"If Despair Is The Most Unforgiveable Sin, Then Hope Is Surely The Most Abused Virtue"

If despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the COP season, that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary. Climate instability and nature extinction are making the Earth an uglier, riskier and more uncertain place, desiccating water supplies, driving up the price of food, displacing humans and non-humans, battering cities and ecosystems with ever fiercer storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts and forest fires. Still worse could be in store as we approach or pass a series of dangerous tipping points for Amazon rainforest dieback, ocean circulation breakdown, ice-cap collapse and other unimaginably horrible, but ever more possible, catastrophes.

Yet, apparently we must still have hope. It is mandatory. Change is impossible, we are told, without positive thinking and a belief in a better future. That is the message of just about every politician and business leader I have interviewed in close to two decades on the environment beat. And we will hear it again, at the UN biodiversity COP 16 in Cali, Colombia, which kicked off this week, then at the climate COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in a few weeks’ time. If past international confabs are any guide, there is little prospect of concrete action in the here and now, but there will be ever-more ambitious plans for the distant future: roadmaps, commitments, targets, reasons to hope. And, of course, we will hear it most loudly in the US presidential election, which is always about which candidate is most faithful to the American dream of endless expansion.

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At the Guardian, we try to present solutions as well as problems. But there needs to be a balance that reflects reality. After the recent New York Climate Week, the journalist Amy Westervelt wrote of the zombie-like repetition of “We have to stay positive!”, “Tell the positive stories!” and “Give people hope!”, even as the reality of the moment was the devastation of Hurricane Helene, deadly landslides in Nepal, the sentencing of a UK climate activist to two years in prison and news that fossil fuel companies are expanding production. As she put it: “Don’t get me wrong, there are good news stories and I know how important it is to share and savour them, but the focus on positivity to the exclusion of anything else felt completely surreal and, if I’m being honest, a little scary.”

Hope is at best a motivating belief, a tool, a commodity. It should never be rammed down other people’s throats, especially those who are suffering the consequences of the wish fulfilment of wealthier, faraway consumers. In the Amazon rainforest right now, the political mood music and government policies are much better under President Lula than they were under President Bolsonaro, yet the situation on the ground is becoming worse. Ever longer dry seasons have left some of the world’s biggest rivers at horrendously low levels and there have been more fires this year than at any time in two decades. It is sadly not enough for this government to be better than the last. It needs help from the rest of the world. That is clear from the big trends: South America is becoming hotter, drier and more flammable. Fires are turning forests into carbon emitters rather than carbon sinks. Up to half of the Amazon could hit a tipping point by 2050 as a result of water stress, land clearance and climate disruption. But what if it is hope that is the problem? What if hope is the antidepressant that has been keeping us all comfortably numb when we have every right to be sad, worried, stirred to action or just plain angry?

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/24/we-need-a-dash-of-hope-but-is-too-much-diverting-our-gaze-from-the-perils-of-the-climate-crisis