The Wuhan Effect

When a cataclysmic eco-disaster looms, threatening the long-term survival of every living thing on the planet, world leaders and industry titans don’t give too much of a shit. But when a virus comes a-knocking, threatening the elderly and the infirm, the world turns on a dime.

As the world is hunkering down to weather the onslaught of the Wuhan Virus, aka. Covid-19, aka. Corona Virus, the social distancing and quarantine programs have produced not-totally unexpected fruits. Clear skies over industrial China. Starlit nights in urban areas. And pristine water in the channels of Venice (even if the claims of returning dolphins were an untrue exaggeration).

Turns out that a near-complete shutdown of the global economy is good for the environment. Whodathunk.

Well, everyone with a sliver of sense in their thick heads could have said so. And have said so. Repeatedly. From experts in pretty much every scientific field, to environmentalists and displeased children, plenty of voices have sounded and pleaded with the world industry to slow the fuck down before we crash into a wall. But any such pleads have fallen on disinterested ears, proving that the future of our children is an acceptable sacrifice for a black bottom line. Even when the next generation shames us in tears at a world summit, nothing changes. But the second that those fossilized fucks at the top of the economic food chain get assaulted by a virus that’s really only dangerous to them and not the wide majority of the population, they sing a different tune.

The politicians and the moguls always told us that a reset was impossible. That making the kind of zero-emission u-turn that the climate activists called necessary was in fact impossible. Unfeasible. Disastrously irresponsible. A fairytale fiction. That no matter what global crisis threatened the very existence of the human race, the factories wouldn’t, couldn’t, shut down. They told us this, laughed at us for our naiveté, and went on with their wanton profiteering.

But the Wuhan Virus has proven that they lied. Undeniable proof that the factories can in fact be shut down. That the ships can be stranded. That the trucks can be stopped. It’s just a matter of the right incentive. And global ecological collapse, rising sea levels, hellraising storms, famine and drought, turned out to be the incorrect incentives for the avaricious and the corrupt. The right incentive wasn’t a mass extinction. It turned out to be a little cough. A little cough from mainland China that rocked the world into compliance.

Because the lives and futures of all those that come after us weren’t as important as the withering lives of those precious few that make all the decisions.

But no matter how hard the markets fall, no matter how many companies shutter their doors and lay off their employees, a pandemic passes. Eventually. No matter what measures we take, what failures we commit, eventually the plague passes. A day will come when the Wuhan Virus is about as irrelevant to global society as the common cold. The question isn’t how we get there, but rather what happens then?

Do we go back to an exponential growth economy that keeps hollowing out the planet we live on? Do we go back to stock markets, carbon and sulphur emissions? Back to commercialism, greed and want? Do we go back to spending the worlds renewable resources at double the rate they replenish at? Because that’s what all the economists, politicians and industry giants  contemplate. On how to go back to the twisted, distorted, dysfunctional way things were.

Or do we count ourselves lucky, and keep our production down enough to satisfy our needs without going back to inflating our wants?

It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? If people living in urban China could keep looking up and seeing the sky? Wouldn’t it be nice to see fabled wildlife return to our ports and channels? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to wear an oxygen supply just to go get groceries? Wouldn’t it be nice if all those parasitic fucks at the top would die off from a little cough, and finally relinquish the reigns of the world to those that prefer to live on our planet rather than profiteer from of it?

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/3-2020

A Brand of Admission

You know what sucks? Being wrong. Doing a bad. Making a mistake. It doesn’t matter what the scope of your mistake is. It always, ever, sucks. Whether it’s being wrong about some little factual thing in a discussion of varying relevance. Or acting out of order with your close ones, leaving hurt feelings and sullen silence in your wake. Or even if you’ve gone so far as to bring down a whole air plane filled with people, regardless if it’s filled with 176 or 298 souls.

And admitting it, that you done fucked up, is even worse.

Why is that though? Why is it so much more fucking terrible to admit your mistakes than it is to actually make them? Everyone fucks up every once in a while. We’ve all done it. Maybe not pushed a button or trigger and ended hundreds of peoples’ lives in a flash of ignited jet fuel. That’s a sin exclusive to just a few sorry sods out there. But just about regardless of the severity of our fumble, that otherwise seems to be such a universal unifier, it is so very very very difficult to cop to it. In many cases, our aversion to own our mistakes takes on such stupendous dimensions that it, for some gods awful reason, seems like a better idea to keep digging the hole we’re in rather than try to climb out of it.

Just a casual look into the Orange Wellspring of Stupidity that used to be known as the White House easily illustrates the point, if although in mind-boggling extremes. How a man, by the loosest definition of the word possible, can keep making mistake after mistake without ever acknowledging a single one of them, and yet retain his position of solidifying power and withering prestige.

A “man” that seems, to his final death rattle, refuse that he ever, ever ever ever, made a single itty bitty mistake. A “man” for whom failure seems to be more abhorrent than fashioning himself into a cult symbol for the most deranged and dangerous people in America. A “man” that just won’t. Stop. Digging.

I wonder why that is. Who or what ever instilled in us the idea that our mistakes define us to such a dire extent that they will completely condemn our character, our identity, if faced. Have churches, schools, parents, political paradigms, profit oriented economical structures, performance anxiety, and philosophers really managed to beat into us so thoroughly that we’re only ever as good as our worst mistake. That success somehow ever comes in the miraculous absence of failure. Despite the very measurable fact that the greatest heroes and role models of any age often stand on a veritable carnage of failures and fumbles to reach their historic heights.

For example, from off the top of my head; George Washington, revered by millions as a revolutionary hero and founding father, who failed in nearly every battle he brought his colonial forces into, and in so winning an unwinnable war. Some accounts of the man going so far as to paint him as wearing his many mistakes and failures on his sleeves, as if they were his real accomplishments. His survivals.

So, why oh why, are we so afraid of admitting failure? Even when the greatest among us are demonstrably the ones that stand unbowed among their shattered chances, as opposed to the countless unsung lessers that are lied to have never broken a vase of opportunity in their lives?

I don’t know. I don’t get it. I, like anyone, also feel that pathetic pang of shame and anguish whensoever I’m called to be held accountable. But I don’t get it either. I don’t understand where it comes from. There’s not a single shred of evidence, in either practise or story sung, where accountability has borne worse consequences than the action itself.

We need to stop. We need to stop making excuses. Stop trying to sweep shattered vases, shot down air planes, or fish choking on plastic and dying coral reefs under the rug. We need to stop leaving our failures in darkness, left to fester and swell unattended and ignored. Even if unbridled shame is the hallmark of the human race, we need to stop. Because just as heroes are forged from openly brandished mistakes, monsters grow from the faults we keep hidden.

Because I think most of us would rather be the former than the latter.

/Sebastian Lindberg 13/1-2020

The Lie of the Environmentally Friendly Oil Refinery

And so, the other shoe finally drops. The Greta Effect was all well and good, but just as Newton teaches us, no force ever exists without a reactionary power to rival it. Which brings us to this moment, when our corporate interests and established economical hegemonies muster to produce counter arguments and publicity in accordance to their single-minded interests to pilfer away capital to the deficit of coming generations.

And the media are either too stupid, too uninformed, or too complicit to stand up to corporate posturing.

The Swedish west coast has been a home to petroleum industries for some sixty years. Plenty of jobs revolve around the refinement of raw oil into everything from plastics to diesel and gasoline. And now, controversy has risen in the face of a planned expansion of Preem‘s oil refinery in the little Swedish coastal hamlet of Lysekil.

The plan is to expand the facilities to permit them to turn their ship fuel products into low-sulphur diesel and gasoline, and thus relieve the world’s oceans of ph-dumping hazards. In the process, however, the Preem facilities will double their carbon footprint from 1,7 million metric tonnes per year, to a whooping 3,4 million tonnes.

The company has invested millions in the project, before it has even begun construction. But environmental groups put a halt to it. Long story short, the project’s dangling in the wind, pending another trial in the environmental courts of the Swedish judicial system.

And thus they come crawling out of the woodwork. The skeavy sleazes, spin-doctors, and obfuscationists, suggesting that the increase in carbon emissions from raw oil refinement would be of lesser detriment to the world than the acidification of the oceans. When in reality, the world has had enough of both infractions.

So, to promote the Preem investments, the regional Swedish newspaper sneaks in a guest column on Midsummer Eve (GöteborgsPosten gästledare, 21/6-2019). Written by a man presenting himself as a business advisor, a past environmental Gothenburg city official and Greenpeace board member. And despite his environmentalist pedigree, the Big Business lobbyist downplays the validity of climate change and the influence of carbon emissions. Making intellectually dishonest arguments such as “carbon dioxide is a life vital gas”. Completely disregarding the concept of carbon balance in the atmosphere, and why digging up new carbon from ancient deposits is patently a bad idea. He goes on to top it all off, after having expunged the benefits of running ships on gasoline and diesel rather than the high-sulphuric alternatives, by casually dismissing climate change as the premier concern by stating, and I quote:

“So maybe the benefits outweigh the harm with this expansion – if you take into account more environmental facts other than just the climate.”

As if it matters if the scarce greenery along the western Swedish coast gets a carbon boost when it’ll all be under water in a few decades if the polar ice keeps melting.

But it surprises absolutely fuck all that this regional newspaper is publishing an anti-environment, pro-business column. They’ve been leaning harder and harder into their capitalist free-market ideology for years. Ever since it became apparent that unbiased newsmongering doesn’t make as much money as propaganda does. But it’s not just them. Even Swedish public service (supposedly our unbiased and a-political public news source) unabashedly and unquestioningly publish arguments to the benefit of the refinery expansion.

It’s true though, that we can’t let our transcontinental shipping keep regurgitating sulphur and other acidifying elements into our oceans. But neither can we allow our carbon emissions to rise either. Enough is enough, and studies show that we’re on the cusp of the breaking point. The environmental systems that govern how our world works are breaking beyond mend. It’s getting to the point of being only a matter of damage control. It’s not a matter of “if we’ve fucked our environment” but “how much we’ve fucked our environment”. And even if Saudi-owned Preem is taking efforts to limit its carbon and sulphur footprint, it will never be a carbon neutral business. Ever. It needs to die, because no manner of compromise will ever make it anything but a detriment to our survival chances.

The environment that we live in doesn’t care about relativistic decreases of human emissions. It doesn’t care about emission taxes or purchased emissions rights. Any carbon or sulphur brought out of imprisonment beneath the earth’s crust is going to have a detrimental effect on our current biosphere. Humanity has traded our future for momentary comfort for too long. And no measure of lobbyism, compromise, or white-washing is going to change that.

We’ve shat the bed. And we need to stop shitting. Altogether. Right. Now.

/Sebastian Lindberg 25/6-2019

The Gilets Jaunes-proof

The rampage of the ”Gilets Jaunes” is into its fourth week, with little sign of abating. Keeping the statistics straight has become a labour of futility, but according to estimates, over two thousand people have been arrested. Over a thousand civilians have been injured, along with some two hundred police officers. Four people have died.

The centrist hope of Europe, Macron, has folded on the tax hikes on petrol and diesel. But the marches keep on coming. Both the extreme right and left of the political spectrum are rooting on, probably hoping to carve up a slice for themselves from whatever’s left of the French nation when the heat finally subsides.

Worse yet, the yellow jacket symbol is spreading. Belgium saw a short stint of protesters, but shut that shit down real quick. In Germany, the yellow jackets have been used by anti-immigration groups. In Italy, anti-EU pro-government organizers have taken up the symbol as their own. The banner has even reached as far as Basra, Iraq, where people were protesting on the fifth of December against low employment.

”No tax deserves to endanger the unity of the nation”, said Prime Minister Éduardo Philippe in a live address to the people.

It is however easy to argue that the ecological survival of this planet’s current biosphere certainly deserves the ruined unity of every nation of the earth if it so demands it. Because without the biosphere as we know it, it is highly unlikely that any nation would be able to survive at all anyway.

But that’s not the argument that I’m going to spend my words on today. I’ve done so already. Instead, I’d like to posit the idea that this extravagant displeasure, this malcontent, makes for an excellent argument that some issues, some problems, are too great, too important, to be left to the populace.

Rising fuel taxes are a necessity to stamp out our reliance on fossil fuels. The only way to stop people from burning oil and gas and all its derivatives, is to make it prohibitively expensive to do so. That is the only incentive a government can use on its people. And ending our reliance on fossil fuels is one of the many requirements toward making our habitation on this blue ball sustainable.

And apparently, The People won’t have it.

For years, we The People have complained that the problem was with our leaders. Our politicians, our industry giants, our scientists. That they needed to solve our problems, our diminishing world. That we needed our leadership to take the mounting ecological disaster seriously and do something about it. That they need to prevent our demise.

We can no longer make that claim. Because now we have empirical evidence of what happens when a nation attempts to reform our energy dependence. We The People won’t accept it. We will destroy any leader that attempts to make a change for the sustainable. We will not sacrifice our comforts, our cars, our precious lifestyle choices, even in the face of pandemic disaster.

The alternative? Just like the Republic of Rome, in a time of crisis, it may behove society to turn the reigns to a choice set of hands. And this, our flickering biosphere, is certainly undergoing a crisis. A slow-cooking doom that the general population seems unwilling to recognize. Perhaps, like environmental scientists have hinted at, wartime-like exceptions are called for to do battle with this our sorry state.

Because the Gilets Jaunes have irrevocably proven one thing to humanity. The problem, the sickness of pollution and decay, does not solely lie with our leaders. It lies with us. We, The People.

And some problems are too grand, have too great consequences, to be left in our indulgent hands.

/Sebastian Lindberg 10/12-2018

A Driver’s Tantrum

France is standing still. Guesstimates number the protesters, dubbed the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ for their yellow vestments, in the hundreds of thousands. All having been rallied through the great imbecile networks of social media for one singular purpose: To protest the rise in petrol and diesel taxes.

As of Sunday, over two hundred people have been injured. One protester was even killed on Saturday, following a driver panicking as protesters swarmed her car. Coming on a hundred people have been arrested.

No one protests quite like the French, do they?

Aside from French malcontent, I’ve had this conversation before. People complaining every time they drive past a petrol station. Lamenting that back in their day, or their parents’ day, prices were reasonable. And even accounting for the cost of living adjustment, they’re right. Taxes were much lower when we didn’t have an ecological Sword of Damocles above our heads. But now we do. But complaints are never levied against the situation at hand, or our own implicit guilt in creating it, but rather at the taxmen; the politicians that in a rare moment of clarity have imposed the imposition upon mere mortals. Upon ordinary folk in rural areas, just trying to get from house to job.

When these fossil fuel dependent people are called upon to include the environment in their reflections, one type of response repeats: “But what else am I to do? How else am I to live, to work, to thrive? Am I to relinquish my freedom of movement simply because the sky is choking?”

When we map greenhouse gas emissions, we can conclude that over a quarter of them come from the transportation sector. Out of which over half comes from personal vehicles and light-duty trucks. This has been true for years. Decades even. Showing no sign of change.

And yet these malignant organisms think it unfair to raise the prices of their malevolent habits of cooking dinosaur-carcasses in our shared environment.

Time and time again it has been proven that the only way to shift a population’s behaviour is to incentivise change. Either by the carrot or by the stick. Preferably both. But you can never trust the droning masses to change their habits simply by asking if they kindly would. Not even in the face of looming and publicized disaster can they manage the change necessary for continued survival. For when you grant the broad population the choice between comfortable habit and radical change, they will chose comfortable habit every time.

So, are these countryfolk and Yellow Vests just simply wrong? Entitled and stubborn? Unenlightened and regressive? Some; surely. Most; maybe. All; no. For even though the rise in petrol and diesel prices is a justified Stick, what’s lacking is a Carrot. Options and alternatives need to be provided. And they’re quite simply not being offered in any feasible regard. It is not reasonable to ask people to bike forty kilometres to work every day. Public transportation is more often than not a poor joke in rural areas. And ignoring the valid environmental criticisms of ”green” car options, such as the controversial Tesla for example, even those aren’t realistic due to either price, range, or availability.

But make no mistake: That does not mean that the price hike for fossil fuels is wrong. It only means more needs to be done. That more change is required. Not less.

So, what’s a country resident to do? What if living outside of urban areas becomes prohibitively expensive? Would that be fair? No, maybe it wouldn’t. But maybe your rural carbon footprint is just as inexcusable as the rest of them. Maybe your right to live where you please, in a place where you can actually see the lit night sky in lieu of light pollution, isn’t a privilege that stands higher than our need to reign in our wanton putrefaction of our habitat. Maybe, if you don’t have the means to be clean about it, you shouldn’t consider it your right to set up shop in whatever remote corner you please.

Because whining about a necessary Stick, because closing down countries with your childish temper tantrums, only paints you as a spoilt villain and an enemy to sustainability.

/Sebastian Lindberg 19/11-2018

Change is Scarier than Ruin

He works as a process technician on one of Norway’s oil platforms. A young engineer at the cusp of his career in oil extraction. Asked by a journalist what he thinks about his field’s inextricable conflict with a sustainable environment.

”That’s not something I really reflect on”, he answers. ”There’s still plenty of oil [to extract], and I think the world will still be dependent on it and gas [for the next 40 years].”

This is what the rationalization of profiting off of the future in the now sounds like. ”I don’t think about it” and ”they’ll buy it as long as I make it”. These are the arguments of a drug dealer, wilfully ignorant of the continual degradation of the health of its customer base. The human world is hooked on oil and gas like a crack whore. It would take an idiot not to take advantage.

It’s a comfort, isn’t it? Stick your head in the sand and just ignore the world burning around you. Ignorance is bliss, and as long as you don’t think about it, your profiteering won’t harm your retarded sense of morality. The same goes for all those that think that buying ecological tomatoes, or ”conflict free” diamonds can balance out bulldozing their way through suburbia in their gallons-guzzling SUVs. Just put a little lotion on your crumbling moral compass, don’t look at the big picture, and you can go on exactly as you always have except for choosing a pricier brand of coffee.

Because change is scary. Apparently more so than an ecological collapse. Not to mention that sufficient private change to subsidize your carbon footprint enough for sustainability goes counter to having all those things that we were promised. A house, a family, a lucrative career, a fancy car, a chromed espresso maker, a summer vacation home right on the beach, an opportunity to see and experience all that the world has to offer in a cramped three-week industrial summer holiday. How can you take advantage of all those things[tm] that were promised to you by the zeitgeist; by the standards of the previous ecologically oblivious generation? To tell you truthfully, you can’t.

Yet people do their damnedest to try. In a society where privilege has taken the form of entitlement and promise, how is a mere human expected to take a solitary stance against such extravagance? New information keeps mounting that there soon won’t be a barrier reef, a rainforest, or alpine glaciers to see. And humans were never known for their grasp of the big picture. It was always an effort to look beyond one’s own paltry needs and desires. Why make the effort now that shit’s already fucked?

Because if you’ve shat the bed, you don’t keep shitting. You clean it up, if for no other reason than uncommon fucking courtesy. And if that is too much to ask, if you’d rather bury your head in the apocalyptic waste than to take responsibility and remedial action, then you deserve to drown in it. The beshatten bed of your own making.

/Sebastian Lindberg 4/9-2018

Triaging the World

“Fossil fuels help prevent sexual assault.”

Supposedly. According to the US Energy Secretary, and long time Texan Governor, Rick Perry.

The Texan had been on a visit in South Africa, and retold the story of a woman describing the sense of danger as soon as the lights were turned off, due to energy shortages. So, by cranking up the use of fossil fuels, lights would stay on, and this woman would be safer from sexual predators. Because monsters mostly come out at night. Mostly.

This is where I pause and let the story and statement sink in with you, dear reader. Just, roll it on your withered tongue for a moment. The very idea that fossil fuels, and the use thereof, will prevent sexual assault. Then, let’s take a look at the components here.

Rick Perry, a fourteen year veteran governor of Texas, a state that has proliferated fossil fuels since the year of ever. South Africa, a country that already derives some 87% of its power from fossil fuels (mainly coal), being referred to as safer if only it burnt more fossil fuels. And then we have that little gem once again, that the statement and story refers to a sense of safety. Not actual safety itself. And we’ve already discussed the problem with confusing the two.

So, already on the surface, we have a biased person, making an in-context irrelevant observation in favour of an unsubstantiated achievement. And thus, finally, we can get into the heart of the matter.

Riddle me this… How many of you set fire to your bathroom to kill a spider? How many of you cut off your foot so that you won’t stub your toe? How many presently still reading ever blow their brains out with a shotgun so that they’ll cure their migraine? No one? Really? Excellent. Then maybe you’ll also understand why it’s a bad idea to wreck your habitat to deal with societal problems.

Now, hold on. I’m not saying that societal issues aren’t important to talk about. Not important to fix. Sexual assault, domestic and otherwise, needs to become an obsolete behavioural pattern in the human race. I agree wholeheartedly with that. But when you propose that we should ruin our world to do it… Well, first off I’ll applaud your misanthropic gumption. Secondly, I’ll tell you that you’re an idiot.

Now, I want to make this absolutely clear: No subjective vindication, no demographic or ethnic injustice, is more important than our environmental concerns. The preservation of a healthy habitat (alternatively the execution of a successful exodus from a wasted world) is the single most important issue that our generation need concern ourselves with. Everything else should be subject to potentially taking a back seat until we solve the bigger riddle. For example, that includes (in no particular order of magnitude) sexual violence, gender-based socio-economical divides, racism or your precious retirement fund.

And yes, I realize that that sentiment will sound privileged. It doesn’t make it any less true. Because the fear you feel of sexual predators when walking home at night isn’t particularly worthwhile when you can’t breathe the air or grow non-toxic food. When the world is on fire, the waters are rising, the storms are coming, then the reliability of the street lights on your way from work will not be your main concern.

The restoration and suspension of a healthy environment, for all ecosystems, triumphs over all other issues. And anyone that tells you differently, that tries to lure you with the promise of snake-oil safety or comfort in lieu of sustainability, is not only a liar but an intellectual cancer, and is probably one of those aforementioned monsters that do not mind, but thrive, in the light.

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/11-2017