Truthdig
We Can't Fight Climate Change if We Keep Lying to Ourselves
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_cant_fight_climate_change_if_we_keep_
lying_to_ourselves_20170618/
Posted on Jun 18, 2017
By Chris Hedges
The sun sets at Juliette, Ga., behind the coal-fired facility known as
Plant Scherer, one of the nation's top carbon dioxide emitters. (Branden
Camp / AP
(http://www.apimages.com/Search?query=global+warming&ss=10&st=kw&entitysearc
h=&toItem=15&orderBy=Newest&searchMediaType=allmedia) )
We must embrace a despair that unflinchingly acknowledges the bleak future
that will be created by climate change. We must see in any act of
resistance, even if it appears futile, a moral victory. African-Americans
understand, in a way perhaps only the oppressed can grasp, that our
character and dignity will be measured by our ability to name and resist the
malignant forces that seem to hold us in a death grip. Catastrophic climate
change is inevitable. Our technology and science will not save us. The
future of humanity is now in peril. At best, we can mitigate the crisis. We
cannot avert it. We are fighting for our lives. If we do not rapidly build
militant movements of sustained revolt, movements willing to break the law
and attack the structures of the corporate state, we will join the 99.9
percent of species that have vanished since life first appeared on earth.
"In these circumstances refusing to accept that we face a very unpleasant
future becomes perverse," Clive Hamilton writes in "Requiem for a Species
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Species ;) ." "Denial requires a
willful misreading of the science, a romantic view of the ability of
political institutions to respond, or faith in divine intervention."
Tens of millions of human beings, especially in the global south, are being
herded into the climate furnaces for immolation. And we in the north are
soon to follow. The earth's temperature has already risen by more than 1
degree Celsius
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-flirts-with-a-1-5-degree-c
elsius-global-warming-threshold1/ ) since the late 19th century. And it is
almost certain to rise a few more degrees-even if we stop all carbon
emissions today. The last time the earth's temperature rose 4 degrees, the
polar ice caps disappeared and the seas were hundreds of feet above their
current levels.
"[Climate change] is interacting with two previously existing crises,"
Christian Parenti (http://www.christianparenti.com/ ;) , author of "Tropic of
Chaos
(https://books.google.com/books?id=t_p9WbQ6RCYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Tropi
c+of+Chaos&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj8j-i4kcjUAhUJ1GMKHQ-NBoIQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepag
e&q=Tropic%20of%20Chaos&f=false ) : Climate Change and the New Geography of
Violence," told me in an interview
(https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/392886-global-climate-change-geopolitic
al/) . "On the one hand, the legacy of neoliberal economic restructuring
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-proble
m-george-monbiot ) has weakened states in the global south so they don't
have the capacity to pave the roads, educate the population, to help farmers
who are in distress. On the other hand, much of the global south is littered
with cheap weapons and veterans of previous conflicts who know how to use
those cheap weapons. In this comes the extreme weather of climate change.
[In] states that have been systematically reduced to the point where they
can't respond even if they wanted to, how do people adapt to climate change?
How do they adapt to the drought and floods? Very often, you pick up surplus
weaponry. You go after your neighbor's cattle. Or you blame it on your
neighbor's ideology or ethnicity. Underneath a lot of these ethnic and
religious conflicts we see there is a climate element."
"The great danger in climate change is that at a certain point [you will
see] the collapse of natural ecosystems, the dying of tropical forests,
which are currently carbon sinks-they pull CO2 out of the atmosphere,"
Parenti said. "But if they die and all that wood burns or rots, they can
become net emitters of greenhouse gases. There are the huge deposits of
methane, frozen methane
(http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/JustOneThing/story?id=8457650 ;) in the
Arctic. These are already beginning to come out."
"The fear is that at a certain point we cross the line and there's a tipping
point," he said. "The primary cause of greenhouse gas emissions will become
the breakdown of these natural systems, and then it really is out of our
control."
We have the technology to build alternative energy and food systems, but the
fossil fuel industry, the most powerful industry in the world, has blocked
all meaningful attempts to curb fossil fuel extraction and reduce energy
consumption. And meat, dairy and egg producers, responding to consumer
demand, are responsible for the emission of more greenhouse gases than the
entire global transportation sector. Livestock generates enormous amounts of
methane, which is 86 times more destructive than CO2. Livestock also
produces 65 percent of nitrous oxide resulting from human activity, a gas
that has 296 times the "Global Warming Potential
(https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials ;)
" of carbon dioxide. The massive animal agriculture industry, like the
fossil fuel industry, receives billions of dollars in subsidies from the
U.S. government. And corrupt and pliant politicians who do the bidding of
these industries receive millions in return from lobbyists. It is legalized
bribery. And it won't stop until this political system is destroyed.
The nonprofit Project Drawdown (http://www.drawdown.org/) , which compiles
research from an international coalition of scientists, says that "a
plant-based diet may be the most effective way an individual can stop
climate change." Adopting such a diet should be our first act of revolt. The
second should be carrying out civil disobedience to disrupt the extraction
of fossil fuels, along with massively reducing our consumption of those
fuels. The third, through mass mobilization, should be to overthrow the
corporate state and nationalize the energy sector, the banking industry,
utilities and public transportation in addition to dismantling a war machine
that in waging futile and unwinnable wars consumes nearly half of all
government expenditures. It is a lot to demand. But if we do not succeed,
the human race will disappear.
Governments, if they were instruments of the common good, would end
subsidies to the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries, retrofit
government vehicles and buildings to use clean energy, ban the fossil fuel
and animal agriculture industries from public lands, end the externalization
of the true costs of these industries, and impose taxes so heavy that
extraction of fossil fuels would be unprofitable and the purchase of animal
food products economically unsustainable-just as those foods are
environmentally unsustainable. But with state power being held captive by
corporations, short-term profit takes precedence over human health and even
human survival.
"The technology exists to strip CO2 out of the atmosphere," Parenti said.
"The problem is it's extremely expensive. And how do you store it? As a gas,
it can leak out. But it can also be turned into basically baking soda
(http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a24631/india-co2-baking-
soda/) . But the costs are so expensive. So this technology currently
exists. It's proprietary. Private companies are using it to facilitate
further oil extraction. If civilization was serious about survival,
governments will seize or buy that technology. Make it open source. And
invest in whatever was necessary to strip CO2 out of the atmosphere
artificially, along with [extraction by] plants and forests etcetera."
Parenti stressed that collapse will be defined not only by rising
temperatures but a series of social and infrastructure failures. It will be
nonlinear. He noted that food prices, including the prices for basic grains,
surged shortly before the 2010-2013 uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
"You had the Black Sea drought, affecting grain harvest in Russia, Ukraine
and Kazakhstan," he said. "This ripples through world markets. Bread prices
spike in Tunisia and Egypt. People are out in the street protesting this
mukhabarat [secret police] state they've lived in for 30 years. But it's
also about the price of bread. That's one way that a climate crisis appears.
It doesn't appear like a climate crisis at first. You have to think about
the interconnections of the world economy."
The civil war in Syria was preceded in 2006 by the worst drought in 900
years, as well as an austerity program that weakened government support
systems. Farmlands were transformed into arid dust bowls. Livestock
perished. Food prices skyrocketed. Over 1.5 million desperate people from
the countryside fled to urban areas, many packing themselves into the
shantytowns and slums set up by refugees during the war in Iraq. And into
the chaos walked Islamic State. The war, which has taken half a million
lives, created 4.8 million refugees and internally displaced 7 million
people in Syria. The refugee crisis that resulted in Europe is the worst
since the end of World War II. The influx to Europe has empowered
nationalist and protofascist movements and touched off a rise in hate
crimes. Climate change is the unseen hand in unrest, social disintegration,
chaos and war.
"At one level, this is a war about ethnicity and religion and opposing the
foreign occupation," Parenti said of the war in Afghanistan. "But on another
level, this is about farmers who are dealing with the worst drought in
living memory, which is occasionally punctuated by extreme flooding, growing
the only crop they can grow in those conditions-[heroin] poppies. The poppy
happens to use about one-fifth or one-sixth the amount of water that wheat
and other traditional Afghan crops use. So farmers have to grow poppy if
they're going to survive. Which side of the conflict will help them do that?
The Taliban. There are subtle and important interconnections to all ongoing
conflicts."
"In India, you have the Naxalites, a Maoist guerrilla movement that has been
going for over 40 years," he said. "It progresses with the drought. District
by district, where there is drought, there are Naxalites. The key there is
the state has withdrawn from the credit markets. Farmers have to go to
moneylenders. The moneylenders will only lend them money to grow cotton
because they can't eat cotton. The more money they borrow, the worst the
drought, the more the cotton is produced, and the lower the cotton price
will go. You have mass suicides. You can imagine if you're a farmer on the
verge of drinking poison to kill yourself, and the Naxalites come along and
say, 'Hey look, we have a short-term and a long-term solution for your
problems. The short-term is when the moneylender comes to town you stop his
car and we kill him. When the cops come, we ambush them. In the long term,
it will be better.' "
Failed states, proliferating in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle
East, are ruled by phantom governments.
"There's a mythology of the central state that operates when the police stop
you and demand some paperwork," Parenti said of failed states. "But really,
there is no central database. [These are the] twitching limbs severed from a
spider. These offices are used for basic survival. They can hold up
travelers and demand a $50, $100 bribe from them in the name of some
centralized state that did, in fact, exist 10, 20, 30 years ago. That's a
part of how states fail-the corruption and re-privatization of the means of
administration and the means of repression. [Max] Weber
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist ;) 's
argument is [that] the modern state is about detaching the leader of a
bureaucracy from the ownership of a bureaucracy. State failure begins with
the re-privatization of the bureaucracies, particularly the repressive
bureaucracies of the police and military."
"In a place like Afghanistan, cops pay to have those jobs," he said. "They
pay the head cops. They pay the dues so they can shake down traffic on the
roads. That's spreading all over the world. Its uniforms, insignia,
paperwork, ministries and officialdom all exist, but exist for the personal
gain of whoever is wearing that uniform."
"The possibility of a progressive, civil, left politics is curtailed in a
world where drug-addled teenagers run the checkpoints," he said. "That's
really important to keep in mind. Then the immediate response in the West is
to justify further military intervention, which in every case is the
immediate cause, or trigger, of state collapse. Of course, there are older,
deeper problems that set it up. Libya is a perfect example. The NATO bombing
campaign created that failed state. Iraq is a semi-failed state. Yemen is a
semi-failed state. Half of Syria is a failed state. U.S. and Western
intervention has been pretty instrumental in a lot of that. The great irony
is there's further justification for an overdeveloped military. That's bad
for democratic politics here."
"In the long run, it won't work," he warned. "The process of state failure
spreads and spreads. What we see in response is also a hardening of
democratic regimes in the north. We've got xenophobic politics in the U.S.
Southwest in response to a migration crisis [and that kind of politics also]
is happening in Europe across the Mediterranean. There are all sorts of
great humanitarian responses. But there's also a very clear shift to the
right. France has this state of emergency
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/14/french-parliament-votes-to-ex
tend-state-of-emergency-until-after-2017-elections) that's still in effect.
Right-wing politics are doing well all across Europe. One of the great
dangers of state failure in the global south in the short term is the
hardening and drift towards increasingly authoritarian, xenophobic,
quasi-fascist type of politics in the global north and developing states."
On one July night in 1977 the power went out in New York City. There were
citywide riots. Arsonists started 1,037 fires. Looters smashed their way
into 1,616 stores. There was over $300 million in damage. This Hobbesian
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hobbesian ;) nightmare will become normal in
more and more parts of the globe as we traverse the sixth great mass
extinction
(http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150623-sixth-extinction-kolbert-
animals-conservation-science-world/) , brought on by the activity of human
beings.
The greatest existential crisis of our time is to at once accept the tragic
reality before us and find the courage to resist. It is to acknowledge that
the world as we know it will become harsher and more difficult, that human
suffering will expand, but that we can, if we fight back, perhaps
reconfigure our lives and our society to mitigate the worst savagery,
dramatically reduce our carbon footprint and save ourselves from complete
annihilation. The power elites will do nothing to save us.
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic," historian
Howard Zinn (http://howardzinn.org/about/biography/ ;) wrote. "It is based
on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of
compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in
this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it
destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and
places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this
gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this
spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in
however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.
The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we
think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is
itself a marvelous victory."
The inability to see what is in front of our eyes replicates the blindness
of all past civilizations that celebrated their eternal glory at moments of
precipitous decline. The difference is that life across the whole planet
will go down this time. It is comforting to pretend this is not happening,
to foster false hopes and fool ourselves with the myth of human progress
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/chris_hedges_jan_27_column_transcript_c
ollapse_of_complex_societies_2014012 ) , but these illusions only
tranquilize us at a moment when we should be rising in collective fury
against those who are orchestrating our doom.
Help a Crucial Message Break Through Prison Walls
(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1298995537/caged)
Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, a longtime teacher in prisons, is working
with 28 of his students to stage a play the incarcerated men collectively
created. "CAGED" was born in a New Jersey prison during a course taught by
Hedges and was the subject of a 2013 column
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_plays_the_thing_20131215) he wrote
for Truthdig.
The play centers on the horrors of mass incarceration and how the prisoners'
lives in impoverished urban communities put them on paths that ended in the
grim cells of the United States' prison-industrial complex.
Now the Pulitzer-winning journalist and the students are engaged in a
special project to stage the play for the first time and to produce a book
about the endeavor. (One of the 28 is now a free man and a key force in the
effort.)
The project-co-sponsored by Truthdig and Passage Theatre, the Trenton, N.J.,
site of the proposed premiere-is funded primarily by a Kickstarter campaign
that runs through the end of June. Your support is essential. Go to
Kickstarter now (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1298995537/caged) to
help put this extraordinary stage work before the American public. "CAGED"
should be let out of prison.
'Road Rage' Cited in Killing of Muslim Girl in Virginia
CIA No Longer Can Defend the Indefensible-Its Torture Program
Russell Brand: London's Grenfell Tower Fire Is 'Terrorism' of a Different
Kind (Video)
John Oliver: Boosting Coal Barons Is Not the Same as Helping Miners (Video)
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
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