Interregnums, Morbid Symptoms, and Climate Denial

By Don Wright

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci

What will future historians – say in 2150 – call this historical moment? The 100-Year Terror, perhaps, a century marked by wars, migrations, and civil breakdowns, each worse than the last. Or the Great Derangement, when we knew that the climate was changing and we let it change anyway.

And will those same historians describe this moment as an interregnum? Possibly. But what if history isn’t unfolding from one regnum, or reign, to another? What if we are in a permanent and inescapable state of morbid symptoms, to use Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, or monsters according to a creative translation of fenomeni morbosi?

After all, the climate crisis is at once irreversible and getting worse, and yet when we should be talking about it and nothing else, we’ve largely stopped talking about it. There’s even a term for it: “climate hushing.” Fearing a backlash from an anxious and restless electorate, politicians have focused on other priorities. In his Davos speech, for example, Mark Carney didn’t mention climate change, not even in passing, and he’s someone who gets climate change and who understands that it’s a threat multiplier. 

For my money, the most morbid symptom, or the worst monster, depending on which translation you prefer, is climate denial, which has its own history.

In 1979, the G7 committed to expanding “alternative sources of energy, especially those which will help to prevent further pollution, particularly increases of carbon dioxide and sulphur oxides in the atmosphere.” Although tentative, it was a clear recognition of CO₂ as a pollutant and an early step in the direction of global climate governance.

In 1980, the American Petroleum Institute (API) – an oil and gas industry association and lobby group – published Two Energy Futures: A National Choice for the 80s which employed for the first time what became a recurring strategy of denial: the science is uncertain and scientists themselves are divided. On the one hand, the API clearly called CO₂ a “pollutant” and acknowledged that some scientists believe CO₂ emissions could cause “climatic changes.” On the other hand, it proceeded to cast doubt on those scientists when it asserted that “[o]ther scientists are more sanguine about the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

To be clear, the G7’s 1979 communiqué didn’t precipitate the API’s 1980 policy paper. But read together, the two documents point to the start of a clear pattern: as scientists studied the link between fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, and climate change, and as politicians responded, however tentatively, the coal, oil, and gas sector launched a campaign of denial to protect its business model and bottom line.

In part funded by fossil fuel interests, the denial machine – a loose network of conservative-libertarian-free market think tanks, lobby groups, blogs, and contrarian scientists that manufacture and disseminate climate disinformation and misinformation – deliberately and successfully threw sand in the gears of climate action. It even captured the Republican Party, at least at the national level. Indeed, the 2024 Republican platform didn’t contain a single reference to climate change, but it did promise, in all caps, to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”

Calling climate change a “hoax” and a “con job,” Donald Trump has moved quickly, withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is also seeking to eliminate once and for all the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 decision that allows the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gasses. To climate deniers, its elimination has been the holy grail: get rid of it, and you get rid of the EPA’s ability to design and enforce regulations to reduce emissions, which, according to a well-placed denier in Trump’s orbit, are little more than “Leninistic” plots to restrict liberty and exert control.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service has removed climate-related signage at, according to one count, four national sites. At Muir Wood National Monument in California, it took down a sign that talked about fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, and the role forests play in storing carbon. At Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park in South Carolina, it removed a sign that referenced climate change, sea level rise, and the site’s vulnerability. At Glacier National Park in Montanna, it removed a sign on climate change and glacial melt. And at Acadia National Park, in Maine, it took down a sign that connected climate change, extreme weather, storm surges, and damage to the park’s different ecosystems. It even removed a sign that encouraged visitors to take the shuttle bus to reduce their carbon footprint.

In effect, climate change has become a front in America’s larger culture war.

But we shouldn’t be too smug, because there’s another form of denial that is different from typical climate denial.

It’s called implications denial. The facts themselves are not denied – if anything, they are accepted – but the implications of those facts are either minimized or ignored, or in a word, denied.

If we understand the fundamental facts of climate change – that it’s real, anthropogenic, and very serious – we don’t incorporate that understanding into our daily lives because not doing so allows us to travel, consume, and eat in the ways that we have come to enjoy, and even expect. It allows us to visit friends in Madrid, or plan a bucket-list trip to Western Australia, or buy a new outfit for our sister’s destination wedding that we know we’ll never wear again, or eat beef because it’s a quick source of protein, and besides, we like it.

“Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance,” Naomi Klein writes, “is simply a part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been ignoring is hitting us in the face – and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.”

And so, we tell ourselves a series of lies about climate change. It’s not that serious. We’ve got time. Technology will save us from the worst impacts.

These lies are clearly a psychological defence mechanism. Without them, we couldn’t do what we do every day, which is to shop online, scout cheap airline tickets, or order a Double Bacon Quarter Pounder through some app.

In this sense, we are all in denial, when to be in denial is to be in a state of deliberate not knowing. And this is a far harder form of denial to combat because no one wants to sacrifice a lifestyle premised on consumption and immediate gratification. It’s part of what makes climate change a super wicked problem: wicked problems require systemic change, to be sure, but they also require behavioural change, and that’s not easy. In fact, it’s bloody hard.

Again, I’m not convinced that we are in an interregnum, but I hope I’m wrong, and I hope that we can slay the monster that is climate denial, and build a new regnum premised on solidarity and a fundamentally different and less hierarchical relationship with our common home.

Don Wright is a historian in the Political Science program at the University of New Brunswick and past-President of the Canadian Historical Association.

This post is part of an activehistory.ca series “The Time of Monsters.” It looks at the challenges contemporary times pose to history and how historians can and have responded to it. Our aim is to highlight how history and historians can address matters such as denialism, the manipulation of public history, the appeal of authoritarianism and a host of other topics. The editors encourage submissions or personal reflections. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Roberta Lexier at rlexier@mtroyal.ca. 

You can find the first post in the series here.