collapse of the old society

(pasted)

The climate crisis didn’t begin with factories, smokestacks, or fossil fuels. It began with slave ships.
In this sharp and provocative lecture, Jason W. Moore delivers a devastating answer: the problem isn’t “anthropogenic” — made by humans. The problem is capitalogenic — made by capital.

Moore critiques the most dangerous idea of the modern world — the "Man" versus "Nature" binary — and shows how it was born in the Columbian invasions after 1492. He replaces the comforting myth of Spaceship Earth with the far more accurate metaphor: Slaveship Earth. Signifying a world-ecology of power, profit and life built on the capitalist expulsion of most humans from “humanity,” Cheap Nature, and five centuries of violence, appropriation, and frontier-making, Moore traces the long history of climate change before and during the capitalist era.

This is not another story of hopelessness or population panic. It is an ecology of hope. Moore reveals how every major climate shift in the Holocene has been a moment of civilizational crisis and political possibility — from the fall of Rome and the peasant revolts that ended feudalism, to today’s climate crisis. He shows why the Capitalocene today is propelling a crisis of life-making and profit-making at once, and why only collective democratic action can seize the opportunities hidden inside the capitalogenic threat.

In this wide-ranging talk, Moore explains:

• Why “anthropogenic global warming” is neither innocent nor accurate — Britain and the US alone are responsible for more than a third of historical greenhouse gas emissions.

• How sugar plantations, silver mines, and the slaveship — not the steam engine or the Industrial Revolution — created the organizational template for capitalism as a world-ecology and its Cheap Nature projects.

• Why the Anthropocene is an elitist anti-politics machine that hides five centuries of capitalogenic crisis behind the fiction of “humans did it.”

• How climate shifts have repeatedly destabilized ruling classes and opened paths to greater equality for the vast majority.

• Why today’s state shift demands we move beyond Green Arithmetic to an ethic of care, connection, and democracy in the web of life.

This is not a call for green tech or climate austerity. It is a call to end the cheapening of life and labor once and for all — and to build a different world inside the one that is dying.

From a public lecture by Jason W. Moore, "Climate, Capitalism, and Geohistorical Crises, School of Architecture, ETH-Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), 25 February, 2019.

Jason W. Moore teaches world history at Binghamton University and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is the author of Capitalism in the Web of Life and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Key ideas for this lecture are drawn from Moore’s books and essays, most freely available on his website jasonwmoore.com, including “The Capitalocene” essays, “Opiates of the Environmentalists," and "Our Capitalogenic World."

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35044726

Officials in Corpus Christi expect a “water emergency” within months and fully run out of water next year. That would halt jet fuel supplies to Texas airports, fuel a surge in gasoline prices and trigger an “economic disaster” without precedent, former officials said.

Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia. Crossing critical temperature thresholds may trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that amplify warming and destabilize distant Earth system components. Uncertain tipping thresholds make precaution essential, as crossing them could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory with long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences.

That pattern seems to be holding. In 2024, global GDP per capita reached a new high as did annual carbon emissions. But as climate targets slip and warnings mount that tipping points may already have been crossed, faith in growth for growth’s sake is starting to fracture.

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/38443838

Experts are warning that the Trump administration's ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.

Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.

"In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard," Finkelstein explained. "When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces."