The Value of Climate Despair

Abstract

Given the current and future suffering associated with human-made climate change and the lack of political action in response to it, it seems only natural to feel despair. However, despair has a bad reputation among climate ethicists and in the wider public. In this paper, we will push back against this view and argue that there is considerable value in climate despair. More specifically, we shall maintain that climate despair can be valuable in two respects. First, it is epistemically valuable because it constitutes a particularly apt way of recognizing the severity of what has already happened and is likely to happen because of human-made climate change, and because it can provide a “reflective break” that allows us to rearrange our values and find new strategies to tackle climate change. Second, climate despair can have various valuable expressive and signaling functions. Most importantly, perhaps, it can send the message that the despairing person cares about important moral values and norms, and remind us all of how big a moral problem climate change, in fact, is.