I've been thinking, before reading this, pretty much the same things that
Hedges writes. All of those big protests haven't accomplished a thing. I've
been listening to Democracy Now's coverage of climate change for years and
watching as things get worse. And that huge worldwide protest against the US
attack on Iraq, accomplished nothing.
Miriam
Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites
Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Friday's climate strike by students across the globe will have no more
impact than the mass mobilizations by women following the election of Donald
Trump or the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets to
denounce the Iraq War. This does not mean these protests should not have
taken place. They should have. But such demonstrations need to be grounded
in the bitter reality that in the corridors of power we do not count. If we
lived in a democracy, which we do not, our aspirations, rights and demands,
especially the demand that we confront the climate emergency, would have an
impact. We would be able to vote representatives into power in government to
carry out change. We would be able to demand environmental justice from the
courts. We would be able to divert resources to the elimination of carbon
emissions.
Voting, lobbying, petitioning and protesting to induce the ruling elites to
respond rationally to the climate catastrophe have proved no more effective
than scrofula victims' appeals to Henry VIII to cure them with a royal
touch. The familiar tactics employed over the past few decades by
environmentalists have been spectacular failures. In 1900 the burning of
fossil fuel-mostly coal-produced about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a
year. That number had risen threefold by 1950. Today the level is 20 times
higher than the 1900 figure. During the last decade the increase in CO2 was
100 to 200 times faster than what the earth experienced during the
transition from the last ice age. On May 11 the Mauna Loa Observatory in
Hawaii recorded 415.26 parts per million of CO2 in the air. It's believed to
be the highest concentration since humans evolved. We will embrace a new
paradigm for resistance or die.
The ruling elites and the corporations they serve are the principal
obstacles to change. They cannot be reformed. And this means revolution,
which is what Extinction Rebellion seeks in calling for an "international
rebellion" on Oct. 7, when it will attempt to shut down city centers around
the globe in acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. Power has to be
transferred into our hands. And since the elites won't give up power
willingly, we will have to take it through nonviolent action.
Protests can be the beginning of political consciousness. But they can also
be empty political theater. They can be used to celebrate our moral
probity-advertisements, especially in the age of social media, for
ourselves. They can be a boutique activism in which protesters allow
themselves to be funneled through police barricades and arrests are politely
choreographed, resulting in a few hours in jail and the credentialing of the
demonstrators as radicals. They can be used to distance ourselves from a
repugnant political figure such as Donald Trump, while leaving us silent and
complicit when the same policies are carried out by a supposed progressive
such as Barack Obama. This is a game the state has learned to play to its
advantage. As long as we do not disrupt the machine, as long as we protest
according to their rules, the elites will let us march through the streets
of Washington in pussy hats or walk out of school for a day.
When power is threatened, as it was in the sustained protests during the
Occupy encampments and at Standing Rock, the ruling elites react very
differently. They employ the full weight of the surveillance state to
demonize the protesters, arrest and detain the leadership and infiltrate
agents provocateurs to carry out violent assaults to justify the use of the
police and security forces to shut the protests down.
Preemptive efforts by the security forces to harass and thwart Extinction
Rebellion's planned October occupation of city centers, an action designed
to negatively affect commerce and bring parts of major cities to a
standstill, have already begun. Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction
Rebellion, was arrested Sept. 14 and charged with attempting to cause a
disruption at Heathrow Airport by using a drone. Hallam has called
Heathrow-which climate activists say emits 18 million tons of carbon dioxide
a year, more than the total emissions of 118 countries-"a crime against
humanity." He and other activists have vowed to halt the airport's plans to
build a third runway. Hallam's case will be heard at the Isleworth Crown
Court on Oct. 14, meaning he will not be released until after the Oct. 7
protests. In addition, other Extinction Rebellion organizers, including
Andrew Medhurst, have been arrested in England, and police have seized their
phones and computers.
It does not matter who is the public face of the corporate state. This is
not about political personalities. It was Obama, after all, who oversaw a
coordinated national effort to eradicate the Occupy encampments and place
the water protectors at Standing Rock under siege. Obama's environmental
policies, despite his lip service to curbing global warming and his support
of the nonbinding Paris climate accord-which the climate scientist James
Hansen called a fraud-were appalling. U.S. oil production rose every year he
was in office, an increase of 88%. It was the largest domestic increase in
oil production in American history. Obama opened offshore drilling to
American oil companies as if he were Sarah Palin. "American energy
production, you wouldn't always know it, but it went up every year I was
president," Obama told an audience at Rice University last year. "And you
know that . suddenly America's like the biggest oil producer . that was me,
people."
Democrats, like Republicans, serve corporate power. They will not end
government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction
industries. They will not impose carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the
ground. They will not limit overconsumption. The technologies they invest
in-fracking, hybrid cars, genetically modified food-are designed to maintain
or expand consumption levels, not reduce them. They will not redirect the
trillions of dollars and scientific and technical expertise from the
military and corporations toward saving us from environmental catastrophe.
The rhetoric and gimmicks they use to placate the public, from carbon
credits to wind turbines and solar panels, are, as the scientist James
Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure
serious diseases with leeches and mercury.
The creation of ever more complex bureaucratic and technocratic systems in
an age of diminishing resources is a characteristic of dying civilizations.
Civilizations in their final phase frantically search for new methods of
exploitation rather than adapt to a changing environment. They repress and
exploit the lower classes with greater and greater ruthlessness to maintain
the insatiable appetites among the elites for power, luxury and hedonism.
The worse things get, the more the elites retreat into their private
enclaves. The more out of touch the elites become, the more catastrophe is
assured. This self-defeating process degrades the ecosystem until
catastrophic systems collapse.
The ruling elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs, are
not equipped to confront the existential problems caused by climate
catastrophe. They are trained to maintain, no matter the cost, the systems
of global capitalism. They are systems managers. They lack the intellectual
capacity and imagination to search for solutions outside the narrow
parameters of global capitalism.
Those living in the global south are already suffering and dying from the
effects of global warming, for which the wealthy industrialized nations of
the global north bear most of the responsibility. The richest 0.54%, or 42
million people across the world, are responsible for more emissions than the
poorest half of the global population, or 3.8 billion people. These elites
are sacrificing the poorest on the planet first as they work up the social
and economic hierarchy to extinguish us all.
We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope,
our naive belief that with grit and determination we can solve all problems.
We have to face the bleakness before us. We live in a world already heavily
damaged by global warming, which will inevitably get worse. Refusal to
participate in the further destruction of the planet means a rupture with
traditional politics. It means noncooperation with authority. It means
defying in every nonviolent way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and
imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including becoming vegans, to
thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation. And it means waves of
sustained civil disobedience until the machine is broken.
The biosphere, including the Amazon rainforest, the oceans and the polar ice
caps, is visibly deteriorating. Heat waves are crippling Europe, Australia
and the American Southwest. Floods devastate the Midwest. Last week,
southeast Texas suffered heavy flooding and deaths when it was hit by the
seventh-wettest tropical cyclone in U.S. history, with some areas receiving
more than 40 inches of rainfall within three days. Monster hurricanes ravage
the Caribbean and the shores of the United States. Wildfires consume the
forests of the West Coast. But despite the tangible signs of a climate
emergency, the elites continue to assure us we can live as we have always
lived.
The mathematical models for the future of the planet have three devastating
trajectories: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human
population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most
other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to
protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive. This third
scenario, which most scientists admit is unlikely, is dependent on a halt to
the production and consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based
diet to destroy the animal agriculture industry-almost as large a
contributor to greenhouse gases as the fossil fuel industry-and greening the
deserts and restoring rainforests. We know what we have to do if our
children are to have a future. The only question left is how do we empower
leaders who will save us.
Climate scientists warn that we will soon reach a tipping point when the
biosphere becomes so degraded no effort to save the ecosystem will halt
runaway climate change. We may already be there. The tipping point, many
believe, is a further increase in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius.
At that point "feedback loops" will see environmental catastrophes
exacerbate each other.
We must embrace a new radicalism. We must carry out sustained civil
disobedience to disrupt the machinery of exploitation, even as we prepare
for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes ahead. We must alter our
lifestyles and consumption to cut our personal carbon footprints. And we
must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of
coping with the crisis before us.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Chris Hedges
