes yet another denial. It suggests that our hair isn't really on fire because that's just a metaphor, but also that our hair isn't really on fire within the metaphor itself. It points, that is, to Hansen's consistent location of the catastrophe in the future. As his title and subtitle emphasize, the threat is to his "grandchildren"; the "climate catastrophe" is "coming" but not yet arrived. It's crucial, of course, to attend to how much worse and widespread the crisis will get—especially if we cannot avoid the tipping points when feedback mechanisms will accelerate the warming past the point at which something like what Hansen calls "humanity" (though perhaps he means "civilization") can survive. But to locate the catastrophe only in the future is to obscure how crucially climate change is implicated in present catastrophes—in, say, genocides in Darfur (in Stephan Faris's account, 5-29) or in Rwanda (in Jared Diamond's, 311-28) that have been stoked by unprecedented drought conditions; or, as drought combines with untimely and severe storms, in the less officially genocidal but still massive violence and social disruption throughout the Global South that Christian Parenti calls the "Tropic of Chaos." Indeed, evoking the future threat especially to "grandchildren"—so that catastrophe is merely prospective—has become one of most ubiquitous tropes by which "acknowledgement" of global warming also functions as a form of denial. "If you've got a spare month some time, google 'global warming' and 'grandchildren,'" Bill McKibben wryly suggests, and he lists several of "the 585,000 essentially identical and anodyne responses" (Eaarth, 11).
Again, a major strand in Storms of My Grandchildren details Hansen's many futile meetings with government officials and his increasingly anxious attempts to "explain the science as well as I could" (98), to "do a good job choosing and explaining the [relevant] quantities" (123). Hansen's "Afterword," however, finally reflects the limitations of conceiving the problem purely in such informational, quantitative terms. On the last page, such limitations compel Hansen to suggest that, "as in other struggles for justice against powerful forces, it may be necessary to take to the streets to draw attention to injustice," even to the point of "civil resistance" (277). He doesn't address the question of how to civilly resist meaningfully within a public sphere that powerfully tends to normalize such action—receiving it as stereotypical, hysterical arm-flapping, or as immature crying over spilled milk, or as the equivalent of one of those generic and thus non-disruptive "phrases we have heard before," the familiarity of which finally drives him beyond the discourses of science. But, in August 2011, he did get arrested in an act of civil disobedience against the Keystone2 pipeline project, proposed by TransCanada to move fossil fuel mined from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast. And Hansen was blunt about the nature of his opposition: if the pipeline were built, it would constitute a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet" ("NASA's") and thus mean "game over" ("Game").
Obedient Disobedience
An international project, Keystone2 required the approval of the US State Department, and so, in an attempt to pressure the President, each day from August 20 to September 3, 2011 opponents of the project gathered in front of the White House and, refusing to disperse when ordered to do so by the police, were arrested—1,253 people, over the two-week period. In contrast to the Human Countdown, it represented an action at least somewhat more commensurate with the urgency of the crisis. Still, while I was grateful for the chance to participate in what was known as the Tar Sands Action, as the most prominent climate action to date it too failed to reckon with the scope and urgency of the crisis, both in the design of the action itself and in the way it framed its arguments.
A central function of the mass media is to domesticate the world according to categories defined by ideological business as usual, to render events recognizable and safely knowable as a commodity called "news." The Human Countdown embraced such representational business as usual, defining itself as a video performance--as a "photo op", an intervention constituted not by the action itself but by the appearance of a short video on the news or on YouTube. In contrast, the Tar Sands Action posed itself as an intervention in and of itself, calling itself "the most sustained" act of civil disobedience "since the epic campaigns of the civil rights movement" (McKibben, "What Comes Next") and in other ways associating itself with historical actions of great import. Far from promising "a fantastic way to spend a Sunday in the park," the organizers wrote that "we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will quite possibly get you arrested" (McKibben, "Join Us"). But while getting arrested in the sticky heat of August is "harder" than spending a September afternoon in the park, in comparison to the difficulties suffered during the "epic campaigns of the civil rights movement" it wasn't really all that hard. Thus, while evoking those epic campaigns might serve as an inspiration, Jeff Goodell writes that it also "underscores how tame the fight against global warming has been so far. The Freedom Riders proved the power of peaceful action, but they also showed astonishing courage and a willingness to risk their lives to change the world. Buses were firebombed. Some of them were attacked by police dogs. Others were beaten bloody, had bones broken, skulls cracked."
Indeed, in many ways the Tar Sands Action ran according to a script, with the protesters and the police playing pre-negotiated roles designed to preclude the possibility of any disturbing disruption. In advance, the police agreed to give each day's protesters two warnings to move away from sidewalk in front of the White House before beginning arrests, so those unwilling to be arrested could step away; it was also agreed that arrestees would be charged only with a violation, and thus could pay $100 and be released that same day, but that each person could get arrested only one time, on one day only. (The organizers were very blunt about this: it was a violation of the "rules" to get arrested more than once and we were warned sternly not to do it.) While nothing bound the police to the agreement, and the first group of those arrested were indeed kept in jail a few days, presumably to try to discourage future protestors, after that the time between arrest and release was only a few hours and events proceeded in highly choreographed fashion (the pre-action training session involved a literally choreographed run through, with the organizers playing the role of the police). This act of civil "disobedience," that is, was rigorously obedient to pre-negotiated rules precisely designed to render the action assimilable by civil business as usual, with minimal risk to the obediently disobedient.
Even as the action evoked exaggerated comparisons with the Freedom Riders, it muted the urgency of what was at stake in the way it framed the importance of stopping the pipeline. Organized opposition to the pipeline, that is, framed itself as a matter of concern both about global warming (about making available vast new sources of fossil fuel from Canadian tar sands) and about the environmental destruction involved in both the mining process and in the construction and operation of the 1,500-mile pipeline. Such coupling of concerns did help build a political coalition, but at the risk of defining global warming primarily as an "environmental" issue—the sort of already-known "issue" of concern mostly to a special interest group known as "environmentalists." The damage caused by the extreme mining, by the construction of the pipeline, and by the inevitable leaks would indeed be immense. But what does it mean to pose that immensity alongside the rapid traumatic disruption of the relatively stable planetary climate system that has prevailed for 10,000 years, a system in which, as Hansen puts it, "civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted" ("Target" 217)? The consequences of the former, though extreme, in and of themselves don't represent a global existential threat; the latter threatens the global system by which "civilization" remains viable. In terms of Hansen's concern with "saving humanity," the pipeline would be catastrophic not because of the "environmental" damage it would involve but because, again, its successful completion would mean "game over."
When Obama decided to postpone the decision on the pipeline for a year, claiming it needed further study, organizers and other environmentalists announced a victory—"Big News: We Won. You Won"—and, certainly, raising the pipeline from its status as invisible business as usual to relatively high-profile political issue was an extraordinary political achievement. But, to the extent this achievement depended upon equating the threat of widespread but (from a global perspective) "local" environmental damage to the threat of the collapse of the current planetary climate system, celebrating it as a significant victory contributed to partly obscuring the scale of the crisis. Indeed, the victory announcement emphasized that "The president explicitly noted climate change, along with the pipeline route, as one of the factors that a new review would need to assess" (my emphasis)—as if those "factors" were somehow roughly comparable in magnitude. Indeed, in a recent account of the ongoing attempt to build the pipeline The New York Times reports that the project "was deemed suitable last year . . . by the State Department but it was prevented because of concerns . . . over the proposed route" (Steinhauer)—eliminating the "factor" of climate change entirely.
Calling Obama's postponement of a decision about the pipeline in order to do a new review a "win" was understandably meant to encourage those who participated and thus to build support for future actions. 3 But, if, as Hansen suggests, "saving humanity" is what's at stake, the postponement of a decision about whether to approve the pipeline is on its own essentially insignificant. A key element of the new review involves considering alternative, ostensibly less environmentally sensitive routes. But if the pipeline would amount to "a fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet," the question of the particular route itself might seem beside the point. The overriding question isn't how the fuse gets to the bomb, but whether or not it does.
Of course, even if the pipeline had been absolutely and definitively rejected, this would amount to a substantial "victory" in political terms only. In relation to the necessity of drastically reducing atmospheric CO2 from its current 392ppm to the 350ppm Hansen has demonstrated is the minimum concentration consistent with "saving humanity," cancelling the pipeline would mean simply that we've declined to pour gasoline on an already raging fire. We are approaching a tipping point—a point of no return—at which increased global warming will trigger feedback mechanisms, causing extreme and (from a geological perspective) sudden changes in a climate system that has been relatively stable for the past 10,000 years. If we haven't already guaranteed that that tipping point will be reached, Hansen and others have made clear that the current rate of production of greenhouse gases (accomplished without the pipeline) means we are at least moving toward it with great haste. Time, that is, is of the essence. 4
Snapping
Just as Hansen's arrest constitutes his response to the limitations of conceiving the problem in informational, quantitative terms—in terms of "do[ing] a good job of choosing and explaining the [relevant] quantities"—the Tar Sands Action responds to a similar rhetorical quandary on the part of its organizers. These include, in particular, Bill McKibben, the action's chief spokesperson and a founder of 350.org, the primary organizing group. Narrating the impetus for what became 350.org, McKibben focuses on the moment when, like Hansen realizing it "may be necessary to take to the streets," he confronts the limitations of the discourses that have enabled his previous speaking:
Twenty years ago I wrote the first book for a general audience about global warming, The End of Nature, and in the years since I've kept speaking and writing about climate. I'd been published in all the right places—the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, National Geographic—but at some point I began to realize that this wasn't enough. . . . Nothing had come of my work or anyone else's; Washington had done absolutely nothing to slow down climate change. I wanted to try and make something happen politically—but what? (Eaarth 206)
This dilemma prompted the development of 350.org, a sponsor of the Human Countdown and the prime mover of the Tar Sands Action. 5
Perhaps it's crucial that McKibben's turn coincided with his own traumatic experience with sickness and confrontation of widespread death. The realization that writing "wasn't enough . . . happened, I think, after that trip to Bangladesh, where I came down with dengue and watched so many people dying. Something in me snapped" (206). This story parallels Al Gore's account of how his felt sense of the urgency of global warming was galvanized by his own traumatic encounter. When his young son had a life-threatening accident, Gore was thrust into a "traumatic period" during which his "flow of . . .days and hours" was "abruptly interrupted" and, he writes, "I began to rethink everything. . .and vowed to make the climate crisis the top priority of my professional life" (8). If we have not yet adequately approached the rhetorical quandary—what kind of discourse might "make something happen politically"?—perhaps we may find a cue to what's at stake in McKibben "snapp[ing]," in Gore's sense of time being "abruptly interrupted." How to represent and try to forestall the climate crisis, in word and deed both, in ways that more fully register the traumatic shock of its existential threat—and that may thus prompt the sort of radical change that might yet prevent the unthinkable worst-case scenarios? As crucial works like Hansen's Storms and actions like the Human Countdown and the Tar Sands Action suggest, this is a question with which even those most publically committed to addressing the climate crisis have yet to adequately reckon.
Lee Zimmerman is professor of English at Hofstra University and editor of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature. His current project involves trauma and the discourse of climate change.
Works Cited
Bluhdorn, Ingolfur. "Locked into the Politics of Unsustainability." <http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2009-10-30-bluhdorn-en.pdf>.
Clark, Timothy. "Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental Politics and the Closure of Ecocriticism." The Oxford Literary Review. 32.1 (2010): 131-49.
Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005
Faris, Stephan. Forecast: The Surprising—and Immediate—Consequences of Climate Change. New York: Holt, 2009
Gelbspan, Ross. Boiling Point. New York: Basic, 2004.
Glover, Leslie. Postmodern Climate Change. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Goodell, Jeff. "Time for Climate Activists to Get Tough." <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/time-for-climate-activists-to-get-tough-20110630>.
Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth. Emmaus: Rodale, 2006.
Hansen, James. "Game Over for the Climate." <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/opinion/game-over-for-the-climate.html>.
---. Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Hansen, James, et al. "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?" The Open Atmospheric Science Journal 2 (2008): 217-231.
Hari, Johann. "The Wrong Kind of Green." thenation.com. March 4, 2010. <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari">http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari">http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari>.
Klein, Naomi. "Capitalism vs. the Climate." thenation.com. November 9, 2011. <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/hari">http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate>.
McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet. New York, Henry Holt, 2010.
---. "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math." <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719>.
---. "Join Us in Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Tar-Sands Pipeline." <http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-06-23-join-us-in-civil-disobedience-to-stop-the-keystone-xl-tar-sands/>.
---. "What Comes Next For Tar Sands Action?" <http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/09/07/313522/mckibben-what-comes-next-for-tar-sands-action/>.
"NASA's Hansen Explains Decision to Join Keystone Pipeline Protests." <http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/29/idUS257590805720110829>.
Parenti, Christian. Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. New York: Nation Books, 2011.
Rosenthal, Elisabeth. "Race Is On as Ice Melt Reveals Arctic Treasure." The New York Times Sept. 19, 2012. A1, A4.
Steinhauer, Jennifer. "Democrats Joining G.O.P. on Pipeline." <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/us/politics/democrats-join-gop-on-pipeline-vote.html>.
- #1 An astonishing recent example of this purely economic framing appeared in the September 19, 2012 New York Times. A front-page headline (accompanied by a striking photograph) announced "Race Is On as Ice Melt Reveals Arctic Treasures." The premise of the article is that "Arctic ice [is] melting at a record pace" (Rosenthal, A1), indeed "much faster than what any scientific model predicted" (A14). But what's "at stake" (A1) in this melting, in the article, is "the Arctic's abundant supplies of oil, gas and minerals that are, thanks to climate change, becoming newly accessible" (my italics). Far from global warming representing an oncoming catastrophe, that is, we owe it "thanks" for making available what the headline calls "treasure." And there's a lot of such treasure: "experts estimate that more than 20 percent of the world's oil and gas reserves are in the arctic" (A14). Of course, as McKibben's "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" has shown, the reserves of fossil fuels to which we already have access and are planning to burn represent at least five times as much greenhouse gas as it would take to make the planet no longer viable for what we call "civilization" (see note 4). Still, most of the long Times article focuses on the details of the "race" among nations to access the "treasures," and it concludes that "boundary disputes are likely to be rapidly resolved through negotiation, so that everyone can get on with the business of making money" (A14). [⤒]
- #2 His index counts 19 references to "special interest" and directs us also to the entry for "political corruption"—7 more references.[⤒]
- #3 And it did help build momentum for a follow-up action a few months later when, on November 6, over 10,000 people formed a human chain around the White House, again calling for Obama to stop the pipeline.[⤒]
- #4 Indeed, the development of tar sands is just one of the extreme, relatively new forms of resource extraction that are making available even more quantities of fossil fuel, including hydrofracking in drilling for natural gas, deep water oil drilling (like BP's Deepwater Horizon), and (a favorite of Obama's) oil drilling in the Arctic (see note 1). Of course, as McKibben elaborates in his recent "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math," the fossil fuels already in the known reserves represent more than five times the amount that could be burned without producing the 2 degree C warming that the political consensus defines as the maximum warming that might not trigger the apocalyptic scenarios (though Hansen and other scientists make a strong case that uncontained catastrophe is likely beyond a 1 degree C warming).[⤒]
- #5 McKibben didn't stop writing, of course, as the existence of this narrative of his confrontation with the limits of writing suggests, and, as I've indicated above, in his most extended work he joins with Naomi Klein, Ingolfur Bluhdorn, and others in recognizing the roots of the crisis in the dominant economic and ideological commitments crucial to what he calls the "growth paradigm." "For the record," he supports in Eaarth a Green New Deal and other such green economic proposals, but stresses that whatever results such projects might produce won't "happen fast enough to ward off enormous change. I don't think the growth paradigm can rise to the occasion; I think the system has met its match" (52, his italics). This is not only a "dark thing to say," he acknowledges, but it also presents a fundamental challenge, at least in the U.S., to national identity: it's "un-American" (53).[⤒]