It Could Happen Here - Interview with Geoff Mann, Co-Author of Climate Leviathan

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

We sit down to talk with Geoff Mann, a Professor of Geography and Political Economy who also co-authored the book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory For Our Planetary Future. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Greetings and salutations. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm part of the research and writing team. And today we have a special treat for everybody here. We are going to be running an interview with Jeff Mann. Jeff Mann is a co-author

of the fantastic book Climate Leviathan, a political theory of our planetary future. Jeff Mann is a professor. He teaches political economy and economic geography. He's done lots of writing on capitalism and climate change. He is a fantastic resource, and I highly recommend his book. It can get a little academic. It has a lot of big fancy words that I probably would have a hard time saying out loud. But it's a very good read. So I would recommend picking up the book if you want to read about economics and climate change and all that kind of stuff. But thankfully, we interviewed him here in the pod. So if you're more so inclined, you can listen to this interview that's going to play right after I'm done talking. So without further ado, here is our

interview with Jeff Mann talking about politics and climate change. Let's go. So the show we're looking to do, the first season of this, which we dropped like years ago, The first season of this, which we dropped like years ago, 2019, was like kind of a my my my base of experience as a journalist is in conflict reporting. So like Iraq, Syria, Ukraine. And it was like, what would happen if there were to be a civil conflict in the United States? How would that actually look? How do these things look in the modern world and all that jazz? This season we're doing what is the world going to be just based on what we know of how climate change is going to affect things? And that's all too bleak to get into without trying to provide some positive possibilities for how things could be, how adaptations that could be made and whatnot. And I think what's so interesting about your book is it provides all of the different,

with the exception of the best case scenario, all of the scenarios you present seem very plausible to me. And I guess I'm wondering of, of the ones that you've put forward in your book, is there one that seems more plausible to you right now? Are you kind of at a point where you're expecting there to be kind of a regional breakdown as to like, you know, this chunk of the world goes to this kind of climate malethane, climate leviathan is this sort of chunk of the world like i'm wondering like what you're seeing right now just as we're watching shit start to really hit home for people yeah yeah um i i i'm always reluctant in these instances to say that i know more than anyone else, you know, about what's going to happen. So I hope it doesn't come across as in any way like me prognosticating,

which actually, to be honest with you, Joel is much more comfortable doing the guy I wrote the book with who you should also chat with if you ever get the chance. Brilliant guy. But I think you're right. I do think there's a sort of fragmentation right now, whether or not, like geopolitically, in the sense, like you said, regional breakdowns or the way that like kind of different trajectories could be happening simultaneously in different parts of the planet. How long that can last or whether or not it just stays that way, I think is a super interesting question. It does seem to me that the Chinese state, for a variety of reasons, some of which I probably have a handle on and others I just don't know enough to know, the Chinese state approaches these problems in a really different way than we do in North America or Western Europe, for example. than we do in North America or Western Europe, for example.

And how they handle like what is clearly fucking coming down their pipe, you know, not just with these floods, but, you know, the overall, like the soil loss, the sort of mass internment in the West, urbanization at a scale that, you know, is like completely unsustainable because the countryside is, because the countryside can't support its people anymore. They have these permit systems and everything. How they approach that whole problem from an ecological breakdown perspective could very much, I think, take a kind of Leviathan-like form,

but a much more authoritarian version. It will not, I don't think, in the short term, look like Mao in terms of a sort of revolutionary process. But here in North America, I think that this idea that, you know, Joel and I tried to float about capital taking over and trying to basically maintain itself at the top of the hierarchy and, you know, basically allow the planet to break down, but to have the social, to maintain the social order in its own interest. I actually still think that's unfolding right in front of us.

And I think Western Europe is the same, just managing it in a very different kind of technocratic way. But I think you're right to identify not a global kind of coalescence, but rather a whole variety of conflicting trajectories. That would be my take on it right now. How do you, when you're trying to have these conversations about like, what's, what's coming down the pipe with people who are less buried in this than you are? Yeah. How do you introduce the concept of climate Leviathan to them?

Well, so, I mean, I run into this, I mean, this might be a terrible, what's the right word I'm thinking of? Comparison to make, but I run into this a lot, like, you know, just in like classroom, like with students and stuff like that. And basically the way I usually begin it is I ask the question, you know, cause people often, I think quite rightly make certain kinds of, uh, prognostications about,

uh, you know, climate change kind of running out of control and destroying life as we know it, um, in a rather immediate way. And, and. And I usually just say like, that runs so counter to the interests of global capital that it's impossible to imagine them not responding. And in anywhere from a kind of minor tweaky to like full on emergency panic mode response, depending upon the situation and conditions. And so I basically say the idea of climate Leviathan is precisely that. It's capital responding. Now, of course, we all, I think, rightly know that that response will never be adequate

to the problem, not even at a purely sort of survivalist level. But I still think that in the medium term, that's what we're going to see. And that's how I usually introduce it. It's like, imagine capital responding to climate change, because they'll have to. What will it look like? It'll look like Leviathan. Yeah, and I think one of the, yeah, no, that makes sense. And one of the reasons I like that, and I like the way you and Joel frame things is that I'm, I've grown very tired of, especially in the, you know, I, I have some prepping kind of interests and stuff. Like I, I think that stuff's neat, but I've always felt like the, the obsession

with collapse is not just silly. It's counterfactual because barring some sort of like the, the ever present possibility of a nuclear conflict or something, I don't, I don't see collapse as a, as a realistic consequence of climate change. I see collapses. I see places collapsing. I see survivability in chunks of the world collapsing, but I think you're absolutely right. There's no way capital's going to allow everything to fall apart because then they can't go to the mall you know exactly

yeah yeah and we can't either and that's yeah they're desperate for us to keep doing that right so yeah i agree totally yeah i'm wondering this climate leviathan like when you describe it it doesn't sound great it also sounds at least. It sounds like the same way I've seen, like that's part of why it's very believable is it sounds like the way the system currently deals with every problem, right? These technocratic half-competent focus group solutions that are generally too late and, you know, only occasionally effective. What scares me is, only occasionally effective. What scares me is, and I forget the exact term, but like, essentially, the authoritarian, the more authoritarian version of this, you know,

like in the more authoritarian kind of coming from a, we're not going to fix the problem, we're just going to protect whatever kind of identitarian chunk we consider our base from it. Do you see that gaining strength right now like where do you where do you looking at kind of the the lay of the land at the moment where are you seeing that yeah that's a really good you know comment uh and from my perspective i agree with you i think that stuff is serious and i think if i'm honest with you it's a little bit of a missing bit in the book's argument in the sense that i don't think we took seriously enough a version of behemoth that doesn't deny climate change but only gives a shit about its own internal territories or yeah i mean its own interests so that it becomes a behemoth like

fuck you to the rest of the world. But, but at the same time takes climate very seriously. You know, I think some people call it like eco-fascism. I'm not so sure, you know, I don't, I, that term, I don't think that covers exactly what I'm trying to say, but maybe I'm just don't understand it well enough. But I, I do think that that the book Joel and I don't take that prospect seriously enough. And I think that is actually like that kind of Mike Davis sort of like, you know, if you guys read that piece, who will build the arc? Yeah. It's, it's fucking awesome. It's an amazing piece of work. It's from about 2010, I think, in the New Left Review.

And he writes basically about, you know, an elite kind of attempt to just sort of create islands of survivability or not more than survivability. Islands of elite leisure in a sense. In a world that's falling apart around it. And I actually think that that's totally believable. Like, I think that's more believable than we thought it was when we wrote the book. Yeah. And I guess, you know, the question of whether or not to call it climate fascism, I think that climate fascism is a separate thing from the possibility of climate authoritarianism, because I think you have this

possibility of like, all right, we have a state or a group of states that are going to introduce very authoritarian measures in order to protect uh their people and their so-called way of life as and i think you also have a chance of this possibility of kind of a more identitarian sort of thing like whether it's white nationalist or whatever um uh i kind of see and i see maybe them feeding into each other. I don't know. Like it's, it all gets very muddled. And I think like one of the problems you have trying to prognosticate about

the future is that there's always so many variables and you can, anything you, any kind of permutation of any of these things that you can dream up, you can see the seeds of them. If you go out and find them, you can find the Christian dominionist chunk of this, like the eco-fascist thing. And you can find a more socialist version and you can find a more white nationalist version. And it's just kind of anyone's guess as to what's going to pick up steam. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, yeah.

I mean, there's something both, I think, important about the kind of thing that Joel and I are trying to do in the book. And there's also something that is perhaps inevitably arrogant about that effort. And that arrogance, like, well, I think both Joel and I would always say that the book, for us at least, was worth writing no matter what. It would be wrong to not acknowledge the arrogance of that analysis that then allows you, as soon as you acknowledge the arrogance, then you acknowledge a lot of the stuff you're talking about, right? Like the fact that, yeah, I mean, there's a million things that ways that this could go. And some of them won't look like what we said they look and we can't, you know, we have to think hard. Well, that's what I find really intelligent about the way you set it up, because you're not saying, okay, this political party is going to evolve

in these ways. You're trying to say that these are kind of the, we can see from responses to other problems and from responses, even to climate change, these are kind of the, we can see from responses to other problems and from responses even to climate change, these are kind of the patterns things are going to break down in. And I guess before I, I'll hand it over to Garrison in a little bit, but kind of the last thing I wanted to really get into was, was it climate X, the term you all used for kind of the most optimistic scenario that I don't think any of us believes in as much as we'd like to at the moment. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah. One of the things that we're trying to do here is envision how that might look. And the best thing that I can come up with

is a mix of really durable, widespread mutual aid networks to support some sort of mass general strike in order to institute sweeping changes both to the nature of capitalism and to like the the the social system we have in order to reduce environmental harm and anyway that sort of thing like that's that's the only thing i can imagine that i don't think you know you're talking about an effort more ambitious than landing a man on the moon um but at least

it's a set of things that could achieve a goal as opposed to like i don't think it's totally pie in the sky it's a possibility yeah i'm wondering what when you think about best case scenario how if like everything breaks right things could be resolved positively like what are you envisioning i'm wondering kind of like what's your optimistic side say when you let it peek through? Right. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it looks a lot like what you're describing. I think that, you know, they'll have to be. And I do think there will be the question is, of course, whether it's too late, and whether it's effective and all other stuff. But there will have to be a kind of mass base to it for sure. But what I don't believe, and I think you're hinting at this too, tell me if I'm misunderstanding. What I don't believe is that it will be a mass-based thing

from what we might think of as a single or monolithic movement. It's going to, it's because the ways that people manage what's coming our way are going to have to be, for one thing, very locally specific, as we know, like, like you said, like there's collapses, there's, you know, people are dealing with different challenges in their own places. And not just environmentally, but of course, their own political histories and all our stuff. I think it has to be like an art an articulation in these mass moments like you're describing like a general strike or whatever of a whole variety of movements that are actually organized primarily around meeting the needs of the people where they live

mutual aid societies other kinds of distributional you know fixes and this kind of chaotic breakdown like you described when things are much more important than coffee are unavailable widely those kinds of things um well let's not let's not let's not downplay the importance of coffee here no no no i would never downplay the importance of coffee but for the moment yeah yeah yeah i get it you know like water you know what i mean or something yeah yes um uh then i i think you're right. I think it's going to be, it has to be, climate X has to be multiple in the sense that it has to take many, many forms specific to the needs of the folks that are there. But what I am convinced of, which I wasn't always actually,

is that the effectiveness of movements like that will have, they will depend upon the extent to which they're democratic, not in terms of actual long-term effectiveness it cannot be like local authoritarianism we can't imagine this as sort of like a series of climate change warlords i don't think that is a a realistic solution even from a purely like kind of managing the climate change perspective. Yeah, no, I've known a couple of warlords and none of them are good at long-term planning. Yeah, so I've never known a warlord, but I can imagine you are right.

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast garrison you want to take over for a bit yeah so yeah i mean i started doing just general kind of climate research like about half a year ago like getting like relatively deep into it and one of your books was one of the things that kept coming up as recommended reading on the topic um and yeah i found it super super um interesting there's a lot of a lot of stuff focuses on like a lot of stuff on the topic focuses on like potential physical effects happening to like um geography and to like environments uh but not there's not as much on like the political

side of things and how that's going to break down like societally in terms of, you know, freedom and liberty and sovereignty over specific, you know, states or, you know, free states. So that, yeah, that's what really drew me into your book specifically was the kind of special focus on that side of things. And the other part that got me pretty early on is the mitigation versus adaption side of things and how, to my understanding, we're kind of like crossing into the place where mitigation is becoming more and more difficult and adaptation is both necessary, but also unfortunately necessary because there's a lot of ways that that can be used by authoritarian states to make things harder to have change

happen in the future um could you like speak on what types of mitigation what type of some mitigation efforts might we still have and how and how adaption is both going to be necessary and how there's going to be like a dark side to some of those adaptions. I would agree with your read there. Like I think we're at the point now where it's fair to say that if you ask the climate scientist, I could be wrong, but I know a few climate scientists and I do quiz them on stuff like this sometimes that we're at the point where

mitigation efforts right now are actually purely adaptive. Like we are past many thresholds where somehow we could imagine like escaping this problem, you know what I mean? Like evading it, getting out the side door or something like that. So even our mitigation efforts right now are actually adaptive in that sense. And adaptation, I think, has become in many ways the holy grail of modern political economy. Like, you know what I mean? How do we have our luxurious Western lifestyles and consumption patterns and all this in the middle of our collapsing ecosystems. Like, how do we manage that? You know what I mean? It's almost like, I think at some point in the book we say, and Joel and I have certainly said it a lot since, you know, adaptation has become

the progress of our time. Like if in the 20th century, we talked about all progress, progress, that's what capitalism and liberalism deliver. Now we're like, oh, the best they can deliver is adaptation to a fucking crazy set of, you know, conditions. And so I guess I would say that from a mitigation perspective, for sure, we still have the capacity to, you know, considerably cut emissions. If we, you know, I mean, we have the sort of pie in the sky, but hopeful things like, you know, the elimination of the fossil fuel industry, that would do a lot. But we would still be in kind of short term, I mean, in medium term, sort of fucked. Like, and that's a big deal. So I do think that the mitigation efforts, I would never want to say, oh, don't bother, like some sort of accelerationist horseshit, because of course that will matter. But I do think that adaptation has

become in some sense, like the mode through which we evaluate anything from like political proposals to, you know, technical fixes, like it's at least amongst people who are willing to admit there's a problem i guess there's a you know a whole world of people who somehow still don't yeah that that good people is always larger than what i you know after like spending like months reading you know so many climate books i'm like still struck at like how basically the majority of people in america don't think it's a big problem and it's like yeah that's i we're we're real screwed yeah that front um yeah it's not it's not i mean you know uh i i think about like fascism the last time it came around and how what a common attitude that was towards fascism sweeping europe and we eventually got on the same page about that

and only like 100 million people died so yeah i know but i guess guess I would say there is like there I think there are really strong ideological, if that's the right word, reasons for the persistence, not of like not of denialism, you know, in this kind Chinese hoax and all that stuff. I don't mean that. I mean, more like this kind of, you know, sometimes people call it the new denialism where you acknowledge it as a problem, but then you don't do anything about it. Like, yeah, this is what we have in Canada. We have a national government that talks all the time and then subsidizes every oil industry that can get its hands on, you know, a sort of like, yeah, yeah, it's a problem. And we're doing everything we can. Here's our new LNG pipeline or whatever um that kind of thing I think that the dominant way of talking about the problem still contains a lot of like weird uncertainty you know like people say things like um you know there's a chance that we're heading toward water scarcity it's like no no no scientist thinks there's a chance yeah nobody knows it's the case

but we frame it as if it's still this vague uncertainty in the future and i think that allows people to feel like what garrison's saying a kind of like it gives room for not doubt but like distance or something i don't know what to describe it as um yeah i think distance because that's all that's that's that's so deep particularly in the american and i guess the canadian psyche right like even just going back to like the wars of the last century this idea that like well we're we're we're separated from it we're far enough away from it and i think there was even an idea among people who accepted the reality of climate change in canada specifically that like well

it's just going to make this place a better growing climate or whatever like it's not gonna it's not going to lead to tornado like it's not going to lead to like massive storm fronts of lightning built by giant fire waves destroying entire cities like that's not going to happen i know um and i yeah yeah the other yeah one interesting thing this is just something i've been writing about lately like not just for myself i haven't published it or anything but but one of the one of the things i've been trying to study a lot lately is is the economic modeling, you know, like the stuff that the government supposedly leans on to like make its plans or determine its tax rates for carbon and this kind of stuff, you know. And one of the crazy things about those models, as I've dug into

them, both at the technical level, like right down to the mathematical, you know, choices made, but also how they conceive of them, is that all those models are built. And therefore, you know, choices made, but also how they conceive of them, is that all those models are built. And therefore, you know, most of the policy expertise that's based on them is also built on this idea that everything political will stay the same. Everything political, economic will stay the same, just things will just get hotter. So like like they are a model of stable capitalism in a warmer world do you know does that make any sense yeah that no yeah it's this idea that well it's it's this acceptance that like it's going to get hotter um but this ignorant of the fact that like and that's going to increase the number of refugees and that's going to provide fuel for the radical

right and that's going to lead to more exterminationist talk and like mainstream politics and like, yeah, it's, yes, I get what you're saying. and then it just cracks and then you know the whole fucking show is no longer temple and that's I think you know those moments like you're describing there'll be place specific I suppose yes but it that's the shit that scares me yeah you know yeah

it didn't make sense to the normal person in the street a couple weeks ago starts to make sense to the normal person in the street a couple weeks ago starts to make sense yeah yeah yeah that's it yeah i think and i think a lot of a lot of people there is definitely like the everything will stay mostly the same syndrome along among a lot of the population whether you know they fall the conservative or liberal side i think there's there's a lot there's a lot of that that's a whole lot easier and in terms of like even for like you know people who are more radical um even you know who are like on like more like the left

um you know there is like this you know perception that capital is just going, it's going to stay very similar to how we see it now. And I think a lot of people underestimate the adaptive capabilities. And I think one of the useful things about the plagues last year is that we've seen capital transform itself in very large ways in terms of retail, industry, supply lines in very quickly um so we've both seen that kind of you know you know large-scale transformation on on like on a global scale and we've also seen the other thing you talked about creating like islands of luxury right of like people who are um you know higher class but also people who are middle class, being able to basically create isolated pockets

where they can live in a life that's pretty similar to what they already had, where everyone else has to live in shit. Everyone else has so much worse, whereas middle class and upper class get to stay in this small bubble. And I think that is definitely i think it's really useful to look at how that happened in the plague you know early on with

people like you know where's people like flying to new zealand to live in their like cabins um and being like yeah that's gonna happen um and now with you know amazon man going to space it's like the same thing right there's gonna be there going to see more and more extreme versions of this. Yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, on that type of thing in terms of, you know, how we can look at like past, past smaller, you know, collapses or crumblings of, you know, of societal norms, get really showing how capital is going to adapt and how quickly it can adapt in some cases. I don't know if I have any specific thoughts, but I am with you on all of that analysis. I feel like, well, for one thing, I think you're very, very right to emphasize the kind of robustness that

capital keeps demonstrating. We can knock it all at once. It's a tough son of a bitch. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I was just about to say. Exactly. once it's a tough son of a bitch yeah exactly that's exactly what i was just about to say exactly and it's tougher than virtually every other political economic arrangement you know that came before it at least in the recent centuries like it it does adapt in this remarkable way or you know i don't know shape shift um but i also think like know, just in terms of the kinds of dynamics you're describing, the inequality that persists today, not only like in its purely economic form in the sense that, you know, there's a few very rich, very powerful people. And then the vast majority of the planet, you know, isn't quite far behind, to put it lightly. But that we're also like it's almost like a total disaster that ideologically this problem emerges precisely at the moment, it seems to me, when inequality is so widely understood to be just normal or natural, so that the reaction to almost any crisis is that the rich will be fine. And people like me might say, that sucks and that's shitty.

But for the most part, it's widely accepted as just the way the world works right now. You know what I mean? There's never been a better argument for a wealth tax than there is right now. I can't think of one, maybe the robber barons in the States or whatever, you know, in the late 19th, early 20th century. But it's like, at least to me, it seems to be just here in Canada, at least it's a total joke. Like we talk about it, but it's nowhere near happening. There's sort of strange like you know i think naomi klein has written about this like the kind of like poor timing of the fact that the climate crisis happened precisely when you know democracy and social democratic forces are at their weakest or at least not weakest but you know not in a good spot yeah i mean and uh I don't know.

It was always tempting earlier to talk about Syria and kind of how climate change contributed to that and how that contributed to rising authoritarianism. There's been actually been some new analysis on that, that kind of has made me less confident in climate change as a driver of that conflict. I am, I guess, but, I do and why I do still talk about that when I talk about like how all this is going to work is kind of one of the things that's most important to understand is that like the problem is not just climate change, right?

Like you said, it's not just that it's getting warmer and it's not even just that climate change is causing these problems is that we have these pre-existing problems. We have all these, these issues we didn't deal with for years and years. It's like an old house and you didn't do the repair work necessary. And then, you know, there's, there's extreme weather and the weather does, it's not just the weather that causes the problems. It's, you've got all these, all these issues that cascade. You know, one of the terms I think we problems. It's, you've got all these, all these issues that cascade. You know, one of the terms I think we're using a lot, because we're trying to get people away from the, from the discussion of collapse, which I don't think is productive. A friend of both Garrison

and I's is an ER nurse who has been kind of working through COVID and was talking about the fact that like, you know, prior to COVID, we had a shortage of healthcare workers. It was exacerbated by COVID, more people quit. It was exacerbated by all of these different sort of like issues structurally within Portland itself and the way the city is set up. And now you've got all these different medical systems kind of like falling apart at the point when they're most necessary. And the term that he uses is the crumbles, which I like a lot, just this,

this thing. It's not ever going to just fall apart, but pieces of it are breaking off at all times. And it's, it's this, I think that I, I think it's an easier way to get people because like there's you know, we're having in Portland right now. We had this fucking heat wave hit at the same time.

We got a notice that because of supply line issues, Oregon was out of chlor. I think it was chlorine in order to like pure for the for the water filtration systems. Wow. And they were like, it'll be fine this time. We're going to we have like enough stored up to deal with like the shortage of equipment, but it's like, okay, but what about next time? And the same thing because of COVID jet fuel, like to save money, companies fired all of their drivers. So there's not enough jet fuel or was not enough jet fuel, which was fine during COVID,

but then these fires hit and they're having to ground firefighting planes because there's just no jet fuel. And what there is, is being requisitioned to keep planes going to and fro. And so you can't adequately fight the fire. It's these, wow. Yeah. All these, these seemingly little things that become big things when you, this, it's like climate change is like steroids to all these little problems too yeah yeah yeah no it makes a lot of sense yeah then and they sort of tend to cascade

in ways that we didn't predict yeah yeah it's chaos theory stuff right it's like we're all we're tipping over the edge of chaos right now past the point where it makes things more adaptable and towards the point where it all just kind of spirals out of control. Yeah. It's hard to imagine talking about something like equilibrium right now in virtually any system. Yeah. But since virtually all of our science is built on the model of equilibrium, that causes trouble. Could you speak to that a little bit more? Cause I'm, I am not a scientist and I'm fairly certain Garrison doesn't either.

So that I hadn't really thought of things in those terms. Yeah. I mean, I only think of it in those terms because, you know, I'm trained in economics and that's the framing. But in general, like most of the complex models, not so not so true of the climate science models necessarily by any means. But most of the ways that we model, like the behavior of an ecosystem or the behavior of an economy assumes that there's a sort of tendency toward normaling normalizing you know what i mean like that over time a series of processes kind of build up a tendency toward a particular direction so like the you know in in economics the economy is understood to be kind of self-correcting not even kind of self-correcting so not even kind of, self-correcting. So if something, they call it a shock, if something happens in the economic system that's

unexpected, then of course the whole system kind of shakes a bit. But then the assumption is that the overall momentum and dynamics of the system will bring things back to normal. Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's exactly how we model ecosystem behavior. Like you cut a hole in the middle of a forest. The assumption is that for a second on forest time, this forest is like, holy fuck, there's all this sunlight and there's weird animals in here that

weren't here before. But over time, the forest's sort of pattern of operation will bring it back to normal. This is why like clear cutting is supposed to be okay because eventually the ecosystem will recover um and most of our sciences are built on this kind of equilibrium oriented model kind of normalizing of the larger processes of the system that just have their own momentum and there's only a few like ecological sciences that break that pattern. And there are things like people who study deserts, which are like, they don't really have a middle. Like it doesn't, it doesn't help to talk about a desert's average

temperature because the desert never is that temperature. You know what I mean? It's just in the middle of extremes. And, and I think that at least from a sort of like scientific tech perspective, technological fixed perspective for climate change, one of the biggest problems is the fact that most of our kind of science-y knowledge can't deal with disequilibrium systems, like ones that actually we don't know where they're going and we don't know where they'll end and we don't have the tools like literally the mathematical tools to manage them so we can't model them and then we don't know what the fuck to do welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. one of the things i've been reading in preparation for this that's been useful from an intellectual framework is this it was written in 2012 it's called the gonzo futurist manifesto and it's a guy kind of laying out as someone looking into this and telling me like well it looks like

everything's in this process of like either free fall or massive change and we're like i don't think a lot of people caught up to and the frame that framework they use is post-normal um is like the acceptance that you're in a post-normal era which i think is what you're getting at there's the equilibrium isn't going to come back right like we're we and we're you're you're starting from a flawed position when you're even thinking of considering that as a possibility um the shift has been too fundamental it's the same thing politically with assuming like anything could work the same way when you're even thinking of considering that as a possibility. The shift has been too fundamental. It's the same thing politically with assuming like anything could work the same way after Trump. Like, no, we're in post-normal times where it's never

going back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I think sometimes it's, you know, it can be quite problematic to talk to progressives of a different generation, like say my parents who weren't by any means lefties, but they were like old school canadian social democrats you know big welfare state that kind of stuff is that the assumption is that that's what we need right now like that's we just need to get that back and everything will be cool like that's that's my dad's analysis of the problem, you know, and I can see the temptation.

Sure. But it's totally not true. Yeah. I mean, the temptation is profound because like, yeah, I mean, if things were, if you have this feeling that things were good, whether or not it's right or wrong, you're naturally going to want to return to that, which, you know, is what, what's going to be the fuel for the authoritarian version of this. But it's also going to be the fuel for climate Leviathan, you know, like, in any case, like, it's easier. The scary thing about trying to bring climate X

into being right is that it's by far the best possible kind of solution you have, but it requires saying fundamentally, we're the way we all live is going to have to change our attitudes towards democracy are going to have to change our attitudes towards what a society is. You're going to have to shift on a fundamental level while everyone else is saying, here's how we bring back what you used to have. Here's how we get the coffee back in the stores you know like yeah yeah that's kind of been the problem with a lot of left-leaning projects is that it is a newer thing and that's why none of them have really lasted very long or they've you know gone horribly wrong very quickly

yeah and especially if we're going to try to do any climate x is more of like a stateless world or at least a stateless area that introduces a whole a whole new problem that we haven't really seen on a mass scale you know outside of like rojava or something um it's going to be a whole new a whole new problem to deal with and a whole lot of people are going to be scared of that agreed and i mean i think it's you know, I'm stating the obvious, so I apologize for this. But part of me thinks, you know, I kind of need to say it to remind myself, but, you know, for for good or ill, I mean, I guess it's for ill, a lot of people, like, even though they know that how they live now is untenable you know in the larger frame it's also

how they live now like like like a lot of us myself included are invested in the way things work now do you know what i mean like like the prospect of that radical change that that is a hard sell when right now you know like this is what put food on the table. This is how my kids go to school. Like these are, you know, this is like that big leap that we will have to demand of ourselves and others at some point in the near future probably is also like justifiably terrifying to lots of people. Yeah. And it's, I mean, the big the big yeah and it's always easier it's always it's a lot less frightening to tell people i can make it like it was yeah you know yeah totally which wasn't awesome but it was you know yeah and maybe it was awesome for some of them you know um for my dad yeah yeah

yeah i find it interesting that you bring up up deserts in that framework of like, of like equilibrium in terms of like, you know, there being a normal and desert is not as one of the things that is, and it's always fluctuating between different temperates. And, you know, and I think there was, there was a popular anarchist book, I think also written in 2012 just just called Desert, about climate change and how it's not about like how the whole world were literally turned into a desert. It's about like how the desert model in terms of like there never being a normal again, it's going to be fluctuating between extremes. It's going to happen in a lot of places, like everything is going to get turned into their own version of deserts yeah the title is based off the idea of that old quote that

like empires uh make a desert and call it peace right and it's kind of seeing global capital as the yeah it's called desert yeah it's free online it's like a i don't know a little bit of a manifesto but i should check it out yeah but yeah like in terms of like we're never gonna even even as the crumbles start happening we're not we're never gonna re-reach a place of stability it's always gonna be in flux we're never gonna get to that normal again we may have coffee for a year we may have insulin you know being produced locally but it's going to be it's not we're not going to have the same false stability that we have now right like we have an idea of stability now now it's not true you know because taco bell doesn't have ground beef anymore um right but like is that actually real are you guys saying

yeah yeah yeah there's i mean there's shortages taco bell's like not able to serve a lot of stuff they're having shortages of things we don't really have taco bell here in canada you're not missing i i was yeah that's because you're a more enlightened society although you guys have tim horton so no one's hands are clean no no no it's true yeah i didn't mean i didn't mean to absolve us from responsibility i just ate some tim horton's cereal this morning my my mother who lives in canada sent me some um so that's what i ate for breakfast so yeah did you used to live in canada i did yeah i'm canadian oh yeah he's canadian as hell you just moved to portland yeah i moved to portland in late 2013 with my family then most most of my family's moved back to canada which is probably the smart move um but i mean

as we see you know both both these countries right now have like liberals in charge quote unquote right now and it's not no you know both trudeudeau and Biden have a lot of the same problems despite their generational gap. And they have kind of the same effect in terms of what they say versus what they do. You know, both of them, you know, Biden talked about banning fracking in his campaign. And everyone who was further to the left of Biden knew, like, no, you're just lying. Like this. Come on. Like, come on. And, you know, Trudeau made a lot of promises about pipelines and how that's not that's not working out um and i think one of the things that we

haven't talked about yet is the symbiotic relationship between the state and like tech companies and oil companies um and how that will be a lot how i see that being a large part of leviathan is basically the government subsidizing or the government letting tech companies try to fix the problem, therefore increasing our reliance on capital and those companies to maintain kind of, you know, in terms of like geo and engineering or carbon capture, right? is going to help help those companies do those things as soon as those companies go away we get so much more carbon released immediately and it's kind of like this like self-preservation that i think capital is going to try to do um i know you you brought up stuff similar to this in terms of like climate leviathan it's like yeah do you have like what what what do you see now that's kind of frightening in terms of you know tech getting its hands on not just like government influence but like you know trying to make itself a necessary part of our world in terms of in terms of climate i mean the tech's necessary for a lot

of ways right now but specifically in terms of climate how do you kind of see that happening yeah no i think that's a really good point and I'm not sure I put enough thought into it, to be honest with you. But I do think you're right. It's obvious, it seems to me right now, that tech or, you know, green, whatever they're calling themselves, this kind of stuff. The goal, and I think it's actually like quite explicit, is to make itself essential to how we deal with the problem, which means that, of course, like I think you just said, the first thing that that requires is that we write off a whole bunch of ways of dealing with the problem so that we can prioritize this way of doing things. And then once that becomes the

way of managing things like carbon capture or something you know, something like that, that requires, as you say, you know, once you, once you start, it's like an addiction, like you can't, you can't stop it or you're fucked. Um, if we've written the other options off the table or they just become untenable at some point, then, then yeah. I mean, the, the, I mean, the way that that tech will be crucial to this is absolutely their plan, I would say, you know, like, and I would say, probably, it's, it's already under discussion in big, you know, serious ways, that big companies like Google and all the rest of it. But the other thing I would say on the same front, and I think you just mentioned it, too, is this idea of, you know, what will happen with geoengineering, which I think, in terms of what I find scary, that I find a bit scary. which you know is pretty terrifying but but the political implications of of the power associated

with being able to manipulate the planet purely in the interests of maintaining capital's power you know like we're really like we're really talking about we are willing to dicker with the entire planet rather than change the way that we live like that's that's like that's astounding the scariest part of your book for me was when you started talking about that and space weaponry um and that i was thinking about this a lot yesterday with bezos going up in his penis rocket um and i i think i even talked about it on on another show is yeah is the intersection between the militarization of the atmosphere with the uh then with like the control of the atmosphere right like basically like making the atmosphere a thing that like i think colonizes the wrong word

i think that that's kind of inappropriate for actual colonization, but it's kind of similar. Like, it's like, it's another frontier that we want to conquer. It's the next one is going to be the atmosphere itself in terms of like weapons, as you talk about in the same thing um yeah i'd like so yeah i was watching that happen yesterday and you know your book was was written a few years ago and it's like it's the same thing you're like that's and before i read your book that's not that's not i never thought about the the space thing specifically and now with bases talking about that that's like wow they're just going all for it like they're're just, they're just like, what, what, what, what, what made you guys think of that possibility? Like what was the thing that you saw that was like, Hey, this is how we kind of see this trend going that will result in this kind of

colonization of the atmosphere and space. And what did you see that kind of got you there? Well, like if I'm honest with you, that was really Joel's brainchild. Like that part of the book about SRM solar radiation management and the space weaponry and that kind of stuff, that was some, that was a connection that he made and he pursued, uh, most rigorously. And he actually wrote that part of the book. Um,

cause as you can imagine, we sort of split it up, you know what I mean? And so I wouldn't want, I mean, for me, what made that connection was Joel. So I wouldn't want to speak for him. both professionally and also just like interest wise with a whole range of of international relations scholars who inside the university are considered kind of wacky like people who take like space weapons seriously like they're sort of like peripheral you know what i mean and joel has been in conversation with them for a very long time so that he knew all that literature like already before we even started and i'd never even heard of it um but i do think the connection is really compelling and i know he's pursued it since i hope you guys get a chance to chat with him he's a fucking brilliant guy i love to you're you were just the easier person to contact yeah yeah you know he's and he loves to chat and he's infinitely more articulate

than me like you'll you'll you'll get way more out of him than you ever have from me. He's a brilliant guy. But he's – that's a connection that he made, and I wouldn't want to speak for how he got there. Sure. I mean like you're more interested – like correct me if I'm wrong, but this is more – you have like a lot of more studying in like the economics side of things. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. more you you have like a lot of more studying and like the economics side of things um do you see because like the other the other kind of side of this you know ties into space weaponry is just the u.s military itself um do you see them interacting with the economy and in collapse

like in like crumble scenarios how do you see the military being used by the state to kind of not solve issues, but like, you know, mitigate some of them or adapt to some of them? Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, I don't want to say I know any better than anyone else. But I do think, I mean, the US military in particular has a couple of advantages, if you want to call it that, in terms of the role that they might play as, you know, certain kinds of crumbling become essential for the state to deal with them. The first is that it's been taking climate change seriously for decades. Yeah, no mincing words in any of those reports.

Exactly. Very blunt and very accurate. Yeah. And they know for a long time. Yeah. And they've been at it, they know for a long time, they know the international security risks. They, you know, they have plans. They're, you know,

they're trying to design weapons that don't require fossil fuels. Like they are, they take the problem seriously. So they're ahead in that sense. And also I do think that the kind of sort of localized, for lack of a better term,

a regionalized crumbling that you guys are discussing will make the militarization of certain parts of the economy, probably especially supply lines and certain production processes, maybe even if something as central as agriculture, the militarization and the securitization of those aspects of the modern economy are going to become more and more essential. And as far as I'm concerned, at least in North America, the principal instrument of that securitization will be the military. And I think the other interesting thing is in terms of like the plague is like, that's the one thing we also saw the military do is be crucial in the vaccine distribution effort.

So I think, you know, really the past year has been a really interesting glimpse into how we're going to use our capital and military power when stuff gets more and more unstable. Yeah, exactly. It seems like in the States, that's how how the state the state knows how to step in is via the military or via the police do you know what i mean because there isn't like as you know here in canada i mean we got lots of fucking things that are problematic but one of the things we didn't need for the distribution of the vaccine was anything more than our public health care system which was extant and worked perfectly fine. Do you know what I mean?

Like we didn't have to build up any new infrastructure and like that. We just had to say, oh, you people who are already doing this, do this too. Yeah, and the lack of civil infrastructure in the States makes us more, both need to rely on the military and it makes Americans' imaginations so small that the only way they can envision that is through military force or is through policing because

the only civil infrastructure we fund is policing in the military well and the military is also the only thing americans overwhelmingly trust like there's no other like you look at polling like there's no other branch of the government that at polling, like, there's no other branch of the government that is widely trusted by U.S. citizens other than the military. And it's, I mean, it's because of the most successful propaganda campaign of all time,

their partnership with Hollywood, but it is a reality. Like, yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. Well, I probably want to wrap up soon but the one other thing i want to mention is like the hardest part of looking at leviathan for me is the is how incapable the un is um in terms of like like how bad they are at doing their job so what do you think would need to change um for something like

the un maybe not the un specifically but like you know if we're going to have like a transnational cooperation of the state and capital to try to to try to to try to you know alleviate some of the worst effects of climate change what would need to happen for to make that more realistic? Because the UN is not it, at least not right now. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I have a good answer to that question, to be honest with you, you know, partly because it's such a good question. I think the UN and the UNFCCC, you know, have proven, like, I mean, I don't think it's too much to say that, you know, that the international negotiations that have gone on around this, you know, Copenhagen, Paris, Cancun, whatever, have literally got us nowhere. Like, seriously, nowhere.

been more of a sort of long-term dithering. And it's hard to imagine, to me at least, that that framework and approach to global problem solving is going to somehow be redeemed the next meeting. Glasgow and everything will be fine again. I think that from a purely like real politic perspective, it's going to take like the U S and China creating a G2 and just making rules for the world. Those rules will be terrible. And, and it, it will be a kind of Levi authoritarian Leviathan form. If that happens, I think, but I think in terms of what we might actually anticipate

happening in the medium term that's much closer than any sort of like global hug that's gonna get us through this i'm so like i'm i'm pretty young i'm i'm 18 i'm part of like the zoomers um my generation you know the friends that i've had that are my age don't have much hope for the future kind of like the term we use is like a doomer that's the kind of like the kind of thing we use is like we can't see anything besides doom and despair and for some people that drives them to nihilism for some people it just drives them to apathy uh sometimes it drives them to like anger and resentment and attack. Do you have any hope for what's going to happen in the next few years? Do you, I'm not sure if you have kids, but like how, what, what do you think, you know, like you're, you're at least you're a teacher. It's like, what, what do you say to like younger generations in terms of like,

how can we look at these very depressing problems and how can we get a more useful outlook than just being doomers um because like the doomer reaction is natural it's easy you know i i default to that every day you know it takes it takes active fighting to not just want to lay in my bed and cry. So like what, what, yeah. Like, do you have hope? Where does it, if so, where does it come from? Where can you see, you know, not non-doomer outlooks being useful? Yeah. I think about this all the time too. I do have kids. They're exactly your age. You're 17 and 20.

So one just graduated from high school. They're partway through university. That's what he went to do. And I don't think, interestingly enough, and I don't mean this in any kind of like valuative way neither of them are doomers both of them are i wouldn't call them hopeful but they are uh they are not which and it would be totally reasonable to be they are not obsessed with what the future seems not to hold. And I say that only because I do think that, well, I guess I have two sort of responses. The first of which is, I apologize, quite cliche, but I actually think it still matters. And that is that your generation will soon be in charge. And that's a very good thing. But that's the cliche. But the second part is that because like Robert was saying earlier, I think I'm assuming you sort

of have a little bit of a similar take, Garrison, because I don't see this as kind of like a collapse process, but rather us managing a series of radical changes in the way that systems work, crumblings, you know, and breakdowns, that kind of thing, but also changes that we, that my hope lies in our capacity to use those moments that my hope lies in our capacity to use those moments as ways to not fix things or make things all better, but to work together generously with the folks with whom we're alive. They'll be dickheads for sure, to make the most of what we have at that moment and to work to the future. And I don't see those moments running out. Those will be there. And insofar as we leap into them generously, because we don't know any better than anyone else necessarily, we will always have the capacity for hopeful and actually joyous solidarity in confronting those problems. And it won't always be fun,

I'm not trying to romanticize it, but all I'm trying to say is that I actually think that the world would not be without joy unless we choose to let it go there. And I guess, like, at least for now, I still feel like we can tell ourselves, we can confront what's coming our way i don't know

if it's going to be bad or good but we will do so and there will be a group of us who does it with good in our hearts and i would just take that for what it's worth you know yeah yeah but like in in like a weird way a lot of these crumbles will almost give an opportunity for radical freedom. Because we think of ourselves as living in a free society, but we rely on so many things that are out of our control. And that makes us unhappy, consciously and subconsciously. And when we're forced to be so active in our life and in our communities and with people we love and care about, such be so active in our life and in our communities and with you know people we love and care about you know it does it i the the one thing that i hope that i do hope for is that it will

give us more opportunities to have like some like radical freedom um and you know be able to live in to be able to have small communities that can live you know much much more free than what we do now um in terms of you of authoritarianism from the state and through companies and capital. Yeah, as long as we don't fall into a full military dictatorship of capital tech, that's kind of the thing that I would like. Yeah. I don't know.

It's really hard to talk about this stuff without sounding cheesy yeah um yeah especially when you talk about when you try to sell people on the only possible optimistic outcomes for this because there's you you have to i get i think we're also. This is another thing capitalism does well talking about it as a resilient system. Um, when you talk about alternatives to capitalism, it's hard not to sound like, uh, it's hard, it's hard not to sound silly to people because anything that isn't the, this specific system either sounds you're either going back and saying,

I want to do a communist Soviet union again, but we'll get it right this time. Or you're, I don't know. It's, it's tough because people are, are very bought, have very much bought into the idea that like anything that isn't a slight modification of what we're doing right now is, is, is, is silly Star Trek bullshit. Yeah, totally. I agree.

You guys have probably both heard that. I come back to it all the time. I think it's great, that famous quote from Frederick Jameson where he says, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. Yeah. And it gets attributed to tons of different people,

but it was coined by that guy, Jameson. He's an English professor, actually, weirdly enough, at Duke. But anyway. There's a good Ursula K. Le Guin comment on kind of the same. Oh yeah, I'm sure. Yeah.

I think you're right. Like it's a quip and it's sort of superficial, but it's actually also true. Like a lot of the times today, it does feel like that. It's literally easier to imagine us driving the planet into the end of its functioning than it is for many people to imagine otherwise. I think you're right, Robert, like when you tell people, oh, no, no. In fact, a lot of things could be otherwise. And we could have it quite quickly if we chose. People look at you like you have fucking two heads yeah and that was one of the most optimistic thing i've experienced in

the last several years was going to northeast syria which is a mess in a very complicated situation but like sitting down with like militia in the desert and having these conversations about like the future that they were trying to build. And like, here's the, like, here's our soil reclamation project. And like,

here's the way we're trying to like alter. And it like, well, if they're able to like try, that's remarkable. And they've got some shit to deal with, you know? Amazing.

Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for talking. Yeah. Super nice to meet you both. i really appreciate getting in touch and that was our interview with jeff mann co-author of climate leviathan you can find him on twitter at jeff p mann um jeff spelt with a with a with a g not with a not with a j you can follow us on Twitter, I'm at CoolZoneMedia and HappenHerePod. You can find me at HungryBowTie.

Thank you for listening, and see you tomorrow. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.