Categories
Australia Energy

May 29, 1992- ANAO says it will look at DPIE’s energy management programme

I know, I know, hardly scintillating!

Thirty five years ago, on this day, May 29th, 1992,

“On 29 May 1992, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) announced its intention to undertake an efficiency audit of DPIE’s energy management program. The audit was to consider the potential for improvement in the administration of the program and in the reporting of program performance. The auditors focussed on the administration of the interim greenhouse gas response initiatives with a view to contributing to efficiencies in the implementation of the NGRS’”

House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts EFFECTIVENESS OF THE IMPLEMENTATION review of Audit Report No. 32 1992-93—an efficiency audit of the Implementation of an Interim Greenhouse Response

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 356ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was various “greenhouse” responses had been proposed. Most had been killed off in the committees and left to die by the wayside. Those that had survived the hazing and salami slicing needed to be looked at for “value for money” etc.

What I think we can learn from this is that you can’t teach an elephant to tapdance.

What happened next  On this particularly? I don’t know. But have a look at Australia’s response to climate change and tell me it hasn’t been catastrophically suicidal. Go on.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 29, 1968 – UN body says “let’s have a conference, maybe?”- 

May 29, 1969 – “A Chemist Thinks about the Future” #Keeling #KeelingCurve

May 29, 2007 “Climate Clever” ad campaign in attempt to save John Howard – All Our Yesterdays

Categories
Australia

May 29, 1989- “We will all be flooded”

Thirty six years ago, on this day, May 9th, 1989 the Canberra Times pointed to sea level rise as a thing.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that by mid 1989 you could not move but for documentaries, newspaper articles, magazine articles about the Greenhouse Effect, at least in Australia. This was part of that.

What I think we can learn from this is that we got all the warnings we needed.But “we” – civil society – was never able to overcome its own inertia and fears, the resistance of the state and the corporates. Not even able to really try, unless you count manifestos, marches and other meaningless maunderings in the absence of sustained, iterative, reflective praxis – and who has the mental, financial, emotional or temporal bandwidth for any of that? 

What happened next. The August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein knocked the issue of The Environment from its perch (something had to – journalists and readers were getting bored!). It turns out we cannot easily – in the words of Donna Haraway – “stay with the trouble.” And then the denial campaigns properly kicked in and everyone settled into a generations-long game of kayfabe, of pretend. Eventually though, by the late 2010s onwards, the consequences of previous failure began to catch up with us. Mephistopheles was knocking on the door, waiting to collect…

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 9, 1959 – “Science News” predicts 25% increase of C02 by end of century (Bert Bolin’s guesstimate) – All Our Yesterdays

May 9, 2009 – Another white flag goes up on the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”

May 9, 2016 – South Australia’s last coal-plant shuts down 

Categories
Podcasts

May 28, 2025 – signs of the times

You can listen to this here (NB Terrible Sound Quality – if/when I do actual podcasting I will have to get some proper kit!)

May 28, 2025, with the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 430ppm, up from 315ppm in 1958.

Three pieces of news today tell you everything you need to know about the planet and the prospects for our species.  Taking them in turn – physical, government-capital and “resistance”.

The physical news first. 

As Madeline Cuff, writing for the New Scientist reports

The world could see its first year of warming above 2°C by the end of the decade, leading climate scientists have warned for the first time…. The chances of seeing a year above 2°C of warming are still very slim, with the WMO/Met Office team estimating the probability at 1 per cent. 

She quotes Leon Hermanson of the Met Office as saying “It’s exceptionally unlikely, but it could happen”

It was the WMO – the World Meteorological Organisation that coordinated the use of satellites and other forms of data collection. In the mid1970s it was a key node in international cooperation and discussion of carbon dioxide build-up. The WMO hosted the First World Climate Conference in February 1979. It  could and should have been a turning point in the way politicians thought about atmospheric pollution.  Almost ten years later it was – along with the United Nations Environment Program – co-founder of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

One of life’s mild coincidences is that 35 years ago today Working Group 1 of the IPCC released its first report on the science of climate change.

The government capital nexus

To the surprise of precisely no-one, in Australia, the Federal Labor government led by Anthony Albanese has said yes to climate chaos, by granting an extension to Woodside’s North West Shelf project. As per the Australia Institute, this is a disaster on five fronts.

The ALP was recently returned to office in Australia, with the overt climate denialists of the Coalition punished by voters. However, given decisions like these, one cannot but be reminded of the mournful closing lines of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – so spoilers – 

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Resistance

Thirteen years ago the UK commentator George Monbiot asked the right question.  In an article called “The Mendacity of Hope” he wrote

“So this is the great question of our age: where is everyone? The monster social movements of the 19th century and first 80 years of the 20th have gone, and nothing has replaced them. Those of us who still contest unwarranted power find our footsteps echoing through cavernous halls once thronged by multitudes“

In late 2018 a new group – “Extinction Rebellion” – made a splash with a declaration of rebellion in Parliament Square in London and then the occupation of five bridges across the Thames. A “rebellion “in London in April 2019 gained a lot of press attention, but a follow-up in October 2019 was less successful and the wheels were wobbling, if not yet actually coming off. 2020 saw COVID and also offshoots from XR – a “Pink Party”, Insulate Britain and then, in 2022, “Just Stop Oil.” High profile arrestable actions followed, as did media smears and police and security service activity.  Many JSO activists have gone to jail. JSO has recently announced it is ceasing its activity. However, the past is not even the past. 

As the BBC’s Laura O’Neill reports

“Four Just Stop Oil protesters who were planning to glue themselves to the taxiway at Manchester Airport have been jailed.

Officers arrested Indigo Rumbelow, Margaret Reid, Leanorah Ward and Daniel Knorr as they were making their way to the airport on 4 August 2024.

They were equipped with heavy-duty bolt-cutters, angle grinders, glue, sand, Just Stop Oil high-visibility vests and a leaflet containing instructions to follow when interacting with police.

All four were found guilty of conspiracy to intentionally cause a public nuisance and jailed at Manchester Minshull Crown Court for between 18 and 30 months. Additionally, they were each fined £2,000.

“

So what can we expect?

We can expect more temperature records to fall. It would be no surprise to me at all to see us breach two degrees by 2030, though I suspect that won’t actually happen until, say 2035.  What does this mean? It means that the second half of the twenty-first century will make the first half of the twentieth look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding. 

We can expect more extractive capitalism projects to be given approval by supine/captured governments (though one should resist the illusions of a golden age -elected and unelected policymakers are almost always and everywhere mere meat puppets for whoever has the most money. It can be more complicated than that, but it usually isn’t.)

And given that the consequences of our species’ failure to act on scientists’ warnings are clear to all but those most determined to deny reality, we can expect more resistance.

The failure, over the last thirty five years of citizens in the West – with freedom of speech, assembly and information – to build strong, determined and resilient social movements and civil society organisations is a fascinating puzzle. Or perhaps a mundane puzzle, made fascinating by the consequences of the failure.  

In any case, despite the jailings, expect  more resistance at some point – which is not to say that that resistance will be any more effective than what has gone on these last thirty six years, as annual carbon dioxide emissions went up by almost 70 per cent and the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide rose from roughly 350 parts per million to the current level of 430ppm.

Categories
Incumbent strategies

May 27, 2025 – Infantilising critics

Inspired by the brilliant “Letters from an American” podcast by Professor Heather Cox Richardson, I bashed out this below.

May 27, 2025, with atmospheric carbon dioxide at roughly 430.36ppm,  up from 315ppm in 1958.

Speaking at the Australian gas industry’s annual conference in Brisbane the CEO of energy giant Woodside, Meg O’Neill, tried to stiffen the spines of her fellow fossil fuel activists by attacking young people who were taking what she called an ideological stand against fossil fuels. As Graham Readfearn of the Guardian Australia reports, she suggested the young  are hypocrites for ordering cheap online consumer goods “without any sort of recognition of the energy and carbon impact of their actions”.

I want to give two bits of context – first historical about the gas industry’s response to climate, and secondly about the nature of these trade events.

It was not always like this. In the late 1980s, when the Greenhouse Effect” – which we now call climate change – was first a hot political issue, the Australian Gas industry had an initial interest in the greenhouse effect in supplanting coal. This continued in the late 1990s when the Australian Gas Association – the peak trade body at the time, was led by one Bill Nagle, who saw gas as “cleaner than coal.” He broke with the Australian Industry Greenhouse network. Coal interests were not impressed at the show of disunity. As described in the 2007 book High and Dry by Guy Pearse  Nagle was warned by a senior Minerals Council figure

“You know, you pursue this hard line and you scratch the coal industry too much harder and they will come out and we will start talking about nitrous oxide emissions, methane, or pipe leakages…Don’t do it, because if you do it we’ll have a big brawl between the energy industries in this country in the public arena which won’t do anybody any good.”

Nagle’s efforts to reorient the Australian Gas Association failed.

On these sort of conferences – they act  as a watering hole for lobbyists to rub shoulders with ministers, for trial balloons to be flown, and carefully honed publicity slogans to begin their journey to “common sense” – repeated by journalists, politicians and other “thought leaders.”.

The Australian Coal Association, now defunct, used to run bi-annual conferences. In 1990, much of the talk was given over to the greenhouse effect – including speakers saying it wasn’t real – and what might be done to blameshift or even take actual technical steps.  Conferences like these also allow inadequate and/or hasbeen journalists the chance to feel important by their proximity to power and wealth, and provides cheap (pre-written) copy. So it’s a win win all around, except for the – checks notes – planet.

By the way, for more details about the gas industry, you can check out Royce Kermelovs’ recent book  Slick and various reports of The Australia Institute on how much – or little – tax the gas giants pay, and who benefits. 

What is the incumbent strategy on display

What O’Neill said is a very well established rhetorical technique. This process of infantilizing critics, ignoring the strongest or most socially powerful critics and instead aiming fire at children, is clever, devious and cynical.

By framing climate change as an issue that young people with their silly views and silly consumer habits are concerned with, rather than something scientists have been studying and warning about for 35 years, tat the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the late Pope Francis and countless others have screamed themselves hoarse over. O’Neill is setting up a straw man and knocking it down. 

O’Neil is ducking and weaving away from the substantive issues that actual adults would need to confront, because she has nothing else if Woodside is to continue making profits, it will have to keep extracting selling fossil fuels that will be burnt and the carbon dioxide From those long molecules of gas will be released into the atmosphere, trapping heat. She knows this, and she also knows that carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal is frankly, “solution” even if it were to work, which it has not so far.

Ultimately, O’Neill is deploying a version of what I call  the “hypocrite/zealot” trap. If a critic benefits from fossil fuels they can be dismissed as a hypocrite. If they are vegan who never flies or drives, they can be dismissed as a zealot. 

What are the earliest/clearest examples of this incumbent strategy being deployed, either on climate or in another context?

This trivialization of opponents and this willful ignorance is not new. Indeed, it pre-dates the battles over climate and environment, as laid out in Oreskes and Conway’s magisterial 2010 work “Merchants of Doubt,“

 If you want to look at how incumbent trade associations and supporters of what are now regarded as horrific practices – slavery, child labour etc  defend themselves –  I would strongly recommend ES Turner s 1950 book Roads to Ruin: A Shocking History of Social Progress.

How has this incumbent strategy been challenged/delayed/defeated in the past?

So, how to respond? How does one challenge these techniques? Well, simply naming them is a start.   By explaining, in clear, vivid and non-technical terms what O’Neill and others are doing, it makes it riskier for her and her colleagues to repeat the same trick again. But that can’t come from the young, because it will look like special pleading. This push back has to come from adults, and preferably ones with scientific and business credentials.

What power/forces would be needed to combat/move this incumbent strategy to the “too costly” or “not effective” space?  

There is a new-ish expression doing the rounds – “every accusation is a confession.”  While I don’t think that is always true, I do think it holds in this case. On some level, presumably, O’Neill knows what she is doing. She is the child here, refusing to accept realities that would force her to stop doing what she wants. Those she accuses of being children, they are the adults. 

What is required is a properly grown-up conversation about where we find ourselves – at 430ppm and rising fast, Why we are here, why almost 40 years of scientific and political concern about climate change has in no meaningful way worked. That would require independent media, brave professionals and brave professional bodies, social movements and political parties that were not made up of -mostly-  meatpuppets for extraction.

What makes the creation/maintenance/extension of that power/that adaptation more difficult.

Look, itt seems unlikely, given the last 40 years, that we are going to start being grown up now, when the social inducements to fantasies of technosalvation and explicit and implicit denial become stronger and stronger.

But who knows, I could be wrong.

Categories
Australia IPCC

 May 28, 1990 – “Global Warming is really here” (IPCC First Assessment Report)

Thirty five years ago, on this day, May 28th, 1990, the Canberra Times reports on the report of Working Group 1 (the science bit) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Mussared, D. 1990. Global warming is really here: UN.  Canberra Times, May 28, page 11

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the IPCC had been agreed in 1988, with pressure from the United States Government, which was keen to avoid a repeat of the ozone issue, where uncontrollable scientists had “bounced” (in the perception of politicians and state functionaries) governments into action. It was not a precedent they wanted reinforced, so the IPCC was set up to head off things like the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases….

The IPCC was asked to produce reports in November 1988 and did so in record time. The Working Group 1 report was presented to Thatcher’s cabinet by John Houghton, head of the Met Office and head of Working Group 1.

What I think we can learn from this. The politicians were briefed. It is not a question of whether they knew enough. They did.

What happened next. The negotiations for a climate treaty were deformed by resistance from the United States, the Gulf states and then Australia. No targets and timetables were set for emissions reductions by rich countries. The IPCC sank into a routine of producing special reports as requested and assessment reports on a five or seven year cycle.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 28, 1954 – Will we control the weather?!

May 28, 1956 – Time Magazine reports on “One Big Greenhouse”

May 28, 1969 – “Ecology and Politics in America” teach-in, Berkeley

May 28, 1982 – “International Conference on Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Plant Productivity”  – All Our Yesterdays

Categories
United States of America

May 27, 1927 – Ford ceases to produce the Model-T

Ninety eight years ago, on this day, May 27th, 1927, the Ford Motor Company ceases manufacture of the Ford Model T and begins to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.

For more info, read this below from someone who has had a couple (cough, cough) of letters published in the pink’un.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 306ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that the American economy was booming. Jazz Age, Prohibition, Gatsby etc etc.  Could the good times EVER end?

What I think we can learn from this is that the choices we are given – for “positional goods” – that allow us to demonstrate (to ourselves as much as others) our “individuality” and our “freedom” are, um corporate creations.

Is there something between this and dungeons like East Germany? I don’t know. Probably there was. But now? It’s not clear to me at all.

What happened next  The marketing of trivial differences to feed (and create) people’s insecurities was ramped up and up. The emissions went up. The concentrations went up. The Great Acceleration happened…

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 27, 1971 – Australia gets a Minister of the Environment 

May 27, 1973 – World Council of Churches wrings its hands

May 27, 1996 – Not just a river in Egypt – denial in #Australia, organised, ramifying…

Categories
United States of America

May 26, 1978 – “Advisory Group on Climate” meeting

Forty eight years ago, on this day, May 26th, 1978,

ADVISORY GROUP ON CLIMATE MEETING, MAY 26, 1978 AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 335ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was

Well, to quote from Joshua Howe

“In the mid-1970s, the largest and most inclusive of America’s science advocacy organizations, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), included climate change as a potential subject of focus as it began to consider new directions for the coming decade. In 1978, the AAAS convened an Advisory Group on Climate. The committee comprised researchers from a variety of disciplines associated with climate questions, including, among others, Roger Revelle, leading agronomist and later critic of consensus views on global warming Sylvan Wittwer, Robert White of the National Academy of Sciences Climate Research Board, Science editor-in-chief Philip Abelson, and California…”

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, and PAUL S. SUTTER. “ADVISORY GROUP ON CLIMATE MEETING, MAY 26, 1978.” Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past, edited by JOSHUA P. HOWE, University of Washington Press, 2017, pp. 128–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnkd5.25. Accessed 15 May 2025.

What I think we can learn from this

It is almost fifty years since we had smart people sitting around nutting out the implications of this issue. That may give you pause to consider how that strategy has worked out, as strategies go…

What happened next

They produced their report. Other committees of Learned Gentlemen (and less frequently Gentlewomen)  produced reports. The reports piled up.

As per this article from The Onion.

The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change …

The Onion

https://theonion.com › Latest

1 Apr 2016 — ‘The Time To Act Is Now,’ Says Yellowing Climate Change Report Sitting In University Archive … The Onion. Privacy Polic

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 26, 1990 – Times front page about Thatcher going for stabilisation target – All Our Yesterdays

May 26, 1993 – more “green jobs” mush

May 26, 1994 – Australian #climate stance “will become increasingly devoid of substance” says Liberal politician. Oh yes

Categories
United States of America

May 25, 1962- JFK speaks to a Conservation conference 

Sixty three years ago, on this day, May 25th, 1962, John Fitzgerald Kennedy took time away from shagging anything that moved and gave a speech –

Secretary Udall, Members of the Senate and the House, Governors, Secretary Stahr, ladies and gentlemen:

I am too late to welcome you to this Conference which has been going on now for 2 days, and I know that I am in no position to congratulate you upon completing the work because I think that this Conference is only a step forward in a long journey which began, fortunately, many years ago and which will continue throughout our lives.

Continues here

https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkwhp-1962-05-25-a#?image_identifier=JFKWHP-AR7268-C

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 318ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that various people “in the know” were getting nervous about the impacts of technology and growth (population, consumerism). There’d been various spills, clearcutting etc. The Conservation Foundation was producing reports etc etc. I don’t know if anyone had seen Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was about to appear in three issues of the New Yorker.

What I think we can learn from this is that, as per Sven Lindqvist, it is not knowledge we lack, but courage.

What happened next

JFK asked for – and got – a report on Carson’s book.

The climate stuff was just then coming onto the radar.  Within a couple of years, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, would include mention of it in his special message to Congress on pollution.

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 25, 1953 – “I read about them in Time Magazine” (Gilbert Plass’s greenhouse warning

May 25, 1990 – Thatcher opens Hadley Centre

May 25, 1992 Keating Cabinet discusses Rio – All Our Yesterdays

May 25 – Interview with Ben King – of #climate, education and the need for tubas

May 25, 2011 – Aussie #climate scientist smeared rather than engaged. Plus ca change…

Categories
Activism Fafocene

Affect and the Fafocene: kayfabe, hypernormalisation and Leonard Cohen

You and I – and everyone we know, everyone and everything on the planet – are living in the Fafocene. A full explanation can be found here, but the short version is this: we are near the beginning of the Age of Consequences, where our failure to heed the warnings of scientists and public intellectuals in the 1940s (here)  and especially the late 1960s and early 1970s (for example – Ritchie Calder “Hell Upon Earth, “November 23 1968) that we will would push beyond the Limits to Growth (see podcast here)  starts to look like a stupid decision or set of stupid decisions.

“We” were warned. We didn’t take action. More specifically, we didn’t sustain organisations and institutions of dissent that could cope with inertia, despair and the counter-actions of corporations trade associations, states, bureaucracies, political parties, junktanks etc. So the assholes of senseless extraction got to kick into open goals, while kicking those who put their bodies on the gear in the head and laughing all the way to the bank.

And now, the things that we were warned about are coming to pass. Oops, it seems like “we” are planet trashing surrender monkeys (1).

In this post, I want to talk about what it feels like to be living in the Fafoscene. I know lots of other people feel the same way and have articulated it better than I will. If you are aware of really good summations of this feeling, please let me know, and I’ll add them to the reading list at the bottom. 

I could fill paragraphs with synonyms for rage, anger, fear, self-disgust, self recrimination, recrimination at being so narcissistic as the world boils, fear, listlessness, bedrotting,  anomie, hopelessness, etc, but these words don’t really work – they describe, but they do not capture the overwhelming sense of futility and listlessness (2) as the insects vanish, with the birds following and the humans not so far down the great chain of Un-being (3).

Btw, affect is distinct from emotion, but for that you need to go to footnote (4). 

Part of this is that we have access to so much information now – we are all at risk of becoming part of the scrolletariat. It’s often been commented that the assault on the people of Gaza is the first genocide to be live-streamed. Perhaps in a similar way that the attack on Vietnam in the 1960s was the first one to end up on Americans television screens, until the war machine “lost Cronkite.”

But the thing is, it’s not just these individual acts of extreme, “kinetic” fast violence. It’s the slow violence. It’s the everyday operating of the system. As per this Onion article, “Millions of Barrels of Oil safely reach port in major environmental disaster as oil tanker”.

And as I used to say to an academic friend, you can walk into any decent bookshop (this is 25 years ago), and within half an hour, come out with a stack of books that tell you pretty well how the world works, naming some of the names and many of the mechanisms. 

This isn’t like the Soviet Union, where you had to use allusions, metaphors, silences, etc (5) . The information is there hiding in plain sight, kinda like Poe’s purloined letter.

In the words of Leonard Cohen, who we’ll come back to, “everybody knows”. 

Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows (Audio)

And this is where two related terms, one I’ve known for a while, and one only just discovered, come into play. And these are kayfabe and hypernormalisation. 

Kayfabe is the agreed fantasy script around professional wrestling where the personas and the personal lives of the wrestlers kind of mingle and overlap, all palimpsestian. It’s pretend, But very rarely does the fourth wall get broken, because everyone is invested in keeping the show on the road.

Hyper normalisation is a term I only just learned. And well, here’s the Wikipedia grab, which, as far as I know, is accurate. (I should hopefully read the book at some point.) 

The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation

So where have I gone with all this? Well, notice, nowhere. So far, “everybody knows the deal is rotten, Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows.” 

So a chunk of the strain of living in the Fafocene, for anyone who is even a little bit awake (or, dare I say, ‘woke’) is the cost of knowing that and having to confront (or choosing NOT to confront) the illusions. Knowing and not acting costs you. “Acting” is never enough and that costs you. Knowing and trying not to know – or act like you don’t know – that costs you too. Bateson’s double-bind, kinda sorta(6).

Which illusions? Not just the obvious ones, about democracy reduced to occasional elections, but the deeper myths. The deepest, I think is “the truth will set you free” one, as per John 8:32  “Educated” –  which seems for the most part to mean indoctrinated – people in the West have this in spades. It’s that touching – but not so much anymore – unspoken but fiercely defended faith in democracy and transparency. 

One of the shocks for them, especially since about 2016 with the first Trump administration, is that truth, decency, (as they see it), transparency, honesty, fact-checking and all the paraphernalia don’t actually count for that much, even in the “civilised” West. 

We’re back to straight power concepts, and that offends people’s self image. It offends their sense-making, it offends their sense of power. It’s not that the world is not intelligible. It’s just that if you put your intelligence to the test, you can make it intelligible, but the lessons you learn about power, about violence in all its forms – slow, fast, psychic, physical, intellectual, cognitive, affective, whatever – are not stories we want to hear, stories we like to believe about ourselves.

And that, I suspect, is what leaves people disconsolate or despairing or worse. 

What do you think? Am I onto anything? Let me know.

Reading suggestions

Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza (though the publisher’s didn’t provide an index – but I did)

 As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch – powerless. What is it doing to us as a society? | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian

Update May 25 2025 – have just been alerted to this fantastic article, which went up on Thursday 22nd…

Footnotes 

  1. This has already been the age of consequences for many, many other species. And of course, Western progress has had some pretty dramatic consequences for inhabitants of the New World and everywhere else. 
  2. “We have been here before, I know – blah blah Robert Musil, Georg Simmel blah blah
  3. Quite proud of that one!
  4. So see this – “Affect is your basic sense of feeling, ranging from unpleasant to pleasant (called valence), and from idle to activated (called arousal). Emotion is a much more complex mental construction.

“Many scientists use the word “affect” when really they mean emotion. They’re trying to talk about emotion cautiously, in a non-partisan way, without taking sides in any debate. As a result, in the science of emotion, the word “affect” can sometimes mean anything emotional. This is unfortunate, because affect is not specific to emotion; it is a feature of consciousness. Affect occurs in every moment (whether you’re aware of it or not) because interoception occurs in every moment.

“Conversely, sometimes scientists use the word “emotion” when really they mean affect. For example, scientists who study how people remember pleasant and unpleasant events sometimes describe what they study as “emotional memory,” but “pleasant” vs. “unpleasant” is a distinction of affect; the findings really reveal how people remember instances of intense valence and arousal (i.e., affect)….”.

  1. I remember talking in 1992 to an Ostie who was trying to explain this to me, and I just kind of couldn’t “get it.”
  2. Gregory Bateson – under-rated thinker. See also stuff by Erving Goffman, about stigma maintenance. Those who Know are stigmatised, and have to manage their identities…
Categories
Vatican City

May 24, 2015 – Is the Pope an environmentalist? Why yes, yes he is.

Ten years ago today, May 24th 2015, the Pope weighs in to the climate debate

Laudato si’ (24 May 2015) | Francis

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 401ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been Pope since March 2013. The Paris COP, the latest “last chance to save the world” conference was coming up in November.  

What I think we can learn from this is that everyone knew, was warned. And here we are.

What happened next. The Pope kept banging on about it, right up to his end. The new Pope will probably do the same. There is, however, such a thing as “too late.”

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Also on this day: 

May 24, 1953 – NYT on “How industry may change climate” – All Our Yesterdays

May 24, 2000- Australian denialist nutjobs have nutjob jamboree

May 24, 2004 – “The Day After Tomorrow” released – All Our Yesterdays

May 24, 2007 – James Hansen ponders whether scientists can be too cautious and quiet (or, indeed “reticent”)