Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Twenty-Four: Let’s Talk About the Doom Loop
I created Bright Green Futures to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there.
First off, I’m going to talk about some hard stuff in this episode and I need to you to stick with me to the end, okay? I promise it will be worth it. If you’ve listened to the podcast at all, you know I’m not a doomer. But I’m also a big believer at taking a clear-eyed look at reality in order to find your way through.
So we’re gonna do some of that today.
The Doom Loop Is Beginning
Back in December, there was an article that made the rounds saying we were entering a doom loop where geopolitical instability was reinforcing the climate crisis which was reinforcing instability and, well, it was a loop. “Geopolitical instability” is nice academic speak for “Oh shit America just elected the fascists again”. And of course America isn’t the only country flirting with fascism. Fascist movements are rising, and sometimes falling, around the world. Germany’s AfD is on the rise, Poland’s Law & Justice fascists lost their hold on power a year ago, and more recently, South Korea both elected a misogynistic fascist and managed to head off his attempted coup and they even impeached the guy. Good for them.
Not so good for America, right now.
The idea that once you head down the road to fascism there’s no turning back is demonstrably false—however, the idea that degradation of democracy and the environment go hand-in-hand and reinforce one another is pretty solid. This is something that’s been predicted for some time, so it can be pretty chilling to start seeing it happen in the real world, just like the climate crisis itself. However, calling it a “doom loop” implies the self-reinforcement is some kind of trap you cannot exit, and I disagree pretty strongly with that, but in the short-term, it’s undeniable that putting fascists in charge of your government is very bad news for fighting the climate crisis.
The real problem is that the climate crisis is accelerating. We’ve pumped so much CO2 into the air, that the climate is destabilizing faster than expected.
People in general have some serious cognitive dissonance about this, even people who believe the climate crisis is real, even people who are very much involved in fighting it. There’s a huge reflex to create psychological distance, to locate climate impacts somewhere in the future, far away in space and time, when in fact, climate disasters are very obviously happening with increasing frequency, right here, right now, today. People will agree with that statement and then compartmentalize it away from everything in their normal life, including choices about where to live and work, what kinds of cars they drive, and what food they eat. I’m not a fan of shaming people for their personal life choices, especially given we live inside a global capitalistic imperialistic enterprise increasingly run by fascists and technofeudalists, but how much do you, personally, factor climate into your everyday decisions? If you’re listening to this podcast, I can guarantee it’s much more than the average person, and yet it’s still nowhere near enough, not compared to the actual risks climate change presents.
Take a look at the housing insurance crisis or what microplastics are doing to our bodies, and you’ll begin to see what big trouble we’re in. Most people haven’t even begun to grapple with the risks or don’t accurately know what they are. Collectively, societally, we really don’t want to know or treat like it’s really real.
As I said in a recent post on bluesky: “Climate change is gonna kill your house insurance and the economy before it kills the fish. But it’s also gonna kill the fish.”
In that post I was guilty of doing something that is actually part of the problem: promoting a doomer narrative in an attempt to wake people up.
Despite being a strong believer in the power of hopeful climate fiction narratives, despite actually writing tons of those kinds of stories, here I was on social media, screaming once again in the void, trying to get people to take climate risks seriously.
So believe me when I say I get the impulse to warn, to scream, to desperately try to alert people to the harms racing toward them.
Doomer Narratives Send People Into Denial
Unfortunately, research shows those narratives that showcase all the harms, both now and in the future, get a lot of traction on social media, but in real life, they mostly make people shut down, look away, and go into denial. There are a several reasons for that, which we’ll unpack in a minute because they’re very important, but it makes intuitive sense, right? We see people going into denial all the time about bad things—people are really good at doing mental gymnastics as to why a bad thing isn’t so bad after all. It persists as a human reaction because in some cases, it’s actually useful.
You gotta get through the day, get the groceries bought, get the kids from school, you cannot solve the world’s problems, anyway, you might as well get a tea from Starbucks in a plastic to-go cup on the way home. You could say that’s a so-called First World problem, but if you listen to folks scraping a living together on the edge of a Chilean desert where mountains of clothes from other countries are being lit on fire and they’re breathing in the toxic smoke… you’ll hear the same denial. The same reasons why it’s not a big deal, what are you going to do anyway, you’re not the one who set the fire, and you need to feed your kids, so you keep haggling through the vast second-hand clothes market from First World countries, hoping to scrape together a living and make it through the day.
Denial is a pretty universal human thing.
Here in America, right now, I’m strategically using denial as a defensive weapon against the firehose of bullshit coming from the fascists in charge. I understand that I’ve got to conserve my energy—it’s not an unlimited resource. I’ve got to pick my part of the fight and stay in that lane, and I can’t change anything—not my personal life, much less anything in the rest of the world—if I’m the exhausted and terrified person the fascists want me to be.
Joy as a Source of Renewable Energy
Joy is resistance… and it’s a key that unlocks a lot more.
This is extremely important—joy is a source of renewable human energy—and we’ll come back to this as well. Please stick with me as I weave all these disparate threads together.
So denial can be a strategic weapon, and sometimes you have to deploy it, sparingly, but for most people, especially around the climate, it is misfiring in our faces.
Ignoring the risks does not make the risks go away. Ignoring risks actually increases your risk because you’re not doing the simple things available to you to reduce your risk. In fact, you’ll find all kinds of reasons why those simple things are just impossible, not because they’re any great burden, certainly compared to the risk they’re mitigating, but because doing those things breaks the spell of normalcy. They make staying in denial impossible.
This is why people become angry—violently so—when they see some stranger wearing a mask. It breaks the spell of normalcy, as if COVID went away, bird flu isn’t looming, and the anti-vaxxers aren’t bringing back measles and who knows what else. Nope, everything is fine, the problem is you, random stranger on the street, wearing a mask and ripping away my denial. How dare you!
This kind of denial is a coping strategy—a bad one—and not a survival strategy.
You may not be able to make your risk go to zero, for anything from COVID to climate change, but by making some small changes in your life, you can definitely reduce your risks, not only to your own health and safety and that of your family, but the risks we’re all facing by being in denial about a changing world.
As a sidebar, it’s deeply, darkly funny to me when people say that change is impossible… when in reality, the world is nothing but constant chaotic change all the time. We’ve literally changed the weather on a planetary scale already. The one thing that’s impossible is to make the world stand still, or as the fascists would like, rewind time back to when white dudes had an unspoken divine right to rule over everyone and everything with zero consequences.
My dude, you can terrorize a lot of people and take away their rights but you can’t make people forget that they had freedom before you came along. You can’t make them not want to be free again. Or just have a better world. You can’t destroy hope.
Not that you won’t try. That’s really all you’ve got.
As Ursula K. Le Guin said:
The doomers say we’ve gone too far, the destruction is already baked in, the climate will get disastrously worse, there’s nothing we can do about that, and that will feed the fears and chaos that empower fascism, and the fascists will, in their endless thirst for more power and riches, burn through planet faster and faster, which will somehow only help them gain more power. The Doom Loop is logical and that logic seems inescapable.
“Like the Divine Right of Kings,” as Le Guin might say.
And certainly our stories tell us this is true, right? That we’re headed straight for apocalypse, only a few of us will survive, it will be a Mad Max/1984/Handmaid’s Tale world. It has been fore-ordained by all the dystopian writers! It must be true!
Meanwhile, we have a great dearth of stories that show how to do the simple things to minimize risk. How to strategically deploy denial but not allow it to hamstring our ability to stay safe. Where are the stories showing people moving from inaction to action, fighting the climate crisis or the fascists? Where are the ones that deeply interrogate how we actually survive, what we have to do to get there, why it's so hard, what the obstacles inside each of us and in the political world outside of us look like? How we can even begin to think differently and work for a better world when we’re drowning in a million images, stories, and narratives constructed in the past, created in a world that no longer exists? Yet somehow these stories still reach their ghostly fingers to the present and strangle our imaginations.
Fascism is a dead ideology—it’s necropolitics, a belief that it is right and just to use political power to dictate who may live and how some must die. It is lifeboat politics, and it is the very opposite of survival because our superpower isn’t cruelty but our ability to work together.
Fascism might be a coping mechanism for some, and it’s probably a preferable way of running the world for those who benefit from it, but it’s actually death for all of us.
We as a species do not make it unless we meet this challenge, and the only way to do it is by unlocking our imaginations and working together to fix what’s broken in the world.
There’s a quote by Mark Gonalez, shared by Walidah Imarisha, African American writer, activist, and spoken word artist that speaks to the state of our world today:
Feels like solarpunk to me.
And who are these people who plant their stories in the cracks? Who grows the living anthology?
Le Guin has an answer for that as well:
It’s not just writers who will change the narratives that are believed in our world. It’s not even just readers of solarpunk or hopeful climate fiction. It’s all of us. Anyone who buys into the inevitability of the doom loop, the unstoppable power of fascism, the idea that maybe there isn’t a divine right for kings but it doesn’t matter because the billionaires are too powerful to fight anyway.
Have you seen the quality of the billionaires lately? These guys can barely hold it together with a kilo of cocaine and legions fluffing them on social media.
None of which means the risks aren’t real—they are deadly real, people are already being harmed, and the worst kind of people just got installed into power in one of the most powerful countries on earth. Shit is real, friends.
But the doom loop we really need to worry about is the one where doomerism feeds denial and denial feeds doomerism, each creating a cycle that traps you in hopelessness and defeat, allowing the worst of humanity to run roughshod over the planet and all of us.
Deep Dive Into the Science
Over the weekend, I did a deep dive into the science: not of climate change, but of people and what makes them set aside their denial and decide to take action in the climate fight.
This deep dive was set off by a 2024 survey of hundreds of thousands of people in sixty countries about what narratives induced them to move climate action up on their “to-do” list, and the answers were as varied and complex as humanity itself, which I found strangely reassuring. These people are onto something, I thought.
The most compelling narratives that they studied did indeed vary by country and even by gender, but for America, the top three were:
Reducing the psychological distance of the climate crisis, which sounds a lot to my ears like “put down the denial and take a clear-eyed look at the risks”
Making the moral case for climate actions, which is another way of saying certain actions have clear positive benefits for everyone, not just yourself, but maybe also you.
Show that collective action is effective, which speaks to the need to convince people that something will “work” before they’re even willing to attempt it.
None of the effects of these various narratives was huge—it’s tremendously difficult to get people to make voluntary change, ones not forced upon them by circumstance—but hopeful climate fiction can address all these, as was thoroughly investigated by my new favorite researcher, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, in a study on the influence of climate fiction on readers.
Turns out that stories can build moral justifications for climate action by showing how actions lead to clear positive benefits, not just for individuals but communities, ecosystems, and the entire world. Stories can connect the dots, so to speak. Stories also famously reduce psychological distance—the same areas of our brains that light up with real actions and emotions will activate when experiencing those things through fiction. It’s one reason reading is so pleasurable. And terrifying. And exciting. All the human things. Stories transport us, and things we experience in fiction become real to us in a way that’s remarkable. And finally, a well constructed story can persuasively show effective collective action. You might have a hard time envisioning people coming together in a generic sense, but when you see people pitching in to distribute water and diapers and clothing to victims of the wildfires in Los Angeles, is anyone really surprised? This resonates with truth about who we, as humans, really are. Stories can go even further, hopping and skipping through time and location to tie together all the pieces and show the way something like that happens, not just for disaster relief but for relief from the ongoing disaster of capitalism and fascism and climate change.
Schneider-Mayerson also found we have trouble making the leap from compelling fiction to action in the real world: that we might read a compelling story about saving the sea turtles then decide that, well, we’re not really the saving-sea-turtle type people. And yet stories also serve a critical function of breaking the silence around climate change. You might not become a sea turtle activist, but you might tell your friend that this sea turtle story really moved you. The ensuing discussion might open up social permission for the both of you to take a tiny step: maybe go see the sea-turtles. Maybe learn more about the sea turtle situation. You two together might decide there’s something you can do after all.
I’m a huge believer in that critical step. Once we decide to actually do something, with our smart brains and good hearts, we will find a way. Once we decide to take action, that’s when we unlock our creativity.
None of us is going to save the world, not even the sea turtles, alone. The effort is massive. We need everyone in the fight. There’s so much to do, it doesn’t even matter where you start. Pick something and go. It will help.
We do this reflexively in the aftermath of a wildfire, spontaneously organizing and doing what we can. But if we believed that there was nothing that could be done, that we’re all doomed, and we might as well let the fires rage, that there’s no sense in fighting them or feeding the evacuees, then we’d stay at home. Worse, we’d make excuses for who’s to blame for the fires or why those people don’t deserve help. We’ll manufacture stories so we can stay in our denial about the world burning around us.
Through my deep dive into the science of how people work, in this area, the most compelling result was that doomer narratives had the opposite effect to what was intended.
Remember me yelling into the void of social media about climate change killing the housing insurance market and the economy long before it would kill the fish? That is true. But drumbeats of climate horrors, no matter how accurate, and especially if they are escalating narratives of doom and destruction and apocalypse, will only send people spinning off into denial.
It’s an extremely human reaction and the study showed it in hard numbers: of the eleven narratives they tested, they all worked a little, some better than others with various populations, but one universally had deeply negative effects: doomerism, it turns out, is universally depressing and makes us turn away, ignoring the risks, because what are we supposed to do if the world is ending?
Party away the time we have left, I guess.
Which seems to be the answer a lot of folks come to. That, or turn to fascism, because the anxiety doesn’t go away just because you’re ignoring the chaotic world all around you, and for some folks, it’s easier to believe that some marginalized person is causing all their problems and that a strongman will fix everything. They’d rather make someone else suffer than face that they’re hiding from the real risks because it’s just honestly terrifying.
Listeners to my podcast aren’t turning to fascism, but you might be tempted to believe that everyone else is (or will). And that’s no more ordained than anything else. The future remains what we make it. People often reject fascism because it relentlessly fails to deliver on its promises. Indeed, it’s incapable of delivering because the only thing it’s doing is assuaging anxiety by targeting some people for suffering and death. It doesn’t actually solve any of the real problems, which in the case of climate change, will get relentlessly worse.
So yes, fascism will accelerate the climate crisis. But the climate crisis was already accelerating, and increasing climate disasters may speed up the process of people realizing that fascism is very ill-equipped to deal with it. Fascism is a bandaid that some people need to cover their eyes while the world burns.
But the world is still burning.
So where does that leave us? Are we in the doom loop or no, Sue?
I can’t make any promises about the future—none of us can. I’m actively using denial to protect my joy—the joy I get from my family and friends, the joy of writing, the simple pleasure of going to the library, getting my library passport stamped, and loading up with more books than I can possibly read and enjoying every second of that. That joy gives me the bandwidth I need to write my hopeful climate fiction stories, to do the podcast and the other things to get more of these hopeful stories out into the world where they can do the good, steady, long-term, underground subversive work of moving people from inaction to action in fighting the climate crisis. And any extra bandwidth I have, I’ll use for more activism or helping out climate disaster victims or building community on a couple of Solarpunk Discords I’ve joined… or simply enjoying my life.
As I told my kid recently, the fascists want to snuff out joy. They want their enemies, people just trying to live their lives, to suffer, not only because demoralized people don’t fight back as their countries are carved up and doled out to the oligarchs… they want you to suffer simply because that makes them feel better. Superior and powerful. And it soothes the anxiety of change because they have the emotional range of a grasshopper and cannot deal with any twitch in the blades of grass.
But we can do better. When we use all the tools in our arsenal—strategic denial, joy, community building, friend-making, education and more—we increase our bandwidth and unlock the true survival skills needed for this cursed 21st Century.
Staying in denial will not save you, but reclaiming your joy just might.
Survival Tools for the Fight
Pick a lane in which to fight the fascists or the climate crisis or the other terrors of the world. Stick to that lane, two at the most, while you build the resilience you’ll need to not just survive but to do so joyfully.
In the mean time, I invite you to try some of these hopeful climate fiction stories—there are so many amazing stories are out there, waiting to give you a bit of uplift about our chances. To bring the climate crisis closer, but in a good way that shows how we fight through it, how we take on the forces of darkness and despair and evil together. How we can shrug off the ghostly fingers of past narratives, stories meant to disable us, to keep us separate and trudging along under the fascists’ yoke.
These stories are one of the tools in our survival toolkit. They show how to build communities of care, how to live in different and better ways, sustainable ways, and how to reclaim the joy that is rightfully ours.
Use them.
Send this episode to a friend who might be struggling with the world right now.
Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading.
LINKS Ep. 24: Let’s Talk About the Doom Loop
A ‘doom loop’ of climate change and geopolitical instability is beginning. The Conversation, Dec 9 2024
New Section on Academic Studies of Solarpunk on Bright Green Futures website
The Impact of Climate Fiction: An Empiricle Study of Readers. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Environmental Humanities (2018) 10 (2): 473–500.
Addressing Climate Change with Behavioral Science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries. Madalina Vlasceanu, et. al. Science Advances, 7 Feb 2024, Vol 10, Issue 6.
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