In 2019, with the help of a brilliant surgeon, an excellent nursing staff, and state-of-the-art technology, I overcame a brain tumor. I was supercharged in fighting for my life, forced to navigate a Byzantine insurance industry and initial medical incompetence, which ultimately became the far greater danger. For months I woke at 3 am to fight for my life, never tired, determined to beat the inch-diameter mass in my head.
Now, you and I must fight with the same energy and resolve today because every one of us is in life-threatening peril as fires, floods, and fascism increasingly engulf our world.
Since Trump regained the Oval Office, I have often struggled to stay on my original topic, which led me here, to climate change. In five years of relentless research, I learned of planetary boundaries, of which climate change is just one facet, albeit the most pressing one. Although I was already keenly aware of overpopulation and overconsumption (I was made aware of coming overpopulation in grade school!), it’s embarrassing to think I had never heard the term overshoot or understood its nine points of danger, seven of which are now breached. If we survive climate change, there is much more work to do.
While I wished to stay on topic, I have not been able to ignore the Gaza genocide or America rapidly devolving into a fascist state. I cannot ignore concentration camps on our own soil. I cannot ignore the gleeful joy of the private prison industry’s record profits led by CoreCivic and the GEO Group, and I cannot ignore the ICE Gestapo murdering people on our own streets, dying in cells from denied medical care, or driven to the desperation of suicide.
One party is demonstrably worse (I think you know which one), but both are guilty of bringing our world to the brink of uninhabitability through the mindless mantra of endless growth on our finite planet built on the corporate victimization of poor nations. Capitalism is unsustainable; neoliberal capitalism is even more repugnant, and the two have led to the rise of fascism as economically harvestable natural resources run out. Iran is a foolish resource war. There will be others without an organized grassroots awakening region by region, country by country, demanding change and willing to shed blood.
Both parties refuse to acknowledge it’s game up, that oil is a one-and-done resource, and that without it, particularly diesel fuel for destructive mining and transport, you can’t electrify the world.
It has always been Homo sapiens modus operandi to shape the environment to suit us. It’s the nature of any organism to propagate itself in the greatest numbers possible. Until humans, the imperceptibly slow workings of our Earth provided the balance and opportunity for innumerable species to thrive and support each other even through death. Every dead plant or animal is meant to return to the soil to provide life again. Look at the life provided by the decaying log fallen in a forest. Death, unappealing to most and even frightening for many, is simply the governing law of a living planet. For something to live, something must die. Choosing to sequester our bodies in wooden boxes is problematic at best and yet another questionable capitalist industry. We’re units of profit even when we’re laid to rest. Let my body nurture a tree. In that way, I live on.
We were gifted, or perhaps cursed, with opposable thumbs and clever hands, making us supreme toolmakers. Other animals have exhibited tool-making ability as well, and not just our closely related primate cousins. Crows and ravens, for instance, have demonstrated the ability to assemble tools and plan for the future. Every organism seeks to dominate its environment either wittingly or unwittingly.
It’s hard to say whether our big brains gave rise to hands or hands gave rise to big brains. Either way, we have used our abilities to reengineer the planet to our liking, which is proving fatal. The Earth sets the limits. We don’t.
In our quest for control, we have merely deferred the inevitable, our own mortality. This has largely been made possible by fossil fuels—energy. Matter can be neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. Our transformation of tens of millions of years of organic matter—plants and animals—into fossil fuel has resulted in a planet on fire and floods inundating our coastlines and sinking islands. We have upset the ebb and flow of life, an imperceptible process in our short life spans.
The bill for our arrogance has come due, the penalty for converting 3,380 gigatons of organic matter—3,726,000,000,000 tons converted into global warming heat. Earth seeks equilibrium, and she will have it.
There have been great thinkers who recognized the foolishness of human behavior, from the famous Greek philosophers to Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Twain, and even the increasing seriousness of George Carlin as he aged, yet here we are in the hands of some of the most evil and ignorant people ever to be born. I can’t list all the wise people. Sadly, despite their efforts, ignorance marches on. Martin Luther King, Jr. died for justice. That’s what it takes. Unshakeable courage.
Trump is a puppet president, nothing more. Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, AIPAC, Big Oil, and tech oligarchs run the show. Trump, ignorant to his core, is a racist and hateful person with grievances that go back to his cold, un-nurtured childhood. His intrinsic malevolence tapped into an ever-present well of hate, racism, and grievance, always present in America, barely quelled by the Civil War and a hard-won and bloody civil rights movement.
No victory for justice is ever permanent. Advances must be protected and fought for repeatedly. Evil never sleeps. As we fight fascism, we lose critical time to overcome climate change disaster. 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures is proving lethal enough, and each increment of temperature rise is an exponential in its wrath, not linear, with unpredictable domino effects leaning on other planetary boundaries.
Since Covid, evil and its companion ignorance have paraded brazenly. We would never argue over who can run 100 meters fastest, but when it comes to brains, anybody with a mouth can be the smartest.
The problem? For the most part, the smartest don’t seek political office, so we’re run by mediocrity at best or worse by self-serving creeps without principles. Rest in hell, Lindsey Graham. Mitch, he’s calling you. Bill and Hillary, you’re deplorable. Even the best of our “leaders” have not recognized the limits of the planet or the physical impossibility of endless growth. And fuck Milton Friedman, too, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976. His vision was deadly, and I am happy to speak ill of the dead when it’s earned. Soulless opportunists, all of these people.
Now we’re in the hands of those actively engaged in speeding our deaths through policy and the Iran War. I have warned repeatedly of what this administration would bring, first in The Administration of Death, then in The Death Cult Alliance, Team Apocalypse, and More Administration of Death. Neocapitalist murder has run rampant since the overthrow of Allende in Chile. Reagan put his foot on that accelerator, and stupid perv Bill Clinton was happy to further destructive world trade policies.
The Iran War, which our military has advised against for decades, is depleting our weaponry and destabilizing the world economy. That’s the idea: to reduce everything to chaos and expedite death at scale. Halting 20 percent of oil transit and critical fertilizer inputs while the world is gripped by drought and an El Niño from hell approaching represents too great an opportunity for Christians begging for End Times and tech oligarchs who want control of shrinking resources.
Personally, I think Heaven and Hell are on Earth. It’s our choice what we make of her. Our most powerful telescopes, particularly the James Webb, have seen neither.
Trump doesn’t care as long as he can grift. He may genuinely not believe climate change isn’t real, as woefully stupid as he is, but we can bet others in his repulsive administration do.
The resources that built the world as we know it are finite and running out in terms of EROI, even basics like copper, let alone fossil fuels. They know this and have decided to leverage climate collapse rather than solve it.
Meanwhile, there are 14,000 temperature-related deaths in Europe so far, with India suffering much worse. While Canada likely won’t break their 2023 record for boreal forest loss to fire this season, it will be plenty bad. Like 2023, I can smell it in Buffalo, NY. Their brilliant leader, Davos darling Mark Carney, is all in on fossil fuel projects.
Offshoots of the massive fires and floods we’re seeing are agriculture failing and disease-carrying mosquitos migrating to cooler climates. Mosquitos are in Iceland now. Iceland! Previously unheard diseases are likely to infect new communities in the years ahead while Ebola is out of control in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.
As stated, I am not religious, but the parallels to biblical prophecy are stunning. Maybe those dudes writing the Bible knew a bit about human behavior.
This behavior now is cannibalism dressed in openly fascist clothing. This is the endgame of neoliberal capitalism and democracy built on genocide and slavery. It ate the wealth of every other country on the globe and had no choice but to finally come home to its birthplace, America, for a last tasty gorge. Check out that Bosch triptych here. I couldn’t embed a high-resolution version. Gorging is depicted. Hieronymus knew something about human behavior, too.
It’s fight or die time for our future. It’s up to us. Organize locally and regionally for the impending system breakdown on a global scale. The government isn’t going to save us. The government is the problem.
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