Poor air quality in Ontario’s Niagara Region as a result of wildfire smoke. Photo by Gogerr/Wikimedia Commons.

As I sat in the lobby of my building, a worker who was installing a new entry system noticed the book I was reading, which dealt with climate change, and made a comment that prompted a major discussion.

He made it clear that he understood the dire threat posed by global heating and was very bitter about the destructive course being set by the fossil fuel industry. He also had scathing things to say about political leaders who are enabling a planetary disaster. Where I took issue with him was with his verdict. He was fully convinced that we are, as he put it, “fucked.” Not only had he decided that climate change has advanced to the point where it is too late to prevent utter catastrophe, but he also held that Big Oil and its political enablers are so powerful that effective resistance is impossible. The notion that we can mobilize, resist, and create alternatives was almost completely alien to his thinking.

Pondering over the significance of our little chat, it struck me that the fatalistic view of this particular worker speaks to both the immediate issue of challenging climate-wrecking capitalism as well as offering an object lesson in a key form of ideological containment that impedes both the development of rebellious thinking and movements of resistance.

Admittedly, no one can definitively refute the claim that climate change may already have advanced to the point where it will only be possible to mitigate the unfolding global catastrophe.

Last year, the UN Climate Programme took stock of the fact that the goal of containing global warming at 1.5C was not being met. It noted, “Even if countries live up to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—and that’s a big “if”—the world will warm by 2.3°C to 2.5°C by the end of the century [which is] more than enough to destabilize delicate climate systems, leading to a surge in droughts, floods, superstorms and other extreme weather.”

At the very least, the dire impacts we are experiencing will go on intensifying and pose huge........

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