These violent delights have violent ends. So it’s a bit heavy today. That said, in our interview with author Hanna E. Morris we do try to keep it a bit lighter.
The imagery we use, the stories we tell, especially the ones we get caught up in without even realising why — have a lot more power than we often consider. And when we see them wielded so crudely, they’re easy to dismiss. But it’s worth noting that there’s a massive asymmetry between people who consciously work those narratives and those who don’t.
People working on climate, at least in my experience, stereotypically have displayed a belief that if you simply show people the facts they will act in their own self-interest, even if the potential suffering of others doesn’t move them. If - as Covering Climate Now’s 89% campaign argues - surely if we see that the vast majority overwhelmingly recognise the need to combat climate change, that will move policy, investment, and votes in the right direction. To do otherwise would be irrational, right?1
But some other people - often highly paid and skilled - working to stop or slow that effort, are playing a different game entirely.
As observers like Naomi Oreskes have documented for decades, a certain “heterodox” science type can find it quite profitable to do some sophistic sleight-of-hand to move the goalposts, finding reasons why it’s simply not necessary to “risk” changing things. The costs for change are concrete, but the benefits of change are harder to quantify. So do nothing for as long as possible. But still, these rely on appeals to reason.
Amy Westervelt has spent much of her career reporting on how those types were made profitable (or at least influential) by well-thought out campaigns to amplify doubts about the science and those advocating for it. But that influence box has plenty of other tools in it. Going back to Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, through WW2 propagandists on both sides to Mad Men to millennial spin doctors, practitioners had plenty of ways to shape public opinion and action that rely on appeals to emotion and symbols.
And as the evidence (and the lived experience of climate effects) mounted, the efficacy of tactics to deny climate change or fuzzy up the facts or just bamboozle people hit a wall. For a few years, accelerating following the Paris Agreement and subsequent waves of protest like the school strikes led by Greta Thunberg or mass mobilisations via Extinction Rebellion, something like consensus broke out among elites. Lining up behind Net Zero came bankers rallied by Mark Carney, big businesses who saw reputational advantage in pledging their support, even parts of the fossil fuel industry itself. A wide political agreement on the need to avoid catastrophe achieved, in hindsight, remarkable degrees of consensus - especially in the UK and Europe.
Yet, starting at least as early as 2016, something else was brewing. Brexit, Trump, name your local factor, fed into a feeling of “total crisis” - the idea that real end-of-civilisation stuff might be around the corner, but we could still prevent it, might scare people straight.
It looked like that might be how it played out. Trump’s announced decision to quit the Paris Agreement in 2017 was telegraphed as controversial even amongst his own inner circle. Reactions to it accelerated a desire to get back to consensus.
But at the same time, others saw an opportunity. What if, instead of the End Times/Apocalypse being a thing we must avoid - it came to be seen as inevitable. A final, twilight struggle in which some wondrous/genius visionary sages would guide a worthy elect few to be saved from the fire and flood. Or that the supposed climate crisis was really a mask for the deeper potential crisis of deracinated modernity devoid of meaning.
Globally, it’s the story of endless growth and material progress. In the American context, it plays out as “Manifest Destiny”. And anyone who stands in the way of that salvation is an Enemy, an Other, who are subject to unlimited force to stop.
Hanna E. Morris started seeing some of this play out in Berkeley 15 years ago during the Occupy Movement. Like me she had a ringside seat here in the UK for the Brexit “we’ve had enough of experts” vote shot, followed by the Trump chaser back in the US just a few months later. And she crystallised her thoughts into a PhD thesis at U Penn, which has been reworked into her new book - Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power. I was super-excited to get her on the show and the chat is - perversely - even more timely than I thought when we started recording. When we finished recording I found out about the murder of Charlie Kirk and saw the online Apocalypse rhetoric off the scale.
Her work is, no pun intended, a Revelation2 and her work seems to promise her a place alongside Oreskes and Westervelt as one of the keenest minds helping to make sense of what we’re seeing.
As she painstakingly demonstrates, that Apocalyptic framing has two effects:
Climate journalism3, with its efflorescence of 2019-2023, found itself reaching for that narrative of avoiding the Apocalypse through a very centrist and nostalgic view of progress. Especially in the US, triumphant narratives of a return of the grownups to save the planet through tech and capitalism animated coverage (and were hoped to be advertiser-friendly into the bargain). Inflation Reduction Act moderate/centrist/good, Green New Deal radical/extreme/bad.
Less savoury actors, with an appreciation for the power of grand narrative and mythos and faith that more normie types find embarrassing to even think about, gradually came to see the Apocalyptic framing (with its Manifest Destiny escape clause - at least for the elect, pity about the damned) as a way of justifying an explicit return to old, hierarchical, centralised, patriarchal forms of power.
The first set of people are charitably thought of as unwitting in how they wind up breaking up . I’ve certainly been in that camp now and then - and was relieved to be let slightly off the hook by Morris in our chat.
The second set are a very different kettle of fish. Morris’ contribution to understanding our current moment is to pull back the curtain on what is not an accident - apocalypse framing, leveraging real-world evidence of that looming threat whether it be in political assassination or fire and flood or climate migrants, is being consciously deployed to pull politics and discourse in a direction that ends in dissent.
On the more esoteric end of that second group where you’ll find people like Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Curtis Yarvin - cerebrally kicking around Rene Gìrard4 and Patrick Dineen and West Coast Straussians. On the thug end you can find Stephen Miller and Trump, with their groyper Chipocalypse Now/Pentagon-produced Venezuelan immigrant boat snuff video/Alligator Alcatraz/let’s rough up some Korean battery factory worker stuff. Somewhere in the middle you can find things like Senator Eric Schmitt speaking at the Thiel-founded/funded National Conservative conference, using “destiny” 7 times in a 20-minute speech that America’s most astute observers immediate recognised as an anti-Gettysburg Address.
All of whom seem determined to prove Morris’s points, over and over and over again.
If this sounds a bit familiar, it’s reminded me of Stephen Markley’s crucial novel, The Deluge. Like Markley, Morris is a bit freaked out that the world seems determined to follow her warning as a script.
I’d love to tell you our chat is a laugh riot from beginning to end, but she’s a great listen as well as a great read. Do check it out and tell us what you think.
At the risk of being cancelled we decided to keep in the outro music on the episode, in honour of the Sen. Eric Schmitt speech that probably sounded better in the original German. Enjoy:
Catalysts Are Back
It’s been a while since we had a full interview and got to Catalysts from the guests but Morris was kind enough to share her three:
A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit
The works of Stuart Hall
Barbie Zelizer, Morris’s mentor
And get Apocalyptic Authoritarianism at Bookshop.org
Which is why, as we know, we started phasing out fossil fuels in the 1980s. What’s that? Oh - yes, I forgot which timeline we’re in.
Apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψις in Ancient Greek) originally meant “revelation”, “an uncovering”.
