What kind of world could we build?

One of the reasons why I write science fiction, is that it’s a way for me to think about what the world could look like, and how it could be different from what I’ve always known. It can be hard to imagine how such a society might work, but fortunately a lot of people over the years have put a lot of thought into societal structures and forms of governance that lack the incentives for injustice and inequality that currently exist. I don’t think I or any other person is capable of giving the “right” answer, but as a collective, we can build on each other’s ideas and strengths, and create things that are better than any one of us could achieve.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what society is all about? Anyway, here’s Thought Slime on that very topic:

Bad news for the Thwaites Glacier

Most of the time, when we talk about melting sea ice, the focus is on the Arctic Ocean. There are a few reasons for this, the biggest one being that sea ice is a much larger part of what happens there, compared to the continent of Antarctica. It’s also a bit easier to measure what’s going on up there. Multiple countries have naval activity under the ice, and they keep track of thickness so they know where their submarines can or cannot surface. There are also many more people living in the Arctic circle, so more people pay attention to what’s happening there, because it affects their daily lives.

There are also three very big considerations when it comes to the rate and impact of global warming. The first is the albedo feedback loop – ice melts, exposing more water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice, and so on. Melting sea ice speeds the rate at which warming happens. The second is that as more and more water is exposed for more of the year, the warmth rising from the water pushes arctic air south, leading to the “polar vortex” events with which we’ve become familiar. And last but certainly not least, the ice and low temperatures of the Arctic play a big role (along with salt concentration, also affected by meltwater) in driving the big oceanic currents that bring oxygen into the abyss, and keep northern regions like western Europe nice and warm. As the planet warms and ice melts, it’s expected that those currents will change, causing a huge change in weather patterns all around the planet on top of those we’re already seeing. I will be writing more about that very soon.

All of that is why we most often hear about Arctic sea ice. This post is about what’s happening on the other side of the planet. Ice around Antarctica plays many of the same roles, and it is also being closely monitored, but it gets a bit less press. The biggest news we tend to see is when a particularly large ice shelf breaks up, and that’s what this news is about – a breakup that we’ve been waiting for, and that we’ve been hoping would happen slowly, and not soon.

So much for that.

Scientists have discovered a series of worrying weaknesses in the ice shelf holding back one of Antarctica’s most dangerous glaciers, suggesting that this important buttress against sea level rise could shatter within the next three to five years.

Until recently, the ice shelf was seen as the most stable part of Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized frozen expanse that already contributes about 4 percent of annual global sea level rise. Because of this brace, the eastern portion of Thwaites flowed more slowly than the rest of the notorious “doomsday glacier.”

But new data show that the warming ocean is eroding the eastern ice shelf from below. Satellite images taken as recently as last month and presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union show several large, diagonal cracks extending across the floating ice wedge.

These weak spots are like cracks in a windshield, said Oregon State University glaciologist Erin Pettit. One more blow and they could spiderweb across the entire ice shelf surface.

“This eastern ice shelf is likely to shatter into hundreds of icebergs,” she said. “Suddenly the whole thing would collapse.”

The failure of the shelf would not immediately accelerate global sea level rise. The shelf already floats on the ocean surface, taking up the same amount of space whether it is solid or liquid.

But when the shelf fails, the eastern third of Thwaites Glacier will triple in speed, spitting formerly landlocked ice into the sea. Total collapse of Thwaites could result in several feet of sea level rise, scientists say, endangering millions of people in coastal areas.

“It’s upwardly mobile in terms of how much ice it could put into the ocean in the future as these processes continue,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a leader of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). He spoke to reporters via Zoom from McMurdo Station on the coast of Antarctica, where he is awaiting a flight to his field site atop the crumbling ice shelf.

“Things are evolving really rapidly here,” Scambos added. “It’s daunting.”

Pettit and Scambos’s observations also show that the warming ocean is loosening the ice shelf’s grip on the underwater mountain that helps it act as a brace against the ice river at its back. Even if the fractures don’t cause the shelf to disintegrate, it is likely to become completely unmoored from the seafloor within the next decade.

Other researchers from the ITGC revealed chaos in the “grounding zone” where the land-bound portion of the glacier connects to the floating shelf that extends out over the sea. Ocean water there is hot, by Antarctic standards, and where it enters crevasses it can create “hot spots” of melting.

Without its protective ice shelf, scientists fear that Thwaites may become vulnerable to ice cliff collapse, a process in which towering walls of ice that directly overlook the ocean start to crumble into the sea.

This process hasn’t been observed in Antarctica. But “if it started instantiating it would become self-sustaining and cause quite a bit of retreat for certain glaciers” including Thwaites, said Anna Crawford, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews.

This would continue the already measurable acceleration of sea level rise, as NASA reported in 2018:

We’re a very long way away from the scenario in my “flooded Manhattan” stories, and there’s no guarantee it’ll ever get to that point, but we are already seeing things like “ghost forests”, caused by salt creeping into the groundwater as seas rise, and multiple island nations are understandably concerned about their looming inundation. On the whole, I think adapting ourselves to sea level rise could be one of the easier climate problems to solve. It will require a lot of construction work, but that’s one thing that we’re generally quite good at, around the world. As always, I think the bigger problem is ensuring just treatment of those affected as part of a broader fight for environmental justice.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

A hotter planet means more extreme weather. Extreme weather means more expensive food.

Maybe lack of surprise is going to be a theme this week…

Agriculture, throughout human history, has been heavily dependent on predictable weather conditions. We have crops for every climate in which we live, but, they’re always tailored to the natural conditions, or to alterations like irrigation that rely on natural conditions. That means that we’ve known for a long time that, as climate change is now well underway and has planet-sized momentum, that our food supply will be affected. Just as increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere means that the planet will trap more heat until the new “insulation” is saturated, there’s no scenario in which that warming doesn’t change agriculture.

This past year has been a rough one for agriculture, and because our ability to access food is tied to markets and capitalism’s endless need for profit, that means that food prices are rising.

Global food prices in November rose 1.2% compared to October, and were at their highest level since June 2011 (unadjusted for inflation), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in its monthly report on December 2. After adjusting for inflation, 2021 food prices averaged for the 11 months of 2021 are the highest in 46 years.

The high prices come despite expectations that total global production of grains in 2021 will set an all-time record: 0.7% higher than the previous record set in 2020. But because of higher demand (in part, from an increased amount of wheat and corn used to feed animals), the 2021 harvest is not expected to meet consumption requirements in 2021/2022, resulting in a modest drawdown in global grain stocks by the end of 2022, to their lowest levels since 2015/2016.

The November increase in global food prices was largely the result of a surge in prices of grains and dairy products, with wheat prices a dominant driver. In an interview at fortune.com, Carlos Mera, head of agri commodities market research at Rabobank, blamed much of the increase in wheat prices on drought and high temperatures hitting major wheat producers including the U.S., Canada, and Russia.

Drought and heat in the U.S. caused a 40% decline in the spring wheat crop in 2021, and a 10% decline in the total wheat crop (spring wheat makes up about 25% of total U.S. wheat production). Economic damages to agriculture in the U.S. are expected to exceed $5 billion in 2021, according to Aon (see Tweet below). The highest losses are expected in the Northern Plains, where the spring wheat crop was hit hard by drought and heat. Fortunately, the 2021 U.S. corn crop was estimated to be the second largest on record, 7% larger than in 2020. The 2021 soybean crop was also estimated to be second largest on record, up 5% from 2020.

[…]

According to Reuters, global fertilizer prices have increased 80% this year, reaching their highest levels since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Primary causes of the current high prices include extreme weather events (particularly the February cold wave in Texas and Hurricane Ida in August), which disrupted U.S. fertilizer production, and the high cost in Europe of natural gas, a key component in producing fertilizer). Fertilizer shortages threaten to reduce grain harvests in 2022, according to CF Industries, a major fertilizer producer.

Carlos Mera of Rabobank pointed out that Russia, a major wheat producer, hiked its export tax on wheat this year to incentivize keeping supplies at home. “That is quite scary,” said Mera. “Events like the French Revolution and the Arab Spring have been blamed on high food prices.” High wheat prices in 2011 (in the wake of export restrictions triggered by the 2010 drought in Russia) helped lead to massive civil unrest and the toppling of multiple governments (the “Arab Spring”).

As I will keep saying, we need to make radical changes to how we produce food, if we want to avoid mass starvation in my lifetime. More than that, as the article mentions, food shortages will cause political unrest and war, which in turn is bad for the environment, bad for agriculture, and in case this needs to be said, bad for humans. I’m also very worried that the nationalistic, and in some cases piratical behavior by wealthy and powerful nations will mean that the pattern of enforced poverty will continue, unless those of us living in those nations stand up to our own governments, in solidarity with those whose lives will be destroyed to keep us fed and happy.

I’m writing this as Storm Barra, which Wikipedia tells me is a “hurricane-force bomb extratropical cyclone”, rages outside. There has been some rain, but most of what I’ve noticed has been the wind. My area is already pretty windy, but this storm is really highlighting the degree to which cold temperatures haven’t been a problem here. Damp, and the mold it brings, is a constant concern, so there hasn’t been a lot of pressure to do things like make sure windows and their frames are fully sealed (it’s free ventilation!), and the flat has vents to the outside in every room. This means that while our home provides real shelter, it’s also very drafty, and doesn’t hold heat very well.

I’m wearing a wool sweater, a wool capote, and a fleece-lined wool hat over my clothes, because I don’t want to waste the gas or the money to keep the flat at a more comfortable temperature. It always strikes me as strange when I’m thinking about the horrors caused by global warming, while dressing like I’m outdoors to keep warm; it’s also the nature of climate change. The cold and darkness of winter can make it easy to feel like this crisis is still far enough away that we have time, but the numbers consistently point in the same direction – we’ve been out of time for a while now, and we should probably start acting like it.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Dwindling water supplies highlight the need for systemic change.

Our modern society was born in a period of relative climatic stability. Regional climate change did destroy various civilizations, but most of the planet remained stable enough for the various human populations to thrive.

A crucial product of that stability has been access to fresh water. That’s why our biggest cities grew by lakes and rivers, and in more recent years, why we’ve been able to expand in dry regions by tapping into vast deposits of underground water. We’ve known for some time that our consumption has far outstripped the ability of aquifers to replenish themselves, but it seems that we’ve reached a point at which some will never recover:

Under a best-case scenario where drought years are followed by consecutive wet years with above-average precipitation, the researchers found there is a high probability it would take six to eight years to fully recover overdrafted water, which occurs when more groundwater is pumped out than is supplied through all sources like precipitation, irrigation and runoff.

However, this best-case scenario where California has six to eight consecutive wet years is not likely because of the state’s increasingly hot and dry climate. Under a more likely, drier climate, there is less than a 20% chance of full overdraft recovery over a 20-year period following a drought.

The Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food and is home to around 6.5 million people. Using too much groundwater during and after droughts could soon push this natural resource beyond the point of recovery unless pumping restrictions are implemented. The study finds recovery times can be halved with modest caps on groundwater pumping in drought and post-drought years.

“This is really threatening,” said Sarfaraz Alam, a hydrologist at Stanford and lead study author. “There are many wells that people draw water from for drinking water. Since [groundwater is] always going down, at some point these wells will go dry and the people won’t have water.”

In ages past, the human populations in California would respond to this by collapsing. Many would die, many would migrate away from whatever had caused the wells to dry up, and some would stay. Those who stayed survived because they were able to adapt their community practices to the new conditions.

There are places that currently have plenty of water, but as the temperature rises, so does water consumption, and there’s no place on the planet that’s “safe” from the warming climate. Migrating will absolutely be part of how we cope with climate change (which is why it’s so important to end our nationalistic obsession with borders) but at the same time we will all be forced to confront the other two options: adapt or die.

The need for us to radically change how we use and dispose of water is almost as important as the need to stop our greenhouse gas emissions. That’s one reason I like the idea of moving food production indoors, where water can be more easily recycled, and temperatures can be controlled. It’s also why I think that the kinds of power generation we use should vary depending on regional and local conditions.

We’ve spent centuries behaving as though we were separate from nature, and many of us are consequently unused to adapting ourselves to the material conditions of our local ecosystem. It’s a thing we need to re-learn, and because I also think we absolutely need to retain the use of technology and science, it’s a thing we need to re-invent. I believe it’s possible to have a high-tech human society that can exist as a conscious part of the global ecosystem, and as stewards of it. I also believe that doing so will require us to let go of expectations about our lives that are rooted in a world that no longer exists because of the societies that gave us those expectations.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Solar panels and shade: using “negative space” to increase climate resilience

I’m generally a fan of solar power, both photovoltaic and thermal. As I’ve said for a while now, I think our best bet for a resilient society is to have a diverse set of tools available, so that the strengths of one kind of power generation can help reinforce the weaknesses of another. I like distributed power generation for its potential to make it harder to control people’s access to electricity, which in turn gives more political power to everyday folks, similar to how a solid mutual aid network or strike fund can allow communities to survive unexpected hardship or to win the “siege” of a strike. I also very much like the portability of solar panels. As circumstances like rising sea levels or persistent heat force us to abandon some of the places in which we currently live, the whole process will be much easier if we can bring our power sources with us.

One problem with solar power is that whether you’re using mirrors to concentrate heat, or photovoltaic cells to generate electricity, both depend on a large surface area covered in the relevant material to “catch” enough sunlight to use. While I don’t buy the idea that we can run our entire society with just wind or just solar, scaling up renewable power in general can potentially conflict with the equally important goals of re-wilding parts of the landscape, and growing “carbon crops” for sequestration.

The solution that’s most commonly offered – at least for photovoltaic power – is to mount the panels on places like rooftops or parking lots, where there’s already guaranteed direct sunlight. I like this for a lot of reasons. Part of it is that it provides a failsafe for individuals and communities – if your building generates at least some of the power you use, that’s a huge benefit for surviving the various dangers of the growing climate crisis. At the same time, there are things that require a lot of power in one place, and power is always lost in transmission. That’s one reason why the whole “we could power the whole planet if we just cover a section of the Sahara with solar panels” idea has never actually been seriously considered – even with magically indestructible transmission lines, too much power would be lost getting to to where people live.

Rooftops are nice because they generally have at least some correlation to the amount of power being used; more people consume more power, and more people means more rooftops. On the other hand, I think as the temperature continues to rise, cities are going to need to introduce a lot more plant life if they want to keep outdoor temperatures at survivable levels. It’d be nice if I didn’t feel the need to keep saying it, but we’re at the point where we need to be deliberately engineering our surroundings to account for lethal heat. If we can, it would be wise for us to also take some action to help our ecosystems cope with the chaos we’ve caused. Fortunately, with solar panels, there’s a way to do that while also getting the benefits of centralized solar farms.

While we should be reducing our use of highways for rapid transit lining those that we do have with solar panels, either on the roadside or even covering parts of the highway is one option. Another is covering canals.

California’s water system is one of the largest in the world and brings critical water resources to over 27 million people. Brandi McKuin, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of the study, found that that shading the canals would lead to a reduction in evaporation of water, kind of like keeping your glass of water under the shade instead of out in the open on a hot summer day prevents evaporation from stealing sips. Putting up a solar panel using trusses or suspension cables to act as a canal’s umbrella is what makes the double-whammy of a solar canal.

“We could save upwards of 63 billion gallons of water annually,” she says. “That would be comparable to the amount needed to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland, or meet the residential water needs of over 2 million people.” Water is of especially critical importance to California, a state regularly stricken with drought.

The actual water savings aren’t huge, but there are also benefits to shading the water that go beyond losing less to evaporation:

Aquatic weeds also plague canals and can bring water flow to a standstill, but the researchers found that by adding shade, and decreasing the plant’s sunshine slashes the amount of weed growth. McKuin says preventing weed growth would also lighten the load for sometimes costly mechanical and chemical waterway maintenance.

As usual, the United States is lagging a bit behind on this one. India has been covering canals with solar panels for some time now, and have found that not only does it keep the canals cooler and more functional for human use, but the lower temperatures and limited sunlight reduce algal blooms that can make people sick, and that suck oxygen out of water, making it difficult for organisms like fish to survive.

Not only do we get those benefits, but the evaporation that does occur also helps keep the solar panels cool, improving their efficiency:

And while the water can benefit from the solar panels above, so do the panels from the water below. The running water helps the panels to remain cool, which increases their efficiency by at least 2.5-5%.

As most articles I’ve read on this point out, the up-front cost of solar farms over water tend to be higher than building on dry land, but I hope I don’t need to point out that cost should not be the primary concern when responding to global climate chaos. I’d like to see more research into the effects of things like shading ponds, lakes and rivers, but with those feeling the burn of climate change too, I think it’s worth trying out.

Going forward, I think there’s going to be a lot of austerity propaganda surrounding climate change. Whenever society has a ruling class, those rulers will always talk about the need to show “the resilience and ingenuity of our people”, by making everyone else suffer more, so that those at the top don’t have give up their power.

There are a lot of ways to combat that, but one is to relentlessly insist on framing the conversation about what collective investments will yield the biggest improvements to life for people in general. Reducing algal blooms and creating shaded swimming and boating areas, for example, could make a hotter climate far more bearable, and we’re going to need as much “more bearable” as we can get.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

The past is present: FBI bias against progressive politics continues to undermine the pretense of democracy in the U.S.

In the United States, we’re often taught about our own history in a way that makes it seem as though the people and events in question are all in the distant past. The good things changed us for the better, and the bad things also changed us for the better because we beat them. Because they’re in the past, you see. We just need to “move forward”.

And so people in positions of power commit crimes and atrocities, and the U.S. “moves forward” with rarely so much as a slap on the wrist.

The FBI has been a corrupt institution from the beginning, and while some people like to pretend that things like COINTELPRO are “in the past”, the reality is that with little change in personnel or policy, that intense bias remains intact. I want to be explicit – the government of the United States of America has, for generations now, spent huge amounts of taxpayer money surveilling, entrapping, killing, and undermining left-wing political movements and groups with the explicit goal of preventing the people from putting progressive politicians in office:

The flip side of this kind of political repression campaign is that they’re just fine with people on the far right, and while they do spend some resources on tracking right-wing extremism, there’s little evidence that their bias has gone anywhere. In fact, the FBI knew, well in advance of January 6 2021, that violence was being planned, and they did almost nothing to prevent it, or suggest that maybe Capitol Police shouldn’t be focused primarily on anti-Trump counterprotesters:

The United States has never been a democracy. You could argue that we’re closer than we used to be, but the reality is that the U.S. government remains deeply committed to capitalism over all other considerations, and they continue to use their resources both around the world and at home to destroy efforts at building something better.

The extremist ideology of endless growth and profits over human life needs to be rooted out of all institutions of power if we’re going to survive the warming climate and build a just and democratic society, and unfortunately we must expect them to fight back. The powerful have always used violence as their ultimate tool to maintain power, and as workers continue to organize and stand up for themselves, I’m very much afraid that there will be an effort to destroy what we’re trying to build, along with the people leading that movement. Hell, the FBI was even involved in furthering that goal in Brazil.

Keep your eyes open. It would be bad enough to have to deal with global warming and corporate power alone, but we will also have to deal with government institutions that have always preferred fascism to democracy.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Folks on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. are going to need help

Hurricane Ida will hit Louisiana later today, and it seems like it’s going to hit New Orleans. It’s a smaller storm than Katrina was, but it’s also a stronger storm. A fair amount of money has gone into making New Orleans more storm-proof since 2005, but I have to admit I’m worried it won’t be enough. I’ll probably write more about this in the coming days, but in the mean time, I guess I have a diffuse call to action.

First, if you’re in the area and still trying to evacuate, check your routes – if the traffic is too bad, you could get caught out in your car when the storm hits, and that’s more likely to be bad than not. If you’re not out already, take shelter.

For everyone else, start making plans and gathering resources. Pitch in to efforts to get help to those affected, but more than that, make plans to push the federal government hard. Both Republicans and Democrats have a history of favoring austerity even in disasters, and I don’t generally have high hopes for Democratic leadership. Maybe they’ll see this as an opportunity to prove they could have done better on Katrina than Bush did, but I worry. Find your members of Congress and push them to call for ending their vacation early to deal with the crisis. If they refuse, ask them why their vacation is more important than human lives. Do it on camera if you can.

When it comes to things like donating goods, please pay close attention to what’s actually needed. Disasters like this turn everything upside down, and conditions on the ground can render some goods more or less useless.

Also bear in mind that we’re still in the middle of the pandemic, and there are plenty of people who still aren’t vaccinated. Many may be anti-vaxxers, but many have been unable to get time or access to the shots. That’s another thing that may be best solved through political action.

As always, I hope this post will be proven to be needlessly pessimistic, but with the hot conditions leading to a stronger storm, and the ongoing pandemic, I fear that every hour without action by the federal government will kill more people. Do what you can with the power you have, and take care of yourselves and each other.

Beyond local networking: Some thoughts on next steps for organizing

No matter how you look at it, those of us who want a better world are engaged in a struggle that has a decidedly asymmetrical arrangement of power. The capitalist class controls almost every aspect of our society, and even peaceful challenges to their power are met with brutal police violence, infiltration and espionage, rhetorical attacks from politicians, and even legislation that effectively legalizes the murder of activists. And remember – that’s just at the “imperial core”. When it comes to activism in the regions where the U.S. anti-Left war machine has influence, the story is often far, far darker. The U.S.-led war on any left-wing movement, no matter how democratic or nonviolent, has included terrorism, assassination, torture, sexual assault, disappearances, massacres, genocide, chemical warfare, and ecological destruction.

What I’m trying to say is that over the years, activists have learned that even the generally “acceptable” forms of resistance – marches and rallies – require planning, preparation, recruitment, protective equipment, defensive strategies, medical personnel, training, budgeting and fundraising, a press strategy, and more. That’s why I like the idea of mutual aid networks as an organizing tool. Even if the network itself never does anything beyond getting emergency help for those who need it, it can act as training for those involved. While I’ve engaged in a tiny amount of this kind of activism, most of what I know about this stuff comes from listening to those who’ve dedicated their lives to this important work, all over the world.

It seems to me that interest in organizing for political change outside of electoral politics is pretty widespread right now. To some degree it was always there – I knew many people growing up who were involved in activism around Palestine, the sanctions against Iraq, the SOA/WHINSEC, and so on – but in the last year I’ve seen more efforts at unionization, mutual aid groups, and discussions of alternatives to police, than at any point in my life. Along with that comes all of the knowledge-sharing that is part of those discussions. I’ve also seen a lot of people trying to feel their way through local organizing, even if it’s just making connections with other people who share that interest. That last category is who I’ve been thinking about as I’ve worked on my direct action post. I think many more people want change than know how to get it, and the concept of “local organizing” as the first step is pretty widespread. The concept of working with your community to improve that community is not new to anyone, but I think it’s hard for folks to see how that can lead to national change. You get your network of well-meaning folks, and then what?

This is my attempt to provide one answer to that question. This is not the only answer, just the path forward that seems best to me, based on what I currently understand about the world.

We’re facing an increasingly hostile climate, massive levels of waste and pollution all over the place, and a rise in fascism that feels sickeningly similar to the early 20th century. It’s not hard to see how a local – or even national – mutual aid network would make a huge difference in people’s lives, and maybe even counteract the way capitalism encourages mistrust and selfishness. What’s harder to see is how that can challenge the power of the ruling class, or push lawmakers to support legislation. In terms of activism other than protests, how do we go from group chats and local networks to coordinated national or multinational actions that attract attention, spread ideas, and maybe even bring some discomfort to the ruling class?

Flash mobs!

No, but seriously. Think about what you’re seeing in that video. Think about how those events came to happen. Think about the fact that many of those people were strangers to one another. Some of them may not have even known what they were going to be doing until shortly before they did it. Some of them had done flash mobs before, or had a pre-existing skill they used, but plenty of people may have participated in one flash mob, and never bothered to do it again. Some of those people organized that event, and some just showed up because they heard about it and it seemed fun.

Starting in 2003 a trend emerged in which a group of people would converge on a location, take some kind of pre-arranged action, and then disperse. A flash mob could be anything from suddenly filling an intersection with people wearing red shirts, or an unannounced theatrical performance, or even people all following instructions from their smartphones. Flash mobs happen without warning, and crucially they often happen without the participants knowing what they’ll be doing until they start. This last point is key, especially for doing things at malls, where security would try to prevent it if they had advance warning (people who control public gathering spaces like to either charge for events, or require an application). The people organizing flash mobs developed an approach to get around those obstacles by limiting who knew what, arranging events without visible leaders, and having immediate dispersal as a built-in part of the game. A core group designs and prepares for the activity, and then they put out a call, by word of mouth or by social media, for anyone who’s game to show up at a specific time and date. Tell them what to bring and where to be. Ideally, you want to have them gather somewhere “off stage” so you can go over the plan, hand out props, and do any rehearsing that’s needed. From there you can give the group the actual location of the action, and instructions for how and when to join in.

Whether you want to draw attention to a message, carry out a last-minute counter-protest, or just make people’s day a little more interesting and fun, it seems to me that flash mobs – including ones that are either limited to a simple message, or are entirely frivolous – are a great way to develop a useful skillset for collective action, while lowering the barrier to involvement for those who want to help but don’t have time or energy for organizing work. There are some elements that are common to any other form of organizing, but flash mobs tend to focus on accomplishing a specific goal.

At this point I want to leave the theoretical and talk a bit about what’s already going on. As I mentioned earlier, people all over the world have been working out ways to resist their rulers for centuries. As the tools and tactics of governments have changed, resistances movements have changed in response. Folks involved in protest – particularly those who’ve taking part in Black Bloc actions – are likely to be familiar with some or all of this stuff. For the purposes of this particular piece, I don’t want to go too deep into specific actions that have been taken, but I do want to focus on this description from a conservative woman who joined in on some Black Bloc activities to see what it was like:

There are different types of bloc organization styles. The building block of antifa is what’s called an affinity group, people you live and work with and trust and know in real life. All the planning is done within that closed bloc, and they don’t let everyone know [what they’re going to do]. I didn’t know that they were going to burn the Portland Police Association when I joined. What they did was put a call out that said, “Anyone show up in black that night at this place, and you can join the action.”

That’s called a semi-open bloc. The planning is done within the closed group, but anyone who’s dressed in black can come join the action.

To be clear – I’m not suggesting that people should burn down buildings, this is just a real-world example of that “flash-mob” style of organizing in action, as described by someone opposed to the group’s goals. These tactics are a tool set, and as with any tool a great deal depends on who’s using it and why. A similar approach could be used to hand out leaflets in a particular location, or to generate buzz about a particular word or phrase, or to crash a politician’s event, or to attract attention to a particular problem. Regardless of what you’re doing, practice and training will increase your odds of a successful outcome.

Flash mobs done for fun or to spread a simple message, are a safe way of practicing logistics and helping people practice coordinated action.  In a lot of ways, it’s practicing martial arts – you might be doing it in case you need to used those skills, but it’s also a fun activity by itself, and largely devoid of any kind of ideological commitment. The same can be said of running, or any other form of exercise. The same can be said of the kinds of marches and rallies we’ve come to associate with political activism.

Generally, those of us interested in organizing are involved with at least one group of like-minded people (if you’re not, you might find help on finding or making such a group somewhere in here). What would it take for that group to get a flash mob together? What are the obstacles? How much notice is needed?

What about having two flash mobs do the same thing at the same time in two different cities? What about more than two?

What would it take to have a flash mob do something in Washington DC at noon, and another do the same thing in London at 5pm? How many people could you get to join in without knowing precisely what was going to happen?

There are already groups that organize events across large regions, but we want to build the capacity for mass coordinated action that – and this is important – is not being run by the political organizations that uphold the power structures and policies we want to change. What I want is for you, dear reader, to have the capacity to do this in pursuit of your own goals. I’ve heard a lot of people over the last year saying that the Left needs a new leader, and while I disagree, I would say that leaders worth following tend to emerge out of work that’s already being done. If you want a leader to follow, then work hard to create a movement that will build up the leaders it needs. Who knows, maybe you’ll find that the real leader was you all along!

Returning to the topic at hand, I listed various tasks involved in organizing an event to underline the need for training. None of us just naturally know how to go about doing any complex action. Even the stuff that seems more or less built in, like moving and talking – all of that requires practice. There’s no reason to think that the skills involved in building and maintaining a just and democratic system wouldn’t be the same. The good thing is that it’s not hard to find basic instructions for how to do this stuff, and it’s not hard to practice it safely and legally, and you can even have fun while you do it!

You will also be practicing field-tested tactics from protest movements around the world. I mentioned this earlier, with the Black Bloc example, but it goes beyond that. During the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, in addition to ingenious use of things like umbrellas and laser pointers, protesters used flash mob tactics to avoid arrest and continue their protests:

Hong Kong protesters have deployed a new strategy of popping up in small groups in multiple locations across the city in an effort to avoid arrest, during their ongoing campaign against police and the local government.
Small flashmobs of protesters demonstrated across a dozen districts after a call for protesters to “blossom everywhere” on Sunday, with many staying closer to home where they could evade police on foot or by bus.
[…]
“We are Pien Dei Hoi Fa[blossoming everywhere],” she said, while behind her a group of fellow protesters smashed up a traffic light.
Crystal, another 21-year-old protester, said: “The police do not allow us to have a big group of people gathering together. They block all the MTR stations, where the police have arrested [us] many times. The police also stop and search at the MTR stations.” She wore a mask, cap and sunglasses to disguise her identity during the demonstration.
She said: “People they just stay around this area. When something happens they can still go home at night without being searched in the tunnel.”

In Chile, where police are notorious for deliberately mutilating protesters, women gathered to sing “Un Violador En Tu Camino”/“El violador eres tú”, as part of their efforts to end the destructive reign of neoliberalism that began with Pinochet. This chant has been taken up, and used in the fight against oppressive governments and patriarchy in other parts of the world as well.

In the 2011 Egyptian revolution, a similar approach to Hong Kong was used, and in the description, we can see how they put their “home field” advantage to work in their favor:

Starting in the alleys was not a random decision. It makes tactical and strategic sense regardless of the technology used to coordinate this. Starting small and away from the main protests is a safe way to pool protesters together. It’s also about creating an iterative approach to a “strength in numbers” dynamic. As more people crowd the smaller the streets, this gives a sense of momentum and confidence. Starting in alley ways localizes the initiative. People are likely neighbors and join because they see their friend or sister out in the street.

The guide also stressed the need to remain peaceful and not engage in sabotage. The discipline of remaining non-violent is instrumental in civil resistance. Engaging in violence provides government forces with the excuse they’re looking for to clamp down on protesters and delegitimize them in a public way. The guide also recommends that activists try to win over the police and army instead of attacking them. The protesters behind this guide were clearly well trained and knew what they were doing.

This brings up another reason I think forming strategy based on local conditions is crucial: trying to win over the enemy is not always a good idea. It’s definitely one of the tactics that’s been used by the BLM movement, but the opposition in the U.S. is not just agents of the State; it’s also the fascist movement. Fascism, as an ideology and strategy that relies on conspiracy theories and ethnic scapegoating, has mass extermination as its end goal. Fascists don’t want to get along, they want you to cease existing. Deradicalization is important work, but even if that’s something you want to do, it is not work that should be attempted in the setting of a public confrontation. In general, these are people who are more likely to be holding themselves back from violence that might get them in trouble, rather than forcing themselves to attack because of orders. Given that we know for certain that white supremacists have been deliberately infiltrating law enforcement in the United States, it’s worth considering whether the people you want to appeal to even consider you to be human. You and those around you are likely to have a better idea what you’re going to be facing in your city or your country than someone who doesn’t live there, so you can shape your tactics accordingly.

If you do a quick search for how to organize a flash mob, you’ll come up with a lot of sites with a basic guide. I definitely recommend looking at multiple guides, but the central theme is the process of recruiting people to show up at a designated time and place, and to join in. If you want to limit who knows about your action in advance, you can rely on personal networks – contact people you know and trust, and have them contact people they know, to find people who might be on board. If you want a larger group, and don’t care who sees, you can put out a recruitment call on social media. For the rest, success largely seems to depend on how much work you can do in advance. The less you need to teach the folks who join up, the easier the experience for everyone once things get rolling. Once you have some practice arranging things locally, you can try working with a group somewhere else to do the same thing in two locations, and get some practice coordinating events. As ever, be aware of what information you give out, and how you go about doing so. US law enforcement has been known to spy on some pretty innocuous groups when it comes to any activism left of center.

I said it before, but it bears repeating: when you’re first trying out this sort of thing, it’s probably better to aim fairly small, and err on the side of caution. Part of the point of using this form of political action is to maximize safety for the people involved, so they’re able to keep working. This approach to political change will be more effective if it can be done at a larger scale. “Blossom Everywhere” is going to make a bigger impact than “Blossom in a couple places”. That means that we want a growing number of people who know what they’re doing. Your wellbeing is a key part of that. There are times when putting yourself at risk is the right thing to do, but the risk is never the goal. So practice, have fun, and if I can impart a bit of wisdom from my brief stint in a youth circus, be willing to make a fool of yourself in pursuit of something worth achieving.

Thank you for reading, and if you found my work useful, please share it around! If you’re financially stable, please consider contributing to my patreon, to help me make ends meet. Due to my current immigration status, I’m not allowed to seek wage labor, so this is my only means of income. Fortunately, the nature of crowdfunding is such that even a dollar per month makes a difference!

As with other such pieces, I will probably update this over time to improve it. Suggestions or discussion in the comments can help a great deal with that process, so feel free to chime in. Thanks for reading, and take care of yourself.

A response to the IPCC report

In a lot of ways I feel like nothing has changed. The IPCC report confirms what we’ve known for a very long time, and I gave up on the world I know still existing when I’m old about a decade ago. We still need to eliminate fossil fuel use. Because the warming has gone so far, there’s also zero question in my mind that we need nuclear power – especially for industry, as one of my esteemed commenters has pointed out – as well as solar and wind power. The fact that the warming will continue for centuries or even millennia, unless we start pulling vast amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere at a currently unattainable rate means that our survival as a species now depends entirely on our technology. All other tools of survival are dependent on the climate conditions under which we’ve evolved, and those are gone. For all practical purposes, they are gone forever. We may be able to re-terraform the planet and return the climate to a temperature that’s more optimal for humanity, but that’s at least a lifetime away, and in order to get there, we have to survive.

We also need to stop driving our entire society based on what generates profit for rich assholes. There is no way that the scale of change we need will be more profitable in the short term than a continuation of the trajectory we are on. That means that our ruling class, who got and maintain their power by sacrificing the lives and happiness of others and who clearly believe they are the best people in the world to decide our fates, will happily drive us to extinction while believing to their dying breaths that nobody could possibly have done better. We are out of time. In my view we have been for many years. If we leave it to those in power, our response to climate change will be increasingly authoritarian societies, mass murder, needless destruction of land and resources through warfare, and ultimately an extinction that may have been preventable. I know this sounds alarmist to some, but I’d like to point out that I got the same response a decade ago when I said people should start thinking about storing food against emergencies, for the sake of their communities. These days it’s getting harder to find someone who would call that alarmist. Capitalism is driving us to extinction, and fascism is on the rise on a global scale.

I also want to repeat that I think extinction may be preventable. Based on where our society is at, right now, I do not think the odds are in our favor. I do, however, believe we can change those odds. I still believe both survival and a better, more just world is possible, but the longer we rely on our current rulers (some of whom have been involved in politics for longer than I’ve been alive, and yet haven’t come close to dealing with this problem), the worse our chances will get. I also believe that we don’t have a lot of room to screw up, which is why I’ve been advocating that we start the process of building a better society right now from the ground up, as part of building the power to create the political change we need. We need that resilience no matter what’s coming, and taking that approach seems to me to be the best way to save lives through both climate change and political change.

It’s a lot. It’s too much, really. There is no justice to what’s happening. Those responsible still wield unimaginable wealth and power, and the people suffering and dying the most are the poorest among us, not just in those nations kept in poverty by the rich nations, but also within the rich nations. Add in the pandemic, and there’s a burden of grief upon everyone who understands what’s going on. It’s hard to see any hope at all sometimes. We’re stuck in a fog bank, and not only can we not see a way out, we know there’s a very real possibility that the fog now envelops the entire world. Insofar as the temperature is going to keep rising, we may be stuck in that “fog” for the rest of our lives. Our best hope to get out is to build new spaces that are fog-proof, so that we can actually see each other and be whole again. In the meantime, we do what people always do when stuck in the fog. We call to each other, so we know we’re not alone. We feel our way forward, and guide those around us to better footing. We build fog horns to call those beyond reach of our voices, and warn them of rocks, or direct them to harbor.

I’m planning to post science fiction much more often here, and more regularly to my patrons, because I think a lot of people have trouble imagining how human society could exist on such a strange and hostile world. Storytelling – narrative of one form or another – is a method of communicating information and ideas that seems to be universal within our species. Hopefully I can find ways of doing it that can help at least some of you in that regard. I also decided, based on comments, to engage a little more directly with bad news and the darker end of things. Beyond that, I’ll keep trying to make content that will help people figure out their role in all this, and I’ll at least consider requests if there are particular things someone wants me to look into.

On that note, I think I’ll leave you with Rebecca Watson’s video about the IPCC report, because I like the tone:

 

Morbid Monday: High temperatures are devastating wheat crops in the United States

I’m working on a fairly long and involved piece on organizing and how to move beyond the local efforts I will continue to promote (remember – direct action both makes a better future more likely, and tends to improve your own outlook and personal mental health). Because I want to add the new piece to my “guidebook”, I want to do it justice if I’m able. In the meantime, the need for action continues to grow, and paying attention to what’s happening now can help us to think about how to act, and to imagine life on the chaotic, hostile planet on which we find ourselves.

For decades now fossil fuel propagandists have used, among many other talking points, the claim that rising CO2 levels is actually a good thing, because “CO2 is plant food”. The problem is that it’s not the only factor affecting the growth of any plant. As with humans, high temperatures dehydrates plants, and as with humans, there are limits to the heat a plant can take. I suppose it’s understandable that people might not know that, since we’ve only been dealing with heat-related crop failures from time to time for a few thousand years. Regardless, the predictable is occurring, and this summers brutal North American heatwaves have been wreaking havoc on our wheat farms:

Sun-baked U.S. spring wheat fields have been so badly hurt by drought this year that some farmers are expecting to harvest what they’re dubbing a “half a crop.”
Plants are visibly stunted. So much so that when crop scouts toured the fields of top-producing state North Dakota this week they kept having to get close to the ground to inspect crops that were about 10 inches (25 centimeters) or shorter — about a third of the normal size for this time of year. Large patches of dry soil could be seen in between rows. In better seasons, the ground isn’t even visible.

All told, the harsh conditions will send yields for spring wheat in the state plunging to 29.1 bushels an acre this year, according to final assessment of estimates following the Wheat Quality Council’s crop tour. While that’s slightly higher than the most-recent estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it would still mean a drop of 41% from last year’s harvest.

Spring wheat is highly prized worldwide for giving foods like pizza crust and bagels their chewiness. This season’s expected shortfall hits as neighboring Canada contends with extreme heat and dryness as well, putting those crops at risk. North American baking and milling companies may end up having to look overseas for imports. Some farmers, after battling shriveled crops and damaging grasshoppers, have already opted to bale up plants for hay or consider the entire field a loss.

The fact that so much of the food we grow goes to waste means that those of us accustomed to reliable access to food are unlikely to starve because of this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if wheat products became more expensive, absent some form of price control or subsidies. This kind of problem is only going to get worse. Various places will still have good years, but those will become fewer in number as the temperature rises, and with the temperatures we’ve seen in Canada this year, I hope it’s clear to everyone that no part of the planet is going to be safe from these problems. As I’ve said before, I think our response to climate change needs to include a massive increase in indoor farming, even if it’s mostly stuff like algae or edible bacterial cultures.

I hope you grew up wanting to live in some kind of science fiction setting where we use advanced technology to survive on a hostile planet, because while we can take steps to mitigate that hostility, I don’t expect the warming to end in my lifetime.

Life costs money and I’m currently in a situation where I’m unable to get conventional wage labor. If you find my work useful or interesting, please consider supporting me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (that’s just 25 cents a week!), and every little bit really does add up. If you can’t afford that – and I know that many can’t right now – please consider sharing my work with anyone you think might appreciate it. Beyond that, take care of yourselves and each other.