The Zombie Climate of Civilization

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Here’s the kind of renewable ecocide the mainstream climate movement loves

 

 

Why did the mainstream climate movement fail? To understand this we first need to understand what this movement was, where it came from, why it was confected, what it was really trying to accomplish.

 

Look in the corporate media and its “alt” followers and you’ll see a new surge of interest and excitement around the climate-industrial movement. With Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion we have a new injection, a new brand, a new chic. This seeming rejuvenation of the hoary mainstream comes at the same time as new ideas are rising, as a small but growing movement of writers, activists, and scientists is saying that the mainstream movement has failed, that its ideology and goals were all wrong in the first place, that its forecasts always have been grossly distorted to the linear and optimist side which is why its forecasts so consistently are outstripped by events, and that the prescriptions of the mainstream are absurdly insufficient to meet the crisis as well as destructive in themselves.

 

From the perspective of ecological fact and all of modern history, what’s happening is nothing but the attempted resurrection and zombification of a corpse. Thunberg is being used as figurehead for the same old lineup of corporate NGOs while Extinction Rebellion, for all its direct action, is dedicated to kettling all action within the capitalist framework and the framework of making “demands” on the very governments driving the destruction as fast as they can as hard as they can. Indeed a modern government can be defined pretty well as a way to organize a society for the maximum destruction of the Earth.

 

So there’s our two big movements of the moment, both sheep-herders on behalf of the destroyers of the Earth. It’s clear that we have here yet another manifestation of the “reform” faction within the organized crime framework. Reformed ecocide, green ecocide.

 

It’s said to be above all a children’s crusade, but if these are children confronting neglectful, abusive parents (a mainstay of the new propaganda), these children certainly don’t reject or break with these parents or any aspect of these parents’ teaching and practice. This is most immediately obvious in the purely consumerist character of the ideology, “demands”, and actions of this movement.

 

We have zombie consumerist reformism in a world where all reformism is long since dead though its zombie adherents don’t know it yet. All for the inherently ecocidal-genocidal civilization.

 

 

It’s all based on the lie propagated by the IPCC that civilization still has a “carbon budget” (such capitalist-technocratic verbiage) to work with, when in fact civilization has been deep into the red for many years now. The debt keeps mounting and the bill is about to come due in full.

 

Throughout the thirty years of the climate movement’s existence, throughout the UNFCCC period, carbon emissions have continued to escalate, and have escalated at an increasing rate. Emissions will continue to climb rapidly because everyone (except for a few of us fugitive Earth First!ers and primalists), including the mainstream climate activists and virtue signalers, never will give up their worthless junk and their decadent luxuries and comforts. The carbon concentration will continue to skyrocket until the economic civilization collapses or destroys itself. No one, and least of all the mainstream movement, will do anything to stop the emissions. That’s why a fraud like Paris – based on fake numbers and whose goals are voluntary anyway – appeals to them so much. It gives them the fake feeling of “doing something” while not actually having to anything at all.

 

Thus the whole congregation keeps holy rolling with hymns to “1.5 degrees” (or the Paris-enshrined 2 degrees, depending on which establishment climate preacher one follows), dispensing the old snake oil (and of course palm oil). Yet reality of the paleoclimatic evidence says the last time the global atmospheric carbon concentration was above 400PPM, as it has been for several years now, the global temperature was 5-10 degrees higher than now. That much heating already is locked in, although temperatures will take some time to catch up to millions of years worth of carbon increase compressed into a hundred year deluge.

 

Civilization never will restrain itself, only the limits and counteractions of the Earth will forcibly restrain civilization by destroying it, if it doesn’t destroy itself first.

 

 

Almost all political and fake-political Americans agree with George Bush that “the American way of life is non-negotiable”. The American way of life: Extreme consumption, extreme production, extreme energy, capitalism, cancer-“growth”. Where it comes to the climate crisis they differ only on what kind of denial to make the basis of their propaganda: From straight de jure denial to various green-capitalist, “sustainable development”, “green growth” scams. These all boil down to the same homicidal-suicidal denial. This is because they would rather die and bring down all life with them than give up “the American way of life”.

 

 

The mainstream climate movement adheres to a basic technocratic-authoritarian ideology:

 

1. Statism: The movement must supplicate before governments. That’s what they mean by “make demands”. Everything must be thought and done within this official hierarchical framework.

 

2. Scientism: The reason to become active for the climate is not for any earthly biological, spiritual, aesthetic, moral reason, but because Big Science says so. Indeed, from the rhetoric of movement cadres one often gets the sense that the very purpose of climate action and concern isn’t for the sake of the Earth or humanity, but to pay fealty and obeisance to Science. This dovetails perfectly with the real primary purpose of the climate-industrial movement which is to prop up productionism and capitalism for as long as possible and to divert all focus and action from the need for radical degrowth.

 

 

To be clear, the human wrangle over the climate crisis has nothing to do with science. It’s a political, ideological, spiritual, biological struggle. Nearly 100% of climate scientists hold the ideology that nothing about the Extreme Energy Civilization should be changed other than its mode of extreme energy production. Their solution, which they dispense to the broader movement, is to continue doing everything driving the ecological crisis, just a greenwashed version: Green capitalism, green cancer (“growth”), Keep Shopping, Keep Driving, more hi-maintenance tech but “better”, keep generating extreme ecocidal energy but in a fake-“renewable” way. Look up anyone’s prescription. Most infamously, the sainted James Hansen is well embarked upon his new career as a nuke shill. Another “hero” turned buffoon.

 

This movement touts only capitalism because they really only want to save capitalism, so the only solutions they recognize are “solutions” within the capitalist/productionist framework. These solutions are all lies. None will halt the onslaught, and almost all only add to the ecological and socioeconomic destruction.

 

 

And this brings us to the new brand of the old failed product. The Thunberg-figureheaded campaign is similar to a color revolution. The architects of the campaign are many of the same corporate NGOs which have engineered various forms of regime change campaigns around the world. It’s a corporate confection engineered from the top down and publicized by the corporate media, has zero grassroots character, zero bona fide movement character. It’s a classic astroturf. As many (including myself) have pointed out, if the corporate media is giving something good publicity, that’s proof it’s either an astroturf or at any rate tame and lame enough as to be no threat. Quite the contrary – it’s a means of co-opting and draining away any potential activist energy.

 

The reason for these new and highly publicized campaigns is that the corporate-NGO management of the climate-industrial movement is becoming worried by the accumulating failure of all of their own anodyne climate forecasts, the growing consciousness of the Sixth Mass Extinction Event and how it is accelerating, the growing consciousness that the climate crisis is just one element of a general ecological crisis being caused directly by the economic civilization which bestows such privilege on these persons and organizations, and the rising sense that the mainstream movement is running a giant con, or at best is woefully insufficient in every way, and that nothing short of radical degrowth and the dismantling of the Extreme Energy Civilization and industrial electricity generation as such can suffice. In response to all this they’re engineering this new propaganda campaign to renew faith in the Big Lie of green capitalism, green cancer, industrial renewables, electric cars, and the whole rest of the malign set which can be summed up as, green ecocide. They do it all because they’re part of the ecocidal civilization and act in accord with what this civilization is.

 

 

The militarist invocations which so easily slide from the tongues and pens of those spewing Green New Deal propaganda – we need a World War Two mobilization, a Manhattan Project (especially appropriate since so many of the climate crocodiles fetishize nukes) an Apollo campaign – are typical. Massive transformations, massive deployments, Tower of Babel, mitigate ecocide by doubling down on the direct cause of ecocide, all things must be big and bigger and biggest, all natives of the Big Lie that ecocidal industrial “renewable energy” can support itself when in reality it’s always completely dependent upon a foundation of fossil fuels. This is true both physically – the entire process, from extraction to transportation to the plastics and many other components of the machinery, requires fossil fuels – and economically – industrial wind and solar never have supported themselves economically any more than nukes have, they always require massive government subsidy. And where does the wealth for such subsidies come from? Only from the fossil-fueled Extreme Energy Economy. So it’s no surprise that those who promise to perpetuate this civilization but with renewables in place of fossil fuels surreptitiously intend to remain fully fossil-dependent.

 

And all this is in order to perpetuate all the ecological and social evils of the industrial/hi-maintenance-tech/production-consumption Extreme Civilization.

 

But this civilization is inherently ecocidal and genocidal. And as the rhetorical and ideological militarism of the WWII-fantasizing climate-industrial movement implies, this movement and corporate environmentalism in general are just another sect embracing the Dominion theology. To this “war on nature” mentality, the climate crisis is latent in nature’s war on humanity and civilization must respond accordingly. Only this can explain “environmentalists” who fantasize about multiplying the horrific mining destruction required for fake-renewables by many orders of magnitude, generating hundreds more vast death zones like the Alberta tar sands desolation, engulfing and poisoning such vast amounts of water as to make fracking look frugal, not to mention those who fetishize nukes and those most rabid psychopaths of all, those who want to deploy geoengineering, all this for something so tawdry and worthless as to perpetuate the soul-killing car-enslaved consumer society. Such insanity can only derive from the underlying lust to wage war on the Earth and dominate it rather than submit to Earth’s orchestration and harmonies. It can arise only from the most unreconstructed reactionary human supremacism. It can arise only from those who still see Earth, including the vast majority of humanity, as nothing but a resource mine and waste dump. This is the essence of the religion of the economic civilization, modern Mammon.

 

It’s perhaps best epitomized by this movement’s ongoing cult of the car, one of the pure evils of modernity. Ecologically, socially, in terms of public health, the car has zero redeeming qualities and is purely destructive. The existence of the car is incompatible with any meaningful climate solution or general environmental solution. But our mainstream “environmentalists” are committed to perpetuate the car and the propaganda of the car, “electric” or “hybrid” of course. But a fracking/coal/nuke/dead salmon car is just as bad as a gasoline car. Right there that proves their bad faith on every level.

 

Indeed, this type of mainstream extreme-impact corporate environmentalism is in many ways just what the de jure deniers say it is, just another thug faction seeking power.*

 

[*If you’re saying “We’re destroying the Earth and need to stop”, yet in the same breath you say “We need to continue doing exactly the same things we’ve been doing, just a ‘green’ version” which looks suspiciously like business as usual (and you prove you mean it by continuing every kind of gratuitous hi-impact action in your professional and personal life), that’s no vision at all. It’s no surprise that those who haven’t embraced the cult of green capitalism, the Green New Deal and the rest of the climate-industrial program sense a scam, nor that many of them come to doubt the existence of the crisis itself.

 

The fact is that the “conspiracy theory” of the rank-and-file de jure denialists (as opposed to the purely mercenary ones) is correct: Various corporate and political scammers are using the idea of the climate crisis to push their power agendas. Where the denialists go wrong is to take the illogical and false extra step of denying the climate phenomenon itself.

 

But this is actually a sign of stupidity, that one is incapable of simultaneously holding two simple thoughts:

 

1. The climate crisis is real and is driven by human action.

 

2. There are factions within the political class organizing political scams around it.]

 

 

No – all the themes and prescriptions of the climate-industrial movement are lies. Their hi-maintenance tech is what drives the crisis. Their capitalism. Their extreme production and consumption. Their extreme energy generation and use.

 

The only solution is much less technology, much lower technology, VASTLY less energy use. Anything which is hi-energy, hi-impact, and unnecessary (almost everything hi-energy and hi-impact is unnecessary) must stop. The rare things which are necessary, do them in the lowest-energy, lowest-impact way possible. Obviously we need to look to the pre-fossil era. Radical degrowth.

 

Needless to say things like the car are existentially incompatible and are not part of any seriously meant prescription.

 

Everything they touch is damaged or destroyed. Any intervention of theirs is destructive. The one and only good thing they can do is stop, refrain, leave alone, withdraw, go away. Any “solution” which involves adding intervention to intervention is a lie. It’ll do nothing but escalate the destruction.

 

 

There is one and only one set of three actions which can avert the worst of the climate crisis, if done in time. If not, and civilization certainly will not do them, then Earth’s kinesis will do its worst as it imposes all three by force. These three actions are:

 

End all industrial emissions; stop destroying carbon sinks; allow all natural sinks to resume their natural ranges.

 

All else is a lie.