I taught environmentalism throughout my career as a university lecturer in sociology. I wrote a book about it published in 1994. There was plenty of cause for concern then. But also reasons for optimism. The debate on climate change was more open, whether it was happening and whether it was human-made. But, if you trust science when it says there is threatening climate change caused by humans, things look more clear now, and not in a good way
About 18 months ago I read a fair bit of Greta Thumberg's The Climate Book. I knew the general picture and how bad things looked but felt I should educate myself on the details more. I followed it up by reading more climate science and watching videos of climate scientists' talks at conferences. One video in particular stuck in my mind for weeks afterwards. It was of a scientist speaking at a climate conference about his data on the overturning of AMOC, with a look of gravity and apprehension. His talk ended with silence across the conference room.
Thumberg's book left me in a slump. There didn't seem much point in doing anything in my life. No projects seemed worthwhile when the future of life seemed in such peril. I had to set climate issues aside for a while, and after a few months, I got out of the fog of gloom and inertia. I started to live life again and do things for pleasure.
On Mastodon I encounter story after story of climate breakdown. My timeline is full of weird weather events being reported. Sometimes it feels as if a gust of warm air on an autumn day or a sudden torrential downpour filmed in someone's garden, is seen with dread (and I don't mean this in a dismissive way).
But elsewhere I've been seeing and hearing people say they are optimistic that the climate crisis will be solved. Several key reasons are given: there are great policies for solving climate change (there are); humans have always been adaptive and ingenious (they have) and will be again. An anarchist geographer I follow on Mastodon said he was optimistic the issue would be resolved because there are so many positive projects coming from the bottom up all around the world (there are). Someone else on Mastodon said the problems are caused by a 1% elite and as the rest of us make up 99% we will overcome them if we get organised.
I have really wanted to buy these points. But I find it hard to. A couple of recent pro-optimism blog posts prompted me to write down why. (One of these posts is by Lou Plummer. I hardly ever disagree with Lou, this is a rare example where I do. He is an amazing blogger).
Optimists and doomers
Let's get some definitions sorted out. For me, optimism is a belief that things will turn out well. Pessimism is where you think they may well not. Pessimism is not smug cynicism (although, of course, you get your smug pessimists); it's based on prediction. Hope is on a different level. You can think there is hope and hope for the best, but you can have hope while being a pessimist. The other side of that coin is that hope, and seeing it, is not the same as optimism because non-optimists can have hope for the best even if pessimistic about it. Doomers are people who think we (life on earth) are doomed - so pessimism but without any hope. I'm a pessimist (about this issue, not all issues, and not by personality) and, on this definition, am at some point on the way towards doomerism. But I think there is hope. And I don't agree that pessimism is a reason for not hoping for and trying for solutions, or even a disincentive to do so.
So, the dichotomy between optimism, hope, and action on one hand and pessimism, doom, and inaction on the other is false.
Reasons not to be cheerful
Why be pessimistic?
Political and corporate action, the big changes that can save us, aren't happening. The last chances for climate crisis deadlines to be met are passing one after the other. Tipping point after tipping point, where things cannot be rolled back, are coming closer enough to be too late for action, or are going by. States and corporations are not making the changes needed to come much closer to mitigating dangerous climate change. In fact, they're often going backwards. The new Labour government in the UK is introducing new green policies. But, encouraging as some are, they will make only a small impression on what the UK needs to do to avert catastrophic climate change. Even where things are going in the right direction it is by yards when hundreds of miles are needed.
I see people on Mastodon saying we are beyond climate crisis and in climate breakdown. I read crises as situations where decisive change is likely to happen, usually for the worst. But it can be exploited for positive change or can be resolved. The doomers (and also some pessimists) on Mastodon say we are in climate breakdown because we are past the crisis point. The crisis has unfolded and breakdown is what is following. We are going through tipping points that will be irreversible. We will pass temperature rises that will have dramatic effects and people now no longer believe we can avoid doing this.
The climate crisis is unique in that it is urgent and solutions are needed now to avert major threats to life, or even for many now is too late and we are past that point in some areas.
But people say we should be optimistic. Things can be solved. We can get out of this. How? Why?
Adaptation and ingenuity
One cause for optimism that is given is that humanity has always been adaptive and ingenious. Things have always got better. The darkness of valleys has tended to be followed by humans rising to the peaks.
We should look at history and learn from it. And, of course, humans have been extraordinarily ingenious. But much of that ingenuity, which delivered great positive changes for humanity (or some of it), is also what's caused many of the crises. What transports us, warms us, drives manufacturing of goods and services, which have transformed many lives for the better, involves drastic life-threatening emissions.
And humans have also been pretty ingenious at creating mass death, and instruments and situations for mass death, and suffering and hell. I'm not sure I have that much faith in human ingenuity always coming back for the better.
Having said that, we do have ingenious and adaptive solutions for climate change. The policies and technologies are there. Our ingenuity is not something that will deliver climate solutions in the future. It has already worked out what they are. However, there is not the politics to match the ingenuity. Political and corporate power are blocking it. I don't see much sign that the fact that this power is held by a small minority means the much more numerous rest of us will overturn it, especially on the urgent timetable required.
Humans have always progressed, things get better
Some say human society has always overall progressed in a positive way. Yes, with great unevenness across the world, with some getting worse off while others get better off, but overall humans have progressed to better lives. So we can be confident, on the basis of history, that progress will triumph in the case of climate action.
I'm not sure this is the case. Of course many things have improved over the centuries - health, medical treatment, shelter, warmth, technology, transport, the making of food and goods, and services etc. But it's often some of this progress that is behind many of the problems. So while there's been improvement, some of the very same things have also brought regression and crisis.
In a shorter range, in my adult life from the 1970s onwards in my country, we have moved from a social democratic welfare state, public and free National Health Service, good public transport, free education, and the end of the Cold War to the breakdown (or break up) of the welfare state and health service, the indebtedness of young people, a mass car society, extensive homelessness, housing crises, rising inequality, and widespread global violence and war, including involving the old cold war sparring partners. I don't see progress overall in this timespan. And this is just looking from a UK perspective. Many others in the world have had it much worse.
One thing about climate change is that it defies ingenuity and adaptability for progress more than other problems. This is because the solutions are urgently needed; in fact, the time for some has even passed. So, it does not compare with past ingenuity and adaptability which we had time to build. The ingenuity needs to be applied right now, in fact even yesterday. And application of the ingenuity needs political and corporate actors as agents, a role they are showing very little intention of adopting.
Westenberg cites publications like the Club of Rome report on growth or Ehrlich's Population Bomb book as examples of pessimism about the global future that proved wrong. But these were predictions by individual authors supported by some readers and experts, yet not many others, in fact not by most people. In the case of climate change, however, there is widespread pessimism across climate science that things look very bad in the absence of radical action to tackle it. This pessimism is much wider and inclusive and less ad-hoc than in the cases Westenberg cites.
Does pessimism lead to inaction?
But if I am right that adaptation and progress cannot be relied on to change things for the better, another way forward is that we should adopt optimism as a catalyst for change and avoid doomerism that leads to inertia.
But optimism can undermine action. Everything will be OK: so why do we have to do anything. It's all going to work itself out. Optimism needn't have this effect but it can do. In fact, this may be one reason why we are in such a dangerous climate situation now.
And I'm not sure despair is immobilising (as Westenberg says). Pessimism can stir action. Radical non-violent direct action by actors such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is, from my experience, carried out often by people many of whom think that things are very very bad and more than likely going to end in catastrophe. This stirs them to action.
Green alternatives and policies: bases for optimism
There are a myriad of positive alternative practices around the world that are climate-friendly. Just look at examples, often in the Global South, outlined by networks such as the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and Vikalp Sangam. But these numerous and amazing initiatives thrive alongside state and corporate inaction or even regressive action. If corporations just carry on as they are, all these alternatives won't be enough, unless they largely replace corporations in the social reproduction of life, or are taken on by larger scale states and businesses (or if state and corporate capitalism is overthrown - but, as people say, it's easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism). There is a limit to how much hope for a global solution we can put in such alternatives alone in the context of large countervailing forces, incredible and inspiring as the alternatives are.
There are plenty of good policies for solving climate change from green technology, to eco-community solutions, to degrowth, to collective ownership and so on. But the issue is not the good policies. It's the lack of transition towards them, again an issue of political and corporate inaction.
Rebecca Solnit puts it well: "We have the lifeboats now – we have the solutions, and we have had them for a while, and they keep getting better, as in better-designed, more efficient, more affordable and adaptable. We just need to implement them, but they’re just not the solutions a lot of the rich and powerful like....I do not know if it would be worse to live in a world in which we genuinely did not have the solutions, or to live in one where we have them but are not implementing them on the speed and scale we know we need to. But I know we have the solutions".
Back to optimism, pessimism, hope, and action
I'm sure there's research on optimism/pessimism and their consequences for taking action. As an ex-academic, I always think you should look for empirical evidence on issues like this. Although with the emphasis on the 'ex-', I have not been following this though I know there is research on the issue.
But as an ex-academic, I also know factors behind action or inaction are complex, and you have to question the way evidence is arrived at. The research depends on who researchers ask, what they ask, and what the responses mean. For instance, if someone asked me for a study if there was hope for climate solutions I would say not much, and if they asked whether me doing anything is likely to change the situation I would say probably not. But that does not mean I think action is not worth it. Even if I thought there was almost no hope I may still believe in keeping on trying. In fact, the desperation of the situation may lead me to. People have often fought against unbelievable odds and with only tiny glimmers of hope for achieving justice or rightness, pessimistically, but they fought on because they believed in the cause, and had that glimmer no matter how small.
So, to go back to our terms. I'm not optimistic. We are passing tipping points and moving to irreversible changes. It can be argued plausibly that in areas we are no longer in climate crisis (which suggests solutions are possible) but have passed that to areas of climate breakdown (where it is already too late, in those areas at least). I think things may well end up very badly for the world. I am pessimistic. But you can be pessimistic and have hope. And if you only have the tiniest grain of hope you can still feel it's worth doing something about what may seem near hopeless. So pessimism is compatible with hope, and even if you are filled with near or likely hopelessness, that is compatible with action.
So, I'm pessimistic and how much hope I have or not I think it's still worth doing something. In fact, as I've said above, it's the sense of doom and pessimism that makes me feel more than ever we need to do something, and something radical and fast. So pessimism can be not just compatible with action. It can be a trigger for it.
If optimism is the quality of being full of hope and emphasising the good parts of a situation, or a belief that something good will happen, then I think Westenberg uses the term optimism too widely, to include a belief in just the possibility things may get better. When she argues for optimism over pessimism she is actually often arguing for hope, and this is something that many pessimists hold on to. Westenberg seems to refer mainly to hope when she talks of optimism; but you can have hope even if pessimistic about it.
What can we do?
What can we do? Everything. I used to be in favour of some solutions, such as collective ownership, degrowth, and system change, against others, eg some technological changes, and adjustments to capitalism and markets. But now I feel everything is so grim we need to try every single thing we can.
I was going to do a blog post starting from how we have great policies that can be used to combat climate change, but that these are not being used; so that the key thing is the means for getting to the policies, from here to there, the transition. I was going to focus on the means of transition on the basis this, and not the already-existing solutions, is what's holding us back. I haven't done it so far (I may still do) because I'm not sure I have anything new to say, it would just be a chart of the pros and cons of each approach, that many people would find obvious.
But the transitional means outlined would include modifications to capitalism and markets, green technology, state/government action, global agreements, municipal action, corporate action, collective ownership, degrowth, social movements, direct action, decentralised green communities and social reproduction, sabotage and so on; each of these having many detailed aspects I could outline more. Many of these are both means of transition to a green future climate-wise and also the policy solutions, some more solely the transitional means, my main concern.
Don't knock the pessimists
I don't think there's much evidence to support optimism about the climate. There is much evidence to support feeling impending doom and pessimism. There is something special about climate change now (such as the urgency - combined with the refusal of power to respond to this) to make the history of ingenuity and adaptability much less relevant to this crisis than others.
But pessimism doesn't stop change, or hope, even if just a smidgen of it. In fact, optimism can make us complacent. Pessimism and doom-ladeness can make us fight for what seems a glimmer of hope against all the odds. If we're going to look at history, we should not just look at past adaptability to offer hope (I don't think it necessarily does clearly); we should also remember that in the face of adversity and what seems hopeless people fight on.
I predict probable (but not necessary) doom. Everything seems to be heading that way, and power seems to be doing nowhere near enough to avert it. But don't knock the pessimists (or maybe even the doomers). They're realists. They don't choose to be pessimistic; the reality leads them to it. It honestly doesn't feel good to believe there's likely to be global catastrophe. It doesn't make you feel smug and superior to be a pessimist, or give you a warm glow of satisfaction over how right you are. It's very depressing, even traumatic. But pessimism doesn't have to lead to inertia. Realism doesn't equate to fatalism. Hope and action aren't the sole property of optimists. Pessimists do these too.