Josh Cohen, 'The Climate Crisis: Why Aren't We Angrier?'

Few writers in recent years have raised the question I pose in my title with more urgency and force than Andreas Malm in his 2021 book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Indeed, he pushes the question further, asking why it is that the climate justice movement remains so determinedly pacific in the face of ecological collapse. Confronted by the brazen daily violence of fossil capital, why are we so squeamish of anything even resembling a commensurate response, like the various acts of ecotage he enjoins against SUVs, pipelines or any of the property and infrastructure accelerating planetary breakdown?

I want to avoid getting caught up in the ethical and strategic knots of violent against non-violent protest. I am interested here more in the ways climate action, and indeed inaction, is tacitly underwritten by our feelings. It might be that my question, 'why aren't we angrier?', is unhelpfully inexact, not to say presumptuous, as though I could possibly know how angry any of us is. It would be more accurate, if more unwieldy, to ask what, for so many of us and certainly for me, obstructs or obscures the passage from anger to effective action. Why do so many of us experience an anger that is impotent or melancholic in the face of the climate emergency?