Here are links to part one, part two, and part three
“To be, or not to be?”
Hamlet’s question. Answer? Humanity is being driven to extinction. So, not to be.
The drive for the net zero and swift green transition, vital to keep our planet habitable for humans and keep us all alive, is vigorously and successfully being opposed by wealthy, greedy, cynical, powerful, determined, ruthless, politically entrenched and capable forces. These include men, companies, political parties, media capitalists, governments etc. They are led by the newly-minted Trump v2. They are currently winning the war.
In the last speech of his presidency, Joe Biden described the United States as an oligarchy, and spoke of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people”. Numerous billionaires now hold senior posts in the new Trump government.
2024 was the hottest year on record. So previously was 2023. The benchmark of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the target maximum set in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, was breached for the first time.
According to experts Bill McGuire and Roger Hallam:
“The planet’s temperature is climbing faster than at any time in the geological record.
“We could shatter the 2°C limit as soon as 2034. This will almost certainly result in the tipping points for collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets being crossed, committing us to the drowning of coastal towns and cities”.
A new report, Planetary Solvency, from risk management experts The Institute of Actuaries and Exeter University, says:
“Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090.
“At 3°C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events”.
The Los Angeles fires
The recent Los Angeles fires were the very worst in California on record. “There is no precedent, and no similar event by scale, cost or damage that has ever occurred in America. None.” (Robert Reich). They destroyed 63 square miles of territory, killed 25 people, and caused 180,000 to be displaced. This tragedy follows recent devastating and frequent hurricanes, floods and storm surges in Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana, as well as elsewhere in the world, causing enormous damage and loss of life.
Human-caused climate change was the underlying cause. The burned area in California has increased by 320% over the last 25 years (new NIDIS-funded study). The rainy season shifts later, and soils and plants dry out in rising heat. At the time of the fires, Southern California had had barely any rain since May, on the heels of a ‘megadrought’ worse than any time in the past 1,200 years.
Donald Trump immediately accused and blamed Democratic governance and in particular Governor Newsom (whom he referred to as Newscum).
Trump’s accusations about water shortage, diversity/equality/inclusion (DEI) hiring, sending equipment and money to Ukraine, Democrat incompetence and much more were widely shared in the right-wing media and social media, and wrongly presented as the cause of the fires (CNN). Of all the US press coverage of the LA fires, only 18% mentioned climate change as the cause or a possible cause.
Trump was also trying to divert attention away from the undoubted and obvious connection between the worsening world climate, the extraordinarily high frequency of catastrophic climate disasters, and his own “drill baby drill” policies, which will dramatically worsen the world’s climate.
Thom Hartmann (13 January 2025):
”Republicans are using their massive media machine to promote naked lies, blaming the fires on Democratic politicians while obscuring the role of the climate change driven by oil industry executives who fund the GOP and many of their think tanks.”
Beyond carbon dioxide emissions
There is much more to saving the planet for human habitation than controlling fossil fuel emissions, though that is vital for stopping the rising temperatures which are causing the climate to deteriorate. Human activities and excesses have led to a huge range of existential problems including nature depletion, build up of plastic waste, agri-business pollutions of various kinds, and air and water pollution, all contributing to human and animal miseries now, and worse to come.
A summary of these threats, and the controls on them which are desperately needed, is provided by Kate Raworth, in her book Doughnut Economics. Her emphasis, like Tim Jackson’s, is on planetary and human, social and ecological well-being, these being completely interdependent.
Some national, regional and city governments around the world are making serious efforts to achieve a switch away from fossil fuels and ameliorate some of their worst effects. They have employed ideas of the circular economy, carbon taxes and incentives on individuals and businesses to reduce their emissions, and transition to net zero and a less wasteful and environmentally damaging mode of living.
These initiatives are to be applauded. But there is a very real danger that they will be watered down or abandoned in the face of right-wing voter resistance following recent elections.
The political far-right are promoting the idea that the transition to a greener economy is unnecessary and excessively expensive. They distort the information about this by minimising or denying the risks associated with global warming and exaggerating the costs and inconveniences of dealing with it. They appeal to the so-called right or self-interest of individuals to pollute without sanction or respect for others. This has been the recent experience in the European Union, and occurred recently in the US State of Washington, where Republicans quashed a popular Democratic carbon tax proposal.
The fight for human survival is now a fight to the death
To bring the planet and human living spaces back from all the pollution and destruction that humans have caused over many recent decades, into a permanent and fully habitable space for all, is a monumental and urgent task for all humankind. The world’s populations desperately need that to happen. It is a matter of life or death for everyone.
Kim Stanley Robinson in The Ministry for the Future graphically and imaginatively describes how, in the face of a supreme heatwave in one country, children and old people die first, unburied bodies lie everywhere in the street and in lakes, food and clean water run out, electricity stops, and untreated sewage lies everywhere. Up to 20 million people die in agony.
The means to halt the climate emergency are well known and readily available – Bill Gates tells us in ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’. Unfortunately he doesn’t explain how to overcome the climate change denialists (for example Heartland) and the mainly right-wing and billionaire-financed forces the world over, and now ascendant in the US too, currently opposing and preventing the green transition.
But unsustainable emissions, rising pollution, nature deterioration and climate-caused catastrophic events continue. Cooperative and concerted action on a worldwide basis are needed but there are overwhelmingly powerful political and economic forces very successfully resisting that.
The main forces and agencies at work preventing the much faster transition to the fossil-free future that we all need are:
- Petro-states, which are also autocratic (i.e. non-democratic) states, such as China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan. These states place their own economic benefit and political power, which thrives on fossil fuels, above any sense of responsibility to humanity;
- Other autocratic states;
- Some democratic governments, including Australia and Canada, and some in Europe, especially the flawed-democracy ones (now the USA);
- Fossil-fuel companies, agri-businesses, banks, finance and tech companies, and those associated with them such as supporting industries and companies, who are unmoved by protests or public responsibilities, and prioritise their own profit and returns to shareholders.
- Political parties, lobbyists, think tanks, billionaire-owned media and social media, who use graft, greenwashing, news distortion and disinformation to play down climate change risks;
- The recipients of greenwashing money, such as sports institutions and clubs, museums, and universities;
- Principle-free, vote-seeking, cynical politicians.
Greed, selfishness, ignorance and corruption, by the few, of the many.
A few democratic countries such as the UK, at least under the present Labour government, are making stronger efforts to limit their emissions more quickly than by simply relying on reductions in the cost of new technology, but many are not.
Politics in the US tainted by lobbyists
The US (accounting for 12% of world emissions; China accounts for 32%), have elected a president who calls climate change a hoax. They have started the process of dismantling all existing restraints on fossil-fuel exploration, drilling, extraction, refining, transportation and export, and all current legal and economic incentives to protect the environment. Trump has received significant financial support from fossil fuel companies, raising rather obvious concerns over whether these are exerting a major influence on presidential policies. Many members of congress have also received such support.
This kind of questionable lobbying practice is widespread, probably in the majority of countries, especially in the world’s autocracies.
US democracy and politics now gives the corporations, their owners, and the billionaires, dominance and control of the US Government. This social injustice echoes the robber-barons of the early 20th century, which took 20 years, a stock market crash, a Great Depression, country-wide bankruptcy and poverty, a decent president (FDR), a New Deal and a world war to rectify.
Is the Grim Reaper coming for humanity?
There remain glimmers of hope.
Green technologies continue to improve, fall in cost and get adopted, but nowhere near quickly enough to avert the existential crisis. United Nations missions (Convention on Biological Diversity, Conference on Plastic Pollution, and Climate Change Conference) continue with worthy ambitions and some limited successes.
Climate change awareness is slowly growing, especially among young people, and is reflected in political outcomes in some countries. The rate of growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is coming down, as greener technology gets adopted and renewable power generation and transport electrification expands.
Advice about how not to lose hope and how to be active when confronted by fossil fuel capitalism is provided by journalists Rebecca Solnit and Tim Winton.
Percy Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, written after the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, offers what’s needed:
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
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