August 16, 2021 • 39 mins
Our world is falling apart. What comes next?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Episode one. Welcome to the Crumbles. The screaming starts while
you're rolling a shopping cart down the aisle of your
local supermarket. You're trying to determine which canned meat looks
most appetizing. The price of fresh meat has been rising
steadily for the last few years, but two months ago
a ransomware attack shut down several massive meat processing plants
(00:23):
in Brazil. In Texas, the last four months of wildfires
also took their toll, burning thousands of acres of pasture
land and hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. So
you were trying to decide between the spam and the
canned chicken. When you heard the commotion start a few
wiles down from your position, you knew immediately that it
had to be about coffee. In the last month, you've
(00:44):
seen two fist fights and a dozen screaming matches start
by the corner of the store that had once held
dozens of friendly, colorful bags of different coffee brands. The
last time it had looked that way was a long
time ago. Before the great plantations of Central America had
succumbed to blight, fire and drought, there was still coffee
capitalism always found a way, but it was harsher and
(01:06):
more bitter than it had been before, and it was
also much more expensive. Each customer was limited to one
half pound per week when it was in stock. You've
gotten lucky today and bought a bag, But evidently another
customer had been less fortunate. He seemed to be screaming
at a staff member, berating her for the problems caused
by a supply chain that had been breaking for the
(01:27):
last decade. You couldn't back it up with data, but
you feel like this sort of thing happens more and
more often every year, not just the supply chain disruptions,
but the outbursts of violence and rage. You don't even
stop to watch the videos on social media anymore. If
customers screaming and starting fights over the ground, beef that
wasn't there for their Fourth of July barbecue or whatever.
(01:50):
You can't tell me there's no coffee. I've seen a
dozen assholes with coffee in their carts. If they have
a right to it, I have a right do it.
You turn away from your cart and sneak a glance
down the other aisle in spite of yourself. The angry
man is heavy set around six feet tall and wearing
a T shirt with a faded, thin blue line flag
on its back. He's yelling at a reedy young man
(02:10):
wearing the uniform of a grocery store clerk. This poor
kid had probably been stalking apple sauce a few minutes earlier.
Now he was the target of this man's entitled rage.
I know you keep more in the back. I don't
give a shit about your excuses. Get it. As the
young clerk tries to explain again that there's no coffee
left in the store, a security guard rounds the corner
(02:32):
at the other end of the aisle. He yells hey
and puts a hand on the taser at his belt. Sir,
you need to leave. I'm not leaving without my coffee.
You realize with a start that a small crowd has
started to form behind you. You feel sudden anxiety at
the fact that you've left your cart undefended, and pull
away from the scene to put your hands on it.
(02:53):
You were lucky enough to get coffee and the last
carton of eggs, and a lot of customers in the
store would happily steal either. Mercifully, your card has survived
the altercation unmolested, You wheel it away from the ongoing
confrontation towards the self checkout. Maybe you can avoid the
worst of the line that way. The yelling stops, and
as you wheel your cart up to the checkout counter,
(03:16):
you see the angry man's storm out of the grocery store,
cursing under his breath. The security guard and the clerk
follow a few feet back and stop when he exits
the building. They both sigh with relief, and for a
few minutes, you lose yourself in the task of running
your products through the self checkout. As you prepare to pay,
you happen to look up just in time to see
(03:36):
the angry man re enter the store through the front door.
You see the gun in his hand an instant before
he raises it up just a few feet from the
clerk's face and fires. On June, Victor Lee Tucker Jr.
(03:57):
Thirty walked into the Big Bear Supermarket into Kalb County, Georgia.
A story employee, forty one year old Lakita Willis, noticed
he was not wearing a face mask and violation of
the store's policies. Lookita informed Victor that he would have
to wear a mask to continue shopping. Victor Tucker left
the store in a huff and returned with a gun,
(04:17):
which he used to murder Lakita Willis and wound the
store security guard, an off duty sheriff's deputy. Lakida and
that security guard are not the only victims of this
sort of violence. At a Flint, Michigan, dollar store, a
forty three year old father of eight and employee was
shot dead over a mask. The city of Stillwater, Oklahoma,
was forced to reverse a mask ordinance when it led
(04:38):
to a surge of violence against service industry employees. We
could go on, but we won't. This is it could
happen here a podcast about collapse dedicated to chronicling where
we all of us are headed in the very near
future if things continue on their present course. The first
season of this show focused on the possibility of a
(04:59):
second to American Civil War, and compared to that, perhaps
a shooting in a grocery store over coffee seems low stakes.
When Hollywood turns its eyes towards the subject of collapse,
they nearly always focus on the exciting parts. Buildings tumbling down,
mass violence in the streets, bandits and gunfights, and explosions,
and all the stuff that looks rad on a silver screen.
(05:21):
But that's not how collapse looks to most of the
people who are forced to endure it. Civilizations die by
paper cuts more often than by bullets. Everyone listening has
and the last year in Change watched the global society
we live in take a solid body blow in the
form of COVID nineteen. Many of the terrible things we
experienced that year. The supply line crunches, the culture war
(05:43):
over masks, the anti lockdown protests, the explosion of conspiracism
among millions of people stuck at home online. These things
are easy to attribute to the freak coming of a plague.
But COVID was not a speed bump. It was the
harbinger of a new era. It revealed how fra duel
much of the infrastructure of modern life truly was. I
(06:03):
wrote this episode while the city of Portland, Oregon, braced
itself for an unprecedented heat wave, with temperatures nearing a
hundred and twenty degrees. Last year's fire season saw Portland
blanketed and a cloud of rancid yellow smog. More than
half a million people living in Oregon had to flee
their homes over ten percent of the state's population. Stores
(06:24):
ran out of respirators, fire axes, and emergency supplies. The
American West's heat wave is a product of the same
thing that may soon strip the coffee from your store shelves,
climate change. In April of one, US coffee stockpiles hit
a six year low, even with Brazil's record twenty twenty crop.
That country is now experiencing its most severe drought in decades,
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which will sink production further. The global coffee deficit, the
amount of the Earth's coffee production falls below demand, is
expected to hit ten point seven million bags this year.
The previous project was a short fall of eight million.
In the vignette that opened this episode, I mentioned a
meat shortage caused in part by cyber attacks on meat
(07:08):
processing plants that actually happened. On May thirty first one, JBS,
the world's largest meat supplier, was hacked, shutting down much
of their operations on Australia, Canada, and the United States
from a rite up. In the Wall Street Journal quote
the culprit a ransomware attack didn't just hit its target,
it royaled the U s food industry from hog farms
(07:29):
in Iowa to small town processing plants in New York restaurants.
The hacks set off a domino effect that drove up
wholesale meat prizes, backed up animals in barns, and forced
food distributors to hurriedly search for new supplies. The attack
was the latest clash between cyber criminals and companies integral
to the functioning of the U. S economy. It was
another disruption to the U. S food industry after the
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COVID nineteen pandemic last year forced weeks of plants shutdowns,
and this year an economic rebound has stretched suppliers ability
to meet demand. Now I read that whole quote because
it illustrates the way all these problems build upon themselves.
Our supply chains are what mathematicians call a chaotic system.
If your knowledge of chaos theory comes primarily from Dr
(08:12):
E and Malcolm, the gist of it is this certain
complex systems can be impacted in huge, unexpected ways by
seemingly minor changes because so many things are interacting at
once that a change in one can set off a
chain of other changes. The most common framing of this
observation is the phrase a butterfly flapping its wings in China,
can cause a hurricane in New York, and variations of
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the same. The world we live in and the infrastructure
that makes our daily lives possible, is such a system.
We've all seen ample evidence of that over the last year.
It really hit home from me earlier in twenty one
when a friend of mine who works as an ear
nurse at a local hospital sent a message to a
signal chat for my local friend group and warned, the
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hospital is full. Don't get hurt. Initially, we all assumed
coronavirus was the cause, but no, he explained very few
of the cases that had filled his r and multiple
overflow rooms had anything to do with a viral infection. Instead,
the cause was a mix of things, people celebrating in
dumb ways as the state reopened, overdoses and car accidents,
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et cetera. In normal times, these might not have drained
the system, but a huge number of doctors and nurses
quit during the worst of the plague. My friend calls
the period wherein now where aspects of modern society that
once seemed immutably solid start to fall apart all at
once as the crumbles. I find this a much more
useful framework for discussing the future than the dreams of
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collapse shared by apocalypse obsessives. One April second study showed
that at least one in five healthcare workers have considered
quitting as result of the virus. More than thirty six
hundred u S healthcare workers died in COVID's first year.
These strains hit the medical system in the midst of
an ongoing drought and healthcare workers. By five the u
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S is likely to face a shortage of more than
four hundred thousand home health aids, twenty nine thousand, four
hundred nurse practitioners, and between fifty four thousand, one hundred
and one hundred and thirty nine thousand physicians. We went
into the pandemic with a shortage of doctors and nurses.
At least some of the six hundred thousand American deaths
from the virus were certainly due to a lack of
(10:22):
qualified medical professionals, and now COVID has further exacerbated that shortage,
ensuring that the next great strain on our health care
system it's even harder, which will drain away more professionals,
which will make the next pandemic or natural disaster even
more devastating. This is the way the crumbles work. Problems
feed into calamities and turn into catastrophes. A healthy society
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has the wherewithal to diagnose its problems and patch the
holes in its systems when they appear. We do not
live in a healthy society. The problems that will confront
us over the next fifty years rising sea levels, out
of control wildfires, crop failures, greater waves of ref you
geez are no less imposing than the COVID nineteen pandemic.
The virus could have been halted by something as simple
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as getting everyone to wear masks and avoid crowded indoor
spaces for a few weeks. The United States could not
handle that. In April, I watched a crowd of anti
lockdown protesters surround a group of doctors and nurses in
the Oregon state capital Salem. The healthcare professionals carried signs
that said please, we just don't want you to get sick.
(11:28):
Protesters spat at them and screamed diaper mouth, mocking the
face masks they wore. Several of these protesters carried rifles.
As you probably guessed by now, this is not a
particularly optimistic podcast, but It's also not my intention to
infect you with a sense of doom. The worst problems
we face all have solutions, or at least strategies for
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adaptation and harm reduction. To my mind, our most pressing
problems fall into three broad categories. One the environmental consequences
of modern civilization. This is going to be by far
the most unibomery point I make to day, but it
cannot be avoided. As I type this, fires are burning
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throughout Oregon, even in the famously wet northern reaches of
the state. Towns in northern California with huge amounts of
rainfall thirty eight inches in some cases are so low
on water that citizens have been restricted to fifty five
gallons per day. Prior to twenty twenty one, Portland's record
high temperature was a hundred and seven degrees this June,
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before the hottest part of the year. It beat that
record for three days straight. The year before twenty twenty,
Australia suffered a mega fire, the largest in its history,
which burnt more than twenty three hundred square miles. All
these fires are just preludes. The world is only getting
hotter from here on out. As I write this, the
United Nations Climate Science Advisers issued a draft report warning
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that the worst projected impacts of climate change are hitting
much faster than previously expe did. We will probably reach
one point five degrees celsius of warming by twenty twenty six. Now,
for years, staying under one and a half degrees celsius
has been the goal. The target amount of warming. Mainstream
climate scientists and climate conscious politicians wanted to limit us too.
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If we were to stop all other forms of emissions
right now, agriculture alone would carry us over the one
point five degree celsius line in just a handful of years.
Most institutional messaging posits one point five degrees of warming
as the acceptable, even relatively pleasant option. A UN Climate
Change tweet from earlier this year made that point in
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image form, showing depictions of the Earth's atmosphere in green, yellow,
and red one point five degrees celsius, two degrees celsius,
and three degrees celsius plus with the text. The difference
between one point five two degrees and three to four
degrees average global warming can sound marginal. In fact, they
represent vastly different scenarios for the future of humanity. It
(14:00):
is true that two or three degrees of warming would
create a radically different world than less than one and
a half. But the data and our lived experience has
made it increasingly clear that one point five degrees, which
we will hit period in the near future, is a
calamity of almost incomprehensible dimensions. The phenomenon we're all staring
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down the barrel is called climate tipping. One example of
this would be unprecedented heat waves causing mass wildfires, which
release more carbon into the atmosphere, which speeds up warming,
which accelerates the whole cycle onward and upward. Scientists in
Europe recently found that climate tipping is likely to cause
sudden shifts in the Gulf Stream, which will cause sudden
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and massive temperature changes in normally tempered zones like western Europe.
The last devastating heat wave to hit France and twenty
nineteen killed at least fifteen dred people. This particular study
was the result of scientists from eighteen universities working in tandem.
Their spokesman, doctor Michael Gill, told fizz dot org quote
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these results indicate that climate tipping is an imminent risk
in the Earth system. Even the safe operating space of
one point five or two degrees above present generally assumed
by the I p c C might not be all
that's safe. According to the precautionary principle, we must consider
abrupt and irreversible changes to the climate system as a
real risk, at least until we understand these phenomena better.
(15:32):
The central problem is that our previous models were far
too optimistic, largely in their assumptions about how gradual the
warming caused by carbon release would be. Another recent study,
published in Science Advances, analyzed twenty years of data to
study the transfer of carbon dioxide between land plants in
the atmosphere. Its findings suggest that if present trends continue,
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forests in twenty forty will absorb only half as much
carbon dioxide as they do now. So when we hit
one and a half degrees celsius, which we will permafrost
will start to thaw, releasing methane, which will warm the planet.
Forests will hold less carbon, more fires will burn, an
estimated hundred and fifty million people will die due to pollution.
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These factors all make it likelier that we will hit
two degrees celsius of warming or even higher, at which
point we will experience catastrophic permafrost thawing alongside another two
hundred and thirty billion tons of carbon burping out of
the soil. The effects of this will be catastrophic for
all of us, but they will be particularly disastrous for
the traditional victims of capitalism Africans. I want to quote
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from an article in The Independent by Ugandan writer Vanessa
Naicaate quote. This year, abnormally warm temperatures and heavy rains
have led to swarms of locusts destroying hundreds of thousands
of hectares of crops in East Africa. Twelve million people
in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are in dire need of food.
Lake Chad has runk to a tenth of its original
size over the last fifty years. Half of Nigeria has
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no access to water. It is hard to be encouraged
by stories of meatless burgers or moonshot technologies when communities
around you are battling an endless and worsening cycle of drought, famine, cyclones,
floods and destruction. This is my world at one point
to degrees celsius of warming. This is not progress. Vague
distant targets for twenty thirty or twenty fifty will not
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keep the world well below two degrees celsius of warming,
as the Paris Agreement promised. I can tell you a
two degrees celsius hotter world is a death sentence for
countries like mine. Now, when you lay it all out
like that, it can be pretty overwhelming. For perspective's sake,
it is important to note that nearly all of the
carbon that's causing these problems was released into the atmosphere
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within the span of a human lifetime. It is, in short,
the result of industrial society and its consequences. Right now,
there is more carbon in the atmosphere than at any
point in the last eight hundred thousand years, and perhaps
as far back as fifteen million years. But all this
carbon started flowing into the atmosphere just three hundred years
ago in the seventeen hundreds, when England started burning coal
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and kicked off a global drive to industrialization. The vast
majority of the carbon in our atmosphere was pumped out
even more recently than that, as David Wallace Wells writes
in his book The Uninhabitable Earth quote, the majority of
the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since
the end of World War Two, the figure is above
eighty five percent. The story of the industrial world's Kama
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Kaze mission is the story of a single lifetime the
planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe
in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and
a funeral. That fact has a tendency to inspire false
hope and some if the real problem only started a
lifetime ago, perhaps we can solve it in the space
of a lifetime. But reality does not work that way,
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my friends. Once the carbon is out there, released from
trees burning in millions of acres of wildfires, from the
exhaust pipes of hundreds of millions of cars, or from
the smoke stacks of factories, it is there to stay.
If we transitioned entirely to nuclear power tomorrow, that carbon
would still be warming us for decades. And as the
globe warms up, it dries out the soil, which in
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turn heats the world further, which pushes more people to
install a c which increases emissions, which dries out the soil,
which leads to wildfires, which releases more carbon, and on
and on and on and on it goes. And this
brings me to pressing problem number two, the authoritarian renaissance.
In two thousand eleven, the Syrian Civil War started, sending
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millions of Syrian refugees fleeing into Europe. In two thousand
and fourteen and fifteen, nearly two million people filed for
asylum in the EU. Contrary to popular opinion, experts are
heavily divided on whether or not climate change played a
major role in sparking the conflict, but the refugee crisis
did play a major role in sparking something else, the
rise of Europe's authoritarian right wing. I'm going to quote
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now from a Leibnitz Institute for Economic Research report by
Andreas Steinmeyer. Quote. In the Upper Austrian state elections in
two thousand fifteen, the far right Freedom Party of Austria
doubled its vote share from two thousand nine and obtained
over thirty percent of the vote with a fierce anti
asylum campaign. Polls indicate that support for the Freedom Party
remained roughly at the level of two thousand nine state
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elections until late two thousand fourteen, but subsequently increased drastically.
In two thousand fifteen, When refugee numbers started to grow,
the salience of the issue in the media, measured as
the number of newspaper articles covering the refugee situation, increased
almost in proportion to the number of asylum applications. Upper
Austria was no exception in Europe. The Sweden Democrats, for instance,
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obtained five point seven percent of votes in the two
thousand ten parliamentary elections in Sweden. After that, support increased
parallel to the rising number of refugees, which increased earlier
in Sweden than in other European countries. In parliamentary elections
in two thousand fourteen, the Sweden Democrats obtained twelve point
nine percent of the vault and pulled around twenty percent
in late two thousand fifteen at the peak of the
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refugee inflow into Sweden. The alternative for Germany a f D,
was not founded until two thousand thirteen. Poles show was
sharp increase in support of up to fifteen percent along
with growing refugee numbers. Now During the two thousand and
sixteen election Canada, Donald Trump in the United States constantly
harped on the danger of refugees from Syria, but also
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from places in Latin America like Guatemala, whose economies had
been devastated by climate change. These climate refugees and the
false perception that they were causing crime and of violence,
fed into a rising American fascist movement that is still
with us today. Authoritarians have always used fear of the other,
and specifically fear of foreign asylum seekers, to stoke division.
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That part of their job is only going to get easier.
The UN projects that by twenty fifty an additional two
hundred million people will be climate refugees. This was the
entire population of planet Earth during the high of the
Roman Empire, clawing desperately at the iron gates of any
country better off than where they've left. Climate change doesn't
just provide opportunities for authoritarian politicians. It tends to make
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society itself more authoritarian by increasing military conflicts and domestic crime.
In two thousand and fourteen, the U. S Department of
Defense authored an annual Defense Review that noted, quote the
nature in pace have observed climate changes and an emerging
scientific consensus on their projected consequences pose severe risks for
our national security. The report goes on to warn about
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conflicts over resources, particularly water in places like Lake Mead,
Nevada and the Colorado River system, where conflicts over scarce
water could spiral into violence. As I write this, a
group of militiamen under the banner of Aim and Bundy
have set up shop by the Klamath River in central Oregon,
claiming to represent the interests of farmers being denied their
normal allotment of water due to severe drought conditions. Bundy
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at All have threatened to break onto federal land are
armed and released the water. As that Department of Defense
reports so aptly noted, these effects are threat multipliers that
will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability,
and social tensions, conditions that can enable terrorist activity and
other forms of violence. We've already seen how both main
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parties in the United States react to violence and the
perception of violence. President Trump responded to a popular uprising
against police brutality with a wave of police brutality. He
was almost universally supported in his re election bid by
police unions. On January six, at least thirty one police
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officers took part in the Capital insurrection aimed at keeping
Trump and power Despite this fact, President Biden suggested in
June that communities should spend much of the three hundred
and fifty billion dollars in COVID nineteen aid dispensed in
May to hire more police officers. A few days earlier,
his administration released its plan for dealing with domestic terrorism,
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inspired by the violence of the Capital Riot. This included
an additional hundred million in funding for local law enforcement.
All this is to say that the state only has
one solution to deal with the problems we will increasingly face,
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and that solution is to put more men with guns
in our communities. Platoons of goons armed with grenade launchers
and armored vehicles may in fact provide some protection to
the people at the very top of our society, but
they will not protect you. That's not just my own
personal bias speaking. And there were more than eight hundred
thousand sworn law enforcement officers serving nationwide, the highest number ever.
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That same year, homicides raised nearly among the nation's ten
largest police departments. The average clearance rate in those departments, however,
dropped by seven percent to about This means a few things.
Murders rose in the United States, with more cops than
ever before. Those cops solved fewer of the murders committed
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than they had in prior years. President Biden's one budget
included twenty two billion dollars to fight global climate change.
His two budget calls for thirty six billion dollars in funding.
That is a substantial rate of increase, but even thirty
six billion dollars is only about one sixth of what
the United States spends on policing and incarcerating its citizens
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each year. The cost to stop global warming at less
than two degrees celsius is a contentious issue, but one
estimate places it at as much as fifty trillion dollars.
Whether you buy that estimate or not, by any sober analysis,
thirty six billion is a drop in the bucket compared
to what will be necessary to avoid the worst case scenario.
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And the worst case scenario is coming. If we want
to have any chance at avoiding it, we're going to
have to organize. And that brings me to pressing problem
number three, weaponized unreality. Starting in two thousand sixteen, Russian
disinformation became a major media buzzword. There were stories about
that nation's Internet Research Agency, its armies of botanuts and
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trolls aimed as stoking division and pushing certain narratives into
the American consciousness. Russia absolutely has an advanced disinformation operation,
but the media made a mistake focusing on them alone.
The reality of the situation is that nations, corporations, political parties,
extremist movements, and every other organization with its shipped together
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does the same thing the Russians do. The name of
the game is to take lies, propaganda, incendiary claims in
rage bait and use them to stoke the ire of
millions of people. I can't claim credit for creating the
term weaponized unreality. That one goes to my friend Carl,
but the term does a brilliant job of describing the problem.
If the coronavirus has taught us one thing, it's that
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the right lies can be deadlier than a thousand or
six hundred thousand guns when properly deployed. Weaponized on reality
is part of why our present problems with climate change
have gotten so very dire. Starting in the nineteen seventies,
Exxonmobile and later a host of other oil and gas companies,
borrowed a public relations strategy initially invented to serve the
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needs of big tobacco. The Union of Concerned Scientists describes
the strategy as manufactured uncertainty by raising doubts about even
the most indisputable scientific evidence. Adopted a strategy of information
laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further
its desired message and therefore confuse the public. Promoted scientific
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spokespeople who misrepresent peer reviewed scientific findings or cherry pick facts,
attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action on
global warming with misleading charges about the need for sound science.
That all sounds pretty bleakly familiar to us now after
a year of dueling coronavirus conspiracy theories matas de sized
que and on bullshit and stop the steel style election disinfo.
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Weaponized un reality is often used by politicians and grifters
people like Alex Jones or Andy No, to make quick
profits or energize their base during an election. Such individuals
seldom consider or fully anticipate the long term impact of
building out an alternate counter factual reality. Think of former
President Trump begging his supporters to get vaccinated and trying
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to take credit for the creation of a vaccine that
forty one percent of his followers think is some sort
of Chinese Bill gatesy and genocide conspiracy. Or think of
Mike Pence, whose career is built on decades of right
wing lies about abortion, climate change, terrorism in the economy.
Now think of Mike huddled in fear behind his bodyguards
as a mob of fanatics burst through the halls of
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power with murder on their minds. The problem with weaponized
unreality is that to really make it work, you have
to craft an entire alternate reality for the true believers,
one with its own meat ea in its own self
reinforcing cycle of disinformation. This is extremely profitable and creates
a durable base of support for the precise reason it
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is tremendously dangerous. Two entirely separate realities cannot coexist in
the same political system. The unreality that the right wing
has spent decades building is centered around the contention that
its enemies, Democrats and the left, are literal servants of Satan,
hell bent on building a system that will exterminate real
Americans and moss. At present, twenty three percent of Republicans
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believe Satanic pedophiles control the US government, the media, and
the financial sector. Roughly fifteen to twenty percent of Americans
nationwide share the same belief. Nearly thirty percent of Republicans
believe that patriots, which their unreality has defined as white conservatives,
may need to resort to violence in order to restore
their version of American values. The good news is that
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a clear majority of Americans do not abide by those views,
but they don't need two. In nineteen thirty two, the
National Socialist German Workers Party had their best performance in
a legitimate election and got just thirty seven point three
percent of the vote. A minority party can manage tremendous
bloodshed if they are sufficiently unified, their opponents are sufficiently disorganized,
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and the political system is biased in their favor. All
of those things were true of the Nazis in the
nineteen thirties, and all of those things are more or
less true of our situation now. The next three years
in change will bring continued climate related collapse. This added
strain will reveal more and more of the holes in
our infrastructure. As I type this, a massive condo complex
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in Florida has just collapsed into a sinkhole, killing dozens,
and the state of Oregon has issued a warning that
a chlorine shortage threatens the state's ability to properly sanitize
drinking water. A new study has revealed that despite six
months of counter disinformation efforts, one third of Americans still
believe the election was stolen by the Democrats, the same
(30:58):
percentage you believed that in No Wimber. On June one,
American news network host Pearson Sharp got in front of
his viewers and said this about the election he believed
had been stolen. How many people were involved in these
efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.
(31:21):
How many people does it take to carry out a
coup against the presidency? And when all the dust settles
from the audit Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada,
and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who were
responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for
(31:44):
traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried
to steal power by taking away the voices of the
American people? What happens to them in their sundry internet?
Heidi holes Q and UN believes took this broadcast as
hard evidence that their long awaited storm was coming and
(32:04):
the mass execution of democratic officials and journalists was about
to begin. I don't think I have to spend much
time here saying how dangerous this is. What I do
want to do is point out that Pearson Sharp was
also a major personality on Sputnik, a Russian propaganda news outlet.
I don't bring this up to further any sort of
Russia Gate fervor, because I don't think that's one of
our main problems. But the kind of content Pierson made
(32:27):
for Sputnik is important. His job was to repeatedly slander
the White Helmets, an organization of Syrian volunteers who helped
provide medical aid and the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime bombings.
A complex and sophisticated propaganda campaign has turned them into
boogieman for a sizeable chunk of the international left. There
are conspiracy theories that the White Helmets actually staged and
(32:49):
faked all of the chemical weapons attacks and bombings, but
shar Al Assad's air force did against civilian targets. On
June eleventh, two thousand eighteen, Pearson took a state sponsor
trip into Syria, escorted by the soldiers of a dictator
who has killed half a million of his citizens. He
posted this, everyone, literally everyone you made in Syria will
(33:10):
tell you how grateful they are to be living under
government held areas and that the Syrian army freed them
from torture under Western backed rebels. Only the terrorists complain
about being liberated. That last line, only the terrorists complain
about being liberated strikes hard within my soul. The point
of this digression is again not about Russian propaganda, but
(33:31):
about the kind of man Pearson sharp is. He has
made for years a career out of denying the violence
of brutal dictators and justifying massacres with propaganda, and in
one he's decided that the trumpe Ist wing of the
Republican Party is the place to be. He is not alone.
The same night that one American news broadcast dropped, Tucker
(33:52):
Carlson got on his show and in front of a
graphic of a Democratic Party donkey with the words anti
white Mania written in front of it, he said this,
The question that we should be meditating on day in
and day out is how do we get out of
this vortex, this cycle Before it's too late. How do
we save this country before we become Rwanda. It's interesting
(34:14):
that Tucker brings up Rwanda here, Interesting and telling because
the genocide that cost a million people their lives in
that country was driven in part by a talk radio
station called r t l M. Scholars describe r t
l M as a de facto wing of the extremest
Hutu government that started the massacre. Roughly ten percent of
the violence that occurred has been tied directly to specific
(34:35):
r t l M broadcasts. Now, look, I promised this
wasn't going to be a Dumer podcast, and I mean
to keep to that. While the three factors I mentioned
are churning us all in the direction of hell, they're
not the only factors to consider. We, the people who
do not want to live in a dictatorship or see
the mass murder of our fellow citizens, are in the majority,
and we have tools with which to fight against our enemies.
(34:59):
The last year and struggles of the pandemic have brought
with them a tremendous rise in the number of organizations
practicing mutual aid. This term has its origins and anarchist
political theory, and is very different from charity. In charity
and individual or organization with plenty gives aid to people
who cannot help themselves. Mutual aid is when communities rise
(35:19):
up to serve their own needs without waiting for their
government or some in GEO to do it for them.
The goal of mutual aid is not just to handle
immediate needs, but to build dual power. When you build
dual power, you are essentially creating organizations that fulfill the
useful roles formerly filled or poorly filled by the state.
(35:39):
Doing this reduces or eliminates people's reliance on the state,
and as a result, vastly increases the public's bargaining position.
If you want to force massive sweeping changes on the
system will replace it entirely, you're going to need to
build dual power first. Mutual aid is also just fucking inspiring,
And when you spend as much time staring into the
(36:00):
this as we all do these days, you need inspiration.
While researching this article, I came across a wonderful piece
and The Guardian about the rise of mutual aid, and
I want a quote from it here. During the final
thousand days of the Second World War, shipyard workers in
the San Francisco Bay area produced one thousand warships a
warship a day. Something like that epic urgent industry seems
(36:21):
to be at work now, but outside the federal government
or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch
of the news site Hoodline reported on Thursday morning, two
tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda.
By the end of the weekend, it had become sixteen
thousand plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed
to self organization by Bay Area makers who have transformed
(36:42):
maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops, and almost anyone with their
own sewing machines, C and C machine, or three D
printer into an ad hoc core of medical supply manufacturers.
The report called the self organized effort involving industrial design
students and teachers a distributed factory. Let's do send. Realized
efforts organized without top down authority are exemplary mutual aid.
(37:05):
In April fourteenth, nurses and seven doctors from the same
institutions set off for a one month assignment on the
Navajo Reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection.
They were coordinated by the existing ucsf Heal Initiative, which
works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal.
Its mission statement is we seek to embody solidarity and
(37:26):
contribute to the movement for global health equity led by
communities themselves. This initiative, based on the principle of solidarity
not charity, has been working with communities under stress for
six years and will still be there when the immediate
crisis is over. When faced with the looming specter of
fascism and gangs of heavily armed racists spent on massacrring
the other, mutual aid may seem like a poor defense
(37:48):
at best. This is not the case. It is, in fact,
the only thing that can pull us back from the brink.
Weaponized on reality works because people are angry, confused, and frightened.
Now of the thirty of Republicans willing to kill to
save their concept of America are bigots, and the things
that confuse and anger them are equality in progress. But
(38:08):
those people are only dangerous at scale when there is
a much larger number of less radical people scared and
confused enough to buy into their lies. The one thing
that can cut through lies, that can build the empathy
necessary to forestall terror is community. When you help people
with their material needs and provide them with a community
that makes them feel valued and cared for, they are
(38:30):
unlikely to support your murder. Effective mutual aid also undercuts
the ability of authoritarians to profit as much from climate change.
When the system falls apart, authoritarians always promised to fix it.
The best way to put lie to that promise is
to build a better solution to the problems, one that
works in real time periods of collapse, and we are
(38:51):
right now all living through collapse, our times in which
people are more open to new modes of living, new
visions of how the world could exist. That's why these
times are so dangerous, but it's also why they hold
so much promise. Right now, we face the risk of
falling together into the darkness, but we also have the
opportunity to build a new world from the ashes of
(39:13):
the old. Either way, we'll be doing it together. For
my part, I know which option I prefer. What about you,
Episode one. Welcome to the Crumbles. The screaming starts while
you're rolling a shopping cart down the aisle of your
local supermarket. You're trying to determine which canned meat looks
most appetizing. The price of fresh meat has been rising
steadily for the last few years, but two months ago
a ransomware attack shut down several massive meat processing plants
(00:23):
in Brazil. In Texas, the last four months of wildfires
also took their toll, burning thousands of acres of pasture
land and hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. So
you were trying to decide between the spam and the
canned chicken. When you heard the commotion start a few
wiles down from your position, you knew immediately that it
had to be about coffee. In the last month, you've
(00:44):
seen two fist fights and a dozen screaming matches start
by the corner of the store that had once held
dozens of friendly, colorful bags of different coffee brands. The
last time it had looked that way was a long
time ago. Before the great plantations of Central America had
succumbed to blight, fire and drought, there was still coffee
capitalism always found a way, but it was harsher and
(01:06):
more bitter than it had been before, and it was
also much more expensive. Each customer was limited to one
half pound per week when it was in stock. You've
gotten lucky today and bought a bag, But evidently another
customer had been less fortunate. He seemed to be screaming
at a staff member, berating her for the problems caused
by a supply chain that had been breaking for the
(01:27):
last decade. You couldn't back it up with data, but
you feel like this sort of thing happens more and
more often every year, not just the supply chain disruptions,
but the outbursts of violence and rage. You don't even
stop to watch the videos on social media anymore. If
customers screaming and starting fights over the ground, beef that
wasn't there for their Fourth of July barbecue or whatever.
(01:50):
You can't tell me there's no coffee. I've seen a
dozen assholes with coffee in their carts. If they have
a right to it, I have a right do it.
You turn away from your cart and sneak a glance
down the other aisle in spite of yourself. The angry
man is heavy set around six feet tall and wearing
a T shirt with a faded, thin blue line flag
on its back. He's yelling at a reedy young man
(02:10):
wearing the uniform of a grocery store clerk. This poor
kid had probably been stalking apple sauce a few minutes earlier.
Now he was the target of this man's entitled rage.
I know you keep more in the back. I don't
give a shit about your excuses. Get it. As the
young clerk tries to explain again that there's no coffee
left in the store, a security guard rounds the corner
(02:32):
at the other end of the aisle. He yells hey
and puts a hand on the taser at his belt. Sir,
you need to leave. I'm not leaving without my coffee.
You realize with a start that a small crowd has
started to form behind you. You feel sudden anxiety at
the fact that you've left your cart undefended, and pull
away from the scene to put your hands on it.
(02:53):
You were lucky enough to get coffee and the last
carton of eggs, and a lot of customers in the
store would happily steal either. Mercifully, your card has survived
the altercation unmolested, You wheel it away from the ongoing
confrontation towards the self checkout. Maybe you can avoid the
worst of the line that way. The yelling stops, and
as you wheel your cart up to the checkout counter,
(03:16):
you see the angry man's storm out of the grocery store,
cursing under his breath. The security guard and the clerk
follow a few feet back and stop when he exits
the building. They both sigh with relief, and for a
few minutes, you lose yourself in the task of running
your products through the self checkout. As you prepare to pay,
you happen to look up just in time to see
(03:36):
the angry man re enter the store through the front door.
You see the gun in his hand an instant before
he raises it up just a few feet from the
clerk's face and fires. On June, Victor Lee Tucker Jr.
(03:57):
Thirty walked into the Big Bear Supermarket into Kalb County, Georgia.
A story employee, forty one year old Lakita Willis, noticed
he was not wearing a face mask and violation of
the store's policies. Lookita informed Victor that he would have
to wear a mask to continue shopping. Victor Tucker left
the store in a huff and returned with a gun,
(04:17):
which he used to murder Lakita Willis and wound the
store security guard, an off duty sheriff's deputy. Lakida and
that security guard are not the only victims of this
sort of violence. At a Flint, Michigan, dollar store, a
forty three year old father of eight and employee was
shot dead over a mask. The city of Stillwater, Oklahoma,
was forced to reverse a mask ordinance when it led
(04:38):
to a surge of violence against service industry employees. We
could go on, but we won't. This is it could
happen here a podcast about collapse dedicated to chronicling where
we all of us are headed in the very near
future if things continue on their present course. The first
season of this show focused on the possibility of a
(04:59):
second to American Civil War, and compared to that, perhaps
a shooting in a grocery store over coffee seems low stakes.
When Hollywood turns its eyes towards the subject of collapse,
they nearly always focus on the exciting parts. Buildings tumbling down,
mass violence in the streets, bandits and gunfights, and explosions,
and all the stuff that looks rad on a silver screen.
(05:21):
But that's not how collapse looks to most of the
people who are forced to endure it. Civilizations die by
paper cuts more often than by bullets. Everyone listening has
and the last year in Change watched the global society
we live in take a solid body blow in the
form of COVID nineteen. Many of the terrible things we
experienced that year. The supply line crunches, the culture war
(05:43):
over masks, the anti lockdown protests, the explosion of conspiracism
among millions of people stuck at home online. These things
are easy to attribute to the freak coming of a plague.
But COVID was not a speed bump. It was the
harbinger of a new era. It revealed how fra duel
much of the infrastructure of modern life truly was. I
(06:03):
wrote this episode while the city of Portland, Oregon, braced
itself for an unprecedented heat wave, with temperatures nearing a
hundred and twenty degrees. Last year's fire season saw Portland
blanketed and a cloud of rancid yellow smog. More than
half a million people living in Oregon had to flee
their homes over ten percent of the state's population. Stores
(06:24):
ran out of respirators, fire axes, and emergency supplies. The
American West's heat wave is a product of the same
thing that may soon strip the coffee from your store shelves,
climate change. In April of one, US coffee stockpiles hit
a six year low, even with Brazil's record twenty twenty crop.
That country is now experiencing its most severe drought in decades,
(06:48):
which will sink production further. The global coffee deficit, the
amount of the Earth's coffee production falls below demand, is
expected to hit ten point seven million bags this year.
The previous project was a short fall of eight million.
In the vignette that opened this episode, I mentioned a
meat shortage caused in part by cyber attacks on meat
(07:08):
processing plants that actually happened. On May thirty first one, JBS,
the world's largest meat supplier, was hacked, shutting down much
of their operations on Australia, Canada, and the United States
from a rite up. In the Wall Street Journal quote
the culprit a ransomware attack didn't just hit its target,
it royaled the U s food industry from hog farms
(07:29):
in Iowa to small town processing plants in New York restaurants.
The hacks set off a domino effect that drove up
wholesale meat prizes, backed up animals in barns, and forced
food distributors to hurriedly search for new supplies. The attack
was the latest clash between cyber criminals and companies integral
to the functioning of the U. S economy. It was
another disruption to the U. S food industry after the
(07:51):
COVID nineteen pandemic last year forced weeks of plants shutdowns,
and this year an economic rebound has stretched suppliers ability
to meet demand. Now I read that whole quote because
it illustrates the way all these problems build upon themselves.
Our supply chains are what mathematicians call a chaotic system.
If your knowledge of chaos theory comes primarily from Dr
(08:12):
E and Malcolm, the gist of it is this certain
complex systems can be impacted in huge, unexpected ways by
seemingly minor changes because so many things are interacting at
once that a change in one can set off a
chain of other changes. The most common framing of this
observation is the phrase a butterfly flapping its wings in China,
can cause a hurricane in New York, and variations of
(08:34):
the same. The world we live in and the infrastructure
that makes our daily lives possible, is such a system.
We've all seen ample evidence of that over the last year.
It really hit home from me earlier in twenty one
when a friend of mine who works as an ear
nurse at a local hospital sent a message to a
signal chat for my local friend group and warned, the
(08:55):
hospital is full. Don't get hurt. Initially, we all assumed
coronavirus was the cause, but no, he explained very few
of the cases that had filled his r and multiple
overflow rooms had anything to do with a viral infection. Instead,
the cause was a mix of things, people celebrating in
dumb ways as the state reopened, overdoses and car accidents,
(09:16):
et cetera. In normal times, these might not have drained
the system, but a huge number of doctors and nurses
quit during the worst of the plague. My friend calls
the period wherein now where aspects of modern society that
once seemed immutably solid start to fall apart all at
once as the crumbles. I find this a much more
useful framework for discussing the future than the dreams of
(09:39):
collapse shared by apocalypse obsessives. One April second study showed
that at least one in five healthcare workers have considered
quitting as result of the virus. More than thirty six
hundred u S healthcare workers died in COVID's first year.
These strains hit the medical system in the midst of
an ongoing drought and healthcare workers. By five the u
(09:59):
S is likely to face a shortage of more than
four hundred thousand home health aids, twenty nine thousand, four
hundred nurse practitioners, and between fifty four thousand, one hundred
and one hundred and thirty nine thousand physicians. We went
into the pandemic with a shortage of doctors and nurses.
At least some of the six hundred thousand American deaths
from the virus were certainly due to a lack of
(10:22):
qualified medical professionals, and now COVID has further exacerbated that shortage,
ensuring that the next great strain on our health care
system it's even harder, which will drain away more professionals,
which will make the next pandemic or natural disaster even
more devastating. This is the way the crumbles work. Problems
feed into calamities and turn into catastrophes. A healthy society
(10:45):
has the wherewithal to diagnose its problems and patch the
holes in its systems when they appear. We do not
live in a healthy society. The problems that will confront
us over the next fifty years rising sea levels, out
of control wildfires, crop failures, greater waves of ref you
geez are no less imposing than the COVID nineteen pandemic.
The virus could have been halted by something as simple
(11:06):
as getting everyone to wear masks and avoid crowded indoor
spaces for a few weeks. The United States could not
handle that. In April, I watched a crowd of anti
lockdown protesters surround a group of doctors and nurses in
the Oregon state capital Salem. The healthcare professionals carried signs
that said please, we just don't want you to get sick.
(11:28):
Protesters spat at them and screamed diaper mouth, mocking the
face masks they wore. Several of these protesters carried rifles.
As you probably guessed by now, this is not a
particularly optimistic podcast, but It's also not my intention to
infect you with a sense of doom. The worst problems
we face all have solutions, or at least strategies for
(11:51):
adaptation and harm reduction. To my mind, our most pressing
problems fall into three broad categories. One the environmental consequences
of modern civilization. This is going to be by far
the most unibomery point I make to day, but it
cannot be avoided. As I type this, fires are burning
(12:11):
throughout Oregon, even in the famously wet northern reaches of
the state. Towns in northern California with huge amounts of
rainfall thirty eight inches in some cases are so low
on water that citizens have been restricted to fifty five
gallons per day. Prior to twenty twenty one, Portland's record
high temperature was a hundred and seven degrees this June,
(12:31):
before the hottest part of the year. It beat that
record for three days straight. The year before twenty twenty,
Australia suffered a mega fire, the largest in its history,
which burnt more than twenty three hundred square miles. All
these fires are just preludes. The world is only getting
hotter from here on out. As I write this, the
United Nations Climate Science Advisers issued a draft report warning
(12:54):
that the worst projected impacts of climate change are hitting
much faster than previously expe did. We will probably reach
one point five degrees celsius of warming by twenty twenty six. Now,
for years, staying under one and a half degrees celsius
has been the goal. The target amount of warming. Mainstream
climate scientists and climate conscious politicians wanted to limit us too.
(13:18):
If we were to stop all other forms of emissions
right now, agriculture alone would carry us over the one
point five degree celsius line in just a handful of years.
Most institutional messaging posits one point five degrees of warming
as the acceptable, even relatively pleasant option. A UN Climate
Change tweet from earlier this year made that point in
(13:38):
image form, showing depictions of the Earth's atmosphere in green, yellow,
and red one point five degrees celsius, two degrees celsius,
and three degrees celsius plus with the text. The difference
between one point five two degrees and three to four
degrees average global warming can sound marginal. In fact, they
represent vastly different scenarios for the future of humanity. It
(14:00):
is true that two or three degrees of warming would
create a radically different world than less than one and
a half. But the data and our lived experience has
made it increasingly clear that one point five degrees, which
we will hit period in the near future, is a
calamity of almost incomprehensible dimensions. The phenomenon we're all staring
(14:29):
down the barrel is called climate tipping. One example of
this would be unprecedented heat waves causing mass wildfires, which
release more carbon into the atmosphere, which speeds up warming,
which accelerates the whole cycle onward and upward. Scientists in
Europe recently found that climate tipping is likely to cause
sudden shifts in the Gulf Stream, which will cause sudden
(14:49):
and massive temperature changes in normally tempered zones like western Europe.
The last devastating heat wave to hit France and twenty
nineteen killed at least fifteen dred people. This particular study
was the result of scientists from eighteen universities working in tandem.
Their spokesman, doctor Michael Gill, told fizz dot org quote
(15:10):
these results indicate that climate tipping is an imminent risk
in the Earth system. Even the safe operating space of
one point five or two degrees above present generally assumed
by the I p c C might not be all
that's safe. According to the precautionary principle, we must consider
abrupt and irreversible changes to the climate system as a
real risk, at least until we understand these phenomena better.
(15:32):
The central problem is that our previous models were far
too optimistic, largely in their assumptions about how gradual the
warming caused by carbon release would be. Another recent study,
published in Science Advances, analyzed twenty years of data to
study the transfer of carbon dioxide between land plants in
the atmosphere. Its findings suggest that if present trends continue,
(15:54):
forests in twenty forty will absorb only half as much
carbon dioxide as they do now. So when we hit
one and a half degrees celsius, which we will permafrost
will start to thaw, releasing methane, which will warm the planet.
Forests will hold less carbon, more fires will burn, an
estimated hundred and fifty million people will die due to pollution.
(16:17):
These factors all make it likelier that we will hit
two degrees celsius of warming or even higher, at which
point we will experience catastrophic permafrost thawing alongside another two
hundred and thirty billion tons of carbon burping out of
the soil. The effects of this will be catastrophic for
all of us, but they will be particularly disastrous for
the traditional victims of capitalism Africans. I want to quote
(16:41):
from an article in The Independent by Ugandan writer Vanessa
Naicaate quote. This year, abnormally warm temperatures and heavy rains
have led to swarms of locusts destroying hundreds of thousands
of hectares of crops in East Africa. Twelve million people
in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are in dire need of food.
Lake Chad has runk to a tenth of its original
size over the last fifty years. Half of Nigeria has
(17:04):
no access to water. It is hard to be encouraged
by stories of meatless burgers or moonshot technologies when communities
around you are battling an endless and worsening cycle of drought, famine, cyclones,
floods and destruction. This is my world at one point
to degrees celsius of warming. This is not progress. Vague
distant targets for twenty thirty or twenty fifty will not
(17:26):
keep the world well below two degrees celsius of warming,
as the Paris Agreement promised. I can tell you a
two degrees celsius hotter world is a death sentence for
countries like mine. Now, when you lay it all out
like that, it can be pretty overwhelming. For perspective's sake,
it is important to note that nearly all of the
carbon that's causing these problems was released into the atmosphere
(17:48):
within the span of a human lifetime. It is, in short,
the result of industrial society and its consequences. Right now,
there is more carbon in the atmosphere than at any
point in the last eight hundred thousand years, and perhaps
as far back as fifteen million years. But all this
carbon started flowing into the atmosphere just three hundred years
ago in the seventeen hundreds, when England started burning coal
(18:11):
and kicked off a global drive to industrialization. The vast
majority of the carbon in our atmosphere was pumped out
even more recently than that, as David Wallace Wells writes
in his book The Uninhabitable Earth quote, the majority of
the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since
the end of World War Two, the figure is above
eighty five percent. The story of the industrial world's Kama
(18:33):
Kaze mission is the story of a single lifetime the
planet brought from seeming stability to the brink of catastrophe
in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and
a funeral. That fact has a tendency to inspire false
hope and some if the real problem only started a
lifetime ago, perhaps we can solve it in the space
of a lifetime. But reality does not work that way,
(18:55):
my friends. Once the carbon is out there, released from
trees burning in millions of acres of wildfires, from the
exhaust pipes of hundreds of millions of cars, or from
the smoke stacks of factories, it is there to stay.
If we transitioned entirely to nuclear power tomorrow, that carbon
would still be warming us for decades. And as the
globe warms up, it dries out the soil, which in
(19:17):
turn heats the world further, which pushes more people to
install a c which increases emissions, which dries out the soil,
which leads to wildfires, which releases more carbon, and on
and on and on and on it goes. And this
brings me to pressing problem number two, the authoritarian renaissance.
In two thousand eleven, the Syrian Civil War started, sending
(19:38):
millions of Syrian refugees fleeing into Europe. In two thousand
and fourteen and fifteen, nearly two million people filed for
asylum in the EU. Contrary to popular opinion, experts are
heavily divided on whether or not climate change played a
major role in sparking the conflict, but the refugee crisis
did play a major role in sparking something else, the
rise of Europe's authoritarian right wing. I'm going to quote
(20:01):
now from a Leibnitz Institute for Economic Research report by
Andreas Steinmeyer. Quote. In the Upper Austrian state elections in
two thousand fifteen, the far right Freedom Party of Austria
doubled its vote share from two thousand nine and obtained
over thirty percent of the vote with a fierce anti
asylum campaign. Polls indicate that support for the Freedom Party
remained roughly at the level of two thousand nine state
(20:22):
elections until late two thousand fourteen, but subsequently increased drastically.
In two thousand fifteen, When refugee numbers started to grow,
the salience of the issue in the media, measured as
the number of newspaper articles covering the refugee situation, increased
almost in proportion to the number of asylum applications. Upper
Austria was no exception in Europe. The Sweden Democrats, for instance,
(20:43):
obtained five point seven percent of votes in the two
thousand ten parliamentary elections in Sweden. After that, support increased
parallel to the rising number of refugees, which increased earlier
in Sweden than in other European countries. In parliamentary elections
in two thousand fourteen, the Sweden Democrats obtained twelve point
nine percent of the vault and pulled around twenty percent
in late two thousand fifteen at the peak of the
(21:04):
refugee inflow into Sweden. The alternative for Germany a f D,
was not founded until two thousand thirteen. Poles show was
sharp increase in support of up to fifteen percent along
with growing refugee numbers. Now During the two thousand and
sixteen election Canada, Donald Trump in the United States constantly
harped on the danger of refugees from Syria, but also
(21:25):
from places in Latin America like Guatemala, whose economies had
been devastated by climate change. These climate refugees and the
false perception that they were causing crime and of violence,
fed into a rising American fascist movement that is still
with us today. Authoritarians have always used fear of the other,
and specifically fear of foreign asylum seekers, to stoke division.
(21:47):
That part of their job is only going to get easier.
The UN projects that by twenty fifty an additional two
hundred million people will be climate refugees. This was the
entire population of planet Earth during the high of the
Roman Empire, clawing desperately at the iron gates of any
country better off than where they've left. Climate change doesn't
just provide opportunities for authoritarian politicians. It tends to make
(22:11):
society itself more authoritarian by increasing military conflicts and domestic crime.
In two thousand and fourteen, the U. S Department of
Defense authored an annual Defense Review that noted, quote the
nature in pace have observed climate changes and an emerging
scientific consensus on their projected consequences pose severe risks for
our national security. The report goes on to warn about
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conflicts over resources, particularly water in places like Lake Mead,
Nevada and the Colorado River system, where conflicts over scarce
water could spiral into violence. As I write this, a
group of militiamen under the banner of Aim and Bundy
have set up shop by the Klamath River in central Oregon,
claiming to represent the interests of farmers being denied their
normal allotment of water due to severe drought conditions. Bundy
(22:57):
at All have threatened to break onto federal land are
armed and released the water. As that Department of Defense
reports so aptly noted, these effects are threat multipliers that
will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability,
and social tensions, conditions that can enable terrorist activity and
other forms of violence. We've already seen how both main
(23:20):
parties in the United States react to violence and the
perception of violence. President Trump responded to a popular uprising
against police brutality with a wave of police brutality. He
was almost universally supported in his re election bid by
police unions. On January six, at least thirty one police
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officers took part in the Capital insurrection aimed at keeping
Trump and power Despite this fact, President Biden suggested in
June that communities should spend much of the three hundred
and fifty billion dollars in COVID nineteen aid dispensed in
May to hire more police officers. A few days earlier,
his administration released its plan for dealing with domestic terrorism,
(24:02):
inspired by the violence of the Capital Riot. This included
an additional hundred million in funding for local law enforcement.
All this is to say that the state only has
one solution to deal with the problems we will increasingly face,
(24:25):
and that solution is to put more men with guns
in our communities. Platoons of goons armed with grenade launchers
and armored vehicles may in fact provide some protection to
the people at the very top of our society, but
they will not protect you. That's not just my own
personal bias speaking. And there were more than eight hundred
thousand sworn law enforcement officers serving nationwide, the highest number ever.
(24:49):
That same year, homicides raised nearly among the nation's ten
largest police departments. The average clearance rate in those departments, however,
dropped by seven percent to about This means a few things.
Murders rose in the United States, with more cops than
ever before. Those cops solved fewer of the murders committed
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than they had in prior years. President Biden's one budget
included twenty two billion dollars to fight global climate change.
His two budget calls for thirty six billion dollars in funding.
That is a substantial rate of increase, but even thirty
six billion dollars is only about one sixth of what
the United States spends on policing and incarcerating its citizens
(25:31):
each year. The cost to stop global warming at less
than two degrees celsius is a contentious issue, but one
estimate places it at as much as fifty trillion dollars.
Whether you buy that estimate or not, by any sober analysis,
thirty six billion is a drop in the bucket compared
to what will be necessary to avoid the worst case scenario.
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And the worst case scenario is coming. If we want
to have any chance at avoiding it, we're going to
have to organize. And that brings me to pressing problem
number three, weaponized unreality. Starting in two thousand sixteen, Russian
disinformation became a major media buzzword. There were stories about
that nation's Internet Research Agency, its armies of botanuts and
(26:16):
trolls aimed as stoking division and pushing certain narratives into
the American consciousness. Russia absolutely has an advanced disinformation operation,
but the media made a mistake focusing on them alone.
The reality of the situation is that nations, corporations, political parties,
extremist movements, and every other organization with its shipped together
(26:36):
does the same thing the Russians do. The name of
the game is to take lies, propaganda, incendiary claims in
rage bait and use them to stoke the ire of
millions of people. I can't claim credit for creating the
term weaponized unreality. That one goes to my friend Carl,
but the term does a brilliant job of describing the problem.
If the coronavirus has taught us one thing, it's that
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the right lies can be deadlier than a thousand or
six hundred thousand guns when properly deployed. Weaponized on reality
is part of why our present problems with climate change
have gotten so very dire. Starting in the nineteen seventies,
Exxonmobile and later a host of other oil and gas companies,
borrowed a public relations strategy initially invented to serve the
(27:21):
needs of big tobacco. The Union of Concerned Scientists describes
the strategy as manufactured uncertainty by raising doubts about even
the most indisputable scientific evidence. Adopted a strategy of information
laundering by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further
its desired message and therefore confuse the public. Promoted scientific
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spokespeople who misrepresent peer reviewed scientific findings or cherry pick facts,
attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action on
global warming with misleading charges about the need for sound science.
That all sounds pretty bleakly familiar to us now after
a year of dueling coronavirus conspiracy theories matas de sized
que and on bullshit and stop the steel style election disinfo.
(28:04):
Weaponized un reality is often used by politicians and grifters
people like Alex Jones or Andy No, to make quick
profits or energize their base during an election. Such individuals
seldom consider or fully anticipate the long term impact of
building out an alternate counter factual reality. Think of former
President Trump begging his supporters to get vaccinated and trying
(28:27):
to take credit for the creation of a vaccine that
forty one percent of his followers think is some sort
of Chinese Bill gatesy and genocide conspiracy. Or think of
Mike Pence, whose career is built on decades of right
wing lies about abortion, climate change, terrorism in the economy.
Now think of Mike huddled in fear behind his bodyguards
as a mob of fanatics burst through the halls of
(28:48):
power with murder on their minds. The problem with weaponized
unreality is that to really make it work, you have
to craft an entire alternate reality for the true believers,
one with its own meat ea in its own self
reinforcing cycle of disinformation. This is extremely profitable and creates
a durable base of support for the precise reason it
(29:09):
is tremendously dangerous. Two entirely separate realities cannot coexist in
the same political system. The unreality that the right wing
has spent decades building is centered around the contention that
its enemies, Democrats and the left, are literal servants of Satan,
hell bent on building a system that will exterminate real
Americans and moss. At present, twenty three percent of Republicans
(29:32):
believe Satanic pedophiles control the US government, the media, and
the financial sector. Roughly fifteen to twenty percent of Americans
nationwide share the same belief. Nearly thirty percent of Republicans
believe that patriots, which their unreality has defined as white conservatives,
may need to resort to violence in order to restore
their version of American values. The good news is that
(29:55):
a clear majority of Americans do not abide by those views,
but they don't need two. In nineteen thirty two, the
National Socialist German Workers Party had their best performance in
a legitimate election and got just thirty seven point three
percent of the vote. A minority party can manage tremendous
bloodshed if they are sufficiently unified, their opponents are sufficiently disorganized,
(30:17):
and the political system is biased in their favor. All
of those things were true of the Nazis in the
nineteen thirties, and all of those things are more or
less true of our situation now. The next three years
in change will bring continued climate related collapse. This added
strain will reveal more and more of the holes in
our infrastructure. As I type this, a massive condo complex
(30:38):
in Florida has just collapsed into a sinkhole, killing dozens,
and the state of Oregon has issued a warning that
a chlorine shortage threatens the state's ability to properly sanitize
drinking water. A new study has revealed that despite six
months of counter disinformation efforts, one third of Americans still
believe the election was stolen by the Democrats, the same
(30:58):
percentage you believed that in No Wimber. On June one,
American news network host Pearson Sharp got in front of
his viewers and said this about the election he believed
had been stolen. How many people were involved in these
efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.
(31:21):
How many people does it take to carry out a
coup against the presidency? And when all the dust settles
from the audit Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada,
and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who were
responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for
(31:44):
traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried
to steal power by taking away the voices of the
American people? What happens to them in their sundry internet?
Heidi holes Q and UN believes took this broadcast as
hard evidence that their long awaited storm was coming and
(32:04):
the mass execution of democratic officials and journalists was about
to begin. I don't think I have to spend much
time here saying how dangerous this is. What I do
want to do is point out that Pearson Sharp was
also a major personality on Sputnik, a Russian propaganda news outlet.
I don't bring this up to further any sort of
Russia Gate fervor, because I don't think that's one of
our main problems. But the kind of content Pierson made
(32:27):
for Sputnik is important. His job was to repeatedly slander
the White Helmets, an organization of Syrian volunteers who helped
provide medical aid and the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime bombings.
A complex and sophisticated propaganda campaign has turned them into
boogieman for a sizeable chunk of the international left. There
are conspiracy theories that the White Helmets actually staged and
(32:49):
faked all of the chemical weapons attacks and bombings, but
shar Al Assad's air force did against civilian targets. On
June eleventh, two thousand eighteen, Pearson took a state sponsor
trip into Syria, escorted by the soldiers of a dictator
who has killed half a million of his citizens. He
posted this, everyone, literally everyone you made in Syria will
(33:10):
tell you how grateful they are to be living under
government held areas and that the Syrian army freed them
from torture under Western backed rebels. Only the terrorists complain
about being liberated. That last line, only the terrorists complain
about being liberated strikes hard within my soul. The point
of this digression is again not about Russian propaganda, but
(33:31):
about the kind of man Pearson sharp is. He has
made for years a career out of denying the violence
of brutal dictators and justifying massacres with propaganda, and in
one he's decided that the trumpe Ist wing of the
Republican Party is the place to be. He is not alone.
The same night that one American news broadcast dropped, Tucker
(33:52):
Carlson got on his show and in front of a
graphic of a Democratic Party donkey with the words anti
white Mania written in front of it, he said this,
The question that we should be meditating on day in
and day out is how do we get out of
this vortex, this cycle Before it's too late. How do
we save this country before we become Rwanda. It's interesting
(34:14):
that Tucker brings up Rwanda here, Interesting and telling because
the genocide that cost a million people their lives in
that country was driven in part by a talk radio
station called r t l M. Scholars describe r t
l M as a de facto wing of the extremest
Hutu government that started the massacre. Roughly ten percent of
the violence that occurred has been tied directly to specific
(34:35):
r t l M broadcasts. Now, look, I promised this
wasn't going to be a Dumer podcast, and I mean
to keep to that. While the three factors I mentioned
are churning us all in the direction of hell, they're
not the only factors to consider. We, the people who
do not want to live in a dictatorship or see
the mass murder of our fellow citizens, are in the majority,
and we have tools with which to fight against our enemies.
(34:59):
The last year and struggles of the pandemic have brought
with them a tremendous rise in the number of organizations
practicing mutual aid. This term has its origins and anarchist
political theory, and is very different from charity. In charity
and individual or organization with plenty gives aid to people
who cannot help themselves. Mutual aid is when communities rise
(35:19):
up to serve their own needs without waiting for their
government or some in GEO to do it for them.
The goal of mutual aid is not just to handle
immediate needs, but to build dual power. When you build
dual power, you are essentially creating organizations that fulfill the
useful roles formerly filled or poorly filled by the state.
(35:39):
Doing this reduces or eliminates people's reliance on the state,
and as a result, vastly increases the public's bargaining position.
If you want to force massive sweeping changes on the
system will replace it entirely, you're going to need to
build dual power first. Mutual aid is also just fucking inspiring,
And when you spend as much time staring into the
(36:00):
this as we all do these days, you need inspiration.
While researching this article, I came across a wonderful piece
and The Guardian about the rise of mutual aid, and
I want a quote from it here. During the final
thousand days of the Second World War, shipyard workers in
the San Francisco Bay area produced one thousand warships a
warship a day. Something like that epic urgent industry seems
(36:21):
to be at work now, but outside the federal government
or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch
of the news site Hoodline reported on Thursday morning, two
tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda.
By the end of the weekend, it had become sixteen
thousand plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed
to self organization by Bay Area makers who have transformed
(36:42):
maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops, and almost anyone with their
own sewing machines, C and C machine, or three D
printer into an ad hoc core of medical supply manufacturers.
The report called the self organized effort involving industrial design
students and teachers a distributed factory. Let's do send. Realized
efforts organized without top down authority are exemplary mutual aid.
(37:05):
In April fourteenth, nurses and seven doctors from the same
institutions set off for a one month assignment on the
Navajo Reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection.
They were coordinated by the existing ucsf Heal Initiative, which
works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal.
Its mission statement is we seek to embody solidarity and
(37:26):
contribute to the movement for global health equity led by
communities themselves. This initiative, based on the principle of solidarity
not charity, has been working with communities under stress for
six years and will still be there when the immediate
crisis is over. When faced with the looming specter of
fascism and gangs of heavily armed racists spent on massacrring
the other, mutual aid may seem like a poor defense
(37:48):
at best. This is not the case. It is, in fact,
the only thing that can pull us back from the brink.
Weaponized on reality works because people are angry, confused, and frightened.
Now of the thirty of Republicans willing to kill to
save their concept of America are bigots, and the things
that confuse and anger them are equality in progress. But
(38:08):
those people are only dangerous at scale when there is
a much larger number of less radical people scared and
confused enough to buy into their lies. The one thing
that can cut through lies, that can build the empathy
necessary to forestall terror is community. When you help people
with their material needs and provide them with a community
that makes them feel valued and cared for, they are
(38:30):
unlikely to support your murder. Effective mutual aid also undercuts
the ability of authoritarians to profit as much from climate change.
When the system falls apart, authoritarians always promised to fix it.
The best way to put lie to that promise is
to build a better solution to the problems, one that
works in real time periods of collapse, and we are
(38:51):
right now all living through collapse, our times in which
people are more open to new modes of living, new
visions of how the world could exist. That's why these
times are so dangerous, but it's also why they hold
so much promise. Right now, we face the risk of
falling together into the darkness, but we also have the
opportunity to build a new world from the ashes of
(39:13):
the old. Either way, we'll be doing it together. For
my part, I know which option I prefer. What about you,
It Could Happen Here News
Host
Robert Evans
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