The Neumayer III polar station sits near the edge of Antarctica’s unforgiving Ekström Ice Shelf. During the winter, when temperatures can plunge below minus 50 degrees Celsius and the winds can climb to more than 100 kilometers per hour, no one can come or go from the station. Its isolation is essential to the meteorological, atmospheric and geophysical science experiments conducted there by the…
[I]f your anger is directed at race and racism…if you’re aiming for change and not…
For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense. “You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking.
Much has been written about climate change or, to use a more truthful term, global warming. But not much has been written about Organising Responses to Climate Change, which is the title of Daniel Nyberg, Christopher Wright and Vanessa Bowden’s new book. The authors have divided it into ten chapters which are organised in five key parts. This very readable and illuminating work starts with The Politics of Climate Change, followed by The Politics of Climate Migration. Inevitably, global warming will lead to massive global migration far exceeding what we have seen up to date. Part III is about something many people think comes too late in time to prevent the earth from being destroyed, namely The Politics of Climate Adaptation.
As the UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said recently at what Greta Thunberg calls the blah-blah-blah festival – also known as COP27 – that took place in the luxery resort of Sharm El-Sheikh in November 2022: ‘We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.’ Perhaps, with still increasing CO2 emisions in 2023, what we call adaptation is merely something that resembles the moving of deckchairs on the Titanic. Whether we adapt or not, what is in store for virtually all of us is climate suffering, as related in Part IV The Politics of Climate Suffering. A handful of super-rich, who have bought land (including bunkers) on the southern island of New Zealand [the earthquake islands], who may also dream of life in space or on Mars, believe they can avoid the suffering. Finally, there is Part V, The Politics of Climate Futures – if we will have a future.
Nyberg and his co-authors start their book with a truism: ‘The climate crisis is the product of a specific political economy: global capitalism […] capitalism relies on the fervent pursuit of continuous economic growth and fossil energy’ (4). Yet, the neoliberal myth of endless growth is still part of the capitalist ideological catechism, despite the fact that we know this is impossible. And we have known this ever since the Club of Rome’s seminal study. Besides, it is simply illogical to continue to propagate the hallucination that endless growth is possible on an non-endless Earth, as the recent study of the Club of Rome has shown – again.
Worse: ‘By 2021, it was clear that existing business practices would not be challenged […] by August 2021, of the $1,950 billion spent by OECD countries on recovery, only $336 billion was assessed as having a positive environmental impact’ (6). Apart from corporate greenwashing, this is why ideologies like business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) exist. ‘Under the ideological cover of CSR, etc., the seven evil sisters – BP, Shell, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York and Texas – became the most wealthy and powerful companies in the world. […] To those one might like to add: Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia, Gazprom and Rosneft in Russia, Kuwait Petroleum, National Iranian Oil Company, China National Petroleum Company, Pemex in Mexico, and Petrobras in Brazil.’ Even more devastating for the environment is the fact that ‘global fossil fuel subsidies alone are conservatively estimated at around US330 billion per annum […] the IMF suggests the true amount could be closer to US5 trillion’ (10). Much of this is smoke-screened through two ideologies – the free market and competition.
Of course, this has led – in terms of ideology – to what the authors call ‘the hegemony of corporate capitalism’ (21) and the global ‘fossil fuel hegemony’, drastically exemplified by a US car bumper sticker that reads kick their ass and get our gas. This prevailing hegemony has ‘truly forged a collective will’ (23) to invade countries that have oil and, in other cases, to – conveniently – overlook human rights abuses in many oil-producing and oil-burning countries. Not only in oil-producing countries but elsewhere too, this ‘hegemony is the practice of politics for maintaining dominance’ (31).
Supported by ideologies like these – and a bit of global corporate greenwashing on the side – ‘the global fossil fuel burn has continued to increase year by year’ (42). In the wake of much of this, corporations have set up a global ‘climate change denial industry’ (44) containing well-paid business school professors, corporate consultancies, conservative think tanks and, of course, the mainstream press.
Almost self-evidently, this is spiced up through oxymorons like ‘clean coal’ (47). It is not at all surprising to see that ‘billionaire businessman Sir Richard Branson claims that our only option to stop climate change is for industry to make money from it’ (51). In other words, the system that is getting us closer and closer to the sixth Mass Extinction (McCallum 2021) and to the end of life on earth is also the system that will get us out of the coming apocalypse. For neoliberal nonsense like this, you get to become a ‘Sir’.
Unlike Sir Branson, Greta Thunberg and the like are described by OPEC ‘as perhaps the greatest threat to our industry going forward’ (64). Meanwhile, this very same OPEC may well be one of the greatest threats to human existence. OPEC and its corporations have gotten us on a highway to climate hell with their foot still on the accelerator. True to the title of their book, the authors suggest support be given to three environmental organisations (67): Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and 350.org. The authors – perhaps correctly – argue that ‘the most spectacular environmental movements to emerge in recent years have been Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future’ (74).
Not surprisingly ‘counter-terrorism police in the UK listed Extinction Rebellion as an extremist ideology’ (80), perhaps in preparation for what is going to come as the conflict between corporate profits and those fighting global warming – literally – heats up. Or, as is the case when the usual methods of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2018) begin to collapse, a well-armed police force is needed just as much as a handy ideology to keep people ignorant. Meanwhile, the rather harmless Greenpeace has been accused ‘of committing acts of terrorism that violate the US Patriot Act’ (80).
Quite apart from defending the system that made rich people super rich, the state is there to protect them against us, as the authors say, ‘by targeting environmentalists as extremists and terrorists, corporations aim to deflect attention from the damage caused by their own activities’ (81). This has been a time-honoured and proven corporate PR strategy ever since Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.
Yet another PR strategy is the hallucination that global warming can be managed through ‘climate adaptation’ (89). In contrast, many others have claimed it is already too late (Turner 2014; Monbiot 2022). One precursor supporting the too little too late argument has been ‘Australia’s Black Summer of 2019 and 2020 [killing] three billion animals’. It was merely an early sign for the looming ‘Pyrocene – the age of fire’. At the same time when earth is facing increases in bush and forest fires, ‘coastal areas [are] vulnerable to rising ocean waters [threatening] major coastal cities such as Miami, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Jakarta’ (93) and many more. In the wake of this, many private properties in these cities might become uninsurable as ‘SwissRe and MunchRe’ (96) sensed long ago. Yet this remains mostly unknown to the general public, particularly Republican voters in Miami, for example.
Meanwhile, in Australia – the home of the authors – ‘the Great Barrier Reef generated AU $6.5 billion in revenue per annum and provided up to 64,000 jobs in tourism, fishing, and associated activities’ (100). Despite the fact that the authors of the book see the value of nature only when it translates into dollar terms and jobs (Klikauer 2023), and refrain from seeing the intrinsic value of the environment, coral bleaching is killing the reef. Besides all this, one of the greatest lines in their book is the following: ‘the great irony, of course, is that, having watched the Arctic melt as global temperatures rose, Shell was first in line to drill in the newly melted waters for yet more oil, which would raise the temperature some more’ (103).
Virtually, all these adaptation processes – including Shell’s expansion in drilling and the raising of their ocean based drilling platforms – are also designed as a policy for ‘the stabilisation of hegemonic power relations’ (114). This is partly done by mainstream (read: corporate) media when creating the ‘ignorance of climate change’ (118). Worse, there are companies that offer ‘retreats [at] the cost of €520 and €820 [for your personal and] inner adaptation’ (122) to climate change. Viewing global warming as an issue of the individual has always been a preferred ideology of neoliberalism and its compliant henchmen. Meanwhile, ‘capitalism’s destruction of the natural world [can still be] hidden from public view’ (131) or can be framed as simply another natural disaster. As the world heats up, this ideological trick might become harder and harder to maintain.
Even more obscene is the fact that ‘climate suffering is […] presented as a space for business philanthropy and charity’ (145). And of course, all this can be cranked up by what the authors call ‘the hypocrisy of artists or celebrities endorsing climate action while jetting around the world or living lavish lifestyles’ (153). Important to all of this is to realise that this ‘hegemony has been highly successful in limiting any efforts even to reduce emissions, let alone to tax them’ (169).
Nyberg and his co-authors end their exquisite book with the words, ‘the world stays locked within an economic system that endangers the future of societies, ecosystems, and the vast diversity of life on this planet […] the prevailing hegemony is that corporate capitalism will somehow continue, [which is] magical thinking’ (194). People who sell us this sort of magical thinking are those people who have put us on a highway to climate hell with their foot still on the accelerator.
While Organising Responses to Climate Change is magnificant on telling the story of global warming, and how the global hegemony is used to camouflage what is being done and what is coming, the book is actually very short on what it had originally set out to achieve, namely Organising Responses to Climate Change. It doesn’t offer much on organising responses to global warming. In a few short pages, the authors only suggest people join three environmental organisations: Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and 350.org. Despite this shortcoming, their book still issues a most persuasive call to fight the system that is bound to destroy the planet.
The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.
The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.
Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.
Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.
We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.
“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018. “These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”
Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”
The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties. African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.
Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control.
Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them.
Aclass I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feign that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ.
My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.
August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Meme, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks:
You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.
Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
In her 2017 article “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind,” my colleague Julie Beck asks a social psychologist: “What would get someone to change their mind about a false belief that is deeply tied to their identity?”
The answer? “Probably nothing.”
We’re generally okay at admitting we’re wrong about small matters, where the evidence is right in front of us. For example, Julie explains, if you thought it was going to be nice outside but then discover that it’s raining, you’ll grab an umbrella before you walk out the door. But if your false belief is tied to your identity or how you see the world, “then people become logical Simone Bileses, doing all the mental gymnastics it takes to remain convinced that they’re right.”
It doesn’t help that our mind is constantly tricking us. Faulty ways of thinking seem to be hardwired into the human brain, as the writer Ben Yagoda noted in 2018. Wikipedia has a standalone “List of cognitive biases,” whose more than 100 entries include the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”) and the IKEA effect (“the tendency for people to place a disproportionately high value on objects that they partially assembled themselves.”)
A hundred or so biases have been repeatedly shown to exist in the human mind, and, Yagoda writes, they might be impossible to get rid of. Or at least near-impossible: He tried several different methods to see if he could weaken his own biases, and the results were mixed.
In her piece, Julie offers some tips to help us try to lovingly change others’ minds. But we’re probably better off starting with ourselves; we’ve got powerful, self-deluding minds to contend with.
On Deluding Ourselves
Concept by Delcan & Co; photograph by The Voorhes
The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain
By Ben Yagoda
Science suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it?
John Garrison
This Article Won’t Change Your Mind
By Julie Beck
The facts on why facts alone can’t change beliefs
Jan Buchczik
Changing Your Mind Can Make You Less Anxious
By Arthur C. Brooks
Humans are programmed to think we’re right at all costs. Fighting that instinct will set you free.
Still Curious?
Other Diversions
P.S.
In December, my colleague Elaine Godfrey expressed an opinion that might have many of you reaching for all the persuasive tools you’ve got: She hates skiing. (And this opinion does seem quite tied to her sense of identity, so chances are she will not be swayed.)
— Isabel
What’s happening in the body, as well as the mind, can be tied to increases in drug overdoses, suicides, and more
Physicists have coaxed particles of light into undergoing opposite transformations simultaneously, like a human turning into a werewolf as the werewolf turns into a human. In carefully engineered circuits, the photons act as if time were flowing in a quantum combination of forward and backward. “For the first time ever, we kind of have a time-traveling machine going in both directions…
The rural-urban voter divide has plagued the United States for nearly three decades, and only continues to increase. For decades now, rural districts are typically governed by Republican House members, while suburban and urban areas tend to be governed by Democrats.
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spoke with many political science experts who have done extensive research on how rural voters’ growing “resentment” continues to fuel a rural-urban “apartheid,” and why it will likely persist for years to come.
MAGA politician Ron Johnson’s Senate win over Democrat Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin last year, Edsall wrote, is the one of the best case studies for “rural realignment and the role it plays in elections.”
READ MORE: Republicans don’t serve their states. They immiserate them
Johnson is a Trump-backed lawmaker who staunchly denies the reality of climate change, has referred to Jan. 6 rioters as “people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement,” and proposed cuts to social programs. Still, he has managed to win reelection.
Edsall talked to Marquette Law School scholar Craig Gilbert who found in his analysis that Johnson’s votes were much lower in the “red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee” compared to his 2016 race, but the group of voters that ultimately steered his win came from “white rural Wisconsin.”
He won the rural vote by 25 points in 2016, but that increased to 29 points this time around, leading him to victory.
University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Katherine Cramer summarized the reasons for this shift in her study “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” highlighting three points: “A belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers; a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources; and a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”
Edsall likens rural voters’ resentment towards Democrats to the “upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
But the start of the rural-urban split, according to Boston College political scientist David Hopkins’s book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics,” began during a “conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s,” such as two major Supreme Court abortion rulings and the 1993 debate over gay people in the military.
However, Hopkins says the milestone that really solidified the divide was the 1992 presidential election, as it started “the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”
After the election, the percentage of House Democrats representing suburban districts increased by nearly 20 percent while Democratic seats in rural districts dropped from 24 percent to 5 percent.
READ MORE: Robert Reich: Agricultural ‘monopolies are slowly killing rural America’
Hopkins wrote in a 2019 study, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018, that “Democratic suburban growth has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”
One of the reasons Republicans continue to pull in rural voters, Jordan Gest of George Mason University gathered in recent research, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”
Harvard postdoctoral research fellow Kristin Lunz Trujillo and University of Minnesota Ph.D candidate Zack Crowley, in their research found, “the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.”
The scholars also found that, “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” And stances on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”
RUPTURE.CAPITAL IN 2025