Speaker 1: Episode four Thumbs and the Dike. We have had too
Speaker 1: much anarchy in our city, the mayor says, and with
Speaker 1: the county sheriff and city police chief behind him, he
Speaker 1: lays out the city's aggressive plan to sweep the encampments
Speaker 1: and strike back at criminals hiding in the guise of
Speaker 1: a social justice movement. He's talking about you, Tom, Aaron,
Speaker 1: and a growing group of friends and allies who spent
Speaker 1: most of October and November doing eviction resistance. It all
Speaker 1: started with the right wing vigilantes who carried out a
Speaker 1: series of drive by attacks on the camps. At first,
Speaker 1: they just lobbed firecrackers, but that soon evolved into emptying
Speaker 1: handguns into tents. In response, the camps organized roving defensive teams.
Speaker 1: There were a couple of gunfights and one death, although
Speaker 1: you weren't around for any of those. By the time
Speaker 1: the attack stopped, you had a large, organized group of
Speaker 1: people used to taking direct action. From that point, making
Speaker 1: the jump to proactively stopping evictions wasn't such a big deal.
Speaker 1: Half the landlords in your part of town had jumped
Speaker 1: ship for other cities with less intense climates. Many of
Speaker 1: their properties were sold to banks, or large rental companies.
Speaker 1: Unemployment in your city hit as high as thirty percent
Speaker 1: by some counts, and more people nationwide are out on
Speaker 1: the street than there have ever been at any point
Speaker 1: in your life, at least where you live, though people
Speaker 1: have options. There are now five camps hosting more than
Speaker 1: five thousand people. Two of them are based out of
Speaker 1: large apartment complexes, two were in city parks, and the
Speaker 1: fifth is made from several square blocks of the city
Speaker 1: that had an eviction rate topping eighty percent. Some of
Speaker 1: the people joining collectives are asking for help are folks
Speaker 1: who months ago surely supported the cops cracking down on encampments.
Speaker 1: Now they're on your side, driven by desperation. You try
Speaker 1: not to let that piss you off. What matters is
Speaker 1: that you're in this together now, and aggressive eviction offense
Speaker 1: has kept hundreds of your neighbors in their homes and
Speaker 1: helped the population in the camps stay manageable. But of
Speaker 1: course the landlords aren't happy with that, and local business
Speaker 1: owners keep blaming the camps for graffiti and hampering the recovery.
Speaker 1: You spend enough time online to know this ship is
Speaker 1: happening all around the country and eviction defense action in
Speaker 1: Portland turned into a gun battle. Activists in l A
Speaker 1: responded to the tear gassing of an encampment by bombing
Speaker 1: an l A p D van, and worst of all,
Speaker 1: the NYPD killed three activists while clearing out a squat
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn. Every day, two different digital collectives allied with
Speaker 1: the encampments gather not just news of different protests around
Speaker 1: the country, but tactical information and after action reports. You, Tom,
Speaker 1: and all of the other hundreds of people in the
Speaker 1: Defensive Committee have been taking notes. You've welded together cal
Speaker 1: trips and dote vehicle barricades, rigged up paint cannons to
Speaker 1: coat police car windshields, and experimented with a dozen other
Speaker 1: tactics to protect the main camps. This is bigger than
Speaker 1: your hometown and your little movement. The federal government has
Speaker 1: responded to the absolute societal free fall of the last
Speaker 1: year by blaming anarchists in government, extremists, and an addiction
Speaker 1: to government entitlements. Disaster funding keeps being slashed, which is
Speaker 1: where a lot of this started anyway, But the President
Speaker 1: just announced a raft of emergency police funding using money
Speaker 1: the last administration had remarked for climate resiliency projects. You've
Speaker 1: spent the last few days going about your duties with
Speaker 1: a sense of doom hanging over your head. It's not
Speaker 1: just the imminent government crackdown. The food situation has gotten
Speaker 1: increasingly tenuous. Wheat crops saw less than half their normal harvest.
Speaker 1: Even potatoes dropped significantly. Several of the camps have started
Speaker 1: permaculture projects in greenhouses, but no one is growing anything
Speaker 1: like what you need to feed all these people. Donations
Speaker 1: helped for a while, but everyone's tapped. For the last
Speaker 1: few weeks. You've been able to close the gap by
Speaker 1: sending out dumpster diving teams into the neighborhoods with stocked
Speaker 1: grocery stores and functioning restaurants. One of your neighbors works
Speaker 1: in an Amazon warehouse, and he provided Tom with information
Speaker 1: on how to break in and where to find the
Speaker 1: dried goods. All this has helped, but the police have
Speaker 1: grown increasingly aware of your efforts. People in the rich
Speaker 1: neighborhoods have been using a community defense app to warn
Speaker 1: the police about criminals stealing food. Mark, a guy you
Speaker 1: sort of knew from a few past eviction defenses, was
Speaker 1: shot dead outside of a safeway two nights back. We
Speaker 1: can't keep going on like this, Tom says, And he
Speaker 1: tells you he's been reaching out to an old marine
Speaker 1: buddy of his who lives on a farm a couple
Speaker 1: hours out of town. They've got food, but their grid
Speaker 1: is still fucked from the summer, and half the small
Speaker 1: farms out there have lost so much production that they're
Speaker 1: on the edge of eviction themselves. We have electricians, we
Speaker 1: can get equipment, and we've got manpower people who will
Speaker 1: help harvest and stand up against the sheriff's department if
Speaker 1: there's an eviction. You'd be lying if you said Tom's
Speaker 1: suggestion didn't scare you a little bit. By bit, the
Speaker 1: daily grind of survival, building resiliency and protecting your community
Speaker 1: has grown to feel more seditious. That seems a bit strong.
Speaker 1: But now you're talking about treating fighters for food to
Speaker 1: defend a farming town against the police. That's nuts. Fuck it.
Speaker 1: You tell Tom, let's get the others together and talk
Speaker 1: about it. Seems like a good idea to me. In night,
Speaker 1: climate scientist James Hansen testified to the Senate and claimed
Speaker 1: for the first time that human influence on warning was
Speaker 1: discernible and separate from natural variability. James was not the
Speaker 1: first expert to warn about what we now call climate change,
Speaker 1: but he was the first one to get up in
Speaker 1: front of the country and give a warning in such
Speaker 1: a clear and unequivocal way at a time when many
Speaker 1: of his fellows would him and haw about natural variability.
Speaker 1: At the time, there was tremendous debate, fueled by donations
Speaker 1: from the fossil fuel industry and politicians eager for a
Speaker 1: culture war, about whether or not Hansen was a doomsayer
Speaker 1: or a prophet. We now know that he was, if anything,
Speaker 1: too optimistic. The warming trends we have seen put us
Speaker 1: roughly thirty years ahead of his most dire predictions. It's
Speaker 1: worth digging into exactly how has happened part of the
Speaker 1: story you already know. Companies like Exxon spent hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars over the last forty years funding think
Speaker 1: tanks and propaganda campaigns designed to so doubt over the
Speaker 1: reality of climate change or global warming. As a child
Speaker 1: growing up in the Bible Belt, nearly everything I learned
Speaker 1: about climate change was filtered through this lens. The picture
Speaker 1: painted by media pundits and best selling authors like Michael
Speaker 1: Crichton was that scientists were at worst corrupt shills pushing
Speaker 1: an environmentalist agenda, and at best alarmist's ginning up panic
Speaker 1: over minor fluctuations in climate. Paul Erlick came up quite
Speaker 1: often in this context. In the late nineteen sixties, he
Speaker 1: was an entomologist at Stanford University who released a book
Speaker 1: called The Population Bomb. Its first sentence was, the battle
Speaker 1: to feed all of humanity is over. Paul predicted that
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies, hundreds of millions of people were
Speaker 1: going to starve to death due to overpopulation, and there
Speaker 1: was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. The Population
Speaker 1: Bomb sparked a global panic and an anti population growth
Speaker 1: movement that led to repressive laws around the world. It
Speaker 1: also didn't come true, thanks in large part to the
Speaker 1: green Revolution sparked by Agronomius. To Norman Borlog's work, there
Speaker 1: was no mass starvation. Borlog has been rightfully lauded for
Speaker 1: creating new hybrid seeds that vastly increased the amount of
Speaker 1: calories farmers in places like India were able to produce.
Speaker 1: His work is credited with saving as many as a
Speaker 1: billion lives. I first learned about him on Penn and
Speaker 1: Teller's Bullshit, a libertarian themed science he show that was
Speaker 1: popular in the early aughts for the same reason as
Speaker 1: South Park. Both shows managed to be anti liberal without
Speaker 1: being right wing in the traditional sense. For kids raised
Speaker 1: conservative but disillusioned with the Republican Party due to the
Speaker 1: Iraq War, these shows provided seemingly clever arguments for why
Speaker 1: both sides were dumb and the smartest thing to do
Speaker 1: was make fun of them. This is not a bad
Speaker 1: thing under all circumstances. If you reflexively to like both
Speaker 1: the Republican and Democratic parties, you will be right more
Speaker 1: often than you were wrong. But in the early at
Speaker 1: some prominent Democrats, most significantly al Gore, did try to
Speaker 1: warn people about climate change. These folks were framed as alarmists,
Speaker 1: like Paul Erlick. Penn and Teller were one of a
Speaker 1: number of popular voices that specifically used Borlog's example to
Speaker 1: attack environmentalists worried about global warming. We'd better develop and
Speaker 1: ever improved science and technology, including the new by technology
Speaker 1: to produce the foodia needed for the world to day. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the humanitarian efforts of people like Dr Borlog are undermined
Speaker 1: by Greenpeace and other assholes. Now, Pinjillette has somewhat come
Speaker 1: around on climate change in recent days, but even in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, in this interview for the Origins podcast, he's
Speaker 1: stuck to the same line about al Gore being an alarmist.
Speaker 1: I think that there's no way you can deny that
Speaker 1: is climate change. I've completely changed on that, although completely
Speaker 1: changed is a little bit confusing because I never went
Speaker 1: beyond I don't know what bothers me about. The climate
Speaker 1: change thing was a great disservice done by al Gore
Speaker 1: of exaggerating. We now know that not only did Algor
Speaker 1: not exaggerate, but it would actually be fair to attack
Speaker 1: him for painting far too rosie a picture of what
Speaker 1: climate change would cause and the adaptations are society would
Speaker 1: need to adopt in order to mitigate it. I'm harping
Speaker 1: on Penn and Teller in particular because this exact line
Speaker 1: of thinking has led to the most durable sort of
Speaker 1: climate denial I've seen in my own life. Earlier this year,
Speaker 1: my father and I endured the most severe snowstorm in
Speaker 1: Texas history together. When I tried to talk about climate change.
Speaker 1: He brought up Paul Erlick and the fact that even
Speaker 1: if climate change is as bad as they say, some
Speaker 1: Norman Borlog will along with a scientific solution that will
Speaker 1: save us. There is no sign of this so far.
Speaker 1: Carbon capture technology, which works by capturing carbon before it
Speaker 1: can reach the atmosphere, has proved to be extremely disappointing.
Speaker 1: Only about point one percent of annual global emissions from
Speaker 1: fossil fuels are captured at present, and of the carbon
Speaker 1: captured to date has been used to extract more oil
Speaker 1: from wells by pumping that carbon into the ground to
Speaker 1: force oil out. But still Boorlog shadow looms large over
Speaker 1: the climate question. Today's episode is about the different paths
Speaker 1: to mitigation and adaptation that we might see in the
Speaker 1: future as the damage caused by climate change becomes too
Speaker 1: great to ignore. Weight and hope for a super genius
Speaker 1: is certainly the path some individuals and probably some politicians
Speaker 1: will continue to take. The myth of the Leonaire inventor
Speaker 1: and the personality colts around men like Elon Musk and
Speaker 1: their own little green projects has made this a popular
Speaker 1: school of thought over the last decade. The good news
Speaker 1: is that we've already reached a point of calamity great
Speaker 1: enough that support for this sort of solution is probably
Speaker 1: past its peak. On the day I write this chapter, July,
Speaker 1: the Guardian has just published an article warning that yet
Speaker 1: another heat dome is set to settle over the entire
Speaker 1: continental United States. The article quoted Michael Verner, a senior
Speaker 1: scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, quote, you expect
Speaker 1: hotter heat waves with climate change, but the estimates may
Speaker 1: have been overly conservative. With the Pacific Northwest heat wave,
Speaker 1: you conclude the event would almost be impossible without climate change,
Speaker 1: But in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer,
Speaker 1: you'd also include it would be impossible with climate change too.
Speaker 1: That is problematic because the event happened. For years, climate
Speaker 1: scientists have been attacked as alarmist, Yet the growing can
Speaker 1: census is that they were actually too conservative with their warnings.
Speaker 1: The situation was more severe than most reports portrayed. Before
Speaker 1: we go further, it's worth looking at why this was.
Speaker 1: I found a good scientific American article from two thousand
Speaker 1: nineteen by the authors of a book called Discerning Experts,
Speaker 1: which analyze the methods by which experts had assessed environmental
Speaker 1: damage in order to provide policy recommendations. They found a
Speaker 1: consistent tendency by scientists to underestimate the severity of threats
Speaker 1: and the rapidity with which they might unfold quote. Among
Speaker 1: the factors that appear to contribute to underestimation is the
Speaker 1: perceived need for consensus, or what we might label univocality,
Speaker 1: the felt need to speak in a single voice. Many
Speaker 1: scientists worry that if disagreement has publicly aired, government officials
Speaker 1: will conflate differences of opinion with ignorance and use this
Speaker 1: as justification for an action. Others worry that even if
Speaker 1: policymakers want to act, they will find it difficult to
Speaker 1: do so if scientists fail to send an unambiguous message
Speaker 1: there or they will actively seek to find their common
Speaker 1: ground and focus on areas of agreement. In some cases,
Speaker 1: there will only put forward conclusions on which they can
Speaker 1: all agree. How does this lead to underestimation? Consider a
Speaker 1: case in which most scientists think that the correct answer
Speaker 1: to a question is in the range of one to ten,
Speaker 1: but some belief that it could be as high as
Speaker 1: one hundred. In such a case, everyone will agree that
Speaker 1: it is at least one to ten, but not everyone
Speaker 1: will agree that it could be as high as one hundred. Therefore,
Speaker 1: the area of agreement is one to ten, and this
Speaker 1: is reported as the consensus view. Wherever there is a
Speaker 1: range of possible outcomes that includes along a high end
Speaker 1: tail of probability, the area of overlap will necessarily lie
Speaker 1: at or near the low end. The other cause of problems,
Speaker 1: they conclude was a common mental model practiced by the
Speaker 1: media as well as by scientists, which tends to unconsciously
Speaker 1: consider facts to be something which all reasonable people should
Speaker 1: be able to agree upon. If there is a mass
Speaker 1: disagreement over the conclusions of a report, then it must
Speaker 1: be because those conclusions are based on opinion rather than facts.
Speaker 1: And the third reason for underestimation involves a very simple
Speaker 1: worry of a reputation. In good science, being wrong shouldn't
Speaker 1: be bad for your career, as a large part of
Speaker 1: the discipline is making hypotheses which are either proven or
Speaker 1: disproven by testing. But when we're talking about a field
Speaker 1: as politicized as climate science, going too far in a
Speaker 1: prediction gets you labeled an alarmist by media talking heads.
Speaker 1: This leads to an understandable trend to conservatism and climate predictions.
Speaker 1: All these factors have already caused huge problems for our society,
Speaker 1: and as we move forward towards trying to adapt, these
Speaker 1: trends will, if not disrupted, caused further calamity. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, fighter pilot Colonel John Boyd coined the term
Speaker 1: ODA loop to describe the cycle by which human beings
Speaker 1: and organizations make decisions at the operational level during military
Speaker 1: campaigns ODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act, and Colonel
Speaker 1: Boyd's terminology has been applied in a dizzying variety of
Speaker 1: situations since, from training troops for combat to training corporations
Speaker 1: for cyber security. The ODA loop helps explain how an
Speaker 1: agile and creative opponent can disrupt and defeat a seemingly
Speaker 1: much more powerful enemy. The basic idea is that if
Speaker 1: you can break any part of your enemy's ODE loop,
Speaker 1: you can stop them from properly reacting in a given
Speaker 1: situation and eventually defeat them. Stop the enemy from observing
Speaker 1: you and they can't orient themselves to your attack, decide
Speaker 1: how to respond to you or take action, disrupt the
Speaker 1: enemy's ability to make decisions, and even if they see
Speaker 1: the problem, they won't be able to act on it
Speaker 1: for years. Our ability to properly observe and orient ourselves
Speaker 1: to the problem of climate change has been hampered by
Speaker 1: all the things we just discussed. As I type this,
Speaker 1: wildfires are burning across the width of Canada. Subways in
Speaker 1: multiple major world cities have become watery tombs. The scope
Speaker 1: of the issue is finally beyond a reasonable doubt in
Speaker 1: almost everyone's mind, yet we still find ourselves disrupted when
Speaker 1: we reach d There will come a time when the
Speaker 1: governments of the world will decide and then act with
Speaker 1: much more of a concerted plan than we've seen before.
Speaker 1: When it comes to predicting what that decision, or more realistically,
Speaker 1: those decisions might be, the best book I found is
Speaker 1: Climate Leviathan by Joel Wainwright and joff Man. The term
Speaker 1: Leviathan comes from a book by Hobbes, The Philosopher not
Speaker 1: the Tiger, which argues that peace and unity can only
Speaker 1: be achieved by the creation of a sovereign power responsible
Speaker 1: for protecting the commonwealth and given absolute authority to do so.
Speaker 1: It's essentially an argument for a big, all powerful state
Speaker 1: or sovereign to keep everything nice. Wainwright and Man's book
Speaker 1: stems from the premise that most people, out of fear
Speaker 1: or desperation, will probably back some sort of leviathan as
Speaker 1: an answer to climate change. Quote. We contend that the
Speaker 1: drive to defend capitalist social relations will putch the world
Speaker 1: towards climate leviathan, namely adaptation projects to allow capitalist eletes
Speaker 1: to stabilize their position amidst planetary crises. This scenario, we
Speaker 1: pose it implies a shift in the character and form
Speaker 1: of sovereignty, the likely emergence of planetary sovereignty defined by
Speaker 1: an exception proclaimed in the name of preserving life on Earth.
Speaker 1: We are not suggesting that sovereignty will be characterized by
Speaker 1: the quasi monarchical rule of a single person, but we recognize,
Speaker 1: as some suggest, Hobbs himself and even Carl Schmidt at
Speaker 1: least after ninety two, also recognized that it is almost
Speaker 1: certainly to be exercised by a collection of powers coordinated
Speaker 1: to save the planet and to determine what measures are
Speaker 1: necessary and what and who must be sacrificed in the
Speaker 1: interests of life on Earth. Wainwright and Man envision a
Speaker 1: few different types of possible leviathan one elucidated above is
Speaker 1: a neoliberal, capitalist leviathan. Think of it as an extension
Speaker 1: of the Western States and the attitudes we've seen so far,
Speaker 1: the smiling face of someone like Joe Biden talking about
Speaker 1: the importance of using paper bags while giving Exxon tax
Speaker 1: breaks so they can invest in cloud seating technology. One
Speaker 1: of the most frightening things about this possibility is that
Speaker 1: the very same corporate actors responsible for fighting any action
Speaker 1: on climate change up until now will surely find a
Speaker 1: key space for themselves partaking in state funded mitigation efforts.
Speaker 1: Think of Jeff Bezos suggesting that polluting industrial buildings be
Speaker 1: moved into space, or imagine Chevron using some of their
Speaker 1: vast fortune to invent snow piercer style technology to blanket
Speaker 1: the atmosphere and reduce warming. These possibilities are frightening because
Speaker 1: any solutions dreamed up under this regime are likely to
Speaker 1: be as selfish and ill considered as the long campaign
Speaker 1: to deny the reality of climate change. In this future,
Speaker 1: the architects of our present misery and shrine themselves forever
Speaker 1: as our protectors. Wainwright and Man also envision what they
Speaker 1: somewhat cheekily call climate Mao an anti capitalist state centered Leviathan,
Speaker 1: possibly based around China or a block of Southeast Asian nations.
Speaker 1: While Climate Leviathan would be an attempt to maintain the
Speaker 1: present capitalist world order while stabilising the environment, Climate Mao
Speaker 1: was a quasi revolutionary attempt to replace it with a
Speaker 1: system just as centralized, but not based around the moneyed
Speaker 1: interests that got us here from the book Climate Leviathan.
Speaker 1: Even today, when an increasingly non Maoist Chinese state invokes
Speaker 1: its full regulatory authority, it can achieve political feats unimaginable
Speaker 1: in liberal democracy. Perhaps the most notable instance of state
Speaker 1: coordinated climate authority is the matter in which Beijing's air
Speaker 1: quality was re engineered during the two thousand eight Olympics.
Speaker 1: Flowers potted all over the city, traffic barred, trees planted
Speaker 1: in the desert, and factories and power plants closed, all
Speaker 1: to successfully blew the skies for the games. Another effect
Speaker 1: of this power is the way in which the Chinese
Speaker 1: state effectively killed General Motors gas guzzling Hummer in early
Speaker 1: two thousand ten, when it blocked the division's sale to
Speaker 1: Sichuan Tenjong Heavy Industrial Machinery due to the vehicles of
Speaker 1: missions levels. One might also point to the Great Green
Speaker 1: Wall against Desertification, which if successfully completed, will cross four thousand,
Speaker 1: four eighty meters of northern China, and various tree planting
Speaker 1: programs that will purportedly give the country forest cover. By
Speaker 1: and since vowing in the summer of two thousand ten
Speaker 1: to apply an iron hand to the task of reducing emissions,
Speaker 1: the Communist Party closed more than two thousand steel mills
Speaker 1: and other carbon emitting factories by March two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: In mid two thousand sixteen, the government announced new dietary
Speaker 1: guidelines encouraging people to consume no more than seventy five
Speaker 1: grams of meat per day. Reducing meat consumption was justified
Speaker 1: on health and environmental grounds and hailed as by climate activists.
Speaker 1: Such policies foretell the possibility of a climate MAO were
Speaker 1: China to become a global hedgemon and also change under
Speaker 1: revolutionary pressures. To be clear, that is a very big if.
Speaker 1: If Leviathan is an attempt to maintain the capitalest world
Speaker 1: ordered in an ego friendly manner, behemoth by far the
Speaker 1: darkest potential future is an acknowledgment that the situation is
Speaker 1: well and truly fucked. The damage is done, and all
Speaker 1: that can be done is grab as much power and
Speaker 1: as many resources as possible and concentrate them in the
Speaker 1: hands of a chosen few, be it a specific nation
Speaker 1: or perhaps an ethno state. Behemoth is the fascist state
Speaker 1: solution to climate change. It's only children will be endless
Speaker 1: resource wars. Now, these are fairly broad categories, and we
Speaker 1: are likely to see variations of each of these archetypes attempted.
Speaker 1: You may note my lack of enthusiasm for any of
Speaker 1: the possibilities. This is a result of my own bias.
Speaker 1: I am not a statist, and while Behemoth is obviously
Speaker 1: the nightmare solution, I am not excited by either the
Speaker 1: neoliberal climate Leviathan or climate MAO. Top down solutions to
Speaker 1: big problems can work, clearly, but they have a nasty
Speaker 1: tendency to crush people in order to fit them into
Speaker 1: a system. An example of why I fear climate Leviathan
Speaker 1: in particular came on June one, when the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Police Department rated the home of a man with a
Speaker 1: significant quantity of illegal fireworks in the midst of the
Speaker 1: deadliest fire season in living memory. The Boys at the
Speaker 1: top decided that cops would need to crack down on
Speaker 1: fireworks fenders. It seems logical enough from a high vantage point,
Speaker 1: and elected leaders always like to send police in to
Speaker 1: see ship because then they can say X pounds of
Speaker 1: substance y was confiscated, and that makes for an easy
Speaker 1: sound bite. But on this occasion, the l ap D
Speaker 1: fucked up. Their technicians loaded what they thought were sixteen
Speaker 1: point five pounds of explosives into an armored truck in
Speaker 1: order to safely detonate it. Instead, they set off forty
Speaker 1: two pounds, which started a chain reaction that turned the
Speaker 1: entire armored truck into a massive I e. D. The
Speaker 1: resulting explosion destroyed multiple homes and led to the deaths
Speaker 1: of two people plus numerous injuries. These are the sort
Speaker 1: of decisions we can expect from climate Leviathan, and the
Speaker 1: sort of consequences too. In their book, Wainwright and Man
Speaker 1: the least likely but best case scenario as something they
Speaker 1: call climate X. This would be a decentralized, ground up
Speaker 1: adaptation to the realities of climate change, a reorganization of
Speaker 1: society not around the lines forced on it by some Leviathan,
Speaker 1: but by regular people rejecting both the consumptive, destructive patterns
Speaker 1: of old and the need for a strong dictatorial power
Speaker 1: to envision a future for them. This is the least
Speaker 1: likely scenario for a number of reasons. For one thing,
Speaker 1: Climate X requires getting a large number of people to
Speaker 1: embrace a future radically different and fundamental organization from the
Speaker 1: world they've known. Climate MAL has to do this too,
Speaker 1: but within the sort of strong state framework that is
Speaker 1: at least much more familiar and thus more comfortable to
Speaker 1: billions of people. We can envision the state taking charge
Speaker 1: and instituting radical change much more easily than we can
Speaker 1: imagine hundreds of millions of people making the decision to
Speaker 1: alter their lives for the betterment of billions of strangers.
Speaker 1: Climate Leviathan offers a very plausible set of predictions for
Speaker 1: the different paths that are most likely, but of course
Speaker 1: it is still not guaranteed that our nation, or other
Speaker 1: large blocks of nations, will ever complete their climate ode
Speaker 1: Loup Mike Davis is a historian and a social critic
Speaker 1: with an enviable reputation for predicting the future. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety he published City of Courts, an analysis of Los
Speaker 1: Angeles that many saw as predicting the epic riots that
Speaker 1: convulsive the city. In nineteen ninety two, his work was
Speaker 1: respected enough within Los Angeles that the Crips and the
Speaker 1: Bloods brought him on as an adviser to help negotiate
Speaker 1: peacemaking deals. In nine Davis wrote Cataclysm of Fear, which
Speaker 1: predicted the next twenty plus years of life in southern California,
Speaker 1: with the line cataclysm has become virtually routine. In two
Speaker 1: thousand five, he published a book on the Avian flu
Speaker 1: as a plague of capitalism, titled The Monster Inters. Davis
Speaker 1: quoted the influencer researcher Robert Webster saying, if a pandemic
Speaker 1: happened today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed and understaffed because
Speaker 1: many medical personnel would be afflicted with the disease. Vaccine
Speaker 1: production would be slow, critical community services would be immobilized.
Speaker 1: Reserves of existing vaccines and medical equipment would be quickly depleted,
Speaker 1: leaving most people vulnerable to infection. Sounds familiar. Permanent bio
Speaker 1: protection against new plagues, Davis added, would require more than vaccines.
Speaker 1: It would need the suppression of these structures of disease emergence.
Speaker 1: The revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that no
Speaker 1: capitalist or state capitalist country whatever willingly undertake. Also, by
Speaker 1: the way, Mike Davis predicted the two thousand eight economic
Speaker 1: crash in an article for the Los Angeles Times, the
Speaker 1: point is he's the kind of guy you should listen
Speaker 1: to when he makes predictions. In two thousand ten, Mike
Speaker 1: looked at the utter failure of international efforts to mitigate
Speaker 1: climate change and imagined a not improbable scenario in which
Speaker 1: mitigation would be quietly abandoned in favor of accelerated investment
Speaker 1: and selective adaptation for Earth's first class passengers. And it's
Speaker 1: here I might bring us briefly back to the subject
Speaker 1: of Jeff Bezos's flight to space. An analysis by Media
Speaker 1: Matters found that the NBC, ABC, and CBS morning shows
Speaker 1: devoted two hundred twelve minutes to Bezos's flight. By contrast,
Speaker 1: those same shows spent two hundred and sixty seven minutes
Speaker 1: covering climate in all of twenty twenty. Now, rich people
Speaker 1: flee to space isn't the likeliest solution the elites will
Speaker 1: shoot for. It's more probable that they'd continue what they've
Speaker 1: been doing for decades. Diverting more resources towards creating permanent
Speaker 1: safe zones shielded from the worst of climate change and
Speaker 1: isolated enough from population centers that their security forces can
Speaker 1: protect them from interlopers. There will be token efforts carbon
Speaker 1: taxes and famine relief, but on the whole, the world's
Speaker 1: poor and much of the middle class will be abandoned
Speaker 1: to misery and death. The only public field the powerful
Speaker 1: will invest in his law enforcement. We've seen shades of
Speaker 1: this already last spring, when the coronavirus started its deadly
Speaker 1: rampage through the Western democracies. The Internet filled with a
Speaker 1: flurry of year identical articles from Bloomberg Coronavirus escape Rich
Speaker 1: Americans head to New Zealand, the New Yorker Doomsday prep
Speaker 1: for the super Rich Vanity Fair inside the survivalist bunker
Speaker 1: where some wealthy people hope to ride out coronavirus. And
Speaker 1: from the Guardian super rich jet off to disaster bunkers
Speaker 1: amid coronavirus outbreak. The gist of all these articles is
Speaker 1: that the ultra wealthy have built a global system of
Speaker 1: safe houses and bunkers in places they deemed secure in
Speaker 1: the event of a wide variety of catastrophes. What I
Speaker 1: find interesting about this is that their preparations are not
Speaker 1: particularly focused in what we know does not suggest any
Speaker 1: sort of collapse the wealthy sea coming due to the
Speaker 1: special knowledge they have as members of the elite. Rather,
Speaker 1: the evidence suggests they've simply fallen into the same assumption
Speaker 1: as millions of regular people. Something terrible is on the horizon.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seventeen, Lincoln co founder Reid Hoffmann told
Speaker 1: The New Yorker that he estimated fifty percent of Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley billionaires had already purchased some sort of a ocalypse
Speaker 1: escape plan. And honestly, if you had that kind of money,
Speaker 1: why wouldn't you? This is bleak as hell. Of course,
Speaker 1: the individuals most responsible for encouraging and profiting from the
Speaker 1: reckless consumption that has endangered us all abandoning society via
Speaker 1: the most literal application of fuck you, money and history.
Speaker 1: But when you dig into the whole story here, it's
Speaker 1: actually somewhat optimistic, because the thing is, these people are
Speaker 1: clearly just as terrified as the rest of us. That's
Speaker 1: why they do things like spend one point five million
Speaker 1: dollars a piece for a nine hundred and twenty square
Speaker 1: foot room and a survival condo built into an underground
Speaker 1: missile silo in Kansas. The best thing many of them
Speaker 1: can think to do is build isolated miniatures of the
Speaker 1: outside world. Staff it with former Navy seals and hope
Speaker 1: for the best. These are not people who have a plan.
Speaker 1: This was really driven home to me in a two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen article by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and
Speaker 1: writer whose work has been extremely influential among tech elites.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seventeen, he was invited to what he
Speaker 1: described as a super deluc private resort to deliver a
Speaker 1: keynote speech on the future of technology. Quote. After I arrived,
Speaker 1: I was ushered into what I thought was the green room,
Speaker 1: But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken
Speaker 1: to a stage, I sat around a playing round table
Speaker 1: as my audience was brought to me five super wealthy guys, yes,
Speaker 1: all men from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world.
Speaker 1: After a bit of small talk, I realized they had
Speaker 1: no interest in the information I had prepared about the
Speaker 1: future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.
Speaker 1: Those questions quickly led to the climate crisis, and they
Speaker 1: wanted to know if New Zealand or Alaska was a
Speaker 1: safer escape bet. One of these CEOs had just finished
Speaker 1: building his own underground bunker system and wanted to know,
Speaker 1: how do I maintain authority over my security force after
Speaker 1: the event? Quote the event that was their euphemism for
Speaker 1: the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or
Speaker 1: Mr robot hack that takes everything down. The single question
Speaker 1: occupied us for the rest of the hour. The new
Speaker 1: armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from
Speaker 1: the angry mobs, but how would they pay the guards
Speaker 1: once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from
Speaker 1: choosing their own leader. The billionaires considered using special combination
Speaker 1: locks on the food supply that only they knew, or
Speaker 1: making guards where disciplinary collars of some kind in return
Speaker 1: for their survival, or maybe building robots to serve as
Speaker 1: guards and workers. If that technology could be developed in time.
Speaker 1: That's when it hit me. At least as far as
Speaker 1: these gentlemen were concerned. This was a talk about the
Speaker 1: future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk, colonizing Mars,
Speaker 1: Peter Tile, reversing the aging process, or sam Altman and
Speaker 1: Ray Kurz. While uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were
Speaker 1: preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot
Speaker 1: less to do with making the world a better place
Speaker 1: than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and
Speaker 1: insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of
Speaker 1: climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic,
Speaker 1: and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is
Speaker 1: really about just one thing escape. At one point, rush
Speaker 1: Off suggested that if these billionaires were really concerned about
Speaker 1: the loyalty of their hired security long term, their best
Speaker 1: bet would be to start treating those people like family. Now.
Speaker 1: Money loses value after the event, love does not. He
Speaker 1: also noted that if they were to use their power
Speaker 1: and influence to extend this ethos of inclusivity more broadly
Speaker 1: in their business practices, it might make such an event
Speaker 1: less likely to occur. Quote, they were amused by my optimism,
Speaker 1: but they didn't really buy it. They were not interested
Speaker 1: in how to avoid a calamity. They're convinced we are
Speaker 1: too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they
Speaker 1: don't believe they can affect the future, and that right
Speaker 1: there is why I am actually optimistic, because these people
Speaker 1: are the enemy. We are at present engaged in a
Speaker 1: battle to determine how the future of our species and
Speaker 1: life on earth will look. We, and by we I
Speaker 1: mean people who want a better, freer, healthier future for all,
Speaker 1: have a few different enemies, but our most powerful foes
Speaker 1: are the people currently standing atop the pyramid, fighting tooth
Speaker 1: and nail against any change to society that reduces their
Speaker 1: privilege and power. These men and women will go to
Speaker 1: their graves to preserve the present power structure as long
Speaker 1: as the rest of us go first. For decades, the
Speaker 1: enemy has had the upper hand, using disinformation, propaganda, the
Speaker 1: violence of the state, and an arsenal of lesser weapons.
Speaker 1: They disrupted every attempt to build a less extractive, more
Speaker 1: sustainable society. But now that the fires are at everyone's
Speaker 1: back door, they have no plan beyond locking themselves away
Speaker 1: from the consequences of the world they insisted on building.
Speaker 1: Reality can no longer be denied, and that's disrupted their
Speaker 1: ode loop. This means those of us on Team Better
Speaker 1: World finally have a chance to get the upper hand.
Speaker 1: To do that, though we're going to have to make
Speaker 1: some decisions of our own