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Title: The Climate is Changing Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 10, 2009 Language: en Topics: climate change, Green Anarchism Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2009/12/10/the-climate-is-changing
Scientific consensus has finally emerged that global warming is taking
place as a result of industrial capitalism and with dire consequences
for life on earth. Corporate efforts to bribe scientists to argue
otherwise are attracting fewer and fewer takers; this is especially
telling in view of how many researchers depend on industry backing. But
rather than engaging with the fact that capitalism itself is
destructive, governments and liberal environmentalists are promoting
corporate responses to the problems posed by climate change.
---
If we really believed what scientists are telling us about global
warming, the fire engines of every fire department would sound their
sirens and race to the nearest factory to extinguish its furnaces. Every
high school student would run to the thermostat of every classroom, turn
it off, and tear it out of the wall, then hit the parking lot to slash
tires. Every responsible suburban parent would don safety gloves and
walk around the block pulling the electrical meters out of the utility
boxes behind houses and condominiums. Every gas station attendant would
press the emergency button to shut off the pumps, cut the hoses, and
glue the locks on the doors; every coal and petroleum corporation would
immediately set about burying their unused product where it came
from—using only the muscles of their own arms, of course.
But it appears we’re too out of touch to grasp what’s happening. And as
long as that continues, we’ll be powerless to stop it.
Those who learn about the destruction of the environment from books or
the internet can’t hope to rescue anything. The decimation of the
natural world has been going on around us for centuries now; it takes a
particularly bourgeois brand of blindness to drive by felled trees,
spewing smokestacks, and acres of asphalt every day without noticing
that anything is happening until it shows up in the newspaper. People
for whom reality is composed of news articles, rather than the world
they see and hear and smell, are bound to destroy everything they touch.
That alienation is the root of the problem; the devastation of the
environment simply follows from it.
When profit margins are more real than living things, when weather
patterns are more real than refugees fleeing hurricanes, when emissions
cap agreements are more real than new developments in our own
neighborhoods, the world has already been signed over for destruction.
The climate crisis isn’t an event that might happen, looming into view
ahead; it is the familiar setting of our daily lives. Deforestation
isn’t just taking place in national forests or foreign jungles; it is as
real at every strip mall in Ohio as it is in the heart of the Amazon.
The buffalo used to roam right here. Our disconnection from the land is
catastrophic whether or not the sea level is rising, whether or not the
desertification and famine sweeping other continents have reached us
yet.
As usual, the people who brought this crisis upon us are eager to
explain that they are the best qualified to remedy it. But there’s no
reason to believe that their motives or methods have changed. The
results are in that smoking causes cancer, but they’re still trying to
sell us low-tar cigarettes.
Forget about nuclear power, solar power, clean coal, and wind turbines.
Forget about carbon trading, biofuels, recycling programs, organic
superfoods. Forget about new legislation, along with every other
inefficient, insufficient response involving ballots, petitions, or some
other proxy. Our only hope is to fight with our own hands, to take a
stand on the ground beneath our feet—rediscovering in the process what
it means to be a part of the world, not separate from it. Every tree
they try to cut down, we can stop them. Every poison they try to release
into the atmosphere, we can block them. Every new “sustainable”
technology they introduce, we can unmask them.
They aren’t going to stop destroying the planet until we make it too
costly for them to continue. The sooner we do, the better.
---
Where others see hardship and tragedy, entrepreneurs see an opportunity
for financial gain. Putting the “green” in greenhouse gases and the
“eco” in economy, they greet the apocalypse with outstretched wallets.
Are natural disasters wrecking communities? That’s great—sell the
survivors disaster relief and put up luxury condominiums where they used
to live. Are food supplies contaminated with toxins? Slap “organic” on
some of them and jack up the price—presto, what was once taken for
granted in every vegetable is suddenly a selling point! Is consumer
culture devouring the planet? Time for a line of environmentally
friendly products, cashing in on guilt and good intentions to move more
units.
So long as being “sustainable” is a privilege reserved for the rich, the
crisis can only intensify. All the better for those banking on it.
Many conservatives deny that our society is causing global warming; of
course, some still don’t believe in evolution, either. But what they
themselves believe is immaterial; they’re more concerned with the
question of what it is profitable for others to believe. For example,
when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its
2007 report, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank linked to the Bush
administration offered $10,000+ to any scientist who would dispute its
findings.
That is to say—some people consider it a better investment to bribe
experts to deny that anything is happening than to take any steps to
avert catastrophe. Better that the apocalypse snatches us unawares so
long as they can maintain their profits one more year. Sooner the end of
life on earth than the possibility of life beyond capitalism!
Certain do-gooders would like to claim credit for bringing global
warming to the attention of the public, even though radicals have been
clamoring about it for decades. But politicians like Al Gore are not
trying to save the environment so much as to rescue the causes of its
destruction. They are pressing for government and corporate recognition
of the crisis because ecological collapse could destabilize capitalism
if it catches them off guard. Small wonder corporate initiatives and
incentives figure so prominently in the solutions they propose.
Like their conservative colleagues, liberals would sooner risk
extinction than consider abandoning industrial capitalism. They’re
simply too invested in it to do otherwise—witness the Gore family’s
long-running relationship with Occidental Petroleum. In this light,
their bid to seize the reins of the environmentalist movement looks
suspiciously like a calculated effort to prevent a more realistic
response to the crisis.
Some people attribute the crisis to overpopulation—but how many
shantytown dwellers and subsistence farmers do you have to add up to
equal the ecological impact of a single high-powered executive?
For centuries, socialists have promised to grant everyone access to
middle class standards of living. Now it turns out that the biosphere
can’t support even a small minority pursuing that lifestyle; one might
expect socialists to adjust their notion of utopia accordingly. Instead
they’ve simply updated it to match the latest in bourgeois fashions:
today every worker deserves to eat organic produce and live in a “green”
condominium. But these products only came to be as a marketing ploy to
differentiate high-end merchandise from proletarian standard fare. If
you’re going to think big enough to imagine a society without class
differences, you might as well aim for a future in which we share the
wealth of a vibrant natural world rather than chopping it up into inert
commodities.
In practice, Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism served as a convenient means
to swiftly jerk “underdeveloped” nations into the industrial age,
utilizing state intervention to “modernize” peoples who still retained a
connection to the land before eventually dropping them unceremoniously
at the margin of the free market. Today, party communists have gotten no
further than blithe assurances that new management would take care of
everything. Sing along to the tune of “Solidarity Forever”:
If the workers owned the factories, climate change would not exist
All the smoke from all the smokestacks would be changed to harmless mist
…
An individual or community can live a completely “sustainable” lifestyle
without doing anything to hinder the corporations and governments
responsible for the vast majority of environmental devastation. Keeping
one’s hands clean—“setting an example” that no statesman or tycoon will
emulate—is meaningless while others lay the planet to waste. To set a
better example, stop them.
Too many radicals respond to the crisis with despair or even a kind of
wrongheaded anticipation. There’s no reason to believe the exhaustion of
the planets petroleum supply will put an end to patriarchy or white
supremacy. Likewise, it’s all too likely that hierarchy can make it
through ecological collapse intact, so long as there are people left to
dominate and obey.
We’ll get out of the apocalypse what we put into it: we can’t expect it
to produce a more liberated society unless we put the foundations in
place now. Forget about individualistic survival schemes that cast you
as the Last Person on Earth—Hurricane Katrina showed that when the storm
hits, the most important thing is to be part of a community that can
defend itself. The coming upheavals may indeed offer a chance for
fundamental social change, but we have to come up with a compelling
vision and the guts to implement it.