Climate Crisis Threatens Everything
It was the summer of 2003. I was employed at the time as the national coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network, working towards, we hoped, a progressive, broad-based alternative to the Dems and Reps. But something happened that summer in Europe which changed my life, leading me to leave that IPPN job a year and a half later in the hope that I could find paying work focused on the climate crisis. What happened that summer to lead to that personal change?
Here is how AI Overview reports it:
The 2003 European heatwave was an extreme, prolonged, and deadly weather event, with estimated fatalities exceeding 30,000 to 70,000, particularly in France, Italy, and Spain. Lasting from June through mid-August 2003, it featured temperatures 3 to 5°C above average, often exceeding 40°C in Western Europe, causing severe agricultural losses and sparking major wildfires…
I had known at the time about “global warming,” knew it was one of many important issues. But the research I did that fall, the books I read, convinced me that this crisis was much more serious, more imminent, than I had thought that it was. If tens of thousands of people in economically developed Europe could die from an extreme weather event caused in large part by the heating up of the atmosphere, and with knowledgeable people predicting this was just one example of what humankind worldwide would be facing for years to come, even if we did stop burning oil, coal and gas, the fossil fuels whose ubiquitous use is the primary reason for these events, this was clearly a very real, here-and-now existential threat for all forms of life on all of the earth.
I remember talking with a good friend at the time who was questioning me about this decision to alter my main focus. I answered that I was doing so primarily because of the seriousness of the crisis but also because I doubted the immediate potential, back then, for a coming together of independent progressives significant enough to have an impact. The conscious Left was weak and divided, not in a position, I felt then, to have much impact nationally for years to come.
I’ve thought about and studied this question a number of times over the past 23 years. During that time I have taken part, on local, state and national levels, in campaigns and initiatives other than just the climate crisis, but that has continued all that time as my top priority. The biggest example is my throwing myself into the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign when it happened in 2015 and 2016. The fact that he made the climate crisis one of the main issues he spoke about, one of a number of them, definitely resonated with me.
Also resonating since then has been the articulation and advancement of the idea of a Green New Deal by AOC and others after that Sanders campaign, an initiative which combines action on the climate crisis/ecological devastation with the kind of systemic, pro-justice, housing/healthcare/childcare/jobs/etc. governmental actions needed on many other pressing issues facing the USA and the world.
When Trump was elected in 2024, I and groups I’m a leader of consciously took part in anti-fascist actions in support of immigrant rights, against ICE, and for other no-to-fascism efforts like the No Kings demonstrations throughout 2025.
As 2026 gets underway, with Spring thankfully on the horizon, there are a number of ways that those of us who get it on the seriousness of the climate crisis can take action. One way is to support Democrats and serious progressive Independents running for elected office who speak about this issue while connecting it to others. A second way is raising this issue up at nationally distributed actions on March 28 No Kings, April 22 Earth Day and May 1 Mayday Strong. A third way is strengthening and broadening out the “Make Climate Polluters Pay” movement working in 1/3 or more of the states to pinpoint the fossil fuel industry and get them to pay for the damage they are causing.
The climate crisis, the worldwide emergency we are in, truly calls out for us in the belly of the beast to keep raising this up, to take on those who don’t give a damn about the ecocide their policies are advancing. This is an issue on the agenda of history and the world right now.
In this critical election year when the Trump fascists are deeply unpopular, but wind and solar continue to have the support of three-fourths of the US population, let’s act accordingly as we go about our anti-fascist organizing.
The Age of Human Arrogance
Why Conservation Is Not Charity but Survival
For most of human history, we lived as one species among many. We shared forests with elephants, rivers with hippos, skies with vultures, and coastlines with turtles whose migrations predate our earliest civilizations. The natural world was not a backdrop to human life; it was the condition that made human life possible. For millennia, animals and ecosystems existed in a balance shaped by climate, instinct, and time — not by human ambition. Today that balance is collapsing, not because nature changed, but because we did.
Deforestation, industrial expansion, mining, poaching, and the global appetite for profit have pushed countless species to the edge of extinction. Forests that once stood for centuries now fall in days. Rivers that sustained entire communities now carry toxins. Animals that evolved over millions of years now disappear faster than we can name them. And yet, in the midst of this destruction, a dangerous idea persists: that humans are the chosen species, entitled to dominate the earth and everything on it. This belief — ancient in origin, modern in its consequences — has become one of the most destructive ideologies of our time.
The Myth of Human Superiority
Human beings often speak as though we are the center of creation. We behave as though the earth was designed for our consumption, our comfort, our expansion. But the truth is simpler and far less flattering: we are not the architects of this planet. We are not the authors of biodiversity. We are not the custodians we pretend to be. We are one species among millions — and the only one destroying the conditions that sustain us. Elephants do not clear forests for profit. Wolves do not poison rivers. Whales do not warm the oceans. Insects do not destabilize the climate. Only humans do this, and we do it while insisting that we are the “intelligent” ones.
Animals Have Coexisted Longer Than Our Civilizations Have Existed
Before the first empire rose, elephants were already shaping savannahs. Before the first city was built, whales were already navigating oceans. And before the first human carved a tool, birds were already migrating across continents and weaving nests with a mastery that required no teacher. Their craftsmanship predates our own, reminding us that the natural world was building, creating, and sustaining life long before humans claimed to be the planet’s designers.
Nature does not need us. We need nature. Yet the modern world behaves as though conservation is an act of charity — something we do for animals out of kindness. In reality, conservation is an act of self‑preservation. When a species disappears, an ecosystem weakens. When ecosystems weaken, human survival becomes uncertain. We are not saving animals. We are saving the conditions that allow us to live.
Empire’s Greed Is the Real Predator
The greatest threat to wildlife is not hunger, drought, or disease. It is the global economic system built on extraction. Forests fall because corporations want timber and land. Elephants die because ivory is profitable. Sharks vanish because their fins are currency. Rainforests burn because soy and cattle feed distant markets. This is not nature’s violence. This is empire’s violence — the violence of profit without responsibility. And it raises a question we rarely ask: what kind of species destroys the world it depends on?
The Disease of Human Exceptionalism
The belief that humans are “God chosen ones” or “superior” has become a moral disease. It allows us to justify destruction as destiny. It allows us to treat other species as resources rather than lives. It allows us to imagine that intelligence is measured by domination rather than coexistence. But intelligence without restraint is not wisdom. Power without responsibility is not leadership. Dominion without care is not stewardship. If anything, our behavior reveals not superiority but insecurity — a species unsure of its place, compensating with control.
The Question We Must Finally Ask
If humans are truly the “God chosen ones”-species, then chosen for what — to dominate or to protect, to consume or to coexist? The answer will determine not only the fate of animals but the fate of our own species.
A Different Imagination Is Possible
Conservation is not about returning to the past. It is about choosing a future — a future where forests are valued for more than their timber, where animals are recognized as co‑inhabitants rather than commodities, where human progress is measured not by what we extract but by what we preserve. This requires humility — the recognition that we are not the center of the world but part of it. It requires restraint — the willingness to limit our appetites. And it requires responsibility — the courage to confront the systems that profit from destruction.
Because the truth is simple: when we destroy the natural world, we destroy ourselves. And no belief in human exceptionalism will save us from the consequences of our own arrogance.
MAGA is the Avatar of a Fossil Fuel Industry Coup
I wrote over a year ago that “doomerism,” or “doomism,” if you prefer, ought to be a precondition for activism. If you believe that the sea won’t soon rise and drown the coastal cities that run the world’s economies, if you believe that deserts won’t swell and swallow up farmlands, if you believe that fascist predatory schemes don’t threaten to spill over into genocide and nuclear war then you have most likely consumed the opiate of happy endings. You capitulate to the cult of false hope, and go about your life in the habitual assumption that good fortune will intervene, as it always has. Trump will die as Hitler did, and after a brief ritual of reckoning, a few therapeutic hangings perhaps, we can all return to the daydreams of a brighter future, or, minimally, the consolation that life goes on. Politics shapes itself to fit the contours of our national stories, our tales, our self-deception, our faith in a mystically blessed USA – the beneficiary of an eternal sequence of eleventh hours.
Maybe we have crossed a threshold into a set of contingencies that no longer adheres, even remotely, to the plotline of our accustomed narrative. Perhaps we have entered a new moral dimension where human regrets no longer have access to the brakes of corporate bureaucracy. What happens to our communities, towns, cities, nations and farmlands if the sixth extinction leapfrogs from being a hypothetical construct to an encroaching reality, with drowned coastal cities, epic wildfires, unimaginable hurricanes and blizzards, desertified croplands and empty shelves at the grocery store? I believe that many of us expect that nature will offer humanity some last minute gift of clarity, as if an anthropomorphic environment itself will create a “Goldilocks Zone” for activism in which pain, anger and resolve all attain “critical mass.” But the US has always been a land of lies, myths, false history and, above all else, manufactured optimism.
We, who call ourselves progressive, grudgingly have begun to admit that we live within a consolidating fascist nightmare, but our collective mindset has been washed and rewashed in the toxic bromides of national destiny. The US survived two centuries of slavery, decades of Jim Crow, the fascist aspirations of Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and for every assault we have formulated a counterattack. We have John Brown, MLK, Muhammed Ali, even Bernie Sanders, and so many warriors of free speech and opposition – Ralph Nader, Dick Gregory, Woody Guthrie and let’s toss in Jesse Welles to keep ourselves current. We are drunk on the nostalgic elixir of The New Deal and Keynesian economics. We, the putative beacon of global Democracy have absorbed the mythology of temporary setbacks.
Unfortunately, we no longer deal exclusively with the bumps and bruises of an eternally rapacious US right wing that has never abandoned its Confederate roots. The right that currently flourishes in the US does not merely bathe in wistful memories of slavery and Jim Crow – it has fully merged with capitalism, circling the wagons to fend off the threat of climate activism via a government takeover, conceived, funded and carried out with oil industry “dark money” and Heritage Foundation planning. The Republican juggernaut has unified around a platform of war and oil colonialism (hiding behind a smokescreen of immigrant scapegoating). The fossil fuel empire no longer limits itself to the rhetoric of denial, but expansively wages an all-out war against nature with the spoils of its successful coup – a $1.5 trillion dollars of imperial military force. Consider the following quote:
“A US foundation associated with the oil company Shell has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to religious right and conservative organizations, many of which deny that climate change is a crisis, tax records reveal.
Fourteen of those groups are on the advisory board of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint proposing radical changes to the federal government, including severely limiting the Environment Protection Agency.
Shell USA Company Foundation sent $544,010 between 2013 and 2022 to organizations that broadly share an agenda of building conservative power, including advocating against LGBTQ+ rights, restricting access to abortions, creating school lesson plans that downplay climate change and drafting a suite of policies aimed at overhauling the federal government.”
The rightwing elites, busily consolidating their particular type of all-American fascism, have seldom been recognized in mainstream media stories as being an extension of the fossil fuel industry. Some pundits may lament that “drill, baby drill,” became the rallying cry of the last Trump campaign, but how often does the press rigorously follow the cash binding Trump to Exxon-Mobil and Chevron?
The clues are everywhere in plain sight. Recall that Trump offered to rescind most environmental regulations in exchange for a billion dollars in fossil fuel campaign donations. This represents a quid pro quo so transparently unethical that, in any other time period, could have only been finalized in absolute secrecy. The marriage of politicians and oil has been performed with bells and whistles, but the relationship still manages to fly under the radar. In the 2024 election Kamala “I Love Fracking Too” Harris made no mention of Trump’s campaign dependence on fossil fuel money.
The two nations being the most obvious targets of US imperial design are Venezuela and Iran (rumored to be under imminent threat of US bombing attacks as I write) – two of the most prolific oil producing nations in the world. The proposed annexation of Canada would bring another oil rich land into the fold of US domination. We might also view Trump’s attempts at a rapprochement with Putin’s Russia as an effort to gain access to Russian oil extraction. The absurdity of our times pivots around a fossil fuel industry contrivance –Kakistocratic Fascism – racing toward consolidation neck and neck with global extinction. We can’t fight the power if we don’t grasp the plot.
This is catastrophic news for planet earth – we have already entered an era of environmental danger unprecedented in human history and quite likely never encountered in geological history either. The greatest environmental apocalypse in the evolution of planet earth took place some 252 million years ago at the Permian/Triassic boundary. Geologists believe that a “large Igneous Province” (LIP) is the smoking gun for the Permian/Triassic extinction event. Some two million years of hyper-volcanism subjected the flourishing biosphere to both a prolonged buildup of atmospheric CO2 from volcanic “outgassing” and from concomitant carbon emissions as coal fields ignited by flowing lava burned for thousands of years. The Permian “Great Dying,” that eliminated some 90% of species, came perilously close to sterilizing the entire planet. Ocean temperatures reached levels resembling those of a hot tub. Acidification, bleached coral reefs and deep ocean anoxic environments – foul smelling, sulfuric and lifeless – characterized the preeminent biological catastrophe in the half billion years of multicellular evolution.
The Permian offers us an imperfect window into our own fossil fuel narrative. The noted paleontologist, Gerta Keller, has called fossil fuel burning, and the natural-historical trend of volcanically driven mass extinction, “exactly the same.” Researchers believe that the Permian extinction – although involving hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity – can largely be traced to relatively short periods (lasting a few thousand years) of volcanic pulses. These brief events released highly concentrated amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 ppm spiked to over five times the levels that preceded the Siberian Traps volcanism. At its most intense, scientists, using proxy sedimentary samples, have estimated that the Siberian Traps and the proximate flaming coal deposits released 4.5 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (1 gigaton equals a billion tons). How, you might ask does that compare with Exxon-Mobil/Chevron’s etc. cumulative yearly emissions? In 2024 atmospheric carbon increased by 38 gigatons – roughly 8 times faster than at the apex of the Permian. If current trends continue, we should expect CO2 emissions to reach 75 gigatons annually by 2050 – or 18 times the velocity of atmospheric carbon during the worst volcanic pulses of the end Permian extinction. Allow that to sink in. The mass exterminating event of our times does not involve the callous indifference of continental plates poking holes in the lithosphere – the lethal chain of events involves a century of oil industry control of government policies on a global scale, culminating in a fascist coup carried out by proxies of the fossil fuel industry – notably, Donald Trump.
Experts warn us that preindustrial CO2 atmospheric concentrations may increase by a factor of three in the next 75 years. This is not compatible with human civilization. One should also understand that CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. As the earth heats, deadly amounts of Methane are released from melting permafrost and warming oceans. Nitrous Oxide is added to the atmosphere from human agricultural practices, and a number of industrial pollutants cause additional warming. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, and as the atmosphere warms, water vapor increases in a feedback loop.
It has been like pulling teeth to get media figures to realize that Trump is a fascist, but that realization only comprises half of the story – Trump is merely an avatar for oil profits. The oil industry drives US fascism with limitless cash and a stream of industrially created right wing narrative fictions from well endowed think tanks. We may vaguely understand that climate deterioration causes immigration to increase, while those too poor to immigrate suffer and die, but we must also be aware that the oil industry funds the politicians, media and think tanks that shape toxic immigration narratives. The evil irony takes your breath away. Those in the Global South, who lose their lives and livelihoods to oil industry greed, also double as scapegoats.
The oil industry has written stories that point fingers at their victims in the past – I am forced again to tell the story of tetraethyl leaded gasoline – the weapon employed to commit the worst crime in history. Leaded gasoline caused a hundred million premature deaths, and the lead poisoned brains of inner-city children has, according to many researchers, been the most likely reason for the several decades of increased violent crime in US cities during the 1960’s to the late 1990’s. The banning of tetraethyl (beginning incrementally in 1970) brought the crime rates down. The dominant US political narrative employed by Nixon, Reagan and Clinton, blamed spiking crime rates on super-predators (a euphemism for Black youth) who were fed into the burgeoning “prison industrial complex.”
History may not repeat itself, but “history just rhymes” we have been warned. Once again the oil industry and its political proxies have composed a narrative to blame their own horrific crimes on innocent scapegoats. Immigrants are being brought by the tens of thousands into brutal caged settings while the perpetrators of a looming planetary holocaust evade all consequences. We struggle to tell the story accurately – the legendary Climate activist, Roger Hallam pleads for us to use requisite language:
“There are certain words polite society forbids.
Genocide.
Collapse.
Treason.
Say them, and you are hysterical. Extreme. Nuts.
But there comes a point in the life of a civilisation when refusing to use the correct word becomes the real extremism.
We are living through the greatest act of intergenerational violence in human history. The evidence is no longer scattered across obscure journals. It is in mainstream newspapers. Intelligence briefings. Government admissions.
The question is no longer whether the crisis is real. The question is whether we are prepared to describe what is happening with moral clarity.”
In line with Hallam’s exhortation to embrace “moral clarity,” we must understand the narrative predicament that we now suffer. A fascist coup, with no other specific description is terrible enough, but a fascist coup paid for and overseen by the fossil fuel industry aspires to do more than merely kill people and scarf up profits. The US environmental program ought to be seen as The Siberian Traps Large Igneous Province on steroids. The barest possibility of survival depends on regime change and the nationalization of the oil industry. Trump and his senile antics are a mere distraction while the oil industry raises its dagger.
Fossil fuels are the mother of capitalism – AI and tech industries consume vast quantities of oil – they are fossil fuel adjuncts. The US Military is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels on earth, but we must understand, as political writer, Grace Blakeley, observes, that the military is inexorably bound to fossil fuels in the manner of a composite entity. The military does not merely consume fossil fuels and pollute the dying planet, it fights wars to procure these fuels. Think of the oil/military industrial complex as the mother of death, the author of US fascism and the executioner of planet earth – then act accordingly.
Phil Wilson writes at Nobody’s Voice.
