Burn the Planet and Lock Up the Dissidents
Roger Hallam — by Mr. Fish
The fossil fuel industry, and the politician class they own, have no intention of halting the ecocide. As the climate crisis worsens, so do the laws and security measures to keep us in bondage.
by Chris Hedges
Norfolk, U.K. — I am sitting with Roger Hallam, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, in the visitor’s room at HM Prison Wayland. On the walls are large photographs of families picnicking on lawns, verdant meadows and children playing. The juxtaposition of the photographs, no doubt hung to give the prison visiting room a homey feel, is jarring. There is no escaping, especially with prison guards circulating around us, where we are. Roger and I sit on squat upholstered chairs and face each other across from a low, white plastic table. Roger’s lanky frame tries to adjust to furniture designed to accommodate children.
Roger, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil, is serving a five-year prison sentence for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse.”
He and his four co-defendants, who each received four-year sentences, were convicted for hosting a Zoom call in 2022 to organize activists to climb onto bridges over the M25, the main motorway that circles Greater London. The short-term aim was to stop traffic. The long-term aim was to force the government to stop new oil and gas licenses.
This was not a symbolic protest, exemplified by protesters hurling tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, preserved by protective glass, in the National Gallery in London. It was a protest designed to disrupt, as it did, commerce and the machinery of state. Although even the protestors who tossed soup at the painting, which was not damaged, received harsh prison terms of nearly three years.
Global warming is expected to exceed 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the 2020s and 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit) before 2050, according to a 2023 study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change journal. NASA scientists warn that “a 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur.”
The more the planet warms, the more extreme events such as severe droughts, heat waves, intense storms, and heavy rainfall intensify. The extinction of animal and plant life — one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction — accelerates.
We are on the verge of tipping points, thresholds beyond which ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, and other components of the climate system sustain and accelerate irreversible changes. There are also tipping points in ecosystems, which can become so degraded that no effort to save them can halt the effects of runaway climate change. At that point “feedback loops” see environmental catastrophes accelerate each other. The game will be up. Nothing will save us.
Mass death from climate disasters is becoming the norm. The official death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 227, making it the deadliest in mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In North Carolina, South Carolina and northern Georgia 1.1 million people remain without power. Mountain towns, without electricity and cell phone service, are cut off. Hundreds of people are missing with many of them feared dead. Anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people were killed last year in a single night by Cyclone Daniel in Libya.
These climate catastrophes, which occur routinely in the Global South, will soon characterize life for all of us.
“A billion refugees, the worst episode of suffering in human history,” Roger says of the 2 degrees Celsius mark, “and then human extinction.”
And yet with the devastation outside their doors, including the Southwest United States enduring the highest temperatures ever recorded in October — 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Palm Springs — the global oligarchs have no intention of risking their privilege and power by disrupting an economy driven by fossil fuel and animal agriculture, which is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock and their byproducts account for 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released each year into the atmosphere and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead of a rational response, we get more drilling and oil leases, more catastrophic storms, more wildfires, more droughts, toxic factory farms, the charade of the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP) summits, the eradication of the rain forests and the false panacea of geoengineering, carbon capture and artificial intelligence.
Fossil fuel subsidies have increased worldwide — from $2 trillion to $7 trillion according to the International Monetary Fund — as governments seek to protect consumers from rising energy prices. This is despite the fact that two years ago, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.
The governments that facilitate genocide in Gaza are, not surprisingly, the overlords of global genocide.
As the Swedish author and professor of human ecology Andreas Malm writes, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth.”