Chasing the High of Being Wrong

Different Perspectives on the Climate Crisis

Photo by Mike Newbry on Unsplash

Here’s a book recommendation: Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, a book of essays edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua. These essays, by longtime climate activists from around the world, jointly argue that the narrative around the climate crisis needs to shift toward highlighting the positive outcomes of the environmental justice/climate justice movement. There have been real victories in the climate movement, but the relentless disaster porn that gets reported makes it seem like the world is ending. This view paralyzes people into believing there is nothing to be done. The only agents who benefit from the perspective of “there’s nothing to be done” are industries that profit from continuing fossil fuel and its reliant technology. In fact, there’s a lot that can be done, and there’s a lot that has been done, successfully reducing the impact of climate change.

The book’s premise - that change is like a snowball, picking up mass as it picks up speed - is comforting, and after I read it, I began to see examples of good news every time I looked at the paper. For example, “sales of electric vehicles have seen explosive growth.” Eleven states have a goal of 100% clean energy and California recently moved their goal of reaching 100% clean energy up to 2045. The passage of the sneakily named Inflation Reduction Act is going to have a monumental impact on reaching climate goals and has already generated billions of dollars in new investment in clean technology and green jobs.

This essay isn’t just a glowing review of Not Too Late, though.

Even though I liked the book and appreciated a positive reframing of the climate crisis through the lens of how climate activists understand the work, it can still be hard to deal with the fire hose of bad news related to the environment. Today, there’s this headline: Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse. State Farm Insurance is pulling out of the California homeowners insurance market because it has become unsustainable to insure homes here. This follows the departure of major insurers from Florida and Louisiana. It Just Got Worse.

This is really bad news for homeowners and not just the ones who insist on buying or building in climate-vulnerable areas of the state. As long as we have a private insurance market that enables home ownership, we need competition in that market to ensure greater coverage at lower costs. What would the Not Too Late crowd make of news like this?

It’s important to note how the New York Times reports on this issue. In general, the NYT coverage of climate change is disaster-based; they don’t do screaming headlines about good news. They made the editorial decision to dramatize it as “It Just Got Worse” even though the article itself makes clear that insurers have been making climate-driven decisions for decades. And is it such a bad thing for state legislatures and homeowners to begin wrestling with the question of where housing should be built? It is long past time to consider whether rebuilding in the fire and flood zones makes a lick of fucking sense (it doesn’t).

As a coda to the optimism of Not Too Late, I would add the perspective that sometimes bad news is needed. I think the Grey Lady, Drama Queen rhetoric is overblown, but we do need to start reckoning with the climate crisis on a different scale, and if it takes State Farm leaving the entire state of California to do that, I welcome the screaming.

What does the title of this essay mean? An offshoot of my thinking about climate change is my thinking about a problem I call “disasteritis.” It’s a made-up word to describe the condition of treating small hurdles as complete disasters. It has other names: doom spiral or negative fantasy. It’s more than pessimism. It’s the instinct that causes a person who needs to make a phone call, for example, to decide ahead of time that no one will answer their call; the answer will be no; the answer will be too complicated to understand or impossible to implement; that when the call drops, it cannot be remade; that all is lost, and one cannot go on living any longer because of the constraints this phone call has placed on the person’s life. This kind of thinking can take place over a day, a week, or several months.

What’s the point? Who cares? Why bother? It’s all fucked up. ARGGGGHHH! FUCK!

Disasteritis usually hits individuals, but it also strikes us culturally. The value of disasteritis is that it lets us off the hook. If everything is shot to hell, then you aren’t responsible for whatever it is you are avoiding. It’s very rewarding to be right: it wasn’t going to succeed, and it didn’t! People get a perverse thrill about being right when terrible things happen. When it happens to other people, it’s called schadenfreude. I don’t know what it’s called when we are happy when we prove to ourselves we are a fuck-up.

In any case, the best way to deal with disasteritis is to acknowledge that it’s happening and then interrupt the associated thoughts. When we do this, or at least, when I do this, I get a different kind of thrill. I think of it as the high of being wrong. This morning I was gloomy about State FUCKING Farm and was able to interrupt it and see the news as a wake-up call. There’s not a ton I can do about the insurance market in California at the moment but I can get out of bed and write an essay. I can also go back and find an old article in the local paper about flood insurance issues in my area and get acquainted with the problem locally. My disasteritis attack is gone and I feel strangely better for having been wrong about it.