CLIMATE URGENCY, EMERGENCY ANTHOLOGY
#2, October 30, 2024
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
What’s at Stake: “Emergency”
became consensus five years ago. Before then, a warming world was
comfortingly called “global warming” or
“climate change.” Then “climate catastrophe” or “climate
calamity,” certainly not comforting labels, were recognized. And now “climate emergency” takes precedence,
or “chaos,”at least among scientists and the well informed populace. Two examples from 2019: Brenda Looper in her
column in the mainstream newspaper Northwest
Arkansas Democrat Gazette (“Weighty Words,” 12-11-19, 7B) wrote about this
rapid evolution of the language used to describe the increase of atmospheric
temperature and its consequences. The Oxford Dictionary’s “Word of the Year
for 2019” is “climate emergency.“ Example
from 10-29-2024: an early morning mainstream news station reported that a new
scientific report on the Paris Agreement’s limit at 1.5 degrees increase of
global temperature had been breached, 2 degrees was likely, and 3 degrees is
now possible. The truth has emerged. Now what will our criminal advocates and
rationalizers of fossil fuels and our irresponsible leaders do? Can we look to The People? --Dick
From hieroglyphic
stairway by Drew Dellinger
What Did You Do?
it’s 3:23 in the
morning
and I’m awake
because my great great
grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great
grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while
the planet was plundered?
what did you do when
the earth was unraveling?
surely you did
something
when the seasons
started failing?
as the mammals,
reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the
streets with protest
when democracy was
stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
Contents
2024
Jill
Stein or Kamala Harris
2024 State of the Climate Report
Climate and Capitalism 10-29-24
2022
PBS:
Earth Emergency. Climate Change: The Facts. Extinction: the Facts.
Tina
Landis. “Social Planning” v. “UN Climate
Report.”
2021
IPCC 6th Assessment Report.
Mark Schuller. Humanity’s Last Stand.
John B. Foster, et al. “Against Doomsday Scenarios” (despite multiple cataclysmic
convergences)
Jayati Ghosh. “Apocalypse or Cooperation?”
Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch. “Our
Not-so-slow-motion Apocalypse.”
Tom Hartmann. “Is That Civilization-Ending
Climate….”
Andreas Malm. “Because Nothing Else Has
Worked,” How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
2019
Ecowatch. “20 Reasons Why 2019 Gave Us
Hope.”
OMNI Climate Emergency Anthology #1, Dec. 17, 2019.
Sources
What’s
the point of the Sources? Why is
the US population still passive regarding the climate catastrophe? Are the majority still ignorant? Or too feebly informed for action? And is that because they do not read
magazines or see television programs that insistently and stringently present climate
realities? Not one of my sources is one
of the corporate mainstream media read and watched by the majority of the
population. Not one leads to fun and
escape from reality, The arc of history
leads to crisis, study, thought, and
action.
BioScience
Climate and Capitalism
Green Left
Independent Media Institute
IPCC
La Progressive Newsletter
Liberation
Monthly Review
mronline.org
Thomas Neuberger
Project Syndicate
PBS
Rolling Stone
Rutgers UP (Mark Schuller)
Tom Dispatch
Verso Books (Andreas Malm)
TEXTS
What follows is a miscellany of writings about what the UN
Secretary-General called the “defining issue of our time,” now widely and
increasingly labeled catastrophe, calamity, emergency, or chaos. I hope to follow soon with a timeline.
2024
JILL STEIN
Campaign climate statement
From record heat waves and wildfires to
devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, the warning signs are clear: we
must take decisive action now to fight runaway global heating and prevent the
worst-case scenario of climate collapse. We need a Green New Deal with
massive investment in green jobs, industries, and technologies to revitalize
the American economy, improve our quality of life, protect our planet and
safeguard our children’s future.
KAMALA HARRIS
[I couldn’t find her campaign climate policy statement]. From an article in Rolling Stone Oct.
29, 2024 by Jeff Goodell, “The
Case for Kamala Harris in a Burning World” contrasting her to Trump.
. . .SINCE SHE BEGAN her presidential campaign in July, Harris has
not spoken forcefully about the risks of life on a super-heated planet. When
pressed about it, she mentions that she cast the tie-breaking vote in the
Senate for President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provided
about $370 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below their
2005 levels by the end of this decade. But Harris has not said much about how
she will build on the success of IRA if she wins. Nor does she talk much about
the astounding fact that clean energy jobs grew at more than twice the rate of the overall economy in 2023.
By the end of last year, there were over half a million jobs in wind, solar,
and energy storage in the United States.
That said, Harris’s record on climate is strong. She has called
climate change “an existential threat.” As California attorney general, she
prosecuted oil companies for environmental violations. During her short-lived
2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, she released a $10 trillion
climate plan that called for investing in renewable energy, holding polluters
accountable, helping communities affected by climate change, and protecting
natural resources. As vice president, she announced $1 billion in grants for
states to address flooding and extreme heat exacerbated by climate change. “The
science is clear,” she said. “Extreme weather will only get worse, and the
climate crisis will only accelerate.’’
Why has she been so soft-spoken about it during the campaign? In a
word, Pennsylvania. Clearly, Harris has made the calculation that talking too
bluntly about climate risk or clean energy might imperil her standing with
voters in that all-important swing state. But how how many voters are we
talking about, really? Trump claims 500,000 workers in the state are employed by fracking, but
that is (of course) bullshit. Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher at the Ohio
River Valley Institute, a think tank in Pennsylvania, calculates that only 18,636 jobs in the state can be
directly attributed to fracking. If you count indirect jobs, the overall job
figure would be about 55,000 — about one-tenth of Trump’s number.
Clean energy, on the other hand, employs nearly 70,000 workers in the state and is growing 50 percent
faster than the rest of Pennsylvania’s economy.
It’s a tricky line for Harris to walk, to be sure. Especially
considering the fact that Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by only 80,555 votes.
But by speaking softly about the climate crisis and the promise of
clean energy, Harris risks alienating young voters who understand very well the
perils of life in a rapidly-warming world. . . . https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/case-kamala-harris-climate-election-2024-1235145639/
“Climate
crisis enters ‘critical and unpredictable new phase’.” : Climate & Capitalism October 9, 2024. Editor.
mronline.org
Scientists
warn: ‘The future of humanity hangs in the balance.’
Originally published: Climate
& Capitalism on October 9, 2024 by The 2024 State of the Climate
Report (more by Climate & Capitalism) (Posted Oct 12, 2024).
Climate Change, EnvironmentGlobalNewswireChristopher Wolf, Fossil Fuels, Greenhouse Gas, William Ripple
This blunt warning
opens The 2024 State of the Climate
Report published
yesterday in the journal BioScience.
We are on the brink of
an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.
Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a
critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.
An international
coalition of scientists headed by William Ripple and Christopher Wolf of Oregon
State University tracks 35 planetary vital signs. This year, 25 of those
indicators are at record extremes. These graphs illustrate some of the
climate-related trends since 1980:
Climate related time
series, 1980-2024. (Photo: Bioscience, October 8, 2024)
The three hottest days
ever came in July 2024, and fossil fuel emissions are at an all-time high. The
annual consumption of fossil fuels climbed by 1.5% in 2023, mainly because of
big jumps in coal (1.6%) and oil use (2.5%).
The Earth’s average
surface temperature is at an all-time high. Ocean acidity and heat content, as
well as average global sea level, are at record extremes. Greenland ice mass,
Antarctica ice mass and average glacier thickness are at all-time lows.
The report shows that
annual tree cover loss globally rose from 22.8 million hectares in 2022 to 28.3
million in 2023. Based on global year-to-date averages, the concentrations of
atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane are at all-time highs.
The past year saw
multiple climate-related disasters, including a series of heat waves across
Asia that killed more than a thousand people and led to temperatures reaching
50°C (122°F) in parts of India. Climate change has already displaced millions
of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even
billions.
The
report, which is subtitled Perilous times on planet Earth, concludes:
We must urgently
reduce ecological overshoot and pursue immediate large-scale climate change
mitigation and adaptation to limit near-term damage. Only through decisive
action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering, and
ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The
future of humanity hangs in the balance.
So why is
the public so unresponsive? Not only
forests, but whole towns are burning.
The oceans are tearing away the shoreline. Why is the public so unreactive?
CLIMATE & CAPITALISM
10-29-24
The
deadly environmental toll of superyachts and private jets Every week, the ultra-rich emit more
greenhouse gas than the poorest people produce in a lifetime Source
Other recent articles
... COP or CON?
Big Conservation corrupts biodiversity protection
Basic
physics explains why storms are getting stronger
Ubiquitous
plastic: A deadly threat to human health
How
climate change destroyed a tar sands boomtown
2022
PBS DEPICTS CLIMATE
REALITY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
These 3 programs alone should motivate all who care about
the planet and our civilization to become a subscribing member of PBS. Did you know that PBS is on the list for
elimination by the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 under Donald Trump.
PBS: 3 CLIMATE history docs back to back
Dec. 29 and 30, 2022:
“Earth
Emergency” | PBS 4-20-22 https://www.pbs.org › show ›
earth-emergency
Climate Change: The Facts
Extinction: the Facts
“Earth Emergency.” PBS
4-20-22 https://www.pbs.org ›
show › earth-emergency From PBS: This
revealing film examines how human activity is setting off dangerous warming
loops that are pushing the climate to a point of no return - and what we need
to do to stop them. With captivating illustrations, stunning footage and
interviews with leading climate scientists as well as support from Greta
Thunberg, "Earth Emergency" adds the missing piece of the climate
puzzle. Dick’s commentary: The film, which premiered Dec. 2021,
despite its brevity seems to cover feedback loops comprehensively and justifies
its title. Everyone should see it. It gives us the scarifying reality of the
Anthropocene; we know what to do to meet the crisis; we have lacked only the
spine. The film ends emphatically with
moral appeals from the Dalai Lama and Greta Thunberg to respect the planet and
get to work to save it and our civilization.
Of course, we have known what the
film so brilliantly summarizes for several decades (as the film shows);
everyone who has followed the IPCC reports and the commentary has known that
our leaders have lacked the will for all those decades. Its conclusion is resoundingly true and
equally familiar to everyone who has followed those reports even
sporadically. We know we need leaders
who understand the urgency; we know we must not only vote for them but campaign
for and finance them. Yet we do not.
But the film could have been
better. Two important factors of the
“puzzle” are missing: population growth
and the criminal profiteers.
Throughout the film, as feedback loops are illustrated over and over, I
expected some mention of the burgeoning population behind those loops. But not so.
Likewise, from the very first feedback loop, I anticipated some mention,
at least, of the industrial and media criminals who so successfully for so long
deluded and delayed public awareness and action, still happening effective
today. But nothing.
But this is only an hour-long film. What it does it does splendidly. And it is sufficiently complemented by a
2-Part documentary on Big Oil. “The
Power of Big Oil, Part I” was shown the same night as “Earth Emergency”,
countering the power of big money and lies with the power of remembering the
historical crimes against nature and its creatures and naming the
criminals. And Part II, “Extinction:
The Facts,” will be shown April 26 and 27.
And for us, elections are
approaching. Dick 4-21-22
Earth Emergency p
2m 24s
Earth
Emergency DVD - Shop PBS
https://shop.pbs.org ›
Science & Nature › Earth
Out of dozens of environmental feedback
loops, Earth Emergency focuses on four, explaining how warming
in forests, permafrost, the atmosphere, and the poles’ $19.99
[I couldn’t open the file 6-25-23, OR 10-29-24!] ]
Earth Emergency (TV Movie 2021) - IMDb
https://www.imdb.com ›
title Earth Emergency: Directed by Susan Gray. With The Dalai Lama,
Richard Gere, Greta Thunberg. Told by leading climate scientists, Earth Emergency examines ...
Rating: 6.1/10 · 76 votes
“Socialist planning could reverse sobering findings in
new UN climate report.” Editor. Mronline.org
(3-12-22)
Originally published: Liberation on March 3, 2022 by
Tina Landis (more by Liberation) | (Posted Mar 11,
2022)’ Capitalism, Climate
Change, Environment, StrategyUnited StatesNewswire
The latest UN
Climate Report [IPCC] on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability released Feb. 28 once
again urges immediate action and outlines the catastrophic effects that
humanity faces with the continued lack of meaningful action. Compiled by 270
researchers from 67 countries, it outlines the impacts that are already
unfolding and how these disasters will increase even if warming is limited to
the 1.5 Celsius temperature threshold above pre-industrial levels. [By October 2024 evidence has grown to
suggest that the 1.5 threshold has been exceeded, that 2. Celsius will also
soon, and 3. also unless drastic, culture-wide measures are taken. –D]
2021
Mronline.org
(8-17-21). The sixth report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) runs to nearly 4,000 pages.
The IPCC has tried to summarise its report as the ‘final opportunity’ to avoid
climate catastrophe.
Mark Schuller. Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global
Catastrophe. Rutgers UP, 2021. Dissects a wide range of interconnected problems—especially
climate change, ultra-right wing nationalism, global inequality—and “proposes
steps to avert total catastrophe.” [A
significant effort to inform our officials and The People of the convergence of
harmful social forces and how we can resist.
–D]
John Bellamy FosterJohn MolyneuxOwen McCormack. “Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now? “ Monthly Review
(Dec 01, 2021). https://monthlyreview.org/2021/12/01/against-doomsday-scenarios/
John Bellamy Foster: We should of course
avoid promoting “doomsday scenarios” in the sense of offering a fatalistic
worldview. In fact, the environmental movement in general and ecosocialism in
particular are all about combating the current trend toward ecological destruction.
As UN general secretary António Guterres recently declared with respect to
climate change, it is now “code red for humanity.” This is not a doomsday
forecast but a call to action.
Still, the word catastrophe is scarcely adequate in the
present age of catastrophe capitalism. Catastrophes are now ubiquitous, since
extending to the scale of the planet itself. We are experiencing throughout the
globe a series of extreme weather events due in large part to climate change,
each of which rank as “catastrophic” by historical precedents, sometimes lying
outside the range of what was previously thought to be physically possible. The
extreme conditions experienced this summer in the Northern Hemisphere—including
floods in Europe; Hurricane Ida in the United States, which not only devastated
New Orleans, but also ended up killing people in floods in New York and New
Jersey; and the worsening drought and wildfires in California and the entire Pacific
Coast of the United States—clearly represent something qualitatively new.
The latest report of
the IPCC, its Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science
Basis, explains that the various climatic and extreme weather
events will tend to compound, as in the case of droughts, desertification
(dustbowlification), soil erosion, wildfires, and weakening monsoons, on the
one hand, and a melting cryosphere, sea level rise, megastorms, and flooding,
on the other—thereby intensifying and extending these catastrophic events,
which will appear to come from everywhere at once. Moreover, the human
consequences go deeper with temperature increases diminishing world grain
production and putting strains on the world food supply; climate change
contributing, along with the destruction of ecosystems by agribusiness, to the
emergence of novel zoonoses, such as COVID-19 (along with numerous other health
hazards); whole populations in cities throughout the planet exposed to
unprecedented flooding; the prospect of climate refugees running into
the hundreds of millions; and numerous other equally dire consequences, imposed
on present and future generations.
The IPCC, which has a record of scientific reticence,
tells us that we will see in the next couple of decades, and indeed throughout
this century, growing cataclysms and a shift toward an Earth System that is
increasingly unsafe for humanity, even in the most optimistic
scenarios. . . . The point is that even in the most optimistic
scenario—which would require a global ecological revolution on the part of
humanity in order to be achieved, leading to carbon emissions peaking halfway
through this decade and net zero emissions being achieved by 2050—the overall
climate catastrophe facing humanity will be extremely dire.
The second most optimistic
scenario is one of staying below a 2°C increase (somewhere around
1.7°C). It too would require a global ecological revolution. The other three
scenarios offered by the IPCC are basically unthinkable, for which the word apocalyptic is appropriate. In fact, we are
currently headed toward the IPCC’s most apocalyptic scenario (SSP5-8.5), in
which global average temperatures this century would, in the “best estimate,”
rise by 4.4°C, which would, according to current scientific assessments, mean
the collapse of industrial civilization, raising questions of human survival.
In an ominous statement leaked from Part II of the Sixth Assessment Report, on “Impacts,” which will not
be published until February, the IPCC says that if humanity is driven into
extinction during the “sixth extinction” arising from anthropogenic causes,
evolution will not bring the human species back.
The trouble is that if we go beyond a 1.5°C increase, and
especially beyond a 2°C increase, more and more climate feedback mechanisms,
such as the loss of arctic ice and thus the weakening of the albedo effect (the
earth’s reflectivity), the release of methane and carbon dioxide from the
melting tundra, the burning of the Amazon, and the degradation of the ocean as
a climate sink will compound the climate problem and create an irreversible
situation, increasing the possibility of runaway climate change that would in
effect feed on itself, to the extent that the very existence of humanity would
be in question.
There is still a
possibility of avoiding absolutely catastrophic climate change on the level
that would threaten human existence altogether. But to accomplish this would
require revolutionary changes in social relations, as well as in technology and
ways of living. Such a revolution would need to begin within the capitalist system but would lead beyond
capital. There is no other way. As Karl Marx indicated, the struggle against
capitalism is not simply about human freedom, it is also about human survival.
I have a lot of respect
for Michael Mann’s work on climate change and his fight against the absolute
climate denialism of the right. . . .There is no doubt that Mann knows the
science well, and he is worth paying attention to in that respect. But he seems
to have no understanding whatsoever of the existing social relations of
production of capitalism, leading him to dismiss as mere “doomsayers” everyone
who points to the extreme urgency of the world’s present plight, rooted in the
nature of our social system, and the need to change the social rules of the
game—as if they were giving up, simply by insisting on the need for radical
social change. He clearly believes there is some moderate, responsible,
enlightened approach based on the existing political-economic system and the
actions of established political elites, and to deviate from that is to be
“defeatist” and a “doomsayer”. . . . Continued:
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/12/01/against-doomsday-scenarios/
Jayati Ghosh. “Apocalypse or
cooperation?”
Mronline.org (8-15-21)
The
perfect storm of COVID-19 and climate change, and the resulting economic
damage, will most likely trigger much more social and political instability.
Although substantially increased international cooperation can still avert this
nightmarish scenario, the current state of global politics provides few grounds
for optimism.
Originally published: Project
Syndicate on August 12, 2021 (more
by Project Syndicate) |
Climate Change, Health, Political Economy, State RepressionIndiaNewswirecoronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic, vaccine
The Apocalypse is now.
That is the glaring message of the perfect storm of COVID-19 and climate change
that has now broken. The pandemic is unlikely to end for years, as the novel
coronavirus mutates into increasingly transmissible, drug-resistant variants.
And the climate catastrophe is no longer “impending” but playing out in real
time.
The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change–whose assessments predate the extreme climate events of the past
year–tells us that some drastic adverse climatic changes are now irreversible.
These will affect every region, as the recent heatwaves, wildfires, and floods
demonstrate. They will also severely damage many natural species, and adversely
affect the possibilities for and conditions of human life.
Keeping future global
warming to a manageable level (even if above the 2015 Paris climate agreement goal of 1.5°C) will require a massive
effort, involving sharp economic-policy reversals in every country. Major
changes in the global legal and economic architecture will be essential.
For its part, the
pandemic has devastated employment and livelihoods, pushing hundreds of
millions of people, mostly in the developing world, into poverty and hunger.
The International Labour Organization’s World Employment and Social
Outlook Trends 2021 shows
the extent of the damage in grinding detail. In 2020, the pandemic caused the
loss of nearly 9% of total global working hours, equivalent to 255 million
full-time jobs. This trend has continued in 2021, with working-hour losses
equivalent to 140 million full-time jobs in the first quarter and 127 million
jobs in the second quarter.
On current trends,
projected employment growth will be insufficient to make up for these losses.
So, even in 2022, total employment will be lower than in 2019 by the equivalent
of at least 23 million full-time jobs. This is despite relatively strong job growth
in the United States, meaning that labor-market deterioration in other, mostly
poorer, regions will be even sharper and more intense. Moreover, the “new” jobs
associated with recovery from the pandemic will be predominantly low-paying and
poor quality.
Meanwhile, economic
inequality between and within countries has reached levels that were
unimaginable in the already extremely unequal pre-pandemic world. While many
people face substantial income losses, declining access to basic needs, acute
deprivation, and hunger, a tiny minority of the extremely wealthy and a few
large corporations have grabbed even more income and wealth, thereby
multiplying their assets.
Today’s new forms of
conspicuous consumption–such as the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos,
recently spending $5.5 billion for a
four-minute ride around suborbital space–are literally out of this world. This amount
could instead have funded the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility
to provide vaccines to two billion people in poor countries, who are currently
unlikely to get them in the next two years.
This state of affairs
obviously cannot continue for long without major social tensions and civil
unrest. Indeed, the perfect storm we are beginning to experience will soon
include much more social and political instability. Rather than spurring a
progressive and transformative agenda, this could descend into ethnic, racial,
and other forms of conflicts, violence, and chaos. . . . MORE
[Ghosh failed to include wars in his “perfect storm” convergence. Not only virus pandemic and global warming
but unceasing wars (especially including nuclear holocaust) create a triadic
convergence for the perfect
storm. Analysis and assessment must
include all contexts. An excellent
recent book on US wars and culture of war is The United States of War by David Vine.–Dick]
Engelhardt. “Our Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse.”
“My Extreme World And
(Un)Welcome to It.” AUGUST 12, 2021 BY TOM ENGELHARDT. https://tomdispatch.com/my-extreme-world/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=2ad6079912-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-2ad6079912-308836209#more
. . .Lest you think that all of this
represents an anomaly of some sort, simply a bad year or two on a planet that
historically has gone from heat to ice and back again, think twice. A recent
report published in Nature Climate Change, for instance, suggests
that heat waves that could put the recent ones in the U.S. West and British
Columbia to shame are a certainty and especially likely for “highly populated regions in
North America, Europe, and China.” (Keep in mind that, a few years ago,
there was already a study suggesting that the North China plain with its 400
million inhabitants could essentially become uninhabitable by the end of this century due to heat waves too
powerful for human beings to survive!) Or as another recent study
suggested, reports the Guardian, “heatwaves that smash
previous records… would become two to seven times more likely in the next three
decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051-2080, unless carbon
emissions are immediately slashed.”
It turns out that, even to describe the new world we already live in, we may
need a new vocabulary. I mean, honestly, until the West Coast broiled and
burned from Los Angeles to British Columbia this summer, had you ever heard of,
no less used, the phrase “heat dome” before? I hadn’t, I can tell you that.
[US MAINSTREAM MEDIA] And by the way, there’s no question that
climate change in its ever more evident forms has finally made the mainstream
news in a major way. It’s no longer left to 350.org or Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement to highlight what’s happening to us on this planet.
It’s taken years, but in 2021 it’s finally become genuine news, even if not always with the truly fierce emphasis it deserves. The New
York Times, to give you an example, typically had a recent piece of
reportage (not an op-ed) by Shawn Hubler headlined “Is This the End of
Summer as We’ve Known It?”
(“The season Americans thought we understood — of playtime and ease, of a sun
we could trust, air we could breathe and a natural world that was, at worst,
indifferent — has become something else, something ominous and immense. This is
the summer we saw climate change merge from the abstract to the now, the summer
we realized that every summer from now on will be more like this than any
quaint memory of past summers.”) And the new IPCC report on how fast things are
indeed proceeding was front-page and front-screen news everywhere, as well it should
have been, given the research it was summing up.
My point here couldn’t be simpler: in heat and weather
terms, our world is not just going to become extreme in 20 years or 50 years or
as this century ends. It’s officially extreme right now. And here’s the
sad thing: I have no doubt that, no matter what I write in this piece, no
matter how up to date I am at this moment, by the time it appears it will
already be missing key climate stories and revelations. Within months, it could
look like ancient history.
Welcome, then, to our very own not-so-slow-motion
apocalypse. A friend of mine recently commented
to me that, for most of the first 30 years of his life, he always expected the
world to go nuclear. That was, of course, at the height of the Cold War
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And then, like so many others, he
stopped ducking and
covering. How could he have known
that, in those very years, the world was indeed beginning to get nuked, or
rather carbon-dioxided, methaned, greenhouse-gassed, even if in a slow-motion fashion? As it happens, this time there’s going to be no pretense
for any of us of truly ducking and covering.
It’s true, of course, that ducking
and covering was a fantasy of the Cold War era. After all, no matter where you
might have ducked and covered then — even the Air Force’s command center dug
into the heart of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado — you probably wouldn’t have been safe
from a full-scale nuclear conflict between the two superpowers of that moment,
or at least not from the world it would have left behind, a disaster barely
avoided in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. (Today, we know that, thanks to the
possibility of “nuclear winter,” even a regional nuclear conflict — say,
between India and Pakistan — could kill billions of us, by starvation if nothing else.)
In that context, I wasn’t surprised
when a home owner, facing his house, his possessions, and his car burned to a
crisp in Oregon’s devastating Bootleg Fire, described the carnage this way: “It looked like an atomic bomb.”
And, of course, so much worse is yet
to come. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a planet on which
the Amazon rain forest has already turned into a carbon emitter or one in which
the Gulf Stream collapses in a way that’s likely to deprive various parts of the
planet of key rainfall necessary to grow crops for billions of people, while
raising sea levels disastrously on the East Coast of this country. And that
just begins to enumerate the dangers involved, including the bizarre
possibility that much of Europe might be plunged into a — hold your hats (and
earmuffs) for this one — new ice age!
World War III
If this were indeed the beginning of
a world war (instead of a world warm), you know perfectly well that the United
States like so many other nations would, in the style of World War II,
instantly mobilize resources to fight it (or as a group of leading climate
scientists put it recently, we would “go big on climate” now). And
yet in this country (as in too many others), so little has indeed been
mobilized. Worse yet, here one of the two major parties, only recently in
control of the White House, supported the further exploitation of fossil fuels (and so the mass creation of greenhouse gases) big
time, as well as further exploration for yet more of them. Many congressional Republicans are still in the equivalent
of a state of staggering (not to say, stark raving mad) denial of what’s
underway. They are ready to pay nothing and raise no money to shut down the production of
greenhouse gases, no less create the genuinely green planet run on alternative
energy sources that would actually rein in what’s happening.
And criminal as that may have been, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and
crew were just aiding and abetting those that, years ago, I called “the biggest criminal enterprise in
history.” I was speaking of the executives of major fossil-fuel
companies who, as I said then, were and remain the true “terrarists” (and no, that’s
not a misspelling) of history. After all, their goal in hijacking all our lives
isn’t simply to destroy buildings like the World Trade Center, but to take down
the Earth (Terra) as we’ve known it. And don’t leave out the leaders of
countries like China still so disastrously intent on, for instance,
producing yet more coal-fired power. Those CEOs and their enablers have been
remarkably intent on quite literally committing terracide and, sadly enough, in
that — as has been made oh-so-clear in this disastrous summer — they’ve already
been remarkably successful.
Companies like ExxonMobil knew long before most of the rest of us the sort of damage and chaos
their products would someday cause and couldn’t have given less of a damn as
long as the mega-profits continued to flow in. (They would, in fact, invest
some of those profits in funding organizations that were promoting
climate-change denial.) Worse yet, as revealing comments by a senior Exxon
lobbyist recently made clear, they’re still at it, working hard to undermine President Biden’s relatively
modest green-energy plans in any way they can.
Thought about a certain way, even those of us who didn’t live in Greenville, California, are already in World War III. Many of us just don’t seem to know it yet. So welcome to my (and your) extreme world, not next month or next year or next decade or next century but right now. It’s a world of disaster worth mobilizing over if, that is, you care about the lives of all of us and particularly of the generations to come. Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II. Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War. See All Articles
Thom Hartmann. “Is That Civilization-Ending Climate Change
Knocking on Our Door?” La Progressive Newsletter (8-6-21).
. . .The insect apocalypse is only a leading indicator of what is already
a larger disaster for much of humanity and is now beginning to hit the wealthy
world (the US and Europe) hard.
Climate change from man-made global warming is
here in a way that even fossil fuel billionaires and their paid shills can no
longer deny. For the moment, we still — probably — have the ability to
determine how bad it’s going to hit us.
We long ago passed the point where we could
decide if we were going to let it make our lives miserable. We’re there.
In all probability we passed that tipping point several generations ago, when
fossil fuel companies and climate scientists were just arriving at a consensus
that it was not only real but could be deadly to human life on this
planet.
The response of the fossil fuel industry was
to follow the tobacco industry’s playbook and fund phony research, create
deceptive think tanks and push out highly paid front men and politicians to lie
to the American people and the world.
The question now is whether we’ll let our
current climate emergency get so far advanced it either wipes out the human
race along with most life on the planet; produces such chaos it tears apart
civilization; or merely disrupts human life so severely it crashes governments
around the world and stresses the ability of democracies like ours to continue
to function. . . .
[USA]In our own hemisphere, as farmland turns
into scrub desert across Central America, climate refugees (particularly from
hard-hit Guatemala)
began streaming north into Mexico and piling up on our southern
border.
In the western US states water is becoming so
scarce that much of our best agricultural land is endangered as well as the
ability of reservoirs and dams to produce the
electricity needed by
Nevada and Southern California; another climate refugee crisis in this country
as bad as or worse than the dustbowl of the 1930s is almost certainly just
around the corner.
Even if every country in the world stopped
emitting carbon right now, we’ve already gone long past that decision
point. This is the new normal, and it’s starting to really get underway
with 120 degree summers and wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, multi-mile-wide
tornadoes across the Midwest, and hurricanes, flooding and wild summer and
winter temperature swings from Florida to Texas, Kansas to New York.
We decided in the Reagan years, when the
science became clear but the fossil fuel giants covered it up and derided as
“doomsayers” the outspoken among our climate scientists, that we’d go this far…
and here we are.
Our current decision isn’t about whether there
will be millions of climate refugees in the Americas or whether every change of
seasons will bring thousands of deaths across North America; we’re already
there. Our current decision is whether we’ll let modern human
civilization as we know it continue or disintegrate.
This concept of civilization-ending climate
change now being just around the corner isn’t far-out or unprecedented; check
out the headline in today’s Washington Post: “The best place to ride
out a global societal collapse is New Zealand, study finds.”. . . .
Seven years ago, George and Leonardo DiCaprio,
Leila Connors, Earl Katz and I put together a short (11 minute) documentary
titled “Last Hours” about a worst-case scenario for our world, something that
may mimic “the great dying” of the Permian Mass Extinction about 250 million
years ago. Few animals larger than a dog survived that event; the
world rebooted itself leading to an entirely new type of dominant animal — the
dinosaurs. An error occurred. When Last Hours came out, a
few climate scientists took me to task for writing and co-narrating a documentary
that would “scare the hell” out of people. . . . .
There are still things we can do, from
reconfiguring our civilization to be more climate-resilient to immediately
cutting our carbon emissions to radical efforts to decarbonize our
atmosphere. But our options are narrowing day by day, and these will all
require worldwide cooperation (you can expect to hear a lot about this next
year when the next IPCC report comes out). But in the face of this climate emergency the
Republican Party continues to deny climate change is even
happening. . . .
Thom Hartmann Independent Media Institute
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
Andreas Malm. ‘Because Nothing Else
Has Worked’
Editor.
Mronline.org (7-30-1). Property
violence kills no one. And yet, to say it again, I'm not today advocating
property violence. I am, on the other hand, advocating a discussion of it. -
Thomas Neuburger.
Originally published: “Andreas
Malm: 'Because Nothing Else Has Worked' “ on July 26, 2021 by Thomas Neuburger (more by Andreas
Malm: 'Because Nothing Else Has Worked')
(Posted Jul 29, 2021). Climate Change, Movements, StrategyUnited StatesReview
“Property will cost us
the earth.” — Andreas Malm
While most people take the climate crisis seriously these
days–the headlines from the Northwest makes that almost impossible to
ignore–it’s very difficult to get most people to take the crisis seriously
enough to act effectively.
Could that be true
because most people realize that “acting effectively” means acting outside the
bounds of what most, these days, are prepared to do? And if so, why is that?
Consider this a
preliminary piece on the ideas of Andreas Malm, of whom I’ll write more
later. While I don’t (yet) advocate for his ideas, I strongly advocate
for discussing them.
Andreas Malm & Attacks on Property
The book of Malm’s
that people are talking about is the one pictured above [How to Blow Up a
Pipeline] ,though he’s written others of note. That book and its subject
are discussed at some length here:
·
“‘Property
Will Cost Us the Earth’: On Ecological Rage and Class Hatred”
also here: “No
Safe Options: A Conversation with Andreas Malm” and also here: Andreas
Malm: “The ecological transition will take us beyond capitalism as we know it” among many other places.
Even Ezra Klein, the
Alex B. Keaton of his generation, is getting
into the act. So let’s start with
Klein and his thoughts:
I spent the weekend
reading a book I wasn’t entirely comfortable being seen with in public. Andreas
Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline is only slightly inaptly named. You
won’t find, anywhere inside, instructions on sabotaging energy infrastructure.
A truer title would be “Why to Blow Up a Pipeline.” On this, Malm’s case is
straightforward: Because nothing else has worked.
We could stop now and
the whole point will have been made. Why blow up a pipeline? Because nothing
else has worked. . . . MORE
How
to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World ...
Verso
Books https://www.versobooks.com ›
products › 2649-how-to...
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate
scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement
to ...
2019
IT’S NOT ALL BAD NEWS
CLIMATE CRISIS
from ECOWATCH
20 Reasons Why 2019 Gave Us Climate Hope
The Climate Reality
Project,
Dec.
28, 2019
There's no question that 2019 was a wakeup call on
the climate crisis. Everything from
devastating extreme weather events and seeing the
planet's hottest
month in recorded history to increasingly dire scientific
reports coming out seemingly each week removed any doubt that this global
emergency is rapidly escalating. We could hardly blame someone for feeling
discouraged.
Here's what we must remember, though.
For all of the
unfortunate events that happened this year, we also saw an equal (and growing)
opposite reaction. People all around the world stepped up for the climate like
never before. What's more, technological
advancements and plain economics are making the solutions to the crisis more
feasible than ever. So, here are the top
reasons why 2019 left us with real climate hope! https://www.ecowatch.com/2019-climate-wins-2642492657.html
OMNI CLIMATE EMERGENCY ANTHOLOGY #1, Dec. 17, 2019.
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/12/omni-climate-emergency-newsletter.html
Moving from Climate Change, to Climate
Catastrophe, to Climate Emergency.
UN Climate report Nov. 26 Bleak
EU Parliament Declares Climate and
Environmental Emergency
Climate Emergency Campaign
Cities Passing Emergency Declarations
Strategies for Local Campaigns
National Declarations
Advice and Inspiration
Google Searches
World Scientists Declare Emergency and Plan for
Action
Colleges and Universities Declare Emergency and
Unveil Plan
And Full Alert: Warming and Nuclear War, Art
Hobson, “The Fate of the Earth”
END OMNI CLIMATE EMERGENCY ANTHOLOGY #2
