One Calamity Is Better Than a Thousand Admonitions

👻🪸🐈‍⬛ Phantomoperand 👻🪸🐈‍⬛

Introduction: Strip the proverb of its status as a saying of fate and reconstruct it as a social diagnosis

The saying one calamity is better than a thousand admonitions often sounds like a crude piece of folk wisdom. As if people only come to their senses when something happens to them, and before it does, they take nothing seriously. But when one looks more carefully at how modern societies function, this saying turns into a much harsher diagnosis than a simple moral judgment. Because the real issue here is not that people dislike advice or are closed to thought. The real issue is that most of modern life operates not through ideas, but through apparatuses. How much people drive, how much they fly, how much they heat themselves, how they commute to work, how loads are transported, how supermarket shelves are stocked, how buildings stay warm, how cities sprawl, and how working life is organized are not determined by will alone. Each of these depends on prices, infrastructures, schedules, habits, spatial compulsions, energy abundance, and institutional rhythms.

This is why the behavior of societies is often jolted into motion not by hearing the right words, but when the material conditions on which those words rest change harshly. Fuel becomes more expensive, speed drops. The office closes, commuting is cut off like a knife. Gas contracts, the thermostat goes down. The supply chain breaks, and old comfort suddenly ceases to be a necessity. In other words, crisis is instructive not because it injects a new morality into people from the outside, but because it makes the invisible supports of life visible. This is exactly what energy institutions have been openly saying in recent years. In its recommendations prepared against oil shocks, the International Energy Agency repeatedly shows that a range of behaviors, from lowering speeds to working from home, from public transport to carpooling, can create serious demand reduction in a short time; moreover, it now discusses these not only in terms of climate targets, but also energy security and price pressure (🔗) (🔗).

One should not draw the wrong conclusion from this. The fact that calamity is instructive does not mean calamity is good. An oil shock, a pandemic, a financial collapse, a gas crisis, or a war-induced supply squeeze are not desirable social teachers. They are costly, unequal, and injurious. They disrupt people’s lives, increase insecurity, and sometimes leave permanent damage. But within all this harshness there is also a moment of disclosure. Many things that in normal times appear natural, inevitable, technically necessary, even beyond dispute, become clearly visible as depending in fact on a certain abundance of energy, cheap transportation, stable supply, and invisible institutional supports only in such moments. Societies often move late not because they do not know what is right, but because they notice only in moments of compression under which material conditions the thing they know becomes genuinely possible.

This is exactly where the climate debate has been jammed for years. On the one hand, the right things are constantly said: consume less, fly less, drive less, waste less, live more carefully. There is something justified in each of these. But on the other hand, there is a deeper problem on which these statements hang suspended. People are told what is right, but it is less often discussed within what kind of life arrangement that right would become practically possible. In the end a strange result emerges: things that can suddenly be done once crisis arrives, and can even enter state reports, sound in non-crisis times like a moral lesson. Then the real question is this: if societies more or less know what is right, why do they really change only at moments of bottleneck? The answer lies not in a lack of knowledge, but in how normal life is organized. The problem is not that people are insufficiently conscious; the problem is that everyday life is built on cheap energy, high mobility, and invisible fossil abundance.

That is why, to understand climate, one must first abandon the following illusion: acting as though the matter were a character problem that could be solved if well-intentioned people were just a little more careful. No; the matter is, before character, the technical and social constitution of life. People’s behavior arises not from individual consciences one by one, but through the road networks, building stock, logistics lines, prices, work arrangements, and energy regimes that bind them to one another. Real change, too, most often appears precisely there, that is, on the material ground on which life rises. Calamity makes this ground visible. Admonition, by contrast, usually circles above this ground.

I. Remove the climate issue from the category of moral problems: The subject is the regime of energy, movement, and comfort

For a very long time, the climate crisis has been narrated between two false extremes. At one extreme, the matter is treated as though it were about the ice at the poles and disasters in the distant future; so much so that its connection to everyday life weakens. At the other extreme, the issue is reduced almost entirely to individual virtue; as though the great knot would be untied if only people behaved carefully enough, moderately enough, and conscientiously enough. Yet the climate problem cannot be fully grasped through any of these. Because at the most basic level, the climate issue is the totality of the ways modern societies use energy, move, produce, transport, heat, and cool. What is called emissions is not an abstract bad habit; it is the numerical trace of the material apparatuses through which a society operates.

Commuting to and from work in the morning is part of this. The fact that cities are built around the automobile is part of this. Whether homes are uninsulated or efficient is part of this. Trucks carrying goods over thousands of kilometers, warehouses running continuously, cold chains remaining standing, cement, steel, fertilizer, plastic, data centers, and the delivery economy operating day and night all swallowing energy are part of this. In short, the climate problem is first a problem of social metabolism. Unless one understands how much energy a society draws and within what regime of movement, comfort, and production it expends this energy, telling people what they ought to do remains incomplete.

One need not go very far to see this. The International Energy Agency’s latest assessment on road transport clearly states that road transport accounts for approximately 45 percent of global oil demand, and that in some countries this rises to much higher shares. The same assessment also shows why working from home, lowering speed, and shifting to public transport are so important: because the problem is not moral laxity, but directly the energy intensity of the regime of movement (🔗). In other words, people produce large emissions not because they are very bad people, but because the lives they live are built on a high-energy circulation.

The same is true for buildings and heating. When the gas squeeze in Europe erupted in 2022, it suddenly became clear that the matter was not just automobiles or airplanes. The temperature of homes, how much walls leaked, how easily hot water was consumed, whether shop doors were kept open, the gas dependency of industry, in short comfort itself, was in the middle of energy policy. The fact that natural gas demand in the European Union fell by 55 billion cubic meters in 2022, that is, by approximately 13 percent, and that behavior changes in the building sector had a serious share in this decline, showed that the climate problem is not merely a morality of consumption, but directly a regime of comfort (🔗). This was a highly instructive moment. Because people were suddenly struck, prior to whether they were environmentally sensitive or not, by how decisive the structures they lived in and their modes of heating actually were.

What must really be broken here is this: the climate debate frequently centers the individual, but relegates the order on which that individual is built to the background. One asks why a person does not drive less, but asks less whether the city that person lives in is inhabitable without a car. One asks why a person does not fly less, but asks less how inadequate rail infrastructure is for short and medium distances. One asks why a person does not heat less, but asks less how much the building they live in leaks heat, whether turning down the thermostat means direct exposure to cold or merely giving up wastefulness. When this happens, climate politics easily begins to look like character education. Yet in reality, the problem is not character, but the energy regime.

To see this better, one must think politics not through intentions one by one, but through flows and dependencies. This is exactly why the language of corridors, chains, transmission, and circulation established in Yersiz Şeyler while discussing energy and war is important. What is insisted on there is that a crisis does not remain only on one front or only in high politics; it strikes the entire chain of movement, from tankers to storage depots, from insurance contracts to truck routes, from wholesale markets to the kitchen table. An energy or war crisis determines not only the foreign policy of a country, but also the cultivated area of a greenhouse operator, the price set by a wholesaler, the bill of a household, and how full a truck will depart (🔗). This also applies to climate. Emissions arise not from the soul of the individual, but from how these chains are set up.

This is why it is easy to blame people’s character; what is difficult is to see within which energy regime they live. People produce emissions not because they are bad, but because the life arrangement into which they are placed is, most of the time, high-energy. And precisely for this reason, major behavioral changes often appear not simply when more advice is given, but when pressure forms somewhere within this arrangement. To separate the climate issue from morality is not to trivialize it. On the contrary, it is to begin grasping it for the first time in its real material dimension.

II. Why does admonition remain weak? Because behavior leans on apparatuses before it leans on will

One of the greatest illusions about human behavior is to think as though, once people learn what is right, they will begin to live accordingly. There is a small share of truth in this thought. Of course ideas, opinions, fears, beliefs, and values matter. People sometimes really do change their habits because they have been persuaded. But when one looks more carefully at behavior at the scale of society, another reality appears: behavior does not consist only of thoughts. It consists of prices, time pressure, distances, existing infrastructure, work arrangements, urban form, the functioning of institutions, material compulsions, and repeated habits. There is often a large gap between what people are able to do and what they ought to do.

For this reason, admonition is not wholly ineffective, but by itself it is weak. One can tell someone to drive less. But if, in the city where that person lives, work, school, the market, the hospital, and the burden of care are far from one another; if public transport is infrequent, transfer-heavy, and unsafe; if time is already scarce and everyday life is built around the automobile, this call remains practically suspended in the air. One can tell someone to fly less. But if the rail network is expensive, slow, and fragmented; if institutional work culture still treats face-to-face presence as a criterion of seriousness; if cross-border movement is organized around flight, this statement again remains incomplete. One can tell someone to heat less. But if the building stock is leaky, insulation is poor, and turning down the thermostat means not merely giving up wastefulness but direct exposure to cold, then here too the language of admonition does not touch reality.

This is where the structural blindness of admonition begins. Because admonition often already presupposes the material conditions that make behavior possible. Yet in many cases these conditions do not exist. People are asked to make better choices, but the life arrangement that would carry those choices has not been established. Then failure appears as the fault not of the arrangement, but of the individual. This is why the moral language in the field of climate so easily hardens and so easily becomes didactic. People are frequently presented with the right idea, but less thought is given to the social force by which that idea would turn into behavior.

The repertoires of emergency measures published in the fields of energy and oil make this difference visible in a crude way. Both in the 10-point plan to reduce oil use prepared by the International Energy Agency in 2022 and in its assessments of the new oil squeeze in 2026, the same behaviors come to the table again and again: lowering the speed limit, working from home up to several days a week, car-free Sundays, making public transport cheaper, carpooling, replacing short-distance flights with other modes of transport, efficient driving, and public employees setting an example (🔗) (🔗) (🔗). What is striking here is not that the recommendations are new; it is that a repertoire long known already is spoken in a serious policy language only at the moment of crisis.

For example, the IEA states that working from home three days a week could save approximately 500 thousand barrels of oil per day in the short term, and that reducing the highway speed limit by only 10 km/h could also create fuel savings on a serious scale (🔗) (🔗). This means that the problem here is not that people did not know this before. The problem is this: while the same measure sounds in non-crisis times like a lifestyle recommendation, at a moment of crisis it sounds like reason of state. The same behavior changes meaning when the context changes. Even though people do not suddenly become different people, the same act suddenly ceases to be an excessive sacrifice and becomes a reasonable measure.

The distinction that must be made here is simple but decisive. The right idea is one thing, the social force that actually carries behavior is another. The right idea says what would be good to do. Social force, by contrast, makes that behavior actually happen. In moments of crisis, price, restriction, prohibition, closure, supply squeeze, institutional order, or compulsory saving suddenly creates this force. That is why social behavior often changes not by saying I am convinced, therefore I am changing, but by saying it has now become harder, more expensive, or less possible to continue in the old way.

Admonition does not become wholly worthless here. It draws a horizon; it says which behaviors are more right, less destructive, more defensible. But if it does not carry behavior, that is, if it does not combine with infrastructure, institution, price, space, time, and necessity, it may sound only like judgment. Crisis, by contrast, is often morally cruder, more painful, and more destructive; but it shows one thing very clearly: what can society really change, which comforts suddenly become luxuries, which habits are in fact not absolute, which modes of movement can shrink rapidly under pressure? Admonition usually says what ought to be done; calamity reveals what can truly be changed.

III. The regime of guilt: Why does climate discourse make even the most obedient feel inadequate?

One of the strangest and most wearing aspects of climate discourse is that responsibility and relief rarely meet in the same place. A person can recycle, use public transport instead of a private vehicle, reduce meat consumption, prefer the train over short distances, buy more efficient devices, and try to cut back on plastic use. After all of this, logically, one would expect the following feeling to emerge: at least I am moving in the right direction. But in current climate discourse, what happens very often is the opposite. The more compliance is shown, the more one is found lacking. The more sacrifice is made, the higher the bar is raised. Thus environmental responsibility ceases to be a limited and concrete set of tasks and turns into an endless regime of atonement.

At this point the problem is not environmental sensitivity itself. The problem is that environmental responsibility turns into a structure of debt that settles into the person’s soul. The person feels guilt not because they have failed to obey the rule, but because they could not be sufficiently flawless. The target is not completable; it recedes more like a horizon. That is why increasing obedience does not produce relief. On the contrary, the sense of debt deepens. Doing something for the environment turns the person, after a while, into the accountant of their own behavior. What they eat, what they wear, how much they travel, how many degrees they heat their home, how much packaging they use, by what means of transport they attend which meeting, even their forms of rest and enjoyment, all become subject to a moral audit. Although the problem is the collective energy order, the experience is lived as though it were an individual moral reckoning.

One of the harsh examples showing how this structure works is found in recent debates that show why the demand for guilt never ends even in societies where environmental discipline is already high. In an analysis written on the climate actions around the A12 line, precisely this paradox is brought to the fore: even in a society where waste separation is widespread, public transport and environmental regularity have become part of everyday life, people are declared inadequate again and again; as a result, the feeling produced is not relief, but irritation and resentment (🔗). The important point here is not that the environmental cause is wrong. On the contrary, even when the cause is just, once it presses down on people as an endless sense of debt, it begins to erode its own ground.

This is why it is often wrong to read the social reaction directed at climate discourse in a simplistic way as people being hostile to science. Even if many people do not deny the fact of climate, they may be weary of the way this fact is translated into their own lives. Because what strikes them is sometimes not the fact itself, but a call that constantly asks for a little more, yet does not share its social burden in a fair and concrete way. Moreover, this call is often piled onto the very segments already inclined to obey rules, already trying to arrange their daily lives. At that moment, environmental responsibility ceases to be a project of common transformation and turns into a feeling of personal inadequacy.

This is where the distinction between individual self-discipline and collective transformation becomes vital. Self-discipline is a person’s effort to reduce, change, and regulate certain things in their own life. Collective transformation, by contrast, requires structural changes in areas such as transport, buildings, the work regime, logistics, urban planning, energy production, and public services. When these two are confused, a structural problem is translated into the individual conscience. Then the weight of collective transformation is made to be carried through self-discipline. Of course this is not possible. In the end, what emerges is a kind of resentment. People begin to react not to the environment, but to the endless demand for self-discipline loaded onto them.

This resentment is not only a psychological matter; it also has a political result. Because while the individual is constantly asked to cut back more and more, when large infrastructures and institutional problems remain in place, people begin to experience the following feeling: the real builders of the problem remain invisible, while the cost is constantly written onto me. As this feeling grows, climate discourse may sound less like a justified warning than like a never-ending accusation. Thus people begin to react not to the fact of climate, but to climate being imposed on them like a machine of guilt. At that moment, scientific reality and political translation separate from one another. Reality itself may not be objected to; but objection grows to the way its name is used.

For this reason, one of the fundamental problems of climate politics is not only what it says, but what kind of affective regime it establishes. If every correct behavior creates the ground for the next deficiency, people feel that nothing they do will ever be enough. In such a climate, responsibility ceases to be empowering; it becomes wearing. And exactly at this point, it becomes even more visible that what really changes behavior most of the time is not intention, but material necessity. Because guilt cannot carry behavior continuously. After a while, it produces either numbness or anger. Crisis, by contrast, in a more ruthless way, but much more clearly, shows within what limits behavior can actually change.

IV. The first historical laboratory: The oil shocks of the 1970s showed that freedom of movement depended on fuel abundance

To really understand today’s debates on climate, energy, and behavior, one must return to the 1970s. Because the oil shocks were the first great laboratory showing how rapidly societies could change behavior even in a period when environmental morality had not yet become as institutionalized as it is today. At that time the issue was not climate; it was, in a more direct and cruder way, supply, price, and security. When the flow of oil was disrupted, people did not wake up one morning and decide to become more virtuous. Nor did states first give their citizens long lessons in consciousness. Instead, something much more material happened: speed limits were reduced, car-free days were declared, gasoline use was restricted, public transport was encouraged, travel was recalibrated. Circulation itself was disciplined.

Seen from today, these measures look familiar, because the first crude versions of many things later recommended under the headings of green living and sustainability appeared there. In both its 2022 plan and its 2026 report, the International Energy Agency explicitly refers to the measures implemented by many countries during the 1973 oil crisis. Lowering speed limits, movement-reducing solutions similar to working from home, car-free Sundays, steering people toward public transport, and various license-plate restrictions may today be discussed as though newly discovered, but their roots extend back to the energy bottlenecks of that period (🔗) (🔗).

For example, car-free Sunday practices emerged in countries such as West Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland as a direct response to the oil squeeze. The IEA says that even today these practices are again mentioned as one of the effective ways of reducing short-term oil demand; it even calculates that regular car-free Sundays in major cities could create savings amounting to hundreds of thousands of barrels in the short term (🔗). What is really instructive here is not only the quantity of savings. More importantly, this: private vehicle circulation, which in normal times appeared indispensable, ordinary, and natural, began at the moment of crisis to be seen as a habit that could be restricted and postponed. In other words, the oil shock gave people, for the first time, the following lesson: what is lived as freedom of movement is in fact a technical order dependent on fuel abundance.

The same is true for the regime of speed. Today speed limits are mostly discussed together with traffic regulation, safety, or air pollution. Yet in 1973 and during the subsequent oil fluctuations, speed came to the fore directly as an energy issue. The IEA’s current assessment of road transport emphasizes that lowering highway speed by 10 km/h can reduce the oil use of the individual driver by 5 to 10 percent and can also produce meaningful savings at the national level. The same text recalls that during the first oil crisis France lowered speed to 90 km/h on intercity roads and to 120 km/h on highways, and that similar calls were made again during the 2022 energy crisis (🔗). This means that speed was not merely a matter of personal preference or driving pleasure; it was directly part of energy demand. This became plainly visible only at the moment of crisis.

The national maximum speed limit introduced in the United States in 1974 is another face of the same story. This policy was significant not only for reducing oil consumption, but also as an explicit acknowledgment of the link between speed and energy. What is interesting is that such measures can sometimes produce not only energy effects, but also safety effects. Studies on the reduction in traffic deaths caused by lower speeds show that measures taken in moments of crisis can also make visible other blind spots in a social order (🔗). In other words, the oil shock was cracking not only fuel, but the whole set of assumptions formed around automobile culture: the normality of speed, the ordinariness of long distance, the continuity of abundant fuel, the naturalness of movement.

The most important lesson the oil shocks left for the present is that behavioral change often emerges not through moral awakening, but through material pressure. People did not drive less because they had become more environmentally conscious; they drove less because it had become more expensive, more difficult, and sometimes less possible. Nor did states lower speed limits, impose restrictions, and encourage alternatives because they were inviting citizens to a virtuous life, but because they were compelled to discipline circulation. But precisely for that reason, many behaviors later narrated as environmental virtue first appeared as the repertoire of energy compression. Less speed, less unnecessary travel, more shared transport, greater efficiency, more measured circulation. Today these mostly sound like moral appeals. In the 1970s, the same things entered life as a harsh lesson in supply.

This is where the real importance of this historical laboratory lies. Society saw there for the first time on a large scale that mobility is not natural. It became clear that automobile civilization, long distance, high speed, and constant circulation were not self-generated, but the product of a certain energy abundance. When crisis arrived, it was not morality but the discipline of circulation that changed. And perhaps the most disturbing truth first showed itself there: what society can really change is revealed most of the time not by sermons, but by bottlenecks. Many practices later presented as green virtue first became visible as the compulsory language of energy compression. This is why the oil shocks are not merely an energy story belonging to the past. They are the conceptual preface to today’s climate debate.

V. The Same Decline Does Not Mean the Same Meaning: Why is it misleading to reduce crises to a single emissions curve?

Reading every moment in which emissions fall as though it were a single success story is one of the easiest but most misleading habits of the climate debate. When one looks at the line descending on the graph, it seems as though there were a single phenomenon at issue: energy use has decreased, production has slowed, mobility has declined, total carbon emissions have fallen. But the emergence of the same outcome does not mean that the social experience leading to that outcome is also the same. An oil shock is one thing; a financial contraction is another; systemic disintegration is another; a pandemic is another; and a gas crisis is yet another. All of them can reduce emissions. But they do not all produce the same life, the same pressure, the same learning, or the same future.

This distinction is not merely a matter of technical classification. Because how emissions fall also tells us exactly where society has broken. In an oil shock, the pressure comes directly from fuel itself. Supply tightens, price jumps, the cost of circulation becomes visible. Then the first thing shaken is the regime of movement. People drive less, drive more slowly, cancel some trips, freight transport is recalculated, speed suddenly becomes not only habit but cost. In a financial recession, by contrast, what first strikes people is not the gasoline queue; it is the slowing of the economic cycle. Fewer orders are placed, less production is carried out, less freight is moved, less investment takes place. Here society does not directly receive the command drive less; but because the economy operates at a lower rate, less carbon is nevertheless emitted. In a pandemic, none of these is by itself decisive. Here contact, circulation, and physical co-presence themselves are restricted. People do not refrain from going because it is more expensive, but because they cannot go. They do not fail to go to the office because they find it more efficient, but because of closure and risk. In a gas crisis, by contrast, what stands at the center is not transport, but heating and comfort. The thermostat, hot water, building stock, insulation, gas use in industry, and energy efficiency suddenly settle in the very middle of the debate. The International Energy Agency’s framework of energy security and demand-restraint measures clearly shows that these different kinds of crisis place pressure on different knots of society; the same institution, on the one hand, lists speed and mobility measures for oil supply crises, while on the other hand, in the European gas crisis, it explains that the decline in demand came from behaviors in the residential and building sectors together with infrastructure (🔗) (🔗). (IEA)

For this reason, the emissions curve cannot speak on its own. The same downward movement sometimes means only a temporary slowdown; sometimes a permanent collapse; sometimes a compulsory suspension; and sometimes a direct loss of comfort. The same tonnage of reduction may in one place mean fewer flights and more online meetings, while elsewhere it may mean closed factories, falling incomes, and deferred maintenance. The same figure reveals in different ways which part of behavior in a society is flexible, which part is structural, and which part can shrink only under pressure. For that reason, the sentence emissions fell is by itself neither hopeful nor frightening; first one must ask what social experience that decline corresponds to.

This difference is also decisive in terms of persistence. Some declines are like rubber; once the pressure is removed, they return to their old form. Others break, together with behavior, the structure that carries that behavior. A very large part of the decline seen during the pandemic arose from the sudden suspension of movement and physical circulation; for that reason, when closures loosened, the return was also rapid. The study published in Nature showed that in the spring of 2020 daily global CO2 emissions fell on some days by approximately 17 percent compared with the 2019 average, and that nearly half of this came from the change in surface transport (🔗). But the same study also revealed the social source of the decline: here the real issue was not a new form of production, but compulsory curtailment. For that reason, it did not carry the same meaning as other declines that appeared to be of the same magnitude. (Nature)

Global emissions series also confirm this heterogeneity. PBL’s assessment concerning 2009 emphasized that, for the first time since 1992, growth in global CO2 emissions had stopped, but that this was mainly connected with the recession and the 7 percent decline in OECD countries and Russia (🔗). What was seen here was not that people had suddenly become more environmentally conscious; it was that the economic machine had turned more slowly. In the 2022 European gas crisis, by contrast, another lesson appeared: the European Union’s natural gas demand fell by approximately 13 percent in one year; alongside industrial slowdown, the savings created by households and public campaigns through thermostat settings and building use were also effective in this (🔗). Here the same downward movement was now no longer revealing movement, but the regime of comfort and heating. (Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving)

Therefore, reducing crises to a single emissions curve darkens social reality. Because this reduction dissolves causes into the outcome. Yet an oil shock disciplines movement, a financial crisis lowers the economic cycle, a pandemic suspends institutional circulation, a gas crisis strikes the regime of comfort, and systemic collapse directly erodes social capacity. All can produce less carbon; but they do not all narrate the same historical truth. The same downward movement does not construct the same social world.

VI. The Harsh Lesson of Collapse: The Emissions Decline of the Early 1990s Was Not a Decline, but a Regime of Compulsory Contraction

One of the most disturbing but most necessary examples for showing that less carbon does not always mean a better life is Eastern Europe and the former Soviet geography in the early 1990s. Because here the decline in emissions does not describe a society beginning to use less energy through conscious saving, environmental enlightenment, or careful degrowth. What happened here was much harsher: the dissolution of an entire regime of production, maintenance, transport, and livelihood. Emissions fell because the very supports of life collapsed. Industry declined, incomes fell, infrastructure wore down, maintenance was deferred, public services weakened, transport capacity narrowed. Society consumed less not because it chose to become more measured, but because the material ground that would sustain the old life was rapidly eroding.

Why this period must be taken especially seriously comes precisely from the fact that it reveals a mistake made very often in climate debate. A decline in emissions is often read as though it were in itself a good indicator. Yet the experience of the former Soviet sphere and the transition economies shows that carbon can sometimes fall merely as the shadow of a shrinking life. The World Bank’s assessment of the transition economies treated the sharp declines in oil demand in countries such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, and Hungary in the period 1989-1992 in the context of economic collapse and structural contraction; these were not pleasant simplifications, but ruptures intertwined with industrial and income loss (🔗). That is, the fall in emissions here indicated not a transition to a socially more rational life, but the collapse of old economic and public capacity. (World Bank)

This distinction is especially important, because it is very easy to romanticize crisis-driven declines in emissions. From the outside, the same picture may be seen: less fuel, less production, less transport, less heating. But from the inside, this does not mean living differently; most of the time it means being able to afford less, repair less, move less, heat less. A society’s carbon emissions may fall because it has become less wasteful. But the same society’s carbon emissions may also fall because it can provide less healthcare, less public security, less industrial maintenance, and less infrastructure renewal. The resulting figure may be similar in both cases. The human experience is entirely different.

Here there is a disturbing but necessary lesson for the climate debate. Less is not always better. Sometimes it means only a narrower, colder, more fragile life. For that reason, drawing a model from the emissions declines seen in moments of crisis requires extreme care. Some declines really do make waste visible; others merely collapse. The former Soviet and Eastern European experience is a harsh example of this second kind. Life there may have become lower-carbon; but this low carbon emerged not through conscious transformation, but at the cost of compulsory contraction.

PBL’s long-term emissions assessments also provide a framework emphasizing the difference between structural rupture and ordinary recession. In the study published for 2009, while it was stated that global growth had stopped, it was also clearly said that this situation was linked especially to advanced economies experiencing recession and to Russia (🔗). Frameworks of this kind show that short-term economic slowdown and long-term structural disintegration cannot be dissolved under the same heading. The decline in the former Soviet geography in the early 1990s was not a recession of a few quarters; it was the breaking of the very structure that carried behavior, production, and maintenance capacity. For that reason, the return of the emissions decline there also differed from other crises. Because what existed there was not only a deferred life, but a life partially dissolved. (Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving)

The principal warning this example carries for climate politics is clear. Writing crisis-driven emissions decline automatically as though it were a normative success can be blindness. Applauding the number without asking about the quality of the decline covers over social reality. In one place, less car use may be a voluntary change of direction; in another, it may be happening because there is no power left to buy gasoline. In one place, less heating may mean good insulation and efficiency; in another, it means direct cold. The same reduction may conceal two utterly different human conditions. Without understanding this difference, speaking of the instructiveness of crises remains incomplete.

VII. The Lesson of Stagnation: 2008-09 Was Not a Matter of Individual Morality, but of the Speed of the Economic Cycle

The global financial crisis of 2008-09 showed another type of emissions decline. This time there was no direct shortage of oil. Nor was there, at first glance on the street, a great closure. Cities did not empty out, offices did not suddenly shut down, flights did not stop altogether. Yet emissions still fell. Because what primarily slowed here was not so much the lifestyle of individuals one by one as the economic cycle itself. Fewer orders were placed, fewer goods were produced, less investment was made, fewer containers were transported, less construction was started, less commercial activity turned. This crisis showed in a naked way just how tightly emissions are tied not only to individual consumption choices, but also to the volume of production and circulation.

This is a very important distinction. The ordinary language of climate debate often turns too directly toward the individual. How much did you fly, how much did you drive, how much did you consume, how carefully did you live? Yet 2008-09 showed this: even if no dramatic moral transformation takes place in the life of the individual, emissions can still fall when the economic machine slows. In 2009, the World Trade Organization announced that it expected a serious global contraction in trade in goods; this clearly suggested that the sharp braking in the global circulation of goods would also have an effect on energy and carbon (🔗). For the same period, PBL stated that, for the first time since 1992, growth in global CO2 emissions had stopped and that emissions in OECD countries and Russia had fallen by approximately 7 percent (🔗). So what was seen here was not more morality, but less turnover. (Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving)

The most instructive side of this example is that it shows how incomplete it is to relate carbon only to visible gestures of consumption. Fewer containers, fewer trucks, less steel, less cement, less heavy industry, less business travel, fewer shipments, less investment. Each of these is an area the individual does not directly see, yet one that has a very large effect on total emissions. Even without experiencing a great transformation of environmental morality in everyday life, a society can emit less carbon when the speed of the economic cycle falls. This too shows that the climate issue is not merely a sum of preferences, but a question of economic intensity.

But here clarity is immediately necessary. Because this decline was not a solution. Financial contraction did not, by itself, establish a low-carbon social model. Neither was the transport system redesigned, nor were cities transformed, nor was the building stock renewed, nor was the economic metabolism permanently directed onto another path. It merely slowed for a while. The report PBL published the following year emphasized that global CO2 emissions in 2010 jumped strongly again and largely took back the decline of the previous year (🔗). This places before us a very simple but very harsh truth: economic contraction can reduce emissions, but that decline itself is not a change of direction. The machine has been slowed for a while; but how the engine is built has not changed. (Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving)

For that reason, the lesson of 2008-09 has two layers. The first lesson is that, to understand emissions, looking only at the morality of the individual is not enough. Production volume, trade intensity, the investment cycle, and logistical flow are at least as decisive as individual lifestyle. The second lesson is this: economic contraction is not in itself climate politics. If the decline arises only from the breaking of business volume, then recovery also largely means a return to the same emissions regime. Here the brakes have been applied, but the steering wheel has not been turned.

This is a necessary correction against individual-centered climate language. Because not all major emissions ruptures can be read through the story people finally chose what was right. Sometimes people remain almost the same people; only the economic order around them works more slowly. And even that creates a major effect. This means that the issue is not only preference, but the social cycle itself. When climate politics does not see this, it either blames the individual too much or underestimates the role of major economic rhythms. This is the most sober lesson left by 2008-09.

VIII. The Great Exposure: The 2020 Pandemic Opened Up the Naked Anatomy of Behavior

The 2020 pandemic became the event that displayed, in the most visible, most concrete, and most universal way, the relationship between behavior and emissions in the modern age. Because this time the pressure was not only in oil prices, not only in industrial orders, nor only in financial flow. Everyday life itself suddenly changed. People did not go to work. Flights were cut. City centers emptied out. Conferences were canceled. Borders closed. Meetings moved online. For the first time it became visible in such a naked way how large a share of shopping, visiting, travel, office presence, and constant movement was in fact institutionally produced.

What made the pandemic appear so striking in climate terms was not only that it created a large decline; it was that it laid before our eyes which behaviors could be changed and how quickly. The research published in Nature showed that in the spring of 2020 daily global CO2 emissions fell at some moments by approximately 17 percent compared with the 2019 average, and that nearly half of this decline resulted from the reduction in surface transport (🔗). In other words, commuting patterns, short- and medium-distance car use, dense daily circulation, and the regime of face-to-face work, all of which had for years seemed like inevitable parts of life, were able to shrink on a massive scale within a few weeks. (Nature)

The truly shocking point here was this: many behavioral changes that had previously been said to be impossible were in fact technically possible. For years, institutions had implied that so many meetings could not be carried out without business travel, that so much work could not be done without physically going to the office, that air traffic and automobile mobility could not be restricted to such a degree. Yet it suddenly became clear that the matter was largely not technical impossibility, but institutional compulsion. Behavior changed not because people had stopped working altogether, but because assumptions about the form in which work could be organized suddenly changed. Society experienced for itself that many rhythms it had previously taken as natural were in fact historical and institutional.

In this sense, the pandemic performed the function of a great exposure. Which movements were truly necessary, and which were habit, status, institutional inertia, or the comfort of the age of cheap energy became more visible. How necessary was it really to go physically to work every day? Which conferences in fact did not require airplanes? Which meetings, which inspections, which trips continued only because people said this is how it is done? During this period it was revealed how much of the regime of constant movement on which cities and work calendars were built was actually a historical choice. What the climate issue had for years been saying in abstract form was, for the first time, felt in the bodies and calendars of millions of people.

But precisely for that reason the pandemic was also very open to being misread. Because from the outset it would have been wrong to describe this great decline as a kind of green awakening. People did not produce less emissions because they had become more virtuous. They produced less emissions because they were able to move less, circulate less, and stayed at home due to certain risks and prohibitions. Moreover, not all sectors shrank in the same way. Residential energy increased in some places; health, care, basic logistics, and necessary services continued to work. This means that the pandemic was not merely the story everything stopped. On the contrary, it also showed which areas could be rapidly curtailed, and which had to continue because they carried society.

This is of great importance. Because the pandemic pulled the climate debate, for the first time, to a more mature place. It forced a distinction not only about what needed to be reduced, but about what was really indispensable and what was merely habit. Not all flights are the same. Not all travel is the same. Not all physical presence is the same. Likewise, consumption, transportation, and circulation are not homogeneous. Crisis revealed this in a crude but instructive way. A significant portion of the things called impossible were not impossible; they had merely been assumed impossible because they had not been thought within another order.

For that reason, the pandemic represents more than a major decline in emissions. It exposed the anatomy of behavior. For the first time, people lived so directly how intertwined the parts of their lives were with carbon, movement, and energy. Empty roads, silent airports, closed offices, and online meetings turned into everyday experience a truth that had been circulating for years in reports and target documents: behavior can change. But the question under what condition, at what cost, and within what limits that change emerges is as important as the change itself. The harshest clarity of the pandemic lies here. Many things that had appeared impossible became possible within a few weeks. This showed with full clarity that the problem is often not technical, but institutional and social.

IX. The Second Lesson of the Pandemic: Teaching Is One Thing, Transforming Is Another

The harshest knowledge left by the pandemic was not only that it showed some behaviors really can change, but that it also revealed why this change did not become permanent on its own. In 2020, flights were cut, city centers emptied, online meetings became normal, commuting was greatly reduced. At that time many people experienced the following feeling: So life really could be organized otherwise. But precisely for that reason, the rebound that occurred when closures loosened and economic activity accelerated again was highly revealing. According to the International Energy Agency, global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 6 percent in 2021 to 36.3 gigatonnes; this was the highest annual level up to that date. The same assessment stated that the roughly 1.9-gigaton decline in 2020 was more than fully taken back by an approximately 2.1-gigaton increase in 2021, and that emissions rose above the 2019 level as well (🔗) (🔗).

Reading this rebound merely as people returned to their old habits remains superficial. What lies deeper is this: a large part of what was suspended in 2020 was suspended without changing the institutions that produced it. The office regime did not truly reconstitute itself; it merely managed for a while with remote work. The culture of business travel was not fundamentally questioned in many sectors; it was only postponed. The spatial structure of cities continued to be built around the automobile and long-distance commuting. Global logistics networks were not redesigned from the ground up in a shorter, more local, and lower-energy form. In short, behavior was shaken, but the structure carrying behavior largely remained in place. That is why, when the crisis loosened, people returned not only to their old ideas, but to their old life arrangement. The speed of the return came precisely from here. The fact that the IEA linked the 2021 emissions surge especially to economic recovery, coal use, and the strong rise in energy demand shows the determining power of the broader structure behind behavior (🔗).

A very important distinction appears here. Seeing that something is technically possible and making it socially permanent are not the same thing. The pandemic became proof that remote work, the reduction of unnecessary business travel, the fact that some meetings do not require flights, and the fact that many institutional rhythms are not actually compulsory are all possible. But that did not mean those rhythms would disappear by themselves. Because modern life is not merely the sum of individual preferences; it operates through layers such as lease contracts, office investments, professional hierarchies, managerial culture, urban planning, the timing of schools and care burdens, logistics contracts, and prestige codes. Crisis can suspend those layers; but it does not transform them. To transform them requires political decision, institutional redesign, and infrastructural change. Otherwise, calamity merely gives a lesson; the lesson itself does not become the new rule of life.

The second lesson of the pandemic appears precisely here. Crisis teaches, but does not save. It can show a society which behaviors can really flex, but if an order capable of turning this knowledge into permanent transformation has not been established, society slips back into its old groove at the first opportunity. That is why the 2020-2021 sequence is important not for optimism, but for sobriety. The knowledge that this means it can be done is very valuable; but it is not sufficient by itself. The problem is not that people are in principle closed to change. The problem is that when the institutions and infrastructures capable of carrying change are not established, temporary flexibilities are swallowed back again by old necessities. The pandemic made this reality visible on a historical scale.

X. The Gas Crisis: The Problem Is Not Only Mobility, but the Regime of Heating and Comfort

During the pandemic, most attention had been directed toward automobiles, flights, commuting, and public circulation. This was understandable; because the most visible contraction had occurred there. But the gas crisis that deepened in Europe in 2022 painfully showed how incomplete it is to confine the climate and energy problem only to the heading of transport. This time, at the heart of the problem lay not the automobile, but shelter and heating. How are homes heated, how much do buildings leak, how easily is hot water consumed, to what extent is industry dependent on which fuel, in which country does turning down the thermostat mean saving, and in which country does it mean direct loss of comfort? All at once, these became central questions. According to the International Energy Agency, the European Union’s natural gas demand fell by 55 billion cubic meters in 2022; this was approximately a 13 percent decline, that is, the harshest annual drop in history. The same assessment stated that behavior changes in the building sector and public campaigns alone contributed at least 7 billion cubic meters of savings, and that households lowered their average thermostat setting by approximately 0.6°C (🔗).

These data do not mean only that people became a little more careful. They show something more fundamental: the energy problem is embedded within the comfort standard of everyday life. A building’s wall, window, roof, boiler, hot water system, and insulation; the heating mode of markets, offices, and public buildings; the input on which industry relies; all of these stand at the very center of the climate issue. The gas crisis made this visible in an extremely harsh way. Because less carbon here did not mean only going less; it also meant heating otherwise, leaking less, living in a more efficient structure, and reducing dependency in industry. The problem suddenly began to look less like environmental morality than like building physics. This was not actually misleading; it merely showed the real ground of the matter more nakedly.

Europe’s high dependency on Russian gas accelerated this denuding even further. Gas prices and supply insecurity did not remain merely the problem of energy companies or governments; they directly became a problem of household budgets, winter comfort, and productive capacity. For precisely this reason, the IEA’s 10-point plan to reduce the European Union’s reliance on Russian gas thought behavior and infrastructure together: it drew a broad framework ranging from thermostat settings to building efficiency, from heat-pump installation to the acceleration of renewable sources (🔗). In other words, here, not for the first time but much more visibly, the following reality came to the surface: the energy transition is not only a matter of switching to cleaner sources on the production side; it is also a matter of establishing, on the consumption side, a material order that leaks less, is less wasteful, and is less dependent.

That is why the difference between the gas crisis and the pandemic is very important. The pandemic laid bare the movement side of behavior. The gas crisis laid bare the comfort side. In the pandemic, the question was how many offices really needed to be gone to every day. In the gas crisis, the question became how many buildings really needed to be heated to how many degrees, and why so much energy was going only to losses. In the pandemic, flights and automobiles suddenly dropped into the middle of the debate. In the gas crisis, radiators, insulation, windows, hot water, and boilers. Both were opening the same basic truth from different fronts: the energy use of modern society does not consist only of visible gestures of consumption; it is distributed across the everyday modes by which life is organized.

The instructive side of the gas crisis was also great for another reason. Some crises only force the curtailment of the present. Others also open to discussion how tomorrow must be built. The 2022 shock in Europe was closer to the second type. Because it turned into a question not only using less, but why one had to use so much in the first place. The rapid spread of heat pumps in Europe showed that high prices and supply anxiety did not remain limited to behavioral response; they also accelerated technical infrastructure investments. The IEA’s assessments concerning heat pumps clearly emphasize that European sales grew by roughly 35-40 percent in 2022, and that energy-security concerns also had an effect on this rise (🔗) (🔗). This was important, because for the first time a very broad public debate rose from the level of be more careful to the level of can we heat otherwise, can we build otherwise?

The conclusion that emerges from this is clear. The energy issue is not only an issue of automobiles and flights; it is an issue of shelter, heating, building quality, hot water, industrial dependency, and the standard of everyday comfort. The gas crisis harshly reminded us of this. That is why what became visible here was not only saving. What became truly visible was how deeply climate and energy are tied to the infrastructures considered most ordinary in everyday life. The meaning of less carbon is not only moving less; most of the time it is living and heating otherwise.

XI. The Knot of the Present: Effective Behaviors Are No Longer Unknown, They Are Only Taken Seriously at Moments of Crisis

When all these historical examples are placed side by side, what is seen most nakedly today is not a lack of knowledge, but a strange delay. Almost everyone now knows that fewer flights, less private car use, lowering speed, working from home, shifting to public transport, building efficiency, and reducing heat loss are effective. Energy institutions know this, states know this, companies know this, and broad segments of society also largely know it. Even so, in normal times the same measures are most often heard as too ambitious, too interventionist, or merely like environmental advice. When crisis arrives, however, the same things suddenly become serious, reasonable, even unavoidable. The knot of the present lies exactly here.

This can be seen most clearly in the IEA line of recent years. The 10-point plan to reduce oil demand published in 2022 calculated that certain behaviors, from lowering speed limits to working from home up to three days a week, from public transport to car sharing, could provide serious oil savings in a short time (🔗). In the major Middle East-related supply disruption of 2026, the same institution once again highlighted measures such as lowering speed, public transport, restricting private vehicle access on different days in large cities, reducing business travel, and working from home in order to ease pressure on consumers (🔗) (🔗). That is, what had appeared as experience in the 1970s, what became a matter of systematic calculation in 2022, returned again in 2026 as an emergency measure. The problem is not that it is unknown; it is that it is legitimized only within the language of crisis.

There is a very instructive repetition here. The fact that working from home three days a week could create daily oil savings amounting to hundreds of thousands of barrels, that lowering the speed limit by at least 10 km/h could provide serious short-term fuel reduction, and that shifting to public transport and rotationally limiting private vehicle access could have meaningful effects is now not merely general intuition, but a matter of institutional calculation (🔗) (🔗). This means that the real issue is not technical uncertainty. Which behaviors are effective is more or less known. But in non-crisis times those behaviors sound like a kind of moral lesson. At the moment of crisis, however, the same behaviors suddenly become rational, responsible, and capable of state implementation. The correctness of the behavior does not change; the context carrying it changes.

The political meaning of this difference is great. Because what comes to the surface here is what society is actually relating to. Most of the time, people react not to the question is driving less a good thing, but to the question why are they asking this of me now. The same proposal may feel like arbitrary interference in a period of oil abundance and relatively low prices; but in a period of supply shock and rapidly rising costs, it may sound like common sense. This does not mean people are hypocritical. On the contrary, it shows that behavior is always perceived together with material context. A measure acquires meaning not only through its abstract correctness, but through how it is positioned within everyday life.

The harsh conclusion that must emerge from this is the following: crisis is not producing new knowledge; it is forcibly making what is already known valid. Society has for a long time more or less known which behaviors are effective in relation to energy and emissions. The oil shocks taught this. The pandemic showed it. The gas crisis confirmed it from another front. Energy institutions tabulated it. Even so, this knowledge largely remains the knowledge of extraordinary periods. As if it counts as real knowledge only when crisis arrives, and once crisis passes it falls back again to the level of semi-moral advice. The knot of the present is exactly this. Humanity has learned what works; but it has not been able to turn that knowledge into the organizing principle of normal life.

XII. The Breaking Point: So the Problem Is Not a Lack of Knowledge, but the Wrong Organization of Normal Life

All the examples lead to the same place. The essential problem before society is no longer not knowing which behaviors reduce emissions. It has long been known that flying less, using private cars less, shifting to trains over short distances, lowering speed limits, working remotely, living in buildings that lose less heat, switching to heat pumps, and establishing energy-efficient systems are effective. Despite this, why do these still appear serious only at moments of crisis? Because the real problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the wrong organization of normal life.

In a society, asking why do people not fly less is, most of the time, the wrong question. The real question is why strong, cheap, and fast rail networks are so limited. The International Energy Agency defines rail as one of the lowest-emission forms of passenger transport and emphasizes that greater modal shift over short and medium distance will be critical in reducing emissions (🔗). That is why it is no accident that in some European countries restrictions on short-haul flights are being discussed or implemented when alternative rail is possible; institutions are beginning to admit that instead of telling the individual be a better person, they have to change the regime of movement (🔗). This means that the matter is as much about infrastructure making a certain choice easier as it is about the will of the individual.

The same is true for the automobile. Asking why do people not give up the car also explains nothing by itself. If cities have been built in such a way as to stretch the distance between housing and work, if care labor has been scattered across dispersed spaces, if public transport is inadequate, if pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure is weak, giving up the car is experienced not as moral elevation but directly as a loss of time and life. The IEA’s assessments concerning road transport show that shifting to public transport and to less intensive automobile use can create important effects on oil demand (🔗). But this also means the following: the spread of the correct behavior depends not only on giving the correct advice, but on establishing an urban and institutional design that normalizes that behavior. The problem is not character, but architecture.

The same knot exists with regard to heating. Asking why do people not heat less is misleading in many cases. Because in a poor building stock, turning down the thermostat most often means directly being cold. In a well-insulated, efficient building, by contrast, the same setting may mean only giving up wastefulness. The acceleration in the turn toward heat pumps and efficiency investments after high gas prices in Europe is important for precisely this reason; not because people suddenly became more virtuous, but because the need for technical transformation became apparent once they saw how fragile and expensive the existing structure was (🔗) (🔗). This means that here too the issue is, before consciousness, building physics. Within a wrongly built structure, correct behavior most often appears only as greater deprivation.

The example of remote work confirms the same truth from another side. The pandemic proved on a large scale that this is technically possible. Despite this, the rapid return of pressure to go back to the office in many sectors shows that the matter has already gone far beyond the level of is it possible or not. The question is now not technical, but institutional. Why does what has been seen to be possible not become normal? Because the work regime, managerial culture, office investments, and prestige codes have been established otherwise. That is, what is lacking here too is not knowledge, but a social design capable of turning that knowledge into the constitutive principle of everyday life.

At this point, the issue of energy and politics must be seen not only in the field of intentions, but in the field of flows. This is why the emphasis on corridors, chains, transmission, and circulation that insistently comes to the fore in Yersiz Şeyler is illuminating. The basic intuition there is that major crises are not lived only at the level of high politics; they flow from contracts to stocks, from stocks to production decisions, from production decisions to truck routes, and from there to the kitchen table. Missile, strait, tanker, insurance, depot, greenhouse, truck, and supermarket shelf are parts of the same material assemblage; when war and energy crises target this assemblage itself, the whole weave of everyday life changes (🔗). The deficiency of the climate debate also most often appears here: it tells people what they ought to think, but speaks less about within which corridors and dependencies life is established.

Seen in this way, the breaking point is extremely clear. The problem is not that people are not sufficiently conscious. The problem is that correct behavior is still expensive, burdensome, slow, difficult, or privileged. If correct behavior appears reasonable only at the moment of calamity, this shows not so much that society is morally deficient as that it is materially built wrongly. Knowledge is not lacking; what is lacking is the will to embed that knowledge into the infrastructure of normal times. Without changing the organization of normal life, people will not live with less carbon merely through greater guilt. On the contrary, the only way to understand why correct behavior appears possible only at the moment of calamity is to begin changing how everyday life is built.

XIII. Why Does Backlash Happen? Because the Cost Is Visible, While Justice Remains Invisible

To understand why climate actions so often backfire, one must first see correctly what people are reacting to. The source of the reaction is most often not direct hostility to nature or denial of science. It is something more ordinary, more everyday, and more material. What people encounter is most often expensive transport, expensive heating, new obligations, new prohibitions, a daily life that functions with greater difficulty, a higher bill, and a more complicated calculation of subsistence. And when, on top of all this, a tone is added that speaks of these things as though they were a lesson directed at people who are morally lower, anger easily slips away from its real target. Because people first live what strikes them in their own lives. Before the abstract truth about the future of the planet, they feel the bus timetable, the rent increase, the natural gas bill, the fuel price, and the workload.

It is precisely in this broken link that the basis of backlash lies. The cost is visible, while justice most often remains invisible. Even if people accept that a measure may be technically correct, they ask at the same time the following question: why is the burden of this once again being written into my life? Why heating again, why transport again, why household expense again, why everyday comfort and the calculation of time again? If the great constructors of the problem, that is, the gigantic infrastructure of the energy system, the regime of global transport, heavy industry, wealthy consumption clusters, and high-emission forms of production, remain in place, while the behavioral adjustment of ordinary households is constantly demanded, people most often grow angry not at the environment, but at this translation. At that moment, climate politics begins to appear not as a project of common transformation, but as a one-sided demand for discipline.

For that reason, the form of protest, however justified it may be, becomes as decisive as the content. The blocking of a road can directly turn the anger of people already squeezed by work, hospital, school, care, and the anxiety of keeping up in daily life toward the protester. The actions on the A12 motorway in the Netherlands are highly instructive in this regard. On the one hand, a strong political objection to fossil-fuel incentives was established; on the other hand, because of the form of road-blocking, police intervention, mass detentions, and intense social debate emerged; Reuters reported in 2024 that in the recurring actions around the A12, hundreds of people were detained and that the persistence of the protest especially on the prohibited motorway line intensified the conflict (🔗) (Reuters). The issue here was not that people were necessarily defending fossil-fuel support. The issue was that the form of action that interrupted everyday life directed anger not toward the system, but toward the nearer and more visible target.

A similar tension can also be seen in actions in societies where environmental discipline is already strong. When the gap between the desire to do something for the environment and the constant demand for still more sacrifice in the name of the environment widens, guilt easily turns into resentment. An analysis of the A12 protests described precisely this paradox: even in a society where recycling, public transport, bottle return, and environmental regularity are ordinary, once the demand expands toward infinity, environmental responsibility can turn into a pressure of the superego; thus people react not to the reality of climate, but to the way this reality returns to them constantly as debt and inadequacy (🔗).

A very common mistake is made here: reading social reaction only as unconsciousness or malice. Yet most often what exists is a dispersed sense of justice. Technical correctness does not produce political legitimacy. No matter how correct a measure may be, if it does not give convincing answers to the questions of who will pay how much, who will be protected how much, who will be blamed how much, and who will remain exempt how much, that measure begins to look to people not like a solution, but like a punishment. Climate politics can backfire for precisely this reason. Because a part of the public hardens not by saying there is no climate, but by saying why is the cost of the problem once again being billed to me. The real motor of the problem operates here.

XIV. The Most Critical Distinction: Not Praising Calamity, but Taking Seriously the Truth That Calamity Reveals

When one says one calamity is better than a thousand admonitions, the greatest danger is that this will be read as though it were praise for disaster. Yet what must be defended here is not disaster itself, but the truth that disaster forcibly makes visible. Crises are not good. They impoverish, create fear, deepen inequality, and sometimes leave permanent wounds. An oil shock, a pandemic, a financial collapse, or a gas bottleneck cannot be presented to society as desirable teachers. But at the same time, to learn nothing from them would be another form of blindness. Because dependencies that remain very abstract in normal times become visible with great harshness only at such moments.

The pandemic did this very clearly. It became visible that many journeys, meetings, and office presences long thought compulsory were in fact conditional. The study in Nature showed that in the spring of 2020 daily global CO2 emissions fell at some moments by approximately 17 percent and that a large part of this resulted from the sudden contraction in surface transport (🔗) (IEA). This does not make the pandemic a good social model. No one can defend closures, illness, death, or compulsory isolation. But what the pandemic showed is still very valuable: that many behaviors are not impossible, but only appear compulsory within a certain institutional order.

The gas crisis, similarly, but from another front, was instructive. The fact that natural gas demand in the European Union fell by approximately 13 percent in one year, that significant savings were achieved through campaigns and behavior changes in the building sector, forcefully demonstrated to everyone that thermostat settings and building efficiency are directly questions of energy politics (🔗) (IEA). This too does not make the gas crisis desirable. But it makes the following truth visible: the standard of comfort is not natural; it depends on a certain abundance of energy and certain technical infrastructures. The same thing had also emerged in the oil shocks of the 1970s. While freedom of movement was lived as though it were a natural right, once fuel supply tightened, speed limits, car-free days, and restrictions suddenly became ordinary (🔗) (IEA).

The fine but vital distinction here is this: what is not defended as a model is nevertheless valuable as knowledge. Disaster itself is not defended; but the structural nakedness that disaster exposes must be taken seriously. Because crises do what many reports and campaigns cannot do: they make visible which behavior can really be cut, which sphere is truly indispensable, which comfort is in fact high-cost, which institution produces unnecessary movement, which building functions like an energy sieve. Learning from this is not wishing for disaster. On the contrary, it is understanding better what must be transformed before disaster arrives.

When this distinction is not made, two errors arise. The first is to romanticize crises. To think as though, without major compressions, society will never change, and therefore crises are a kind of necessary discipline, is blinding both politically and humanly. The second is its opposite: not taking seriously everything crises show, simply because it appears in a painful context. This too is another kind of wastefulness. Because calamity shows with full clarity how far social structure can flex and at which knots it truly breaks. What must be taken seriously is not the pain of disaster, but the structural truth that disaster forcibly makes visible.

XV. The Line of Exit: Institution, Infrastructure, and Livable Transformation Instead of Guilt

The only serious path that emerges from all these historical lessons is not to make people feel more guilty, but to make correct behavior easy, reasonable, and livable outside the moment of crisis as well. Because what has been seen up to now is clear. It is already known that headings such as fewer flights, fewer automobiles, more efficient heating, less business travel, stronger public transport, and better building stock are effective. The problem is that for most people these are still expensive, slow, burdensome, uncertain, or class-bound and inaccessible. Then the way out passes not through more moral pressure, but through the material reconstitution of everyday life.

Its counterpart on the side of transport is extremely concrete. If fewer flights over short and medium distances are desired, the counterpart of this is not merely to tell people not to fly; it is to establish a strong, fast, cheap, and reliable rail network. The International Energy Agency defines rail as one of the lowest-emission forms of transport and emphasizes the critical importance of shifting passenger transport to rail systems (🔗) (IEA). Likewise, if less private car use is desired, this is possible only with an urban structure that makes public transport cheaper, makes walking and cycling safe, does not sever housing from work, and does not compel people into the automobile. Otherwise, giving up the automobile is experienced not as an environmental choice, but like a punishment of time and labor.

The same logic applies on the side of heating and buildings. If less energy loss is desired, the counterpart of this is not to keep advising people constantly to turn down the thermostat, but to spread technical transformations such as insulation, building renovation, efficient heating systems, and heat pumps. The IEA’s assessments of heat pumps emphasize that this technology is a rapidly growing critical tool both in terms of energy security and emissions reduction; the installations that accelerated in Europe after 2022 showed that behavior and infrastructure can change together (🔗) (🔗) (IEA). Here too the issue is the same: correct behavior requires not merely being more sacrificial, but living in a physical environment that leaks less and wastes less.

When viewed from the perspective of the work regime as well, the solution proceeds according to the same logic. The IEA clearly calculates that remote work, the hybrid model, and reducing unnecessary business travel can provide serious energy and oil savings; in the 2022 plan and in later assessments, significant daily savings potentials are listed through working from home several days a week (🔗) (🔗) (IEA). But this becomes permanent only if labor law, institutional criteria of prestige, and managerial culture change. Telling people one by one travel less is not the same thing as removing companies’ criteria of success and seriousness from an obsession with face-to-face presence and making them result-oriented. The way out is not to load more pressure onto the soul of the individual, but to re-establish the flow of life in such a way that it demands less energy.

That is why real transformation begins not in narrating sacrifice more nobly, but in making correct behavior cheaper, faster, easier, and more accessible. When public transport is better, people use less automobile transport. When trains are stronger, short flights decrease. When the building stock is renewed, turning down the thermostat does not mean directly being cold. When work norms change, business travel decreases. In short, the way out is not moral exaltation, but material construction. What crises teach by force must be embedded into the infrastructure of normal life.

XVI. Conclusion: The Planet Is Protected Not by Admonition, but by the Reconstitution of Life

When all these historical examples and social backlashes are thought together, the judgment that remains is both harsh and plain. What changes people is most often not advice, but compression. But the conclusion that must be drawn from this is not to sanctify compression. The real conclusion is that politics has for years lingered too much in the wrong place. Too much conscience, too little order. Too much guilt, too little institutional design. Too many correct words, too little correct infrastructure. For a long time, the climate issue was spoken of as though it were the task of teaching people to be more careful, more modest, more measured. Yet throughout history, the great ruptures that truly displaced behavior were most often moments when not admonition, but the material texture of life was shaken.

In the 1970s, the oil shocks revealed that freedom of movement depended on fuel abundance. The financial crisis of 2008-09 showed that emissions depend not only on individual preferences, but also on the speed of the economic cycle. The pandemic of 2020 laid bare that many behavioral changes called impossible could become possible within a few weeks. The gas crisis of 2022 showed that the problem is not only automobiles and flights, but heating, building stock, and the regime of comfort. By 2026, it had become thoroughly visible that it is not that effective behaviors are unknown, but that they are taken seriously only in the language of crisis; the fact that the IEA again advanced measures such as lowering speed, working from home, public transport, and limiting vehicle use as emergency instruments openly confirms this (🔗) (🔗) (IEA).

The common line here is now sufficiently clear. Society largely knows what works. It is no secret that fewer flights, less private car use, more efficient buildings, less unnecessary business travel, stronger rail systems, and cities that support better public transport are effective. Even so, all of this is still heard in moments of crisis as compulsory reason, while in non-crisis times it is most often heard as a moral lesson. This once again confirms that the issue is not knowledge, but organization. People do not change because they are better people; they change when the material conditions of living otherwise are established and the conditions of living in the old way are shaken.

For that reason, the planet is not protected by admonition. The planet is protected by establishing shelter, transport, work, heating, production, and circulation otherwise. Crises reveal this truth harshly. Good politics, by contrast, is politics capable of institutionalizing what compression teaches by force without waiting for disaster. This is the real task. To inherit the knowledge of calamity, but not to make calamity itself into fate. Only then can correct behavior cease to be the temporary exception of extraordinary moments and become the ordinary logic of everyday life.

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Bir Musibet Bin Nasihatten İyidir | 🦋🤖 YERSİZ ŞEYLER says:

March 21, 2026 at 2:43 am

[…] (İngilizcesi, Almancası) […]

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Phantomoperand 👻🪸🐈‍⬛ | 🦋🤖 YERSİZ ŞEYLER says:

March 21, 2026 at 2:51 am

[…] Musibet Bin Nasihatten İyidir (playlist) / One Calamity Is Better Than a Thousand Admonitions / 1. 2. Aynı Düşüş, Aynı Anlam Değil3. Normalin […]

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Ein Unglück ist besser als tausend Ermahnungen – Žižekian Analysis says:

March 21, 2026 at 2:52 am

[…] (Türkisch, Englisch) […]

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Žižekian Analysis

The lion only leaps once!

One Calamity Is Better Than a Thousand Admonitions

Introduction: Strip the proverb of its status as a saying of fate and reconstruct it as a social diagnosis

I. Remove the climate issue from the category of moral problems: The subject is the regime of energy, movement, and comfort

II. Why does admonition remain weak? Because behavior leans on apparatuses before it leans on will

III. The regime of guilt: Why does climate discourse make even the most obedient feel inadequate?

IV. The first historical laboratory: The oil shocks of the 1970s showed that freedom of movement depended on fuel abundance

V. The Same Decline Does Not Mean the Same Meaning: Why is it misleading to reduce crises to a single emissions curve?

VI. The Harsh Lesson of Collapse: The Emissions Decline of the Early 1990s Was Not a Decline, but a Regime of Compulsory Contraction

VII. The Lesson of Stagnation: 2008-09 Was Not a Matter of Individual Morality, but of the Speed of the Economic Cycle

VIII. The Great Exposure: The 2020 Pandemic Opened Up the Naked Anatomy of Behavior

IX. The Second Lesson of the Pandemic: Teaching Is One Thing, Transforming Is Another

X. The Gas Crisis: The Problem Is Not Only Mobility, but the Regime of Heating and Comfort

XI. The Knot of the Present: Effective Behaviors Are No Longer Unknown, They Are Only Taken Seriously at Moments of Crisis

XII. The Breaking Point: So the Problem Is Not a Lack of Knowledge, but the Wrong Organization of Normal Life

XIII. Why Does Backlash Happen? Because the Cost Is Visible, While Justice Remains Invisible

XIV. The Most Critical Distinction: Not Praising Calamity, but Taking Seriously the Truth That Calamity Reveals

XV. The Line of Exit: Institution, Infrastructure, and Livable Transformation Instead of Guilt

XVI. Conclusion: The Planet Is Protected Not by Admonition, but by the Reconstitution of Life

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One Calamity Is Better Than a Thousand Admonitions

Introduction: Strip the proverb of its status as a saying of fate and reconstruct it as a social diagnosis

I. Remove the climate issue from the category of moral problems: The subject is the regime of energy, movement, and comfort

II. Why does admonition remain weak? Because behavior leans on apparatuses before it leans on will

III. The regime of guilt: Why does climate discourse make even the most obedient feel inadequate?

IV. The first historical laboratory: The oil shocks of the 1970s showed that freedom of movement depended on fuel abundance

V. The Same Decline Does Not Mean the Same Meaning: Why is it misleading to reduce crises to a single emissions curve?

VI. The Harsh Lesson of Collapse: The Emissions Decline of the Early 1990s Was Not a Decline, but a Regime of Compulsory Contraction

VII. The Lesson of Stagnation: 2008-09 Was Not a Matter of Individual Morality, but of the Speed of the Economic Cycle

VIII. The Great Exposure: The 2020 Pandemic Opened Up the Naked Anatomy of Behavior

IX. The Second Lesson of the Pandemic: Teaching Is One Thing, Transforming Is Another

X. The Gas Crisis: The Problem Is Not Only Mobility, but the Regime of Heating and Comfort

XI. The Knot of the Present: Effective Behaviors Are No Longer Unknown, They Are Only Taken Seriously at Moments of Crisis

XII. The Breaking Point: So the Problem Is Not a Lack of Knowledge, but the Wrong Organization of Normal Life

XIII. Why Does Backlash Happen? Because the Cost Is Visible, While Justice Remains Invisible

XIV. The Most Critical Distinction: Not Praising Calamity, but Taking Seriously the Truth That Calamity Reveals

XV. The Line of Exit: Institution, Infrastructure, and Livable Transformation Instead of Guilt

XVI. Conclusion: The Planet Is Protected Not by Admonition, but by the Reconstitution of Life

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