Everyday climate catastrophe - Living in a schizoid world
Only mass action will save us
5 minute read
The smokes have cleared this morning. The air outside is in the green zone, AQI 31. I’ve opened the windows to let in some fresh air. Nearing 10 last night it was “hazardous” red at 164. Seattle hit #3 on the list of the world’s most polluted cities.
I went to the upper deck of our common house yesterday evening to look at the red ball sun slowly sinking into the smoky horizon. Across Lake Union, Queen Anne Hill was veiled in haze. The lake was dotted with a multitude of sailboats and motorboats. Of course, people were escaping the heat. But it seemed incongruous, a picture of enjoyment through a dull gray filter. Another vista of our schizoid world.
How many tragic pictures do we have to see? How many announcements? Climate Code Red, say the world’s authoritative climate science group. July the hottest month in history. Shutdown of the Atlantic currents that drive the world’s climate a real prospect. Fires ravaging Southern Europe, Siberia, Western North America.
The world doesn’t fit together. It doesn’t make sense anymore. In the classic double bind that doesn’t let us settle in any one state, we flip from Climate Code Red to going out and getting the groceries. Living schizoid lives. The days seem to go on as usual, but nothing is normal anymore. It is hard to know what to say that hasn’t been said a million times before. We have to get up and do something unprecedented, to vastly change economies and the values that drive our lives. Yet no one seems to have a leverage point to do it.
If we were really serious, if we treated the climate emergency like it really was an emergency, we would not be talking about 2050 goals, or 2030. We would be talking about what we are going to do today and tomorrow. Literally. We would not be continuing business as usual. We would be doing stuff like we did going into World War II. Shutting down and converting production lines. Where pickup trucks were rolling off, it would be e-bikes and buses.
We would be nationalizing oil companies, cutting oil production and rationing fuel use. Closing off car lanes to make bus lanes and bike paths. Shutting down power plants while retrofitting buildings to reduce energy use and get gas and oil out. Creating a massive program to shift farming to regenerative, soil-building agriculture. Stopping deforestation.
We would be taking it seriously.
Instead, we get an administration with a president that proclaims climate an existential crisis one day, then the next urges OPEC to increase oil production so the economy will not be hurt, while issuing more oil and gas leases than anyone since George W. Bush. Even from the scientists proclaiming the urgent need to change our ways, this is the best we get:
The best of scenarios for climate stabilization, “The world shifts gradually, pervasively, toward a more sustainable path,” still leaves us with only a marginal chance to hold at the 1.5 deg. C mark agreed as the point to avert the worst catastrophes. Even as the floods and fires around the world testify we are already well into the danger zone. It is as if the allied nations had said we will “gradually, pervasively” beat Hitler by 1955 or ‘60 when he was overrunning Europe in 1940.
It’s a schizoid world, and I can barely stand it anymore. Sometimes I just want to rip it a new one.
I can take heart in what political scientist Erica Chenoweth found studying 323 campaigns for change from 1900 to 2006, that when 3.5% of people become fully engaged, go to the streets and demand change, it happens. When we fight, we win. She also found that nonviolence is twice as effective as violence, because it engages more people.
“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says. “There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event.”
But we don’t have those numbers yet, or anywhere close. Handfuls of us protest at banks, a few thousand at pipelines. On very rare occasions we get a few hundred thousand together at a single demonstration. But we haven’t seen anything like the sustained, massive people power pressure needed to move the institutions that rule our world, with their sociopathic pursuit of power and profit at the expense of all future generations and the natural world of which we still are a part whether we want to admit it or not.
So we bury our rage and fear and live our schizoid lives, driven by daily necessities, and often by the psychological need to avoid painful realities with which we can barely cope. We flip back and forth, not knowing what to do.
I know two things.
First, we cannot trust the people who run this world. They rose to their high positions in institutions buying into the power and profit assumptions which drive those institutions. If they are not sociopaths going in, the institutions make them into sociopaths in order to rise in the ranks. Some of them may even say the right words to soothe us. Sociopaths are good at that. As always, look at what they do, not what they say.
Second, it’s up to us as ordinary people to take it into our hands. Rise in mass action, in ways that stop business as usual, throw sand in the gears of everyday operations. Until we do, our own personal realities will be as schizoid as the world we live in.
Get into the streets.
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This isn’t a local issue, nor domestic, or national, it’s global. There’s no time to yell and scream at ordinary people to get into the streets and it won’t work anyway. There’s no time for that and people won’t just kinda, “hey, yeah, that’s it, extinction’s just round the corner, I reckon I’ll hit the streets”. This thing is bigger than that. The only thing that will get any momentum is if the Left, the whole landscape, all its inhabitants, the already existing orgs projects, groups and media, ALL OF THEM, start to prioritise survival over revolution or radical change. And the necessary change will only come through the use of existing institutions and structures because we have no time to replace them with revolutionary ones…mainly because the bloody left loves to fight with itself most of the time and it can’t truly agree on what those are anyway…even at the experienced end of the left spectrum where those members of “demonstrated wisdom” reside.
If you want ordinary people in the street, then ALL ALREADY WELL FOUNDED ESTABLISHED ORGS have to show they can unite and put real pressure on existing institutions…GOVERNMENTS and anyone fucking else they need to. And I mean ALL. I’m tired of people yelling at individuals or ordinary people to hit the streets because it’s a meaningless call. I’m tired of people yelling at ordinary folk expecting them to somehow spontaneously unite and actually know what to do in some coherent way. Half the time, no in fact more than half, if you ask a leftist what do they want, they have not the foggiest idea except maybe a bunch of vague notions they haven’t thought through. Or the answers are so radically diverse as to being almost useless as a vision. Or they’re crazy over the top anarcho -primmies with good hearts but shitty solutions. And most lefties don’t even have a good clear idea of socialism…let alone coherent economic models that would foster it.
What’s needed right now, for survival, not revolution, is a Global Green New Deal up and running by at the latest 2025, otherwise we won’t need revolution! So that means all specific single issue concerns, revolutionary concerns etc., of existing Left orgs, must be set aside in favour of this. ALL the disconnected, disparate groups, orgs, projects, be they, Marxist, anarchist, Pareconista, sort of anarchist, simpler way folk, extreme simpler way folk, feminist groups, revolutionaries of sorts , radicals of sorts, liberals of sorts, progressives of sorts, BLM, TLM, green groups, Progressive International (actually see the list of member orgs there to get an idea), DiEM25, DSA, Next System Project, Commons Transition, what’s left of the Wobblies, Unions, Sunrise, Extinction Rebellion, and whoever else and whatever other orgs are in and active on all other continents, must unite around this issue. They do not have to forget their specific concerns and focus totally, but just set them to the side to show the rest of the population there is a united front…a forceful huge left movement on this specific issue. And if needed, they can raise their specific concerns, their expertise on certain focuses for change, but not if those concerns are going to disrupt or stop altogether getting a Global Green New Deal up by 2025. Because the bloody Left, in all it bullshit sectarian glory so often shoots itself in the foot…see Trump getting elected and other scary leader folk elsewhere…and sabotages it’s own efforts.
Only then, if the Left can unite over this, maybe, and it’s a maybe, ordinary folk will see it, notice, think and hopefully take heed. And it must be done visibly and with easy to obtain information for ordinary folk, pertaining to what a Global Green New Deal actually is and what it means.
Just telling people to get into the streets or that we need x, y or z, or to vote this way or to ring your local member is way way off what’s needed.
If the Left landscape, a quite disparate, disconnected bunch of concerned citizens with DIVERSE opinions and ideas about what change is, even among green groups (and believe me I want the whole friggin market capitalist economy infuckingverted and replaced with something approaching Parecon, which is as radical as it get), who normally struggle to talk to each other or develop coherent strategies and program connected to clear vision for change, cannot come together under a visible banner or logo screaming GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL NOW, then do not expect the rest of the worlds population, the “bewildered herd”, the “rascal multitude”, the “great unwashed” to do so. The left has been around for at least 220 years (longer even) since Owen, Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin and on and on and has never ever built a mass movement around clear visions for major major shifts in production, consumption and allocation (Spanish Rev, maybe but it got crushed, Paris Commune? Crushed. Zapatistas maybe, Rojava, maybe)…why because most of the Left has never ever spelled out clearly and coherently what it wants so most “ordinary folk” have no idea themselves, and when asked, most Lefty oriented people reply, “we’ll figure it out as we go”, which is just blindly meaningless and useless except maybe on a small community, local level. And a few people yelling or writing that the people must hit the streets is useless and the odd essay tucked in between a stack of other essays on some marginal left media site doesn’t cut it. Who’s reading this shit anyway? Very very few people.
No, it must come from a completely new strategy of already existing Left orgs, and there are many already out there well established, showing the way to ordinary folk by actually uniting themselves VERY VISIBLY. Because if they can’t unite seriously around the issue of survival, then we can kiss our fight for gender equality and our fight against racism, and our fight against authoritarianism and against capitalism…which MUST include the abolition of markets…goodbye because there won’t be any point to any of it. There won’t be a planet able to support any organised human life.
So get out and yell at any and every left media site, org or group to pull their fingers out 24/7 and unite under this banner. In fact, they could all put on their site’s front pages a clearly visible banner reading GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL NOW, with a link to some site with info regarding what that actually entails. Even something as ridiculously simple as that may create some kind of feeling, or illusion the Left is united, even if superficially. “Hey look man, all these orgs have got this same banner on their website. Cool”. Create a meme. Probably the most important meme ever.
You need something other than just saying get out there, we need a mass movement, or do x, y and z…it doesn't mean anything to people. The Left has been saying that for centuries and look where WE ARE NOW. We got 3 and a half yrs to get this GGND up according to Robert Pollin. And this date has been around as a kind of point of no return for ages now. It can be found in The Climate Movement’s Victory Plan and so many other predictions and projections for needed change. Naomi Klein too. So we is runnin’ out of time people, and just saying the same shit the Left has been saying’ for years is useless.
And just outlining changes that may be part of a GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL doesn't do anything either. The whole package has to be made clear and easily available to ordinary punters so they can understand what’s really going on, what it truly entails, because it’s a hugely complex and major shift on so many fronts and it has to be worker friendly. In fact it has to be friendly on many levels, and to many peoples, as well as it being seriously daunting. That’s why the WHOLE LEFT LANDSCAPE has to unite together to push forcefully and visibly the idea of a GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL NOW into the heads of the rascal multitude so as to get Government to NOW…SERIOUSLY…NOT HALF ASSED.
The already existing, experienced Left has to band together NOW, in a way it has never done before. So it first needs to yell at itself, not out at ordinary folk.
See Climate Crisis And The Global Green New Deal by Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky.
Agreed!!