Just in case you think my last post was too pessimistic, here’s the latest news from Antarctica.

This week, ice scientists meeting in New Orleans warned that something even more alarming was brewing on the West Antarctic ice sheet – a vast basin of ice on the Antarctic peninsula. Years of research by teams of British and American researchers showed that great cracks and fissures had opened up both on top of and underneath the Thwaites glacier, one of the biggest in the world, and it was feared that parts of it, too, may fracture and collapse possibly within five years or less.

Thwaites makes Larsen B look like an icicle. It is roughly 100 times larger, about the size of Britain, and contains enough water on its own to raise sea levels worldwide by more than half a metre. It contributes about 4% of annual global sea level rise and has been called the most important glacier in the world, even the “doomsday” glacier. Satellite studies show it is melting far faster than it did in the 1990s.

Thwaites is worrisome, but there are many other great glaciers in Antarctica also retreating, thinning and melting as the Southern Ocean warms. Many are being held back because Thwaites acts like a cork, blocking their exit to the sea. Should Thwaites fall apart, scientists believe the others would speed up, leading to the collapse of the whole ice sheet and catastrophic global sea level rises of several metres.

The Thwaites glacier looks so small in the satellite view. All the white icy stuff piled up behind it looks even more ominous now.

Don’t panic! Governments around the world are leaping into action…or not.

Yet just one month after Cop26 ended in Glasgow, the warning that the 300-metre thick, 50-mile wide Thwaites glacier has started to crack up has been met with silence from governments preoccupied by Covid-19 and the return of normal politics. The danger is that the many actions pledged in November to address global heating will be shelved for another year, to become just one more risk in an increasingly dangerous world.

Thwaites underlines that global heating and glaciers do not wait for politicians, and every year action to reduce climate emissions is delayed only accelerates global disaster.

Isn’t it reassuring that no matter how dismal I sound, reality is so much worse?

Can’t you see I’m working here? The birds have taken over. My wife has set up multiple bird feeders, and she also sows seeds on the snow, so all day long it’s flocks of birds flitting past my office window. I’m trying to get these exams graded, but I get these constant visual distractions.

Also, bird butts.

You might ask, “why not close your window shades?”. I answer that it doesn’t help, because these birds are flighty and numerous. They swoop in, peck as a mob at the seeds, and then after 10 or 15 seconds, they abruptly rise with a whooshing whirr that is quite loud and audible in my office, indoors.

Also, there’s a hawk that occasionally darts in for a snack and sends everyone in frantic flight, and I’d like to catch it in the act.

Years ago, when we moved into our home, it was graced with magnificent trees. In the front yard, we had this huge weeping willow, one of the notable landmarks in our neighborhood, and a pair of tall pine trees; the centerpiece of the back yard was a grand old slippery elm. They’ve all succumbed to age, and we’ve had to pay experts to come in and chop them down as they became increasingly dangerous, losing limbs in storms and just generally falling into crepitude.

We have only one original tree left, right outside my office window. It’s a busy home to squirrels and birds. But it’s also doomed. Look at this hideous gnarled gap in the trunk.

It’s a deep wound, and that’s a horrible pale fungus eating away at the heartwood. We’re probably going to have to butcher this tree, too.

We’ve had a fair number of saplings planted around the yard, but it’s doubtful that I’ll live long enough to enjoy their shade someday.

Big Oil would like us all to forget that they lied to us for decades — they tried to tell the public that global warming wasn’t a big deal, it wasn’t happening, and if it was, it was all our fault with our great galumphing carbon footprints, while they were innocently serving our needs and using the profits to do great things for the environment. Now that climate change is here to stay and dramatically and conspicuously affecting our lives, they’d like those campaigns to vanish down a memory hole. Don’t let it happen! The oil companies are literally evil villains, conspiring to cause world-wide suffering in service to their profits.

Mobil and ExxonMobil ran one of the most comprehensive climate denial campaigns of all time, with a foray in the 1980s, a blitz in the 1990s and continued messaging through the late 2000s. Their climate “advertorials” – advertisements disguised as editorials – appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and other newspapers and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America”.

Between 1996 and 1998, for instance, Mobil ran 12 advertorials timed with the 1997 UN Kyoto negotiations that questioned whether the climate crisis is real and human-made and 10 that downplayed its seriousness. “Reset the alarm,” one ad suggested. “Let’s not rush to a decision at Kyoto … We still don’t know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet.”

Liar, liar, planet’s on fire. These were prolonged FUD campaigns. Scientists knew what was happening and what was going to happen, and they said so, and Big Oil paid pet scientists to lie. It happens every time a company gets huge and its shareholders get greedy and rampant, raging capitalism kicks in to destroy all restraint. This is what the tobacco companies did when the scientific evidence came pouring in that smoking causes cancer — they lied. And they got away with it. It’s what Big Ag got away with with profligate spraying of pesticides. It’s what the oil companies got away with again with spewing lead into the environment.

How are we going to make them pay if we forget how much they consciously, intentionally lied to the world?

I think it would be a fine idea to shut down amoral, exploitive companies, like the oil and gas industry, and while we’re at it, the tobacco companies, and we should do it soon before they metastasize any more. The question is…how? Tumbrels and guillotines are so passé, and they aren’t at all effective against abstract legal entities. We also can’t just, say, blow up their pipelines and processing plants, because that doesn’t provide for a gentle, gradual transition that won’t kill people — and as someone looking at an onrushing Minnesota winter, I can assure you that just shutting off the gas will kill lots of us. Another problem is that these companies are using their ill-gotten profits to diversify, buying up other companies that will keep them fat and happy even if we do demolish the petroleum industry, so it’ll be hard to satisfy the lust for vengeance.

OK, tumbrels and guillotines it is, then!

No, wait, here’s an article that makes some productive suggestions about shutting down the petro fuel industry. Shucks, I guess we could try this first.

Pro-abolition groups say this process would entail putting elected officials – not corporate executives – in charge of fossil fuel assets. The US government would slowly stop drilling or buying leases as it prioritizes lowering emissions and investing in clean energy. Nationalized ownership would allow the US to leave oil and gas reserves in the ground while simultaneously shrinking the fossil fuel company’s grip on the nation.

Such public intervention would also prevent oil companies from simply shutting down operations, laying off their workers and leaving behind devastated towns and counties, as coal companies have done, Skandier said. “We need to consider that a lot of these communities are highly dependent on fossil fuel revenues, so we need to plan how we’re going to build community wealth and diversify their economies to make sure they’re not only economically stable but resilient to climate impacts in the future.”

The US could take the land or reserves currently owned by the fossil fuel industry via eminent domain, the legal right governments have to seize land or infrastructure for the public interest. The federal government has done this before to create national parks and even to convert a private energy company in Tennessee into the now publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority during the Great Depression.

All in favor, say “AYE”.

The article admits that it won’t be easy and there will be pitfalls.

Any movement to break up big oil, however, will inevitably face enormous headwinds. The industry benefits from being deeply ingrained within American society, and it’s expected that oil and gas interests would push back hard in courts. Nationalizing profitable industries would also take an unprecedented amount of political will, which has yet to materialize.

Law expert Sean Hecht warns that breaking up energy companies may lead to unintended ripple effects. History suggests that simply erasing a company’s existence may make it easier for them to ignore their financial responsibilities when they’ve caused harm.

Hecht, the co-executive director of UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, saw this firsthand in Los Angeles, where he lives. When the Department of Justice shut down Exide Technologies in 2015 for illegally poisoning neighborhoods with lead for decades, the company filed for bankruptcy and left taxpayers to foot the cleanup bill.

This is going to hurt, and there are a lot of lawyers who will savagely fight back. Of course there will be unexpected and deleterious side effects — but will they be worse than rising seas, out-of-control wildfires, gooey black muck in our water supplies, or vast tracts of land rendered uninhabitable by lethal summer temperatures? I think not.