Rejecting the Anthropocene

Introduction

The fundamental paradox of our times is the diachronic paralysis of climate politics. Judging by the amount of scientific knowledge heretofore assembled, inaction seems inexplicable. Already in 1965, Lyndon Johnson was informed that ‘[m]an is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment with potential deleterious consequences for Humanity’ (Science Advisory Committee, 1965, pp. 126–27). By the late seventies, scientific conclusions on the reality of anthropogenic climate change were solidified,1 international scientific institutions were soon established while scientists recommended concrete targets that could keep climate change manageable.2 Furthermore, climate change was discovered when environmentalism was internationally on the rise and the idea of a potential environmental catastrophe was entrenched in the social imaginary. This new danger, incomparable in scope to the previous ones, could have been seen as the definite vindication of environmentalism triggering an urgent reaction.

Nevertheless, international mobilisation remained mostly rhetorical: emissions have never stopped increasing, while, despite their precarious moderation, the internationally agreed climate objectives will not be met (United Nations Environment Programme, 2025). Sixty years after the first warnings about humanity’s geophysical prowess, climate politics consist of a succession of melancholic hallmarks (Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, Paris), unheeded ‘last warnings’ and violated deadlines. As an issue recognised as of epochal significance that cannot mobilise action, climate inaction emerges as the most persistent paradox of our times.

This enigma has not evaded the attention of scholars. Α wealth of interpretations has been offered and far-reaching conclusions have been drawn on the character of modernity, post-modernity and human nature as revealed in the mirror of climate change. Even a new regime of historicity has allegedly been established with the advent of the Anthropocene. All of these interpretations postulate a fundamental rift between climate science and ‘politics’; all of them try to demarcate the dialectic in which knowledge interacts with power. What follows is an essay that engages critically with the literature of climate politics.

I argue that history can offer a distinct understanding of this paradox and this essay aims at designating concepts, methods and sources that could prove useful in this quest.

On History, Ideology and Time

The first step towards a historical understanding of climate inaction is to clarify the meaning of ‘history’. This is necessary because, in the last fifteen years, there has been a vibrant debate about how historiography should respond to the advent of the Anthropocene. Starting with Dipesh Chakrabarty, important thinkers have claimed that since man has become a geological force capable of transforming the planet, historians must overcome the dichotomy between nature and culture if they want to understand the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, 2009, pp. 197–222). Despite its stimulating character and its increasing popularity, this is a thesis I cannot endorse. History, as defined in this essay, is the study of culturally conditioned, self-reflective human action. This is an epistemological (and not ontological) thesis that does not preclude the study of human and natural entanglements but insists that humans must also be studied as cultural beings – something that makes the distinction between nature and culture indispensable.3

Moreover, if historians ignored climate change for long, this was not because of their humanist orientation, as Chakrabarty argued (2009), but because historical methodology was not systematically applied to climate politics.

Applying the historical method entails the rejection of all nomographic explanations4 and the analysis of climate inaction through concrete cultural norms and, specifically, through the study of the coherent nexuses of ideas we call ideologies.5 Until now, there have been very few studies on how contemporary ideologies have interpreted and acted on climate change.6 This is a critical absence since ideologies constitute the most potent sources of collective action given their dual nature as producers of knowledge and moral demands. Ideologies are the major translators of knowledge into power; the mediators between science and morals.

Ideologies are also producers of time. The temporal perspective is crucial since climate science has long become a science of deadlines and a concrete horizon of action has been established: by 2050, societies must decarbonise their economies, if they are to avert catastrophic change. It is thus imperative to ask a question that is neglected in the literature on climate politics: how did the various ideologies perceive climate deadlines? Did they ever accept their urgent character and, if not, did they mobilise antagonistic temporalities pointing to a different future from the one predicted by natural science? What was the future of the world according to twenty-first-century ideologies and what was the role, if any, that climate change played in its construction?

Naturally, this essay does not provide an interpretation of the entire ideological landscape. It focuses rather on a specific ideological milieu: the neoliberal American Right and specifically its two most important magazines, National Review and Reason.7 We shall also examine the Economist, arguably the most influential liberal review in the West. These three Atlantic reviews diverge systematically in certain issues; nevertheless, regarding environmental issues all three were inspired (in different degrees) by Hayekian epistemology, a fact that allows their common examination as neoliberal.8 Despite their obvious importance, these sources remain unexplored.9

This is, therefore, a historical essay on how the twenty-first-century Atlantic Right integrated climate change in its ideological outlook. It is an essay about great expectations, deep commitments and unshakeable certainties; an essay about the rejection of the Anthropocene as a way to interpret the future of the world and the construction of antagonistic temporalities. Nevertheless, and as we approach the end, we might encounter the dissolution of these certainties and the restructuring of the tie that binds knowledge to power.

The Importance of Limits

It is common knowledge that the American Right has been the most vociferous host of climate denialism.10 Nevertheless, historians need to disentangle their gaze from the rejection of climate science alone. This is not only because denialism is in retreat (Center for American Progress Action, 2019), but, more importantly, because identifying the rejection of climate action with denialism is factually wrong. The Anglo-American Right’s argument against coordinated climate action was always multifaceted and thus not dependent exclusively on the rejection of climate science itself.

It was also an argument with deep historical roots. In order to understand climate politics, it is imperative to stress that the interpretation of climate science was heavily indebted to historical perceptions of the environmental movement of the sixties and seventies: the roots of climate inaction lie before the publicisation of global warming.

As it has been well attested, during the sixties and the seventies, Greens issued a direct challenge to the perennial increase of both consumption and population forcing, for the first time in their history, liberals and socialists to deal with the issue of limits.

The liberal and socialist response was eventually dismissive: hard limits to economic expansion and population were proclaimed immoral and unscientific and were summarily rejected.11 Neoliberals waged too a fierce war against the perspective of limits declaring the criticism of economic growth an immoral and anti-scientific enterprise driven by irresponsible elitists (Dunn, 1978). Furthermore, it was a neoliberal economist, Julian Simon, who argued that human creativity guarantees the eternal substitutability of resources and the eternal failure of ‘apocalyptic’ neo-Malthusian predictions (Simon, 1981). We shall meet Simon’s thesis again later in this essay, but for now we should discuss a bit more the debate on limits and its critical aftermath.

Following the defeat of limits, ecologism12 was forced to abandon its most radical strivings and abstain from ‘alarmism’, dire prophecies and the cultivation of a sense of emergency (Bernstein, 2001). It was this gradualist and relatively unambitious iteration of ecology that western societies embraced in the post-Cold War Era.

Nevertheless, neoliberals did not believe that Green radicalism was marginalised. At the end of the Cold War, they designated environmentalism as the ‘new enemy of society’ due to its anti-progress and statist orientation (Postrel, 1990; 1999; Arnold, 1983). The elevation of ecologism as the direst threat to human progress was a somewhat strange choice. After all, in the early nineties, the perspective of limits was denounced essentially from everyone: neo-Malthusianism was out of vogue and about to suffer a fundamental defeat in Cairo (Hodgson & Watkins, 1997) while no major ideological grouping – including ecological ones – was actively pursuing a stationary state. Growthism reigned triumphant even in the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change where it was stressed that climate action should not antagonise economic growth and consumer rights (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1992, p. 58).

Neoliberals could very well imitate both Liberals and the Left who had already embraced post-limit ecologism as a sympathetic companion while downplaying the severity of environmental warnings, including climate change.13 But this was not to be the case. Neoliberals never acknowledged the defeat of the limits’ perspective. On the contrary, they declared the retreat of Greens a façade and their ideas of limits not abandoned but essentially submerged under liberal and socialist cover. Thenceforth, ecologism would be interpreted as an essential component of the progressive front threatening American and global progress. Strange tides of history: thoroughly defeated everywhere, the ecologism of limits emerged victorious in the perceptions of its most dedicated opponents. This development offered ecological ideas a lifeline of relevance in the broader cultural wars of the nineties but theirs was a spectral presence, the outcome of an absent victory.

This nexus of ideas regarding the ‘environment’ and its ‘extremist’ defenders was transposed to climate change, a topic that had received virtually no attention during the limits debate.

The Greening of Climate Change

The most pertinent fact about climate change is one that is persistently ignored. This fact is that climate change was subsumed in the broader environmental question and implicated in the liberal and socialist perceptions of ecologism. Climate change was never a neutral scientific fact, but, since the beginning, it was interpreted through the lens of former ‘Green’ warnings. It was perceived, in other words, as an environmentalist issue among others, a perception that might seem ‘natural’, but it was, nevertheless, a historical decision of critical importance.

Τhe consequences of the greening of climate change were momentous since scientific proclamations were tainted with the legacy of a defeated ideology. The long history of climate scepticism, as it unfolds paradigmatically in National Review and Reason, derives its authority from the condemnation of ecological anti-modernism, green apocalypticism and the ritualistic reminder of failed ecological warnings. For the last fifty years, these two reviews have never stopped drawing lessons from the limits’ perspective with the ‘infamous’ 1972 Limits to Growth study and Paul Elrich’s population projections designated as the prime examples of failed Green predictions codified as ‘apocalypticism’ and ‘doomsaying’. Not one of ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows’ postulated by Greens, neoliberals warned, ever came to pass (Scarlett, 1998).

It must also be stressed that the above do not pertain exclusively to the American Right despite the latter’s passionate antipathy against Greens. As we have already mentioned, liberals and socialists also consistently rejected environmental alarmism and it is not unreasonable to make the hypothesis that this transideological aversion might have contributed to the self-effacing wording of earlier scientific reports on the climate.14

The discussion about climate change would take place under the sign of the limits in what might prove the most enduring legacy of the seventies.

The Alternative Futures of the Right

Before 1990, neoliberals did not contest climate science. Reason acknowledged the reality of anthropogenic climate change (Anonymous, 1978) as well as the imperative to abandon – at some point – fossil fuels. Despite the unwavering defence of growthism and the deep antipathy towards Greens, there were still in the early nineties neoliberal voices expressing a mild disquietude when pondering the potentially transformative impact of global warming (Heppenheimer, 1990). Eventually, though, neoliberal thought took a decisively opposite direction.

From 1990 and onwards, the American Right started to popularise climate denialism and denounce the ‘politicisation’ of science (Turner & Isenberg, 2018, pp. 149–57). Deeply worried about the potential perils of a rejuvenated environmentalism, neoliberals rejuvenated their commitment to denouncing ‘green apocalypticism’, reminding everyone of its former failed predictions and tracing its pernicious influence in silencing climate sceptics (Lips, 1992). As years passed, warnings about the inadequacy of climate science became a standard feature of both reviews as both rejected any mandatory action on emissions (Henderson, 1992).

Nevertheless, as we have already mentioned, climate denialism did not exhaust the neoliberal world view. As the years passed and denialism gradually faded, other long-held arguments against coordinated climate action took precedence.

The Future of the World

As their environmentalist enemies (and, increasingly, thousands of scientists) warned about a possible collapse of civilisation, neoliberals dismissed these warnings as the latest iteration of Green apocalypticism, a transparently failed way of knowing the world. The neoliberal perspective was structured around a set of temporalities indicating a progressive future for the world immune to any environmental challenges.

At the heart of these temporalities lies a deep faith in human creativity. Julian Simon’s thesis on the unlimited substitutability of resources was smoothly applied to climate change by The Economist. Urging for moderation before the Paris Conference, the newspaper declared that ‘thinking caps should replace hair shirts, and pragmatism should replace green theology. The climate is changing because of extraordinary inventions like the steam turbine and the internal combustion engine. The best way to cope is to keep inventing’ (Anonymous, 2015a, p. 12).

In this perspective, deadlines are irrelevant because social problems are seen as automatic triggers of invention. A hybrid epistemology underpins this thesis: inventiveness is posed as the realm of human freedom against the hard natural sciences, but this realm is nonetheless bound to laws: people will eventually invent what they wish to invent. Naturally, the exact content we can never describe because that would deprive people of their freedom: culture is seen as an unpredictable yet strangely reliable independent variable.15

It is clear that this sense of time is antagonistic to climatic deadlines. This is why TheEconomist, along with National Review and Reason could explicitly reject the two-degree target without having to provide alternatives. Or, more accurately, they did not need to provide alternatives symmetrical to the discourse of climate scientists. This is because there were always many epistemologies at play: having adopted Friedrich Hayek’s theory on the fundamental uncertainty surrounding human action, neoliberals maintained that even if climate change proves a serious problem, energy should not be regulated. Markets will channel human creativity and the world will gradually gravitate towards mitigation or adaptation. In this perspective, the appropriate governmental response to climate change is mild or even non-existent.

Moreover, the ability of contemporary societies to avert disaster has already been demonstrated scientifically. The literature on climate politics neglects it but neoliberals – and not only them – have routinely mobilised a plethora of statistics pertaining to the state of the world that demonstrate the free market’s explosive potential for progress and the failure of apocalyptic ecological warnings.

Bjorn Lomborg, the famous ‘sceptical environmentalist’, summarised this data-driven argument:

In almost every way we can measure, life on earth is better now than it was at any time in history. Since 1900, we have more than doubled our life expectancy. […] Health inequality has diminished significantly. The world is more literate; child labor has been dropping; we are living in one of the most peaceful times in history. [Lomborg, 2022]16

Other writers have invoked the reduction of absolute poverty, the rise of democracies and the reduction of deaths caused by natural disasters (Hulme, 2023, pp. 136–37).

These statistics demonstrate, according to neoliberals, the abject failure of neo-Malthusian ideas since humanity is constantly progressing despite its increasing numbers17 as well as the intellectual bankruptcy of Green ‘apocalypticism’.

Regardless of their veracity, the invocation of these statistics demonstrates that climate science was always competing with many other temporalities and epistemologies. It also demonstrates that denialism was never the sole – or even the most important – argument of neoliberals against climate action.

The ‘Timescape’ of Growth

Human creativity was not the only cause of progress; a prominent role was also accorded to economic growth. Neoliberals argued that a growing economy constitutes a virtual guarantee that the world will stay safe, healthy, employed and affluent; an argument based on social scientific correlations between social variables. Strengthened by the studies of the Nobelist William Nordhaus, a person destined to occupy a central place in climate history,18 who maintained that even dire climate change will not impede economic progress, the Right argued for the guaranteed adaptability of future societies (Tuttle, 2017). Dependent on growth, climate change was demoted to a derivative issue of relative importance.19 Thus, we need to understand economic growth not as a fact but as an ideal with its own temporal regime.

Growthism stands at the intersection of multiple temporalities. At first glance, the eternal increase in national wealth and the improvement of the world point to a linear time of achievement. It is this linearity of progress, as we mentioned above, that disproves climate deadlines among neoliberals. But there is also another, more important temporality of growthism, one that pertains to all modern ideologies and not just the American Right, one that reveals the linearity of growth as an illusion.

As an ideal that can never be permanently achieved and, at the same time, is inspected on a daily basis, growth subsumes societies in a cyclical time. In this, success is always fragile; as certain economies lag behind others, they might then cover ground, before they are found again deficient compared to some other more dynamic competitor and return to the purgatory of expectant mediocrity. This cycle is not easily broken since growth is seen as the necessary precondition guaranteeing human progress, national pride and for tackling a plethora of other issues, inequality being the foremost among them.

In the face of rising inequality, climate concerns seem out of order or, more accurately, out of time. Recall for example the famous Yellow-Vest slogan: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world, we are about the end of the month’ (Martin & Islar, 2021, p. 601). One might think that the end of the month is given priority because it is closer. But in light of growthism’s ever-returning deadlines, we might conclude that the end of the month dominates the entire political horizon while the end of the world resides in an altogether different ‘timescape’; in a future inhabited by the nebulous ‘future generations’ who will inherit today’s mistakes but do not partake in its present agony. Exiled in the future, climate action remains utopian because it has no time on which to land.

The same applies to interstate relations – especially those between North and South. Deep aspirations of decolonisation and global equality meet and reinforce the ideal of incessant growth. Already in the seventies, it was evident that the division between developed and developing countries would make environmental deadlines irrelevant (Bernstein, 2001, pp. 28–59). It was also evident that citizens of earth conceptualised hope, justice and catastrophe according to the deep temporalities of mainstream ideologies and not to ecological warnings.

Neoliberals endorsed the above. Far from being unqualified supporters of inequality,20 they consistently denounce environmental measures as depriving the world of cheap, abundant energy, hurting therefore the poor of America and the globe. This is not surprising: as we saw, the gradual reduction of global poverty has been a badge of honour among neoliberals and the proof of the unreasonableness of ecological ‘doomsaying’ (Williamson, 2012; Cookes, 2013; Davidson, 2014). If there is any way forward for remedying the ills of humanity, the Atlantic Right argued, it won’t be through state action but through markets and growth. And nature, they argued, would benefit as well.

Free-Market Environmentalism

Neoliberal progress encompassed environmental issues. At the turn of the century, National Review was certain that nature did not need the Greens:

The environment is getting better. The air is cleaner, the water too. Species extinctions are declining and we haven’t lost any really cute animals in a very long time. There are more trees in the US than there were in the 1920s. Vital resources are all getting cheaper. Food is abundant — despite the fact that people like Paul Ehrlich predicted that most surviving Americans would be eating human-foot stew by now. [Goldberg, 2000]

Citing the famous environmental Kuznets curve or statistics similar to the above, neoliberals reassured humanity that ‘capitalism makes you cleaner’ (Welch, 2015); a trend that also pertained to global warming. The unexceptional status of climate change among environmental issues, the phenomenon we called earlier the greening of climate change, allowed neoliberals, to employ ‘environmental’ statistics unrelated to climate change to discredit Green apocalypticism. The paradigmatically Hayekian (and thus anti-neoclassical) principles of free-market environmentalism were articulated by Lynn Scarlett of Reason:

People seek shelter, nourishment, health, security, learning, fairness, companionship, freedom, and personal comfort together with environmental protection. They even seek many, sometimes competing, environmental goals. They don’t agree on how to marshal their resources (and time) in pursuit of these many goals. And it is often difficult for outsiders – or even individuals themselves – to know in advance how they would prefer to trade off among different values. [Scarlett, 1996]

If societies trust markets and not governments and bureaucratic elites, optimal outcomes will ensue; the weak and the consumers will not be burdened unnecessarily (Bailey, 2001) while the prospect of a ‘green road to serfdom’ will be averted.21 Faith in markets among neoliberals remained unshakeable as a general principle, although it admitted more nuances than it is often assumed. For the American Right whose strictly Hayekian epistemology precluded the pricing of externalities, the appropriate response to global climate change was indeed ‘policy nihilism’ (Bailey, 2009);22 for The Economist, a review whose neoliberalism is diluted with a heavy dose of neoclassical theory,23 the market mechanism should have been complemented by a (lenient) carbon tax.

Nevertheless, what remained beyond question is the impossibility of attaining the targets recommended by climate science: this would be achievable only through a ‘sort of second-world-war style national effort harnessing the full powers of the government’ (T. C., 2010), a scenario that The Economist rejected for all the reasons already analysed in this essay – and for one more: an all-encompassing climatic mobilisation would shatter the continuity of our world.

This was the last argument of the Atlantic Right against climate action, but before we turn to this, we need to think what the long horizon of neoliberal thought and its meticulous computation of the dialectic between man and nature reveals about some major interpretations of climate inaction.

Ideologies between Nature and Culture

The prism of ideology as a producer of knowledge illuminates the inadequacy of many interpretations of climate inaction. It has been postulated for example that the necessity of taking the distant future into consideration is antagonistic to ‘the very short-term nature of politics’ (Maslin, 2009, p. 147).

Our investigation of the American Right demonstrated the exact opposite: the future was always meticulously predicted while even the most distant permutations were extrapolated from present social and economic facts or tendencies all of them ‘demonstrating’ that climate anxiety is groundless. Climate paralysis has its roots in the assessment of the future, not at its disregard. There is nothing surprising in this. Modern ideologies have dreamt of the most distant future without any hesitation and often with the utmost attention to detail: one only needs to recall how indissolubly linked to the future Marxists and liberals have been.

The above is not the only problematic nor the most influential interpretation of climate inaction. For many decades, it has been relentlessly argued that the ecological predicament is due to a fundamental dissociation of nature from culture and the subsumption of the former under the dominion of man. This thesis has a long pedigree dating back (at least) to the nineteenth century and it has been redeployed by important authors like Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty to explain climate inaction (Latour, 1993; Chakrabarty & Latour, 2020). In this view, climate change constitutes a dramatic proof that, trying to liberate themselves, humans in modernity orchestrated their alienation from the world they inhabit (Beck, 1992; 2016).

The scope of the paper does not permit a thorough analysis of this influential view. It should be noted, however, that it rests on a conceptual hyperextension of ‘nature’ while it also lacks factual grounding.24 As this essay demonstrated, the perceived gap between natural scientific knowledge and social inaction was always mediated by ideologists who undertook – as they always do – the responsibility of transposing the scientific into the moral, to turn conclusions about nature into action about society. Far from dissociating ‘nature’ from ‘culture’, neoliberals provided an exemplary fusion of moral and scientific concerns arguing for the benefits of free-market environmentalism and the relative unimportance of climate change.

No desire for dominion over nature was expressed or presupposed in this undertaking; no Baconian arrogance or cold Enlightenment rationality can be traced in the neoliberal method of interpreting nature. The neoliberal argument does not rest on the abstraction of nature but on a plethora of statistics, social scientific models (most importantly the statistics of prosperity and Nordhaus’ economic estimations), epistemologies (mostly of the Hayekian variety) as well as historical facts (the persistent failure of Green predictions); in other words, the neoliberal argument against climate action depended on the meticulous intertwining of nature with culture. Furthermore, the dominion of nature thesis ignores even fundamental facts related to climate change: until the 1960s, the scientific consensus claimed that the man was impotent to alter the global climate; an argument often propagated by climate denialists.

Historiography should disentangle itself from the temptation of platitudinal concepts like ‘the modern subject’ and its alluring ‘contradictions’. Climate paralysis should be explained through the study of concrete ideological trajectories and the attendant theories they elaborated connecting nature to culture and knowledge to power.

But we must now return to neoliberals and their future.

Defenders of Happiness

Growthism was not only a promise of remedying problems but, equally, a guarantee of happiness. Despite initial reservations about the use of GDP25 and Hayek’s insistence that market economies should not be endorsed mainly for their material benefits (Hayek, 2012, pp. 15–16), neoliberals eventually embraced consumerist growthism.

The challenge of limits liberated this ideological potential. National Review and Reason were inundated by images of consumerist well-being, carefully chosen to defy environmental concerns.26 Instances of personal or collective relaxation, independence and happiness, like driving fast in a highway,27 shopping with friends, grilling with neighbours were mobilised to assert the continuity of our world. This freedom does not guarantee happiness, as a perceptive essayist clarified (Twitchell, 2000), but the right of Americans to experiment on ways of being happy while keeping themselves on the move. The end of history was haunted by the ‘impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies’ (Fukuyama, 1989, p. 14), but for these authors the value of liberalism lies less in the noble character of social desires than in their endless variety.

On the other hand, the ecological vision of an economical society is constantly ridiculed with National Review proclaiming that its proponents suffer from ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’ (Cookes, 2013b). A society of limits is a sad, crowded and potentially autocratic vision propagated by an ideology, the ecologism of limits whose errors have repeatedly been demonstrated (Long, 2010; Lilecs, 2013).

If we look beyond the exceptional antipathy of the Right against ecologism, we can recognise that the material comforts described in neoliberal texts are equally valued by all contemporary ideologies equated as they are with the ubiquitous ‘standard of living’ – a code name of growth’s major promise. Equated with comfort and modernity, connected with our most intimate moments of social and personal life, the joy offered by consumer goods constitutes a distinct sense of time; an intimate knowledge of the continuity of our world. We should consider it as the last argument against climate mobilisation.

Conclusion

We can now summarise. Contemporary ideologies and, by extension, contemporary societies did not see climate change as a crisis. This was because climatic warnings were tainted with the legacy of a defeated ideology: the environmentalism of limits. Furthermore, warnings were competing with the dominant temporalities of our times – the linear time of data-supported human progress, the cyclical temporality of economic growth, the domestic time of consumerist happiness and, again, the refuted time of earlier ecological warnings. All these ways of seeing the world were elaborated by contemporary ideologies and all of them dictated that climate action is unnecessary or morally insufferable.

Many scholars seem to disagree. Ulrich Beck, for example, argued in 2016 that ‘never before in human history has political life been saturated by this much knowledge for a global emergency’ (Beck, 2016, pp. 47–48), while François Hartog detected the rise of a certain ‘apocalyptic effervescence’ (Hartog, 2022, p. 222), but these are views that ignore factual evidence: for many decades apathy was the rule, an apathy supported with many arguments and diverse epistemologies. The failure of climate conferences and the incessant rise of emissions was never paradoxical but the offspring of history and (a certain idea of) knowledge. The juxtaposition of science with politics ignores that social production of knowledge is multifaceted and integrated in broader ideational nexuses. However, the tide of apathy is turning.

The End of Many Futures: Towards the Anthropocene

The first victim of change was denialism. Its long-time funders, energy corporations, finally acceded to the reality of climate change and the same applied to neoliberals. After 2014, both reviews essentially rejected denialism with National Review denouncing denialists (and the Trump administration) as ‘embarrassing’ (Cass, 2016) and even ‘irresponsible or dishonest’ (Cass, 2017).

Furthermore, the indifference of contemporary ideologies is gradually being replaced by a creeping sense that climate change constitutes indeed an existential threat. From 2017 and onwards, all major liberal and socialist reviews started issuing warnings about a danger long ignored by the public and themselves. Fifty years after the dismissal of limits, societies are again willing to experience an ecological shock.28

But what about the post-denialist American Right? Has its advocacy of ‘policy nihilism’ towards mitigation stayed intact? For National Review the answer seems affirmative (Anonymous, 2023),29 but Reason presents a more interesting case.

From 2018 and onwards, one can detect the invasion of alien terms in the pages of the magazine. There is suddenly talk of a broken climate (Bailey, 2018) that might prove a ‘significant’ problem for humanity (Bailey, 2019), along with the ‘unhappy’ admission that ‘climate change is proceeding faster and is worse’ than Reason estimated (Bailey, 2020). A strange unexpectedness lingers about the American Right, and Reason argues for the necessity of renewables while, tellingly, in January 2020, the deadlines of climate science make their first appearance in the magazine. Reason now asks from politicians to honour their Paris pledges, the same ones that libertarians were denouncing not long ago as ineffectual, irrelevant and possibly autocratic (Bailey, 2021).

Along with the deadlines, fear makes its first appearance in the magazine. Ronald Bailey, scientific editor and former climate sceptic, started asking difficult questions: ‘Will climate change be apocalyptic? Probably not, but the possibility is not zero. So just how lucky do you feel? Frankly, after reviewing the scientific evidence, I’m not feeling nearly as lucky as I once did’ (Bailey, 2020).

Liberalism’s intellectual compass has started to turn. Suddenly, the dispersed knowledge of market actors is not enough, suddenly the established ways of knowing and acting on the world seem inadequate. Across the Atlantic, the same sense of fear, surprise and powerlessness is on the rise: ‘The world is losing the war against climate change’, The Economist suddenly exclaimed in 2018, and catastrophe might follow (Anonymous, 2018). Knowledge is tied to power in many ways; some of them attest to the continuity of our world while others foretell of an exile.

This is a new and uncharted territory which contemporary ideologies, these persistent and often audacious producers of knowledge, are obliged to navigate. Their strange unexpectedness signals that a ‘Brave New World’ has appeared on the horizon: the world of the Anthropocene. Standing on the threshold of a new era, amidst wildfires and droughts, our heroes are suddenly compelled into a contemplation they neither understand nor desire, face to face, for the first time in history, with a future exceeding their capacity for wonder.