How I Reached a Tipping Point

By Ruby S

To start off, I’m not a good writer. Or certainly not a good enough writer to take the assignment of writing about the dangers of climate change and the monumental farce that is the COP 26 conference. I agreed to write this article. That was a mistake, Dear Reader.

All You Need To Know

So, I googled “COP 21.” The assignment was for writing about COP 26, but I’d already mixed up the numbers. So what is COP 21? Happily for me, it is related to the subject of my research! I learned COP 21 was the 21st in the series of international conferences organized by the United Nations to encourage participation of a majority of the world’s nations in coordinated climate change … (let’s graciously say) “mitigation.”

The 21st conference in the series of talks, held in Paris in 2015, that led to the famous Paris Agreement. Ah! I had heard of this. I do know it is associated with a liberal/conservative game of political football, with Trump having withdrawn us from (the crowd gasps) and Biden re-engaging with (the crowd politely claps).

I’m speculating, but it seems the natural law of COP XX meetings is that they are very serious affairs – with a seriousness that is exactly the inverse proportion of how much they matter – which is not at all. 

The Paris agreement’s marquee goal was to hold global temperature gains to 1.5 degrees centigrade (that means in degrees of Celsius) above pre-industrial capitalist levels. Except, you know, they also committed to 2 degrees of rise at the same meeting for some reason. Oh yeah, by the way, we are already at 1.2 degrees centigrade rise and likely to blow past 1.5 by (looks at watch) a little after lunch time tomorrow.

The UN writes that the current trajectory “unless actions are taken immediately, may lead to a temperature rise of about 2.7C by the end of the century.” (UNFCC, September 17, 2021)

You always gain confidence in the target when a committee sets a secondary “realistic” target, fully expecting the first to be completely blown out. 

The Tipping Point

My editor sent me a tip to check out the article “THE TIPPING POINT” by comrade Jess Spear on COP 26 in Rupture magazine 6, the publication of R&R fellow travelers in Ireland (see rupture.ie). This was a game changer, a real article by someone qualified to write this one. So, yeah, that 1.5 degree target… so, that 2 degree target…

“What really matters are the submitted NDCs – nationally determined contributions which are the emission reduction targets each country sets for itself. If each country meets these targets – and the decades-long foot dragging doesn’t inspire much hope – warming is only limited to 2.4°C. That’s better than the targets from Paris six years ago which amounted to 3.7°C warming, but still nowhere good enough.”

Holy shit, Paris. 3.7 degrees Celsius? You had a third target all along?

I had reached a tipping point of sorts myself for the article I was supposed to be writing. Here was evidence I couldn’t ignore as easily as nearly everyone ignores climate science: COP 21 was a load of shit. One could reasonably project that COP26 was also a load of shit.

Now, I could choose to take the road Jess rightly and smartly took, which was to write about the demise of birds and the release of methane and radioactive waste from the burning tundra that is sure to happen if COP 26 is all we have to rely on.

Let’s face it: I’m not a climate scientist. I’m not even a climate plumber. I’m not going to convince you of the importance of climate change. 

Shit’s Real Weird

No, we aren’t in a “facts” and “objective reality” problem. We are fully in the weird world of problems of “the subjective.” Some not insignificant number of Trump supporters are refusing to get a vaccine Trump himself proudly owned as a political victory, because they think it contains government tracking chips or something.

We are in the world of the recently released movie “Don’t Look Up” about scientists whose warnings of a certain Armageddon via meteor goes unheeded. A movie being critically panned for being too “on the nose” – basically of making its point too well.

Also recently released: the resurrection of a cult classic, The Matrix, in The Matrix: Resurrections, a movie about how audiences want to escape into a fantasy world of nostalgia for the original film rather than be challenged by any new fantasy.

The Matrix: Resurrections is also being critically panned. Now, I haven’t seen either of these movies, though I would encourage my editors to share their HBO Max and NetFlix  log-ins if they have them, so I can’t speak to the strengths and weaknesses of these artistic endeavors. 

However, I do find it interesting to see Hollywood take up these issues of what Marxists might call “false consciousness” in connection with COP 26. I’m not the only one to notice, either. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist, writes in the Guardian (Dec 29, 2021):

I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what’s coming while collectively failing to act.

Between Complicity and Individual Heroism?

Of course, this isn’t the first time false consciousness has been addressed by Hollywood. In fact, one only has to recall the original The Matrix movie which posits humans (workers?) as complicit in their own oppression under the Matrix (capitalism?):

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. (1)

Is Don’t Look Up saying that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged as well? Such nihilism and defeatism is presumably not what a veteran progressive political operator and co-writer like David Sirota intended. 

However, it is an understandable reaction by those already awakened to the reality of “the Matrix” of oppression presented by capitalism in climate change, racism, transphobia, sexism, and such. It is one of the earliest and easiest traps for activists to fall into: hopelessness upon looking at the objective reality of the magnitude of the situation and seeing the apparent sea of indifference.

The Matrix presents one of the common conclusions Hollywood reaches for the movement: individual acts of heroism/terrorism! Don’t worry about the big problem of actually leading a revolution against the system, look for one neat trick. Don’t Look Up presents another Hollywood alternative, – inevitable doom.

Thankfully, we don’t live in a Hollywood simulation of reality, or even an AI. We don’t need to be worried about Elon Musk hacking his way out of the universe and into the godhead anytime soon. Unfortunately for me, ironic detachment simply won’t serve as a life raft. We have to deal with the consequences our society has had on the planet and what those impacts on us, our loved ones, and our class actually mean.

It is not a matter of faith that we must win over the working class to take the fossil fuel companies into democratic public ownership under a worker’s government, jail the company owners for their crimes against our children, and confiscate their capital to be used for renewable energy and climate change mitigation. It’s our only option. 

Change won’t happen overnight, it won’t happen with the one or two people we can individually recruit, but only by the mass movements of the majority of the working class for its own interest. It certainly won’t happen at COP 43 with an agreement between a banker and an oil baron. Massive upheavals in the future are inevitable and workers will not start at the conclusions of socialists. Through their experience in mass events and with their careful building of a Marxist leadership and organization through those experiences, they will have their only opportunity to prevent the worst catastrophes our class will have to face together.

Endnotes:

(1) Quoted from ImdB, an Amazon company, www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/characters/nm000040)