⚰️Choosing Slow Extinction: Labour's Immorality on Climate
“If warming reaches 2 °C … mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans”
-- Peer Reviewed Paper in Energies, July 2023
"If you feel our children need a party that conserves, that fights for … the careful bond between this generation and the next – then let me tell you, Britain already has one"
--Keir Starmer’s conference speech.
The greatest denial – probably the greatest to exist in human history – is the lie that the “climate problem” is linear. Meaning that it just exists – like slavery, inequality, dictatorship, - you name it. It’s there, it’s obscene but if you don’t sort it this year, well there’s always next year – it will be much the same. Slavery will still be there – but it won’t be 10 times bigger next year, and 100 times bigger a year after that.
Compare that with a meteorite heading for New York in one of those movies. You can do nothing – you can slow it down a bit, or you can destroy it. Options 1 and 2 are effectively the same. With both options, the kilometre-wide rock crashes into the city and millions of people die. There is only one moral option – the third, which is to destroy the rock. This is not politics, it’s not ideology, it’s physics.
The “climate” is independent of “politics”. The present Labour Party has the wildly irrationalist notion that politics comes first –that the climate can be fitted into its logic. This means that to win power Labour must not do too much on climate and so climate has to be constructed as “having not much needing to be done to it”. But the climate is not socially constructed. It’s physical. It’s non-negotiable.
At between 1-2C of global heating, all the main tipping points will be passed with the resultant main scenario that the human race will effectively go extinct - 8 billion deaths in the coming two to three generations. If you doubt this then you have – with respect – simply not been paying attention. Tipping points are like dominos and you just follow the peer-reviewed papers on what happens when one domino falls then what happens when this leads to the next one being knocked down and you continue to follow the science along the line.
The debate about the “odds” of various levels of mass death is as obscene as questioning whether 5 or 6 million Jews were murdered by Hitler. Does it matter whether 4 or 8 billion people die? It does not matter whether there is a 10% or 30% chance of going over 5C during the lifetime of our children. Only a culture which has descended into the depths of moral depravity entertains whether such odds justify the risks of continuing the emission of more carbon.
Which brings us to the psychotic stupidity of Keir Starmer. We do not need to get lost in the weeds of whether he will cancel Rosebank or just stop new drilling from the point of winning the election. All we have to recognise is that the ideology is inseparable from the project to create mass death because the essence of that ideology is to act as a house slave to international capital – to the carbon system. Only a revolutionary change in the structure of the state, society, and culture over the next decade has any chance of actually stopping the meteorite devastating New York. Option three is political revolution.
The Labour Party needless to say is never going to do anything even approaching option three. It has no intention of “conserving the careful bond between this generation and the next”. Its intention is to stand by and have our children die slightly slower than the Tory Party.
The analogy with a meteorite of course is radically inadequate. The hyperobject that is the “climate” is the ecological collapse of the whole planet, not one city, causing billions of deaths and going on effectively forever. There is no greater crime than for a political party to allow this to happen. And there is no greater crime than to vote for a party that will facilitate such evil.
House slaves will say what they always say – “We have no choice” but to submit to those who impose humiliation and murder upon us. But their demand for our submission is always the Big Lie. We are human for one simple reason – we always have “free will” – we always have the choice to revolt.
Concretely, around the Western world, some people will now do whatever it takes to stop this system from violating everything we value – there are plans afoot in many countries to bring people together, rediscover our humanity, and create mass movements to replace the regime of pathological political parties with alternative governmental institutions based upon popular assemblies. With rule by the people for the people. The centuries-long dream has now become a matter of life or death. And we will choose life.
The Labour Party leadership will disappear into the dustbin of history as the last gasp of an inexpressibly dumb and cruel social episode – a cesspit of self-serving delusion.
We are all so much better than that. Aren’t we? We will show ourselves to be so in the next two years.
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This week especially feels like we live in a foreign country - where the real is disregarded and the dream is all pervasive. Where protest is ruled over by power. Where power is about to have us die.https://t.co/eQczMptQSX https://t.co/syPx0Oyt5k
- Roger Hallam (@RogerHallamCS21) October 14, 2023
