The Third and Final Form of Doomism

I admit,  I have poor comprehension skills when it comes to reading essays and creative writing. Give me numbers all day long, but ask me to make sense of word-soup, no, my head just swims. This lack on my part was put to the test when I tried to make sense of Genevieve Guenther’s so called “third and final form of doomism” that she described on page 24 of her book The Language of Climate Politics as follows:

Cynicism shades into the third and final form of doomism, where it becomes a pure form of nihilism that serves to justify one’s own bare refusal to engage with the climate crisis. This is the doomism of the privileged—the Global North professionals confident that they can live out their days largely insulated from climate damages and secretly (or not so secretly) glad they will be dead before the proverbial shit really hits the fan.  These people—often white, often male—not only take their contempt for democratic politics as a badge of moral courage and intellectual sophistication, attacking climate activists for their supposed credulity in believe that the future is worth fighting for.

What the f&%k? Word soup. I asked Grok AI to explain this paragraph to me in terms a sixth grader could understand and now I think I get it:

This kind of doomism happens with rich people in places like America or Europe. They think they’re safe from the bad stuff and are quietly happy they’ll die before it gets super awful. These folks, often white guys, hate how governments work and act like that’s smart and brave. They make fun of people trying to fix climate change, calling them silly for thinking we can save the future.

To put it more simply, this is Guenther’s attempt to generalize her racist, sexist and classist opinion of some specifc person she doesn’t like into a definition. It is certainly not a widely adopted definition of doomers or doomism, as can be seen by Guenther’s failure to cite a source, nor is it a definition I have seen any other author use. Fortunately for the reader, she lets us know who the person is in her next paragraph.

Case in point: Roy Scranton, an English professor at the university of Notre Dame, who publishes commentary in the New York times and writes books with titles like Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What? Scranton insists that only “the deluded and naïve could maintain that nonviolent protest politics is much more than ritualized wishful thinking,” as if protest politics has never led to change with respect to global heating (it has, as we shall see). But Scranton has no time for historical struggle. He imagines that “the story we’re living in is one of failure, catastrophe, suffering and tragedy: an out-of-control car careening off a dark road.”  Unsurprisingly, he grounds this extreme pessimism in misrepresentations of the science: “even if humans stopped emitting CO2 worldwide today,” Scranton says, “we would still face levels of warming over the next several decades that will … have a good chance of initiating runaway climate change.”  This, happily, is patently untrue. For now, and for a few more decades at least, once emissions fall to net zero the planet will stop warming within three to five years.

Her portrayal not only caricaturizes Scranton but also undermines the broader defense of doomers (not doomism) as truth-seeking science-based environmentalists. Doomers confront these irreversible horrors head-on. It’s not fun. It’s sad and exhausting work. But it is also activism.

And by dismissing doomers this way, Guenther exposes her own hypocrisy: she is a white, educated author from the Global North, critiquing from a perch of academic insulation in her denial of the coming collapse. Likewise, her book targets an educated readership likely sharing her demographic, preaching hope as a moral imperative while ignoring how such narratives serve the privileged like herself by sustaining business-as-usual.

What she failed to mention was that Scranton’s writing stems not from disdain for climate activists but from a life full of failed and futile activism. As a veteran of the Iraq War and participant in movements from the 1999 WTO protests to the 2014 People’s Climate March, Scranton saw his actions function as nothing more than theater within a capitalist framework engineered to neutralize dissent. The 2003 anti-Iraq War protests, involving millions globally, failed to avert invasion, the massive 2011 “We are the 99%” rallies did not punish the wealthy, and the climate activism of Roger Hallam (a white male from the Global North) and Extinction Rebellion did not dismantle fossil fuels.

Yes, some activism has worked for some causes. Huge progress was made in the 1970’s through environmental protests worldwide. But right now, today, fossil-fuel use is growing and the biosphere is accelerating in the wrong directon, while the protections won in the 1970’s are being dismantled by fascist kakistocracies. Scranton knows all of this and yet still reaches out to his readers to lend a helping hand.

And whether getting to net-zero will or will not reduce global warming within 3 to 5 years, well that’s just bandwagon stuff. Yes, no, who cares? Fairies dancing on the head of a pin can also cure cancer and travel faster than light. Humans are not getting to net-zero, not with the feedbacks and tipping points already in place, not with the global carbon cycle flipping sinks to sources, not with the rise of global anti-green fascists, not while global industrial civilization and oil concurrently occupy this planet. Scranton simply echoes legitimate warnings from experts like James Hansen (a white male from the Global North), who put it quite bluntly in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren” when he said, “What we’re doing to the atmosphere is turning the skies into a guillotine blade dropping slowly toward our necks.”

For the record, here is my own cherry picked extended quote from Scranton, a screen shot from his book We’re Doomed. Now What?

Scranton’s writing isn’t anti-democratic contempt. It is a call for realism and transformative personal change. From civil rights to classism to climate change, his vision is disruption beyond rallies, boycotts, strikes, and legal battles. It’s hopeful idealism through spiritual realization. And it’s the opposite of cynicism and nihilism.

Scranton, like myself, wants more change than the political system or gradual social change can ever offer. It’s revolutionary activism. It’s saving everything else. And, tragically, it ain’t gonna happen.

Guenther’s binary of activism versus nihilism oversimplifies the conversation with the arrogant tone of an academic talking outside their specialty. By getting this much wrong this early in her book, by making up definitions without citations, and by resorting to ad-hominem attacks based on cherry picked quotes, Guenther has shamelessly shown the potential shallowness of her arguments to follow. She should and could do better. Read her book with caution.