They will not stop unless we stop them

Fossil fuel executives kill people.

Reading Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More, An All-Consuming History of Energy and Overshoot by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton has been a confronting experience. Fressoz’s book shows that there has never been an energy transition. Human history is really about new forms of energy being added to existing sources, and even helping to intensify their use. More wood is used in the production of energy today than in the pre-industrial age, when wood burning was the primary form of energy production. Many historians, ecomodernists and celebrators of “progress” think that coal replaced wood in the 19^th century, and oil replaced coal in the 20^th, and that renewables will inevitably replace them all in the 21^st as prices for solar and wind continue to drop. But, as Fressoz shows, despite all the warnings about global warming, and all the fluff about the “energy transition”, more coal is burned today than ever in history, and oil companies are making record profits and reinvesting them in increased production. I’ve known for a long time, thanks in particular to the great work done by Sean Sweeney at Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, that renewables are really just helping to meet new demand for energy rather than replacing fossil fuels at anything like the scale and pace needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. More and More and More provides all the statistics and historical analysis to show that there is no energy transition taking place in any real sense, and that the workings of markets and capitalism on their own will never make one happen.

Overshoot shows how the fossil fuel industry has never taken energy transition seriously, that it is determined to exploit the reserves of fossil fuels that all the world’s climate experts say need to stay in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophe.

What conclusion do I take from these two books? A pretty clear one: the only way to ensure a transition from fossil energy to renewable energy and thus to save human civilisation is for active political decisions to be taken to shut down the fossil fuel industry and to strip fossil fuel companies of their reserves that they otherwise intend to exploit. Leaving it up to markets or to imagined processes of technological transition that have never occurred before simply won’t cut it.

Which brings us to some very difficult, troubling questions that must now be asked, even if no-one in mainstream politics or media wants to go there.

Let me set things out very clearly.

1. It is now widely accepted that temperature increases above 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels are likely to be catastrophic for organised human life on earth. That tipping point is rapidly being approached. In some parts of the world it may have already been exceeded. Any temperature increase above 2 degrees will almost certainly produce ecosystem collapses, substantial sea level rises, food system failures, parts of the globe becoming uninhabitable, large population movements, fresh water shortages, extreme wildfires, storms and floods, droughts, starvation. Many of these catastrophes are likely to occur below the 2 degree level and indeed are already occurring in many places. The political classes of most countries, with the exception of the post-rational, nihilist or thano-capitalist far-right, accept these prognoses and purport to wish to avoid them. Even the CEOs of most big fossil fuel companies accept that climate change is occurring and that their products are causing it. They have known this for decades, having done some of the earliest research on the problem.

2. Scientific experts are explicit that if we are to prevent global temperatures rising above 1.5 degrees there is no scope for the opening of new fossil fuel extraction projects. Existing extraction must be reduced over the next 25 years to close to zero.

3. The vast majority of fossil fuel companies have no intention of reducing their extraction of fossil fuels at the scale or pace needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. Most such companies are continuing to expand their exploration and extraction efforts. The profits to be made from extracting and burning fossil fuels simply make them unwilling to do what is necessary to save human civilisation.

What flows from the above indisputable facts?

1. Fossil fuel company executives know that what their companies are doing is killing people now and will kill many millions more in coming decades. There can be no doubt about this. They are making active choices to kill people for the sake of profits.

2. What would have happened if a British industrialist had insisted on selling Spitfires or tanks to Nazi Germany in 1940? The British government would have taken action against the industrialist for treason, arresting him and perhaps executing him.

3. Are not fossil fuel executives today analogous to the treasonous industrialist of 1940? They know that their industry is causing untold harm. They know that it is killing people. Are not the people of the world entitled to defend themselves and their children from these people?

The rank failure of the world to act on climate change at the pace and scale needed, and now the election of the Trump death cult in the USA mean that the difficult questions that I have posed now have to be faced. It is now time for an open political discussion to be had about the following question: what measures are the people of the world entitled to take, and prepared to take, to protect themselves against fossil fuel executives, their political stooges and their deliberate plans to maximise their profits at the expense of millions of lives and the future habitability of the planet? Fossil fuel executives and their political supporters have only themselves to blame if the time for a peaceful, gradual transition to a sustainable economy has now essentially passed, and if the future resistance to their depredations takes on a different character.

Perhaps not the best photo in the world, but it makes my point. This is a small part of the memorial wall of miners killed at Broken Hill over the years. I couldn’t take a photo that took in the full scale of the memorial wall and the hundreds of miners killed for mining company profits.