Mini-Theory Blog: Play it Again, Sam

NinaIllingworth November 9, 2022November 9, 2022 1.5 degrees Celsius, a policy of genocide, anticapitalism, blog, broken promises, CA4, capitalism, capitalism vs the climate, carbon, carbon emissions, CC3, climate catastrophe, Climate Crisis, climate genocide, climate massacre, corporate power, ecofascism, empty promises, genocide, green energy, instagram, left wing theory, Media, Mini Theory Blog, missed targets, Nina Illingworth, Play it Again Sam, policy, politicians, ST2, Theory, WD7, WMO, World Meteorological Organization

Editor’s note: Our Mini-Theory Blog is a weekday feature on Instagram that examines one key left wing idea, theory, or concept in 2200 keystrokes or less. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today.

This past Sunday, the World Meteorological Organization quietly confirmed the worst-kept dirty secret in polite society; we’re absolutely going to murder billions of people to keep doing capitalism. Unsurprisingly, this event barely touched the media, but I feel it is instructive all the same. Indeed, in the wake of news that after the eight consecutive hottest years in recorded history, the human species now has zero hope of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, I think we can identify a pattern of Pig Empire ruling class behavior around the issue of climate crisis. Roughly speaking, that pattern looks something like ragging the puck until your opposition, in this case the planet, runs out of time.

First you fight tooth and nail to strip the teeth out of crisis mitigation efforts while pretending to support fighting climate catastrophe. Then you announce blatantly insufficient carbon reduction policies, while promising to plant so many trees it’ll take a whole continent emptied of brown people to contain them. While this process is playing out, you funnel public money to “green energy” ventures that continue to poison the planet and benefit the same pools of capital currently killing all life on Earth. Finally, when you blow by your targets without slowing the emissions creep at all, you quietly ignore the passing of that milestone and set new, wholly insufficient targets.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that what you’re looking at is not a plan to reduce carbon emissions and stop climate catastrophe. Rather it is a plan to lull people to sleep until it’s too late for them to mobilize to stop the carnage; particularly folks in Pig Empire nations whose political empowerment still represents a threat to this plot. Given the choice between ending capitalism, and saving humanity, capitalists have chosen to continue the genocide; while bought politicians and media minions sell you a gravesite. These folks aren’t going to tell you it’s the end of the world until the last penny has been wrung from the corpse, and it’s too late to stop them.

We should act accordingly.