Climate change breaks the distinction between past, present, and future- our claims aren’t the futurism they are looking for

(Richard, Politics@Leeds, Climate science, the politics of climate change and futures of IR, International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946365)

In the wake of the Special Report, the young activist Greta Thunberg and social movements like Extinction Rebellion emphasize that the temporal horizon of disaster is imminent (they use the language of ‘existential risk’), and that, accordingly, large-scale coordinated action is required now.13 As Thunberg memorably put it in March 2019 in front of the Davos elite, ‘We don’t want your hope. We don’t want you to be hopeful. We want you to panic and take action’.14 The second implication lies here (whether one agrees with some of the strategies of present-day environmental activism, or not). The long-term future of the planet exists already in our human and non-human present. Or, inversely and better, because of the stock of CO2eq in the atmosphere, our present is already the future. The point is well made by us returning to the above decrease this year in carbon emissions (8% on average). This decrease only reduces the average global carbon budget by 0.4 parts per million because of the stock of CO2eq already in the atmosphere.15 Now, it is precisely because this stock has a life-expectancy of 1000 years that a sustained strategy of carbon reduction and of negative carbon emissions is required. Climate change is, as a result, an immediate intergenerational phenomenon. This temporal complication of our present means two things in turn. The past responsibility of the largest emitters is about the present and the future. Past, present and future are brought together not through a human narrative offered by religion or national myth, myths that we know can motivate collective action on vast scales.16 Past, present and future are brought together through the scientific fact of climate change: through, that is, the material effect of human action on the environment. This bringing together of past, present and future is unprecedented because it is empirical, not normative. Human endeavour (simultaneously creative and destructive) has been marked in the last 1000 years by political teleology. According to this teleology, the future exists in the present in the specific normative sense that the present constitutes a means to a delimited future goal. The politico-religious narrative of Christianity has provided perhaps the strongest example of this temporal logic, just as the secularization of this narrative in Marxism and Liberalism provide the strongest examples in the temporal logic of modernity.17 Indeed, it is not wrong to say that the embedding of the future in the present constitutes one of the strongest characteristics of political ideology and is the reason why such ideologies can motivate people to effect change: structuring the present through the future makes this present emotionally resonant and directed. What is clearly particular about the climate embedding of the future in the present is that this embedding is empirical and non-human, not normative and human-focused. In terms of the overall concerns of this SI – where the aim is to think through varied types of human interconnections which include connections between the human and the non-human – the future present of climate change unmakes the modern (human) organization of the present, a present pregnant with a future that defines modern notions of progress, development and growth. This temporal dimension of climate change constitutes, accordingly, a radical material departure from human normative organizations of time, and this departure has important political consequences that I address in the next section.18