Risk

“The line between betting, speculating and investing has largely disappeared,” said Timothy Massad, who served as the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for financial stability after the 2008 recession. “It’s very worrisome to me.” As if there was a well-defined line in some mythical past. We pretend it is not a casino so as to preserve legitimacy, I guess. But the system rewards and therefore creates gamblers. “Since 1980, the Arctic annual air temperatures have warmed nearly three times faster than the rest of the planet,” according to Dr. Druckenmiller. permafrost has been melting since the early 2000s, and researchers have now discovered toxic chemicals leaching into rivers in northern Alaska as the permafrost melts. Turkey, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, “pushed to dilute wording on the climate crisis, the science of melting glaciers and the role of young and Indigenous people”. Oil and gas profits drive this resistance, of course, and these profiteers are gambling with the future, betting on some miracle techno solution to emerge soon. How about AI driven quantum computers developing fusion energy? Perfect! "Time of Monsters" kind of says it all. Wack grifter ideologues warning us to wake up to "wokeness". All this as the next "extreme El Nino" begins to build and the polycrisis morphs into total chaos. War, "political" idiocy, in a word: oblivion. "The worst are filled with passionate intensity..." "We would rather die than change", plenty of ancient wisdom out there but none of it acknowledged. It should be obvious by now that there is only one way to reduce fossil fuel consumption in capitalism: catastrophe. We last saw reductions during the pandemic, but as soon as the masks came off, people went back to the status quo. Now we see the Straight of Hormuz closed through war and again consumption will go down temporarily. It is not difficult to extrapolate from this as to what needs to happen to arrest climate change. As Max Wilbert puts it, no one wants to see the inevitable short-term suffering, but "ecologically, collapse is likely the best path forward, given that governments and communities have refused to take meaningful action to halt global warming, the mass extinction of biological life, and the rest of the eco-crisis." The obvious argument is always "but we don't know if what comes after is better or worse". By this they mean governance or economic conditions or liberty/ rights etc.. This is a totally human-centric approach. The question we need to ask is "Will this be better for Nature, for the biosphere?"