Global Warming is the Punchline to History

so the setup is key.

Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

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James Joyce¹ was out with his brother on the streets of Dublin when he pointed out a man who had just dodged out of the way of an oncoming tram. Imagine, he said, if he had not moved, had just stood there and been run over and killed. Suddenly, his every action, every object he left behind in the world, would become imbued with a significance, a narrative: a slow build up to that moment of decision…or was it indecision? Death brings meaning where before there were just facts. Death binds life into narrative. Especially if that it was a suicide. This is true of individuals and of collectives.

Collectively, our death will have been a suicide. And that makes the story of just how it happened more interesting. More interesting than making observations and then debating those observations. Not because the climate broadly speaking is uninteresting—all complex systems are hypnotizing, once you begin looking closely—but because your observations or opinions about those observations don’t change the physical reality. I prefer to ground my study in the material. The things caused it: coal, oil, and methane.

If global warming is our collective Death (as opposed to nuclear weapons), then the cause-of-death will be the white men about whom I write. More specifically, their will to power: what they did to achieve power, exactly what assets they commanded, and how they deployed those assets to kill and create and kill again the world we now live in. Most of these men were motivated entirely by their own personal greed, their pursuit of personal gain.

Despite the Negarestani quote, “Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host,” I do not think that all this was over-determined. Yes, the oil was waiting for us beneath the ground the whole time, and yes, capitalism is deeply entangled with oil. But it is not by an entropic settling into most-likely scenarios that form the narrative shapes of the 20th century, but rather massively destructive expenditures of energy and labor. The petrolocized world could not have been afforded if left entirely up to private markets and economic logic: it required a nationalist orgy of violence that lasted forty-odd years.

By that I mean, the flows of the industrialized world require massive initial investments in physical infrastructure. That initial cost could not have been borne by the private capital of the day. Before the War, neither the oil nor the gas men were willing to build the long pipelines needed to connect the supply of oil and gas in the southwest to the markets in the northeast. Those pipelines required public budgets, public money. They were called the Big Inch and the Little Inch, the latter terminating at Beaumont(Patillo Higgens’ hometown). And so they required the World Wars. It was war, not free market capitalism, that brought Oil to the throne of history. The Invisible Hand turned out to be quite visible and extremely violent.

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I believe that one of oil’s attributes is agency, or at least certainly actancy. But people including Andreas Malm want to believe that only humans can really have agency, or, when feeling charitable, animals. For them, the warming itself, the change of climate, is an “unintended consequence” of industrial history. For them, the moral equation changed at the moment the humans became aware of this unintended consequence; at that point, we should have tried to stop burning oil to prevent the worst of global warming. That would have been nice, had that happened. The intended consequence, that would imply, was maximally corrupted global capitalism.

The most direct actants upon the climate are the carbon-bearing molecules in the atmosphere, driving the planet towards a specific heat-death. Whether by coincidence or intent—my argument is the latter, but it doesn’t matter—fuel is pushing the biosphere towards another iteration of the planetary regime of when the stuff was last actually alive 360 million years ago, when, as will always be mentioned first in this type of article, the sea levels were 120 meters above their current level. All of the water that constituted that pre-pangea ocean is still here on this earth, and the portion of it that is currently frozen will not be forever, now that the warming has taken hold in earnest. Much of the land that remains unflooded will become desert. The interface zone between these landscapes will be salt marshes, where the remaining terrestrial life will thrive, perhaps including recognizable humans, metabolizing the pollutants of our own century, so fecund that the vegetation could become thick enough to become, following its own eventual descent into the earth plus another 360 million years, petroleum again.

“Archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it.” (J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 29)

Is that what It is after, Its driving desire? A return to a paleozoic climate? Or is it, as Negarestani says, “the Tellurian Omega through which the Earth reaches utter immanence with the burning core of itself and the Sun” (104)?  Scientifically speaking, that is the way the Earth will end—but does that eventual final heat death have anything to do with this current unnatural global heatwave?

Every single combustion from the 1860s onward has contributed to the accumulation of carbon dioxide, before and after awareness of that fact dawned upon human animals. A much greater portion of the carbon in the air dates from after the truth was known. The intended and unintended consequences cannot be differentiated, any more than a drug’s effects can be differentiated from its side effects.

The thing that ignited and fed oil’s endless flame has always been the military-industrial complex. This must be understood in historically specific terms, rather than taking a constant refuge in theory. The “deep state” has created a circumstance in which our interests, as humans, are firmly subordinate to those of oil and its creatures.

As the billboard proclaims, “it’s not too late to do something about global warming, but later will be too late.” Perhaps it is already too late; I am not the arbiter of that decision. We urgently need to resubordinate oil to the needs of humans. We need the power to make global, collective, (communist) decisions about who gets to burn oil, and why. Only with that power can we pursue policies like climate reparations. The goal, therefore, must be to weaken the petrological agents that have seized control of our politics. The sad reality, though is that the revolution is more likely to come in retribution for the coming catastrophes; it will not arrive in time to be preventative.

This was not historically inevitable. That is why They had to kill Albert Parsons, Clara Immerwahr, Joe Hill, Subhas Chandra Bose, Mohandas Gandhi, Ruben Um Nyobè, Barthélemy Boganda, Adriano Olivetti, Joseph Bamina, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Dag Hammarskjöld, Ngô Đình Diệm,  John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Mehdi Ben Barka, Ahmadu Ibrahim Bello, Richard Fariña, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Robert Kennedy, Eduardo Mondlane, Fred Hampton, Walter Reuther, Sukarno, Jimi Hendrix, Abdel Nasser, Salvador Allende, Aldo Moro, Ali Soilih M'Tsashiwa, Park Chung-hee, Hafizullah Amin, William Tolbert, Josip Tito, Anwar Sadat, Olof Palme, Thomas Sankara, Huey Newton,  Agathe Uwilingiyimana, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Tupac Shakur, Mark Lombardi, Paul Wellstone, Benazir Bhutto, Muammar Gaddafi, Young Dolph, and millions of others.

As a punchline to all that, Global Warming! lacks a certain wit; perhaps in the hands of a more capable writer, it would be funnier. It does feel very stupid. It also feels very stupid, and immaterial, that there are still so many people in denial about it. There’s really not that much to say about it, but most of what is worth saying is history.

1. Richard Ellman, James Joyce, page 163. It is not made explicit that the hypothetical tram death was a suicide, but it could have been.