How Climate Broke Reality

We can't agree on what's true. Is it because the truth about the planet is too inconvenient?

Another year, another neverstorm.

This summer Texas hill country was hit with terrifying flash floods, killing hundreds, including dozens of children attending a summer camp. There has been some examination of the role played by recent cuts to government meteorology and the poorly funded flood warning system in the county. But any attempt to advance a rational policy response to this disaster is muddied by various conspiracy theory nonsense and right-wing blame deflection. There is a loud contingent online who see an “unprecedented, yet increasingly common” climate event like this and point the finger not at climate change, but at fantasies of targeted “weather warfare” and nefarious cloud seeding.

Garbage Day featured a couple relatable responses to this deluge of denial:

“A common progressive fantasy is that once conservatives see the consequences of climate change, they will have some sort of come to Jesus moment,” X user @KrangTNelson wrote. “But it was always pretty obvious to people paying attention that they were just gonna blame it on Deep State Flooding Tech and learn nothing.”

Or as @wb_baskerville put more bluntly, “I don’t know how you share a democratic society with millions of people who are just pervasively unwilling to occupy reality in the most basic terms.”

When I teach rhetoric, I cover stasis theory, a concept that dates back to the ancient Greeks. The idea is to isolate the source of a disagreement to one of four categories, or stases:

1. Facts

2. Definitions

3. Quality (severity/values)

4. Policy (what should be done)

It’s very hard to have a meaningful policy discussion if you don’t agree on the previous three stases. Unfortunately, in America today very few of our political disagreements are actually about policy, or even about values. Most of our political disputes are stuck in the first stasis, unable to agree on the basic facts of reality. (Though of course, any good rhetorician will point out that one’s facts do tend to reveal things about one’s values.)

Call it an epistemic crisis. It has loomed like a dark cloud over climate politics for decades, and now looms over all of American life. Neal Stephenson put it succinctly in a recent Long Now interview: “For me the two [biggest problems] are carbon, and the fact that we can’t agree on what’s real.”

In the climate movement, it often feels like dealing with the former (the carbon) is —— in a very stasis theory sort of way —— gated behind dealing with the latter (consensus reality). Or even that the latter is the cause of the former: climate change has gotten out of hand because our epistemic troubles have paralyzed us into inaction.

I’d like to propose, however, that perhaps the reverse is actually true. That perhaps climate change is the reason reality is broken.

Climate Denial → Reality Denial

The basic argument is this:

1. Everyone knows that climate change is real, that it’s our fault, and that it’s a huge problem for the whole world.

2. Everyone also knows that not much is being done to address this problem, and that what is being done is mostly too little, too late.

3. And yet everyone has to get up and go about their days, carrying on despite knowing the planetary bus is headed off a cliff.

4. This multi-decade acquiescence to inaction in the face of a terrible reality has culturally prepared us to collectively acquiesce to, for instance,

   • politicians who constantly lie to our faces;

   • social media dynamics where lying is a source not of shame but of clout;

   • AI tools that generate answers which merely look correct, but aren’t actually grounded in fact.

5. Thus climate change is behind our epistemic crisis, rather than the other way around.

You might reasonably ask: what about the climate skeptics, the low information voters, the confused and uneducated? Exceptions to every rule, but I don’t think there are any actual climate skeptics. Deniers, sure, but no skeptics. In their heart of hearts, everyone —— even your most ornery uncle —— knows the basic score.

Climate denial is a quasi-religious behavior. It’s about having faith in a personal or sectarian narrative that runs counter to rationality, the findings of scientific inquiry, even lived experience. That faith is the point. It allows one to feel special, superior. It provides comforting answers to tough questions.

The fixation on “weather weapons” is a real tell. Those folks know human activity can impact the weather, but prefer to make themselves and those they identify with into victims of targeted plots, rather than acknowledge that they are participants in a civilization-wide screwup.

As for the rest, the not in-the-know, maybe they aren’t informed on the chemistry or the policy nuance, but everyone has for decades been swimming in a culture of climate anxiety. And as that culture has increased in intensity, so too has the epistemic crisis.

Because this isn’t really about climate denial. It’s about anti-vaxxers and AI hallucinations and fake news and health misinfo and book bans and sports gambling and viral conspiracy theories and fascism. It’s about reality denial. Reality denial and destruction at the highest levels of our society, and reality apathy everywhere else.

A Truth Too Inconvenient

Last month, in my big solarpunk retrospective, I indulged in an extended complaint about the terrible information environment we are choking on in 2025:

Social media, under the auspices of oligarch platform-rule, has turned out to be both addictive and socially/intellectually corrosive in the extreme, particularly for elites and various civil society/courtier-types (reporters, pundits, activists, etc.). Journalism is either in tatters, captured by billionaires and private equity, or strung out on discourse-clicks. The web as a repository of knowledge is crumbling. For various reasons (particularly, I think, the ‘inconvenient truth’ of the climate crisis), our ability to accurately perceive and learn about reality has atrophied, or been deliberately sabotaged. The trauma and dislocation of the pandemic massively accelerated this process, and now the genAI iconoclasm/infoclasm is accelerating it further.

I’ve had a few people ask me about that middle bit (now in bold). It’s an allusion, of course, to Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which won him two Oscars and a Nobel Peace Prize. In terms of impact and attention, I can’t think of a documentary with a bigger profile. It was a massive cultural moment that has been completely forgotten.

A lot of climate activists today look back on An Inconvenient Truth as a missed opportunity. The call to action everyone remembers from it is “change your lightbulbs,” when in fact we needed to galvanize people to confront fossil fuel interests and demand massive state investment in decarbonization. 11 years later, An Inconvenient Sequel would hit those notes, but the resentment/dismissal toward the original remains.

But for me, that “inconvenient truth” phrase still has a lot of explanatory power. It’s not “an important truth” or “a necessary truth” or “a useful truth.” No, the most fundamental thing about climate change is that it’s inconvenient, frustrating, shitty. Even if you believe, as I do, that fixing climate change is an opportunity to fix many other problems in our society, it’s still inconvenient that the chemistry worked out this way. It’s inconvenient that we didn’t catch the problem sooner. It’s inconvenient that so much of our society runs on fuel that’s killing us. It’s inconvenient that this is happening now, to us, and not at some later or even earlier point in our development.

For most, climate change is a derailment of collective (as well as often individual) plans and expectations and forward movement. A diminishing of the future as a site of meaning, even as some aspects of perceived futurity arrive in the present. I see it on my students’ faces when I teach futuring: any mention of climate saps the excitement and joy out of imagining the future. As Jay put it in an excellent post/podcast recently, “It feels like the future has run out of road.”

We all gravitate towards convenience. For some people, if “truth” is in the way of living a convenient life, or collecting convenient profits, or punishing convenient enemies, then truth itself has to go.

Paying for Lies

Destroying truth has been the right-wing political project for the entire 21st century, culminating today in the defunding of science and the dismantling of government services that convey accurate information about the world — such as meteorological data about flash flood risk. They’re even moving to incinerate tremendously expensive and useful satellites that track (among other things) the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Usually, accurately perceiving reality is a strategic advantage, even a necessity, for any actor in a competitive arena like politics. Leaders that fire generals whose assessments they dislike don’t historically tend to fare well when actual conflict begins. So why has a major segment of the elite abandoned a clear-eyed reckoning with the planetary situation? In short: money.

Sufficient resources can make up for the informational disadvantage. The fossil fuel industry has been pouring money into politics for decades—the kind of money you get when the whole of civilization is hooked on your product. Partly this buys influence, but also it helps preferred candidates survive the handicap.

The result has been the creation of a political faction where willingness to deny reality is a requirement for entry. If you try to run as a Republican who takes climate seriously, you’ll often get outcompeted by better funded opponents who are happy to call it all a hoax to please their backers. And a system that filters for willingness to talk crazy is a system that will let in a lot of genuine crazy, too.

And we aren’t just talking PAC funding, but huge tranches of economic development. In Louisiana last month, I heard from a former Dem staffer who’d helped the previous governor put together the state’s first climate plan (RIP). “People thought the world would end if you said ‘climate change’ in Louisiana,” he’d said. That really struck me. There was a fear that acknowledging the existence of the climate crisis would cause the fossil fuel industry to pick up and move to another state, Alabama maybe, taking all their money and jobs with them. Everyone lauded the supposed prosperity oil and gas had brought to the state, and everyone felt that denial of reality—even though they could feel it getting hotter and watch sea level rise shrink their coasts—was part of the deal.

This dynamic has been at work for decades, ever since the fossil fuel industry decided they weren’t going to let what happened to cigarettes in that first episode Mad Men happen to them. (Often they had the same lawyers and doubt merchants as the tobacco industry.) If science said their product was harmful, then they’d destroy trust in science. Sometimes I wonder if now they feel a bit like a dog that caught the car—if the corporate leaders who paid to politicize science are now a little nervous about the world they made, with all its resurgent disease and surging fascism. After all, they have to live here too. I remember a line in a Bruce Sterling novel (Distraction, maybe?) about how it’s better to have knowledge in a time of no money than money in a time of no knowledge.

Plus, there is money in the climate transition, and the fossil majors now love to style themselves as “energy” companies as they reach for their slice. It’s so strange to see them participating in spaces like the COP, while back home they fund candidates who want to dismantle the whole UN.

But this type of Janus-faced behavior is normal for the climate era. We’ve all learned to live in unreality. We all go about our days trying to be happy even when, arguably, we shouldn’t be.

To Fix Reality, We Fix the Climate

To be honest, I feel like I’ve only just begun to explore this thesis. It’s argument that can snake into so many corners, recasting culture and politics in a new, often harsher light. How much does climate anxiety fuel the anxiety behind the so-called ‘masculinity crisis’? How much are we driven to addictive screens because the weather is getting worse, and we have reason to be afraid of the sky? How much have we lost faith in journalism because it seems to struggle to tackle the biggest story on the planet? The entanglements are endless, once you start looking for them.

I do know where this argument ends, however, the conclusion to draw that makes this notion more than just another chicken-v-egg debate. It comes down to this: To restore our collective grip on consensus reality, we have to start fixing the climate.

Some on the left have long argued that building a solidaristic working class must start with winning real material gains, such as “non-reformist reforms” like Medicare for All. You have deliver something to show people that your cause is worth joining and struggling with. I think this is a lot like that. Yes, it feels like real societal mobilization around climate is impossible as long as long as we fail to agree on facts and are ruled by shameless liars. But I think we have to try anyway.

And we have to tell a story that goes beyond the world’s current limp climate targets, beyond merely decarbonizing and halting warming at 1.5-2°C. Managed decline and blunted disaster inspire no one, and I think everyone understands, deep down, that this is what’s being proposed. We need to start telling people that an actual restoration of the holocene atmosphere is possible, and that they can be a part of it.

Climate repair. It’s tricky and complicated, but I think it gives us a way of thinking about this problem that is fundamentally less insanity-making. I think for a lot of regular people, the prospect that this crisis can be resolved, that the poison can be sucked from the wound — well, if they hear that, some painful tautness in our souls will start to loosen. The liars and grifters and hallucinations will lose some of their appeal. The world will start feeling like a place worth making sense of again.

Preorder My Book

I have a book on the way! Absence: A Novel will tentatively come out May 5, 2026, from Soho Press. It’s a twisty cosmic mystery about a planetary crisis of human vanishing, and a woman who may or may not have the answers the world has been waiting for. If any of the essay above resonated with you, you’ll want to read it.

We’re still finalizing things like the cover, but the preorder pages with some of the metadata (and outdated jacket copy) is now out there. You can find links to your preferred preorder destination by clicking this link or the button below.

Art Tour: Moon Opera

“A ópera da lua (The Moon Opera),” OSGEMEOS 2014

In DC I saw a wonderful exhibit at the Hirshhorn featuring a huge number of works by the Brazilian twin artist duo OSGEMEOS. The above was one of my favorites.

A Note on Future Newsletters

For various reasons, I’m looking into moving this newsletter off Substack. So…that may happen! Hopefully it won’t require any action from you, my readers, but just a heads up that the next issue may be arriving to your inbox via another platform.