Thread by @kalahar1

What we talk about when we talk about climate change. A short(ish) thread.
1. What is presented as climate action is actually action intended to legitimise liberalism in the face of a catastrophe for which liberalism has no answers. Here's how it's done 1/10

2/10. Dominant representations of this unprecedented and overwhelming crisis are anchored in what is already familiar and known. That anchoring has to date been done by liberal Western institutions, within discursive guardrails that serve the interests of those institutions.

3/10. Climate scientists talk of boundaries or guardrails to describe limits we must observe to avoid dangerous climate change. Likewise, liberal discourses of climate change employ symbolic guardrails to avoid dangerous political ideas. I identify five discursive guardrails.

Guardrail 1: Climate change is not a challenge to individualism. It is through our individual free choices that climate change is solved. The state and corporations will respond to the signals they receive from individual choices, and enable the change that individuals demand.

4/10 Guardrail 2: The Western construction of climate change is universally true. Western descriptions of acceptable levels of harm sit above ideology, national interests, culture and geography. The one dangerous limit to climate change is the same whoever and wherever you are.

5/10 Guardrail 3: Climate change is not an historical phenomenon. Climate change can be solved within the existing capitalist relations of production. Climate change should be de-politicised, and responded to purely on the basis of the science and agreed targets.

6/10 Guardrail 4: Climate change will be solved, and it will be solved through technological innovation. Human progress is real, is expressed through technological change and is an unassailable imperative of human existence.

7/10 Guardrail 5: New stories will save us. We need new stories that show how the whole of humanity can align with the norms of Western liberal democracies, and live clean, smart, prosperous and fulfilling lifestyles without dangerous emissions of greenhouse gases.

8/10 I interviewed 14 climate opinion formers. All recognised the urgent need for fundamental changes to our economy, ideology and politics (IPCC 2022). None (myself included) know how to bring that change about or what the destination looks like. No one is in control

What to do? We can’t work with existing liberal capitalist states. We need to build new ‘climate’ states. That requires we work at some distance from the state to build an alternative model. A new language of climate, us and the world is an essential part of that work.

We need a new vocabulary of climate and a new kind of state, rooted in the best, not the worst of human nature. The work begins by abandoning the mainstream imperialistic, corporate and woefully naive existing visions of our 2050 1.5C net zero future.