In dealing with the poverty that still plagued so much of the Indian populace, the Indian government had had to create electricity as fast as they could, and also, since they existed in a world run by the market, as cheaply as they could. Otherwise outside investors would not invest, because the rate of return would not be high enough. So they had burned coal, yes. Like everyone else had up until just a few years before. Now India was being told not to burn coal, when everyone else had finished burning enough of it to build up the capital to afford to shift to cleaner sources of power. India had been told to get better without any financial help to do so whatsoever. Told to tighten the belt and embrace austerity, and be the working class for the bourgeoisie of the developed world, and suffer in silence until better times came—but the better times could never come, that plan was shot. The deck had been stacked, the game was over. And now twenty million people were dead.

it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States—mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.

the fossil fuels industry has already located at least 3,000 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground. All these concentrations of carbon are listed as assets by the corporations that have located them, and they are regarded as national resources by the nation-states in which they have been found. Only about a quarter of this carbon is owned by private companies; the rest is in the possession of various nation-states. The notional value of the 2,500 gigatons of carbon that should be left in the ground, calculated by using the current price of oil, is on the order of 1,500 trillion US dollars. It seems quite possible that these 2,500 gigatons of carbon might eventually come to be regarded as a kind of stranded asset, but in the meantime, some people will be trying to sell and burn the portion of it they own or control, while they still can. Just enough to make a trillion or two, they’ll be saying to themselves—not the crucial portion, not the burn that pushes us over the edge, just one last little taking. People need it.

There is a real situation, that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it’s the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus.

early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic—beyond that, après moi le déluge.

Today we’re here to inquire who actually enacts the world’s economy—who are the ones who make it all go, so to speak. Possibly these people constitute a minority, as it is often said that most people alive today would actively welcome a change in the system. Only a stupid person would say that. Well, and yet I’ve just said it. Yes. But to get back to the question in hand, who do we think actually enacts the market as such? By which I mean to say, who theorizes it, who implements it, who administers it, who defends it? The police. It being the law. So but can we then assume that those people who make the laws are deeply implicated? Yes. But lawmakers are often lawyers themselves, notoriously bereft of ideas. Can we assume they get their ideas about law from others? Yes. And who are some of those others? Think tanks. Academics. Meaning MBA professors. All kinds of academics. And very quickly their students. Economics departments, you mean. The World Trade Organization. Stock markets. All the laws, and the politicians and bureaucrats administering the laws. And the police and army enforcing them. And I suppose the CEOs of all the companies. Banks. Shareholder associations, pension funds, individual shareholders, hedge funds, financial firms. Might the central banks indeed be central to all this? Yes. Anyone else? Insurance companies, re-insurance companies. Big investors. And their algorithms, right? So, mathematicians? The math is primitive. And yet even primitive math still takes mathematicians, the rest of us being so clueless. Yes. Also I suppose simply prices themselves, and interest rates and the like. Which is to say simply the system itself. You were asking about the people doing it. Yes, but it’s an actor network. Some of the actors in an actor network aren’t human. Balderdash. What, you don’t believe in actor networks? There are actor networks, but it’s the actors with agency who can choose to do things differently. That’s what you were trying to talk about. All right, but what about money? What about it? To my mind, money acts as if it worked as gravity does—the more of it you gather together, the more gathering power it exerts, as with mass and its gravitational attraction. Cute. Ultimately this is a very big and articulated system! Insightful. All right then, back to the ones who administer our economic system as such, and teach others how to work it, and by a not-so-coincidental coincidence, benefit from it the most. I wonder how many people that would turn out to be? About eight million. You’re sure? No. So this would be about one in every thousand persons alive today. Well done. Thank you! And the programs they’ve written. Stick to the people. But if the non-human elements of the system were to break? Stick to the people. You were almost getting interesting. Who matters the most in that group of eight million? Government legislators. That’s a bad thought. No it isn’t. Why would you say that? Corruption, stupidity—Rule of law. But—But me no buts. Rule of law. What a weak reed to stand on! Yes. What can we do about that? Just make it stick.

One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking. One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.

there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. That evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak, crushing them underfoot.

In our real world of the mid-twenty-first century, countries with a low Gini coefficient, like the social democracies, are generally a bit below 0.3, while highly unequal countries are a bit above 0.6. The US, China, and many other countries have seen their Gini coefficients shoot up in the neoliberal era, from 0.3 or 0.4 up to 0.5 or 0.6, this with barely a squeak from the people losing the most in this increase in inequality, and indeed many of those harmed often vote for politicians who will increase their relative impoverishment. Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we’re patriots! At least we’re self-reliant and we can take care of ourselves, and so on, right into an early grave, as the average lifetimes of the poorer citizens in these countries are much shorter than those of the wealthy citizens. And average lifetimes overall are therefore decreasing for the first time since the eighteenth century.

monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.

It’s the structure of feeling in our time; we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP. This is said to be the only thing people can agree on. Although those who say this are often economists.

We are always more confident of our reasoning than we should be.

It’ll cost a ton! What’s cost? I said. Postdocs can be so stovepiped, it would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. I clarified reality for them: Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.

If at first you don’t succeed—You’ll never get funded again.

attempts are always made to divide the past into periods. This is always an act of imagination, which fixes on matters geological (ice ages and extinction events, etc.), technological (the stone age, the bronze age, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution), dynastic (the imperial sequences in China and India, the various rulers in Europe and elsewhere), hegemonic (the Roman empire, the Arab expansion, European colonialism, the post-colonial, the neo-colonial), economic (feudalism, capitalism), ideational (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism), and so on. These are only a few of the periodizing schemes applied to the flux of recorded events. They are dubiously illuminative, perhaps, but as someone once wrote, “we cannot not periodize,” and as this appears to be true, the hunt is on to find out how we can best put this urge to use. Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years. And if on the other hand things feel chaotic to the point of dissolution, it is also impossible that some kind of new order will not emerge eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.

The Arctic ice cap, which at its first measurement in the 1950s was more than ten meters thick, had been a big part of the Earth’s albedo; during northern summers it had reflected as much as two or three percent of the sun’s incoming insolation back into space.

Demonstrations are parties. People party and then go home. Nothing changes.

we could go back to relieving ourselves in more or less the usual manner, although it was nasty. It was like being trapped at Woodstock but with no music.

The whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals.

Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet?

High-frequency trading has been put forth as an example of computers out-achieving the market proper, but instead of improving the system it’s just been used to take rents on every exchange. This a sign of effective computational power, but used by people still stuck in the 1930s terminology of market versus planning, capitalism versus communism. And by people not trying to improve system, but merely to make more money in current system.

What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few years ahead, or even in many cases, as with high-speed trading, a few micro-seconds ahead.

If we don’t fund a rapid carbon drawdown, if we don’t take the immense amount of capital that flows around the world looking for the highest rate of return and redirect it into decarbonizing work, civilization could crash. Then the dollar will be weak indeed.”

Because money ruled the world, these people ruled the world. They were the world’s rulers, in some very real sense. Bankers. Non-democratic, answerable to no one. The technocratic elite at its most elite: financiers.

Just because the need was urgent and her case was good, that didn’t mean anything would change. You couldn’t change things with just an idea, no matter how good it was. Was that right? It felt right. Power was entrenched—but that phrase caught just a hint of the situation—actually the trenches were foundations that went right to the center of the earth. They could not be changed.

And yet here they are. Most of them are young, not all, but it takes a certain idealism, and that’s mainly a young person’s feeling. They are almost all younger than me now, but not so long ago, when I first came here, they were my age.

the neoliberal order was all about efficiency, in its purest economic definition: the speed and frictionlessness with which money moved from the poor to the rich.

Now that the Cold War was over and Germany was in economic terms stronger than Russia, it could detach itself from the US a bit, cleverly pretending to be a client when it was convenient, but by and large pursuing its own course. This was obvious to everyone in Europe, but America’s narcissistic myopia regarding the rest of the world didn’t allow it to see that very well.

The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death. Everyone felt it. The culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed. They went through the motions, always in a state of suspended dread, always aware of their wounded status, wondering what massive stroke would fall next, and how they would manage to ignore that one too, when it was already such a huge effort to ignore the ones that had happened so far, a string of them going all the way back to 2020.

And yet still they burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the heat wave and would cause the next one. Profits still were added up in a way that led to shareholder dividends. And so on.

it was mostly just discursive struggle, a war of words and ideas and laws, which only had brutal death-dealing consequences as a derivative effect that could be denied by aggressors on both sides. It was a civil war, perhaps, a body politic punching itself over and over.

The fossil fuels industry’s lawyers were getting more and more interested to learn how much they could extort from the system if they chose to sequester their asset.

they all wanted compensation, even though all of them had agreed in the Paris Agreement to decarbonize. Pay us for not ruining the world! It was extortion, a protection racket squeezing its victims; but the victims were the national populations, so in effect they were putting the squeeze on themselves. Or their elected politicians were putting the squeeze on them. So the situation was bizarre, both hard to define and constantly changing.

The state-owned companies looked interested at the idea of compensation for their stranded assets, which they had already borrowed against, in the usual way of the rampant reckless financialization which was the hallmark of their time.

The crash in insect numbers put every ecological system on terrestrial Earth in danger of collapse. Collapse—meaning most of the species currently on Earth dead and gone. The surviving species subsequent to this event would be free to spread in all the empty ecological niches, spread and evolve and speciate, so that in twenty million years, maybe less, maybe only two million years, a differently constituted array of species would fully re-occupy the biosphere.

China, where the stance had always been that the Chinese Communist Party was precisely a company in that mold, owned by its consumers and only in existence to advance their welfare.

It is the theory which decides what one can observe.

So even if the central bankers were regarding their task in the very narrowest terms, as stabilizing prices and helping the employment rate, and more than anything else, preserving the perceived value of money itself—to do that now, they had to leave their usual monetarist silos, and regard themselves as what they were, the not-so-secret government of the world. In that capacity, something more was now called for than merely adjusting their fucking interest rates.

all central banks were undemocratic technocracies, not that dissimilar to China’s top-down system. They were run by financial elites who did what they felt was best without consulting even their own legislatures, much less the citizens of their countries. As institutions they were in fact specifically designed to function outside any legislative or democratic whims, the better to keep the financial ship of the world steadily sailing on into the great west of universal prosperity—for the elites first, and everyone else if they could be accommodated without endangering the elites on the first-class deck.

This, Mary thought as the days and weeks after the meeting passed, was beginning to look like a pattern. They were only really doing things to try to ameliorate the situation they were falling into after it was too late for those things to succeed. They kept closing the barn door after the horses were out, or after the barn had burned down. At that point their actions, which a few years or decades earlier might have been quite effective, weren’t enough. Maybe even close to useless. Over and again it was a case of too little too late, with nothing stronger anyone could think of to apply to the worsening situation.

The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.

Narcissism is generally regarded as the result of a stunted imagination, and a form of fear. For the narcissist, the other is too fearful to register, and thus the individual death of the narcissist represents the end of everything real; as a result, death for the narcissist becomes even more fearful and disastrous than it is for people who accept the reality of the other and the continuance of the world beyond their individual end. Even the night sky frightens the narcissist, as presenting impossible-to-deny evidence of a world exterior to the self. Narcissists therefore tend to stay indoors, live in ideas, and demand compliance and assent from everyone they come in contact with, who are all regarded as servants, or ghosts. And as death approaches, they do their best to destroy as much of the world as they can.

People are supposed to trust money, but then a lot of it gets stolen, by the very structure of money itself.

“The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

carbon, the king of the elements, sweetly six-sided and tetravalent, able to bond with the atoms of my kind in several different ways, and to compound with other atoms in almost countless ways, being so friendly.

this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

It was without doubt a volatile situation. But recall that the financial markets of that time loved stock price volatility, as it made money for financiers no matter what happened, their having gone both long and short on everything. These were not economists, but speculators. Finance in that late moment of capitalism’s exhaustion meant gamblers, sure, but more than that, the casino in which people gambled. And the house always won. And carbon coins were the best opportunity to go long ever created. Almost a kind of sure thing. So in certain respects, the craziness of the time was simply good for investors. Those who had shorted fossil fuels and gone long on clean renewables were now making fortunes; and fortunes require reinvestment to actually be fortunes. Growth! Growth!

measurement of anything always leads to financialization of the measurement method itself.

If we could keep under the radar in Washington, where assholes congregate and bray loudly about the God-given right to kill everything in creation without restraint, we could usually make corridor creation work quite well.

The Midwest has been treated like a continent-sized factory floor for assembling grocery store commodities, and anything that got in the way of that was designated a pest or vermin and killed off.

Deer are the sad sacks of American wildlife, so beautiful, so defenseless, so numerous, so dim. Their chief predator is cars. They never seem to get it, about cars or anything else; or maybe they do, but they don’t have a good way to transmit what they learn to their kids, if they happen to get lucky and live past their youth. It’s important always to remember that even if they’re as common as rats, some kind of mammal weed, they are still beautiful wild animals, getting by on their own in a dangerous world.

the Green New Deal, that early shot in the War for the Earth. It was more than that: it was trying to think through how to do the needful in the biosphere’s time of crisis, while orthodox economics failed to rise to the occasion, and stayed focused in its old analysis of capitalism, as if capitalism were the only possible political economy, thus freezing economics as a discipline like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car.

Since money is an idea, a system based on social trust, when things go south, and trust disappears in a poof, then there simply isn’t as much money as there used to be.

When you get one pay amount, and someone doing something easier gets a thousand of that pay amount, that’s a disincentive to care about anything. At that point you throw a rock through a window, or vote for some asshole who is going to break everything, which may give you a chance to start over, and if that doesn’t work then at least you have said fuck you to the thousand-getters. And so on.

In a fight between sociopathic sick wounded angry fucked-up wicked people, and all the rest of them, not just the good and the brave but the ordinary and weak, the sheep who just wanted to get by, the fuckers always won.

The few took power and wielded it like torturers, happy to tear the happiness away from the many. Oh sure everyone had their reasons. The killers always thought they were defending their race or their nation or their kids or their values. They looked through the mirror and threw their own ugliness onto the other, so they didn’t see it in themselves. Always the other!

in the Great Internet of Things, the Quantified World, the World as Data, all these aspects of the problem were being measured,

Our tools are expressions of our intentions, so what we want to do is the key driver.

Our systems are what drive history, not our tools.

Have you heard that the warming of the oceans means that the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in fish and thus available for human consumption may drop by as much as sixty percent? And that these fatty acids are crucial to signal transduction in the brain, so it’s possible that our collective intelligence is now rapidly dropping because of an ocean-warming-caused diminishment in brain power? That would explain a lot.

The narcissism of small differences. That’s an odd name. It’s Freud’s name. Means more regard for yourself than for your allies or the problems you both face.

We in Hong Kong have a very particular culture and feeling. We lived as servants of the British, and we know very well what it felt like to be subaltern to a hegemonic power. That only lasted a few generations, but it set a particular feeling here, right in people’s hearts: never again.

language is family. Language is the real family.