Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change

by Tad DeLay

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth's paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left?

The symptoms suggest society's inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War.

Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Environment, Climate Change, Philosophy, Ecology, Economics

403 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 9, 2024

About the author

Tad DeLay, PhD is a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary critical theorist. His books include Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (2024), Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? (2019), The Cynic & the Fool (2017), and God Is Unconscious (2015). He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in Baltimore.

Reviews

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could have rated this better because DeLay’s message needs to be heard. However, his well-meaning but meandering work doesn’t arrive at what he really wants to discuss until the final two chapters …

We must arrange all our thoughts and actions so as to prevent another relapse into barbarism. In that spirit, I tell every student we study the humanities because we live at the start of the greatest migration there ever has been or ever will be. It’s the real reason for this book [my emphasis]. The responsibility to understand difference and learn from the failures of those who went before us is a heavy burden.

… but he is likely to have lost many of his readers before that point. The “denial” DeLay is talking about is not just the simple climate denialism of reactionaries on the right, but the fact that everyone else is in denial about how the consequences of global warming are going to affect us, no matter how few degrees of warming there ultimately are, and certainly no matter what we do individually.

To get there, however, you have to wade through multiple chapters on: examples of older crises (eg, the Black Plague), the variation of temperature, CO2 and sea levels over geolologic time-scales (as if that were still an issue!), carbon-offset delusions, various carbon-mitigation scenarios from the UN IPCC conferences, the oil industry’s hiding for years of the real effects of CO2 emission, the failure of markets to limit CO2 emissions, etc, etc, etc …

It’s not wrong and it’s actually very perceptive, but DeLay is a philosopher not a scientist, so his explanations can be tortuous (is “kilowatt-hour” really such an esoteric unit?) and his writing is too often abstract and impenetrable, much of that stemming from his theories of denial which are grounded in Freudian psychology:

Human experience is overdetermined or layered with too many desires, incentives, confusions, and goals, and we need methods for defamiliarizing problems too casually ascribed to legible logics, sciences, or market incentives.

DeLay’s economics likewise tend to the Marxist, so there is a lot of dispiriting language that sounds awfully like old communist “Capitalist Roader” rhetoric:

… the bourgeois capitalist denialist ISA [Ideological State Apparatus] and the proletarian reactionaries ally on the right.

All in all, I found this framework quite off-putting even though what DeLay had to say made sense. (But seeing as he did lean on Marxist analysis so heavily, I thought it was a pity he didn’t give more prominence to the grotesquely outsized carbon emissions of the top 0.1% compared to the rest of the USA, never mind to the rest of the world. Oh well)

So, to those last chapters. His writings about the coming “greatest migration” as a response to catastrophic climate change, and the likely fascist and nationalistic responses in the more fortunate regions of the world ring absolutely true; this is his strength and I wish he had spent more space and time developing it.
And his final paragraph is worth quoting too for its eloquence:

Can we alter course in a storm called progress? Let us reckon with our denial.
Socialism or barbarism? The Great War took the latter option. Then an armistice held for a few years until blood spilled again. After the Second World War’s battlefields and genocide, major powers quieted down to proxy fights. The developing world suffered most. For decades, nuclear weapons nearly snuffed out humankind on multiple occasions. Life went on mostly oblivious. But in the midst of that nuclear danger, another was detected. President Johnson learned of it in a dull 1965 report. Exxon knew by the late seventies. The Charney Report in 1979. Hansen’s Congressional testimony in 1988, same year as the IPCC formed. Report after report after report. Kyoto in ’97, Copenhagen in ’09, and Paris in ’15. The public awakened but found few levers of power. Mass protests swelled and went ignored. Militaries armed themselves. Refugees were displaced. “You’re not from around here, are you?” A possible Green New Deal, a decarbonization plan, net-zero commitments, fossil emissions still rise, grifts, and hopes, and barbarism. Hints of an energy transition. Barely a hope of socialism. What next? What next?

[Josiah Solis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We approach climate change like Protestants, as if salvation depends primarily on whether an individual has the correct beliefs.”

Sigmund Freud might have called psychoanalysis a plague, but Tad Delay prehaps best understands it as a two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow; a tool to expose our innermost thoughts and desires, but ultimately our denials. "Future of Denial" provides both a crash course on climate science (spoiler alert: things are bad) and psychoanalytic diagnosis of why we are all in denial (spoiler alert: yes, you too are are in denial). 

A critical book for a world that is quickly running out of time. "This isn't a game. Don't you see what's on the horizon?"

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

really like DeLay as a thinker. I was expecting more psychoanalysis than the this--just the 2nd chapter is substantial, that's the one i assigned to my students (we'll see how they fare). i super sped read the rest of it once i realized that it was not really the theory book i hoped/need. that said, it's a really comprehensive and up-to-date description of the terrain of climate change from models to politics, predictions, economics, technologies and the like. there's also some interesting formal experimentation in the deep history chapter about earth's extinctions. so, the book is probably appropriate for a wider audience than it otherwise would be, i just need to find that comprehensive psychoanalytic take on denial/disavowal still.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

For an author who, in the introduction, said "I mostly ignore 'doomers,' those who overhype the dangers, and my close adherence to mainstream climate science should be read as a corrective to pessimistic impulses sometimes found on the left" ... he doesn't make much of a case against 'doom.'

Tad DeLay follows the science, and makes the connections between aspects of our collective denial suggesting that we will burn through accessible fossil fuels to maintain our 'entitlements.'

"Stories and case studies in this book are conversions of denial—that is, behaviors consistent with what we might expect when people who don’t believe in or care about climate change are suddenly confronted with its effects. How do imaginary antifa arsonists become a more intuitive explanatory heuristic than warmer conditions in the Pacific Northwest? Denial is best theorized as a tendency to negate threats in accord with material relations, generating symptomatic activity in order to justify, curate, and maintain regimes of power and material relations. I’m interpreting denial as would a psychoanalyst, where blockages, delay tactics, acting out, and even budgetary concerns are read as resistance."

“In its relation to desire, reality appears only as marginal.” [Lacan]

The Future of Denial offers a well-presented case in the spirit of Kyo's (2012) Already Extinct and Malm's (2021) How to Blow up a Pipeline, among others.

[Sam Orndorff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delay provides a good overview of dual forms of climate denial. The first, which he mostly critiques using basic Earth/physical science, is liberal green capitalism. The second is a reactionary pro fossil fuel system of right wing capitalist extraction and neocolonialism. You can see how these sides compete and play out in many countries, so I find the overall argument compelling.

That said, there is not much depth if you want to learn how terrestrial ecosystems are shaped by humans. Not much depth about the minerals “needed” for a transition to batteries. I don’t think the author conveys the scale of industrial activity taking place on land based resources to feed energy and mobility systems - whether fed by green renewables or fossil fuel combustion. A significant amount of ecosystems will be destroyed to make EVs and solar panels possible. Whose mobility and electricity is being supplied?

Instead he focuses on the atmosphere and shows the depressing extent to which temperatures will rise (not much about the ocean or hydrological cycle, again, the text focuses in the atmosphere). Much of the argument builds on Wainwright & Mann’s ‘Climate Leviathan’. Good easy read for understanding climate politics from eco-socialist lens.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

tone problem endemic to the topic that I feel okay about wanting to police because obviously, I agree. offers some factoids i hadn't been exposed to before that are worth looking into more, like the 'first' carbon credit project in Guatemala and the 'first' person to link CO2 and warming being a Seneca Falls suffragette.

borrows a lot of argumentation and examples from its more rigorous contemporaries (naomi klein, aronoff, malm) and also some other random tertiary sources that don't always pan out in the citations (I know the dangers of this as a desk researcher often asked to punch above my weight in terms of expertise). the most specious of the latter was a twice repeated comment about US and UK biofuel production exacerbating food prices during the Syrian civil war. citation had a dead underlying report from the linked blog post and blog source wasn't augmented with discussion of the most obvious other obstacles to increasing Western food aid / imports in a MENA country at war in the 2010s. not to mention if those acres weren't going to biofuel feedstock, they'd be devoted to animal feed crops instead - or maybe wouldn't even be in cultivation at all. US agricultural exports have various knock-on effects in the world agricultural market, which are modeled obsessively, but the source doesn't reference modeling, its point is a back of the envelope caloric estimation. It's a strange argument to repeat given its cursoriness.

the novelty in this book is the gloomy rearticulation of facts or interpretations it chooses, its un-qualified leftism, and the psychoanalytic asides. it spares no bit of climate science or decarbonization jargon and while i believe DeLay has at least basic understanding of all these topics, he's far from offering the insight of a disciplinary professional (the part where he specifically mentions IAMs using neoclassical 'Cobb-Douglas' functions instead of Marxian "and even Keynesian" economic equations in them made me LAUGH; weirdly he's kind of positive about BECCS?). occasionally there are invocations of freud or lacan, fanon and melanie klein i believe each once, to explain climate denial or reactionary behavior but the real estate dedicated to them is sparse and fails to represent a comprehensive theory. it could have set itself apart from its cohort if it relied on these thinkers more.

i sound very negative. my criticisms are informed by getting paid to understand similar issues and entertain the devil's advocacy about them. while i used to love an overly stylized fact, the burden of substantiation i've been saddled with has decreased my tolerance for them. that is to say my personal reflections on similar topics coalesce in a congruently pessimistic, guilt-riddenness, so there may be a narcissism of small differences at play. my one glib statement is Western 2020s climate contextualizers have an overreliance on certain incidents of scene setting, i'm personally renouncing the 2018 Camp Fire. made me appreciate the humanity and stronger historiography of amitav ghosh's climate non-fiction.

[Florence Ouellet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because it promised to answer the questions at the root of the quiet panic I feel when I think too long about climate change: for years, we have had all the information and resources at our disposal to avoid the worst—so why is nothing happening? We talk about the climate crisis and its tentacles reaching into every aspect of the world as we have known it for years. We've managed to create more new flavours of anxiety than real solutions. How is that possible?

In my opinion, this book provides a thorough look at several key points that can help start a reflection on these issues, although it doesn't fully achieve its stated goal of answering them.
First, the strengths:
- Delay goes into great detail about the flaws in the instruments, mechanisms, agreements, and regulations that are supposed to guide the fight against climate change. This, in my view, is the book's main strength. The author effectively shows the cause-and-effect relationship between our political and economic choices, rising average temperatures, and their impact on populations. This section of the book is particularly enlightening and highly relevant, written in a style that appeals to the reader’s intelligence rather than inducing fear or guilt. The information is, of course, not encouraging, but it ends up being soothing in the sense that it reduces the uncertainty surrounding life in a climate crisis in the short and medium term.
- The author makes insightful causal links between current economic forces, the climate crisis, and migration issues. I think it’s essential to understand these dynamics in order to face the coming years.

The weaknesses:
- Especially at the beginning of the book, the author places a lot of emphasis on the collective psychological phenomena involved in the poor management of the climate crisis (particularly denial, as mentioned in the title). This was what interested me the most about reading this book, and it’s what disappointed me the most. The explanations seem convoluted and don’t clearly relate to any defined thesis. Moreover, the author frequently cites Freud, even though there is much more recent and credible literature in behavioral sciences that could better explain the phenomena described. It’s even more ironic since the author criticizes the use of certain pseudosciences to maintain a sense of comfort in our collective denial of the climate crisis. Delay has a doctorate in philosophy. I find it hard to believe that he is unaware of Karl Popper's contributions to defining pseudoscience and how it applies to Freud and psychoanalysis in general.
- For a book that denounces the lack of effective action on the climate crisis and the humanitarian crises that stem from it, it offers remarkably few possible action points. It seems to care little about provoking the same paralysis in the reader that it identifies as the cause of our troubling situation.

[Bill T. · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a frustrating read (OK, skim—I didn't have the patience to really read it). Tad's writing comes across as a that of a leftist professor the right loves to condemn. He does spend a great deal of timing going over the evidence of how we're burning the planet (the choir is not impressed). He also makes several references to Freud, because denial, I guess, which isn't too outlandish, but he spends an awful lot of words on his favorite hobby horses:

1. He makes an astonishing number of references to Karl Marx, of all people, and seems to think everything will be solved if we all got the socialism we are apparently pining for. (Please note: Socialism is another flavor of industrialism and will requires energy inputs as well).

2. Furthermore, he seems to enjoy calling out the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as criminal. Sure, I can see that one could argue that's the case, but...what was the title, again?

3. And then he veers off into conspiracy-theory land, whining about how little coverage the media gave Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries. Again, what's the title of the book?

I do give Tad credit for recognizing that shutting off natural gas will cause billions to starve (natural gas is the primary feedstock for producing nitrogen fertilizer). What I don't think he realizes is that shutting off the capital spigot will also cause billions to starve, as many farmers are dependent on loans in order to pay for the seeds, fuel, pesticides, and, yes, fertilizers required to produce the volumes of food the world requires.

Anyhow, I was tempted to go down to one star, but the book got enough of a reaction out of me that it deserves another star just for that.

[Adrian Fanaca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about how to deny a catastrophe, carbon footprints, extinctions, carbon dioxide, what they knew and when they knew it, fossil capital, energy trajectories, decoupling and the limits of growth, what does the liberal want, adaptation and mitigation, the greatest migration and about that the north will not escape this storm. I give it a 4 stars because I remember a few things after readings it, for example the fact that if a plane would have its fuel tank replaced with an equal weight battery, the range will be around 200km, or that over 80% of climate scientists do not believe we will be able to stay under 1.5C by 2050, or what is decoupling. I cannot give it a 5 stars because it did not change my life directly in any way.

[Lonnie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched introduction to current understandings on climate science, and (mostly American) politics surrounding the same.

The strength of this volume lies with its psychoanalytical approach specifically regarding two major forms of denial: denial of reality and denial of responsibility. DeLay excels here. The chapter on adaption and mitigation and their interplay with denial was probably the most powerful for me.

I left the book wanting more of the psychoanalytic aspects. I personally would have preferred the bulk of the science and math of first 3rd of the book be pushed to footnotes or an appendix and those pages filled with an even deeper dive into psychology.

[Simon B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This covered a lot of ground and drew on a lot of research about climate science, climate denial and climate politics. Its analysis is convincing overall, radical without posturing, thorough but not full of jargon. Sometimes it felt a bit eclectic, jumping from topic to topic without having the space to delve deeply into any particular aspect of climate politics. But it provides a good summary of what's at stake and the inventive ways the reality is repressed and fantasised. Probably unfairly, I hoped for a bit more emphasis on or elaboration about the mass psychology of climate denial. It's there, but I kind of expected more of it in a book like this.

[Philemon - · Rating 5 out of 5]

Denial, Tad DeLay argues, is not a tactical screen under which our true self hides trembling. It's much more basic than that. It's what and who we are. Let that sink in.

DeLay appears to have rock-solid knowledge of climate science and history. He repeats some of what climate mavens have already read, but adds much, much more to it. He's thought deeply about the political side of climate change and knows all about the history of negotiations, cap and trade, and all the rest. But beyond that he offers a rich background in philosophy, psychology, even theology (though that's not a main angle). He has a lot of well thought out things to say, with passion and intelligence. He imagines the future and studied the future, from carbon capture to geoengineering. I expect to go back for more; a single reading scarcely exhausts it.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

A lovely reminder that we'll all doomed, it's the global norths fault and hope is futile xoxo

[Anthony S · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect follow up to Klein's This Changes Everything, DeLay expertly explores the climate crisis and the hellish path our society seems hellbent on pursuing.