Post AW7tRwC0SFn5M7wTC4 by Hex@kolektiva.social
(DIR) More posts by Hex@kolektiva.social
(DIR) Post #AW7tRwC0SFn5M7wTC4 by Hex@kolektiva.social
2023-05-27T17:53:41Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
On some level, failure to address climate change doesn't make sense. No one can avoid the impacts of climate change. It seems like only the petroleum industry is invested in continuing this and that all other industries, even the auto industry, have a vested interest in changing. It seems like this is something that actually could be fixed by the state because capital should have a vested interest in a different future. This is roughly the model sold to us by the Democratic party and other reformists.There are a lot of problems with this model, but the biggest one is that the entire global order is propped up by petroleum. We are living at the end of the petroleum age. The end of this age won't simply be the same global order with oil swapped out for some other energy source and set of mineral resources; it will be a completely different global order. Let me unpack that a bit.Reading the intro to The Sacking of Fallujah, I realized I never thought deeply about the fact that petroleum forms the core of the military industrial complex. The US military sees access to petroleum as strategically critical. US foreign policy is shaped primarily by maintaining access to oil. It makes a lot of sense given that the machinery of the military is almost universally petroleum based. Losing control of petroleum could give massive advantages to large enemy nations. If *all* large militaries were denied access to petroleum it would completely rebalance world power by removing entire classes of weapons from the battlefield. The existing order of industrialized nations dominating the developing world is held in place by continued access to petroleum. It is logistically impossible for the US military to disentangle itself from petroleum, probably for several decades. There are like, 300k Humvees and like 10-20k MRAPs. Electrification of *non-combat* vehicles alone is mandated for 2035. Charging infrastructure is a major unsolved problem, and none of that accounts for the 10k+ Abrams tanks. All of these huge numbers completely omit entire branches or the military. There is no electrification plan for aircraft. Imagine the US military without the ability to establish air superiority. The US military is the largest consumer of petroleum in the world. The military needs petroleum corporations for their extraction and logistics. These corporations, therefore, can direct military action to ensure their survival. They can also direct decisions that impact civil society as national security issues. All coronations outside of petroleum rely on US global domination through violence and the threat of violence to secure their supply chains. Farming relies on migrant labor fleeing conditions created by US interventions. The price of resources are kept low through US backed coups and interventions. But even things you wouldn't expect like the recording industry is propped up at least indirectly by US global domination. It's common in EU countries to tax all basically technology to pay intellectual property holders under the assumption that technology will be used for piracy. This is fundamentally just tribute paid to the US, and it's tribute that probably wouldn't be paid if the US couldn't rain death on anyone it finds inconvenient or threaten to rain death on the behalf of those who pay sufficient tribute.Every element of the US economy rests on petroleum extraction directly, indirectly via the military, or indirectly via military enforced cost suppression. Without petroleum, the US economy would crumble. Oil created this social order, and there is likely no combination of resource and technology that can maintain the same social order.Democratization of technology like drones is already starting to rebalance global power, as seen in Ukraine (which is, by the way, another oil war). As access to petroleum becomes more of a challenge, the impacts of those technologies will be magnified.Until the US military finds a way to replace oil, it will continue to use oil. Policy makers will continue to prop up industries that support the oil industry (like the auto industry) and will continue to propose fake solutions in order to buy time to find a new path to global domination. If there is no alternative to oil, the US military will use every last drop of oil in the search for that alternative. Policy makers will continue to make room for the petroleum industry, they will allow every possible well to be drilled, they will drill and frack in the antarctic, they will not stop until there is nothing left. They can't stop because their entire paradigm is based on the assumption of US hegemony and that is not possible without US control of oil.You can't vote that away (at a national level anyway). Even if you did manage to elect a leader who would actually do something, and that person wasn't just eliminated during primaries, and wasn't just eliminated by some coup, and wasn't just killed, there would just be a military coup. There is no democratic way to solve this problem.It's a good thing we never needed democracy to shape the world.
(DIR) Post #AW7tRxEWaNOoaE7zl2 by Hex@kolektiva.social
2023-05-27T18:03:50Z
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It's funny, but locally we're actually a lot more powerful than nationally. Local politicians can be pushed to make changes to infrastructure that undermine petroleum and the oil industry. Local politicians simply don't share the same scope and mostly don't have the same lense.Collective action works. Local democracy *can* work when combined with direct action. Direct action gets the goods.The flip side of this doom-and-gloom "you can never change things" rant is that there's actually a massive vulnerability at the heart of the machine that's holding a lot of us down and killing us all. Not only is it possible for things to change for the better, it's going to happen. We will live in a more egalitarian world. The question isn't if that will happen, but how long we will suffer though the transition and how many people and species will die before we make it to the other side.
(DIR) Post #AW7tcOTS9ymDxt5YLw by dibi58@this.mouse.rocks
2023-05-28T21:35:52Z
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@Hex "what were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree" (re: easter island)(jared diamond, collapse)