THE recent Netflix film Don’t Look Up has divided critics and audiences.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it is, as of writing, rated rotten with a 56% rating. Yet even as film critics were not impressed by its delivery, scientists have been singing its praises.

One calls it “the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown” as it captured their experience of marginalisation and ridicule when they had to compete with pop culture and electoral cycles to get their warning across about the climate crisis.

Speaking as someone who believes that the climate crisis is unequivocally the existential threat to human civilisation and that no form of conscientious individual action can substitute for radical systemic change, I still think it is vital to parse the film’s criticism.

More so if we were to take its political message seriously: that the climate crisis is indeed a one that we can’t look away from.

Of all the criticisms, I found this one in The Guardian to be quite useful. The reviewer claims that the main weakness of the film is that “the script states the obvious as if everyone else is too stupid to realise it and does so from a position of lofty superiority that would drive away any partisans who still need to be won over”.

A meteor strike is unlike climate change

To summarise the plot, the film uses a fictional case of an impending meteor strike as an allegory to climate change.

Its metaphor for those “for” and “against” climate action is depicted as between those “looking up” (those realising the danger of a planet-ending meteor) and those who don’t (people who deny the science for reasons of politics, ignorance, and corporate profits).

However, the dangers of a meteor strike are decidedly unlike global warming. The former is imminent (in the film, the impact is only months away from the meteor’s discovery), and its consequence is clear: an extinction-level event.

In such a case, you may argue that to deny action over the meteor is tantamount to denying the science.

However, global warming, despite warnings from scientists that its effect has appeared earlier and is worse than expected, we still have decades before we can account for how it has altered the Earth’s ecology and human civilisation to an irreversible, devastating point.

It is not entirely certain if we are facing an extinction-level event yet.

Even if the level of human suffering would be grotesque, unlike how the Anthropocene itself was an extinction-level event for most wildlife, the verdict’s still out there as to whether climate change can usher in human extinction.

The fact that climate projections were often made until 2100 meant that we humans don’t think we are slated for extinction yet.

The fact is that despite having a sizeable number of climate change deniers at the fringe, the major hurdle towards more decisive climate action is not that we are split between climate science believers and deniers.

Rather, we are divided between different hierarchies of priorities whereby addressing climate change is seen as more or less important to various issues (some justifiable, such as poverty reduction, others not).

Such hierarchies of priorities also determine whether climate change is serious enough to consider radical action, such as through policies of degrowth, trillions of investments in clean energy, climate-proof infrastructure, and carbon capture technology, and punitive carbon taxing.

The idea propagated by the film that we are too saturated and left too complacent by a narcissistic and entertainment-focused media to the extent that we ignore all existential threats is debatable.

For example, after the September 11 attacks, terrorism was recognised across the aisle (and globally) very much as an existential threat (although one may very well disagree with the assessment). Drastic as well as disastrous action was taken.

Regardless of what we may think of the enterprise now, on and after that fateful Tuesday in 2001, many people did look up.

The problem is not that people are denying science

Also, picturing the case as either affirming or denying science is problematic because the people who aren’t treating climate change as much a priority as we would like them to are not naturally climate science deniers. This characterisation that normal people are consciously not “looking up” to science misses the point.

By contrast, our public sphere is awash with climate rhetoric, from the sustainability agenda attaching itself onto policy and corporate discourse and to events like the recently concluded COP26 – as disappointing as it may be – being recognised as top-tiered global summits.

Insisting that those who disagree with us on climate action are “denying the science” makes it as if we are facing the stupid (and many of these folks are caricatured in the film as sheer idiots). That’s a reductive, if not condescending, take on a complicated issue.

Science is not being denied, action is. The obstacle is not ignorance but interest: corporate interests, political interests, ideological interests.

Furthermore, to stress that we must govern according to science is faulty if we don’t follow the argument to its logical end: that we let scientists govern.

Yet, science is about discovering the laws of nature and not making laws, which is the realm of politics.

Unlike in the case of dealing with a meteor strike in the film, where science is indispensable to a one-off solution (destroying/fragmenting the meteor), addressing climate change is a decades-long battle that will be split into thousands and thousands of initiatives, investments, and institutional action.

Climate action will need scientific guidance, but science alone can’t tell us what action to take and what are the trade-offs and sacrifices worth making.

For example, science can tell us that current cement-making processes are high in CO2 emissions. It may even help us discover green(er) cement-making methods.

However, science can’t tell us if we should stop producing cement altogether (and when?), or which construction project to stop, and what are the reasonable socioeconomic costs to bear in thinking through these options.

Science can’t adjudicate questions of sacrifice and trade-offs because science can’t adjudicate over questions of kindness and cruelty, which is also why scientists aren’t historically the paragons of humanity.

Hitler has his share of committed scientists, and scholars have found engineers over-represented in violent extremist movements.

It’s not entirely clear if we can cleanly separate science from ideology when science is used to anchor political action. A crude example can be seen in Malaysia’s medicalisation of the LGBT issue.

With scientific knowledge, cruel people are effective. Without science, cruel people are stupid. I honestly can’t say which is worse.

It is that we are denying accountability

I believe the real divide that straddles climate politics is between those who look up all the time (which is also supported by factors of age, class, and geographical location) and those who decide to look away for all kinds of reasons.

Those who looked up may be the same who looked away too. You see that in Malaysia, where the same people who talked about the need to take strong action against deforestation during periods of flood can be the same ones who accuse environment activists as “socialists” or “Western agents” on non-rainy days.

This also means that if we want to ensure that the climate crisis remains at the centre of political and policy discourses, we have to deal with issues and characters that have, and will side-track the agenda.

Let me use a concrete example here. I won’t name names, but recently a Pakatan Harapan politician shared a post from a right-wing populist figure who wrote a grievous post condemning the timber tsunami in Bentong, Pahang.

The share was later retracted, but such platforming of an ethnoreligious supremacist, even if it’s meant to increase environmental awareness, will not be helpful for the agenda.

While not immune to appropriating the environmental discourse to capitalise on public anger, these populist actors have and will continue to ally with the politico-economic establishment that has benefitted from an exploitative, carbon-intensive economy in the name of stopping minorities and “liberals” from gaining power (also see the case of “green-cloaked nativism” here).

For all their talk about being anti-corruption, such promises will be in vain because the identity barriers they erect in their racial and religious supremacist discourse will always lower the barrier for corruption and abuse of power instead of increasing it.

Some of us are willing to settle for less because we want “our” people to win regardless of the cost.

In other words, we didn’t look away because science is denied (even the most hateful and vilest ideologues in Malaysia aren’t anti-vax people, for example). We looked away because of identity politics.

Until we do away with a kind of identity politics that thrive on low standards (and double-standards) such as ours, we are in no position to take on climate change. – January 6, 2022.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.