From this historical standpoint, climate change is not so much a surprising reversal of fortunes as a lifting of the veil on two centuries of fossil capital – which is, of course, the literal meaning of the Greek word apokalyptein. The truth has been hidden from view; the present moment reveals the meaning of what has been going on for a long time. Benjamin’s angel of history ‘sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at its feet’; Theodor Adorno concurs – ‘normality is death’ – but emphasises that the eternity of horror ‘manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms.’ From the very start, at the very smallest scale – in the hot factory, the smoky street, the mine laden with explosives – there emerged a pattern – some swept away by the storm we call progress, others sailing to their fortunes – subsequently magnified and iterated on progressively larger scales, until climate scientists discovered it in the biosphere as a whole, where the self-similar storm now spirals on. Every impact of climate change unfolds a fraction of that hitherto folded past.
