Making the World Great Again Together
A "Make America Great Over again" baseball game cap rests on the knee of a person at the "Rally to Protect Our Elections" event in Phoenix, on July 24, 2021.
Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Nostalgia for empire is what seems to drive Vladimir Putin — that and a want to overcome the shame of punishing economical shock therapy imposed on Russia at the end of the Cold War. Nostalgia for American "greatness" is function of what drives the motility Donald Trump still leads — that and a desire to overcome the shame of having to face the villainy of white supremacy that shaped the founding of the United states and mutilates it still. Nostalgia is too what animates the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa for the ameliorate part of a month, wielding their red-and-white flags similar a conquering army, evoking a simpler time when their consciences were undisturbed by thoughts of the bodies of Indigenous children, whose remains are still being discovered on the grounds of those genocidal institutions that once dared to phone call themselves "schools."
This is not the warm and cozy nostalgia of fuzzily remembered childhood pleasures; information technology's an enraged and annihilating nostalgia that clings to imitation memories of by glories against all mitigating bear witness.
All these nostalgia-based movements and figures share a longing for something else, something which may seem unrelated only is non. A nostalgia for a time when fossil fuels could exist extracted from the earth without uneasy thoughts of mass extinction, or children demanding their right to a future, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, similar the one just released yesterday, that reads, in the words of United Nations Secretary Full general António Guterres, like an "atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership." Putin, of form, leads a petrostate, one that has defiantly refused to diversify its economic dependence on oil and gas, despite the devastating effect of the commodity roller coaster on its people and despite the reality of climate change. Trump is obsessed with the easy money that fossil fuels offer and every bit president made climate denial a signature policy.
The Canadian truckers, for their part, not simply chose idling 18-wheelers and smuggled jerry cans equally their protestation symbols, but the leadership of the motility is also securely rooted in the extra-dirty oil of the Alberta tar sands. Before it was the "freedom convoy," many of these same players staged the dress rehearsal known as United We Roll, a 2022 convoy that combined a zealous defense of oil pipelines, opposition to carbon pricing, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and explicit nostalgia for a white, Christian Canada.
Oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview.
Though petrodollars underwrite these players and forces, it's critical to understand that oil is a stand up-in for a broader worldview, a cosmology deeply entwined with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, which ranked human being as well as nonhuman life inside a rigid hierarchy, with white Christian men at the top. Oil, in this context, is the symbol of the extractivist mindset: not simply a perceived God-given right to continue extracting fossil fuels, just as well the correct to keep taking whatever they want, leave poison backside, and never expect back.
This is why the fast-moving climate crunch represents not just an economic threat to people invested in the extractive sectors but also a cosmological threat to the people invested in this worldview. Because climate change is the Earth telling us that nothing is gratuitous; that the historic period of (white, male person) human being "dominion" has concluded; that there is no such thing as a one-way relationship comprised only of taking; that all deportment have reactions. These centuries of earthworks and spewing are now unleashing forces that make even the sturdiest structures created by industrial societies — coastal cities, highways, oil rigs — look vulnerable and fragile. And within the extractivist mindset, that is impossible to accept.
Given their mutual cosmologies, information technology should come as no surprise that Putin, Trump, and the "freedom convoys" are reaching toward one another across disparate geographies and wildly dissimilar circumstances. So Trump praises Canada's "peaceful movement of patriotic truckers, workers, and families protesting for their most basic rights and liberties"; Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon cheer on Putin while the truckers sport their MAGA hats; Randy Hillier, a member of the Ontario Legislature who is one of the convoy's loudest supporters, declares on Twitter that "Far more people have & will die from this shot [the Covid vaccines], than in the Russian federation/Ukraine state of war." And how virtually the Ontario restaurant that last week put on its daily specials board the announcement that Putin "is not occupying Ukraine" but standing up to the Great Reset, the Satanists, and "fighting against the enslavement of humanity."
These alliances seem securely weird and unlikely at commencement. Simply look a piffling closer, and it's articulate that they are bound together by an attitude toward time, 1 that clings to an arcadian version of the by and steadfastly refuses to face up hard truths about the future. They also share a delight in the do of raw ability: the xviii-wheeler vs. the pedestrian, the shouted manufactured reality vs. the cautious scientific report, the nuclear armory vs. the machine gun. This is the energy currently surging in many different spheres, starting wars, attacking seats of regime, and defiantly destabilizing our planet'due south life support systems. This is the ethos at the root of so many democratic crises, geopolitical crises, and the climate crisis: a violent clinging to a toxic past and a refusal to face a more entangled and interrelational time to come, 1 divisional past the limits of what people and planet tin can accept. It is a pure expression of what the late bell hooks often described, with a playful wink, as "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" — because sometimes all the big guns are needed to describe our world accurately.
Photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The most urgent political task at hand is to put enough force per unit area on Putin that he sees his criminal invasion of Ukraine as too dandy a risk to sustain. Merely that is but the barest of beginnings. "There is a brief and apace closing window to secure a liveable time to come on the planet," said Hans-Otto Portner, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic change working group that organized the landmark report released this week. If at that place is a uniting political chore of our time, it is to provide a comprehensive response to this conflagration of toxic nostalgia. And within a mod earth birthed in genocide and dispossession, that requires laying out a vision for a future where we accept never been before.
The leadership of our various countries, with very few exceptions, are nowhere near coming together this challenge. Putin and Trump are backward-facing, nostalgic figures, and they have enough of company on the difficult right. Jair Bolsonaro was elected by playing on nostalgia for Brazil's era of war machine rule, and the Philippines, alarmingly, is poised to elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as its next president, son of the late dictator who pillaged and terrorized his nation through much of the '70s and '80s. But this is not just a correct-fly crisis. Many liberal standard bearers are securely nostalgic figures too, offering equally antidotes to surging fascism naught but warmed-over neoliberalism, openly aligned with the predatory corporate interests — from Big Pharma to big banks — that have shredded living standards. Joe Biden was elected on the comforting promise of a return to pre-Trump normal, never mind that this was the same soil in which Trumpism grew. Justin Trudeau is the younger version of the aforementioned impulse: a shallow, attention-economy echo of his father, the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In 2015, Trudeau Jr.'s first statement on the globe phase was "Canada is back"; Biden's, five years afterward, was "America is back, fix to atomic number 82 the world."
We will not defeat the forces of toxic nostalgia with these weak doses of marginally less toxic nostalgia. It's not enough to exist "dorsum"; we are in desperate need of new. The skilful news is that nosotros know what it looks like to fight the forces enabling royal aggression, right-wing pseudo-populism, and climate breakup at the same fourth dimension. Information technology looks very much like a Light-green New Deal, a framework to go off fossil fuels past investing in family-supporting unionized jobs doing meaningful work, like building light-green affordable homes and good schools, starting with the most systematically abandoned and polluted communities first. And that requires moving away from the fantasy of limitless growth and investing in the labor of care and repair.
The Green New Deal — or the Red, Blackness, and Green New Deal — is our all-time promise for edifice a sturdy multiracial working-grade coalition, based on finding common ground across divides. It also happens to be the all-time way to cut off the petrodollars flowing to people like Putin, since green economies that have beat the addiction to endless growth don't demand imported oil and gas. And it's too how we cut off the oxygen to the pseudo-populism of Trump/Carlson/Bannon, whose bases are expanding because they are far better at harnessing the rage directed at Davos elites than the Democrats, whose leaders, for the most part, are those elites.
Russia's invasion underlines the urgency of this kind of green transformation, simply it as well throws upward new challenges. Before Russia'southward tanks started rolling, we were already hearing that the all-time way to stop Putin's assailment is to ramp upwardly fossil fuel production in Due north America. Within hours of the invasion, every planet-torching projection that the climate justice movement had managed to block over the past decade was being frantically rushed back onto the table by correct-fly politicians and industry-friendly pundits: every canceled oil pipeline, every nixed gas export concluding, every protected fracking field, every Arctic drilling dream. Since Putin'due south war machine is funded with petrodollars, the solution nosotros are told, is to drill, frack, and transport more of our own.
There is no such matter every bit a short-term fossil fuel play.
This is all a disaster capitalist deception of the kind of I have written about too many times before. Offset, Communist china volition continue buying Russian oil regardless of what happens in the Marcellus Shale or the Alberta tar sands. Second, the timelines are fantastical. At that place is no such affair equally a short-term fossil fuel play. Every 1 of the projects being flogged as a solution to dependence on Russian fossil fuels would take years to have an impact and, in gild for their sunk costs to make financial sense, the projects would need to stay in performance for decades, in defiance of the increasingly desperate warnings we are receiving from the scientific community.
But of course the push for new fossil projects in North America is not about helping Ukrainians or weakening Putin. The real reason all the old piping dreams are existence dusted off is far more crass: This war has made them vastly more than profitable overnight. In the week that Russia invaded Ukraine, the European oil benchmark, Brent crude, reached $105 a butt, a price not seen since 2014, and it is still hovering above $100 (that'south twice what it was at the end of 2020).
Banks and energy companies are desperate to make the most of this price rally, in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Alberta.
Every bit surely as Putin is determined to reshape Eastern Europe'southward postal service-Cold War map, this power play by the fossil fuel sector stands to reshape the energy map. The climate justice movement has won some very important battles over the last decade. It has succeeded in banning fracking in entire countries, states, and provinces; huge pipelines like Keystone XL have been blocked; and then take many export terminals and various Arctic drilling forays. Indigenous leadership has played a central function in virtually every fight. And remarkably, equally of this week, $xl trillion worth of endowment and pension funds at over 1,500 institutions have committed to some form of fossil fuel divestment, thanks to a decade of dogged divestment organizing.
But here is a cloak-and-dagger our movements often keep even from themselves: Since the toll of oil plummeted in 2015, nosotros accept been fighting an industry with one mitt tied behind its dorsum. That's because the cheaper, easier-to-access oil and gas is mostly depleted in N America, then the pitched battles over new projects have primarily been over anarchistic, costlier to extract sources: fossil fuels trapped in shale stone, or under the seabed in the deep ocean, or nether Arctic ice, or the semi-solid sludge of the Alberta tar sands. Many of these new fossil fuel frontiers merely became profitable subsequently the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, which sent oil prices soaring. Suddenly, it made economic sense to make those multibillion-dollar investments to excerpt oil from the deep body of water or to turn Alberta'due south muddied bitumen into refined oil. The boom years were upon u.s., with the Financial Times describing the frenzy in tar sands every bit "north America'southward biggest resources boom since the Klondike gilded rush."
Nevertheless, when the price of oil complanate in 2015, industry'southward decision to keep growing at such a frenetic pace wavered. In some cases, investors weren't sure they would earn their money dorsum, which led some majors to pull back from the Arctic and the tar sands. And with profits and stock prices downwards, divestment organizers were all of a sudden able to make the example that fossil fuel stocks weren't but immoral, they were a lousy investment, even on capitalism's ain terms.
Well, Putin'southward deportment have untied the manus backside Big Oil'southward back and turned it into a fist.
This explains the contempo wave of attacks on the climate movement and on the handful of Autonomous politicians who take avant-garde science-based climate action. Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican from New York, claimed last week, "The U.s.a. has the free energy resources to knock Russia out of the oil and gas market entirely, but we don't utilize those resources because of President Biden's partisan pandering to the environmental extremists of the Democratic party."
The precise opposite is true. If governments, many of whom ran promising Green New Deal-like policies over the past decade and half, had actually implemented them, Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will even so have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons. The underlying crisis we face is non that N American and Western European countries take failed to build out the fossil fuel infrastructure that would permit it to readapt Russian oil and gas; it is that all of us — the U.S., Canada, Frg, Nippon — are however consuming obscene and untenable amounts of oil and gas, and indeed of energy, menstruum.
We know the way out of this crunch: Ramp up the infrastructure for renewables, power homes with wind and solar, electrify our transportation systems. And because all free energy sources behave ecological costs, we must also reduce demand for energy overall, through greater efficiency, more than mass transit, and less wasteful overconsumption. The climate justice motion has been saying this for decades now. The trouble is not that political elites have spent too much time listening to so-called environmental extremists, it's that they have hardly listened to us at all.
Now we observe ourselves at a strange moment, when a great deal feels up for grabs. BP announced on Sun that information technology will sell off its 20 percent stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft, and others are following its pb. That'south potentially good news for Ukraine, since pressure on this about critical sector will certainly get Putin'due south attention. However, nosotros should also be clear that it is likely but happening because BP is planning to take full advantage of the oil and gas frenzy, unleashed by higher prices, in Due north America and elsewhere. "BP remains confident in the flexibility and resilience of its financial frame," it reassured market watchers in its printing release announcing the Rosneft move.
It's significant also that BP'southward news came within hours of German language Chancellor Olaf Scholz announcing that his country will build two new import terminals to receive shipments of natural gas, further locking in dependence on fossil fuels in the middle of a climate emergency. The terminals had long been opposed past High german environmentalists, yet now they are being pushed through under cover of war, presented as the only way of making up for the gas that Scholz had recently announced would not menstruum through Nord Stream 2, the newly built pipeline running under the Baltic Sea. That move turned a country-of-the-fine art piece of fossil fuel infrastructure into an "$xi-billion hole in the ground," in the words of The Globe and Mail's European bureau chief, Eric Reguly.
Nevertheless it's not just fossil fuel projects that are being killed and revived. "Nosotros are doubling down on renewables," Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Committee, announced ahead of Russian federation'due south invasion. "This will increase Europe'due south strategic independence on energy."
Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Watching these geopolitical chess pieces fly across the lath in a matter of days, along with the latest moving ridge of dramatic sanctions confronting Russian banks and air travel, there are plenty of reasons for dread, including a repeat of measures that punish the poor for the crimes of the rich. But there are flashes of optimism too. What is heartening is less the substance of any private motion than their sheer speed and decisiveness. As in the early months of the pandemic, the response to Russian federation's invasion should remind the states that despite the complexity of our financial and energy systems, it turns out that they can still be transformed by the decisions of mere mortals.
If BP can walk away from a 20 percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot exist abased if it is premised on the destruction of a habitable planet?
Information technology's worth pausing over some of the implications. If Deutschland can carelessness an $eleven billion pipeline because it's suddenly seen as immoral (it always was), then all fossil fuel infrastructure that violates our right to a stable climate should also exist upwards for contend. If BP tin can walk away from a 20 percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot be abandoned if information technology is premised on the devastation of a habitable planet? And if public money tin exist announced to build gas terminals in the blink of an eye, then it's not besides tardily to fight for far more than solar and wind.
As Bill McKibben wrote in his excellent newsletter final week, Biden could help in this transformation, using powers only bachelor during times of emergency, by invoking the Defence Production Act to build large numbers of electrical heat pumps and aircraft them to Europe to mitigate the hurting of losing Russian gas. That is the artistic spirit nosotros demand in this moment. Considering if we are edifice new energy infrastructure — and we must — surely it should be the infrastructure of the future, non more toxic nostalgia.
There are many lessons nosotros must take from the trembling moment we are living through. Nearly the dangers of allowing nuclear weapons to proliferate unchecked. Most the brusque-sightedness of shaming one time not bad powers. Almost the grotesque double standards in Western media about which lands, and which lives, are treated as invadable and disposable. About which forced migrations are treated every bit crises for the people moving, and which are treated as crises for the countries they are moving to. About the willingness of everyday people to fight for lands — and most whose fights for self-decision and territorial integrity are historic every bit heroic, and whose are cast as terrorist. All of these are lessons we must learn from living through this moment of naked history.
And nosotros must learn this one too: It is still possible for humans to alter the world we have built when life is on the line, and to do it quickly and dramatically. Equally we were two years ago when the pandemic was first declared, we are in yet another terrifying simply highly malleable moment.
War is reshaping our earth, but so too is the climate emergency. The question is: Will we harness wartime levels of urgency and activeness to catalyze climate action, making usa all safer for decades to come, or will we allow war to add more fuel to a planet already on fire? That challenge was put most sharply recently by Svitlana Krakovska, a Ukrainian scientist who is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic change working group that produced this week'south report. Even as her country was under the Kremlin'south set on, she reportedly told her scientific colleagues in a virtual coming together that "Human being-induced climate modify and the state of war on Ukraine take the same roots, fossil fuels, and our dependence on them."
One time you've denied climate breakdown, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much any class of objective reality is a lite lift.
Russian federation'south outrages in Ukraine should remind us that the corrupting influence of oil and gas lies at the root of virtually every force that is destabilizing our planet. Putin'southward smug swagger? Brought to you by oil, gas, and nukes. The trucks that occupied Ottawa for a month, harassing residents and filling the air with fumes and inspiring copycat convoys effectually the word? One of the occupation'southward leaders showed up in court a few days ago wearing an "I ♥ Oil and Gas" sweatshirt. She knows who her sponsors are. Covid-denialism and surging conspiracy culture? Hey, one time you lot accept denied climate breakdown, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much whatsoever course of objective reality is a light elevator.
At this tardily stage in the debate, much of this is well understood. The climate justice move has won all the arguments for transformational action. What we take chances losing, in the fog of state of war, is our nerve. Because nothing changes the discipline like farthermost violence, fifty-fifty violence that is being actively subsidized by the soaring price of oil. To prevent that from happening, we could do far worse than to take inspiration from Krakovska, who plainly told her colleagues at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Modify in that closed-door meeting, "We volition not surrender in Ukraine. And we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate-resilient future." Her words so moved her Russian counterpart, eye witnesses reported, that he broke ranks and apologized for the actions of his regime — a brief glimpse of a earth looking forward, not back.
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Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/war-climate-crisis-putin-trump-oil-gas/
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