The end of social movement theory, the beginning of climate breakdown revolutionary theory - Roger Hallam
https://www.facebook.com/100003329775307/posts/4475886602532288/

As the UK XR rebellion moves along in a slightly repressed and underwhelming way it is worth revisiting the notion of “emergency” and the related idea that “this changes everything”. “Everything” presumably includes the way we see social movements and the whole process of political change. If we want the state to force industry to “jump to it” World War Two style then surely it is right that we to apply the same challenge to ourselves.

When I started doing research on this field at King’s College I was initially very excited by the rich literatures on social movement theory. But when it came to advising climate activists and doing the strategic framework for the setting up of XR, I quickly realised it was not fit for purpose, to put it mildly.

“This changes everything”. Does it or are we just saying it?

The main point here is that social movement theory has this idea of the “radical flank”. I was told for instance at the end of 2019 by those “in the know” that I should “go off and set up a radical flank to XR”. The implicit assumption here is that the “herd” – that is the centre of the radical opinion are the sensible guys, and then there are a few pesty ultra radicals who every now and again pull the space to the Left.

This makes no sense when you are dealing with a physical crisis – such as the melting of the Arctic. This is an objective threat not a social construction – like someone pushing your kid off a cliff, or gassing your community in a sealed room. This means that the required response is objective – you have to stop the Arctic melting and therefore have to stop the emission of carbon emissions. It is a binary situation. You either stop it or you lose it for hundreds of thousands of years and humanity goes extinct. This is what is means to be facing tipping points – it’s an absolute emergency. It’s a pushing the kid off the cliff or gassing people to death type of thing applied to the whole of humanity.

In this situation there is no “radical flank” – there is only action which is deluded, or at best performative, and then there is action that gets the job done, that actually forces the government to decarbonise. So we have to get into the ballpark of creating mass civil resistance or you fail. “Radical flank” does not come into it.

The reality is that if we don’t have thousands of people ready to go on hunger strike, engage in open criminal damage (with lawful excuse) and repeated actions which result in prison we simply won’t catch the ball before it races away down the hill.

Social movement theory is based upon the meta assumption that conflicts are linear and limited. If you don’t sort out slavery this year you can have another bash at it the following year – it’s still obscene but no one is claiming it will be ten times as obscene next year. Hitler was just plain evil but once you have defeated him things go back to normal. With the climate crisis you have three to four years to completely change the economy or you are done for – everyone and for ever. That’s a beyond the imagination totally different situation. You cannot go to nature in ten year’s time and go sorry we are ready to go to prison now – your chance has gone. Nature does not give a damn.

That changes everything.

The theory then is totally redundant. As I often say this is not a political observation any more than the observation that ice melts when it’s warm is “political”: no one wants the collapse of their societies unless they are a nihilistic psychopath. Stopping collapse is the number one priority whether you are a radical or a conservative. It’s not a question of politics it’s a question of being able to face reality. The problem is the whole complex of reformist and gradualist ideas that underlie social movement theory which then determine what we are told, and tell each other, about how to change society. In other words we look at the future with our eyes fixed on the rules of thumb or “heuristics” which worked in the past.

But the past has gone forever.

A core redundant notion here is the idea that “you don’t have get arrested”. This is pure false compassion. The situation is you get arrested now (in numbers to get to critical mass) or you watch your kids die of starvation and social collapse in a decade or so. You often get an implicit racist reaction when you say this to people – meaning they don’t think it will happen to them but to those black lives in Africa who they secretly consider as disposable and they think that is, well, okay. If the dead bodies were in the home counties they would be lining up around to block to engage in civil resistance.

Of course you have to get arrested. If for no other reason than self interest. There are always exceptions like with everything – don’t do it if your mum has just died, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. If you have to transform society in three to four years, engaging in nonviolent resistance to the point of getting arrested is the least you have to do.

Social movement theory then is just a posh phrase for whole bunch of delusionary ideas of people in the environmental and “progressive” movements who don’t want to face reality. They become self-fulfilling prophecies – you don’t need to get arrested and so it’s not surprising that people decide they can’t be.

The alternative theory I would call climate breakdown revolutionary theory. The core idea is: “whatever it nonviolently takes”. And again this is self-fulfilling. If you tell people the only way you are going to get in the ballpark of stopping the arctic from melting is to have thousands of people in prison then you get people stepping up. I have just done around 40 public meetings in the past three months saying this so I have plenty of evidence that it is the case.

And the good news (there is good news) is once a critical mass of people adopt this new theory of political change then the transformation will happen– and very fast. No one knows if it will happen in time of course, that will be determined by how fast we give up on redundant ideas. But that it will happen is inevitable. Humans being don’t just lie down and let themselves be killed. As the elites will soon find out.

People stepping into civil resistance email ring2021@protonmail.com

TADEAS:

New York 2140 - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_2140

New York 2140 is a 2017 climate fiction novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel is set in a New York City that has been flooded and altered by rising water

TADEAS:

fukuyamovo review

We're Cooked
https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/were-cooked/

Robinson’s most recent book is his 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, which Barack Obama named as one of his favorite books. The novel begins sometime in the mid-21st century, when global warming has continued largely unabated from the present. It begins with a massive heat wave that kills 20 million people in India in a single week, and ends, somewhat later in the century, in a happy place (spoiler alert) where enough carbon has been sucked out of the atmosphere to not just slow but to reverse global warming.

...

The premise of the novel is that, following the Indian heat wave, the climate crisis has gotten so dangerous and immediate that governments around the world start throwing everything they have into fighting it. The crisis stimulates a shadowy underground movement called the Children of Kali that starts to assassinate executives of fossil fuel companies, blows up refineries, and shoots down airliners for their carbon output. Governments do not wait for international agreement, but on their own launch ambitious geo-engineering projects to do things like increase earth’s albedo or slow the melting of Antarctic glaciers. The most important initiative carried out by Mary Murphy and her Ministry is to convince a group of central bankers to issue unlimited numbers of carbon coins, which in effect pay people to either not produce or sequester carbon. Rather than making money from pumping oil and gas, fossil fuel companies find that they can earn more profits keeping their reserves in the ground. In addition to reversing the climate crisis, these massive interventions permit governments to cap incomes and institute something like universal basic income, so that everyone is protected from the huge economic disruptions that take place.

...

I suppose that this novel is intended to be a hopeful blueprint for a way out of the climate crisis. Knowing what I do about global politics and human nature, however, The Ministry for the Future left me rather despairing that it will ever be solved. For all of his seeming political sophistication, Robinson posits the most optimistic possible political developments at every turn, developments that enable Russia, China, the United States, Europe, and the developing world to work together cooperatively to solve the problem. For example, the first three countries listed take their aircraft carriers out of military service and use them to support the pumping of groundwater in the Artic. After the heat catastrophe, India gets its act together and acts boldly as a world leader in geo-engineering. The assassinations of corporate executives and the downing of commercial airliners does not lead to repression of the eco-terrorists, but rather convinces people that they should travel by steamship and dirigible instead. They discover that they don’t actually need to get from Zurich to San Francisco in a day, but are much more productive spending several weeks on a ship. The massive economic downturn provoked by the effective withdrawal of liquidity produces global unemployment higher than that of the Great Depression, but it lasts less than a year as central banks create massive amounts of liquidity and are put under the effective control of the people of their respective countries. After being kidnapped and held hostage at one Davos conference, the world’s elites are safely released and agree to climb onboard with the policies demanded by their kidnappers. Five million people spontaneously march on Tiananmen Square and force the Communist Party to work to save the planet instead of prioritizing economic growth. At the same time that they deal with the climate crisis, governments around the world cap wealth and implement something like universal basic income. They do this as they are depopulating millions of square miles of their own territory and allowing it to be reclaimed by native flora and fauna.

...

Robinson is right that our future depends on some big governance choices we have yet to make, both at national and international levels. I’m afraid, however, that if he’s right about the needed agenda, we’re all cooked

SEJDA: ono ta sopka asi nevybuchuje 24/7/365 hele (samozrejme zalezi na velikosti erupce a jak vysoko se castice dostanou) a mas pocit ze co2 tam hzustane taky navzdy? ale muzes se samozrejme modlit k jakemusi bohu, jestli ti to pomaha

no a pak tu mas taky takovou zajimavou vec, kdyz ti nekde roztajou ledovce, tak mas mensi tlak, ktery pusobi na podlozi a to ti muze zapricinit vyssi vulkanickou aktivitu
treba to je dobrej finalni ochrannej system zeme, kterej zamete i s lidma
"Glaciers and ice sheets on many active volcanoes are rapidly receding. There is compelling evidence that melting of ice during the last deglaciation triggered a dramatic acceleration in volcanic activity."

SEJDA: sem se skvele hodi jedno stare kocici porekadlo

The Unnatural History of the Sea
https://islandpress.org/books/unnatural-history-sea

Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island was the last redoubt of a species that had been decimated by hunting and habitat loss years before the explorers set sail.

As Callum M. Roberts reveals in The Unnatural History of the Sea, the oceans’ bounty didn’t disappear overnight. While today’s fishing industry is ruthlessly efficient, intense exploitation began not in the modern era, or even with the dawn of industrialization, but in the eleventh century in medieval Europe. Roberts explores this long and colorful history of commercial fishing, taking readers around the world and through the centuries to witness the transformation of the seas.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by fifteenth century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas.

The story does not end with an empty ocean. Instead, Roberts describes how we might restore the splendor and prosperity of the seas through smarter management of our resources and some simple restraint. From the coasts of Florida to New Zealand, marine reserves have fostered spectacular recovery of plants and animals to levels not seen in a century. They prove that history need not repeat itself: we can leave the oceans richer than we found them.

Climate colonialism and the EU’s Green Deal | Climate Change | Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/23/the-eus-green-deal-could-propagate-climate-colonialism

"In the pursuit of making the EU the first climate-neutral region in the world by 2050, Brussels is falling back on its old ways and deploying what we call climate colonialism.

The EU’s apolitical narrative on climate change – ignoring the impact of colonialism and capitalism and heavily influenced by the very corporations who profit from them – could result in climate action that is not only non-impactful but, worse, could be unsustainable and damaging for marginalised communities on the continent as well as the Global South.

"Although the end of colonialism was declared decades ago, its last effects in the form of these extractive industries are clear. The system of Indigenous land takeovers, resource extraction, labour exploitation and wealth transfer set up by European colonialists continues to operate and dispossess people in the Global South."

Když budou ty volby

Betonu se nenajíme, ani když jej budeme zapíjet řepkovým olejem. Odpovědi SPD na předvolební anketu Ekolistu - Ekolist.cz
https://ekolist.cz/cz/zpravodajstvi/zpravy/betonu-se-nenajime-ani-kdyz-jej-budeme-zapijet-repkovym-olejem.odpovedi-spd-na-predvolebni-anketu-ekolistu

20 meat and dairy firms emit more greenhouse gas than Germany, Britain or France | Meat industry | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/07/20-meat-and-dairy-firms-emit-more-greenhouse-gas-than-germany-britain-or-france

Raising livestock contributes significantly to carbon emissions, with animal agriculture accounting for 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific reports have found that rich countries need huge reductions in meat and dairy consumption to tackle the climate emergency.

Extinction Rebellion
https://www.facebook.com/100067055445890/posts/176182527960261/

Not only is the fossil fuel industry responsible for extreme weather events. They are not safe from these extreme weather events.

Here we see numerous Oil slicks, spills and flaring in the aftermath of #HurricaneIda

Posing a grave danger to people and animals after disaster strikes.

It is time to shut the fossil industry down, prepare yourself for a post carbon world.


Aerial Photos Of Hurricane Ida’s Aftermath Show What 'Code Red' for the Planet Looks Like in South Louisiana - DeSmog
https://www.desmog.com/2021/09/06/aerial-photos-of-hurricane-idas-aftermath-show-what-code-red-for-the-planet-looks-like-in-south-louisiana/