Wim Carton dissects the gore, gaslighting and chaotic consequences of fossil capitalism
Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode.
His book with Andreas Malm, The Long Heat: Climate Action When It's Too Late, is a study of the science and politics of geoengineering, carbon capture and "muscular" climate adaptation. The book offers what Wim calls an "event ethnography" of the people and organizations adopting tactics to fix the climate crisis, and the ways they end up fixing the status quo of climate breakdown through capitalist accumulation firmly in place. Carton and Malm learned in their research that functionaries are "very aware of the flaws and the problems" with their approach, but can't or won't abandon the assumption that the "solutions they've always believed in" will succeed, despite so much evidence that markets, private capital and the pursuit of profit are leading us into the slow violence of escalating disaster.
One of the core problems is technological optimism, or the dangerous persistence of a mechanistic worldview when it comes to the way the world works. Regardless of how necessary it will be to build resilience as we hurtle into the long heat, faith in climate adaptation is strengthening as the resolve for addressing the drivers of climate change weakens. We can't allow adaptation to "substitute for dealing with the real problem."
In this moment, too, we see the emergence of technologies like carbon capture and storage or geoengineering replacing and displacing the push for mitigation. Carton talks about the dark side of these technologies as forms of "reputation management" that enable further investment in fossil fuel infrastructure.
The planet doesn't care if we ignore its limits. If we create an entirely new climate, we are playing with fire. Allowing the ruling classes to "look away from the suffering that is being rained down, literally, on people in Gaza, Iran and much of the Global South" will only deepen the coldness that characterizes our current age. In opposition, we need a revolutionary alternative that holds power to account, to rage against the deadly incrementalism that defers action and renders the future unlivable. In Wim's words, crises always expose "cracks in the system," and right now, in the context of an imperial war sowing chaos in the site of some of the most rapacious fossil fuel extraction, the "obvious solution is to go full-on renewable and reduce dependence" on this toxic sludge.
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