Polluting Ourselves Into Extinction? Will There Be A Warning First? An Alarm Bell To Get Serious?

One of the perks of being president of a large company is that I could use one of the company jets any time I wanted and didn’t have to tell anyone why. And I travelled a lot— to New York, to London and all over the world. And you know how many times I ordered the company jet? Exactly zero times. I hitched rides with other people who were using it a couple times, but the idea of ordering one made me nauseous. All that money that could be used for promoting our artists… all that pollution… just disgusting to me. Although the few times I went with other people… wow! I understand why people— sociopaths— like them. One of my favorite artists in the world once asked me to loan him the corporate jet (for a good reason). He wasn't used to being turned down but I said no and our relationship turned chilly... forever. I knew it would.

Ed Markey (D-MA) penned an OpEd for The Guardian yesterday, Private jets are awful for the climate. It’s time to tax the rich who fly in them. I hope he can get that done. But a lot of private jets filled with Republican members of Congress and 3 or 4 Supreme Court justices will have to collide before that happens. Every time Clarence Thomas took one of those private jet bribes he was polluting far more than he would have had he flown commercial. [T]he tax-dodging ultra-wealthy,” wrote Markey, “need to stop fueling the problem and start supporting first-class solutions. That’s why, this July, I introduced the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (Fatcat) Act with Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez. Private air travel is the most energy-intensive form of transportation. For each passenger, private jets pollute as much as 14 times more than commercial flights and 50 times more than trains. Despite their sky-high emissions, private air travel is taxed considerably less than commercial air travel.”

Senate co-sponsors include Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). They want to raise fuel taxes for private jets from $0.22 to $1.95 per gallon. “At the moment,” he wrote, “billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are getting a bargain, paying less in taxes each year to fly private and contribute more pollution than millions of drivers combined on the roads below. Just one hour of flying private negates the climate benefits of driving an electric car for an entire year. That is unfair and it is unacceptable. For the sake of our environment, it is time to ground these fat cats and make them pay their fair share, so that we can invest in building the energy-efficient and clean public transportation that our economy and communities across the country desperately need. We cannot continue to ask frontline communities— disproportionately low-income, rural, immigrant, Black and brown Americans who are bearing the weight of the climate crisis— to subsidize billionaires jet-setting the globe… A billionaire who takes to the skies in a private jet isn’t going to feel the hardship of paying a sky-high air conditioning or electric bill. The ultra-wealthy who own their own airplanes aren’t going to feel the hardship of breathing dirty air.”

So, are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the free spending corporate masters of the world sociopaths— or at least exhibiting sociopathic behavior? Does space travel for fun pollute too? Lack of empathy as a psychological trait is usually applied to individuals rather than to society. Sociopaths come off as indifferent and callous to other people’s problems— unable to understand or care about other’s people’s feelings. Although, like billionaires, sociopaths rarely show any remorse or guilt or a sense of responsibility.

Instead of relating to individuals that way, they are ignoring the urgency of the Climate Crisis and refusing to collaborate with the rest of society to solve the problem rather than make it worse. Their private jet lobby, the National Business Aviation Association, is already attacking Markey. “If Congress wants to debate the amount of the fuel tax, that is its prerogative, but we oppose efforts to unfairly single out one mode of transportation for punitive tax treatment, especially for expenditures unrelated to investments in preserving our nation’s world-leading position in aviation… Many business aviation companies are gearing up for the 2024 elections where jets are essential for most candidates. We look forward to Senator Markey campaigning across theCommonwealth of Massachusetts— including its many islands like Nantucket— by train, bus, bike and canoe at the next election. If he steps into any business aircraft— helicopter, piston, turboprop or jet— he will be a hypocrite. And no politician would ever want to be called that.”

You can see why a public intellectual like Umair Haque would write that the world feels like it’s going crazy. “Right about now,” he wrote on Wednesday, “something even more frightening than ‘climate change’— more properly called extinction— is starting to happen. What, you ask, could that even be? For many of our societies, and the factions within them, extinction appears to be…the plan. Horrific, right? Think of America’s right wing, where Ron DeSantis is approving climate-denial videos in…schools. Think of Britain, India, China, Russia, the list goes on. The way that the fanatics in these societies have taken power, and appear to be embracing collapse rather than preventing it… Take a look at America. It’s a society whose entire West— a big place, to say the least— is running out of water. Not in some remote future, but right now. By 2025 or so, critical tipping points will be hit. The plan? The plan is there is no plan. And there’s no plan because that’s the way too many, at least too many in power, want it. Anti-vaxxers…flat earthers…climate change deniers.”

Instead of resisting extinction— which means building systems to survive this millennium, for everything from water to food to energy to money, thousand-year systems— America’s lunatics have made it a collapsed society. They’re out there buying guns— and that’s not some kind of exaggeration or joke. Do you want to know what’s tripled since 2000? Not incomes, not clean water, not functioning systems— guns.

The fanatics seem to see collapse as a kind of cleansing. And this is the way that history goes, if you think about it. The hard right embraces collapse, extinction, apocalypse, because for it, it winnows away the “weak,” meaning the vulnerable, the at-risk, those whom it thinks of as liabilities. For the fundamentalists, apocalypse becomes a test of faith, separating the faithful from the faithless. And for the supremacists, collapse is a scythe that cuts down the inferior, leaving only the pure.

That’s the way they see it, of course— not the way it is. Plenty of them suffer and die, too, historically, when catastrophe strikes. But in the midst of catastrophe, fundamentalists, theocrats, conservatives, fascists, supremacists— the lunatics of human history— the great theme is that they embrace it.

Think of the way that instead of fighting for the survival of half their country— the West running dry— America’s lunatics instead forced the end of Roe. Think of the way DeSantis isn’t lifting a finger to fight climate change in a state that is at extreme risk from it— and is instead allowing climate denial videos in school. The priorities such a politics reveals are crystal clear.

Ending Roe, of course, wasn’t about “saving lives”— plenty more women will die than babies will ever be forcibly born, as maternal mortality rates skyrocket. It’s about power. The power of life and death over more than half of society— women. This is what the fanatics want, and what collapse gives them: the power of life and death.

…We’re not pulling together at a global level because our societies are riven from within by fanatics who have no desire for progress. Hence, the division you can see clearly in the world today.

Emissions are at their highest point ever. Most people don’t know that there’s only one region in the world— only one— which has successfully reduced emissions. Europe. That’s it. The rest of the globe? Barely even trying, like Australia, which had a climate change denier for a PM during its Black Summer, or like America, where the right wing is planning on undoing climate protections. What does it tell you when there’s just one region on the planet which has successfully cut emissions? Something’s gone incredibly, shockingly badly wrong.

You can click on a polluter

That something is politics. Everything in this age has become “politicized.”But not everything is politics. Global warming, aka climate change, aka Extinction, isn’t a political point. It’s not something that me and every decent climate scientist and economist warn of urgently now because we’re trying to win a college society debate. It’s a fact. It’s an empirical reality.

And yet it’s been made mere politics— just like, for example, wearing a mask. Wearing a mask was something people should should have done, and should still do, because of a simple fact: it can prevent the next person getting sick. That’s not politics. It’s just science, plus basic human decency, but mostly science, because, well, even science says we should prevent pandemics, so that we stop tomorrow’s. In the same way, though, extinction has been made politics. Pundits say that you can “believe it” or not, like this was Ripley’s.

That’s not a complaint. It’s an observation. This isn’t about sides. There aren’t two sides to climate change, ontologically, meaning factually, in reality. It’s happening, and it’s going to continue to happen. So how come there are two sides to it, in our societies? Because of the bad faith position of all the above. The idea that you can “not believe” in it, which gives you the license to embrace it.

In other words, extinction dovetails all too neatly with the political pseudo-philosophy of ultra-conservatism: an ultra Darwinian position, which posits that if only the strong survive, then we’re all better off, as if humanity was some kind of, I don’t know, herd. But this logic doesn’t even really apply to the natural world. Darwin himself observed that nature could scarcely function without cooperation, mutualism, interlocking webs of support. The trees don’t charge us for the air we breathe. The rivers aren’t out there asking us for money for water. They just give that stuff to us. In this sense— and it’s a profound one— Darwinism as a political pseudo-philosophy is built on a Big Lie.

And yet this is where we are. The Darwinian philosophies of the world are these: fundamentalism, fascism, authoritarianism, theocracy. All these belief systems have one thing in common, the Darwinist position. Only the strong should survive, and the weak should perish. The strong, of faith, of blood, of body, and so on. The weak— the impure, the unfaithful, the vulnerable— they should perish, after they have served the strong.

The fanatics have all come together to embrace Extinction because it’s what their philosophies want: a great apocalypse, which leaves only them standing. They don’t seem to grasp that it’s not going to work that way. As our basic systems continue to fail— for water, food, air, medicine, energy, money— nobody’s going to win.

But the fanatics have reasoned that it’s better to stand atop a ruined civilization, do a victory dance in its ashes, and then build a dystopia— the one they always wanted. That’s why America’s far right, for example, embraces its social collapse, even accelerates it. What else do you call a plan to dismantle climate protections? As systems fail, democracy erodes, and all that gives them power. The power to take rights away from in hideous ways— like banning websites and books and words about being gay, or being a woman.

Most of us are horrified at seeing the planet begin to burn. Literally, not in some abstract future. At seeing Canada in flames, Greek islands evacuated, at the fact that people are dying from surface burns because the pavement is just that hot.

For most of us, it’s increasingly becoming clear that Extinction is something unspeakably horrific and tragic. But for an ultra-Darwinian fanatic, Extinction is something like history’s great opportunity. (Think of how corporations profited off a pandemic, raised prices, and then never lowered them, in what I called Greedflation, and you’ll have a better idea of what I mean.) What better chance is there to seize the reins of power and build the kingdom you’ve always wanted when civilization’s crumbling? What better time to seize control, and take rights away from everyone, than when everything’s beginning to collapse anyways? When the guardrails don’t work?

For the fanatics, the lunatics among us, Extinction is the plan. In some societies, like America and Britain, they are fast seizing control— all the way to the heights of power, the Supreme Court, the affairs of state. They warn us that much, much worse is yet to come. Human beings created climate change, global warming, Extinction. But that isn’t— amazingly, tragically, idiotically— even the limit of their folly. That limit? Embracing the world collapsing, so they can control the descent.

Let us resist them, then, with all our might.