speeding toward apocalypse
Originally written December 11
I was reading an article in The Irish Times yesterday, about the climate apocalypse we are heading into which no respectable mainstream figures deny, and which billion-dollar industries are continually lobbying to keep heading towards so that they can continue lining their pockets. I found it to be an articulate expression of the same things I see and resent.
The article described this state of affairs, where residents of Somalia and the Philippines suffer as a result of carbon emitted by people in the U.S. or Europe, as looking "less like democracy and more like another political system familiar to us here in Ireland: empire."
Not only an empire of nations, but an empire of corporations. Empire is what you get when you allow capitalism to reach its endgame — monopolistic corporations whose annual revenue is greater than the GDP of Portugal. Extracting 'value' from our limited natural resources until there is nothing more left to extract. The engine that prioritizes economic growth over our continued existence as a species.
At what point will the earth become uninhabitable?
When it does, it will be us that killed it.
How do we stop this? How do we stop billion-dollar industries and their lobbyists from turning earth into hell in my lifetime?
We just lost an election that could have made the future less bad.
The US will continue to churn out even more emissions, undo decades of progress, with deregulation – rolling back legislation on which poisons are allowed to be put in food, how much lead is permitted in your drinking water, what kind of safety measures protect workers from debilitating or fatal workplace injuries, etc.
How do we stop the fossil fuel industry, the weapons industry, every hegemonic behemoth of a certain size — armed with lawyers and pockets deeper than the foundations of the fancy buildings they use as HQ — from destroying the future of humankind in the name of profit?
The article cited a group of activists in County Mayo, Ireland, who picketed the site at which an oil pipeline was to be built. They prevented workers from gathering, created disturbances, and sabotaged some of the infrastructure. Their efforts were unsuccessful – the pipeline was built anyway – but they tripled the cost of the project.
Capitalism operates on pursuing the investment that will generate the largest economic value. Avoiding losses, and pursuing the cheapest option to produce a profit. If cadmium is cheaper than cocoa beans, there will be cadmium padding your chocolate. If exploited child labor is cheaper than paying adult workers fair wages, that is what factories will do. The way to make progress against the engine driven only by profit is to make bad choices more costly than good ones.
Isn't that how we defeated child labor in America? By straight-up making it illegal, and then enforcing it so companies found to be employing children would have to pay much more in legal fees than they would by paying adults. Continuing the fight when the Supreme Court threw out the first attempt to abolish it.
I don't have a better answer than this right now. Voting... We had a shot, and then we lost it. I saw a tweet this morning by Trump promising that "any person or company investing one billion dollars, or more, in the United States… will receive… all environmental approvals." Explicitly granting the people with the most resources to cause harm, the freedom to do so.
I've been thinking about these issues a lot in the wake of the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. This feels like it has the potential to be a pivotal moment in history, and I hope that there is some positive societal change that can come out of it.
The New York Times is already using the phrase "class war" to describe the overwhelming support Luigi has gotten, and the New Yorker published a well-written piece on what the shooting has come to symbolize.
"Denied health-insurance claims are not broadly understood [in terms of violence], in part because people in consequential positions at health-insurance companies, and those in their social circles, are likely to have experienced denied claims mainly as a matter of extreme annoyance at worst: hours on the phone, maybe; a bunch of extra paperwork; maybe money spent that could've gone to next year's vacation. For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. Maybe everyone knows this, anyway, and structural violence—another term for it is "social injustice"—is simply, at this point, the structure of American life, and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not."
The article goes on to cite John Galtung, the sociologist who coined the term "structural violence."
"There is either—Galtung notes that this is the most important distinction—a person who acts to commit the violence or there is not. Violence can be intended or unintended. It can be manifest, or latent. Traditionally, our society fixates on only one version of this: direct physical violence committed by a person intending harm... If one were to, hypothetically, blow up an unoccupied private jet in protest of the fact that the wealthiest one per cent of the global population accounts for more carbon emissions than the poorest sixty-six per cent, this would be seen by many people—like Thompson's murder, and unlike the tens of thousands of human deaths per year already caused by climate change—as a sign of profoundly alarming social decay."
It's all so ill-defined, because everything is happening right now. Is this a class struggle? Right now it's a wave of online support after the CEO of the healthcare company with the highest rate of claim rejections was assassinated. It's too soon to tell what's going to happen.
I hope that those in power actually take this shit seriously. A friend of mine, when I spoke with them about this, said "I think this shows that the people have much more power than the oligarchs would like them to believe." I will leave it at that.