Climate Change and the Politics of Apocalyptic Redirection

Introduction

In her recent study of the history of apocalyptic thought in the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Morgenthau, Alison McQueen (2018: 196) suggests that an apocalypse-inspired ‘salutary fear’ of impending climate catastrophe might be useful for the purposes of mobilising collective action in order to prevent further deterioration of the climate. McQueen describes this as a ‘redirection’ of apocalyptic thought. In contrast to apocalyptic thought proper, which, on her view, understands catastrophe as a prelude to utopia, apocalyptic redirection describes catastrophe as an appropriate object of fear, to be avoided if at all possible.

After showing how Hobbes and Morgenthau made use of apocalyptic redirection for their own purposes, McQueen argues that it may hold some appeal for political realists who are inclined to view apocalyptic thought with suspicion and may otherwise prefer to reject it altogether. True, she acknowledges that apocalyptic redirection is dangerous. It may be liable to inspire political movements that are reckless and unhelpfully destructive (McQueen, 2018: 14, 204). However, she also suggests it might be a particularly effective way of dealing with a ‘prospective catastrophe’ like climate change (McQueen, 2018: 199–205).

My aim here is to show that we have good reasons to be suspicious of any use of apocalyptic redirection to deal with climate change. This is not because of the dangers that McQueen acknowledges. Rather, it is because it is ideological in the pejorative sense. It presents the interests of the material comfortable as if they are universal human interests. ¹ While it may be the case that all human beings have an interest in preventing catastrophic climate change, it would be a mistake to assume that all human beings have reason to make it the kind of overriding priority that apocalyptic redirection portrays it as. To the extent that political realism is concerned with avoiding the trappings of ideological and wishful thinking (Geuss, 2017: 245), redirection is therefore problematic on realist terms.

In the second section, I will briefly summarise how McQueen understands apocalyptic thought and her notion of redirection. In particular, I will focus on the way in which apocalyptic redirection purports to be a universalising discourse, generating reasons for everyone to prioritise acting to prevent the prospective catastrophe. In the third section, I will discuss McQueen’s reasons for thinking that apocalyptic redirection might be an exemplary realist form of politics. In the fourth section, I will argue that the idea that everyone has an interest in prioritising preventing climate change above all else is deeply mistaken. Hence, framing climate change in terms of apocalyptic redirection involves misrepresenting the interests of some as universal interests. The fifth considers how the ideological characteristics of this discourse may shape its political function, with reference to the Stop Adani Convoy in Australia as a case study. The sixth section concludes.

Apocalyptic Thought and Apocalyptic Redirection

McQueen (2018: 57–59) describes an apocalypse – whether religious or secular – as having the following five key features:

I happen to think this depiction of the apocalyptic worldview is actually quite misleading, as I discuss elsewhere (Cross, 2021a). I readily grant that a different understanding of apocalypticism might support a very productive approach to climate change. However, in this article, my sole concern is with McQueen’s interpretation.

The apocalyptic worldview, so understood, typically views catastrophe as a necessary, or perhaps even welcome step towards utopia. As McQueen (2018: 57) puts it, ‘the cataclysm is a form of creative destruction, the preparatory work for building a new world’. A person who holds this view will likely take one of two practical stances towards impending catastrophe. First, she may stress the importance of perseverance and patience. John of Patmos might be understood as doing this when he calls for ‘endurance’ (hupomone) on no less than seven occasions throughout the book of Revelation (1:9, 2:2, 2:3, 2:19, 3:10, 13:10, 14:12). Second, she might even be motivated to take action to hasten the coming catastrophe. The giddy optimism with which the likes of William Laurence greeted the testing of the atomic bomb might reflect this disposition (McQueen, 2018: 159). In either case, catastrophe is not viewed as something to be prevented.

Apocalyptic redirection, by contrast, views catastrophe as something to be prevented at all costs. It takes the same cataclysmic language which the apocalyptic worldview uses to describe the coming catastrophe and recasts it as an object of fear. Redirection might even take the form of a ‘self-defeating prophecy’, as per the book of Jonah; the prophet Jonah predicts the destruction of the city of Nineveh as punishment for its sins, its people are stirred into drastic acts of repentance, and their destruction is ultimately averted (McQueen, 2018: 187). Similarly, we might at least imagine a prediction of climate change-induced disasters effectively catapulting humanity into the kind of collective action necessary to prevent them from happening. It might even be that the prediction could only have this effect if it is pitched as certain, rather than possible or even probable.

McQueen views Al Gore’s (2018: 201–203) An Inconvenient Truth as an exemplary use of apocalyptic redirection. She identifies three important features. First, it portrays the prospective catastrophe – in this case, climate change – as an imminent threat. Second, it dramatises the destructiveness of the catastrophe by conjuring memories of historical disasters like the Holocaust. Third, it presents the catastrophe as creating opportunities for a ‘transcendent and unifying purpose’, requiring human beings to put aside their differences and work together to prevent the catastrophe from taking place.

This third point is especially important for our purposes here. Apocalyptic redirection presents a prospective catastrophe as something that everyone has a reason to prioritise preventing above all else. If this were not the case, Al Gore would not be able to represent the catastrophic threat posed by climate change as ‘a shared and unifying cause’ that stands above ‘pettiness and conflict’ (Gore, 2006; McQueen, 2018: 202). Every human being is therefore supposed to have an interest in putting aside supposedly lesser concerns in order to help prevent climate change.

Apocalyptic Redirection’s Realist Credentials

It is worth noting that McQueen views apocalyptic redirection as a political strategy that exemplifies realist virtues:

This strategy is consistent with political realism’s sensitivity to context. This sensitivity is grounded in realism’s resistance to moralism and utopianism. Instead of formulating and applying abstract normative principles to particular cases, the realist attends to the actual complaints of particular people in specific circumstances (McQueen, 2018: 199).

The idea seems to be that realists start with the kinds of discourses and principles that real people already use or care about. The advantage of this method is that it seems more capable of mobilising action than more abstract methods. In addition, realists do not have any necessary objection to the use of fear to inspire action. Fear may not be the sort of motivation a Kantian would approve of, but for the realist, what matters is its capacity to motivate productive political action. ²

These apparent realist strengths of apocalyptic redirection seem to stem from the idea that it provides everyone with a strong ‘internal’ reason for acting on climate change by connecting with their real interests rather than external moral beliefs (Williams, 1981: chapter 8). To the extent that it does this, it seems to be an exemplary realist approach to dealing with prospective catastrophes. Political realists are generally sceptical of external reason claims, viewing them as products of wishful thinking (Cross, 2021b). A discourse that connects with people’s internal reasons for action is thus all the more attractive to realists.

In the following section, I will argue that this appearance is misleading. Apocalyptic redirection provides some people with internal reasons for prioritising action on climate change, but not others. If I am right about this, apocalyptic redirection’s realist credentials are sorely lacking. Before I get to this, I want to draw attention to the way in which apocalyptic redirection still retains a certain moralised character. Gore (2006; McQueen, 2018: 202), for his part, claims that the climate crisis provides humanity with ‘the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose’. Perhaps his idea is that this is an (un)happy circumstance where the demands of morality and the actions required for our survival happen to coincide. But we might get greater clarity on the moralised aspects of this discourse if we consider what it would mean for someone to reject it. If the climate crisis really is universal in the sense implied by apocalyptic redirection, then a person who fails to prioritise preventing climate change seems to have one of two characteristics: she selfishly neglects the long-term interests of others in order to prioritise her own short-term interests; or she is a ‘science denier’ who refuses to accept the reality of climate change. The second of these two possibilities may be thought to amount to a failure that is more epistemic than moral. However, I am inclined to think the two are intertwined here. Consider how people who fail to ‘trust the experts’ are often regarded as arrogant, stubborn, victims of their own hubris, and so on (see, for example, Carrington, 2020). Hence, even though apocalyptic redirection purports to provide people with internal reasons for acting, it seems to function as a kind of hyper-moralistic discourse, framing those who reject it as ‘selfish’ or as ‘denialists’. It associates refusal to prioritise preventing climate change not merely with defective moral reasoning, but with vicious moral character.

This hyper-moralism is not in tension with apocalyptic redirection’s claim to provide everyone with internal reasons for prioritising climate change. In fact, hyper-moralism seems an inevitable implication of this kind of universalised internalism. If I refuse to do something that is in the long-term interests of myself and everyone else, then others might plausibly suppose that I am selfishly prioritising my short-term interests, or ignorant of my long-term interests. However, this point is significant because if it turns out that apocalyptic redirection fails to provide everyone with internal reasons for prioritising climate change, it does not merely misrepresent certain people’s interests. It also attaches a particularly strong moral denunciation to people who do not act in accordance with this mistaken picture of their interests. As we will see in section ‘The Stop Adani Convoy and Political Functions of Apocalyptic Redirection’, this makes apocalyptic redirection even less capable of generating popular support for action on climate change, and even more liable to be used in ways that reproduce existing power relations.

Apocalyptic Redirection, Climate Change and Non-universalism

In this section, I will argue that it is not the case that all people have an interest in prioritising the prevention of climate change above all else. If this argument is sound, then using apocalyptic redirection to describe climate change involves misrepresenting the interests of a selection of people as universal.

My claim is that the people who do have an interest in prioritising the prevention of climate change above all else are those who we may call the ‘materially secure’. The materially secure are those who (1) currently have secure access to a minimum standard of living and (2) will not need to make sacrifices in order to prevent climate change that might threaten their access to a minimum standard of living. By contrast, I claim that the ‘materially insecure’, for whom (1) and/or (2) do not hold, do not necessarily have a reason to prioritise preventing climate change above all else. Since apocalyptic redirection presents climate change as something that everyone has an interest in prioritising preventing above all else, it misleadingly presents the interests of the materially insecure as the interests of all.

This argument may understandably strike the reader as paradoxical, given the more familiar point about climate change’s asymmetrical impact. The damage inflicted by climate change disproportionately affects the world’s poorest communities. Furthermore, the rich may have access to various means of preventing or mitigating climate change-induced damages to themselves. They may have their own metaphorical ‘lifeboats’ while everyone else is forced to go down with the ship (Swyngedouw, 2013: 17). If so, one might think that the opposite of my claim is true; the world’s poor have an overwhelming interest in prioritising preventing climate change, while the wealthy do not. But this presupposes an overly simplistic picture of the interests of the world’s poor, according to which preventing climate change is their only serious material threat.

As an analogy, consider the kind of asymmetrical interests that Britain and the Soviet Union may have had in taking action to prevent the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. On one hand, Nazism posed a far greater existential threat to the Soviet Union. It was not separated from Germany by water, Hitler had explicitly identified expansion into Russian territory as a means of creating Lebensraum, Nazi ideology was militantly anti-communist, and so on. If things were as simple as this, then we might plausibly say that the Soviet Union has the stronger interest in preventing the rise of Nazism. But on the other hand, the Soviet Union was plagued by famine and a still largely pre-industrial economy. Furthermore, any pre-emptive action to suppress Nazism would likely require collaboration with Western powers. The Soviet Union may have viewed them as unreliable allies at best, and believed that it would bear the bulk of the repercussions for any failed pre-emptive action. It might therefore judge that its interests would be best served by making peace with Nazism in order to buy time to develop and stabilise its economy, even if this peace might only be temporary. On this basis, one might claim that Britain, not the Soviet Union, had an overwhelming interest in taking necessary action to prevent the rise of Nazism, and that British diplomats lecturing Soviet leaders about the threat of Nazism would be overlooking this asymmetry of interests. My claim is that something like this is going on when the materially insecure are lectured about the threat of climate change. My point is not that such lecturing is disrespectful or ineffective, but that it involves an ideological depiction of the materially insecure’s interests, and that we can plausibly expect it to be ineffective for this reason.

The argument I will make here is as follows:

A few clarifications. First, the argument is entirely unrelated to be increasingly fashionable topic of climate justice. I do not make any claim or assumption about what a just or fair distribution responsibilities for addressing climate change would look like. Rather, my claim is solely descriptive. It is a claim about how the interests of some differ from those of others when it comes to addressing climate change.

Second, the concept of a minimal standard of living I have in mind here is not absolute or unchangeable. It is certainly not the same as what Bernard Williams refers to as ‘Hobbesian fear’. A person experiences Hobbesian fear when she suffers ‘what by more or less universal consent would be regarded as a disaster from their point of view, something basically to be feared: they are starving, under-nourished, terrorized, murdered, under attack, forcibly moved, and so forth’ (Williams, 2005: 145). A minimal standard of living requires more than avoiding Hobbesian fear. I take it to be shaped by a basic Marxist insight that human beings acquire new needs as society develops (Raekstad, 2018). For example, access to electricity is, for the most part, a human need in 2021, whereas the same could not be said in 1900. If people lack access to electricity today, then I think it is generally accurate to say that they lack access to something necessary for a minimal standard of living. Similarly, I think it is accurate to regard involuntary unemployment as something that at least impinges on one’s ability to have a minimal standard of living, even if it does not necessarily lead to homelessness or food insecurity.

Third, the argument allows that some materially insecure people – specifically, those for whom prioritising preventing climate change does not threaten their interest in enjoying a minimal standard of living – might still have an interest in prioritising preventing climate change. It only claims that there are some materially insecure people for whom these interests are in tension, and as a result, they do not necessarily have an interest in making preventing climate change their number one priority.

The fourth and fifth premises seem to be the main points of controversy. True, one could conceivably challenge the first or second premise by pointing to the fact that the wealthiest people have means of avoiding or mitigating the threat posed by climate change to themselves. However, I think there are at least two reasons why climate change is nonetheless a very serious threat even to them. First, it may trigger natural disasters that affect their homes and persons. New York, for example, may be adversely affected by rising sea levels (Gornitz et al., 2019). Second, climate change also poses a threat to global production, especially with respect to food (Kummu et al., 2021). To be sure, this more directly impacts the distribution of commodities to poorer areas, but to the extent that the economies of wealthier nations like the US rely substantially on overseas imports, this may adversely affect the access of the materially secure to commodities as well.

Let me now explain why I think the fourth and fifth premises are true. The fourth premise might be challenged on the basis that climate change plays a substantial role in creating and deepening conditions of poverty, thereby denying people a minimal standard of living. The most obvious way in which it does this is by threatening them with more frequent and more destructive natural disasters, resulting in loss of home and livelihood. It may also have other effects which only add to make the already extensive difficulties of being poor. For example, an increase in global temperatures poses a serious threat to the health and comfort of many who lack access to effective air conditioning (McLeman, 2013: 87).

However, I do not think we need to look too far to find cases where the goals of fighting poverty and fighting climate change do not neatly align. The most obvious example is India. On one hand, climate change threatens many of India’s poorest people with grave harms, most notably that of becoming refugees from drought and flood-affected areas (Arthur, 2019; Mukhopadhyay and Revi, 2009). On the other hand, it is generally acknowledged that fighting poverty requires modes of economic development which involve substantial amounts of greenhouse gas emissions (Khosla and Bhardwaj, 2019; Sreenivas and Gambhir, 2019). Sreenivas and Gambhir (2019: 427–428) note that ‘while developmental concerns and climate concerns do not always come into conflict, often there are difficult choices to be made between the two’. In Western countries, the most familiar example is that of workers in fossil fuel industries who face the prospect of job loss due to climate change-related policies. I will say more about this example shortly.

The fifth premise is probably the most controversial. The main objection, I think, is that a prospective catastrophe like climate change threatens an amount of destruction so extraordinary that even the materially insecure have an interest in prioritising preventing it above all else. I grant that there are some conceivable perspective catastrophes which everyone, including the materially insecure, may well have a clear interest in prioritising preventing. For example, if there is a marauding army approaching the city hellbent on slaughtering everyone in the city, then everyone in the city has an interest in doing all they can to stop it. However, I think the threat of climate change is disanalogous in two important ways.

First, its trajectory is a lot less certain and predictable then that of the marauding army. While climate change is also undoubtedly deadly and destructive, few if any can say that they will be killed by climate change-related disasters with the same degree of certainty as those living in the city can say they will be killed by the marauding army if it is not stopped.

Second, and most importantly, there is a crucial temporal difference between the two examples. The marauding army is a straightforward threat to the present. The case of climate change is more complex. On one hand, climate change has undoubtedly already adversely affected the livelihood of people around the world. Yet, the most catastrophic effects of climate change are still yet to happen, even if the time when they are likely to happen is rapidly drawing near (Steffen et al., 2018).

This complicates matters greatly for the materially insecure. Those who live in Hobbesian fear generally have very limited space for pursuing long-term goals, since their short-term survival is in doubt. But what about less extreme examples where the threat of Hobbesian fear might not be present? Consider, for example, a coal miner who becomes unemployed as a result of climate change-motivated decisions to close down fossil fuel industries. The coal miner’s present interests have here been sacrificed for the sake of the interests of future people and – depending on her age and the rate at which climate change will progress if unhalted – the interests of her future self. Are her interests best served by this course of action, assuming it a necessary part of prioritising preventing climate change?

To the extent that we can conceive of this coal miner as having interests that stretch across time, I think it is far from obvious that her interests are best served by this. The sacrifice she is asked to make to her present interests in order to prevent climate change is not comparable to any sacrifice that might be asked of the materially secure. Even if the latter might sacrifice more in absolute terms, they are not at risk of compromising their access to a minimal standard of living.

If our (not-so) hypothetical coal miner does make the sacrifice that is asked of her (willingly or otherwise), her best hope is that she will be offered retraining in another industry in which she will soon find a job with a comparable salary. Perhaps this option can be made available to her, but the likelihood that it will be made available to her is another thing entirely (Weller, 2019). And just as importantly, she suffers what might be best described as a loss of dignity – a loss which, I think, can have serious consequences for her ability to enjoy a minimally decent standard of living. This point was made by Tony Maher, former president of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) in Australia in a 2016 speech:

Green jobs is a mantra that may work well with people in an office environment, or with those yet to enter the workforce. It does not resonate well with people working in tough industries seeking some stability in their life and to put food on the table and their kids through school without constant worry about their next pay packet.

Working people usually don’t want a new green job. They want their existing job made greener. They want jobs that are sustainable, that they can be proud of, that they think are contributing to a better world for themselves and their community (Maher, 2016).

My point is not that all or even most jobs in fossil fuel industries can be made ‘greener’. It is only that losing one’s job on the grounds that it is now viewed as contributing harm rather than good to the world amounts to a substantial loss of dignity. If so, this is another good relevant to one’s ability to have a minimal standard of living that fossil fuel workers may be asked to sacrifice in the name of prioritising preventing climate change.

I think, then, that we have reason to think that each premise of the argument is true. To be clear, the point is not that the interests of the materially insecure have no connection with the prevention of climate change. Rather, it is that since taking action to prevent climate change may often come at the expense of their interest in enjoying a minimal standard of living, it is at least unclear that their overall interests are best served by prioritising preventing climate change above all else. Contrast this with the materially secure. For them, there is no greater threat to their interests than the prospective catastrophe of climate change, and as a result, their overall interests do seem best served by prioritising preventing it above all else. Hence, we can see that their interests differ from any materially insecure persons for whom preventing climate change might threaten their ability to enjoy a minimal standard of living. But apocalyptic redirection erroneously presupposes that their interests are all the same when it comes to prioritising action on climate change. Hence, it misleadingly presents the interests of some as the interests of all.

The Stop Adani Convoy and Political Functions of Apocalyptic Redirection

In the previous section, I argued that applying the discourse of apocalyptic redirection to climate change involves portraying the interests of the materially secure as universal interests. Although it presents a prospective catastrophe as something that all people have an interest in prioritising preventing above all else, the materially insecure do not necessarily have an interest in making the prevention of climate change their highest priority.

This much is sufficient to tell us that the discourse of apocalyptic redirection is ideological in the pejorative sense when applied to climate change. However, it is also worth exploring what political functions it may serve. In this section, I will explore how understanding the ideological character of this discourse enables us to see how it is largely ineffective as a method of generating popular support for action on climate change. I will also suggest it may reveal how this discourse may reproduce existing forms of power. In order to do this, I will examine the Stop Adani Convoy as a case study.

The Adani Carmichael Coal Mine is located in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland in Australia. It is owned by a group now called Bravus Mining and Resources, formerly known as Adani Australia. Approval for the construction of the mine was initially granted by state and federal government authorities in 2014. In August 2015, the federal court revoked the approval on the grounds that the federal government had overlooked the potential impact of the mine on endangered animal species. In October, however, the federal government reapproved the mine, subject to a series of conditions. After nearly four more years of extended legal and political challenges, resulting in the substantial downsizing of the project, construction of the mine finally began in June 2019 after receiving final approval from all relevant political and regulatory institutions.

Importantly, construction began only a month after a federal election, held on 18 May, in which the proposed coal mine was a prominent issue. Proponents of the mine claimed that it would create as many as 10,000 new jobs, although there are reasons to think this figure is wildly exaggerated (Campbell, 2015). Opponents made a variety of arguments against it, including potential damage to the local environment, adverse impacts on ground water, disregard of native title considerations and excessive carbon emissions.

In the lead-up to the election, the incumbent Liberal-National Coalition government was largely supportive of the planned construction of the mine. The Labor Party, the main opposition party, did not take a clear stance either way (Murphy, 2019). The Greens, the largest minor party in Australia, opposed the construction of the mine. Polls had predicted a Labor victory (Johnson, 2020). However, the Coalition retained government, partly due to an exceptionally strong showing in Queensland, where it picked up two new seats. Many post-election analyses attributed the Coalition’s performance in Queensland to popular local support for the mine, along with frustration with Labor’s comparatively unclear stance (Horn, 2019).

One of the significant events in the lead-up to the election was the ‘Stop Adani Convoy’, led by former Greens leader Bob Brown. The Convoy, consisting of several hundred protesters, travelled north from Hobart on 17 April to the small coal mining town of Clermont in Queensland, before returning to Canberra on 5 May. The stated purpose of the convoy was to influence voters in the lead up to the election. Brown himself claimed, ‘Our convoy will be a success if voters, on May 18th, have the Adani issue changing their vote’ (Bob Brown Foundation, 2019b).

The speeches and media releases made throughout the duration of the convoy targeted a variety of environmental issues surrounding the mine. It did not focus exclusively on the general threat of climate change. In particular, Brown sought to draw attention to the mine’s potential to harm the Great Barrier Reef and ‘the 64,000 jobs dependent on it’ (Bob Brown Foundation, 2019c). At the same time, the threat of climate change featured prominently in campaign rhetoric, often in ways that incorporated the following three elements of apocalyptic redirection: imminence, conjuring past catastrophes and opportunities for transcending divisions. In February, Brown had authored a piece promoting the convoy in which he began by noting his awareness that ‘every minute of every day our planet is hotter than when I was a boy’. He also invoked one of Bertrand Russell’s statements on the threat of nuclear annihilation: ‘the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt’ (Brown, 2019). At the convoy rally in Clermont, Brown told the crowd ‘you can back your children or you can back Gautam Adani’s mine but you can’t have both’ (Jeffrey, 2019). Tellingly, Brown did not hold a meeting with the people of Clermont (Moore, 2019). Rather, the convoy held rallies in an attempt to emphasise the perceived immorality of the mine. Even in the aftermath of the election, Brown insisted that ‘Adani remains Australia’s moral challenge, 2019’ (Bob Brown Foundation, 2019a).

What might the Stop Adani Convoy tell us about the use of apocalyptic redirection to describe climate change? The first and most obvious point to note is that, when it comes to mobilising bipartisan support for action on climate change, it fails spectacularly. The convoy clearly did not achieve its stated aim of persuading people to vote to stop the construction of the mine. On a little reflection, it is not difficult to see why. We have seen how apocalyptic redirection, as a hyper-moralistic discourse, presents the interests of the materially secure as universal interests. It assumes that failure to prioritise action on climate change above all other considerations can only amount to a manifestation of selfishness or climate denialism, while in fact this assumption is plausible only for the materially secure. Hence, if the materially insecure voice doubts about a proposed course of action on climate change because of its perceived adverse impact on their livelihood and receive responses that take the form of apocalyptic redirection, they are effectively being told – quite inaccurately – that they are either selfish or some sort of climate denialist.

To use an analogy, suppose a person is reluctant to dive into shark-infested waters to save someone from drowning. A bystander who does not face the same dilemma then subjects this person to the kind of moral criticism that might be appropriate if the location was a swimming pool. Apocalyptic redirection, I think, engages in just this kind of moral criticism. If so, it is no wonder that people do not take kindly to it. The point here is not just that telling people they are selfish or climate denialists is not an effective way of getting them to do something about climate change, although I do think this is largely correct. It is also that the assumption that those among the materially insecure who oppose action on climate change are necessarily selfish or climate denialists is based on an ideological conflation of their interests with those of the materially insecure. To the extent that they are more or less cognisant of their interests, they have further reasons for viewing apocalyptic redirection with hostility.

Recent research on the effects of the convoy on the election result seem to suggest that its hyper-moralistic approach played a major role in its failure. Colvin (2020: 10) argues that ‘the Convoy most likely worked against the unifying aims of the just transition approach’ to climate change by returning ‘to the legacy of past conflict where normative fit dictates that environmental objectives must be at odds with the objectives of working people and regional, resource-dependent communities’. It presented the demands of fighting climate change as requiring a sacrifice from these communities that is not only morally obligatory, but such that failure to fulfil this obligation could be understood only as a symptom of selfishness or climate denialism. As it happens, the evidence that communities like Clermont are indifferent to environmental issues is highly dubious. Local and regional media outlets were often highly critical of the environmental credentials of the mine (Somerville and Ames, 2020). Tranter and Foxwell-Norton (2021) reject the view that Queensland voters were more supportive of new coal mines than voters in other Australian states. Instead, they suggest that the Convoy’s moralised framing of the issue drove voters towards the Coalition:

The strong focus on the coal industry by the ‘Stop Adani Convoy’ also simplified Queenslanders’ relationships with fossil fuels – and indeed – those in other parts of Australia. Voters were encouraged to choose between the scientifically supported but (apparently for many) temporally remote threat of [climate change], and the (perceived) more immediate economic advantages offered by new coal mines, a highly polarising choice. Importantly, many Queenslanders did not appreciate environmental activists from other states telling them what to do (Tranter and Foxwell-Norton, 2021: 99).

It might be argued that apocalyptic redirection may be used effectively in order to win over parts of the electorate, including other working class communities, whose interests are not so clearly at stake in this particular issue. It may be that Brown hoped that the convoy would serve as a moral rallying cry to other parts of the Australian electorate, with the result that the Coalition would suffer substantial electoral losses in states other than Queensland. After the election, he criticised Labor leader Bill Shorten’s refusal to clearly oppose the mine, claiming that it would have resulted in greater electoral gains elsewhere (Quinn, 2020). The success of this kind of use of apocalyptic redirection obviously relies on a relative absence of working class solidarity. Even then, however, apocalyptic redirection may be readily recognisable as a discourse that is generally unfriendly to working class interests. The fact that it supposes that there can be nothing comparably important to fighting climate change may make it generally unappealing to any who view maintaining a minimally decent standard of living as a challenge rather than a given. It is notable that the only electoral gains made by Labor were in postcodes in the highest income quintile (Tranter and Foxwell-Norton, 2021: 91). In Australia, as in many other places, ostensibly left-wing parties are increasingly becoming the parties of the materially secure, forfeiting much of their former working class support. Their reliance on hyper-moralistic discourses like apocalyptic redirection may be playing a role in this development.

I would therefore suggest that apocalyptic redirection is unlikely to be an effective mechanism for winning public democratic contests. However, my second point is that there may be something about the class position of those who use this discourse that makes it difficult for them to realise its ineffectiveness. Apart from blaming the election result on Labor’s indecisiveness, Brown also insisted that ‘greed won’ in the federal election (Bamsley, 2019). The idea that the people in Queensland who voted for the Coalition on the basis of concerns about job security for themselves and their communities were motivated by ‘greed’ may strike us as disturbingly inaccurate. But this point may escape us if we buy into the logic of apocalyptic redirection and insist that failure to prioritise climate change always amounts to selfishness or denialism. Brown’s invocation of Russell’s quote is also telling, not just because of its allusion to nuclear annihilation as a prospective catastrophe comparable to climate change, but because of its division of people into the following two categories: ‘stupid’ people who are apparently indifferent to the catastrophe in question and ‘intelligent’ people who recognise the threat it poses. The implication seems to be that those who did not vote to stop the mine are simply stupid (or vicious), while those who opposed the mine have a monopoly on being ‘intelligent’. Apocalyptic redirection, it seems, may be far more effective at producing or enabling ideological illusions for its users than for its intended audience.

This inability to recognise the impotence of apocalyptic redirection in public democratic contests connects with my third point; apocalyptic redirection may serve the class interests of those who use it by reinforcing their worldview. This worldview consists of the idea that since the mass of working class people is immoral, short-sighted and generally reactionary, they need to be made the object of moral preaching or ignored entirely. Apocalyptic redirection thus fits neatly with the interests of elite aspirants. It helps them stabilise capitalist exploitation by concealing the antagonism between their interests and the interests of working people. It also helps them further accumulate social capital by affirming their own virtue in contrast with the supposedly reactionary masses (Liu, 2020). We might therefore suppose that those who use apocalyptic redirection may even have an interest in being unable to realise its impotence. They may want it to be the case that the main obstacles to effective collective action on climate change are the prevalence of selfishness and denialism among the masses.

The fourth and final point I want to make is that the failure of apocalyptic redirection in public democratic contests may lead to its use as a means of providing cover for more covert forms of action on climate change which take place without widespread public scrutiny. Here, apocalyptic redirection may function as a kind of battering ram, creating space for the implementation of ostensibly environmentally friendly policies that would have a little chance of getting through standard democratic procedures and largely ignore local interests altogether.

This kind of politics may strike some as remarkably similar to Naomi Klein’s influential ‘shock doctrine’, according to which governments and corporate actors may seize on a particular crisis as an opportunity for rapidly implementing neoliberal economic policies (Klein, 2007). Robert Fletcher (2012) has shown how the shock doctrine can help make sense of certain corporate responses to the climate crisis. The emergence of carbon markets has allowed market mechanisms to displace states as the primary regulatory force. In so doing, they have given the corporate sector greater leeway to exploit poorer populations who may be especially vulnerable to climate change for financial gain. This particular form of disaster capitalism, like other historical instances of its implementation, has tended to produce profits for the wealthy while leaving the already vulnerable no better off or in even worse circumstances than before (Thomas and Warner, 2019).

Conclusion

I have argued that the use of apocalyptic redirection to describe the threat of climate change is ideological in the pejorative sense because it presents the interests of the materially secure as universal interests. I want to emphasise that nothing I have said in this article in any way implies that climate change is not a serious threat to the interests of most human beings. Nor is it the case that popular cross-class support for action on climate change is impossible. The obvious alternative approach to apocalyptic redirection is one which focuses closely on local interests, acknowledges the disproportionate burdens placed on some and places a great deal of emphasis on how these burdens might be compensated. An alternative approach to the issue of the Adani Carmichael Mine might have been to propose a different jobs and infrastructure project geared towards the interests of regional communities in Queensland and stress its superiority to the construction of a new mine, not exclusively – or even primarily – in terms of its environmental credentials, but also in terms of its capacity to provide local people with better and more secure employment options. In this approach, the dominant theme would be interest, rather than morality. People would be invited to support this project over the new mine not so much because they owe it to anyone, but because it best addresses their interests. ³ Of course, there is no guarantee that such an approach would have succeeded in Australia in 2019. It would require clear and consistent messaging from a political party willing to make itself accountable to local interests, and it is not clear that Labor was capable of doing this. Still, I am inclined to think that this approach offers the best hope for generating popular democratic support for action on climate change.

The main problem with this approach, however, is that those who hold political power may not have a clear incentive to pursue it. This may be because they are incapable of seeing the shortcomings of apocalyptic redirection and other moralistic approaches for the reasons covered in the previous section. It may also be because they find it quite amenable to their own interests in spite of its ineffectiveness in winning democratic political contests. They may also appreciate its capacity to enable covert action on climate change. For all these reasons, we might plausibly expect apocalyptic redirection to continue to play a prominent role in the politics of climate change for the foreseeable future. But if the argument I have made in this article is correct, it would be naïve to suppose that the interests it will serve are those of humanity as a whole.

Research Data