The party is over

Since the Industrial Revolution, the West has been living as if there is no tomorrow. Fueled by the remnants of fossils that had been accumulating underground for hundreds of millions of years, over a few centuries economic growth exploded like never in thousands of years of human history.

People have been warning for decades that we were living on borrowed time, but now we know for sure that the fossil fuels party is over. The latest UN report on climate makes it clear that already we have inflicted irreversible damage that can’t be fixed and will take centuries or millennia just to begin to reverse. There is no more time for delay and denial.

The problems of burning coal for heating, trains, ships, and factories were almost immediately evident in cities like London where the air became thick with a mixture of fog and smoke. The smog obscured the sun, respiratory illnesses increased, and even the insects were affected. As trees turned black from soot, insects with white coloration became easy prey and dark-colored ones proliferated.

Not until early in the twentieth century did consciousness about the global effects of the massive burning of fossil fuels begin to dawn, and then only as a far-off prospect. The web site Mashable reports that:

“Nearly 110 years ago, a New Zealand newspaper warned that the great ‘furnaces of the world’ would raise Earth’s temperature. ‘The effect may be considerable in a few centuries,’ the paper wrote.”

The paper was prescient but overly optimistic. It took less than a century for scientists to begin raising the alarm. It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century, however, that the long term and global effects of the massive burning of fossil fuels began to be understood. By the late 20th century, the level of alarm, as reflected in the reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative source on the subject, rose progressively. The 2021 report represents a quantum leap in this regard, “a final wake up call” that warns about threats that are “unequivocal and unprecedented.”  The future of the human species is at stake. How did we come to this pass?

The interests that enriched themselves royally from the Industrial Revolution—a small sliver of the population—championed unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism under which the government didn’t interfere if gaseous garbage was freely spewed into the atmosphere.  Air, the most basic need for human existence, became toxic; the harm fell on the mass of workers while the owners accrued the profits.

This is the basic blueprint that has existed ever since, despite government interventions to curb environmental pollution and social reforms that for a time decreased economic inequality. Especially in the United States, after four decades of laissez faire ideology and Republican political predominance, these reforms have been severely eroded.

The Trump administration was the culmination of it all: laissez faire, corporate license to pollute and despoil, economic inequality, climate change denialism. But Trump, which in his own eyes and those of reactionary counterrevolution that would undo all the reforms, from those of the progressive era of the early 20th century right up to those brought by Barack Obama.

In a single term, Trump’s counterrevolution succeeded, to a considerable extent, in turning back the clock a few hours, but the agenda was unfinished. The plan was to complete that during a second term, more brutal than the first. Therein lies the strength with which the seismic shock that Trump’s electoral defeat convulsed Trump and his Republican counterrevolutionaries—and their outraged, seditious, violent reaction.

We were almost there, so close to our dreams, they thought. They were dismayed at the fact that they were able to weaken but unable to destroy Obamacare; lower taxes on the rich radically but not abolish the income tax; dilute but not repeal all gun laws; make the civil and voting rights acts merely symbolic but not abolish them entirely; unleash the police and the rest of the punitive apparatus to mete out violence and punishment against protesters, political opponents, and minorities but not to use the FBI, the Justice Department, the Capitol police, and the military to steal an election; to return to capital punishment but only at the federal level and not on a big scale; dismantle much but not all of the regulatory apparatus; let the corporations do almost whatever they wanted but not all they wanted: frack the earth, frack consumers, frack workers, frack democracy—until they couldn’t.

The failed January 6 insurrection did not shame them, chasten them, or dissuade them from their goals but spurred them to double down. They aim to complete their counterrevolution come what may. I think of them like the goons who shot down labor union strikers on behalf of the mining companies in the early twentieth century and the founders of the second KKK, who aimed to terrorize Blacks and immigrants coming from Italy and Eastern Europe during the same period. Bad actors.

The fate of humanity, the earth and democracy, is in the balance. From now to 2022 and 2024, we must lobby, organize, work, and vote. Let’s tell them, in a single loud voice: Frack you!