This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
It hardly matters whether you're talking about the Canadian wildfires that continue to burn in an out-of-control fashion or the 120-degree temperatures in" no, not India! -- Texas!! Heat waves, megadroughts, ever more violent storms, ever fiercer fires, ever more staggering floods, you name it and we're either already experiencing it or likely to do so in the years to come. In short, we're living in -- and no, for once I'm not thinking of Donald Trump -- an ever more extreme world. And worse yet -- okay, okay, I apologize but I just can't help myself -- Trump, DeSantis, and most of the rest of that crew are ready to deny that any of it is actually happening. If one of them were to take power in 2024 (and don't for a second think it couldn't happen!), it might well ensure that our children and grandchildren will all too literally find themselves in a hell on earth.
Yes, once upon a time, the fires of hell were left for the afterlife (ask Dante!), but no longer, it seems. And it's not just in Canada. In recent years, ever fiercer fires have been setting the worst sorts of records in this country, too. Out-of-control flames have been turning even people in the United States, even people I know, into climate refugees. And North America is anything but alone. Europe set fire records last summer, while record heat waves from North Africa to China should remind us that we are, in some sense, on a planet Dante might well have recognized.
Given all of this (and more), it seems appropriate to let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox consider the kinds of violent meltdowns (and not even the most literal versions of them) that are likely to leave us all on an increasingly broken and costly hell of a planet. Tom
We're Having a Violent Meltdown
The Human Costs of Global Warming -- and of Our Response to It
By Stan Cox
Several times in recent weeks I've heard people suggest that Mother Nature has been speaking to us through that smoke endlessly drifting south from the still-raging Canadian wildfires. She's saying that she wants the coal, oil, and gas left in the ground, but I fear her message will have little more influence on climate policy than her previous ones did. After all, we essentially hit the "snooze" button on the wakeup call from Hurricane Katrina 18 years ago; ditto the disastrous Hurricane Sandy seven years later, as well as the East Coast heat waves and West Coast wildfires of more recent years; or the startling overheating of global waters and the sea level rise that goes with it. And that's just to begin an ever longer list of horrors.
Despite the fact that, in recent weeks, more than 100 million North Americans have been inhaling lungfuls of smoke from those Canadian wildfires, we'll probably continue to ignore the pummeling so many here are enduring daily while carbon dioxide continues to accumulate overhead. Climate disasters are not only failing to goad governments into taking bold action but may be nudging societies toward increasing violence and cruelty.
Recently, Joel Millward-Hopkins of the University of Leeds suggested that, as the climate emergency intensifies, we may only find ourselves ever more affected by some of the indirect impacts of global warming. Those would include the "widening of socioeconomic inequalities (within and between countries), increases in migration (intra- and inter-nationally), and heightened risk of conflict (from violence and war through to hate speech and crime)." Such impacts, he suggests, will reflect a "highly inconvenient overlap with key drivers of the authoritarian populism that has proliferated in the 21st century." Inconvenient indeed.
In other words, although weather disasters of many kinds can increase public concern about climate change, they can also help to whip up an oppressively violent sociopolitical climate that may prove ever more hostile to the very idea of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions -- especially in large, affluent, high-emission societies.
Warm in the USA
Though not itself linked to climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic may have given us a preview of such developments. When it first struck, a feeling of noble national purpose, shared sacrifice, and mutual aid swept the country" for perhaps a few weeks. Then came the waves of social conflict that may, in the end, have left us even more poorly prepared for the next public health emergency. After all, the pandemic of hate that first fed on anti-vaccine and anti-mask fervor now sups from a far larger buffet of political issues including energy and climate.
Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote recently that "culture war entrepreneurs" are casting efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as authoritarian attacks on ordinary people's fundamental freedoms. Be ready to do battle, they say, against any move to promote heat pumps over furnaces or electric induction stoves over gas stoves or walking to the store instead of driving a big-ass truck there. In fact, he suggests, "you cannot propose even the mildest change without a hundred professionally outraged influencers leaping up to announce: 'They're coming for your ...'"
There are always going to be people under the influence of such influencers who will respond by jumping in their trucks for a session of "rollin' coal" -- that is, spewing toxic diesel fumes into the faces of pedestrians and cyclists. Or maybe they'll run over a climate protester (without fear of prosecution if they're in Florida, Iowa, or Oklahoma).
This outbreak of hostility and violence among right-wingers is occurring even though no one has actually curtailed any of their freedoms. Now, imagine the ferocity of the backlash if we could somehow manage to enact the policies that are undoubtedly most urgently needed to rein in greenhouse gases and other environmental threats: a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and cuts in the extraction and use of material resources. The eruption would undoubtedly be far more aggressive and violent than the resistance to Covid-19 regulations.
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