Catastrophe Without a Cut
On climate, accumulation, and the question the technocrats are paid not to ask
Stand on the seafront at Espinho in February, when the Atlantic comes in over the engineered defences and the spray reaches the first row of buildings, and you understand at once what the disaster film has stolen from us. The cinema of catastrophe trained us to expect a wave and a cut: the spectacle, the rupture, the clean edit that delivers us into the aftermath. But the storm at Espinho does not cut. It is a long take. It has the duration of Béla Tarr's rain, that unbearable continuousness in which nothing is resolved and everything is decided, and what is decided in it is not the fate of the esplanade but the question of who is permitted to act while the water rises. That is the form of the climate crisis. Not the event. The duration. And the scandal of our moment is that we have surrendered the long take to those whose entire interest lies in its prolongation.
So begin where the official discourse refuses to begin: not with the measure but with the agent. Ask by whom before what, because the two cannot be separated, and the separation is itself the first ideological operation to be undone.
It is not a market failure.
The dominant framing offers us climate change as an externality — a cost that escaped the price, a malfunction in an otherwise rational mechanism, to be corrected by the gentle re-pricing of carbon and the patient accumulation of green subsidy. This is a lie of the most respectable kind, the kind delivered in committee. The biosphere was not accidentally omitted from the ledger. It was converted into the ledger. The compulsion to accumulate, to transform living systems into surplus and surplus into more accumulation, is not a bug in the system that produced this crisis; it is the system's principle of motion. To call this a failure of the market is to mistake the market's most characteristic success for an aberration. The European Emissions Trading System is feared, on the Left, precisely because it works — it is the device by which decarbonisation is rendered compatible with capital, slow by design, regressive in its incidence, careful above all never to touch the question of ownership. A carbon price asks the system to discipline itself. It will not.
The sky has a class composition.
We are instructed to picture humanity as a single emitting subject, a species that has collectively overspent its account, and to accept therefore a symmetrical penance. But the carbon is not distributed as the guilt is distributed. The yacht and the bus do not share a sky in the same proportions. When the top tenth of the income distribution accounts for a share of emissions that dwarfs its numbers, and the private jet burns in an hour what a worker's whole year cannot approach, the language of universal sacrifice becomes an instrument of class peace — an invitation to the pensioner in Aveiro to atone for the appetites of a class she will never join. The Left's mitigation programme begins here, in the refusal of the false universal: progressive carbon levies, the suppression of luxury emissions, the grounding of short-haul flights where the rail already runs, the planned contraction not of life but of waste — the advertising, the planned obsolescence, the arms industry, the manufactured churn that exists only to keep the wheel turning. Sufficiency, not merely efficiency. And underneath it all, the decommodification of energy itself: the grid and the generation taken into public and municipal hands, because a private utility that owns a coal asset will burn it, and only a public power can choose to leave it in the ground.
Adaptation is the privatisation of survival — unless we seize it.
Here is the front on which the coming decades will be lost or held, and it is the front the market is already quietly winning. Left to capital, adaptation becomes a sorting mechanism: the private insurance premium, the climate-proofed enclave, the inland retreat of those who can pay and the abandonment of those who cannot. The sea wall at Espinho is, in this light, a small monument to another logic — the commons defending itself, collectively, in public, on behalf of everyone the wall stands in front of. That logic must be generalised and defended against the disaster capitalists who see in every flood a contract and in every reconstruction an enclosure. Adaptation as public good: flood and heat infrastructure, water systems, the retrofit of the housing stock that is at once mitigation, adaptation and the abolition of fuel poverty, the public health system braced for the heat, and — the demand the unions of the south now raise over their dead — the enforceable right of the warehouse worker and the bricklayer to stop work when the temperature would kill them. Survival is not a service. It is a right, or it is nothing.
There is no green transition built on a sacrifice zone.
And the transition must not become the next round of dispossession dressed in the colours of virtue. This is not abstract from where I write. The lithium beneath Barroso is the perfect figure of green colonialism turned inward: the electric vehicle of the metropolitan consumer purchased with the gutting of an interior periphery, the sacrifice zone relocated from the Congo to Trás-os-Montes, the same extractive relation under a cleaner flag. A Left climate politics that does not refuse this refuses nothing. It means, at the European scale, treating climate finance for the global South not as charity but as the partial repayment of a debt the imperial core has owed since the first coal was burned in its name — reparation, technology transfer, the waiving of green patents, the cancellation of the sovereign debts that force the periphery into the very extractivism we then condemn. Europe was metabolised from a carbon budget it stole. It does not get to balance the account by stealing more.
The agent does not yet exist. It must be built.
Which returns us, as it must, to by whom. Not the unaided market, which produced this. Not the neoliberal regulatory state, which administers it. The answer is a state transformed into an instrument of democratic planning — and at the European level this forces a confrontation the Left has been too timid to name: whether the Treaties themselves, with their competition law and their fiscal discipline, structurally forbid the intervention the moment demands, so that the choice is between rewriting the Union and breaking with it. Beneath the state, the new municipalism: the remunicipalised water and power, the city as the laboratory where the future is rehearsed before it is permitted nationally. And beneath that, the only motor that has ever actually moved history — the organised many, from below.
The decisive lesson is written in the wreckage of the gilets jaunes, and the Left forgets it at its peril. A carbon tax laid upon the worker while the oligarch flies free does not produce a transition; it produces a revolt, and the revolt is correct. You cannot ask those who fear the end of the month to mobilise for the end of the world unless you make the two demands one. Fin du mois, fin du monde — the social question and the ecological question are not rivals competing for the same scarce concern. They are the same question, and the work of a serious Left is to make them speak with one voice.
The water is rising in real time, in a take that will not cut. The only thing still undecided is whose hand will be on the lever while it does. Everything follows from that. Nothing precedes it.