“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
– Tennessee Williams
But wait. There’s more.
The reelection of Donald Trump portends a dark period for America and the world. But it’s more than just Trump’s reascendance to the White House casting its pall over the global landscape. The worldwide embrace of authoritarianism stymies progress on many fronts, from social justice and income inequality to climate change.
Last month, another annual UN COP climate summit—the 29th—concluded in after-hours bickering and pledged half-measures. The international community’s failure to meet the challenge is palpable. The process seems ever more in the grip of powerful interests that oppose its purpose.
After a brief hiatus courtesy of the global pandemic, carbon emissions continue to rise as the consequences of a changing climate are increasingly manifest. Any hope of containing global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels is gone. Extreme weather, floods, and heatwaves are on the rise globally.
Even those who care about climate change and want to act on it are apt to feel lost and powerless.
We can succumb to doomerism, but that smacks of surrender. We can choose instead to accept where we are and steel ourselves to fight for a better future, even as the dark clouds descend around us. Hope is when we stop fooling ourselves.
There is a lesson and an opportunity in this moment.
Meeting the Moment: Saving Ourselves
For sociologist, author, and TED / public speaker Dana Fisher, that lesson is learning “apocalyptic optimism.” Fisher’s expertise and research on social dynamics reveal historical precedents of how civil activism has led to systemic social change. Knowing this, vested corporate interests cling to a shifting status quo. The public relations gatekeepers guard the fences with incrementalism, doubt, and shifting responsibility—the well-worn tools of Big Oil and its patrons in government.
This attempt at shifting responsibility is where the notion of a “carbon footprint” derives. It is a distraction aimed at obscuring the enormous scale and impact of an unsustainable supply chain. Well-meaning individuals visit websites to learn how they can reduce their footprint, a means of “redirecting civic efforts away from the systemic level,” writes Fisher in her latest book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
“Not only did fossil fuel companies hide their knowledge about the effects that the growing concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere would have on the climate, they invested in efforts to redirect the focus of climate action away from themselves to the individual consumer,” Fisher writes.
These same powerful interests that would have individuals focused on their carbon footprints also have a stranglehold on government actors. “Fossil fuel interests are deeply embedded in the political and economic system,” writes Fisher.
“Rather than working to facilitate system-wide transformations to carbon-free power generation, transportation, and industrial sectors, they maintain their power by distracting consumers with their calls for personal actions that focus on individual carbon footprints while they take advantage of unprecedented tax subsidies that ensure their power will continue for decades.”
Big Fossil, if you will, has effectively blocked any substantive climate change action through political manipulation, misinformation campaigns, economic coercion, and regulatory capture.
Our Leaders Won’t, Can’t, Save Us
Political leaders are either too inept, corrupt, or weak to offer solutions for a broken economic system that must change. The failure of incumbents worldwide reflects a largely unspecified malaise among civil society. Granting that people do care about the price of eggs, it runs deeper than that or the illiberal tropes of “culture warriors.” Between price shocks and culture wars, there is a growing sense that things can’t go on as they are. A realization that the system is broken and unsustainable.
It has left us with Donald Trump, a rightward lurch in global politics, and climate denial at the highest levels. The irony is that this could be the catalyst the climate change movement needs. While devastating for immediate environmental policy, such a presidency could galvanize a broader social movement.
“Just in terms of getting people mobilized in the streets, a Donald Trump presidency would do it much more effectively than we have right now,” Fisher told GlobalWarmingisReal in a recent interview. “Granted, it would be repressive, it would limit democracy, it would be terrible for the climate. There’s no question that there have been a lot of incremental successes from the Biden administration. And I don’t want to discount them because they matter. It’s just not enough.”
We can embrace the reality of what is lost and what is coming despite our best efforts and use that realization as the foundation for individual and collective action.
We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.
Climate Shocks, Risk Pivots, and AnthroShifts: From Despair to Action
It is often the case that someone suffering from addiction must hit rock bottom before they can turn their lives around and emerge from its grip. It is a shock, a realization so severe that it spurs a radical shift in their behavior, leading to a new way of life. So it is with individuals, it can also be with societies.
If we as a society are addicted to fossil fuels, if the “pusher man” mercilessly feeds us the means to our destruction, then must we hit rock bottom to wrest ourselves from the seeds of ruin?
Yes, posits Fisher. Difficult as it may be to embrace the slide toward the apocalypse, this is where we can discover optimism.
In Saving Ourselves, Fisher introduces the concept of “climate shocks”—extreme weather events such as we now see with increasing intensity—that illicit profound social disruptions that fundamentally challenge our existing systems. Unlike incremental approaches that treat climate change as a distant threat, Fisher argues that these shocks will force society to confront the reality of environmental breakdown.
These climate shocks, combined with state repression of climate action and activism, present an opportunity to harness individual outrage into moral shocks and what Fisher calls an “AnthroShift,” a radical reconfiguration of social, economic, and political relationships in response to sustained environmental risk. AnthroShifts aren’t a linear progression but a complex process of social adaptation that can move in multiple directions. The key is reaching a “critical mass” of collective experience, what Fisher calls a “risk pivot,” that demands systemic change.
“That’s where we get the Apocolypse,” Fisher told GWIR. “(It’s) the process through which I think social change is most likely given all of the powers pushing back against any change and wanting to maintain business as usual, which you and I have both observed over 30 years, given that we’re talking about needing climate shocks that wake up enough people to push back.”
“Because you need a big power to push back against that for decision makers to take the message of the little guy and take it seriously. Clearly, they’re pushing back against all their campaign contributions and all the ways these economic actors have been pushing and maintaining power for so long.”
“This is the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced,” Fisher told GWIR. “And the most embedded crisis because this whole system is our economic system as it runs, even in places predominantly reliant on clean energy. Any country that can (is) extracting and making money from it. And until making money off of the resource is no longer the priority, that’s going to continue. That’s where it is. It’s either that or there’s this technological innovation, the silver bullet that everybody keeps waiting for, that’s not coming.”
We can wait for that non-existent silver bullet—EVs, carbon capture, what have you—wait for something beyond extraction that will feed wealth to the vested interests and make it all go away. We’ve waited long enough.
“And that’s why we need this apocalyptic shift. And that’s where I’m optimistic because I believe we can do that,” says Fisher. There are unmistakable signs of the “very real” possibility of autocracy sweeping the globe, which would quash any viable collective action. “But I believe in democracy. I believe in the power of the people, and I believe that people will rise up before we get there.”
Saving Ourselves, Because Nobody Else Will
We must be agents of change. In Saving Ourselves, Fisher calls us to action. We are not helpless victims of climate change but potential architects of a transformed society.
Contrary to narratives of helplessness, Fisher sees hope in emerging forms of climate activism. Radical tactics—from civil disobedience to direct action—are not just expressions of frustration but strategic tools for social transformation. The climate movement’s growing radical flank is crucial for challenging entrenched power structures. It also allows cover for less radical forms of activism and coalesces around the demand for change.
Fisher’s approach is not about passive acceptance but active engagement. Her strategy involves:
1. Building resilient community networks
2. Capitalizing on “moral shocks”
3. Developing adaptive capabilities
4. Maintaining hope through collective action
Donald Trump is (or soon will be) president. The institutions mandated to address climate change are in the thrall of vested interests determined to cleave to an untenable status quo. We are charging into a difficult, climate-changed world. The path forward requires acknowledging hard truths while maintaining an unwavering commitment to collective change.
In Saving Ourselves, Fisher writes, “When risk becomes so common that it is felt across society, the interrelations among the main actors—coming from the state, market, and civil society sectors—shift substantially.”
The question is not whether change will come but whether we will be prepared to shape it when it arrives. Spoiler alert. The change is here. Our house is on fire. We are the fire department.
