By Cameron Hu

Emergent Conversation 22

This essay is part of the series The Politics of Crisis, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 22

I

“Crisis,” Janet Roitman asserts in 2014’s probing Anti-Crisis, “is an observation that produces meaning” (42). Ten years later—as climate crisis increasingly motivates extravagant state and corporate schemes to re-engineer the whole Earth—my annotation is that “crisis” is an observation that produces action.

This much is hard to miss at present. I suspect anyone familiar with mainstream Euro-American climate politics will recognize the refrains. Climate crisis is time to act. Facing planet-sized crisis, there is no choice but to take action. We can’t do nothing about the crisis. We must do something. And we have to do something fast—before it is too late to act—or before time runs out. In March 2023, the UN Secretary General summarized the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by repurposing the title of a ubiquitous action-comedy: “Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Indeed, North Atlantic talk about the planet tends to emplot present circumstance within the dramatic arc of a very specific sort of blockbuster: the kind that generates a complex enjoyment of nervy tension by setting a timer on disaster, so that jump-suited Americans in the spaceship or war zone or situation room can beat the clock. A lot has been written about the taste for apocalypse in popular culture, and how Euro-America today finds it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (e.g. Fisher 2009). But on close inspection, so many Armageddon plots, as with Armageddon (1998) itself, are actually dramas of crisis-and-solution, in which deep-sea drillers or similar squads of hard-working, hard-living men take drastic, risky measures to engineer away catastrophe in the nick of time. What the prevailing form of life finds easiest to imagine and dramatize, over and over, is that it can “ultimately resolve all problems and never create new, intractable ones” (Asad 2018, 161).

II

This basic article of secular faith exerts a lot of control over what situations can come up for consideration as a “crisis,” and what, in turn, “doing something” can ever mean. It is almost definitional that crisis solicits intervention. Conversely, it is probably no crisis at all if you can’t do anything about it. Consider what sorts of things will never amount to “crisis” as such. The Norman Invasion of 1066, the entropic heat death of the universe: the unbudging catastrophes of the sealed-off past and the Ultimate Fate of the Universe don’t yield to contemporary powers of industrious causation. They are unlikely to present themselves to consciousness as “crises” even as talk of a world-consuming “polycrisis” now gathers every dimension of contemporary existence under the sign of crisis (Tooze 2022).

Crisis is for doers and for doings. And it is for doers and doings of a particular, modern kind—the efficacious doers and doings that would put the global situation in order. Should the compulsion to do something about the planet send you to, say, prayer, or poems, or difficult reflection on the provincial idea that the indefinite expansion of the human-qua-species is a self-evident good—and not, say, carbon trading or solar radiation management—you may be very busy indeed. But by prevailing standards you have still to do something about the crisis. Crisis, we might summarize, is how the world and the Earth now come into view from the standpoint of the capital-A agent whose compulsion is to set the world straight. If the prevailing form of life is distinguished by the passion and prestige it allocates to world-ordering, nature-adjusting, history-generating movement, perhaps it is “crisis” that now gets that form of life going, not least after so much industrial “progress” has itself come to look like a crisis. In the crisis that demands you act before it is too late, the modern subject’s “anxiously empty commitment to motion” (Mazzarella n.d.) discovers new direction just as old paths reach a dead end.

And although the ongoing degradation of the planet can seem like uncharted territory, the grammar of crisis and action through which North Atlantic powers grasp an imperiled Earth does not lack precedent. It was very recently, amidst the post ’89 moral ecology of humanitarian intervention and counter-terrorism, that think tanks and liberal intellectuals learned to justify the application of military force throughout the globe via the now-familiar obligation “do something before it is too late” (Meister 2011, 45, see also Ticktin and Feldman eds., 2010). American power would motivate its various invasions on the urgent premises that “something must be done” and “doing nothing is not an option” (Li 2020, 26). Elsewhere I have explored how the post-Cold War enterprise of stabilizing the worldwide liberal order has inflected, and even controlled, contemporary aspirations to stabilize a neo-cybernetic Earth System (Hu 2021, see also Allan 2017, Grove 2019, and Masco 2014). Called to act now, we may begin to wonder how thoroughly the crisis grammars of imperial military intervention now determine the moral-political idioms of planetary “action”—and whether passage from a war on terror to a war on weather has been rather too seamless.

III

Is it possible to be fully engaged by the moral and political realities of the ongoing, all-too-real, unequally-suffered degradation of the planet and still suspect that there is something not quite right—in truth “counterrevolutionary,” as Masco (2017, S67) puts it—when the planet comes into view as a total crisis demanding and valorizing action? The question seems salient today. Because the meaning of action lately seems to be narrowing around a class of exuberant projects for the shock-and-awe industrial re-engineering of Earth processes. In West Texas, where I have been conducting research over several years, multinational oil corporations are developing vast facilities to capture atmospheric carbon, which they may redeploy to sweep further petroleum molecules from old oil reservoirs (Webb 2024). Elsewhere, start-ups are moving to “reverse global warming” by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere on the logic that “climate efforts need time, a luxury that only stratospheric aerosols can provide” (Make Sunsets 2023); and this is perhaps not so different from less controversial ambitions to, say, spread solar panels over huge regions of the Earth’s surface (Badami 2021) or accelerate the evolution of coral reefs (Bright 2022). The urgency of doing something, of solving the crisis before it is too late, seems to motivate nothing so naturally as it motivates capital-intensive, profit-seeking, high-risk engineering projects launched from the metropole straight at the functions of the whole Earth. One need not strain to hear the echo of the imperial crisis talk of the recent past, for example, that in Iraq “regime change may well be dangerous…. but sometimes the dangers of inaction are greater than those of action” (Lewis 2002).

If the progress of capital and empire installed multinational extractive corporations into the structure of the Earth, and if the arc of that progress has tended toward planetary “crisis,” doing something about crisis has lately revealed itself to mean installing those corporations still deeper into the workings of the planet. It is conventional to say that while corporation and state first came as imperious explorer-extractors of land and labor, they are today maturing into responsible manager-modulators of the carbon cycle. Yet those two modes do not look so distinct from one other in places like Texas. When, for example, a multinational oil company moves to pull carbon dioxide from the air, journalists invite us to applaud the scene of innovative technoscience undoing the bad past in pursuit of the good future—shifting, as in one exemplary formulation, “a reverse gear on a car headed for the cliff” (Rathi 2019). But as the same corporation deploys that captured carbon to sweep residual petroleum molecules from the Texas subsurface, we may just as easily observe the continuous intensification of the industrial manipulation of the Earth in pursuit of a too-familiar end, with further and further portions of the world funneled into the operation of oil wells.

So today, under the sign of planetary crisis, the deep-sea drillers are helicoptering in to pre-empt Armageddon again, saving the world by drilling it, just in the nick of time. And it is perhaps testimony to the power of “crisis” in the liberal North Atlantic that even those who make careers from critical knowingness meet them with applause, or at least relief. “I guess,” a prominent environmental humanities scholar recently said to me at a conference, “we just have to do geo-engineering now,” with resignation but not irony. It can seem weird to find deep agreement between academic critics and the defense intellectuals who publish articles in Foreign Affairs with titles like “The Time for Geoengineering is Now: Drastic Climate Change Calls for Drastic Measures” (Litan 2022). That unexpected agreement is the stuff of conscription to the active grammar of crisis.

One ineliminable difficulty with the urgent demand to do something, to never do nothing, is that one is mostly able to do what one already knows how to do. This point is tacit in Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1957) writings on action and agency. Called to “act now,” you may find yourself rushing to undertake the varieties of action already self-evident or intelligible as acting within the prevailing form of life—even if that whole hyperactive form of life and the habituated expressions of its hyperactivity may be the very source of the circumstances that now solicit action. Compelled by crisis to do something now, you are rather likely to find yourself deploying the tools you have in hand, even if those tools were designed to break the thing you are now eager to repair. A serious consideration of planetary crisis might require not only concern about what is not done in the face of crisis, but also about the things that “crisis” makes you do.

IV

By 2021, the Permian Basin of West Texas, the world’s most prolific fracking zone, became the superlative icon of a new kind of crisis. A satellite floating across Texas detected the largest flux of methane gas over any oil and gas zone in the Americas. That flux was symptomatic of a broader finding: that far more methane was leaking from oil and gas fields worldwide than previously thought. Methane, whose radiative forcing is both more intense and yet shorter lived than that of carbon dioxide, had not been much in the news. Now it is commonplace to speak of a worldwide “methane crisis.” “It is time,” we now read, “to freak out about methane emissions”—which is to say, it is time for “governments and corporations to take urgent action” (Leber 2021). Yet from West Texas, one might see that we are today “freaking out” precisely about the usual way that governments and corporations take urgent action.

When the sciences of climate identified carbon dioxide emissions as the basic agent of climate change, they quietly dignified methane gas with a new political description. From the late 1980s, methane, or “natural gas,” became a “clean” fossil fuel from the standpoint of the whole Earth, because methane combustion threw off less carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal combustion. In the whiteboard space of redox equations a climate strategy presented itself: if methane extraction could grow fast enough to replace a significant amount of coal, then North Atlantic economies could slow the greenhouse effect without slowing economic growth (see Hu 2021).

When methane became “clean,” the growth of methane extraction became a climate solution; and when it became a climate solution, methane extraction became a high-prestige object of academic and industrial research and an economic prospect dear to technocratic elites (see Wylie 2018, and symptomatically, Podesta and Wirth 2009). From the 1990s onward, elite universities and government laboratories in the United States collaborated with the petroleum industry to devise techniques for pulling methane from previously forbidding but gas-rich shale formations; meanwhile US government and many climate activists alike threw their weight behind the growing methane industry, enthusing, as the environmentalist Bill McKibben did, that “in the United States, we’ve found some new supplies of natural gas, which is a good ‘bridge fuel’ between dirty coal and clean sun” (2011, 54). Celebrating the “new supplies of natural gas” made available by novel extractive technologies, McKibben was celebrating the ascent of American fracking. Until very recently, fracking—it is as strange as it is easy to document—was a paradigmatic climate solution. Fracking was doing something about planetary crisis by the usual standards of action. Before carbon capture and solar radiation management, there was methane and fracking.

Fracking technologies resurrected declining extractive zones like those of West Texas. And as methane leaks skyward from the sprawling machinery of reanimated Texas oil—wells and flares, pipelines and compressor stations—one observes a novel crisis that follows, Möbius-like, from the ready-to-hand tools of crisis resolution. A crisis of carbon dioxide made fracking irresistible, and if there is today a “methane crisis,” we may want to pay attention to the sorts of actions it will make irresistible in turn.

Here I can annotate my annotation to Roitman’s Anti-Crisis. If crisis is an observation that produces action, then crisis is also the observation that produces the next crisis, with each urgent attempt to set the world straight creating a new problem that requires solution, each solution setting the stage for the next consuming melodrama that requires the drillers fly in to avert apocalypse, in the nick of time, doing the thing they know how. Facing a “crisis in crisis” (Masco 2017) the urgent thing may now be to solve an endless project of solving, to do something about the compulsion to do something.

Cameron Hu’s work explores the cultural logics of technoscientific capitalism and liberal empire. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation, Knowing Destroying, received the Daniel F. Nugent Prize in Historical Anthropology. He is currently Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University.

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Nandita Badami, Gretchen Bakke, Damien Bright, Stefan Schaefer, Mudit Trivedi, and Derek Woods for early conversations on the themes explored here.

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