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.
In this excerpt from episode 7, “Strategy for a Burning World,” of The Green Flame podcast, the author and philosopher Derrick Jensen urges listeners to join in the struggle for the planet and for justice.
“It is a terrible time to be alive in terms of having to watch the destruction of the planet,” he says, “but it is also a wonderful time to be alive because we have opportunities to stop this destruction that were not available to those [fighting back] 200 years ago.”
He also discusses the morality of advocating for industrial collapse. Derrick describes conversations with two prominent agrarian organizers, and how many poor and working people around the world have the collective skills they need to survive outside capitalism right now, but are prevented from accessing land. He also discusses the relationship between colonization, free trade, and immigration. Note that Derrick is making a point about the harms of “free trade” and closed borders, not advocating that immigration be halted.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” ― Carl Sagan
David Spratt, research director of the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Australia, recently warned us that “no political, social, or military system can cope” with the outcomes of climate collapse. The consequences are almost too extreme to process: global crop failures, water shortages, extreme natural disasters, dying ecosystems, and unstoppable climate feedback systems. These increasingly chaotic variables can lead to crippling uncertainty; should you dedicate all of your energy to fighting against greenhouse gas emissions and ecological destruction? Should you balance your time between resistance and preparing for adaptation? What are the skills and resources needed to survive? This article is the first in a series designed to help frame and answer those questions.
I grew up in the wilderness and was a stranger to civilization until my mid teens. Outside my childhood home I could have walked for weeks or months without encountering another human, and I often spent extended periods of time doing just that. It was a difficult environment to survive in because the summers were searing hot, the winters were far below freezing, there was little water, and vegetation was sprase. My classroom was the natural world, my teachers were the native species, and some of my tests were high stakes. I learned how to quickly build shelters, how to find clean water from miles away, and how to find enough food to survive. It was a perfect childhood, despite many challenges and hardships.
When I moved into the town I was around 14 years old. I found the endless, often arbitrary, rules perplexing and frequently amusing. The “city people” were alien to me. I was utterly convinced that they would die of dehydration if they couldn’t get water from a tap, and that if they were told to walk off a cliff by someone wearing an adequately authoritative costume, they would do so. My amusement with this alternative reality soon turned into frustration. City cultures were full of people whose minds had been filled with often useless information by school curricula that insisted knowing the names and birthdays of bygone presidents was more important that knowing how to grow your own food, purify your own water, or build your own home. I was disturbed by this culture which had stripped people of their ancestral knowledge, of their independence.
Several decades later, my frustration has given way to activism. The brutal reality is that most of us, at least among the English speakers, have no clue how to survive without industrial civilization; which makes us the slaves and victims of that dominant culture. With climate collapse rapidly approaching, one of the most radical things we can do is restore our ancestral knowledge and rebuild the self sufficiency of our families and immediate communities.
Food and Water Security
Fast moving water is generally cleaner than slow or still water. Morning dew is often abundant. Conserving water is as important as collecting it. Sand, rocks, and charcoal purify still water. Trees and bushes transpire. Beaches produce freshwater. These are the lessons we used to learn as children and they provide us with security; indigenous cultures knew thousands of these variations, and specialized them for their local ecosystems over millennia. We need to restore this knowledge and disseminate it widely among our communities, both for our own individual security and also to maintain as much social stability as possible in the midst of collapse. There will be a day when your community attempts to turn on the tap for a glass of water to discover that it’s no longer working, and the ratio of infrastructure downtime will increase until we’re left to fend for ourselves. Communities with better developed skills will be better equipped to avoid desperation and violence.
Likewise, our food security needs to be addressed. Some ecosystems will soon become completely uninhabitable, others may remain habitable but become chaotic and prone to extreme weather events. Most of the food we eat today comes from industrial scale farming, which is entirely reliant on fossil fuels for pesticides, fertilizers, heavy equipment, refrigeration, and shipping. There will come a day, sooner than most people realize, when none of that infrastructure will work. This poses an immense challenge for communities whose farmers have forgotten how to produce crops without tractors and pesticides. Likewise, the average person has no idea how to grow or store their own food, and when the grocery store shelves go empty they’re going to become extremely desperate.
This is why we must prioritize local food and water security, which involves upskilling our communities and also leading efforts to build sustainable local systems. Every child needs to know the basic principles of permaculture, they need to know how to blend perennials and seasonals in regenerative rotations, they need to understand soil balance and which plants produce nitrogen, and they need to learn these things very quickly. Additionally, we need to replace lawns with gardens, ornamental plants with edibles for ourselves and pollinators, and we need to urgently protect the habitats of interdependent species and ecosystems. This starts by forming a group, knocking on your neighbours’ doors, and helping them build their first small garden.
Community Stability
Whether we like it or not, most of us are surrounded by larger communities of people. When people become too thirsty or too hungry their desperations leads to violence, which often ends up exacerbating their condition in a vicious cycle. For this reason, I think the worst possible place to be during climate collapse are cities. By nature of their design, city cultures are largely anonymous, callous, and unsustainable. The only way to feed the inhabitants of a city is to take food and other resources from the surrounding region, which will become increasingly difficult. Scarcity with lead cities to experience worsening class stratification, xenophobia, and misogyny; fear and poverty will also lead to reactionary movements and fascism, as it always does.
Communities will fare better when they’re small enough for the inhabitants to either know each other or recognize each other based on shared relations. I personally think populations between 2,000 and 5,000 are ideal because they’re large enough to significantly share resources and protect themselves, but small enough to be deeply integrated. In sufficiently rural or wilderness settings I would be inclined to live in even smaller populations.
The single most important thing you can do to maintain or prolong local stability is forge strong bonds with your neighbours, and to intentionally do so across preexisting divisions like class, race, and tribe. It’s important to foster a shared identity. One of the best ways to establish these bonds is to lead local permaculture, ecological, and economic adaptation efforts. If it can be at all avoided, never blame individuals in your local community for climate collapse or the worsening state of the world; even if it’s true, you’re now all in this together and those petty divisions can fester into dangerous conflicts as external tension builds.
Also focus on preparing today’s children. The next 10-20 years will be very difficult, but the following 50 years will be inconceivably difficult and we need to provide intensive training for the generation that will be attempting to survive it. Today’s 10 year old will probably be 25-30 years old when civilization as we know it collapses, those of us who are still alive will be relying on them to maintain order and potentially to help care for us as we age, experience illness, or become less independently capable. We will have great regrets if we fail to adequately prepare the next generation for what lies ahead.
Healthcare Essentials
Collapse will be most immediately horrific for people with serious health conditions. I relate deeply to this issue because my own medical condition, if left untreated, will probably significantly shorten my life and result in an unpleasant demise. It will be worse for people with conditions like kidney failure, who will be unable to receive dialysis treatments, or for cancer patients who will be unable to receive chemo therapy. Childbirth will also become increasingly dangerous. The good news is that we can mitigate some of these effects by connecting the dots between modern medical research and the active compounds found in various plants and fungi. Most of the world’s pharmaceuticals were initially derived from medicinal plants and fungi, and indigenous peoples have used those plants (often effectively) for countless generations. There will be increasing demand for local sources of medicine to treat things like infections, chronic pain, epilepsy, and even certain cancers. We need healthcare leaders in the future who are able to connect scientific medical research to processes which employ local plants and fungi.
We also need to improve our relationship with death because, unfortunately, there’s going to be a great deal more of it in the world. Most of our cultures have exacerbated our fear of death, in part because we have become so removed from it. For example, almost everyone eats meat, which obviously involves death, but how many people have slaughtered the animals themselves and processed through those complex emotions? Many of us have had loved ones die, but how many of us have been one of the primary caregivers, washed their body, and cremated/buried them ourselves? We have build entire economies around cultural desires to hide death behind layers of abstraction, and very few of us have learned to deal with it in healthy ways. The dominant culture prefers to pretend that death doesn’t exist; sometimes by ignoring our own mortality until the last minute, and sometimes even by denying mortality at all by propagating superstitions about eternal afterlife.
How we deal with death relates, in many ways, with my final point about healthcare: mental health. Our current frameworks for understanding and addressing mental health are deeply inadequate in the context of climate collapse. As our global and local situations progressively worsen, and as people realize that it will never return to their understanding of “normal” it will cause significant psychological trauma, persistent anxiety, and spiraling depression. I predict that suicide rates will increase dramatically, and I can’t blame those people. Likewise, it will become inceasingly difficult to deal with individuals whose mental health conditions may be significantly disruptive or even dangerous for other members of their communities. We will reach a point where we’re no longer able to access antipsychotic, antidepressant, antianxiety, bipolar, or any number of other mental health medications; this, combined with the intense psychological pressures of collapse will create great volatility among some of the most at risk members of our communities.
Part 1 Summary
This is first article is an overview of the scale of our challenges and some of the most essential priorities (food, water, community, and healthcare). As you can see, we have immense challenges ahead of us and it’s going to be a difficult road even for those of us living in the most temperature ecosystems. In the next article I’ll delve deeper into specific food and water systems, and provide detailed processes for organizing our communities toward those objectives. From a resistance perspective, it’s critical that we begin to address the details of how to resolve these issues. Our communities will be much more supportive of radical, direct action toward preventing global extinction if they feel like their most essential needs can be met in a post-collapse world. If we cannot provide and implement clear strategies for addressing these needs, people will retreat into denialism and delusions, eventually responding violently toward any group or information which threatens their fantasies. This is why we must take urgent action.
In this series of videos, DGR cadre Will Falk and Max Wilbert discuss the moral issues surrounding the Deep Green Resistance strategy, which calls for dismantling the global industrial economy by any means necessary, as rapidly as possible.
“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.” —Derrick Jensen
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Deep Green Resistance is a radical environmental movement, dedicated to shifting activists towards strategies that have a real chance to stop the murder of the planet. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the land around us; we fight for the salmon, the pine trees, and the songbirds, not the solar panels and space shuttles so many ‘environmentalists’ have fallen in love with. We in DGR don’t want a more sustainable nightmare. We want a living world.
Deep Green Resistance recognizes that industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet – and when our way of living conflicts with the needs of the land, our way of living must go. This transition to a healthy and just relationship with the natural world is a massive undertaking, one that won’t be achieved with individual lifestyle changes and a green coat of paint on the latest mountain-killing mining rig. Real change will take a revolutionary heart. Anything less is a recipe for failure.
Deep Green Resistance has a roadmap for that revolution. We call it Decisive Ecological Warfare. We’ve studied the most successful movements in history, from the Irish Republicans to Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, and applied the lessons they can teach us to the fight for Earth liberation. Our goal as aboveground activists is to promote this strategic resistance, with the goal of triggering cascading systems failure within industrial infrastructure. In this mission, we are guided by a strict code of conduct, a steering committee of seasoned revolutionaries, and, most of all, an unwavering dedication to the land on which we live.
HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED?
In the midst of all this destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But there’s one nice thing about living in such dark times – anywhere you look, there’s great work to be done. Deep Green Resistance isn’t afraid to make the connections between open-pit mining and police brutality, between rape and deforestation, between acidified oceans and settler colonialism. We are proud anti-capitalists, anti-racists, and radical feminists, with members working on everything from pornography and prostitution to indigenous land rights and prison reform.
Whether on the front lines or behind the scenes, there is room for you in this war. So get in touch! We have members across the globe and resources in multiple languages. Head to our website, check our Facebook, or send us an email and introduce yourself. We’ll help you learn more about DGR, find opportunities for volunteering, and apply for greater involvement. You’ll also be able to download a free ebook copy of the Deep Green Resistance book.
DGR is working to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. In order to succeed, we’ll need teachers, healers, warriors, and workers. If you’re tired of the false solutions and the feel-good failures, Deep Green Resistance is for you, whatever your skills. In a fight like this, we need it all.
Remember: Deep Green Resistance is an aboveground organization, meaning we don’t engage in violence or property destruction. If you feel your talents would best be put to use in more militant actions, please do not contact us. This will keep you safer, and help us be more effective. We will not answer any questions related to any underground that may or may not exist.
“Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
Editor’s Note: This 2012 research article from University of Utah physicist and researcher Timothy Garrett concludes that “If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2 levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv.” We see this as further evidence that the Deep Green Resistance strategy of purposefully accelerating a managed collapse will provide the best chance for continuation of life on this planet.
No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change.
Abstract. In a prior study (Garrett, 2011), I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models, civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction made between individual nations, economic sectors, labor, or capital investments. At the model core is a hypothesis that the global economy’s current rate of primary energy consumption is tied through a constant to a very general representation of its historically accumulated wealth. Observations support this hypothesis, and indicate that the constant’s value is λ = 9.7 ± 0.3 milliwatts per 1990 US dollar. It is this link that allows for treatment of seemingly complex economic systems as simple physical systems. Here, this growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the evolution of globally well-mixed atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While very simple, the coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of trajectories in gross world product (GWP) and CO2. Extending the model to the future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially underestimate how much CO2 levels will rise for a given level of future economic prosperity. For one, global CO2 emission rates cannot be decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric CO2 concentrations to remain below a “dangerous” level of 450 ppmv (Hansen et al., 2007), model forecasts suggest that there will have to be some combination of an unrealistically rapid rate of energy decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global civilization wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a double-bind. If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2 levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv [emphasis added]; but, if CO2 levels rise by this much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards collapse.
Originally published as Garrett, T. J.: No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change, Earth Syst. Dynam., 3, 1-17, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-3-1-2012, 2012.
