Climate chaos

Our son was born just after midnight on New Year’s Day, in the middle of a blizzard and at the apex of a plague. We jokingly call him Kyber Chaosborn, partly in homage to Daenerys Stormborn and partly to deflect from a harrowing labor we’re not yet ready to fully process.

Kyber was born in Ohio, where my wife and I grew up. While my wife was pregnant, we took an anxiety-ridden journey from California back to Ohio because we hoped to improve our odds of avoiding COVID-19 by staying with family. Given all that effort and concern, you can see why I was so insulted and dismayed when an Ohio senate candidate retweeted the following sentiments in support of his mission to ensure a “healthy ruling class”:

“The Democrat party is a party of childless people and I think that affects their view of the future…You don’t think about your investment in your community the same way if you know your children aren’t going to inherit it.”

This comment is monstrous, likely intentionally so, on many levels. One of its more glaring fallacies is that it reverses the causal arrow: many people, not all of them Democrats or liberals, hold a pessimistic vision of the future, and that view is what influences their decision not to have children. What the tweeter’s political ideology must discount are the myriad reasons people who might want to have children choose not to – student debt, medical debt, health insurance costs, childcare costs, housing costs, stagnating wages, and, of course, climate change.

It was another Ohioan, Michael Shannon’s tortured, Cassandra-like protagonist in Take Shelter, who failed to convince his small town of an imminent climate calamity. While Shannon experienced nightmarish previsions of an apocalyptic storm, we watch climate catastrophes playout live almost daily on our newsfeeds.

No matter how dire it gets – skies choked with wildfire smoke, concrete buckling from scorching heat, villages washing away completely in floodwaters, lakes and rivers dried up completely due to drought – many remain unmoved.

This is due in part because to pledge allegiance to conservative politics today is to occupy an unconscionable paracosm – an alternate reality where every major threat to the community, such as climate change and COVID-19, must be denounced as a hoax, while a myriad of manufactured problems, such as migrant caravans and mass election fraud, consume all of the media bandwidth.

Underpinning these political priorities is an impoverished conception of freedom that almost always maximizes personal risk in ways that favor corporate profits. Personhood is equated with profitability. This dogmatized theory of freedom excludes that which would improve quality of life, such as access to healthcare, breathable air, and a living wage, but includes the right to expose oneself and others to a deadly virus, nearly perpetual gun violence, and a battery of toxins pumped into our air and water.

It should come as no surprise that this notion of freedom boosts corporate bottom lines as much as it belittles any sense of community care. The overarching goal of the hyper-individualistic dogma, to quote Elizabeth Andersen, is “to mask problematic features of our world” and “misrepresent the space of possibilities so as to obscure better options.”

Excerpted: ‘Keepers of the Flame: Climate Chaos and Creeping Authoritarianism’

Counterpunch.org