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.
A wake-up call from our post, Preparing for Collapse: Why the Focus on Climate/Energy Sustainability Is Destructive:
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:
Peter Watts: In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.
In response to all of this, the last COP was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas….
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.
For example: ‘On borrowed time’: World marks new global heat record in March (Aljazeera).
Or locally, news like this: Sacramento records 45th day of 100-degree heat, setting new record for most in a year (CBS News).
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.
The massacre of the Hutu people in Congo (source)
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.
