The Progress of This Storm. Andreas Malm
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with the feeling: to a far higher degree than their conspecifics in the US or UK, people in countries like Brazil and Bangladesh tend to view the problem as very serious, although the unease is surely domestically stratified as well.36 As a double realisation, the warming condition arrives first among masses possessing no significant property, primarily in the peripheries of the capitalist world-economy. It is an old truth that the human condition is expressed in its most concentrated, ominous form among such masses: hence any theorisation should have its antennas directed towards them. An event like Hurricane Sandy is so significant because it sends the signal home.
What, then, can theory for the warming condition inspire, other than despair? Put differently: if both the 1.5°C and 2°C guardrails turn out to have been breached, should we conclude that the storm is raging uncontrollably and that we might just as well start playing the fiddle? No. We should conclude, first of all, that building a new coal-fired power plant, or continuing to operate an old one, or drilling for oil, or expanding an airport, or planning for a highway is now irrational violence. The case can be made that large-scale fossil fuel combustion has always constituted violence, as it inflicts harm on other people and species, and that it has been plainly irrational since the wide diffusion of the basics of climate science, but surely it reaches a new level of demented aggression when temperatures have increased by 1.5°C or a sea level rise of several metres has been locked into the earth system. If the resistance against fossil fuels has been feeble up to that point, it ought to become ferocious after it: even after all this, you still go on. The fight is to minimise the losses and maximise the prospects for survival. What, more concretely, can it achieve? We shall offer only some very brief and provisional reflections on this question towards the end. For now, we shall begin from the premise that any theory for the warming condition should have the struggle to stabilise climate – with the demolition of the fossil economy the necessary first step – as its practical, if only ideal, point of reference. It should clear up space for action and resistance.
DISCOVERING COAL ON LABUAN
But to theorise this present, we need a picture of the sort of past that is weighing on it.
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the British Empire deployed steamboats to extend its control over territories and accelerate its appropriation of resources from around the world. They required coal. Agents of the imperial machine – officers, engineers, merchants – were instructed to keep their eyes open for coal seams wherever they sat foot, such as on Borneo, where a missionary happened upon some outcroppings in 1837. His discovery touched off a rush for the black gold on that far-flung island, positioned right on the highway between India and China, potentially a perfect fuel depot for the steamboats now frequenting their shores. The most exciting reserves were located on a small island called Labuan. Off the northern tip of Borneo, a most suitable port of call, Labuan was covered by luxuriant tropical forests, and right in their midst, thick veins of coal protruded.37
The lieutenant in the Royal Navy leading the expedition later reconstructed the scene in a lithograph. It shows two puny white men pointing at a seam of coal standing out between high trees and a stream of water. The man in the right corner is dressed in the uniform of a Royal Navy officer: he represents the military power by which the Empire has landed in this jungle. With a wondrously erect posture, his eyes turned towards the officer, the other man gesticulates wildly and enthusiastically at the finding; most likely, he envisions the coal as a source of fortune, a material his business can extract and sell to steamboats, not the least those operated by the Navy.38 The scene exudes excitement, a sense of mastery and proprietary right. It registers the moment when foreign shores are integrated into the fossil economy – a distinctly British invention, most simply defined as an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels and therefore generating a sustained growth in CO2 emissions.39 The coal of Labuan had never before been connected to any such pursuits. The native population knew about it, but had left most of it untouched: only with the arrival of the British was the coal hauled into a circuit that expanded by setting it on fire.
First the fuel was in the ground, still and unstirred; then someone came to the scene and, eyeing profit and power, commenced its exploitation. In this regard, the lithograph provides an Urbild of the fossil economy. It is, if you will, a picture of the Fall (and downwards like a fall, into a shaft the ground, is the fundamental movement of that economy). The uncountable repetitions of the same act over the past two centuries form the defeated time now pouring down from the sky. How can we apprehend that process?
On the Building of Nature: Against Constructionism
AN EPIC CASE OF BAD HISTORICAL TIMING
In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, Naomi Klein spots an ‘epic case of bad historical timing’: just as scientists awakened to the magnitude of global warming and called for a drastic change of course, governments, under neoliberal sway, surrendered the very idea of interfering with the self-driving market.1 Another case can be added. Just as the biosphere began to catch fire, social theory retreated ever further from sooty matter, into the pure air of text. The introduction to an issue of Theory, Culture and Society devoted to climate change registers a late awakening: ‘The world of culture and virtuality has met its match; the material world apparently does matter and can “bite back”.’2 Almost as disarmed as governments, a social theory sequestered in the cultural turn long faced climate change with an ingrained refusal to recognise – let alone intervene in – extra-discursive reality: no wonder it looked the other way.
As the atmospheric concentration of CO2 climbed towards the 400 ppm mark, postmodernist philosophers advanced the view that what historians do is little more than invent images of the past. The real past, says Keith Jenkins, ‘doesn’t actually enter into historiography except rhetorically’: when the historian purports to relay events, what she is actually doing is giving a passionate speech embellished with cherry-picked data. All interpretations of the past are ‘fabricated’, ‘invented’, ‘metaphorical’, ‘self-referencing’ – having no basis outside of themselves – and hence equally valid; the sole ground for choosing one over the other is personal taste.3 In his already classic rebuttal of such historiography, In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans deploys Auschwitz as an overwhelming master-case; mutatis mutandis, we can expect global warming to be similarly used. To paraphrase Evans: global warming is not a discourse. It trivialises the suffering it generates to see it as a text. The excessive temperatures are not a piece of rhetoric. Global warming is indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of global warming, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well.4
One premise of the postmodernist philosophy of history is incontrovertible: the past is gone forever and cannot be retrieved for sensory perception. Historians have access only to shards and fragments that happen to have survived the flames of time, and their representations of the past cannot be taken at face value. Consider the picture of the two British men in the rainforest of Labuan. Supposedly painting a scene that once took place in reality, how can we rely on it to correctly depict what happened? From this sceptical attitude – the stock and trade of historians, as so many have pointed out – postmodernists draw the eccentric conclusion that documents like this offer no peephole into the real past, for they are saturated by the power of discourse blocking the sight. And surely, the picture is overlaid with a set of discursive constructs: white men in virginal nature, picking out what belongs to them, finding the path to progress ‘savages’ have neglected, preparing to tame the raw. But it also appears to have a material substratum. We have reasons to believe that it refers not only to other images – of men, nature, progress, order – but likewise to an actual identification of the coal seams of Labuan by British imperial agents.5 Among those reasons is global warming itself.