Murder!

MURDER!

I must be reading too much by Roger Hallam. When I heard the Alberta Premier announce that she is quickly reaching her goal to double tar sands oil production and build new pipelines both east to Ontario and west to tide in Vancouver my first thought was “Murderer!”. What was particularly unsettling about my response was that is was not a deliberate, rational response: it came from deep down in my emotional – from deep within my limbic system. It seems that I’ve reached my emotional tipping point after reading way too much about our murder of the planet. For example, I had just watched this you tube video before hearing the Alberta Premier talk and the contrast between what she thinks is “good for the citizens of Alberta” and what is happening to agriculture in the USA was so stark that I snapped and thus the only rational response was “Murderer!”.

Here is what that video asks: What happens when 30% of a nation’s water supply starts disappearing… silently? The Ogallala Aquifer has powered American agriculture for decades—supporting nearly 20% of the country’s food production and sustaining millions of acres of farmland. But now, it’s collapsing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjNkJ6MuHdA

To help get you to the emotional place where part of me lives try reading this latest email from Roger Hallam as he comments on the discussion in England about the need to put AC in everybody’s home or office or factory. It will give you a flavour of where he and I think we are at in this moment in history.

Participating in the “public debate” about whether everyone should have AC has the same logic as the Jewish councils negotiating with the Nazis over the Holocaust in World War Two. The framing is this: do you want to die this way or do you want to die that way? You choose. Do you want people to die by not having AC because it will get so hot they will die in their apartments, or do you want everyone to get AC, which will massively increase emissions so even more people will die through starvation and wars as food production collapses? For the record, put the question “what does 7 days of 40C heat in temperate climate countries — that is, Europe — do to food supplies” into an AI chatbot and you get the answer: a 20 to 50% reduction in food outputs for that year. And that is just the beginning. It goes on and on.

The Jewish Councils were given the obscene proposition that they should cooperate with the Nazi authorities to send just a few people to the death camps in order to save everyone else. Except, of course, their tormentors were lying. Like today’s corporate elites on AC, the Nazis just wanted to reduce their “costs”. Duping the leaders of Jewish communities was a way to do this. And yes, as we now know, the plan was always to progressively exterminate the whole of the Jewish population. In the famous example of the Warsaw ghetto, it took the decline of population from over 300,000 to 60,000 for the penny to drop about what was actually going on — and for the remaining population to revolt: to die on their feet rather than like sheep.

The Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt [she is a must read!] pointed out the indisputable fact that the Jewish Councils’ cooperation with their murderers significantly aided the ability of the Nazis to enact the mass murder of six million people. She was heavily criticised for merely stating what is, of course, obvious. But, as she tried to make clear, she was not making a moral judgement on their actions — she was simply pointing out what happens when you cooperate with such intensity of evil. In a sense, we could say “they did not know.” This level of deliberate genocide had never been enacted before in Europe.

But this is the key point: we do know. After the Second World War, the core moral slogan of Western democracies became “never again” — meaning never again for anyone. We now know what humans are capable of. We cannot pretend. We know the Nazi Holocaust happened. And we know how it happened: by the systematic dehumanisation of the other. Core to this strategy is the framing of “do this and fewer people will die” — the disgusting cesspit of instrumental calculation.

So what do you do? Don’t fall for any attempts to sustain Business As Usual [BAU]. BAU is dead. Climate peace is dead. We are not at peace with Nature and the world’s climate – we are at war. And it is a war which we cannot win. Nature and the ocean of forces that dictate our climate make “victory” – which I will define for this moment as any attempt to continue BAU – impossible. And we know it – if we will admit to to it. Like Hannah Arendt says – cooperation with evil is evil. There is “I choose the lesser evil” – because the lesser evil is still evil. There is no sustainable growth – we know that now. There is only living within the ecological boundaries of the Earth or overshoot. So what do you do? Seek Justice. Feel solidarity with those who are now suffering from what we are doing to Mother Earth. Live a just life by identifying with the longings and hungers of the poor, the meek, and those who weep and live accordingly.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice: They shall have their fill.
—Matthew 5:6