MEDIA NARRATIVES
Climate, Covid & Wishful Thinking
Two sides, same coin
The challenges presented by climate chaos and the Covid-19 pandemic have both elicited cultural responses that superficially appear to be opposed to one another, but that end up working hand-in-hand to bolster a status quo that’s intrinsically harmful to everyone. Both succeed by appealing to wishful thinking.
In the case of anthropogenic climate chaos, the two clusters are centered around denialism and what we could call technophilia or perhaps techno-hopium. Climate chaos results from industrial-scaled agricultural civilization, so seriously addressing it would any would entail significantly changing that system, and — if we’re going to be honest — ultimately phasing it out. Avoiding such change is the shared motivation of both parties, so Team Denial shrilly insists that climate chaos is not real, or if real is “natural” rather than “man-made,” so there’s nothing we have to change about how we live. Team Technophile smugly assures us that it is real, but that “green energy” (so-called “renewables” like solar, wind & hydro) will solve the problem, so… there’s nothing we have to change about how we live.
In both cases, it’s wishful thinking: the former insist there’s no problem to solve, and the latter that science alone can do it.