Global warming is killing people in Canada and the U.S. as I write this.

Heat exhaustion is a miserable experience. The worst I ever had it was when I was working on the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut. I think it started while I was asleep. I used a hammock instead of a tent, which generally kept me decently cool, but the temperature hadn’t dropped much that night, and was sweating when I woke. My head hurt, and I felt sluggish. I immediately drank some water and had some food/electrolytes. The problem is, when it’s hot and humid enough, your body loses the ability to effectively cool itself. I hiked another few miles, feeling worse by the step, while taking time to take care of myself. I took frequent breaks, I drank lots of water, I tried to cool myself off at the well-named Limestone Spring campsite – I did everything I could. At that point in time I was reasonably healthy. I was backpacking for 10 days out of every 14, I had my Wilderness First Responder certification, and I’d been managing my excessive sweatiness while camping for many years at that point. I knew how to take care of myself, and I did everything I could while still hiking my allotted section of the trail.

I got to Salisbury, CT in a bit of a haze. I knew I wasn’t well, and that I needed to cool off, so I went straight to an ice cream shop, and by the time I made it to the counter, the temperature change of going into the air conditioning hit me with a wave of nausea. I almost collapsed.

If you’ve never had heat exhaustion, it’s a bit like having the flu on the most miserably hot day you’ve ever experienced. Everything feels wrong, and if you’re lucky (assuming you’re alone like I was) you can tell your brain isn’t working right. It’s a horrible feeling, and looking back, it freaks me out a little that I was addled enough to think I should keep hiking.

Heat stroke, the next stage before death, is worse. 

I got lucky. I was young, healthy, and accustomed to the activity I was undertaking. If I was in the same circumstances now, there’s a very real chance I wouldn’t have made it to that ice cream shop.

Death by heat is miserable. I don’t know any other way to put it, just from the tiny taste I got of the early stages.

As I write this, there’s a heat wave in large parts of the United States and Canada. It’s breaking temperature records and it is, without question, killing people right now.

Temperature extremes affect us differently depending on what we’re used to, up to a point. A normal day in Arizona can be a lethal heat wave in Canada. Yesterday Lytton, BC got up to 46.6°C/116°F. On top of the formerly unheard-of temperatures (I regret to say this won’t be the last time this happens), virtually nobody in Canada has air conditioning. They’ve never needed it before. **Correction: Plenty of people in Canada do have air conditioning. It’s not as universal as it is in the parts of the US that get that more often, but it is around. That’s a thing I’m glad to have been wrong about. Sorry for the mistake!**

People died yesterday because of global warming.

They died because a few decades ago, a handful of multimillionaires learned that the source of their wealth was rapidly destabilizing the entire planet’s climate, and they responded the way capitalists always do – they spent some of their fortune to mislead people, to protect their income.

I want to be clear here – the folks who made that call at the top of every fossil fuel corporation are people who do not need more money. They could never have another cent come their way beyond the interest on their existing fortunes, and they would be able to live in luxury for the rest of their lives, as would their children and grandchildren. That’s true today, and it was true back then. These were not people faced with even the relative “poverty” of a middle-class lifestyle.

But it wasn’t enough. They decided that the people who died yesterday, and the people who are dying right now, and those who will die tomorrow, and every day for the rest of our lives and beyond, were worth less than turning obscene wealth into unimaginable wealth.

They committed murder for profit, and they knew they were doing it. That is no different from those who profit from endless war, and so spend money to ensure that the war never ends. It is, in my opinion, worse than the crimes of any paid assassin. In the end, it will result in more death than any terrorist attack in history.

This is not hyperbole.

This is the reality of climate change – it’s people being killed by the ruling class in the name of greed.

This is also why that ruling class cannot be allowed to keep their power. It’s why humanity cannot have a ruling class. We can’t survive that any longer. The millionaires oozing around the halls of power are no different than any rulers of any other society – they make decisions based on what they think benefits themselves, no matter the cost to everyone else.

Continuing to value private property and wealth over human life will drive humanity to extinction.

Here are some useful tips on surviving heat waves. As I say in my direct action post, education is important, and that includes knowing things for basic survival. One tip I’ll add for now, is that if you don’t have air conditioning, see if you can gain access to a store, mall, or some other public space that does have it. While it’s useful to acclimatize yourself to heat, when you’re getting to extreme temperatures, cooling down periodically makes a big difference – it allows your body to rest and recover. Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.

Unfortunately, life still costs money, and this blog is my only means of income right now. If you get some value from my writing, consider signing up to help support my work at patreon.com/oceanoxia. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month, and doing so gets you access to some additional content. Check it out, and share my work with any who you think would appreciate it. Thanks!

India Walton: “This is organizing”

India Walton just won the Democratic Party primary for the mayoral race in Buffalo, NY. She’s a socialist, and has centered the working class in her campaign thus far. It’s also likely that, given the voting record of her city, Walton will win her election in November, though obviously nothing is guaranteed.

The line from the speech that I quoted in this post’s title is one I want to dwell on for a moment.

“This is organizing.”

Organizing is key to any of the changes we want. Any progress towards justice, equality, or even a future for humanity goes against the systems that gave our ruling class their power. Not only will they pour their billions into opposing candidates like Walton during elections, they will also do everything they can to corrupt, co-opt, and disempower such politicians once in office. Organizing is our best tool for fighting back against that – specifically organizing that’s focused on the results we want, not on any particular individual.

Organization that outlasts electoral campaigns is how we can hold leaders of all sorts accountable. It’s how the working class (which includes the “middle class”, by the way) can keep their power ready to use. Organization is the most important maintenance of any system with a pretense at democracy. It’s equivalent to ensuring the brakes work on your car – they’re no good if you don’t think about function and maintenance until you’re in a crisis and need to stop fast.

There will never be a time when we will be safe from people seeking to accumulate power over others. Organization is our best tool to prevent that, or to take that power away. It’s not just about knocking on doors to get votes, it’s about knocking on doors during a power outage to make sure those in your community are OK. It’s about making sure nobody in your community is going to starve if they go on strike. It’s about working together to ensure our would-be rulers cannot achieve their ends by threatening our lives through starvation, exposure, lack of medicine, or any other means. It’s how we defend ourselves, and how we replace leaders when the need arises.

It’s also our best bet at surviving climate change.

The more work we do to organize now, the more likely we are to be prepared for the future, no matter what it throws at us. Collective action is humanity’s greatest strength, and always has been. It’s how we can achieve things that are laughably impossible for any one person alone.

It’s also how the concentrated power of the ruling class can be dismantled – because the left, at its best, is all about using humanity’s greatest strengths for the benefit of all humanity.

The presupposition of scarcity and competition should not dictate how we end fossil fuel use

I’ve noticed a frustrating tendency among some climate activists to cling to a mode of thought that works to uphold the justifications for capitalism, and the bleak view of life perpetuated by capitalist and fascist propagandists. It’s the notion of endless competition as a driving force in society. It’s Spencer’s pseudo-scientific notion of “survival of the fittest”, supported by the lie that resources will always be less than what would meet the basic needs of humanity. The notion of false scarcity was probably made most famous by the diamond industry, which boosted the price of its product by strictly controlling the supply, and limiting the rate at which new diamonds entered the market. Similar shady practices also drive up housing prices, and a related line of justification is used not to increase the price of food – though that has happened a bit – but rather to justify the hunger of those who are prevented from eating food that would otherwise go to waste. Diamonds are actually pretty common, there are more empty homes than homeless people, and there is more food than we need to feed everyone. We are not, in reality, stuck in endless competition with each other. We live in a world and in a time when nobody needs to worry about their basic necessities.

We’re just forced to, in order to force us to use our bodies and our time for the enrichment of someone else.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and if we’re going to find a way out of this mess, we will have to train ourselves not to see the world that way, and I think that includes our sources of power. Maybe this is also partly because we’ve found that certain sources – fossil fuels – cannot be used safely, so we see a need to get a “better” energy source, and that can lead to viewing things like solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and so on as being in competition with each other. As Le Guin said, we live in capitalism, and its power seems inescapable. For an example, take this recent study from the University of Sussex:

If countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritize support for renewables, rather than nuclear power.

That’s the finding of new analysis of 123 countries over 25 years by the University of Sussex Business School and the ISM International School of Management which reveals that nuclear energy programmes around the world tend not to deliver sufficient carbon emission reductions and so should not be considered an effective low carbon energy source.

Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions — and in poorer countries nuclear programmes actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions.

Published today in Nature Energy, the study reveals that nuclear and renewable energy programmes do not tend to co-exist well together in national low-carbon energy systems but instead crowd each other out and limit effectiveness.

Benjmin K Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said: “The evidence clearly points to nuclear being the least effective of the two broad carbon emissions abatement strategies, and coupled with its tendency not to co-exist well with its renewable alternative, this raises serious doubts about the wisdom of prioritising investment in nuclear over renewable energy. Countries planning large-scale investments in new nuclear power are risking suppression of greater climate benefits from alternative renewable energy investments.”

This is where I start to worry about the analysis of these researchers, and the conclusions they draw. From what I can tell, they’re basing their conclusions on the notion that we’ll be swapping out power sources, but leaving much of the rest of how things work as is. We have the resources, as a species, to do a large-scale rollout of renewable power sources, and also to build new nuclear power plants. The obstacle isn’t one of resources for investment, it’s one of political and social obstacles. Likewise, for countries that currently have well-established nuclear power, it’s not like that’s the only factor affecting CO2 emissions, and many of the power plants in question are decades old, which means they’re worse on pretty much every metric than newer reactor and plant designs.

I have my reservations about nuclear power, but they largely stem back to the same root as my problem with this sort of analysis. It’s likely that without changing the power and incentive structures of our society, no power source will be either sufficient or safe. There are too many problems, even if we only focus on the environment, that are caused by pursuit of profit over all else, and that cannot be solved because doing so isn’t  “profitable”. I think it’s highly unlikely that we will be able to avoid total collapse under the political and economic conditions these authors assume will continue to be the norm.

The researchers, using World Bank and International Energy Agency data covering 1990-2014, found that nuclear and renewables tend to exhibit lock-ins and path dependencies that crowd each other out, identifying a number of ways in which a combined nuclear and renewable energy mix is incompatible.

These include the configuration of electricity transmission and distribution systems where a grid structure optimized for larger scale centralized power production such as conventional nuclear, will make it more challenging, time-consuming and costly to introduce small-scale distributed renewable power.

Similarly, finance markets, regulatory institutions and employment practices structured around large-scale, base-load, long-lead time construction projects for centralized thermal generating plant are not well designed to also facilitate a multiplicity of much smaller short-term distributed initiatives.

Andy Stirling, Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the University of Sussex Business School, said: “This paper exposes the irrationality of arguing for nuclear investment based on a ‘do everything’ argument. Our findings show not only that nuclear investments around the world tend on balance to be less effective than renewable investments at carbon emissions mitigation, but that tensions between these two strategies can further erode the effectiveness of averting climate disruption.”

The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy.

And in countries with a low GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production clearly associates with CO2 emissions that tend to be higher.

Patrick Schmid, from the ISM International School of Management München, said: “While it is important to acknowledge the correlative nature of our data analysis, it is astonishing how clear and consistent the results are across different time frames and country sets. In certain large country samples the relationship between renewable electricity and CO2-emissions is up to seven times stronger than the corresponding relationship for nuclear.”

Ironically, my objection to this analysis is similar to an objection I’ve raised to more avid nuclear advocates – we can’t base our plans for the future on how things have been historically, because we are in a historically unprecedented time. If we continue to assign value and importance within the constraints of a capitalist rule set, we’re never going to see an end to overproduction. If a grid designed for distributed power generation can’t handle the output of a nuclear plant, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to put the technology to use. If your reactor is adequately protected from sea level rise (high elevation or placement on a floating structure), a nuclear plant could be an excellent way to power large-scale desalination, hydrolysis, or both. It could also be used to power industrial activity – factories, waste processing, shipping, or even indoor farming.

As I’ve mentioned before, the best path to both sustainable population size and sustainable energy usage is to equalize at a decent standard of living, and to stop centering things around consumption and growth:

However, not only do the findings show that the energy required to provide a decent living could likely be met entirely by clean sources, but it also offers a firm rebuttal to reactive claims that reducing global consumption to sustainable levels requires an end to modern comforts and a ‘return to the dark ages’.

The authors’ tongue in cheek response to the critique that sweeping energy reform would require us all to become ‘cave dwellers’ was: “Yes, perhaps, but these are rather luxurious caves with highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food and washing clothes; comfortable temperatures maintained throughout the year, computer networks — among other things — not to mention the larger caves providing universal healthcare and education to all 5-19 year olds.”

That said, providing growing conditions that can feed humanity, ensuring access to water, maintaining pleasant indoor temperature and air quality, and manufacturing durable goods in a sustainable manner are all likely to consume a lot of power. I generally favor distributed power generation through “renewable” energy sources, for the flexibility and resilience that provides, but it would be very foolish, in my opinion, to just dismiss nuclear power, or to stop working on ways to improve on it.

There’s also another factor to consider. Ideally, we’re going to do more than just deal with our impact on the climate and reduce the production of new waste. We also need to deal with the waste we’ve already produced, both in terms of disposed products, and in terms of things like mine waste, industrial byproducts, and new kinds of toxic waste like the concentrated brine from desalination plants.

We need to make an industry out of cleaning up and rendering harmless a vast array of substances, including radioactive waste that has nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear power.

Unfortunately, the speed at which the planet is heating means that the amount of energy we’re going to have to consume to both survive and end fossil fuel use is going to be massive. Even as we take steps to increase energy efficiency and reduce consumption, we’re going to have other growing demands for energy. I think it’s entirely likely that in some situations, a nuclear reactor is going to be the best option. The focus should be on what conditions must be met. I think most modern reactor designs are very, very safe, if they’re operated by people whose primary incentive is their safe and reliable operation, without consideration for things like profit. Any community within the exclusion zone of a reactor should have a role in oversight of that reactor, as well as a responsibility to educate themselves in defense against misinformation.

If we manage to actually gain the power to start reshaping society, one of our first problems is going to be cleaning up after the last century or so. It only seems responsible to keep nuclear power as an option, for when we do need a massive concentration of energy in one location.

I also think that we’d do well, insofar as we have the power to influence any of this, to encourage as non-fossil energy production is possible, and rather than focusing on storing excess for later, use the excess as it’s generated, and arrange things so that at the grid’s lowest ebb, we have enough for the minimum requirements of day to day life.

As I mentioned at the outset, a lot of the world’s power comes from control over access to vital resources – food, water, shelter, healthcare, and in the modern era, electricity. One of the reasons that mutual aid networks can serve as a foundation for organized, working class power, is that they make it harder to use the subtler forms of coercion that government and capital typically use to keep people in line. If you can ensure supply lines of food, water, and so on, then people actually have firm ground on which to make a stand. A strike is far more sustainable when those involved know that their families will still have their needs met, even if they lose their wages.

We can use abundance as a weapon against economic coercion.

Now, as we’ve seen recently, they’re willing to be overt, if that’s what it takes to keep people working, but strike-breaking, or openly manipulating things like access to unemployment insurance in order to force people to work for poverty wages, tend to help turn people against the ruling class.

As this century continues, I think it would be wise to adopt a similar strategy for energy production. We need to combine increased efficiency with increased zero-carbon power generation to create a state of abundance, where excess can be used for essential work, and it’s much harder for a government or corporation to wield power over people by controlling their electricity access.

We should continue to invest in distributed power generation, especially at the community level, where possible, but I honestly think we’d be foolish cease all investment in nuclear power.

Unfortunately, life still costs money, and this blog is my only means of income right now. If you get some value from my writing, consider signing up to help support my work at patreon.com/oceanoxia. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month, and doing so gets you access to some additional content. Check it out, and share my work with any who you think would appreciate it. Thanks!

Kick them when they’re down: The fight we’re in isn’t fair, and we shouldn’t pretend it is.

This is a useful interview on how to deal with tech monopolies, but I think it doesn’t go far enough. The approaches that Doctrow lays out are, I think, an excellent starting place. If we want humanity to survive the next century or two, and to simultaneously build a more just and happy society, we need to be working on a whole lot of changes all at once. That means the kinds of power-building work I’ve talked about before, but it also means using the the political system we have now to make that other work easier, to whatever degree we can. That means both direct organizing, and working through our representative democracy. We have to do it all.

Under the current system, the default approach to change is a sort of timid incrementalism that always seems to treat history as a settled matter, starting yesterday. That means that when a dramatic change is made, there’s generally a great deal of opposition and complaining, but then as soon as anyone suggests changing things back, it’s treated as just as big a problem as the initial change. Change is viewed as both generally bad, and as value-neutral. The problem isn’t the kind of change, it’s the scale of that change.  Taking steps to undo the damage done by “Reaganomics”, or even by the Trump administration, is met with similar or even increased level of hand-wringing, as the initial damage. It’s different people making a stink, but they make about the same level of stink, and more importantly, the media treats it as all being the same.

It’s all just a game played by opposing teams, and it’s “fair” to give both sides equal footing.

Of course, this ignores the fact that, when one side fetishizes procedure and incrementalism, while the other side is committed to getting their way no matter the cost, you get predictable results. Things either move in the direction preferred by the more committed side, or they don’t move at all.

Changes in social norms – like the gradually increasing acceptance of homosexuality – can happen under this framework, but not any real changes in how power is distributed or used.

We tend to treat it as an unassailable truth that the way we operate now is the best way to operate, and so truly systemic change is anathema. That’s why, for all the changes seen in the United States over the last century, power has continued to rest primarily in the hands of the capitalist class, which has used its power to whittle away those changes in things like labor law and social safety nets that gave more power to the working classes.

People whose primary goal is the accumulation of wealth and power will always use the wealth and power they currently have to get more. The more they have, the more they are able to reshape society to funnel more to themselves, and to prevent others from preventing that. This is a path that leads inevitably to monopoly and to oligarchy. Even if someone like Bezos or Gates were to decide that they should burn through all of their personal net worth to solve one problem or another, the end result of that is that they would lose the personal power that society gives to capitalists, and someone else would increase in power by comparison. At best, the changes made by one multibillionaire would be temporary, and rolled back by those multibillionaires who chose instead to continue hoarding power.

Ultimately, the only way out of this trap is to make it impossible for individuals to hold that level of power. Until we do that, there will always be people like the Kochs, like Bezos, like Musk, or like Gates, pulling strings around the globe for their personal benefit, and asserting control over resources that we desperately need for things like dealing with pandemics, or with global climate change.

We need to use the tools we have – taxation and regulation – to decrease the power of the ruling class, much as FDR was doing when he talked about taking power away from “economic royalists”, but we cannot simply stop there. We can’t win in a metaphorical bout of fisticuffs and then walk away having “taught them a lesson”, while still leaving them with outsized wealth and power. History has shown that they will, in general, respond by stabbing us in the back. Their goal is dominance, not winning in a fair fight.

Take away all of their power, and don’t give it to anyone else. Use it for degrowth, for new energy infrastructure, and for adaptation to coming climate change. Use it to make sure that nobody can use poverty or deprivation to force others to work FOR them.

We have to knock down the ruling class and kick them while they’re down. We have to remove that class from existence. That does not mean that we have to kill anyone, necessarily. Ideally, the “horrible fate” I want for today’s billionaires includes guaranteed healthcare, food, shelter, freedom of speech, expression, and movement, and so on. The one thing I want to take away from them is their ability to govern the lives of other people, and I don’t want that ability to go to anyone else in their stead.

We are in a fight for our lives, and for the lives of those with less power than each of us might personally be able to wield. We are fighting against people who have attained their power by exploiting every loophole and weakness they can find, and cheating every person they can. We are not in a fair fight, and we should not pretend otherwise.

If you find the contents of this blog useful or entertaining, or if you think that it’s moving in that direction, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/oceanoxia, and/or encouraging others to do so. I’d to keep writing, and keep building this into a useful resource for those who want a better world, and to do that, I need money to survive. I’m still pulling in far, far less than minimum wage, and it’d be awesome if I could close that gap.

Mitigating the harm of climate change, using changes in the climate

One thing that is fast becoming a central theme of my work is the notion that, in addition to decentralizing political power, and creating a more democratic economy than capitalism can provide, we also need view ourselves as a part of the “natural world”. That means moving away from the historical trend of using technology to separate ourselves from the rest of the biosphere, and instead more fully integrating human civilization with the ecosystems that surround us.

This includes a lot of the standard stuff from the solarpunk genre: urban agriculture and urban wildlife, waste management that minimizes or eliminates pollution, and an end to wasteful things like planned obsolescence. It also goes beyond that, to molding ourselves to better suit our ecosystems, and to reduce the amount of labor and energy required to survive in a sometimes hostile landscape.

As the climate warms, the trend in much of the world seems to be towards stable or increasing annual rainfall, but with all of that rain coming in a smaller number of more intense storms. The practical effect of that is a worsening cycle of drought, flooding, and erosion, as the majority of the year is too dry for most plant life, and the sudden, intense rainfall floods the landscape causing landslides, and washing away both plant life and topsoil.

This, in turn, is likely to worsen the next year’s drought, while doing little to provide actual relief, as the water all rushes out to sea, or evaporates quickly following the downpour. The result is a cycle that’s likely to affect a huge portion of currently inhabited land, starting with the areas already suffering from this, like California:

As climate change intensifies the severity and frequency of these extreme events, amplifying refill rates could help the state reach a more balanced groundwater budget. One practice, called water banking or managed aquifer recharge, involves augmenting surface infrastructure, such as reservoirs or pipelines, with underground infrastructure, such as aquifers and wells, to increase the transfer of floodwater for storage in groundwater basins.

A newer strategy for managing surface water, compared to more traditional methods like reservoirs and dams, water banking poses multiple benefits including flood risk reduction and improved ecosystem services. While groundwater basins offer a vast network for water safekeeping, pinpointing areas prime for replenishment, gauging infrastructure needed and the amount of water available remains key, especially in a warming and uncertain climate.

“Integrating managed aquifer recharge with floodwaters into already complex water management infrastructure offers many benefits, but requires careful consideration of uncertainties and constraints. Our growing understanding of climate change makes this an opportune time to examine the potential for these benefits,” said senior author David Freyberg, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

The researchers designed a framework to estimate future floodwater availability across the state. Developing a hybrid computer model using hydrologic and climate simulations and statistical tools, the team calculated water available for recharge under different climate change scenarios through 2090. They also identified areas where infrastructure investments should be prioritized to tap floodwater potential and increase recharge.

As things currently stand, flood waters tend to be dangerous. They sweep up badly stored chemicals, human and animal waste, and sediments carrying pollution from past eras, resulting in a mix of poisons and bacteria that can do a lot of harm. Building infrastructure to catch that water, clean it, and direct it into aquifers would be a huge investment, but one that I think would be well worth it, and have benefits lasting far into the future.

Similar to things like food forests and managed prairies, water conservation and banking practices can help us build up not only our own resilience, but also the resilience of surrounding ecosystems.

Image shows the flooded terraces of a Balinese rice farm, creating a sort of managed ecosystem of grasses, trees, and ponds climbing up mountainsides

“For most crops, irrigation simply provides water for the plant’s roots. But in a Balinese rice terrace, water is used to construct a complex, pulsed artificial ecosystem. Water temples manipulate the states of the system, at ascending levels in regional hierarchies.”

The industrial revolution, colonialism, and capitalism all worked to devastate the biosphere of this planet in ways we’re still working to fully understand. We must turn from being consumers of the world, to being stewards of it. In the past, rhetoric like this might have been used to push the idea that we should just “leave nature alone”, but I want to be clear that that’s not what I’m suggesting.

The ecological collapse we’ve created means that we have a responsibility to use our technology and understanding to help our ecosystems survive, for our own benefit. That’s likely to mean increased intervention in what remains of wild spaces, at least in some ways. I think it’s obvious we should work to end the conditions that drive practices like deforestation and over-fishing; but it may also mean things like using banked or desalinated water to irrigate drought-stricken “wilderness”, if we can find ways to do so.

This is a complex issue, and must be approached as such. The measures taken to help one region could prove devastating in another, and it’s almost certain that such efforts will only work if undertaken in a cooperative manner across the arbitrary borders that divide the world into “nations”. As I’ve said before, a better world is possible, but I believe it will require the creation and maintenance of global solidarity. We cannot continue to indulge exploitation and bigotry, if we want to survive.

If you find the contents of this blog useful or entertaining, or if you think that it’s moving in that direction, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/oceanoxia, and/or encouraging others to do so. I’d to keep writing, and keep building this into a useful resource for those who want a better world, and to do that, I need money to survive. I’m still pulling in far, far less than minimum wage, and it’d be awesome if I could close that gap.

Renegade Cut: Why Riots Happen

America’s “protest season” has begun, and the government has continued its brutal response to any calls for systemic change. Because injustice has not been corrected, political unrest will not cease. As they saying goes, “No justice, no peace”. This video is a useful examination of riots, and how violence is defined, justified, or condemned within our society. Education alone will not save us, but it is a powerful tool in the struggle for a better world.

The video has been “age-restricted”, I suspect due to a mass-flagging campaign by those who object to any content critical of police, and of white supremacy. You’ll need to sign in to see it, but I think that’s worth doing.

 

Guest post: Planning a pantry, chapter one of…?

Guest post by Tegan
Note: This is the beginning of our effort to build up advice on the kind of pro-social prepping mentioned in the direct action post

When thinking of creating a pantry, there are of course two immediate questions that need answering: (1) what is the pantry for? and (2) how do you utilize those foodstuffs to ensure that money spent on it isn’t wasted?

To me, building a pantry always seemed like the easy and logical step. My mother and grandmother both always had pantries filled with options for food. In regards to my grandmother’s pantry, which included her kitchen fridge and freezer, the downstairs full-sized freezer, the freezer in the building next door, and a root cellar, my grandmother seemed prepared for an apocalypse – or simply grandchildren visiting, as she would usually pull bags of potato chips and cookies out of the bedroom closet as well as the ice cream from the basement freezer. My mother, not having the space my grandmother did as well as having to move several times in her adult life, had fewer options. I grew up with only a single extra three-quarter size standalone freezer as well as the requisite amount of cupboard and pantry goods. This meant that when I was first developing my household management skills after I moved into my first of many apartments, I naturally knew that I had to buy food for pantries. This meant that my initial answer to the first question, asked implicitly almost two decades ago, was ‘the pantry is to have a pantry.’

In the intervening two decades I have moved households dozens of times. I have had any number of roommates with differing or similar approaches to food. I have learned to cook a wider variety of foods as well as learned a large number of general-use techniques in the kitchen. I have gone in and out of doomerism concerning peak oil and into concern about late-stage capitalism and climate change that Abe discusses so eloquently. I have moved internationally twice. And throughout most of this, I have been very poor. Answering that first question now, my response would be: ‘the pantry is to protect against lean times, to buy in bulk for savings if possible, to ensure that my household will always have something to eat even if it is boring.’

All well and good. We now have a more coherent and well thought out answer to the first question. The task gets harder as we move into the second question.

How to use the foodstuffs in your pantry to ensure that it isn’t wasted money and effort? My mother and grandmother have never fully known the answer to this question. For both of them, they use what they remember having in stock, and purchase duplicates of what they don’t remember. By the time I knew her, my grandmother was not in the habit of rotating through her stock and when she first entered a nursing home a few years ago, there was a great purge of old food. Meat expired over a decade previously. Frosting from the Clinton era. Home-canned vegetables that were both unlabeled and unrecognizable. My mother rotates her pantry semi-annually, but still has to throw out a fair amount of food. Usually vegetables that lurked in the back of the fridge, or the occasional item that was equally hidden in a freezer. Who actually gets to the back of their freezer often? Unless it is specifically a planned event, it can be difficult to remember to check the storage corners of the household. All this is to say that any ideas regarding pantry management I have, I have learned at the expense of good food gone to waste, and not from any training while growing up. Most of this advice can be summed up into one single sentence: Know What You Cook.

Almost every pantry article I have ever read – and I have read many! – has been written by a chef. Unsurprisingly, their ideas of what are kitchen Must-Have ingredients have been very different from my own. From lists stating that every household needs a quart of buttermilk at all times, to needing preserved lemons, or flatly stating that the author cannot live without at least three types of cheese in the house – these lists are each designed for one household in particular. And that’s ok! I don’t need a chef to put a stamp of approval on the type of cooking that my household does. We just need to eat the food that we buy as efficiently and effectively as possible. So what decisions do Abe and I make when purchasing food?

Firstly, we buy pasta. As cheap as we can find it, and several different kinds. Classic Italian pastas like spaghetti or rotini; the food of broke people everywhere, ramen; and if I wind up at an Asian grocer or the like I’ll buy rice pasta or egg noodle nests. But I want each purchase to at least offer me two packages per unit of currency, preferably three. Other households eat bread or rice or potatoes as the primary carb of their diet. We eat mostly pasta.

Secondly, we have lots of flavor options. Bouillon, tomato sauce, bbq sauce, sweet chili sauce, and hoisin sauce, when we have the resources. Even if you are eating the same food every single day, it won’t taste the same if you change up the flavor profile.

Thirdly, we always have the ability to bake. If I can’t figure out how to bake a cake with the ingredients that we have, we do not have enough food in the house. One of the first things I did after I arrived in Dublin was to bake a cake. I threw together canned coconut milk (we were out of milk), canned pumpkin, an egg, sugar, spices, and GF Halal flour intended for fasting meals (which was the only flour in the house). Was it the world’s best cake? No. But it filled that urge to have a warm sweet treat and did not require me to break quarantine.

Fourthly, we make sure that we have food other than carbs. Abe cares about vegetables so he ensures our freezer stays stocked with frozen veg. I care about protein so I make sure that we have eggs, and canned fish, and frozen meat, and deli meats that were on clearance that I also freeze.

Outside of these strong guidelines, we shop for deals. If something is cheap this week, we buy extra to have it in the house. We try to keep track of what we go through swiftly and adjust our shopping accordingly. But just as it’s important to know what to buy for yourself, it’s also important to track the failures. We don’t purchase a wide variety of grains. In the past we have done so, and we had a LOT of fancy or specialty grains to get rid of with the first international move. We don’t purchase a large amount of dried beans. We go through beans regularly enough, but not so swiftly as to require a significant portion of our storage space dedicated to them. We don’t buy items that we don’t know how to use. A friend had gifted me homemade pomegranate syrup. That stayed in my fridge through three moves and then it molded and I threw it out, unused. A package of boba survived ten years of moves before finally being eaten. In short, we don’t purchase food aspirationally.

So there it is! My two main tips for building a pantry can be summed up into two pithy and almost unhelpfully brief sentences: Know What You Cook, and Don’t Purchase Aspirationally.

If you want to help pay for the content of this blog, fill our bellies, and feed our pets, please head over to the Oceanoxia Collective on Patreon. My patrons are a wonderful group of people who give according to their abilities that I might live and work according to my needs. I’m grateful for every one of them, and you could join their ranks for as little as one U.S. dollar per month!

You should watch this video on mutual aid

I’ve already added this to my direct action post, but the more people see it, the better off the world will be. If pressed to describe my political movement leftward, I would say that the values with which I was raised haven’t changed a whole lot, but my understanding of the world has changed deepened a great deal. I think I’ve mentioned before that I was opposed to American imperialism and to capitalism before I realized I was. I’ve participated in activism around monstrosities like The School of the Americas/WHINSEC, the sanctions against Iraq and later invasion, the embargo against Cuba, climate change, and more. For all of that, I would say I’m relatively new to being “A Leftist”. I’ve learned enough to know that I have a huge amount left to learn. One of the most important things I’ve been learning is that there are a myriad of people looking to share what they’ve learned.

One theme I’ve encountered – a sort of a joke, I guess – is that the anarchist strategy for revolution is “do mutual aid and then we win”. Obviously, this kind of analysis is going to be too simplistic for any political theory that’s been around for a while, but at the surface level, it’s easy to see why people dismiss anarchism in this way. Part of the problem often seems to be a lack of understanding about what mutual aid actually is, what makes it different from the various things often described as “charity”, and where it fits into a desire for rapid, revolutionary change.

This video from Saint Andrewism covers all of that and more. Watch it, check out the rest of the channel, and support him on patreon if you can.

The danger of fascism has not gone away. Not even close.

As the world’s largest and most aggressive military power, I think it’s fair say that the rise of fascism in the United States is a matter of great concern for our entire species. I do not think that an overtly fascist U.S. would succeed in its goals over the long term. Fascism is an ideology that, dependent on fiction and scapegoating, will always carry the seeds of its own destruction. That said, beyond the entirely reasonable fear for the groups targeted by white supremacist fascism, there’s also the concern that the anti-environmentalist tendencies of the right would continue interfere with the global response to climate change badly enough and for long enough that we would be unable to cope with the approaching climate chaos.

I think for a lot of Americans, the Trump presidency was a wake-up call. That’s good, as far as it goes, but for whatever subset of the population didn’t realize how urgently change was needed before 2016, there’s a very real danger that Biden’s victory and the Democratic Party taking control of Congress will “hit the snooze button”. The conditions that gave rise to the Trump presidency have not gone away, and for all the talk about how different Biden and the Democrats are, they are not at all likely to do what’s needed to keep the U.S. from sliding further into overt, white supremacist fascism. The leaders of that party are wealthy, comfortable, and more concerned with maintaining their personal positions of power than they are with the future of the country or the species.

They may favor change, but only if that change doesn’t threaten their wealth and power. That means that the economic hardships, escalating nationalist and white supremacist propaganda, and the growing feeling of doom brought on by ecological and climate collapse will continue to push much of the white population of the United States towards fascism. The problem is that the economic system that governs most of the world is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals of democracy that are supposed to be at the core of a free and just society. Capitalism is designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those whose primary interest and ability is the hoarding of money. The results of this have always been the same – those at the top use their resources to solidify their lofty positions in society by funneling an ever-increasing amount away from everyone else. Under capitalism, society simultaneously becomes more authoritarian, while becoming more difficult for the growing pool of those at “the bottom”.

So-called “social democracies” mitigate this process through progressive tax structures and generous social safety nets, but from what I can tell that only slows the process, and shifts the burdens of it onto those colonies and “former” colonies that have been ruthlessly exploited for their resources throughout the history of capitalism. As those at the top continue to demand more, they erode social safety nets of all forms, to both take more of society’s wealth, and to increase the number of people desperate enough to agree to bad pay and conditions, in order to survive in a world with no other options.

The left and the extremist right both claim to offer solutions to these problems. On the left, we want to change the nature of the system that brought us to this point. We want power and wealth to be distributed more evenly, not just because we want everyone to have their needs met, but also because allowing a small ruling class to run everything, while exempting themselves from the problems created by their rule, threatens to destroy us all.

The right’s solution is to turn those with the least power into scapegoats. Minorities and foreigners are blamed for our problems, and punished with increased poverty. When that inevitably fails to solve anything, the number of groups being blamed, and the severity of the punishment is increased. This cycle gets repeated, until ethnic cleansing is the only “solution” left (since taking power away from those in charge is obviously off the table). A “correction” like the New Deal may be able set this process back a bit, but it’s not capable of actually stopping it.

And while this is underway at any stage, we will remain unable to deal with problems that, as with climate change, are driven by the endless need for accumulating wealth that makes up the foundation of any version of capitalism.

Biden and the Democratic party cannot save us, and they never could. What they can do, at least in theory, is slow the process down for a short while, to allow for the kinds of work that will empower us to save ourselves.

Whether it’s peasants with torches and pitchforks, unions going on strike, or mass political unrest of other kinds, collective power and collective action has always been the solution to the lethal greed and irresponsibility of the aristocracy. As it stands, those living in the heart of the American Empire lack the organization to force revolutionary change – violent or otherwise.

We need to use what time and resources we have to change that.

It’s hard to know how this effort will end up going. The willingness of the powerful to use violence to keep their power may be one of the most reliable trends in human history, and it has been a central feature of the United States of America from the beginning. I believe our best chance at both avoiding violence and at surviving it if avoidance becomes impossible is through encouraging people to look out for each other, and to begin relying on each other as communities, rather than on governments or corporations. We need to start rebuilding society from the ground up, within the crumbling structure of the systems that currently govern the world, so that we can use all these marvels of technology for the benefit of life as a whole. 

If we don’t, then momentum will carry us to an era of horrors that will make the 20th century look peaceful by comparison. We cannot afford to waste the next four years. We cannot afford to relax. Biden’s victory might have bought us time, but only if we work on organizing to change course now.

 

 

If you want to help pay for the content of this blog, cover the costs of my recent move, and feed my pets, please head over to the Oceanoxia Collective on Patreon. My patrons are a wonderful group of people who give according to their abilities that I might live and work according to my needs. I’m grateful for every one of them, and you could join their ranks for as little as one U.S. dollar per month!

This fire season looks bad for California.

If you or anyone you care about lives I’m California, now is a good time to prepare for a possible evacuation.

I would say this goes for anyone living in an area known to have seasonal fires. The exact contents of your “bug-out bag” and other evacuation prep may vary depending on your needs, but it’s a good idea to have something ready in case of short notice.

Not only will it make it easier for you to move it you need to, it means any time saved by preparing now will.be time you can use to help others, should the need arise.