The Climate Coup with Mark Alizart and Robin Mackay

Thank you. Thank you.

Good evening everyone. My name is Matthias Rambaud. I run the book department at the French Institute in London. Welcome to the physical audience and to the digital audience through our live stream to this first event, which is the first of a series of talks entitled The Earth Here and Now. A series of talks the French Institute organizes in partnership with Politi and on the occasion of the COP26 in Glasgow in November. On the 10th of November, we will host a talk entitled Living as a Bird with Belgian philosopher Vincent Desprez and Gary Marvin.

And on the 8th of December, we will host a talk entitled A Decolonial Ecology with Malcolm Ferdinand and Sheila Sheik. Today, for this event entitled The Climate Coop, we are hosting Marc Alizar and Robin McKay. Marc Alizar is a philosopher born in London and living in Paris. He formerly served as an associate director of the Palais de Tokyo from 2006 to 2011 and curator of the cultural programs for the Centre Pompidou. He is the author of several books available in English, all translated and published by Politi,

Dogs, published in 2019, Crypto Communism, published the same year, and The Climate Coupe, which was released this year in Robin McKay's translation. Robin McKay is a philosopher and director of the publishing house Urbanomic and he's also translated numerous works of French contemporary philosophy from Alain Badiou to Quentin Meissou, Jean-François Yoletard, Bernard Stiegler, to name but a few. and actually I think all Mark's books available in English have been translated by Robin, is that right? and so before giving the floor to you Robin to start this conversation

let me quote the first chapter of the climate coup so I could say Mark chapter 1 verse 6-8 we can no longer believe that convincing the public that climate change is real and dangerous is enough to make a difference. Neither can we imagine that the only resistances to overcome in order to fight it are technical or financial. As crazy as it seems, we now have to address the fundamental question as to even why climate change should be averted. So if to study philosophy is to learn to die, as Montaigne put it, this worrying statement may be the best way to start your conversation, isn't it?

Thanks very much. Thank you. Hi, Marc. It's great to be here talking with you again. The last time we met was two years ago. And thanks very much to the Institut Francaise for hosting us. They've supported a great deal of my translation work in the past. and so yeah the last time we met was 2019 when we had fish and chips in Cornwall and since then quite a lot of things have happened there's been a lot of hand washing there's been a lot of social distancing and perhaps in the midst of all that people have become distracted from thinking about the climate crisis so maybe this is a good time this is

the first time I've done anything in real life for a very long time. So perhaps it's appropriate for us to remind people and to talk about your book, The Climate Coup, which not only reminds us that this is very much still a crisis, but also makes the provocative suggestion that there are those who would like the crisis to get worse and who have an interest in doing so. But before we enter into that, as Amatya said, I've translated three of your books, one on cryptocurrency, one on climate change, and one about dogs. So you have quite a range of interests,

it seems to me. But they all have some things in common stylistically. They're all quite compact, punchy books of great clarity, I think. They're recognizably philosophical, but they're not academic. They don't have the heavy apparatus of footnotes and references and the need to vie with every other thinker out there. there's a very unstuffy style, but it has a dynamic that's very recognizable as well, which I find every book that you've written builds towards a greater and greater provocation

that has a kind of an accelerative dynamic that's very recognizably your style. And you're not afraid to go beyond hypotheses and suggestions that are sensible and everyday. Each of your books has some quite surprising things to say. So before we talk specifically about climate coup, I'm kind of interested in asking you about your writing and your life as a writer. You seem surprisingly free of neuroses for a writer. you seem very happy to wander into different subjects

and you talk with great authority on all of them how did you come to be such a happy writer Mark? It's weird you ask this question because I don't feel that way really I think I'm an unhappy writer as you know I write my books all over again all the time and the first one I wrote I wanted to take out of the bookshops as soon as it was written but my publisher in France said it wasn't possible maybe I should buy all the copies but no, no I actually I think I have the same I think the same problem the problem doesn't change

the problem is political always has been which is how do we get out of this mess and the entries in the problem have been different but there is some kind of continuity between all the books. The first book, well, I even wrote a book on Protestants and then a book on computers. So the variety of subjects, as you say, is even wider. But they all call upon each other. As you know, the climate group is actually the kind of expanded conclusion of cryptocommunism, which shows itself a postscriptum to celestial informatics, which wasn't translated in English, which was itself one after the pop theology.

And yeah, but basically the idea is that the problems we face need a philosophical approach, even a religious one that was my first book um because they're spiritual in nature well that was my first idea as a as a academic philosopher for the firm i mean i was like in this romantic romantic idea that all our problems are spiritual that if we fix the the spiritual problems behind them we fix the we fix the whole world and the whole my whole progress has been to become more materialistic in my approach. And so there were computers were one part of it. And I have this idea that, in fact, the spiritual today,

what Hegel would call the spiritual, the spirit, is actually embodied in computers, in information theory. And from information theory, I had to come to Thermodynamics, which is a book about crypto-communism, Marx and Thermodynamics. and from thermodynamics I came to environmentalism because ecology is about applicated thermodynamics it's the idea that the whole world is a thermodynamical system and so there is some kind of line of thought which goes through all these I would put dogs apart and the next one on Tintin which are the kind of stuff So there's a common problematic that you're trying to tackle from different points of view.

So, yeah, how do we get into this mess and how can we get out of it? The Climate Coup is a worrying book, but I still would say it's positive. Perhaps I'll retract happy, but it's positive. And it asks a question, I think, about agency. And I think many of the most difficult things to think about the climate crisis, about environmentalism, are about agency now usually the question is about the agency of the general public what can we do and we've been asked to do many things we've been convoked to enter into the environmental action in various different ways the way that you open the book is to say that

ecology has won. Ecology has won the battle for hearts and minds and not only that but the technology is also there and yet nothing's changed and because nothing's changed I would add also there's a growing disenchantment with being asked to do more, being asked to do your bit. So you seem to be asking a different question of agency and that is that you're saying there's a small section of society who have an investment in making sure that things don't get better and in fact has an interest in making sure that they get worse so to start with do we distinguish this from saying that the system is

rotten are you talking about specific people there are specific people who have have made a choice, who are continually making the choice not to do anything, or even to take positive action that makes the climate emergency worse. You're right to say the starting point of the book was this fact we can all fathom that, yes, ecology has won one battle, which we thought was the war, which was awareness. The first battle to win was to make us aware that there's a problem, and it was already a very uphill battle, because we've known that climate is in danger since the 70s, even. Well, scientifically speaking, we're absolutely sure of it.

The American government got a report stating figures which are exactly the ones that we're living through today, measuring, so it was very accurate already. oil companies asked for their own reports on climate change and induced climate change and same thing happened they have these reports since 50 years already ago maybe a little less, 40 years ago they had these reports which are very accurate and then there was a club of Rome engineers gathered who wrote the limits on growth and explained what the trajectories of the world, of economies, were going to be if we went to business as usual. So this has been pretty clear for 40 years.

And still, or because of that, we learned afterwards that there had been a huge work done by oil companies and other companies and the American government and all agencies in the government to make us unaware of that, which is very similar to what happened to the cigarette papers when cigarette makers understood that cigarettes gave us cancer and they deployed advertisement to explain that on the contrary smoking cigarettes was really good for your health. You still find that in films today. In old films, people smoking cigarettes when they're ill because it makes it good for your health. And climate change underwent the same kind of process So in the 90s or until, I would say, even until the very big fires of the last couple of years, it was still taboo in American politics to talk about man-induced climate change.

And we know it's a battle. It's a cultural battle which is fought by conservatives everywhere in the world that there is no climate change. I think this battle is lost actually today. but still the idea behind this battle that once we would be aware that we're going to a catastrophe we would change everything this didn't happen I wrote the book because once again, how do we get out of this mess what do we do how do we do it if awareness isn't enough what's next what's more what do we need to do more to get us moving. There's this idea in the environmentalist movement that if we are aware, if we can convince people, we are all rational beings

and we want good, we want to do good. So obviously we want to change things. It doesn't work that way. And I wrote that, I wrote the book before COVID. And when I spoke about that, people would say, you know, I mean, are you sure? It sounds like a conspiracy theory that people would not want to save the world. Everybody wants to save the world. And then COVID happened and this amazing thing happened that wearing masks was actually a question, was politicized. I mean, who could have thought that the question of wearing a mask to protect yourself, protect the others, not getting a disease, I mean, protect yourself first.

I mean, just in the very idea of saving your own life, because obviously it's also about protecting others, but it's also about protecting yourself, that people would politicize that and say, no, I won't be wearing a mask. Why? And this has changed. that's why the English tradition is different from the French one, because I added this experience that we lived through COVID, that health issues, even health issues, that rational people would treat the same way, a disease, protect yourself because we need vaccines. Well, either they provoke irrational fears, which I can understand, or irrational refusal for the vaccines. I mean, there's a long history of vaccine resistance.

masks, very different, very, very strange. And then there's the discourse. We know what happened. We know when it broke. Donald Trump first wanted to be the kind of hero that saved America from COVID. And he was very forceful on the measures that needed to be taken and everything. And then there was this report that said that people who died from COVID were people of color, poor people. And they didn't vote Republican, basically. This is when COVID was politicized. Sorry to say it in a crude way like this, but this is what happened. And the backdrop of this, and this happened in England too, and we know because Dominic Cummings admitted it to the parliament a few weeks ago,

was that, you know, just let people have COVID. And we'll see who stands out. Survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. This is the default ideology of the people who are governing us, which is a default ideology of neoliberalism since the 1920s. It was theorized like that. The conferences that gave birth to neo-capitalism as we know it today in the 1920s and 1930s were based on social Darwinism, because capitalism is also the survival of the fittest. So this survival of the fittest ideology has been implemented. We saw it as like a lapsus calamus happened in COVID. But this is what this, I believe, is what's behind the fact that despite the awareness to climate change, nothing changes.

It's not despite. It's because people know that climate change is real. But they don't agree on the very fact that it should be adverted. Right, so as Greta Thunberg said either they're ignorant or they're evil That's it But she goes back immediately How wouldn't you? She dismisses the second option She's 16, how wouldn't you go back? And she's in front of the UN saying either you're ignorant or evil So she goes back, she says you can't be evil it's not possible, I mean you're grown ups And yet what more can be done for awareness to make people aware of what's happening Right. I mean, they'll even say it. I mean, politicians will even say, you know, Chirac in France said,

La Maison Brûle, our house is burning 10 years ago. We've known this since the Congress of Rio in 1992. Every politician has been through the common discourse saying, you know, it's very, we're all going to die if nothing happens. And they go back to business just afterwards. Some are ignorant. I'm not saying contrary. Some don't care because they won't be re-elected or they'll be dead. And then, I mean, politicians are not the only thing. Think tanks, much more powerful forces, which are not elected, but go on and on and on, decades after decades, spilling the same misinformation. They know exactly what they're doing.

I'm sorry it's sad but we have to be able to say it without being treated as if we were crazy loonies like dreaming of you know whatever sure one possible objection would be the hallmark of conspiracy theory is that there's always a they there's a they there's a cabal there's a secret group a minority group who are running things and And another way to look at it would be it's systemic. Yes, there's incompetence, there's greed, there's profiteering, but all of those are part of the system of capitalism. And therefore, fundamentally, in order to tackle climate change,

we have to tackle capitalism, right? And it's not a question of the agency of individual human beings. It's a systemic problem. One of the really interesting things that you get into in the second half of the book is to say leftist politics needs to understand that it has to subordinate its political aims and its anti-capitalism to the climate problem. The climate problem has to come first. And that's, I think, a very provocative proposition for the left. But how do you defend your thesis against the idea that it's systemic, it's the system that's at fault?

It is also the system, because the system is social Darwinist. So that's how it works. The system is the conspiracy, if you want. But there are, I mean, like, let's take a very specific object, which is water. for instance, you're drinking. There was a paper written by the sister of Jacob Rees-Mug, which was called How to Profit from the Water Crisis. This is the title of the paper. I'm not inventing the title of the paper. It's just crazy to write a paper like this. And in effect, people are profiting from the water crisis. Where? In Australia?

In California, where water has been privatized. Why has it been privatized? Because of drafts and fires. Because there's no water left. So the argument is to say, well, there's no water left, so we have to privatize it. We don't know how to handle so little water, which is ridiculous. And now you have traders in water who admitted during the fires and the heat waves in Australia that they were doing very good business with this. Can you imagine if the whole planet, the water was privatized? You'd have all these traders interested, have this vested interest in the fact that there should be less water. I mean, Naomi Klein talks about it very well, and I think she made a point which is not debatable.

I mean, when there is a disaster, a shock, as she calls it, there is a shock doctrine. there's an aftershock which profits to people who are positioned. This is how the whole world works. This is how the stock market works. But you go much further. You're not saying simply that people are profiteering from the effects of climate change, but that they have an interest in making it irreversible, in pushing it towards being irreversible because there's a minority who will benefit from it. And furthermore, that climate change isn't a consequence of capitalism.

It's a way that capitalism has to survive. And those people can see that clearly, right? I think so. I think so. I mean, why would somebody like Bolsonaro burn his own forests? I mean, he knows the impact of burning this. Why would Trump say to New Yorkers? At one point, Trump tweeted, New Yorkers wanted to build a wall around New York because of the rising oceans. And he tweeted, I won't help you to build that wall. You'll just have to get your mobs and your buckets. Why? Because New York didn't vote for him. But you have to know that Trump is a very intelligent man and all his golf courses are in short against the ocean rising.

So, I mean, what is this double discourse? I mean, my point of view is that if people are aware and if they don't do anything, then they bear responsibility for wanting it. there's no double there's no you know you can't put it you can't put it both ways you can't you can't say I'm aware I'm doing nothing and I'm even doing worse than nothing and then say but I was ignorant it's not possible and then I would agree to you that I don't have proof of anything and I don't want to go into any kind of craziness so I'm I'm fine with pulling back with with any provocative statements. But I think what you do in the book is you give a very compelling

modeling of how it would be a rational calculation for certain people to not just let this happen. It is rational on many degrees. I mean, fighting climate change is extremely costly. We don't even know if we can fight it. That's the truth. We don't know. We don't know how. So taking up this fight is a political dead end. Very costly. And what would you come to if you get to that status quo? For how many years? Nobody knows. Going with the flow is actually less costly,

although it will cost... I mean the main point is to understand it won't cost everyone the same and there's a kind of positive feedback where those who have the power now to let things get worse or not are the ones who are going to benefit when it gets worse well that's another thing with Greta which is with Greta Thunberg which is I think which might she doesn't get it wrong but the idea that we're all going to die if climate changes and biodiversity break down. Well, the thing is, not all. That's where, you know, the devil lies in this detail. Not all of us. I think this is the crux of it, and this is the really scary point, I think,

is when you get to describing essentially a kind of apartheid. Well, IPCC wrote about climatic apartheid. It's happening already. They wrote a bit about Earthxit as well, you know, because billionaires are already building bunkers in New Zealand. The Silicon Valley has basically bought the whole of New Zealand to build bunkers just waiting for the breakdown of climate. It looks like a bad sci-fi movie, you know, but it is. This is what we're in. And you have to get inside the head of crazies. I think that's the most difficult thing when you're an academic. You write with your own way of seeing the world,

which is rational, but the world is full of crazies who don't put masks, don't take vaccines. And like Christian evangelicals, they believe that America will be saved, like the arch of Noah from the rising waters. I mean, you have to understand, these people have power. They're not only like a very remote sect somewhere in the deep south. They have the commands of power. They have had since Ronald Reagan and the idea of the shiny city upon the hill. The shiny city upon the hill is basically Noah's Ark floating above the ocean, above the raising waters. And the guy in Christchurch killed 86 people because of climate change.

because he thought that the only way to avert climate change was to kill people, minorities or people of color in New Zealand because they reproduced too much. This is in his testament. He wrote a 500-page crazy testament. So, you know, when Hitler came to power in the 1930s, A lot of people like us used to discuss in institutes and stuff and say, you know, even Walter Benjamin. I read letters from Walter Benjamin a few days ago. He was German. He was Jew. He read the news. He thought Hitler was a thug. He wouldn't last. Germany would never. And in effect, he was. He never got elected with a majority of votes.

The party itself was 27 percent or 30 percent in the elections. nobody believed because it was it was just too far away to believe these things but these things actually happened so at what point are we supposed to be like the socialist left of Germany in 1930 to whom Trotsky writes do not underestimate this guy he will fight in the streets to get power and this is what he did I don't know but what we're facing now is, as you've said, in a sense, more absurd, more difficult to believe than that situation. That's why people would call you a conspiracy theorist

because you can't grasp the situation without grasping the utter absurdity and craziness of what's going on. But what's most frightening is when you describe the rationality of these people. and how that converges with, as you said, far-right politics, racism, this new form of apartheid, and yet you kind of reconstruct that thought chillingly, step by step. It makes sense. The fact that it makes sense. I didn't need to because books have been written on that from the far-right. a book called The Camp of the Saints, which was written in the 80s by a French fascist,

which is cited in Huntington's book on the clash of civilizations. It has a fantastic book. It talks about migrants coming massively on the coasts of Europe because of climate change. The anticipation was already done. I mean, what does climate change change? It changes basically the South. It changes the parts of the world which are already the most dire situations economically or others. So it might create this kind of migration wave. And yes, I think some people who are not us

can build up scenarios on this. I mean, I talk about it. It's not quite the same, but I talk about that in the book. So I find it so, so strange that we see these films and we don't think about it. There's the Avengers film with Thanos, which is the first film, first sci-fi event, well, blockbuster on climate change, because basically that's the story, you know, that the Avengers have to assemble because a guy called Thanos has decided to fight climate change by gathering rings, which will give him the almighty power to avert climate change in his idea, which is to kill one person, every person, well, one, one person a day.

One person, every two persons. How do you say that? One out of two. One out of two. One out of two have to die, and then we avert climate change. And then you see the second episode, and one out of two people have died. And in effect, yes, the world is a much nicer place, except everybody is mourning. But then, you know, we've averted climate change. Why did the scenario, well, the people who wrote the scenario did not think that with the almighty power of all the power rings of Thanos, he couldn't erase one atom of carbon dioxide out of two. This is crazy. I mean, this is the world we're given, we're fed. We're fed with these ideas. How can you not understand people who believe them?

Yeah, I want to come... Anos is Malthus, no? Sure. It's the same word, it's the same name. He's inspired by this French philosopher who thought that there was too many people on Earth. And once again, I mean, the guy killed 86 people because of this. not because of this, but inspired by the same kind of... It's called eco-fascism. It's got a name. People have blogs. You have to be aware of this. I'd like to come back to this question. And there was a coup on the Senate. Yeah, of course. I mean, that happened after the book as well. The book has a picture on it, which is the Amazon forest burning with the Reichstag fire behind it. and then there was a coup on the American Reichstag. You literally couldn't make it up.

You asked me, well, how do I write my books? I actually have these images sometimes and I have to go, I produced the image. I was fascinated, obsessed with this idea that fires burning, forests burning were the same thing as a Reichstag burning, democracy burning. And we still weren't paying attention. And then there's another thing I need to say, which is really the, I think, most important part of the book, which is the second part. It's two conferences, actually, I stitched together. The first one is this question about awareness and why, despite this awareness, nothing's happening.

And the second part is how do we fight it? and how do we fight it? By creating narratives, by creating counter-narratives and this is one. You know, I got a very strange endorsement. I'm pretty proud of it actually because I would have written it myself but it is strange. It was from the spokesman of Extinction Rebellion, Rupert Reed, which I admire a lot and see, he read the book and he wrote, everyone will find much to disagree with in Alizade's short new book. I certainly do, but that's not the point. The point of his non-fiction novella is to provoke and to force one to consider certain disturbing possibilities. In that objective, he undoubtedly succeeds. I agree with this idea.

We can disagree, but that's not the point because I tried to invent a counter-narrative inspired by Trotsky, by what Trotsky said to the socialist left in the 1930s and by another very important social movement, which was ACT UP against AIDS. How did ACT UP reverse the politics of AIDS in the 1980s by creating this kind of conspiracy theory narrative, willingly? Yeah. What did they do? They said, you say you're trying to do something about AIDS. I say you're not.

I say you're trying to make a genocide with the homosexuals. This changed everything. Before, AIDS used to ravage people for years. And politicians said, oh, we're on it. We're on it. We're working. And nothing happened. So what did people say? They're incompetent, they're ignorant, etc. And then these guys came up and said, no, let's change this. It's enough of ignorance, incompetence. Everybody knows about it. We're going to say that if you don't do anything, you're complicit in killing us. And we're going to throw blood on you and we're going to make you assassins.

This changed everything. I don't know if they believed it. I don't know if it was right or wrong, but it was fantastically effective. It created a front. It created the obligation to be in solidarity with people dying from AIDS. And it forced politicians to put real money on the table to fight it. And I really believe that you don't need to agree with me. to endorse the fact that we have to say this now if we want to unblock the situation we're talking about. The question about the battle and the war, the question about the fact that awareness is here but nothing is happening, this we have to unblock now.

We have two or three years to unblock it. After that, it's over. And these two or three years, I believe, have to be used to change the way environmentalists talk about climate change and the responsibility of politicians and leaders and banks. It started. The social justice movement has acknowledged that climate change hits the hardest poor and people of color. Extinction Rebellion has made fantastic steps in the direction of changing the way activists put up front the problem of climate change. But I think we can go further. And this is what I tried to do. Yeah, I mean, in a sense, it's interesting that it's the Thanoses of the world who have a clear planetary vision of politics and of the future.

That's the scary thing. While we're being told to put our cardboard in the right bin, that's obviously not good enough. You make three... I think there's three points that you direct at environmentalists activism or politics. And the first one, perhaps, is the most provocative, which is turn away from consensus. This isn't going to get done through consensus. This is precisely what ACT UP understood very well. Right. When AIDS started to kill homosexuals, prisoners, drug addicts, Haitians, because there was a big AIDS crisis in Haiti, The answer was, you know, oh no, we're on it because AIDS is, you know, a menace for everyone.

Heterosexuals, homosexuals, white people, people of color. So we're really, it's really scary. And they said, no, this is the false consensus. This is what has to be broken. We have to put on the public scene that it kills homosexuals. That it's a homosexual problem. It wasn't, in fact, it's true it wasn't specifically, well, it wasn't, at large could be a bigger problem, but it was specifically a homosexual problem. It had to be addressed as homosexuals, and homosexuals had to come out, and that was a pride idea, as homosexuals. And they had to be seen, and they had to be said, you want to kill a homosexual? Here we are. And that's the first brilliant idea of actor, but it was actually an idea from Trotsky. was the first to say

fight against consensus, fight against the idea which was the idea of the socialist left in Germany in the 1930s that we could find an accord with Hitler that he was he would understand that there was no point in concurring Europe or making war to Russia he was crazy there was no consensus to find with these there's no consensus i mean and the question that obviously is is to is addressed to biden today does he want to reach a consensus or does he want to rule with executive orders if a press if an american president can declare war to iraq on the simple basis of an executive order i don't agree that he can't do the same

declare war on climate change. But he won't. He's looking for consensus. And declaring war requires that you draw a very sharp line and that's the second point that you make is admit that there is an enemy. That there are the privileged who are going to benefit and there are victims who are going to suffer and draw a clear line between them. Exactly. This is the the baseline of the book. This is not a crisis to overcome. It's a war to win. Sometimes, I'm laughing because I'm thinking of the 1%.

And I was walking, I got lost in London. I was looking for another tangerine cafe and ended up in a place where there were only Mercedes and Rand Rovers. And I said, oh, this is where the 1% live. And you have this in the environmental discourse saying 1% of the population is responsible for 99% of the emissions or 50% of the emissions or whatever. And then they mistake the problem with the solution. They say, oh, so the 1% have to give up their nine cars, their five properties, their horses. What if they don't? What if they say, fuck you? I'm not. I'm keeping my nine cars. try get them you know you want them get them this is what they do this is

literally the situation the one percent are saying yes we are responsible for 60 percent of them what are you going to do so they are enemies of course they are enemies and they have to be they have to be singularized as such and how do you mobilize that you kind of consciousness and that materialized that schism. It's very difficult because as Alain Badiou, whom you translate and know very well, says, the problem is that they're not 1%. They're probably more like 25 because they have 24 useful idiots, which I'm part of, who have enough to have a house and one car or half a car, who don't understand the problem.

and and that's 30 of a population and that's that's way enough to you know have business as usual continuing forever are we also enjoying it yes because when you're talking about the avengers films i was thinking about how we consume with such avid uh delight repetition after repetition of the end of the world, are we all enjoying it? And is there something to be said about nihilism, enjoyment, and maybe even the death drive? Two chapters, two paragraphs on this. There's one which is really on the death drive, which is a psychoanalyst, a French psychoanalyst,

wrote a little book on this saying, yes, we are enjoying the end of the world because the end of the world is the end of problems. Basically, we all have problems. It's also the beginning of enjoyment. You also have these films when the apocalypse is announced and then people have parties. They don't have to pay their rent at the end of the month. Why should they work or do anything else at the party? Yes, there is a part of pathological morbidity in this whole thing. Then there's a politic of nihilism. This is what Bannon has theorized. deconstruction of state, burn everything to ashes. I mean, and this is understandable,

and this is the backdrop and the difficulty of this, is that at one point billionaires managed to make a pact with the proletariat, because the proletariat has nothing. So in that sense, telling these people who have nothing that other people will have nothing is the kind of consolation. Why should they have something and should I have nothing? Nihilism is a very, very strong drive. There was a sondage, a survey was done to, a poll, a poll was where people were asked, should this society be burned to ashes and built again?

Do you think yes or no? Like 54% said yes. Right. These are the people who vote for Trump as well because that's what he's promising, basically, is that they will burn everything to ashes and then we can rebuild something new out of this. So the 1% is interested in widening the gap and those at the bottom, the best they can hope for is a levelling of everything. And in some weird sense, those two have entered into an alliance, a pact. This is what Trotsky called fascism in a technical way. What is fascism? What's the meaning of fascism? It's many things, obviously. It's racism. But at the core, at the institutional core, it's the alliance between billionaires, the ruling class, and the proletariat to crush the middle class.

that's it, that's what fascism is about and that's what Trump managed to do in a partial way he didn't he failed to get to him what Marx called the lumpen proletariat which is even under the proletariat proletariat today is more like the petit bourgeoisie the déclassé petit bourgeoisie the real proletariat in America which is mainly people of color, once again, didn't vote for Trump. And this is probably why Trump failed at the end of the day, at least getting re-elected. But should he manage to get re-elected or somebody like him

by creating this total alliance, then we would have full force fascism. I'm absolutely convinced of that. And again, the left is not, it seems, equipped to deal with this new situation. No, because the left is part of the 24%. The left has shifted totally from the proletariat to, I don't know, people like us, teachers. you know. But how do you engage people who by definition have no future, have no stake in the future? Is writing a part of that? Well that's what I call hope. Yeah yeah. You engage them by

saying you know it doesn't have to be that way, there's another way. We don't need to have 1% and 99%. That's not the way society is supposed to be built and we don't need to live in a society where there's not enough bread for everyone because there's way too much bread for everyone. We're actually putting in the dustbin every day at the end of the day. So this is the, you know, the cornucopia. How do you call that? Cornucopia. Cornucopia. I love that. I love that. But that's what Marxism is about. The third point of Trotsky is hope. Hope, yeah. Technology and hope. We have technology. we can try to do something, at least try.

We can unite in the idea of trying, of developing something which we could call a war effort on climate change, like electrifying the whole planet now in two years. It's possible, but it's a war effort. That means you actually mobilize the whole army, the whole industrial forces, and you decide. There's a fantastic anecdote of Churchill calling Roosevelt during the war in 1941. And he's obviously losing the war against Hitler because of the power of the German industry of planes and ships and stuff. And he calls Roosevelt, he said, we need help. We need planes, we need boats. And America at that point was building something like 10 boats a year and seven planes. And so Roosevelt says, okay, how many do you need?

Yeah, how many do you need? We can make 40 maybe next year. He says, we need 4,000. And they build 4,000 planes in a year. Because that's what a war effort is. So my idea of addressing politicians that way is to get them to do that, or accept to be complicit. Right. Yeah, because all the technological resources are on the wrong side. Well, they're nowhere. They're nowhere to be seen. I mean, people say, yeah, we're investing a lot in technology to fight climate change. And then other septics, and I understand them, say, you know, carbon capture is far away.

It's never happened. Electrifying is very complicated. Do you know how many we invest? The state invests in fundamental research. I mean, I know companies invest, but the state. In France, 25 million. which is enough to run maybe a very small museum. This is what's invested. In America, I think the number is somewhere here. Where are the notes at the end? I think, okay, yeah, it's here. Over the last 10 years, the American government committed $5 billion to carbon capture and storage.

$5 billion, okay? Notwithstanding the fact that carbon capture storage is a particular and debatable mode of carbon control, such an amount of money is ridiculously small. As a comparison, the New York Police Department, not America, New York Police Department, operating budget alone is $10 billion a year. The American government is spending half the annual operating budget of New York Police Department to save the world. That's the reality. That's where technology is right now. Yeah. Have we got any questions? I'd like to say again, there is hope in the book. Well, yes, because it's a socialist book,

because I believe in socialism, and I actually believe climate change is creating the conditions of a socialist, of a new socialism. it's actually a chance for socialism. It's an internationalism. It's about poor people. It's about us. It's about the sharing of resources. And it's also about a very fundamental aspect of socialism, which has been forgotten in the history of socialism, which is thermodynamics, which I talked about. So scientific socialism, as it was called and been ridiculed since, what was scientific socialism? Scientific socialism was the fact that Marx and Engels were fascinated with the idea, they were contemporary of the steam engine. And they were fascinated with the idea

that society worked like a steam engine. And in fact, it does. It's been proven since. We work, and Earth is a steam engine. And of course, we're talking of 1870s, so they didn't have all the tools we have. They didn't know about information technology. They didn't know about computers. They didn't know a lot of things that happened since. We know about it. And this is why ecology is impossible, because we can compute, model the Earth, ecosystem and climate, because it works like a steam engine with a computer built in it. And socialism was really about how do we take control of the steam engine? The thing which depressed Marx and which is a very deep explanation of what Marxism is, was that if you leave a steam engine to itself, it loses power every cycle because of entropy.

He didn't know about entropy. He thought that if the steam engine lost power, it's because some kind of demon took some energy, some heat out of it. And this demon is the bourgeois. The bourgeois takes money out of the system, the plus-value, which makes the fact that the system, every new cycle of economy, produces less output. So you have to, because it's stolen. This is wrong, actually. if you have an open system, an open steam engine, then it doesn't have to lose any energy. And that's aspects of things I talk about in Crypto-Curmanism, the other book. And it's been that in the 60s, the few environmentalists who have not read at all enough today,

Nicolas Georgicourozen or René Passé, wrote thermodynamic books on ecology and socialism, which is called eco-socialism. it's the encounter of ecology and socialism on the basic of thermodynamics so I have hope in a sense that what is happening is forcing us to go back to these texts to these two to science and and to global awareness to political awareness a renewed political awareness that could in effect yes change the world well thanks for giving us that hope were there any questions in the audience yeah one at the back thank you so much that was really fascinating and Mark

I don't know your work but I will change that tomorrow then those things that I wanted to ask about but I was quite interested ways what you said at the beginning talking about your career that you start off thinking about religious and spiritual questions. And I just wonder, when you talked about the Greta Thunberg quotation, that either you're evil or you're stupid, to what extent this is a problem of evil. The discourse of environmentalism is somehow, oh, the appeals to people's moral nature, that one should behave in a way that is against climate change or further the environment because it's the morally right thing to do. Who will think of the children, for example? Everybody loves children. and be immoral, right, to be bad towards them. But here we're dealing with people who you're arguing, it sounds like,

actually know what is wrong and want to do it. It's that quotation from Romans, you know, I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I don't want to do. Well, these people know what the evil is and want to do it nonetheless. And I wonder whether, you know, just in the way that, you know, after Nietzsche and so on, we've lost a sense of God, we have, despite the Holocaust and genocide and so on of the 20th century, lost the sense of evil. We actually can't believe that these shadowy people, I do see the point that Robin was saying, they are a little bit shadowy for me, but there is a problem of evil. So my question is, to what extent does this have a spiritual or religious dimension or is that going in completely the wrong place? Or indeed, is it part of your task to create a narrative

in which people can see that what's happening is evil? Why not put these people in the role of Thanos? I don't personally believe in evil. I believe in crazy. And I believe in the rationale of crazy. You know, paranoia is a very rationalistic neurosis. It could be even called a neurosis of rationality, like Immanuel Kant could be called a paranoiac. It's a paranoiac philosophy. Zizek is very bright when he talks about these things. So I'm not sure I relate to this idea of evilness, really. But to get back to your question, well, my first book was about the continuing influence of the reformation on our way of life.

Max Weber, when he wrote on the ethics of, on the spirit of capitalism and Protestantism, well explained, it was debatable, but he explained basically that we were very tributary from the reformation and the idea of the individual and individual salvation especially. But Max Weber, who was a pessimist, thought that he was living through the end of that in the 1920s and that the reformation was dead and that religion was dead, God was dead, and that we were living through the times of the last man, as Nietzsche calls it, that knows nothing, believes in nothing, not even in evil, in fact.

And I argued that we were living through something exactly the contrary and that Max Weber had understated the role of the neo-reformation, which had happened in the 19th century, which was called the Great Awakening and started here in London. And a few monuments to this Great Awakening because it was led by a priest called Wesley, John Wesley. He was basically on his own. I mean, literally with his brother who wrote songs. And he got called. And his calling was that he had to awaken Protestants throughout the world. So he went out with his brother, wrote a couple of gospels and went and evangelized people.

And this is the beginning of the new Protestantism we know today with Quakers and stuff. Not Quakers because Quakers is older, but he revived that tradition of Quakerism and Pietism, which is now the evangelical Christians all over the world. It's the most important revolution ever to have happened in spiritual force. There's nothing comparable to what happened through the Great Awakening. It started here with two people. A century afterwards, the whole of America was Methodist. And half of England and even parts of France. if you find novels all this has totally disappeared

and it's in itself a symptom of something which is really interesting how much we are religious how much pop culture, sports television were all invented through the lens of the great awakening and yes So the book argued that we are, as Nietzsche would say, not suffering from the death of God, but from too much of God still. And we really have to get rid of this second reformation in order to be able to go further. But I discovered in the book that this is precisely what the Romantic movement was about.

The Romantic movement was about understanding how the Second Reformation should happen. Fisch thought of himself as the new Luther. Hegel thought of himself as the new Luther. Marx says, I'm the new Luther. This is, Heidegger even thought he was the new Luther. This is the main, you know, the axis of German philosophy and German politics is the Second Reformation. and uh and i and then celestial informatics my second book was about was about saying it actually has happened but in a good way through information theory which is another subject i can't talk about it's too long so for you it's getting it's about getting beyond evil the evil is not a useful

concept. Well, I guess I think we even had this discussion when we were writing the cover, the back cover, because I agree with you now. I should have listened to you when you said we shouldn't write evil because you're not saying they're evil. You're saying they're irrational. There is an evil rationality even in good. But there's a slight contradiction there because you're also talking about building narratives, right? So surely someone being evil is a better narrative than being rational. Well, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe. It's an open question. Because if someone is calculating and rational under the constraints of the system they're in, then that, in a sense, exculpates them,

whereas saying they're evil makes them into a real enemy. And this is probably why I chose finally to leave evil. I mean, basically, you are saying to everyone, the people of the world, Avengers assemble, maybe evil is a useful concept yeah it probably is no I'm just thinking aloud because it's a concept you will find also on the conservative side and you know they know how to they've demonized the half of America calling it evil so I don't know if it would be so effective to call them evil now but maybe it is any other questions? You talk about the Earth operating as a steam engine. What do you make of something like the Gaia?

Gaia hypothesis is precisely that. Lovelock, who invented the Gaia hypothesis, so everybody's on the same page. Gaia hypothesis was a book written by James Lovelock, who explained that the Earth is a living being. Gaia, I call Gaia. And it's been hugely influential in parts of environmentalists who are animists or neo-animists and who say that the answer is to go back to Gaia and to the Pachamama and the old idea of the planet Earth as a mother, etc. But James Lusflok is actually an engineer and a thermodynamic dynamician. And the Gaia hypothesis was just a word to explain

that it was a self-sustainable system which looked very much like a living being because a living being is a steam engine. I mean, it's probably a little more, but basically the basic mechanism is that you eat calories, which is heat, and you make work out of heat. And then you have your body temperature, which takes the heat out of you, and then you have to eat again as this cycle repeats, and then you die. Because at each cycle, you produce less work. And again, you know, the same idea. So, yeah, exactly. That's the entropy. But I wanted to say something else. Yeah, I was thinking whilst I was walking here, I should say something

also on this heat story, because we talk about one or two degrees of climate warming. And sometimes in conversation it can happen that people will say one or two degrees. So what? I mean, the summer will be a little hotter, but one or two degrees. I mean, and one thing you have to understand, because the Earth is a steam engine, because the Earth is a body, as you were saying, it has a body temperature. That's the main point. Do you know what the body temperature of the Earth is? Our hours is 37 degrees, approximately, Celsius. So when we have fever, when we have one or two degrees, we feel really bad.

The earth temperature, the body temperature, is 17. So one or two degrees, and it's actually not one or two degrees, we're heading to 4.5 degrees. the worst scenario of IPCC, the worst scenario of Club of Rome. That's the trajectory we're on. Two days ago, the IPCC confirmed we were heading to 2.7, but that's actually way understated. We know we're heading to 4.5 if we don't do anything in 10 years to come. 4.5 on a body temperature of 17, you die. That's it. This is how you have got to understand and fathom the idea of the one degree. Other questions?

Well, I'd like to thank you. Thanks, Mark. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Merci. Climate Coup, which is available in all good bookshops right now. And thanks everyone for coming out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.