#climate leviathan

A major misconception in the Green, Environmentalist, Solarpunk, and adjacent movements is that Combustion Technology and other "Dirty" Technologies are necessarily damaging to our Environment.

The world’s wealthy and powerful are already adapting to rapid planetary changes. Through massive private investment and the exploitation of their ties to powerful state institutions, the elite are cementing structures to protect their wealth, status, and power. They recognize that the present world order is incapable of stemming accelerating climate change. Wall Street cannot prevent the next Superstorm Sandy, but with enough concrete and generators, it can buffer itself from the worst effects, and with catastrophe bonds it can more than cover the increased cost of doing business in the storm surge. If the need to rapidly reduce carbon emissions is the world’s greatest collective action problem, then the prevailing patterns of adaptation—which entrench profound inequalities —reflect the premeditated refusal of elites to solve it. The relatively poor and least powerful are left to fend for themselves.

Science is inescapably social. This is easy to forget because it is often imagined as a project of distinct individuals: people, armed with genius and objective data, who make “breakthroughs”. In truth, breakthroughs are exceptionally rare, and even when they occur—Darwin’s theory of evolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity—they are the result of the social labor of many more people who, by learning from the insights of others, exchanging ideas, trying things, comparing results and so on, generate insights that enable creative thought. (Not to mention the many others who have no direct involvement in the “science” but enable the would-be Darwin or Einstein to devote themselves to scientific pursuits.) Even more fundamentally, the scientific process always requires coordination, exchange, and language. Thus, it always exhibits some traces of the underlying social relations that give rise to it. For this reason, science is also always deeply historical; scientific activities and meanings are of their time. This is difficult to grasp for one’s own time but obvious in retrospect. What qualified as science for the ancient Maya and Greeks was the result of genuinely scientific social labor (trying things, comparing results, and so on), even if much of it has little “scientific” meaning today.

There is no realistic scenario for addressing climate change that does not involve a comprehensive reorganization of human societies in the reasonably near term. Yet we emphasize reorganization, not collapse or apocalypse. As a species, humanity will almost certainly survive the coming centuries. But who will survive, and how they will live, is genuinely uncertain. The distribution of the burdens of substantial adaptation—which is now inevitable, whatever the extent of future carbon mitigation—and the political-economic means by which distribution is implemented: these are urgent issues facing us all.

Insofar as Indigenous modes of life are not about “settling” the land—colonizing it, making it property—but rather about the continuity of living together within and upon it, they show the poverty of the liberal concept of sovereignty, which “designates less a content that can be replaced” and more “a process of compulsory relation, one predicated on the supposedly unquestionable fact of national territorial boundaries.” Hence, as we witness the gathering of Indigenous leaders in opposition to a colonial climate injustice, in Paris or Standing Rock, it is a grave mistake to assume “that what indigenous peoples are seeking in recognition of their nationhood is at its core the same as that which countries like Canada and the United States possess now.”

Unlike the People’s Climate March, so enormous it brought central Manhattan to a standstill, the group of radicals who attempted to flood Wall Street was far too small to seriously disrupt business as usual in lower Manhattan. But this demonstration was immediately attacked by police; more than 100 protesters were arrested. Why such rough treatment from a state that only the day before watched so serenely as 300,000 people filled the streets? The question almost answers itself. It can hardly be attributed solely to the fact that the financial district protesters did not have a permit. The state cannot prevent the ocean from flooding New York City, but the police can protect Wall Street. Better flooding tomorrow than anticapitalists today.