Rev Left Radio - "Code Red" for Humanity: The IPCC Report 2021

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

In this unlocked Red Menace patreon episode, Alyson and Breht discuss the latest IPCC report on climate change and discuss its implications. Listen to more Red Menace: https://redmenace.libsyn.com/ ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello, you are listening to Red Minnis. I am Allison, and I'm here with Brett, and this is our Patreon episode for this month. So for this month, because we are doing a theoretical episode on Paula Freyer's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as our main public episode, we wanted to talk about a big current event that happened for our patrons. It also relates to a theme that we can just seem to not stop going back to, which is climate change. So, as you may know, the IPCC released a new report that does a fair amount of work,

looking at data about climate change and paints some pictures that I think are worth looking at. So the IPCC is this intergovernmental panel that is made up of a broad range of scientists who look at climate change from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and end up issuing statements. Historically, back in the 1990s, when we started to get IPCC reports, they tended to be not very alarming. The first IPC report, for example, actually argued that there wasn't sufficient evidence that climate change was human caused. and now here we are with an IPCC report that is quite alarming in 2021.

So today we're going to go ahead and go through some of this, give our thoughts on it, and try to think about how all this matters from a Marxist perspective. So maybe we can start just walking through some of the findings from this report. So I'm going to read you some of the summaries that the IPCC put together for what they found. So the first thing that they found in this you've probably already seen headlines of is, they say, the report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next decades and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5

degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees Celsius will be beyond reach. And as a note, when they say immediate, they mean immediate. Like, we would have to start doing it now. The second thing that they say is the report shows that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1 degree Celsius of warming since 1850 through 1900 and finds that the average over the next 20 years, global temperature is now expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. So they did some historical analysis that found that actually warming is a process that's been going on quite a bit and that has already raised the planet up from levels in the mid-1800s. Third, the report projects that in the coming decades, climate change will increase in

all regions for 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons, and shorter cold seasons. And at two degrees Celsius of global warming, which we may be approaching, heat extremes would be more often reached critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows. And in addition to all of this, they made a short laundry list of sort of effects that we can see as a result of 1.5 to 2 degree Celsius warming. I'll go through that list for us briefly. First, climate change is intensifying the water cycle. This is bringing more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions, as we are seeing on the West Coast very severely

at the moment. Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns. In high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase while it's projected to decrease over large parts of the subtropics. Changing to monsoon precipitation are expected, which will vary by region. Next, coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding and low-laying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could be expected to happen every year by the end of this century. Further, warming will amplify permafrost thawing and the loss of seasonal snow cover,

melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and the loss of summer Arctic sea ice. Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heat waves, and ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels have been clearly linked to human influence. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of the centuries. And for cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat, since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings, flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities. So that's kind of the list that they lay out there, and they conclude by saying the report also shows that human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate, so it is not actually hopeless. The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide CO2 is the main driver of climate change, even as other greenhouse gases and air pollutants also affect the climate. So that's the

big picture of some of the findings that are in this IPCC report. Again, it's pretty urgent, right immediate action is needed to prevent 1.5 to 2 degrees and many people are saying we're already past the threshold for the 1.5 degrees and we've here seen some analysis of what that means and again with the IPCC we're actually often looking at what is a more conservative estimation because of the way decision making goes they have to reach consensus on what they'll say so those who have a sort of more pessimistic view often moderate it to find consensus with more conservative members of the panel And this is the result of that process of moderation. So that gives us an idea of what is in this IPCC report that we can go ahead and dive into a little bit if you have any thoughts right off the bat, Brett.

Yeah, I have an endless array of thoughts. One sort of bittersweet aspect of this whole report and the development since the last IPCC report is that climate models have gotten a lot better. There's a lot more research at every single level, better climate modeling, mathematical modeling, et cetera. So what the, there is a conservative bias in science, and there's certainly a conservative bias in the IPCC reports, as, you know, science wants to be sober-minded about these things. And that conservatism, it certainly doesn't stop the right from calling them alarmists, but what it does tend to do is create sort of projections and scenarios that are, more conservative than they should be. And so something like the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest is stuff that the conservative scientific community thought

probably wouldn't be around for another 20, 30 years and hit us this year. So there's this extra layer of anxiety in that the things that are happening already were assumed even just a few years ago to not happen for another decade two or three. So that's certainly concerning. Another thing is the 1.5 degree threshold that our entire lives we've been told is the quote unquote safe limit, which we're at 1.1 degrees Celsius right now and look at what's happening.

That's going to be blown past. I think there is no world, no world in which we get our shit together at such a high speed, literally in the next 5 to 10 years that will prevent us from blowing past that 1.5 degrees. of warming. So look at what 1.1 degree of warming is. It is massive wildfires from Turkey and Greece to the west coast of the U.S. It is once in a century flooding events happening over and over again in Germany and China. Nebraska itself had a historic flood just a couple years ago. It is unbearable heat waves across the planet. It's mass die-offs. It is the destabilization of entire ecosystems. That's at one degree of warming. um two degrees it's not it's not a linear process either so two degrees our best case scenario is not

going to be exactly double what we're seeing now in some ways it'll be worse it's a nonlinear sort of process that that is that is playing out and even at two degrees again which would be the best case scenario realistically for what we can accomplish and god i hope we keep it to that um we're still talking about this is from david wallace wells is uninhabitable earth he's a climate journalist, a really good one. He's like, even at two degrees, it would mean 150 million extra people dying from air pollution. It would mean once a century storms hitting every single year. It would mean hundreds of millions of climate refugees making the Syrian refugee crisis look tame in comparison.

It would mean cities around the world, especially the equatorial belt, hotter parts of the world, South Asia and the Middle East, would have situations that in the summer it would be literally too hot for people to go outside. side. There's this concept of wet bulb temperature, which is basically the humidity plus the heat and you have a situation where if it's above 95 degrees Fahrenheit outside and the humidity goes above 90%, which can and will increasingly happen with climate change because hotter air holds more water in the atmosphere for a plethora of reasons. The human body loses its capacity to cool itself off via sweating and even the healthiest athlete can only survive for a hand full of hours in those conditions before their organs just shut down to say nothing of the

elderly of the disabled of those who are small children or anything else and so that is going to be something that we really have to look out for and then the wildfires and the heat waves that we're already experiencing are going to get many many times worse than they are now and that's the best case scenario anything above two degrees Celsius of warming we're really sort of, we're talking about feedback loops, we're talking about levels of warming and runaway effects that we really can't even predict. And all the models only go till 2100, but we know for a fact that the consequences of this insane rate of warming will last for centuries, if not millennia. And there are some things that you can't reverse. When certain ice shelves melt,

there's no coming back from that, at least not on human timelines. there's enough of the Amazon that is cut back, you could start a die-off process by which a huge carbon sink, the Amazon rainforest, is now a carbon emitter, which parts of it already are, but then it reaches a threshold by which it cannot grow back and a sustained die-off process happens across the entire ecosystem there. You can see, you can imagine scenarios in which wars start because some countries do not want the Amazon to be cut for cattle and crop production like is happening under Bolsonaro, and you might actually have to militaristically intervene in countries to prevent the dying off of an ecosystem that is crucial for all of us.

So, you know, that sort of conflict, I think, is going to become more and more intense. And the longer we've waited, which the fossil fuel corporations and the Republican politicians and denialist funders have successfully held off for 30 years, 1988 was the date that the whole world became aware of the climate process scientists and Exxon mobile CEOs had known for longer than that. The longer we wait to address it, the more intense the interventions are going to be. So right now, to avoid over two degrees of warming, we're going to have to have massive interventions in the next decade or two, get to net zero by 2050. And that high-level intensity interventionism is going to result in high-level intensity reaction. to the interventions that are necessary.

The social, the economic, the political interventions that are going to be necessary to stem the crisis is also going to impose transformations on hierarchies of class and race that those people that benefit from those hierarchies do not want to see and will kill and die to make sure do not happen. So that's another thing we have to look forward to. Island nations around the world already argue that two degrees of warming is genocide. For them, for many parts of the world, Madagascar and farmers are already eating bugs

and having their harvests not come to fruition because of shifting rain patterns. That's only going to accelerate. And that's only at one degree, roughly, of warming. So two degrees, you're talking about the devastation of entire nations. And, of course, those nations are more likely to be in the Equatorial Belt, in the global south,

not have the power of global north countries and will be just sort of casualties of the, the process. Mass migrations are already here. They're going to become more and more intense as people flee increasingly inhospitable conditions and regions, which creates a fascist backlash in the global north. So anti-fascism, right, is going to be a crucial part of the climate crisis and the struggle against it to come out and fight against fascist forces that are going to react to the consequences of fossil fuel burning in the predictable ways. Hungary has already built a border wall around its certain borders of its country picking up after the trumpian sort of

idea and running with it i think we're going to see more attempts to do that um so on all levels this is this is incredibly scary and something i try to get across to people is even at ostensibly minor you know global average or average temperature shifts right one degree Celsius i mean for an american or like what is that as a shorthand you can basically double it um to get a Fahrenheit um but it's not exactly but you know just a shorthand mental thing but still one degrees one degree Celsius of warming 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming doesn't seem like a lot but that shifts the overall sort of bell curve such that the extreme weather events become many many times more likely even at tiny shifts in global average temperature one thing I like to tell people is that during the

ice age when there is a mile of glacial ice above New York City and above where I'm sitting right now that was a roughly 5 degree Celsius cooling. Some people put it at 7 or 8 degrees of cooling. But just that tiny 5 degree shift downward created massive glacial, miles of glacial ice above huge cities and totally transformed the world that we live in now. That process of dying off, of, I mean, those glaciers melting and the warming period that ended the ice age,

it took 900 years for the global average temperature to rise one single degree Celsius. So as the ice age is ending, the planet's warming up, those glaciers are being pushed back. It took 900 years to get to one degree Celsius of warming. Humans have done that in 75 years. So what we're looking at is an unprecedented rate. It's not the highest that carbon has ever been in the atmosphere. It's not the hottest it's ever been yet. But the rate of change is absolutely unprecedented in Earth's history, not just human history, in Earth's history.

We haven't had this much carbon in the sky for some people say up to two million years, if not longer. Humans didn't exist in any recognizable form, you know, in those conditions. And here we are plunging head first into it. And still there is more awareness. People are sort of being rattled by it. certainly younger people who pay attention are having depressive and anxious episodes because their entire futures are on the line but the powers that be are slow to move and the most powerful people in this world are often older they have that death drive we've talked about

in the in the public episode um on pedigogy of the oppress and they are not going to go without a fight uh you know if it means the last 10 years of their life are more comfortable and they have to change nothing they will fucking slaughter tens of millions of millions of people directly or indirectly to make that happen. And so we are up against it in every way. I do think there are reasons to be optimistic. I do think we have a chance. I think humans are capable of adapting.

And if we can do the historical fight of our time and fulfill the obligation we have to future generations to keeping it under two degrees of warming, it's going to come with massive human suffering at every level and nobody's going to escape it. But I think humanity can persist. If we're talking over three, four degrees of warming, I think nobody knows what that creates. And the hellish dystopia that that will unleash on humanity is unimaginable, truly unimaginable.

So those are some of my first thoughts, but I'm sure we have plenty more to say. So I'll toss it back over to you, Allison. Yeah, there's a couple things there that I think I want to build on. One thing that you get at that I think is important for us to think about is sort of the mathematics behind the rate of increase. So you got the fact that it's not linear, right? And this is something that I think people have trouble conceptualizing, which is important to think about. So the difference from one degree to two degree isn't the same difference from zero degrees to one degrees, right? And part of the reason that that is isn't just because the function by which it's increasing

is exponential. It's because of cyclical forms of climate change, right? So one of the things that we're seeing now at 1.1 degrees is thawing in Siberia of permafrost, right? And one of the problems that we're seeing with that, as that permafrost thaws, it's releasing more methane that was trapped underneath it into the air. And so as you get that increase, the rate actually picks up over time. The other thing that you mentioned briefly that I think is worth thinking about is the slowing down of the Gulf Stream, right? Which is still something I have trouble wrapping my mind around as a concept. But the Gulf Stream is slowing down because it changes in ocean temperature, which destroys the ability for the ocean to regulate itself, and that becomes

cyclical as it moves on over time too. And the dumping of freshwater into areas that are salt water disturbs that balance and it prevents ocean turnover, which slows currents, yeah. Exactly. And the problem, right, is that as we hit those higher levels, it's not just that the rate increases more quickly, it's also the reversibility goes away, right? And that's one of the things that I think we often struggle to think about, which is that we could potentially in hundreds of years undo one degree of change, right? That is possible. But when we start talking about two degrees or three degrees, the scale on which it would take for that to reverse becomes larger and larger and larger and larger into unthinkable amounts of time. And so the mathematics behind it are one

thing that we have to think about because of the way that there are all these systems that are sort of cyclically intertwined with each other. And when one starts to go, the others start to go, and the process really picks up its pace. So that's one thing that's worth thinking about. The other thing that I think is worth thinking about that you got at, Brett, is sort of this idea of, you know, this generation that is still here who won't have to see it, doesn't want to let go of their way of living, and are willing to doom future generations as a result of that. And I think we should all kind of, to some degree, consider our own ways of living in relationship to this, too, because climate change is going to disrupt that, right? So one thing that

we're seeing in the United States already is declining wheat harvest. This has been a huge problem on the West Coast has been that wheat harvests are not giving the yields that they used to give, and wheat is central to our diet, right? We eat a ton of food that includes wheat in it. But we're also seeing massive decreases in beef because there hasn't been enough grass for cows to graze throughout much of the grazing territory in the West either. And farmers have said that they've had to call up to 50% of their herds because there's not enough there. So already we're going to feel these impacts to our lives from climate change at this 1.1 degree mark that we're all. We're already at. And I think that we need to think about the ways that that is going to continue to

impact our lives and prepare for that a little bit. So I was actually just listening to an interview also with David Wallace Wells, who you mentioned, who he was talking about one thing that is kind of interesting is that at the end of the day, when you talk to radicals or you talk to liberals, none of us are really living like this problem is as big as it actually is, give or take people who are prepping, essentially, right? For the most part, no one is actually thinking through those adaptations. And one thing that we can start doing, is thinking through those adaptations now, right? What is going to happen to our diets? How are those things going to be affected? And how are we going to learn to live with that? And those are things we can

practice at this moment. We talked about in our Patreon episode last month, each of us thinking about how will we get water, right? If water becomes more scarce. How will we provide food? These are questions that we need to think about and that we need to think about communally, again, not as individuals in order to respond to this. Because we are at the 1.1 mark. We are going to hit the 1.5 mark. I don't think there's any question about that. And honestly, I think we're going to hit the two mark as well. And that is going to impact us within our lifetimes potentially. And we need to think about adapting to that by practicing ways of living now so that we're not caught off guard when the time comes where that's forced on us. So that's another thought that I kind of had

that was sparked somewhat by Wallace Wells' statements on that as well. It's a tricky situation, and it's a dire situation. And as always, we're painting a pretty grim picture of things. So one thing that I perhaps want to add is that we absolutely can't give up in the face of any of this, right? And I think that's really important for us to insist on is that it's easy to throw up your hands and say, okay, I mean, we're facing two degrees Celsius and very little chance of doing anything about it. So screw it. Why even try? And I think that that's an attitude that the capitalist class who's responsible for this disaster would be totally happy for us to adopt because it's an attitude that doesn't put up resistance. It's an attitude that doesn't try to

fight this, that doesn't try to make the world a better place, and that lets them get away with doing this to the planet. And I think we have to resist that at all costs. There is a tendency, I think, to say, like, fuck it, we can't do anything, and hey, this will collapse capitalism anyway. We all just need to go along for the ride, right? I've kind of heard that idea expressed. And I think that that's a betrayal of our responsibility as people to fight these things. But it also, unfortunately, underestimates how much capitalism can probably survive a lot of this, right? One of the horrific things to think about and, you know, that is hard to think about is maybe more horrific than the idea of everything collapsing under climate change, is capitalism

adapting to climate catastrophe, right? Is the idea that it will be able to profit off of these disasters. There have been a lot of authors who have proposed the idea of disaster capitalism and the way that capitalism has been able to profit from suffering from natural disasters. And as those increase, I think it would be naive not to assume that capitalism will find a way to continue to profit from it and continue to extract value everywhere it can. So we can't just put our hands up and say let the collapse happen because it might not really even be a collapse. It might be, and I think this is more likely, an increasingly fascistic and just horrifying

iteration of capitalism that figures out how to continue to operate in the middle of global catastrophe and crisis. So what's really important is even with all this stuff that's in this IPCC report, even with all the difficulty of it, we can't let it. it mean that we give up. And I really, really want to emphasize that because I know I struggle with this. I know that Brett, you struggle with this too. Sometimes it is hard to find that hope and to find that motivation in the face of this. But we have an obligation to each other. We have an obligation to the world we live in, not just human life, but the world on the whole,

to not accept this, even if the odds look very, very minimal in our favor. One comrade I was talking to, who I really love and respect said, you know, climate change is a reminder that there's some things that are worth fighting and losing for, even if you're going to lose ultimately. And I think that's really how we have to come to view it, even if we don't win. You know, you have to try because the costs of not winning are just so high that we are going to have to act. So I do want to emphasize not to lose hope in the face of this. We probably aren't going to dodge the 1.5 or 2 degree, but that doesn't mean human extinction,

and it doesn't mean the end of capitalism either, which means that our roles as people organizing against systems of repression, domination, exploitation will still continue to exist and we still have a responsibility. Yeah. You know, I have, I've come to the realization that my obsession over the last several months that's manifested on this show and Rev. Left Radio with climate change and obsessively tracking it, which I'm sure many of you can relate to, is a process of grieving. It is a protracted process by which I am finally psychological.

logically coming to terms with the enormity of the devastation that's already here and is coming. I'm grieving for the biosphere. I'm grieving for human beings that did not do anything wrong, but are going to have to suffer the bulk of what is coming. I'm weeping for my children's future and their grandchildren's future and for my own future. And that process, it parallels the grieving process of when you lose a loved one. There's anger. There's There's denial, there's confusion, there's depression, there's anxiety, they come in waves, but ultimately there's acceptance. And I don't know if I'm quite there, but I'm certainly closer to it than I've been. And not in acceptance of like the black pill nihilism acceptance, but an acceptance of I have now fully internalized to the tragedy.

I have went through the process of grieving it properly. And now I'm in a better position as a human being to make meaningful. action in the world and and that process hurts and you can't quite see the end of the tunnel when you're going through it but I think it's an important process that more and more people are going to be forced to go through and that you should embrace if you start to feel that yourself is going through it because I do think the sort of acceptance and the person that it produces on the other side is worthwhile so so I'll say that another interesting wrinkle in my life is every time I have a child. I have an existential crisis. And they manifest in different ways when I had my son

last time about six or seven years ago. I went through this. I've talked about it. This deep obsession, obsessive, compulsive thinking about death 24-7 for many, many months. And it would be anxiety and depression. And my girlfriend at the time was pregnant. So it's clearly like anchored into that. But it's also like me coming to terms with my own mortality. And the mortality, the mortality of the children that I'm producing, et cetera. And this time, my wife is pregnant right now, going through a high-risk pregnancy. And the same existential crisis has come up,

but it's not about death. It's about the climate crisis. And, you know, my children's future and my future in that context. And in both cases, I'm grieving. So in the death existential crisis, I'm coming to terms with and going through the grieving process of mortality. Me and everyone I love are ultimately going to die. That's a hard fucking thing to face.

We all know it intellectually. to face it viscerally is quite a different manner. And I think so much of our culture is set up to prevent that confrontation. And I'm going through a similar process now with climate change. And one of the tensions that comes up when I think about this is the tension historically on the left, right? Between like prefigrative politics and this sort of dismissal often advanced under the Trojan horse of no ethical consumption under capitalism, right? And it's like this idea of like nothing you do under capitalism matters. The system, that's the problem.

You know, your votes and your little carbon footprint, you know, light bulb things don't make any effective difference. And that can often be used as an excuse not to do the sort of prefiguring that Allison is talking about. I think communally and organizationally, but also individually, this idea that I've talked about of being an asset or a liability as much as possible, looking forward to what's coming. there's certain things, certain tasks, certain things you can learn and develop skill sets that you can develop that will put you in a position to help other people more effectively on the individual level as well as on the organizational level and those things should be taken seriously. So any attempt to, you know, not face, for example, your own participation in the hyperconsumption model on the grounds that there's no ethical consumption

under capitalism anyway, so fuck it. I want to buy that thing. It makes me feel better for a few seconds i want to do it i think that can be sloppy and that can be an excuse not to prefigure the world coming not because individual prefigurative politics affects the outcome right in a material way it's not like changing your light bulb has any effect or walking to work has any effect whatsoever on climate but it's the psychological reorientation that you're undergoing and the big question that americans that give a fuck are going to have to wrestle with and some of them won't Some of them will not give up their three hamburgers a day and their Chevy Suburban, but for the rest of us, you know, how can I psychologically prefigured the world that's coming?

How can I consume less? How can I examine and uproot the desire for consumption that capitalism so easily falls prey to? How can I make myself an asset to others depending on the skill sets that I can develop? I've talked about getting into harvesting rain and building permaculture. I'm going to have episodes on Rev. Left about that in the coming. the coming days learning things that you can then teach others and help people in an organizational or communal context and yes it's always important to do things collectively organizationally that cannot be left out that is an essential part of it but it is also just the fact especially under

multiple waves of a pandemic that you spend a lot of time alone and that time alone can be used to politically educate yourself and to build skill sets that can help other people in an uncertain future So I want to do more work on this tension between no ethical consumption and prefigrative politics and flesh out the differences there. And I say this about voting and I'll say it about climate change. If you and everybody you've ever personally met in your life were to be raptured tomorrow just disappear off the face of the planet, it would make no difference in the outcome of an election and no difference in the outcome of climate change. That really drives home how systemic and institutional and global the problem of climate change. change is. But it's also not an excuse to just throw your hands up and fall into fatalism or nihilism or to not have to investigate whatsoever how you can lessen your contribution to it

and become more of an asset towards others. So in that sense, I think it's important to really think deeply about those phrases and what they actually mean. And then the last thing I'll say before I toss it back over to you, Allison, is you were mentioning fascism and we know capital what this fascism is what capitalism does when it's in crisis and now it's in a perpetual state of crisis therefore it will be an intensifying phase of explicit fascism as being just synonymous with keeping capitalism around it that's just what's going to happen and there's a book i'm about to start reading called climate leviathan i i don't i haven't read it yet i'm sure there might be some things i disagree with and of the multiple models they set out of trajectories into the

future calling one of them climate Maoism certainly not It doesn't vote well for how I'm going to conceptualize that particular thing. But I think it's interesting and worth the reading. I'm going to read it a little bit. But, you know, one of the options is a climate behemoth. And I think that's pretty much fascism. That is a militarized, hyper-militarized border. It's hyper-scarcity mindset.

It is the fear that people are increasingly going to be faced with being turned in to reactionary politics. I can save you. We need strong men to rise up and, you know, shut the gates. and purge the interior of any diseased people or any, you know, people that are being, you know, sucks on the system, et cetera.

That's a very possible future, and that might happen, this climate neoliberalism, which amounts to fascism, but perhaps a different kind, where it's like the Joe Biden's of the world still, you know, saying we're doing these little things around the edges,

but keeping the system intact overall, the imperialist and colonialist system for sure. and in climate Maoism I think and I'll have to get back to you on more detail but basically like a Chinese model of still centralized authoritarian quote unquote control but I mean out of the other two options I think it is the best because it takes the problem seriously it uses the power of the state to mobilize adaptation and mitigation efforts etc but I think that the one that those authors are really pushing forward is a model of decentralization of building power from the bottom up of community control over resources, engaged in an internationalism, et cetera. And that's a beautiful world. And that's a world that can happen

through this bottleneck of suffering that we're being forced into. So I like to think of this, and Allison alluded to this earlier, not as an extinction event. It's not the end of humanity. It's going to be the end of many humans and we're all going to be negatively

terrorized by this fucking thing. But it's the biggest transformation in human history. since not only the industrial revolution, I would argue since the agricultural revolution. The humanity that stumbles out the other side of this tragedy and this crisis, it could look many different ways, but it's going to be transformed in a way that not even the industrial revolution or the transition from feudalism to capitalism can be comparable with.

And so thinking about that and thinking how we can make that transformation toward the world that we've always wanted. I mean, this is, you know, we talk about using moments of crisis to push the revolutionary energy forward. This is a moment of perpetual capitalism is never again going to be out of crisis. And that presents a lot of suffering and horror, but it also presents a lot of opportunities. And to sit back, to turn away, to get blackpilled is cowardly and is reactionary, to get misanthropic is fully fascist.

We have to resist those tendencies. They appear within us. Note them. Be aware of them. but undermine them through that awareness and do not let them grab hold of you it does nobody any good at all to be deactivated that's going to also require us to find ways communally to take care of each other and to deal with the mental health fallout of this ongoing rumbling bumbling chaotic crisis that we're all going to be forced and already being forced into so those are those are a bunch of

things that i think about a lot i have more to say of course but alison any any thread you want to pick up? Yeah, I want to talk about the prefiguration question a little bit, maybe, because I think, you know, this is a question that the left wrestles with, and, you know, don't get me wrong. Like, prefigurative politics don't do anything in a sense, right? Like, if we're talking broader structurally, no, they don't challenge structures, right? But it also might be a failed criteria to say the only things that have any value are things that immediately directly threaten structures of power, right? That might not be the only thing that has value. And in fact, there are other things that may not directly do that that might make us better at doing the things

that do threaten power. And I think that prefigurative kind of approaches are important. Because one thing I just sort of want to emphasize, right, is that like if we're being really honest about what all of this means for our futures, like I said, it means a change in our quality of life. It means that we're not going to have access to the kinds of food that we have now. We're not going to have access to the forms of transportation that we have now. Hell, a lot of us, honestly, you know, I'm thinking about this every day, thinking about the drought in the West Coast might be displaced because of what's happening. We may not have the places we want to live. And I don't want to sound like some individualist Nietzsche or whatever, but at the same time, if we haven't taken the time

to kind of prepare for that and toughen up for a tougher reality, then we're going to be in a bad situation, right? And so that preparation may not ultimately challenge capitalism or stop climate change, but it will position us better to ride that wave as it comes and be able to organize other people along the way. And one thing that at least I keep coming back to that I think can fall into individualism, if we're not careful, but which I think is important to think about, is these revolutionary leaders who we all think of as these great figures throughout history, the Fred Hamptons, the Malcolm X's, the Lennons, the Mao's, these are people who weren't unaware of the need to develop themselves as individuals and leaders, right? So one thing that I've mentioned before and that I always come back to is kind of Malcolm X, I think really stands out as an example of someone who took personal cultivating of himself into a disciplined, controlled, reflective, and meditative person as a necessary step to be a revolutionary leader, to the point that again, when the FBI was trying to dig up,

dirt on him, they couldn't, right? They famously complained that he kind of was beyond smearing because he took self-disciplined very seriously. And that is how a lot of these revolutionary leaders that we all look up to have been throughout history. And sure, developing yourself as an individual into a more disciplined, more thoughtful, more engaged person doesn't challenge capitalism whatsoever. But it does position you better to challenge it in other ways. And so one thing, if nothing else with the prefigurative stuff, is that it's worth working on yourself as an individual to prepare yourself for a world that is going to be more unstable, more violent, more hostile, and more unpleasant, and to get yourself to the point where you're not going to be caught off guard by that.

And no, that won't undo climate change on itself, but it will put you on a better grounding to fight climate change and fight capitalism as things get worse and worse as things go on. So that can sound individualistic. I know these are ideas that people sometimes don't like talking about this kind of like personal development, but I think it's important, especially if you want to be involved in a leadership position, or God forbid, you believe in the concept of vanguardism, then perhaps it's really, really important for you to consider those types of personal development. And if prefiguration is part of that as well, then I think it has value. Absolutely. And I think generally speaking, a dialectical approach to any problem

doesn't leave out one side of any coin. There's always the collective aspect to struggle. But, you know, as Allison said, with all these great revolutionaries of the past, none of them said, I don't have to do anything about my, I mean, all of Mao's work, and, you know, Malcolm X is a great example as well. Fred Hampton, an amazing example is like this subordination of their own, you know, petty wants and desires to the, to the cause of something greater than themselves in all the ways that that manifests. So, yeah, I think that's absolutely crucial. One question that keeps coming up, and I mentioned it, I think, in my last Red Hot take on Rev. Left at the end is, what are you willing to give up? There's no world in which you maintain the life that you've had

for the last 20, 30 years of your life since you were born. There's no world in which you can keep that stuff. Are you willing to give up your iPhone, if it means that somebody across the world gets a better wage and there's a flux of wealth going to the global south and the global north? Are you willing to give up your comfy little car? Are you willing to live in a smaller house. Now, some of you are, you know, as we are working class and don't live in these extravagant places to begin with, but still, there's a million different ways in which you're going to have to adapt to this. And you're going to have to give stuff up as a necessity, but also as a role model to others, willingly to set things down that you're used to and to walk away from them and say,

in the bigger scheme of things, this thing was nice, it was cool, but I don't need it. It's unnecessary and it causes suffering to somebody else and so I'm not going to, you know, I think that that's going to be incredibly important. I think what we're going to see as well, this is a topic I want to continue to explore, is acts of terrorism in the desperation that is going to be created by this crisis. Now, what do we see in the late 90s, earlier 2000s here in the U.S.? We saw a concerted effort by the state to crack down on quote unquote eco-terrorists. Often these were people who did no violent crime to another individual. It was almost entirely property damage to sort of throw a wrench in the machine of, you know,

big agriculture, industrial extradivation, extractivism, I'm sorry, etc. And they got the book thrown at them under terrorism charges, 10, 20, 30 years in prison. And that is still continuing with pipeline defenders, having the book thrown at them as well. And so the state has already been gearing up and will continue to gear up for the rhetoric and the policies that come with trying to suppress any effort to really rise up and throw your body on the cogs of this machine as it were in various ways. I think we're going to continue to see that rise. And, you know, there's going to be horrible instantiations of that, eco-fascist terrorism, that takes out the anxieties and the desperation on innocent, vulnerable people. and we might even see forms of left-wing ecoterrorism in which sites of extraction are attacked in various ways.

A fact I learned recently, this is just insane. That six cruise ships, just six, not whole companies, this is from Second Thought on YouTube, highly recommend. Six individual cruise ships use as much, I mean, they emit as much carbon in a year than all of the fucking car traffic in Europe combined. Okay, cruises have to go. They have to go.

One way or another. Private planes, they got to fucking go. Are the people that enjoy those things and that make money off those things going to hand them over? Absolutely not. Welcome to conflict land. We're going to have to do something about that. If government won't enact policies that do something about it, the regular people are going to have to do something about it. And that's going to require high levels of organization and coordination. So, I mean, you know, there's so many different dimensions of this. Allison and I have and will continue to talk about it. Perhaps we can address certain concepts and ideas and arguments in this field. We mentioned degrowth as something we might tackle. There's a philosophy work. I haven't read it yet, but it's called hyper-objects philosophy and ecology at the end of the world, which I think is kind of interesting.

A hyper-object and global warming is used as the quintessential example of a hyper-object is an entity of such vast, temporal, and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place and makes the psychological reckoning with it even more complex. I would say capitalism itself is also a hyper-object. There might be some fruitful discussions to be had there. I also think that denialism is going to continue to morph and change and evolve. It's not going to be the explicit denialism of the Republican Party 10 years ago.

That's getting harder and harder to maintain. but there are liberal and conservative forms of denialism. The lack of action by the Democratic Party on the climate front is a form of denialism, even though their rhetoric, you know, pays lip service to the immensity and importance of the problem. One denialism that you see all the time, and I even reached out to somebody close in my life, who's a family member, who is a conservative, but, you know, they're college educated, they're not like a QAnon weirdo. There's like a pretty sober-minded, but a conservative person, and always has been.

And I just ask them, you know, not confrontationally, you know, what are your thoughts on climate change, etc. And their response was, I don't think we know enough. I don't think there's really a consensus. I'm not coming down one way or the other, but people much smarter than us will figure it out and they'll fix the problem through technology. And that, I think, is pernicious and going to be something you see all along the political spectrum of people with this, you know, techno-utopian, which has been beaten into us by popular culture, the Elon Musk's of the world. this idea that technology is it's the liberal emancipatory tool that that will get us out of this problem and it won't in many cases it will make it worse now technology has a role to play certainly but it is the widespread social political and economic transformation of institutions

that is the most crucial piece of that puzzle and if that work is not done and we just fall back on the technological front we're going to be ushered quite quickly into an utter dystopia and find the consequences of trying to do techno fixes to the climate crisis to have consequences that exacerbate instead of solve the problem. So that form of denialism is already here and is going to increase. I see Fox News saying, yeah, climate change is happening. Oh, well, you know, what's the little warmer summers and, you know, a couple inches of sea level rise? One thing I absolutely hate, and this just came to my mind, is the hyper focus on sea level rise

is like the end-all, be-all of climate change. It's like that is actually in my mind. I mean, it's very important for like low-line islands and certain coastal regions for Damshore. But it is a minor part of this puzzle. The heat waves, the droughts, the floods, the wildfires, the mass die-offs, deforestation, these things are really the spear tip of this crisis.

And the sea level rise is a sort of downstream effect of these things. If you talk to a lot of people specifically in the media, all they fucking mention, it seems, these days, and in the past has been sea level rise. And a lot of the denialists will say, who gives a shit? We have to move buildings a few feet inland or whatever. It's not that big of a deal. Look at the IPCC even said it's only going to be a few inches. What's a few inches? I mean, these are delusional and they're ignorant.

They don't understand how even a few inches can cause devastating storm surges, et cetera. But you will continue to see that. So be on the lookout for all the subtle ways that denialism manifests and evolves. I think we have to stay on top of that as well. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know that I have much to add, honestly, now that we're hitting about 46 minutes. But one thing I will say is we should absolutely do that Timothy Morton book at some point on hyperobjects. One of my, like, philosophical rabbit holes that I love is actually object-oriented ontology,

which he's associated with. So that overlaps somewhat with another philosophical interest. We should definitely do that book. Have you read it yet? I have not. I've read a lot of the other authors who are kind of in that broader field of sort of eco-criticism from that perspective. So I'd be really interested to deep dive into that for, you know, an episode because, you know, it's fun philosophy in addition to the political importance. Totally.

Yeah. And I guess I'll end by just doing a couple quick recommendations. I just watched the film Bring Your Own Brigade. It just came out. you have to look where to watch it there's different ways to watch it online but it's about the wildfire crisis in the West

and I think it does a really interesting job of sort of exploring the psychology of like conservatives in Northern California who are being terrorized by wildfires but do not link it up to climate change the efforts of like communities to come together in town halls

and solve problems but nobody wants to do anything that might require even a tiny bit of sacrifice land management from the indigenous who for millennia lived on the west coast and used controlled burns as a way to manage the forest and the absurdity of developing in places that are just not meant to be developed for these huge mansions that sit right at the crossroads of historically wildfire areas and the water wars that are fueling the entire thing, the extreme drought that the southwest

is going in and how wildfires and droughts play off each other. more drought it means more wildfires and vice versa as the land is scorched so bring your own brigade i think is really interesting um and is worth watching if you can get your hands on it and then a book i just finished is called the ends of the world and it uh it talks about in detail every chapter covers um one of the mass extinctions from the past and it talks about what caused those extinctions what the effect on flora and fauna were and it was always kind of gesturing towards and linking it up with the current ecological crisis and climate change. And one thing you realize is that carbon levels in the atmosphere have played a huge role

in almost every single mass extinction event. Now, it was caused by a bunch of different reasons, volcanism, you know, asteroid impacts, etc. But just to see the continual role that this exact thing plays in past mass extinctions is sort of dizzying and disturbing, but also provides you with a fucking ton of really fascinating and interesting information that fills out a picture and deepens your knowledge of earth science more broadly. So that movie and that book, things I've just done this past week or two, I would recommend. All right. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap this one up.

We'll definitely return to this topic for sure. But thank you to everybody who supports the show financially and those of you who sometimes can't support us financially but share episodes hand it out to your friends, and especially, and I'm always blown away, by how much organizations use our work here at Red Menace to facilitate political education within cadres and organizations. We fucking love that, and that was the core intention behind doing these deep dives on theories more broadly. So thank you to everybody who utilizes our work in that way. It means the world to us. And with that, we'll talk to you soon.

Love and solidarity.