(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Noam Chomsky once dismissed questions about 9/11—he refused to speculate like a typical conspiracy theorist, saying that there were bigger fish to fry that needed to be gotten to as quickly as possible. What Chomsky wanted to focus our attention on was what we still had limited time to do something about, namely his three major concerns: climate change, nuclear war, and the end of democracy. Any one of these could put an end to the experiment called human life on planet Earth. How can we force our leaders to address this problem?
The long heat
I Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton we get a clear picture of where we as a planet are in terms of climate policy. What we knew, when we knew it, and what we are doing about the crisis that has definitely become a consequence of limited or no action. Malm and Carton begin by telling the reader that what they mean by overshooting is measures to remedy the situation. They write: “Overshooting here is not a fate that is passively accepted. It is an active program for how we are going to deal with the disaster: Let it continue for now, and then we will sort it out by the end of this century.” This strikes Malm and Carton as abhorrent and perhaps insane.
“The capacity of people in capitalist society to deny and, when this no longer works, suppress the climate crisis.”
If mitigation measures don't work, and they won't, there is a plan for the future. "The dominant classes will have to come up with secondary backup measures to deal with the consequences of warming." Reassuring, isn't it? they seem to be asking the reader. The 'backup measures' include three options (or bankruptcy stages, depending on how you look at it): adaptation, carbon removal and geoengineering. "All three are also fraught with consequences, ranging from the annoying to the apocalyptic," write the two, who plan to publish their own analysis of the three backup options. They have already called it The Long Heat: Climate Policy When It's Too Late. “It will pay particular attention to the psychological dimensions of the climate crisis,” they write, “particularly the enormous capacity of people in capitalist society to deny and, when this no longer works, to suppress it.”
The authors focus on fossil fuel. They see that the warnings have not reached the point. They note that the world had a chance to take advantage of the proverbial bright spot that came with Covid-19 and the lockdown regime. They write: “In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, something highly unusual happened: global CO2emissions fell… The lockdowns that closed the highways of the world economy reduced total emissions by 5–6 percent… Coincidentally, the pandemic out just as the wave of climate mobilizations in the streets from Berlin to Bogotá to London was peaking – in 2019 this had been ‘the fastest growing social movement in history’. Proposals were made to use the pandemic to start the transition that was then long overdue. These came to nothing.”
Egoism reigns supreme.
They didn't lead to anything. Miracles from God have been rare for millennia – we all know that – but to see CO2-the recession in 2020 was almost like a sign from heaven. But no, selfishness reigns supreme.
climate disaster
The authors continue the chronicle of the end of the planetIn 2021, “CO increased2emissions by six percent, or two gigatonnes.” Then the authors got really trippy. To visualize an abstract gigatonne as a concrete image, they wrote, you can think of a gigatonne as a unit of mass “equivalent to the weight of over 100 African elephants.” So two gigatonnes is equivalent to 000 African elephants.
… a third of Bangladesh under water … Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland … engulfed in flames …
The authors list the damage already caused by the climate catastrophe, which is being ignored for what it is – potentially eschatological in scope: “The double blow of a cyclone and an early monsoon … a third of Bangladesh underwater … Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland … engulfed in flames … in the Atlantic Ocean – thirty named storms. In the space of a fortnight, two hurricanes tear through Nicaragua … for the first time a hurricane hits Somalia … (cities are flooded to a greater extent, wetlands are on fire) … large parts of Turkey and Greece … are in flames, while in the Chinese province of Henan a year’s worth of rain fell in three days – downpours ‘not seen in 1000 years’. But in southern Madagascar, drought forced eight out of ten inhabitants to fill their stomachs with leaves, cacti and locusts.”
The long heat
Overshoot is divided into a preface and three main parts: The Border is Not a Border; Fossil Capital is a Demon, and Into the Long Heat. What We Have as mitigation is not enough – it is not even a beginning. The culprit is the one we all know: Big Oil. The long heat means that our children and grandchildren will have to live underground to survive. That is what the book tells. Methodically. With details. The last chapter, as in its resignation to our fate. But it holds forth the notion that a shock to the system's dominant class control can lead to a real reduction.
I remember reading Daniel Ellsbergs memoirs, The Doomsday Machine (2017). There he recounts how he and a RAND colleague saw Dr. Strangelove when it came out, and how he and his colleague agreed that the madness they had just witnessed “basically looked like a documentary.” One of the strangest scenes in the film is where Dr. Strangelove explains how after the war everyone will have to live underground, but the good news is that each man will be given a set of ten beautiful women to populate the world with. It’s a crazy line of thinking.
Some areas of public policy are far too important for the elites and the bluffers and the technocrats to be given responsibility for them, or for the state to give up implicit control in exchange for ever more money and power.
Translated by MODERN TIMES' editor.
