Bridge Collapse Sends Traincars of Asphalt and Sulfur into Yellowstone River

Water intakes along the Yellowstone River have been shut off, following the collapse of a rail bridge, which sent several cars full of asphalt and sulfur into the water. Photos show crumpled, steaming tanker cars, and what appears to be bright yellow stuff roiling in the water. Pictures from Rawsalerts on Twitter:

The image is taken from the river banks downstream of the wreckage. Grass and shrubs in the foreground, then muddy, turbulent river water. The bridge and train run across the middle, and in the center, you can see yellow-white froth, where sulfur seems to be leaking into the water. In the background, forested hills under a partly cloudy sky.

The image is taken from the river banks downstream of the wreckage. Grass and shrubs in the foreground, then muddy, turbulent river water. The bridge and train run across the middle, and in the center, you can see yellow-white froth, where sulfur seems to be leaking into the water. In the background, forested hills under a partly cloudy sky.

The image is taken from the riverbank, near one end of the ruined rail bridge. You can see grass and yellow flowers in the foreground, with the river, bridge, and train in the middle. The tanker cars are twisted and crumpled, with steam hovering over them. If you look closely, you can see yellow in the water near the wreckage. In the background, a forested hill, under gray clouds.

The image is taken from the riverbank, near one end of the ruined rail bridge. You can see grass and yellow flowers in the foreground, with the river, bridge, and train in the middle. The tanker cars are twisted and crumpled, with steam hovering over them. If you look closely, you can see yellow in the water near the wreckage. In the background, a forested hill, under gray clouds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This will keep happening, until the US government can stop kissing capitalist asses long enough to actually do its job, and overhaul the infrastructure of the whole damned country. The rails need to be nationalized, with profits from their use re-invested in maintaining, improving, and expanding the network. It seems that Montana’s had enough rain recently, that the stuff pouring into the river is pretty diluted, so cleanup workers are supposedly not at any risk. I have my doubts, obviously, but that’s what’s being reported:

COLUMBUS, Mont. — A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below.

The train cars were carrying asphalt and sulfur, said David Stamey, Stillwater County’s chief of emergency services. Officials shut down drinking water intakes downstream while they evaluated the danger. An Associated Press reporter witnessed a yellow substance coming out of some of the tank cars.

However, Stamey said there was no immediate danger for the crews working at the site, and the hazardous material was being diluted by the swollen river. There were eight rail cars in the river or on the part of the bridge that collapsed.

The train crew was safe and no injuries were reported, Montana Rail Link spokesman Andy Garland said in a statement.

Railroad crews were at the scene in Stillwater County, near the town of Columbus, about 40 miles (about 64 kilometers) west of Billings. The area is in a sparsely populated section of the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by ranch and farmland. The river there flows away from Yellowstone National Park, which is about 110 miles (177 kilometers) southwest.

“We are committed to addressing any potential impacts to the area as a result of this incident and working to understand the reasons behind the accident,” Garland said.

In neighboring Yellowstone County, officials said they instituted emergency measures at water treatment plants due to the “potential hazmat spill” and asked residents to conserve water.

The cause of the collapse is under investigation. The river was swollen with recent heavy rains, but it’s unclear whether that was a factor.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing – unless the US takes this seriously, climate change is going to keep putting more stress on its already-crumbling infrastructure. I don’t think climate change is the biggest factor here, given the overall neglect of the nation’s roads, rails, and bridges, but it’s more of a factor every year, and there’s no good excuse for not working to keep ahead of it.

I’m glad Yellowstone National Park won’t be directly affected, but while it’s a lovely place, all the other ecosystems along the river, including the river itself, also merit our concern. Obviously, there will be some human costs associated with this spill, but it’s hard for me to predict those at this stage. If you live downstream from this, along the Yellowstone river, or the Missouri river downstream of where the Yellowstone joins it, it’s probably a good idea to stock up on water, if you haven’t already.

Video: Beau of the Fifth Column on updates in Russia

As most of you are no doubt aware, Wagner Group, a private Russian army claiming to have 25,000 troops, has attacked Russia. The Group’s leader hasn’t declared war on Putin, per se – he’s claiming to be after corrupt leaders in the military. That said, I think it’s a distinction without a difference, at least right now. As usual, I think Beau has a good take on this – the outcome will probably depend on the Russian people, and whether or not they decide to get involved. Given the Wagner Group’s cuddly relationship with neo-Nazis, it seems unlikely to me that their rule would be much different than Putin’s, so it’s not a change that I’d personally be willing to fight for.

Indigenous Knowledge Leads to Likely Treatment for Episodic Ataxia

I was hanging out with some neighbors the other night, and the subject of gaming came up, along with the fact that the first guild I was in, playing WoW in my college years, was called “Ataxia”; my neighbors, being doctors, did a bit of a double-take. For those who don’t know, ataxia is basically a set of neuromuscular symptoms associated with a few different neurological conditions. I don’t remember why the guild’s founder had chosen that name. The term covers balance issues, coordination issues, sensory problems, and more. It’s pretty broad, and from what I can tell, even if the underlying condition isn’t especially dangerous, those symptoms that are called ataxia are a problem all by themselves. That means that being able to make them go away can be a huge victory – it lets the patient regain control of their body.

I mention all of that, because researchers from the University of California – Irvine have found that plant extracts used by the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations in the Pacific Northwest are a viable treatment, specifically for type 1 episodic ataxia. This is something that could help people all around the world, and it’s a good reminder of the importance of biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous rights. I’ll get into that stuff a little, but first, let’s hear from the researchers:

“Episodic Ataxia 1 (EA1) is a movement disorder caused by inherited mutations in the human KCNA1 gene, which encodes Kv1.1, a voltage-gated potassium channel essential for normal function of the human nervous system,” said Geoffrey W. Abbott, PhD, vice dean of basic science research and professor in the Department of Physiology & Biophysics at the UCI School of Medicine. “We found that extracts of stinging nettle, bladderwrack kelp and Pacific ninebark can all correct function of the mutation-carrying proteins causing a specific form of ataxia.”

Abbott’s research team also found that two compounds contained in these plants, tannic acid and gallic acid, are each able to rescue activity of the EA1-linked mutation-carrying ion channel proteins.

“The plant compounds are the first known compounds to rescue the activity of Kv1.1 carrying EA1-linked loss-of-function sequence variants,” said Abbott. “Gallic acid in particular is of therapeutic interest because it is already available over the counter as a nutritional supplement and is very well tolerated in toxicity studies.”

Individuals with ataxia exhibit abnormal gait, slurring, eye movement abnormalities, difficulties with balance and walking, tremors, and disruption of fine motor skills.

“These mutations can cause other disorders, including epilepsy, and so there is therapeutic potential for those conditions as well,” said Abbott. “We have discovered that where modern synthetic drug development techniques have failed to produce a drug that directly rescues EA1-linked mutant channel function, traditional botanical medicine developed by North American First Nation peoples has succeeded.”

Further research is now needed to explore the efficacy of the plant-derived compounds in preclinical and clinical studies.

“We have made a mouse model of a relatively severe form of human EA1 so that we can test the efficacy and safety of gallic acid and also whole plant extracts,” said Abbott. “If the preclinical studies go well, our goal is to move to clinical trials. Concurrently, we are synthesizing and testing other plant compounds and derivatives to discover other compounds with potential for treating EA1 and related disorders.”

This is really neat, and I hope clinical trials go smoothly and quickly, for the sake of everyone this could help. I also hope, if this bears out, that the researchers get due credit.

That said, I have a couple thoughts. The first is that, as I said earlier, this underscores one of the many reasons why biodiversity is important to us, as humans. There are lots of those reasons, but the fact that we keep discovering new medicines in our fellow organisms is nothing to sneeze at. That is also why Indigenous rights and Indigenous land management practices are so important. As with biodiversity, this isn’t the only reason those things are important. It shouldn’t need to be said, but these days, it feels like it’s better to be explicit, so: Indigenous people deserve rights and autonomy because they are people. Beyond that, Indigenous land management practices tend to shape ecosystems to be beneficial to humans, while actively maintaining and promoting ecosystem health and biodiversity.

This is also why it is absolutely fucked that this discovery will probably end up being the private property of some pharmaceutical corporation, for the prescription version, and some big supplement corporation for the herbal version. I feel like I should apologize for always coming back to capitalism, but it’s hard to talk about big problems in this world without mentioning the economic system that dominates most of the planet.

And so, in addition to biodiversity and Indigenous rights, this is also a good reason to end capitalism. This knowledge comes, in part, from people who were nearly erased in support of capitalism, and the medicine comes from wild plants, and the ecosystems they inhabit. I have no problem with the notion of some sort of socially born price for the work that goes into turning plant into medicine, but that should never be a barrier to access for those who need it. Likewise, capitalism has proven to be disastrous for biodiversity and ecosystem health. We will never know exactly what we’ve lost, in the wanton, profit-driven destruction of so many ecosystems, but looking at discoveries like this, it seems certain that it’s not nothing. This world has so much to offer us, and we can enjoy its bounty, as well as marvels of our own invention, without destroying everything in the process. The path we’re on will lead us to lose everything, but if we have the courage to take a new, and different path, we stand to gain everything despite how close we stand to oblivion.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Video: Meteorologist Resigns Following Right-Wing Threats Over Climate Change Coverage

For a couple years now, I’ve paired fighting climate change, with fighting fascism. There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one, from the climate perspective, is that fascists value power far more highly than the environment, and so they’ll happily continue denying climate science, and using fossil fuels. When it comes to crises that can’t be ignored, well, the recent refugee boat disaster, which I’ve seen some right-wingers celebrating, is a good example of the eco-fascist solution. In the meantime, they are actively terrorizing people just for reporting on what’s happening. An Iowa meteorologist named Chris Gloninger has been getting death threats, some bad enough to give him PTSD, and has decided to resign because of it. Mike Figueredo from The Humanist Report has more:

As a species, we cannot afford rich people.

Like most of you, I’ve been half-heartedly following the story some some obscenely rich tourists who went to look at the wreck of the Titanic, for funsies, in a submarine that has been described as sub-standard for such extreme conditions. That, plus a seemingly careless attitude from the CEO of the submarine tour company (the sub doesn’t even have an emergency beacon), meant I was actually surprised to see that they’d done this dive successfully at least a couple times since 2021. There have been comments about the appropriateness of using what amounts to a mass grave as a tourist destination, but that’s not something about which I feel particularly strongly.

Growing up, I read about the voyages of the submarine Alvin, and I very much wanted to go on a dive. Having learned more about what that entails, I’ve mostly lost interest in going down there myself, but I’m glad that other people do make such journeys, for the pictures, video, and information that they bring back. This was not that. The huge expense ($250,000 per passenger, apparently) wasn’t for gathering information with a few tourists along to help fund it. That’s an arrangement that makes sense to me, especially in a capitalist society. If bringing a billionaire along on your research trip makes that trip possible, then sure – take their money and bring them along, as long as they don’t get in the way. From what I can tell, this was all about a rich person making money by selling an experience to other rich people, similar to the recent billionaire space flights we heard about.

Very similar, in fact. It turns out that one of the missing billionaire tourists also went into space on Jeff Bezos’ novelty-shaped rocket. Apparently he’s used his wealth to pay for a number of expensive trips to remote locations, and has thus earned the title “explorer”. Regular readers will no doubt be aware of the huge amount of human suffering it costs to make a billionaire, so you may understand my general lack of concern about this. On a human level, I hope the people on that sub survive. Assuming they weren’t killed immediately, suffocating in a sealed metal tube sounds like a horrible way to die. While I do want to take away all of these people’s money, and actually do something useful with it, I would only condemn the actual people to suffer the same sort of life the rest of us lead, but with guaranteed food, housing and healthcare.

Mainly, I’m just tired of rich people. I’m tired of a system that actively rewards people for ruthless, murderous exploitation. I’m tired of the way everyone in the world has to put up with the whims of these people. Astronomers warned that Musk’s Starlink system could devastate Earth-based astronomy, but they couldn’t actually do anything about it. Educators warned that Gates’ plan to “fix” USian education wouldn’t work, but they couldn’t stop him from messing with a generation of students. Most of the world wants to deal with climate change, but the petty greed of a handful of rich assholes has almost completely prevented us from saving ourselves. Trans people are just trying to live their lives, but on Twitter, Musk has decided to actively support his fellow bigots, and given what a petty man-child he is, it’s almost certainly because his trans daughter disowned him, and his ex-wife started dating a trans woman.

And a handful of billionaires go missing on their deep-sea joy ride, and the news breathlessly covers every detail. There has been news about the refugee ship that sank (possibly with the help of the Greek coast guard), but that coverage has been all but drowned out by the submarine story, and that’s just one of many such ships. Those refugees were just a few hundred out of the many millions who’ve been displaced in recent years, by neocolonial policies and wars, and by climate change. The displaced are just a hundred million out of the billions living and dying in poverty, and a huge portion of that suffering could be avoided, if our society even had the capacity to value life over profit.

How much money is being spent, right now, to find those rich tourists and their shitty submarine? US and Canadian coast guards are involved, as are the navies of those nations, and other branches, and an oil and gas corp. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of that effort would have been unnecessary if the submarine had had an emergency locator beacon, of the kind that’s been available for decades.

From what I can tell, the only thing of real value that we’ve gotten from this, is yet another demonstration that the meritocracy is a lie, and that building our society around that lie has had both devastating and ridiculous consequences.

On balance, I hope that the submarine passengers survive. I also hope that, if that happens, the guy running this submarine company has his toys taken away, because it’s very clear that he cannot play with them responsibly, and it is absurd to the point of offensiveness that the governments of two nations are involved in trying to find him and his shitty submarine, because he couldn’t be bothered to spring for a couple extra safety measures. How many times do we have to bail these people out, before we realize that they’re a wholly unnecessary burden? How many ways do we have to bail them out?

As a species, we cannot afford rich people.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Defeat By Small Victories

We all dwell on missed opportunities from time to time. Maybe there was a job you almost took, or a trip you almost went on. Maybe you regret going somewhere or doing something when you just wanted to have a little time to yourself. Maybe there was a company you should have invested in, or an investment you shouldn’t have made. For me, the one that nags me the most isn’t one from my own life, but the time that’s been wasted on climate change. What would the world be like if governments had acted when scientists and corporations all knew what was going on, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s? I think it’s entirely possible that we couldn’t have “solved” the problem, but there’s no question that we had a chance for a drastically different future. If we’d been making the kind of steady, deliberate change that was being called for, the planet would be a cooler and less chaotic place, today.

We had a chance, and it was squandered before I was born. Worse than that, the same choice has been made every damned day since then, and so now big changes are all that’s left. Either we change our entire society in a major way, or it will be “changed” for us by the rapidly warming climate. The oceans are doing scary shit right now, and it seems like the powers that be are moving ahead with their plans to use violent repression to deal with the crisis they’ve created.

But hey – fossil fuel lobbyists will have to identify themselves at the next conference that’s supposedly about responding to climate change:

The move by the UN to require anyone registering for the summit to declare their affiliation was heralded as a victory for transparency by campaigners who have been increasingly concerned at the growing presence of oil and gas lobbyists at climate talks.

Scott Kirby, a campaigner from Youngo, which represents youth campaigners at the UN climate talks, said: “When young people see the number of fossil fuel lobbyists present at UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences, it makes us question the ability this process has to solve the biggest challenge threatening our futures. This is why we welcome the step to increase transparency of observer interests in the talks.”

Many campaigners said the change to make potential conflicts of interest more apparent should be only a first step towards excluding fossil fuel companies from the talks, or from key parts of them.

Hwei Mian Lim, of the Women and Gender Constituency, said: “We can only meaningfully tackle the climate crisis when we kick big polluters out. Fortunately, we have the real solutions, including gender-just climate solutions, and have the power in collective feminist movements to prevent untold suffering, in particular among women and girls in the global south.

“This is strengthened with weeding out the undue influence of big polluters that seek to undermine climate action. Cop28 is our best chance to start implementing them and we must do so in the most gender responsive, and effective and impactful way.”

Hey, we did it guys! We won!

In all seriousness, this is a good thing. It’s good that they will have to identify themselves, and it’s even possible that most of them will do it. My problem, in case it wasn’t clear, is that this is the kind of change that should have been made, once again, before I was born. We’ve gotten to the point where global warming is already displacing millions of people every year, and it’s worth a headline that fossil fuel lobbyists have to identify themselves as such at a conference that should be about eliminating their entire industry? At this rate, we’ll be celebrating their ban from the conference some time after the flooded ruins of Miami are finally abandoned.

I want to be clear – I have no problem with the people who fought for this rule change, and it’s clear from the article that they also view this as a very small victory, compared to the scale of what needs doing. If nothing else, their efforts are needed to show why it’s so important for people to organize and take direct action, rather than relying on a political and economic system that might as well be designed to drive us to extinction.

And hey, at least the conference will be limiting the influence of oil interests, right? That’s progress!

The change came as nations wrapped up nearly two weeks of talks in Bonn, where officials tried to lay the groundwork for Cop28, which starts on 30 November.

The event will be held in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil and gas producer, and chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who is head of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc. The company is planning a large expansion of its production capacity, and last year it sent scores of executives to the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.

Al Jaber attended the Bonn talks for two days last week and spoke only briefly in public. He said: “The phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable. The speed at which this happens depends on how quickly we can phase up zero-carbon alternatives, while ensuring energy security, accessibility and affordability.”

He failed to give an assurance that a phase-out of fossil fuels would be on the official agenda at Cop28, despite a concerted push by many developed and developing countries for its inclusion. The UAE Cop28 presidency has insisted it is up to all the countries represented at the talks to make decisions on the agenda.

Anyway, remember what I said about organizing? I feel like it would be good if we didn’t have to rely corrupt governments to solve our problems. Having an organized and empowered working class won’t fix everything, but it seems pretty clear that it can’t be worse than giving power to people based on how good they are at exploiting others.

I feel as though I’ve spent my entire life hearing about small victories in one area or another, and how each one will help us a whole lot, at some point in the future. They never seem to deliver on that promise. Some of those victories did pay off, by reducing emissions, but they’re hard to notice because they weren’t enough to stop overall emissions from continuing to rise. The majority seem to just be empty promises, or doomed half-measures like trying to offset CO2 emissions with forests, which definitely never catch fire or anything.

It’s frustrating, and discouraging. It reminds me of the many years now that I’ve seen articles and research reports promising revolutionary new batteries, or new ways to harvest power, or new, safer nuclear designs. Just a few more adjustments, and then everything will be fine! It reminds me of the fallacious incrementalism promised by centrist politicians over the years.

We have an abundance of small victories, and they will never be enough if we don’t demand big ones, and fight for them whether or not the people in power want us to. It says everything bad about our political leaders that fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists aren’t treated as pariahs for their decades of destruction, corruption, and misinformation. Until we have the power to actually bring things to a halt, and force change, these small “victories” are likely to be the best we get, as the world continues to burn. I used to like reading about things like this but these days, it just feels like a reminder of how little progress we’ve made.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Video: New Reporting Adds to Kissinger’s Death Toll

When Henry Kissinger turned 100 last month, there was a lot of talk about how the worst people on the planet seem to live longer than most of us. I’d like to believe that everybody’s clear on why Kissinger has earned all the hate he gets and more, but given that major players in the Democratic Party apparently consider him a friend, I’m not so sure. The Vietnam War was wholly unjustified, and every death in it – American, Vietnamese, or Cambodian, is the fault of the American politicians who started it, and who kept it going. We’ve long known that Kissinger played a major role in increasing the bloodshed, but some recent reporting shows that he was worse than previously thought. His continued freedom, wealth, and comfort prove every day that there is no justice in this society.

Reckless Water Consumption Is Tilting The Entire Planet

There have been many attempts, over the last few decades, to find ways to talk about global warming that convey the immense scale of what we’re doing to our planet, but one of the more effective ones, in my opinion, is being able to point to the fact that through ice melt, we’ve actually moved enough mass to shift the axis around which our planet spins. It’s not something that affects our lives, but it does convey the message that what’s happening really is planet-sized.

Unfortunately, it turns out that’s not the only way in which we’ve been messing with Earth’s axis. As you may be aware, humanity has something of a problem with unsustainable water usage. Even without global warming, we’re pulling it out of the ground far faster than it’s being replenished, and polluting a lot of it in the process. How much water have we been pumping? Enough to shift the planet:

By pumping water out of the ground and moving it elsewhere, humans have shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) east between 1993 and 2010 alone, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for short-format, high-impact research with implications spanning the Earth and space sciences.

Based on climate models, scientists previously estimated humans pumped 2,150 gigatons of groundwater, equivalent to more than 6 millimeters (0.24 inches) of sea level rise, from 1993 to 2010. But validating that estimate is difficult.

One approach lies with the Earth’s rotational pole, which is the point around which the planet rotates. It moves during a process called polar motion, which is when the position of the Earth’s rotational pole varies relative to the crust. The distribution of water on the planet affects how mass is distributed. Like adding a tiny bit of weight to a spinning top, the Earth spins a little differently as water is moved around.

“Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot,” said Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University who led the study. “Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.”

Water’s ability to change the Earth’s rotation was discovered in 2016, and until now, the specific contribution of groundwater to these rotational changes was unexplored. In the new study, researchers modeled the observed changes in the drift of Earth’s rotational pole and the movement of water — first, with only ice sheets and glaciers considered, and then adding in different scenarios of groundwater redistribution.

The model only matched the observed polar drift once the researchers included 2150 gigatons of groundwater redistribution. Without it, the model was off by 78.5 centimeters (31 inches), or 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches) of drift per year.

“I’m very glad to find the unexplained cause of the rotation pole drift,” Seo said. “On the other hand, as a resident of Earth and a father, I’m concerned and surprised to see that pumping groundwater is another source of sea-level rise.”

“This is a nice contribution and an important documentation for sure,” said Surendra Adhikari, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in this study. Adhikari published the 2016 paper on water redistribution impacting rotational drift. “They’ve quantified the role of groundwater pumping on polar motion, and it’s pretty significant.”

The location of the groundwater matters for how much it could change polar drift; redistributing water from the midlatitudes has a larger impact on the rotational pole. During the study period, the most water was redistributed in western North America and northwestern India, both at midlatitudes.

Countries’ attempts to slow groundwater depletion rates, especially in those sensitive regions, could theoretically alter the change in drift, but only if such conservation approaches are sustained for decades, Seo said.

I would not have guessed that pumped water would rate higher than melting land ice, but apparently it’s easy to under-estimate just how much water our species uses, particularly for agriculture. I’m saying nothing new here, but we’ve got to stop treating natural resources as though they are infinite, and require no maintenance. We are fully capable of using water more efficiently, it’s just that doing so would require changes in how things are run, and that might as well be the end of the world, for the folks profiting off the status quo.

I don’t believe overpopulation is really a problem we need to work on. That said, the size of our population, combined with the technology at our disposal, means that we can change the surface of this planet in massive ways. That’s not an inherently bad thing – if nothing else, it means we can repair some of the damage we’ve done – but it does mean that if we want our species to continue, and to have a future worth living in, we need to start changing how we use resources, and what we do with them afterwards. Not only is this level of over-exploitation not needed for everyone to have a decent standard of living, it’s actively detrimental to that goal. It is making this planet a worse place to live, all to satisfy the pathological greed of capitalist, and we’re reaching the point where either it ends, or we do.

Colonialism, Cobalt, and the False Promise of Electric Cars

If you get into enough arguments about slavery in the United States, you will encounter people making the claim that reparations aren’t owed, because black people in the U.S. are better off than black people in Africa. Often, this will come with the implication or outright statement that poverty and political instability in present-day Africa is due to some innate deficiency in black people. This is, in case it wasn’t clear from the start, and argument rooted in white supremacy, and like all such arguments, it relies heavily on ignorance and/or dismissal of history. Among other things, it ignores that the continent of Africa wasn’t simply plundered for slaves, and otherwise left alone. It was divided up by European empires, and almost the entire population of the continent was enslaved in their own homes, all to generate wealth for already-wealthy European aristocrats.

The reality is, that never changed. “European aristocrats” has expanded to include billionaires in other regions, like the United States and China, but for much of the continent, every effort at actual self-determination has been met with violence from the imperial powers of the world. One of the worst-hit regions, if not the worst-hit, is what’s currently known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). King Leopold the Second of Belgium laid personal claim to the Congo, and enslaved its entire population for the sole purpose of enriching himself. The Belgian government eventually caught on, and was outraged that the profit from the enslavement, murder, and mutilation of countless humans as going to the king, rather than to the coffers of the Belgian government.

The Congo did gain its independence in 1960, but the leader of that movement, Patrice Lumumba, was promptly tortured and assassinated. His body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, his bones ground, and the dust scattered to prevent any grave site from becoming a source of consolation or inspiration. While Lumumba’s death stood out for the viciousness, assassination is routine result of an African leader fighting for actual independence, and for a better future.

Colonialism did not end. At most, it changed forms, but when it comes to the DRC, that change seems to be barely perceptible. Where Belgium once brutalized and exploited the country for rubber, now many countries and corporations exploit it for minerals, chief of which is cobalt. Congo supplies 63% of the global cobalt supply, without which, we would not have the lithium-ion batteries in our phones and electric cars. China controls and profits from most of that, but since my audience is probably more familiar with USian billionaires, I want you to think about the wealth that has come from just those batteries in that country. Elon Musk became the richest man in the world, for a bit, and it was Tesla that bought him his “Iron Man” reputation. How many other billionaires have been made from smartphones? And hey – if hard work and playing by the rules pays off in a capitalist world, does that mean that the Congolese people mining that cobalt are also doing well?

Of course not. Why would I even ask me such a question? Haven’t I been paying attention?

This is why electric cars are not an acceptable “solution” to climate change. We can’t just swap out power sources, and continue on as we have been. We cannot condemn uncountable millions of people, for centuries to come, to hopeless lives of body-destroying toil, and call that a “solution. If it was good that the atrocities of the past were ended – and it was – then it is good that the atrocities of the present be ended. Complaints about the size of the change are no more acceptable today than they were in the past. One cannot claim that the economy must be preserved “for the greater good”, when that economy’s normal function depends on such murderous exploitation.