by DGR News Service | Dec 9, 2019 | Culture of Resistance
Dreaming of a power outage that lasts forever.
By Max Wilbert / Earth Island Journal
Each winter, storms knock out the electricity to my home. I live in the country, over hills and past muddy pastures and brown meadows. Snow and ice grip the trees, pulling them towards the breaking point, and the lights flicker and die.
The first thing I notice is the quiet. The hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the hot water heater, the barely perceptible vibration of the electrical system itself. The sounds drop away. That is how I awoke this February morning; to silence, just the murmur of a million wet snowflakes settling onto the trees, the grass, the cabin roof.
As a child, I craved power outages. School canceled, all obligations swept aside — an excuse to bypass the siren song of television, jobs, routine, and to instead place candles on the table and sit together around the flickering light. All this, of course, after the obligatory snowball fight.
Luck and privilege underlie my experience; the luck of living in a temperate climate, where a small fire and sweatshirt keep us warm inside; the privilege of a family with just enough money to relax and enjoy power outages despite not being able to work.
Power outages are still magical times for me. Now, grown, I live far enough away from the city that outages can last many days. We sit around the wood stove after a day of chores, cooking dinner slowly on the stovetop, snow melting in a pot for tea. Nothing is fast. There is no rush, and nowhere to go, and nothing to be done beyond: talk, read, cook, wash dishes in a tub with fire-warmed water. It is a balm to a soul chafed by the demands of modernity — speed, productivity, constant connectivity.
These days, I dream of power outages that last forever. I dream of hydroelectric dams crumbling and salmon leaping upstream, coming home. I dream of coal power plants going dark and rusting away, and of our atmosphere breathing a deep, clean sigh of relief. I even dream of wind turbines creaking to a halt and solar panels gathering dust, eventually buried by shifting Mojave sands, and of the birds and bats and our slow-moving kin, the desert tortoises, moving freely again through their desert home. I dream of power lines toppling beneath thick layers of ice and snow.
It has been said that the electric grid is the biggest machine in the world. What would it mean to turn off that machine, to throw a wrench in its gears? What would it mean to the living Earth? What would it mean to us?
I have heard that, years ago, the city of Los Angeles lost power, and darkness reigned, and frightened people called the police to report strange lights in the sky: the stars. We are far along the wrong path when we no longer recognize the stars, our billion-year-old companions in the night.
When the power comes back on, as it did tonight, it is a bitter transition for me. Yes, power does make life easier. It washes our clothes and our dishes. It provides our entertainment and our light. It prepares our food and offers heat. It powers the production of life-saving medicines and hospitals. But these benefits of the grid accrue only to the wealthy, to the first world. And power corrupts, too. For countless people, the coming of power is a disaster: displacement, genocide, privatization, proletarianization. The World Commission on Dams estimates that at least 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by hydroelectric dams alone — many of them Indigenous and poor.
Perhaps it is time for us to have no power again. And not just for a day or a week, but for as long as it takes for the salmon to come home, for the desert tortoises to reclaim their dens, for us to remember our place in the world.
I dream of standing on a hill above a vast metro-necropolis, and watching the lights go out in a wave, watching darkness reclaim her land, watching night return to life.
The salmon, the tortoises, and I — we will all be ready.
Featured image by Chris Richmond / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
by DGR News Service | Nov 18, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance
Written and photographed by Max Wilbert
In 1941, as World War II thundered across half the planet, my grandfather was drafted into the United States military.
Faced with the prospect of being sent overseas to kill other young men in World War II, his morality rebelled. He refused to join the military and applied for conscientious objector status, which he was eventually granted.
This was not a popular stand to take. Among 10 million draftees, about 43,000, or less than half of one percent, became COs. He and other COs were widely criticized, attacked, and ostracized. Their beliefs were tested by draft boards, families, and communities who rejected their moral convictions and labeled them cowards, deserters, and traitors.
Nearly fifty years later, I was born into a family that looked up to my grandfather’s example. He was a warm, kind grandfather to me. When I was a child, discussions of war, imperialism, racism, exploitation of women, oppression, and the destruction of the planet were not unusual among my family. I was taught that these things must be ended. Social change was a necessity, and non-violent resistance was the method.
Faced with the prospect of World War II, what choices would I have made in my grandfather’s place? On the one hand, the Nazi regime was one of unspeakable evil, and imperial Japan’s actions were equally horrific. On the other hand, the actions of US empire—before, during, and after the war—were not exactly benevolent. As Howard Zinn writes, before the war broke out the United States:
“had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.”
And of course, this is just a partial list. In 1942, the U.S. was still a rigorously segregated society (which it remains today) committed to extracting value from people of color using any means necessary. Slavery built the wealth of the United States, and literally built the White House. And of course, the entire country was built on a settler-colonial genocide—a genocide that Hitler took as inspiration for his “final solution.”
Many prominent Americans, like Henry Ford, were supporters of the Nazi regime. The U.S. government not only failed to speak out against persecution of German Jews before the war, despite clear evidence, but actively rejected those seeking refuge and thereby condemned them to death.
The United States did not fight because of fascism, although individual soldiers may have. Critical history tells us that the U.S. fought Germany, Italy, and Japan primarily for geopolitical reasons: to control a competitor in Germany, to contain communist Russia, and to expand control of the Pacific.
For example, historian Gabriel Kolko says “the American economic war aim was to save capitalism at home and abroad.” This was achieved by consolidating American control over oil in the Middle East, gaining access to new markets formerly dominated by the British, and by a concentrated injection of public funds into private corporations: Boeing, Lockheed, and the other war profiteers.
And at the conclusion of the war, the United States killed 150,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing that P.M.S. Blackett calls “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” In other words, 150,000 people were murdered not out of military necessity, but for the sake of geopolitical posturing.
The fascists needed to be stopped, yes. But the United States’ war was not a particularly just one.
I respect my grandfather’s choice. Most especially, I am impressed by the ethical toughness required to endure serious personal and professional consequences while maintaining his principled stance. There are not many people with that dignity and conviction.
Eighty years after the rise of Nazi Party, we’re faced with rising fascism around the world.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Putin. Countless fascist political parties and grassroots movements are on the march. Their main systemic opposition comes from neoliberal capitalism, a soft fascism of it’s own and the primary force which has decimated the planet over the past 40 years. By dismantling public institutions, embracing corporate power and unbridled militarism, corrupting the language of justice, and doubling down on exploitation of the poor and the third world, neoliberals like Barack Obama and the Clintons have helped pave the way for the rise of outright fascism today.
Capitalism itself is a war against the planet and the poor. The global economy is built on exploited farmworkers, sweatshop labor, and a toxic electronics industry that drives workers to mass suicide. All this takes place on top of stolen indigenous lands and a legacy of ongoing genocide.
The material goods that drive economic growth are made from the dead bodies of the land. Mountains are mined and blown to pieces. Rivers are dammed and enslaved. Prairies are plowed under. Forests are scalped. The oceans are strained of all life. Biodiversity is collapsing, the oceans are collapsing, and global warming is advancing faster than the worst-case scenarios. Greenhouse gas emissions are higher year after year, despite slick marketing campaigns about green industry.
The mindset of exploitation and greed is mirrored in the dominant culture. Sexual assault is endemic. Black and brown people are disenfranchised and exploited for slave labor in the prison system, then regularly executed on the streets in a form of modern public lynching. The poor, the homeless, addicts and countless other people are treated as disposable in this society, and they die by the millions as people like Jeff Bezos enjoys a cruise in his latest $100 million yacht.
Now we must grapple with the same question our grandparents did.
What is the moral course of action in this world?
Before we can know the right course of action, we have to understand the root of the problems we face. This step of diagnosis is essential to proper cure. And in fact, the origin of the term radical comes from the Latin word meaning “root.”
Too many people in society today look only at surface-level causes. We must go deeper.
First, we must understand that the problems we face are not an accident or the result of a glitch in the system. This is the normal functioning of industrial civilization. This is business as usual. The economy is booming, and the wealthy are doing very well. Things are working perfectly.
For those in power, times are good
I’ve heard it said that capitalism is a war against the planet and the poor. This is not a metaphor. The dominant economic system is killing, maiming, and destroying the lives of countless billions of humans and trillions of non-humans.
As the world’s third-richest man, Warren Buffett, once said, “there’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
This is a war, and it is a one-sided one.
Working people, the poor, and especially environmentalists often don’t see this system as a form of warfare against us. Relentless propaganda, fed to us through mass media and education, teaches us that we live in a beautiful, just society. All the problems we face—migration, climate disasters, terrorism, sexual abuse—are externalized. Instead of being factors integral to the American experience, these are regarded as someone else’s problem, or ignored completely.
Propaganda, besides inculcating American exceptionalism and the capitalist ethic, also enforces a rigid box of acceptable ways to change the world. Social struggles, we’re told, should take place via policy changes, at the ballot box, and in non-profit offices.
But these models aren’t working
Legislative change, for example, is rarely permanent. Long-standing policies like the Voting Rights Act can easily be struck down or undermined. This is happening right now. The Voting Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act—all of these laws, which are very limited in the first place, are being gutted.
The business of running empire is firmly bipartisan. The Democratic and Republican parties in the United States play out a society-wide “good cop/bad cop” routine. They deceive us into believing that we live in a democracy. They allow robust debate within an extremely narrow range of acceptable politics, and therefore keep people distracted from the theft and violence of the ruling class.
The truth is we have little to no say in how our own communities operate, let alone in how the country is governed.
Constrained by felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the electoral college, constant propaganda, and a representative system with zero accountability, our votes are largely meaningless.
We are so alienated from the concept of self-governance that we have a hard time even imagining it. When was the last time you made a meaningful decision about the political, economic, and social future of the neighborhood, the city, the state, or the country you live in?
For most of us, the answer is “never.”
To call the United States a democracy is laughable. Scholars have proven that our society is an oligarchy. Professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page concluded, in their 2014 research paper, that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
This is reflected in the nation’s capital. It has been decades since Congress passed a major bill that didn’t benefit the ultra-rich and corporations. Every major national policy decision is designed to steal more from the poor, to destroy the planet even faster, and in the process to make the owning class even more decadently wealthy.
The Non-profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)
Faced with a bankrupt political system, where do people go? Many turn to non-profits, expecting to find a world of small, fiery, organized groups fighting for social change. Instead, they find a new nightmare of bureaucracy, 60-hour work weeks, and starvation wages.
The non-profit system emerges from a liberal ideology that sees American-style capitalism as righteous. In this worldview, small gradual reforms are all that is needed to keep the system humming along happily.
Many of today’s largest foundations we’re created by tax-dodging ultra-wealthy elites in the early 20th century. These have been lucrative investments. Liberal foundations have long served to pacify social movements and prevent radical change.
One of the biggest examples of this is the professionalization of black resistance in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the wake of revolutionary social upheavals of the 1960’s, foundations invested billions of dollars to create countless new non-profits and social service organizations. Vietnam War hawk McGeorge Bundy, head of the Ford Foundation, led a nationwide push to address racism. But behind the rhetoric was a desire not to address the roots of racism, but to pacify and assimilate oppositional black power movements into the dominant power structure.
Today’s non-profit movement politics reflect the same values: elitist liberalism, individual empowerment, and the optics of diversity. And they produce the same results: endless campaigning for progressive candidates, countless fundraising campaigns, and burnout.
What is absent is a revolutionary agenda for collective liberation from systems of oppression.
The Indian dissident Arundhati Roy, one of the most brilliant writers of our time, has a blistering critique of the non-profit system. She writes:
“Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade and channelize their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think-tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors.
Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.
There are now millions of non-profit organizations, many of them connected through a byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations… The Privatization of Everything has also meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them for what they are. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush.
However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like shareholders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries.”
Greenwashing the environmental movement
One of the most damning examples of the bankruptcy of the non-profit system comes from the large environmental organizations. From The Sierra Club taking $25 million from the fracking industry to Greenpeace cooperating with the Canadian Lumber Industry to the Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with the world’s most polluting corporations, environmental non-profits have a track record of atrocities, compromises, and failures.
On their watch, everything is getting worse. And their solutions? Vote for a democrat, change your lightbulbs, and ride your bike. It’s pathetic.
Today, the global non-profit industrial complex serves as a “pressure relief valve” for budding revolutionary sentiments. By redirecting the energy that should demand fundamental change into piecemeal reformism, organizations like this are worse than distractions. They are in some ways complicit in the system that is killing the planet. Instead of radical change, these groups campaign for relatively minor reforms, such as a shift away from fossil fuels and towards green energy. These efforts are applauded by international conglomerates like General Electric, which stand to make billions in guaranteed government contracts in this so-called “green transition.”
Meanwhile, the forests continue to fall, mountains continue to be mined, and greenhouse gas emissions trend upwards.
Even in places like Germany, home to the supposed “green miracle” of wind and solar energy, emissions continue to rise and corporations grow ever more bloated on government handouts and electricity rebates, while the poor pay for big business to expand the electric grid. To be clear: big business is exempted from the taxes to pay for grid expansions and wind energy projects, then turns around and profits from the contracts to build these industrial megaprojects. Meanwhile, working people foot the bill.
This is a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich.
From one capitalist agenda to another, major environmental non-profits are shaped by what can get funded, and what gets funded is a de facto pro-corporate, pro-capitalist agenda of industrial energy production and “green products.” Driven by a results-oriented framework designed to please large donors, this system inherently deprioritizes radical critiques and revolutionary ideas in favor of what makes money and political sense in the short term.
In short, large non-profits are the social wing of the capitalist system.
Individuals within these non-profits may mean well, but intentions are not as important as outcomes when the fate of our world is at stake.
Cory Morningstar calls liberal climate activism “the hope industry,” writing that “350.org and friends serve a vital purpose . . . [by making] the public feel good about themselves. Simultaneously, they ensure obedience and passiveness to the state in order to secure current system/power structures and keep them intact… We have now reached the critical juncture where corporations will begin the slow process of ridding themselves of their toxic holdings while preparing for a new wave of unprecedented, unsurpassed ‘climate wealth.’ We are about to witness the global transition to profitable false solutions under the guise of ‘green economy’ . . . all while they simultaneously greenwash themselves as noble stewards of the Earth.”
This is how the ruling class rules
In his book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote that an effective totalitarianism doesn’t look like pointing a gun at every person, all the time. “A really efficient totalitarian state,” he writes, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
Today’s elites have worked hard to create such a world. They ride the dynamic tension between reform and reaction. When political and economic conditions make it possible to do so, they mercilessly expand their exploitation of the planet and the poor. When groundswells of social discontent force concessions, they offer limited reforms. With the illusion of democracy provided by elections, legislative changes, and the non-profit industrial complex, the ruling class manipulate global society. In this way, they defuse revolutionary potential, expand their power, and consolidate their gains.
These elites, the owning class in global society, are waging an offensive struggle. Meanwhile, progressives and radicals are stuck in a reactionary position, defending ourselves against the latest assault and falling ever further behind. Our work is almost entirely defensive.
But as any experienced warrior knows, wars are not won defensively. These defensive measures can only end one way: in steady erosion of victories, slow slides into fascism, and eventual defeat. This is what we are experiencing right now.
Counter-revolutionary propaganda
Systems for social change have been co-opted by the corporate elite. But agents of oppression are never satisfied with dismantling organizations and institutions alone. They must murder revolutionary leaders, too.
When Che Guevara was on the firing line, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at the age of 21 years, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabé revolutionary sometimes called “Africa’s Che,” had the same message before he was killed: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”
This hasn’t stopped those in power from murdering dangerous individuals and trying to smash dangerous ideas. Psychological and information warfare is constant in modern society. Popular music, television, movies, and other media, as well as institutions like the school system and non-profits, all promote vicious counter-revolutionary propaganda.
According to the psychologist John F. Schumaker we “are by far the most propagandized people in history.” Corporations are expected to spend $2.1 trillion on media in 2019.
Developing an effective offense requires that we discard the mythologies and misconceptions taught by these systems. In other words: as long as our minds are still colonized, we will not be able to fight and win.
One of the most pervasive misconceptions we must dismantle is the mythology of pacifism. This mythology is carefully constructed. School lessons around social movements—if the topic is covered at all—paint a picture of civil non-violent struggle. This is no accident. A whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. is emphasized, while the Black Panthers are never discussed. The bourgeois American Revolution is celebrated, while the Haitian Revolution is ignored. Women’s suffrage is mentioned, but the radical direct action of suffragists around the world is bypassed. In this way, the imaginations of entire societies are shaped and molded.
The reality, of course, is that social change is won through struggle. The history of our society is the history of class warfare. And revolution is the solution to the problems we face. But revolutionaries are ignored in our education system, slandered in the mass media, and actively opposed in US policy. We must reject these toxic lessons to have a chance.
Beyond non-violence
Non-violence is a profoundly moral way of changing society. In the right conditions, it can be highly effective. But deepening inequality, global ecological collapse, and the utter failure of established institutions to address these crises have led me to question non-violence—not as a moral guiding light, but as a practical strategy.
This morning, I am following the latest news from the Unist’ot’en Camp. In western Canada, the Unist’ot’en have stopped proposed tar sands and fracked gas pipelines for nearly a decade.
They have never ceded their land to the Canadian Government or signed a treaty. Under Canadian law, their land has been recognized as sovereign. But in December, the pipeline company applied for an injunction from Canadian courts. This injunction gives the police (the RCMP) authority to removing any blockades from the roads.
Now, as a result of the injunction, armed men are in Wet’suwet’en Territory to remove the land defenders and facilitate the fracking, logging, water poisoning, road building, and other destruction the pipeline will bring.
The late Secwepemc organizer and international leader on indigenous rights Arthur Manuel called injunctions the “ace in the sleeve of the Canadian government.” He said, “every time there is a dispute between indigenous people’s territories and industry, the court pulls out their court injunctions and sides with industry.”
This fight is still in progress. We don’t know how it will end. It might end in a victory, as did anti-fracking fights on Mi’kmaq territory in 2013. Or it might end in a defeat like at Standing Rock.
But we do know that, as this fight continues, industry is going about their business unimpeded elsewhere. We are not able to fight them everywhere at once. Around the world, coal oil and gas extraction is booming. Tar sands in South America, offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, fracking in the Marcellus Shale, coal mining in Mongolia. Major industrial projects are booming worldwide, and greenhouse gas emissions are rising to unprecedented levels as forests, wetlands, grasslands, and oceanic preserves are destroyed for industry. Carbon emissions in 2018 surged by 3.4 percent over the previous year—the largest increase in eight years. Time is short.
To have a chance of stopping the forces that are squeezing the life from the planet, defensive stands like Unist’ot’en Camp are crucial. But defense alone is not enough, and governments continue to side with industry. If we want to survive, we need legitimate offensive strategies.
What does offensive struggle look like?
Legislative change, voting, and the non-profit industrial complex are all controlled by the ruling class. Offensive struggle is, by design, essentially impossible in these arenas.
Real offensive struggle is inherently revolutionary. A revolution is “a forcible overthrow of a government, class, or social order, in favor of a new system.” While that force does not necessarily mean open violence, violence is a part of every revolutionary struggle.
Most people who want social and environmental justice have been taught that violent revolution is morally indefensible. Through fear and lies, elites have shamed us out of organizing and carrying out a revolution. Thus, they limit us to defensive action.
Breaking our allegiance to the dominant system is the first step to effective resistance. This requires we decolonize our minds and remember the true source of life. We all need to choose sides: life or the machine.
Which side do you choose?
Even the preeminent strategist on non-violence, Gene Sharp, talks about non-violent resistance as a form of war. Perceiving our struggle in this way is important. Defensive struggles are possible to undertake while denying that you are engaged in a war. But once you acknowledge that we are in a war, offensive struggle becomes a legitimate possibility.
Once our imaginations have expanded, we can attempt to answer the question: what does offensive struggle look like?
In military strategy, the purpose of offensive action is to destroy your opponents ability to wage war. After effective offensive action, they cannot continue to fight you, no matter how badly they want to.
In my analysis, the primary weapon of war being used against the planet and the poor is the global industrial economy. Therefore, offensive struggle today means breaking the supply lines of industrial capitalism by targeting and destroying key bottlenecks in the the global economic system, and dismantling the institutions of the dominant culture.
If this were carried out, it would change the balance of power globally. Those in power would no longer be physically able to destroy the world, and the way would be clear for alternative cultures, land restoration, and the Earth itself to begin the process of healing.
Ending the war
The war against the planet and the poor is raging right now. To end this war as quickly as possible and with the smallest possible loss of life, our only feasible path is to stop the aggressor’s ability to harm the poor and destroy the planet.
Capitalism has made this a life-or-death struggle. Voting isn’t working. Signing petitions isn’t working. Liberal institutions are in shambles. Those of us who reject this system cannot survive by trying to coexist with the system. At the current rate, it appears that either industrial civilization will survive, or the biosphere will.
War is terrible, and business as usual is a war. The faster the global industrial economy is ended, the less suffering there will be. Ending this war must be our overriding objective. This means destroying capitalism’s ability to wage war. Anything less is merely whistling on the way to our collective grave.
Fighting a war is dangerous, difficult, and demanding. Sometimes I imagine sitting this war out, becoming a modern conscientious objector, and living simply. But that path isn’t a moral one. Given our current political situation, we must make adult choices. The crisis we face is calling all of us to become revolutionaries.
I wish that my grandfather was still alive so I could sit down with him to discuss all of this. Alzheimer’s disease claimed him before I was fully grown. But I still know that, unlike so many, he would not flinch away from these realities. He would face the truth, think, and decide on the right course of action.
My political stances are extremely unpopular at every level. I have received death threats from racist far-right ideologues. I have been shouted down by the left and the environmental community. And I have been harassed by federal agents. When she heard about the FBI harassment, one of my aunties told me that my grandfather would have been proud of me. She told me that he would have said, “you must be doing something right.”
That is what we must do: what is right.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance. Max is the author of two books: the forthcoming Bright Green Lies, and We Choose to Speak, a collection of essays released in 2018.
by DGR News Service | Nov 1, 2019 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Max Wilbert
As the world moves further into a state of climate crisis, it’s imperative that we study and critique the strategies being proposed to address greenhouse gas emissions, and develop our own strategies based on rigorous assessment of their effectiveness.
Many of the strategies currently being pursued by the mainstream environmental movement hinge on courts and on legislative change. This article will examine one these strategies—the “climate trust” lawsuits brought by the group Our Children’s Trust—in some detail. First, however, we must review a basic framework of how the court system, and more fundamentally, the legal system in general, serves ruling class interests within capitalism.
From early English laws like the Statutes of Merton and Westminster that authorized enclosure of the commons, to the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” in 1493 which authorized the Doctrine of Discovery and the conquest and colonization of non-Christian lands west of the Azores, law within capitalism has always been an exercise in justifying systematic theft.
These ancient foundations continue to underlie law. For example, in the United States the Johnson v. M’Intosh Supreme Court case of 1823 is regarded as the foundation of modern property law and studied by nearly every law student. In the unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that “the whole theory of their titles to lands in America, rests upon the hypothesis, that the Indians had no right of soil as sovereign, independent states. Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives.”[i]
What is the Purpose of Law within Capitalism?
French Liberal School economist and laissez faire advocate Frederic Bastiat provided one of the most concise definitions of law within capitalism. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” he wrote in 1850, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”[ii]
With this statement, Bastiat was attempting to critique socialism and collectivist tendencies. Marx, a contemporary of Bastiat, called him “The shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.” But Bastiat has inadvertently provided a functional description of law within capitalism.
In a similar manner, the free-market advocate, New York Times columnist, and Iraq War crusader Thomas Friedman inadvertently described the link between imperialist warfare and free-market capitalism perfectly when he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1999 that “[t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for silicon valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy, and Marine Corps.”[iii]
Friedman’s piece argued for “sustainable globalization” which “cannot be maintained without the active [military] involvement of the United States,” and explicitly argued for increased cooperation between U.S. corporations and military.
The Institutionalization of Organized Theft
Critics of globalized capitalism agree with Friedman’s linkage of corporate power and military hegemony, but to borrow Bastiat’s term, see these entities as facilitating the plunder that defines modern capitalism, not ushering in Friedman’s neoliberal fantasy. Military aggression and economic colonization were the foundation of imperial power in Bastiat’s time, just as they are today. Today’s capitalist societies have evolved their methods. Instead of legalized chattel slavery,[iv] the United States now has a slave-like prison system and the global economy is fully dependent on systematic labor exploitation. Some of the most lasting impacts of globalization include the outsourcing of jobs to poor nations with artificially deflated labor costs, the outsourcing of pollution to what Lawrence Summers called “underpolluted” nations, and the explosion of international trade. All of this is facilitated by the IMF and World Bank, which leverage development loans to systematically privatize the wealth and dismantle social and environmental regulations within poor nations. Altogether, this organized theft leads to an average wealth transfer of roughly $2 trillion per year from poor countries to rich countries, not counting externalities.[v]
The accelerating extraction of wealth from the poor has been matched by similar growth in destructive theft from the planet. Extraction of primary resources—timber, foodstuffs, ore, fossil fuels, water, etc.—has tripled over the past 40 years to more than 70 billion tonnes annually.[vi] Greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980, and more than 1 million species are threatened with extinction, threatening to unravel the ecological basis of life on this planet.[vii] Human disconnection from the natural world is at an all-time high as business privatizes even our most intimate private lives with pornography, dating apps, and ubiquitous data gathering.
By realistic economic measures, the owners of society are wealthier than ever and inequality is reaching record levels.[viii] And as Bastiat described, this arrangement of power is undergirded by a legal structure that authorizes and glorifies this exploitation.
The United States—still the epicenter of imperial power, despite a steady decline in influence since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—provides illustrative examples. The extraction of profits from workers and the land is the bedrock principle of American law. The idea that workers should be in control of their own communities and benefit from the work they and their neighbors do is not even a topic of discussion in courtrooms and legislative halls. Nature is owned and managed as property. The idea that nature should be respected as the source of all human goods and life is, at best, commodified into the ideology of “natural capitalism”, while true deep ecology ideals—that nature exists and has value for it’s own sake, on it’s own terms—remain fringe positions.
The Legal System as an Arena of Political Change
Movements for justice have always used the legal system and the courts as arenas of political struggle. The Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement, the Labor movement, and the Environmental movement have all won significant victories in courtrooms. The feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, who is credited with the legal recognition of sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, wrote in collaboration with Andrea Dworkin that “law organizes power.”[ix]
Given the current supremacy of the capitalist state, the courts are an important arena of political struggle. To concede this legal battleground to reactionaries could be suicidal. But to rely only on legal methods is also a flawed strategy. Legal reform has never proved able to do more than slow the progression of capital’s death march.
The Voting Rights Act has now been dismantled, reversing a key gain of the Civil Rights Movement.[x] Roe v. Wade, which established Federal legality of abortion, has been under incessant attack for decades. Countless state laws have closed abortion clinics, limited funding, and attacked the principle of female bodily autonomy via more than 400 laws in the last 9 years alone.[xi] With the new Supreme Court, it’s likely Roe will be completely overturned. The Clean Water Act is currently being gutted.[xii] Union membership is at an all-time low as “right-to-work” laws proliferate, undermining the effectiveness of even bourgeois workplace organizing efforts.[xiii] This reflects global efforts to undermine minimum wages and other basic labor protections.[xiv]
Recently, environmentalists in the United States and elsewhere are testing a set of innovative legal strategies. These include the group “Our Children’s Trust,” which is filing lawsuits against the federal government for failing to uphold the “public trust doctrine,” a legal principle that the government is responsible for managing public resources for the benefit of the public. Our Children’s Trust is attempting to expand the purview of the trust doctrine to include the climate, and thus potentially force the U.S. government to fight climate change.
But the flaw in this plan is obvious right away: the U.S. government, like all capitalist states, has never existed to wisely steward public resources, but rather to facilitate their exploitation for private gain. In truth, even most socialist states have fallen victim to industrial arms races with capitalist societies or to an industrial productivism that values development of industry as the highest good, and have thus fallen well short of this ideal.
Rights of Nature, the Trust Doctrine, and The Necessity Defense
The trust doctrine approach is just one of the innovative legal strategies being pursued by the environmental movement today. Two others are the Rights of Nature movement, and the push for the “climate necessity defense.” The rights of nature movement seeks to expand basic rights, such as personhood, to non-human ecosystems. The necessity defense is the legal principle that it is sometimes legal to break the law in order to prevent a greater harm; the classic example is breaking a window to save a child from a home that is on fire. It has been used to defend protestors in a few high-profile cases of civil disobedience.[xv]
These legal strategies aim to advance ecological struggles by providing protections for ecosystems, by forcing changes in U.S. and international law to curtail global warming, and by protecting political dissidents.
Can they succeed? And what would success look like?
I argue that these efforts, while laudable, will not lead to significant change because of structural barriers. For example, let’s imagine that the “Our Children’s Trust” lawsuit was successful, and U.S. courts recognized the obligation of the federal government to safeguard climate stability, and ordered emissions reductions of, for example, 80 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. And let’s suppose they choose to implement the methods proposed by Our Children’s Trust.
Our Children’s Trust proposes a three-pronged strategy for halting global warming.[xvi] First, they call for 100 gigatons of carbon sequestration via reforestation, perennial agriculture, and soil conservation. Second, they call for reducing emissions by “designing our cities for walking and biking, investing in mass transit, constructing high-performance energy efficient buildings, transitioning to 100% clean energy, shifting to green manufacturing and durable products, and adopting restorative forestry and farming practices.” Finally, they propose fees on carbon pollution and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
Their first category of solutions is admirable, as long as “reforestation” is not twisted to mean expanding the monocrop plantations of industrial forestry. But as I exhaustively detail in my forthcoming book Bright Green Lies, their second category, technological solutions, is woefully insufficient for addressing global climate destabilization.
The Failure of Green Technology
According to the work of sociologist Richard York, renewable energy today rarely actually displaces fossil fuels. Instead, predictably, these energy sources are typically added on top of existing sources, helping to grow the capitalist economy. York writes that “Non-hydro renewable [energy] sources have a positive coefficient, indicating the opposite of displacement, but this coefficient is not significantly different from 0, indicating that renewables tend to simply be added to the energy mix without displacing fossil fuels.”[xvii] Another study in China had similar results, finding that “Non-hydro alternative energy did not show statistically significant displacement effect in any of the six regional grids.”[xviii]At a global level (which is ultimately the only significant scope for global warming), the burning of coal, oil, and gas has grown significantly even as wind and solar have boomed.[xix]
After five years of research, one climate solutions lab found that even “a wholesale adoption of renewable energy… would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions” and concluded that “Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work.”[xx]
Socialists have long argued that centralized planning and the lack of a growth imperative would allow non-capitalist societies to adopt new technologies cautiously and rationally. This remains a largely untested hypothesis in our era of global ecological crisis, but regardless, this is not what Our Children’s Trust is promoting. Instead, they chose to promote unproven and extremely expensive carbon capture technology (as one recent headline reads, “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”[xxi]), electric cars, and energy efficiency which hasn’t made a dent in growth in consumption. In truth, efficiency within capitalism is almost certain to lead to Jevon’s Paradox: more profit, more investment, and more growth in resource use.[xxii]
“Green Cities” and Market Failures
Even dense, walkable cities—a favorite of “green growth” and de-growth advocates alike probably represent an illusory solution. As urban planning professor Michael Neuman succinctly explains, “Since 1960, while human population has doubled [and the majority of the world’s population has moved to cities], the global economy has quadrupled, and resource consumption quintupled,” he says. “Thus, we are getting less efficient and less sustainable as we move to cities, not more, contrary to popular belief and professional dogma.”[xxiii] Study after study from locations as widely spaced as Iran, Taiwan, and the Netherlands have shown little or no reduction in energy consumption resulting from increased urban density.
As with other market-based measures for environmental protection, carbon tax schemes have been almost completely ineffective in lowering emissions. For example, the European market is flooded with allowances, and has at best reduced emissions by 2 or 3 percent across the continent.[xxiv] At worst, it has simply incentivized pollution outsourcing and “carbon laundering” as seen most prominently in the Volkswagen emissions case.
Given these realities, even a positive ruling in the Our Children’s Trust case wouldn’t significantly slow or stop global climate destabilization. Direct approaches, like stopping fossil fuel extraction, are not discussed in their strategy, and there is no critique of capitalism apparent either.
Some proponents argue that major policy proposals like The Green New Deal or lawsuits like the Our Children’s Trust cases represent organizing focal points which expand the scope of acceptable debate.[xxv] This is certainly true. But while false solutions to the problems of capitalism are always acceptable to ruling class, they will never solve the problems they purport to address. It is past time to build explicitly anti-capitalist organizations to address the ecological crisis, and to arm them with effective (read: revolutionary) methods.
The Necessity of Dismantling Industrial Capitalism
The reason Our Children’s Trust isn’t tackling this issue is likely the same reason The Green New Deal didn’t include a proposal to shut down the fossil fuel industry. As Brad Hornick writes in Resilience, “[Stopping anthropogenic climate disruption] implies a radical retrenchment or collapse of the dominant industries and infrastructure based upon fossil fuel production, including automobiles, aircraft, shipping, petrochemical, synthetic fabrics, construction, agribusiness, industrial agriculture, packaging, plastic production (disposables economy), and the war industries.”
In other words, stopping climate chaos requires an end to capitalism, to much of the global economy, and to U.S. hegemony. This is not popular in society, nor is it politically acceptable—even thinkable—in courtrooms. The U.S. court system will never order the dismantling of the global economy and of U.S. empire. In the 19th century, Mikhail Bakunin wrote that “The supreme law of the State is self-preservation at any cost.” This remains true today.
Legally speaking, judges can rule anything they want, as long as they can justify it using legal precedent. But there are also specific legal and doctrinal barriers that confine all judges who sincerely believe in the structure of American law. Namely, as mentioned earlier, the notion that nature is property, that property can be rightfully destroyed or consumed by its owner, and the principles of corporate rights all stand in the way in the significant legal change. Further, even favorable court rulings would depend on the Executive and Legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as on police, military, and other Federal employees, to enforce such a legal shift.
To rely on the law alone is to concede to a never-ending tug of war—an endless battle which the ruling class wages using billions in lobbying dollars. But institutions are not monolithic. Ideological power struggles within them can change the material conditions for resistance taking place within the broader culture. And there is some promise in all of these legal strategies. For example, the Rights of Nature approach has the possibility to instill a new, fundamental respect for the integrity of the natural world throughout certain populations. The climate necessity defense approach has promise for protecting activists who engage in non-violent direct action (which we should note has been thus far entirely ineffective in stopping the murder of the planet). Therefore, the promise these new legal approaches represent is primarily cultural. In military terminology, these are shaping actions, not decisive ones.[xxvi]
Reform Will Not Halt The Crisis
These legal strategies may change the framing conditions and lead to reform. But as the last 50 years can attest, reforms will not be enough to halt the ecological crisis. At worst, ill-fated movements can divert valuable resources and energy into dead-end efforts. Left historians do not look kindly on Nelson Mandela’s pro-capitalist turn late in life, but he articulated an important consideration when he justified his decision to create the Unkhonte We Sizwe, an armed underground insurgency, writing that “There is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”[xxvii]
Modern movements would do well to consider this.
David Brower, the founder of Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, and former director of the Sierra Club once said, “All I have done in my career is to slow the rate at which things get worse.” In this historical moment, we don’t have time to merely slow the destruction. We need to rapidly halt it and to reverse it. This means choosing effective methods, and at a minimum, dismantling capitalism.
The struggle to halt the ecological crisis will not be primarily fought in courtrooms, legislated by policymakers, sold by corporations, or decided by foundation-funded NGOs. It will be fought by people’s movements and by revolutionaries who are willing to fight for the survival of the human species and the global community of biotic life. That’s something that the courts will never do.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He been involved in campaigns against sexual violence, destruction of the planet, and racism for 18 years.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
References
[i] Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823)
[ii] Frederick Bastiat. The Law. 1850.
[iii] Thomas L. Friedman. “A Manifesto for the Fast World.” New York Times Magazine (March 28, 1999).
[iv] Although it should be noted there are an estimated 40 million literal slaves in the world today, mostly in forced manual labor, service industries, and sexual slavery.
[v] Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna, and John Bellamy Foster. “Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism.” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1-24.
[vi] “Worldwide Extraction of Materials Triples in Four Decades, Intensifying Climate Change and Air Pollution.” International Resource Panel, U.N. Environmental Programme (20 July 2016).
[vii] “Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating.’” Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (May 6, 2019).
[viii] Jason Hickel. “Global inequality may be much worse than we think.” The Guardian (April 8, 2016).
[ix] Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. MacKinnon. Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988).
[x] “Voting Rights Act Dismantled by Supreme Court.” Democracy Chronicles (June 25, 2013)..
[xi] “Roe v. Wade: The Constitutional Right to Access Safe, Legal Abortion.” Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
[xii] Michelle Chen. “Trump Moves to Gut the Clean Water Act.” The Nation (December 13, 2018).
[xiii] Gordon Lafer. “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012.” Economic Policy Institute (October 31, 2013).
[xiv] Subodh Varma. “World Bank: abolish minimum wage, other labour laws.” Monthly Review Online (April 24, 2018).
[xv] Andrew Buncombe. “Anti-pipeline campaigners found not guilty by judge because ‘protest against climate change crisis’ was legal ‘necessity.’” The Independent (March 27, 2018).
[xvi] “Pathway to Climate Recovery.” Our Children’s Trust.
[xvii] Richard York. “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 441-443.
[xviii] Yuanan Hu and Hefa Cheng. “Displacement efficiency of alternative energy and trans-provincial imported electricity in China.” Nature Communications 8 (2017): 14590.
[xix] Barry Saxifrage. “Fossil fuel expansion crushes renewables.” National Observer (September 20, 2017).
[xx] Ross Koningstein and David Fork. “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change.” IEEE Spectrum (November 18, 2014).
[xxi] Michael Barnard. “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered.” CleanTechnica (June 12, 2019).
[xxii] John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York. “Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency.” Monthly Review 62, no. 6 (November 1, 2010).
[xxiii] Alan Oakes. “Revisiting Neuman’s ‘Compact City Fallacy.’” Green Building and Design Magazine (2013).
[xxiv] “The EU Emissions Trading System.” European Commission Climate Action (July 22, 2016).
[xxv] Carol Dansereau, John Foran, Ted Franklin, Brad Hornick, Sandra Lindberg, Jennifer Scarlott. “One, Two, … Many Green New Deals: An Ecosocialist Roundtable.” Resilience (February 26, 2019).
[xxvi] “ADP 3-0. Unified Land Operations.” Department of the Army (2011).
[xxvii] Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom (Little Brown & Co., 1994).
by DGR News Service | Oct 23, 2019 | Culture of Resistance
By Max Wilbert
For the past 9 years, I have been part of a revolutionary social and ecological organization. In that time, I have made some of my best friends in the world. I have met some of the most incredible people I can imagine: true-hearted warriors with courage, conviction, and character.
These comrades are doing incredible work, around the world, every day. They are fighting coal mines and oil pipelines. They are sponsoring refugees and campaigning for women’s rights. They are advocating for revolutionary environmentalism. They are restoring land and fighting “development,” better known as destruction of the land. They are collaborating and allying with indigenous nations in decolonization and resistance.
They are also doing the everyday work of human beings. They are raising intelligent, articulate, capable children. They are rewriting the rules of equal relationships. They are being good friends. They are creating local, sustainable food systems. They are building community over shared meals and shared ideals, then working to make their ideals a reality.
It has become a tradition in this community for us to support members and close allies who are going through difficult times. We send them notes of support, packages of food, herbal medicines, art. We care for one another.
It is not easy to be a revolutionary. Some of us have lost our jobs for our political views. Others have faced physical violence, ostracization, blacklisting. Taunts, jeers, death and rape threats: these are a regular occurrence for many of us. Many of us live under authoritarian governments and police states of one degree or another. Disappearance, trumped-up jail time, and solitary confinement in maximum-security is a constant threat.
Radical communities can be volatile. Personalities clash, ideals are tested, and the oppression of the dominant culture is never fully stamped out. As we grapple with the biggest problems ever faced by our species—mass extinction, global warming, toxification, militarism, patriarchy, racism—we struggle to form solidarity with each other.
We have had our share of problems. We make mistakes. We hurt each other. We make poor decisions. We have much to learn.
But we are serious, and we are committed. We know ecological revolution is perhaps the only remaining path to a livable future. We are facing the end of life on the planet; any risks are small in comparison to that nightmare. As we struggle externally, against the dominant culture, against the machine, we struggle internally as well. To be better people. To live up to our ideals. To be relentless in our love, our passion, our commitment. To personify the spirit of the revolution.
In this world in crisis, we know where we stand. We stand together, united, in defense of the living planet, and in defense of justice.
—
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement, and works with Deep Green Resistance. He is the author of two books.
by DGR News Service | Sep 25, 2019 | Climate Change
Featured image: Linear clouds in this satellite photo show the path of large ships. Exhaust from the extremely polluting bunker fuel these ships burn acts as a nucleus for condensing water vapor, forming clouds. One container ship releases as much pollution as 50 million cars. Public domain photo.
By Max Wilbert
The Global Climate System
Global climate can be understood as a simple energy balance equation. When climate is stable, energy inputs (sunlight hitting the Earth) matches the amount of energy lost to space through radiation. Industrial civilization has upset this balance by destroying forests, plowing grasslands, damming rivers, and digging up and burning coal, oil, and gas. These processes all release greenhouse gases, which trap additional heat inside the atmosphere. This is called radiative forcing.
This has gradually changed the energy balance of the entire planet. Since 1998, these greenhouse gases have caused an amount of energy equivalent to nearly 2.8 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs to be captured inside the Earth’s atmosphere. Most of this heat has been absorbed by the oceans.
We know the consequences of this: ocean acidification, glaciers melting, droughts, heat waves, floods, stronger hurricanes, crop failures, migration, and so on. The ramifications of global warming are catastrophic and pervasive to essentially every aspect of human and non-human life. But some of the details of global warming are less often discussed.
What Are Aerosols?
One of these rarely-discussed issues is the aerosol masking effect. “Aerosols” in climate science are defined as collections of airborne solid or liquid particles, with a typical size between 0.01 and 10 µm (micrometers) that reside in the atmosphere for at least several hours. Aerosols may be of either natural or anthropogenic origin. Aerosols may influence climate in several ways: directly through scattering and absorbing radiation, and indirectly by acting as cloud condensation nuclei or modifying the optical properties and lifetime of clouds (see Indirect aerosol effect). Examples of aerosols include dust, volcanic ash, pollen, soot, sulphates, even bacteria.
Some of the most common aerosols come from coal, driving cars, and fire for land clearance. When entering the lungs, these particles are extremely hazardous to health of all creatures, and are estimated to kill about 5.5 million people per year. This is one reason that pollution is estimated to be responsible for roughly 40% of all human deaths.
Aerosols also cool the planet by reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. In the past, researchers have estimated this blocked as much as half of the warming caused to this point. As Dan Bailed wrote online, “It has long been conjectured that an immediate cessation of the burning of fossil fuels would be swiftly accompanied by a spike in surface temperatures (warming rates might spike from 0.2 C per decade to as much as 0.4 to 0.8 C per decade).”
Does Aerosol Masking Make Resistance Counterproductive?
This has been a common question for us here at Deep Green Resistance:
“What’s your take on the aerosol masking effect? Some people believe it is actually protecting the Earth from runaway climate change. If industrial collapse happens, wouldn’t this cause a decrease in aerosols and result in rapid warming? Wouldn’t this mean that life on earth is doomed even faster? Won’t reducing industrial emissions just result in faster warming?”
We have for years regarded this as a false double-bind, or an example of a legitimate concern twisted into an excuse for inaction. Using aerosol masking as an excuse for not shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure is an exercise in cowardice, in holding change hostage, in a sort of blackmail: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
As you know, the only way out of a double-bind is to smash it.
New Science Reduces Concerns Over Aerosol Masking
But even legitimate concerns may be laid to rest by new science published in Nature this month. In the paper, two researchers Shindell and Smith note that reductions in fossil fuel burning, and thus in aerosols, “do not produce a substantial near-term increase in either the magnitude or the rate of warming.” This warming, they explain, would be negligible “at essentially all decadal to centennial timescales.”
Their conclusion: “We find that any climate penalty associated with the rapid phase-out of fossil-fuel usage… is likely to be at most 0.29 °C.” While climate science is complex and new findings could always change the situation, our conclusion is straightforward as well.
The medicine is not worse than the disease. There is only one clear path to a livable planet: stopping the fossil fuel economy as soon as possible. The sooner civilization crashes, the better.
