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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>January</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 16, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ AP news - increasing risk ]</i><br>
<b>More CEOs fear their companies won’t survive 10 years as AI and
climate challenges grow, survey says</b><br>
BY COURTNEY BONNELL<br>
January 15, 2024<br>
LONDON (AP) — More executives are feeling better about the global
economy, but a growing number don’t think their companies will
survive the coming decade without a major overhaul because of
pressure from climate change and technology like artificial
intelligence, according to a new survey of CEOs by one of the
world’s largest consulting firms, PwC.<br>
<br>
The survey of more than 4,700 CEOs worldwide was released Monday as
business elites, political leaders and activists descended on the
World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and it
showed a mixed picture of the coming years...<br>
...<br>
The online survey — which again showed that business is the most
trusted institution among government, media, science and
nongovernmental organizations — gathered responses from more than
32,000 respondents in 28 countries from Nov. 3 to Nov. 22.<br>
<br>
Similar to AI, the PwC survey shows that the climate transition is
both an opportunity and a risk. An increasing number of CEOs —
nearly a third — say climate change was expected to shift how they
do things over the next three years.<br>
<br>
More than three-quarters of the executives said they have begun or
completed changes to increase energy efficiency, but only 45% noted
that they have made progress on taking the climate risks into
account in financial planning.<br>
<br>
The PwC survey of 4,702 CEOs in 105 countries and territories was
conducted from Oct. 2 to Nov. 10.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://apnews.com/article/davos-ceo-survey-ai-climate-change-economy-cdf526bec5ce12812b5d2704dc054867">https://apnews.com/article/davos-ceo-survey-ai-climate-change-economy-cdf526bec5ce12812b5d2704dc054867</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ NYTimes goes for the headlines - clips from interview w
activist Andreas Malm ]</i><br>
<b>How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence</b><br>
By David Marchese<br>
Jan. 14, 2024<br>
With the 2021 publication of his unsettling book, “How to Blow Up a
Pipeline,” Andreas Malm established himself as a leading thinker of
climate radicalism. The provocatively titled manifesto, which, to be
clear, does not actually provide instructions for destroying
anything, functioned both as a question — why has climate activism
remained so steadfastly peaceful in the face of minimal results? —
and as a call for the escalation of protest tactics like sabotage...<br>
- -<br>
<b>But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy,
however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for
violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?
</b>Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t
seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge
of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President
Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it
accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in
the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something
like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult
question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to
take into account how democracy works in a country like the United
States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the
planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy
and should therefore be respected.<br>
<br>
<b>Could you give me a reason to live? </b>What do you mean?<br>
<br>
<b>Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human
project. </b>I’m not an optimist about the human project.<br>
<br>
<b>So give me a reason to live.</b> Well, here’s where we enter the
virgin territories of metaphysics.<br>
<b>Those are my favorite territories.</b> Wonderful.<br>
<br>
<b>I’m not joking. </b>Yeah, I’m not sure that I have the
qualifications to give people advice about reasons to live. My daily
affective state is one of great despair about the incredible
destructive forces at work in this world — not only at the level of
climate. What has been going on in the Middle East just adds to this
feeling of destructive forces completely out of control. The
situation in the world, as far as I can tell, is incredibly bleak.
So how do we live with what we know about the climate crisis?
Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to
keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you
are overwhelmingly strong. This often requires some kind of
religious conviction, because sometimes it seems irrational.<br>
<br>
<b>I think all you need to do is look at your children.</b> Yes, but
I have to admit to some kind of cognitive dissonance, because,
rationally, when you think about children and their future, you have
to be dismal. Children are fundamentally a source of joy, and
psychologically you want to keep them that way. I try to keep my
children in the category of the nonapocalyptic. I’m quite happy to
go and swim with my son and be in that moment and not think, Ah, 30
years from now he’s going to lie dead on some inundated beach. You
know what I mean?<br>
<br>
<b>Which of your arguments are you most unsure of?</b> I cannot
claim to have a good explanation for what is essentially a mystery,
namely that humanity is allowing the climate catastrophe to spiral
on. One of my personal intellectual journeys in recent years has
been psychoanalysis. Once you start looking into the psychic
dimensions of a problem like the climate crisis, you have to open
yourself to the fundamental difficulty in understanding what’s
happening.<br>
<br>
<b>Is it possible for you to summarize your psychoanalytic
understanding of the climate crisis?</b> Not simply, because it’s
so complex. On the far right, you see this aggressive defense of
cars and fossil fuels that verges on a desire for destruction, which
of course is part of Freud’s latent theory of the two categories of
drives: eros and thanatos.<br>
<br>
In Freud’s writings, he argued that individuals wrestle with the
desire to live, eros, and the desire to die, widely known as
thanatos.<br>
Another fundamental category in the psychic dimension of the climate
crisis is denial. Denial is as central to the development of the
climate crisis as the greenhouse effect.<br>
<br>
<b>What about you, psychoanalytically speaking?</b> I have my weekly
therapy on Thursday.<br>
<p><b>But what’s your deal? </b>You mean in my private life?</p>
<p><b>Yeah. </b>On a deeper level, the point for the psychoanalysis
is that you go back to your childhood and try to process your
relation to your parents and how they have constituted you. Do you
really want me to go there?</p>
<b>Yes.</b> I have to try to figure out how this ties in with my
climate activism. I guess this is some sort of a superego part of
it: a strong sense of duty or obligation; that I have to try to do
what I can to intervene in this situation. That’s a very strong
affective mechanism. For instance, I constantly give up on an
intellectual project that would be far more satisfying, a nerdy
historical project,<br>
<i>(That project is about what Malm calls a “people’s histories of
wilderness,” with a focus on how some have withdrawn “into the
wild to get away from oppression and potentially fight back.”<br>
because I feel that I cannot with good conscience do this when the
world is on fire.)</i><br>
<br>
<b>But I’m asking what caused your impulses.</b> Now we’re into the
deep psychoanalytic stuff. I had a vicious Oedipal conflict with my
father. One way that this came to express itself was that in the
preteen years, I clashed with my father — even more violently during
my teenage years. My way to defend myself against what I perceived
as his tyranny was to become as proficient as he was in arguing and
beat him in his own game by rhetorically defeating him. I think I
did. I think he accepted that I’m his superior when it comes to
writing and arguing. Psychoanalytically, of course, the things that
I’ve continued to do can be understood as an extension of my
formative rebellion against my authoritarian father in a classically
Oedipal setting, if you see what I mean.<br>
<br>
<b>I asked why you aren’t blowing up pipelines, and you gave this
answer about how action has to happen in the context of a
community and “Oh, but I have done very serious stuff” — there’s
something fishy. You have actually engaged in property
destruction? Or are you just scared of somebody calling you a
hypocrite? </b>There are things that I have done when it comes to
militant activism recently that I, as a matter of principle and
political expediency, do not reveal. Part of the whole point of it
is to not reveal it. Sure, someone could accuse me of being a
hypocrite because I don’t offer evidence that I have done anything
militant. But those close to me know. That’s good enough for me.<br>
<p><b>I also said, “Give me a reason to live.” </b>I will always
remember this. No one ever asked me this before.</p>
<b>And I said that one of the reasons to keep going is kids. But you
said their future is rationally going to be terrible. If you think
your children’s future is going to be terrible, why keep going?</b>
One of the arguments in this “Overshoot” book is that the technical
possibilities are all there. It’s a matter of the political trends.
This feeling that my kids will face a terrible future isn’t based on
the idea that it’s impossible to save us by technical means. It’s
just, to quote Walter Benjamin, the enemy has never ceased to be
victorious— and it’s more victorious than ever. That’s how it feels.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OE0.pA9P.ihxssceh4iFr&smid=url-share">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html?unlocked_article_code=1.OE0.pA9P.ihxssceh4iFr&smid=url-share</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ BBC reports on emotions ]</i><br>
<b>Climate anxiety: 'I don't want to burden the world with my child'</b><br>
15th January 2024<br>
By Navin Singh Khadka<br>
Environment correspondent, for BBC 100 Women<br>
Awareness of the climate crisis has generally been strongest in
developed countries, but "climate anxiety" is now also leading some
couples in other parts of the world to decide against having
children.<br>
<br>
Julia Borges' worries about climate change intensified during the
first months of the pandemic, when she and others were in isolation,
alone with their thoughts.<br>
<br>
"I started to picture my city and my university under water," says
the 23-year-old agriculture and engineering student from Recife, on
Brazil's north-eastern coast.<br>
<br>
"I started to have anxiety crises, to the point of thinking about
giving up on my own life, because I didn't know how to deal with it
all."<br>
<br>
Taking a course in climate leadership was little help - it only
increased her feeling of responsibility for what was happening. She
soon came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be right to have a
child.<br>
<br>
"I cannot see myself as responsible for the life of another human
being, for generating a new life that would become another burden to
a planet that is so overloaded already," Julia says.<br>
<br>
In 2022 a team from Nottingham University asked adults in 11
countries whether anxiety or distress about climate change had made
them think they should not have children, or had made them regret
having them. The proportion saying that they did have such thoughts
- sometimes, often or always - ranged from 27% in Japan to 74% in
India. The study is due to be published next year.<br>
<br>
An earlier study published in the Lancet, based on a 2021 survey of
10,000 people aged 16 to 25, found that more than 40% of respondents
in Australia, Brazil, India and the Philippines said climate change
made them hesitant about having children. In France, Portugal, the
UK and the US the figure was between 30% and 40%. In Nigeria it was
23%.<br>
<br>
And an analysis of 13 earlier studies carried out between 2012 and
2022, which was published this month by researchers from University
College London, found that concerns about climate change were
typically associated with a desire for fewer children.<br>
This was usually because participants were concerned about the
effect climate change might have on their children's lives, or
because they felt, like Julia, that more children would only add to
pressure on the planet's resources. However, in two studies in
Zambia and Ethiopia researchers say the dominant view was that
"smaller families are better positioned to support themselves during
adverse environmental conditions".<br>
<br>
In 2019 the singer Miley Cyrus said she wouldn't have children
because of the state of the planet, and US congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez asked on Instagram if it would be right to bring
children into a world blighted by climate change. The same debate
now seems to be happening in countries that are on the front line of
the climate crisis.<br>
<br>
BBC 100 Women names 100 inspiring and influential women around the
world every year and tells stories with women at the centre<br>
Meet 2023's 100 Women here<br>
Julia's concern about climate change only increased when in May
2022, Recife was hit by a storm that caused floods and landslides,
leading to more than 120 deaths in the region.<br>
<br>
"Just three days before those massive rains, I had given a lecture
to children from a local NGO, on the topic of climate crisis. Right
on the spot, as that was later the area most affected by the
flooding," she says. "That really affected me, in the sense of how
can we think about children in the future if the children of the
present are already in danger?"<br>
Shristi, 40, had been concerned about climate change long before
this. Eight years ago, she used to look at her sleeping newborn
daughter and worry about the world she would inherit.<br>
<br>
"Understanding how this world works, how climate change is changing
lives for the worst, for animals and children - this realisation
made me cry everyday. It was pretty horrible to me," she says.<br>
<br>
She vowed then not to have another child.<br>
<br>
This new tragedy in the village - which led to young girls being
married off by parents who couldn't feed them - caused her to have
sleepless nights, wracked by climate anxiety...<br>
<b><br>
What is climate anxiety?</b><br>
By psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, University of Bath<br>
<br>
Climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, is the healthy distress that we
feel when we look at what is happening in our changing world. We are
facing personal and planetary threats from our rapidly changing
climate. And it causes us to feel anxious and afraid for our own and
our children's futures.<br>
<br>
It is not just anxiety, but also sadness, depression, grief,
despair, anger, frustration, and confusion. We often have moments of
hope or optimism, but this can be hard to hold on to as we are
heading rapidly in the wrong direction and not taking sufficient
steps to slow down the climate crisis.<br>
<br>
For 24-year-old Ayomide Olude, who works for a sustainability NGO in
Nigeria, the experience of filming a documentary in a coastal
fishing community last year strengthened her determination never to
have a child.<br>
Residents of Folu, 100km east of Lagos, showed her a pier that had
been used in the past to have fun by the sea, almost all of which
was already under water.<br>
<br>
"During storm surges the flood water now reaches quite deep into the
village, so people are now leaving their houses," Ayomide says.
"This was where there was a real-estate boom in the past but now you
see abandoned houses and some parts of the village are already under
water."<br>
<br>
Fishermen told her their job was now unsafe, because storms had
become so intense.<br>
<br>
Ayomide says she often hears young Nigerians discuss their anxieties
in a "climate café" she runs in Ogun state, north of Lagos, a
setting where people are encouraged to share what they know and feel
about climate change. The experience in Folu sharpened her own
concerns.<br>
Like Julia in Brazil, she faces pressure from society and her family
to have children, but says nothing will persuade her to change her
mind.<br>
<br>
"In a society where women barely have the power to decide, and where
there are religious beliefs that one should have kids, it takes
considerable strength and determination to say this in public," she
says.<br>
<br>
"My parents are upset, and we don't talk about it much. I try not to
think about it although I feel sad for them."<br>
<br>
Shristi, for her part, has to cope with relatives continually asking
when she will have a second child.<br>
<br>
But all three women say their partners support their decision.<br>
University of Bath psychotherapist Caroline Hickman, the lead author
of the 2021 Lancet study, argues that climate anxiety is a healthy
response to the climate crisis.<br>
<br>
She advises anyone experiencing it to make contact with others who
feel the same way, and to collaborate with them on practical steps
to address the crisis.<br>
<br>
"These difficulties are not going away, so we need to learn how to
face them."
<blockquote><b>Tips for coping</b><br>
-- Be part of a community of like-minded people so you have people
to share feelings and thoughts with.<br>
-- Learn to regulate your emotions so you do not get overwhelmed
(feeling too much) or shut down (feeling too little). Mindfulness
and meditation can be helpful, but so is anything that helps to
build emotional resilience.<br>
--Then there is a possibility to "re-frame" eco-anxiety into
eco-care, eco-courage, eco-connection. --We should not try to get
rid of it, we only feel eco-anxiety because we care. We should
feel proud that we care!<br>
</blockquote>
<b>Caroline Hickman, University of Bath</b><br>
<br>
Julia has taken this path. She has helped map areas vulnerable to
flooding and landslides, and works for a local NGO that educates
people about the climate and the environment.<br>
<br>
"What helped me release some of that anxiety was to become an agent
of change and transformation in my community," she says.<br>
<br>
Nonetheless, her worries remain.<br>
<br>
"I can still feel that despair, but I've been working on it with my
therapist - and it helps to talk about it."<br>
<br>
Additional reporting by Paula Adamo Idoeta<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-67298903">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-67298903</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<br>
<i>[ From Real Climate - a little heavy on the geeky side of climate
science]</i><br>
<b>Not just another dot on the graph?</b><br>
12 JAN 2024 BY GAVIN <br>
<br>
As the climate monitoring groups add an additional dot to their
graphs this week, there is some disquiet among people paying
attention about just how extraordinary 2023 really was.<br>
<br>
First, it’s been obvious for months that 2023 would be a record year
– in temperatures (at the surface, troposphere and in the ocean), in
Antarctic sea ice, in the number of big climate disasters etc. But
this was not at all obvious at the beginning of the year – even
assuming that El Niño would develop by the this winter. Indeed, even
as late as October, with only two months to go, the estimates for
the annual mean still did not encompass the eventual annual number.<br>
<br>
In the GISTEMP product, the record was easily broken, and by a
record amount. Only the jump from 2014 to 2015 (coincidentally (?)
also a year in which El Niño developed over the year) was comparable
(both 2023 and 2015 broke the previous record by more than 0.15ºC).<br>
<br>
<b>Why oh why?</b><br>
<br>
So why was 2023 so special? There are lots of candidates, the
ongoing El Niño, aerosol decreases, the Hunga-Tonga eruption,
internal variability in southern ocean sea ice, extreme Indian-Ocean
dipole, the NAO, low levels of Saharan dust, and maybe all of the
above. However, none of them on their own are sufficient at least
with present estimates. Better quantification is possible (based on
updating the sulphate and water vapor data for HT in models, new
aerosol emission files, new climate simulations etc.), and the
progress of 2024 will hopefully also be informative. But right now,
it’s a puzzle.<br>
<br>
One swallow does not a summer make, and so I’m still withholding
judgement on the degree to which this is a blip or a systematic
shift, until we got some more of these factors quantified.<br>
<br>
<b>Through a glass, darkly</b><br>
<br>
The comparison figure above neatly illustrates another issue that
has come to the fore recently related to questions of exactly what
is the warming from the “pre-industrial”? It’s clear that the
multiple records post-1970 are all highly coherent (this is
something that wasn’t so true 5 years ago, but since everyone now
interpolates over the Arctic, the differences have reduced sharply).
However, going back before 1940, there is a noticeable increase in
the divergence of the records. This is mostly due to the sea surface
temperature part of the product – and the two main efforts to define
that, HadSST and ERSST from NOAA, adopt quite different methods to
fill in missing data in the early part of the record. This leads to
a roughly 0.1 to 0.2ºC difference in ‘pre-industrial’ baselines
(Berkeley Earth, HadCRUT5 (and hence Copernicus/ERA5) use HadSST and
are ~0.15ºC cooler in 1850-1900 than NOAA or NASA (who use ERSSTv5).
For reference, 2023 is 1.39, 1.49, 1.37, 1.55ºC warmer than
1880-1900 for GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA, and Berkeley Earth,
respectively, and it is 1.48, 1.34 and 1.54ºC warmer than 1850-1900
for HadCRUT5, NOAA and Berkeley Earth (the difference between the
baselines is around 0.01 to 0.03ºC). It’s worth noting that there
are some improvements in the uncertainty models for these products
are in the pipeline (for instance, Lenssen et al, subm on the new
GISTEMP ensemble).<br>
<br>
This spread is frustrating to some folks who want (but will not get)
a clear answer to the 1.5ºC question, but I would argue that this
frustration is largely misplaced. The level of uncertainty that
exists (around 0.2ºC) is simply not policy relevant (in the sense
that no decisions related to mitigation or adaptation depend
crucially on this number). Mitigation of CO2 and CH4 emissions is a
worthwhile to reduce future climate risk regardless of whether we
are at 1.4 or 1.6ºC above 1850 (the WMO has 1.45±0.12ºC (90% CI)),
and adaptation to current and foreseeable future changes is a good
idea regardless.<br>
<br>
<b>Ongoing issues</b><br>
<br>
Last year at this time, I discussed ongoing work to understand
trends in the Southern Ocean. Some of this work was recently
published (Schmidt et al., 2023; Roach et al., 2023). The upshot is
that the impact of recent anomalous freshwater from the melting of
the ice sheet is enough to change the sign of the sea ice and SST
trends from 1990 onward, and that the winds are a very good
predictor of the interannual variability – and combined, you get a
pretty good match to the observations…. until around 2016, when the
rapid decline in sea ice extent starts. Efforts to update and
improve the freshwater estimates will be undertaken this spring
(register for the workshop here!).<br>
<br>
As usual, updated graphics can always be found here, and I will
undertake to update the model-observation comparisons over the next
week or so.<br>
<br>
<b>Final amusing anecdote</b><br>
<br>
While of no salience whatsoever, it’s funny to see how the
denialists are dealing with all this. Of course, the records being
set in the UAH TLT record blows the ‘climate has been cooling since
2016’ trope that they used through to about last summer, leaving
them no plausible data refuge. No matter, they then switched to
promoting a totally bogus website run by an anonymous coder that
purports to give updated global temperature data, but is obviously
totally borked. Funnily enough, this ‘data’ also has an upward
trend! The subsequent flail is to retreat to “there is no such thing
as global mean temperature!” (sure_jan.gif), and that our inability
to explain everything about the (non-existent) temperature record is
a sign that the ‘science isn’t settled’ (ha!) and therefore we know
nothing (surprise!). Some things in climate remain extremely
predictable.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2024/01/not-just-another-dot-on-the-graph/">https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2024/01/not-just-another-dot-on-the-graph/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><i><br>
</i> </p>
<i>[ Climate & Capitalism - a deep, but obvious question. ]</i><br>
<b>Do capitalists want to kill humanity … and themselves?</b><br>
January 14, 2024<br>
What mad ideas lie behind capitalism’s drive towards planetary
catastrophe?<br>
by João Camargo<br>
<br>
There’s a complicated question we can’t run away from anymore. Do
the elites of capitalism want to die? <br>
<br>
If they know the origin and consequences of the climate crisis and
don’t solve it, aren’t they actively destroying the material
foundations – a stable global climate, predictability in terms of
soil and water for agriculture, availability of water and
habitability of territories where hundreds of millions of people
live. Aren’t they digging their own grave?<br>
<br>
The answer is yes. The political and economic elites of capitalism
are pushing us (and themselves) towards collapse. To ours and their
catastrophe.<br>
<br>
There are those who answer no and go on to explain that they have an
extra plan, which we don’t know about. They use this argument to put
themselves in one of two comfortable positions:<br>
<br>
Saying (and believing?) there is no climate change.<br>
Saying (and believing?) there is a solution that is yet to appear.<br>
Another issue is also raised: they’re not planning on dying, as they
have huge plans to profit from the climate crisis.<br>
<br>
Both answers are true. They’re not planning on dying, and they have,
as they always do, plans to profit off of everything.<br>
<br>
I’ve struggled with this question ever since I realized that climate
change existed, almost 20 years ago. I was initially paralyzed by
the lack of an answer.<br>
<br>
For a long time I watched what was happening, hoping I was wrong.
Maybe there was no climate change, maybe someone was working it out
in the shadows.<br>
<br>
Many were making money, as always. I watched the unstoppable rise in
emissions, accompanying the now dizzying rise in temperature, the
institutional process of the COPs, the Kyoto protocol, the Paris
Agreement, the repetitive talk of technology that was going to but
never did solve the growing emissions. The fact that I didn’t have
the answers didn’t mean the questions weren’t right.<br>
<br>
How is it that such an articulated global system, with so many
resources at its disposal, pushes its foundations – humanity, water,
soil, natural resources – towards collapse? It’s counterintuitive,
irrational. Nevertheless, it is what is happening.<br>
<br>
The main explanation for this is usually attributed to the inertia
of the capitalist system, a machine so colossal and total that it
has made all social, political and economic principles conform to
its rules. That’s why the board or the management of a company that
doesn’t grow and expand (or grow and expand more than its rivals) is
pushed out . It is the reason why a country that doesn’t colonize or
intensify the exploitation of its people or resources sees its
governance harassed or removed. That is why every aspect of our
social and private lives is being commodified or is already a
commodity.<br>
<br>
To this I would now add another explanation: the alienation of the
elites under capitalism. I take this idea from the work of Antonio
Gramsci. To understand, I need to explain Gramsi’s ideas about
ideology.<br>
<br>
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian communist organiser and unparalleled
thinker. He wrote down his ideas while he was a political prisoner
in Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s and 30s. Gramsci challenged two
dominant ideas of his time: epiphenomenalism and class
reductionism. Shortly, epiphenomenalism was a theory about physical
and mental realities, advocating that mental states (such as ideas
and ideology) were completely dependent on physical states, that is,
that only material conditions determine ideology.<br>
<br>
Gramsci questioned the direct correlation between ideological
superstructure and economic infrastructure, previously (and
subsequently) assumed almost as a ‘natural law’. Gramsci denied the
idea that capitalist society would inevitably collapse as a result
of its own economic laws and contradictions that lead to
pauperisation of the working glass and to environmental collapse.
The question of consent as a part of power, rather than pure
coercion by the class in power was central, as it lead to the
question of hegemony in society.<br>
<br>
Gramsci divided the “integral state” into two spheres. One was
Political Society: the coercive apparatus to conform the masses
according to the type of production and economy at any given moment.
The other was Civil Society: the hegemony of a social group over the
entirety of society exercised through private organisations like-
the church, the unions and the schools.<br>
<br>
Refusing class reductionism in ideology, Gramsci denied that there
were pure class ideologies, he defined ideology as a set of
practices, principles, and dogmas with a material and institutional
nature in which individual subjects were ‘inserted’. In his view
ideology still is a system of class rule and hegemony. But it is
brought together not only by coercion, economic structure or class,
but also through an organic arrangement that assembles a unified
system, an “organic ideology”. This organic ideology expresses the
hegemony of an economic class through economic supremacy and the
ability to articulate essential elements in the ideological
discourses of the subordinate classes in civil society.<br>
<br>
The concept of hegemony in Gramsci makes it clear that the stability
of a regime or system depends on its ability to manage and preserve
power through a strategy he named “passive revolution”, that keeps
alternative hegemonies from developing. Individuals and groups are
not only “victims” though, as the basis for hegemony implies some
form of acceptance of the relationship, usually through a trade-off.<br>
<br>
In Gramsci’s words, this trade-off comes from “collusion in the
success of a strategy of passive revolution, which responds to
pressures from below by incorporating popular demands. Such a
strategy can succeed in improving the lives of enough of the
population to legitimate hegemonic claims as long as economic
conditions permit”.<br>
<br>
Through many different and complementary mechanisms – discourses,
institutions, culture, media and laws, ideologies struggle to
produce hegemonic tools to become organic ideologies. When these
become “naturalised”, they turn into metanarratives. These are the
“bigger stories”, the often unspoken stories we rarely think of, but
rather simply assume, the naturalised ideas that are no longer ideas
in that we do not use them to question issues, but rather use them
to reply to questions about most issues.<br>
<br>
Metanarratives reside in the fact that we are social animals: we
build community and we take comfort in sharing either explicit or
implicit world views. When metanarratives achieve a mature level of
naturalisation, they become forgotten and are assumed as “human
nature”. In fact, they are the closest we can get to human nature,
in that it is a collective idea that is widely shared. Yet they may
not have any grounds in nature or reality.<br>
<br>
Even the promoters of a metanarrative can and often do become
engulfed by it – and this is one of the most relevant
characteristics of our current situation. A metanarrative it is not
only a tool through which a ruling class dominates the productive
system and articulates the ideological discourse of the subordinate
classes. By by becoming naturalised, it articulates the ideological
discourses of all classes – including the very ruling classes,
fixing them into a worldview that can damage even these very
classes.<br>
<br>
In order to dominate humanity, the capitalist elites have produced
countless stories, narratives, traditions, institutions, laws,
schools, art forms, think tanks, newspapers, media outlets,
commentators and other devices over the centuries. It’s not a
conspiracy, it just became the shared story we tell each other every
day.<br>
<br>
To reduce barriers to expansion and exploitation, the elites have
created a series of common ideas – people of a different color are
inferior, women are inferior to men, those who are rich deserve it,
poverty is laziness, there are magical mechanisms that “regulate”
local and even global trade, the “wild” and the natural are things
to be dominated. Some are new ideas, others are recycling of very
old ideas, and also represent the historical alliances capitalism
made to thrive: with the patriarchy, with colonialism, with applied
sciences, among other.<br>
<br>
A key issue is that part of these ideas have to do with the elites
themselves, their self-image of exceptionality, merit and
intelligence. Another is the magical characteristics attributed to
humanity – led, of course, by the capitalist elite. These include
humanity’s insurmountable intelligence and capability of
technological miracles. This technopositivism is science as
ideology. In the end, like in the movie Armageddon, we’ll be able to
mine a meteorite in space, put an atomic bomb there and detonate it
before it collides with the earth. Bravo.<br>
<br>
Most of these ideas, created and propagated to maintain the power
structure, have become naturalized over time. They no longer need to
be said, they have become culture. They are not a narrative, they
don’t need to be spelled out, because they are a metanarrative, they
are what society has come to use as a tool to answer things.<br>
<br>
The elites themselves, instead of just using these vast set of ideas
to dominate the other classes, actually came to be dominated by
them. They came to believe the mystical hype about their role in the
world and in society, about capitalism as the only way to organize
human societies, about historical miracles and about the end of
history. They are still doing so despite their tiny historical
existence and despite the fact that some of their own institutions
recognize that they are jeopardizing the subsistence of global
civilization.<br>
<br>
The test of status quo ideas and culture comes whenever material
disruption collides with the stories society tells itself. That’s
what’s happening with the climate crisis. It’s still easier to
imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but soon,
it won’t be anymore. Another story needs to emerge for us to be able
to prevent climate breakdown.<br>
<br>
Capitalism is such an alienated form of organization that, despite
knowing the outcome of the climate crisis for decades, its agents at
a global level have launched a huge amount of renewable energy but
haven’t taken fossils off the grid, they’ve just added more
productive capacity and more emissions. It’s not an accident, it’s a
compulsory need derived from their very own metanarrative in which
they are stuck. They can’t help themselves, it is their core social
and cultural programming. They will never be able to solve the
crisis, but only to deepen it. We need to overthrow them or their
death pulse will lead us all into collapse.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/01/14/do-capitalists-want-to-kill-humanity-and-themselves/">https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/01/14/do-capitalists-want-to-kill-humanity-and-themselves/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[The news archive - Al Gore is a part of
history ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>January 16, 2006 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> lJanuary 16, 2006: At a speech in
Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C., former Vice President Al Gore
declares:<br>
<br>
"[T]he American people, who have a right to believe that its elected
representatives will learn the truth and act on the basis of
knowledge and utilize the rule of reason, have been let down.<br>
<br>
To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic
consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a
political appointee in the White House with no scientific training
whatsoever.<br>
<br>
"Today one of the most distinguished scientific experts in the world
on global warming, who works in NASA, has been ordered not to talk
to members of the press; ordered to keep a careful log of everyone
he meets with so that the executive branch can monitor and control
what he shares of his knowledge about global warming.<br>
<br>
"This is a planetary crisis. We owe ourselves a truthful and
reasoned discussion."<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600779.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600779.html</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD_2e1dIl2s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD_2e1dIl2s</a><br>
<br>
<p><font face="Calibri"> <br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><br>
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--------------------------------------- <br>
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