by Lee Zimmerman
The uncertainty
he says he
finds exhilarating. He loves
that sense of constant re-adjustment.
He wishes to be quoted as saying at present:
“Half is enough.”Elizabeth Bishop, “The Gentleman of Shallot”
.’
I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. . .of remaining content with half-knowledge.
John Keats in Letter to George and Tom Keats
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
Andrew Marvel, “To His Coy Mistress”
Presenting what sounds like a settled matter, “The Gentleman of Shallot’s”’s lapidary last line, “half is enough,” might seem to suggest the gentleman is settling for a something short of the “exhilaration” that, the stanza’s first line tells us, he finds in uncertainty. Abstracted from its context in the poem, it is often reframed as a final verdict—a pithy formulation of Bishop’s stance toward the world. But the poem itself frames its final line not as the revelation of an underlying truth but only as what the gentleman “wishes to be quoted as saying at present.” Of course, what one wishes to be quoted as saying isn’t necessarily the same thing as what one really thinks or feels. And if, in this case, it does seem likely the words he wishes for reflect his own real view, this is only what he wishes for “at present”—as if his nonce conclusion that “half is enough” were itself a matter of “constant readjustment.” The gentleman, that is, resists understandings of knowledge as final or as abstractable from any particular context.
What the particular context of the climate crisis tells us is that half is not enough. My argument, though, is that, in the ways that crisis is written about and discussed, the urgent, overriding, question of “enough-ness” for the most part goes unbroached
There’s likely very little time left, something like seven years, for preventing a collapse of the climate system that has been a condition of being for the development and maintenance of what we call “civilization.” It’s a desperate situation, demanding radical and immediate action. But business as usual carries on nonetheless, unperturbed by that desperation. Indeed, the more we know and talk about the climate crisis, the more atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise.
I have suggested elsewhere that this ecocidal, economically determined “business as usual” is normalized by a fundamentally denialist discursive business as usual. “Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” as Greta Thunberg puts it. “30 years of blah, blah, blah and where has that led us?” In short, there is something wrong with the way we talk and write about the climate crisis. And beyond what I’ve recently described as the vocabulary of normalized denial, at the center of this wrongness is the way that in our discursive business as usual overriding questions of enough-ness simply are made to disappear.
The most pressing of such disappeared questions is this one: “What might be sufficient to prevent the likely collapse of our climate system—the system that constitutes the Earth as a habitable planet for humans at anything like our present number?”
Because of anthropogenic global warming (supplemented by other ecocidal degradations) that system—our necessary home—is likely rapidly approaching a threshold, a point of irreversible collapse into some other system altogether, sometimes called “hothouse earth.” “Sufficient” action, then, would offer some reasonable chance of stopping short of that catastrophic threshold.
Of course, given the innumerable, complex processes involved, and the necessarily incomplete understanding of how they might interact, defining any specified degree of increased warming as a threshold is really only defining what degree of risk one calls acceptable. But in 2009, the international community confirmed 2°C of warming (above the pre-industrial level) as a limit that should not be crossed, and in 2018 a special Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report stressed the extreme danger of passing even the 1.5 degree mark.
Though that report has itself been criticized for framing the danger too conservatively, it nonetheless calls for changes on “a non-incremental scale,” detailing how limiting heating to 1.5°C would require greenhouse emissions to be about halved by 2030 and brought to “net zero” by about 2050 (though even the target of “net zero” is itself an evasion). When the report was issued, that would have involved cutting emissions 7.6 percent a year, starting in 2020. Since that time, emissions have in fact increased, as we race headlong toward the catastrophic point of no return.
As even the historically too-cautious IPCC report has it, taking the question of sufficiency seriously—meeting the necessary reduction targets—would mean “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” Nevertheless, discussions about how to respond to the climate crisis for the most part remain rooted precisely in a business as usual that defines itself against the prospect of such rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented change— a status quo to which, when it comes to actual laws and policy, sufficient measures either don’t make it to the table in the first place or are dismissed as “unrealistic.”
The 2015 Paris Agreement offers a prominent case in point. Everywhere the Agreement is lauded as the mark of historic progress. It “remains of one President Obama’s proudest achievements,” the Obama Foundation tells us in 2020, still “[t]he Best Possible Shot to Save the One Planet We’ve Got.” On the one hand, the Agreement defines its goal as “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” On the other, even in the (to put it mildly) unlikely event that every signing country decreased its emissions by its voluntarily pledged amount, that would “limit” warming to around 3°C warming—utter catastrophe.
When the Foundation does for a moment glance at the question of enough-ness, acknowledging that “President Obama underscored that the agreement alone was not enough to address the crisis,” it does so only in the act of averting its eyes from the existential import of that question, reassuring us that the agreement set us on the right path by “provid[ing] a framework for increased ambition in the fight against climate change, including through summits like the one taking place in Glasgow next week.” The Foundation, that is, offers an avalanche of incrementalisms, oblivious to its own assertions of the unconditional imperative of immediacy. If, to save the burning house, you needed to stop fueling the fire immediately, and if saving the house were really the point, and, if you really wanted to save that house and the people inside it, you’d hardly think in terms of “providing a framework” to talk about what has to be done. Nor would you call such ecocidal can-kicking “increasingly ambitious.”
While our dominant institutions often begin by acknowledging the drastic urgency of what they call the “crisis,” they remain embedded in a fundamental commitment to business as usual and thus exclude the question of sufficiency from the policy blah blah blah to which they then turn.
Summarizing the IPCC’s April 2022 report, for example, Working Group III Co-Chair Jim Skea warns “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F).” and “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it [keeping to that limit] will be impossible.” What that report shows, IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee tells us in the U.N.’s account, is that “half-measures are no longer an option.” But that same account also optimistically announces that “there is increasing evidence of climate action,” stressing that “[s]ince 2010, there have been sustained decreases of up to 85% in the costs of solar and wind energy, and batteries” and that ”[a]n increasing range of policies and laws have enhanced energy efficiency, reduced rates of deforestation and accelerated the deployment of renewable energy.”
Crucially, most of such talk about renewable energy remains decoupled from the question of the reduction of burning fossil fuel. That renewable energy costs have decreased, for instance, doesn’t mean renewables have therefore begun to replace fossil fuel, the burning of which has in fact continued to escalate. Rather than somehow automatically replacing fossil fuel, the increase in renewables simply means an increase in the overall amount of energy available for use, so that, despite the rise of wind and solar power and the decrease of their costs, the world burned more fossil fuel in 2021 than in 2010. Indeed, in that period, the percentage of overall energy use that comes from fossil fuels has remained about the same, close to eighty percent. (For that matter, because of the economic “rebound effect,” in the U.S., increases in efficiency and renewables have produced an increase in greenhouse emissions.)
The “increasing evidence of climate action” offered by the UN here thus amounts to precisely the incrementalist “half-measures” for which Lee has said we don’t have time. As is mind-numbingly characteristic of such pronouncements, however, Lee goes on to report being “encouraged by the climate action being taken in many countries”—his previous dismissal of incrementalism having simply vanished. “There are policies, regulations and market instruments that are proving effective,” he adds, evoking more half-measures and defining “effective” only in a way that disallows considerations of whether those measures are proving effective “enough.”
“Effective” here floats free of any context. Its meaninglessness vacuity obscures the truth that the report in which the term appears is in fact warning of the disastrous rise in overall emissions.
A paradigmatic instance of the way that policy blah blah blah works to evade real questions of enough-ness appeared in the New York Times on October 25, 2021. The headline of the article does introduce the question of enough-ness—but only in the context of balancing a glass-half-full story, “Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate,” with its corresponding glass-half-empty one, “No, It’s Not Nearly Enough.” Consistent with the paper’s commitment to its fantasy of journalistic detachment, the headline’s balancing of “Yes and No” structures the article itself. It begins by sketching an apparent measure of progress from 2014 (when “the world was on track to heat up nearly 4 degrees C. . . by the end of century, an outcome widely seen as catastrophic”) to “today” (Oct. 2021) (when “thanks to rapid growth in clean energy, humanity has started to bend the emissions curve”) so that, because of “current policies we are on pace for roughly 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.” This is pronounced a “better result,” though “still devastating.”
As a sketch of some “progress,” this rhetorically self-cancelling formulation reveals the strain of trying to fit the square peg of the actual history into the round hole of the Times’s fundamental investment in balancing glass-half-empty stories with glass-half-full ones. It is premised on the far from self-evident assumption that a “devasting” future is “better” than a “catastrophic” one. Even that “better,” though “devasting” future depends on “current policies” that are largely simply pledges and plans made by governments whose approach to the crisis has been mainly lip-service and whose previous policies, let us not forget, produced the crisis in the first place.
The body of the article maintains its fundamentally “balanced” approach to representing climate “progress,” drawing on the research of the Climate Action Tracker to show that “the data offers reasons for both hope and alarm.” In a section titled “How Things Improved,” it presents as the chief “reason for hope” the fact that whereas “in 2014 the world was on track for 4 degrees C warming by 2100,” the “current policies [in 2021] put the world on pace for roughly 2.9 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100”—past the point where the worst-case scenarios seem likely. In 2012, Bill McKibben put it that, “The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can’t raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it’s become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees,” and since that time even the IPCC has defined the necessity of limiting warming to 1.5 degree. In the Times, though, the far-beyond-the-tolerable bottom line of 2.9 degrees is adduced as proof that “things are improved.”
While Niklas Hohne, a founder of Climate Action Tracker, does in the article acknowledge that, “You can say that progress has been too slow, that it’s still not enough,” he then drains the notion of “enough” of any substance, countering what “you can say” with his glass-half-full assertion that “we do see real movement”—evidence, the article has it, that there’s an “improved outlook,” that the future looks more promising than it did in 2014. As we’ve seen, though, since 2014 greenhouse emissions have in fact risen, and the percentage of overall energy usage that is derived from fossil fuel has remained constant. And as this history is made to fit the procrustean bed of “we’re making progress,” the ways we talk about climate policy become disarticulated from what it would take to stop the house from burning down. Like that troubling history itself, in the policy context the question of “enough-ness” is made to disappear.
As time left for sufficient action rapidly runs out, Hohne rationalizes his bizarre conclusion that a world on the fast track to 2.9 degrees C warming represents some “progress” with a resort to a familiar, contextless analogy: “You can see the glass as half-full or half-empty.” In posing the “half-full story” as somehow equivalent to the “half-empty” one (you could see the glass either way), this framing pretends that the former, that “countries have good intentions and are sending the right signals to investors,” isn’t revealed as nonsense by the latter—that “none of these countries that have pledged to go to zero have sufficient short-term policies to really put themselves on track” (given the urgency, the “short-term” is the only really relevant consideration). This pretense can be maintained only by abstracting the either half-full or half-empty glass from its location inside a burning down house and, instead, locating it precisely nowhere. If to put out the fire that’s burning down your house you need a full glass of water right now, the right question isn’t, “Is the glass half-empty or half-full?” but, “Is the glass full-enough?”
Without subjecting Hohne’s desperate claim that “we do see real movement” to scrutiny, the Times proceeds to offer “several reasons for the improved outlook.” Predictably, the first is the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and though the article acknowledges that each country’s pledge to curb emissions is merely voluntary, the real value of Paris, as the article has it, is that it “helped spur new actions,” a few of which are briefly mentioned: “The European Union tightened caps on industrial emissions. China and India ramped up renewable energy. Egypt scaled back subsidies for fossil fuels. Indonesia began cracking down on illegal deforestation.”
These are barely even the sort of half-measures for which the 2022 IPCC report demonstrates we have no time. Because of accounting questions, it’s not clear that the EU has in fact actually reduced the emissions for which it is responsible. Nor do its reduction targets themselves reflect what might be sufficient under our emergency conditions. Revealingly, asked whether the European Union’s 2020 target was “ambitious enough,” the ex-executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change first acknowledges that it wasn’t “ambitious enough from the perspective of avoiding dangerous climate change.” This is a damning indictment, to which he nonetheless appears to remain numb as, fetishizing balance, he goes on simply, but incoherently, to add another apparently equivalent “perspective”—that of “politics,” from which the target “was seen as sufficiently ambitious and a critical step in the right direction,” as if “avoiding dangerous climate change” weren’t the whole point in the first place.
Similarly, China and India may have ramped up renewables, but their emissions in fact continue to rise, as do Egypt’s, despite its scaling back fossil fuel subsidies (in any case, it contributes only about 0.6 percent of global total emissions). Though late in the day, Indonesia “began” to try to limit deforestation (deforestation raises levels of greenhouse gas by removing carbon sinks), deforestation continues there on a large scale, so that from 2019 through 2021, about 750,000 hectares (almost 2 million acres) of forest were lost.
Against these “reasons for an improved outlook,” the Times lists examples of what it calls some “backsliding.” Most notably, the list includes the Trump administration’s having “rolled back some major climate policies.” The implication is that before Trump the U.S. was somehow making progress. But in fact none of President Obama’s so-called “major climate policies” countered the unprecedented expansion of fossil fuel production during his administration. Summarizing his detailed analysis, David Lapp Jost writes, “The Obama-Biden administration drove the sharpest expansion of oil production in the history of the U.S., and perhaps the largest or second-largest boom of any country in human history. Trump continued the momentum, but it was Obama who launched the new oil era.” (Out of office, Obama highlighted the “sudden talk of America’s leading role in oil and gas production,” proudly declaring “that was me people. Just say thank you.”)
While such putative “backsliding” actually represents a fundamental continuation of business as usual, the article punctuates its discussion of the “reasons for the improved outlook” with the assessment that “on the whole, countries are doing more than they were a decade ago”— a relativistic claim, once again, behind which the burning question of sufficiency cannot be glimpsed, as we speed toward the 2-degree cliff.
As a reason for an “improved” outlook, “just as important” as countries (ostensibly) doing “more,” in the Times account, is that “clean energy advanced far more quickly than predicted” so that “today, wind and solar power are the cheapest new source of electricity in most markets.” Here, as throughout US climate discourse, the boosterish discussion of renewables remains decoupled from the question of reducing fossil fuel directly, reflecting the widespread assumption that the mere development and lowered cost of renewable energy is equivalent to the reduction of the burning of fossil fuel. We’ve seen above why this isn’t the case, and, indeed, as if to underscore the point, in the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act the development of renewable energy projects on public lands is contingent on the “massive ramp up” of oil and gas leasing on those lands.
Fulfilling its fundamental commitment to “balance,” the Times article does proceed to review why these reasons for an improved outlook aren’t enough. It introduces its discussion here with the crucial observation that “as governments have awakened to the danger, they have vowed to do more,” but “so far, their promises often just exist on paper.” And it concludes with the International Energy Agency’s estimate that “current policies worldwide will deliver only one-fifth of the emission cuts needed this decade to stay on track for 1.5 degrees.” As a result, then, “without an immediate and rapid acceleration of action, that climate goal could be out of reach within a few short years.” However stark this conclusion, in such an article it cannot be allowed to unleash the question of enough-ness. Instead, it rhetorically balances, as if in an abyss of contextless abstract position taking without consequence, discussions of “reasons for hope” with those of “how things improved.”
With stories like this, The New York Times thus helps shape mainstream climate discourse’s continuing failure to define the central policy question of the climate crisis with an urgency or precision adequate to the enormity of the devastation unchecked climate change will (and is already beginning to) produce. That question is, when it comes to preventing the house from burning down, “What is ‘enough’?”
***
Lurking behind the consideration of how our dominant discourses suppress the question of enough-ness when it comes to climate policy lies another, even more fundamental suppressed question: “How much energy do we actually ‘need’ to use?” That is, “How much energy is enough?”
Here, again, Bishop’s Gentleman of Shallot seems to have miscalculated. At least to whatever extent it’s possible to roughly measure such things, “human well-being” has been found to be tied to energy usage only to a point. That point is about 79 gigajoules per person per year according to a recent, widely quoted study which also found that Americans use, on average, 284 gigajoules—almost 4 times the optimal amount.
Of course, the average figure doesn’t account for the extreme inequality in energy consumption. Nor do the various findings that people in general (in industrialized societies) are less happy or satisfied now than they were decades ago, during periods of lower per capita energy use, tell us much about how the findings are inflected by race, class, and other factors (like the climate crisis itself). But such general claims nevertheless do point to how climate discourse for the most part remains embedded in a system where the fundamental commitment to endless economic growth goes essentially unchallenged.
Just as discussions of climate policy mostly evade questions about whether particular policies might reduce greenhouse emissions drastically and quickly enough to forestall the worst-case scenarios, such discussions, even most versions of the Green New Deal, rigorously avoid the question of how much energy consumption and production, from whatever source, is sufficient in the first place—not only for “human well-being” but also for the sustainability of what some people call civilization itself. The human species is now in “overshoot”—using natural resources more rapidly than they can be replenished. Indeed, the data show that, if everyone on Earth consumed resources at the rate of the average American, humanity would need over five Earths. When it comes to the question of overall energy consumption, that is, half is in fact much too much.
Of course, in raising questions about real sufficiency, it’s important to remember that, in dealing with such complex systems as the planet, our knowing is necessarily embedded in a vaster space of not-knowing. As a general principle, one ought to be suspicious of the ways systems of knowledge and power, administered by experts, obscure that embeddedness, presenting themselves as universal and detached from any particular context. Indeed, the fantasy that, detached from the context of “nature” itself, humans could act on the environment and know precisely what they are doing is arguably what produced the climate crisis in the first place.
One might recall here Einstein’s remark about another anthropogenic existential threat: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” John Keats’s Negative Capability remains a crucial touchstone, as does its latter-day expressions in Donna Haraway’s warning against thought crossing the “brink of becoming much Too Big” (50) or Eve Sedgwick’s call for “weak theory.” But if all knowledge is conditional, what the emergency conditions of the climate crisis tell us is that resisting Enlightenment claims of epistemological mastery ought not to preclude the imperative, as David Wood puts it, to “do the calculations” (275). What we can’t or don’t know must not obscure what we can and do—however much that knowing might disrupt the prevailing certainties, that dominant mode of thinking the persistence of which speeds us toward utter catastrophe, normalizing an ecocidal commitment to infinite economic growth premised on the burning of fossil fuel
Elsewhere, I’ve argued that the process of normalizing ecocidal business as usual depends partly on the persistence of discursive business as usual—that, again, there is something really wrong with the way our dominant institutions talk and write about the “climate crisis.” Tracing some of the major elements of that wrongness, I proposed that the way we are being habituated to talk and thus think about that “crisis” helps perpetuate what might more tellingly be called an “atrocity-in process.” Committed by those in power in the global North, most immediately against the global South and eventually against everyone on the planet, this atrocity is in the process of killing hundreds of millions, and probably billions, of people in the present and in the future
As the time left for meaningful action drains away, naming the present as an atrocity-in-process might help usher in questions of enough-ness, and thus inject real urgency into the conversation. Disrupting the atrocity in process will take more than talk, of course—and we will have to talk pretty fast. But action sufficient for that disruption may well depend upon a language beyond the blah blah blah that dominates policy talk at the moment. More than we realize, we desperately need a language with which questions of enough-ness can be made paramount.
Postscript
As I finished writing this essay, climate talk turned to the suddenly announced and much-lauded Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. This isn’t the occasion either to scrutinize the bill in detail—to examine, for example, whether the projected emissions cuts of 40 percent by 2030 might in fact be too optimistic—or to consider what it means to rely on an approach based mainly on “incentives to the private sector to do the right thing” or one that, far from directly suppressing fossil fuel production in fact encourages and subsidizes it. But it is revealing in this context that the mainly celebratory response remains mostly unruffled by questions of enough-ness.
While some of the bill’s compromises are routinely noted, for the most part representations of the bill have followed the lead of President Biden who introduced it as “the most significant legislation in history to . . . tackle the climate crisis,” and of Chuck Schumer who called it “the boldest climate package in U.S history.” In the New York Times’s op-ed pages, for instance, David Wallace-Wells acknowledges that, though the bill is “retooled and whittled down,” it’s “still unthinkably large by the standards of previous administrations.” He adds that, though “it may well prove inadequate,” it still “represents a generational achievement.” Also in those pages, in a piece titled “Did the Democrats Just Save Civilization?,” Paul Krugman briefly notes that “[t]he act isn’t, by itself, enough to avert climate disaster,” before joining those who are “giddy” about it, calling it. a “huge step in the right direction.” (We might well wonder here what it means to call something a major “achievement” even as it would likely be “inadequate” in preventing the deaths of billions of human beings, or to react to that prospect of unaverted disaster with giddiness—or, especially, what it means that such questions apparently occur neither to the two prominent columnists themselves nor to their editors at the Times.) Typifying the response of even many environmentalist groups, the Clean Air Task Force has it that “the climate and clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act amount to the largest piece of climate action ever taken by any Congress.”
For the most part, that is, the IRA is framed in relation to the standard of what has been done in the past (a history of abject failure), not to what is necessary to have a chance of avoiding the worst-case scenarios in the present and future. Again, the urgent, absolute question, “Given how quickly we are approaching the catastrophic point of no return, is the bill sufficient?” is supplanted by the much more palatable, relativistic one, “Is the bill better than what came before?”
Where Krugman and many others see a “huge step,” others see “10% of what’s needed” or even only a “drop in the bucket.” But even the ostensibly huge step is, in Krugman’s account, said to be important only because it “sets the stage for more action in the years ahead”—kicking the can down the road yet one more time. And even by the bill’s own most optimistic terms, cutting emissions a net 40 percent by 2030, the measure falls short of accomplishing the net 50 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by that date needed to have a reasonable chance to limit warming to 1.5 degrees--—a target that itself, combined with the U.S. contributions to international climate finance, the Climate Action Tracker finds “not enough to make up its fair share.”
Eschewing questions of such “fairness,” as with the more “ambitious” (but itself still insufficient) climate plan on which he campaigned, Biden frames what is a global problem, demanding a global solution, in insistently nationalistic terms. He offers as a selling point that his plan “is going to give us the ability not only to compete with China for the future, but to lead the world and win the economic competition of the 21st century.” Even if the IRA were enough to meet the US emissions reduction target, insofar as it is contextualized in relation to “competing with China”—for the “future,” as if for some colonial prize—and “winning the economic competition,” its nationalistic premises remain ecocidally insufficient in the face of a crisis demanding a global solution. The problem is not how to preserve American economic power. It is how to interrupt a global atrocity-in-process that the present is committing on the future.
As our climate house burns down, against Bishop’s Gentleman of Shallot we might then counterpose the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” Had we but world enough and time, incremental and therefore insufficient climate policy wouldn’t be a crime. But as we race toward a catastrophic point of no return, we don’t have time enough, and, already in a state of “overshoot,” we don’t have world enough either.
In his time-and-world limited conditions, when Marvell’s speaker calls the failure to act a “crime,” his hyperbole signals what he intends as rhetorical playfulness, or at least as a transparent strategy. As our business as usual persists in its commitment to ecocide, we might well take his logic literally and his diction seriously and begin to think of that business as usual not only as a crime, but as a crime against all the species of the earth, including humanity.
When he considers the fate of individual people Marvel imagines “deserts of vast eternity,” but we might generalize his vision from individuals to the earth itself. In the poem’s world, desolation is non-negotiable, simply a matter of our mortal human condition. In our not quite yet burned down world, we might still be able to prevent the worst. With neither world nor time enough for incrementalism, if we say “enough!” to our criminal business as usual, our words and actions might still give us the chance to have enough—a just sufficiency—of both.