[✔️] Jan 16, 2024 Global Warming News | CEO fears, Andre Malm, Climate anxiety, RealClimate dot on a graph, Capitalism and climate, 2006 Al Gore speaks

[Richard Pauli]

/*January*//*16, 2024*/

/[ AP news - increasing risk ]/
*More CEOs fear their companies won’t survive 10 years as AI and climate 
challenges grow, survey says*
BY COURTNEY BONNELL
January 15, 2024
LONDON (AP) — More executives are feeling better about the global 
economy, but a growing number don’t think their companies will survive 
the coming decade without a major overhaul because of pressure from 
climate change and technology like artificial intelligence, according to 
a new survey of CEOs by one of the world’s largest consulting firms, PwC.

The survey of more than 4,700 CEOs worldwide was released Monday as 
business elites, political leaders and activists descended on the World 
Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and it showed a 
mixed picture of the coming years...
...
The online survey — which again showed that business is the most trusted 
institution among government, media, science and nongovernmental 
organizations — gathered responses from more than 32,000 respondents in 
28 countries from Nov. 3 to Nov. 22.

Similar to AI, the PwC survey shows that the climate transition is both 
an opportunity and a risk. An increasing number of CEOs — nearly a third 
— say climate change was expected to shift how they do things over the 
next three years.

More than three-quarters of the executives said they have begun or 
completed changes to increase energy efficiency, but only 45% noted that 
they have made progress on taking the climate risks into account in 
financial planning.

The PwC survey of 4,702 CEOs in 105 countries and territories was 
conducted from Oct. 2 to Nov. 10.
https://apnews.com/article/davos-ceo-survey-ai-climate-change-economy-cdf526bec5ce12812b5d2704dc054867



/[ NYTimes goes for the headlines - clips from interview w activist 
Andreas Malm ]/
*How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence*
By David Marchese
Jan. 14, 2024
With the 2021 publication of his unsettling book, “How to Blow Up a 
Pipeline,” Andreas Malm established himself as a leading thinker of 
climate radicalism. The provocatively titled manifesto, which, to be 
clear, does not actually provide instructions for destroying anything, 
functioned both as a question — why has climate activism remained so 
steadfastly peaceful in the face of minimal results? — and as a call for 
the escalation of protest tactics like sabotage...
- -
*But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however 
debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within 
what are supposed to be the ideals of our system? *Imagine you have a 
Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you 
get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls 
back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the 
climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a 
democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it 
radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit 
that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured 
response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a 
country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel 
companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a 
form of democracy and should therefore be respected.

*Could you give me a reason to live? *What do you mean?

*Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project. 
*I’m not an optimist about the human project.

*So give me a reason to live.* Well, here’s where we enter the virgin 
territories of metaphysics.
*Those are my favorite territories.* Wonderful.

*I’m not joking. *Yeah, I’m not sure that I have the qualifications to 
give people advice about reasons to live. My daily affective state is 
one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in 
this world — not only at the level of climate. What has been going on in 
the Middle East just adds to this feeling of destructive forces 
completely out of control. The situation in the world, as far as I can 
tell, is incredibly bleak. So how do we live with what we know about the 
climate crisis? Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not 
give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked 
against you are overwhelmingly strong. This often requires some kind of 
religious conviction, because sometimes it seems irrational.

*I think all you need to do is look at your children.* Yes, but I have 
to admit to some kind of cognitive dissonance, because, rationally, when 
you think about children and their future, you have to be dismal. 
Children are fundamentally a source of joy, and psychologically you want 
to keep them that way. I try to keep my children in the category of the 
nonapocalyptic. I’m quite happy to go and swim with my son and be in 
that moment and not think, Ah, 30 years from now he’s going to lie dead 
on some inundated beach. You know what I mean?

*Which of your arguments are you most unsure of?* I cannot claim to have 
a good explanation for what is essentially a mystery, namely that 
humanity is allowing the climate catastrophe to spiral on. One of my 
personal intellectual journeys in recent years has been psychoanalysis. 
Once you start looking into the psychic dimensions of a problem like the 
climate crisis, you have to open yourself to the fundamental difficulty 
in understanding what’s happening.

*Is it possible for you to summarize your psychoanalytic understanding 
of the climate crisis?* Not simply, because it’s so complex. On the far 
right, you see this aggressive defense of cars and fossil fuels that 
verges on a desire for destruction, which of course is part of Freud’s 
latent theory of the two categories of drives: eros and thanatos.

In Freud’s writings, he argued that individuals wrestle with the desire 
to live, eros, and the desire to die, widely known as thanatos.
Another fundamental category in the psychic dimension of the climate 
crisis is denial. Denial is as central to the development of the climate 
crisis as the greenhouse effect.

*What about you, psychoanalytically speaking?* I have my weekly therapy 
on Thursday.

*But what’s your deal? *You mean in my private life?

*Yeah. *On a deeper level, the point for the psychoanalysis is that you 
go back to your childhood and try to process your relation to your 
parents and how they have constituted you. Do you really want me to go 
there?

*Yes.* I have to try to figure out how this ties in with my climate 
activism. I guess this is some sort of a superego part of it: a strong 
sense of duty or obligation; that I have to try to do what I can to 
intervene in this situation. That’s a very strong affective mechanism. 
For instance, I constantly give up on an intellectual project that would 
be far more satisfying, a nerdy historical project,
/(That project is about what Malm calls a “people’s histories of 
wilderness,” with a focus on how some have withdrawn “into the wild to 
get away from oppression and potentially fight back.”
because I feel that I cannot with good conscience do this when the world 
is on fire.)/

*But I’m asking what caused your impulses.* Now we’re into the deep 
psychoanalytic stuff. I had a vicious Oedipal conflict with my father. 
One way that this came to express itself was that in the preteen years, 
I clashed with my father — even more violently during my teenage years. 
My way to defend myself against what I perceived as his tyranny was to 
become as proficient as he was in arguing and beat him in his own game 
by rhetorically defeating him. I think I did. I think he accepted that 
I’m his superior when it comes to writing and arguing. 
Psychoanalytically, of course, the things that I’ve continued to do can 
be understood as an extension of my formative rebellion against my 
authoritarian father in a classically Oedipal setting, if you see what I 
mean.

*I asked why you aren’t blowing up pipelines, and you gave this answer 
about how action has to happen in the context of a community and “Oh, 
but I have done very serious stuff” — there’s something fishy. You have 
actually engaged in property destruction? Or are you just scared of 
somebody calling you a hypocrite? *There are things that I have done 
when it comes to militant activism recently that I, as a matter of 
principle and political expediency, do not reveal. Part of the whole 
point of it is to not reveal it. Sure, someone could accuse me of being 
a hypocrite because I don’t offer evidence that I have done anything 
militant. But those close to me know. That’s good enough for me.

*I also said, “Give me a reason to live.” *I will always remember this. 
No one ever asked me this before.

*And I said that one of the reasons to keep going is kids. But you said 
their future is rationally going to be terrible. If you think your 
children’s future is going to be terrible, why keep going?* One of the 
arguments in this “Overshoot” book is that the technical possibilities 
are all there. It’s a matter of the political trends. This feeling that 
my kids will face a terrible future isn’t based on the idea that it’s 
impossible to save us by technical means. It’s just, to quote Walter 
Benjamin, the enemy has never ceased to be victorious— and it’s more 
victorious than ever. That’s how it feels.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OE0.pA9P.ihxssceh4iFr&smid=url-share



/[ BBC reports on emotions  ]/
*Climate anxiety: 'I don't want to burden the world with my child'*
15th January 2024
By Navin Singh Khadka
Environment correspondent, for BBC 100 Women
Awareness of the climate crisis has generally been strongest in 
developed countries, but "climate anxiety" is now also leading some 
couples in other parts of the world to decide against having children.

Julia Borges' worries about climate change intensified during the first 
months of the pandemic, when she and others were in isolation, alone 
with their thoughts.

"I started to picture my city and my university under water," says the 
23-year-old agriculture and engineering student from Recife, on Brazil's 
north-eastern coast.

"I started to have anxiety crises, to the point of thinking about giving 
up on my own life, because I didn't know how to deal with it all."

Taking a course in climate leadership was little help - it only 
increased her feeling of responsibility for what was happening. She soon 
came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be right to have a child.

"I cannot see myself as responsible for the life of another human being, 
for generating a new life that would become another burden to a planet 
that is so overloaded already," Julia says.

In 2022 a team from Nottingham University asked adults in 11 countries 
whether anxiety or distress about climate change had made them think 
they should not have children, or had made them regret having them. The 
proportion saying that they did have such thoughts - sometimes, often or 
always - ranged from 27% in Japan to 74% in India. The study is due to 
be published next year.

An earlier study published in the Lancet, based on a 2021 survey of 
10,000 people aged 16 to 25, found that more than 40% of respondents in 
Australia, Brazil, India and the Philippines said climate change made 
them hesitant about having children. In France, Portugal, the UK and the 
US the figure was between 30% and 40%. In Nigeria it was 23%.

And an analysis of 13 earlier studies carried out between 2012 and 2022, 
which was published this month by researchers from University College 
London, found that concerns about climate change were typically 
associated with a desire for fewer children.
This was usually because participants were concerned about the effect 
climate change might have on their children's lives, or because they 
felt, like Julia, that more children would only add to pressure on the 
planet's resources. However, in two studies in Zambia and Ethiopia 
researchers say the dominant view was that "smaller families are better 
positioned to support themselves during adverse environmental conditions".

In 2019 the singer Miley Cyrus said she wouldn't have children because 
of the state of the planet, and US congresswoman Alexandria 
Ocasio-Cortez asked on Instagram if it would be right to bring children 
into a world blighted by climate change. The same debate now seems to be 
happening in countries that are on the front line of the climate crisis.

BBC 100 Women names 100 inspiring and influential women around the world 
every year and tells stories with women at the centre
Meet 2023's 100 Women here
Julia's concern about climate change only increased when in May 2022, 
Recife was hit by a storm that caused floods and landslides, leading to 
more than 120 deaths in the region.

"Just three days before those massive rains, I had given a lecture to 
children from a local NGO, on the topic of climate crisis. Right on the 
spot, as that was later the area most affected by the flooding," she 
says. "That really affected me, in the sense of how can we think about 
children in the future if the children of the present are already in 
danger?"
Shristi, 40, had been concerned about climate change long before this. 
Eight years ago, she used to look at her sleeping newborn daughter and 
worry about the world she would inherit.

"Understanding how this world works, how climate change is changing 
lives for the worst, for animals and children - this realisation made me 
cry everyday. It was pretty horrible to me," she says.

She vowed then not to have another child.

This new tragedy in the village - which led to young girls being married 
off by parents who couldn't feed them - caused her to have sleepless 
nights, wracked by climate anxiety...
*
What is climate anxiety?*
By psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, University of Bath

Climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, is the healthy distress that we feel 
when we look at what is happening in our changing world. We are facing 
personal and planetary threats from our rapidly changing climate. And it 
causes us to feel anxious and afraid for our own and our children's futures.

It is not just anxiety, but also sadness, depression, grief, despair, 
anger, frustration, and confusion. We often have moments of hope or 
optimism, but this can be hard to hold on to as we are heading rapidly 
in the wrong direction and not taking sufficient steps to slow down the 
climate crisis.

For 24-year-old Ayomide Olude, who works for a sustainability NGO in 
Nigeria, the experience of filming a documentary in a coastal fishing 
community last year strengthened her determination never to have a child.
Residents of Folu, 100km east of Lagos, showed her a pier that had been 
used in the past to have fun by the sea, almost all of which was already 
under water.

"During storm surges the flood water now reaches quite deep into the 
village, so people are now leaving their houses," Ayomide says. "This 
was where there was a real-estate boom in the past but now you see 
abandoned houses and some parts of the village are already under water."

Fishermen told her their job was now unsafe, because storms had become 
so intense.

Ayomide says she often hears young Nigerians discuss their anxieties in 
a "climate café" she runs in Ogun state, north of Lagos, a setting where 
people are encouraged to share what they know and feel about climate 
change. The experience in Folu sharpened her own concerns.
Like Julia in Brazil, she faces pressure from society and her family to 
have children, but says nothing will persuade her to change her mind.

"In a society where women barely have the power to decide, and where 
there are religious beliefs that one should have kids, it takes 
considerable strength and determination to say this in public," she says.

"My parents are upset, and we don't talk about it much. I try not to 
think about it although I feel sad for them."

Shristi, for her part, has to cope with relatives continually asking 
when she will have a second child.

But all three women say their partners support their decision.
University of Bath psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, the lead author of 
the 2021 Lancet study, argues that climate anxiety is a healthy response 
to the climate crisis.

She advises anyone experiencing it to make contact with others who feel 
the same way, and to collaborate with them on practical steps to address 
the crisis.

"These difficulties are not going away, so we need to learn how to face 
them."

    *Tips for coping*
    -- Be part of a community of like-minded people so you have people
    to share feelings and thoughts with.
    -- Learn to regulate your emotions so you do not get overwhelmed
    (feeling too much) or shut down (feeling too little). Mindfulness
    and meditation can be helpful, but so is anything that helps to
    build emotional resilience.
    --Then there is a possibility to "re-frame" eco-anxiety into
    eco-care, eco-courage, eco-connection. --We should not try to get
    rid of it, we only feel eco-anxiety because we care. We should feel
    proud that we care!

*Caroline Hickman, University of Bath*

Julia has taken this path. She has helped map areas vulnerable to 
flooding and landslides, and works for a local NGO that educates people 
about the climate and the environment.

"What helped me release some of that anxiety was to become an agent of 
change and transformation in my community," she says.

Nonetheless, her worries remain.

"I can still feel that despair, but I've been working on it with my 
therapist - and it helps to talk about it."

Additional reporting by Paula Adamo Idoeta
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-67298903




/[ From Real Climate - a little heavy on the geeky side of climate science]/
*Not just another dot on the graph?*
12 JAN 2024 BY GAVIN

As the climate monitoring groups add an additional dot to their graphs 
this week, there is some disquiet among people paying attention about 
just how extraordinary 2023 really was.

First, it’s been obvious for months that 2023 would be a record year – 
in temperatures (at the surface, troposphere and in the ocean), in 
Antarctic sea ice, in the number of big climate disasters etc. But this 
was not at all obvious at the beginning of the year – even assuming that 
El Niño would develop by the this winter. Indeed, even as late as 
October, with only two months to go, the estimates for the annual mean 
still did not encompass the eventual annual number.

In the GISTEMP product, the record was easily broken, and by a record 
amount. Only the jump from 2014 to 2015 (coincidentally (?) also a year 
in which El Niño developed over the year) was comparable (both 2023 and 
2015 broke the previous record by more than 0.15ºC).

*Why oh why?*

So why was 2023 so special? There are lots of candidates, the ongoing El 
Niño, aerosol decreases, the Hunga-Tonga eruption, internal variability 
in southern ocean sea ice, extreme Indian-Ocean dipole, the NAO, low 
levels of Saharan dust, and maybe all of the above. However, none of 
them on their own are sufficient at least with present estimates. Better 
quantification is possible (based on updating the sulphate and water 
vapor data for HT in models, new aerosol emission files, new climate 
simulations etc.), and the progress of 2024 will hopefully also be 
informative. But right now, it’s a puzzle.

One swallow does not a summer make, and so I’m still withholding 
judgement on the degree to which this is a blip or a systematic shift, 
until we got some more of these factors quantified.

*Through a glass, darkly*

The comparison figure above neatly illustrates another issue that has 
come to the fore recently related to questions of exactly what is the 
warming from the “pre-industrial”? It’s clear that the multiple records 
post-1970 are all highly coherent (this is something that wasn’t so true 
5 years ago, but since everyone now interpolates over the Arctic, the 
differences have reduced sharply). However, going back before 1940, 
there is a noticeable increase in the divergence of the records. This is 
mostly due to the sea surface temperature part of the product – and the 
two main efforts to define that, HadSST and ERSST from NOAA, adopt quite 
different methods to fill in missing data in the early part of the 
record. This leads to a roughly 0.1 to 0.2ºC difference in 
‘pre-industrial’ baselines (Berkeley Earth, HadCRUT5 (and hence 
Copernicus/ERA5) use HadSST and are ~0.15ºC cooler in 1850-1900 than 
NOAA or NASA (who use ERSSTv5). For reference, 2023 is 1.39, 1.49, 1.37, 
1.55ºC warmer than 1880-1900 for GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA, and Berkeley 
Earth, respectively, and it is 1.48, 1.34 and 1.54ºC warmer than 
1850-1900 for HadCRUT5, NOAA and Berkeley Earth (the difference between 
the baselines is around 0.01 to 0.03ºC). It’s worth noting that there 
are some improvements in the uncertainty models for these products are 
in the pipeline (for instance, Lenssen et al, subm on the new GISTEMP 
ensemble).

This spread is frustrating to some folks who want (but will not get) a 
clear answer to the 1.5ºC question, but I would argue that this 
frustration is largely misplaced. The level of uncertainty that exists 
(around 0.2ºC) is simply not policy relevant (in the sense that no 
decisions related to mitigation or adaptation depend crucially on this 
number). Mitigation of CO2 and CH4 emissions is a worthwhile to reduce 
future climate risk regardless of whether we are at 1.4 or 1.6ºC above 
1850 (the WMO has 1.45±0.12ºC (90% CI)), and adaptation to current and 
foreseeable future changes is a good idea regardless.

*Ongoing issues*

Last year at this time, I discussed ongoing work to understand trends in 
the Southern Ocean. Some of this work was recently published (Schmidt et 
al., 2023; Roach et al., 2023). The upshot is that the impact of recent 
anomalous freshwater from the melting of the ice sheet is enough to 
change the sign of the sea ice and SST trends from 1990 onward, and that 
the winds are a very good predictor of the interannual variability – and 
combined, you get a pretty good match to the observations…. until around 
2016, when the rapid decline in sea ice extent starts. Efforts to update 
and improve the freshwater estimates will be undertaken this spring 
(register for the workshop here!).

As usual, updated graphics can always be found here, and I will 
undertake to update the model-observation comparisons over the next week 
or so.

*Final amusing anecdote*

While of no salience whatsoever, it’s funny to see how the denialists 
are dealing with all this. Of course, the records being set in the UAH 
TLT record blows the ‘climate has been cooling since 2016’ trope that 
they used through to about last summer, leaving them no plausible data 
refuge. No matter, they then switched to promoting a totally bogus 
website run by an anonymous coder that purports to give updated global 
temperature data, but is obviously totally borked. Funnily enough, this 
‘data’ also has an upward trend! The subsequent flail is to retreat to 
“there is no such thing as global mean temperature!” (sure_jan.gif), and 
that our inability to explain everything about the (non-existent) 
temperature record is a sign that the ‘science isn’t settled’ (ha!) and 
therefore we know nothing (surprise!). Some things in climate remain 
extremely predictable.

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2024/01/not-just-another-dot-on-the-graph/


/
/

/[ Climate & Capitalism - a deep, but obvious question. ]/
*Do capitalists want to kill humanity … and themselves?*
January 14, 2024
What mad ideas lie behind capitalism’s drive towards planetary catastrophe?
by João Camargo

There’s a complicated question we can’t run away from anymore. Do the 
elites of capitalism want to die?

If they know the origin and consequences of the climate crisis and don’t 
solve it, aren’t they actively destroying the material foundations – a 
stable global climate, predictability in terms of soil and water for 
agriculture, availability of water and habitability of territories where 
hundreds of millions of people live. Aren’t they digging their own grave?

The answer is yes. The political and economic elites of capitalism are 
pushing us (and themselves) towards collapse. To ours and their catastrophe.

There are those who answer no and go on to explain that they have an 
extra plan, which we don’t know about. They use this argument to put 
themselves in one of two comfortable positions:

Saying (and believing?) there is no climate change.
Saying (and believing?) there is a solution that is yet to appear.
Another issue is also raised: they’re not planning on dying, as they 
have huge plans to profit from the climate crisis.

Both answers are true. They’re not planning on dying, and they have, as 
they always do, plans to profit off of everything.

I’ve struggled with this question ever since I realized that climate 
change existed, almost 20 years ago. I was initially paralyzed by the 
lack of an answer.

For a long time I watched what was happening, hoping I was wrong. Maybe 
there was no climate change, maybe someone was working it out in the 
shadows.

Many were making money, as always. I watched the unstoppable rise in 
emissions, accompanying the now dizzying rise in temperature, the 
institutional process of the COPs, the Kyoto protocol, the Paris 
Agreement, the repetitive talk of technology that was going to but never 
did solve the growing emissions. The fact that I didn’t have the answers 
didn’t mean the questions weren’t right.

How is it that such an articulated global system, with so many resources 
at its disposal, pushes its foundations – humanity, water, soil, natural 
resources – towards collapse? It’s counterintuitive, irrational. 
Nevertheless, it is what is happening.

The main explanation for this is usually attributed to the inertia of 
the capitalist system, a machine so colossal and total that it has made 
all social, political and economic principles conform to its rules. 
That’s why the board or the management of a company that doesn’t grow 
and expand (or grow and expand more than its rivals) is pushed out . It 
is the reason why a country that doesn’t colonize or intensify the 
exploitation of its people or resources sees its governance harassed or 
removed. That is why every aspect of our social and private lives is 
being commodified or is already a commodity.

To this I would now add another explanation: the alienation of the 
elites under capitalism. I take this idea from the work of Antonio 
Gramsci. To understand, I need to explain Gramsi’s ideas about ideology.

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist organiser and unparalleled 
thinker. He wrote down his ideas while he was a political prisoner in 
Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s and 30s. Gramsci challenged two dominant 
ideas of his time: epiphenomenalism and class reductionism.  Shortly, 
epiphenomenalism was a theory about physical and mental realities, 
advocating that mental states (such as ideas and ideology) were 
completely dependent on physical states, that is, that only material 
conditions determine ideology.

Gramsci questioned the direct correlation between ideological 
superstructure and economic infrastructure, previously (and 
subsequently) assumed almost as a ‘natural law’. Gramsci denied the idea 
that capitalist society would inevitably collapse as a result of its own 
economic laws and contradictions that lead to pauperisation of the 
working glass and to environmental collapse. The question of consent as 
a part of power, rather than pure coercion by the class in power was 
central, as it lead to the question of hegemony in society.

Gramsci divided the “integral state” into two spheres. One was Political 
Society: the coercive apparatus to conform the masses according to the 
type of production and economy at any given moment. The other was Civil 
Society: the hegemony of a social group over the entirety of society 
exercised through private organisations like- the church, the unions and 
the schools.

Refusing class reductionism in ideology, Gramsci denied that there were 
pure class ideologies, he defined ideology as a set of practices, 
principles, and dogmas with a material and institutional nature in which 
individual subjects were ‘inserted’. In his view ideology still is a 
system of class rule and hegemony. But it is brought together not only 
by coercion, economic structure or class, but also through an organic 
arrangement that assembles a unified system, an “organic ideology”. This 
organic ideology expresses the hegemony of an economic class through 
economic supremacy and the ability to articulate essential elements in 
the ideological discourses of the subordinate classes in civil society.

The concept of hegemony in Gramsci makes it clear that the stability of 
a regime or system depends on its ability to manage and preserve power 
through a strategy he named “passive revolution”, that keeps alternative 
hegemonies from developing. Individuals and groups are not only 
“victims” though, as the basis for hegemony implies some form of 
acceptance of the relationship, usually through a trade-off.

In Gramsci’s words, this trade-off comes from “collusion in the success 
of a strategy of passive revolution, which responds to pressures from 
below by incorporating popular demands. Such a strategy can succeed in 
improving the lives of enough of the population to legitimate hegemonic 
claims as long as economic conditions permit”.

Through many different and complementary mechanisms – discourses, 
institutions, culture, media and laws, ideologies struggle to produce 
hegemonic tools to become organic ideologies. When these become 
“naturalised”, they turn into metanarratives. These are the “bigger 
stories”, the often unspoken stories we rarely think of, but rather 
simply assume, the naturalised ideas that are no longer ideas in that we 
do not use them to question issues, but rather use them to reply to 
questions about most issues.

Metanarratives reside in the fact that we are social animals: we build 
community and we take comfort in sharing either explicit or implicit 
world views. When metanarratives achieve a mature level of 
naturalisation, they become forgotten and are assumed as “human nature”. 
In fact, they are the closest we can get to human nature, in that it is 
a collective idea that is widely shared. Yet they may not have any 
grounds in nature or reality.

Even the promoters of a metanarrative can and often do become engulfed 
by it – and this is one of the most relevant characteristics of our 
current situation. A metanarrative it is not only a tool through which a 
ruling class dominates the productive system and articulates the 
ideological discourse of the subordinate classes. By by becoming 
naturalised, it articulates the ideological discourses of all classes – 
including the very ruling classes, fixing them into a worldview that can 
damage even these very classes.

In order to dominate humanity, the capitalist elites have produced 
countless stories, narratives, traditions, institutions, laws, schools, 
art forms, think tanks, newspapers, media outlets, commentators and 
other devices over the centuries. It’s not a conspiracy, it just became 
the shared story we tell each other every day.

To reduce barriers to expansion and exploitation, the elites have 
created a series of common ideas – people of a different color are 
inferior, women are inferior to men, those who are rich deserve it, 
poverty is laziness, there are magical mechanisms that “regulate” local 
and even global trade, the “wild” and the natural are things to be 
dominated. Some are new ideas, others are recycling of very old ideas, 
and also represent the historical alliances capitalism made to thrive: 
with the patriarchy, with colonialism, with applied sciences, among other.

A key issue is that part of these ideas have to do with the elites 
themselves, their self-image of exceptionality, merit and intelligence. 
Another is the magical characteristics attributed to humanity – led, of 
course, by the capitalist elite. These include humanity’s insurmountable 
intelligence and capability of technological miracles. This 
technopositivism is science as ideology. In the end, like in the movie 
Armageddon, we’ll be able to mine a meteorite in space, put an atomic 
bomb there and detonate it before it collides with the earth. Bravo.

Most of these ideas, created and propagated to maintain the power 
structure, have become naturalized over time. They no longer need to be 
said, they have become culture. They are not a narrative, they don’t 
need to be spelled out, because they are a metanarrative, they are what 
society has come to use as a tool to answer things.

The elites themselves, instead of just using these vast set of ideas to 
dominate the other classes, actually came to be dominated by them. They 
came to believe the mystical hype about their role in the world and in 
society, about capitalism as the only way to organize human societies, 
about historical miracles and about the end of history. They are still 
doing so despite their tiny historical existence and despite the fact 
that some of their own institutions recognize that they are jeopardizing 
the subsistence of global civilization.

The test of status quo ideas and culture comes whenever material 
disruption collides with the stories society tells itself. That’s what’s 
happening with the climate crisis. It’s still easier to imagine the end 
of the world than the end of capitalism, but soon, it won’t be anymore. 
Another story needs to emerge for us to be able to prevent climate 
breakdown.

Capitalism is such an alienated form of organization that, despite 
knowing the outcome of the climate crisis for decades, its agents at a 
global level have launched a huge amount of renewable energy but haven’t 
taken fossils off the grid, they’ve just added more productive capacity 
and more emissions. It’s not an accident, it’s a compulsory need derived 
from their very own metanarrative in which they are stuck. They can’t 
help themselves, it is their core social and cultural programming. They 
will never be able to solve the crisis, but only to deepen it. We need 
to overthrow them or their death pulse will lead us all into collapse.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/01/14/do-capitalists-want-to-kill-humanity-and-themselves/


/[The news archive - Al Gore is a part of history ]/
/*January 16, 2006 */
lJanuary 16, 2006: At a speech in Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C., 
former Vice President Al Gore declares:

"[T]he American people, who have a right to believe that its elected 
representatives will learn the truth and act on the basis of knowledge 
and utilize the rule of reason, have been let down.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic 
consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political 
appointee in the White House with no scientific training whatsoever.

"Today one of the most distinguished scientific experts in the world on 
global warming, who works in NASA, has been ordered not to talk to 
members of the press; ordered to keep a careful log of everyone he meets 
with so that the executive branch can monitor and control what he shares 
of his knowledge about global warming.

"This is a planetary crisis. We owe ourselves a truthful and reasoned 
discussion."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600779.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD_2e1dIl2s



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