Yves here. Tom Neuburger argues that climate change in/insufficient action is a scheme by the elites to reduce global population and keep their position.
I have to push back strongly against this. It is sadly too much a part of human nature to want to depict someone or someones as being responsible for bad outcomes. For instance, the idea that SARS-Cov-2 came out of a lab was appealing because the alternative, that nature (admittedly abetted in a big way by terrible animal husbandry practices) could so overwhelm our vaunted sense of safety from disease was in some was even more psychologically troubling. The notion that we are not much in control of our physical environment, as in we are fundamentally unsafe, is not a line of thinking that sits well with most. Key detailsfrom Nature of a in the highly regarded journal, Cell, in COVID pandemic started in Wuhan market animals after all, suggests latest study:
The authors of the Cell study also argue that the viral diversity present in the market suggests it was the site of the pandemic’s emergence. In particular, they say the presence of two SARS-CoV-2 lineages — known as A and B — circulating in the market suggests that the virus jumped twice from animals to people. The researchers conclude that, although it is possible that infected humans brought the virus to the market on two separate occasions, that is a much less likely scenario than the virus jumping twice from animals, especially since their analysis suggests that very few people would have been infected at that point and it is unlikely that one person seeded both lineages. “It really just fits this ongoing infection in animal populations that spilled over multiple times to people,” says Gronvall.
Returning to climate change, an assumption below is our putative betters will be able to pile into lifeboats and leave the rest of us behind. That’s fallacious. As extreme climate change outcomes take hold, breakdowns in production and transportation will occur. How will the elites fare in a world where pharmaceutical supplies are erratic or not existent? Where chips are not longer made at scale and the scenario of harvesting washing machines for them is a reality?
Many of the super rich have built what amounts to large scale safe rooms in the form of well protected compounds. How long do you think they could last in them? What happens when they run of meds, or need an operation and don’t have an OR, surgical supplies, extensive advanced imaging equipment, and a doctor who has the foggiest idea of how to perform the operation? These shelters buy them maybe 5, under a super good luck scenario 10, years of lifestyle preservation beyond what dull normals will enjoy.
A hidden assumption is that elites are blocking climate action. Ih fact, all of us are. Too many buy into Green New Deal hopium that if we shopped better, as in had incentives to convert to cleaner energy source sooner and did some other tinkering like more high speed rail and building more energy efficient houses and offices, worst outcomes could be forestalled.
But as we have regularly inveighted, we are way past that point. An MIT study if anything was more dour that our previous argument that our only hope was radical conservation, as serious reductions in energy use and resource exploitation. And that is never going to happen because we are in a neoliberal system where nearly all people must sell their labor to survive. Radical conservation would destroy many jobs. Just start with the travel and hospitality sectors. The resulting unemployment would be so high as to lead to social and political upheaval.
Key sections from the must read, The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? from the MIT Press Reader, an interview by science fiction writer Peter Watts, with Dan Brooks, co-author of A Darwinian Survival Guide:
Daniel Brooks: Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it?…
To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive….
Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours….
What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those [desirable] elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?…
It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”?
Now to the main event, Neuburger’s post.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Extinction Rebellion protesters blocking traffic on Whitehall at the bottom of Trafalgar Square during a 2019 rally in London. Image credit: Matt Dunham/Associated Press
“Climate change was a very sophisticated analysis by corporate PR people in the 1990s when they re-fashioned this crisis in terms of a technical phrase, the “climate” and “change.” What we’re dealing with has nothing to do with climate and it’s certainly not looking at change.
What we’re dealing with is a social project by the global elites to have billions of people die in order to maintain their power. In other words, it’s a subset of class struggle.”
—Roger Hallam
In a Links post for paid subscribers, I recently featured the first quotation above by Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam. He’s quite a controversial figure in the climate movement; he and the groups he creates take seriously the fact that “billions will die,” call the death that’s coming a “genocide,” and recommend strong, non-violent, disruptive responses.
Hallam is currently serving a five-year jail term for, technically, “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” i.e., disrupting traffic on Greater London’s ring road for four straight days.
But that’s just technically his crime. He’s actually in jail for being a longtime pest, the way Socrates was tried and executed for being a gadfly. As Judge Hehir said to Hallam and the other defendants during sentencing, “Each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.”
His real crime is crossing “a line.” For that, five years for Hallam and four for his co-conspirators. The sentence itself is proof that Hallam is right — that elite resistance to climate solutions is all about power and control.
By the way, evidence for the conspiracy came from a journalist. The Daily Mail: “A journalist from the Sun newspaper, who had joined the [Zoom planning] call pretending to be interested in the protest, managed to record some of it and passed the recordings on to the police.”
Again, a perfect illustration of Hallam’s point. Here the elites are joined by their retainers, the compliant free press, which seems to see its job as message control.
‘Climate Change’ or ‘Genocide’? It’s All in the Frame
But rather than deal with Hallam the man, let’s look at his ideas — in particular, the one in the quote above, said in the course of the following video interview. This was recorded in 2023, prior to his recent jailing. I’ve cued it to start at the quote.
His full comment is this (lightly edited for clarity):
Let’s go back to a few fundamentals, right? Climate change was a very sophisticated … analysis by corporate PR people in the 1990s when they re-fashioned this crisis in terms of a technical phrase, the “climate” and “change.” What we’re dealing with has nothing to do with climate and it’s certainly not looking at change.
What we’re dealing with is a social project by the global elites to have billions of people die in order to maintain their power. In other words, it’s a subset of class struggle, and it needs to be seen as a subset of a wider narrative that’s been going on, you know, since the Industrial Revolution and arguably for before that. […]
What we need to talk about is the process of oppression and the process of genocide and how that happens historically and how it’s been replicated in this last chapter of humanity that we face potentially.
Is the problem we currently face best understood as “climate change,” a technical issue with a technical solution? Or is it best understood as elite resistance to a change that would diminish their power — a resistance that will lead inevitably to “genocide,” a global mass death, all so the current elites can stay in power?
That’s the question Roger Hallam asks us to ask.
As a Class the Rich Always Kill
I know there are many in the country who don’t think climate change is an issue, but this group is getting smaller. People more and more see that more severe weather now comes faster, stronger, more often.
Floods, fires, loss of homes and insurance are great convincers. So what should these people be told? What are they being told now?
Let’s use Hallam’s language. What we’re told now — the “liberal frame” that climate change is a technical problem — distracts us from identifying actors, doers, and perps; humans responsible, people who get and remain very very rich from fossil fuel sale; people whose power would be lost if technology changed; people whose seat at the feast of government bribes (aka “campaign contributions”) would be taken away if the flow of money stopped.
Instead of identifying actors — Who is doing this to us? — the liberal frame encourages technical questions: How should this be addressed? With what technology? Where should the technology be applied? How much money should be spent in the attempt? How much is too much?
In Hallam’s view, the liberal elite, which he explicitly says includes the interviewer, has been duped by the corporate elite into retracting from the analysis the simplest historical fact — that as a class, the rich will always murder to keep and grow their wealth.
Cargo plan for the slave ship “Brookes”. By using space to the utmost on this not particularly large ship, 452 enslaved laborers could be taken on board. Each adult man was only allotted 182 centimeters x 41 centimeters (71 inches by 16 inches) to lie on and only 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) up to the next layer of people. The enslaved laborers lay here for months on the journey to the West Indies (Thomas Clarkson, The History of the African Slave-Trade, vol. 2, 1808).
Hallem:
Well, I think the liberal class in 1990 allowed itself to be duped by the corporate class into using the frame of the corporate class. That’s the first thing to say. And I think the left space also allowed itself to be duped, to think that the climate was something separate, the environment was something separate, than the social confrontation of the last 200 years. It’s not another chapter in that confrontation. And it’s the last chapter in that confrontation.
“Duped” or “bribed”? That’s a separate discussion. The fact is, in no mainstream analysis of climate change are individuals — wealthy and powerful ones — held to account for their deeds or motivation.
Global Genocide
A decision by, say, ten individuals at Exxon, all at the top, to monetize enough carbon reserves to drive atmospheric CO2 from 425 to 800 ppm is a choice, by them, to stay wealthy despite the result.
If you think the result includes mass death, a global genocide, then you think those ten fit Hallam’s description perfectly. Should the “climate change” problem be described with them as the cause? Hallam does.
If he’s right, then what should be done? Should these actors and their enablers be hid or exposed, protected or forced to stop? Is the CEO of Exxon another Pol Pot, or someone who should be honored, feted and praised?
Tables for members of the “Oh, it’s you, senator” club (source)You can’t solve a problem if you can’t name the cause.
First of all, I’d agree with Yves that all this smacks less of elite conspiracy than a combination of elite incompetence and indifference exacerbated by the century-long project of turning us all into unthinking consumers, especially of energy.
One quibble with Neuburger:
corporate PR people in the 1990s when they re-fashioned this crisis in terms of a technical phrase, the “climate” and “change.”
“Climate” and “change” were linked well before the 90s. On Jimi Hendrix’s second album, Axis Bold as Love released in 1967, there is a tune titled “Up From the Skies.” The lyric portrays Jimi as a visitor from another time line or planet who is revisiting Earth:
I have lived here before, in the days of ice,
And of course this is why I’m so concerned.
And I come back to find the stars misplaced,
And the smell of a world that has burned,
A smell of the world that has burned.
Yeah well, maybe
Maybe it’s just a change of climate.
Incompetent, inertia… bear in mind the ultra-rich depend very much on business as usual and that would be very much changed if climate change was to be addressed seriously. We can, i believe, safely say that the richest are the least interested on the fight (the real one) against climate change and the ones offering more resistance to change —apart from being the ones with the most outrageous carbon print on earth. That is the real plot or conspiracy if one likes these words.
Nobody wrapped up in our consumers uber all Golden Billion economy wants to give it up for what sounds an awful lot like the austerity Soviet bloc party participants went through.
Imagine only having 1 type of toothpaste in lieu of 23?
The horror!
We’re all complicit, I did the math the other day and reckon i’ve personally used 30,000 gallons of gas so far-so good, in my travels on 4 wheels good.
That’s perhaps more oil than the whole world used say pre 1850 back to ancient China & Egypt.
What I want to know is what sort of bling is in the Illionaires bunker, because when they unearth it in say 3244 on a Wednesday in August, wouldn’t it be cool to find original Andy Warhols & Picassos on the walls?
King Tut had better goods, i’ll give you that.
Bought some yellow chicken curry Mountain House freeze dried entrees, and oh so good served with a boil in the bag rice packet, in the back of beyond.
They gave me hope for the future as the use-by date is 2054.
You point to another problem. OK, yes, millions, and particularly the millions in the richest countries, would have to change their life styles, change their minds about what is really their hopes, objectives,… to something more realistic that does not demand the destruction of the planet. But, but, but if the ones who are in control of the levers (the moneyed) are the less likely to want those changes we’ve got a problem there.
Agree with both you and Wuk. One way to understand it is to ask yourself what is our society’s overriding goal. What is the principle for which all else must come second?
I think the answer comes out to return on the billionaires’ capital. Yeah, there are small and not so small fry who make money along with them, but if it came down to it, the billionaires’ interests will come out on top every time. Over ecological disaster. Over a pandemic. Over social dissolution.
It’s a kind of madness. It’s funny how ancient prophets and philosophers along with many myths mostly warned against acquiring wealth. And our rich today have so much more power over humans and the rest of Nature than any of the rich of ancient times. It’s a drug that’s both addictive and delusion inducing.
Those freeze dried entrees are very wasteful. The packaging ends up in landfills (or maybe some alpine lake). Homo sapien is a very needy specie. More so now than ever before. I’s a conundrum. To me it seems that homo sapien is simply incompatible with the earth’s ecosystems. Two stark choices – homo sapien OR a living planet. Choose one.
Other than their use-by date your freeze dried entrees leave me little to stoke optimism although I believe that is the meaning of this tail to your comment.
Unlike you, I do not feel complicit in the gallons of gasoline I spent driving into town to pick up a week-end supply of liquid comforts. I had no part in dismantling the red-line in Los Angeles or that any where else. I did not spread the rural communities or suburbs so far apart.
The words ‘climate’ and ‘change’ when pushed together and maniputulated to suggest the modesty and languorous motion of the ‘change’ innoculates our minds to the fullness and import those changes will bring. As I recall, popular concerns for the environment, including a subsidiary concern for the climate, were used as tools to turn u.s. attention away from the Viet Nam war — but smog and dying-off pelicans took precedence over other climate concerns. We averted a silent spring … for a while.
The “ultra-rich depend very much on business as usual and that would be very much changed if climate change were to be addressed seriously.” — quite so. Can we do much about the present state of affairs? I believe very little legal, or political means remain within our power.
I dunno. The super-rich may not really want to kill off a lot of their fellow humans, but it doesn’t look from here like they’re going to change the way they live.
“The greatest users of carbon aren’t the middle classes of various countries, including the United States, though their use is still excessive. The greatest users aren’t the struggling poor or the rising workers of developing nations like India and China.
The greatest users by far are the very rich, the top 10% and especially 1%, wherever they’re found. Mostly they’re found in the West.”
Totally ridiculous thesis. If climatologists like James Hansen are only partially right, climate change and the destruction of the biosphere for which we are adapted will spare no one. Of course, life will continue, since recombinant DNA is almost indestructible, but without us, rich and poor, white and black.
Agreed. There is a deep problem which spans climate change, identity politics, and category errors: cross-correlation in a complex environment allows too many positives.
The rejection of the thesis still allows for:
: genocidal elites
: genocidal elites who think they can control the weather
: genocidal elites trying to control the weather.
The hard part for me is Neuburger appearing to lend credence as The Explanation. I admire his work on elite machinations over the years, but it may have contaminated his perspective on Climate Change.
So we have a classic ‘prisonners dilemma’ where we collectively have the incentive to consume less but individually the incentive to consume more. Adding in a “Darwinian” point of view, Nature seems designed to encourage excess reproduction and consumption in normal times but then occasionally creates a ‘bust’ like the Black Death where 33% of humanity dies off (not to speak of ice ages or dinosaurs).
Surely the basic moral/cultural problem is that ‘cheating’ is regarded as smart — provided you can get away with it. In this context, cheating will mean storing the means of long term survival without being discovered.
Naive ‘one-percenters’ are not the cause of the bust and will be taken out by people who know how to use guns or even pitchforks… Malthus may have been right, but he was >200 years too early, and this timetable uncertainty persists making each generation kick the can down the road.
The current warming cycle is El Nino riding on the longer-term climate warming trend. As we move into La Nina, there will be several years of slight cooling, lowering incentives to do anything (as if).
At a recent talk I attended, Steve Koonin estimated $12 trillion-ish have been spent on the renewable energy transition with no impact on the amount of hydrocarbons burned – it only redirected some of the growth – China is installing more renewables than the rest of the globe combined, yet also is increasing its fossil fuel consumption – at least for a few more decades.
This raises the question: Would we be better off if we had spent those resources on protecting the Amazon? Or is virtue signaling while offshoring GHG production to the developing world more important?
Given that US voters have no statistically detectable effect on legislation (and even less on regulations, which requires litigation)—and I suspect even less so in EU land—the problem, IMHO, is that the elite cannot envision how they can remain elite in a renewable-powered, low-energy-intensity world, preferring the Masada solution to risking a loss of (relative) power.
Were Americans ever given an acceptable choice that did not involve becoming homeless? Not that I recall. And more importantly, paying for Nigerians to have a decent, renewable-powered life? It could have happened if we didn’t spend trillions annually on war, highlighting our species (tribal) priorities.
The current warming cycle is El Nino riding on the longer-term climate warming trend. As we move into La Nina, there will be several years of slight cooling, lowering incentives to do anything (as if).
This is not entirely correct. We exited El Nino during April-May this year and are currently ENSO-neutral, with NOAA predicting La Nina to emerge and persist into around March 2025.
Assuming even slight cooling from La Nina I think is a bit hopeful. Based on our experience of the 2014-2016 El Nino, it appears it functions as a stepwise ratchet. That is, we will likely plateau in this hotter state until the next El Nino phase shift.
Either way, we won’t do anything so the point is moot. If there is cooling and a return to “normal” temperatures until the next El Nino, we won’t take advantage of our luck.
but of course there is inertia in the system wrt warming, particularly for the US warm Gulf of Mexico waters, which powered the Helene from Force 1 to 4 in 8 hours!
Most likely we will be in La Nina in November. If the forecast of a weak La Nina is correct, then there will be no relief from the heat, just a relenting of the increase.
In the meantime AI is consuming more and more electrical energy. We are racing to stay in place.
While radical conservation won’t stop climate change, it’s the only reasonable action to projecting a potential partial survival. Anything else is simply ‘joy riding’ on future generations.
We need a book written in simple language for Middlebrow people to understand and maybe take to heart . . . a book successfully debunking Libertarianism and exposing its roots to open view and open ridicule and open rejection. I have no idea how to write such a book.
If someone does, I can offer a title in case anyone wants to use it.
The Road To Serfdom Is Private.
The fish or some new version of fish will return. Wildlife, though different wildlife will return. Humankind will most probably survive, here and there. But nothing will be quite the same, and so very much will be forever forgotten, and never again, perhaps nevermore contemplated by sentient beings on this beautiful blue planet.
Why interview somebody and argue with them the entire interview instead of letting the audience hear what he has to say, learn something, think about his point of view and then make up their own minds. Its also highly disrespectful to him. If you want to argue with him do so in a pub. Your audience wants to hear his point of view and not yours.
I listened to the whole thing, and one theme that emerged is this — the interviewer says “I completely agree” then explains his disagreement, over and over. A tell, since he knows (and later on is told) that he’s one of the “liberal” apologists Hallam decries. The interviewer’s own behavior makes Hallam’s point for him.
And Bastani’s near-constant interrupting in the second half is almost unlistenable. (I did a transcript; painful.)
I agree with you Yves, thanks for the pushback on this. As the world continues to deteriorate, humans will increasingly lean into magical thinking and delusion to cope.
Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity catastrophic human hubris.
I like to paraphrase Huey Long to describe the response of most Americans to the lifestyle changes required to partially mitigate climate change.
“Don’t climate change me, don’t climate change thee, climate change the man behind the tree”.
Radical conservation is about the only option that will buy time, but in my view, that is not something the political class, business class and financial industry would functionally support.
And there are many financially stressed people in the USA that have no excess consumption to conserve.
Instead, economic growth will be pitched as the solution until it is painfully obvious it is not.
Just wanted to add a point of clarification. Hallam’s idea, as I understand it, is not that elites have genocide as a goal. It’s that they have their own (imagined) preservation as a goal, and if that causes mass death, they’re fine with that.
If true, does that make them responsible for the genocide that results? In Hallam’s view, yes.
Consider the slave ship pictured above in the piece. These were months-long voyages with people packed like sardines.
Each adult man was only allotted 71 inches by 16 inches to lie on and only 31.5 inches up to the next layer of people.
People die packed together like that. Was the goal of the traders to kill their cargo? No, their goal was to get or stay rich. But if doing that caused many of their captives to die, they’re fine with that. Does that make them murderers? One has to say yes.
So for Hallam, I think, it’s not a genocide project, it’s a stay-rich project by the global elites, with genocide as an acceptable by-product.
Side note: That project will fail, of course. The rich will go down with the rest. Our elites aren’t very smart. But they do have power.
Anyway, carry on. Looking forward to the rest of the discussion.
While I think calling it a genocide is going too far, the rich are stopping alot of helpful things if it hurts their investments.
The fact that power companies conspire to make home solar more difficult or not allowing more efficient Chinese cars to sell in the US.
I think it comes down to capitalism essentially, you can’t do infinite growth on a finite planet.
The only solutions allowed are those which make the already rich richer.
On the bright side; here in the city by the sea Mr. & Mrs. Richie Rich own just about everything ocean, bay and river side and will be the first into the lifeboats. They can expect a rude reception here at 120′ above mean high tide.
Ownership, even money will not have much value after the electric Grid stops its operation. Mr. & Mrs. Richie Rich will be given to the sea. They could at best hope to depart as a couple … assuming they have any mutual regard that extends past clauses of their prenuptial agreements.
I have bought goods from Walmart, though I have avoided Amazon for while now. Where I live, there are few if any alternatives to Walmart. The local Mainstreet is not ‘healthy’.
My broken record is stuck on the track telling me that there were 2.5B lives in being when I was born in the mid-1950’s; today there are over 8B of us, expected to reach 9B by 2040 or so. This is a fact.
Did elite perfidy cause this exponential growth? Hardly. All of humanity has benefited from lower infant mortality, better health and diet, absence of major wars, and vastly improved life expectancy. The majority of those 8B have a better and longer quality of life than those 2.5B did, and likely will continue to until resource depletion and competition bring on a civilizational collapse. Then we won’t.
The collapse will happen sooner for some of us than for others. We should all try to put off the effects of this inevitable collapse for as long as possible by conserving resources, but none of us will avoid it entirely. I’m quite frankly tired of elites telling us to cut back on our quality of life so that they can extend theirs.
That’s not genocide, it’s selfishness. We are all guilty.
First, on “scientific” studies like those Yves mentioned above. The question is, as it always should be, who financed the studies–studies don’t grow on trees. Also scientific journals have been shown to be error-prone though not as much as the actual researchers are for a variety of reasons. This is based on the famous “study of studies” by Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford who came to doubt that most studies can be trusted along with many other studies dealing with researchers’ goals, preconceptions and so on that tended to skew results. We have to remember that when everything becomes a “business” the work of these businesses are always about making money in our hyper-materialistic capitalist society. As morality continues to decline who can we trust? It seems anybody is capable of anything in a social system with crumbling moral and intellectual standards.
Having said that, I don’t particularly distrust scientific studies but, from experience, I tend to trust my own observations and intuitions as well as those same things from people I trust. When studies not funded by political organizations or universities (who are, increasingly, businesses) come out and find the same thing then I pay attention. Thus, I tend to distrust COVID studies more than Climate Science because I’ve been following this issue since the late 80s and the pattern is clear to me.
On the genocide matter, I have no opinion other than I do know that the very wealthy (as opposed to the merely wealthy) don’t care about the well-being or even survival of a country, a culture, but they care, naturally, for profit and more wealth and power. A quarter century ago Christopher Lasch wrote The Revolt of the Elites which gives a historical perspective of how this willing alienation from the rest of us happened. Since my exposure to the filthy rich is very limited, I can say that they are not all the same but they all do feel they are better human beings that the other people around them and believe they should be in charge. Trump is an exaggerated version of this type.
My argument has always been that the elites do reflect the common state of the society we live in. If they are amoral to the extraordinary degree they are then they are reflecting the common moral state of the society which in the case of the West (or Empire if you prefer), is wretched. Technology can provide us with a beautiful environment with little poverty and celebration rather than the misery most people seem to be in. We have been robbed of the fruits of Western Civilization by, ultimately, ourselves. We are all connected and all at fault and if the filthy rich are deliberately wanting to cull the population it is a reflection of our own negative view of ourselves and humanity. The “answer” or cure to all this is spirituality, however you define it–radical hyper-materialism is the disease.
I suppose I share some of your distaste for the moral state of our Society, or might I suggest the demoralized state of our Society. I seriously doubt a vast surge of spirituality in the Populace could cure the disease afflicting Humankind with an utter inability to quell the rising tides and temperatures of Climate Chaos. Our Elites have taken full control over the instruments of communications and spent years twisting the minds of all but a few among the Populace — and not a large or happy few. Much as I despise the radical hyper-materialism burdening so many in our Society, much as you condemn them with your comment, I hesitate to lay so much blame on the victims who will suffer the consequences of Climate Chaos, among other threats to their future. Many of those who will most suffer through the Crucible are too young to blame and some have yet to be born.
I place the fullest weight of blame and condemnation on our Elites. With but one exception, I would make no excuses for them. The Elites have once more removed the modicum of control the Populace enjoyed in choosing a direction for our Society. The perhaps controversial exception I make, is that too many among our Elites have themselves fallen victim to the moralities and control of the Corporate Entities they so carefully birthed and so lovingly nurtured these last two centuries or so. Though incorporeal, too many Corporations have acquired weight and influence in Society far beyond that of any legal ‘person’, actual or crafted from paper, law, and remarkably broad interpretations of the law. For Corporate persons and their multitudinous minions there is no future beyond the misty fogs that obscure all futures past the next three months.
Spirituality cannot hope to win fight against such foes.
Genocide is a word with a very particular, & recent, provenance. It is also a word that, given its historical weight and emotional charge, can easily short circuit any attempt at analysis or discussion. Since its coinage in 1944 a good number of organised programs of mass slaughter and oppression that undeniably fit the criteria for genocide, both prior to and since ’44, have either led to hair-splitting controversies over its usage or flat denial by people in power that said events qualify. There are at least three genocides occurring right now as well as several others ongoing whose origins go back centuries. In each of these cases, the term, while appropriate, ends up creating more smoke than fire. Which is why Roger Hallam began using it indiscriminately several yeas ago. I don’t think Roger really foresees any just solution or plan of preparedness for the actual hell caused by the destruction of the systems that support most life. He has his own ideas (imho simplistic, demented & ill-informed) and he has unshakable belief in them. This combined with a certain grim charisma & a genuinely sincere, selfless, ascetic dedication to getting at least some people convinced worked to get Extinction Rebellion going.
I got involved with XR because of a talk I heard Hallam give, although at the time it was less Roger himself than the fact that people were finally doing something. I worked with a group of other people in Europe fairly early on to try and get XR off the ground internationally, to help the movement grow at scale beyond the UK. On behalf of my colleagues I actually went to London & spoke with Hallam to try and convince him that his strategy and rhetoric were a) not going to fly in some continental European countries & b) were actually going to get people tortured and killed elsewhere. His response was mildly contemptuous indifference and a private-audience repetition of the talk he gave everywhere. Which btw included numerous uses of the obscurantist term “climate change.” He seemed more annoyed that his time was being wasted with genuine concerns that might contradict his one-size-fits-all program.
At the time France was in the throes of a full-blown spontaneous, bottom-up insurrection with no specific ideological orientation, but a lot of justified rage (ironically set off by a “green” tax on diesel). Some members of French XR wanted to ally with the more Left-leaning elements of the inchoate Gilets Jaunes; Hallam’s line then was XR’s slogan “Beyond Politics.” He certainly wasn’t interested class struggle, saying “Look, we all know we’re all really more or less on the Left. But we needn’t to bring that up.” (Recently, I read him in The Ecologist advising that: “We should learn a few key lessons from the early communists under Lenin: in particular, leadership, ideology, and discipline.” Who’d leadership, I wonder? And which ideology?)
He went on over the course of the following year, single-minded and deaf to counsel, to sometimes intentionally undermine almost everything those of us in the international section were trying to do, culminating in a number of disastrously ignorant remarks in the German press, both politically & historically ignorant. If Extinction Rebellion still exists in Europe it is in spite, not because, of Roger Hallam. The same goes for the USA where Hallam worked via proxies to promote a minority group within XR that was “anti-woke,” a defensible position but these folks were on it in a pretty primary kind of way. Predictably, this was not the group that prevailed.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful to and in admiration of the Just Stop Oil activists now in prison, including Roger Hallam. This sort of direct action is imperative, and yes, if the tories decided to come down hard on nonviolent protesters it is because people with money and power are getting spooked. But not by Roger Hallam. They’re more likely freaked because the accelerating devastation of earth systems, the chock-a-block “natural catastrophes and disappearance of species and populations is now too far advanced to ignore. Certainly too far to be reversed, and very possibly to be significantly slowed or attenuated. The NYTimes front page now lists the cities with dangerous levels of heat or rainfall instead of the weather. And this means increased “instability,” the advent of extreme “non-stationarity” making planning, to say nothing of controlling anything increasingly difficult if not impossible.
Long(ish), term do billionaires and members of the PMC really care if the bottom 80% suffer and die? No. Do they worry, short term, about their profit margins and stocks of life-extension drugs in their luxury bunkers. Hell, yes. Have they conspired to bring these things about? Absolutely not. If they had it would mean they’re in control and, increasingly, they’re not. Do the middle-classes, white and brown, in Euro-US countries fear immigrants more than they do the board of Exxon? Well, many do – they don’t even think about Exxon except at the gas-pump. But none of this qualifies as calculated genocide.
I was very glad Yves Smith decided to push back against Thomas Neuburg’s piece. I apologise for the length of this post, but having seen Hallam’s “thought” in action at perhaps closer quarters than has Neuburg I felt compelled to fire off a hopefully salutary ad hominem attack. Neuburg says at one point “But rather than deal with Hallam the man, let’s look at his ideas…” In the case of Roger Hallam, I’m regret to say that those “ideas” are incubated in isolation, in self-imposed provincial experience, a solipsistic, self-righteous echo-chamber. Roger Hallam’s one of the pure ones – as he thinks so he is.
I think of the word ‘genocide’ as having a very particular context based on its original meaning. It immediately suggests Eugenics programs to me. I believe its use in describing the mass murders in Cambodia, and in Israel’s current mass murders in Gaza stretches its meaning too far. Deliberate massacres of the populations in territories captured through warfare seem little motivated by Eugenics and much more driven by simple greed and blood lust. To me, ‘genocide’ is more evil and insidious than the commonplace total or near total massacres that have followed many of the conquests in history, past and present. I also believe the distinctions between genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ should be maintained. ‘Ethnic’ ties the massacres to cultural differences and intolerance.
I doubt most of the very rich care enough about what happens to billions of the Populace to bother implementing or executing plans to exterminate those billions. This is not to suggest that the Elites will not or have not thought of the rest of us as items of commerce or units of acceptable loss attending some of their transactions. However the notion “that elite resistance to climate solutions is all about power and control” rings true. The Elites naturally resist initiatives by the Populace — they believe the Populace should follow the direction of their betters, the Elites.
In the famous words of Chuck Prince:
“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,”
It does not sound to me as if Mr. Prince is dancing to his own tune. How many CEOs could order their Corporations to move in a direction contrary to the Corporate Will? How many CEOs could be selected that might have any inclinations to move a Corporation in a direction contrary to the Corporate Will? This does raise questions about the origins and evolutions of this ‘Corporate Will’. Earth’s new Climate will result in a great reduction in the numbers of Humankind but I seriously doubt any Elites designed this outcome. It runs contrary to their constant emphasis on ‘economic growth’.
Earth’s new Climate will force radical changes in the way Humankind lives and gets its daily bread. The end of the Age of Fossil Fuels will and is radically changing the material substance of nations as well as the kinds of Society able to survive in that world without much metal, glass, or ceramics [other than what can be scavenged from today’s trash heaps] … to mention only a few of the materials modern Society relies upon. The Elites hope to create their tiny islands of reverence for their lost worlds, where they can live out their last days leaving the rest of us to die and live in the ashes of the ruined past Society. That is a very short-term goal remarkable only in its extension past the quarterly view of the future that blinkers most of the Elites and most of the Populace: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” — so we had best keep dancing while the music plays on.
[Is Roger Hallam a fan of Hugh Howey’s “Silo Series”?]
I think a good metaphor or somewhat similar historical period is the Great Hunger or Great Famine of Ireland in the 1800s. The population of Ireland only recently recovered. Many argue that genocidal policies of the British Gov’t, 1845 to 1850 contributed.
The die-off that now approaches in the next few decades (perhaps it has already just begun) will be on a much larger scale, more wide spread. Sometimes we call it “The Jackpot” as mentioned in a sci-fi novel by W Gibson, The Peripheral.
I don’t really think you can say those who control the media and governments (as well as most universities!), and think tanks that come up with most of the policies implemented (and control corporations as well of course), are blameless. Most people have their heads in the sand, and really resist looking at what is on its way. But they are actively encouraged in this by the media etc. So is it like when you are walking or driving past another person begging on the street, and you ignore them, or is it that many are being lied to?
To my thinking, the glorification of Israeli “defense” policies in Western media is an example of how the narrative for most people who consume such information is twisted. Similarly what we face (a die-off of billions) in the climate emergency is being avoided as things begin to fall apart and the death toll mounts.
Why not both? One can almost see the outline of a new Dune tale fit for the zeitgeist. The Bene Gesserits (Silicon Valley elites) have finally found their Kwisatz Haderach/Lisan al Gaib i.e. Elon Muad’dib, and he’s either going to lead them to the stars with the help of Space X and that supercomputer he is building or failing that provide them with ElonSuit 1.0 that will allow the techno believers to survive climate change/lack of water that was just touched upon in the “What happens when the water runs out?” article just from a few days ago. Genocide? That’s just the cost of doing business.
I’m coming to this discussion late, so I’ll just make a few brief points.
1. While it’s completely true that our whole society’s way of life is dependent on fossil fuels, it is also true that global warming was foreseen but info about it was intentionally minimized and suppressed by the oil companies, in much the same way as the tobacco companies lied about the dangers of smoking. It wasn’t that cigarette makers WANTED to kill my mother, a smoking addict who died of lung cancer at the age of 60 — but they did everything they could to keep the profits coming. The ecological overshoot situation, of which climate change is just one manifestation, both radically more complex and a much bigger deal.
2. Global population hypertrophy is dependent on technology, trade, etc but all this rests on a very large input of energy, currently mostly from fossil fuels. Can the same throughput come from a combination of wind, solar, biofuel, or fission or fusion? Very unlikely.
3. Things that can’t go on, won’t.
4. Wes Jackson speaks of a “saving remnant” – what can we do now that will be useful to people or the biosphere in general after the collapse? Connie Barlow, widow of Michael Dowd, is a leading advocate for the “assisted migration” of native trees poleward in this time of rapid climate change.
I have been thinking about this one point for a long time, but with far less clarity:
“ Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point”
It is how I have been thinking of elites and about elite production, watching the kids pass through these institutions. I would clumsily say something like these CEO’s don’t know how to do anything which was never quite right. They are trained to do one or two things exceptionally well, but the environment is changing. And rather than looking to adapt, it seems most double down in fear. Or confusion. Or hope.
Anyway, once again, appreciate the posts. Thank you.
It’s GLOBAL climate change so it’s going to have to be at global effort to make any change. Given that right now elites in the West seem to be dead set on trying to live it up like it’s perpetually 1992 no matter what’s happening, it’s going to be impossible to coordinate and make progress at the levels required to ensure survival. Elites in the West may soon realize they are just as stuck in this as anybody else so maybe we’ll start to see progress (too late but whatever).
I post this again so that people can see the history of actually doing SOMETHING and just how late we are in doing anything (NSFW, but funny!):
First of all, I’d agree with Yves that all this smacks less of elite conspiracy than a combination of elite incompetence and indifference exacerbated by the century-long project of turning us all into unthinking consumers, especially of energy.
One quibble with Neuburger:
“Climate” and “change” were linked well before the 90s. On Jimi Hendrix’s second album, Axis Bold as Love released in 1967, there is a tune titled “Up From the Skies.” The lyric portrays Jimi as a visitor from another time line or planet who is revisiting Earth:
“Up From the Skies“
Incompetent, inertia… bear in mind the ultra-rich depend very much on business as usual and that would be very much changed if climate change was to be addressed seriously. We can, i believe, safely say that the richest are the least interested on the fight (the real one) against climate change and the ones offering more resistance to change —apart from being the ones with the most outrageous carbon print on earth. That is the real plot or conspiracy if one likes these words.
Nobody wrapped up in our consumers uber all Golden Billion economy wants to give it up for what sounds an awful lot like the austerity Soviet bloc party participants went through.
Imagine only having 1 type of toothpaste in lieu of 23?
The horror!
We’re all complicit, I did the math the other day and reckon i’ve personally used 30,000 gallons of gas so far-so good, in my travels on 4 wheels good.
That’s perhaps more oil than the whole world used say pre 1850 back to ancient China & Egypt.
What I want to know is what sort of bling is in the Illionaires bunker, because when they unearth it in say 3244 on a Wednesday in August, wouldn’t it be cool to find original Andy Warhols & Picassos on the walls?
King Tut had better goods, i’ll give you that.
Bought some yellow chicken curry Mountain House freeze dried entrees, and oh so good served with a boil in the bag rice packet, in the back of beyond.
They gave me hope for the future as the use-by date is 2054.
You point to another problem. OK, yes, millions, and particularly the millions in the richest countries, would have to change their life styles, change their minds about what is really their hopes, objectives,… to something more realistic that does not demand the destruction of the planet. But, but, but if the ones who are in control of the levers (the moneyed) are the less likely to want those changes we’ve got a problem there.
Agree with both you and Wuk. One way to understand it is to ask yourself what is our society’s overriding goal. What is the principle for which all else must come second?
I think the answer comes out to return on the billionaires’ capital. Yeah, there are small and not so small fry who make money along with them, but if it came down to it, the billionaires’ interests will come out on top every time. Over ecological disaster. Over a pandemic. Over social dissolution.
It’s a kind of madness. It’s funny how ancient prophets and philosophers along with many myths mostly warned against acquiring wealth. And our rich today have so much more power over humans and the rest of Nature than any of the rich of ancient times. It’s a drug that’s both addictive and delusion inducing.
But we get the bad trip.
Those freeze dried entrees are very wasteful. The packaging ends up in landfills (or maybe some alpine lake). Homo sapien is a very needy specie. More so now than ever before. I’s a conundrum. To me it seems that homo sapien is simply incompatible with the earth’s ecosystems. Two stark choices – homo sapien OR a living planet. Choose one.
We are an evolutionary twig, with no branches, and on the way out. We will not be missed.
Other than their use-by date your freeze dried entrees leave me little to stoke optimism although I believe that is the meaning of this tail to your comment.
Unlike you, I do not feel complicit in the gallons of gasoline I spent driving into town to pick up a week-end supply of liquid comforts. I had no part in dismantling the red-line in Los Angeles or that any where else. I did not spread the rural communities or suburbs so far apart.
The words ‘climate’ and ‘change’ when pushed together and maniputulated to suggest the modesty and languorous motion of the ‘change’ innoculates our minds to the fullness and import those changes will bring. As I recall, popular concerns for the environment, including a subsidiary concern for the climate, were used as tools to turn u.s. attention away from the Viet Nam war — but smog and dying-off pelicans took precedence over other climate concerns. We averted a silent spring … for a while.
The “ultra-rich depend very much on business as usual and that would be very much changed if climate change were to be addressed seriously.” — quite so. Can we do much about the present state of affairs? I believe very little legal, or political means remain within our power.
I dunno. The super-rich may not really want to kill off a lot of their fellow humans, but it doesn’t look from here like they’re going to change the way they live.
from Neuberger’s story that ran here last August 24:
“The greatest users of carbon aren’t the middle classes of various countries, including the United States, though their use is still excessive. The greatest users aren’t the struggling poor or the rising workers of developing nations like India and China.
The greatest users by far are the very rich, the top 10% and especially 1%, wherever they’re found. Mostly they’re found in the West.”
The top 10% of global energy consumers most definitely does include the North American middle class.
Totally ridiculous thesis. If climatologists like James Hansen are only partially right, climate change and the destruction of the biosphere for which we are adapted will spare no one. Of course, life will continue, since recombinant DNA is almost indestructible, but without us, rich and poor, white and black.
Agreed. There is a deep problem which spans climate change, identity politics, and category errors: cross-correlation in a complex environment allows too many positives.
The rejection of the thesis still allows for:
: genocidal elites
: genocidal elites who think they can control the weather
: genocidal elites trying to control the weather.
The hard part for me is Neuburger appearing to lend credence as The Explanation. I admire his work on elite machinations over the years, but it may have contaminated his perspective on Climate Change.
A late addendum:
: non-genocidal elites trying to control the weather.
So we have a classic ‘prisonners dilemma’ where we collectively have the incentive to consume less but individually the incentive to consume more. Adding in a “Darwinian” point of view, Nature seems designed to encourage excess reproduction and consumption in normal times but then occasionally creates a ‘bust’ like the Black Death where 33% of humanity dies off (not to speak of ice ages or dinosaurs).
Surely the basic moral/cultural problem is that ‘cheating’ is regarded as smart — provided you can get away with it. In this context, cheating will mean storing the means of long term survival without being discovered.
Naive ‘one-percenters’ are not the cause of the bust and will be taken out by people who know how to use guns or even pitchforks… Malthus may have been right, but he was >200 years too early, and this timetable uncertainty persists making each generation kick the can down the road.
The current warming cycle is El Nino riding on the longer-term climate warming trend. As we move into La Nina, there will be several years of slight cooling, lowering incentives to do anything (as if).
At a recent talk I attended, Steve Koonin estimated $12 trillion-ish have been spent on the renewable energy transition with no impact on the amount of hydrocarbons burned – it only redirected some of the growth – China is installing more renewables than the rest of the globe combined, yet also is increasing its fossil fuel consumption – at least for a few more decades.
This raises the question: Would we be better off if we had spent those resources on protecting the Amazon? Or is virtue signaling while offshoring GHG production to the developing world more important?
Given that US voters have no statistically detectable effect on legislation (and even less on regulations, which requires litigation)—and I suspect even less so in EU land—the problem, IMHO, is that the elite cannot envision how they can remain elite in a renewable-powered, low-energy-intensity world, preferring the Masada solution to risking a loss of (relative) power.
Were Americans ever given an acceptable choice that did not involve becoming homeless? Not that I recall. And more importantly, paying for Nigerians to have a decent, renewable-powered life? It could have happened if we didn’t spend trillions annually on war, highlighting our species (tribal) priorities.
This is not entirely correct. We exited El Nino during April-May this year and are currently ENSO-neutral, with NOAA predicting La Nina to emerge and persist into around March 2025.
Assuming even slight cooling from La Nina I think is a bit hopeful. Based on our experience of the 2014-2016 El Nino, it appears it functions as a stepwise ratchet. That is, we will likely plateau in this hotter state until the next El Nino phase shift.
Either way, we won’t do anything so the point is moot. If there is cooling and a return to “normal” temperatures until the next El Nino, we won’t take advantage of our luck.
from NOAA
“ENSO-neutral continued during August 2024,”
but of course there is inertia in the system wrt warming, particularly for the US warm Gulf of Mexico waters, which powered the Helene from Force 1 to 4 in 8 hours!
Most likely we will be in La Nina in November. If the forecast of a weak La Nina is correct, then there will be no relief from the heat, just a relenting of the increase.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml
. . . ” a relenting of the increase” . . .
At which point the global warming denialists , led by such as Tucker Carlson and so forth, will laugh and say ” where is your global warming now?”
From my looking at world energy use numbers, the totals have gone up. Some of that rise is being produced by renewables some by fossil fuels.
The amount of solar and wind being installed per year world wide is staggeringly huge. It is making an impact.
In the meantime AI is consuming more and more electrical energy. We are racing to stay in place.
While radical conservation won’t stop climate change, it’s the only reasonable action to projecting a potential partial survival. Anything else is simply ‘joy riding’ on future generations.
As well as ‘genocide’ there is the issue of killing off wildlife for profit. Here is a piece about UK fisheries policy:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/27/bluefin-tuna-uk-waters-fishing-industry-government
{Monbiot blames FA Hayek for overexploitation}
We need a book written in simple language for Middlebrow people to understand and maybe take to heart . . . a book successfully debunking Libertarianism and exposing its roots to open view and open ridicule and open rejection. I have no idea how to write such a book.
If someone does, I can offer a title in case anyone wants to use it.
The Road To Serfdom Is Private.
The fish or some new version of fish will return. Wildlife, though different wildlife will return. Humankind will most probably survive, here and there. But nothing will be quite the same, and so very much will be forever forgotten, and never again, perhaps nevermore contemplated by sentient beings on this beautiful blue planet.
Why interview somebody and argue with them the entire interview instead of letting the audience hear what he has to say, learn something, think about his point of view and then make up their own minds. Its also highly disrespectful to him. If you want to argue with him do so in a pub. Your audience wants to hear his point of view and not yours.
Excellent point. Allan.
I listened to the whole thing, and one theme that emerged is this — the interviewer says “I completely agree” then explains his disagreement, over and over. A tell, since he knows (and later on is told) that he’s one of the “liberal” apologists Hallam decries. The interviewer’s own behavior makes Hallam’s point for him.
And Bastani’s near-constant interrupting in the second half is almost unlistenable. (I did a transcript; painful.)
Thomas
I agree with you Yves, thanks for the pushback on this. As the world continues to deteriorate, humans will increasingly lean into magical thinking and delusion to cope.
Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupiditycatastrophic human hubris.I like to paraphrase Huey Long to describe the response of most Americans to the lifestyle changes required to partially mitigate climate change.
“Don’t climate change me, don’t climate change thee, climate change the man behind the tree”.
Radical conservation is about the only option that will buy time, but in my view, that is not something the political class, business class and financial industry would functionally support.
And there are many financially stressed people in the USA that have no excess consumption to conserve.
Instead, economic growth will be pitched as the solution until it is painfully obvious it is not.
As always, great discussion here!
Just wanted to add a point of clarification. Hallam’s idea, as I understand it, is not that elites have genocide as a goal. It’s that they have their own (imagined) preservation as a goal, and if that causes mass death, they’re fine with that.
If true, does that make them responsible for the genocide that results? In Hallam’s view, yes.
Consider the slave ship pictured above in the piece. These were months-long voyages with people packed like sardines.
People die packed together like that. Was the goal of the traders to kill their cargo? No, their goal was to get or stay rich. But if doing that caused many of their captives to die, they’re fine with that. Does that make them murderers? One has to say yes.
So for Hallam, I think, it’s not a genocide project, it’s a stay-rich project by the global elites, with genocide as an acceptable by-product.
Side note: That project will fail, of course. The rich will go down with the rest. Our elites aren’t very smart. But they do have power.
Anyway, carry on. Looking forward to the rest of the discussion.
Thomas
Not quite double pre-destination, then.
Alot of the proposed solutions from various regimes – are they genocide?
That’s going to come as a question too.
It’s both.
While I think calling it a genocide is going too far, the rich are stopping alot of helpful things if it hurts their investments.
The fact that power companies conspire to make home solar more difficult or not allowing more efficient Chinese cars to sell in the US.
I think it comes down to capitalism essentially, you can’t do infinite growth on a finite planet.
The only solutions allowed are those which make the already rich richer.
On the bright side; here in the city by the sea Mr. & Mrs. Richie Rich own just about everything ocean, bay and river side and will be the first into the lifeboats. They can expect a rude reception here at 120′ above mean high tide.
Ownership, even money will not have much value after the electric Grid stops its operation. Mr. & Mrs. Richie Rich will be given to the sea. They could at best hope to depart as a couple … assuming they have any mutual regard that extends past clauses of their prenuptial agreements.
I’ve never bought anything from Walmart or Bezo.
Neither have I, so far.
I have bought goods from Walmart, though I have avoided Amazon for while now. Where I live, there are few if any alternatives to Walmart. The local Mainstreet is not ‘healthy’.
My broken record is stuck on the track telling me that there were 2.5B lives in being when I was born in the mid-1950’s; today there are over 8B of us, expected to reach 9B by 2040 or so. This is a fact.
Did elite perfidy cause this exponential growth? Hardly. All of humanity has benefited from lower infant mortality, better health and diet, absence of major wars, and vastly improved life expectancy. The majority of those 8B have a better and longer quality of life than those 2.5B did, and likely will continue to until resource depletion and competition bring on a civilizational collapse. Then we won’t.
The collapse will happen sooner for some of us than for others. We should all try to put off the effects of this inevitable collapse for as long as possible by conserving resources, but none of us will avoid it entirely. I’m quite frankly tired of elites telling us to cut back on our quality of life so that they can extend theirs.
That’s not genocide, it’s selfishness. We are all guilty.
First, on “scientific” studies like those Yves mentioned above. The question is, as it always should be, who financed the studies–studies don’t grow on trees. Also scientific journals have been shown to be error-prone though not as much as the actual researchers are for a variety of reasons. This is based on the famous “study of studies” by Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford who came to doubt that most studies can be trusted along with many other studies dealing with researchers’ goals, preconceptions and so on that tended to skew results. We have to remember that when everything becomes a “business” the work of these businesses are always about making money in our hyper-materialistic capitalist society. As morality continues to decline who can we trust? It seems anybody is capable of anything in a social system with crumbling moral and intellectual standards.
Having said that, I don’t particularly distrust scientific studies but, from experience, I tend to trust my own observations and intuitions as well as those same things from people I trust. When studies not funded by political organizations or universities (who are, increasingly, businesses) come out and find the same thing then I pay attention. Thus, I tend to distrust COVID studies more than Climate Science because I’ve been following this issue since the late 80s and the pattern is clear to me.
On the genocide matter, I have no opinion other than I do know that the very wealthy (as opposed to the merely wealthy) don’t care about the well-being or even survival of a country, a culture, but they care, naturally, for profit and more wealth and power. A quarter century ago Christopher Lasch wrote The Revolt of the Elites which gives a historical perspective of how this willing alienation from the rest of us happened. Since my exposure to the filthy rich is very limited, I can say that they are not all the same but they all do feel they are better human beings that the other people around them and believe they should be in charge. Trump is an exaggerated version of this type.
My argument has always been that the elites do reflect the common state of the society we live in. If they are amoral to the extraordinary degree they are then they are reflecting the common moral state of the society which in the case of the West (or Empire if you prefer), is wretched. Technology can provide us with a beautiful environment with little poverty and celebration rather than the misery most people seem to be in. We have been robbed of the fruits of Western Civilization by, ultimately, ourselves. We are all connected and all at fault and if the filthy rich are deliberately wanting to cull the population it is a reflection of our own negative view of ourselves and humanity. The “answer” or cure to all this is spirituality, however you define it–radical hyper-materialism is the disease.
I suppose I share some of your distaste for the moral state of our Society, or might I suggest the demoralized state of our Society. I seriously doubt a vast surge of spirituality in the Populace could cure the disease afflicting Humankind with an utter inability to quell the rising tides and temperatures of Climate Chaos. Our Elites have taken full control over the instruments of communications and spent years twisting the minds of all but a few among the Populace — and not a large or happy few. Much as I despise the radical hyper-materialism burdening so many in our Society, much as you condemn them with your comment, I hesitate to lay so much blame on the victims who will suffer the consequences of Climate Chaos, among other threats to their future. Many of those who will most suffer through the Crucible are too young to blame and some have yet to be born.
I place the fullest weight of blame and condemnation on our Elites. With but one exception, I would make no excuses for them. The Elites have once more removed the modicum of control the Populace enjoyed in choosing a direction for our Society. The perhaps controversial exception I make, is that too many among our Elites have themselves fallen victim to the moralities and control of the Corporate Entities they so carefully birthed and so lovingly nurtured these last two centuries or so. Though incorporeal, too many Corporations have acquired weight and influence in Society far beyond that of any legal ‘person’, actual or crafted from paper, law, and remarkably broad interpretations of the law. For Corporate persons and their multitudinous minions there is no future beyond the misty fogs that obscure all futures past the next three months.
Spirituality cannot hope to win fight against such foes.
Genocide is a word with a very particular, & recent, provenance. It is also a word that, given its historical weight and emotional charge, can easily short circuit any attempt at analysis or discussion. Since its coinage in 1944 a good number of organised programs of mass slaughter and oppression that undeniably fit the criteria for genocide, both prior to and since ’44, have either led to hair-splitting controversies over its usage or flat denial by people in power that said events qualify. There are at least three genocides occurring right now as well as several others ongoing whose origins go back centuries. In each of these cases, the term, while appropriate, ends up creating more smoke than fire. Which is why Roger Hallam began using it indiscriminately several yeas ago. I don’t think Roger really foresees any just solution or plan of preparedness for the actual hell caused by the destruction of the systems that support most life. He has his own ideas (imho simplistic, demented & ill-informed) and he has unshakable belief in them. This combined with a certain grim charisma & a genuinely sincere, selfless, ascetic dedication to getting at least some people convinced worked to get Extinction Rebellion going.
I got involved with XR because of a talk I heard Hallam give, although at the time it was less Roger himself than the fact that people were finally doing something. I worked with a group of other people in Europe fairly early on to try and get XR off the ground internationally, to help the movement grow at scale beyond the UK. On behalf of my colleagues I actually went to London & spoke with Hallam to try and convince him that his strategy and rhetoric were a) not going to fly in some continental European countries & b) were actually going to get people tortured and killed elsewhere. His response was mildly contemptuous indifference and a private-audience repetition of the talk he gave everywhere. Which btw included numerous uses of the obscurantist term “climate change.” He seemed more annoyed that his time was being wasted with genuine concerns that might contradict his one-size-fits-all program.
At the time France was in the throes of a full-blown spontaneous, bottom-up insurrection with no specific ideological orientation, but a lot of justified rage (ironically set off by a “green” tax on diesel). Some members of French XR wanted to ally with the more Left-leaning elements of the inchoate Gilets Jaunes; Hallam’s line then was XR’s slogan “Beyond Politics.” He certainly wasn’t interested class struggle, saying “Look, we all know we’re all really more or less on the Left. But we needn’t to bring that up.” (Recently, I read him in The Ecologist advising that: “We should learn a few key lessons from the early communists under Lenin: in particular, leadership, ideology, and discipline.” Who’d leadership, I wonder? And which ideology?)
He went on over the course of the following year, single-minded and deaf to counsel, to sometimes intentionally undermine almost everything those of us in the international section were trying to do, culminating in a number of disastrously ignorant remarks in the German press, both politically & historically ignorant. If Extinction Rebellion still exists in Europe it is in spite, not because, of Roger Hallam. The same goes for the USA where Hallam worked via proxies to promote a minority group within XR that was “anti-woke,” a defensible position but these folks were on it in a pretty primary kind of way. Predictably, this was not the group that prevailed.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful to and in admiration of the Just Stop Oil activists now in prison, including Roger Hallam. This sort of direct action is imperative, and yes, if the tories decided to come down hard on nonviolent protesters it is because people with money and power are getting spooked. But not by Roger Hallam. They’re more likely freaked because the accelerating devastation of earth systems, the chock-a-block “natural catastrophes and disappearance of species and populations is now too far advanced to ignore. Certainly too far to be reversed, and very possibly to be significantly slowed or attenuated. The NYTimes front page now lists the cities with dangerous levels of heat or rainfall instead of the weather. And this means increased “instability,” the advent of extreme “non-stationarity” making planning, to say nothing of controlling anything increasingly difficult if not impossible.
Long(ish), term do billionaires and members of the PMC really care if the bottom 80% suffer and die? No. Do they worry, short term, about their profit margins and stocks of life-extension drugs in their luxury bunkers. Hell, yes. Have they conspired to bring these things about? Absolutely not. If they had it would mean they’re in control and, increasingly, they’re not. Do the middle-classes, white and brown, in Euro-US countries fear immigrants more than they do the board of Exxon? Well, many do – they don’t even think about Exxon except at the gas-pump. But none of this qualifies as calculated genocide.
I was very glad Yves Smith decided to push back against Thomas Neuburg’s piece. I apologise for the length of this post, but having seen Hallam’s “thought” in action at perhaps closer quarters than has Neuburg I felt compelled to fire off a hopefully salutary ad hominem attack. Neuburg says at one point “But rather than deal with Hallam the man, let’s look at his ideas…” In the case of Roger Hallam, I’m regret to say that those “ideas” are incubated in isolation, in self-imposed provincial experience, a solipsistic, self-righteous echo-chamber. Roger Hallam’s one of the pure ones – as he thinks so he is.
I think of the word ‘genocide’ as having a very particular context based on its original meaning. It immediately suggests Eugenics programs to me. I believe its use in describing the mass murders in Cambodia, and in Israel’s current mass murders in Gaza stretches its meaning too far. Deliberate massacres of the populations in territories captured through warfare seem little motivated by Eugenics and much more driven by simple greed and blood lust. To me, ‘genocide’ is more evil and insidious than the commonplace total or near total massacres that have followed many of the conquests in history, past and present. I also believe the distinctions between genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ should be maintained. ‘Ethnic’ ties the massacres to cultural differences and intolerance.
I doubt most of the very rich care enough about what happens to billions of the Populace to bother implementing or executing plans to exterminate those billions. This is not to suggest that the Elites will not or have not thought of the rest of us as items of commerce or units of acceptable loss attending some of their transactions. However the notion “that elite resistance to climate solutions is all about power and control” rings true. The Elites naturally resist initiatives by the Populace — they believe the Populace should follow the direction of their betters, the Elites.
In the famous words of Chuck Prince:
“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,”
It does not sound to me as if Mr. Prince is dancing to his own tune. How many CEOs could order their Corporations to move in a direction contrary to the Corporate Will? How many CEOs could be selected that might have any inclinations to move a Corporation in a direction contrary to the Corporate Will? This does raise questions about the origins and evolutions of this ‘Corporate Will’. Earth’s new Climate will result in a great reduction in the numbers of Humankind but I seriously doubt any Elites designed this outcome. It runs contrary to their constant emphasis on ‘economic growth’.
Earth’s new Climate will force radical changes in the way Humankind lives and gets its daily bread. The end of the Age of Fossil Fuels will and is radically changing the material substance of nations as well as the kinds of Society able to survive in that world without much metal, glass, or ceramics [other than what can be scavenged from today’s trash heaps] … to mention only a few of the materials modern Society relies upon. The Elites hope to create their tiny islands of reverence for their lost worlds, where they can live out their last days leaving the rest of us to die and live in the ashes of the ruined past Society. That is a very short-term goal remarkable only in its extension past the quarterly view of the future that blinkers most of the Elites and most of the Populace: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” — so we had best keep dancing while the music plays on.
[Is Roger Hallam a fan of Hugh Howey’s “Silo Series”?]
I think a good metaphor or somewhat similar historical period is the Great Hunger or Great Famine of Ireland in the 1800s. The population of Ireland only recently recovered. Many argue that genocidal policies of the British Gov’t, 1845 to 1850 contributed.
The die-off that now approaches in the next few decades (perhaps it has already just begun) will be on a much larger scale, more wide spread. Sometimes we call it “The Jackpot” as mentioned in a sci-fi novel by W Gibson, The Peripheral.
I don’t really think you can say those who control the media and governments (as well as most universities!), and think tanks that come up with most of the policies implemented (and control corporations as well of course), are blameless. Most people have their heads in the sand, and really resist looking at what is on its way. But they are actively encouraged in this by the media etc. So is it like when you are walking or driving past another person begging on the street, and you ignore them, or is it that many are being lied to?
To my thinking, the glorification of Israeli “defense” policies in Western media is an example of how the narrative for most people who consume such information is twisted. Similarly what we face (a die-off of billions) in the climate emergency is being avoided as things begin to fall apart and the death toll mounts.
Why not both? One can almost see the outline of a new Dune tale fit for the zeitgeist. The Bene Gesserits (Silicon Valley elites) have finally found their Kwisatz Haderach/Lisan al Gaib i.e. Elon Muad’dib, and he’s either going to lead them to the stars with the help of Space X and that supercomputer he is building or failing that provide them with ElonSuit 1.0 that will allow the techno believers to survive climate change/lack of water that was just touched upon in the “What happens when the water runs out?” article just from a few days ago. Genocide? That’s just the cost of doing business.
I’m coming to this discussion late, so I’ll just make a few brief points.
1. While it’s completely true that our whole society’s way of life is dependent on fossil fuels, it is also true that global warming was foreseen but info about it was intentionally minimized and suppressed by the oil companies, in much the same way as the tobacco companies lied about the dangers of smoking. It wasn’t that cigarette makers WANTED to kill my mother, a smoking addict who died of lung cancer at the age of 60 — but they did everything they could to keep the profits coming. The ecological overshoot situation, of which climate change is just one manifestation, both radically more complex and a much bigger deal.
2. Global population hypertrophy is dependent on technology, trade, etc but all this rests on a very large input of energy, currently mostly from fossil fuels. Can the same throughput come from a combination of wind, solar, biofuel, or fission or fusion? Very unlikely.
3. Things that can’t go on, won’t.
4. Wes Jackson speaks of a “saving remnant” – what can we do now that will be useful to people or the biosphere in general after the collapse? Connie Barlow, widow of Michael Dowd, is a leading advocate for the “assisted migration” of native trees poleward in this time of rapid climate change.
I have been thinking about this one point for a long time, but with far less clarity:
“ Peter Watts: So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point”
It is how I have been thinking of elites and about elite production, watching the kids pass through these institutions. I would clumsily say something like these CEO’s don’t know how to do anything which was never quite right. They are trained to do one or two things exceptionally well, but the environment is changing. And rather than looking to adapt, it seems most double down in fear. Or confusion. Or hope.
Anyway, once again, appreciate the posts. Thank you.
Late to this discussion, but here’s my 2 cents:
It’s GLOBAL climate change so it’s going to have to be at global effort to make any change. Given that right now elites in the West seem to be dead set on trying to live it up like it’s perpetually 1992 no matter what’s happening, it’s going to be impossible to coordinate and make progress at the levels required to ensure survival. Elites in the West may soon realize they are just as stuck in this as anybody else so maybe we’ll start to see progress (too late but whatever).
I post this again so that people can see the history of actually doing SOMETHING and just how late we are in doing anything (NSFW, but funny!):
The Time America Almost Stopped Climate Change | Climate Town https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MondapIjAAM