It is Illegal to Discuss the Only Thing That Could Have Ever Saved Us
It is important not to speak of the apocalypse as a potential, far-off disaster. It is already here, it will only get worse, and we were always powerless to stop it because it is illegal to do so.
The Onion, ironically one of the last bastions of real journalism in American media, uses satire to get away with stating uncomfortable truths
In “Cataloguing the Sixth Mass Extinction” I laid out a relatively wide-reaching but by no means exhaustive overview of the many facets of the ongoing Anthropocene extinction. As of May 2022, it can no longer be denied (not for many decades now actually) that the current international arrangement is causing both an ongoing and accelerating humanitarian emergency. Non-violent protest and awareness campaigns have thus far failed miserably foster responsiveness among the elites, who have a self-interest in maintaining the status quo and widely consider themselves insulated from the worst potential outcomes. Their future is relatively secure; ours is not.
Do we then not have some self-defense recourse against our assuredly imminent harm? What is the level of action justified by the ongoing and eventually complete destruction of our civilization? What “crimes” would have been considered too extreme if at some point in the last 100 years, their commission would have thwarted the coming apocalypse entirely?
We must be careful not to endorse or directly discussion such actions, which will remain nameless, but as often as I am asked “If you think things are so irreparably damaged that there is no cause to hold onto hope, why don’t you just kill yourself?” I am asked “If you think big polluters are destroying the planet, why don’t you do something more compelling than protesting or adopting a vegan lifestyle”? This is a powerful rhetorical trick, because it forces the climate realist (what some might derisively refer to as a “doomer”) into the trap of admitting either some level of hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, or the intent to engage in questionably legal sabotage or other direct action. It lazily forces us to put ourselves at risk of investigation in order to be consistent with our principles, but the onus is placed unfairly on us, because the illegality of direct action is itself unjust—we had a relatively small hand in the creation of the issue, so the burden is not appropriately ours to bear. Powerful CEOs, on the other hand, were much more directly involved in the climate crisis and are therefore more responsible for doing what they are able to correct their past indiscretions. They are also in a position to accomplish much more than the average individual. But is direct, potentially violent action necessary? Surely there are less damaging alternatives available to us while we still have time.
To conceptually justify direct action, it must first be established as the only remaining option via a process of elimination. Basic proportionality dictates that if one can deescalate a potentially dangerous situation with less violent methods, they must first try to do so if it is reasonably safe. To show that violent action is justified, the “doomer” way of thinking must be proven correct. The BBC recently hosted one of many increasingly common and rote calls for optimism and the rejection of what its author sees as inaction facilitated by “doomer” thinking:
Climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, who has been working with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: "I don't think it's helpful to pretend that climate change will lead to humanity's extinction."
In its most recent report, the IPCC laid out a detailed plan that it believes could help the world avoid the worst impacts of rising temperatures.
It involves "rapid, deep and immediate" cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases - which trap the sun's heat and make the planet hotter.
"There is no denying that there are large changes across the globe, and that some of them are irreversible," says Dr Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment.
"It doesn't mean the world is going to end - but we have to adapt, and we have to stop emitting."
No “doomer” thinks the world is going to end, or that the human race is going to go extinct. This is a textbook example of moving the goalposts: there are many terrifying outcomes that fall just short of complete human extinction which we would invite the author Marco Silva and Dr. Otto to consider.
Notice as well the language “the IPCC laid out a detailed plan that it believes could help the world avoid the worst impacts of rising temperatures.” The worst impacts will always exist, and will always be potentially avoided. This statement is effectively meaningless and amounts to telling an immobile, nearly comatose quadriplegic that at least the accident didn’t kill them outright. It is no cause for optimism to acknowledge that every environmentalist action we take has some small benefit for the future, some small catastrophe avoided or minimized. That is the very basic definition of cause and effect.
Then there is the usual admission that the situation is dire (“some of them are irreversible”) followed by a call to cease emissions now, a necessity that has no realistic evidence for its possibility. The increasing popularity and cheapness of green technology is usually offered as a hopeful sign that international capitalism can be turned around, but this will always be too little too late, a pat rationalization that allows biased writers to sleep well knowing their rank optimism has been sufficiently sanitized in the minds of readers. It is this kind of unrealistic hope in future solutions (under the capitalist system responsible for causing the destruction in the first place, of course) that spurs true inaction and complacency, not climate “doomers” raising the alarm appropriately. The hope in a future technological solution of that magnitude is indistinguishable from magic—the climate change denial industry would hesitate to admonish climate realists for questioning the proposal that God will appear and suck the extra carbon and methane out of the sky with a straw, but they are doing exactly this by placing their hope in carbon capture and other green tech.
The answer to the above BBC thinkpiece’s central question “Why is climate 'doomism' going viral?” is an easy one: because it is correct and now undeniable, and something must be done to at least minimize future harm as much as possible (the time to avert disaster entirely has long since passed). Less severe methods of direct action and awareness raising have been attempted, to no real success (writer and activist George Monbiot, from shortly before his 2019 arrest in London):
A few hours after this column is published, I hope to be in a police cell. I don’t yet know what the charge will be, where I will be arrested or when, but I know that if I go home this evening without feeling the hand of the law on my sleeve, I will have failed. This may sound like a strange ambition, but I believe it is a reasonable one.
If I succeed, I will be one of many. In the current wave of Extinction Rebellion protests, more than 1,400 people have so far allowed themselves to be arrested. It’s a controversial tactic, but it has often proved effective. The suffragettes, the Indian salt marchers, the civil rights movement and the Polish and East German democracy movements, to name just a few, all used it as a crucial strategy. Mass arrests are a potent form of democratic protest.
They work because they show that the campaigners are serious.
Do they work, though? We are still accelerating the destruction of the biosphere (touching off unknown and potentially catastrophic feedback loops all the way), with climate change only receiving lip service by reluctant politicians who immediately find an excuse (there will always be excuses) not to pursue even token efforts to address the obvious pressing issues. There are no indications beyond the increasing availability of cheap, less carbon-intensive technologies that any progress whatsoever has been made as a result of peaceful protest. Visibility has increased, but that is more down to the inability of the government to hide discussion centering on increasing carbon and temperature rise, deforestation, the increasing frequency of costly natural disaster, or even something as plainly visible to us all as the lack of insect biomass, to name one example. Much can be hidden from the public, but the lifeless background silence, the lack of bothersome buzzing and distant birdcalls, is deafening. Awareness will increase whether it is the result of scientists publicizing their findings or the plainly obvious, preternaturally distressing outcome of a century of wanton overconsumption.
In 2022, a similar protest occurred around the world (scientist and activist Peter Kalmus, writing for The Guardian in April):
I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?
On Wednesday, I was arrested for locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chaseational campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.
We chose JP Morgan Chase because out of all the investment banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase funds the most new fossil fuel projects. As the new IPCC report explains, emissions from current and planned fossil energy infrastructure are already more than twice the amount that would push the planet over 1.5°C of global heating, a level of heating that will bring much more intense heat, fire, storms, flooding, and drought than the present 1.2°C.
Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025.
“Our movement is growing fast.” Not fast enough.
There are those who would argue that the imminent end of our way of life proves its own unworthiness, that our civilization’s wasteful, rapacious character is what led to its destruction and must therefore be abandoned in favor of a return to an agrarian lifestyle. Should we then allow the climate breakdown to take its course with no attempt to pacify its worst outcomes? In other words, should we allow the killer to stab their victim because they weren’t a great person to begin with? There are two main problems with this line of thinking: one, it forsakes those who depend on modern technology to survive (their needs could easily be accommodated in a technologically advanced but sustainable economic arrangement), and two, the destruction of the biosphere will do much more than revert human civilization back to the 18th century in a quick, painless way. That is the most visible and direct outcome, but the inevitably massive damage to the biosphere, aquifers, and even topsoil calls into question the viability of returning to a simpler way of life in the post-apocalypse on anything resembling a wide scale.
No, something must and should be done, and the enormity of the problem justifies a comparably enormous solution. But that something cannot be openly discussed, or planned, or alluded to without immediate consequences, whether real or imagined—the latter is just as stultifying as the former and capitalist law enforcement knows it, which is why any monitoring programs are left vaguely defined and shadowy.
It should immediately strike anyone as ridiculous and unacceptable that we can only speak about actions which could have saved civilization from its imminent and ongoing collapse (or presently avert a significant part of the disaster) in hushed, furtive tones and oblique euphemisms, but the justified fear of even seemingly endorsing a hypothetical direct action speaks to the stranglehold the forces of shortsighted capitalist avarice have on law enforcement, which exists to ensure that the current profoundly unequal, environmentally poisonous arrangements remain in place. If the status quo is cancerous, and the police, military, and other bureaus exist to unthinkingly defend that status quo, then it follows that they too are cancerous. It is illegal to advocate for the removal of that cancer in certain ways, but not illegal to celebrate its growth, despite the fact that the malignancy has already led to widespread suffering, displacement and death and is going to very shortly lead to exponentially more. The law itself is corrupt, dictated by the agents in charge of the ongoing mass extinction. There is no alternative to direct action on a massive (if necessary violent) scale to avert the worst of the ongoing, looming disaster—this much is undeniably true, but speaking about it openly is likely to court worried shushes and glances skyward. We are always being watched.
Kalmus writes in the above Guardian piece:
Martin Luther King Jr said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Out of necessity, and after exhaustive efforts, I’ve joined the ranks of those who selflessly risk their freedom and put their bodies on the line for the Earth, despite ridicule from the ignorant and punishment from a colonizing legal system designed to protect the planet-killing interests of the rich. It’s time we all join them. The feeling of solidarity is a wonderful balm.
How can any of us sit idly by while the very planet is threatened?
It is no surprise that the only realistic option left in the toolkit is illegal to speak about and endorse. This is the only recourse the fascists in power have if they are unwilling to address the problems themselves, and there is no reason to believe they will ever do so. If more of us speak up and give weight to the enormity of the problem by pointing out this absurdity, perhaps the elites will be more likely to listen.
Disclaimer:
I will not do anything illegal to meaningfully alter the course of Western history, if such a thing was ever possible (this essay is a thought experiment and commentary on the forbidden discourse, not a statement of any kind of intent). I will instead work to minimize my own carbon footprint while recognizing the futility of doing so. Your project to foster short-sighted avarice and inequality will be allowed to finalize its dark and ultimately self-defeating mission with no violent or overly disruptive action on my part. I will sit obediently by and watch as we poison our home, content in the knowledge that I have at least not reproduced and thereby doomed any offspring to a fate worse than nonexistence, that my privilege dictates I will likely die before unlivable situations find me, and that the time for meaningful action of that kind was at any rate likely over many decades ago. I recognize that this is a selfish, comfortable inaction, but I did not ask to be born into a dying world and would have preferred it never happened.