Nothing is over the top any more. Insanity or hyperbole? You decide.
Despite the obvious parallels with coronavirus shutdowns, states still show little determination to put in place the measures we’ll need to deal with the climate emergency. For Andreas Malm, we need to stop seeing climate change as a problem for the future — and use state power now to impose a drastic reordering of our economies.
A little assertion there, a little leap in logic there and without much in between, voila, pandemics are just like climate change.
From quite early on in the course of the pandemic, commentators began to draw comparisons between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis. However, I argue that such direct comparisons are flawed in the sense that the current pandemic constitutes a specific event, whereas global warming is a secular trend. Nevertheless, we miss the essence of the COVID-19 outbreak if we fail to recognize it for what it is, namely one extreme — but long expected — manifestation of another secular trend: the rise in the rate of infectious diseases jumping from wild animals to human populations. This is a trend that has increased over past decades and is projected to accelerate in the future.
The most important driving force behind the production of pandemics is clear in the scientific literature and it is deforestation — which is also the second biggest contributor to global climate change. The place in which you find the greatest biodiversity on Earth is in tropical forests, and this biodiversity includes pathogens. These pathogens, which circulate among nonhuman animals in wild habitats, do not generally pose a problem to humanity as long as humans stay away from them. However, the problem arises as the human economy makes deeper and deeper incursions into these habitats. The clearance of forests for logging, agriculture, mining, and the construction of roads creates new interfaces where humans come into contact with wildlife. Through these interfaces, animal pathogens are able to mutate and leap into human populations through a process called zoonotic spillover.
Global warming itself also accelerates this trend. As temperatures rise, certain animals are forced to migrate in search of climates that match those to which they are adapted. A generalized chaos ensues in which animal populations — including, significantly, bats — are increasingly brought into contact with human populations, thereby increasing the rate of transmission. While there are upward of 1,200 different species of bats, all share a common trait that makes them unique among mammals, namely their ability to engage in sustained flight. This shared characteristic not only makes them highly mobile and therefore susceptible to climate-change-induced migration, it also requires prodigious amounts of energy, driving metabolic rates to a point where bodily temperatures reach 40°C for many hours on end, a level that would be experienced as fever by most other mammals. This process has been postulated as the primary reason behind bats being the main carrier of pathogens such as coronaviruses. [emphasis mine]
Postulated, and in passive voice. Good enough for me. Gotta love sciency writing.
And of course, it’s always a problem of oppression and inequity.
There was a moment in March 2020 when many of us in the climate justice movement felt a degree of surprise to find that governments in Europe and elsewhere were prepared to basically shut down their entire economies in an effort to contain the pandemic. This is striking, given that the same states had never contemplated undertaking any kind of intervention in the economy for the sake of the climate crisis. The primary reason for this lies in the different timeline of victimhood manifested by these two crises.
Now, overall, the pandemic has played out similarly to that of global warming in the simple sense that those who have suffered most and those who are most likely to die are the working class — most particularly working-class people of color and those in various hotspots in the Global South. The rich, meanwhile, have been able to self-isolate with ease by escaping to additional homes in the countryside and have been able to access private health care.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
The current juncture therefore provides us with an opportunity to oppose the return to business as usual, to push for the transformation of the global economy and the launch of something like a Green New Deal.
Nevertheless, we have to be honest about the situation we find ourselves in. COVID-19 has brought about the sudden obliteration of the climate justice movement in terms of everything that had been built up by the end of 2019. Since early 2020, COVID-19 has completely paralyzed all the most promising developments in the environmental movement — Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Ende Gelände, and so on — this is a situation of grave disaster. Prior to this, there had been a growing momentum toward aggressively disrupting business as usual, and while there have been attempts to temporarily move these actions online, there is simply no way to exert the same kind of pressure through digital means.
The article goes on to discuss ways of defeating Capitalism and saving the world through the joyous overturning of the oppressive planet-killing system.
The whole strategic direction of Lenin after 1914 was to turn World War I into a fatal blow against capitalism. This is precisely the same strategic orientation we must embrace today — and this is what I mean by ecological Leninism. We must find a way of turning the environmental crisis into a crisis for fossil capital itself.
You can read the full article here.
Why stop with Lenin. Why not go the full Stalinist famine; should be able to cull a billion or so.
CAGW has always been a political phenomenon rather than a physical one.
CAGW has always been an evil Leftist tool to destroy Western Civilization and free-market enterprise in order to create a Utopian totalitarian world order..
So in reality, the CAGW Hoax required the pursuit of Leninism for its very existence…
I looked up a photo of author Andreas Malm…and…OMG what a LEFTIST! Just another hypocrite liberal, I bet he uses fossil fuels every day!
We need more literacy and numeracy and I wish you luck with that madam-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/nsw-to-declutter-school-curriculum-and-re-prioritise-literacy-and-numeracy/ar-BB15z533
Maybe we could swap the police and school teachers around for a while? Might work as not much else is at present.
Because the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea and the former Soviet-bloc satellite states have a better environmental record than the USA, Western Europe, Canada, etc?
“Modern society is hypnotised by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in.
And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it’s coming from as it moves swiftly towards you.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“In our country (Russia) the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State”. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Malm appears to be suffering from, among other things, an extreme case of verbal diarrhea. Such people couldn’t speak truthfully about anything if their life depended on it.
Sooner or later, our governments are going to implement their plans to reach their impossible climate change targets and it will be too late to change anything until our economies are in ruins.
Our politicians believe that the science is settled and are keen to respond to every alarmist story that the BBC, ABC or any other network churns out by promising ever more ambitious carbon dioxide reduction targets without ever considering what negligible difference this will make to our climate.
Their vision of a new green economy appears to be entirely built on everything being electric without any hint of a reliable source. What has happened to the thousands of power engineers who know the energy plans are impossible? Are they all yes men or have they given up?
We need to get our act together. The science is flawed and we need to spell that out, for example the models are not fit for purpose. The energy plans are flawed and we need to have an appropriate statement there too.
Our arguments need to be heard and they need to be consistent.
Perhaps those who frequently post on these matters could suggest arguments that we can all use when convincing others that the proposed green energy policies are madness and the climate change science is unsound.
Now those leftists are starting a new attempt to sell us the overcome rule of mass murderers like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Che & Co, as eco-model for the future.
Their old wine in new bottles is relabeled “eco-socialism”. In this brave new world we will be tortured and killed, we will starve and die inside and outside of concentration camps as before under rule of “xxx-socialisms”, but we will suffer for the sake of “Mother Earth , “Environment” and “The Great Transformation”, not for a better life in a communist paradise! The best we can hope for is something like a futuristic “People’s Republic of China”?
Isn’t that wonderful?
“This is striking, given that the same states had never contemplated undertaking any kind of intervention in the economy for the sake of the climate crisis”
Really? What about generous taxpayer-funded subsidies for wind farms? Generous subsidies to buy EVs? Mandating the closure of coal fired power stations, either directly or by imposing emission restrictions so severe that they have no choice but to close? Forcing conversion of Europe’s largest thermal power station to burn wood from American forests? Banning fracking wherever you can get away with it? Using endless delay in the “approval process” to block construction of pipelines (Obama)? Simply not approving pipelines (Trudeau)? Creating an environmental review process so onerous that companies give up and walk away (Trudeau)? Giving territorial rights to hereditary chiefs who oppose a pipeline and refusing to even talk to elected chiefs who see a pipeline as a way of lifting their people out of poverty (Trudeau)? Closing down all your nukes so you have to buy Russian gas and open a big lignite mine (well, they don’t actually have to make logical sense)? These are just a few examples of what look awfully like “intervention in the economy” to me.
I suppose the Leninist style of intervention is more what he has in mind. (“Give me the keys, I’m in charge now, you go to Siberia”).
To your average progressive, anything less than total commitment to the cause, is indistinguishable from active opposition.
“We are the true carbon copy clones, we know ‘ What Is to Be Done, Burning Questions of Our Movement’, we are the AGWs
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/AGWs.htm
It is all insanity with a bit of a profit/control motive mixed in.
“The most important driving force behind the production of pandemics is clear in the scientific literature and it is deforestation — which is also the second biggest contributor to global climate change. ”
You realize, of course, that in the US there is much more more forest than there was 100 years ago?
One of the American Scientist book reviewers said almost the same thing without the obvious pejorative names. At least this one is more openly honest, but calls others juveniles. Also calls it a secular problem, ok let’s do it that way, dictionary says long time for the word. Thinks that he can just turn a switch like all petty, and not so petty, dictators.
“The whole strategic direction of Lenin after 1914 was to turn World War I into a fatal blow against capitalism. This is precisely the same strategic orientation we must embrace today — and this is what I mean by ecological Leninism. We must find a way of turning the environmental crisis into a crisis for fossil capital itself.” He gave away his totalitarianism. I am old enough to remember when we used to denigrate all the communists in universities in other countries.
Why is it that every generation gets trapped in leftist mindset and gets angry? Because lazy wishful thinking is incompatible with laws of nature: probability density function of any natural phenomena is never flat, never equal. Whether this is about rainfall, crop yields, population of salmon, person’s height and weight, or his cognitive ability, or performance on the job, or susceptibility to virus, etc., nothing is equally distributed in space or time. We live in a multi-dimensional world with millions of variables, these variables are interdependent, most often nonlinearly, and their distributions are anything but flat. Even talking about distributions is not the right language: most of the observable phenomena is best characterized as complex metastable attractor spaces with highly nonlinear dynamics. So much for demanding the equality of outcome.
Born in USSR, lived there for thirty years, plus the last thirty in the US. When the name of Lenin is invoked as a rallying cry, this is not about science or climate or economics. To put it in the starkest of terms, the question is whether this stupid world can escape yet another catastrophe of mass murder, mass fear, and mass misery. Fight it as much as you can! Do not dismiss it as some sort of background noise. Demand that the history of Russian revolution is taught as a mandatory subject in schools and colleges. I wouldn’t bet on common sense prevailing, or scientific reasoning, or anything. Lenin was shameless in exploiting the stupidity of uneducated masses, and those who resisted were simply killed off. The new leninists are latching onto the same mass ignorance, and the outcome may be the same.
Well said. I live and work with Aussies who yearn for an Australian version of the USSR, yet they don’t know what they talk of and what it REALLY means. I was in a discussion yesterday with my workmates about the terms “Master” and “Slave” in coding and that the terms are being actively banned because of racial connotations. It’s complete BS. It’s Orwellian 1984.
Henceforth all bodies shall be displayed in wax body form with long orderly lines for viewing.
Don’t forget what happened to all the international useful idiots that followed Lenin to Moscow.
All to prevent something hugely beneficial to the earth, increased CO2 (and maybe a little mild, beneficial warming).
No shortage of neo-socialist dumb-wits is there? Or should they be called neo-anarchists?
I found this interesting reading:
A study of cultured bat cells shows that their strong immune responses, constantly primed to respond to viruses, can drive viruses to greater virulence. Modelling bat immune systems on a computer, the researchers showed that when bat cells quickly release interferon upon infection, other cells quickly wall themselves off. This drives viruses to faster reproduction. The increased virulence and infectivity wreak havoc when these viruses infect animals with tamer immune systems, like humans.
You’ll find it on https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200210144854.htm
I’m gunna use the Sin Gas to make building blocks for cheap offset homes and really clean up-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/technology/there-s-a-sustainable-new-way-to-convert-co2-waste-into-building-blocks-for-fuel/ar-BB15Ah1K
These watermelons are ripe for the plucking.
This whole charade of CAGW was never about the climate, but a smokescreen for the far left to reorder the economic system. To this day I will never understand what the attraction is to give up freedom and private property, and replace it with a jackboot to the throat. After all, Communism is essentially about big overbearing government telling adults when, how and where they can live. There must be some serious mental issue in individuals who think big government (bloated petty bureaucracy) is an improvement in the human condition. Mediocrity, shoddy scarce consumer goods, drudgery and limits on all the freedoms we assume are desirable, like travel, a nice home, abundant choice, etc etc would evaporate. Perhaps a whole generation needs to be forced to live under the repressive vindictive system of Communism to understand what was lost. Let’s hope not but these far left types can never be trusted with our liberty. The current generation is alive in the most ideal conditions ever (The Covid virus is nothing compared to war or famine).
Lefties have a fundamental pathological flaw that they believe they know what’s best for everybody and the way to Utopia. That pathology naturally leads inevitably to only one Fearless Leader with the Great Leap Forward that knows the one true light and the way there. Unfortunately lefties don’t get the fallacy of composition here and hence Hitler Stalin Mao Pol Pot uncle Kim etc and welcome to leftism in context. The day pathological lefties gain a democratic majority we’re all in deep trouble being contextualised like that.
“ecological Leninism”
A system whereby the peasant majority who are excluded from the ruling party elite are forced to live a life of minimum subsistence in the name of saving the environment, whilst the ruling elites live a life of excess and abundance on the hard toils of the peasants.
A better idea would be to send all of these people to Greenland or Antarctica so as they can create their dream lifestyles without fear of warmth and without impacting those who seek a different path.
Author is worried about a “grave disaster”. Is that like a zombie apocalypse?
I believe we should adapt the method of Patton and Macarthur, in this case. To defeat the Leftist and Environuts, we will need to attack such. This is the only way to beat back the enemy. If the Leftist and Environuts really want to eliminate our society, we should engage them.
What are we waiting for? War is want they want, then war it is.
Note there is no “sarc/”.
Bryan A,
Here in the Marxist enclave of Scotland, we must be record breakers.
Between 2000 and d 2019 , 13.9 million trees were felled to build roads and spaces for windmills in Tax payer owned (they call it Government owned) forestery in Scotland.
That is separate from trees felled in privately owned land and those felled to build and access the thousands of miles of pylon supported copper wires.
Then down in Boris Corbyn utopia, we have (or had), Europe’s largest power station sitting on top of a 600 year supply of coal.
It is still Europe’s biggest single power generator – now powered entirely by wood chips transported thousands of miles from America.
And you thought 1984 had passed? I don’t mean you personally Bryan