Thumbs in the Dike

most of October and November doing eviction resistance. It all started with the right wing vigilantes who carried out a series of drive by attacks on the camps. At first, they just lobbed firecrackers, but that soon evolved into emptying handguns into tents. In response, the camps organized roving defensive teams. There were a couple of gunfights and one death, although you weren't around for any of those. By the time the attack stopped, you had a large, organized group of

people used to taking direct action. From that point, making the jump to proactively stopping evictions wasn't such a big deal. Half the landlords in your part of town had jumped ship for other cities with less intense climates. Many of their properties were sold to banks, or large rental companies.

Unemployment in your city hit as high as thirty percent by some counts, and more people nationwide are out on the street than there have ever been at any point in your life, at least where you live, though people have options. There are now five camps hosting more than five thousand people. Two of them are based out of large apartment complexes, two were in city parks, and the fifth is made from several square blocks of the city

that had an eviction rate topping eighty percent. Some of the people joining collectives are asking for help are folks who months ago surely supported the cops cracking down on encampments. Now they're on your side, driven by desperation. You try not to let that piss you off. What matters is that you're in this together now, and aggressive eviction offense has kept hundreds of your neighbors in their homes and

helped the population in the camps stay manageable. But of course the landlords aren't happy with that, and local business owners keep blaming the camps for graffiti and hampering the recovery. You spend enough time online to know this ship is happening all around the country and eviction defense action in

Portland turned into a gun battle. Activists in l A responded to the tear gassing of an encampment by bombing an l A p D van, and worst of all, the NYPD killed three activists while clearing out a squat in Brooklyn. Every day, two different digital collectives allied with the encampments gather not just news of different protests around the country, but tactical information and after action reports. You, Tom, and all of the other hundreds of people in the

Defensive Committee have been taking notes. You've welded together cal trips and dote vehicle barricades, rigged up paint cannons to coat police car windshields, and experimented with a dozen other tactics to protect the main camps. This is bigger than your hometown and your little movement. The federal government has responded to the absolute societal free fall of the last year by blaming anarchists in government, extremists, and an addiction

to government entitlements. Disaster funding keeps being slashed, which is where a lot of this started anyway, But the President just announced a raft of emergency police funding using money the last administration had remarked for climate resiliency projects. You've spent the last few days going about your duties with a sense of doom hanging over your head. It's not just the imminent government crackdown. The food situation has gotten

increasingly tenuous. Wheat crops saw less than half their normal harvest. Even potatoes dropped significantly. Several of the camps have started permaculture projects in greenhouses, but no one is growing anything like what you need to feed all these people. Donations helped for a while, but everyone's tapped. For the last few weeks. You've been able to close the gap by sending out dumpster diving teams into the neighborhoods with stocked

grocery stores and functioning restaurants. One of your neighbors works in an Amazon warehouse, and he provided Tom with information on how to break in and where to find the dried goods. All this has helped, but the police have grown increasingly aware of your efforts. People in the rich neighborhoods have been using a community defense app to warn the police about criminals stealing food. Mark, a guy you sort of knew from a few past eviction defenses, was

shot dead outside of a safeway two nights back. We can't keep going on like this, Tom says, And he tells you he's been reaching out to an old marine buddy of his who lives on a farm a couple hours out of town. They've got food, but their grid is still fucked from the summer, and half the small farms out there have lost so much production that they're

on the edge of eviction themselves. We have electricians, we can get equipment, and we've got manpower people who will help harvest and stand up against the sheriff's department if there's an eviction. You'd be lying if you said Tom's suggestion didn't scare you a little bit. By bit, the daily grind of survival, building resiliency and protecting your community has grown to feel more seditious. That seems a bit strong. But now you're talking about treating fighters for food to

defend a farming town against the police. That's nuts. Fuck it. You tell Tom, let's get the others together and talk about it. Seems like a good idea to me. In night, climate scientist James Hansen testified to the Senate and claimed for the first time that human influence on warning was

discernible and separate from natural variability. James was not the first expert to warn about what we now call climate change, but he was the first one to get up in front of the country and give a warning in such a clear and unequivocal way at a time when many of his fellows would him and haw about natural variability. At the time, there was tremendous debate, fueled by donations from the fossil fuel industry and politicians eager for a culture war, about whether or not Hansen was a doomsayer

or a prophet. We now know that he was, if anything, too optimistic. The warming trends we have seen put us roughly thirty years ahead of his most dire predictions. It's worth digging into exactly how has happened part of the story you already know. Companies like Exxon spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last forty years funding think tanks and propaganda campaigns designed to so doubt over the

reality of climate change or global warming. As a child growing up in the Bible Belt, nearly everything I learned about climate change was filtered through this lens. The picture painted by media pundits and best selling authors like Michael Crichton was that scientists were at worst corrupt shills pushing an environmentalist agenda, and at best alarmist's ginning up panic over minor fluctuations in climate. Paul Erlick came up quite

often in this context. In the late nineteen sixties, he was an entomologist at Stanford University who released a book called The Population Bomb. Its first sentence was, the battle to feed all of humanity is over. Paul predicted that in the nineteen seventies, hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death due to overpopulation, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. The Population Bomb sparked a global panic and an anti population growth

movement that led to repressive laws around the world. It also didn't come true, thanks in large part to the green Revolution sparked by Agronomius. To Norman Borlog's work, there was no mass starvation. Borlog has been rightfully lauded for creating new hybrid seeds that vastly increased the amount of calories farmers in places like India were able to produce. His work is credited with saving as many as a

billion lives. I first learned about him on Penn and Teller's Bullshit, a libertarian themed science he show that was popular in the early aughts for the same reason as South Park. Both shows managed to be anti liberal without being right wing in the traditional sense. For kids raised conservative but disillusioned with the Republican Party due to the Iraq War, these shows provided seemingly clever arguments for why both sides were dumb and the smartest thing to do

was make fun of them. This is not a bad thing under all circumstances. If you reflexively to like both the Republican and Democratic parties, you will be right more often than you were wrong. But in the early at some prominent Democrats, most significantly al Gore, did try to warn people about climate change. These folks were framed as alarmists, like Paul Erlick. Penn and Teller were one of a number of popular voices that specifically used Borlog's example to

attack environmentalists worried about global warming. We'd better develop and ever improved science and technology, including the new by technology to produce the foodia needed for the world to day. Unfortunately, the humanitarian efforts of people like Dr Borlog are undermined

by Greenpeace and other assholes. Now, Pinjillette has somewhat come around on climate change in recent days, but even in twenty nineteen, in this interview for the Origins podcast, he's stuck to the same line about al Gore being an alarmist. I think that there's no way you can deny that is climate change. I've completely changed on that, although completely changed is a little bit confusing because I never went

beyond I don't know what bothers me about. The climate change thing was a great disservice done by al Gore of exaggerating. We now know that not only did Algor not exaggerate, but it would actually be fair to attack him for painting far too rosie a picture of what climate change would cause and the adaptations are society would need to adopt in order to mitigate it. I'm harping on Penn and Teller in particular because this exact line of thinking has led to the most durable sort of

climate denial I've seen in my own life. Earlier this year, my father and I endured the most severe snowstorm in Texas history together. When I tried to talk about climate change. He brought up Paul Erlick and the fact that even if climate change is as bad as they say, some Norman Borlog will along with a scientific solution that will save us. There is no sign of this so far.

Carbon capture technology, which works by capturing carbon before it can reach the atmosphere, has proved to be extremely disappointing. Only about point one percent of annual global emissions from fossil fuels are captured at present, and of the carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from wells by pumping that carbon into the ground to force oil out. But still Boorlog shadow looms large over

the climate question. Today's episode is about the different paths to mitigation and adaptation that we might see in the future as the damage caused by climate change becomes too great to ignore. Weight and hope for a super genius is certainly the path some individuals and probably some politicians will continue to take. The myth of the Leonaire inventor and the personality colts around men like Elon Musk and their own little green projects has made this a popular

school of thought over the last decade. The good news is that we've already reached a point of calamity great enough that support for this sort of solution is probably past its peak. On the day I write this chapter, July, the Guardian has just published an article warning that yet another heat dome is set to settle over the entire

continental United States. The article quoted Michael Verner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, quote, you expect hotter heat waves with climate change, but the estimates may have been overly conservative. With the Pacific Northwest heat wave, you conclude the event would almost be impossible without climate change, But in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer, you'd also include it would be impossible with climate change too.

That is problematic because the event happened. For years, climate scientists have been attacked as alarmist, Yet the growing can census is that they were actually too conservative with their warnings. The situation was more severe than most reports portrayed. Before we go further, it's worth looking at why this was.

I found a good scientific American article from two thousand nineteen by the authors of a book called Discerning Experts, which analyze the methods by which experts had assessed environmental damage in order to provide policy recommendations. They found a consistent tendency by scientists to underestimate the severity of threats

and the rapidity with which they might unfold quote. Among the factors that appear to contribute to underestimation is the perceived need for consensus, or what we might label univocality, the felt need to speak in a single voice. Many scientists worry that if disagreement has publicly aired, government officials will conflate differences of opinion with ignorance and use this

as justification for an action. Others worry that even if policymakers want to act, they will find it difficult to do so if scientists fail to send an unambiguous message there or they will actively seek to find their common ground and focus on areas of agreement. In some cases, there will only put forward conclusions on which they can

all agree. How does this lead to underestimation? Consider a case in which most scientists think that the correct answer to a question is in the range of one to ten, but some belief that it could be as high as one hundred. In such a case, everyone will agree that it is at least one to ten, but not everyone will agree that it could be as high as one hundred. Therefore, the area of agreement is one to ten, and this

is reported as the consensus view. Wherever there is a range of possible outcomes that includes along a high end tail of probability, the area of overlap will necessarily lie at or near the low end. The other cause of problems, they conclude was a common mental model practiced by the media as well as by scientists, which tends to unconsciously consider facts to be something which all reasonable people should

be able to agree upon. If there is a mass disagreement over the conclusions of a report, then it must be because those conclusions are based on opinion rather than facts. And the third reason for underestimation involves a very simple worry of a reputation. In good science, being wrong shouldn't be bad for your career, as a large part of the discipline is making hypotheses which are either proven or

disproven by testing. But when we're talking about a field as politicized as climate science, going too far in a prediction gets you labeled an alarmist by media talking heads. This leads to an understandable trend to conservatism and climate predictions. All these factors have already caused huge problems for our society, and as we move forward towards trying to adapt, these

trends will, if not disrupted, caused further calamity. In the nineteen fifties, fighter pilot Colonel John Boyd coined the term ODA loop to describe the cycle by which human beings and organizations make decisions at the operational level during military campaigns ODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act, and Colonel Boyd's terminology has been applied in a dizzying variety of situations since, from training troops for combat to training corporations

for cyber security. The ODA loop helps explain how an agile and creative opponent can disrupt and defeat a seemingly much more powerful enemy. The basic idea is that if you can break any part of your enemy's ODE loop, you can stop them from properly reacting in a given

situation and eventually defeat them. Stop the enemy from observing you and they can't orient themselves to your attack, decide how to respond to you or take action, disrupt the enemy's ability to make decisions, and even if they see the problem, they won't be able to act on it for years. Our ability to properly observe and orient ourselves to the problem of climate change has been hampered by all the things we just discussed. As I type this,

wildfires are burning across the width of Canada. Subways in multiple major world cities have become watery tombs. The scope of the issue is finally beyond a reasonable doubt in almost everyone's mind, yet we still find ourselves disrupted when we reach d There will come a time when the governments of the world will decide and then act with much more of a concerted plan than we've seen before.

When it comes to predicting what that decision, or more realistically, those decisions might be, the best book I found is Climate Leviathan by Joel Wainwright and joff Man. The term Leviathan comes from a book by Hobbes, The Philosopher not the Tiger, which argues that peace and unity can only be achieved by the creation of a sovereign power responsible for protecting the commonwealth and given absolute authority to do so. It's essentially an argument for a big, all powerful state

or sovereign to keep everything nice. Wainwright and Man's book stems from the premise that most people, out of fear or desperation, will probably back some sort of leviathan as an answer to climate change. Quote. We contend that the drive to defend capitalist social relations will putch the world towards climate leviathan, namely adaptation projects to allow capitalist eletes

to stabilize their position amidst planetary crises. This scenario, we pose it implies a shift in the character and form of sovereignty, the likely emergence of planetary sovereignty defined by an exception proclaimed in the name of preserving life on Earth.

We are not suggesting that sovereignty will be characterized by the quasi monarchical rule of a single person, but we recognize, as some suggest, Hobbs himself and even Carl Schmidt at least after ninety two, also recognized that it is almost certainly to be exercised by a collection of powers coordinated to save the planet and to determine what measures are necessary and what and who must be sacrificed in the

interests of life on Earth. Wainwright and Man envision a few different types of possible leviathan one elucidated above is a neoliberal, capitalist leviathan. Think of it as an extension of the Western States and the attitudes we've seen so far, the smiling face of someone like Joe Biden talking about the importance of using paper bags while giving Exxon tax

breaks so they can invest in cloud seating technology. One of the most frightening things about this possibility is that the very same corporate actors responsible for fighting any action on climate change up until now will surely find a key space for themselves partaking in state funded mitigation efforts. Think of Jeff Bezos suggesting that polluting industrial buildings be moved into space, or imagine Chevron using some of their vast fortune to invent snow piercer style technology to blanket

the atmosphere and reduce warming. These possibilities are frightening because any solutions dreamed up under this regime are likely to be as selfish and ill considered as the long campaign to deny the reality of climate change. In this future, the architects of our present misery and shrine themselves forever

as our protectors. Wainwright and Man also envision what they somewhat cheekily call climate Mao an anti capitalist state centered Leviathan, possibly based around China or a block of Southeast Asian nations.

While Climate Leviathan would be an attempt to maintain the present capitalist world order while stabilising the environment, Climate Mao was a quasi revolutionary attempt to replace it with a system just as centralized, but not based around the moneyed interests that got us here from the book Climate Leviathan. Even today, when an increasingly non Maoist Chinese state invokes its full regulatory authority, it can achieve political feats unimaginable

in liberal democracy. Perhaps the most notable instance of state coordinated climate authority is the matter in which Beijing's air quality was re engineered during the two thousand eight Olympics. Flowers potted all over the city, traffic barred, trees planted in the desert, and factories and power plants closed, all

to successfully blew the skies for the games. Another effect of this power is the way in which the Chinese state effectively killed General Motors gas guzzling Hummer in early two thousand ten, when it blocked the division's sale to Sichuan Tenjong Heavy Industrial Machinery due to the vehicles of

missions levels. One might also point to the Great Green Wall against Desertification, which if successfully completed, will cross four thousand, four eighty meters of northern China, and various tree planting

programs that will purportedly give the country forest cover. By and since vowing in the summer of two thousand ten to apply an iron hand to the task of reducing emissions, the Communist Party closed more than two thousand steel mills and other carbon emitting factories by March two thousand eleven. In mid two thousand sixteen, the government announced new dietary guidelines encouraging people to consume no more than seventy five

grams of meat per day. Reducing meat consumption was justified on health and environmental grounds and hailed as by climate activists. Such policies foretell the possibility of a climate MAO were China to become a global hedgemon and also change under revolutionary pressures. To be clear, that is a very big if. If Leviathan is an attempt to maintain the capitalest world ordered in an ego friendly manner, behemoth by far the darkest potential future is an acknowledgment that the situation is

well and truly fucked. The damage is done, and all that can be done is grab as much power and as many resources as possible and concentrate them in the hands of a chosen few, be it a specific nation or perhaps an ethno state. Behemoth is the fascist state solution to climate change. It's only children will be endless resource wars. Now, these are fairly broad categories, and we are likely to see variations of each of these archetypes attempted. You may note my lack of enthusiasm for any of

the possibilities. This is a result of my own bias. I am not a statist, and while Behemoth is obviously the nightmare solution, I am not excited by either the neoliberal climate Leviathan or climate MAO. Top down solutions to big problems can work, clearly, but they have a nasty tendency to crush people in order to fit them into

a system. An example of why I fear climate Leviathan in particular came on June one, when the Los Angeles Police Department rated the home of a man with a significant quantity of illegal fireworks in the midst of the deadliest fire season in living memory. The Boys at the top decided that cops would need to crack down on

fireworks fenders. It seems logical enough from a high vantage point, and elected leaders always like to send police in to see ship because then they can say X pounds of substance y was confiscated, and that makes for an easy sound bite. But on this occasion, the l ap D fucked up. Their technicians loaded what they thought were sixteen point five pounds of explosives into an armored truck in

order to safely detonate it. Instead, they set off forty two pounds, which started a chain reaction that turned the entire armored truck into a massive I e. D. The resulting explosion destroyed multiple homes and led to the deaths of two people plus numerous injuries. These are the sort of decisions we can expect from climate Leviathan, and the

sort of consequences too. In their book, Wainwright and Man the least likely but best case scenario as something they call climate X. This would be a decentralized, ground up adaptation to the realities of climate change, a reorganization of society not around the lines forced on it by some Leviathan, but by regular people rejecting both the consumptive, destructive patterns of old and the need for a strong dictatorial power to envision a future for them. This is the least

likely scenario for a number of reasons. For one thing, Climate X requires getting a large number of people to embrace a future radically different and fundamental organization from the world they've known. Climate MAL has to do this too, but within the sort of strong state framework that is at least much more familiar and thus more comfortable to

billions of people. We can envision the state taking charge and instituting radical change much more easily than we can imagine hundreds of millions of people making the decision to alter their lives for the betterment of billions of strangers.

Climate Leviathan offers a very plausible set of predictions for the different paths that are most likely, but of course it is still not guaranteed that our nation, or other large blocks of nations, will ever complete their climate ode Loup Mike Davis is a historian and a social critic with an enviable reputation for predicting the future. In nineteen ninety he published City of Courts, an analysis of Los Angeles that many saw as predicting the epic riots that

convulsive the city. In nineteen ninety two, his work was respected enough within Los Angeles that the Crips and the Bloods brought him on as an adviser to help negotiate peacemaking deals. In nine Davis wrote Cataclysm of Fear, which predicted the next twenty plus years of life in southern California, with the line cataclysm has become virtually routine. In two thousand five, he published a book on the Avian flu

as a plague of capitalism, titled The Monster Inters. Davis quoted the influencer researcher Robert Webster saying, if a pandemic happened today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed and understaffed because many medical personnel would be afflicted with the disease. Vaccine production would be slow, critical community services would be immobilized. Reserves of existing vaccines and medical equipment would be quickly depleted,

leaving most people vulnerable to infection. Sounds familiar. Permanent bio protection against new plagues, Davis added, would require more than vaccines. It would need the suppression of these structures of disease emergence. The revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that no

capitalist or state capitalist country whatever willingly undertake. Also, by the way, Mike Davis predicted the two thousand eight economic crash in an article for the Los Angeles Times, the point is he's the kind of guy you should listen to when he makes predictions. In two thousand ten, Mike looked at the utter failure of international efforts to mitigate climate change and imagined a not improbable scenario in which mitigation would be quietly abandoned in favor of accelerated investment

and selective adaptation for Earth's first class passengers. And it's here I might bring us briefly back to the subject of Jeff Bezos's flight to space. An analysis by Media Matters found that the NBC, ABC, and CBS morning shows devoted two hundred twelve minutes to Bezos's flight. By contrast, those same shows spent two hundred and sixty seven minutes covering climate in all of twenty twenty. Now, rich people flee to space isn't the likeliest solution the elites will

shoot for. It's more probable that they'd continue what they've been doing for decades. Diverting more resources towards creating permanent safe zones shielded from the worst of climate change and isolated enough from population centers that their security forces can protect them from interlopers. There will be token efforts carbon taxes and famine relief, but on the whole, the world's poor and much of the middle class will be abandoned to misery and death. The only public field the powerful

will invest in his law enforcement. We've seen shades of this already last spring, when the coronavirus started its deadly rampage through the Western democracies. The Internet filled with a flurry of year identical articles from Bloomberg Coronavirus escape Rich Americans head to New Zealand, the New Yorker Doomsday prep for the super Rich Vanity Fair inside the survivalist bunker

where some wealthy people hope to ride out coronavirus. And from the Guardian super rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreak. The gist of all these articles is that the ultra wealthy have built a global system of safe houses and bunkers in places they deemed secure in

the event of a wide variety of catastrophes. What I find interesting about this is that their preparations are not particularly focused in what we know does not suggest any sort of collapse the wealthy sea coming due to the special knowledge they have as members of the elite. Rather, the evidence suggests they've simply fallen into the same assumption as millions of regular people. Something terrible is on the horizon.

In two thousand seventeen, Lincoln co founder Reid Hoffmann told The New Yorker that he estimated fifty percent of Silicon Valley billionaires had already purchased some sort of a ocalypse escape plan. And honestly, if you had that kind of money,

why wouldn't you? This is bleak as hell. Of course, the individuals most responsible for encouraging and profiting from the reckless consumption that has endangered us all abandoning society via the most literal application of fuck you, money and history. But when you dig into the whole story here, it's actually somewhat optimistic, because the thing is, these people are

clearly just as terrified as the rest of us. That's why they do things like spend one point five million dollars a piece for a nine hundred and twenty square foot room and a survival condo built into an underground missile silo in Kansas. The best thing many of them can think to do is build isolated miniatures of the outside world. Staff it with former Navy seals and hope for the best. These are not people who have a plan.

This was really driven home to me in a two thousand eighteen article by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and writer whose work has been extremely influential among tech elites. In two thousand seventeen, he was invited to what he described as a super deluc private resort to deliver a

keynote speech on the future of technology. Quote. After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room, But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I sat around a playing round table as my audience was brought to me five super wealthy guys, yes, all men from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the

future of technology. They had come with questions of their own. Those questions quickly led to the climate crisis, and they wanted to know if New Zealand or Alaska was a safer escape bet. One of these CEOs had just finished building his own underground bunker system and wanted to know, how do I maintain authority over my security force after the event? Quote the event that was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or

Mr robot hack that takes everything down. The single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. The new armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs, but how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from

choosing their own leader. The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew, or making guards where disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival, or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers. If that technology could be developed in time. That's when it hit me. At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned. This was a talk about the

future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk, colonizing Mars, Peter Tile, reversing the aging process, or sam Altman and

Ray Kurz. While uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is

really about just one thing escape. At one point, rush Off suggested that if these billionaires were really concerned about the loyalty of their hired security long term, their best bet would be to start treating those people like family. Now. Money loses value after the event, love does not. He also noted that if they were to use their power and influence to extend this ethos of inclusivity more broadly in their business practices, it might make such an event

less likely to occur. Quote, they were amused by my optimism, but they didn't really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity. They're convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don't believe they can affect the future, and that right there is why I am actually optimistic, because these people are the enemy. We are at present engaged in a battle to determine how the future of our species and

life on earth will look. We, and by we I mean people who want a better, freer, healthier future for all, have a few different enemies, but our most powerful foes are the people currently standing atop the pyramid, fighting tooth and nail against any change to society that reduces their privilege and power. These men and women will go to their graves to preserve the present power structure as long

as the rest of us go first. For decades, the enemy has had the upper hand, using disinformation, propaganda, the violence of the state, and an arsenal of lesser weapons. They disrupted every attempt to build a less extractive, more sustainable society. But now that the fires are at everyone's back door, they have no plan beyond locking themselves away from the consequences of the world they insisted on building. Reality can no longer be denied, and that's disrupted their

ode loop. This means those of us on Team Better World finally have a chance to get the upper hand. To do that, though we're going to have to make some decisions of our own