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Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2876641

2164-0041

Charles Derber,

Optimism, Hope, and Well-being

hope is crucial to most political activism, but when the situation is dire, watch out for the “hope industry.” It’s made up of institutions and people who send out messages of false hope, stoking collective ignorance, soothing consumers’ consciences, and revving up the climate change engine.In the age of climate change, false hope is everywhere. It takes two main forms: denial and necessary illusions.The denial message is spouted and funded by the core of the U.S. hope industry: the big energy companies and the Republican Party. Some peddlers of denial say climate change is not happening. Others acknowledge its existence but say humans did not cause it. And yet others within the corporate hope industry say climate change is real but deny its gravity, telling us that smart companies can solve the problem. Hey, no worries. Because the problem doesn’t exist or will resolve itself.According to polls, about 40 percent of Americans buy into this corporate false hope. The mass denial is devastating to real hope.Some liberals tend to believe that the problem can be solved within the existing economic and political system. The liberal false hope is that conventional politics can deal with the problem—or that personal changes in lifestyle (recycling, driving hybrids, going to farmer markets) will do the trick. Along with liberal citizens, self-proclaimed “environmentally friendly” companies—whether Exxon and Chevron or Bank of America and McDonalds—promote this denial. Hope-peddling corporations make money off their “greenwashing,” a word invented to describe the acts of companies that lie to persuade consumers that their products are environmentally safe. This goes beyond “clean coal” companies and oil corporations fracking for natural gas. A 2010 report called “The Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Edition” conducted by the environmental marketing agency TerraChoice showed that 95 percent of consumer products claiming to be green were lying or obfuscating in some way, and the annual Greenwash Academy Awards have exposed some of the worst offenders. Whole industries profit deceitfully on individuals’ efforts to live green.False hope also takes the form of “necessary illusions”—corporate-manufactured messages that justify corporate rule. Noam Chomsky has identified several of the necessary illusions in circulation within our society: the virtues of the market, the benign invisible hand of capitalism, the morality of American militarism, and American exceptionalism. In the context of climate change, these translate into the following false hopes:Many environmentalists join the corporate hope industry in believing that technological innovations—from solar panels and wind turbines to electric cars and bio-diesel fuels—will save the day. Technological change is certainly necessary to help heal the planet, but believing in a technological fix to a systemic crisis is magical thinking and false hope.Capitalism may have created some of the climate problem but by another trick of magical thinking, the hope industry argues it is also the only system certain to fix it. This necessary illusion rests on the reigning neoclassical economic view that self-correction is built into capitalist markets. Market theorists argue that if climate change creates the costs that environmentalists predict, fossil fuel sources will lose out in the market and the problem will be corrected naturally. Keynsians, meanwhile, argue that the necessary changes will follow from prodding by government regulatory and tax incentives.The hope industry doesn’t tell us that capitalism requires endless expansion of production and consumption in a finite world. Companies that don’t sell more than their competitors will lose market share and capital investment, and eventually be driven out of business. Capitalism “externalizes” the inevitable costs of more and more production, shifting the pollution burden down the road to future generations. This partly reflects the power of capitalist companies—including energy giants such as ExxonMobil, one of the most profitable companies in the world—to resist paying the costs themselves. It also reflects the inability of the market to accurately see the true costs, which—in the case of climate—are indirect, diffuse, and set to occur most powerfully beyond the time frame in which capitalist decision makers operate. To change the market’s blindness to these costs would require profound and long-term planning and public intervention in the market. In other words, capitalism can’t solve this problem because making capitalism responsive to the threat of climate change would require undoing the privatized wiring and the capitalist-class political power of capitalism itself.The idea that the climate problem will be solved in the future rather than in the present exonerates current generations from the genocide of the future generations they are creating. The necessary illusion is that we can carry on fine for decades and that if conditions worsen, people will respond to survive. The cruder version is: “Well, I’ll be dead when the shit hits the fan, so I don’t have to worry about it.” Like other false hopes, it is wrong because we are already suffering the extinction of thousands of species. Ice melts are already occurring that will inundate the 3 billion people living within 50 miles of a coast, and the fossil fuels we are merrily pumping into the atmosphere cannot be vacuumed out by future generations, who will suffer a horrible fate unless this generation acts now.All of these necessary illusions are false hopes resting ultimately on the ideology of American Exceptionalism. How could the best civilization in history destroy human civilization itself? It’s a concept that’s threatening to millions of Americans, and it is so threatening to corporate profits that it will never be treated by elites as anything but a necessary illusion.Hope requires exposing and discrediting the hope industry.First, we must acknowledge that the situation is systemic and grave. Shout the truth to the rooftops: climate change creates the greatest threat known to humanity, along with nuclear war, and we are already suffering the consequences. The 2014 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the most authoritative scientific climate statement, tells us that we are now warming at the fastest rate in history, and that prior IPCC reports have been too conservative in estimating present and future devastation.Second, we must recognize that politics is personal. Scientific truths must be told again and again, in a way that moves people by traveling from the brain to the gut. Millions of people who know the facts do not act, because they don’t feel either the fear or the hope in their gut. That happens only when they personalize the threat. If a doctor tells you that you have cancer, you will drop everything to heal yourself. Climate change means we have collective cancer and thus have to feel like we each have been told we have cancer. That grim truth will move millions into action—and it is the paradoxical road to hope.As you personalize the threat, you must personalize the change. I recently spent a weekend in a Vermont cottage of a friend that was completely off the grid. I enjoyed delicious local food, sitting next to a solar battery generator that ran the lamps and the laptops in the house and got its own energy from two small solar panels the size of a flat-screen TV. There was no refrigerator or running water, but most of the creature comforts I needed were there. I came away feeling hope that was based on the personal experience of a different lifestyle that seemed more attainable.Third, hope requires that we see climate change as a systemic problem that requires changing the system. This means we need a climate movement that is simultaneously a labor movement, a peace movement, and a civil rights movement. Corporate capitalism is just another name for climate change. That means the climate movement is just another name for the pursuit of social and economic justice. Only the 1 percent will be able, for a while, to buy security and the good life, moving to higher ground as the seas rise and climate changes accelerate. The environmental movement has no special claim on climate change since it is just as much an economic and peace and civil rights issue.Fortunately, justice movements are waking up to this. The peace movement, labor unions, women’s groups, faith communities, and student groups, joined by 350.org and other leading environmental groups, organized the astonishingly big and beautiful climate march in New York City on September 21, 2014, and 500,000 marched in solidarity across the world, from Paris to Melbourne. The next day, Occupy and climate activists committed civil disobedience on Wall Street—a crucial melding of justice movements. World leaders, including Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, called climate the world’s top priority the day after the march. The conservative World Bank announced it was coordinating seventy-three countries’ efforts to factor carbon costs into energy prices. And the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, filthy rich with oil revenues, proclaimed, astonishingly, that it was divesting from fossil fuel stocks as part of a global divestment movement.Fourth, we need to mainstream this movement of movements, using electoral politics and nonviolent direct action. Claiming he would put hard emission targets on the table at the 2015 Paris climate meeting, President Obama said in September 2014: “Our citizens keep marching, we cannot pretend we cannot hear them. We have to answer the call.” This could be pure rhetoric, but on my bus back to Boston from the march, we pledged to organize in our communities and colleges to force the president’s hand.Fortunately, the youthful millennial generation tends to see climate change as part of their personal reality. Corporate capitalism is not welcoming them as they enter adulthood, and they tend not to see America as exceptional or even fair. According to Pew and Rasmussen polls, half of American young people have a negative association to the word “capitalism,” and nearly 50 percent positively associate to “socialism,” hinting that millions of youth could support systemic change. Moreover, many millennials have expressed openness toward a less consumerist lifestyle, indicating that the focus on material goods stresses them out because of cost and competition for status.Fifth, we need to reframe our talk and walk, showing that climate solutions also help fix poverty, unemployment, infrastructure issues, and other key socioeconomic problems. We need to ditch wasteful material growth for growth in our education, health, public transit, arts, and community. We need to throw out mindless consumerism, let go of all our “stuff,” and instead seek enjoyment in good conversation, good food, and good company.We have hope when we feel that our climate activism is a way of overcoming our most important deficit—that of public goods, and especially of community and justice itself.