@top_jumbomortgage_lender #greece #flood ♬ original sound - steve
Check out the people on the left, some of whom continue to eat and drink as if this is all dinner theatre. Nothing will wake us up to what's happening around the world. We're in the top end of the boat, just thankful it's not impacting us right this second, and somehow convinced it never will.
We live in the "Goldilocks Zone" and have for many thousands of years, but that's changing very quickly. When agriculture started as an option, it wasn't just that people figured out to plant seeds, but quite possibly that the climate began to be able to support having crops grown repeatedly in the same place. Now we appear to be moving out of that zone.
Change is hard. Absolutely. But we can't properly alter our habits until we face up to what's happening.
Jeff Goodell recently wrote The Heat Will Kill You First. I haven't read it yet, but a NYTimes article, he said,
"Extreme heat situations are becoming more democratic. . . . All living things share one simple fate. If the temperature they're used to rises too far, too fast, they die. . . . Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels. The more oil, gas and coal we burn, the hotter it will get."
An article in The Guardian focuses more on his view that racism is at the heart of America's failure to act:
"To be blunt about it, the people most impacted by heat are not the kind of voting demographic that gets any politician nervous. They're unsheltered people, poor people, agricultural and construction workers. People like Sebastian Perez are just seen as expendable. They 're not seen as humans who need to be protected. Racism is absolutely central to the government's failure to protect vulnerable people."
In this end time neoliberalism, profit at any cost, dystopia we're gleefully tolerating, Texas has a law that prohibits any law "requiring shade or water breaks for outdoor workers." Goodell calls it "emblematic of the 'cruelty is the point' ideology in so much of our politics right now." He adds in issues with air conditioning I pointed to two days ago:
"Air conditioning is emblematic of all of the insanity and paradoxes of what we consider progress, both a technology of personal comfort and a technology of forgetting. It is such an American idea, such an American way of trying to solve a really complex problem with a techno fix ... it's emblematic of the inequalities of heat, the gap between the cool and the damned. The hotter it gets, the bigger the divide."
We're still sitting in that place of me: What can make me happy today? How can I be entertained?
It makes me think of coming home from school as a kid, and my parents would ask what I learned and if I was good today. Was I a good person, making moral choices even when it's difficult, was an important check-in question. They didn't mean, Did you follow the rules?, because they sometimes explained that not following the rules can be the right path. They wanted to know that my moral centre was strengthening in school alongside my cognition and knowledge base.
Now the typical question at the end of the day seems to be, "Did you have fun today?"
At some point along the way we've shifted focus from being upright people to getting as much enjoyment out of every moment possible. From caretakers to consumers.
Goodell said,
"Covid showed us how much death we're willing to tolerate. I am concerned that we'll simply adapt to the chaos and tragedy and accept 60,000 people dying every summer, and we'll forget that we created this climate and that we have control over it. . . . There's not gonna be a kind of larger cultural moment, or a single thing that changes the political dynamic in a big way. We'll see incremental changes, two steps forward, one step back. This is trench warfare, everywhere, all the time."
Are you not entertained? Right?! I have no solutions to get us to a point where we have more concern for our fellow being than for having fun. We are a careless lot. It's not too late, but we're still not about to change how we operate.
George Monbiot made a 9 minute video reiterating what Chomsky and Chris Hedges have been saying for ages: it's a system-wide problem. Conservatives and left-leaning parties and the media are all in the hands of the fossil fuel industry. We can't look to leaders to support us or guide us. They aren't on our side.
"[PM Sunak] is an immensely privileged man - the richest man in Parliament - who claims that he's pursuing his policies for the sake of the working man and woman, the man and woman in the street: 'That's why I'm against ULEZ the ultra low emission zones. That's why I'm against all these other green measures even 20 mph zones. Solely for the sake of you the ordinary person who I emote with and connect with so strongly from 1,000 foot up in my helicopter.' But who he's really representing: the dirtiest of all all industrial interests.
You cannot understand politics in this country or indeed in any other without grasping an essential insight into how it works that is called the 'Pollution Paradox'. And the 'Pollution Paradox' works as follows: The industries and the billionaires and oligarchs with the greatest incentive to invest in politics are those involved in the dirtiest and most anti-social businesses. Those who are causing the pollution, those who are treating their workers like shit, those who are exploiting their consumers, those who are dumping their costs onto society. These are the people with the greatest incentive to invest in politics because if they don't they'll be regulated out of existence. Because people don't like them people will vote against their interests if they get the chance. And as a result of that - and this is a crucial point - politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest and most anti-social companies. And the political parties which win elections are those which are backed by the dirtiest and most anti-social companies, and that is where the Conservatives are today. . . .
[The opposition leader, Keir Starmer] goes on TV and in the media publicly to beat up environmental activists. He attacks Just Stop Oil on the completely mistaken idea that they're trying to stop the use of all fossil fuels immediately from day one. In fact what they're trying to do is to stop the exploitation of new sources of oil and gas. . . . You don't do anything about the massively rising inequality, and that means that you're not taking a neutral position; you are siding with the rich against the poor you're siding with the few against the many. The labor party is unashamably pro-business. Just Stop Oil is right, and the government is wrong, but because Just Stop Oil is trying to defend our lives against the fossil fuel companies, it finds itself at odds with the politicians who are sponsored by those fossil fuel companies.
Recently the Tory party has taken 3.5 million pounds from 'pollutocrats.' It is unequivocally on the side of the fossil fuel companies, so it uses Just Stop Oil as a whipping boy, as a scapegoat, as a way of defining itself against something. It says, We're not like those people who are interfering with you, the God-fearing decent working men and women of this country who we stand shoulder to shoulder with while we're a thousand feet up in our helicopter. We are against those scuzzy people who are trying to stop you from getting to work.
But actually what those scuzzy people are trying to do is to permit human life to continue, it's to permit the habitable planet to be sustained. Because they're following the science, and the science says we have to leave the oil and gas in the ground. We can't open up any reserves which haven't already been opened. . . .
This next bit reminds my of Fraud Fest that I wrote about yesterday. Our wedge issue is trans children.
Politicians nowadays are always pursuing the wedge issue. This is the Lynton Crosby strategy, the Tory strategist who says we've got a find the issue which divides people away from the labor party and onto your side, and it doesn't matter what the issue is. You know, it can be a culture war issue, immigration asylum - those always work well. Now they've latched onto the green agenda as a wedge issue, and it's not through any conviction that Sunak is doing this. It's simply to create another wedge issue. It's another part of the spectrum of political warfare that the Tories are engaging in. They always tell you, Oh it's impossible we can't make that change. And other people answer, Why should we be the ones to do it? In fact the UK has fallen way behind other countries including countries much poorer than ourselves, and the world leader in environmental policy is Costa Rica with a fraction of our GDP but it's done extraordinary things. Its forest cover has gone from 24% to 57% in just a few decades through brilliant foresight and the environmental policies which follow from that. Even France just across the channel is doing extraordinary things to try to transform itself into an ecological civilization. It's not perfect by any means, of course it isn't, but it's way way ahead of where we are.
We are now being left behind in the fossil age. It is not because it's good for us, far from it. It's very bad for us. Indeed it's because of corruption. It's because the government is effectively owned by fossil fuel interests. This isn't just a question of what happens to our children and grandchildren. We will start to see the effects in our own lifetimes. We're already seeing massive fires across large parts of the planet. We're seeing huge heat domes with devastating heat waves which have already killed thousands of people through heat exhaustion, and now we're seeing even more alarming signs: a massive sea surface temperature anomaly like nothing we we've ever seen before, which could lead to the collapse of marine food chains. We've already begun to see massive storms and floods, which have been greatly exacerbated by climate breakdown. We're seeing in the Antarctic ice melt which is just completely off the charts.
A few weeks ago one of the most important scientific papers ever published was released: It said that we have greatly underestimated the chances of what's called simultaneous breadbasket failure, which basically means that very large numbers of people will not be able to eat adequately. Now this paper got five mentions in the media anywhere on earth. A scandal about a British TV personality called Philip Schofield got 10,000 news stories dedicated to it. In the media, celebrity gossip is literally considered thousands of times more important than what are objectively and obviously the most important stories on Earth, and that applies right across the media and right across our politics.
So we're faced at this moment by these two existential crises: The existential crisis facing humanity as a result of environmental breakdown, and the existential crisis facing the industries causing that breakdown the fossil fuel industry, meat industry, internal combustion industries and the others which have to be regulated out of existence. Only one of us can win, and if they win, in the long run everybody loses."
So it goes.
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