The gods may move slow, but when they do move, they move inexorably. We feel like we have control over climate collapse but we don’t. This change has been a long time coming and we just happen to be here when it plays out. It’s like being on the beach and seeing a tsunami coming in. It’s a category error to ‘stop’ it and too late to run. What’s happening is much is bigger than us, and it’s the big one. Indrajit Samarajiva
Police Violence
Police violence and pollution are more connected than you might realize — and they have financial ties too. A new investigation documents how the fossil fuel industry finances police groups in major U.S. cities while polluting majority Black and brown communities.
The report from the Public Accountability Initiative and LittleSis, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, details how oil and gas companies are funding police foundations around the country, from New Orleans to Detroit. In some states, the fossil fuel industry has also supported laws to criminalize pipeline protests.
According to the report, the oil giant Chevron is a “Corporate Partner of the Police” for the New Orleans Police & Justice Foundation and a board member of police foundations in Houston and Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, community members in Richmond, California, a city that is disproportionately Black, have been fighting against pollution produced by one of Chevron’s biggest refineries.
It’s not just oil and gas companies; the report also looks into private utilities and financial institutions with fossil fuel investments. Exelon, the country’s largest utility company, which in 2019 settled a pollution lawsuit in the Chesapeake Bay for $200 million, has donated to police foundations in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. JPMorgan Chase, the top global bank financing fossil fuels, is also a corporate partner for the New Orleans Police & Justice Foundation, and in 2011 donated $4.6 million to the NYC Police Foundation. Wells Fargo, the second biggest financier of fossil fuels, has ties to police foundations in Charlotte, Seattle, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City.
The funders of Police Violence and the destruction of the planet.
Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters
With access to powerful people came funding from powerful sources. A review of Atlas’s publicly available financials, data from the Conservative Transparency database, and 990 tax forms filed by various foundations reveals that Atlas has received millions of dollars in funding from a number of Koch-funded foundations, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which has a long history of funding climate denial since its founding. As with the Fraser Institute in Canada, the various Koch-backed think tanks in the U.S., and the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, many of the individual member think tanks that form the Atlas Network are separately funded by foundations affiliated with extractive industries—and, in some cases, directly supported by donations from industry—as well.
Fisher focused in the early years of the Atlas Network on expanding internationally—particularly in Latin America, where oil executives were concerned about leftist movements. One of the first investments Atlas made was in Venezuela, where it funded the launch of the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information, or CEDICE, in 1984. Decades later, CEDICE was instrumental in ousting Hugo Chávez.
Fisher focused in the early years of the Atlas Network on expanding internationally—particularly in Latin America, where oil executives were concerned about leftist movements. One of the first investments Atlas made was in Venezuela, where it funded the launch of the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information, or CEDICE, in 1984. Decades later, CEDICE was instrumental in ousting Hugo Chávez.
Atlas also set up shop in Brazil in the 1980s, working with various agribusiness groups to push back against the environmental regulations and Indigenous rights proposals being made by the Workers Party. Decades later, Atlas helped to spur the “Free Brazil” movement in 2014, which helped to propel Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. This year, at an annual regional event put on by Atlas, agribusiness influencers and think tank heads spoke about finding a path back to power and stopping the current president, Luiz “Lula” Da Silva, from what they described as a “land invasion”: his campaign promise to protect Indigenous land rights from agribusiness and to transfer private farmland to worker ownership.
Police Increasingly Cite Climate Disasters When Seeking Military Gear, Documents Show
When locals learned that the Johnson County, Iowa, sheriff’s office had gotten hold of a massive, mine-resistant vehicle, Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek reassured a skeptical public that officers would primarily use it during extreme weather events in order to save residents from the state’s extraordinary blizzards or floods.
“Essentially it’s really a rescue, recovery and transport vehicle,” Pulkrabek said in 2014.
But in the seven years since, the vehicle — which comes from the Pentagon’s much-maligned 1033 Program that arms local law enforcement with weapons, gear and vehicles leftover from the country’s foreign wars — has been used for almost anything but that.
Iowa City police, who share use of the vehicle with the sheriff’s office, staged it near last year’s racial justice protests, where officers fired tear gas at peaceful protesters for refusing to disperse. And this May, residents fumed after police drove the former war machine through a predominantly Black neighborhood to serve arrest warrants.
Imperialism abroad, policing at home fundamentally connected, says researcher
By the end of the 19th century, French colonizers in North and West Africa banned rural communities from practicing their centuries-old subsistence farming methods. That soon led to extensive environmental degradation. The locals were forced to chop down forests to make way for cotton plantations and other cash crops throughout French Equatorial Africa — which extended from the Congo River into the Sahel.
As the soils of these regions lost moisture and the land started losing its vegetation, a French colonial forester coined the term “desertification.” The colonizers then blamed the land management practices of migratory tribes and other Indigenous people for the environmental degradation that they as outsiders had caused.
“The Indigenous way of life does not match this idea of Western-imposed private property and cash crop farming that the colonizers had implemented by force,” said Assali.
To date, history is repeating itself. In the southern region of Palestine, the Palestinian population that once lived and farmed the area was expelled — largely to the Gaza Strip — and the region is now facing widespread desertification after the Israeli government diverted the Jordan River and uprooted innumerable native olive trees. During the early stages of the founding of the state of Israel and the displacement of Indigenous Palestinian communities, a joint Israeli-Australian project planted thousands of eucalyptus trees instead of native trees and vegetation as an effort to “dry the swamps” of southern Palestine.
“That was a means of dispossessing people from their land because the eucalyptus trees dried out all of their ancient water wells and other water sources,” added Assali. “Even though Israel claims to be environmentally sustainable and innovative — in fact one of its founding myths is that it ‘made the desert bloom’ — they are actively causing the desertification of Palestine and using the land for exploitative purposes.”
Indrajit Samarajiva is a writer born in Canada, raised in the United States, and currently resides in Sri Lanka. He previews what collapse will look like for us from his experience in Sri Lanka.
What ‘Losing’ To Climate Change Looks Like
I have a miserably unique perspective on this because my country, Sri Lanka, ran out of fossil fuels last year as a western debt-trap clanged shut. What this meant, in real life, is that my car was a paperweight, we had to struggle to get basic foodstuff, and the economy seized up and collapsed. Only the very rich could ‘switch’ to ‘renewables’ because money and shipping and everything required to get these things broke down. After a brief period of solidarity where rich people took the bus and grew food, the country got effectively colonized again, this via the IMF.
Sri Lanka ‘recovered’ from this collapse by sacrificing its poor and entire generations of young people to the dictates of the new colonizers (same as the old colonizers). So now we get more oil and more debt so foreign bondholders and the local comprador class can make a bit more money until the whole thing goes down. But the same structural problems are there locally (we’re a debt colony) and we’re sailing into the same global headwinds as everyone else. Sri Lankans are merely the canaries in the coal mine and giving us another shot of adrenaline does not change the fact that the atmosphere is poisonous and we should all get out.
The thing that makes me the angriest is that even at the point of collapse, the rich reacted by preserving their privileges, while the poor, the very young, and the very old are suffering so bitterly. Most people in my country are not eating well, and many have proper protein maybe once a week. It breaks my heart.
Simon Kuper writes an opinion piece. In the Financial Times, Wolfgang Blau, the co-founder of Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), inspired Kuper to write by encouraging journalists to embrace their climate denial as neglect of the climate crisis and stop reporting on the many shiny objects that distract, leaving those of us that live in “full consciousness of the potential catastrophe” watching in horror as one climate-fueled natural disaster after another impacts our civilization.
I was chatting with my teenage daughter the other day when she mentioned climate change. Inevitably, it causes her anxiety. She will probably live to see many coastal cities go under, countries become too hot to inhabit and rich havens shut out climate refugees. My instinctive response was to change the subject. I was exhibiting the new, mainstream form of climate denial: a refusal to think about climate change because it’s too painful.
I understood the “new climate denial” only after hearing a talk about it by Wolfgang Blau, head of the global climate hub at the consultancy Brunswick. Most of us practise the new denial. We’ll activate it next week during the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, which will achieve almost nothing and be overshadowed by wars and nonsense. But saving my daughter’s generation will require ditching denial. Blau, speaking at the recent Faith Angle Europe conference, suggested how to do that.
Climate denial has changed over the years; only the most ignorant and dangerous morons (think Donald Trump and his legions of followers in his death cult) out there believe that it is not happening. Denialism has evolved.
Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t.” — Chris HedgesThis new denial takes many forms. One is “delayism”: we’ll cut emissions later, when the economy is stronger. Philippe Lamberts, co-president of the Greens in the European parliament, identifies another version of denialism — the sort that believes: “Technology will save us, so we don’t need to change anything significant.” In this comforting story, the shift to renewables will be painless. It might even make us richer! This, Lamberts warns, is a fantasy; it’s too late for a smooth transition.
What’s the model message to encourage collective action? Try Churchill’s speeches in spring 1940. He’s realistic, promising Britons only “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. He offers agency: “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” And he admits the possibility of failure: “If this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”If the comparison between facing peak Hitler and climate change sounds melodramatic, that’s just your denial kicking in.
Does collapse mean the end of everything? No, it is a process and likely kick-started the process during the Great Acceleration in the 1950s.
If We’re All Going To Die In The Collapse, Why Bother Prepping?
The problem is that most people are thinking about collapse in the wrong way. They imagine it as a future event that hasn’t happened yet.
But collapse isn’t an event; it’s a process—and it’s happening right now. One could argue that the collapse began when the human population first went into overshoot, and that was over 50 years ago.
Still, it seems like most collapsniks have this idea that someday the collapse will happen and nearly everyone will die in a short period of time. They’re imagining civilization as a person who will suddenly drop dead from a heart attack.
But unless there’s a nuclear war or some other apocalyptic event, it’s not going to be like that. It’s going to be more like a person dying from cancer. The process could be long and drawn out, with good days and bad days.
Yow! Be sure to cover the kiddie's ears.