As the world flips through the last few pages of the final chapter of the climate change story, it’s important to point out how we found ourselves flailing and powerless at this critical point in time.
As you recall, international headlines were made less than a week ago when the United Nations released the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1.5 report. That report provided the world a must act target of 12 years to halve our greenhouse gas emissions to keep the Earth at 1.5 C in order to avoid a catastrophic 2C world at all costs.
If we don’t act as if our lives depended on it, then the IPCC warns we will face an apocalyptic world of famine, wildfire, flood, disease, violence, trauma, suicide, mass migration, and deadly heat waves by 2040. That half a degree of warming may sound insignificant to most but, it is enough to kill off the world’s coral reefs and leave the Arctic without sea ice - which is what cools the planet allowing our civilization to exist as we know it.
There is one thing about the IPCC report that escaped the public’s attention, the dirty secret that the nightmare scenario we face, according to the United Nations, is not the worst case scenario but instead the best case scenario.
If you are still reading after this scary and grim news, you may ask what does neo-fascism have to do with any of this. Why make fascists angry? It is way too hot of a topic.
Too conspiratorial. Too dicey. Too speculative. Too dangerous. We are all to blame for our predicament some say, but that is not true. One hundred companies are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions and, most knew of the cataclysmic results the Earth would experience by the combustion of coal and oil for our energy needs decades ago. There are billions of us that want action.
Umair Haque wrote an essay titled — Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now. It is a dark and unforgiving look on “How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism”. Haque offers his thoughts on the new report arguing that our fate is sealed and that humanity has lost the war against climate change.
Yet that is for a very unexpected — yet perfectly predictable — reason: the sudden explosion in global fascism — which in turn is a consequence of capitalism having failed as a model of global order. If, when, Brazil elects a neo-fascist who plans to raze and sell off the Amazon — the world’s lungs — then how do you suppose the fight against warming will be won? It will be set back by decades — decades…we don’t have. America’s newest Supreme Court justice is already striking down environmental laws — in his first few days in office — but he will be on the bench for life…beside a President who hasn’t just decimated the EPA, but stacked it with the kind of delusional simpletons who think global warming is a hoax. Again, the world is set by back by decades…it doesn’t have. Do you see my point yet? Let me make it razor sharp.
My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
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And then — Bang! America was the first nation to fall to the neo fascist wave. Instead of a President who might have taken the country into a decarbonized future, Americans elected the king of the idiots (no, please don’t give me an apologia for the electoral college.) This king of the idiots did what kings of idiots do: he lionized, of all things…coal. He questioned whether climate change was…real. He packed the government with lobbyists and cronies who were quite happy to see the world burn, if it meant a penthouse overlooking a drowned Central Park. He broke up with allies, friends, and partners. Do you see the point? The idea of a decarbonizing future was suddenly turned on its head. It had been a possibility yesterday — but now, it was becoming an impossibility.
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So now let’s connect all the dots. Capitalism didn’t just rape the planet laughing, and cause climate change that way. It did something which history will think of as even more astonishing. By quite predictably imploding into fascism at precisely the moment when the world needed cooperation, it made it impossible, more or less, for the fight against climate change to gather strength, pace, and force. It wasn’t just the environmental costs of capitalism which melted down the planet — it was the social costs, too, which, by wrecking global democracy, international law, cooperation, the idea that nations should work together, made a fractured, broken world which no longer had the capability to act jointly to prevent the rising floodwaters and the burning summers.
While researching links on the migrant crisis involving Syrians and Africans fleeing a hellscape to Europe, I ran across this image of drowned African migrants in the Mediterranean that did not make it to shore alive.
Posted initially to Ghana Forever, an embedded link brings you directly to the white nationalist Storm Front web page. There is no need to click on the Storm Front link embedded in the image; I went to that dark place for you. I can testify that the hateful comments and expressions of joy posted on their page supports the topic in this diary, and then some.
Donald Trump has proclivities toward Fascism. We know it as Trumpism, and it is as ugly and repulsive as any other name it may call itself. Trump demands to know who “drew” the United Nations report. He rants, with zero evidence that climate scientists are political, they aren't, but we are stuck with him for the foreseeable future and, we will regret it for the rest of our lives.
Trump’s wall is exhibit A when it comes to proof of his fascist leanings. He started his presidential campaign attacking migrants and immigrants from south of the US border and he and his death cult of followers have yet to give up this personification of hate, cruelty, intolerance, and fear of the other. If constructed we will see asylum seekers dying in front of the wall. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands then millions will suffer and die as result. What an ugly world it will be. Donald Trump may play dumb, but you can bet that he along with Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller see it clearly
For example:
“The [Trump] family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told PBS in a 2016 “Frontline” episode that really should have gotten more attention at the time. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
Huffington Post reacted to this by putting together a compilation of quotes from Trump over the years, demonstrating his lifelong obsession with the idea of genetic superiority, which he clearly believes he possesses.
The video shows Trump denying that all men are created equal, by insisting that some are simply born smart and others aren’t. Other quotes show Trump repeatedly and extensively insisting that he was born with superior intellect, which he attributes to having “a certain gene” and his “great genes” and “the winning gene.” He also attributes other people’s failings to what he assumes is genetic inferiority.
“When you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse,” he says in one clip.
“You know, I’m proud to have that German blood. There’s no question about it,” he says in another clip. “Great stuff.”
Still not convinced of this monsters evil soul? Vanity Fair published a story that Ivana Trump shared on her marriage-in an article published in 1990:
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
From New York Magazine:
UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.
The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge. “Amplifies” may be the better term. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.”
If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.
Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the new report describes as a climate catastrophe. As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present — a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs. But the real meaning of the report is not “climate change is much worse than you think,” because anyone who knows the state of the research will find nothing surprising in it. The real meaning is, “you now have permission to freak out.”
We are fucked. But there are different degrees of being fucked and that is why we must act. What can I do about such an overwhelming situation? Vote in the mid-terms, because we can always make the world a little less fucked if we choose to.