Climate barbarism: Adapting to a wrong world

Abstract

In the next few decades, it is possible that all we talk about will be the weather. Nowadays, the discussion on climate change tends to be about the effects of it on our landscape and living conditions, on whom to blame, and how best to mitigate it. These discussions are becoming stale. We all know where it comes from, what it does, and how to stop it—but we are stuck in a political and social-economic order that makes it nearly impossible to change anything in a serious way without a radical shift of priorities. One way to get out of this deadlock is to rethink the problem both morally and politically. The subfield of climate ethics has been mostly concerned with two issues: (1) what principles of justice should underlie negotiations between states over how best to mitigate climate change and adapt to its effects (Caney, 2005, 2014; Bell, 2010; Gardiner, 2004; Jamieson, 1992, 2005; Moellendorf, 2015; Shue, 2014), and (2) to what extent do individuals have moral duties to change their own behavior to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2005; Jamieson, 2010; Hiller, 2011; Schwenkenbecher, 2014; Cripps, 2013; Fragnière, 2016; Godoy, 2017). While interesting, these questions fail to address the novel moral challenges that climate change places on human beings in the present. By temporally and spatially disassembling cause and effect, perpetrator and victim, as well as intention and action, climate change challenges conventional normative accounts of what it means to be a person, that is, to be accountable to others, to be responsible for harm, to be blameworthy, even to have choices that matter (Gardiner, 2006, 2011; Jamieson, 2014; Page, 1999). Rawlsian, utilitarian, and Kantian ethical frameworks are not enough; we need a new way of thinking the human under conditions of climate catastrophe (Jonas, 1984), one sensitive to our dependence on particular ecological parameters for human flourishing, parameters currently being destroyed in the so-called “Anthropocene.” The buzzword of the “Anthropocene” has been circulating through social theory like a wildfire ever since a few stratigraphers proposed this term in the 2000s to mark a new geological epoch, one defined by the markings of human beings on the very sediment of the planet (Steffen et al., 2007). A few critical theorists (Malm & Hornborg, 2014) have pushed back against the use of term, arguing that it wrongly identifies all of humanity, that is, Man as such, for irreversible destroying the ecological parameters of the Holocene epoch. Is the human species as a whole really the agent of this ruin, as some claim, or does it make sense to categorially distinguish different kinds of human relationships to nature within the species, and if so, what is the criterion for such distinctions? That is to say, what are we to make of clashing epistemological, metaphysical, and anthropological perspectives toward the environment when judging the validity of the Anthropocene concept? Along with Malm and Hornborg (2014), I believe that an antagonistic theory of the development of human social relations refutes any generalization of universal species attributes in regards to the environment. And yet, contrary to them, there is still a room for a philosophical theory of the Anthropocene, not as a causal-empirical account of human domination of the ecosystem, but as normative account of what it means to live together on a fragile planet. But how can we act together in the Anthropocene, given the status of permanent crisis, emergency, and catastrophe? There is a common belief that genuine awareness and acceptance of the existence of anthropogenic climate change (as opposed to either ignorance or denial) automatically leads one to develop political and moral positions which advocate for collective human action toward minimizing suffering for all and adapting human societies toward a fossil-free future. This is a mistake. Against the idea that scientific awareness of the facts of climate change is enough to motivate a common ethical project of humanity toward a unifying good, I argue that climate change awareness can just as well equally motivate heightened divisions of humanity into anti-egalitarian, xenophobic, class-differentiated zones of competitive survival (Klein, 2019a; Parenti, 2011; Taylor, 2019). I call this climate barbarism, and seek to explain its conceptual grounds. This article has two parts: the first is a critique of the narrowness of climate ethics, and the second is a contribution to climate politics. The aim in the first half is to show the deep connection between the fossil economy and climate change, a structural connection which renders individual market-based solutions not only inadequate, but ideological. 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