The shadow of the eco: Denial and climate change

We are talking about a trauma, and thus an event, whose temporality proceeds neither from the now that is present nor from the present that is past but from an im-presentable to come(à venir). A weapon wounds and leaves forever open an unconscious scar; but this weapon is terrifying because it comes from the to-come, from the future, a future so radically to come that it resists even the grammar of the future anterior. (Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror ¹ )

In both in neurosis and psychosis there comes into consideration the question not only of a loss of reality but also of a substitute for reality. (Freud, “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis” ² )

The invisible girl who never says anything is suddenly the one who is heard and seen the most. (Greta Thunberg, Malena Ernman, et al., Our House in On Fire ³ )

On 28 February 2022, as news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine jolted the world to attention, another story was also billed as ‘breaking news’. As reported by the New York Times, in a new report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 270 researchers from 67 countries condemned failure of leadership on the part of the world’s largest polluters, provided overwhelming evidence of systematic climate injustice, and concluded, as the headline of the article succinctly put it, that ‘Climate Change is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt’. ⁴ The following week, there was a news item reporting that the Amazon rain forest has now suffered irrevocable destruction and another explaining that the dramatic decrease in the population of insects threatens agriculture and the food chain. For the purposes of this essay, I want to call attention to the weirdness of the fact that these starkly dire conclusions about the fate of the planet and all its living creatures are presented both as something new and as events that are comparable to other news. These news items move in and out of the news feed on any given day as they are displaced and subsumed by other, apparently equally pressing and urgent matters. But is the announcement that the earth is becoming catastrophically damaged and potentially uninhabitable faster than we can adapt to it on the same order of reality as any other kind of event?

I begin with this news story because it encapsulates how much and how little has changed since I wrote the first version of this essay in February 2021. Let me say from the start that I support climate activism and am ready to embrace a radical, progressive, political solution to this crisis. Let me add too that I have no expertise in climate science. The reflections about denial and climate change that follow are motivated by a very specific question: how can psychoanalysis help us think about the way psychic processes are inscribed and emmeshed in this global political crisis at every level? There is, I feel, something about the radical unthinkability of climate change that puts excessive demands on the psyche. The incalculable scale and speed of the catastrophic destruction underway calls for a reconsideration of that unthinkability and of the force and quality of the denial that accompanies it.

Before moving on, I want to acknowledge that when it comes to climate change, the very gesture of framing the question in terms of ‘denial’ is often viewed as inherently politically suspect. For many, the decision to focus on the psychological or psychoanalytic dimension of denial is itself, de facto, a denial of the more fundamental and indeed more pressing role played by politics. This is so because, as Naomi Klein has been saying for years, capitalism and the climate are incompatible. ⁵ Any truly effective confrontation with the reality of climate change would necessitate, as Klein so aptly puts it, ‘changing everything’. Taking action on climate change would require exposing and dismantling the vested interests of corporations, banks, the fossil fuel industry, sovereign states, conservative politicians and wealthy individuals. Action on climate change would require an overturning of the status quo. For this reason, for some progressive activist/writers/thinkers, because any effective recognition of climate change would require a corresponding commitment to participating in political change, the challenges posed by climate change – however daunting – offer a vital opportunity for change as well as an alarming existential threat.

From this perspective, climate change denial must be understood as willful, conscious and calculated. The ‘calculation’ is that the price for not acting will not be paid by those who currently benefit from the politics of extraction and exploitation that undergirds the current energy economy. In a recent book, Down to Earth, Bruno Latour argues not only that climate change denial is political, but also that ‘climate change denial organizes all politics at the present time’. ⁶ Climate change denial is, for him, the foundation of all forms of ‘post-truth’ politics. Contesting the complacency of the media who claim to have remained ‘rational thinkers’, he argues that:

“rational” sorts are just as caught up as the others in the tangle of disinformation. They do not see that it is useless to be indignant that people “believe in alternative facts,” when they themselves live in an alternative world, a world in which climate mutation occurs, while it does not in the world of their opponents. It is not a matter of learning how to repair cognitive deficiencies, but rather how to live in the same world. (DTE, 25)

Latour’s point here is that climate change denial is in fact a logical and paradoxically ‘rational’ extension of the various political and legal institutions and philosophical conceptual systems that gave rise to the climate crisis in the first place. Like other institutional practices founded upon exploitation and inequities (racism and sexism, for example), climate change deniers know perfectly well what they can and cannot afford to know. And, according to Latour, what they know is that ‘if they wanted to survive in comfort, they had to stop pretending, even in their dreams, to share the earth with the rest of the world’ (DTE, 19). For him, the ostensibly ‘rational’ position of journalists and mainstream media outlets participates in the very denial that it claims to lament by failing to take the measure of the many ongoing political, racialized, and ethical acts of violence and aggression that are root causes of the climate crisis and that perpetuate it.

In keeping with this logic, Latour describes former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord as ‘a declaration of war authorizing the occupation of all other countries, if not with troops, at least with C02, which America retains its right to emit’ (DTE, 84). For Latour, in other words, climate change denial – as practiced by Trump and other political and corporate actors – is in fact ‘politics by other means’ – that is, war.

But even if one concedes that positive change will require radical progressive political action and that climate change deniers are calculating political actors, there is still something radically unthinkable about climate change that calls for a psychoanalytic reading. Unlike most other modes of knowledge, psychoanalysis does not take the subject’s relation to external reality as a given. On the contrary, for psychoanalysis denial of reality is not something that befalls an already constituted subject. It is a condition of possibility of the formation of the subject. Reality is hard won and fragile. For Freud, at the origin of psychic life, in the foundational psychic structure that he calls the ‘primary processes’, there is no relation to the reality of the external world. Reality – such as it is – emerges belatedly as the tenuous product of the complicated mental activity that Freud calls ‘reality testing’. As the term implies, the experience of reality is not accessible via direct perception of the external world, but rather must be produced by each individual subject through complicated psychic labor. The sense of reality that emerges from this process is a partial construction made up of memory traces and psychic compromises dictated by instinctual conflicts. Furthermore, as Freud insists, the perception and acceptance of ‘reality’ is always fragile, partial, tenuous and bound by fantasy. ⁷ He insists, for example, that fantasy and reality emerge simultaneously and are inseparable from one another. Every construction of reality requires psychic negotiations that are destined to fail to greater or lesser degrees: normal neurotics flee from the demands of the external world by producing symptoms, whereas psychotics replace the unbearable existing external world with a wishful substitute for it. ⁸ Or, to put things another way, the subject’s relation to reality is not opposed to denial, but rather is a particular expression of it.

Because the psychic structure of the sense of reality described above relies upon the capacity to link present perceptions to past memory traces, it implicitly requires that the external world remain more or less stable over time. The speed of current changes to the environment undermines the very possibility of reality testing. We are no longer engaged in testing reality; reality is now testing us. If, to paraphrase the language of the New York Times, the external world is changing faster than our capacity to adapt, reality itself is not what it used to be. Nor, I might add, is denial. It seems to me that we are undergoing a massive shift in public discourses about climate change and climate change denial. Until very recently, climate change operated like a constant murmur. More recently, however, it has moved from the periphery of everyday discourse to the center. No longer a murmur, references to climate change are now ubiquitous: they punctuate every consequential collective conversation, and surface in every communicative medium. Where there was once a murmur, there is now a shriek and a scream. Nonetheless, it would seem that speaking about the disaster has had little effect on weakening the denial of the disaster or on hastening collective action to counteract it.

In ‘Thoughts for the Times on War on Death’, a short work written as a response to the carnage and cruelty of World War I, Freud tells the following joke: speaking to his wife, a husband says, ‘if one of us two dies, I shall move to Paris’. ⁹ The joke is funny because it shows that when faced with even the remotest and most hypothetical prospect of his own death, the speaking ‘I’ unconsciously prefers to sustain its belief in its own immortality by displacing the burden of death onto the other even if that other is none other than his own beloved wife. Freud tells this little one-liner to illustrate his claim ‘that there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death’. (296). At the level of the unconscious primary processes, not only is death something that can only happen to other people, but others only die because I wished them dead. Elaborating further on this point, Freud writes:

“Our unconscious does not carry out the killing; it merely thinks it and wishes it. But it would be wrong…to undervalue this psychical reality as compared with factual reality…Indeed, our unconscious will murder even for trifles; like the ancient Athenian code of Draco, it knows no other punishment for crime than death. And this has a certain consistency, for every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego is at bottom a crime of lèse-majesté” (297).

At the end of ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, Freud explains that if he insists upon the murderous, autocratic and tyrannical qualities of the primary processes, it is because not to do so could lead to a potentially riskier and more catastrophic exposure to future war. In the closing passages of that work, he asserts that ‘in our civilized attitude towards death we are…living psychologically beyond our means’ (299). For Freud, the apparently rational expectation that we have moved beyond the aggressions associated with the primordial denial of death is itself an unrealistic – and hence potentially even more dangerous – act of denial. The savagery of war teaches Freud that the actions of sovereign nations, like those of individual people, are not governed by diplomacy and political rationality but by reactive responses to pressures from the primary processes. The expectation that the power of reason can resolve political conflicts is unreasonable, Freud claims, because it is unrealistic. Therefore, Freud proposes to ward off further violent consequences by taking ‘a backward step’ that advocates a less aspirational, less idealized view of humanity. By stepping back, Freud aims to counter regression with regression: in lieu of the aggressive enactments associated with regression, he seeks to enlist regression’s capacity to bring us closer to the truth about the fundamental conflicts that organize the peoples’ relation to the world. Only by stepping back from the deluded belief that the actions of sovereign European nations are actually governed by the enlightenment moral and political values they claim to espouse, Freud says, will we be able to ‘take the truth more into account’ so as to make ‘life more tolerable for us once again’. In the final lines of the essay, he writes: ‘to tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us’ (299).

When Freud concludes his essay with the bold maxim that ‘tolerating life is our first duty’ he implicitly acknowledges how difficult – if not impossible – it is to perform that essential duty. Psychoanalysis tells us that even under the best of circumstances, the psyche relies on illusions and denials to survive its encounters with the world. Each individual subject forms itself by constructing an edifice of psychic reality whose very purpose is to transform life into something tolerable. But if the psyche requires illusions in times of peace and prosperity because they hide the evidence of everything that threatens its tranquility, Freud here argues that the psychic energy necessary for maintaining those illusions simply costs too much in times of war. Because war attacks the illusions that make life tolerable, the psychic cost of trying to prop up those illusions becomes unbearable. Freud thus ends up saying both that tolerating life without illusion is not possible and that we can only do our duty to tolerate life by giving up the illusion that life is tolerable.

Such is the double bind of war. Keeping these thoughts in mind, if we now turn to the psychic stresses elicited by climate change, the picture becomes even more complicated. In what follows, I would like to suggest that the complexity of the threats to the human psyche posed by climate change render it radically, inexorably, unthinkable. One of the reasons for this is that the phenomenon known as climate change is without a graspable, knowable object. The threats posed to the psyche are not reducible to anything that can be known or studied by science. Science can measure greenhouse gasses, changes in the temperature of the ocean, the destruction of coral reefs, emissions, changes in weather patterns, animal extinctions etc. And, thankfully, in some cases science can and will develop new technologies to counteract the harm done to the earth and its atmosphere. But however important and vital that knowledge and those reparative gestures might be, they do not and cannot take the measure of the impact of the real and psychic devastation that we are already living with – whether we know it or not – and that awaits us in the future. As Jacques Derrida points out in the quotation with which I began, the temporality of trauma comes from the future. Building upon Derrida’s insight, I want to suggest that the traumatic temporality of climate change unfolds as an unprogrammable future that bears within it the belated, unknowable and incalculable effects of past actions and inactions that are beyond repair.

In preparing these thoughts, I have been struggling with the fact that there is no word that adequately captures the precise dynamic entanglement of human/non-human agencies, temporal instability, incalculability and cascading effects that I am trying to describe. The umbrella term ‘climate change’ cannot account for the colossal scale, speed, scope, range and impact of the many interrelated and compounding consequences of the damages that have already been done and that are to come. I like the word ‘Ecocide’ because of its evocation of a primordial crime scene and for the way in which it conjures up a symbiotic reciprocal feedback loop whereby humans have destroyed the environmental conditions that now threaten the ongoing existence of humans. The term ecocide joins parricide, matricide, infanticide as delineating the anthropological contours of culture itself. The term ecocide also insinuates that the murder of the primal other is also a form of suicide. Ecocide is always also egocide.

Still, while this anthropocentric view of the global catastrophe has the advantage of attempting to hold humans accountable for human actions, it seems to me that it misses something essential about the crisis itself. If I ultimately choose to stick with the more prosaic term ‘climate change’ rather than the more mytho-poetically evocative term ecocide, it is because ecocide implicitly posits a scenario in which the ego remains endowed with too much consistency, agency and stability. As I see it, the term ecocide conjures up a conflict in which there is still the perceptible trace of a subject/object relation. The shadow of the ego falls too heavily over the eco. Ecocide still gives egos an object to mourn, whereas ‘climate’ challenges the very subject/object relation. The word ‘climate’ in the expression ‘climate change’ conveys the sense of determining the very conditions of the field in which events transpire while also remaining amorphous, unstable, fluid and inaccessible to precise description. ‘Climate change’ is a pleonasm because climate is change. ¹⁰ The problem now for humans is that that the acceleration of that change has undermined the fundamental possibility of establishing a relation to the external world as that world has become too unstable.

Whether used in the political realm or in terms of a so-called natural disasters (fires, floods, etc.) the term ‘unprecedented’ both implicitly always disavows any knowledge of why the particular event ruptures temporal and historical continuity and attempts to restore narrative continuity by replacing that event back into a linear, causal, teleological narrative. Climate change as I am invoking it here challenges all of these descriptive models and narrative structures.

The dizzying and vertiginous range of consequences resulting from climate change destabilize the interdependent interactions among virtually every system in the world by producing new configurations of contingency and causality that make the external world newly unknowable, unstable and unmanageable. Fires and floods produce homelessness, migration, disease, famine, etc. While this was always the case, the acceleration of changes causes an increasing proliferation of variables which then cascade into new catastrophes. The point here is not merely that each individual event is catastrophic, but rather that the catastrophes in question pose an unbearable threat to the psyche because they are increasingly unpredictable, unknowable, incalculable. Put another way, external reality can no longer provide an external bulwark to the psyche when the real world itself becomes ungrounded. According to Freud, time is directly bound to the reality principle. In destroying the very consistency of reality, climate change also unmoors temporality.

More problematically still, even if – by some stroke of magic – all nation states, corporations and individuals could be convinced to commit to collective action combating climate change tomorrow (and what a wonderful fairy tale that would be), those efforts – however urgently needed – would not, I believe, either succeed in repairing the damage that has been done to the planet or alleviate the psychic effects of that damage. The omnipresent specter of climate change and global warming cannot be processed by individual psyches because there is little – if anything – that individual people can do to stop the devastation that hovers on the horizon. While quotidian sanity requires that we deny the magnitude of that devastation, denial of reality only accelerates and exacerbates the very reality that it aims to deny.

In ‘On Transience’, another short essay written during the First World War, Freud conjures up a scenario of total annihilation of life on earth to make the point that from the perspective of the psyche, the actual prospect that the world might really come to an end does not in and of itself constitute a threat. ¹¹ He writes:

…a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration. (306)

In this scenario, Freud argues that we are able to contemplate the future destruction of the world without distress because that future eventuality has no reality or meaning for our present emotional life. But Freud also suggests that the capacity to remain indifferent to that doomsday vision requires that the event in question be radically external to us, beyond our control and unrelated to any specific desires or actions that we may have taken or failed to take in the past. Later in the same essay, Freud contrasts this psychic equanimity to the melancholia exhibited by his poet friend who is unable to enjoy beauty because it is doomed to fade. For Freud, the poet’s inability to take pleasure in the beauty of the present moment indicates that he is actually suffering from a pre-existing loss that was not mourned. The poet’s melancholic response signals that a work of mourning has not been done. If we turn now our attention back to climate change, the threat to the psyche manifests as anxiety as well as grief and denial. The prevalence of anxiety associated with climate change registers the traumatic return of disavowed and un-mourned past losses that were not consciously registered as events as they were occurring.

In common parlance, the term ‘climate change denial’ refers to a dominant group of conservative politicians, corporations and industries that refuse to admit the scientific evidence that establishes the factual basis of climate change. I am suggesting here that most popular current discourses about climate change are themselves not immune from climate change denial even if that denial takes a very different form and has other consequences. For instance, the very New York Times fact sheet that claims to give clear ‘answers’ to basic questions about climate change also participates in denying reality by implying that the ongoing traumatic effects of climate change can be mitigated and overcome via scientific rationality, information sharing and participation in existing political systems. In response to the question ‘are there any realistic solutions to the problem?’, the Times reports that:

society has put off action for so long that the risks are now severe, scientists say. But …it is not too late to act. The warming will slow to a potentially manageable pace only when human emissions are reduced to zero. The good news is that they are now falling in many countries as a result of programs like fuel-economy standards for cars, stricter building codes and emissions limits for power plants. But experts say the energy transition needs to speed up drastically to head off the worst effects of climate change. ¹²

Despite alluding to unspecified risks and rates of warming, the future is offered up like an ecstatic homeostatic nirvana principle that can only be attained when all human emissions are reduced to zero. The dubiously realistic goal of ‘zero emissions’ pervades almost all popular discussions of climate change solutions. It is hard to imagine what human life with ‘zero emissions’ would look like or how we would arrive at that point even if we are only talking about cars and buildings and power plants rather than the many other ways humans consume energy and excrete waste. The optimal scenario that is proposed here (attaining the nirvana principle of ‘zero emissions’) relies upon a basic act of dissociation: the nefarious effects of one specific polluting agent (car emissions) is disengaged from its position within the entire ecosystem of human and non-human agents. The narrative that this dissociation produces is one in which nothing else in the world is happening during the time that it will take for everyone to act together so that we can reduce our collective human emissions to zero. According to this narrative, time does not pass while we get our act together to act together to produce zero emissions in the name of the future. There are no catastrophic events in the meantime, no other surprises, nothing that would interrupt our aim at a projected future target of zero human emissions. The image of future survival invoked here looks a lot like living death.

Popular culture is full of human interest stories advocating personal responsibility for climate change. Significant swathes of (particularly privileged) individuals have eagerly embraced composting, recycling, alternative energy and transportation methods as they seek to do their part to combat climate change. However laudable these individual actions may be, they are primarily ways of warding off anxiety and managing feelings of guilt and helplessness. These individual acts almost invariably also bear the mark of wealth and privilege. People with money to burn buy electric cars and invest in solar panels. The poor and the disenfranchised, however, are always left in the position to clean up the shit or risk being shat out of the system as human leftovers. We don’t know much about the precise suffering that we are in for, but what we do know is that that suffering will not be borne equally by all.

The unbearable reality of climate change exposes the psyche to a primordial tear in reality itself. The inexorably real threat of climate change threatens the psyche’s ability to establish a rational relation to reality. There is no merely sane relation to climate change. It has made us crazy, and it will make us crazy. Denial is our only defense, but it is also our undoing. There is no outside to denial. There are only different forms of denial that will have different side-effects and unintended consequences. Some of the most ‘well-meaning’ forms of denial may turn out to be the most insidious as they attempt to rationalize, humanize and normalize actions and events that ought to force us to reckon with what we cannot bear to know.

For example, and by way of conclusion, it seems clear that the idolization of Greta Thunberg reinforces fantasies of individual sovereignty. Since bursting onto the international political stage in 2018 at the age of 15 with her ‘School Strike for Climate’, Greta Thunberg has become the iconic personification – one might even say the poster child – for climate activism. Her school strike galvanized a generation of young people. In numerous books, films, videos and interviews, Greta Thunberg has explained how her earlier childhood experiences prepared her to become the public voice for climate action. As she tells the story, when she was around 8 years old, two events determined her future path: she was bullied in school on account of her neurodiversity and she learned about the climate crisis and the collective lack of response to it. Greta then became very ill: she stopped eating and speaking. ¹³ It is clear that Greta’s public persona is very much that of a girl-child rather than a young woman. On the basis of descriptions provided by her mother in Our House in On Fire of the sudden disappearance of Greta’s symptoms, it seems that Greta’s climate activism functioned like a kind of a talking cure, providing her with access to speech.

But Greta does not simply speak, she speaks as a public thing. Her formerly silent mouth has become the oracular public mouthpiece for an entire generation. Her outsized public voice has become received as a political rallying cry, an object of collective adulation, fascination and/or contempt. While she has retreated from the public stage somewhat in recent times (for reasons that would merit close examination on another occasion), during the period between 2015 and 2021 she became the preeminent cultural emblem for the climate crisis. ¹⁴ Furthermore, it is significant that this girl-child/young woman has generally chosen to address herself to world leaders by explicitly claiming the position of a child who speaks in the name of the future that, as she puts it, has been stolen from all the children of the world. There is an uncanny conjunction between her oracular and stern public voice and her pre-pubescent feminine physical presence. Like Antigone, ¹⁵ to whom she has been often compared, Greta Thunberg’s authority derives from the way she defies social conventions and challenges the (mostly male) authority of world leaders. Like Antigone, her message has always been disarmingly simple: she stands for the truth and she speaks truth to power. Her famous ‘How dare you’ speech, which she gave at the September 23 United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City in 2019, exemplifies her rhetorical position: she rebukes the empowered world leaders for acting like selfish children who invest in ‘fairytales’ about economic growth rather than guaranteeing a viable future for the actual children of the world:

How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! You are failing us… But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. ¹⁶

Greta Thunberg sees what others cannot bear to see and says what needs saying to those in power. Restated in her own conceptual language, and as she herself proudly proclaims, her climate activism is in many ways a function of her neurodiversity. Diagnosed with Asperger’s, OCD and autism, she has credited her neurodiversity with being a ‘superpower’. Greta often likes to point out that it is that ‘superpower’ that renders her impervious to climate change denial and immune to self-serving hypocrisy. ¹⁷ Part of the mythology surrounding the celebration of this ‘superpower’ is the idea that her voice is a super-human, super-legal super-ego that belongs to the public sphere despite (or indeed perhaps even because) the fact that Greta herself is personally ill-equipped to live in the social world. If she speaks truth to power, it is because she is incapable of thinking or uttering anything else.

Put in different terms, her ‘superpower’ renders her uniquely suited to take on government superpowers. In this regard, it is no accident that the greatest impact of Greta’s activism was felt during the Trump years. Greta’s activism, and the fascination it produced, is curiously bound up with Trump era post-truth politics. She has been explicitly figured as the very incarnation of Anti-Trump. ¹⁸ Her asexual child-girl femininity would appear to be the opposite of his toxic masculinity. She, not he, was chosen to be Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ in 2019. ¹⁹ They went toe to toe with one another in Twitter squabbles. Where she speaks truth to power, he trumps truth with power. But however antithetical they most certainly are, the fascination they both generated partakes of the same cultural logic. Both voices are inscribed in climate change denial. Despite her own commitment to being the voice denouncing the denial of the climate crisis, the collection investment in her as a solution to the climate crisis bears the trace of a particularly familiar fantasy regarding individual action and personal sovereign power. ²⁰

The collective fantasy that the heroic actions of a virginal teenage girl will save the world because, like Antigone, she stands up to sovereign authority by speaking truth to power might feel good, but I am not sure exactly how the truth she embodies translates into tolerating life under climate change. Unlike other disasters and calamities that have affected humans (war, genocide, nuclear destruction, pandemics, despotism), climate change presents unique challenges to the human psyche as it engages traumatic temporality on a global scale. Humans are responsible for causing damage that humans cannot repair. What is done cannot be undone. This is a double position: we are simultaneously responsible for ongoing crimes against the primordial other (the earth), and rendered helpless by what we have done. Because it is already too late to prevent irreparable damage to the earth and to the ecosystems in which we live, the very recognition of climate tests the subject’s relation to both time and reality.

The super-rich are planning their exit strategies like there is no tomorrow.

While the rest of us starve, fight, and perish, they’re planning on moving to Mars.