No Comfort for the Dead
Or maimed. Or illegally deported. Or children ripped from parents’ arms.
When I started this work four years ago, it was to address the existential threat of climate change. Introduced to climate scientists on Twitter before it’s calculated and destructive purchase by Elon Musk, I felt a responsibility to deeply understand the issue and communicate it. This information is not presented in mainstream media with either the gravity or frequency needed.
Since that time, I have read thousands of articles and dozens of scientific reports to gain that understanding. My core conviction hasn’t changed. Solutions to our dilemma won’t be achieved through technology.
I’ve investigated the technology from so-called renewables such as wind and solar backed with battery storage (they’re not renewable, metals and minerals are just as finite as oil), to supposed storage and mitigation strategies such as Carbon Capture Systems (CSS) and Strategic Aerosol Injection (SAI). CSS is simply another Big Oil scam, and SAI a gamble of desperation at best. The only way to salvage an inhabitable planet is to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, presenting its own dire challenges since every aspect of our societies is built on them.
These challenges can only be met through profound behavioral change, a complete makeover of our values, expectations and priorities. This is why I favor of degrowth, which I explained in this article in 2023, a plan of sustainability conceived decades ago that would actually improve our lives, not diminish them.
We are of this Earth and by this Earth. At the most basic level we have put too much energy — trapped heat into our biosphere since the Industrial Revolution through burning coal and oil. There are additional problems associated with overshoot and planetary boundaries, the root cause fossil fuels, each potentially deadly. If we can’t grasp this, we will be an evolutionary dead-end.
As clever monkeys driven by primitive instincts, the discovery of fossil fuels has led us to the precipice. The core of what defines a good life — reasonable safety, food and shelter — have been perverted into what I called The Normalization of Madness last July, lunacy ranging from fast fashion (leaving other nations drowning in its waste) to the granite countertops somehow defining success. Mindless overconsumption is not the meaning of life. It’s a form of enslavement, every needless debt a result of endless brainwashing advertising. We’re convinced to build prisons of debt and create our own emotional and physical self-destruction, while never sated billionaires laugh.
Cheap thrills at a heavy price, extinction, without radical immediate action.
Equally troubling, fossil fuel has built unfathomable war machines (morbid polluters themselves) used to routinely steal other people’s resources (colonialism and the rape of the Global South) and persecute and kill each other, justified by the most primitive instincts of all — fear of skin color, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation. And now, the dumbest racist, most corrupt monkey to ever ascend to the presidency, a product of abject society-wide educational failure, is in possession of the nuclear suitcase. His minions whether tech bros or Christian fascists believe in some form of the rapture, and are stepping on the gas to bring it as quickly as possible.
While there have been and continue to be inspiring exceptions to the rule — the Mahatma Gandhi’s, Nelson Mandela’s, Martin Luther King’s, John Brown’s, Greta Thunberg’s and Roger Hallum’s of this world — the greater arc of humanity has been one of violence and exploitation of both the planet and each other. The cries of the dead, mutilated and enslaved reach back thousands of years and reverberate today in the voiceless remains of Palestinian babies. Even the Athenian philosophers we admire for establishing scientific method and the fragile tenets of democracy held slaves, as did the founders of this nation.
We have never practiced true wisdom and there has never been true civilization. That could only exist if we stopped routinely murdering each other.
A cease fire exists in Gaza now (already breached by more deaths), after two years of blatant genocide gutlessly termed a “war” by our deplorable billionaire owned media, a media dominated by incessant pharmaceutical advertising that purports relief from exploding autoimmune diseases bestowed on us by the food we eat, water we drink, and air we breathe, such is the toxicity we’ve created on the planet. The “peace” plan is in reality more apartheid. There is plastic in our brains now. Why address the lucrative source of problems when there is money to be made on the backend as well? This is the mentality we’re up against in the fight for our survival.
The pathological nature of our “leadership” is demonstrated every day in innumerable acts. This new “administration” abducts people off the streets without charges or due process with masked “agents” I would term thugs. Children are left without parents, thrown into detention camps and deprived of human rights such as medical care or medicines they may depend on.
The cries of pain from that tiny parcel of apartheid controlled land called Gaza, a decades-old open air prison defined by enforced poverty and military check points backed against a Mediterranean Sea filled with 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas are stark evidence of our lack of evolution and sham of what we call civilization. This ludicrousness was further heightened by Trump demanding a Nobel Peace Prize, a subhuman who like all preceding presidents provided the weapons Israel requires to displace, isolate and murder Palestinians since its formation.
Oil over life every time.
Gaza is just the genocide we have been paying attention to. Crimes against humanity are routine and never ending. Here’s a list of twenty such ongoing slaughters. Abuses in places like Myanmar and the Congo are barely reported in western media. It’s best for corporations to hide their dirty secrets in the drive to “clean” energy, now being abandoned as those at the top conclude we’ve ruined the planet anyhow. May as well party. Morgan Stanley, one of the dirtiest financiers of fossil fuels advises us to buy air conditioning stocks.
We walk around blithely indifferent to the human suffering contained in each of our “smart” phones and EV batteries dependent on lithium and cobalt that destroy the communities of the poorest. Children’s lives are stolen, enslaved to work in mines. Evictions of entire villages are common, with criminally low reparations. The average EV battery requires over 28 pounds of cobalt, and a mobile phone battery about a quarter of an ounce. Cobalt demand is expected to reach 222,000 tons by 2025, tripling since 2010. There is nothing environmentally or morally clean about any of this.
Fortunately, as an American I don’t have to think about all that. I can watch a “reality” TV show like Survivor, a talent show like The Voice, or regurgitation TV like Matlock. Or I can watch yet another documentary on the serial killers America so expertly produces or choose from endless, meaningless sporting contests, each one exactly like the last one year after year. I can root for my billionaire owned logo instead of your billionaire owned logo, while I stuff GMO Doritos laced with addictive monosodium glutamate and artery clogging trans fats in my face. It’s all I can do — retreat into a cocoon of passive, mind-numbing garbage, from working two or three shit jobs to survive. Maybe, I’ll get me some Burger King double Whoppers, while I’m injecting weight loss drugs into my body, so I can be a king, too.
The path to extinction is truly a stupid, meaningless shitshow.
As Kurt Cobain sang in Smells Like Teen Spirit:
With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
My lights are not out, and I am not entertained. Maybe you're not either, seeing you have made it through my diatribe thus far. My words were far more gentle four years ago, but we are running out of time. We have been gaslit by both parties, advertising, corrupt media and corporate propaganda for decades now.
The only thing important is salvaging an inhabitable Earth, if that’s possible. Recognizing that must be our uniting bond. If we unite to successfully defeat the fascism gripping America, perhaps we can unite over that, too. Continued tribalism and international borders are death on our shrinking planet.
Core learning from my work
Renewable energy was a scam, at best a temporary transition to a low energy world. It should have been implemented decades ago for the best effectiveness in that transition.
Planetary boundaries must be part of the conversation. Seven of nine are now crossed, ocean acidification the latest. Climate change is merely the most pressing of a host of fatal issues.
Fossil fuels are running out, only extended by exploiting less desirable reserves. Tar sand and shale oil through fracking are industry evidence more economically attractive reserves are played out. Projects like those in the Permian Basin, now rapidly drying up, would not be chosen if more lucrative ones were available. Decades long oil industry geologist Art Berman is predicting about 60 years in this interview (scroll about halfway down) before EROI is exceeded with dire preceding consequences on OilPrice.com., hardly a “green” entity.
So-called renewable energy can only be created with mining for both the prosaic needs of steel and concrete as well as the minerals and metals required. This can only be achieved with heavy diesel equipment every step of the way, from mining to installation, maintenance and replacement. Life expectancy is about 25 years for both wind turbines and hundreds of thousands of acres of solar arrays. Both feed the destruction of planetary boundaries. Falsely promised electrification of the world depends on fossil fuels, period. That’s a Catch-22, baby.
There is no acknowledgment or plan for these realities.
Courage and education
The courage demonstrated in the second No Kings Day protests was inspiring. Only through collective action and willingness to put our bodies on the line can we stop this alliance of fascism and accelerated destruction of our Earth. It’s not their planet, she belongs to all of us.
Land carbon sinks are failing, and the oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the GHGs and heat we have generated. They’re nearing complete saturation. Without their absorption, land surface temperatures would be far greater, certain fatality. I did not attend yesterday’s event, but I did attend the first one. Talking to people revealed a depressing lack of awareness of the trouble the planet is in or the inevitable and at hand end of oil.
Please carry my work forward and the work of others who clearly see our dilemma.
Great post and forced me to unblock you and resubscribe. Too many humans are using/depleting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including GHGs and climate collapse. The canary in the coal mine of our overheated environment are the 1.2 trillion tons of global ice melting annually, where each pound absorbs 144 BTUs of heat energy we are generating by burning 8 B tons of coal annually and 100 M barrels of oil daily. Have a blessed evening and know that you/we are not alone.
Thank you, Geoffrey! We are essentially living in Zizek Slavoj's End Times, with the confluence of everything bad imaginable all at once. The existential threats rank in this order: nuclear war (at any time), plastics pollution which WILL hasten the 6th extinction, taking out most species in about 2 generations, and lastly global warming, a long-term decline in livability. The deliberate breaking of the world financial situation throws all other initiatives in the trash bin, and the coming economic collapse can result in devastating civil wars. These are 1000x more concerning than "planetary health" - the planet will be just fine - humans, not so much. Which is OK, really.