Living With Heat

The earth gets hotter, as rich nations continue their coal, oil and gas burning spree, while those who urge a course correction get…thrown into prison. The latest casualty of a judiciary dedicated to preserving ecocidal plutocracy is Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam, sentenced to five years in jail in the U.K. for his efforts to stop the corporate insanity defiling the planet. You may think “defiling” is a strong word. But with a heat index of 144 degrees Fahrenheit in Dubai July 16, multiple heat domes baking enormous swaths of the globe this month at record-smashing temperatures for record-smashing lengths of time, and the four hottest days IN A ROW ever recorded in July, you might want to thank Hallam for attempting to arrest this calamity. But if you do, be prepared for the violent, most rapacious aristo-oligarchs in human history – especially those peopling the top echelons of giant oil corporations – to try to shut you up.

Those moneyed bigwigs have been fiendishly effective when it comes to tarring the climate movement and climate science as junk. It seems the hotter the planet becomes, the more undeniable the evidence of our senses and statistics, the more these fantastically wealthy polluters double down on their planetary pyromania. They do not care what happens to the next generation and suffer from the delusion that they will be immune to the climate fiasco unfolding now. So they go on pooh-poohing extreme weather and dangerous heat and leading the best congress their money can buy by the nose.

Back to Hallam. His crime? In his own words: “Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction.” Hallam recounts in his recent posts that when, during his trial, he described the climate apocalypse we face – “floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths” – the judge muzzled him. “He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn’t stop.” Hallam kept talking. The jury was kept out of the courtroom.

The accused cited the Dutch Supreme Court ruling “that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emissions of greenhouse gases.” When the jury returned, Hallam referred to case law, but the judge ordered the jurors to disregard him, even as he highlighted “the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food.” Indeed, some experts argue that by the end of the century, the much warmer earth will be unsuitable for growing wheat. So I guess those alive then will have to get their carbs from something other than bread.

 Things are bad for this planet, our only home. In the past two years, global temps have shot way up, past scientific predictions, while ocean heat has blasted through all recorded precedents. According to the New York Times April 10, “the ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year.” This kills marine life, causes coral bleaching and impacts weather, already severely eccentric and out of kilter from atmospheric warming. “Biblical flooding, scorching heat, collapsing grid systems, animals crumbling, waters rising, crops wilting, economy on the brink and millions displaced,” wrote Robert Hunziker in CounterPunch June 21. “Welcome to the future of climate change…Pakistan.” To prevent that future from spreading to other parts of the globe, we must stop burning fossil fuels, pronto.

This article cites an interview from Inside Climate News June 8, entitled “As Temperatures in Pakistan Top 120 Degrees, There’s Nowhere to Run.” This is something no nation, no leader wants to invite. Right, Donald “I Dig Coal” Trump? We can assume the Dems are somewhat on board (vide: Kamala “Prosecuted Polluters” Harris who has specifically addressed this matter of our collective fate), but the GOP is not. However, Trump’s surprisingly heartening plan to encourage Beijing to plant new industries here in the U.S. could easily include what China excels at, namely renewables.

Producing renewables means big bucks and entails lots of new jobs, and for GOP skeptics who want to boost fossil fuels, well hello? Wasn’t the multi-week, crushing heat dome over North America in July enough for you? Or do you actually want this heat/hurricane/wildfire catastrophe to get worse? It’s not good for business when electrical grids crash, whole cities like Houston lose power and sweltering residents decide, in large numbers, to move elsewhere. Or is the GOP content to let the south and west become uninhabitable?

Pakastani environmental lawyer Rafay Alam is quoted by Hunziker: “There is a significant denialism on climate change in places like the United States…It’s extremely infuriating to see people who’ve participated in this global warming deny it, deny any accountability, try and move on as if nothing’s happened and try to continue to make money and drive that bottom line.” Alam says multitudes in the Global South share this view. But the problem is that waking up your average American businessman is almost impossible, his uninformed mind is already made up, and climate doom, homo boobus thinks, is bad fer bizness. Well, it IS bad for business, at least for business as it’s conducted now, but it’s good for a whole slew of new, green businesses. However, no American entrepreneur wants to hear that what he does will ultimately end the world as we know it, why, that could scare off customers…almost as fast as a hurricane blows away their roofs.

One can always hope, and maybe we’ll get lucky, that the latest shocking heat trends are a fluke and that climate scientists’ more conservative – though equally devastating in the long term – predictions prove correct. Activists, however, won’t sit on their hands and wait. Take Hallam again. Prison guards, he posted July 22, have one main maxim: “Break the rules and you will be punished.” That, Hallam writes, corresponds to “politics at the end of the world. You can vote for whoever you want to as long as they don’t stop the project to destroy the human race over the next two decades…Civilizations…commit suicide, to use historian Arnold Toynbee’s famous phrase. Actually, they all destroy themselves eventually…because they are so sure they will not destroy themselves.”

Hallam argues that currently capital “has escaped control by the state…And soon capital will lose…” That’s because its externalities, i.e. carbon pollution, ruin the livable world. Historically, capital refused to pay for its externalities, for destroying and deforming the earth, and there’s no sign that’s about to change, even though, as of July 23 – just for instance – the whole ocean basin of the North Atlantic experiences a heatwave up 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal. This, while ocean temps have shot up 16 degrees Fahrenheit above average. The ocean is vast. It takes lots of carbon pollution to do this. But that’s what our vaunted, unchecked, rampaging, late capitalism has wrought, and that’s merely one example among hundreds.

Another for instance: In May and June, a heat dome stalled over Mexico and temps shot up over 113 degrees Fahrenheit, killing dozens of people, while bats, birds and monkeys got so hot they fell dead from the trees. This is not normal. This is life-threatening. It did not happen in the 20^th century; back then summers were hot, but not nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks on end on, say, the North American East Coast. If we want to arrest this disaster, business as usual must rapidly alter. Such a prescription may be anathema to plutocrats, but they, too, should consider what the world will be like in mere decades. Is it really worth gambling dying of heat prostration, or drowning in a flood, or being swept away by a hurricane? Because a broken climate will not spare the rich. It will kill them, too.

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