Introduction

      On 13 January 2020, we first put pen to paper for this book. Our argument felt clear and horrifying: as climate systems broke down, the centre of political normalcy would collapse, and people would find themselves looking for more drastic solutions. The escalating climate crisis would provide opportunities to all parts of the far right. Seductive neo-Malthusian arguments about overpopulation would bolster hardline security policies and borders, and give seemingly compelling justification for the radical deepening of racist politics in the Global North. The cultural tropes of uncleanliness, pollution and pestilence, which for centuries dictated the hierarchy of different people’s places within, and access to, nature, would become more potent as people once again encountered the natural world as their antagonist. The interests of capital would swing behind authoritarian governments as a means to protect profits and growth. While we disagreed with some who had said that ‘ecofascism’ would be a direct and unavoidable consequence of climate breakdown, we thought such a project couldn’t entirely be ruled out.

On the day we began to write, 41 people were in a serious condition in a hospital in Wuhan, China, their lungs filled with a strange form of pneumonia, caused by a virus which did not yet have a name. In a matter of months, what came to be known as COVID-19 spread across the world, and some of the social stressors we had envisaged occurring with the onset of serious catastrophic climate breakdown arrived a decade or three early.

      Much of the response to the pandemic avoided talk of the climate crisis directly. This is perhaps because the diverse ecological problems facing us have sometimes been simplified into the correlation of two measures: the parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the rise in global average temperatures. Such a simplification cannot account for the increasing risk of pandemics, among a host of other events. COVID-19 wasn’t caused by a rise in CO₂ levels, but it was arguably a product of the transformative effects modern capitalist societies have had on the environment.¹ It was perhaps the moment at which we should have collectively and decisively moved in our understanding – and not just in our terminology – from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate systems breakdown’.

The pandemic provided a glimpse into possible political responses to future climate breakdown. Past responses to climate crises such as extreme weather events had been shot through with environmental racism and state violence, but the scale of total social transformation implied by the word ‘fascism’ would have been hyperbole. Long imagined in disaster-movie style as a series of blazing hot summers and polar bears adrift, all punctuated by the occasional cataclysmic wave, it suddenly seemed to us that climate systems breakdown might actually look much more like the pandemic did: mass death events, sudden stresses on global supply chains, abrupt and previously unthinkable changes to everyday life, massive discrepancies in vulnerability across class and racial groups, a generally increased anxiety, racially displaced blame, the tightening of surveillance regimes, a sudden return to governments acting exclusively and aggressively in their national and class interest, the mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, talk of the end of globalization, a retreat to protectionism, unprecedented measures that suddenly seem entirely necessary, the sudden collapse of livelihoods for billions of the world’s poor, and a deep economic shock worldwide.

      This book is not about the coronavirus pandemic, and we should not expect the politics that emerges in response to major climate events