The Measurement of Suffering

In recent years, we’ve learned disturbing things about the beliefs and behaviors of the ruling class. We still don’t know how far the Epstein scandal reaches, but it seems like everyone above a certain level of wealth was, at minimum, aware of him, and had a pretty good idea of the “services” he provided.

There’s a degree to which we’ve always known about this. It’s not a coincidence that vampires, with their predatory and sadistic nature, are traditionally aristocrats in fiction. We’ve always known about this, but the propaganda of capitalism pulled a veil over the eyes of far too many in the cores of European empires. It’s been a while since it was spelled out so publicly and explicitly, but the fact remains: For most if not all of our rulers, the measurement of power is the ability to inflict suffering without consequence.

As Tegan recently pointed out to me, that’s the meaning of “fuck you money“, when you get down to it. It’s having enough power that you can be an asshole to whoever you want, and they can’t do anything about it, except stay out of your way and hope you don’t make them a project.

This is a pretty common dream, at least in the US, and it’s enacted by petty tyrants at every level of society. We can discuss the psychology behind that another time, but the point here is that for a substantial portion of the population, and a majority of the ruling class, the best-case scenario is that they are indifferent to our suffering.

And so if we wrongly assume that our rulers are indifferent, rather than people who enjoy making our lives worse, how is our suffering considered?

Because it is considered. They know the scale of harm they cause, and they know it upsets people. Most of them don’t understand what motivates the peasantry beyond survival and greed, but they know they know we have cause for anger at them, and they know they need to keep an eye on us. How much trouble will we cause for our “betters”? How likely are we to start burning warehouses or killing executives? Our suffering is measured in unrest.

It is this calculation, I think, that has driven the rise in spending on police in the United States. Remember Atlanta’s “Cop City”, that I wrote about a few years ago? That’s still a thing, and there are more of them being set up all over the country. Since 2001, police have been increasingly armed and funded like a military force, and now these domestic law-enforcement officers are being trained in urban warfare, as if American cities were gang combat zones out of an 80s action flick.

They understand that we can barely survive. That was their goal all along. They want us too poor, sick, divided, and desperate to demand anything better, and because they know pushing people to that point tends to result in violence, they want us terrified as well. They don’t just want us to be under constant surveillance, they want us to know we are under constant surveillance. They want us afraid to speak our minds, even among friends. Our suffering, to them, is a metric. It’s a number on a dial that tells them how effectively they’re exploiting us, and how much they need to spend on violence and propaganda to keep us in line. As they feel their capacity to control us increases, they turn up the dial on the suffering. More overtime, less pay, less healthcare, more dangerous working conditions, and higher rent for worse homes. They want humanity to spend every waking instant working for their profit, without time or resources to actually live our lives. They want us to be slaves, or something so close the difference is meaningless.

They believe that is the best possible world, they believe they deserve that kind of power, and they are willing to destroy everything, because they think the worst-cased scenario for them is that they’re like Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road; god-kings ruling over a feeble, grovelling populace by controlling our access to the means for basic survival.

Will This Be the Coldest Summer of the Rest of Your Life?

There’s a scene in The Simpsons Movie that has become a regular in conversations about the world getting worse in various ways. Bart says, “this is the worst day of my life”, and Homer responds with a cheerful, “The worst day of your life, so far.” Naturally, this has been adapted for all sorts of situations, including the climate crisis:

A two-panel comic. In the first, a weather map of a US heatwave is superimposed next to Bart Simpson, with the caption, "This is the hottest summer of my life." In the second panel, Homer puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "This is the COLDEST summer of the REST of your life."

I like this meme. It’s a nice piece of gallows humor about the fact that the people running our world seem to be actively seeking our extinction, and so the planet is going to keep getting hotter, probably for centuries to come. There is a way in which this is entirely correct, and there is a way in which, for this particular summer, it is not.

The way in which it is correct is that the planet, as a whole, is getting hotter every moment. Over a decade ago, John Cook compared the rate of warming to the nuclear bomb detonated over Hiroshima. Specifically, the rate of warming was equivalent to detonating four of those bombs every second of every day, without pause. The rate has only increased since then.

I’m a little uncomfortable using one of the most horrifying war crimes in history as a unit of measurement, but the scale of what’s happening is beyond what most of us are able to hold in our little monkey brains, and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave us a way to convert these numbers into a human frame of reference.

Fortunately for us, the overwhelming majority of that heat is absorbed by the ocean. That means that it has felt gradual to most, and climate scientists have been unanimous in saying that we’d still have hot years and cold years, just an overall upward trend. More recently, it’s been harder to ignore that every year really is hotter than the last, and it looks increasingly likely that 2026 is gonna be a real doozy.

In January of this year, a research team published the results of a study of ocean warming in 2025. To use our measure of atomic explosions, the oceans absorbed heat equivalent to twelve per second, for every second of 2025.

And the Pacific ocean is about to give a lot of that heat back to the atmosphere.

As many of you are already aware, climate scientists are warning that this year will be the most intense El Niño since the 1870s. I want to dig, just a little, into what that means.

The first thing, going back to the meme at the beginning, is that after this ends, there will be a period that is cooler. “El Niño” refers to the warming phase of the Southern Oscillation that moves between warm phases and cool phases (called “La Niña”). The cycle is basically driven by the Pacific Ocean sloshing back and forth over the period of a few years. That means that the cycle isn’t going to just stop, so as we go into this warm phase, with whatever chaos it brings, please know that it will cool down, at least from our perspective. In terms of lived experience, this will not be the coldest summer for the rest of your life.

However, this will be a good demonstration of conditions we can expect more and more frequently as this century progresses. The more heat there is in the system, the better the odds of a major El Niño event. More than that, as the global temperature keeps rising, we will encounter conditions like what we’re about to experience much more often, and eventually we’ll have them as just the normal state of affairs, with hot phases of the Southern Oscillation being beyond anything humanity has experienced. I also want to note, as I have before, that even though events like this are really just redistributing heat that was already here, it will add to the momentum of global warming as a whole.

Now on to the short-term impacts. In 1877 and 1878, a massive El Niño event triggered a global famine that killed 50 million people. As news outlets have been reminding people, better technology and understanding of the world make it unlikely that the current event will be like that, but I think it will be devastating. The unfortunate reality is that most famines tend to be a matter of logistics and social constructs, rather than the absolute ability to feed anyone. Ireland famously exported more than enough food to feed everybody during the Great Famine, but the eugenicist government of the British Empire saw mass death among the Irish as a good thing, and valued the profits from commercial exports more than Irish lives. Even before modern agriculture really took off, famines tended to be the result of the ruling class’s reckless disregard for life, and their unwillingness to tighten their own belts, even as they blamed the poverty they created on their victims. Worse, famine has long been a weapon of genocide. That’s the case with the ongoing, Saudi-caused famine in Yemen (with US support), and the starving of Gaza (with US support).

As I’ve said many times before, we’ve been able to end world hunger for decades. What we lack is a system that values human life enough to do so. There may not be as big a food shortage as 1877/78, relative to our population, but the global economy is still governed by people who don’t value human life very much. In the case of the Trump regime, they’re also eugenicists.

Eugenics is basically the pseudoscientific idea of using selective breeding practices on human populations. A huge part of selective breeding is the sterilization or culling of individuals with “undesirable traits”, and to the fascists of the GOP, those traits tend to include any disability or neurodiversity, any form of Queerness, any form of left-wing thought, and also the roughly 87% of humanity that’s not “white”.

So I think it’s hard to predict. I don’t know if you remember, but when people first started talking about COVID-19 in late 2019, early 2020, most experts believed that it wouldn’t be as bad as it became. They believed that because we knew how to handle disease outbreaks. We knew how to use PPE, quarantine, lockdowns, and so on, and so it was just a matter of taking those steps, and either slowing or stopping the spread so we didn’t overwhelm healthcare systems while we worked on a vaccine.

It might have become a pandemic either way, but not every country was willing to take the economic hit of a real lockdown, and the folks running the US weren’t willing to risk the general public getting the idea that maybe the government could be making life easier on a daily basis.

And not only did the US government needlessly let hundreds of thousands die, they also interfered, along with US oligarchs, in the COVID responses of other countries. The US even resorted to piracy to shore up its greed-driven PPE shortage. The same people are running the US now, and have demonstrated their willingness to murder innocent fishermen, steal Venezuelan oil, and generally crash the global economy, apparently to serve Trump’s ego and Netanyahu’s fantasy of making Iran a failed state, and therefor not an obstacle to Israel’s imperial project. Whatever the climate does over the next couple years, we’re going into it with an oil crisis and a fertilizer shortage, neither of which needed to happen.

My greatest frustration with the world is that it could be so, so much better than it is, but our systems are governed by people who are either fine with destroying countless lives, or who actively enjoy it. Worse, there are far too many within the working class who have the same desire for power over others. We have yet to shake off the burden of rulers, and so we are still, in far too many ways, subject to their whims.

So there will be droughts, and heat waves, and flooding, and crop failures. Very likely, rich, developed nations will experience shortages and high prices, but not outright famine. That’s the way this thing tends to go these days. If people like Stephen Miller have their way, things will be worse. It will be used as an excuse to further limit food imports to the former colonies that have largely been forced to continue producing cheap goods for the global market, while importing large portions of the food they eat. I think it is likely to be a rough couple of years for humanity.

The US is a dying empire with global reach, and that tends to be a chaotic and violent period in an empire’s life. Adding a record-breaking global heat event to the mix could have a stifling effect on that chaos, or it could add fuel to the fire.

As always, those hit the hardest will be the people who are most vulnerable, and who had the least say in making the world the way it is.

And now I want to end on a slightly less gloomy note. A lot of people online have been wondering how we know about the 1887/8 El Niño, if we didn’t have satellites back then. I always enjoy the subject of how we know what we know, and when it comes to the climate of the past, it’s always cool stuff. In this case, we have a lot of records.

It’s important to remember, when we’re considering anything relating to the last few centuries, that global empires have been a factor since the 1400s. That means global shipping, navies all over the place, and the tracking of agricultural conditions across colonies. Any ship on the ocean needs to be aware of weather conditions, so they tracked them religiously. By looking at those records, we can form a picture of the global climate. There are also farm records, the notes of amateur naturalists, and paleoclimatology tricks like tree rings and sediment cores.

We have always been at the whim of the weather to one degree or another, so we’ve always tracked it to the best of our ability. The rise of civilization as we currently understand it was dependent on reliable seasonal weather patterns for regular mass production of food, and while I’ve long advocated that we start moving food production indoors, the dependence remains. Well, that period of stability is gone, and we’re just starting to get a taste of the new era.

The Republican Party’s War on Autistic People

The post I had intended for today is simply not ready yet, and I’d rather not put half-finished work out for the public. If you want to see my stuff when it’s less refined and less coherent, you can give me money on Patreon.

For this week, I’m posting an important video essay from Ember Green on the Trump administration’s plans for autistic people. RFK Jr. is a eugenicist, who is following Thomas Malthus’ prescription of “courting the return of the plague” to kill off poor people, but sadly mass death isn’t enough for him; he also needs to torture people. He has filled HHS leadership with quacks of the highest order, and when it comes to the issue of autism, he and his people still think it is something that can be “cured”, rather than just a way of being human. This is a common response, among certain types of mind, to any deviation from their fantasy of an ordered world with everyone in their place. They have a similar response to trans people as well, and in both cases the proposed treatments basically amount to psychological and physical tortures devised in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Recommended “treatment” include things like electroconvulsive therapy/ECT (running electricity through the brain to induce a seizure), and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. As with Ivermectin, these are treatments that do have valid uses, when applied carefully and correctly.  ECT can be used in the treatment of severe depression, schizophrenia, catatonia, and some other conditions. It has been tried for autism, and there’s no reason to think it works.

That’s a theme with these people. They love to take treatments that were tried long ago, and ignore the reasons why they’re not used that way anymore. ECT can be safe, and can be helpful, but it can also fuck up your nervous system, and it’s not something to use without cause.

Hyperbaric oxygen treatment is basically used for certain kinds of problems involving gas in the bloodstream. It’s most commonly used for decompression sickness, when divers ascending too quickly get nitrogen gas bubbles in the blood and other parts of the body. It’s also used for carbon monoxide poisoning, necrosis, crushing injuries, and other conditions, all of which involve problems with tissues not in the nervous system. As with ECT, high-pressure therapies can be safe, and life-saving, but as with ECT, there are serious dangers to messing about with pressure, so it shouldn’t be done when it’s not needed, and once again, there is no evidence to suggest it can help in any way with autism.

It’s hard to say what, exactly, is wrong with RFK Jr., or other people who seem to think death is preferable to autism, but it honestly doesn’t matter. What matters is that they should not have the power they have been given, and people will be tortured, injured, and killed by their refusal to engage with reality.

Ember goes into more detail, so check out the video, and consider supporting her work.

New Patreon Rewards!

I have always struggled a bit with the “rewards” part of Patreon. I have limited time and energy, and with the exception of a period of time during COVID, I have always had other priorities that didn’t lend themselves to the rewards system. That has now changed.

Over the last couple years, I’ve been exploring the wonderful world of tattoos. I don’t have all that many, but I’ve discovered that I find the process of designing them to be very satisfying. I think I want my next one to be a raven, but I want to do it myself. I have the tools, but I currently lack the artistic skill to make permanent marks on myself that are up to my standards. I’m working to overcome the perfectionism, but in the meantime I want to get better at drawing ravens in a way that transfers to making tattoos without the expensive machinery a pro would use. I’m trying to draw one every day, and if I can’t do a whole one, I can at least put a little ink on paper. It also turns out that my various bits of art education over the years have left me better at this than I expected. It helps that stippling is a pretty forgiving technique. The better proportions on the second two are because I took the time to measure and mark a few key distances, rather than just eyeballing everything.

So.

I’m about to have a surplus of raven drawings, I bought some nice cards to put them on, and from now on, every patron giving more than €15 gets one raven drawing with a note on the back of the card. If that’s you, then all you have to do is give me the address to send it to, and request the note. I will post all available drawings here as they become available. Each card is 105x148mm.

As with the blog posts, I’m going to make all of them as good as I can with the time I have, but I’m sure some will be better than others because that’s how this goes. If there’s not one you like available, you can always wait for a better one to come along. I don’t have many currently, but this time next year I should at least have a couple hundred, so supply shouldn’t be a problem, as my hordes of adoring patrons pour in for this exciting and unique opportunity. Patrons will get to see the new drawings as I post them, but I’ll update here as well from time to time.

The only other “reward” I currently have is that all paying patrons get to see an earlier draft of each post.

Next week we’ll be back to posts with weighty subject matter, but for now, you should head over to patreon.com/oceanoxia and sign up for the Raven Tier!

Update: Forgot to credit the photographers!

 

 

The False Promises of Ethnocracy

It has come to my attention that a disturbing number of people think that ethnostates, or ethnocracies, are fine as a concept, and an effective and ethical way to protect the ethnicity in question. This is wrong. I believe that the inherent nature of such a system is such that no matter how noble the intentions may be (and I have my doubts about that), it will inevitably lead to some form of ethno-supremacist fascism. The world being what it is, I should also state that ethno-supremacist fascism is bad and destructive, and a threat to all of humanity, and most life on the planet.

An ethnocracy is a system of government that operates for the benefit of one ethnic group above all others. It is not a country in which the overwhelming majority of people are of one ethnicity. The ethnocracy with the most mainstream acceptance in my lifetime has been the nation of Israel, and it’s also the one that I believe is the closest to being defensible based on the way most people understand history. For that reason, Israel and Zionism will take up more space here than other examples. While most of humanity is horrified by what Israel has become, there are still a great many people who believe that an ethnocracy can be done “right”.

The idea of a Jewish state was born in an era when most of the European world believed in so-called “race science”, and ethnocracies were considered more or less normal. The US, South Africa, and Australia all fit that definition, as did Rhodesia. It had long been commonly accepted that there were racial and national traits that were not just a matter of social evolution, but of biological evolution. Crucially, the state of the world, after centuries of colonialism, was seen as evidence of white superiority, while the reluctance of oppressed or enslaved populations to be enthusiastic supporters of their oppressors’ interests was seen as laziness, or irrational intransigence. With this belief came the idea that social strife, while not unique to multicultural societies, was inevitable within them unless a racial hierarchy was maintained. This was also generally tied to an ideology of Christian supremacy, and Christian indoctrination was a regular, usually mandatory part of the ethnic domination.

Many horrors arose from these ideas that we’re dealing with to this day, and it was in this setting that the virulent antisemitism of Europe came to a head with the Holocaust. At this point, it is important to understand that while there were certainly things that set Nazi Germany apart from its enemies, it was also unremarkable in many other ways. The bloody conquest of the American west and American eugenic policies informed much of what the Nazis did, and the empires fighting against the Nazis were involved in their own white supremacist colonial domination. The Nazis did it in Europe, and they tried to do it at industrial scale and speed.

Antisemitism was a centuries-old problem in Europe, and the idea of a Jewish state was gaining popularity both among Jews who believed it was the only way to be free of European antisemitism, and among European antisemites who loved the idea of finally expelling all the Jews from Europe, and sending them somewhere else. This ethnic cleansing was far from an untested idea. Pogroms and other purges fill European history, and England famously expelled all resident Jews in 1290, without any noticeable increase in peace, prosperity, or security as a result.

I’m talking about all of this because it makes sense that those cultures, when presented with the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust, decided that the solution was to create a Jewish state outside of Europe, and since the British Empire “owned” Palestine, they could just use that land for it, with a few adjustments to the existing population. The founding act of the nation of Israel was the Nakba, in which thousands of Palestinians were killed, and hundreds of thousands were forced out of their homes, to make room for the new Jewish ethnocracy.

This was, I should note, a year after the British Empire exited India, where the “solution” to tensions between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority was partition. Two ethnocracies were created, and millions of people were forced from their homes in order to create a Hindu state in India, and a Muslim state in Pakistan. Ever since, the border between the two countries has been a site of endless tension, and regular fears of a war that could turn nuclear. It does not seem to have promoted peace, nor has it led to any unusual level of unity within the majority group. The downsides abound, but the upsides never seem to actually manifest.

Turning back to Israel, here are plenty of Zionists who would defend the hideous violence of the Nakba, but the people to whom I am writing today are those who believe that while murderous ethnic cleansing was the wrong way to go about it, there is a right way to have an ethnocracy. I disagree. I believe there is no way to do it that does not result in fear, hatred, and oppression, all of which tend to create violent conflict.

I was tempted to play out an ideal scenario, in which we start with a perfectly homogenous country, but the problem with that is that it’s not a thing. Various nations have tried to force homogeneity within their borders, but every effort, without exception, has used oppressive violence to do so. Every effort has also utterly failed to bring about peace, unity, and safety. There is a sort of No True Scotsman fallacy going on here, in which ethnocracy supporters refuse to acknowledge and consider the history of their ideas, and instead insist that we engage in their idea on a purely theoretical basis – that we pretend history isn’t relevant because it “should work in theory”. I think they also have some fantasy of a world neatly divided into ethnic regions and categories like a children’s geography book. This is supported by the large number of Americans who apparently think most people in the continent of Africa are (a) the same ethnic group, and (b) live in mud huts, both of which are (a) racist and (b) incorrect to an absurd degree. The ethnic diversity on that continent is off the charts, because we’ve been there the longest, and humans diversify.

The closest we can get to homogeneity is to throw out an umbrella label, and pretend that everyone who fits it has roughly the same beliefs and interests. History has shown that that’s not how anything works, but that has never stopped corrupt, bigoted, and misguided people from trying it. Humans don’t abide homogeneity. We explore new ideas, and we try new things. An area may achieve some level of superficial homogeneity through isolation, but even that has to be constantly and coercively maintained. If difference didn’t exist, it wouldn’t need to be continually punished out of existence. There will always be people who think and act differently, and question the way things are, as there always have been. Ethnocracy has to be maintained by domination through both law and culture, and suppression of challenges to that status quo.

So here’s the next problem:

If you have a society that, as a matter of law and culture, privileges one group of people over all others, you need justification. Because people naturally question things, you need to constantly re-state the reason why this inequality must exist.

As I see it, any argument for this stems from fear, either of violence, or of cultural dilution. In the case of Israel, it is the very reasonable and historically supported fear of European antisemitic violence. The problem here is twofold. First, it’s an inherently militaristic motivation. It’s not just the promise safety in political dominance within a nation, it’s also the use of that political power to develop enough military might to defeat any force that might seek to continue that bigoted violence. Second, in order to justify both ethnocracy and military development, you have to maintain that fear of persecution, otherwise, why not relax and invest in peace? The fear must be maintained, and that is not without consequences.

If you are constantly convinced the rest of the world is out to get you, the rest of the world ceases to be fully human. WE know that Our People are good, it’s obvious to us, so if the rest of the world hates Our People, then they must be deranged and evil, incapable of the rational consideration that would lead them to see Us as just other people. To paraphrase a famously sagacious puppet, fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hatred. It’s a recipe for dehumanization, which brings us to the next problem: thinking that Our People are better. Remember, we’re not just defending Our People in an ethnocracy, we are also privileging Our People above all others within our borders. Goodies for Us, guns for Them.

And if it is right and good that We are treated better than Them, then does that not imply that We simply… are better?

If we’re not better, how can we say it is just that Our People may own property, or wield power, or receive government benefits, but others may not? Historically, people have usually claimed some version of divine favor, but even without that, we as humans generally need to believe that we are good, and our actions are righteous, or at least justifiable. For billionaires, the tendency is to believe that they are simply more intelligent, and harder workers than everyone else. They deserve their wealth, no matter how they got it, and the flip side of that is that those in poverty deserve the suffering that comes with it. If you treat a group of people as if they are better, most of them will believe it. This will create an ethno-supremacist feedback loop for a large portion of Our People, which, if coupled with militarism, is a recipe for eventual imperial conquest. If We are so much better, and They are so violent and hateful, why should we let such unworthy people rule anything? Don’t a Great People such as Us deserve a little more living room?
When England ethnically cleansed its Jewish population in 1290, it didn’t become safer or more prosperous because of it, but it did become more antisemitic, and fancied itself “better” due to its supposed purity. While it is not solely to blame, the notion of British superiority served as justification for incalculable violence all over this planet.

So here’s the next problem:

All of this is challenged by familiarity. If we live in community with people who are different from ourselves, those differences become less mysterious, and tend to matter less over time. Eventually, the people in a minority position will find supporters within the majority, who cannot see any good justification for the unequal treatment. If your country is an ethnocracy, then there is no recourse for those people. Such a country might be a democracy in the sense of ancient Greece, with many people living in something like serfdom or some form of slavery, but it’s nothing close to the modern ideal of autonomy – government by the people, for the people. Eventually, such a nation will have the kinds of liberation movements we’ve seen in South Africa, the US, Ireland, and many, many other countries around the world. That is the case for any form of systemic domination.

What’s more, because the “serfs” in this scenario are defined by their exclusion from Our People, we need to maintain a clear distinction. If we are committed to treating people differently based on their category, we must know to which category a person belongs, so we know how to treat them. That gets tricky if you have Our People forming relationships with Their People, so you have to ban intermarriage, or at least make sure that mixed couples and their children are excluded from the rights and protections reserved for Our People. What if people want to intermarry? Well, we can avoid that problem, and the issue of familiarity if we don’t let them mix, right? So, we have different areas with different rules. Their People get to live where we tell them, in the conditions we provide, while Our People get to live in better places, under better conditions. Maybe Their People even get some level of representation in government, but only with the understanding that They will never be allowed actual equality.

We will also have to severely limit immigration, as everyone who isn’t Our People is one of Them, and must not be afforded Our privileges, allowed to mix with Our People, or allowed to build enough political power to challenge the ethnocracy.

At the end of the day, the idea of an ethnocracy is one of appeasement. It’s the belief that those among us who cannot feel safe around people different from themselves can be satisfied through exclusion and oppression. The reality is that such people will never be satisfied.

If everyone who’s not Our People is somehow removed as a threat, then they’ll be afraid of those members of Our People who think or believe differently from themselves. Large portions of history can be described as failed efforts to impose homogeneity on regions of the world in the name of stability and security, and the result has always been injustice, oppression, and failure.

And even if, in our fantasy world, we achieve a country with total cultural homogeneity and internal harmony, those people perpetually afraid of the Other will look for problems elsewhere. We already know that outsiders are Bad, otherwise we would let them live in our country, but what if the outsiders OUTSIDE our country are causing problems? What if some of our politicians are under the influence of outsiders? They must be, otherwise why would there still be problems in our nice, homogenous ethnostate? It’s still the outsiders, and those who sympathize with them. We’re under siege! We’re being undermined from the outside, so we have to isolate ourselves further, and we have to suppress those who sympathize with the outsiders.

And when problems persist, well, maybe the outsiders need to be forced to stop, and we already know they’re irrational monsters who want us destroyed, so really, attacking them is self defense. Homogeneity can also lead to an echo chamber problem, where dissenting voices become rarer and more marginalized, and so the ignorance, hatred, and misconceptions of Our People can spiral into the kind of insanity that lets people believe a minority ethnic group is secretly controlling the world and causing all of its problems on purpose, because they are evil.

Ethnocracy is a death spiral of paranoia and stagnation. It is inherently opposed to ideas like equality, freedom, and self-governance. You can support those things, or you can support ethnocracies. You can’t support both.

As I close, I want to clarify something, since opposition to ethnocracy is currently considered antisemitism by a great many Zionists. I do not believe any nation has a right to exist, but I do believe that every person has a right to exist in freedom and safety. As I hope I’ve made clear, freedom and safety are incompatible with ethnocracy. I want the Jewish people to live free from persecution or oppression as I want that for everyone else, and the way to make that happen is to do the incredibly hard work of building peace and justice for all.

“No justice, no peace” is a statement of fact as much as it is a good chant, in in the same way, none of us is free until all of us are free.

That doesn’t mean we go invade ethnocracies to make them change. That’s just continuing the cycle of violence, and that’s not what we want. It does mean we stop supporting and justifying such projects, and instead support genuine efforts to bring justice and equality in both the short-term and the long term. Ethnonationalists tend to believe that a world of freedom, democracy, and open borders will result in the loss of their cultures, but the reality is that such a world is the only way for us to exist peacefully with the diversity that is a natural and unavoidable part of our species.

An earlier draft of this article went up on my Patreon last Sunday. If you want to see these when I’m mostly done with them, and have input before they go public, you can sign up to give me money at patreon.com/oceanoxia.

LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

One of my long-standing frustrations with the Democratic Party is they way they will happily campaign and fund-raise on all sorts of important issues, while rarely actually using their power to fight for them. One of the most egregious examples of this, in my opinion, has been the issue of abortion. Democrats have branded themselves as the party of reproductive rights, in contrast to the Republicans, for longer than I’ve been alive. For as long as I have been paying attention, they have been asking people for money to help in their “fight” to codify Roe v. Wade into law. They have also, for that entire time, consistently supported, funded, and conceded to anti-abortion members of their own party. This means that while they have nominally held power in the house, senate, and presidency, they have never made a serious attempt to actually pass a law protecting the right to abortion. Thanks to their definition of a “big tent”, they always have anti-choice party members to stand in the way.

The justification they give is that they have to support these people, in order to get power, and so they have to just give up on this issue every time they’re in power, and hey – if they’re in power, at least abortion rights are protected (except in red states where they’ve been all but eliminated already). They will attack their own in some cases, like when it comes to slandering members of their own party as antisemites for acknowledging the humanity and rights of Palestinians. They’ll play hardball when it comes to keeping someone like Bernie Sanders from winning their primary, and work through the night to fund the genocide Israel is committing, but when it comes to any actual progress, there is no principle they will not sacrifice to maintain their strategy of trying to win over “moderate” Republicans.

I think Nancy Pelosi said it best, when she told reporters that “we need a strong Republican Party”. The Democratic Party has only one real loyalty, from what I can tell, and that is to the status quo, and they are far more comfortable being “pulled” backwards by the GOP than they are working to move forwards. If they were driven by a desire to make things better, then they would constantly be running messaging campaigns about policies to give people more control over their own lives, and to make it easier to get by. They would use the power they have, when they have it, to push the envelope – to use executive power, or to try to pass things like a public healthcare option, or an explicit national right to abortion. In short, they would do the sort of thing the GOP does, except in service of the people, rather than in service to bigotry and the ruling class. They won’t do that, because they seem to view the very act of fighting for something, and of actually caring about something, to be a sign of extremism. They may or may not oppose a given Republican policy, but they won’t “stoop to their level” by putting the same amount of effort into their own claimed agenda. Anything can be sacrificed to gain power, except a “status quo” that seems to be forever stuck in the 1990s.

And so, of course, they have decided that the in the face of a GOP hate campaign, rights of LGBTQIA people are not worth fighting for, because doing so might read as “extreme” to the tiny sliver of the American population that has just about become the sole focus of their political machine. The GOP has fully embraced genocidal rhetoric and policy against trans people, and after a few years of halfhearted opposition from some Democrats and actual action at the state level by others, the national party has decided to just… concede that fight for now.

When Harris said, “I think we should follow the law” about trans rights in October, she did so knowing full well that “the law” is subject to change, if lawmakers want it to change. She also knew that the GOP was fighting to change the relevant laws. Her statement amounted to saying, “This is no longer a priority for us”, and the lackluster response to the GOP attack on Sarah McBride seems to confirm that. This comes at a time when the entire queer community is under attack, both legally and in propaganda. If the Democrats are abandoning that community, then it’s clearly time for LGBTQIA people and allies to change tactics.

Julia Serano has called for everyone with a platform to post something today with the title “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back”, in order to send a clear, coordinated message:

Despite the fact that there is no evidence that trans people pose any threat in sex-segregated spaces, only a handful of Democrats spoke out against this policy change. Even worse, many lauded incoming trans congresswoman Sarah McBride for agreeing to comply with it.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Mace (who is now selling merch as part of her anti-trans crusade) has proposed a Federal Trans Bathroom Ban that would impact Washington DC airports, museums, and federal buildings across the U.S., impacting trans workers and visitors alike. And it’s clear that Republicans will not stop there.

In “red states” where Republicans have a trifecta (governor plus both state legislatures), they have passed all sorts of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. A quick glance at that legislation confirms that this is not about any isolated issue: Republican lawmakers who rail against trans athletes or gender-affirming care for trans youth are also pushing bans on trans healthcare for adults, “don’t say gay” bills that impact all LGBTQ+ students, drag bans written so broadly that they outlaw most LGBTQ+ performances and pride events, and attempts to censor books and digital media penned by all queer creators.

[…]

I propose that on Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024 (the first day that both the House and Senate are back in session), all of us who are invested in this issue and have a platform (whether it be a blog, newsletter, column, podcast, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.) publish a piece with the shared title: “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.” Yes, I know, it’s a cheesy title, but it holds Democrats accountable to their own talking points and makes it clear that backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights is nonnegotiable for us.

What you write or say or express in your op-ed or article or video or podcast etcetera is up to you. I encourage you to make it personal and feel free to tailor it to your audience. My only request (other than all of us using the same title) is that you implore people to contact their Congressperson and Senators (and perhaps even local politicians) and tell them that 1) you will not tolerate any backpedaling on LGBTQ+ rights whatsoever, and 2) if they fail to strongly stand up against these attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, then you will take your vote elsewhere next election.

What does “take your vote elsewhere” entail?

Well, that’s up to each individual to decide for themselves. It could mean simply refusing to vote for them, or voting for their primary opponents, or voting third party. The purpose of this endeavor is not to dictate how you should vote in future elections, but to remind your representatives that your vote should not be taken for granted, and if they abandon LGBTQ+ people or backslide on LGBTQ+ rights, then they will pay a political price for that decision.

It looks like the coming years are going to be very dark indeed. It’s important to reach out to each other in the darkness, to remember that even if we can’t see any light, we are not alone, and by working together, we can find our way forward. Check out Serano’s post for more information, and post something yourself if you have a platform and the time. I’ve been a bit tuned out in the last few months, so I didn’t hear about this until yesterday, but it shouldn’t be hard to post something small, or even just the “title” on social media.

Hey, sorry about the long silence. I’ve been reshaping my life a lot in the last few months, and adjusting some of my priorities. I plan on posting more frequently in 2025, but probably with a slightly different approach than in the past. More essays, fewer reactions to news and events. Hang in there, everybody!

A year later, and the Gaza death march continues

Well, it’s been a year since my post in response to the attack last October. The months since have contained even more horror than I expected, and it doesn’t seem even close to ending. I’ve been trying to write a post about it for months now, and I keep finding myself unequal to the task. It’s all so big, so monstrous, and it seems like there’s nothing I can do. Israel wants wholesale genocide, and the US government seems to be willing to provide them with the means to carry it out. Israel wants regional war, and probably to expand their genocide to the whole area they consider to be “Greater Israel”, and from everything the Biden administration has done, they seem to want all that too. They tell long-debunked lies to justify the endless slaughter, they pay half-hearted lip-service to the idea of peace, while eagerly stoking the engines of war. They smear and demonize any who protest for peace, or speak out for justice, including members of their own party, all while the world is being shown the mangled corpses of innocent children and adults, and the perpetrators are so open about their hatred that they will protest for the right to rape prisoners to death.

Nothing I could possibly write would come close to covering everything that has happened, or the scale of hatred and sadism on display, so I’m not going to try. What I will do, is talk about one aspect of all this that I haven’t seen mentioned much in the possibly naive effort to persuade those still not convinced that what we have been witnessing is, in fact, a genocide.

There’s been talk over the last year of the tactics being used – Bombing civilians, starvation, disease, and so on. I’ve seen a couple other people mention it, but when it comes to the tactics of genocide, I would argue that what has been happening in Gaza has been a death march.

In brief, a death march is when you take a group of whatever minority is being subjected to genocide, and force them to walk for days, weeks, or months on end, with little to no food, water, medical attention, or shelter. This serves two purposes for the perpetrators- the most obvious, with marches like the Trail of Tears, is that it physically removes the victims from land that the perpetrators want. The main purpose of it is to kill as many of those people as possible, while maintaining the “plausible” deniability of merely transporting them, or of protecting them from some greater harm (usually threatened by the perpetrators themselves). The death marches of the Holocaust make this a little clearer, as they were generally moving Jewish victims between concentration camps, and many of them happened nearer the end of World War 2, as part of the “final solution”.

What has been happening in Gaza is just as nakedly genocidal in nature and intent as what the Nazis were doing. Since last October, we’ve seen the cycle repeat again and again: Israel tells civilians to evacuate to a “humanitarian zone” where they will be safe from bombing. That humanitarian zone is then bombed anyway, before the civilians are told to evacuate again to a different part of Gaza, which is also not safe. They’ve gone back and forth across the Gaza strip for months now, through an increasingly devastated landscape. Rather than forcing Palestinians to move from one place to another, they’re forcing them to walk around and around the rubble of their own homes, which used to provide shelter, being bombed, sniped, and otherwise attacked all the while.

Somewhere around January, or last December,  the “official” death toll stopped climbing. This was largely because Israel had destroyed most of the infrastructure and killed most of the people who would be able to provide those numbers. I feel comfortable saying the actual number is in the hundreds of thousands, because Gaza has been in a state of famine for months now, while also dealing with the total destruction of their sanitation system, and the absence of clean water. Those not killed by bombs, bullets, or the elements, are being killed by starvation, thirst, and disease. All of these conditions are ones that are known to cause death. People who are tired, hungry, and thirsty are also more vulnerable to all forms of infection. So are people who’ve had their limbs blown off, or gotten other injuries. They can’t heal if they can’t rest, and they can’t rest if they’re constantly under attack, and being forced to move around.

It is not plausible that the perpetrators of this do not know what they are doing, and how many will die as a result.

Israel likes to pretend that it’s doing the civilian population of Gaza a favor by telling them in advance to move away from where they’re going to bomb, but even that “kindness” is designed for mass murder. It’s been one endless death march, with the people of Gaza being given a choice between being killed directly and labeled as “terrorists”, a title which is now conferred upon anyone who commits the crime of coming in contact with an Israeli bomb or bullet, or dying of starvation and disease while trying to avoid that fate. It is also clear that Israel will not stop until they are forced to stop.

I’m not going to go into every detail of how to “solve” the situation in this post, but step one seems pretty obvious – the international community (especially the US) needs to cease all support for the nation of Israel, and place them under sanctions until the killing stops, and they agree to actual peace negotiations. Actual pressure needs to be put on Israel, because they have demonstrated that they have no better nature to appeal to – they are in this for total genocide.

Invest in Mass Transit. Electric Cars Still Pollute Air, Water, and Food.

I saw a tweet today from author/influencer Hank Green, asking for arguments against electric cars, and decided I’d put in my oar. In a lot of ways, electric cars are the most obvious “fix” for the problem of transit emissions. Combined with renewable and nuclear energy, they could make a huge dent in overall CO2 emissions, which would only grow as manufacturing is also switched over to low/no-carbon power. There’s good reason to look at electric cars as “the solution”, especially because it’s not hard to imagine keeping things as they are, but with electric instead of gas-powered cars. They could absolutely be a part of a climate-friendly society, in terms of carbon emissions. That said, I have a few reasons why I do not think we should take that route.

The first is that “keeping everything else the same” is not acceptable to me. It would mean that hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to deal with needless poverty and oppression, all to feed the insatiable greed of capitalists. It means injustice, and mass murder, and billions knowingly poisoned in the name of profit. It means virtually every battery in our electronics was partly build with brutal slave labor. I’m not here to fight for things to stay the same as they have been, minus the climate crisis, I’m here to fight for things to get better.

Second is that the climate crisis is not the only environmental crisis we’re facing. As I wrote a couple years back, chemical pollution is a serious global threat to both human health and biodiversity. There are many causes for that chemical pollution, but overproduction driven by the profit motive is a big factor. On its face, a certain amount of overproduction is probably a good thing. If we produce more than we need, we can store up resources against hard times, and invest in things like big infrastructure projects, space exploration, and so on. We’re in this to build a world where everyone has everything they need, and the only way to ensure that is to produce an excess. Unfortunately, the excesses we produce under capitalism have nothing to do with meeting people’s needs – they’re about profit for the owning class. That means that while we grow enough edible biomass to feed billions more people than currently exist, a huge portion of that is grown as feed for livestock, or to make ethanol as a gasoline additive, and a big portion of what is grown for human consumption is thrown away, because that’s better for the bottom line than simply giving unwanted food to people who need it.

It also means that products are deliberately designed to break or wear out sooner than is necessary, so that the product’s owner is forced to either pay for repairs, or buy a new product. We call this planned obsolescence, and while these days we may associate it more with smartphone charging cables, it was pioneered by the auto industry, and spread from there like a plague. I think that even in my utopian society, there would be electric cars. For all their flaws, cars are extremely useful machines, and can fill needs that mass transit cannot. That said, I think they should be more of a community resource, and the incentive structure surrounding their construction should be about durability and function, not simply turning raw materials and human labor into profit.

And third, switching to electric cars would continue the problem of air pollution from traffic. Popular media tends to focus on exhaust from tailpipes when depicting and discussing traffic pollution, but the reality is that these days the overwhelming majority of dangerous traffic pollution comes from the tires of the cars, not their tailpipes. The friction of tire against road rubs off ultra-fine particles that float around, and can work their way through our lungs and into our bloodstream, where they contribute to heart problems, strokes, brain problems, and more. In fact, as I was refreshing my memory for this post, I came across a piece of recent research that’s quite relevant. It shouldn’t be surprising, but it turns out that the traffic pollution that’s infiltrating our bodies, is getting into our food as well, not just from the air, but also from the half-treated sewage often used as fertilizer, and the water used for irrigation:

The presence of drug residues in commercially sold fruit and vegetables has already been scientifically investigated many times. However, chemical substances from tire wear, so-called additives, also find their way into the food chain. This has now been shown in a new study by an international research team led by Thilo Hofmann at the Center for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science at the University of Vienna (CeMESS) in collaboration with a team the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led by Benny Chefetz. Vegetables from Switzerland and Israel were examined. Some of these substances and their transformation products can potentially pose ecological and toxicological risks.

Car tires consist of a complex mixture of materials that improve their performance and durability. These include 5-15% chemical additives, which comprise hundreds of substances, for example antioxidants, antiozonants, vulcanizing agents, anti-aging agents and many more, to enable the hig-tech performance of a modern tire. “The toxicity of tire and road wear particles is related to their organic additives and associated transformation products,” explains Anya Sherman, PhD student at CeMESS and first author of the recently published study.

The compounds extracted from car tires find their way into agriculture through atmospheric deposition, irrigation with treated wastewater and the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer. “There they can be taken-up by plants and thus also reach humans,” adds Thilo Hofmann, head of the research group.

Residues of tire wear in leafy vegetables from the supermarket and field

Finally, the researchers extrapolated the measured values from the vegetables to the intake of these substances in the diet. “We calculated the intake per day based on what people in Switzerland and Israel eat,” says Sherman. The concentrations of the tire additives in leafy vegetables are low overall and are, for example, 238 ng/kg for benzothiazole (BTZ), or 0.4 ng/kg for 6PPD, a substance whose transformation product 6PPD quinone is known to be highly toxic for aquatic species like coho salmon. Depending on the diet, this leads to a daily intake per person of 12 to 1,296 ng for BTZ, or 0.06 to 2.6 ng for 6PPD. This is comparable in magnitude to drug residues, which also enter the food chain. According to Thilo Hofmann, the study shows clear results: “While the concentrations and daily intake are fortunately relatively low, additives from car tires are still found in food. That’s not where they belong.” According to Hofmann, the next steps should now be to investigate the environmental and human health aspects.

From the street, to the plant, into the body

As early as 2023, the scientists were able to show that additives from car tires can in principle be absorbed by plants. “However, the question was whether this only happens in our mechanistic laboratory study or also in the field,” explains first author Anya Sherman. In the current study, the Viennese and Israeli environmental scientists therefore analyzed whether lettuce plants absorb the chemicals released by car tires under natural growing conditions. “We examined real samples from supermarkets in Switzerland and field vegetables from Israel,” says Thilo Hofmann, explaining the background to the study published last week.

The international team of researchers used high-resolution mass spectrometry to analyze the samples for a total of sixteen tire-associated compounds. The countries of origin of the leafy vegetables in the Swiss samples from the supermarket were Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. In the Israeli samples, field vegetables from Israel directly after harvest.

The bit about sewage and treated water makes me worry that this is becoming something of an amplifying feedback loop, where our wasteful farming practices combine with wasteful transportation practices to gradually increase the concentration of tire chemicals in our diet. We don’t know yet what the full implications of this may be, but add it to the news about “forever chemicals” in our blood and tissues, and it’s hard to feel optimistic about it. So, my argument against electric cars is quite similar to my argument against gas-powered cars. Cars, as they are used today, are a problem no matter what is fueling them. Instead of investing in electric car companies and their profits, we should be investing in better mass transit, and redesigning our societies to minimize car dependence.

Now, I’m going to end with a slight topic shift. As I said at near the beginning, I find the global status quo unacceptable. There are a myriad of gross and utterly needless injustices going on around the world, both in the name of profit, and in the name of maintaining a particular order. Despite the propaganda you may have heard since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that order is not “rules-based”. American composer Frank Wilhoit once said “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds, but does not protect.” We can see that philosophy in action in conservative countries like the United States, but also in the world at large, led by the United States. There is no more glaring example of that, right at this moment, than the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, being carried out by Israel, with the full material and rhetorical support of the U.S. government.

I’m writing a longer post on this, which has had to undergo a number of changes, as events have unfolded more quickly than I’ve been able to work on it, but I felt I had to say something here because this research comes, in part, from an Israeli university. I could claim that this work is unrelated to the policies of the Israeli government, but the reality is that the whole country, as it has been conceived thus far, is an inherently violent and unjust project. Rather than actually grapple with the horrors of European and American antisemitism, the decision was made to invest in creating the nation of Israel, encouraging Jews to leave Europe, and forcing the people already living in Palestine to endure generations of oppression and ethnic cleansing. The Israeli project needs to end, as do all ethno-nationalist projects. The only path to a lasting, just peace in the region is one democratic nation, with equal rights for all, with an international peacekeeping force to aid what will unquestionably be a difficult and dangerous transitional period. I support the BDS movement, and the call for colleges and universities to cut ties with Israeli institutions, and any war profiteers working with Israel until the apartheid is ended, and Palestine is free.

The Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Now Seems Inevitable.

I struggled a bit in thinking about what to post today. I’ve been working on a Gaza post for a little while now, but it keeps not feeling done, and then new things keep happening. I hope I’ll have it out very soon, but that’ll depend a bit on how well I can wrangle my brain this week. Then I was thinking about a post that can be summarized by paraphrasing Forrest Gump: “Cops are like a box of chocolates. They’ll kill your dog.” I may still write that one, but that felt a bit too grim, and hit a little too close to home. I have guests in town, and I didn’t want  to be putting myself in a bad mood while playing host. I considered a couple other topics, but eventually I turned to my standby, climate science headlines, and boy do they disappoint! Specifically, I always hope for good news, and am very often disappointed, so I’ve got bad news today! It’s exciting!

As you are all no doubt aware, this little planet of ours currently has two ice caps – one on top of the island of Greenland, and one on top of the continent of Antarctica. These are such massive sheets of ice that they generate a gravitational pull on the ocean surrounding their respective landmasses, pulling the water toward them in the same way that mountains do. I know it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of ice in those ice sheets, but it bears repeating, because those ice sheets are melting, and the hotter this planet gets, the faster they melt. I think it would be helpful, for today’s discussion, to think of the ice sheets that make up those ice caps as big lakes, and glaciers as the rivers flowing from them.

For a while now, the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica has been dubbed “The Doomsday Glacier”, which sounds like a disaster movie so over the top and campy it would put The Day After Tomorrow to shame. It’s called that because that glacier is all that’s keeping the west Antarctic ice sheet from sliding into the ocean. There has long been a worry that the combination of rising sea levels and warming water would lift the glacier above it’s current “grounding line”- the spot on the sea floor that’s currently slowing it down. If the bottom melts enough, and the glacier floats up enough, then it loses that friction, and can just flow out into the ocean, soon followed by the ice sheet. The final result of that would be 3-4 meters of sea level rise, or roughly 10-13 feet. The sea level rise in that time frame would considerably more than that, given contributions from the rest of Antarctica, from Greenland, from mountain glaciers, and from thermal expansion as the temperature continues to rise.

And so I regret to inform you that we have yet more bad news from the Thwaites glacier:

A team of glaciologists led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine used high-resolution satellite radar data to find evidence of the intrusion of warm, high-pressure seawater many kilometers beneath the grounded ice of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier.

In a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the UC Irvine-led team said that widespread contact between ocean water and the glacier – a process that is replicated throughout Antarctica and in Greenland – causes “vigorous melting” and may require a reassessment of global sea level rise projections.

The glaciologists relied on data gathered from March to June of 2023 by Finland’s ICEYE commercial satellite mission. The ICEYE satellites form a “constellation” in polar orbit around the planet, using InSAR – interferometer synthetic aperture radar – to persistently monitor changes on the Earth’s surface. Many passes by a spacecraft over a small, defined area render smooth data results. In the case of this study, it showed the rise, fall and bending of Thwaites Glacier.

“These ICEYE data provided a long-time series of daily observations closely conforming to tidal cycles,” said lead author Eric Rignot, UC Irvine professor of Earth system science. “In the past, we had some sporadically available data, and with just those few observations it was hard to figure out what was happening. When we have a continuous time series and compare that with the tidal cycle, we see the seawater coming in at high tide and receding and sometimes going farther up underneath the glacier and getting trapped. Thanks to ICEYE, we’re beginning to witness this tidal dynamic for the first time.”

ICEYE Director of Analytics Michael Wollersheim, co-author, said, “Until now, some of the most dynamic processes in nature have been impossible to observe with sufficient detail or frequency to allow us to understand and model them. Observing these processes from space and using radar satellite images, which provide centimeter-level precision InSAR measurements at daily frequency, marks a significant leap forward.”

Rignot said the project helped him and his colleagues develop a better understanding of the behavior of seawater on undersides of Thwaites Glacier. He said that seawater coming in at the base of the ice sheet, combined with freshwater generated by geothermal flux and friction, builds up and “has to flow somewhere.” Water is distributed through natural conduits or collects in cavities, creating enough pressure to elevate the ice sheet.

“There are places where the water is almost at the pressure of the overlying ice, so just a little more pressure is needed to push up the ice,” Rignot said. “The water is then squeezed enough to jack up a column of more than half a mile of ice.”

Just to be clear, half a mile is just under the height of the tallest building in the world, we’re talking a solid sheet of ice, not a hollow building. I know the scale is probably familiar to everyone reading this blog, but I still find it a bit mind-boggling how much weight is being lifted by this slowly intruding water. Maybe it’s just that this is a small enough “big” part of what’s happening to the planet as a whole that I can just about wrap my brain around it. Unfortunately, this is exactly what scientists have long been fearing, because that layer of water isn’t just lifting the ice, it’s acting as lubrication, letting it slide faster, and worse, it’s speeding the melting from the underside:

And it’s not just any seawater. For decades, Rignot and his colleagues have been gathering evidence of the impact of climate change on ocean currents, which push warmer seawater to the shores of Antarctica and other polar ice regions. Circumpolar deep water is salty and has a lower freezing point. While freshwater freezes at zero degrees Celsius, saltwater freezes at minus two degrees, and that small difference is enough to contribute to the “vigorous melting” of basal ice as found in the study.

Climate scientists have been warning the world about the dangers of climate change since at least the 1950s, and all along the way, their projections have proven to be either accurate, or too optimistic. They’ve been ignored and dismissed by the rich and powerful, and contrary to the fantasies of climate science deniers, the scientists are not actually getting the support they need.

Co-author Christine Dow, professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, said, “Thwaites is the most unstable place in the Antarctic and contains the equivalent of 60 centimeters of sea level rise. The worry is that we are underestimating the speed that the glacier is changing, which would be devastating for coastal communities around the world.”

Rignot said that he hopes and expects the results of this project to spur further research on the conditions beneath Antarctic glaciers, exhibitions involving autonomous robots and more satellite observations.

“There is a lot of enthusiasm from the scientific community to go to these remote, polar regions to gather data and build our understanding of what’s happening, but the funding is lagging,” he said. “We operate at the same budget in 2024 in real dollars that we were in the 1990s. We need to grow the community of glaciologists and physical oceanographers to address these observation issues sooner rather than later, but right now we’re still climbing Mount Everest in tennis shoes.”

They’ll keep on climbing in those tennis shoes, but It feels like it would be a good idea to get them proper funding. The whole world is changing, and for all I called this a “little planet”, that’s a lot of area to cover, in studying how global warming is changing things. It’s nice to have a warning about what looks to be the unavoidable collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet, but the less we fund climate science, the more likely are to get a nasty surprise.

The good news is that this process will not happen all at once. We do still have time to slow the warming, and to prepare for the rising sea. Even with the rapid acceleration, it will take many, many years for the ice sheet to flow into the ocean. This is not a meltwater pulse. That said, it will result in more rapid sea level rise throughout this century. As always, the degree to which this is a disaster will depend on what we do, as a species, to prepare for it, and to mitigate change. We’ve been warned with time to respond. The only question is whether we will heed that warning.

How Not To Do Renewable Energy: A Case for Systemic Change

I am in favor of using renewable energy as one way to replace fossil fuels as a  power source. I don’t write about that on this blog as much as I used to, because I came to realize that simply writing about solutions is insufficient. Between nuclear energy, renewable energy, and an abundance of ways to decrease energy consumption, we’ve had the tools to solve the climate crisis for decades. The problem is not a lack of solutions, or even a lack of popular desire for change. The problem is that the US government serves neither the will, nor the interests of the people.  It serves the interests of capitalists – those who own for a living, rather than selling their labor. That makes sense, right? In a capitalist society, the government serves capitalists. There are exceptions to that, of course, but the vast majority of those rights and guarantees came as grudging concessions in the face of mass uprisings and disaster. Further, once rights are won, like a fair wage or the right to abortion (one of the times we arguably gained rights without a mass movement), they are under constant attack, and can be lost again.

I’ve talked before about how climate change is not the only environmental crisis facing us, though it’s unquestionably the biggest. Chemical pollution, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss are also taking an increasing toll on the ecosystems that make our world habitable, and all of those problems are amplified by the rising temperature. It’s possible that, as climate chaos causes crop failures and escalating disasters, we’ll see the capitalists looking to cash in on the energy transition win out over fossil fuels and the would-be post-apocalyptic warlords. What that would not do is stop the chemical pollution and habitat destruction, or end the brutal exploitation and disregard for human life that still fuels the engines of capitalism. This was on my mind today, because I was recently reminded of a good example of why I don’t think we can leave it all to the current system.

One of the big problems with solar energy is at it requires a lot of surface area, and there’s not really any way to get around that. In my opinion, the way we ought to be rolling out photovoltaic power is by putting solar panels on roofs, and over things like parking lots, wherever we can. There is a lot of existing surface area that’s exposed to the sun, and that could be used to generate electricity or heat water, without claiming more land. Without doing something like destroying a delicate desert ecosystem to put up a solar farm. From May of last year:

Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.

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“When people look across the desert, they just see scrubby little plants that look dead half the time,” says Robin Kobaly, a botanist who worked at the BLM for over 20 years as a wildlife biologist before founding the Summertree Institute, an environmental education non-profit. “But they are missing 90% of the story – which is underground.”

Her book, The Desert Underground, features illustrated cross-sections that reveal the hidden universe of roots extended up to 150ft below the surface, supported by branching networks of fungal mycelium. “This is how we need to look at the desert,” she says, turning a diagram from her book upside-down. “It’s an underground forest – just as majestic and important as a giant redwood forest, but we can’t see it.”

The reason this root network is so valuable, she argues, because it operates as an enormous “carbon sink” where plants breathe in carbon dioxide at the surface and out underground, forming layers of sedimentary rock known as caliche. “If left undisturbed, the carbon can remain stored for thousands of years,’” she says.

Desert plants are some of the oldest carbon-capturers around: Mojave yuccas can be up to 2,500 years old, while the humble creosote bush can live for over 10,000 years. These plants also sequester carbon in the form of glomalin, a protein secreted around the fungal threads connected to the plants’ roots, thought to store a third of the world’s soil carbon. “By digging these plants up,” says Kobaly, “we are removing the most efficient carbon sequestration units on the planet – and releasing millennia of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the solar panels we are replacing them with have a lifespan of around 25 years.”

See, when a corporation sets up solar panels, under our current system, they’re not doing so for the benefit of the environment. They’re doing it for money, because that’s how things work in this system. That means that they have the exact same incentives as every other corporation that destroys habitat in the name of profits and “progress”. I want more solar energy, but if we’re doing it like this, because it’s more profitable than tackling the more complex process of using existing spaces like rooftops and parking lots, then we’re better off spending that money on nuclear power.

How the transition is done will make a big difference when it comes to the resilience of the planet’s ecosystems, and capitalism does not value things like biodiversity, despite all the effort that’s gone into framing its value in dollars. We can see this in the destruction discussed above, or with the ill-considered placement of wind turbines leading to landslides in Scotland and Northern Ireland. And so, “climate action” must encompass systemic change. The political and economic structures that govern our lives must be replaced, or we will be forever stuck dealing with half-measures and habitat destruction, on top of the burdens imposed by our unstable climate.