Bad planet

Australia is an island continent composed of a vast treeless desert edged with a fringe of heavily urbanized temperate bush where the fierce heat of the land is moderated by onshore ocean breezes from the Pacific to the East and the Indian Ocean to the West.

Now, areas of this temperate fringe are aflame as hot desert winds fan bush fires amidst a record series of early-summer heat waves. A world audience watches in horror as news reaches them framed in terms of houses destroyed, lives lost, koalas scorched and kookaburras that no longer sing in the oppressive heat. Greta tweets, “Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?”

But it is indeed possible, probable, and arguably even inevitable because the climate crisis, née global warming, is embedded in a mostly white, liberal, humanist civilization whose peoples, at least since the middle of the fifteenth century, have privileged the appropriation of land, labour and geological resources over an ecological accommodation of the rest of the planet. It is this ideology, rooted in capital accumulation, that now manifests as extreme weather events.

Their remediation requires not just political action, but an almost unimaginable civilizational reboot. We refuse to make this leap because making it threatens the accustomed terms of our existence.

Despite conventional green-wisdom, and Greta’s urging, changing our predominant energy source to real-time solar, wind, photovoltaic, and hydro from the harvesting of prehistoric, subterranean stores of fossil biomass does not change the underlying modes of subjugation practiced by the capitalist class hell bent on resource extraction.

Alternative energy sources promote an extension of appropriation – the seizure of cobalt and lithium, for instance, in addition to the continued extraction of coal and oil. Having reached the ends of the earth, the territory of depredation is, even now, being technologically extended to the seabed where polymetallic nodules await harvesting deep beneath the world’s oceans to provide copper, manganese, nickel and cobalt – all elements essential to the chimera of new ‘clean’, ‘renewable’ energy. Can we doubt the extractive implications of state-sponsored and commercial space exploration?

The climate action agendas proposed or enacted across the planet, including the Green New Deal, represent opportunities to replace, and potentially to expand energy use – and thus to expand the despoliation of ecosystems, human culture, communities and individual lives.

They will do so by continuing to feed the algorithms of acquisition and over-consumption (by some) that Timothy Morton, Jared Diamond and other thinkers source to the beginnings of agriculture.

Excerpted from: ‘Bad Planet’.

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