Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Take: “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

This is the debut episode of a new Rev Left Radio sub-series called Red Hot Takes, where Breht breaks down and analyzes current events, new works, or breaking news in a monologue format. In this episode, Breht analyzes the popular new book on Climate Change by journalist David Wallace-Wells entitled "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming" from a Marxist perspective.  Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. As we work towards expanding to create and provide more content please consider: Becoming a Patreon supporter (and receive access to bonus content including the Rev Left book club) here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio - OR - making a one-time donation to the Rev Left Radio team here: paypal.me/revleft Thank you for your support!

Hello everyone. Welcome to the first ever episode of Red Hot Takes. This is an expansion of Rev Left Radio, where I, your trusted host, We'll take a new story, a current event, or a new work, summarize it, and then deconstruct it in order to analyze its contents from a Marxist perspective. Since we do not have guests for these Red Hot Take episodes, they will be shorter than normal Rev Left episodes, and they will be recorded in both audio podcast form as well as video form eventually. This will not affect in any way the normal Rev Left radio interview episodes. This is just adding another component to the show, not taking anything away.

We hope you enjoy this new expansion of Rev Left, and we want to thank all of our patrons who support the show with their hard-earned money. Without them, there is no RevLeft radio, and there certainly is no expansion of the show like you are seeing now. So from the bottom of our little Red Hearts, thank you. Now, let's get into the show. For this debut episode of Red Hot Takes, I read the brand new book, which just came out last month on climate change by David Wallace Wells, entitled The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. What makes this book different from many others like it, and what makes it worth reading and analyzing,

is that one, it's totally up to date encompassing all the newest scientific discoveries through 2018. Two, it openly and honestly explores the implications of climate change with no sense of unearned optimism and without the excessive rhetorical caution that scientists have taken in the face of extreme backlash and criticism from the forces of reaction on this issue. And three, it explores the implications of climate change for our political systems, our sense of time and ethics, our mental health, our tendency towards storytelling, and much more. The author says in the introduction that this book is not about the science of warming, rather it's about what warming means for the way we live on this planet.

As such, the book is broken into two main parts, aside from the introduction and the conclusion. In the first part, Wallace Wells lays out the science in all its grotesque and horrifying dimensions, systematically showing how climate change is and will continue to affect all spheres of our lives and how it affects all aspects of the environment, with entire chapters dedicated to our oceans, to heat waves, to agriculture, to conflict, and to every other conceivable part of our lives. The second part is a sort of philosophical reflection on the reality and implications of climate change for our lives, our institutions, our psychologies, and more. It is, of course, impossible for me to cover every part of this book, so in this episode I will be summarizing the most jarring and fascinating

facts that the book offers, exploring and summarizing the philosophical reflections of the author, and then taking all of that and giving it a Marxist interpretation, ranging from how we got into this trouble, the role capitalism plays in perpetuating climate change, why socialism is genuinely the only viable option, and finally what we, as organizers and thinkers on the socialist left, can meaningfully do in the here and now to fight back against the ravages of climate chaos

and all of its horror show implications. First, let's lay out some of the realities of climate change and catch everyone up on where we currently are in relation to warming and where we are likely going. And as a segue into that area of discussion, it's worth reflecting on the fact, as the author makes clear, that more than half of the carbon

pumped into our atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the last three decades alone, which means, terrifyingly, that we have done as much emissions-based damage to the atmosphere since Al Gore published his first book on climate, or since Seinfeld debuted on television,

then we have in all of the centuries and millennia before it. So where are we with regards to warming right now? Well, we are currently sitting at 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, the gold standard when it comes to assessments of the state of the planet and as likely trajectory, has repeatedly pointed to two degrees of warming as catastrophic, and has, for over a decade at least, pointed to two degrees of warming as the threshold we should be working as hard as we can to not overshoot.

As such, so much of the literature on the effects of climate change tends to stop at two degrees of warming. Partly because that is the threshold that scientists generally accept as the focal point, but also as the author lays out in convincing fashion, because scientists and the journalists who report on their findings are overly concerned about being alarmist. Specifically here in the U.S., the home to the only major political party in the world whose baseline position on climate change is that it doesn't exist,

or if it does, it's not because of human activity. scientists are constantly being attacked and brutalized in the media if they dare put forward any analysis that in any way can be interpreted as, quote-unquote, alarmist. Add that to the inbuilt caution and humility inherent in the scientific method, and you create a situation where scientists restrain themselves too much when they are trying to inform the public of the threat posed by climate change. This leads to a distortion of people's understanding of the problem, as the author says. quote, when we dismiss the worst-case possibilities, it distorts our sense of likelier outcomes, which we then regard as extreme scenarios we need not plan so conscientiously for. High-end estimates establish the boundaries of what is possible, between which we can

better conceive of what is likely, and perhaps they will prove better guides even than that, considering the optimist have never, in the half-century of climate anxiety we've already endured, been correct, end quote. So, if we are currently at 1.1 degrees of warming, and the two-degree mark is seen as a sort of catastrophic threshold, where are we heading right now? And moreover, what does Earth look like at each degree of warming? Well, the news is not good. To be able to stop warming at or below two degrees from our current position in 2019 would take the sort of immediate and global effort that literally all strains of our global politics at the moment seem to make impossible. It would require, at the very least, and in the most optimistic,

outlook, every country in the Paris Accords sticking doggedly to their commitments and accomplishing them on time. Sadly, under the Trump administration, the third largest country on earth and a prime emitter of carbon has completely pulled out of those accords and rolled back the small gains made by the Obama administration on the issue, including reopening miles and miles of coastline for offshore drilling. But even if the U.S. stayed in, there isn't a single country in the Paris Accords who are, at this moment, on track to implement the policies again.

agreed on in those accords. Moreover, the most recent IPCC report made clear that even if all the commitments made in Paris were implemented successfully, we would still be on track for a 3.2 degrees of warming, or about three times as much warming as the planet has seen since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Add to this all of the possible feedback loops in nature, which scientists don't fully understand yet, including the possibility for methane leaks as permafrost melts away, which is a far more intense greenhouse gas than CO2 is, and which could lead to a runaway effect, and this situation becomes even more dire. A sober assessment of the modeled trajectories combined with the abysmal state of global

politics, and a conservative estimate for the amount of warming we are due for by the end of the century looks more like 3 to 3.5 degrees of warming. If we do nothing at all and stick to our current level of emissions over the next few decades, we would be suddenly looking at four to five degrees of warming. But those numbers are small, and given the way that humans understand numbers, not to mention how people confuse weather with climate, the difference between two and three degrees of warming may not sound that urgent to the average reader or listener, but that would be a dangerous assumption.

So what exactly does two degrees of warming mean for the earth? Or for that matter, what does three, four, or five degrees mean? Well, the author breaks it down quite well. At two degrees of warming, which is pretty much the best, scenario given where we currently are as a species in addressing the issue will be dire. The ice sheets will begin their total collapse. 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity as heat waves and droughts devastate water supplies, and major cities in the equatorial band will become unlivable in the summer.

India, for example, is set to be the worst off country with regards to climate change impact, with, among many other threats, 30 times as many heat waves, which will last an average of five times longer than normal. And major Indian cities with tens of millions of people like Calcutta, Mumbai, and Delhi will become inhospitable to human life in the summertime. This is again our best case scenario. And don't content yourself with the fact that you don't live in India, as that's just one example of one country. But nobody on any corner of the globe will be able to escape the reach of climate chaos. In fact, the United States is among the top three countries predicted to be hit hardest by two degrees or more of warming. At three degrees of warming,

a more sober and more likely prediction of where we will be, Southern Europe would be in permanent drought. And droughts in places like Central America, the Caribbean, and Northern Africa would last two to five years longer on average than they currently do today. The areas burned each year by wildfires in the U.S. alone would sex tipple, making places like California much less hospitable than it is today. And even today, wildfires over the past few years have devastated countless lives in that state. At four degrees of warming, there would be 8 million more annual cases of dengue fever in Latin America alone,

and there would be a global food crisis on an annual basis the world over. Floods would occur much more often and grow radically more intense, multiplying 30-fold in Bangladesh and as much as 60-fold in the United Kingdom. Climate disasters like droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, the spread of disease, floods, and more could pile up in the same country in the same year, devastating entire. nations as they scramble to address disasters in every corner of their territory. Globally, damages from these disasters are likely to reach $600 trillion, which is more than twice all the wealth that currently exists in the world today.

Couple that with the annihilation of economic growth and global GDP, and we will have a poorer world with increasingly costly disasters happening more and more frequently. All of this is what we will get by 2100, the UN predicts, if we will have a poorer world with increasingly costly disasters, get by 2100, the UN predicts if we continue business as usual. This is, in other words, the path we are currently on. Only human action on a global scale in the next few decades alone can prevent us from ending up here. And remember, even if you aren't planning on living until 2100, you will still be affected by all of this. These things will grow and grow year by year. Nobody under the age of 60 years old today, assuming they live anywhere close to the average

lifespan of a human being, will be able to avoid some degree of these effects. This is not posterity's problem. This is our problem. And our single lifespans are the scales we are operating on. So here we have the range of possibilities that are most likely given some serious actions on climate change by the nations of the world, namely between two and four degrees of warming. In fact, the UN says that if we continue business as usual, we will very possibly reach 4.5 degrees of warming by 2100. That is a half degree more than the four degrees of warming I just laid out above. But one has to believe that some sort of action will be taken and that we will not surpass four degrees of warming by 2100.

The most likely scenario, given the most likely sets of actions that the world will take to address climate change over the next few decades, and setting aside the possibility for catastrophic feedback loops and nature that we don't fully understand, is that we will probably land somewhere between three and four degrees of warming by the end of the century. In the book Climate Shock by scientist Wagner and Weitzman, the authors run the best climate models we currently have over and over and over again and conclude that there is an 11% chance that we overshoot 6 degrees of warming by the end of the century. That's a 1 in 10 chance that we, for all intents and purposes, drive ourselves into an eco-apocalypse. At 6 degrees of warming or more, there will be very little hope for civilization as we currently know it.

The absolute worst-case scenario put forward by the UN is 8 degrees of warming by 2100. This is, again, at the very high end of the probability curve and likely to be avoided, but it's worth addressing briefly so as to give you the full spectrum of the climate change bell curve. At eight degrees of warming, the oceans would swell 200 feet higher than they currently are, flooding two-thirds of the world's major cities. Very little of the land on Earth would be capable of producing any of the food that we currently eat. Forests would be dominated by rolling storms of fire, and coasts would be obliterated by hurricanes the likes of,

which no human has ever laid eyes upon. Tropical disease would flourish and expand all the way to the Arctic, and a third of the planet would be made unlivable via direct heat alone. This is what extinction looks like. And while we will almost certainly avoid this fate, every step we take in its direction is a step we cannot take back. And every degree of warming that we create in that direction is a degree of warming that entails intrinsically the inexorable and unbearable increase of human and animal suffering, taken towards levels that would make the black plague look like a seasonal flu in comparison. Those are the facts. Everything I've said to this point is not the hyperbolic or paranoid fantasies of one journalist or one weird podcast host.

These are the sober and empirical assessments made by the most scientifically informed and engaged scholars and organizations in human history. The next question virtually asks itself, what does all of this mean for our politics, our economy, and our institutions? Well, although no one can say for sure exactly how the effects of climate change will ripple across the face of the earth, one thing can be said for sure. A more unstable planet will mean more scarcity and more desperation, and that means more conflict and more war. Take, for example, the Syrian Civil War, which exploded onto the scene in 2011. This was a war started in part because of a history. historic drought in that region. In the very least, we can say that the drought and the famine-like

conditions it brought about acted as a spark which ignited long-simmering tensions and conflicts in the region. One result of this horrific war was the unleashing of about one million refugees over several years into the surrounding countries and eventually into Europe. The result of which, among many other things, was the hysterical rise in reactionary, white supremacist, and fascist movements all across the West's. As little children's bodies washed up on European shores, alongside rafts of refugees desperately seeking some sort of sanctuary for themselves and their families, European and U.S. politics were thrown into xenophobic hysteria, helping give rise to reactionary political movements like Brexit and reactionary politicians like Trump. The effects

of this civil war and the resulting refugee crisis is ongoing. And without hindsight, it's hard to fully calculate and take account of. But suffice it to say that large migrants, of peoples into foreign lands dominated by the inequalities and scarcities created by global capitalism is a recipe for the most despicable acts of tribalism, nationalism, and violent chauvinism. But here, we are only talking about a million people spread out over half a decade. Climate change and the mass migrations, which it stubbornly implies, will make this event in its subsequent political pathologies seem tame in comparison. The World Bank, for example, that bastion of neoliberal plundering,

predicts that by 2050, over 140 million refugees will be moving across the globe, displaced by various effects of climate chaos. That is more than a hundred times the refugee crisis of the Syrian Civil War in only three decades. The UN's projections are even worse, estimating that over 200 million refugees by 2050, which was the entire population of planet Earth at the peak of the Roman Empire. I will be 60 years old in 2050. my children will be in their 30s and 40s respectively.

What does a world marked by 200 times the refugee crisis of the Syrian Civil War look like? Well, the vast majority of you listening to this right now will be alive to find out for yourself. In any case, one thing is certain. Fascism will absolutely thrive in this environment. Climate change is, in some ways, the ultimate tool of fascists in that it's a genocide machine far greater and more efficient than anything the Nazi worms in their heyday could come up with, and in fact, there is a rise in what is called eco-fascism already occurring today. These are groups of fascists who acknowledge climate

change and who are preparing to navigate the chaos it brings with the goal of every fascist movement, namely the violent elimination of entire categories of human beings deemed subhuman by the fascist mind, which tends to include pretty much everyone who is not an angry and violent white fascist. In a world dominated by disasters, plagued with increasing scarcity of basic needs, exacerbated by economic and political inequality, and driven to desperation by all of these factors and more, the fascist appeal becomes more compelling to more people. Its simplistic scapegoating of the other, and its tribalistic insistence on race and nation as the only unifying concepts on offer, coupled with a curious pseudo-Froidian human impulse

to search for strong men and father figures in times of uncertainty, makes a world plunge into chaos the perfect breeding ground for fascism. The billionaires who litter the ruling class today and who hoard as much wealth and power as they possibly can won't be there to save us with their already insufficient institutions and legal frameworks. Instead, the appeal of fascism will be alluring to them over the prospect of handing over their wealth and power in the name of the betterment of humanity, as history has proven so many times before. The liberal center technocrats, who drenched themselves in the idealist tech utopianism emanating from Silicon Valley, won't be there to save us either. as their heads are so far up their own asses, it'll likely take much more than the prospect of real-world devastation to wrench them out. They'll be lecturing us about the entrepreneurial spirit, the power of the market, and horseshoe theory, while offering nothing more than

escapism in the form of technology, new apps, and absurd hopes of colonizing Mars while the world burns all around them. In other words, we cannot depend on capitalism, on liberalism, on bourgeois idealism, or on the absurdly ineffectual governments that are rise out of their combination. We have to save us, and that means real world organizing here and now and the construction of institutions and infrastructures made by us and for us with the likely future we are facing firmly in mind. But I will return to this point in more detail at the end of this presentation.

The point I am making here is that the resurgent fascism we are currently seeing in the world today is but a tiny preview of the variegated and grotesque forms of fascism, which are and will continue to emerge in the face of climate change. And it's our job, today and in the future, to be on the front line opposing and hindering its development by any means necessary, while simultaneously building up our capacities to navigate and help others navigate the world that we are being ushered into daily.

But all of that is, of course, just one aspect of the global conflict that we are likely to see rage in the not-so-distant future. In fact, researchers have predicted that for every half-to-year, degree of warming, societies will see between a 10 and 20% increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. And in a context in which monopoly capitalism and the imperialism inherent in monopoly capitalism rule the globe, a planet increasingly defined by the destruction of economic growth, of massive food shortages, and the generalized misery of relentless instability, will

absolutely vomit up more wars, perhaps even world wars. One need look no further than the U.S. military and the Pentagon itself to confirm that we are indeed on a path for more conflict. As the author of the book says, quote, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change, the Pentagon issuing regular climate threat assessments and planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming, end quote. It's ultimately a farcical irony that those in our society who most eagerly lick the boots of the military and who get weepy-eyed at the side of an American flag waving in the wind and who go out of their way to make a performance, about how much they love the troops

are the exact segment of our society who are the least likely to believe in climate change at all. Even when the object of their jingoistic admiration, namely the military, is perhaps the only organization outside of science itself that is the most convinced that climate change is real and the most active in preparing for it. But the military sees everything through its own lens.

And so climate change is not seen so much as a human problem that desperately needs solving and which could be meaningfully addressed with I don't know, large chunks of money taken away from the bloated U.S. military industrial complex budget and funneled into projects that decrease emissions and put us toward a sustainable energy future, but rather as merely a new stage upon which the full murderous force of the U.S. military will strut and swagger. But it's not even on the level of nation states that the bulk of conflict will be carried out. The regional and even the interpersonal levels of society will be saturated in conflict as well.

It's a well-known fact, for example, that extreme heat alone results reliably in increased violent crime rates across the board. Rates of murder, rapes, assaults, and robberies all routinely peak during the hottest parts of the year. Police are even statistically shown to be more likely to fire on suspects when exercises are conducted in hotter weather. Add to the heat more social instability, more scarcity of necessary goods and resources, more economic and political inequality and an increasingly less and less responsive government, and we will be dealing with levels of violence at every realm of our lives and in every sphere of society, that it'll make Stephen Pinkers the better angels of our nature look like some sort of macabre joke, in the same way

that Francis Fukuyama's arrogant declaration that history had ended is reduced to absurdity by the two decades of history that have passed since his utterance. But outside of the collective pathologies defined by violence and conflict, which are heading our way like an unstoppable train, there are also the more subtle effects on psychology and culture. There will be, without a doubt, new religious and cultural movements blossoming, sometimes frighteningly, in the face of climate chaos. If the political and cultural failure of the 60s gave rise to serial killers and cults in the 70s and 80s, one can only imagine a whole array of such things coming to the fore as human psychology is tested on a collective scale in ways

it's never been tested before. Doomsday cults, religious extremism, and more action, and more acts of senseless mass violence are inevitable, as some fraction of humans embrace nihilism and suicide in the face of our changing world. But there will also likely be a rise in, quote unquote, back-to-nature movements in the romantic Russoian tradition, as people begin to see how valuable the natural world is and how much it's been taken for granted, a fact highlighted by its deterioration. This can take the positive form of environmentalist politics, but it can also take the form of turning away from politics entirely, and retreating into a sort of Walden's pond-type individualism. In fact, many people, of all stripes, will likely be so overwhelmed

by developments across the globe that simply turning away and falling into various forms of escapism becomes the only possible move. Whether that escapeism is through drugs, virtual reality, an aesthetic retreat into the mountains, or any other form of averting one's gaze and disavowing responsibility, one thing is for sure. Those currents in our society will accept. expand and grow, oftentimes into unprecedented and wholly unimaginable directions. On top of those cultural realities, we must also take stock of the realities of human psychology and the trauma, grief, and loss that more and more people will inevitably be faced with in a warmer and less stable world.

The author writes about this cogently. Quote, in a world of suffering, the self-interested mind craves compartmentalization. In a world of suffering, the self-interested mind craves compartmentalization. And one of the most interesting frontiers of emerging climate science traces the imprint left on our psychological well-being by the force of global warming, which can overwhelm whatever methods we devise to cope, that is, the mental health effects of a world on fire. Perhaps the most predictable vector is trauma.

Between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health. In England, flooding was found to quadruple levels of psychological distress, even among those in an inundated community, but not personally affected by the flooding. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 62% of evacuees exceeded the diagnostic threshold for acute stress disorder. In the region as a whole, nearly a third has PTSD. Wildfires curiously yielded a lower incidence, just 24.

percent of evacuees in the aftermath of one series of California blazes. But a third of those who lived through fire were diagnosed in its aftermath with depression. Unsurprisingly, climate trauma is especially harsh on the young. In this, our folk wisdom about the impressionable minds of children is reliable. 32 weeks after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, killing 40, more than half of children surveyed had moderate PTSD, and more than a third had a severe form. In the high-impact areas, 70% of children scored in the moderate to severe range fully 21 months after the Category 5 storm. By dismal contrast, soldiers returning from war are estimated to suffer from PTSD at a rate between 11 and 31%. One especially detailed study examined the mental health fallout from Hurricane Mitch, a category 5 storm and the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, which struck Central America in 1998, leaving 11,000.

dead. In Pulsatega, the most hard-hit region of Nicaragua, children had a 27% chance of having been seriously injured, a 31% chance of having lost a family member, and a 63% chance of their home having been damaged or destroyed. You can imagine the after effects. 90% of adolescents in the area were left with PTSD, with an average adolescent boy registering at the high end of the range of severe PTSD, and the average teenage girl registering over the threshold. threshold of very severe. Six months after the storm, four out of every five teenage survivors from Pulsataga suffered from depression. And then there are the more surprising mental health costs. Climate affects both the onset and the severity of depression, the Lancet has found.

Rising temperatures and humidity are married in the data to emergency room visits for mental health issues. When it's hotter out, psychiatric hospitals see spikes in proper inpatient and missions as well. Schizophrenics especially are admitted at much higher rates when the temperatures are higher, and inside those hospitals, ward temperature significantly increases symptom severity in schizophrenic patients. Heat waves bring waves of other things too. Mood disorders, anxiety disorders, dementia. Heat produces violence and conflict between people, we know, and so it should probably not surprise us that it also generates a spike in violence against oneself. Each increase, of a single degree Celsius in monthly temperature is associated with almost a percentage point

rise in the suicide rate in the United States and more than two percentage points in Mexico. An unmitigated emission scenario could produce 40,000 additional suicides in these countries by 2050. One startling paper by Tamacarleton has suggested that global warming is already responsible for 59,000 suicides, many of them farmers in India, where one-fifth of all the world's suicides now occur, and where suicide rates have doubled since just 1980. When temperatures are already high, she found, a rise of just one additional degree on a single day will produce 70 additional corpses, each dead by the farmer's own hand.

End quote. What sort of effects will these psychological afflictions have on everything we've discussed so far? They will, it's certain, act as multipliers of human suffering on every level, putting enormous stress on already stressed health care systems and giving rise to new social issues that we haven't even conceived of yet. So from the global to the national, to the interpersonal, and even to the level of individual psychology, climate change, even in a two to three degree world, will touch every imaginable sphere of our lives and no amount of wealth or privilege will be enough to cordon oneself off from that suffering, though it will certainly be a cushion

that will buffer the wealthiest from the worst of it, for a while at least. But unprecedented wealth inequality, like the sort we currently have today, will become increasingly less acceptable as scarcity and uncertainly tighten their grip on people's lives over the next several decades. However, that unacceptability of inequality is in contradiction with the fact that we still live in a global bourgeois dictatorship. And using the mechanisms of the ruling class to try and take away their wealth to provide for the rest of society will definitely not be easy, and will probably be impossible.

After all, the ruling class fights tooth and nail against any redistributive policy in the best of times. How will they fight against it in the worst of times? This is where class warfare stops being obscured by ideology and explodes into plain sight. History shows that the ruling classes, when pushed in this way, will quickly embrace and side with the worst forms of violent reaction. It happened in the Spanish Civil War. It happened in Yen days Chile. It happened in Burkina Faso after Sankara was assassinated.

It happened after the Bolshevik Revolution. and it will happen again. But if the ruling class and their moneyed puppets in government refuse to move aside and exit the historical stage and instead plunge any attempts to build a different world into an ocean of bloody repression, then the only option the desperate will have left is to take revenge. To scour the dying planet in the last ditch effort

to make those who destroyed our families and our world in the name of money feel the pain and horror they've inflicted on others. Their wealth won't save them. It will only fuel the death. desperate rage of vengeance by the lower classes and lay the foundation for their own terror. A revenge that doesn't seek to gain anything, but only to destroy, is the scariest and most unstoppable form of revenge. And it's the exact genre of revenge that the ruling classes will tremble in front of if they continue to drive us into oblivion. The only way forward for our

species is to transcend the economic system of capitalism, which incentivizes profiteering at all costs, even at the cost of the natural world in which all of that economic activity must take place. This system of global domination and extraction must be transcended and replaced by a system which incentivizes using the wealth and resources of our world to provide the highest quality of life for the most amount of human beings as possible, which reorientes itself to nature and conceptualizes itself as an interdependent part of that entire ecosystem, which aims not to turn the natural world into combined.

commodities to be sold on a market for profit, but rather to live in balanced and sustainable harmony with the natural world. A system that rejects the anarchy of the market and its wasteful overproduction and overconsumption, which is destroying our world, and turns instead toward economic planning, which, using the very technologies produced under capitalism, directs the production of goods and services in a rational, systematic, and equitable way. Capitalism has extended its tentacles to every corner of the planet, and having bunched. bumped up against the end of the world with nowhere else to go, it turns in on itself and begins to devour its own flesh. This is the stage of capitalism that we are currently in, the stage

of capitalist cannibalism. But as we descend toward a closing here, I want to take everything we've discussed thus far and see which lessons we can pull from it and incorporate into our organizing going forward. First and foremost, as human beings and as revolutionaries, we cannot succumb to the siren songs of apathy, nihilism, or fatalism. In fact, we must combat them, in ourselves as well as in others. One way we can do it is to offer people a detailed vision of a better world, and most importantly, to meaningfully organize in the here and now, forging connections with comrades across the region, country, and globe to lay the infrastructural groundwork and build the mass base of support that will be necessary as people begin to look for political alternatives.

We cannot wait until a crisis occurs before we scramble to organize. We must organize now, and we must organize with climate change and all of its myriad implications firmly in our mind each step of the way. Secondly, as the science laid out in this book empirically shows, a hotter and more unstable world means a more violent world, a world in which the virus of fascism can and probably will gain significant footholds around the world. What that means for us is that we must be anti-fascist in every world, way and use every tool at our disposal to fight fascism on every front and by any means necessary.

We must build up goodwill in our communities by humbly serving the people. We must become competent in the use of firearms and community self-defense, and we must teach these skills to others, especially those who are most vulnerable to the sort of xenophobic violence that already exist everywhere, but which will only increase in the decades to come. We cannot spend the next decade arguing with one another on Twitter. a dead end. Organizing doesn't happen online. Social media is not a sphere in which we should invest our time and energy. Political education and mass organizing in the real world is the only way forward and hyper-focusing on the minutia of our sectarian differences as the world hurdles toward

dystopia is, in my opinion, one of the most irresponsible things that any of us can do. Thirdly, proletarian internationalism will become increasingly essential. As scarcity ravages parts of the world and natural disasters hit people in the global south the hardest, the impulse to recoil into one's national identity is a reactionary impulse and is the first step towards fascism. Any leftist formation that postures as a leftism for Americans only or which plays up national identity is nothing more than Strasserite chauvinism. The suffering of a mother in Bangladesh or of a child in Yemen or of a grandfather in Jamaica is our suffering, and we need to frame it as such, both to ourselves as well as to others. Alienation from the natural world is, in part, what got us to this point.

If we use that as an excuse to become alienated from our brothers and sisters in other corners of the globe, then we are only adding to the problem, not solving it. Lastly, we should, as communist and revolutionaries of different stripes, support any meaningful attempt on any level to decrease carbon emissions, to develop green energy alternatives, to redistribute wealth, and to mitigate warming as much as possible. This means supporting reforms within this system, while also highlighting constantly the unsustainability of the capitalist mode of production and consumption and the underlying material causes of this problem. climate change makes a mockery of purity politics we are living in radically impure times there is no path forward that is rooted in dogmatism or blind doctrine climate change is a wholly unique problem and it is and will continue to severely alter material conditions at a rate which we've never quite seen before this demands from us a dynamic flexibility cooperation across ideological tendencies on the left and a thoroughly scientific approach to the problem on a

every conceivable level. To fall prey to utopianism or to drift away on a cloud of idealism is functionally the same move that the neoliberal Silicon Valley techno-utopians make, and it's a dead end. We must stay tethered to reality, even as more and more people all around us from various political formations all over the spectrum retreat from it. In conclusion, we must not cast our gaze over the realities I've just outlined and feel despair, as challenging as that. can be. We must let it invigorate us, inspire us, push us forward toward the real everyday work of education and mass organizing. We are not mere pawns which history pushes around in a deterministic fashion. Rather, we are all the vehicles through which history flows and is directed. It is up to us

to rise to the challenges of our times, as daunting and unprecedented as they are, and to carry forth that proletarian flame, sometimes reduced to an ember by circumstance, but glowing nonetheless, and let it be a relentless light of hope in the darkness of our historical epoch. Good night. I've seen a focus I've seen too much I've seen it all You haven't seen a laugh Until my head comes off

When I'm a child Close and children Plus and children Here I'm alone Everything all in the time Oh I say you're coming, I say you're coming, let me hear both sides, let me hear both sides, let me hear both, I see you coming, I see you coming, throw them in the fire, throw in a fire, throw in a fire, throw in a water, we're not scared, mongering, this is really happening, happening, happening, We'll not

scale on the end This is really happening Happening Mobile's working Mobile's chirping Take the money run, take the money wrong, take the money wrong, take the money. Everything all in the time

I'm here, all everything all in the time. We are in love, everything all in a time. I'm going to do. I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to

and I'm gonnae. ...you know ...and ...toe ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... You know,

I'm going to do. I mean, you know, We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. A lot of a lot of POMPEO,

BASY, BATES BOR, BOR, BOR, BOR, BOR, BADY,

BOR, BOR, I don't know. I'm going to be able to be. You know, I'm going to be able to be. I'm sorry. You know what I'm going to be.

You know, I'm going to be the I don't know. I don't know. You know,