A new Year a new start. That’s what we like to call it, and we also symbolize it. Just before with retrospectives and annual overviews, with dinner, a toast, and just after with a party and perhaps a New Year’s dive. Then, as if reborn, we step into the uncertain future. Of course we also know that it doesn’t really work that way. But the idea of a fresh start, a new chance, is important. If only to tackle the issues that have remained unresolved with fresh courage. This is especially important with regard to climate change, because as the French thinker Bruno Latour, who died last year, showed, there is no washing away of guilt – not even in the imagination.
Latour depicted modern man as Gregor Samsa, the hero of Kafka’s novella The Verwandlung. Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant black beetle. Movement succeeds, but it is difficult, by feeling. The shield that Samsa carries with him is an allegory for the CO2s that humans – Western humans in particular – have been chasing into the atmosphere over the past two hundred years, and which has ushered in a new regime: the Climate Regime.
This imposes restrictions in unforeseen ways, in ways that were never intended. Just think of the heat waves that ravaged our continent last summer, the burning forests, the dried up rivers. But that CO2We can’t get into the ground that easily anymore. That is why Latour did not speak of a crisis, but of a mutation.
We have entered a new, more unpleasant world. Can we then at least prevent that we do not produce even more CO2produce, that the shield becomes even heavier? That is not a new start, but it is hope. Is there hope? In any case, there is a widespread sense of urgency. The conversation about climate change is happening everywhere and constantly. Five years ago nobody had heard of Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion, and we weren’t talking about ambitious Green Deals. The sound of ‘climate skeptics’ has almost died down in recent years.
When people get furious at young activists clinging to the security glass of valuable paintings, it’s more about the form, not the content. They largely agree with the activists’ message. Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Shell, is suddenly, and to his own surprise, on the defensive. La peur a change de camp, say the French, fear has changed camp. Users have some explaining to do, but the dealers are no longer free either.
At the same time: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions mercilessly exposed how much our economy runs on fossil fuels. Oil and gas flow through it like blood through a body. It is hopeful that the costs of wind and solar energy have fallen to such an extent that scientists no longer see the energy transition in terms of costs, but in terms of profit. Meanwhile, a quiet food revolution is underway that its proponents claim will have made the cow obsolete within the next twenty years.
Is it enough? “We live in a future that we could not have imagined,” noticed the American writer Rebecca Solnit recently op. It was precisely this ‘radical uncertainty’ that gave her hope. The fact that we now see that things cannot go on like this did not mean that there was no path. “It means that the world is moving on, not as it is, but in an unimaginable, transformed state.”
That doesn’t reassure me, but today I’ll do it with it.
Mary Kruk is a historian and journalist. Every other week he writes a column about politics and the imagination of the climate era.
A version of this article also appeared in the January 2, 2023 issue