Climate Confessions, Climate Christs

My punishment for theatrical anhedonia: I'm sick today, the day before we open. Ah, well.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones points to an intriguing feature on NBC News: "Climate Confessions." Tying in with the Democratic candidates' primary race, with its focus on climate issues, the site invites people to write their climate sins. You can view others' confessions as well. A sampling:

• I recycle but only to keep the trash volume to a manageable level.
• I drive 80 miles to and from work everyday.
• I like the temperature low in my home so I blast the AC in the summer. Using so little heat in the winter justifies it somehow.

The feature appears to be only lightly moderated. Several comments express resistance:

• I run my AC 24/7. I'm not going to sweat to appease this climate religion 
• I do not believe in man-made climate change and do absolutely nothing to 'prevent' it in any way, shape or form. 

Drum is unimpressed by NBC's tactic: 

Congratulations, NBC. This is probably the most efficient possible way to ensure that nothing gets done about climate change. In one stroke it:

• Perpetuates the myth that voluntary individual action makes much of a difference.
• Makes people feel guilty about ordinary, everyday activities.
• And then turns the whole thing into a game where we absolve ourselves with a public confession.

Climate change isn’t a game, and trying to make people feel bad about living their lives isn’t going to increase support for the kinds of things that really make a difference. It just gives people a reason to put climate change out of their minds in order to avoid having to feel guilty about it.

I concur with Drum. To go further, the doctrine of guilt and responsibility behind the site conveys a very Western Christian understanding of sin. The site, of course, doesn't use the word sin, asking instead for people to share where they "fall short in preventing climate change." But "falling short" is of course the meaning of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) the Greek word often used in the Christian Testament to name sin. "Confessing" these shortfalls adds to the religious sense, suggesting that some kind of expiation--guilt, penitence, punishment--is possible and required. It's neatly transactional: you sin, you confess and repent, and boom! Climate change thwarted!
I'll say I see a similar sin-guilt-confession-repentance model operating in some threads of social justice discourse, where racism and sexims--or, worse, white privilege or male privilege--get  framed as purely individual failings. This has been one of the criticisms of privilege discourse from the left: that focusing exclusively on one's privilege leads to an unhelpful cycle of guilt-confession-repentance that focuses on the privileged individual rather than on the larger systems and structures that perpetuate that privilege.

The real gospel of global warming, unfortunately, is much less rosy and self-serving. As Drum has noted, to really, truly stop global warming to the extent we can, everyone--especially those in industrialized countries--must endure radical transformations to their way of life. Most people, even those concerned with global warming, just aren't willing to endure such transformations--or at least aren't able or willing to inflict those transformations on everyone else.

I wonder, then, if the secret wish behind this little exercise is really for Grace--a Climate Christ who, in an act of triumph or atonement (depending on your theology of crucifixion), eradicates the sin, the guilt, and the punishment altogether.

More tomorrow,

JF