We Will Run the Experiment

Doomberg, my new source for capitalist thinking around energy, wants us to accept reality. He asserts that there will be no stopping the juggernaut and so the only relevant question is one of adaptation. Like Nordhaus, he hopes the wealth created by fossil energy will help us adapt to future impacts. This is magical thinking, but since the current (and mostly future) impacts fall on poor black and brown people, who gives a shit, right? According to research out of Cornell University, 1.6 billion people may become refugees due to global warming by 2060. By 2100, one billion deaths may be attributable to the climate crisis. These are the subjects of the "experiment" Doomberg accepts as inevitable. Laboratory rats. And capitalism is the laboratory. Do we count the dead in the latest LA fires? The 219 killed by Helene? It is unclear when the count begins and what metric is used to determine the success or failure of the experiment. I suppose you could come up with a formula: deaths per point of GDP growth? Again, we are only talking about humans, as if theirs are the only lives which count. Doomberg's investment strategy is astute. As the experiment is run, lots of money will be made by those making the smart bets. The gambling part is on the temporal plane: how long can you go before the experiment's failure- climate chaos - puts the kabosh to the accumulation and profit. Bet long, bet short. Winners and losers. The world runs on contracts. But physics eventually has its way.

Sleepy Time Time

Now that decarbonization is woke we can sleep our way into the catastrophe. A flood here, a fire there, wake me when it's over. A conversation between Times Opinion deputy editor Patrick Healy and columnist David Wallace-Wells, where they try to parse the new climate "political" landscape, is instructive as to the liberal panic around this dreamscape. Although they avoided the word capitalism they did use the term spectacle. Although not in the Debordian sense. More like "it's a show you know". Wallace-Wells begins by claiming the U.S. is "neck deep in de-carbonization" then immediately contradicts himself by admitting how paltry the investment and progress actually is. And of course he gages "progress"by the number of EV's out there on the road. Healy posits the theory that Trump senses that "climate voters are on the ropes" ( there was virtually no mention of it during the capmpaigns) and he is using the moment to finish them off. Sorry 350, but it's for the best. Wallace-Wells tries to salvage some bit of hope by claiming conservatives may, following the LA fires, want to see "more done on the adap[tation and resilience side by government investment". More fire hydrants perhaps? That should save us. That and "fuel thinning", that is, white workers chopping down millions of acres of tinder-dry brush ( brown ones are all to be deported). Yes. Brilliant idea. Another source of "hope" for these liberals is that Trump recognizes a resource crisis and then wants to expedite the sourcing of critical minerals. And get rid of those pesky "permitting problems". So we can have unlimited electricty forever. Awesome. The fact is these liberals are also asleep to the fact that, as Naomi Klein observed, the Right is right; capitalism cannot solve the crisis that it created. Because the Right understands this inconvenient truth, it suggests sleep. A widely accepted alternative to all the anxiety (and thoughts of limits and relinquishment) that consciousness brings.

A New Working Class / Oligarch Coalition of Collapse

MAGA has achieved the liberal dream of frictionless capitalism. It turns out the best way to discipline labor is to incorporate it, or, as the Situationists described it, recuperate it. The technique starts with atomizing, alienating and individualizing the worker, stressing the competition between Her and Her Fellow Workers. Dog eat dog, as Joni Mitchel sang it. Then you add some stimulus/ reward - just enough treats so the worker won't take any risks -like a long line of credit,( personal debt is at a record high) a house in the suburbs, a nice vehicle or two. For their part, the oligarchs need to do some serious grooming. They polish up the image, projecting htemnselves as humanist disrupters, radicals, revolutionaries. In Gramsci’s words, this trade-off comes from “collusion in the success of a strategy of passive revolution, which responds to pressures from below by incorporating popular demands. Such a strategy can succeed in improving the lives of enough of the population to legitimate hegemonic claims as long as economic conditions permit”. In other words, as I have long argued, elites/"ruling classes/ the "capitalist class" will grudgingly incorporate social democratic reforms into their agenda when it serves their purpose of legitimization. It can be as simple as the price of gas, or eggs. This supports the "metanarrative" that markets and the profit system are the only way to organize society. They give a little then take a lot. Which is all well and good until the oligarchs start believing their own hype and they too are subsumed in the Spectacle. As Joao Camargo puts it: "The elites themselves, instead of just using these vast set of ideas to dominate the other classes, actually came to be dominated by them. They came to believe the mystical hype about their role in the world and in society, about capitalism as the only way to organize human societies, about historical miracles and about the end of history. They are still doing so despite their tiny historical existence and despite the fact that some of their own institutions recognize that they are jeopardizing the subsistence of global civilization." The rulers themselves are mired in "a compulsory need derived from their very own metanarrative in which they are stuck. They can’t help themselves, it is their core social and cultural programming. They will never be able to solve the crisis, but only to deepen it. We need to overthrow them or their death pulse will lead us all into collapse."

Got A Feeling About The Future

And it ain't too good. I know I'm supposed to feel profound sympathy for the people losing their homes to fire in LA, but instead I feel much more sympathy for the people who live in tents or cars on the streets of America. Or the people who live in shacks throughout the so-called "developing world". People who don't get "homes" , but basic shelter. Speaking of homes: "The numbers show how climate change is eroding the underpinnings of American life by making home insurance costlier and harder to hang on to, even as wildfires, hurricanes and other calamities increasingly threaten what is, for many people, their most valuable asset." Gee, who could have predicted that insurance would be the Achilles heel? In his book Against the Crisis;Economy and Ecology in a Burning World, author Stale Holgersen argues that rather than crisis undermining capitalism, it actually serves to strenthen the system. Basically taking shock doctrine to the next level. What seems to be undefined, however, is the difference between, or dialectic of, crisis and rupture. I get that "creative destruction" is a feature of capitalism but what we will soon be looking at is uncreative destruction. The shattering of the last, tenuous social bonds. Klein also wrote This Changes Everything, with an understanding that unlike other "metabolic rifts", climate change will not be a linear progression of events. it accelerates exponentially till you've plunged off the cliff. Capitalism will not thrive under this regime. As for today's inauguration of Trump, the American People just want cheaper groceries and if it takes burning fossil fuel, whatever. It is a simple, transactional formula. Votes for treats. Of course physics doesn't argue and more houses will burn or be flooded or blown away, the sooner the better IMO. One of Trumps executive orders does away with "the social cost of carbon", one of the linchpins of green capitalism. The formula, first proposed by Nobel winning economist Nordhaus, was supposed to make markets more rational and efficient but it ignored Capitalism's ideological component.

Stampede to the Exit

According to influential financial analysts, the era of ESG (concern for environmental, social and governance issues) is over. The model is already in retreat, but when Trump takes the helm we will see a "stampede to the exit". After all, any corporation will be at a "competitive disadvantage if you don't end all that stuff." No matter how much gloss you want to put on it, COP 29 was a disaster in the sense that time is running out and there is still zero sense of urgency. Stalling and posturing and dissembling followed by lofty pronouncements. Sound familiar? As the analyist succinctly puts it: "It doesn't matter if it's ( meaning ecological breakdown) is real or not, because the occupants of this planet are not going to do anything about it. Brace yourself for impact, we are going to run the experiment." What he means by "brace" is position yourself to make as much money as possible in the time remaining. A rather insane, fatalistic cynicism, grasping for justification as the rational means to promote development forA the needy poor people of the planet. He continues: "If it is as calamitous as they (science, physics) claim it is going to be we will have to deal with such impacts as they arise.Because that is what is going to happen." The "we" he is talking about has already shown how it plans to deal with impacts. Push costs ( human sufering and monetary) off onto the periphery (those least responsible). Live it up while the band plays on then grab a lifeboat and shove off. The Doomberg Postulate: Every molecule of fossil fuel will be burned by somebody somewhere. Climate change is a "narrative" you can choose to adopt or reject. All those "green" capitalists will burn through their subsidies and find themselves building more solar-powered sweatshops in order to compete. And the end game, you ask? Sorry. There isn't one.