Cyber sovereignty

Sanaullah Abbasi

DAWN

November 16, 2024 

FOR a modern society, the intersection of rights and governance in the digital sphere should become an area of pressing concern.

As scholar Evgeny Morozov observes, “the internet is a reflection of humanity with all its beauty and ugliness”.

The statement above aptly captures the complexities of Pakistan’s evolving digital environment, which hosts millions of people who participate in substantive online engagement. The country’s internet penetration is projected to reach approximately 111m users this year. While this growth suggests immense technological advancement and connectivity, it also presents significant challenges, which require an in-depth analysis.

An assessment of the dynamics of Pakistan’s internet usage reveals a diverse and multifaceted online experience: Facebook leads with 44.5m users; it is followed by YouTube with 71.7m, TikTok has 54.38m and Instagram has 17.3m. Despite such vibrant and large-scale engagement on social media platforms, the digital landscape faces a number of challenges. Amid declining global internet freedom, Freedom on the Net 2024, a report from the Washington-based, nonprofit Freedom House, classifies Pakistan as ‘not free’ with a pathetic score of 27 out of 100.

The scale of online harassment — there are more than 3,000 reported cases that predominantly involve women — exacerbates the situation and raises concern about safety and equity in cyberspace. Moreover, data security and privacy breaches have resulted in a climate of distrust — over 20 documented infringements have adversely affected more than 1m people.


The rapid evolution of cyberspace demands a new social contract.

The economic ramifications of such challenges are considerable. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority estimates show that daily internet outages lead to approximately Rs3.5 billion worth of losses; annually, these disruptions account for about 2pc of the national GDP, which means that a total of Rs540bn are lost. The e-commerce sector is particularly hard hit, as it suffers daily damages to the tune of Rs750m. These economic implications underscore the urgent need for improved infrastructure and regulatory oversight in the country’s internet governance.

In response to this spate of problems, the government has introduced regulatory frameworks aimed at mitigating online misconduct and protecting digital rights. A preliminary step towards securing digital commerce was the Electronic Transaction Act, 2002, and then the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016, which criminalised the various violations that plague the integrity of the digital space. But the Punjab Defamation Act, 2024, is viewed as a draconian law that seeks to curb free speech.While the Cybercrime Investigating Agency is seen as a worthy instrument of law enforcement in the country, its long-term value remains uncertain.

In the broader context of rights, while the 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria stressed on the primacy of dignity, life and liberty over property rights, Sigmund Freud’s assertion that “unexpressed emotions will never die; they are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”, is particularly relevant to Pakistan, where unaddressed grievances manifest as anti-social disorders that require sustained treatment.

However, the challenges faced by Pakistan resonate with the international commentary on cyber rights and governance. International organisations, inc­luding the United Nations, have highlighted the need for regulatory frameworks to monitor the development and use of artificial intelligence, especially because so­­c­ial and technological revolutions have always coexisted. Yuval Noah Harari, in A Brief History of Tomorrow, warns of the existential threats posed by unregulated AI, particularly in authoritarian regimes, and underscores the necessity to prioritise human rights and dignity.

The rapid evolution of cyberspace demands the establishment of a new social contract, which is nationally and internationally grounded in specialised cyber laws on AI, currency and governance mechanisms to criminalise rights violations.

Finally, navigating the complexities of contemporary digital interactions demands that Pakistan addresses these challenges, and also works towards creating a framework that empowers its citizens, granting them the freedom to safely engage with internet rights for innovation, expression and opportunity. These internet rights have given birth to a scientific and societal revolution.

The writer has a PhD degree in law. He is former DG, FIA and currently a faculty member at SZABUL Law University, Karachi.

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2024

The Plague of Disaster Nationalism

Review of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization by Richard Seymour (Verso, 2024)

By Chris Green
November 13, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

In case you have not heard, Donald Trump was just elected President of the United States for a second time. The United States is in for some extremely difficult months and years ahead. The situation is made worse by the narrow vision and cluelessness of mainstream liberals pooh poohing legitimate voter concerns about the cost of living increases which played a major role in securing Trump’s victory. At their worst, these liberals have argued that the Biden economy was absolutely marvelous and anyone disagreeing was brainwashed by right wing propaganda. They have cited strong economic indicators achieved under Biden’s presidency but are oblivious to the fact that all too many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, barely keeping their heads above water. It is foolish to think that Trump will do anything but make the affordability crisis of health care, child care, transportation, housing and groceries worse. But the Democrats have been feeble in offering their own solutions to these problems. 

From mainstream media analysis in recent years it has been easy to get the impression that Trump is a populist with a “white working class” base but that is misleading. As political scientist Anthony Dimaggio and others have shown, the core of the MAGA base is in the middle and upper middle classes. In this year’s election, 37% of the eligible voting population did not participate. Trump was elected with the votes of only 29% of the eligible electorate. Poor and working class people are significantly overrepresented among non-voters, the largest group among the electorate in this and every presidential election in recent memory. 

Nonetheless, as this year’s election showed, Trumpism has a visible foothold in the working class. Exit polls indicate he won 45% of union voters, 53% of voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 and 51% with household incomes between $50,000 and $100,000

Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

How did we get to this point? Is there anything we can do to effectively defeat Trumpism? Some heavy food for thought on these questions is provided by the book Disaster Nationalism: the Downfall of Liberal Civilization, published late last month. 

The book’s author, Richard Seymour, is a highly impressive intellectual with an interesting life story. He had a troubled childhood in Northern Ireland but eventually achieved a PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics. He rose to public notice in the 2000s as the proprietor of a blog called Lenin’s Tomb and as a luminary in the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In 2013, being of courageous and independent minded character, Seymour made a public break with the SWP’s leadership after revelations emerged that the party had covered up multiple sexual assaults by a leading party member. He has published numerous books on subjects such as British politics, social media, the history of American anti-imperialism and the intellectual decline of the late Christopher Hitchens. These days his main publishing forum is a Patreon page. Along with the noted Marxist fiction writer China Mieville, he is a member of the editorial collective of Salvage, a UK based radical left journal of fiction, sociological and political essays. He also periodically writes for The Guardian. 

In Disaster Nationalism, Seymour seeks to understand the far right populism that has become ascendant in the United States and around the world. He attaches the term “disaster nationalism” to these movements. For Seymour, disaster nationalism has not yet reached outright fascist proportions–although he allows that in many cases it has made significant strides towards that end. 

For example, he observes that during the George Floyd summer of 2020, MAGA took on the characteristics of an outright counterrevolutionary insurgency. Trump was faced with mass protests–which had significant popular support, at least initially–seeking fundamental progressive transformation of US law enforcement. The response by MAGA officialdom at the national level and among local police was to cooperate with violent, far right thugs like the Proud Boys. They embraced the vigilante murderer Kyle Rittenhouse and seemingly quietly approved of the dozens of vehicular assaults by vigilantes on BLM protestors. Meanwhile, federal law enforcement agents, operating secret police style in unmarked vehicles, started snatching BLM activists from the streets of Portland, Oregon, and in Washington state, local police deputized as US Marshals conducted an apparent extrajudicial execution of Michael Reinoehl, an antifascist activist accused of murdering Proud Boy Aaron Danielson. 

Seymour suggests that among Trump’s global allies, Israel governed by Netanyahu and India under Narendra Modi’s premiership have reached the farthest on the road to facism. Netanyahu, of course, is currently waging a literal war of extermination in Gaza. Modi’s Hindu fundamentalist government has imposed a regime of outright totalitarian terror in Kashmir and actively eroded citizenship rights for India’s Muslim minority, while police terror and mob violence against the latter has soared under his watch. For example, since Modi rose to power in 2014, hundreds of Indian Muslims have been lynched by Hindu vigilantes enforcing government laws banning the slaughter of cows and consumption of beef.

Modi, of course, is most famous for being the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, leading the incitement of Hindu mobs that–with police complicity–massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands of Muslims. Seymour devotes a few paragraphs to describing the gruesome methods through which many of those Muslims were murdered. Another major Muslim pogrom overseen by Modi was the Delhi riots of February 2020, incited by politicians of Modi’s BJP party in response to mass protests against the erosion of the citizenship rights of the country’s Muslims. As Seymour observes, this pogrom occurred concurrently as Modi–-making the ultimate symbolic statement–received his friend Trump on an official state visit, just a few miles from the central area of the violence. 

Disaster Nationalism: Fascist or Prefascist?

Seymour is reluctant to label disaster nationalist movements as outright fascist: he states that, at the moment, they show predominantly prefascist characteristics. None of the movements Seymour studies have fundamentally destroyed preexisting institutions of bourgeois democracy. None of them have the ideological coherence of Hitler or Mussolini and none of them–Modi’s BJP is perhaps an exception–are able to mobilize the sort of political and social organizations with deep and widespread roots among ordinary people that Hitler and Mussolini could.. Unlike the movements of Hitler and Mussolini (to say nothing of the neoconservatives ascendant during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), adherents of disaster nationalist movements like MAGA show no particular fervor for global military expansionism. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, leaders like Trump and Modi have made no pretense of eliminating the economic stratification produced by unregulated capitalism. Trump, Modi and their ilk worldwide accept the fundamental inequalities produced by neoliberal capitalism–although they have sometimes offered rhetoric criticizing aspects of that capitalism. 

Seymour notes there is another major difference between the disaster nationalists of today and the classical fascists of yesteryear. First and foremost, ruling classes of both Germany and Italy backed fascist politics as their primary method in destroying vibrant radical left and labor movements that were ascendant in both countries. In contrast, disaster nationalists in the United States and around the world face a political landscape where radical left movements and labor unions have been in serious long term decline. 

Unlike classical fascists, disaster nationalists are notable for a complete lack of rationality. There is no organized group or political current that presents any serious threat to overturn existing social and economic hierarchies in the United States (or practically anywhere else in the world). However, the minds of MAGA adherents are often filled with the most idiotic paranoia and fantastical conspiracy theories about George Soros, Antifa, undocumented immigrants, pro-transgender teachers, Chinese communists and similar malefactors imminently poised to completely destroy American institutions and traditions. Many adherents of disaster nationalist movements like MAGA–in their capacity as political thinkers and activists–are profoundly stupid people. The irrationality and ineptitude of MAGA followers led to a serious setback for their movement on January 6th and we can only hope that there will be more cases of them self-destructing. 

For Seymour, a prime illustration of disaster nationalist idiocy and irrationality is the spread of the rumor during the Summer of 2020 that wildfires in eastern Oregon were set by Antifa activists. Scores of armed MAGA sympathizer vigilantes spread out in the region, setting up checkpoints on roads and in other ways harassing people in order to hunt down the mythical Antifa malefactors. Seymour observes that the actual primary trigger for the wildfires was climate change. 

At the same time, as noted above, Seymour is willing to allow that modern disaster nationalism does share characteristics with classical fascism. Obviously, leaders like Trump and Modi-as with Hitler and Mussolini before them–use racist demagoguery, scapegoating of alleged subversives–immigrants, Muslims and political progressives in the case of Trump and Modi– to mobilize their base. Seymour predicts that destruction caused by climate change in the years and decades ahead will provide further opportunities for fascist style politics. He points out that this is already the case in the Indian state of Assam where Modi’s regime has been inciting violence and conducting terror against Muslim Bangladeshi refugees who have fled climate disaster in their native country. 

Although modern disaster nationalists lack the fervor for state economic intervention of HItler and Mussolini, they often call for governments to adopt industrial policies that will supposedly reverse deindustrialization (for example Trump’s fervor for imposing tariffs on Chinese imports). Like Hitler and Mussolini, disaster nationalists often adopt a populist tone, posing as the champion of a “deserving” (i.e. white) working class whose hard-earned income has supposedly been siphoned off for welfare payments to undocumented immigrants and who have been abused and exploited by “woke” big business. 

Seymour notes that a region like eastern Oregon is particularly vulnerable to far right propaganda. Its key industries of fishing and logging in long term decline at the time of the Great Recession in 2008, the region was hit with particularly severity by the meltdown and has not recovered since. In connection to this dynamic of social and economic disintegration, Seymour quotes a 2020 statistic that 12% of the population of Oregon overall were alcoholics. 

Similar to the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, the disaster nationalism of Trump has gained its initial core support among middle class elements fearful of downward mobility in the midst of economic and social breakdown caused by neoliberal economic policies.Seymour observes that this core support rooted in the middle class–in the case of both classical fascism and modern day disaster nationalism–eventually makes inroads into other economic classes, including the working class. 

Seymour writes that in spite of Trump’s promise to provide material bounty for American workers, “average incomes under Trump grew more slowly than under his predecessor, and the rich gained far more than anyone else.” What really has drawn masses of Americans to Trump’s movement is not material improvement but what Seymour calls the “psychological surplus offered by nationalist renewal” and “the ethic of popular war against national enemies” e.g. undocumented immigrants, Antifa, “wokeness,” etc. 

Seymour notes that this dynamic of a charismatic demagogic leader enchanting masses of ordinary people and inciting them to their worst instincts of hatred and cruelty was clearly on display in the Philippines after the election of Rodrigo Duterte as president in 2016. By the time Duterte left office in 2022 he was the most popular head of state on the planet, gaining an almost unanimous approval rating from all economic classes of Filipinos–in spite of the fact that poverty in the already deeply impoverished country steadily increased under his presidency. As president, Duterte incited regular police and private vigilantes to form death squads that murdered tens of thousands of alleged drug addicts and street criminals. This anti-crime campaign served as a convenient cover for a reign of terror against Duterte’s political dissidents, particularly those on the left. 

Marx and Freud

Seymour’s argument that demagogues like Trump and Duterte divert ordinary peoples’ attention from the injustices caused by economic elites with the device of demagogic scapegoating of society’s weakest groups–or that they pretend to be populist while actually serving economic oligarchy–is not particularly original. What is original are the tools of analysis he brings, fusing Marxist analysis with psychoanalysis. At some point, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago, references to the psychoanalytic theory of the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan started to appear in his writings–to the distaste of a few of his Marxist admirers. He latched onto psychoanalysis at least in part as a way of understanding his own childhood traumas–but also in order to mine it for insight into the human mind that might facilitate the revolutionary socialist goal of achieving the full flowering of human freedom. Like a true revolutionary socialist, Seymour argues that the best antidote to the disaster nationalism of Trump & company is the creation of conditions for the full flowering of what Karl Marx called the “species-being”: the fundamental needs of humans to create, live, work, love and play, without coercion and in solidarity with other people. 

There is one point in the book where Seymour’s laborious psychoanalytic dissection of the motivations of followers of disaster nationalist movements has me a little lost. It is in the book’s chapter where he makes an argument, which I find unconvincing, relating to persons who believe the conspiracy theory that the Covid vaccine contains a microchip which allows Bill Gates to spy on persons receiving the vaccine. In holding such beliefs, according to Seymour, people are really attempting to unconsciously suppress “erotic fantasies of bodily penetration.” I think he is on stronger ground when he applies this same Freudian analysis to fans of Andrew Tate, the American-British, pro- Trump misogynist influencer and reputed sex trafficker. Tate, who has achieved an alarmingly wide influence among young males in the UK, has heavily implied publicly that he would be willing to rape women if he felt like it. In defending Tate’s stance–that he deserves to get away with rape because he is a “top G”–Seymour posits that the influencer’s “extremely suasible male fans” are really displaying an unconscious openness to being raped by Tate himself, should their hero desire it. 

One of a Kind

I fully admit that I don’t always follow some of Seymour’s Freudian analysis or fully understand all of his theoretical arguments, at least upon first reading. As when I read essays on his Patreon page, Disaster Nationalism had me periodically resorting to the proverbial dictionary (Google) because the author sometimes peppers his prose with advanced vocabulary (for example, detumescence and misprision). I can report that the author’s use of such vocabulary didn’t derail my understanding of his fundamental arguments. 

I also believe that Disaster Nationalism (and his other writings) show Richard Seymour to be an extremely intelligent person with whom I never fail to feel intellectually stimulated after I’ve read him. In Disaster Nationalism, I particularly recommend chapter 6, which features Seymour applying his concept of disaster nationalism to Israel’s current genocide in Gaza. It is the best part of the book. It contains really first rate writing and analysis. 

In the breadth of his knowledge, intellectual curiosity and intelligence, Seymour, in important ways, is comparable to the late Mike Davis. He is a treasure amongst the English speaking Marxist left. 

 

Ocean Issues Dominate at Three UN Climate Negotiation Summits

Courtesy Cali COP16

Published Nov 10, 2024 4:21 PM by Dialogue Earth

 

 

[By Felipe Cárcamo Moreno]

Those who know how to surf understand that the rhythm of the waves changes. Clinging to the board, watching the ocean, you decide which wave to take or let go, calculating the direction. And suddenly you are already on your feet, gliding through the sea … aligned with the rhythm of the ocean. Looking at the horizon, you can clearly see what is coming. 

This year has been a decisive one in the management of the ecological crises that plague the ocean. We are currently surfing between three UN Conferences of the Parties (COPs), dedicated to three different UN conventions. Each has a different agenda, but also several elements in common. Among them, the ocean stands out as a cross-cutting and potentially unifying theme.

But despite its importance, there is a deficit of attention being paid to the ocean and its three crises. Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss on the seas are already manifesting in rising sea levels, record water temperatures, changes in precipitation, ocean acidification and deoxygenation, and the decline of ecosystems.

Three UN gatherings dominate the end-of-year environmental agenda: the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP16 in Colombia, the Framework Convention on Climate Change’s COP29 in Azerbaijan, and the Convention to Combat Desertification’s COP16 in Saudi Arabia. Will the ocean command the attention it demands? Let’s dive in.

October | Biodiversity, COP16 | Cali

In 2022, the parties to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) set a milestone target of protecting 30% of terrestrial and marine areas by 2030. As they gathered in Cali last month, it became clear that global ocean protection languishes far short of this goal.

Another UN treaty will be a key building block in reaching this goal: the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction – otherwise known as the High Seas Treaty. Once it has been ratified by 60 countries (currently only 15 have done so, after France recently joined the list) it will enable the establishment of marine protected areas on the high seas, the two thirds of the ocean that lies beyond national jurisdiction. Protecting this will complement efforts to reach the KMGBF’s 30% target.

Ocean protection is further strengthened by other international instruments negotiated in recent years: the Port State Measures Agreement and the Fisheries Subsidies Agreement. Both are designed to combat illegal fishing and promote marine sustainability.

Funding, however, remained a central and outstanding challenge at Cali’s COP16. 

The Latin American and Caribbean Network for a Sustainable Financial System (REDFIS) says funding specifically allocated to biodiversity protection and conservation in each country must be established. The network says the current financial resources on the table are insufficient, and the critical situation of the debt markets in Global South countries is diverting funds that could combat climate change to pay off interest. REDFIS also says more effective mechanisms are needed to channel funds directly to those who protect nature. In particular, local communities, Indigenous peoples and African descendants who manage marine areas. 

November | Climate change, COP29 | Baku

A turning point for climate change discussions to sufficiently incorporate the ocean is hopefully indicated by a recent report. Compiled by the facilitators of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s “ocean dialogue”, the report emphasises the need for synergies between various UN multilateral frameworks. For example, between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, and the Global Biodiversity Framework. The report stresses this collaboration is critical to the success of national policies on climate change, including adaptation and mitigation.

A central theme of COP29 will be how to implement climate pledges. The ocean dialogue report urges countries to unify their efforts to avoid duplication and strengthen collective action on oceans. How to fund the climate pledges of developing countries will feature prominently.

For Latin America, it is crucial to establish a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) defining a level of international support for climate finance that effectively supports developing countries in protecting their waters. In addition, countries should integrate oceans into their Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans by 2025 – both of which detail countries’ efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and adapt to climate change.

Technology is emerging as a controversial issue where ocean concerns meet climate change, particularly in two areas. The first is geoengineering for marine carbon sequestration, as supervised by the UN’s International Maritime Organization. The consequences of such technologies are yet to be decisively proven. They could enlarge the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide, but they could also fail to make a significant difference and further damage already battered ecosystems.

The second area is deep sea mining, supervised by the International Seabed Authority. Some experts worry this could disrupt carbon sequestration in the deep, while advocates say it is a vital source of elements needed for the green transition. Nations including several in Latin America are promoting a moratorium. That would allow for further scientific research on these little-understood deep-sea ecosystems, applying a precautionary principle in the face of possible environmental impacts. 

For significant progress to be made in protecting the oceans in Baku, agreement on concrete action is needed for all the above areas.

December | Desertification, COP16 | Riyadh

The connection between land and ocean is of particular relevance to the third COP of 2024: in Saudi Arabia, members of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification will gather for their 16th conference. 

In addressing the intensification of droughts, the convention stresses the need to align efforts with the findings of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The convention’s approach is holistic: it highlights the interrelationship of terrestrial and marine ecosystems and encourages development that strengthens their resilience. It also recognises that pressures on ocean ecosystems and water resources are intimately linked to the need to secure food and water for millions of people.

This year has been marked by devastating cyclones and unprecedented ocean warming, alerting the world to the fundamental need to protect the oceans to mitigate climate change and safeguard biodiversity.

It is encouraging to note that behind every political decision there is a relentless activist struggle. One shaped by local, Indigenous and African-descendant communities that are increasingly mobilised to protect the oceans. 

As surfers know, it takes balance to get on the board. Taming the waves of change, which are already crashing, demands a triple balance: being guided by scientific and local knowledge, taking permanent action that is forceful, and having high ambition in the work to mitigate climate change. Get it right and before we know it, we will be on our feet, gliding across the sea.

Felipe Cárcamo Moreno is a programme analyst for FIMA, a Chilean environmental NGO. He works on ocean issues, especially illegal fishing. He also has a master’s degree in sociology.

This article appears courtesy of Dialogue Earth and may be found in its original form here. 

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

Overshot and Kaput: Humankind Wears Out Its Welcome

John Kendall Hawkins

 November 6, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When Noam Chomsky deflected questions about 9/11 — refused to speculate like a common theorist of conspiracies — but, in short, directed us to the Truth: We have bigger fish to fry and have to get to it ASAP.  No doubt, he wouldn’t deny that there were such men in the world who would be happy to be Insiders with sticks of dynamite. That shit built the world we know. People who spread opines like, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. This election is too important for the people to decide.” The Kissinger Doctrine, once so beloved, now junk.

Kissingers have been breeding like quazy wabbits since “we” double-tapped the Japs in ‘45. That is the way of the world.  The world we must change. What Chomsky wanted to draw our attention to was what we still had limited time to do something about, his Three Big Concerns: Climate Change, nuclear war, and the end of democracy. Any one of these could bring an end to the experiment/accident called human life on planet Earth. How do we force our leaders to address this problem?

In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso 2024) by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, we get a clear picture of where we, as a globe, are at regarding Climate Change policy. What we knew, when we knew it, and what we are doing about the crisis that definitely has Doom as a consequence of limited or non-action.  Malm and Carton begin by telling the reader that mitigation is what they mean by overshoot.  They write,  “Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to. It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.” This strikes Malm and Carton as hideous and maybe insane.

If mitigation, such as it is, doesn’t work, and it won’t, there is a post-mitigation plan.  “The dominant classes have to come up with secondary, backup measures for managing the consequences of excess heat.” Reassuring, isn’t it? they seem to enquire of the reader. The backup includes three options (or phases of bankruptcy, depending on how you look at it): Adaptation, carbon removal, and geoengineering.  “All three are also replete with repercussions, ranging from the annoying to the apocalyptic,” write the pair, who plan on publishing a separate analysis of the three backup options, already calling it The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late. “It will pay special attention to the psychic dimensions of the climate crisis,” they write, “notably the tremendous capacity of people in capitalist society to deny, and, when this no longer works, repress it.”

The authors focus on fossil fuels.  They can see that warnings fall on deaf ears.  They note that the world had a chance to take advantage of the proverbial silver lining that came with Covid-19 and its lockdown regimen.  They write,

“In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, something highly unusual took place: global CO2 emissions fell…The lockdowns that closed the highways of the world economy cut their total by some 5 or 6 per cent…coincidentally, the pandemic broke out just as the wave of climate mobilisations on streets from Berlin to Bogotá and Luanda to London crested – in 2019, this had been ‘the fastest-growing social movement in history’ – and so proposals were floated for using the pandemic to start the transition by then long overdue. These came to nothing.”

Came to nothing.  Miracles from God have been precious few for  millennia — this we all know — but seeing the CO₂plummet in 2020 was almost like a sign from heaven that our so-called covenant since Noah was still solid. But no. Selfishness rules.

The authors continue the chronicle of our planet’s demise.  In 2021, “CO₂ emissions rose by 6 per cent, or two gigatonnes.” Then the authors got trippy.  To picture an abstract gigatonne as a concrete image, they wrote, see a gigatonne as a unit of mass “which equals the weight of over 100,000,000 African elephants.” Two gigatonnes, then, would be the equivalent of 200,000,000 African elephants. Phew, I whistled. That would be heaven on Earth for the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest, but then I actually pictured two-thirds of the American population replaced by African elephants. That’s a lot of elephant shit. And methane. Phew, I held my nose.

The authors list the damage done already by climate catastrophe ignored for what it is — potentially eschatological in scope — “The double blow of a cyclone and an early monsoon …one third of Bangladesh under water…Pantanal, the planet’s largest wetland..enveloped in flames…in the Atlantic – thirty named storms; within a fortnight, two hurricanes lacerating Nicaragua…for the first time, a hurricane struck Somalia…(cities more deeply flooded) or introducing novelties (wetlands ablaze)…Swathes of ,,,Turkey and Greece…aglow, while in the Chinese province of Henan, a year’s worth of rain fell in three days – downpours ‘unseen in the last 1,000 years’ – but in southern Madagascar, drought forced eight in ten inhabitants to fill their stomachs with leaves, cacti and locusts.”  Almost there. Almost at the point where a plague of locusts arrives and is welcomed as a much-needed meal served up.

Overshoot is divided into a Preface and three main sections: The Limit Is Not a Limit; Fossil Capital Is a Demon, and Into the Long Heat. What we have going as mitigation is not enough; it’s not even a start. The culprit is the one we all know: Big Oil. The Long Heat means our children and children’s children will have to live underground to survive.  That’s what the book tells. Methodically. With detail. Last Chapter, like in its resignation to our fate. But — it does hold out the notion that some shock to the system’s dominant classes’s control of the shituation (h/t Peter Tosh) can lead to real mitigation.

I recall reading Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir, The Doomsday Machine. In it he relates how he and a RAND colleague went to see Dr. Strangelove when it came out, and how he and his companion agreed that the crazy shit they’d just seen came across as “essentially a documentary.”  In the film, one of the strangest scenes is the one where Dr. Strangelove explains how everyone, after the war, will have to live underground, but the good news is each man will be given a set of 10 beautiful women to restock the world with humans. Preferably of Nordic persuasion and pedigree. It is crazy thinking.

Some public policies are way too important for the elites and bloviators and technocrats to be put in charge of or to be ceded implicit control by the state in exchange for more and more money and power. In his most recent book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book co-written by ex-Google wonk Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, wherein Schmidt writes, “AI…is being applied to more elements of our lives; it is altering the role our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions.” Schmidt, who, in his previous book Empire of the Mind (later re-titled to The New Digital Age), envisioned hologram machines in the dens of dominant class families, so that spoiled kids could go on field trips to the slum of Mumbai, is all for ceding control of mind to machines.

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a planet go to shit due to the irresponsibility of its elites. This crisis – these myriad crises — are too important for the dinosaur people to deride. It’s time to get tough, pinky. Where up against false Darwinism and stolen plans. The time for clownin’ around and making faces is over.

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.