« It’s not too late! » On the other hand, « we are fucked. » Climate commentary swings between these poles.

Victor Frankl once compared optimism to laughter: If you want people to laugh, really laugh, then you must provide them with a reason for it. You must tell a joke, or do something funny. It is impossible to evoke real laughter just by urging someone to laugh. « Doing so would be like urging people in front of a camera to say ‘cheese’, » Frankl explained, « only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles. »

The phrase « it’s not too late », for me, brings an artificial smile. I stumble onto it as I walk into a bookstore and see the flashy Carbon Almanac (2022) promoted at the entrance, one of many such books to appear in the last, late year. It shouts from the cover: « It’s not too late. » The foreword was written by Seth Godin, a marketing guru out of the dot-com avantgarde. What will save us is « the hope that comes from realizing that it’s not too late. » The refrain is a staple of the genre. Another entry, a new report from the Club of Rome entitled Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, offers a kindred burst of optimism about the future against the backdrop of a bleak present. Greater planetary health and social well-being are within reach. The authors will « show you that this is indeed fully possible ». Meanwhile the heavy-weight United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released two punchy reports of its own in 2022. They hammered the message that countries’ pledges to cut emissions fall far below climate change targets, and that the impact of climate change is already devastating for many parts of humanity, the ecosystem, and for the biodiversity that now suffers a mass extinction.

« We are fucked » is Extinction Rebellion’s much better slogan than the worn and tattered « it’s not too late ». A paradoxical solace follows from the realization that we are fucked. The future’s openness is made to rest not on stubborn optimism but, far from it, on the inevitability of our fuckedness. Such a slogan inspires, paradoxically, as an antidote to false optimism and artificial smiles. A stubborn optimism that announces itself as being tied « realistically » to possibilities of a different outcome at some point becomes an obstacle to meaningful action and even a betrayal of freedom. Stubborn optimism, that is to say, becomes cruel optimism. The stubborn optimism of Earth for All risks being cruel because its recommendations have been known and unheeded. There is no reason to believe that this time would be different.

This is as much a problem of genre as a problem of ideology — or, more precisely, it is a problem of temporality: of how we think about time…