“Drill, Baby, Drill”: The Pitfalls of Politicizing the Climate in a Society of Enjoyment

Authors’ note: This contribution is based on our forthcoming book, Enjoying Climate Change, and a paper published in Political Geography in 2023.

“The imminent catastrophe is conjured up with a mixture of trembling and pleasure and awaited with both terror and longing.” – Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Critique of Political Ecology”

Despite the widespread consensus on anthropogenic climate change, political inertia not only persists but climate matters have moved to the back burner while geopolitical tensions intensify, autocratic populist anti-environmental policies spread, and the climate indicators keep speeding southwards. In this contribution, we contend that affective investments—whether in eco-sacrifice, nationalist green populism, or refusal to take the climate issue seriously—can account for this inertia by entrenching libidinal attachments to the present status quo and thereby deepening the climate breakdown. Overcoming this impasse demands reconfiguring individual and collective desire and traversing the fantasy of sustainability under capitalism.

Enjoyment as a Political Factor

In current accounts of the political implications of climate change, there is growing recognition that psychic dynamics are involved in (not) changing the environmental status quo. Psychoanalytic theory, in particular, has been increasingly mobilized to account for the persistence of today’s climate deadlock. The latter refers to the paradoxical situation wherein, despite the fact that the knowledge of climate change and its infernal consequences is widely accepted and all manner of actions are undertaken, the reality of climate change deteriorates as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

In this contribution, we mobilize the notion of “enjoyment as a political factor,” and relate this to the Lacanian sense of enjoyment as jouissance, a view that suggests how enjoyment is precisely what defines the subject and constitutes a crucial, if unconscious, vector animating life itself (for more on this theme, see here). Jouissance is predicated upon a lack, a gap, or absence to be covered, an insatiable search for completeness and wholeness. The longing (or rather drive) to fullness and blissful being is precisely what sets enjoyment in motion. Nonetheless, this drive forever fails in its repetitive attempt to fill the gap and become whole. This (death) drive pushes the subject continuously “beyond the pleasure principle,” the latter understood as a state of pure blissful existence without pain or suffering. Enjoyment—in contrast to pleasure—is this insatiable, anxiety-ridden, and often painful, but incessantly failing attempt to suture the void (of being).

This void that structures the subject’s psychic apparatus becomes stained with a spectral presence, which Lacan denotes as “the object-cause of desire” or “object a.”It allows the subject to “give body” to the lack (of enjoyment) that perpetuates its existence. Object a is the phantasmagorical “little thing” that sets desire into motion and promises fulfilment and completion, but ultimately never really satisfies fully. Desire is thus, according to Lacan, the “other pole” of enjoyment. While the latter emerges out of a gap, a void, a nothingness, the former circulates around a real or imaginary “small a” that animates the subject in the pursuit of a “little” or partial satisfaction, one that is never fully really “it.” Indeed, to preserve their possibility for enjoyment, the subject clings to loss and to the suffering it entails. As Jodi Dean explains:

Enjoyment is centrally about “I can’t get no, or rather not enough, satisfaction!” Hence, subjects become caught in the circular and repetitive process of attaining each time again the “thing” that fails to do what fantasy promised, because the presumed qualities of the object to finally “complete” the subject does not originate from the object itself (although its particular characteristics are invoked as carriers of possible satisfaction), but from the fantasy structure it is placed in. Take, for example, the commodity as the entity (according to Marx) that is presumably full of phantasmagorical possibilities and promises, yet, when acquired, loses its appeal and becomes again the mundane thing that sustains capitalist social relations. As soon as the subject comes too close to it, the supposed object-cause of desire turns out to be not “it.” No commodity ever really satisfies fully. This is what, quite literally, “drives” capitalist development.

Enjoyment, therefore, requires and is embedded in a fantasy configuration closely associated with the position of the subject in the social bond (see here and here). It is crucial, not only for the individual, but also for the organization of society. Xenophobia and racism are classically understood as originating with the loss of jouissance, whereby the external intruder (the migrant) is associated with the “theft of enjoyment.” Only by eliminating the intruder can full access to (imaginary) enjoyment be restored. We contend that the climate conundrum exhibits similar libidinal attachments that stand in the way of real transformation. In the following section, we trace how enjoyment functions as a political factor in relation to climate change.

The Enjoyment of and in Climate Change

The Superego Injunction to Enjoy Fossil Fuels

It is difficult to ignore the libidinal attachment inscribed in this slogan. It is not just the overtly sexualized meaning and erotic excess that the slogan evokes—in fact, Penthouse made a soft-porn flick with the same title and a Palin lookalike as a lead actress a year later—it is also that, with this slogan, Palin expresses a deeper satisfaction with the continuing destruction of the planet as well as with transgressing the dominant scientific and broad political consensus about the challenges and dangers posed by accelerating climate change (For an extensive study on the psycho-social relationship with fossil fuels, see Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil). This is jouissance at its best: an excessive, painful, often self-destructing yet exhilarating and norm-transgressing satisfaction.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” has been resurrected by Donald Trump, who started to use it again in his 2024 campaign for president. In a television interview in December 2023, he explained to thunderous applause what he plans to do in the first few days after winning the elections: “Day one, the border gets closed. And day one and a half we drill. We drill, baby, drill. Drill, drill, drill. And probably on day two we’ll get rid of this ridiculous electric car mandate.”

In a similar vein, another American trend following the imperative to enjoy, by fuelling a deeper satisfaction with the continuing destruction of the planet, can be seen in the phenomenon of “rolling coal.” Rolling coal is an intentional act of air pollution for the sake of entertainment or protest. To do this, the particulate filter of a truck’s diesel engine is removed, and smoke switches and special exhaust pipes are installed to feed more fuel into the engine in order to emit large amounts of sooty exhaust fumes. Often practiced in the presence of hybrid cars to taunt their drivers, rolling coal is further used against liberal protesters, foreign cars, bicyclists, or pedestrians. While the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency already stated in July 2014 that rolling coal is illegal (as it violates the Clean Air Act), it still receives a lot of attention on social media, often accompanied by slogans like “American freedom” and masculinist offenses against protesters campaigning for a cleaner environment.

A similar process of “enjoying climate change” has been observed in the context of eco-businesses, for whom the ecological crisis offers new profit and accumulation possibilities while the very drive for growth worsens the climate crisis. In light of the superego’s command to enjoy, destroying the planet is neither accidental nor unnecessary, but rather has to be considered as the obscene underside of the social bond, especially in societies that rely on fossil capital. As long as we are obliged to enjoy fossil fuels, there is a certain duty to do this at the cost of destroying the environment. Climate change is thus the price to pay for organizing enjoyment in a certain way.

The Imaginary Enjoyment of Environmental Politics

So far, we have mainly focused on the conservative side of climate politics and action and argued that it’s being driven by the superego’s injunction to enjoy fossil fuels. On the other side of the political spectrum, many environmental activists proffer the enjoyment of sacrifice as a way out of our climate pickle.² Renouncing excessive consumption based on fossil fuels, promoting “flygskam” (flight shame), reducing auto-mobility, vegetarianism, recycling, and the anxiety-ridden if not depression-inducing loop of the always insufficient ascetism to make the earth and its climate whole(some) again indicate a libidinal attachment to sacrifice as a road to fullness.

Compared with the superego’s injunction to enjoy, here too enjoyment is associated with an unfulfillable satisfaction and with the deep pleasures propelled by transgressing the hegemonic ways of speaking and acting. The recent wave of environmental activism, centred on gluing oneself to famous artworks or streets, is another illustration of this. Enjoying sacrificial constraint now to achieve full satisfaction later is indeed strangely akin to the sacrifices enjoined by the infernal loop of incessant capitalist consumption, driven too by the urge to get satisfaction from the next product on the shelf, just to experience that further sacrifice is required, as the failure of each new product to instill full and final satisfaction incites the rush for the next. As Jodi Dean maintains, enjoying climate change unfolds in Manichean parallel to the circuit of enjoyment that fuels the drive for accumulation:

One of the backbones of imaginary enjoyment is that the lost enjoyment (the Thing) has been “stolen” by an Other whose very enjoyment stands as the fulcrum of what is presumably lost (Slavoj Žižek deals with this theme here). Take, for example, this quote from a speech given by Greta Thunberg at the British Houses of Parliament in April 2019:

The climate conundrum, and the dominant discursive matrices that sustain its enjoyment, operate through projecting a fantasy that is animated by a generic wish to produce a socially and environmentally “sustainable” (i.e., good) society in a climatic environment that supports and nurtures such cohesion. Nonetheless, while it is generally recognized that fundamental transformations in the socio-ecological order called capitalism are necessary to avert catastrophe, this knowledge is displaced onto a terrain of nudging individual behaviour, nurturing eco-technological change, and re-arranging or producing new institutional configurations and managerial apparatuses, while repressing (or rather disavowing) the traumatic origins of the making of this problematic climate (as one of us has written about more extensively here).

Enjoying Climate Change and Fighting for One Another

A main concern that unites most variants of mainstream climate politics, anti-climate protests, and climate activism, especially in the Global North, is that they all, in one way or another, try to maintain the dominant mode of enjoyment as a political factor. What needs to be secured from each of these standpoints is a society, or “world,” more generally, in which one’s own enjoyment is sustained and prioritized. The gesture of restricting oneself and one’s endeavors primarily to the pursuit of personal freedom and the hope for fulfilment and satisfaction is precisely what fuels today’s enjoyment-oriented capitalist society. This fixation on individual gratification perpetuates the status quo and undermines every effort for radical change.

Following McGowan’s argument, we might say that right-wing enjoyment is “provincial,” in the sense that it relies on someone who does not belong to the social order, while leftist emancipatory enjoyment is “universal,” as it embraces the non-belonging of everyone. If we subscribe to this argument, we can conclude that both the conservative and activist approaches to climate change are more closely tied to rightist enjoyment. While eco-conservative enjoyment embraces the difference between those who belong (and therefore have access to enjoyment) against those who do not belong (and therefore do not have a right to enjoy), the eco-liberal position is based on the premise that everyone should have access to enjoyment. However, the path towards a left-wing enjoyment is a different one: It is neither “us” against “them” nor “we” all, but no one who belongs and thus has full access to enjoyment.

Such negative universality opens up the terrain of emancipation. Fostering an emancipatory enjoyment requires traversing the fantasy that sustains the phantasmic attachment to climate change. It means moving away from foregrounding the antinomies and enemies that continuously undermine “full” enjoyment, holding the subject in the iron grip of repeating the failure to reach the thing it desires, and toward recognizing precisely the lack that defines the subject. In other words, the “lack in being” needs full endorsement. That basically means abolishing the superego’s injunction to enjoy climate change without sacrificing oneself to fight climate change. Other than the climate fantasies identified above, which evoke a symptom of the repetitive failure to enjoy, caused by an Other who is imagined as standing in the way, a recognition that the failure to enjoy is constitutive (and not external) potentially opens a terrain for a truly political enjoyment of climate change. This implies reframing enjoyment away from “sacrificing in the name of Nature,” “passionately destroying Nature,” or fetishistically displacing the issue to a question of greenhouse gases.

We have to consider a way to collectively enjoy despite and within climate change without further destroying the planet or sacrificing in the name of Nature. Such an enjoyment can only be an “enjoyment of lack that anyone can access,” an enjoyment of the shared struggle to cope with climate change.

If we really want to take the ecological condition seriously, we have to displace the question of ecology onto the terrain of egalitarian politicization, animated by a sustained and militant fidelity to the possibility and necessity of creating a common world. In other words, we have to consider a way to collectively enjoy despite and within climate change without further destroying the planet or sacrificing in the name of Nature. Such an enjoyment can only be an “enjoyment of lack that anyone can access,” an enjoyment of the shared struggle to cope with climate change. Once we openly confront the fact that “[w]hat every society shares today is the environmental catastrophe that it cannot master” and recognize that—even though the climate crisis unfolds unevenly—it still “marks the limit that no society can eliminate,” then we may be able to enjoy climate change as a means of fighting for (and not against) one another. It is through such a political project that a common and enabling climate might be constituted.

1. Further evidence of the thirst for burning coal and tapping U.S. coal reserves was offered by Mike Davis in Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. ↩︎
2. We are aware that “the West” is a somewhat easy target when it comes to examining the pitfalls of political responses to climate change. For example, across Latin America, we encounter political responses to climate change that go beyond the linkages of enjoyment and climate change we outlined above. Resource extraction, for example, produces extraordinary socio-ecological conflicts and environmental degradation, while environmental activism is often accompanied by life-threatening dangers, especially for indigenous populations. These conditions make it increasingly impossible to enjoy climate change, although one might say that they are the ‘obscene underbelly’ of the technological and institutional advances that secure a socio-ecologically sensible life elsewhere. ↩︎
3. This chimes very well with the sacrificial nature of capitalism itself, as outlined by Todd McGowan in Capitalism and Desire. The dynamics of capitalism are inherently sacrificial as environments, people, and indeed, personal enjoyment are surrendered to assuring the sustainability of capitalism as a more or less coherent socio-ecological configuration. ↩︎

Lucas Pohl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Innsbruck. His research mediates between urban, political, and environmental geography, focusing on geographical imaginaries, built environments, and urban political ecologies. His works have been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Political Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at The University of Manchester, UK, and Senior Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change, South Africa. He holds a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University and was awarded Honorary Doctorates from Roskilde University and the University of Malmö. He works on political ecology, critical theory, and environmental and emancipatory politics. He is the author of, among others, Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Democratic Environment (MIT Press), Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in 20th Century Spain (MIT Press), and Social Power and the Urbanization of Nature (Oxford University Press). He is currently completing a book (with Prof. Lucas Pohl), entitled Enjoying Climate Change.