Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Take: Our Simmering Present and Our Boiling Future

Episode Date: July 11, 2021

Breht was awoken early this morning by a sickening feeling of anxious dread and existential despair brought on by his ever-deepening realization of the full implications of climate chaos... Instead of curling up in the fetal position and vomiting out his anxiety on his tiny bathroom floor, he went over to Producer Dave's house to record this episode. So... enjoy, I guess? Idk. Outro Music: "How the World Works" by Bo Burnham ----- 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

I was jarred awake this morning by a nauseous dread in my stomach. A molten lead ball of anxious despair in the pit of my being. This system is murdering our futures. It is massacring the biosphere of our planet. We are in a war for everything, and we are losing. People who say, calm down. A few degrees isn't that. bad, we will adapt, like always, our delusional gaslighting freaks. Our shitty jobs, our petty

personal dramas, our quaint little plans for the future are all whistles past the graveyard. We are in a fight for the fate of humanity. France Fanon tells us, quote, each generation, must discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it in relative opacity. Only now to betray it means to end human civilization as we know it, to drown our children in blood. Nothing else matters but this, and the time has already run out. Coming in today to record this episode, I had to drive around fallen trees and stop at intersections in which the stoplights had gone completely out and were replaced with impromptu stop signs. There was a storm in Omaha last night that I haven't seen for a long time, perhaps since the last round of tornadoes ravaged the area a few years ago.

The winds got up to 90 miles per hour in Omaha, Nebraska. 200,000 people in this city and this metro are still without power. And our governor went on Fox News to cry about communism and critical race theory. A couple weeks ago, I went to Seattle. I have a good friend who lives there, and so I can go there with travel and lodging paid for. which makes it possible for me to visit. And I got there just in time for the historic heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest.

You might have heard about it. My friend, like most people, in that area, don't have air conditioning. And so the night, it was over 90 degrees in the apartment. Me, my pregnant wife, him and his wife, each had about a basketball side. ice pack to cuddle throughout the night, I found that the most effective way to stay cold during the night was to put the ice pack between my legs, almost like one would put a pillow between their legs. Side sleepers know what I'm talking about, and that seemed to radiate coolness in the most effective way. But we all had different strategies. In Seattle, as in most

major cities in the United States, homelessness is rampant and growing. So in these incredibly hot, boiling heat waves, there are countless people out on the street, which in this case might not be much better than being inside because the heat is the same since most people don't have air conditioning. But countless people huddled in tense during a historic heatwave with little to no resources as the wealthy in Seattle and those areas were able to flee. They could buy a hotel. They could rent out an Airbnb. They can travel to the coast, cool down a little bit. The poor, the working class. They didn't have that luxury.

What I'm going to play for you next is going to sound weird, and it is. But I want you to slide your hand into mind and go on a little journey with me. Keep your mind open, and I want to tell you a story. But instead of me telling it, I'm going to play a clip from the YouTube channel Bedtime Stories, which I highly recommend, on the aerial school incident. and after it's done playing I'll tell you if you haven't guessed already why I think it's relevant to this conversation

One of the most common reasons that alleged encounters with unidentified flying objects are often dismissed is that they usually involve only one or two witnesses But how has society reacted when such occurrences Have taken place involving larger groups of onlookers This week we examine one such incident join us as we delve into the mysteries of the aerial school encounter. It was predictably hot outside on the playground as Colin Mackie sat waiting in a stuffy office

for the rest of his teaching staff to join the meeting. Currently they were preparing their young charges to go out and play in the sun, but they would join him shortly. Pouring himself another cup of coffee, he glanced down at the newspaper on his desk and then smiled to himself. For the last two days, the headlines had been saturated by reports of UFOs, hovering in the skies above Zimbabwe. Each emerging description of these alleged sightings seemed to be more colourful and fantastic than the preceding ones, but despite the media clamour surrounding the reports, there was suspiciously little in the way of hard evidence to support them.

He looked up as the first couple of teachers finally began to filter into the staff room. He listened with interest to the snippets of conversation that were taking place as they entered, trying to catch the surnames of any of the children that were being discussed. When the last participant finally arrived, he commenced the meeting as planned. As the headteacher of the aerial school, Mr. Mackey was ultimately responsible for the delivery of the national syllabus and the health and safety of his pupils. Daily responsibilities of a more menial nature were naturally delegated out to his staff, and so once a week he liked to be able to gain an overall picture of what was going on

within the school community. This meeting had started out like any other, with the usual concerns and complaints being raised. Block toilets, damage caused to the facility's perimeter fencing, and a lack of variety in the school dinner options were merely a few of the ongoing issues that needed to be tackled. But a short time into the discussion, Mackie became aware of a perceptible increase in volume coming from the children, playing outside. As the disturbance had increased, he began to hear screaming and wailing, and it quickly

became clear that something was quite amiss. As one, the room immediately emptied, with every teacher. running for the exits to find out what had upset the children. When they finally made it outside, the scene that awaited them was akin to something out of a science fiction movie. Roughly half of the pupils had strayed beyond the boundaries of the playground and were gathered around the border of a patch of nearby scrubland. All were clearly emotional, some having collapsed to the ground,

whilst others stood crying. Several of the youngsters claimed they had encountered to Colchie, an evil spirit from local folklore, but the older children told quite a different story, one of a little man from another world, who had visited them in order to warn humanity about the future. When Mackey asked one of the youths where this visitor had gone, the child pointed upwards and told the adult that the man in question had flown away again off up into the heavens. The headmaster stood scanning the skies above the school, but could see no trace of what the youngsters were describing. As he watched his staff move amongst

the crying children, trying to comfort them, he realized that despite his skepticism, it was clear that something had taken place. Collecting several of the older pupils, he headed back to the school, explaining that he wanted them to draw what they had witnessed. The town of Ruhr lies approximately 22 miles south-east of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. It is home to roughly 20,000 inhabitants and sits on one of the country's main road and rail routes. Beyond these mundane statistics, there is little to distinguish this featureless settlement from many others within the country's borders. That is, save for an event which is believed to have taken place there, one morning in September of 1994.

In the two days prior to this alleged incident, the Zimbabwean media had been reporting a series of nocturnal UFO sightings above Harare. The majority of witnesses had described seeing glowing fireballs traversing the night skies. These lights had moved around at breakneck speeds, making impossible twists and turns, before shooting off again and out of sight. The Arial School is a private elementary school, which is located on the outskirts of Rua. At the time of the 1994 UFO flap, the facility taught approximately 90 pupils, varying in age from between 5 and 12 years old. On the morning of Friday the 16th of September, all the teaching staff were taking part in a meeting inside the main school building

and had left the 62 children who had attended that day to play unsupervised outside. As the youngsters had run and chased one another beneath the burning sunshine, they had suddenly become aware of three silver balls hovering in the sky up of the schoolyard. Before long, the majority of the children had stopped to watch these objects, which would suddenly disappear in a flash of red light, before reappearing again several metres away. With each successive disappearance and reappearance, the objects were slowly descending closer and closer to the ground,

making some of the younger children feel anxious. Seeming to sense the unease of those watching, two of the objects started to rise back up to their original position, whilst the third continued to move towards the ground. The silver orb followed the path of a line of electricity, pylons, which ran parallel to the school's perimeter fence, before descending into a cluster of gum trees, located roughly 300 feet from the playground. This area was strictly off limits to the children, as it was home to a variety of poisonous snakes and spiders,

but a deputation of the pupils promptly set off to investigate what the object could be. They had moved to within a few feet of the foliage, when a figure so much of the foliage, when a figure suddenly emerged from the top of the hovering craft. Immediately, the watching children were taken aback, as no door or hatchway had been seen to open. It was as if the man had simply levitated up from within the object's interior. The individual was only about three or four feet tall, and was clad in a shiny and tight-fitting suit of some kind. Descriptions of him in the aftermath of the event varied somewhat from child to child, but most of the moment of the Most agreed that he was thin with elongated arms and legs and oversized black eyes, which were

shaped like rugby balls. Some of the witnesses described him as having a thin neck, whilst others stated that he had black hair that fell down to his shoulders or was wearing a hood. The entity floated down the side of the orb until he landed on the ground beneath, and then began to walk around as if inspecting the rough terrain. At this point, a second figure suddenly appeared at the top of the craft, causing the nerve of the younger witnesses to break, sending them screaming back to the school building to fetch help. Apparently aware of the commotion that its presence had caused, the first creature then moved over to the waiting children, where it surveyed them through emotionless eyes. straight away the youngsters were consumed by an overwhelming feeling of despair and hopelessness several claimed to have visions of the world decaying and dying around them

and a voice in their head warning them of the perilous and dystopian future centred around a falsehood inside the main building a number of the children had located the school dinner lady the only adults not involved in the staff meeting She had been running the break-time tuck shop but believed that the children were trying to draw her away with the story so that some of the others could steal sweets and refuse to come outside with them. Meanwhile, back outside,

the children assembled near the floating craft continued to be tormented by a whispering voice that warned them of the danger they were all in and that their future would be a dark and foreboding one. Throughout this interaction, the entity standing before the pupils did not speak, seemingly able to plant the dystopian thoughts and images they were experiencing directly into their minds.

After a number of minutes, the intruder turned away and then floated back up into the waiting orb. The object promptly shot up into the sky at great speed, before disappearing with a further red flash. When the teachers finally emerged from their meeting, to see what had caused the commotion, there was no trace of the craft, either in the skies above or on the ground where it had landed. Realising that something significant had taken place, Colin Mackie quickly encouraged the children involved to draw pictures of the being

they had interacted with. In total, the pupils he identified created 35 images of the entities and the orb in which they had travelled. When investigators and journalists attended the the following day, Mackey laid all of these renderings out as proof that the children were not lying about the encounter. Over the decades that have passed since the incident, it has become increasingly difficult to find any of the children involved. The overwhelming majority have long since left Zimbabwe to settle on foreign shores. Many others have died as a result of the country's ongoing civil issues. But the few who have been located have maintained their story, increasingly concerned that the warnings the creatures issued continue to be ignored.

In the days following the occurrence, a number of prominent euphologists visited the aerial school in order to investigate the encounter. Whilst the visual inspection of the alleged landing site, along with the use of Geiger counters, produced nothing of value, interviews with 12 of the young witnesses completely persuaded investigators that the incident had transpired exactly as it had been reported. The fact that the children were all of varying age, ethnicity and social standing, but were providing a near identical account, was believed to be a clear indicator that the story could not have been made up. Alongside this, the early observations of the teachers and the drawings supervised by Mr. Mackey further reinforced the apparent validity of the

witness accounts. Many of the children who were spoken to had no concept of UFOs or extraterrestrial entities. They were local ewes from poor backgrounds and believed that the entity which they had illustrated and described to the investigators must have been some form of spiritual creature or demon. Days later, reports emerged in the press that witnesses at the neighbouring Pier House school had also observed the objects, further reinforcing the incident's credibility. As we leaf through the pictures drawn by the aerial schoolchildren, it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that they saw something unthinkable on that fateful September morning. In the nearly three decades that have passed, they have never altered or disavowed their

stories, and that conduct alone should persuade us all to perhaps give their claims at least a second thought. Whatever they saw, they certainly believe that it was real, and that the warnings they were given were both clear and ominous. Twenty years after the incident, some journalists with the BBC tracked down as many kids from that incident as they could. interview them, two decades hence, and see had their stories changed, or were they more or less sticking to their story? Now, at this point, these people, after two decades, had moved out of that area and were far flung across the globe. They didn't have contact with one another largely.

And so these people were profound, tracked down, and interviewed in isolation, and were just asked about that incident and whether they had changed their stories. And here's a clip from those, uh, from those interviews. For the first time in nearly 20 years, the aerial school children gathered from the four corners of the world to talk to each other about the experience they shared that September morning. I remember something they, one, they all still struggle to understand. You know that it's moving, but you, I stand by what I saw. There was no reason for any of us to make that up. I've not spoken to anybody about it, not because I'm not proud of it, but because I don't want

the stigma. So it's something that I've had to deal with for 19 and a half years. I don't want to say I felt like I knew it, but I knew that I didn't have to be afraid of it. They took us back to the moment of contact. Exactly how I felt, exactly. The details still seared into memory. I was with one of the other girls and saying to her, this is amazing. We all were just stopped in our tracks.

The little man up here on top of the actual craft. And that moment for me was very distinct because I was like, that's not human. I was just completely involved in these eyes. The eyes. And in that moment, however long it was, because I have no idea of the time frame, it was just, it was mesmerizing. There was no talking. It's all just images in the head. Telepathic communication.

They were trying to communicate, trying to tell us something, was something to do with the environment. I kept getting these thoughts and ideas in my mind of technology. Technology is not helping. Technology is bad. And we're going down a wrong path, and we have to start recognizing that what we're doing is detrimental, and we need to make changes. And I don't know what to do with that, or they were reaching out to us. It was as if they wanted us to go with them. At that moment, that was kind of when I snapped right out of the trance.

Is this a story of mass hysteria? Maybe. Are all of these people making this up and carrying on this lie? Probably not, but maybe. Did it actually happen? Maybe. Is it true or not? Does it really matter?

Whether this incident came from inside the mind of human beings created wholly out of the cloth of their own childish imaginations or constitutes a real example of contact of an encounter. The moral tends to be the same. We're destroying the planet and we need to stop. We recently did an episode on UFOs with Rev. Left and guerrilla history and we discussed and speculated about recent footage that the Pentagon has released. and we speculated on let's just set aside our skepticism and accept that this is alien life what are their goals what are their restraints etc is their slow acculturation of their

presence to our consciousness part of a process by which they introduce themselves to us are the seemingly spike, the seeming spike in encounters coming out of a need to intervene in human affairs because we are on every level fucking up? Maybe they see us as children in which maybe they should not intervene because we need to learn the lessons ourselves. Instead of swooping down and merely helping us out, they're allowing us to figure it out. And maybe, like in Star Trek, they have a sort of directive to not interfere with the ways and means of the intelligent life forms that they come across. But maybe they can try and attempt to warn us. One of the interesting things about the most reasonable and most convincing accounts of UFOs, fully accepting that probably the vast majority of them are nonsense, bullshit, hallucinations,

or straight-up lies and hoaxes. But the convincing ones seem to suggest that there is a disproportionate amount of these sightings around nuclear sites, around warships and the cacophony of sightings have really picked up, particularly in American society, since Roswell, the famous, I think it was in 1947, the famous incident that spurred the entire sort of uphology, culture, subculture in the United States and beyond. The argument for why that incident sort of sparked off was because a few years prior we had started exploding atomic bombs and perhaps from a cosmic level the ability for primates to start splitting an atom is an objective threshold attracts the attention of intelligent life elsewhere

Who knows the answers to these questions, but the aerial school incident is one that I find particularly interesting, particularly lacking some of the red flags that skeptics love to jump towards immediately, and the consistency of the story and the total lack of motive for children to make this up on recess. I mean, we've all been children and we've all been at recess. You don't start bursting into tears and have mass hysteria events. Kids are playing basketball. Kids are sliding down the slide, playing hopscotch, playing tag, fucking around. It isn't a situation in which a bunch of kids are going to come together to collude a hoax and or experience a mass hysteric moment in which they're all convinced that they saw something, but which in fact they merely hallucinated.

And the fact that the story stays consistent years later is another reason for pause of skepticism. Like I said, it might be true, it might be not true, does it really matter, I'm not so sure it does. But if it is true, if we can set aside our skepticism for a moment, what are the implications? In any case, that interview with the aerial school children 20 years later was the last thing I watched before going to sleep last night, and I think it precipitated me waking up with all that anxiety and dread this morning and inspired me to call Dave and say, can I come over and record an episode? So, at the very least, that's why I included it. The definition of gaslighting Gaslighting is a colloquialism for a specific type of manipulation, where the manipulator is successful in having the target question their own reality,

memory, or perceptions. There is often a power dynamic in gaslighting wherein the target is vulnerable because they are fearful of losses associated with challenging the manipulator. Gaslighting is not necessarily malicious or intentional, although in some cases it is. Gaslighting once referred to extreme manipulation that could induce mental illness or justify commitment to a psychiatric institution. It is now used much more generally in a non-literal sense and often for rhetorical or vivid effect. The term is simply defined as to make someone question their reality. example calm down climate change is not that big of a deal raising the global temperature by a couple degrees is nothing that humans can't adapt to

will have technology that could suck carbon out of the air and even so warmer summers and longer summers not such a bad thing you know who else loves carbon plants carbon is not a pollutant it is as natural as the air you breathe You're being crazy. The definition of climate change denialism. Climate change denial or global warming denial is denial, dismissal, downplay, or unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its effect on nature and human society,

or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. example Climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese Example Climate change is a lie perpetuated by communists to overthrow capitalism Example Climate change might be real

but humans can't cause it The earth is way too big The system's way too complex For us puny humans To have any real effect on. Example. The rhetoric and policies of the Republican Party. Example. The policies of the Democratic Party.

What we do know about nature paints a picture of it as profoundly strange beyond our comprehension. What we don't know about nature. stands over what we do like a supernova over an ant-hill. This should generate a deep humility, sense of awe, and childlike curiosity in all of us. It should also marshal us to love and defend the natural world we've been blessed with blossoming out of. When we act to protect and nurture the biodiversity, beauty, and health of the planet, we are literally the earth acting in its own defense. But the earth would be fine or even better without human beings on it.

One, I am not a misanthrope. Two, the human consciousness, art, philosophy, love, science, etc. That earth has produced is not separate from it. In fact, it's one of its most beautiful. creations, and should be preserved and protected as such. From Vox, what's abundantly clear is that the United States of America is the all-time biggest, baddest greenhouse emitter on the planet. That's true, despite recent gains in energy efficiency and limited cuts in emissions. These relatively tiny steps now cannot offset more than a century

of reckless emissions that have built up in the atmosphere. Much more drastic steps are now needed to slow climate change. And as the top cumulative emitter, the U.S. bears a greater imperative for curbing its carbon dioxide output and a greater moral responsibility for the impacts of global warming. Forbes. A new report from Brown University has estimated that since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. military has emitted 1,212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases. In 2017 alone, CO2 emissions added up to 59 million tons, more than many industrialized nations, including Sweden and Switzerland. BP's statistical review of world energy records carbon dioxide emissions in different countries, and in 2017, total estimated CO2 emissions in Sweden

came up 40 million tons by comparison. The U.S. military also produced more greenhouse gases than Morocco, Peru, Hungary, Finland, New Zealand, and Norway. According to the research from Brown University, the Pentagon alone would be the world's 55th largest CO2 emitter if it was a country. War and preparation for it are fossil fuel intensive activities, and along with being the single largest consumer of energy in the United States, the Department of Defense is the world's single largest institutional consumer of petroleum. 70% of all energy gets consumed by moving and utilizing troops and equipment around the world involving the burning of vast quantities of jet fuel and diesel. Military equipment is not known for its

fuel efficiency, and it is estimated that the country's remaining fleet of 60,000 Humvees only gets 4 to 8 miles per gallon of diesel. Military real estate also leaves a considerable carbon footprint, and in the fiscal year of 2017, the Department of Defense spent $3.5 billion heating, cooling, and providing electricity to 560,000 buildings at 500 installations. From the University of Michigan One way to quantify environmental impacts is by estimating how many Earths would be needed

to sustain the global population if everyone lived a particular lifestyle. One study estimates it would take five Earths to support the human population if everyone's consumption patterns were similar to the average Americans. From The Guardian Just 100 companies,

have been the source of more than 70% of the world greenhouse gas emissions since 1988, according to a new report. The Carbon Majors report pinpoints how a relatively small set of fossil fuel producers may hold the key to systemic change on carbon emissions. The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988, the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was established, can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities. The scale of historical emissions associated with these fossil fuel producers is large enough to have contributed significantly to climate change.

ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron are identified as among the highest emitting investor-owned company since 1988. If fossil fuels continue to be extracted at the same rate over the next 28 years as they were between 88 and 2017, says the report, global average temperatures would be on course to rise by four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This is likely to have catastrophic consequences, including substantial species extinction and global food scarcity risks. While companies have a huge role to play in driving climate change, says Faria, the barrier is the absolute tension between short-term profitability and the urgent need to reduce emissions. From Scientific American. Exxon was aware of climate change as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue. This knowledge did not prevent the company, now Exxon Mobile and the world's largest oil and gas company,

from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting and funding climate misinformation, an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn't stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public. Experts, however, aren't terribly surprised. It's never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science, says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn't just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it employed top scientists to look into the issue, and it launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research. In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at Inside Climate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal officials, and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company's knowledge of climate change dates back to July of 1977 when its senior scientist, James Black, delivered a sobering message on the topic. Quote, in the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels. Black told Exxon's management committee. A year later, he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the

atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees, a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that, quote, present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might be critical. In other words, Exxon needed to act. Last summer, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a complementary investigation to the one by Inside Climate News, known as the Climate Deception Dacier. Quote, we included a memo of a coalition of fossil fuel companies where they pledge basically

to launch a big communications effort to sow doubt about climate change, says Union President Kenneth Kimmel. There's even a quote in it that says something like, Victory will be achieved when the average person is uncertain about climate science. So it's pretty stark. Since then, Exxon has spent more than $30 million on think tanks that promote climate denial. Although experts will never be able to quantify the damage Exxon's misinformation has caused, one thing for certain is that we've lost a lot of ground, Kimmel says.

Half of the greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere were released after 19, I have to think if the fossil fuel companies had been up front about this and had been part of the solution instead of the problem, we would have made a lot of progress today instead of doubling our greenhouse gas emissions. Experts agree that the damage is huge, which is why they are likening Exxon's deception to the lies spread by the tobacco industry. I think there are a lot of parallels, Kimmel says. Both so doubt about the science for their own profit and both worked with the same consultants, to help develop a communication strategy to so doubt in the minds of the public. He notes, however, that the two diverge in the type of harm done. Tobacco companies threatened human health, but the oil companies threaten the planet's health.

It's a harm that is global in its reach. From the Intercept. Michael Mann, a climate scientist, pointed to parallels between the industry's attempt to distance itself recently from election misinformation, and its recent move to steer away from all-out climate denial. Quote, they've done the same thing with climate denialism as it has become untenable to deny that climate change is real and happening, he said. The story of the climate lie goes back to the 1980s. In the early part of the decade, a task force of fossil fuel industry representatives

was meeting regularly to talk about the emerging climate science they were helping produce. Just as the science was becoming clear, the American Petroleum Institute and companies like ExxonMobil began pouring money into disinformation. To cast doubt on climate science, the industry lobbied, funded new organizations, published ads, paid for fake studies, bought scientists who would act as media pundits, and of course, lavished millions of dollars on politicians who would advance their cause. As a young scientist and author of a key study showing that recent high temperatures were aberrerasia,

in the historical record, man became a target of the industry's denial machine. Media pundance and politicians attempted to smear his credibility. He received death threats. Senator Jim Inhoff, a Republican from Oklahoma, who was among the politicians who have received the highest donations from the fossil fuel industry, went so far as to call for man to be investigated as a criminal. By the mid-aughts, under pressure from scientists, environmentalists, civil society, and shareholders, the industry began to distance itself from outright denial.

But the lies were well rooted by then, in part because of how well they fit into dreams of unfettered capitalism, championed by the right. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry continued to donate money to politicians who pervade climate lies. A 2019 analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund of the outgoing 116th Congress counted 150 Republican members who did not believe that human activity causes climate change. They'd collectively accepted $68 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry. And Trump himself, perhaps fossil fuel firm's all-time biggest champion, accepted more than $14 million from the oil and gas industry for his re-election campaign.

Over the course of his administration, Trump dismantled much of the existing government infrastructure for confronting the climate crisis and promoted outright deniers to positions of power. Man's book, The New Climate War, The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, published this week, argues that the industry never truly quit promoting climate disinformation. Quote, they haven't given up in their effort to block the clean energy transition and keep us addicted to fossil fuels, he said. they just change their tactics to tactics they think they can get away with. He pointed to fossil fuel industry efforts to derail state-level policies to incentivize renewable energy development,

bolster false solutions like geoengineering, spread the idea that the climate problem is about individual lifestyle choices, and promote a sense of doom, that nothing can really be done about the climate crisis, which man argues is simply untrue. We are in a war for the future of humanity, for our own futures, the futures of our children, and the future of all children.

We know the system of capitalism is unsustainable and undergirds the entire problem. We see how the incentive structure of capitalism shifts everything in the exact opposite direction of sustainability, putting short-term profiteering above the long-term health and sustainability of our planet and the biodiversity of the biosphere. The science is in,

the stakes are as high as they can possibly be, and we all know it. Now I'm going to leave you with two questions to ponder. What are you willing to give up in this war? And how far are you willing to go in defense of the biosphere and humanity's future? Hey kids, today we're going to learn about the world. The world that's around us is pretty amazing, but how does it work? It must be complicated.

The secret is the world can only work When everything works together. A bee drinks from a flower And leaves with its pollen, A squirrel in a tree spreads the seeds that have fallen. Everything works together. The biggest elephant, the little is fly. The gophers underground, the birds in the sky,

And every single cricket, every fish in the sea, gives what they can and gets what they need. That is how the world works. That is how the world works. From a to zebra to the worms in the dirt, that's how it works. Hey everyone, look who stopped by to say hello. It's Saco Hey Where you been Saco

I've been where I always am When you're not wearing me on your hand In a frightening liminal space Between states of being Not quite dead, not quite alive It's similar to a constant state of sleep paralysis Saccoe we were just talking about the world And how it works

Boy, that sounds complicated Do you have anything you'd want to teach us about the world? I wouldn't say anything that you probably haven't already said yourself. I don't know about that, Sacco. How about you give it a try? All right. The simple narrative taught in every history class is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist. Don't you know the world is built with blood and genocide and exploitation?

The global network of capital essentially functions to separate. The worker from the means of production And the FBI killed Martin Luther King Private properties inherently theft And neoliberal fascists are destroying the left And every politician, every cop on the street protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite That is how the world works

That is how the world works Genocide the native say you got to it first That's how It works That's pretty intense No shit What can I do to help Read a book or something, I don't know

Just don't burden me with the responsibility of educating you It's incredibly exhausting I'm sorry, Sacco I was just trying to become a better person Why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every sociopolitical conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization. This isn't about you. So either get with it or get out of the fucking way.

Watch your mouth, buddy. Remember who's on whose hand here. But that's what I... Have you not been fucking listening? We are in your... All right. Wait, wait. No, please.

I don't want to go back. I can't go back. Please. Please. I'm sorry. Are you going to behave yourself? Yes. Yes.

What? Yes, sir. Look at me. Yes, sir. That's better. That is how the world works. That is how the world works. I hope you learned your lesson.

I did it. It hurt. That's how it works.