2. Imagining Structural Climate Denial

Why I'm a climate denier and you probably are too.

What and where and when do you imagine climate change? If you were to point it, where would you point? To nail down “the problem” of climate change I’d argue is impossible. Its problemed-ness perfuses every moment in time and point in space. It is everywhere and nowhere, everywhen and nowhen, everywhat and nowhat all at once. And yet we talk about it in so many fucking ways that contradict and muddle one another as to render it nearly unimaginable.

Over a few posts, I’m going to try to type out a handful of different ways I think it’s useful to imagine climate change and what to do about it. This is the first of that handful. So, what the fuck is climate change, is it a problem, and if it is a problem, what’s the problem?

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It seems today that the imagined political problem that we talk about today as climate change has taken on this almost Christan-God-like quality. I wonder sometimes if the same neurological structures in my brain that were committed at an early age to enable the imagination of a transcendent Christian God are sometimes recruited for thinking about climate change—so big as to be manifest in every molecule of our planet and yet so small it is invisible. And I think one way to look at it is that this itself is the problem of climate change: that we actually just cannot imagine it. There are not material or iconic manifestations of the problem that are stored in a way for us to all collectively say, “Oh, there it is!”

Even when unprecedented storms come—another 100-year flood in the past decade, another hurricane, oh, Houston’s underwater again!—the most scientifically literate amongst us balk at the notion that any single disaster is because of climate change. We’re told by those with the most authority that, well, it would be inaccurate to say that climate change exactly caused this storm. And so the years pass…

I think to myself: Was any single microaggression caused by sexism? Was any single lynching really just about racism? I think many would agree: yes. There are ways in which climate change as a political problem is not the same as these cultural problems of racism and sexism. In fact, the struggle to render the problem imaginable to the public is in a way the opposite direction as with these imagined (and real) political problems.

For instance, those working to end the problem of racism throughout America have struggled enormously (and somewhat successfully) to shift the imagined problem for many Americans away from physical event-ness (lynchings, people using the n-word, etc.) to a structural problem, the systemic disease of white supremacy. It is easier for our minds to imagine the political problem of racism through iconic images of firehoses on Black skin or white men spitting on Black men at a diner. These images, frozen moments become our collective imagination of the problem, and thus ridding the world of what is portrayed in these iconically problematic images can become the goal in our collective political imagination. If we just end lynching, racism will be over. If we just desegregate schools, racism will be a thing of the past.

And as we know, as those who’ve committed their lives to solve the problem of racism in America, these are half-truths. Both anti-lynching laws and school desegregation policy are and remain important in combating the more constitutive problem of a culture that is deeply but not, I would argue, irredeemably racist. But framing the problem of racism as cultural portends (I fucking hate this word, but it works here) an entirely different suite of solutions.

This is super basic but important to reiterate: technical problems demand technical solutions, institutional problems demand institutional or policy solutions, and cultural problems demand cultural solutions. If you have a cultural problem, often the solutions will involve some combination of stories, propaganda, Netflix, memes, images, celebrities, heroes, colors, and a decent amount of generational turnover…when cultural problems are rendered technical or institutional carrying out the solutions proposed often becomes more about resolving the personal insecurity of those championing the solutions than about solving the real cultural problem.

For instance, where I lived for a long time in Jackson, Wyoming there are more environmental nonprofits per capita than maybe anywhere else in the United States, all of which are sort of doing the same thing, all the while the Greater Yellowstone continues to collapse, real estate expands, migration corridors are slowly strangled, another generational ranch is divided amongst siblings who subdivide it for suburban development and cash in big…but the nonprofits are certainly good opportunities for those involved to feel like they’re solving big problems and are thus on the good side of environmental history. If we just have wildlife crossings, that’ll do it! It’ll do something, but it won’t do it. Let’s start a charity that pays for food for Black families in times of need, that’ll do it! It’ll do something, but it won’t do it.

For many of us, imagining structural political problems has been a central task of the past decade, whether it be in understanding racism, sexism, ableism, etc. It is this sort of tool of political imagination that allows for both transcendence and immanence. Sure, racism is a transcendent cultural force in our country but is also now more immanent and visible than ever before—in statistics emerging from big data, in corporate hiring policies, in college admissions processes, and in representation in advertising. The structural nature of the political problem of racism has become imaginable to many Americans quite quickly, and I think that we need to shift our imagination of the political problem of climate change in a similar way, if not in the reverse direction—move climate from the atmospheric God-like imaginings to one that is immanent in institutions.

This is not to equate or compare these two political problems, as they are actually quite overlapping and tend to exacerbate one another (this in a later post!), but it is to say the way we are collectively learning to imagine the problem of racism, the pattern of thinking that this involves, has lessons for the political problem that we, I think, inaccurately call climate change.

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About a year ago while scrolling through Apple Podcasts I found this very dense conversation between philosopher Bruno Latour and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. At some point deeeeeep into the weeds of climate philosophy, Chakrabarty said something that really stuck with me upon first listen and even now, after listening to this conversation like ten or more times. He said something like, “you know, in practice, we’re all climate deniers.” Sort of duh, sort of not.

And I think this is a subtle but important reframing of the problem of climate change from someone who’s spent his life telling the history of rural India where in many ways the material phenomenon of climate change is an enormous problem. Climate denial is not something that people either are or are not, it is a structural property of the entire Western world. People are not either climate deniers or not, everybody in the Western world is implicated in a culture of climate denial every single day. There is of course an important conversation to be had about who is more implicated than others in this culture of climate denial than others, and who is harmed by these structures, who benefit directly from this culture, but that’s not one I want to take up here, though I will try in another post.

All I want to do here is try to shift the conversation about climate change and climate denial away from Exxon and the flat-earthers and rich assholes in Congress who are actual fucking idiots and toward an understanding that the material problem of a changing climate as a symptom of a culture that is deeply, institutionally, and philosophically a culture of climate denial, one that if you’re reading this post on the internet means you, like me, are certainly deeply implicated in.

It is worth pointing out that the explicit and ongoing public campaigns of climate denial that Exxon started in 1990 in the wake of the first IPCC report are fucking terrible. I was born in 1991, and so in some ways, a subtle but central aspect of my short life has been one of corporations like Exxon denying the science, denying their eyes. It is as if in 1990 Exxon opened an arm of the corporation focused solely on manufacturing a pair of glasses that people can put on in order to also deny their eyes. People who wear these cool glasses then created a culture of people who also wear these Exxon-glasses. Whatever. But we need to stop being blinded by this idiocy. It allows all of us to shirk our own implicatedness in the broad ideology of climate denial that is central to the Western world.

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Our changing climate is a symptom of an ideology of climate denial that has become the central character of a culture of climate denial. Out of this culture of denial have grown real, material institutions, laws, and policies that have brought this culture of climate denial to life in real structural climate denial. And now we live at a time in global history where these structures that are driven by a culture that is defined by an ideology have effectively conquered and colonized the planet. And this is just me bullshitting, but it seems like the ideology of climate denial that we represent is sort of the product of two sorts of forms of subjugation: of future humans and of nonhuman life.

First, it is the belief that our needs today should take precedence over the needs of our future self and of future generations of people that will no doubt try their best to eat well and drink clean water and love and have maybe children and experience pleasure and the wonders of looking at the stars on a clear night, of two beers, of dew in the morning, wondering about grass and bugs and the color of dandelions, of tides and wind and what the old scientists at the old particle colliders were trying to say and the weird stories they heard about people talking with one another across the planet, “the period when space disappeared” they called it and we accelerated fully into the grand mysterious beauty of decline like leaves in fall, beautiful in their own right. The Japanese connect dots like these into an aesthetic constellation called mono no aware.

Second, it is the belief that our human story is ontologically (nature of being) separated and superior to the story of all the rest of this life here. That the ethics that guide the human world should necessarily be differentiated from those that guide our relationship to nonhuman life, built from the same material on the same planet, converted chemically through the intestinal lining to energy to fuel the tiny combustion-specialized firey once-independent microorganisms we call mitochondria that live in each of our cells who labor away, in one sense enslaved and in another fully contextually alive, to build things like the United Nations and Joseph Stalin and two people in love on a coffee farm in Nicaragua. The culture that lives in each of us forms our expectations about how important each of us is, about how important it is that each of us are able to story our life as one of profit at the expense of people and nonpeople…that is us, that is me!

Taken together, our lack of care for future generations of people and lack of care for current nonhuman people that we share this planet with constitutes what I guess I’m trying to call an ideology of climate denial, our culture of climate denial, structural climate denial. What this means for each of us is, like other cultural problems, we cannot actually separate ourselves from the problem, we can only work against it. In the United States especially one cannot functionally be not climate-denying, one can only be anti-climate-denying.

At some point soon I want to get into imagining solutions to a culture of climate denial and how this structural problem intersects with other structural problems, but for now I think I want to stop typing and just reiterate that the same tools of imagination that have allowed some of us to start making sense of structural political problems broadly I think should be applied to understanding and imagining the problem of climate change, or rather, why our climate is changing so quickly.

Maybe we could start using the term structural climate denial to articulate the ways in which our institutions, laws, and policies render invisible the needs of both future humans and nonhuman life. Neither, as they say, “have standing” in a courtroom. And this lack of standing, it seems, is ultimately a downstream product of our basic philosophical expectations about who should get what in all this life here.

Really, all I wanted to do here was try to use the tools of political imagination that have rendered problems like structural racism more visible in recent years to much of the American public to reimagine the problem of climate change as a symptom of ideological, cultural, and structural climate denial. I meant this to be mostly definitional. Maybe there’s a better term for this, but I hope this is a start.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! And if you like or hate or whatever, just want to help me out please share this with friends and family!