Catastrophism

 In the midst of another brutally hot summer (Tampa—where I've been all week—just experienced its hottest day on record), the Trump administration is making another move to undermine the government's ability to mitigate global warming. Specifically, the administration is reportedly eliminating the EPA's "endangerment" finding vis-a-vis climate change. As I understand it, this change will effectively make it all-but impossible for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on a large scale. 

In order to justify this destructive move, the administration released a report reiterating the contrarian right-wing position on climate change—which has evolved, in recent years, from denying the existence of global warming outright, to now saying—yes, it's happening; but it's no big deal. I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's line—about the long journey that every idea takes from being condemned as paradoxical to being deprecated as trivial. We have reached the "climate change is real but insignificant" stage. 

Which means that the administration intends to simply plunge ahead into potential ecological catastrophe. While thinking about this, I've been reading and returning to Byron's poem "Darkness" in recent days—an apocalyptic reflection on the potential destruction of life on Earth. I've often said that Byron had the best politics of anyone in the early nineteenth century; and it turns out—from the evidence of this poem—that he was even a prophet of climate change. This is, after all, a poem about climate destruction. 

Of course, Byron was talking about a different climate crisis. He had been influenced by Cuvier's theory of the periodic "catastrophes" that shaped Earth's past; and he was also writing in the midst of the eerie "year without a summer" (1816)—when much of the planet's surface was covered with unseasonable darkness, leading to global crop failure and suppressed temperatures, as a result of a volcanic eruption in present-day Indonesia. Byron's poem imagines what would happen if the sun simply went out entirely. 

In the era of global warming, we are having the opposite problem—excess heat instead of freezing. Some say the world will end in ice; some in fire, as Robert Frost said. Byron plumped in 1816 for ice—as a result of the epochal darkness he was witnessing. But his poem puts in a word for fire too as an agent of destruction. In order to warm themselves after the sun goes out—in Byron's poem—the Earth's people burn every forest on the planet—until they have exhausted every last piece of combustible material. 

And it is here—in his description of the universal inferno—that one feels most that Byron had caught a glimpse into our future. Trump and his administration just decided that there is to be no upper limit on how much fossil fuel our species burns. And so, our forests—and eventually, all of us, may burn with them. 

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black. [...]

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.