When I feel uncertain, I find it is helpful to write down things I know to be true. Fossil fuels are causing irreversible planetary overheating. Overheating threatens essentially all life on Earth. Oil and gas executives knew this, but they chose to systematically lie and block a climate transition. They continue to make this choice.
I choose to focus my energy on the climate crisis because a habitable planet is a prerequisite for everything worth fighting for, and because the prospect of losing a planet feels horrific and sad to me in a primal way that I cannot express with words. I am also simply in love with the Earth.
However, planetary overheating is really just the most geophysical symptom of extractive colonial capitalism — “billionairism” — a system designed to pump wealth from the poor to the rich, creating billionaires, the healthcare crisis, the housing crisis, genocide, hierarchies like racism and patriarchy, and a great deal of suffering.
Illustration: Mountain People
Humanity already has the technology to quickly transition away from fossil fuels; solar has been the cheapest way to produce electricity for half a decade now, but ultra-wealthy people are blocking the transition. Perhaps they do not wake up with intent to destroy the planet, but they are invested in maintaining the extractive system that gives them godlike power and privilege and is destroying the planet.
Over centuries of enclosure, the ultra-wealthy have refined a system in which wealth accrues more wealth, even spanning generations. They have systematically removed constraints on their ability to hoard, buying politicians and laws to further tilt the system in their favor and entrench their hold on power.
Elon Musk just spent US$277 million to help US president-elect Donald Trump and other Republican candidates win, but this was a mere 0.06 percent of his net worth. (Understanding just how much wealth US$430 billion represents requires a good visualization.)
The Mountain Valley pipeline, a fracked gas project that is the last thing this overheating planet needs and that had been essentially killed by activists, was revived after a backing corporation donated a measly US$302,600 to Democratic US Senator Chuck Schumer.
However, to solve the climate crisis, the healthcare crisis and all the other symptoms of billionairism — to transition to a system designed for the well-being of all — power must flow away from the billionaire class.
As Earth rapidly overheats, the rest of us cannot wait for them to cede power voluntarily. Due in part to the lies intentionally spread by fossil fuel executives, most people still have no clue what grave danger they are in. The wealthy are stealing the planet out from under them.
To resist, then, start by orienting against the real enemy: wealthy people invested in the “status quo.” For climate specifically, orient against the oil, gas and coal executives who spread disinformation to continue profiting from our planet’s destruction. Taking away their power will not be easy. They use their influence on the media to keep the rest of us divided and ignorant, delaying the sort of coherent public outrage that would be their downfall.
However, people are waking up. Those of us fighting for a livable planet must build our own power, join together in mutual support and use the truth to fan the flames of this justified rage in every way we can.
As global heating continues to accelerate, the billionaire class will attempt to use worsening climate catastrophes to further divide us, redirecting our fears toward scapegoats and using fascism to further consolidate power through state violence. We must use climate chaos instead to unite across the aisle. Conservative working-class people, although gaslit by political and faith leaders who continue to lie and tell them the climate crisis is a hoax, are realizing through their lived experience that the planet actually is overheating and breaking down. We must welcome them into the movement of movements.
Can we imagine finding common ground with each other? Can we imagine coming out of the fear that makes us so easy to divide? I have experienced how my own grief can feel threatening to those who cling to cheap hope. Paradoxically, real hope comes through accepting grief, from allowing your mind to let go of modernity, because this letting go unlocks new possibilities and pathways for action. We must guard against the kind of superficial hope that is in service of denial, such as the belief that we can keep fossil-fueled modernity going with distractions like recycling and carbon capture.
We need to make resistance a party.
Let us have conspiracy potlucks. Let us remember how to listen and to figure things out together. Let us join and nurture networks of communities based on trust and mutual aid, where we have each others’ backs and take care of each other in a material way.
We also need to take bigger risks.
We have the receipts that big oil knew and lied. We have the receipts that big pharma knew and lied. We will find out that the wealthy leaders of extractive industries across the board knew and lied, because this is the operating principle of their system.
However, the moral injury they have perpetrated is also a lever for change. It is the power behind civil disobedience, one of the best ways I know to connect with people and bring them into the movement. Billions of human lives are on the line, but our institutions, laws and social systems have not yet realized this.
When the billionaire class and its corporations pose such a grave danger through the web of laws they have created, when they use those laws as a normative framework to kill us, it is time to disobey. And it is not necessary to turn yourself in.
Let us do everything we can think of to chip away at the social license that the billionaire class and the fossil fuel industry desperately cling to. This is their Achilles heel. And we are on the right side of history.
Resistance is a choice, to commit to fight, to refuse to comply in advance. And on climate, every bit of extra fossil fuel burned, every fraction of a degree of added heating matters. It is late and we have already lost a lot, but it will never be too late to fight. Get creative, get spicy and fight on every front.
The thing that gives me hope, strangely, is that I have accepted the end of this form of profit-obsessed modernity. Extractive colonial capitalism has been a death cult for hundreds of years and now the masks are off. I know humans can do much better than this, but before the new thing can emerge, we have to let go of this billionaire-creating, planet-overheating, healthcare restricting, genocidal thing we have now. I hope to live to see something better arise, a society whose goal is the well-being of all, even though it will, unfortunately, be on a hotter planet.
Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist.
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