Is there hope for climate action: The role of crises, memory, and imagined futures

A number of ambitious climate actions (European Green Deal, Paris Agreement etc.) have been proposed in recent years. However, it is also the case that the major drivers of climate change have been known since the early 1900s (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). Even though this understanding had become incontrovertible by the mid-1960s (Robinson and Robbins, 1968), very little has been accomplished in terms of stemming Greenhouse emissions. Given this historical background, one can have serious doubts about the effectiveness of any newly proposed initiative. So, is there any hope for averting climate change? This paper attempts to argue that there is at least one reason for some optimism. The world has just witnessed what may be regarded the two most important global crises since the second World War – the Great Financial Crisis and the on-going COVID crises. I argue that the large-scale state interventions that took place as part of these crises have changed the horizon of expectation (Kosseleck, 1985) and future imaginaries (Beckert, 2013), especially as far as state interventions and international restrictions are concerned. It is the memory of these two previous crises which influences what actions are deemed possible to combat the current and future crises of climate change. In order to develop this argument, this paper develops a conceptualization of the important interlinkages between crises, memory, and imagined futures and it subsequently relates these to current policy discussions of major climate change initiatives.