Ecological catastrophe justifies immediacy’s claim that proactive agency is exhausted

Evidence

Blur, immersion, presence: too late is no longer merely late. The material corollary of this stylized time is the inevitable environmental ruin wreaked by undead zombie capitalism. It is too late. Ecocide has already taken place. Lethal deluges, catastrophic droughts, and heat death are already baked into our future. The earth is hotter now than at any moment in the last 125,000 years. No matter what happens tomorrow, sea levels will rise six to twelve inches over the next two decades. Two billion people worldwide are currently living on land that will soon be either uninhabitably hot or well underwater, or both. There is no going back. Already in 1988, the first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change compiled enough terrifying data to compel virtually every country on earth to recognize the severity of climate change, commit to mitigating greenhouse gases, and do so in accordance with a principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” acknowledging wealth, power, and contributory inequities; thirty years later little action has ensued. A small number of hyper-consuming billionaires, their oligarchic plutocratic enablers, and syndicates of lumpen McShoppers have irreparably degraded the planet, ergo billions of people will be displaced and killed. The world’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for 50 percent of carbon emissions, which have skyrocketed in direct proportion to our undeniable knowledge of their catastrophic effects. Scorching temperatures and rising waters aren’t the only effects; along with biodiversity collapse there is also the horrific reality that concentrated carbon dioxide levels compromise cognition, diminishing the human brain’s ability to think strategically, react patiently, or read theory books for the hell of it. In the near future, we will be hot and imperiled and stupid. It is too late. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 33

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that elevated CO2 degrades cognition connects to her broader structural argument (defended in the Antitheory chapter) that external conditions attack the capacity for theory/mediation itself.