The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  121 “becomes a commodity”: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 3rd ed. (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 59.

  123 “with us always”: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 25.

  123 predecessor obsolete: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, loc. 1412.

  123 “wrong side of history”: http://www.slate.com.

  126 vulnerable to climate change: Cf. IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report: What’s in It for South Asia, Executive Summary (available at: http://cdkn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CDKN-IPCC-Whats-in-it-for-South-Asia-AR5.pdf).

  127 implicit in it: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), tr. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  127 journey of self-discovery: “This emphasis on individual conscience and its capacity to ‘trump’ all other arguments in fact seems to be a defining feature of much of what has passed for radical (i.e., revolutionary) politics in the United States since the 1960s. . . . There is a pervasive stress on what each and every individual feels and experiences as providing the ultimate standard of legitimacy, action, and definition of collective goals.” See Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Kindle edition, loc. 1946.

  128 “his own life”: http://electricliterature.com.

  128 “Puritan religiosity”: Adam B. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences, loc. 1526.

  128 imagining of possibilities: I follow here the notion of the subjunctive that is employed by Adam Seligman and his coauthors in Ritual and Its Consequences.

  129 “ice shelf broke up”: The question “Where were you at 400 ppm?” is posed by Joshua P. Howe in “This Is Nature; This Is Un-Nature: Reading the Keeling Curve,” Environmental History 20, no. 2 (2015): 286–93, 290.

  130 “implement their demands”: Ingolfur Blühdorn, “Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation, Environmental Politics 16, no. 2 (2007): 251–75, 264–65.

  130 after the First World War: Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, loc. 2998.

  130 “They only consume”: Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), Kindle edition, loc. 640.

  131 “legislation and governance”: Ibid.

  131 “the modern world”: Adam B. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences, loc. 171.

  131 “mere representation”: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 1.

  131 “reestablishes its rule”: Ibid, thesis 18; my italics.

  132 “moral issue”: Naomi Klein makes a powerful case for enframing climate change as a moral issue in her magisterial This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Knopf, 2014). See also the following interview with Michael Mann: http://paulharrisonline.blogspot.in/2015/07/michael-mann-on-climate-change.html.

  133 opposite side: I am following here the use of the word sincerity in Adam B. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences.

  133 acted upon: As Rachel Dyer notes, “all the stuff about changing the light-bulbs and driving less, although it is useful for raising consciousness and gives people some sense of control over their fate, is practically irrelevant to the outcome of this crisis.” See Rachel Dyer, Climate Wars, loc. 118.

  134 “at the same time!”: John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926).

  134 parts of a whole: In the words of Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, this is a “quasi-religious faith, hence the label market fundamentalism” (The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future [New York: Columbia University Press, 2014], 37).

  135 “wicked problem”: In one definition “wicked problems are essentially unique, have no definitive formulation, and can be considered symptoms of yet other problems” (Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], 334).

  136 last two centuries: This is how Tim Flannery puts it: “America and Australia were created on the frontier, and the citizens of both nations hold deep beliefs about the benefits of endless growth and expansion.” See The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 237.

  136 throughout the Anglosphere: That the phenomenon of climate denial has a special place within the Anglosphere is recognized by many; see, for example, this conversation between George Monbiot and George Marshall: https://www.youtube.com (at 29 min.). See also “The Strange Relationship between Global Warming Denial and . . . Speaking English,” Mother Jones, http://www.motherjones.com. The survey on which the article is based is available here: http://www.ipsosglobaltrends.com/environment.html. In most industrialized European countries, by contrast, there is very little denial, either at the popular or official levels: cf. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Pieter van Geel, the Dutch environment secretary, described the European outlook to me as follows: ‘We cannot say, “Well, we have our wealth, based on the use of fossil fuels for the last three hundred years, and, now that your countries are growing, you may not grow at this rate, because we have a climate change problem.”’” See chap. 8 of Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006).

  136 in the United States: Anthony Giddens notes, “In no other country is opinion about climate change so acutely divided as in the US today.” See Giddens’s The Politics of Climate Change, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011), 89.

  137 politics of self-definition: See Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism”: “Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we like it or not” (10). Similarly Andrew J. Hoffman, notes, “The debate over climate change in the United States (and elsewhere) is not about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas models; it is about opposing cultural values and worldviews through which that science is seen” (How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015], Kindle edition, loc. 139).

  137 to be American: Raymond S. Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation: How Politicians Cracked Down on Scientists as the Earth Heated Up (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 128.

  137 communism, and so on: Cf. George Marshall, Don’t Even Think about It, 37: “As Rush Limbaugh says, climate science ‘has become a home for displaced socialists and communists.’”

  137 the Cold War: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 214.

  137 intimidation: Michael Mann describes his battles with climate change deniers at length in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). See also Raymond S. Bradley, Global Warming and Political Intimidation, 125 and 145–48.

  137 energy billionaires: Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

  137 within the electorate: Elizabeth Kolbert in chap. 8 of Field Notes from a Catastrophe names some of the lobbying groups, such as the “Global Climate Coalition, a group that was sponsored by, among others, Chevron, Exxon, Ford, General Motors, Mobil, Shell, and Texaco.” See also Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers, 239.

  137 climate scientists: In any case, as Kevin Lister notes, “Even the most ardent papers on climate change such as the Guardian and Independent continue to devote far more space to advertising high carbon holidays abroad and reporting the most intricate details of Formula 1 than they do on reporting climate change” (The Vortex of Violence and Why We Are Losing the Battle on Climate Change [CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014]), 21.

  138 politics of the Anglosphere: “Denial” is not a major factor in most of the world, as Anthony Giddens notes in The Politics of Climate Change: “Surveys taken on a global level show that people in th
e developing countries are the most concerned about climate change. A cross-cultural study of nine developed and developing countries indicated that about 60 per cent of people interviewed about climate change in China, India, Mexico and Brazil felt a ‘high level of concern.’” (104).

  138 money and manipulation: For more on this, see Joshua P. Howe’s review of Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, in his article “The Stories We Tell,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 3 (June 2012): 244–54, esp. 253.

  139 “of the solution”: George Marshall, Don’t Even Think about It, 75–76. Gwynne Dyer in Climate Wars notes that the “US Army War College sponsored a two-day conference on ‘The National Security Implications of Climate Change’ in 2007” (loc. 250).

  139 “security environment”: “Admiral Locklear: Climate Change the Biggest Long-Term Security Risk in the Pacific Region,” http://climateandsecurity.org.

  139 “Dept. of Defense”: https://www.youtube.com.

  139 the public sphere: Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle, Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Kindle edition, locs. 3193–215.

  139 “neo-securities are one”: Ibid., loc. 3256.

  140 climate change: See, for example, Kurt Campbell et al., “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change” (Center for New American Security, 2007). Gwynne Dyer in Climate Wars notes of this study that “the lead authors . . . include John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to President Clinton in 1998–2000; Leon Fuerth, national security advisor to Vice President Gore . . . and R. James Woolsey, Jr., head of the Central Intelligence Agency 1993–95” (loc. 304).

  140 “disobedience, and vandalism”: Quoted in Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, loc. 80.

  140 a top priority: The FBI, for instance, has named “animal rights extremists and eco-terrorism” as its “highest domestic terrorism priority.” See Will Potter, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011), 25, 44.

  140 post-9/11 era: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, tr. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Kindle edition, loc. 40.

  140 recent years: See Nafeez Ahmed, “Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent Over Climate and Energy Shocks, The Guardian, June 14, 2013 (also available at http://www.theguardian.com).

  140 many different kinds: Cf. Adam Federman, “We’re Being Watched: How Corporations and Law Enforcement Are Spying on Environmentalists,” Earth Island Journal (Summer 2013), also available at http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php. The term “gray intelligence” was coined by Dr. Bob Hoogenboom, a Dutch professor of Forensic Business Studies.

  140 “and its impacts”: Cf. “Be Prepared: Climate Change Security and Australia’s Defense Force,” Climate Council: http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/fa8b3c7d4c6477720434d6d10897af18.pdf.

  141 approach to climate change: As Roy Scranton points out, “President Obama’s 2010 National Security Strategy, the Pentagon’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and the Department of Homeland Security’s 2014 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, all identify climate change as a severe and imminent danger” (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, loc. 86.)

  141 are most visible: Lewis R. Gordon, in What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), writes, “In the colonies the truth was naked, the ‘metropoles’ preferred it clothed” (133).

  141 of the metropole: “In the colonies the truth was naked, the ‘metropoles’ preferred it clothed.” Cf. ibid.

  142 “biopolitics”: In Foucault’s definition, biopolitics is the “attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race” (Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, tr. Graham Burchell [New York: Picador, 2004], 317).

  142 “would not exist”: Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, loc. 136.

  143 political legitimacy: Although some would argue, following John Rawls, that principles of justice “apply only to the internal affairs within nations and cannot be extended to apply either to relations between nations or among all the world’s persons” (Steve Vanderheiden, Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 83).

  143 “climate budget”: Cf. Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 76–85.

  143 “anti-immigrant policing”: Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2012), 225.

  143 “combat with the earth”: Sanjay Chaturdevi and Timothy Doyle, Climate Terror, loc. 2893.

  145 military space: Ibid., loc. 2984.

  145 mitigatory measures: Thus George Monbiot writes (and I wish it were true): “there is a good political reason for fairness. People are more willing to act if they perceive that everyone else is acting” (Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 43).

  146 “90 percent”: David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 163.

  147 accustomed to hardship: Something like this was actually implied by Larry Summers when, as head of the World Bank, he proposed that polluting industries should be relocated to less developed nations: “After all, those living in the Third World couldn’t expect to live as long as ‘we’ do, so what could be wrong with reducing their lifetimes by a miniscule amount . . . ?” See David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), vii–viii. Other economists have applied a similar logic. As George Monbiot points out in Heat: “In 1996, for example, a study for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that a life lost in the poor nations could be priced at $150,00, while a life lost in the rich nations could be assessed at $ 1.5 million” (50).

  147 “each food calorie”: David Orr, Down to the Wire, 33.

  148 “fifty-six thousand”: James Lawrence Powell, Rough Winds: Extreme Weather and Climate Change, Kindle Single, 2011, locs. 212–37.

  148 living in isolation: Ibid., loc. 210.

  149 “those from the OECD”: Cf. Samir Saran and Vivan Sharan, “Unbundling the Coal-Climate Equation,” The Hindu, October 7, 2015.

  149 climate change negotiations: As Clive Hamilton observes, the obsession with growth in developing countries is “perhaps the last and most potent legacy of colonialism” (Growth Fetish [Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003], Kindle edition, loc. 232).

  150 “ramp of global warming”: The phrase is Michael Mann’s; cf. http://bigstory.ap.org.

  150 appeared in December: The texts are, respectively, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care of Our Common Home (hereafter Encyclical), available at https://laudatosi.com; and Framework Convention on Climate Change (hereafter Agreement), published by the United Nations and available at http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09.pdf.

  150 are also texts: The text of the Agreement is specified as having originally been written in English. No original language is specified in the case of the Encyclical nor is any translator listed, so it must be presumed that the text is at least partly the result of a collaboration.

  153 already beyond reach: For an extended discussion of “dangerous limits” and public policy, see Christopher Shaw, The Two Degree Dangerous Limit: Public Understanding and Decision Making (London: Routledge, 2015).

  153 succeed at scale: Cf. Kevin Anderson, The Hidden Agenda: How Veiled Techno-Utopias Shore Up the Paris Agreement, http://kevinanderson.info. See also “COP21: Paris Deal Far Too Weak to Prevent Devastating Climate Change, Academics Warn,�
� The Independent, January 8, 2016.

  154 “experts in technology”: Encyclical, 79/106.

  154 “technological growth”: Ibid., 82/109.

  154 “drug addiction,” and so on: See, for example, United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (available at https://www.unodc.org), resolution 3.

  154 “market imperfections”: Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (available at http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf), article 2 a/v.

  154 “concern for humankind”: Agreement, 20.

  155 celestial needle: Very soon after the Agreement was reached, twenty-one climate scientists published a open letter saying that the deal had succeeded only in kicking “the can down the road by committing to calculate a new carbon budget for a 1.5 deg C temperature increase that can be talked about in 2020.” See “COP 21: Paris Deal Far Too Weak to Prevent Devastating Climate Change Academics Warn,” The Independent, January 8, 2016.