Climate change appears to be a hopeless spiral into ever-hotter temperatures, with eventual outcomes being crop failure, release of methane clathrates from permafrost and from ocean floors and the transformation of Earth into a planet of Venus-lite, dead to the universe. The world will end in the way Mary Shelley's once-disliked novel The Last Man ended -- with everyone dead.

It sure looks that way right now; it looks like at some point an inexorable physics will take over and there will be a collective global death spiral. To be honest, I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why the climate crisis appears this sort of hopeless. The persistence of capitalism, for instance, is a very important reason why the climate crisis seems hopeless. Naomi Klein mentions that one in her critique of Rich's piece, titled "Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not 'Human Nature.'"

Naomi Klein's recent piece, here, is a critique of another piece, Nathaniel Rich's "Losing Earth," which has received a ton of print space and publicity from the New York Times. I have to imagine the Rich piece as ultimately reactionary. Still, Rich recounts an interesting history which is worth reading if you can get past his ideas of who is to blame for climate change, what to feel about climate change, and what to do about climate change.

Klein is correct about Rich as regards his historical arguments -- she argues that the late '80s period Rich celebrates as the chance "we" blew to do something real about climate change was in fact merely the big growth period for neoliberal capitalism. But at this point the historical argument is water under the bridge. The Eighties came and went, and yes they sucked even though climate change was coming into public awareness back then. People were not aware of how they were being manipulated.

To some extent they still aren't; but groundbreaking articles such as "Beyond Paris: avoiding the trap of carbon metrics" reveal the man behind the curtain. The Powers That Be want you to believe that the only way to "reducing carbon emissions" is by reducing carbon emissions, whereas the trick that will really count toward a better world is in creating a post-carbon society from whole cloth while phasing out the fossil fuel industry. Playing a cute numbers game with a couple of emissions reductions here and there will mean nothing to the dead planet our grandchildren will inherit if we continue with the society we've got. And past unenlightment is sad truth, but certainly avoidable for the sake of the enlightenment of the present.

Capitalism is an important reason for our despair, to be sure; yet one can easily read "Losing Earth" and suspect that the real culprit and cause for climate change hopelessness is in writers such as Nathaniel Rich. Rich and his friends are the vanguard of the culture of fake climate change activism, the people who keep the elites happy in their escape from responsibility and who get large quantities of space in places such as the New York Times and its online equivalent. Let's go over some Rich statements so we can see for ourselves how rich they in fact are. Starting with this one:

Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Grappling with physical solutions to climate change would mean that the fossil-fuel industry would have looked for ways of putting itself out of business. Rich of course doesn't mention this. To reduce "carbon emissions" to the extent necessary, a world must be created with no fossil-fuel industry, and therefore no fossil-fuel extractions.

Or how about this one?

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes.

Rich wants to comfort us in our bullshit notions that individual belief in climate change matters all by itself. Donald Trump doesn't believe in climate change, but we do, so it's all kewl, as implied by the likes of Rich. Never mind that we don't have a smidgen of the power Donald Trump has. In reality, of course, what matters is not belief but action, and in fact not all action matters but only a certain type of action, action involving democratic empowerment to end capitalism for the sake of global sustainability, really matters.

Ultimately, Rich wants to invoke liberal guilt as the primary emotion to feel about climate change. His big question? "Why did we do this to ourselves?" But as Kate Aronoff points out:

Rich begins by summarizing a decade of meetings, hearings, summits, and backroom deals between scientists, politicians, and lobbyists. The upshot? We blew it, and failed in “breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels.”

Aw, gee, we couldn't quit the hard stuff fast enough back in the Eighties. So we are at fault, and so let's mope on that one a bit like good liberals. But wait a minute! Could it be, maybe, that back then we were too busy freakin' earning a living to contemplate some kind of half-baked and elitist individual divorce from the fossil fuels we needed to use in order to earn a living? Well, now that you put it that way, maybe we were more in the way of victims of circumstance than we were anything else.

Kate Aronoff's argument against Nathaniel Rich is also fun because she skewers his main premise so well. Here it is, for joy and pleasure:

In the story, global warming is presented as a problem that humans aren’t fully equipped or prepared to confront. “We have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present,” Rich writes. We “worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.” At a private event unveiling the piece Tuesday night, Rich put it more bluntly. “We haven’t reckoned, at the level of civilization, with what we’ve done to ourselves,” he explained.

But who’s done what to whom exactly? Who is the “we”?

The Aronoff argument, however, loses its grip on the solution at that point when she starts to blame Americans as the "we." It continues:

The fact remains that other nations—197 of them—haven’t been quite as profligate on climate action as the United States, which accounts for around 15 percent of emissions worldwide. The kind of outright climate denial that helped arrest our participation in the Kyoto Protocol 21 years ago and, more recently, the Paris Agreement, isn’t widespread outside of the United States, either. It’s not that the global community has a fool-proof mitigation plan; it does not. But America’s particular failure to address climate change isn’t a failure of all of humanity.

Here I need to say, more clearly this time: addressing climate change does not mean doing anything effective about it. And doing something, in turn, means taking control of the social systems which define, empower, and limit acts of "doing something." Americans are only a bit worse than the other peoples of the world in our failure to take charge. So let me suggest another "we" at fault for the failures of climate change mitigation. "We," in this version, are the likes of Nathaniel Rich, people who want to imagine a Golden Age of Climate Change Activism in order to stop at appeals to liberal guilt and bogus discussions of "human nature" in their half-baked search for a social solution to climate change.

Oh, sure, go ahead and read Rich's long history of climate change research and scientific discussion. While you're at it, though, read Spencer Weart's book on the history of climate science. It will give you the context necessary to understand what Rich is talking about. Rich's history may be good -- but his ideas of what to do about it? Puh-leeze.

Meanwhile, enjoy the record high temperatures!