Enjoying Climate Change: Why We Keep the Planet Burning

A sharp diagnosis of why societies resist climate action, Swyngedouw and Pohl uncover what psychoanalysis can teach us about radical environmental politics

Enjoying Climate Change shows why conventional climate action cannot break today’s accelerating ecological and political deadlock. Pohl and Swyngedouw reveal how our attachment to the current system is sustained not only by political economic conditions but by a libidinal economy: the unconscious investments that keep people attached to destructive capitalist structures even as conditions worsen. It is this strange kernel of ‘enjoyment’ that persists despite (or because of) the destructive relations between economic and ecological conditions in times of climate crisis that this book focuses on. By shifting the lens from the climate as the cause of our troubles to the political effects of the unconscious, the authors expose why societies repeatedly fail to act at the scale required – and what must be confronted to enable radical change. Drawing on Lacanian and Marxist perspectives, the book offers both a sharp diagnosis of the climate impasse and insights for building a more egalitarian world.