The account given in Chapter 5 of the underlying human condition as tragic arms us against the temptations of an irresponsible utopianism, but it also leads us towards a better grasp of the climate crisis. Certainly, if we are now urgently compelled to bring hope against hope to bear on that crisis, and such hope must be provided with a standing defence against those temptations if it is to do the proper work of hope instead of lapsing into wilful escapism, then a recognition of the tragic as central to human experience must be vital to that hope's defeasibility. Such recognition can also, however, give us important insights into the actual structure of our climate plight, which itself exhibits the characteristic tragic feature of life-energy coming into inevitable self-conflict.

A pattern of key strengths bringing with them exposure to destructive forces, which represented our initial scoping of the tragic, is indeed readily identifiable in the aetiology of climate emergency. The secular and instrumentally rational Enlightenment spirit which has produced so much worthwhile life-improvement across the world has also generated an apparent inability to rein in the relevant activities before they do irreversible harm. Distinctive human capacities which Western civilization in particular has realized – to make rational deliberated choices, to base belief on evidence and empirical testing, to free ourselves from ignorance, superstition and dogma – have been accompanied in their development by the striving for mastery and control which has betrayed us into doing decisive eco-systemic damage. Meanwhile the real and undeniable material improvements which exercising these capacities has brought us have blinded us (at first through ignorance, and latterly through various forms of denial) to the extent of the damage entailed. And now, to have any chance at all of escaping the worst consequences of that damage, we must at the very least severely constrain some of the key Enlightenment liberties currently being exercised in ‘the pursuit of happiness’. Many of the classic ingredients of tragedy seem to be here. Moreover, the good and the evil in this situation are apparently incommensurable. How much present life-improvement, in terms not just of consumer durables but also of better health care, for instance, would be outweighed by how much future famine or drought? – any such question seems simply unanswerable, and not because the calculations involved would be very hard to do.