Abolish the police

Is that too much for you?

Do you honestly think cops do more good than harm? Based on what? We need first responders, but we don’t need cops any more than we need the ruling class the cops defend. So many of the crises of our time come from the failed experiment of putting our political power in the hands of “representatives”, in the hopes that they will use it wisely.

They haven’t.

Police are just the tip of the bloody iceberg, but they’re a horror show all by themselves. Police lie, constantly. Police murder family pets. Police steal more from Americans than burglars do. Police kill people every day, and for every one they kill, many more are traumatized, injured, maimed, or have their lives ruined by a bullshit arrest on their record, or by cops making them late for something important. Cops also have open contempt for the constitution, if you happen to care about that thing. They exist to uphold and defend the current power structure, and nothing more.

We spend obscene amounts of money on the police, and that doesn’t go towards keeping us safe. It goes towards keeping the ruling class in power, and keeping them safe from us, even as they drive us towards extinction. Start with defunding them, and redistributing that money to things that actually help the communities, and reduce the incentives for crimes that actually cause harm. As with so much else, we know how to make a better world – we just can’t actually do it while we’re governed by those who would lose their power in making that world.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Be on the lookout for people spreading the propaganda of a fascist terrorist

I don’t have a lot to say about the Chicago shooting. It’s yet another act of terrorism by a white American fascist. These will continue to happen until some time after the fascists feel certain that they have no open support from the general public or from the ruling class. My proposed course of action hasn’t changed. There is, however, one thing that I believe is important to highlight:

This seems like a pretty clear-cut attempt to add fuel to the fire of American transphobia. There’s already an effort underway to erase trans people from U.S. society, and to paint them as every kind of villain, evidence be damned. I’ve seen headlines focusing on the fact the shooter “wore women’s clothes”, but they all seem to be claiming that the clothes were an attempt to blend in.

I suppose it’s possible that there’s some truth to that, but given the nature of online fascist discourse, I think Erin Reed’s reading in the above tweet is more than reasonable. It’s also playing on a pretty common trope in media. Everyone is in danger from this fascist movement, but the amount of danger depends on what stage we’re at, and whether you’re seen as an ally to the victims of the moment. Fascists have always preferred targets with little to no political power, and trans people are pretty much always at the top of that list. Pointing out propaganda can help defuse it, and I think more people should be on the lookout for this sort of thing.

And right now the most important thing you can do, is figure out how to join and/or support anti-fascist activity. I’m all in favor of rehabilitating fascists, but that must come after they have no power to hurt anyone. The top priority has to be stopping them.

Reminder: Making real progress on climate change would cost less than 1% of global GDP, but we’re still not doing it.

The world needs to quadruple its annual investment in nature if the climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises are to be tackled by the middle of the century, according to a new UN report.

Boy, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? We need to quadruple what we’re currently investing! What does that look like in terms of what economists call “real numbers?

Investing just 0.1% of global GDP every year in restorative agriculture, forests, pollution management and protected areas to close a $4.1tn (£2.9tn) financial gap by 2050 could avoid the breakdown of natural ecosystem “services” such as clean water, food and flood protection, the report said.

I did badly in calculus. Honestly, most math after basic geometry and algebra was pretty rough for me. I’m saying this because maybe my numbers are off here. It sure seems like what this article is saying, is that in response to a crisis that scientists are increasingly telling us could destroy our civilization within just a few decades, the world is investing 0.025% of its GDP? Am I reading that right?

Seriously, though, I’m not surprised. I should say that this article is from last spring, but this isn’t the first time numbers like this have come up, and I think it’s something worth remembering from time to time. It’s not just that we’re not doing enough, it’s that we’re not even doing the bare minimum. I think that estimation of what would be required is far too low, but we haven’t even tried it. It’s not just that our leaders are too greedy and deluded do use their power to make the world better for everyone, it’s that they can’t even be bothered to decrease their pathological hoarding by even a fraction of a percent. Being rich isn’t enough, they have to be constantly getting richer, and they need to do that faster than anyone else. What’s really mind-boggling to me is that if they did invest their collective trillions in really dealing with climate change, they would become international heroes, and they would still almost certainly be obscenely wealthy. They’d still be rich even if they met my standards, and ended poverty around the world, too.

At this point, I think that the fact that they still haven’t done that means that they’re actually incapable of doing it. That means that it will not happen unless their hand is forced, either by total disaster, or by the masses. They really do seem to be aiming for a world in which they rule a shattered wasteland from their high-tech fortresses. Why else would we still be on this path when it would take so little for them to change our course?

The State of Finance for Nature report, produced by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative (ELD), said a total investment of $8.1tn was required to maintain the biodiversity and natural habitats vital to human civilisation, reaching $536bn a year by 2050, projected to be about 0.13% of global GDP.

More than that, this analysis backs up one of the points I’ve been hammering for a while now (and I’m far from alone). We need to invest in the protection and stewardship of biodiversity.

More than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity but about a fifth of countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to the destruction of the natural world, according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re last year. Australia, Israel and South Africa were among the most threatened.

The Unep report, which looked at terrestrial nature-based solutions, urges governments to repurpose billions of dollars of damaging agricultural and fossil fuel subsidies to benefit nature and integrate the financial value of nature in decision-making. By 2050, governments and the private sector will need to spend $203bn on the management, conservation and restoration of forests around the world.

“The dependency of global GDP on nature is abstract but what we really mean are livelihoods, jobs, people’s ability to feed themselves, and water security,” said Teresa Hartmann, the WEF lead on climate and nature. “If we don’t do this, there are irreversible damages. The four-trillion gap we describe cannot be filled later on. There will be irreversible damages to biodiversity that we can no longer fix.”

The report follows a warning by leading scientists in January that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” because of ignorance and inaction.

“The way that we use natural resources for food, textiles, wood, fibre and so on, that needs to change,” Hartmann said. “Everybody’s talking about an energy transition at the heart of everybody’s understanding of climate change. Nobody’s talking about a land-use change transition. We cannot afford to continue exploiting and producing as we do now.”

About $133bn is invested in nature every year, often by national governments. Nearly two-thirds of that is spent on forest and peatland restoration, regenerative agriculture and natural pollution-control systems.

The report’s authors said nature and climate should be high on government lending conditions as part of the expansion of investment, also citing the example of Costa Rica’s tax on petrol, which is used to finance its reforestation programme. Private investment in nature-based solutions accounts for only about 14% of the current total, according to the report, which said it needed to be scaled up through carbon markets, sustainable agricultural and forestry supply chains, and private finance.

Ivo Mulder, head of Unep’s climate finance unit, said: “At the moment, emission levels are equal or par to pre-Covid levels. So despite what everybody’s saying, both businesses and governments have been building back as usual.
“The question is: how serious are we about investing in nature-based solutions, both from a government and business perspective? Failing to do so will probably stop us from meeting the Paris climate agreement and deplete biodiversity further.”

This is the flip side of the “we know what we need to do, and how to do it; what’s missing is a desire to do it on the part of those people in whose hands we’ve concentrated most of our species’ collective power. That means that we need to take back that power if we want anything to change, and that – as always – comes down to organizing. I was talking to a friend recently about the frustrations of trying to motivate comfortable people to direct action, and while I still have very little experience myself, it seems like we really do need to start a new kind of political system from scratch. It’s going to be painfully slow, especially as we watch our rulers destroy the world around us, but I don’t see another way forward. The one bit of encouragement I can offer from this is that even if this analysis is far too optimistic about the investment that’s needed, building a better world is still well within our material capacity.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

New research shows how mines harm salmon populations

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far, fast.

I’ve been encountering that sentiment, on climate change, for about as long as I’ve been paying attention to the issue. Looking back, I’m surprised it wasn’t a phrase that frustrated me more. It perfectly conveys the need for reckless urgency in the face of this growing crisis, and yet the same communities that adored phrases like that also tended to think I was being alarmist for suggesting that people get in the habit of storing food. For my entire life, people have been talking about what a big crisis this is, but so many of them seem to think that going far, fast means everybody acting as if they’re alone. I hope by now it’s clear to all of you that we can’t change the world through individual people choosing to buy better products or to live sustainably on the periphery of an unsustainable society. There’s simply too much to do.

This is probably going to end up being one of those topics that I talk about more as time goes on. It’s encouraging to know that there are bacteria that can eat plastic and things like that, but the sheer volume of toxic material that we’ve pumped into this world is reaching a crisis point even without the rising temperature. All the conservation and renewable energy in the world won’t save us if we cause a mass extinction anyway by poisoning the world.

We need to go far, fast, and in this case that includes a massive, global cleanup of mining sites, and a revolution in how we go about the process of resources extraction.

A new paper published in Science Advances synthesizes the impact of metal and coal mines on salmon and trout in northwestern North America, and highlights the need for more complete and transparent science to inform mining policy.

It is the first comprehensive effort by an interdisciplinary group of experts that explicitly links mining policy to current understanding of watershed ecology and salmonid biology.

“Our paper is not for or against mining, but it does describe current environmental challenges and gaps in the application of science to mining governance. We believe it will provide critically needed scientific clarity for this controversial topic,” said lead author Chris Sergeant, a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and a research scientist at the University of Montana.

For the study, experts integrated and reviewed information on hydrology, river ecology, aquatic toxicology, biology and mining policy. Their robust assessment maps more than 3,600 mines throughout Montana, Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska. The size of the mines ranges from family-run placer sites to massive open-pit projects.

The study shows that, despite impact assessments intended to evaluate risk and inform mitigation, mines continue to harm salmonid-bearing watersheds through contaminants, stream channel burial and streamflow alteration. Silt suffocates eggs, and embryos may not survive contaminated groundwater. Heavy metals compromise a salmon’s sense of smell, which affects their ability to react to predators and find their way back from the ocean to spawn.

“Not all mines pose the same level of risk, but our review revealed that harm from mining can be severe and long-lasting. The extent of mining pressures on these watersheds underscores the importance of accurately assessing risk to water, fish and communities,” said Sergeant.

The paper also describes how some mining policies do not account for the breadth and length of mining impacts on the environment, or the increasing effects of climate change.

“The crux of the issue is that salmon use so much of the watershed during their life cycle. They move throughout watersheds, whereas the impact assessments of mining projects tend to be very locally focused, and they don’t sufficiently consider all of the compounding and downstream effects of mining,” said salmon biologist and CFOS faculty member Megan McPhee.

She explained that some impact assessments don’t fully assess the infrastructure required to operate a mine, such as roads, electricity generation and water removal.

“Another thing is that most mines, after closure, have to be mitigated in perpetuity. That’s a problem because most corporations aren’t structured that way. Also, most mitigation strategies don’t take into account environmental change, including permafrost melting, and climate change-induced flooding,” said McPhee.

If you haven’t studied the ecological role played by salmon and other anadromous fish, you might not appreciate how much they matter. Entire forest ecosystems are shaped around this near-miraculous delivery of an abundance of high-quality food from the ocean. These fish spend their lives eating and growing at sea, and then they carry all those nutrients back up the river, where they lay a mind-boggling amount of eggs, and in the case of salmon, die. It is not an exaggeration to say that without these fish, a number of ecosystems around the world would look radically different.

And in case it needs saying, the problem of mine waste is not limited to this study’s geographic region.

Going far, fast is reckless. There’s no way around that. Honestly, the crises we’re facing today are in part because we ignored that rule for so long. We have to be reckless now, too. We have to be willing to try modes of life that we’re not sure will work. We have to be willing to do things that have never been done. We have to be willing to take the risk of failure, because if we continue to be paralyzed by fear of the new, we will be consumed by the devil we know.

I think we can have a future with a better standard of living that most people have today, while also leaving this planet a better place to live. While a lot of that will come from re-using materials, and building things to last, it seems likely that there will still be a need for mining. The upside of needing to do this cleanup work is that it will almost certainly teach us how to make mining something that’s more or less environmentally friendly.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Why capitalism loves disasters (and how that includes global warming)

I mentioned The Shock Doctrine (also known as disaster capitalism) yesterday, in reference to what looks to be an endless chain of disasters being manufactured by the U.S. Supreme Court. While still think everyone should read the book or listen to the audiobook, this video provides a decent overview of the history of this economic doctrine, and how it relates to climate change. It also touches on how we may be able to use some of the same principles to make the world better, instead of worst.

Shock Doctrine: The U.S. Supreme Court has declared war on humanity.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America has declared war on humanity. The assault on bodily autonomy in overturning Roe v. Wade is already set to do incalculable amounts of harm for generations to come, and you think an increasingly fascist U.S. wouldn’t use its power to push this vicious ideology around the world, then I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.

Unfortunately, there’s more. The most recent outrage is the decision to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.

By a vote of 6 to 3, the court said that any time an agency does something big and new – in this case addressing climate change – the regulation is presumptively invalid, unless Congress has specifically authorized regulating in this sphere.

“That’s a very big deal because they’re not going to get it from Congress because Congress is essentially dysfunctional,” said Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus, an expert on environmental law. “This could not have come at a worse time” because “the consequences of climate change are increasingly dire and we’re running out of time to address it.”

As I understand it, this means that all regulations may be on the chopping block, if they’re not explicitly spelled out by Congress. That doesn’t just mean greenhouse gas emissions, it could theoretically gut the entirety of the agency system of the U.S., which has been the primary bulwark protecting the general public from the murderous greed of corporations.

From everything I can tell, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court is applying Shock Doctrine tactics. To quote Milton Friedman, the Prophet of Neoliberalism:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. What that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

In this case, they are creating their own crisis, and using it to destroy barriers to corporate and oligarchic power. They want to take us back to the time of burning rivers an choking smog, and they want to do it in the middle of a warming event that already threatens humanity with extinction.

At this point, it’s starting to seem like the death of most of humanity is their goal.

They’re relying on the scale and speed of their action to shock institutions of power into inaction. They’re also relying on the majority that doesn’t like what’s happening being unable to do anything to stop it. At the moment, I’m worried that they’re right. It doesn’t seem like the Democratic party intends to do much of anything about what this court is doing. They certainly didn’t have any plan ready to go for this extremely predictable situation. It’s not just that we got the leaked Roe ruling, or that it was obvious the three Trump appointees lied about abortion to get on the court. It’s that these tactics have been a standard part of the US foreign policy playbook for decades. Many of those “centrist” politicians whose careers supposedly make them qualified to lead have been involved in inflicting this kind of treatment on other countries, so we have a pretty good idea of the playbook. If you haven’t read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, I continue to think it’s essential to understanding what’s going on in the world today, and the audiobook is free.

I’m worried about what will come next, and I think you all should be as well. With climate change, habitat destruction, chemical pollution, and fascism all in the mix together, it feels like there’s no limit on how bad things could get. The Supreme Court of the United States has declared war on humanity, and they will wage that war whether we fight back or not. As always: Organize, train, practice coordinated action, and prepare for hard times.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Housekeeping

Back in the beginning of June, I had gotten a thousand words or so written on a post about the recent spike in transphobia in the United States. I promised that post because I felt fairly confident that I’d have it done in a week or so. So far I’m at around a little under 6,000 words, and it’s no so much an essay as it is a literary amoeba that keeps extending new psuedopodia as new, terrible things happen to feed it. I’m not even clear on what my point is, beyond wanting people to be safe, which feels like it ought to be the bare minimum. At this point the fact that I still haven’t finished it is becoming a problem in my brain, so as odd as it may sound, I have to remove the deadline if I want to get it done any time soon.

I feel like I’ve been talking about ADHD a fair amount on this blog recently. It’s a predictable result of maintaining a commitment to daily posting, if I want this blog to be more than just recycled content. I only really came to believe I have the disorder in the last couple years, and since medical treatment remains out of reach, I’ve been in the process of trying to figure out how to manage a brain the often refuses to cooperate. One lesson I should have learned a while ago is that I need to stop promising the results of work that isn’t already done.

That post will be up when it’s finished, and unfortunately I see no indication that it will be less relevant in July or August than it was in June. The tragic reality is that without some very uncharacteristic behavior from the leadership of the Democratic Party, it looks like we’re in for a long period of conservative, theocratic, minoritarian rule in the United States. If the implications of that don’t chill you to the bone, then you either haven’t been paying attention, or you’re one of the bad guys. Neither of those are good things.

I’m generally inclined to believe that people are products of our experiences. To me that means that saying someone is “good” or “bad” tends to obscure a more complicated reality. That said, bigotry is similar to violent crime – we can discuss the philosophical implications after the harm has been stopped, and the people inflicting the harm no longer have the power to do so. The important thing right now is defending those who are under attack, and as with oppressive regimes of the past, that may will involve doing things that could make you a target, either of the government, or of the fascist movement that is currently being emboldened.

That’s not an easy call to make. I would never pretend it is, especially seeing as how I up and left the country.

But I think it’s important to understand what seems to be happening, and to think about what that means for us, and for the other people in our lives. A lot of people are justifiably frightened, angry, and grieving right now, all while continuing the never-ending struggle to make ends meet.

To quote my new favorite movie, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.”

Video: True Facts about the beaver

So I got lots of writing done today, but most of it was for a fantasy novel that’s not going to be available for at least a year (though maybe some stuff sooner for patrons?). Long story short, I’m wiped, so I’m going to lean on Ze Frank again, to continue my ongoing campaign for a human-beaver partnership.

There are a couple of things in that video I never knew, including the fact that beavers apparently build dams because one of their common ancestors hated a very particular kind of noise made by flowing water, to the point where the entire species seems to structure its life around putting sticks on the noisy water to make it stop.

Science says win first, answer questions later.

The prevailing theory of change in the United States has long been that you persuade people to agree with you, and when you get enough people on your side, they vote for representatives, who will enact the policies desired by the majority. It’s something that works in theory, but that has been consistently undermined and sabotaged by the forces of capitalism. Even before the U.S. entered this period of more or less open minoritarian rule, the will of the majority was regularly ignored on things like climate change or a public health insurance option. Despite all of this, a lot of the mainstream rhetoric around political change has remained focused on persuading those who are either apathetic or in opposition to our goals.

Unfortunately, it seems that public opinion tends to follow policy much more than some of us might wish:

“The design of climate mitigation policies relies on economic models. Our research shows that it is possible to improve such models to represent changes in preferences,” says Linus Mattauch, lead author of the paper and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the University of Oxford. “Preferences represent values and habits, meaning essentially what you as an individual like and not, what you prefer to consume more of and what less. Economists typically assume you are basically born with a fixed set of values and preferences that remain that way throughout your life. It makes calculations easier – but it is a simplification from reality. And, crucially, if you assume preferences will always remain the same, real change like the transition to a decarbonised economy is harder.”

Preference changes are well documented in the past: When the negative health impacts of smoking were raised in education campaigns alongside price interventions and bans, more and more people quit smoking – economics rarely understands this as a change in preferences.

Climate policies can change people’s way of looking at things

“Carbon pricing is indispensable for delivering on climate targets,” says co-author Nicholas Stern, who published the famous 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. “However, if carbon pricing changes people’s preferences – and there is evidence that it does – this has implications. For example, if citizens see carbon prices as indicating purposefulness of policy in directions that they find sensible, then the response to carbon pricing could be enhanced.” They do not simply act as consumers: as citizens, they will develop low-carbon preferences, and more environmental protection could be achieved by a given tax rate.

“Another example is urban redesign,” adds Mattauch. “If a government puts in the money and makes a city’s infrastructure more bike-friendly, citizens will switch from driving to using public transport or cycling. This behaviour will stick, even in different infrastructures – bringing further benefits to the environment and their own health. Taking those benefits into account can lower the threshold for making such big investments worthwhile.”

Reducing demand-side emissions to the benefit of planet and people

One might argue that aiming for preference changes is something policies shouldn’t do. “Our short general answer to this objection is: If society does not debate how preferences are formed, they risk being shaped by and to the benefit of special interest groups rather than in a democratic way. For the enormous challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the near-future, recognizing that climate policy instruments modify the preference formation process can produce better climate policies for everyone – and help advance the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent recommendation of using demand-side measures to curb carbon emissions,” Mattauch concludes.

I call this “unfortunate”, because of what’s happening with the Supreme Court right now. That, combined with billionaire-funded propaganda could well result in public opinion swinging to the right on a number of issues. Unfortunately, abortion isn’t close to being the only thing on the table. I also think it’s a bit unfortunate because I don’t share their belief that carbon pricing is the way to go.

That said, I think this is useful information to have. It bolsters what many of us already suspected – if we can actually get the changes we want, it’ll be a lot easier to convince people that their hesitation or opposition was ill-founded. That’s one reason why I think we need to be building collective power – there are times when you need to make change over the objections of those who see everything new as a sign of the coming apocalypse. Trying to persuade someone who sees you as an enemy could well be a lot harder than simply changing the world around them, and demonstrating that it’s better.

That’s basically what the conservatives have been doing, though their definition of “better” is abominable. They don’t care about persuading you, they care about getting their way, and silencing objection. I fear this may be one of those cases where the ends really do justify at least some means. To be clear, I don’t think we need to sacrifice our commitment to the values of life, autonomy, and democracy to win; but I do think that we need to be willing to work outside the system, and to “play dirty”, so to speak. To me, there is no honor in pretending that we’re in a fair fight, while the delay that causes destroys lives. At this point, playing by the rules of this system is conceding defeat before the battle has begun, and I think that includes trying to solve climate change with carbon pricing. Our system is corrupt and it has been from the start, and real change will only ever come from outside it.

So we win first, and answer questions later.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!