Climate and society in the face of collapse: Presentism, progress, and the temporal failure of the New Convivialist Manifesto

This article offers a sympathetic critique of the New Convivialist Manifesto, arguing that its climate politics suffer from a fatal lack of realism. The manifesto writes as if a 2°C future was still attainable through political will and gradual reform. This is no longer credible. 1.5°C will likely be exceeded by the early 2030s, and current climate policies put us on track for 2.8°C or more. Catastrophic consequences – extreme weather events, ecosystem destabilisation, mass displacement, and societal breakdown – are no longer avoidable; they are already locked in. The manifesto refuses to confront this reality. It oscillates between apocalyptic rhetoric and a defensive progress belief. It ignores that every IPCC scenario relies on negative emissions and geoengineering, and it celebrates prefigurative experiments without asking which social forces could drive systemic change. A convivialist climate politics worthy of the name would tackle the question of learning to live with catastrophe and develop a new temporal consciousness and bricolage that takes post-catastrophic prospects seriously without collapsing into fatalism.