More To Say...

Arguing with a corrupt fire-chief about his crimes while the house is burning.

There’s More To Say

This morning I posted a rant about the misappropriation of Charlie Kirk as a paragon of Christian virtue, while ignoring his Christian Nationalism, Racism, Xenophobia and Mysogynism. I thought it necessary to point out that he, like JD Vance, was a t creation of right-wing billionaires who funded his career and organization Turning Point and made him the National Figure he became. They did that expressly to create a vehicle to counter the liberalism of college students, and were lucky enough to find a charismatic and articulate man to serve as a political ice-breaker. I stand by all that.

Having said that, my former piece is like arguing with a corrupt fire-chief about his crimes while the house is burning. Unsaid in all this is the critical issue of Global Warming and the total inadequacy or capitalism to address it.

I recommend to any and all Trevor Jackson’s important article, “How to Blow Up a Planet” in the September 25, New York Review of Books. I initially appreciated it for the drubbing he gave Ezra “Reagan”-Kline’s book Abundance and for its glib assertions that nuclear power and “deregulation” will make our future bright again. Far more important in the article, is the review of Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. In that book, environmental thinker Mark Fisher declares that our future has been foreclosed; that we’ve been evicted from it by what he calls ‘Capitalist realism’—the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative.

The President was at the UN today instructing the world that their pursuit of Green energy was ruining their countries. He told them they needed coal and oil “to be great again.” In Overshoot we learn that by 2021 we’ve already reached 1.1C of global warming—all the floods, hurricanes, and global suffering, and yet , since then, we’ve generated the greatest surge in absolute emissions(which directly determines the rate of warming) in recorded history. The five largest oil companies and banks have invested over $5 trillion in fossil fuel projects and global construction of pipelines and gas terminals. Despite all the science and catastrophes, there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines and 485 new coal power plants. They are all poised to destroy the future.

Reducing emiissions on a scale and at a speed that could keep global warming below 1.5 degrees C would require companies to lose billions of dollars in already-made fixed capital investments—those pipelines, mines, machinery and decades of research. Having recognized that there wasn’t going to be any meaningful mitigation of carbon emissions and that all climate targets were unreachable, the group Malm and Carton call “the dominant classes” began to argue that it was actually permissible to overshoot the targets because it would be easier in the future to do a lot of mitigation very quickly, thanks to technological progress.

…as if those technological events would have no shadow-sides, no deleterious effects.

Because this is pathological horseshit, Malm and Carton conclude that there must be a full-scale revolution to achieve these goals. However, because revolution is impossible to countenance..the problem must be solved by markets and technologies, which the authors refer to as “an elite psychopathology…not mere moral madness: it is madness without gualifier; madness in the original, clinical sense of the term. Later they quote from a 2020 report by JP Morgan economists:

“We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened…The earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive”

JP Morgan is the top funder of fossil fuel industries in the world. And I challenge any reader of this piece to find any of this information on any of the major news sources. Could it be because they are wholly owned by the corporate sector which is the primary agent of planetary destruction? Or should I just go “F**ck myself?”