Climate change - as it was popularised by Republican Party strategist and full time reactionary Frank Luntz in a bid to make the issue seem less threatening - is an issue at the height of political importance in 2020. The issue has become so dramatic in fact that a new term has been popularised that is far more representative of the reality of the situation: climate collapse. Finally the time has come when this historically underrepresented issue has come to the forefront of our political discussions, and we are now dealing with politics with the looming threat of climate systems being at their brink firmly in mind.
The only problem is that this isn’t remotely the case. The problem is that every political issue should orientate around the swirling whirlpool of climate collapse – and yet at the moment, it is largely understood as an issue that should be discussed alongside other political issues. By an instinct finely honed in us by the moulding forces of our capitalist society, we understand climate collapse not as a protracted and intertwined system of processes that acts upon every aspect of our daily life, but as a largely abstracted and complete object that should be understood to act upon singular issues most likely sometime in the future.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to get to grips with the cataclysmic nature of climate collapse. Let’s take one example.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; by 2050 the world may see up to 200 million climate refugees forced from their homes and lands to “greener” pastures – this is one of the more conservative estimates. The data is complex, and that means extrapolations and inaccuracies in modelling. Figures vary from as “little” as 15 million people displaced, up to 1 billion. Let’s stick to the conservative estimate. In perspective, this would mean 1 in every 45 people on Earth will be subject to displacement from systemic climate collapse. To put this into perspective the UN estimates that since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, almost 6.5 million Syrians have been displaced. The same Syrian refugees which prompted a bolstering of far right populist rhetoric across Europe, worrying privileged white faces as to whether a starving child might be fed, or a boat full of exploited families might have to live in their neighbourhood.
Clearly we can see that even in this tiny sliver of data, the effect of climate collapse is likely to be in the realm of utter catastrophe. If we take the conservative estimate seriously, we would have ~31 Syria’s by 2050. But how can we even comprehend these figures? What does this mean in practice? Why should we worry when our current political climate seems not to emphasise the issue?
Many of these questions can be understood by looking at climate collapse as a hyperobject and understanding capitalism’s role in the creation of this object.
A hyperobject is a term popularised by philosopher and ecological theorist, Timothy Morton. The central premise of a hyperobject is that it’s something that made up of systems upon systems, interacting with each other at all points, constantly changing the understanding of the object as we try to comprehend it. Climate collapse is one such hyperobject, in that it is so colossal that we cannot comprehend it in its entirety – we may try to understand one aspect as we have just done above with our climate refugee example, but ultimately this is one small aspect of an unimaginably large problem. How then, do we try to understand this hyperobject – and why?
One such way of understanding climate collapse as a hyperobject is to understand not the object itself - in this case the entirety of the interlacing systems and their shifting processes – but the relation that this object has to our current political economy. One of the reasons we cannot understand what this hyperobject might mean in terms of change for our economies is because our economies are incompatible with the outcomes that it poses for it.
One thing is certain: current global capitalist production cannot continue in the same way under the pressures of climate collapse. Whether we focus on just-in-time logistics, the supply of global surplus labour as a necessity for cheap production, the breadbaskets of our world producing the food to sustain global populations, or even whether workers will still be able to breathe the air and survive the intense heat brought about in new ever more hostile climates – every single aspect of the global economy is under threat by the climate collapse. How would a politician go about solving this problem? It would require something so monumental, so radical – that it’s almost impossible to even imagine, or at least hard to imagine under our current system.
Such a shift would mean the transformation of every aspect of daily life, of politics, of global economics, of how we understand ourselves and our environments. This is also something that doesn’t promise a large profit.
So what is at stake in our politics today? The answer is everything – but in a sense that is so real, that the abstract nature of our current politics cannot allow its comprehension. The answer to the hyperobject lies in striving for a revolutionary politics that is equally detached from the abstract, and perhaps too real to comprehend directly –but it is a politics that must be reckoned with, lest we break upon the shores that are posed before us.
We should bear in mind the concept of the hyperobject as we question the minutiae of political strife and the dense thickets of electoral myopia, so that we can orientate ourselves towards a reality and politics that is at once both unimaginably complex, and infinitely more real than the crafted narratives of our modern political discourses.
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