posted on
Jun 18, 2017
By Chris Hedges
We must embrace a despair that
unflinchingly acknowledges the bleak future that will be created by climate
change. We must see in any act of resistance, even if it appears futile, a
moral victory. African-Americans understand, in a way perhaps only the
oppressed can grasp, that our character and dignity will be measured by our
ability to name and resist the malignant forces that seem to hold us in a death
grip. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Our technology and science
will not save us. The future of humanity is now in peril. At best, we can mitigate
the crisis. We cannot avert it. We are fighting for our lives. If we do not
rapidly build militant movements of sustained revolt, movements willing to
break the law and attack the structures of the corporate state, we will join
the 99.9 percent of species that have vanished since life first appeared on
earth.
“In these circumstances
refusing to accept that we face a very unpleasant future becomes perverse,”
Clive Hamilton writes in “Requiem
for a Species.” “Denial requires a willful misreading of the science, a
romantic view of the ability of political institutions to respond, or faith in
divine intervention.”
Tens of millions of human
beings, especially in the global south, are being herded into the climate
furnaces for immolation. And we in the north are soon to follow. The earth’s
temperature has already risen by more than 1 degree Celsius since the late 19th century. And
it is almost certain to rise a few more degrees—even if we stop all carbon
emissions today. The last time the earth’s temperature rose 4 degrees, the
polar ice caps disappeared and the seas were hundreds of feet above their
current levels.
“[Climate change] is
interacting with two previously existing crises,” Christian Parenti, author of “Tropic
of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence,” told
me in an interview. “On the one hand, the legacy of neoliberal
economic restructuring has weakened states in the global south so they
don’t have the capacity to pave the roads, educate the population, to help
farmers who are in distress. On the other hand, much of the global south is
littered with cheap weapons and veterans of previous conflicts who know how to
use those cheap weapons. In this comes the extreme weather of climate change.
[In] states that have been systematically reduced to the point where they can’t
respond even if they wanted to, how do people adapt to climate change? How do
they adapt to the drought and floods? Very often, you pick up surplus weaponry.
You go after your neighbor’s cattle. Or you blame it on your neighbor’s ideology
or ethnicity. Underneath a lot of these ethnic and religious conflicts we see
there is a climate element.”
“The great danger in climate
change is that at a certain point [you will see] the collapse of natural
ecosystems, the dying of tropical forests, which are currently carbon
sinks—they pull CO2 out of the atmosphere,” Parenti said. “But if they die and
all that wood burns or rots, they can become net emitters of greenhouse gases.
There are the huge deposits of methane, frozen methane in the Arctic. These are already beginning
to come out.”
“The fear is that at a certain
point we cross the line and there’s a tipping point,” he said.
“The primary cause of greenhouse
gas emissions will become the breakdown of these natural systems, and then it
really is out of our control.”
We have the technology to
build alternative energy and food systems, but the fossil fuel industry, the
most powerful industry in the world, has blocked all meaningful attempts to
curb fossil fuel extraction and reduce energy consumption. And meat, dairy and
egg producers, responding to consumer demand, are responsible for the emission
of more greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector.
Livestock generates enormous amounts of methane, which is 86 times more
destructive than CO2. Livestock also produces 65 percent of nitrous oxide
resulting from human activity, a gas that has 296 times the “Global Warming Potential” of carbon dioxide. The massive
animal agriculture industry, like the fossil fuel industry, receives billions
of dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government. And corrupt and pliant
politicians who do the bidding of these industries receive millions in return
from lobbyists. It is legalized bribery. And it won’t stop until this political
system is destroyed.
The nonprofit Project Drawdown, which
compiles research from an international coalition of scientists, says that “a
plant-based diet may be the most effective way an individual can stop climate
change.” Adopting such a diet should be our first act of revolt. The second
should be carrying out civil disobedience to disrupt the extraction of fossil
fuels, along with massively reducing our consumption of those fuels. The third,
through mass mobilization, should be to overthrow the corporate state and
nationalize the energy sector, the banking industry, utilities and public
transportation in addition to dismantling a war machine that in waging futile
and unwinnable wars consumes nearly half of all government expenditures. It is
a lot to demand. But if we do not succeed, the human race will disappear.
Governments, if they were
instruments of the common good, would end subsidies to the fossil fuel and
animal agriculture industries, retrofit government vehicles and buildings to
use clean energy, ban the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries from
public lands, end the externalization of the true costs of these industries,
and impose taxes so heavy that extraction of fossil fuels would be unprofitable
and the purchase of animal food products economically unsustainable—just as
those foods are environmentally unsustainable. But with state power being held
captive by corporations, short-term profit takes precedence over human health
and even human survival.
“The technology exists to
strip CO2 out of the atmosphere,” Parenti said. “The problem is it’s extremely
expensive. And how do you store it? As a gas, it can leak out. But it can also
be turned into basically baking soda. But the costs are so
expensive. So this technology currently exists. It’s proprietary. Private
companies are using it to facilitate further oil extraction. If civilization
was serious about survival, governments will seize or buy that technology. Make
it open source. And invest in whatever was necessary to strip CO2 out of the
atmosphere artificially, along with [extraction by] plants and forests
etcetera.”
Parenti stressed that collapse
will be defined not only by rising temperatures but a series of social and
infrastructure failures. It will be nonlinear. He noted that food prices,
including the prices for basic grains, surged shortly before the 2010-2013
uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
“You had the Black Sea
drought, affecting grain harvest in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” he said.
“This ripples through world markets. Bread prices spike in Tunisia and Egypt.
People are out in the street protesting this mukhabarat [secret police] state
they’ve lived in for 30 years. But it’s also about the price of bread. That’s
one way that a climate crisis appears. It doesn’t appear like a climate crisis
at first. You have to think about the interconnections of the world economy.”
The civil war in Syria was
preceded in 2006 by the worst drought in 900 years, as well as an austerity
program that weakened government support systems. Farmlands were transformed
into arid dust bowls. Livestock perished. Food prices skyrocketed. Over 1.5
million desperate people from the countryside fled to urban areas, many packing
themselves into the shantytowns and slums set up by refugees during the war in
Iraq. And into the chaos walked Islamic State. The war, which has taken half a
million lives, created 4.8 million refugees and internally displaced 7 million
people in Syria. The refugee crisis that resulted in Europe is the worst since
the end of World War II. The influx to Europe has empowered nationalist and
protofascist movements and touched off a rise in hate crimes. Climate change is
the unseen hand in unrest, social disintegration, chaos and war.
“At one level, this is a war
about ethnicity and religion and opposing the foreign occupation,” Parenti said
of the war in Afghanistan. “But on another level, this is about farmers who are
dealing with the worst drought in living memory, which is occasionally
punctuated by extreme flooding, growing the only crop they can grow in those
conditions—[heroin] poppies. The poppy happens to use about one-fifth or
one-sixth the amount of water that wheat and other traditional Afghan crops
use. So farmers have to grow poppy if they’re going to survive. Which side of
the conflict will help them do that? The Taliban. There are subtle and
important interconnections to all ongoing conflicts.”
“In India, you have the Naxalites,
a Maoist guerrilla movement that has been going for over 40 years,” he said.
“It progresses with the drought. District by district, where there is drought,
there are Naxalites. The key there is the state has withdrawn from the credit
markets. Farmers have to go to moneylenders. The moneylenders will only lend
them money to grow cotton because they can’t eat cotton. The more money they
borrow, the worst the drought, the more the cotton is produced, and the lower
the cotton price will go. You have mass suicides. You can imagine if you’re a
farmer on the verge of drinking poison to kill yourself, and the Naxalites come
along and say, ‘Hey look, we have a short-term and a long-term solution for
your problems. The short-term is when the moneylender comes to town you stop
his car and we kill him. When the cops come, we ambush them. In the long term,
it will be better.’ ”
Failed states, proliferating
in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, are ruled by phantom
governments.
“There’s a mythology of the
central state that operates when the police stop you and demand some
paperwork,” Parenti said of failed states. “But really, there is no central
database. [These are the] twitching limbs severed from a spider. These offices
are used for basic survival. They can hold up travelers and demand a $50, $100
bribe from them in the name of some centralized state that did, in fact, exist
10, 20, 30 years ago. That’s a part of how states fail—the corruption and
re-privatization of the means of administration and the means of repression. [Max] Weber’s argument is [that] the modern state is about
detaching the leader of a bureaucracy from the ownership of a bureaucracy. State
failure begins with the re-privatization of the bureaucracies, particularly the
repressive bureaucracies of the police and military.”
“In a place like Afghanistan,
cops pay to have those jobs,” he said. “They pay the head cops. They pay the
dues so they can shake down traffic on the roads. That’s spreading all over the
world. Its uniforms, insignia, paperwork, ministries and officialdom all exist,
but exist for the personal gain of whoever is wearing that uniform.”
“The possibility of a
progressive, civil, left politics is curtailed in a world where drug-addled
teenagers run the checkpoints,” he said. “That’s really important to keep in
mind. Then the immediate response in the West is to justify further military
intervention, which in every case is the immediate cause, or trigger, of state
collapse. Of course, there are older, deeper problems that set it up. Libya is
a perfect example. The NATO bombing campaign created that failed state. Iraq is
a semi-failed state. Yemen is a semi-failed state. Half of Syria is a failed
state. U.S. and Western intervention has been pretty instrumental in a lot of
that. The great irony is there’s further justification for an overdeveloped
military. That’s bad for democratic politics here.”
“In the long run, it won’t work,”
he warned. “The process of state failure spreads and spreads. What we see in
response is also a hardening of democratic regimes in the north. We’ve got
xenophobic politics in the U.S. Southwest in response to a migration crisis
[and that kind of politics also] is happening in Europe across the
Mediterranean. There are all sorts of great humanitarian responses. But there’s
also a very clear shift to the right. France has this state of emergency that’s still in effect.
Right-wing politics are doing well all across Europe. One of the great dangers
of state failure in the global south in the short term is the hardening and
drift towards increasingly authoritarian, xenophobic, quasi-fascist type of
politics in the global north and developing states.”
On one July night in 1977 the
power went out in New York City. There were citywide riots. Arsonists started
1,037 fires. Looters smashed their way into 1,616 stores. There was over $300
million in damage. This Hobbesian
nightmare will become normal in more and more parts of the globe as we traverse
the sixth
great mass extinction, brought on by the activity of human beings.
The greatest existential
crisis of our time is to at once accept the tragic reality before us and find
the courage to resist. It is to acknowledge that the world as we know it will
become harsher and more difficult, that human suffering will expand, but that
we can, if we fight back, perhaps reconfigure our lives and our society to
mitigate the worst savagery, dramatically reduce our carbon footprint and save
ourselves from complete annihilation. The power elites will do nothing to save
us.
“To be hopeful in bad times is
not just foolishly romantic,” historian Howard Zinn wrote.
“It is based on the fact that
human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion,
sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex
history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our
capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are
so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to
act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a
different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to
wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of
presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of
all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
The inability to see what is
in front of our eyes replicates the blindness of all past civilizations that
celebrated their eternal glory at moments of precipitous decline. The
difference is that life across the whole planet will go down this time. It is
comforting to pretend this is not happening, to foster false hopes and fool
ourselves with the myth
of human progress, but these illusions only tranquilize us at a moment when
we should be rising in collective fury against those who are orchestrating our
doom.
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