You wake up in the morning and you grab your phone. You open your social media app of choice, and you start scrolling. After scrolling past the daily bad news about the war, inflation, Covid-19 etc. you end up reading some news about climate change.  You read stories which sound very familiar, x number of years left before a climate catastrophe, governments missing climate targets, greenhouse gas emissions increasing  and so on.

You have been reading such news for a few years now, and every time it seems to be getting worse, or at least it is not getting any better, and you start thinking that we might never get through this climate change mess we got ourselves into. You might even start thinking that it is all pointless, that there is no need to put so much of your time, effort, and energy into something if we are all doomed anyways. You would be far from the first to experience this emotion, it has been well documented and it has many names climate despair, eco nihilism, climate doomism, but no matter what you call it is real and it is affecting many people. What makes this especially dangerous is that it affects people who otherwise would be fighting against climate change, but instead they choose to not do anything. As you could imagine if people who are likely to advocate for change give up, it makes the status quo even more powerful.  

So, you might ask yourself what can be done against this, and the answer is a lot. One could try to convince people that it is not too late through scientific evidence, or one could try and take a more philosophical approach. Many have talked about the scientific reason why it is not too late, and many continue to do so, and since those who feel this sense of despair do believe in climate change, it is very likely that they will listen to scientific evidence. But sometimes scientific evidence does not address the emotional and philosophical reaction people have, and therefore this blog post will look at the philosophical aspect of things.

Since the idea of climate doomism is relatively new, not that many people have taken the opportunity to look at it through a more philosophical lens, but that does not mean that we can’t take ideas from other aspects of philosophy and try to apply them to this specific topic. In this blog post I will do exactly that, I will look at what absurdism can teach us about dealing with climate doomism.

While today we will be discussing whether it makes sense to continue the climate fight, absurdism looked at whether it makes sense to continue living and if life itself has any meaning. Absurdism itself dates back to the post World War 2 period in Europe, and its most important work is The Myth of Sisyphus by the French author and philosopher Albert Camus. The need to discuss the meaning (or lack thereof) of human life came after such a major and traumatic global event, and therefore it makes sense to have a similar discussion about the fight against climate change while we are experiencing the consequences of another major event.

If we accept the premise of climate doomists that climate change will mean the end of the world, that it will mark the doom of humanity, and that this destiny is set in stone, we can easily see how it relates to Camus’s absurd. Camus says that we go about our day to day trying to improve ourselves to try and find some meaning, but at the end it falls on the universe’s deaf ear. Similarly, climate doomist believe that all the effort to fight against climate change is also useless, and that it will also fall onto the deaf ears of the universe (or in this case planet) since the consequences are set in stone and we are already too late to do anything.

The main idea Camus brings forward to deal with the absurd, and the idea I want to reshape slightly to fit the climate context, is that one should accept and even embrace the absurd. He illustrates this through the old myth of Sisyphus, who was punished by the Greek Gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever, only to see if roll down at the end of the day. Camus says that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” and that the struggle itself is what matters at the end of the day and what gives Sisyphus happiness and meaning.

This brings us all the way back to the title of this blog post. As you might have noticed, this blog has nothing to do with Greta Thunberg. In the same way that The Myth of Sisyphus is not about Sisyphus but rather humanity, this blog post is not about her, but rather all people who care about climate change and spend their time fighting against it.

The fight against climate change is not a simple one, it takes many forms, and it involves many different aspects. In some cases, we might be able to push the boulder all the way up the mountain and enjoy some success. In other cases we might believe that we have pushed the boulder all the way up the mountain, only to see it roll down again. Even when we finally deal with one boulder, one aspect of climate change, there are many more boulders that need to be pushed up the mountain, and there will always be more.

What absurdism teaches us is that we should not care if we push the boulder all the way up, we should not care if it rolls back down, what matters is that we keep pushing it. Camus argued that Sisyphus’s happiness comes not from denying the reality that he will push the boulder forever, but rather from accepting the fact and embracing the struggle itself as your source of happiness. In the same way, people fighting against climate change should not deny the fact that this fight can and will go on forever, people should not despair because of it, but should rather embrace it and accept the struggle itself as their source of meaning and happiness.