Opinion | How To Lose The Planet – News18

Last Updated:January 18, 2025, 22:32 IST

While the belly of denialism keeps increasing, the resolute silence of our policymakers and world leaders on the future of this Earth that we all inhabit is deafening

“Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness,” posted Elon Musk on social media site X, on December 9, 2024. I wish Musk could exercise more intelligence to understand that survival depends upon ecological interactions and not capital transactions. In other words, survival is contingent on the consciousness of the interconnectedness of life, and not on millions of words rhapsodising and justifying the merits of capitalist ventures.

Of course, Musk’s fixated puerility stems from his hyper-self-serving interests, which is obviously reminiscent of the fact that survival has become synonymous with the idea of the scapegoat, linked as it is to the whims and fancies of the perverted idea of endless growth, safeguarded by and for a select few.

But Musk is not alone in imagining life on another planet. Of late, such views have accumulated, even intensified, bringing us to a point where the sixth mass extinction of the planet seems to be lurking around the corner. Yet the efforts to mitigate this planetary crisis seem to be ridden with a sense of fanatical arrogance and racial prejudices and driven by an acute degree of denialism. The sophomoric enchantment with the possibility of life on another planet has not only licensed and legitimised the powerful echelons to chemicalise and militarise life in certain peripheral geographies but has also intensified environmental degradation.

No doubt, these powerful echelons have built strong capital muscles, but their intellectual impoverishment to see life in a unidirectional dimension, starting and finishing within themselves, is nothing less than a juvenile fantasy. To see themselves as an epitome of the planetary species while reducing other fellow humans and species into non-liveable ones, throwing them into utter darkness to gasp, sums up the fundamental reason that grips the ongoing environmental catastrophe.

The acidification of rivers and chemicalisation of soil, air, and food, undergirded with a constant supply of “slow violence” continues to spur the creation of graveyards in many developing nations. We have reached that stage of civilisational progress where 1 in every 8 deaths is linked to air pollution. It is another matter that the Europeans do not identify this as a problem.

As a New York Times report points out, the “rich countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of western Europe, account for just 12 per cent of the global population today but are responsible for 50 per cent of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry over the past 170 years.” Racial and capital privilege continue to underpin the global order that has largely exacerbated the climate crisis. No wonder a few term this colossal moment as an instance of “climate apartheid”. While the cannibalistic capital forces operate their savagery under the garb of modernity, the developing world is coerced to sit on a ticking bomb that may explode at any time.

Yet, what is utterly surprising is an acute sense of silence over the death zones that keep multiplying in underdeveloped nations. For example, while Canada has reduced carbon emissions at home, it has outsourced the risks to developing nations, exporting unprecedented emissions than ever before. According to Canada’s largest environmental law charity, “Between 2012 and 2019, Canada’s exported emissions from the sale of oil, gas, and coal increased an alarming 46.43 per cent.”

Within the populist media, even policy documents related to controlling climate degradation, one finds a huge empire of climate change denialists. Because denialism is the sine qua non of climate change policies, it also acts as both the virtuous and the evil for powerful world leaders and predatory capitalism. How else can one justify the absurd statement of William Happer, who also served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Emerging Technologies at the National Security Council in the White House for a while? In a co-authored paper, he bluntly states, “Science demonstrates that there is no climate-related risk caused by fossil fuels and CO2 and no climate emergency.” The paper goes on to mention, “Eliminating fossil fuels and reducing CO2 emissions will be disastrous for the poor, people worldwide, future generations and the country.”

In another statement, Happer pointedly says, “Higher levels of carbon dioxide have had positive value for humanity.” In the same vein, Dr Harold Lewis, a distinguished nuclear experimental physicist and professor at the University of California, reinforces the denialism that undergirds climate change policymaking: “The global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it… has corrupted so many scientists… It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” It should not be a surprise, therefore, to see Donald Trump calling climate change “mythical”, “nonexistent”, or “an expensive hoax.”

As such, “Thousands of web pages with climate change information have been removed or buried at agencies including the US EPA, the Interior and Energy departments, and elsewhere across the government,” according to a report from the watchdog group, Environmental Data & Governance.

On the one hand, one could see a deluge of seminars, conferences, and events on climate risks, and on the other, one could find Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson launching themselves into space on rockets “emitting as much per passenger as anyone from the poorest billion emits in an entire lifetime.”

The disabled conditions of habitability rendered by such versions of denialism have turned climate change events into a farce, reminding us of how “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” That’s exactly the fate of our present moment that sums up the farcical approach towards addressing the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Despite several clarion calls to reconsider our notion of accelerated progress and rethink sustainability, climate change solutions are energised by the resolute silence and denialism of our powerful echelons. The insanity of our world leaders, particularly those in the global North, has only exacerbated the habitability on this planet for many of us living in developing countries.

When the virulent ones turn virtuous, it is time to recheck our intellectual barometers and guard ourselves against such liberal savagery that has triggered and intensified the planetary crisis. We need to remember that evil always disguises itself in many forms, and as it does this, it also evades the grip of moral language. While the belly of denialism keeps increasing, the resolute silence of our policymakers and world leaders on the future of this Earth that we all inhabit is deafening.

(To be concluded)

Om Prakash Dwivedi is a literary critic and columnist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.