climate hauntologies: notes on reading carbon removal through Mark Fisher | by Holly Jean | Mediumhttps://medium.com/@hollyjeanbuck/climate-hauntologies-notes-on-reading-carbon-removal-through-mark-fisher-61c4988fe57Capitalist realism, writes Mark Fisher, is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
Climate change intersects with this.
On one hand, there are emergent forms of
climate realism / climate doomerism — that it’s unrealistic to think we will mount a response to climate change, or that we can’t imagine a response.
On the other hand, we may see
fossil realism emerging: that it’s unrealistic to think we can imagine an alternative to fossil fuels. That they are so embedded in our infrastructure, imbricated in the pattern of how all things modern grow, in our financial system and institutions, that they can’t be removed, or something like that.
So far, though, the environmental movement has done a pretty good job of making a coherent imaginary about renewable energy. They have fought hard to make this an imaginable, tangible thing to strive towards — to a point.
The problem is that we will soon be up against various limitations of what wind / water / solar can do — social limitations, land use conflicts, critical minerals, etc. To keep warming below 1.5°, and probably 2°C, we need wind/water/solar and a bunch of ands — and nuclear, and carbon capture, and what the Swedish government refers to as “supplementary measures”, aka carbon removal. We will need all the ands even though some of them do not fit into what mainstream environmentalists view as the good life.
Varieties of realism about carbon removal abound as well. You may hear technoeconomic realism: Carbon removal isn’t realistic, it’s not mature technology, it will never be built at scale, it costs too much, it’s magical thinking. You may hear (from the same people) a sort of entrenched interests realism: If carbon removal does happen, it’s only by fossil fuel interests, they own it and will control it.
Both of these may be true. What I want to point out here is the inconsistency of these forms of realism, because they are not applied to the challenge of full decarbonization, technically nor politically. Wind/water/solar, on the other hand, must be viewed as fully realistic.
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Mark Fisher described how the latest form of capitalism involves a turn from belief to aesthetics and from engagement to spectatorship, leaving us, as Fisher described, the “consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”
Yet another explanation for the failure of contemporary environmentalism to be new and widely moving is the wider exhaustion identified by Fisher: new cultural ideas are not really being generated, and environmental imaginaries are just one more instance. Fisher attributes some of this in high-rent cities and more — “Neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new-middle-class.”
“We remain trapped in the 20th century. The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.”...
That which has not yet happened, but which is already acting: doomerism. The climate apocalypse is unfolding unevenly, and for some people, regions, and ecosystems it is already here; yet a complete climate breakdown is still in the future.
Why does it have such purchase on contemporary imaginations?
“Environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious totally colonized by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after capitalism,” writes Fisher. Perhaps that is part of its appeal.
Fisher compares capitalist realism to “the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.”
Climate Twitter is rife with this mood. Obviously, climate change is a sharp danger, but it’s clear to an observer that something more is going on here than reacting to a danger, something religious in nature which is seeps into and shapes daily interaction
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We have seen a decade of rising authoritarianism and the disappointing failures of the promises of globalization (much of which was predictable, in left critiques of globalization).
But we have not integrated these disappointments, facts, events, and trends into climate strategy.
Thinking about climate seems to proceed along local lines; when the global enters, it’s in the context of solidarity, of echoing calls for climate justice and climate finance from developing nations. It’s like we expect the same strategies that failed in these other places in the 2010s to also deliver climate action. We need a new way of thinking about this. Otherwise, we’re left with fossil realism and climate realism.