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james lovelock
Is the Covid-19 Pandemic Mother Nature's Response to Human Transgression?
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up.
Apr 02, 2020
As the coronavirus sweeps across the planet, leaving death and mayhem in its wake, many theories are being expounded to explain its ferocity. One, widely circulated within right-wing conspiracy circles, is that it originated as a biological weapon developed at a secret Chinese military lab in the city of Wuhan that somehow (perhaps intentionally?) escaped into the civilian population. Although that "theory" has been thoroughly debunked, President Trump and his acolytes continue to call Covid-19 the China Virus, the Wuhan Virus, or even the "Kung Flu," claiming its global spread was the result of an inept and secretive Chinese government response. Scientists, by and large, believe the virus originated in bats and was transmitted to humans by wildlife sold at a Wuhan seafood market. But perhaps there's another far more ominous possibility to consider: that this is one of Mother Nature's ways of resisting humanity's assault on her essential life systems.
Let's be clear: this pandemic is a world-shattering phenomenon of massive proportions. Not only has it infected hundreds of thousands of people across the planet, killing more than 40,000 of them, but it's brought the global economy to a virtual stand-still, potentially crushing millions of businesses, large and small, while putting tens of millions, or possibly hundreds of millions, of people out of work. In the past, disasters of this magnitude have toppled empires, triggered mass rebellions, and caused widespread famine and starvation. This upheaval, too, will produce widespread misery and imperil the survival of numerous governments.
Understandably, our forebears came to view such calamities as manifestations of the fury of gods incensed by human disrespect for and mistreatment of their universe, the natural world. Today, educated people generally dismiss such notions, but scientists have recently been discovering that human impacts on the environment, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are producing feedback loops causing increasingly severe harm to communities across the globe, in the form of extreme storms, persistent droughts, massive wildfires, and recurring heat waves of an ever deadlier sort.
Climate scientists also speak of "singularities," "non-linear events," and "tipping points" -- the sudden and irreversible collapse of vital ecological systems with far-ranging, highly destructive consequences for humanity. Evidence for such tipping points is growing -- for example in the unexpectedly rapid melting of the Arctic icecap. In that context, a question naturally arises: Is the coronavirus a stand-alone event, independent of any other mega-trends, or does it represent some sort of catastrophic tipping point?
It will be some time before scientists can answer that question with any certainty. There are, however, good reasons to believe that this might be the case and, if so, perhaps it's high time humanity reconsiders its relationship with nature.
Humans vs. Nature
It's common to think of human history as an evolutionary process in which broad, long-studied trends like colonialism and post-colonialism have largely shaped human affairs. When sudden disruptions have occurred, they are usually attributed to, say, the collapse of a long-lasting dynasty or the rise of an ambitious new ruler. But the course of human affairs has also been altered -- often in even more dramatic ways -- by natural occurrences, ranging from prolonged droughts to catastrophic volcanic activity to (yes, of course) plagues and pandemics. The ancient Minoan civilization of the eastern Mediterranean, for example, is widely believed to have disintegrated following a powerful volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now known as Santorini) in the 17th century BCE. Archaeological evidence further suggests that other once-thriving cultures were similarly undermined or even extinguished by natural disasters.
It's hardly surprising that the survivors of such catastrophes often attributed their misfortunes to the anger of various gods over human excesses and depredations. In the ancient world, sacrifices -- even human ones -- were considered a necessity to appease such angry spirits. At the onset of the Trojan War, for example, the Greek goddess Artemis, protectress of wild animals, the wilderness, and the moon, stilled the winds needed to propel the Greek fleet to Troy because Agamemnon, its commander, had killed a sacred deer. To appease her and restore the essential winds, Agamemnon felt obliged -- or so the poet Homer tells us -- to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia (the plot line for many a Greek and modern tragedy).
In more recent times, educated people have generally seen coronavirus-style calamities as either inexplicable acts of God or as explicable, if surprising, natural events. With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in Europe, moreover, many influential thinkers came to believe that humans could use science and technology to overpower nature and so harness it to the will of humanity. The seventeenth-century French mathematician Rene Descartes, for example, wrote of employing science and human knowledge so that "we can... render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature."
This outlook undergirded the view, common in the last three centuries, that the Earth was "virgin" territory (especially when it came to the colonial possessions of the major powers) and so fully open to exploitation by human entrepreneurs. This led to the deforestation of vast areas, as well as the extinction or near-extinction of many animals, and in more recent times, to the plunder of underground mineral and energy deposits.
As it happened, though, this planet proved anything but an impotent victim of colonization and exploitation. Human mistreatment of the natural environment has turned out to have distinctly painful boomerang effects. The ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest, for example, is altering Brazil's climate, raising temperatures and reducing rainfall in significant ways, with painful consequences for local farmers and even more distant urban dwellers. (And the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, thanks to increasingly massive forest fires, will only increase the pace of climate change globally.) Similarly, the technique of hydraulic fracking, used to extract oil and natural gas trapped in underground shale deposits, can trigger earthquakes that damage aboveground structures and endanger human life. In so many ways like these, Mother Nature strikes back when her vital organs suffer harm.
This interplay between human activity and planetary behavior has led some analysts to rethink our relationship with the natural world. They have reconceptualized the Earth as a complex matrix of living and inorganic systems, all (under normal conditions) interacting to maintain a stable balance. When one component of the larger matrix is damaged or destroyed, the others respond in their unique ways in attempting to restore the natural order of things. Originally propounded by the environmental scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s, this notion has often been described as "the Gaia Hypothesis," after the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life.
Climate Tipping Points
Posing the ultimate threat to planetary health, climate change -- a direct consequence of the human impulse to dump ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially heating the planet to the breaking point -- is guaranteed to generate the most brutal of all such feedback loops. By emitting ever more carbon dioxide and other gases, humans are fundamentally altering planetary chemistry and posing an almost unimaginable threat to natural ecosystems. Climate-change deniers in the Trumpian mode continue to insist that we can keep doing this with no cost to our way of life. It is, however, becoming increasingly apparent that the more we alter the climate, the more the planet will respond in ways guaranteed to endanger human life and prosperity.
The main engine of climate change is the greenhouse effect, as all those greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere entrap ever more radiated solar heat from the Earth's surface, raising temperatures worldwide and so altering global climate patterns. Until now, much of this added heat and carbon dioxide has been absorbed by the planet's oceans, resulting in rising water temperatures and the increased acidification of their waters. This, in turn, has already led to, among other deleterious effects, the mass die-off of coral reefs -- the preferred habitat of many of the fish species on which large numbers of humans rely for their sustenance and livelihoods. Just as consequential, higher ocean temperatures have provided the excess energy that has fueled many of the most destructive hurricanes of recent times, including Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, and Dorian.
A warmer atmosphere can also sustain greater accumulations of moisture, making possible the prolonged downpours and catastrophic flooding being experienced in many parts of the world, including the upper Midwest in the United States. In other areas, rainfall is decreasing and heat waves are becoming more frequent and prolonged, resulting in devastating wildfires of the sort witnessed in the American West in recent years and in Australia this year.
In all such ways, Mother Nature, you might say, is striking back. It is, however, the potential for "non-linear" events and "tipping points" that has some climate scientists especially concerned, fearing that we now live on what might be thought of as an avenging planet. While many climate effects, like prolonged heat waves, will become more pronounced over time, other effects, it is now believed, will occur suddenly, with little warning, and could result in large-scale disruptions in human life (as in this coronavirus moment). You might think of this as Mother Nature saying, "Stop! Do not go past this point or there will be dreadful consequences!"
Scientists are understandably cautious in discussing such possibilities, as they are harder to study than linear events like rising world temperatures. But the concern is there. "Large-scale singular events (also called 'tipping points,' or critical thresholds) are abrupt and drastic changes in physical, ecological, or social systems" brought about by the relentless rise in temperatures, noted the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its comprehensive 2014 assessment of anticipated impacts. Such events, the IPCC pointed out, "pose key risks because of the potential magnitude of the consequences; the rate at which they would occur; and, depending on this rate, the limited ability of society to cope with them."
Six years later, that striking description sounds eerily like the present moment.
Until now, the tipping points of greatest concern to scientists have been the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Those two massive reservoirs of ice contain the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of square miles of water. Should they melt ever more quickly with all that water flowing into neighboring oceans, a sea level rise of 20 feet or more can be expected, inundating many of the world's most populous coastal cities and forcing billions of people to relocate. In its 2014 study, the IPCC predicted that this might occur over several centuries, at least offering plenty of time for humans to adapt, but more recent research indicates that those two ice sheets are melting far more rapidly than previously believed -- and so a sharp increase in sea levels can be expected well before the end of this century with catastrophic consequences for coastal communities.
The IPCC also identified two other possible tipping points with potentially far-reaching consequences: the die-off of the Amazon rain forest and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Both are already under way, reducing the survival prospects of flora and fauna in their respective habitats. As these processes gain momentum, entire ecosystems are likely to be obliterated and many species killed off, with drastic consequences for the humans who rely on them in so many ways (from food to pollination chains) for their survival. But as is always the case in such transformations, other species -- perhaps insects and microorganisms highly dangerous to humans -- could occupy those spaces emptied by extinction.
Climate Change and Pandemics
Back in 2014, the IPCC did not identify human pandemics among potential climate-induced tipping points, but it did provide plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.
Combined with mechanized agriculture and deforestation, climate change is also undermining subsistence farming and indigenous lifestyles in many parts of the world, driving millions of impoverished people to already crowded urban centers, where health facilities are often overburdened and the risk of contagion ever greater. "Virtually all the projected growth in populations will occur in urban agglomerations," the IPCC noted then. Adequate sanitation is lacking in many of these cities, particularly in the densely populated shantytowns that often surround them. "About 150 million people currently live in cities affected by chronic water shortages, and by 2050, unless there are rapid improvements in urban environments, the number will rise to almost a billion."
Such newly settled urban dwellers often retain strong ties to family members still in the countryside who, in turn, may come in contact with wild animals carrying deadly viruses. This appears to have been the origin of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, which affected tens of thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Scientists believe that the Ebola virus (like the coronavirus) originated in bats and was then transmitted to gorillas and other wild animals that coexist with people living on the fringes of tropical forests. Somehow, a human or humans contracted the disease from exposure to such creatures and then transmitted it to visitors from the city who, upon their return, infected many others.
The coronavirus appears to have had somewhat similar origins. In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures.
The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case. If so, we had better take heed.
Heeding Mother Nature's Warning
Suppose this interpretation of the Covid-19 pandemic is correct. Suppose that the coronavirus is nature's warning, its way of telling us that we've gone too far and must alter our behavior lest we risk further contamination. What then?
To adapt a phrase from the Cold War era, what humanity may need to do is institute a new policy of "peaceful coexistence" with Mother Nature. This approach would legitimize the continued presence of large numbers of humans on the planet but require that they respect certain limits in their interactions with its ecosphere. We humans could use our talents and technologies to improve life in areas we've long occupied, but infringement elsewhere would be heavily restricted. Natural disasters -- floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the like -- would, of course, still occur, but not at a rate exceeding what we experienced in the pre-industrial past.
Implementation of such a strategy would, at the very least, require putting the brakes on climate change as swiftly as possible through the rapid and thorough elimination of human-induced carbon emissions -- something that has, in fact, happened in at least a modest way, and however briefly, thanks to this Covid-19 moment. Deforestation would also have to be halted and the world's remaining wilderness areas preserved as is forever. Any further despoliation of the oceans would have to be stopped, including the dumping of wastes, plastics, engine fuel, and runoff pesticides.
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up. The only way to avert such a catastrophe and assure ourselves that Earth will not become an avenger planet is to heed Mother Nature's warning and cease the further desecration of essential ecosystems.
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We Need Biodiversity-Based Agriculture to Solve the Climate Crisis
We need to move from oil to soil.
Oct 07, 2019
The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity -- an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems -- that can meet all our needs and sustain life.
Through biodiversity and the living functions of the biosphere, the Earth regulates temperature and climate, and has created the conditions for our species to evolve. This is what NASA scientist James Lovelock found in working with Lynn Margulis, who was studying the processes by which living organisms produce and remove gases from the atmosphere. The Earth is a self-regulating living organism, and life on Earth creates conditions for life to be maintained and evolve.
The Gaia Hypothesis, born in the 1970s, was a scientific reawakening to the Living Earth. The Earth fossilized some living carbon, and transformed it into dead carbon, storing it underground. That is where we should have left it.
All the coal, petroleum and natural gas we are burning and extracting to run our contemporary oil-based economy was formed over 600 million years. We are burning up millions of years of nature's work annually. This is why the carbon cycle is broken.
A few centuries of fossil fuel-based civilization have brought our very survival under threat by rupturing the Earth's carbon cycle, disrupting key climate systems and self-regulatory capacity, and pushing diverse species to extinction at 1000 times the normal rate. The connection between biodiversity and climate change is intimate.
While using 75 percent of the total land that is being used for agriculture, industrial agriculture based on fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures produce only 30 percent of the food we eat, while small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of the land provide 70 percent of the food.Extinction is a certainty if we continue a little longer on the fossil fuel path. A shift to a biodiversity-based civilization is now a survival imperative.
Take the example of food and agriculture systems. The Earth has roughly 300,000 edible plant species, but the contemporary global human community eats only 200 of them. And, according to the New Scientist, "half our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat." Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the soy that is grown is used as food for humans. The rest goes to produce biofuels and animal feed.
Our agriculture system is not primarily a food system, it is an industrial system, and it is not sustainable.
The Amazon rainforests are home to 10 percent of the Earth's biodiversity. Now, the rich forests are being burned for the expansion of GMO soy crops.
The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on land and climate highlights how the climate problem begins with what we do on land.
We have been repeatedly told that monocultures of crops with intensive chemical inputs of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are necessary for feeding the world.
While using 75 percent of the total land that is being used for agriculture, industrial agriculture based on fossil fuel-intensive, chemical-intensive monocultures produce only 30 percent of the food we eat, while small, biodiverse farms using 25 percent of the land provide 70 percent of the food. Industrial agriculture is responsible for 75 percent of the destruction of soil, water and biodiversity of the planet. At this rate, if the share of fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture and industrial food in our diet is increased to 40 percent, we will have a dead planet. There will be no life, no food, on a dead planet.
Besides the carbon dioxide directly emitted from fossil fuel agriculture, nitrous oxide is emitted from nitrogen fertilizers based on fossil fuels, and methane is emitted from factory farms and food waste.
The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer is highly energy-intensive. One kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of 2 liters of diesel. Energy used during fertilizer manufacture was equivalent to 191 billion liters of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030. This is a major contributor to climate change, yet largely ignored. One kilogram of phosphate fertilizer requires half a liter of diesel.
Nitrous oxide is 300 times more disruptive for the climate than carbon dioxide. Nitrogen fertilizers are destabilizing the climate, creating dead zones in the oceans and desertifying the soils. In the planetary context, the erosion of biodiversity and the transgression of the nitrogen boundary are serious, though often-overlooked, crises.
Thus, regenerating the planet through biodiversity-based ecological processes has become a survival imperative for the human species and all beings. Central to the transition is a shift from fossil fuels and dead carbon, to living processes based on growing and recycling living carbon renewed and grown as biodiversity.
Organic farming--working with nature--takes excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where it doesn't belong, and puts it back in the soil where it belongs, through photosynthesis. It also increases the water-holding capacity of soil, contributing to resilience in times of more frequent droughts, floods and other climate extremes. Organic farming has the potential of sequestering 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the amount needed to be removed from the atmosphere to keep atmospheric carbon below 350 parts per million, and the average temperature increase of 2 degrees centigrade. We can bridge the emissions gap through ecological biodiversity-intensive agriculture, working with nature.
And the more biodiversity and biomass we grow, the more the plants sequester atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, and reduce both emissions and the stocks of pollutants in the air. Carbon is returned to the soil through plants.
The more we grow biodiversity and biomass on forests and farms, the more organic matter is available to return to the soil, thus reversing the trends toward desertification, which is already a major reason for the displacement and uprooting of people and the creation of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Biodiversity-based agriculture is not just a climate solution, it is also a solution to hunger. Approximately 1 billion people are permanently hungry. Biodiversity-intensive, fossil-fuel-free, chemical-free systems produce more nutrition per acre and can feed more people using less land.
To repair the broken carbon cycle, we need to turn to seeds, to the soil and to the sun to increase the living carbon in the plants and in the soil. We need to remember that living carbon gives life, and dead fossil carbon is disrupting living processes. With our care and consciousness we can increase living carbon on the planet, and increase the well-being of all. On the other hand, the more we exploit and use dead carbon, and the more pollution we create, the less we have for the future. Dead carbon must be left underground. This is an ethical obligation and ecological imperative.
This is why the term "decarbonization," which fails to make a distinction between living and dead carbon, is scientifically and ecologically inappropriate. If we decarbonized the economy, we would have no plants, which are living carbon. We would have no life on earth, which creates and is sustained by living carbon. A decarbonized planet would be a dead planet.
We need to recarbonize the world with biodiversity and living carbon. We need to leave dead carbon in the ground. We need to move from oil to soil. We need to urgently move from a fossil fuel-based system to a biodiversity-based ecological civilization. We can plant the seeds of hope, the seeds of the future.
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Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites
We must organize to replace existing structures of power with ones capable of coping with the crisis before us.
Sep 23, 2019
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.
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.
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