Guillotine

Global heating is a choice—future generations are watching our decisions.

“The choice is ours—let’s choose with eyes open.”

“We’re dropping the guillotine on these future beings—we’re dropping the guillotine on this strength and we’re dropping the guillotine on this giftedness and we’re dropping the guillotine on this mastery.”

“Where are the rich? Where are the powerful? The two spheres merged a long time ago, but the rich and powerful are immersed in the delusion that these two spheres remain separate—the rich and powerful continue to act as though omnicide is somehow good for them and their families.”

“It’s up to people to decide whether to extend the ‘human experiment on Earth’ or whether to lock in the unthinkable.”

“People can join Extinction Rebellion and people can join Sunrise Movement. And people should look at the long list of climate groups that people can join.”

We can—regarding the climate emergency—choose to act immediately or choose to drop the guillotine on future generations.

The choice is ours—let’s choose with eyes open. You can’t say “I don’t know about the choice”—the information is right in front of your eyes unless you deliberately shut your eyes.

A Premium on the Future

Dropping the guillotine on future generations would be morally catastrophic due to the quantity of human lives involved—there are so many billions of future humans.

And dropping the guillotine on future generations would be even more morally catastrophic—exponentially more so?—due to the potential quality of future human lives.

So we should all put a premium on the future due to the issue of the sheer quantity of human lives that exist in the future, but I think that we should also go further and put an exponentially larger premium on future lives on the grounds that those future lives have the potential to be vastly better—in terms of quality—than any life currently being lived.

My life is sometimes bad, but I always derive hope and joy and confidence from the idea that every bad thing in life arises from some arbitrary and contingent and unnecessary aspect of human biology—you can look at any physical or neurological or mental shortcoming that you have and imagine the flip side of that shortcoming and imagine a future being that has only strength and giftedness and mastery in place of that shortcoming.

We’re dropping the guillotine on these future beings—we’re dropping the guillotine on this strength and we’re dropping the guillotine on this giftedness and we’re dropping the guillotine on this mastery.

We’re dropping the guillotine on ourselves and on the world’s vulnerable populations—we can choose to witness the inferno on the subcontinent.

We’re carrying out an awe-inspiring assault on nature—we’re dropping the guillotine on a vast and enormous and diverse array of unique and beautiful and unrecoverable species.

The Spheres of Self-Interest and Morality

There was—previously—a distinction between the spheres of self-interest and morality. People would pursue wealth and power, ignore the horrible things in their own society, and ignore the horrible things that their government was doing around the world—people would pursue self-interest and not fulfill their moral responsibilities.

But our century’s existential crises have merged the two spheres—it makes zero sense to pursue wealth and power if you and your family are just going to burn and die and it makes zero sense to pursue wealth and power if you’re just going to live in a fancy depressing bunker as the world burns down around you.

Where are the rich? Where are the powerful? The two spheres merged a long time ago, but the rich and powerful are immersed in the delusion that these two spheres remain separate—the rich and powerful continue to act as though omnicide is somehow good for them and their families.

I’m proud of my 29 December 2021 piece that makes the case the two spheres are one and the same—I showed my 29 December 2021 piece to my friend and they agreed that they had indeed been immersed in the delusion that the two spheres remain separate.

Hope

There is hope—we shouldn’t despair or anything. Noam Chomsky made some interesting remarks in a discussion about the environment and I took the following notes based on Chomsky’s remarks:

• the “situation is ominous”

• “There are feasible means to reach the IPCC goals and avert catastrophe, and also move on to a better world.”

• “There are careful studies showing persuasively that these goals can be attained at a cost of 2-3% of global GDP, a substantial sum but well within reach—a tiny fraction of what was spent during World War II, and serious as the stakes were in that global struggle, what we face today is more significant by orders of magnitude.”

• “At stake is the question whether the human experiment will survive in any recognizable form.”

• “The most extensive and detailed work I know on how to reach these goals is by economist Robert Pollin.”

• Pollin’s “ideas are currently being implemented in a number of places”

• “Other eco-economists, using somewhat different models, have reached similar conclusions.”

• “Just recently IRENA—the International Renewable Energy Agency, part of the UN—came out with the same estimate of clean energy investments to reach the IPCC goals.”

• “There is not much time to implement these proposals.”

• “The real question is not so much feasibility as will.”

• “There is little doubt that it will be a major struggle.”

• “Powerful entrenched interests will work relentlessly to preserve short-term profit at the cost of incalculable disaster.”

• “Current scientific work conjectures that failure to reach the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will set irreversible processes in motion that are likely to lead to a ‘hothouse earth,’ reaching unthinkable temperatures 4-5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, likely to result in an end to any form of organized human society.”

• “Let’s begin with population growth. There is a humane and feasible method to constrain that: education of women.”

• “That has a major effect on fertility in both rich regions and poor, and should be expedited anyway.”

• “The effects are quite substantial leading to sharp population decline by now in parts of the developed world.”

• “The point generalizes. Measures to fend off ‘global ecosocial disaster’ can and should proceed in parallel with social and institutional change to promote values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, collective responsibility, democratic control of institutions, concern for other species, harmony with nature—values that are commonly upheld by indigenous societies and that have deep roots in popular struggles in what are called the ‘developed societies’—where, unfortunately, material and moral development are all too often uncorrelated.”

So there’s lots of hope—Robert Pollin has the answers and other eco-economists do too, but it will be a massive struggle against the forces that will “work relentlessly to preserve short-term profit at the cost of incalculable disaster”.

The GOP and the Guillotine

The GOP is dropping the guillotine on humanity’s future and it turns your stomach to witness the GOP’s behavior—people can recover from their assault on women’s rights and people can recover from their horrifying neoliberal legislative agenda and people can recover from their effort to install theocracy in the United States, but the world can’t recover from omnicidal environmental policies that lock in an unmanageable trajectory of devastation.

I took the following notes on a 30 June 2022 NYT piece:

• “The Supreme Court has issued one of the most important environmental rulings ever, which will make the battle against global warming even more difficult.”

• “The ruling, in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, not only limits the authority of the E.P.A., but potentially that of other agencies to enact a broad array of regulations to protect the environment and public health.”

• “It was the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.”

• “The failure of the United States—the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in history—to meet its climate targets would very likely mean the world will not be able to keep global warming at about 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels.”

• “Beyond that threshold, scientists say, the likelihood of catastrophic heat waves, drought, flooding and widespread extinctions increases significantly.”

The following pieces explain the history of the effort to dismantle regulations:

• “E.P.A. Ruling Is Milestone in Long Pushback to Regulation of Business” (30 June 2022)

• “How Charles Koch Purchased the Supreme Court’s EPA Decision” (30 June 2022)

There are no words in the English language for billionaires who pursue omnicidal environmental policies in order to stuff even more billions of dollars into their overstuffed pockets—our language only contains inadequate words like “greed” and “psychopathy” and “insanity”.

There’s an interesting 3 July 2022 piece that explains that these SCOTUS justices are engaged in outrageous and dishonest abuses of their power—I took these notes:

• “First, the court had no business taking this case at all, under long-standing conventions embraced across the ideological spectrum, certainly by judges purporting to be conservative—let alone to convert the matter into a platform to enable themselves to micromanage future EPA regulatory efforts.”

• “Second, on the merits of its de facto advisory opinion favorable to EPA’s opponents, the ultraconservative justices not only flouted—overtly—the actual text of the Clean Air Act, as well as the undisputed purpose of the law and its framers. They concocted a workaround by unfurling novel doctrinal excuses for shelving the textualist-originalist credos to which conservative self-proclaimed ‘constitutionalists’ profess fidelity.”

• “The third eyebrow-raising aspect of the ultraconservatives’ decision to bludgeon the EPA’s (and Congress’s) efforts to combat global warming is the interests they deployed such brazen activism to protect. Reflecting conventional wisdom, The New York Times headlined that the decision was a victory for ‘business interests challeng[ing] regulations.’ But, as noted in an interview by Sean Donahue, a veteran of high-stakes environmental Supreme Court advocacy, ‘One of the amazing things about this case is that no actual regulated entity petitioned for [the Supreme Court to hear the case] and the power industry almost unanimously supported EPA.’ Defending the EPA’s approach to regulating greenhouse gases as parties was a phalanx of megapower companies, including Con Edison, Exelon, National Grid USA, and Pacific Gas & Electric; counsel for these companies—Beth Brinkmann of the elite Washington, D.C., firm Covington & Burling, and a former senior Justice Department official—split oral argument time with the U.S. solicitor general.” 

• these right-wing justices “did not deign to mention the affected industries’ contrary view”

• these right-wing justices did not “explain why—in this hugely consequential case—the most pro-business court in history ignored a major affected industry in order to bend national environmental policy to fit the interests of West Virginia’s Republican attorney general and his carbon-coddling allies”

There’s a 7 July 2022 NYT piece about the options that remain for the Biden administration—I took these notes:

• “Following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last week limiting the government’s ability to restrict the pollution that is causing global warming, the Biden administration is planning to use other regulatory tools in hopes of achieving similar goals.”

• “White House officials said they believe President Biden’s goal of slashing emissions roughly in half by the end of this decade, and fully eliminating fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035, still remains well within reach.”

• “Still, the federal government’s piecemeal approach, which is still taking shape, could make it tougher to achieve its goals, many observers said.”

• “The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, which concluded that the E.P.A. lacks broad authority to transform the nation’s electrical system away from fossil fuels, has left the Biden administration bereft of a powerful tool, energy experts said.”

• “The ruling did not strip the E.P.A. of its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but it allowed only narrower policies to regulate how individual power plants operate.”

• “That means the administration’s backup strategies are not likely to spur a rapid metamorphosis to clean energy unless the administration acts quickly and aggressively, experts said.”

• “Scientists say that if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the likelihood of catastrophic consequences from climate change—worsening heat waves and droughts, intensifying storms, and other crises— increases significantly.”

• “The planet has already heated by an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius, and worldwide emissions continue to climb.”

I also took the following notes on a 30 June 2022 New Yorker piece:

• “Credit where due: the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in West Virginia v. E.P.A. is the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the federal government won’t threaten the business status quo.”

• the right-wing justices “have taken more or less total control of Washington’s ability to generate policy that might disrupt the status quo”

• “In essence, the ruling begins to strip away the power of agencies such as the E.P.A. to enforce policy: instead of allowing federal agencies to enforce, say, the Clean Air Act to clean the air, in this new dispensation, Congress would have to pass regulations that are much more explicit, as each new pollutant came to the fore.”

• “A train of similar cases now approaches the high court—they would, for instance, make it all but impossible for the federal government to regulate tailpipe emissions or to consider the financial toll of climate change when deciding whether to approve a new pipeline.”

• “this new jurisprudence would, in turn, make it even harder to achieve any international progress on rising temperatures”

• “If the United States—historically, the world’s largest emitter of carbon—can’t play a serious policy role, it won’t play a serious leadership role.”

• “Given the record flooding in Asia, the record heat in the Mideast, the record fires in the Southwest, and the record rainfall in Yellowstone, there’s a nihilist strain to this ruling.”

And I took the following notes on a 30 June 2022 CNN piece:

• “That the court limited the EPA’s power to push toward carbon neutrality is a massive blow.”

• “It sets the United States back in its efforts to eliminate fossil fuel pollution.”

• “That’s a task on which we already are decades behind.”

• “The world is likely to continue to become a more dangerous place—and a more unequal place—because of this decision.”

• “Describing the court’s decision as a blow to the Biden administration, as many have done, is hopelessly myopic, by the way.”

• “This is one of millions of self-inflicted wounds that puts all of Earth’s systems in jeopardy.”

• “Stepping back from the court’s opinion, this is the 36.4 billionth reminder that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment for climate action.”

• “Hope feels like a distant emotion these days.”

• “I could spend all of your time recounting missed opportunities for climate action, which extend back for more than three decades; we’ve known about this crisis longer than that.”

• “if the people, from West Virginia to Washington state, actually demanded not just climate talking points but serious climate action—rid-the-economy-of-fossil-fuels type of action—we could do this”

• “Our best hope is that outrage about the Supreme Court’s shortsighted, dangerous decision this week will fuel not the fossil fuel industry but the energy of the American public.”

• “the truth is that if the branches of the US government won’t stop global warming, then people must make it happen”

I asked my friend about how bad this SCOTUS decision really is—they responded as follows:

The narrow decision is bad but not catastrophic. But the justices’ goal is to open the way to catastrophe—other cases are coming along that will enable them to drive more nails into the coffin of the human experiment on Earth.

It’s up to people to decide whether to extend the “human experiment on Earth” or whether to lock in the unthinkable.

Taking Action

Americans can contact their legislators about global heating.

People can join Extinction Rebellion and people can join Sunrise Movement. And people should look at the long list of climate groups that people can join.