Either way, you’re entitled to your feelings. We all feel doomy or optimistic depending on the day, sometimes for rational reasons. But our narratives should be true and responsible—which means neither the totally positive nor totally negative affect is quite right.
Charlie Heller, who’s part of a group of ecosocialists in the Democratic Socialists of America that helped to pass New York’s renewable energy bill, agrees. “Doomism is the worst,” he told me, “but we also don’t want people to feel blindly hopeful.” Instead, he said, we want people to understand that the climate crisis is serious but that with serious and committed political action we can mitigate the problem. We can’t stop it, but we can save many human lives, great civilizations, beloved species, and vital ecosystems. Call it a tempered pessimism or a cautious optimism, but it’s the only defensible approach to climate change. The crisis is serious, but everything we do right now matters, and is saving lives.
All the most serious climate policy—whether it’s policy in Washington or at the city and state level—comes out of the recognition that as a species, we are staring extinction in the face. But such progress also wouldn’t be happening without large numbers of people taking a leap of faith that humans can address this problem and bothering to do all the nitty-gritty, ultimately optimistic work of pressuring politicians and standing up to the fossil fuel industry. Whatever our feelings might be, political victories like these are all that matter, not only for the carbon they remove from the earth but because they undermine the dangerous narratives that nothing can be done—and the complacent hope that someone else is already doing it.