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Scott Greathouse's avatar

Your analysis is the only one that fits what's happening. Your sourcing is consistently great. We know that the IPCC and other components of climate science are controlled by capital, in the sense that what they are allowed to say is limited in specific ways to avoid blaming capitalists or capitalism for the problem, and to avoid solutions that compromise the ability of extremely wealthy people to be able to continue being extremely wealthy.

Interestingly, the Club of Rome estimate for collapse is also 2050. That estimate was based on nothing significant changing, and nothing significant has changed. So it isn't "your" estimate so much as the estimate that fits the data.

I just rewatched part of the Noam Chomsky movie "Manufacturing Consent" and one of the things he talks about is how important it is for the "political class" (which includes everyone working in the field of climate science) must be boxed into specific, safe narratives in order to keep the overall system on track. Dissenting voices must be marginalized or they disrupt the entire system. It's a miracle, really, that we even have the accurate data available to us.

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Jed's avatar
Nov 14Edited

Richard -- I felt shadowbanned in r/collapse because they don't let you post anything about potential solutions, even extremely radical ones ("solutions" so violent and chaotic that they would be synonymous to "collapse" -- the collapse of the capitalist order. I tried to link my recent post there and the mods wouldn't let it through.

Either way, as the resident crank of climate Substack (for the communism thing) and a passing crank on r/collapse (for the same), I totally feel you on being pushed to the sides as a crank in other spaces, but you are completely right. The science is wrong. Climate sensitivity is way higher than they think it is. Qualitatively, immensely higher; we just don't know the full impact of doubling the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and when you look into deep time or geologic time, it's even more; we've drastically reversed the course that the planet was on, and that will have reverberations even after the earth system has regained stability at a new, warmer/more enthalpic level.

My thing is, So why do we STILL look to the SCIENTISTS for LEADERSHIP around this issue? They are wrong. They are wrong on the science and they are VERY wrong on the possible solutions, the politics, on WHAT IS TO BE DONE. If anything -- I know that the answer in r/collapse is that there's nothing to be done.* But I think it's not fair to ask people to live with this painful cognitive dissonance that comes from making the problem worse with our every motion. People are going to start seeking revolutionary solutions. Is the CLIMATE movement going to embrace them or push them away, as has been the traditional move?

This is now a problem not for bourgeoisie scientists to deal with, this is now something that can only be handled by "professional revolutionaries", to take Lenin's phrase.

*edit, more thought: The gap between the stance of r/collapse and my own is not about how extreme the situation is, but whether people are given any agency. For r/collapse, and from what I've seen from most writers on this issue, we as people are subjects of this historic catastrophe but have no agency to make change, because to this point change has been impossible to achieve. But I believe in revolution; it's happened before and when conditions are right, it can happen again. Everything will already be destroyed and collapsed when that revolution comes but it doesn't matter, we still must hold on to the dignity of knowing that we as people have agency, that there are other ways of looking at the problem outside of neoliberalism. This is all summed up in Fred Jameson's immortal words, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Well, I'm asking us to imagine the latter.

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