Climate catastrophe and (post) apocalyptic TV: Don’t worry, be glum by Dennis Broe, p. 1

Climate catastrophe and
(post) apocalyptic TV —
Don’t worry, be glum.

Teaser: triple apocalypses

Wildfires in Los Angeles have laid waste to both the more affluent homes in the Pacific Palisades and its nearby canyons while utterly ravaging the African-American community of Altadena where evacuation warnings were delayed and all of the 18 deaths from the most powerful fire occurred. On the East Coast the soot from the recent Canadian wildfires was so thick that in New York and Washington school sessions were cancelled and messengers, compelled to keep working, resurrected N95 masks from the COVID apocalypse in order to breathe. Meanwhile in Europe the floods from the sabotage of the Russian-controlled dam in the Ukraine may result in 20,000 hectares of land used to grow grain in the breadbasket of the world remaining infertile for five years (Barroux and Sillah) while that same act also endangered the cooling process in the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe. To add to these conditions there is a new lack of concern for the coming apocalypse, even as it grows ever nearer.

Pilot

Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”[1] [open endnotes in new window] has been taken up wholeheartedly by the makers of corporate television. In numerous series stretching across different genres and now accounting for its own genre—Post-Apocalyptic TV—broadcast, cable and streaming TV (and of course numerous films) have concocted a plethora of “endings” to the world as we know it. These have the effect of failing to challenge the climate apocalypse as the catastrophe calls for immediate action in the present to keep the worst from happening. In so doing, the makers of corporate TV, largely U.S. but then picked up across the globe using the U.S. prototypes, have found a new way forward. They still have a persistent refusal to challenge the fossil fuel industry but with a more sophisticated approach to the now mostly discredited “climate denial” narrative initiated by that industry (Dembicki). [2] That is, if the catastrophe is unavoidable, we may as well begin planning for the post-Apocalyptic future.

In the industry these are referred to as Dystopian Series but that is similar to calling climate destruction “climate change.” It’s a carbon neutral way of labelling the problem without discussing it. Here I highlight the shift from Apocalyptic Series, which focus on the moment of earth’s end times, and might be politically more useful, to “Post-Apocalyptic” Series, where the end and point of destruction has already come and gone and the series is about coping with the aftermath in the best way possible. That is, the genre for the most part—as David Harvey utilizes these terms borrowed from Marx’s Grundrisse—“presupposes” the end as inevitable at this stage and instead “posits” how to survive after the end, once the end times presupposition is established.

Material reasons for preoccupation with apocalypse at this conjuncture are the destruction of the earth, escalating danger of nuclear war and decline of the West. And all of these factors are accompanied by a resolute repression in the corporate media which either refuses to engage or downplays the implications of these conditions.

However, dialectically, this ideological elision also allows for an opening. Whereas, in series based in the present, political content is mostly abandoned or repressed, these series, once the idea that the end time is not neigh but here, may allow a freedom for both pursuing a deep critique of the contemporary order and a positing of alternative orders.

In Season 11 of The Walking Dead (AMC, US, 2010-2022), the originator and dean of this genre, the present’s problems resurface. In the series’ story arc, the neoliberal “perfect world” of The Commonwealth conceals a vicious and violent inner core, a repressive deep state needed to maintain a surface air of gentility. The Last of Us (HBO, US, 2023-) presupposes at its outset a fascist government, the end point of today’s neoliberal experiments. However, in the course of the two lead characters’ cross-country travels, the script posits the creation of a communal compound which is the opposite of this order and which opposes it. The Le Pen threat of a far-right breakdown of the social order is nearly explicitly elaborated in season’s one and two of the most prescient of The Walking Dead spinoffs, Daryl Dixon (AMC, 2023). The redneck motorcyclist with a heart of gold finds himself in a France overrun by a Le Pen wannabee whose rhetoric is eerily similar to her real-world counterpart, suggesting metaphorically that the French turn to Le Pen is a result of their no longer believing in Macron as a bulwark against fascism since he has used undemocratic techniques himself.

Finally, class antagonism in Snowpiercer (TNT, US, 2020-2024), indicates that the post-Apocalyptic world cannot escape the present’s problems, perhaps negating or qualifying the effectiveness of this flight into fantasy. The narrative also suggests, in the most radical positing of the genre, that a world shorn of capitalists can negotiate its own resurrection.

Oil I want is you

“The best thing about the Earth is, if you poke holes in it, oil and gas comes out.”
—Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 2013, qtd. in Klein.

If you think of the often feminization of the earth, Mother Earth etc., this quotation is a statement rich in meaning, promoting both ecocide and misogyny.

We are all witnessing the increasing failure to confront climate catastrophe and to rein in the fossil fuel industry. The last two global climate conferences have been held in oil capitals—2023’s in Dubai, chaired by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company which is invested billions in pumping more oil the next year (Bearak); and 2024’s in Baku, one of the global centers of oil production. Both events have been met with calls to boycott the conference.

In addition, the United States, now with the re-ascension of Trump, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is retreating not to climate denial but to climate indifference. The tariffs that the United States and the European Union have levied on Chinese electric cars, the cheapest and most efficient in the world, have already had the effect of slowing Western production of these vehicles. The Biden/Trump regime is also synonymous with slapping tariffs on solar panels and lithium batteries used to power the electric vehicles. In fact, the Biden administration, in a blatant disregard for the health of the planet, announced it was applying these tariffs the day after a 2024 climate conference concluded.[3]

With this capitulation, depictions of end times have increased. At a recent Series Mania, the largest television festival in the world held in Lille, France, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic series had, along with +MeToofemale liberation series, become the dominant genre, accounting for 13 percent of the total of 55 series. These ranged from the apocalyptic tone of the endpoint of Western science in Lars Von Trier’s return to The Kingdom (DR, DK, 1994, 1997, 2022)to South Korean high-school teens training for an alien threat that hovers over their heads in Duty After School (TVING, KR, 2023). The Spanish series Apagon (Moviestar Plus+, ES, 2022)has a solar tempest strike the earth and The Fortress (Viaplay, NO, 2023) recounts how Norway, in Trump-style, walls itself off from the world and then must confront a deadly virus. Finally The Swarm (ZDF, DE, 2023), a global series financed by several European public television networks, depicts the ocean setting out to wreak its revenge on a humanity bent on destroying it.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, as planetary destruction looms. This grim future reality though is belied by a most abundant present for oil and gas companies whose profits have never been greater. Largely as a result of the energy crisis because of the war in the Ukraine, the profits of the five largest producers of oil and gas, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Total, were $195 billion in 2022, almost 120 percent more than the previous year and at the highest level in the industry’s history (Global Witness). Even the U.S. President Biden accused these companies of “war profiteering.” Only five percent of their profits went to developing clean energy, with the majority going, as Chevron claimed, to “returning cash to shareholders, investing capital efficiently, and paying down debt” (Ibid.)

In addition, the Ukraine war has occasioned a return to the most dangerous and polluting methods of extraction, including in the West deepwater drilling and a return of coal and in the U.S. and across the world. Nuclear power plants are announced in Malaysia, Indonesia and The Philippines, and France threatens to bring 6 to 14 new plants on line, regardless of the nuclear waste these plants will generate. In the United States, now become the largest supplier of natural gas, this has meant returning to and reopening the previously unprofitable industry of fracking, and for that, the new narrative is that this process, which destroys drinking water and leaks methane in a way comparable to coal mining, has “saved American democracy.” The day the war against Ukraine began the Bloomberg News Agency ran a story headlined, “Fracking: A Powerful Weapon Against Russia,” trumpeting the return of an industry that had almost gone bankrupt.

The carbon imprint of replacing Russian oil and natural gas with U.S. fracked gas, with its increased transport distance, is two times greater than before. Add to that the imprint of U.S. hydraulic fracking, and the carbon imprint is almost three times greater (Reymond and Rimbert). In addition, the war has also seen the blowing up of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 Russian pipelines, with the culprit still an object of surmise but with much of the evidence, as marshalled by the U.S. Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, leaning toward the United States and Norway, oil producers who have been the major benefactors of the sabotage. The 40,000 tons of methane emitted from the cloud that passed across Europe was described as “the highest release of methane gas ever on the planet (Reuters).”

Since the onset of the war, Western governments have caved in to the demands of an ever more dominant and omnipotent fossil fuel industry with U.S. President Biden having implemented all the policy requests of a secretive fossil fuel lobby group. In this context, a former president, George W. Bush, in a secret meeting never made public, had signed on to his Vice President Dick Cheney’s Haliburton agenda. Subsequently, Trump, more brazenly, has named the head of Exxon as his secretary of state. In a similar way, European leaders met more than 100 times with the fossil fuel industry since the Ukraine war began, while industry lobbyists at 2002’s U.N. climate conference far outnumbered “climate vulnerable African countries and Indigenous communities” (Global Witness).

The effects of this onslaught have already appeared in the United States in rising coastal sea levels in the East amid worse hurricanes and storms, Midwestern mega rains and droughts destroying crops and homes, and worsening and more destructive forest fires in the West. The apocalyptic effect by the end of this century if this destruction is not halted will be the drowning of island nations, inundating of coastal areas from Ecuador to Brazil to the Netherlands as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia, and the potential extinction of major cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai and Shanghai (Klein).

All of this is linked to the failure to confront the fossil fuel industry. As Naomi Klein says,

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. The actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe…[threaten] an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

In terms of the apocalyptic imagination the result is “the acute and painful realization” that our “leaders are not looking after us . . . we are not cared for at the level of our very survival.”

Other apocalypses

Two other forms of destruction ever more on the horizon but also essentially going largely undiscussed and unheeded are the (renewed) threat of nuclear war in the face of the ever-escalating war in Ukraine and what we might, after Paul Gilroy, call Imperial Malaise (Dworkin). The decline of the West is being hastened by the conflict between the West and the rest of the world with their rise and resistance prompted also by the war and amid the following developments:

Russia has announced stationing nuclear weapons in nearby Belarus as the NATO countries continue the path of escalation.
The United States is sending long-range missiles to target deep into Russia,
The British supply depleted uranium weapons which will leave radiation traces on both Ukrainian users and Russian targets while destroying swathes of the environment.
Germany is sending Leopard tanks east in an ominous suggestion of World War II; and
Poland now demands to be armed with U.S. nuclear weapons.

In the midst of this, the U.S. Secretary of State Blinkin declares that the U.S. will support no peace talks and will not end the war. So the threat of a full-scale nuclear war increases daily. In a news conference when the lame duck President Biden was asked by a journalist about hope for a ceasefire in another potentially nuclear hotspot, the Middle East, instead of answering, Biden essentially told the journalist if she kept up this line of questioning a camera could fall on her head.[4] The nuclear threat, mostly unacknowledged in the corporate press, also feeds the feeling of hopelessness and a sense the world may be coming to an end.

The failure of the West, led by the United States, to enlist the rest of the world in its campaign against Russia, with fully 87 percent of the world refusing to go along with U.S. sanctions (Norton), has hastened its already accelerating decline. The center of economic activity has shifted eastward to Asia and to the economically expanding now 10-member BRICS countries, which boast the largest grouping of the world’s population and the world’s wealth.

As a result, a cumulative economic apocalypse has seen income disparity worsen, for example, to the point where the creators of these television series, Hollywood writers, claim as a primary reason for their 2023 strike that they can no longer support themselves on their salaries while profits within the streaming industry soar. In France, inflation from price gauging and the war, the raising of the retirement age and the cancelling of job security are expressed in a bit of graffiti on the left bank that simply states, “Gréve ou Creve,” Strike or Die. Finally, there is the crisis of the drug epidemic, a way of coping with this destruction that has passed from heroin to Purdue-Pharma-distributed oxycontin to fentanyl, seven times more potent and addictive than heroin—all three discovered and originally manufactured in Big Pharma laboratories—making the streets of Los Angeles unsafe.[5] It’s no wonder that one of the contemporary Hollywood apocalyptic series From has everyone locked in their homes at night, with living dead, flesh-eating zombies ready to devour anyone who lets their guard down and goes outside.

Part of the Imperial “malaise” comes from the refusal to cut back or even question the use of technological devices (smartphones, smart cars, and the newest toys provided by AI, all of which carry a heavy carbon imprint) which are used to convince Western audiences that they are still in a (long since surpassed) era of abundance, of course belied by shrinking salaries and social services. The full weight of these various apocalypses is never narrated in the continuing onslaught of corporate media where we are told that despite it all, the system is coping, doing its best and is still the hope for humanity.

The cognitive dissonance and distance between what is said and what the collective unconscious knows to be true but which must remain unsaid is also responsible for the dominance of the terrifying images of post-apocalyptic television (as well as for the ongoing desertion of audiences from mainstream news channels such as MSNBC and CNBC, now both being spun off from their parent company Comcast because unprofitable.)[6] How can it be, for example, that a country which holds itself up as a shining beacon to the world, sometimes called “the indispensable nation,” supplies B-16 bombers to Ukraine at $550 million per plane but forces its homeless in Los Angeles, epicenter of a national housing crisis, to sleep at night on public buses?