How Not To Do Renewable Energy: A Case for Systemic Change

I am in favor of using renewable energy as one way to replace fossil fuels as a  power source. I don’t write about that on this blog as much as I used to, because I came to realize that simply writing about solutions is insufficient. Between nuclear energy, renewable energy, and an abundance of ways to decrease energy consumption, we’ve had the tools to solve the climate crisis for decades. The problem is not a lack of solutions, or even a lack of popular desire for change. The problem is that the US government serves neither the will, nor the interests of the people.  It serves the interests of capitalists – those who own for a living, rather than selling their labor. That makes sense, right? In a capitalist society, the government serves capitalists. There are exceptions to that, of course, but the vast majority of those rights and guarantees came as grudging concessions in the face of mass uprisings and disaster. Further, once rights are won, like a fair wage or the right to abortion (one of the times we arguably gained rights without a mass movement), they are under constant attack, and can be lost again.

I’ve talked before about how climate change is not the only environmental crisis facing us, though it’s unquestionably the biggest. Chemical pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss are also taking an increasing toll on the ecosystems that make our world habitable, and all of those problems are amplified by the rising temperature. It’s possible that, as climate chaos causes crop failures and escalating disasters, we’ll see the capitalists looking to cash in on the energy transition win out over fossil fuels and the would-be post-apocalyptic warlords. What that would not do is stop the chemical pollution and habitat destruction, or end the brutal exploitation and disregard for human life that still fuels the engines of capitalism. This was on my mind today, because I was recently reminded of a good example of why I don’t think we can leave it all to the current system.

One of the big problems with solar energy is at it requires a lot of surface area, and there’s not really any way to get around that. In my opinion, the way we ought to be rolling out photovoltaic power is by putting solar panels on roofs, and over things like parking lots, wherever we can. There is a lot of existing surface area that’s exposed to the sun, and that could be used to generate electricity or heat water, without claiming more land. Without doing something like destroying a delicate desert ecosystem to put up a solar farm. From May of last year:

Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.

[…]

“When people look across the desert, they just see scrubby little plants that look dead half the time,” says Robin Kobaly, a botanist who worked at the BLM for over 20 years as a wildlife biologist before founding the Summertree Institute, an environmental education non-profit. “But they are missing 90% of the story – which is underground.”

Her book, The Desert Underground, features illustrated cross-sections that reveal the hidden universe of roots extended up to 150ft below the surface, supported by branching networks of fungal mycelium. “This is how we need to look at the desert,” she says, turning a diagram from her book upside-down. “It’s an underground forest – just as majestic and important as a giant redwood forest, but we can’t see it.”

The reason this root network is so valuable, she argues, because it operates as an enormous “carbon sink” where plants breathe in carbon dioxide at the surface and out underground, forming layers of sedimentary rock known as caliche. “If left undisturbed, the carbon can remain stored for thousands of years,’” she says.

Desert plants are some of the oldest carbon-capturers around: Mojave yuccas can be up to 2,500 years old, while the humble creosote bush can live for over 10,000 years. These plants also sequester carbon in the form of glomalin, a protein secreted around the fungal threads connected to the plants’ roots, thought to store a third of the world’s soil carbon. “By digging these plants up,” says Kobaly, “we are removing the most efficient carbon sequestration units on the planet – and releasing millennia of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the solar panels we are replacing them with have a lifespan of around 25 years.”

See, when a corporation sets up solar panels, under our current system, they’re not doing so for the benefit of the environment. They’re doing it for money, because that’s how things work in this system. That means that they have the exact same incentives as every other corporation that destroys habitat in the name of profits and “progress”. I want more solar energy, but if we’re doing it like this, because it’s more profitable than tackling the more complex process of using existing spaces like rooftops and parking lots, then we’re better off spending that money on nuclear power.

How the transition is done will make a big difference when it comes to the resilience of the planet’s ecosystems, and capitalism does not value things like biodiversity, despite all the effort that’s gone into framing its value in dollars. We can see this in the destruction discussed above, or with the ill-considered placement of wind turbines leading to landslides in Scotland and Northern Ireland. And so, “climate action” must encompass systemic change. The political and economic structures that govern our lives must be replaced, or we will be forever stuck dealing with half-measures and habitat destruction, on top of the burdens imposed by our unstable climate.

Driven to Distraction by Howling Death Machines

There are valid concerns about renewable energy sources, particularly as they are being implemented today. Corporations and governments have been pursuing their lackluster energy transition with the same destructive recklessness as they pursue fossil fuels, threatening or destroying habitats around the world to put up turbines or solar farms, rather than using existing spaces like parking lots and rooftops, or actually taking the time to consider environmental impacts. Wind turbines also do kill birds and bats, albeit fewer than are killed by fossil fuels, and the wind industry seems to have no interest in voluntarily adopting different turbine designs to avoid that. Why would they? They’re capitalist organizations, just like all the rest.

None of this, however, negates the need for renewable and nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels, and so in addition to considering those valid concerns, I’ve also learned about a great many concerns that have no validity whatsoever, and perhaps the pinnacle of those has been the so-called “Wind Turbine Syndrome“. In a nutshell, organizations in the employ of the fossil fuel industry spread the false notion that the mere presence of a wind turbine was destructive to the health of local communities. The primary lie was that the turbines generated “infrasound” that acted like some kind of sonic weapon to cause all sorts of health problems. This has been debunked many times over, but it turns out that by spreading this panic among targeted populations, they created a “nocebo effect”, which generated psychosomatic symptoms. People literally worried themselves sick over the sound of wind turbines.

I thought of this today, because as I was pondering topics for this post, I came across an interesting bit of research about an actual public health problem caused by sound. What’s more, if we were to eliminate the source of this problem, it would actually help the fight against global warming!

The bad news is that doing so means reigning in the military-industrial complex that has become one of the biggest businesses in the United States, which is no mean feat. The US armed forces, in addition to being the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world, are a noisy bunch, and have little regard for the people living around them. Normally when we’re talking about the harm done by the Pentagon, we’re talking about chemical pollution, and the devastating human, social, and political impacts of the United States’ constant warmongering. This may not be as big of a problem as those two, but noise pollution is also a big problem, and it’s not just an annoyance. You may have heard of the US Navy’s sonar messing with whales, and now it turns out that the US Navy’s “growler” jet is so loud that it’s actually harming the health of people as it flies over.

Bob Wilbur thought he’d found a retirement home that would be a place of peace. Nestled against Admiralty Bay on the western edge of Whidbey Island, the three-story house is surrounded by trees and shoreline. It offers the kind of quiet that only an island can provide. Except when the Growlers fly. 

As often as four days a week, Boeing EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft based at the nearby Naval Air Station Whidbey Island fly loops overhead as pilots practice touch-and-go landings. The noise is immense, around the level of a loud rock concert. “It interrupts your day,” Wilbur said. “You’re unable to have a pleasant evening at home. You can’t communicate. You constantly try to organize your day around being gone when the jets are flying.” 

New research from the University of Washington shows that the noise isn’t just disruptive — it presents a substantial risk to public health. Published May 9 in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, an analysis of the Navy’s own acoustic monitoring data found that more than 74,000 people are exposed to noise levels associated with adverse health effects.  

“Military aircraft noise is substantially more intense and disturbing than commercial jet noise,” said lead author Giordano Jacuzzi, a graduate student in the UW College of the Environment. “Noise exposure has many downstream effects beyond just annoyance and stress — high levels of sleep disturbance, hearing impairment, increased risk of cardiovascular disease — these have real impacts on human health and quality of life. We also found that several schools in the area are exposed to levels that have been shown to put children at risk of delayed learning.”

Maybe this sort of thing doesn’t capture the imagination of the world’s conspiracy theorists the way an undetectable “infrasound” does, but the main way sound can harm us is by being too loud. I think it’s often easy for us to dismiss annoyances. We learn to live with minor discomforts, because that’s just what’s required to get through life. As we age, we acquire new and often worse discomforts, and we learn to cope with those too, but this stuff wears on us. The health impacts of stress, and sleeplessness are well known, and there are some conditions to which humans cannot adapt. We can try, and we can live with them for a time, but they wear us down as surely as exposure to a chronic poison.

In total, an estimated 74,316 people were exposed to average noise levels that posed a risk of annoyance, 41,089 of whom were exposed to nighttime noise levels associated with adverse effects on sleep. Another 8,059 people — most of whom lived within fairly close proximity to aircraft landing strips – were exposed to noise levels that can pose a risk of hearing impairment over time. 

“Our bodies produce a lot of stress hormone response to noise in general, it doesn’t matter what kind of noise it is. But particularly if it’s this repeated acute noise, you might expect that stress hormone response to be exacerbated,” said co-author Edmund Seto, a UW professor of environmental and occupational health sciences. “What was really interesting was that we’re reaching noise exposure levels that are actually harmful for hearing. Usually I only think of hearing in the context of working in factories or other really, really loud occupational settings. But here, we’re reaching those levels for the community.”  

Taken as a whole, the potential harms can be quite serious, Seto said. “Imagine people trying to sleep, or children in school trying to understand their teachers and you’ve got these jets flying.” 

Every monitoring station on Whidbey Island measured noise events in excess of 100 decibels when jets were flying. In some instances, noise levels were “off the charts” — exceeding the limits of models used to predict the health effects of noise exposure around the world.  

“We found it striking that Growler noise exceeds the scientific community’s current understanding of the potential health outcomes,” said co-author Julian Olden, a UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “For this reason, our estimates of health impacts are conservative.” 

As I said before, this is very far down on the list of reasons why the US imperial armed forces need to be dismantled for the good of humanity (not JUST the US, to be clear – it’s just the worst offender). The endless war, the genocides the US keeps supporting, of which the ongoing massacre of the Palestinian people is just one, the rampant pollution of land, sea, and air; a little noise seems like nothing next to all of that. Which is why I decided to write this post. When the world is filled with vicious savagery, hatred, and destruction, it’s easy to overlook those problems that don’t cause human bodies to be torn apart or filled with cancer, but the suffering of those subjected to the maddening noise of constant military fly-overs also merits our concern.

We live in a vast and tangled web of interconnected systems, many of which are extremely harmful for the vast majority of humanity. Stafford Beer popularized the notion that the purpose of a system is what it does, and what the Pentagon does, is destroy lives in so many ways that we may never quantify all of them. It destabilizes our world in pretty much every way one could imagine, all to provide the illusion of stability that comes from the same group of people being in charge, decade after decade. Taking on the US military, even at the funding end rather than the killing end, is one of the most daunting tasks there is, but it has also always been a part of the fight for a stable climate. It remains a tall order, but as Ursula Le Guin once said:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Two Dead Whistleblowers: History’s Lessons on Capitalist Violence

I’ve been listening to arguments in favor of capitalism for at least a couple decades now, since long before I started wanting a different system. Most often, people will point to the “failures” of 20th-century efforts to create something else, but if you take the time to drill down past the examples, and the factors that led to those failures, the conversation often ends up in some form of naturalization. Capitalism is the best we can hope for, because it’s the natural state of things, and/or because human nature is inherently selfish, and so we should have a system that acknowledges and uses that fact.

Personally, I think if you believe that about humans, then capitalism makes even less sense than left-wing systems. History has been pretty clear about what happens when you give the most wealth and power to those most obsessed with increasing their personal wealth and power. Those people are pretty much always going to use what they have to change the system to give themselves even more wealth and power, no matter the cost to the rest of us. After all, that’s what they’ve been doing for their whole lives, and they’re celebrated for it.

This also calls into question another common argument I see, that our society has “advanced”, and learned from past mistakes, so the militancy of labor movements past is no longer necessary or helpful. That opinion seems to be in decline, as the abuses of the owning class become more blatant, but I still run into it from time to time. If human nature is unchanging, then surely modern capitalists would be just as willing to use violence as the robber barons of old, right?

Capitalist corporations, and the people they serve, have always demonstrated indifference to human life, and intense disdain for human happiness. This can be seen in their constant fight to get more hours from their workers, for less pay, their hatred of safety and environmental regulations, and their apparent scorn for the wellbeing of their customers. This is true whether it’s Johnson and Johnson knowingly selling asbestos to be used on babies, or Boeing knowingly selling unsafe airplanes. Why, then, would we expect them to suddenly value the lives of their workers, when those workers are standing in their way?

Personally, I don’t buy that narrative about human nature. Humans are complex, and shaped by the world around us, including those parts of the world that we ourselves create. What I do believe is that our system is designed to empower and reward the same kind of thinking and behavior as it did back when bosses were hiring thugs to fire machine guns at striking workers. Similar incentives tend to yield similar results.

Readers of this blog probably saw the headlines when John Barnett, a whistleblower who was testifying in a case against Boeing, was found dead, killed by a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound back in March. Suicide is a complicated phenomenon, and sometimes it can take those left behind by surprise. That said, those who knew the man seem convinced that he did not take his own life, including a claim that he had explicitly stated that any declaration of his suicide should not be believed.  We may never know for certain, but it sure was suspicious.

And then, just a couple days ago, a second whistleblower died, this time from a sudden respiratory illness, at age 45. His name was Joshua Dean.

It was a stunning turn of events for Dean and his family. Green says he was very healthy — someone who went to the gym, ran nearly every day and was very careful about his diet.

“This was his first time ever in a hospital,” she said. “He didn’t even have a doctor because he never was sick.”

But within days, Dean’s kidneys gave out and he was relying on an ECMO life support machine to do the work of his heart and lungs. The night before Dean died, Green said, the medical staff in Oklahoma did a bronchoscopy on his lungs.

“The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it before in his life. His lungs were just totally … gummed up, and like a mesh over them.”

Green says she has asked for an autopsy to determine exactly what killed her son. Results will likely take months, she said.

“We’re not sure what he died of,” she said. “We know that he had a bunch of viruses. But you know, we don’t know if somebody did something to him, or did he just get real sick.”

Now, just as suicide is a thing that happens, so is sudden, lethal illness at 45. That said, the timing is odd, isn’t it? And as we’ve already established, the giant corporation that makes military aircraft and sells unsafe planes to increase their profits does not value human life the way you or I do, and neither do the people running that corporation.

We may never know for for certain, but it sure was suspicious.

So what’s my point here? Is it just to ensure that my suspicion is shared by my readers? Well, partly, but it’s more than that. I also think that those of us who want to build a better world would be well advised to acknowledge that we are up against people who have the means, motive, and I would say inclination to kill those who threaten their wealth and power. Depending on your perspective, Dear Reader, this may sound like I’m understating the case, or like I’m paranoid, but I absolutely believe that most capitalists would purchase the death of an opponent and not lose a wink of sleep, if they thought they could get away with it.

Therefor, I believe it is necessary for workers to cooperate, and have each others’ backs, and to build the kind of organized, collective power that cannot be stopped just by killing leaders or whistleblowers. I don’t know whether either of these men would have wanted a union security detail, for example, but it seems like something that should be available. The one bit of good news – insofar as any of this mess can be called “good” – is that the entirely coincidental and innocent deaths of John Barnett and Joshua Dean have led ten more whistleblowers to step forward. That’s the kind of solidarity that can make a movement unstoppable – cut off two heads, ten more take their place.

It seems like we’re entering an era in which, to quote Dennis the Peasant, we are seeing the violence inherent in the system. Capitalists are over-reaching, and the results of their greed are eating away at the foundations of society, leaving it as unstable as infrastructure in the United States. Whether it’s by firing organizers, brutalizing activists, or assassinating whistleblowers, those at the top will use violence to keep their place above us. Thankfully, history doesn’t just teach us about the viciousness of the powerful, it also teaches us that together, we are stronger. Individuals and leaders can be shut down or shot down, but the movement carries on.

The Saber-toothed Salmon: When Fact Is Goofier Than Fiction

When I was growing up, my parents had a subscription to the Boston Globe. As a child, what mattered to me was the comics section, which I read daily, including the political cartoons that mostly went over my head. My family also had a number of comic books around, so by my teens, I had read pretty much every Doonesbury strip that had been published, along with the original Addams Family, The Far Side, and a century’s worth of New Yorker cartoons.

And somewhere in all of that, there’s a hazy memory of one cartoon in particular, that I simply cannot find on the internet. It was a sketchy one-panel job, that feels most like some of Gary Larson’s doodles, that depicted a bunch of “saber-toothed” prehistoric animals. Sure, we’ve got the tigers, but what about saber-toothed rabbits, or cows, or squirrels? As a joke, it’s worth a slight puff of air from the nostrils, at least. But hey, that’s just fun imagining, right? Plenty of extinct critters had odd teeth, but that doesn’t mean there’s a  saber-toothed version of everything, right? Well, maybe, but it turns out that one thing we did have in the past is a saber-toothed salmon!

The species was first described in the 1970s, and its former name, Smilodonicthys rastrosus, tells us exactly what paleontologists thought this fish looked like – a giant salmon with large, dagger-like fangs at the tip of its snout. For those who don’t know, Smilodon is the genus that contains all of the saber-toothed cats. It turns out that that image was about 90% right – the fish had the fangs, but they didn’t point down, they pointed sideways. It’s less saber-toothed tiger, and more warthog:

This picture is a compilation of four images, labeled A, B, C, and D. "A" is in the top left corner, and it's a scan of the fossilized head of the extinct salmon, with the "saber-tooth" highlighted and drawn over in green and yellow, pointing downward in the "saber-tooth" position that had been originally proposed. B is on the bottom left, showing a view of the fossilized skull from the front, showing the "saber-teeth" pointing sideways, rather than down. "C" is on the top right, and shows an artist's recreation of the newly proposed tooth position, pointing sideways, in a manner clearly not designed for hunting. Image "D" is the bottom right, and shows the artist's reconstruction of the whole fish, with the same sideways-pointing "fangs".

This picture is a compilation of four images, labeled A, B, C, and D. “A” is in the top left corner, and it’s a scan of the fossilized head of the extinct salmon, with the “saber-tooth” highlighted and drawn over in green and yellow, pointing downward in the “saber-tooth” position that had been originally proposed. B is on the bottom left, showing a view of the fossilized skull from the front, showing the “saber-teeth” pointing sideways, rather than down. “C” is on the top right, and shows an artist’s recreation of the newly proposed tooth position, pointing sideways, in a manner clearly not designed for hunting. Image “D” is the bottom right, and shows the artist’s reconstruction of the whole fish, with the same sideways-pointing “fangs”.

O. rastrosus, first described in the 1970s, has been estimated to reach up to 2.7 meters (8.9 feet) long, making it the largest member of the Salmonidae family ever discovered. Initially, researchers thought its oversized front teeth pointed backward into the mouth like fangs, in large part because fossils of the teeth were found apart from the rest of the skull. This led to the common name “saber-toothed salmon.” But through new CT scans and analysis of various Oncorhynchus rastrosus fossils collected over the years, researchers have now been able to confirm that the teeth actually pointed sideways out of the fish’s mouth, similar to a warthog. As a result, the authors say, the species should be renamed the “spike-toothed salmon.”

While it’s unclear exactly what these teeth may have been used for, the researchers believe they were likely used for fighting — either against other spiked-toothed salmon or as a defense against predators — or as a tool for digging out nests. It’s also possible the teeth were used for multiple purposes, the authors note. But the teeth likely weren’t used for catching prey, since Oncorhynchus rastrosus is believed to have been a filter-feeder that dined on plankton.

I love that. The fearsome saber-toothed salmon revealed to be a filter feeder. It reminds me of creatures like basking sharks or sturgeons, that can look fearsome at a glance, but that pose no threat to humans who leave them alone. Over the centuries, as we’ve learned more about the history of life on this planet, we’ve often looked at the bones of a deceased creature, and seen something to fear. Elephant skulls become proof of the giant, man-eating cyclops, the Iguanodon’s thumbs were assumed to be draconic horns, and a filter-feeding fish with some odd sideways teeth became the saber-toothed salmon.

Our imaginations often build the world around us into something that is harsh and terrifying by nature, when the reality is often just strange, with the real danger being our imaginations and the fear that so often drives them. For all its horrors, the so-called Natural World is indifferent to us, and those horrors come hand-in-hand with a whole lot of beauty, and some of the goofiest shit you’ve ever seen.

FtB Podish-Sortacast on Israel and Palestine (and a life update from me)

Hey everybody, sorry about the long silence! I’m applying to a creative writing master’s program, so I’ve been pushing ahead on my novel in order to submit the first chapter as part of the application. Because of the way I currently write, getting the first chapter just right has required me to be pretty clear about aspects of the worldbuilding, and aspects of the story that don’t take place until a couple books later in the series. It feels as though every thousand words of the novel, I need about five to ten thousand words that either come far later, or that will never make it into the story. It’s going well, but it hasn’t left me with much energy for the blog. Once the current flurry of activity is done, I intend to return for more regular posts once more.

Partly to get my brain back into the groove as I finish up this application, and partly because it’s an important topic, I’ll be participating in today’s FtB podcast-thing on Israel and Palestine. I probably should have done a blog post on it before now, I’ve just found it difficult to think of anything to say that’s not woefully inadequate in the face of such horror and hatred. That said, this and my last half-assed post on the subject are even less adequate, so I’ll give it thought. In the meantime, stop by for our discussion if you’ve got time this evening. Sorry for the short notice!

 

Fascism’s Amoeba of Hate

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

This is the third of Lawrence Britt’s 14 characteristics of fascism (not to be confused with Eco’s 14 features of fascism), and a common warning given to those who might be sympathetic or apathetic towards a rising fascist movement. They’re going after trans people now, but once they feel they’ve won that battle, they’ll turn to someone else. First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. This may actually be the most famous warning about fascists – that they are so utterly dependent on scapegoating as a unifying force and a way to maintain the pretense of might, that they will find and oppress a scapegoat, even if they have to create a group of people that never existed in order to do it. Working with them will not protect you from them.

When we hear about this, we generally think of cultural and political persecution. What’s being done to the trans community right now is the first genocidal project of a fascist movement, and if they are allowed to succeed, their focus will turn to other groups. I think it’s absolutely correct for that to be the first thing that comes to mind, but I have one complaint about it, and that is the implication that fascists are disciplined enough to go about this in a methodical, systematic manner, and to hide their hand until the time comes to switch groups.

There’s a sequence of focus, maybe, but the actual practice is utter chaos. Rather than inching forward in a line, like a Nazi worm, they move like a Nazi amoeba. They move in every direction at once, and then shift towards whichever pseudopod finds good fodder for their hatred. The predictability in the path they end up taking has everything to do with the environment in which the fascist movement develops – where their hatred can latch on and motivate people. As has been remarked many times, there are similarities between the United States and Weimar Germany, and those similarities play a big role in the way this fascist movement seems to mirror that one. Transphobia was already present and powerful, and so the trans community proved to be a good early scapegoat then, as now.

But it’s not like they’re hiding their racism, or their antisemitism, or their hatred of communists, and the myth of fascist efficiency and competence remains just that – a myth. This is where the amoeba analogy breaks down, because when an amoeba finds a piece of food, it will generally concentrate on that until it’s dealt with before resuming its pseudopodous journey. It is also a single organism, at relative peace with itself. Not so, fascists.

Maybe it’s something about the kinds of people who’re drawn to fascism, or maybe it’s the result of an ideology obsessed with domination and competition, but they also fight each other, constantly. Attacking is their only response to failure, or the perception of weakness. If they fail, the blame must always be put onto someone else, because they are Strong, and the Strong do not fail.

The current example, which sent me down this particular line of thought, is the way the right wing of the Republican Party is blaming its own chaos and incompetence on a succession of Republican leaders. Kevin McCarthy was the big recent example, but since getting rid of him didn’t solve anything, they’ve aimed some blame at McCarthy’s replacement, Mike Johnson, but also at Mitch McConnell. They don’t always get their way – their attacks on Johnson haven’t really gone anywhere, and McConnell seems committed to clinging to power until he rots – but they don’t need to always get their way. All they need is for one attack to work, one pseudopod to find something tasty, and that becomes their new way to show off their power, even if they still can’t get anything done.

It’s possible that this is level of chaos is unique to modern fascism, but I suspect that as with the Autobahn myth, this appearance of competence and efficiency came from a combination of this amoebic approach, the Nazis’ unceasing proclamations of their own superiority, and the degree to which their devout belief in white supremacy was also embraced by the Western societies that opposed them. I’m no scholar of the rise of fascism, but from what little I do know, paranoia, infighting, and a sort of chronic chaos seem to play a big role in fascist movements throughout history.

More that that, however, it highlights the degree to which there should be no excuse, at this stage, for anyone being ignorant of the fact that they will keep coming for different groups for as long as they have the power to do so. They’re making no secret of it, or of their desperate need to blame others for everything they do, all while preaching personal responsibility as a feeble disguise. Any time a new problem arises, they will immediately seek out a new scapegoat, even if it’s someone, like Mitch McConnell, who has dedicated their life to creating that very fascist movement. We don’t actually need to learn from past fascist movements to know where this one is headed – they’re making it perfectly clear with everything they say and do.

Stuck in the 90s again

I recently decided to start dedicating time every day to reading, both fiction and nonfiction. Somewhere along the way, I got out of the habit of reading books, and that’s something I’d like to change, for a number of reasons. My parents gave me Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger for Christmas, and I had already been interested in reading it, so that’s what I’m starting with. All of this is to say, there’s a good chance that this won’t be the last blog post in some way inspired or influenced by that book. Towards the end of the introduction, Klein talks about the ways in which, thanks to things like social media, A.I., and the bizarre propaganda of a powerful fascist movement, we are truly in a different world from the one in which we were born. She writes of the surreal nature of our current moment, where nothing seems real in part because so much is not real.

That feeling of disorientation we tell one another about? Of not understanding whom we can trust and what to believe? Of friends and loved ones behaving like strangers? It’s because our world has changed, but, like a collective case of jet lag, most of us are still attuned to the rhythms and habits of the place left behind. It’s past time to find our bearings in this new place.

This resonated with me for three reasons. The most obvious is that I’ve gotten that feeling she describes from interacting with our culture. The second reason is that I’ve been arguing for a while now that we are, in a material and practical sense, on a different planet from the one on which humanity built this civilization. I believe that, as scientists have long been warning, we’ve passed the point at which we’ll be able to stop our planet from warming for generations to come. It is currently shifting towards a new equilibrium, much hotter than anything our species has had to deal with, and while I believe it’s possible to reverse that trend, we’re nowhere close to doing so. We are on a different planet, and yet our society acts as though nothing has changed.

Which brings me to the third reason Klein’s words caught my attention: The fact that our leaders appear to be stuck in the past. Specifically, they seem to be stuck in the 90s.

Growing up, the music I listened to was heavily influenced by my older brother’s tastes, and one group to which he introduced me was the Canadian band Moxy Früvous. They’ve got a lot of good songs, but this one – Stuck in the 90’s – has been echoing in my head for years now, like the discordant soundtrack of a dystopian thriller. The song relates the experience of someone named Clem, who has a fantasy of living in a society freed from the shackles of right-wing politics, before coming back to the grim reality of triumphant neoliberalism:

Clem had a daydream, daydream from heaven
Picked up the headline, his country was made up of singers
And no more right-wingers

He wakes up to “Homeless are stupid, welfare is stupid
Private investment efficiency, cool fiscal plannin'”
Sounds like more Pat Buchanan

Back in his day job this afternoon
Unlikely he’ll move down to Cuba soon

Reluctant to find he’s stuck in the 90’s again

Obviously, I relate to Clem here, but the reason this song has made a permanent home in my brain, is my growing awareness that a number of the people running the United States (though not just the United States), are people for whom the 1990s represent the pinnacle of what society had to offer the world. I’m talking about elderly Democratic Party politicians like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, many of whom were born before World War 2, and whose lives and politics were heavily influenced by the Cold War, and particularly the Reagan era. The ones who, from a progressive liberal perspective, seem to mean well, and say they want progressive policies, but somehow never seem to fight for them.

The 1990s saw the United States victorious in its long and bloody campaign to crush and/or isolate left-wing political movements around the world. That campaign didn’t stop, of course, but with the collapse of the USSR, communism was no longer in any danger of “taking over”, the way capitalists had feared. They believed they had reached, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, the End of History. “That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

To wealthy, neoliberal politicians, this was as close to utopia as it was possible to get. What’s more, I think the massive popularity of Bill Clinton, combined with projected demographic trends in the U.S. population, convinced a lot of Democrats that they were never really going to lose power again. All that remained was to achieve the perfect team of technocrats to recreate the TV show The West Wing in perpetuity. The Republican Party, in this view, basically existed to be a curmudgeonly opposition party, forever doomed to minority status, and existing only to keep things from improving “too fast”. The 2000 presidential election, and everything that followed from it, popped that bubble, and from where I’m sitting, it seems like they’ve never stopped trying to re-inflate it. Part of the reason why they refuse to fight for actually progressive policies is that they honestly believe that the perfect form of human civilization was already achieved, and all we need to do is go back to it.

Writing it out like this, I’ve noticed something else, which may be apparent to you as well, Dear Reader. This sounds an awful lot like I’m outlining the ideology of a fascist movement. “Our People were great once, until we were brought low by our enemy, and now we must go back to the old ways and reclaim our rightful glory.” If that raised alarm bells for you, that’s a good thing, but I don’t think I am describing a fascist ideology here. For one thing, there’s not really an “Our People” element to it. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, they want everyone around the world to have a functioning liberal democracy. Their fantasy isn’t for their ethnic group to reign supreme, and their enemy, insofar as you can use the term, isn’t a racial or ethnic group, but rather the far right, and most of the left – anyone who wants real change. Their utopia isn’t about the supremacy of a people, but of a process. They believe that “true” liberal democracy is the perfect system. They believe that it’s self-correcting, and that it will naturally guide society along a gradual path towards greater rights, freedoms, and prosperity for all. Further, they don’t seem to believe in actually fighting for their utopia, because they believe that their perfect process, having already been put in place, will guide society back to where it needs to be, if only they can keep power for long enough to fix what the Republicans broke.

This is, I should say, a charitable interpretation of things. It assumes that the politicians in question are unaware of the harm their “perfect system” caused around the world in the 1990s, and still causes to this day. It assumes a degree of ignorance and naïveté on behalf of rich and powerful politicians that I honestly find hard to believe. The 90s were good for them, but they came along with abysmal working conditions maintained by brutal violence, and the U.S. federal government is at the core of that global system of oppression. A government in which people like Biden and Pelosi have long been active and powerful participants. It must be noted that the beneficiaries of this system are almost entirely white, and its victims almost entirely non-white. If we assume that these powerful people are cynical rather than naïve, then we should also assume that they’re aware of the racial dynamics built into the “utopia” to which they would have us return. The “Our People” element may not be built into their ideology, but it’s not entirely incompatible, either.

Ultimately, I’m not sure whether their intentions matter a whole lot. At the end of the day, whether benevolent or malevolent, they clearly mean to cling to power until they die, and to drag all of us along on their doomed quest to reclaim the glory days. We’re not stuck in the 90s, we’re stuck in a world where the closest thing our rulers have to a positive vision for the future, is the impossible dream of returning to the 90s, at the same time as fascists are trying to return us to an even worse fictional past.

Maybe none of these people should have power.

Documenting Collapse, and the Importance of Research Collections

I’ve written a little about evolution in response to climate change, but it’s important to remember that life responds to our other ecological impacts as well. Thanks to habitat destruction, pesticide use, and various other forms of pollution, there has been a well-established decline in insect populations, all around the world, including pollinators. Most of the focus has been on how that will affect human food production, but it’s also a major concern for broader ecological collapse. Given how important insects are to ecosystems, not just as pollinators but also as predators, as prey, as scavengers, and as detritivores, their decline is a problem for the world. The thing about this sort of collapse is that, as with global warming, it’s a dynamic process. It’s not like a Jenga tower, where pieces are removed one at a time until the inevitable downfall – the “pieces” of an ecosystem respond to what’s happening around them.

What happens when there are fewer pollinators? Well those that can, make do without:

Scientists at the CNRS and the University of Montpellier1 have discovered that flowering plants growing in farmland are increasingly doing without insect pollinators. As reproduction becomes more difficult for them in an environment depleted in pollinating insects, the plants are evolving towards self-fertilisation. These findings are published in a paper in the journal New Phytologist dated December 20, 2023.

The first thing to note is that the flowering plant in question is a particular species of pansy, Viola arvensis, which is already known to have the ability to reproduce via self-pollination, or “selfing”. I think that’s important to state clearly, because the completely new development of this ability would, in my view, be a much more dramatic discovery.

In previous posts, there was some question as to whether changes observed were truly “evolution”, as opposed to something smaller. Selfing is already a known trait of V. arvensis, so how do we know this isn’t just the plants taking care of business with the traits at hand? Well, it clearly is that, of course, but in this case, the research team used a version of “resurrection ecology” to test whether the change was actually a genetic shift in the population. They took seeds that had been collected decades ago, between 1992 and 2001, and used them to make a genetic comparison. Not only is there movement towards more selfing, but also towards smaller, less attractive flowers, and less of a reward for pollinators(PDF):

  • We used resurrection ecology methodology to contrast ancestors and contemporary des-
    cendants in four natural populations of the field pansy (Viola arvensis) in the Paris region
    (France), a depauperate pollinator environment. We combine population genetics analysis,
    phenotypic measurements and behavioural tests on a common garden experiment.
  • Population genetics analysis reveals 27% increase in realized selfing rates in the field during
    this period. We documented trait evolution towards smaller and less conspicuous corollas,
    reduced nectar production and reduced attractiveness to bumblebees, with these trait shifts
    convergent across the four studied populations

This makes a great deal of sense. Big, showy flowers take energy to produce and maintain, and the same is true of nectar. If you’re not getting any benefit in exchange for that investment, then most of the flower becomes little more than a liability. Those selfing plants that have smaller flowers will have more resources to invest in seeds than their showier counterparts.

On the surface, this could be seen as a good thing. Yes, we’re messing up ecosystems, but the plants are adapting! They’re finding a way! The problem is that, as the authors mention, this is likely to be one part of a feedback loop. The decline in flower size, attractiveness, and reward will make it that much harder for those pollinators who are still alive to get the food they need, putting further pressure on them. This will exacerbate the pollinator decline, which in turn will maintain the pressure towards smaller flowers, and so on, with effects that resonate throughout the ecosystem.

There is, however, one thing I want to stress beyond the ever-present need for systemic change and further research, and that is the importance of research collections. This study was possible because someone, decades ago, collected seeds and stored them in the right conditions. When science is discussed in the general population, a lot of attention is paid to the results. New discoveries and dramatic news make the best headlines, but all of that stuff is supported by the unsung work of generations who came before. Often, that’s the data collected and the papers written – the official records of research that can be copied, shared, and used. There are also contributions from more “hobbyist” sources, like the journals of birders and botanists who write down when the flowers appear in the spring, or when the birds start migrating in the fall.

And then there’s the physical record. During my brief stint as a working ecologist, we gathered lots of data, including DNA samples, but I don’t think those were preserved. Earlier, when I worked at a natural history museum in college, my main job was to create museum specimens out of dead animals. It was mostly window-killed birds, with a few mammals picked up on the side of the road. I and my fellow student workers skinned them, preserved the skins, and added them to the museum’s research collection. These weren’t made for display, or for any particular research project, but rather to create a databank of sorts, that can be used in the future when new questions and new techniques arise.

The seeds used in the pansy study were part of a similar collection, and I think that’s an aspect of science that should get more attention than it does. It’s also a part of science that, like the hobbyist journals I mentioned earlier, can be done by those of us who are not trained scientists. Even in the midst of ecosystem collapse, it’s important for this archival work to continue, both to understand what’s happening, and to answer questions that – currently – we don’t know enough to ask.

Beyond the actual acquisition of specimens, these collections also require active maintenance. Organisms, as you may be aware, tend to fall apart when they die, and even things as hardy as seeds need to be kept in the right conditions.  That means paying people to do that work, and paying for the materials those people need. Without that investment, neglect is inevitable, and entire collections are put at risk, and these specimens, as biological snapshots from particular moments of time, cannot be replaced.

I can’t help but tie one pattern of neglect to another. Research collections are imperiled for the same reason our biosphere is in peril – the system in which we live does not value investment in our collective future. There is no arrangement whereby shareholders can reap ever-increasing profits from building and maintaining these collections, just as there’s no short-term profit in protecting the world for future generations, and so destruction and neglect seem to be the default. Obviously, I think we need to do systemic change about this, but at a smaller level, if you want to get involved, I suggest getting in touch with local universities and natural history museums. They’re likely to know what sort of help is needed where you are, even if it’s just donating a little to help keep things running.

The Transphobes are Losing at the Voting Booth

Conservatives, as a rule, lie to win elections. This isn’t some unique observation I’ve just made, it’s a pretty well-established fact. Their policies are almost always bad for a majority of people, and so they can’t run on what they actually want to do. They have to distract people. At their most honest, they lie about the effects of the laws they want to pass, like when they insist that cutting taxes for the rich will cause that wealth to “trickle down” to everyone else. They make similar claims about keeping wages low, and deregulating businesses, but they’ve been saying that stuff for so long that most people can see the lie for themselves.

Their preference, at least right now, is to focus on what we’ve come to know as “the culture war”. This narrative relies on the much more vague overarching lie that the reason everything’s getting worse (whether or not it actually is) is all those cultural evils and bad people they’ve been warning against. Immigrants, secularism, homosexuality, anti-racism, and – their current favorite – the terrifying existence of trans people. They’re playing on nostalgia – the idea that things used to be better in “the good old days”, and drawing a spurious correlation: All this stuff that seems new and makes us uncomfortable has been increasing at the same time as things have been “getting worse”, therefor the new and uncomfortable stuff must be the cause of things getting worse. If we can just make the bad people and bad stuff go away, things will go back to the way they used to be, and everything will be good (for us) again.

It’s an old lie, but an enduring one. I think part of its tenacity, at least in the United States, comes from the ubiquity of certain kinds of Christianity. We grow up hearing about how God causes societal calamities as a way to punish people who’ve “gone astray” and do evil things. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because the people there just wouldn’t stop sinning, and so God killed them all. The entire planet was flooded, and every terrestrial life extinguished (except for a handful on a boat), because they were all just so evil that God didn’t have any other choice. All those evil, evil babies just had to go!

I think if you directly challenged them on this connection, many conservatives would say they don’t actually believe that there’s a direct link, but rather that it’s all coming from the same people. Maybe some would say that God is “allowing” bad people into government as punishment for tolerance, or something like that, but there seems to be this general belief that all this “decadence” and acceptance is somehow making everything worse, so we need to return to the Old Ways.

This has had varying levels of success. A majority of people don’t seem to think this way, but our laws are built so that you don’t need an actual majority of people to gain power. You need a majority of voters in key locations, which can be a clear minority of the overall population. That means that there’s power to be gained from collecting a small number of dedicated people, and keeping them enraged at all times.

The go-to over the last few years has been attacking trans people, and lying about them to scare gullible bigots. It’s been observed by others that they tend to make the perfect target. They’re a small enough minority that a lot of folks can go through life never (knowingly) meeting a trans person, which makes it easy to lie about them without getting caught by the target audience. They’ve also shown that their sense of self is strong enough that they won’t just go away in the face of an oppressive society. The fact that trans people are who they say they are means that they will keep fighting to live as themselves, as anyone would, and so there’s a movement for conservatives to push against, and lie about. When you break it down, it seems like a reliable strategy, and the Republican Party has certainly made it central to their efforts.

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to work quite like they want it to.

Youtuber Three Arrows did a video about this about a year ago, pointing out that the vicious campaign against trans people was failing, as an electoral strategy. The blog Ettingermentum has been making a similar case, and recently went on The Majority Report to elaborate:

It’s just not working. People at large aren’t buying the bullshit the way the hardcore Republican base are, and all the hateful rhetoric isn’t translating to electoral success. In some cases, it’s even hurting them, and it’s wonderful to see.

That does not mean that the problem is going to go away by itself. Bigotry does still motivate a lot of people, and the US is set up to heavily favor a conservative minority in a number of ways, meaning that they’re fully able to pass laws and foment violence against trans people (and any perceived as such), and that means that the fight for trans rights is as important as it’s ever been. Transphobia is still widespread in the general population.

The thing is, it’s not something that’s actually motivating new people to go vote for the oppression of trans people. Those who do vote for it were already reliably going to vote Republican, and most other people – even if they’re transphobic – view the focus on trans people as some great existential threat as the bizarre obsession that it is. At times, it can feel as though we’ll be stuck fighting the same battles forever, but in many ways, that feeling itself is a lie told by the bigots themselves – that they will never go away, never stop hating, and that they never lose. The truth is that they are losing on this issue, because humanity as a whole is simply better than them. Keep fighting and keep loving, because it is making a difference!

Déjà Vu Isn’t a Glitch, It’s the Matrix Working as Designed

So, in pursuit of posting something weekly, I started writing about a recently published study on Greenland’s glaciers. The main take-away is that over the last twenty years, they’ve doubled their rate of retreat, with a couple possible exceptions in the far north. This was expected. Greenhouse gas emissions have not meaningfully decreased, and so their concentration in the atmosphere has continued to rise. The mechanism by which the planet is heating has increased, so of course the rate of warming has increased. The temperature has increased, so of course the rate of ice melt has increased. That’s all there really is to say about it, and it’s not really news to anyone reading this blog.

It’s the same sort of thing that’s been written countless times by countless people all around the world, and still, nothing meaningful is being done. There’s widespread support around the world for doing something about it and there has been for ages, and still, nothing meaningful is being done.

The politicians that claim to be the ones who accept the seriousness of the problem very clearly do not, as they continue supporting new fossil fuel extraction, and they keep increasing the budget of the US military, one of the biggest polluters on the planet. It seems pretty clear, from their actions, that the goal of the rich and powerful is to stay the course, and use violence to suppress any effort to steer us away from the cliff. They seem to actively want to make the world as uninhabitable and chaotic as they can, while holding on to their wealth and power. Looking at their actions, it’s hard to see anything other than murderous intent.

Elon Musk is increasingly displaying his own white supremacist beliefs, for example, even supporting the message of the Illinois Nazis from the Blues Brothers, and it’s increasingly clear that he’s far from alone in that belief, within his class. Wherever there’s a change that would benefit most of humanity, you will find billionaires spending their obscene wealth to create opposition to it, and to demonize those supporting it. If you want a cease-fire in Palestine, that means you’re antisemitic, even if you’re Jewish. If you want to end fossil fuel use, that clearly means that you want to keep the world’s poor in their poverty by denying them coal-generated electricity, even though those at the bottom are the hardest-hit by the warming climate, and the least able to withstand those blows.

It’s probably pretty easy to develop bigoted views about those “beneath” you, when you’re part of a class that’s wholly detached from human concerns. Many of them have never worried about having enough to survive in their lives, and it’s far easier to blame those who do struggle, than to actually face the injustice built into their luxurious and destructive lifestyles.

So, in pursuit of posting every week, I started writing about the growing gap in wealth, power, and life experience between the rich, and everyone else, and how wealth and privilege twist the human mind in ways that virtually guarantee this outcome. It’s the same sort of thing that’s been written countless times, by countless people, and yet the problem keeps getting worse. Rents keep rising, along with other expenses, even though there’s plenty of everything to go around.

So, I started writing about organizing – a topic on which I’m still fairly ignorant, because its the one area where I can find at least a little hope. Interest in unions has risen dramatically in the last three years, and major strike actions have proven successful, as workers and bosses both realize the power that the workers have, when united.

This hasn’t resulted in real climate action, or real change to the political/economic system that has brought us to this point, but in a capitalist society, where money is power, the ability for workers to claw back even a little of the wealth that they generate with their labor is far from nothing. Less material desperation means more time and energy for living life, and for further collective action. These wins also act as a proof of concept – nonviolent collective action, aimed at the flow of money, can get real results.

The question is, how far does that go? How much are unions able to do to repair systemic harm? How much can we claw back before the powerful turn to violence to keep the rabble in their place? I don’t see a way around finding out, because as I’ve said many times, those at the top are clearly willing to let the world burn, if they get to rule the ashes. Hell, I think some of them want the world to burn, because they know that increased desperation at the bottom makes their exploitation much easier. If you look at the edges, like the effort to stop Atlanta’s “cop city”, you begin see the violence inherent in the system. Look past the borders, at the bottom of the global economic system, and you will find a level of violence that we in the rich nations of the world were taught had been left behind. You’ll discover that that violence has always been an integral part of the system. From there, it’s not exactly hard to believe that those whose billions stem from that violence would be willing to turn it on their subjects in wealthy nations, if that’s what it took to protect their power.

There’s no easy way out of this, from what I can tell. There’s no point at which those in power will say, “Ok, we’ve clearly messed up, let’s try actual democracy for a change”. They’re convinced that the only reason things are bad anywhere, is that they don’t have enough power. They’re a class of would-be dictators or oligarchs, who all think that they would be the kind of ruler the world needs, and any effort to empower those at the bottom just proves that the rabble need to be ruled.

I think that things like unions, strikes, and direct action are our best path forward, and I think that the world as a whole urgently needs these things to happen in rich and powerful nations. Time and time again, efforts at systemic change in the former colonies have been met with genocidal violence, backed by wealthy nations that know they’re safe from any retaliation. There’s no reason for the rulers of those nations to stop doing that, unless the people of those nations take action to make them stop. We are inside the fortress, in a manner of speaking, which means that we have the ability to change things here, without having to get past the walls and armaments. I sometimes wonder if that is why there’s so much effort to demonize immigrants, and to create and maintain societal segregation between groups. It keeps people from working together, and it keeps the citizenry of wealthy nations from understanding how the world works, and how their own problems are part of the same system that’s causing so much death and misery “over there”.

This isn’t a guaranteed victory. The people, united, can still fuck up. We can still perpetuate bigotry, and maintain injustice. There’s no guarantee of victory, but I think it’s fair to say, at this point, that without revolutionary change, there is a guarantee of defeat, for humanity as a whole.