aronoff kate aronoff is a writing fellow in these times magazine and a contributing writer for the intercept where she covers american politics and the politics of climate change kate previously worked for the new economy coalition and is currently pursuing a master's degree in econ at john jay college of criminal justice and has also written for basically everywhere and all the way to my far left is michelle miller this joke never gets  old michelle miller is the co founder of co worker org a digital platform for worker voice since its founding in two thousand and thirteen co worker org has supported worker organizing to shift power at companies like starbucks rei wells fargo amazing stuff so i i won't give to your you can find longer descriptions of all of our bios and including my own in i think a packet that's circulating but without further ado i think i should hand it off to elissa to get us started uh you know it's challenging to be a mother sometimes and so they're you know they're clearly i think a lot of things that one could say about marx in relation to capitals and technology and ecology he talks about machinery and automation at length and his descriptions of machinery can be quite stunning really he wrote about agriculture and soil fertility and of course the metabolic rift he was interested in chemistry and physics and the lessons that they held for socialists he talks about primitive accumulation and the technology and ecology in particular is technology a means of liberating humans from the constraints of necessity and eking out a harsh living from you know an unfriendly nature or is it a means of dominating nature towards capitalist  ends that we should you know seek to to you know we should we shouldn't actually aim for this kind of domination even if non human nature and so i think there are a lot of questions and you know i think you could plausibly use marx to argue different which technologies can be you know liberatore and in ways and that you know how we can a complicate our relationship to nature and to capitalism and so i'm gonna think through in particular so i sort of things that i want to talk about but i might only get through one of them and those are at first so in my work i tend to think about the place of ecosystemic activity under capitalism in relation to feminist theories of social reproduction so  how we think about this kind of background activity that's necessary and to reproduce life against which the production of commodities occurs and you know i think people like john building foster jason moore and others have shown that marx thought about these things but they weren't you know quite central to his thought they were certainly not what he spent most of his time thinking about but they are you know a significant thing we should think about what is what is the work of a in an ecosystem how do we think about that uh north east capitalism and firestone in particular have written about reproductive technologies with regard to human bodies and how we control our own reproductive systems but so i'm kind of curious whether and how we think about this in relation to this sort of tech and so on i think that tends to be people tend to think about technologies that try to reduce the impact of production and that use fewer particularly non renewable resources so you you know things like solar production on the earth and you know historically a lot of environmental concern has been promised on the idea that we're going to run out of resources like oil coal oil minerals and and a lot of economists mainstream economists will say well there aren't really these like natural resource limits aren't a real threat of growth because natural resources and man made ones are substitutable so you can invent technologies that will stand in for natural resources and and shift production or shift what kinds of  that these are one hundred percent substitutable so there's nothing that occurs out in nature that you couldn't figure out like another thing that people can either make or find another kind of resource and so that's been a major sort of debate around like a lot of the planet there are many levels of the planet that are not the biosphere as far as we know and so yes i think the question is i mean and i'm going to be looking at or talking a little bit about this example of a project that was aiming not to just d you know they had a number of different ecosystems like a rainforest of savannah you can see some of them here marsh you know desert and so on the lung over here and i sort of i mean be man made and you know um engineered in some way and whether people could could create this this livable space and the reason people were doing this was it was based off of inspired by in part these obviously are sort of like going in a you know neo star trek aesthetic it's pretty nice but what was actually going on so you know they had this whole we're building the bear but it's built on top of a massive techno sphere i kind of compiled some images to create sorry i'm pointing at this i should be pointing at this but they so pointer calls us the garden of eden on top of an aircraft carrier and this is yeah huge amount of like technological stuff that they had to you used to build the set of you know artificial systems that would but although populated with like actual animals and insects and plants and things like that still had you like kind of recreate some version of biochemical cycles  and it wasn't quite the garden of eden they lived inside it for two years grew eighty percent of their food lost a lot of weight and had a lot of fights lost a lot of oxygen and so had a hard time you know sleeping and breathing and things like that eventually they had to pump it it was supposed to be like completely closed where they were not going to insert any new anything with me outside but they had to because they were losing so much austere you didn't know that or shut it down the carbon dioxide levels rose very fast and they tried to figure out what to unfortunately a lot of the species like thirty to forty percent of the species died off they were plagued by like ants and cockroaches and you know other kinds of things after two years the original crew left the biosphere two on schedule and they were gonna they were like oh we're gonna run this for a hundred years and have new cr for fifty new crews for two years each for one hundred years but did not happen this was the only crew that ever went in and it's been kind of hard to assess like what you know it was both kind of looked at as a stunt that went totally wrong certainly about how to recreate them so i think he'll say a bit more about in a minute but um you know because this is definitely not a socialist project or even a governmental one it was actually run by a company called the  profit making venture they were going to charge people they did charge people like thirteen dollars i was probably on twenty five dollars the half a million people actually came and saw it and kind of would like walk around looking like into the biosphere and it was you of like big brother type thing you could like watch the the crew is inside interacting and so on it didn't make any money so bass fire most of the staff while the crew was still inside there was a huge like math steve bannon came in to manage the cost overruns he laboratory and you know some tumors sued for back pay there were a bunch of lawsuits and lots of acrimony and so this is definitely a failed capitalist venture that i don't really know what their you know they were like it's a tourist attraction but also or something who knows so uh you know it didn't work out for them and i think you know there's it's still of course a fantasy of couples in some way we now have  you know just fight this you know kind of failure of figuring out how to live on another planet we now have you know our friend yael and musk saying well i'm gonna save humanity by colin icing mars and the only way we can not go extinct here on this planet is to become a spacefaring multiplanetary species he's done this absolutely hideous thing i this is like the most curse that image in my opinion it's so bad but so you know we're going to mars but like a  but and you know i'll say on where shakes that it's probably harder to build socials and then to go to mars and you know i think that's play chew but i think it's probably very hard to live on mars and that's actually a question that i think actually is pretty pertinent to socialism in an age of ecological catastrophe because you know what it takes to live on mars is not that different from or understand what it would take to live on mars is also pertinent to what it will take to live on earth and how we can figure out what what kinds of you know how we with on our planet and i think there are a lot of different version of this you know the i guess the lower tech versions or things like rewilding and a lot of ecological restoration projects and building parks and certain kinds of biotech i think all you can see as potential ways that we are thinking about technology about that so yeah but going to say for this kind of like elisa like elisa mentioned there's a lot of sort of inroads into thinking about marks in relationship to the planet and ecology and one thing i think is really useful that comes from mark's is an ability to think about technology is not just some this progression of sort of innovation along a sort of neutral path that just happens as time goes on but but actually is a product of social relations and as something which you know all use dialectics maybe people will yell at me for that i don't i haven't you know maybe been to a nascar ad school to use it properly but yeah but but there's this really interesting interplay between humans and technology that we've seen over time and and in particular in the history of fossil fuels that that's something that's come up sort of again and again so timothy mitchell historian has done a lot of work on this sort of pointing out kind of how how the early history of coal  coincided with sort of demands for things like a shorter work week for the abolition of child labor and that was because the sort of coal production process lent itself to unions to the growth of trade unions  y having people sort of together in in close proximity and cold transportation sort of relied on the supply chains most most of which involved trains and if you have a bunch of teamsters it's very easy to shut down a train line and prevent coal from getting from point a to point b and so naturally capital was not very happy about about this and you know this isn't necessarily a direct line i wouldn't want to say but part of the story of the transition over to oil and how oil became so popular  in this is this is his argument i'm not saying anything terribly new here was that you could build pipelines and and that sort of got rid of the problem of workers sort of getting in the way of fossil fuel production and transportation  and so i think that that kind of level of thinking hasn't been i haven't seen it extended as as naturally into solar and wind production and sort of renewables in kind of waters the like labor political productive processes aren't as bound up in toxic supply chains that that is often framed as a technical question right and so considering that sort of an earnest being sort of earnest historical materialists in the st cent language maybe where or how the words for power mean i mean many different things so powers and political power and powers and kind of what turns the lights on and and those two things are not you know that's not necessarily coincidence and so what i want to talk so i'm a reporter i end up looking a lot of climate policy and so there's been sort of various waves of what's kind of in vogue and climate policy and so a few years ago that was cap and trade now the sort of center left demand seems to be around one hundred percent renewable energy and getting to one hundred percent renewable energy there was a bill introduced last year by bernie sanders and i think it was science sanders a crew of sort of progressive legislators legislators on capitol hill and and there have been versions of this at in state legislatures and elsewhere and that really doesn't it's true right like that we need one hundred percent renewable energy but there are all these state and how we how we sort of apportion benefits and think of the role of the state in in people's lives and in in the economy and and looking at you know what is the fight over that look like and what is the fight to build a good life look like in some ways that are not necessarily thought of as as climate demands but i think are politically important to think about as where as we're thinking about you know the huge technical tasks on the one hand but also the huge political task of just creating the sort of will for this level of massive transformation transformational change the economy in the next you know now  so yeah so i'm gonna i'm going to sort of spend the rest of the time just talking about you know what are what are these these other pieces of decarbonization which we don't we do not talk about which brings me to striking features in west virginia kentucky and oklahoma in particular i have not followed arizona quite as closely and so i'm not gonna pretend to talk about that and and as you might see it doesn't sort of fit as well into the story that i serious that i want to tell but  virginia kentucky and oklahoma it's really i don't think a coincidence that that all three of these strikes occurred in states whose economies have historically relied almost entirely or at least very very heavily around fossil fuels so west urging in kentucky last several years has declined as the natural gas boom has taken off and that's devastated devastated the economies of west virginia kentucky and so part of having basically a state is that you have very friendly tax policies toward towards coal companies and toward you know there is a little bit of natural gas in west virginia there's not very much in kentucky we'll talk about oklahoma in a little bit which is sort of a wasteland of teachers are responding to in a way that there simply isn't as much money as there used to be in the states to fund the public sphere and so there's this big question there of how do you fund a public sphere in a place where that actually after the oil crisis many many states around the country that are resource intensive created their own permanent funds north dakota actually created one at the start of the fracking boom and it's education spending  so it's very easy in these places to make for the right to make a political argument that you know there is a trade off to be made between between getting rid of fossil fuels and jobs and that that is a direct sort of economic like that doesn't involve fossil fuels and i think that's not you know that's not as as sort of talked about kind of in the in in sort of the green circles that i've in climate circles it that i've been a part of but i think is really crucial particularly in those is really challenging i think in part because some of our models that we we often look to for social democracy up through you know socialism have been petro states if you look at scandinavian social democracies much of that wealth comes from the sort of accumulated wealth of of oil particularly oil in places like norway less so in sweden and i won't claim to be an expert on that but i think that the model the existing models we have don't fully reckon in thinking about decarbonization and what it looks like to muster the political will but what really does need to be sort of proactively thinking about what that what that looks like and i'll talk i don't know how much time i get into the sort of whole history of why puerto rico's in the situation that it is starting with colonialism but and and you know continuing with colonialism but what the what the government there has done is  so there's a way in which like the set of tools that politicians are working with sort of across the board both in places where where the state has relied on extraction and places that are actually dealing with climate impacts  just totally sort of ill equipped to deal with you know any any sort of the picture of the carbonization kind of what the st century will look like which for many places will mean more climate disasters will mean more sort of destruction and so in thinking thanks yeah so this morning when i was trying to think about what i was gonna say and if i was gonna be able to say it in like a sort of linear manner i started thinking about this piece that i read back in december by the science fiction writer ted chiang who was reacting to the sudden dire warnings from people like elon musk and bill gates about the coming a i like robot apocalypse it's gonna take us all over and do terrible things to us and ted chang's position and the piece was essentially like well yeah if it acts like you but it doesn't have to and he you know he really talked about it as like the reason that they're scared of is because they think ai is going to act like capitalism and it doesn't actually have to do that and he said i mean who else pursues goals with a monomaniacal focus oblivious to the possibility of negative outcome scorched earth approach to instant increasing market share you so so what what i loved about that was that it did really reframe these questions that we have about the growing power that artificial intelligence and algorithms and technology has in our economy to something that has the potential to actually be in our hands and to do really great things for us but that currently the growth of technology is actually based on the logic of resource extraction  there's a lot of reason why if you read you know about like a lot of economists right now talk about like data is the new oil that a lot of the investment the most technology companies are getting is not in the production of product or not in the creation of innovation or new things but actually finding really new clever ways to get your data from you and there's a huge speculation economy built on what we might be able to do with that data someday  explains this and a lot of the work that she's done on the idea of surveillance capitalism that it started with tech platforms like and facebook that perfected the art of taking your data and using it to sell you ads and now they've actually figured out how to take those mechanisms that were just about data extraction for ad sales and to start to apply them to creating artificially intelligent systems that both can sort of self perpetuate but also  continue to think of even more clever ways to get your data to sell you ads and then also build technology that will do that will automate all of the things in our lives and so i think a lot about that in the context of worker organizing because while it's hard in sort of amorphous in the use of consumer platforms like google and in the ways in which we in our regular lives interact with these platforms when you are at work you actually have an economic relationship with the technology that you're using and with the power that is implementing that technology on your life and so is the workplace and is worker organizing a place to start contesting the power of these extractive technologies and to reclaim them for the commons and for ourselves and so that's a little bit of what i wanted to talk about i built an organization about five years ago that essentially says if we can use platforms to aggregate people to do work then could we use platforms to aggregate them to contest power at work if we can use the network's effects of facebook to create you know communities to to send ads and to and to do all kinds of other things can those communities be communities of workers who start to actually like function as workers of the world not just workers of a nation state or workers of a single entity and so i have a lot of faith in the repurposing of the technology in order to contest that power but we have to start thinking about the ways that companies make money and the ways that they are building their own power as not that they're you know creating a bunch of products or technological innovations that we want to use but that they're hoarding a commodity of ours which is data  i like a year or two ago i started thinking about the ways in which data extraction and in algorithmic manipulation take place inside the workplace in ways that we could build a labor movement that's able to respond to that and return some of the productivity to workers from that so one very simple example is the use of productivity trackers they you know they watch people who work at amazon warehouses or people who even like white collar workers at their desks and they determine you know how many steps it took you to get from like seeing a two thing b and they either well they never really reward you i mean it doesn't pay you or they dock you for like not meeting the metrics that are set and in that case like there's the the sort of blatant exploitation of managing a person by a robot that sets artificially high standards for performance and then penalizes people for not meeting them but there is also the fact that all of those systems are built on data that workers are contributing to it as they are performing those tasks that are actually telling it what the bare minimum should be and they are not compensated for any of the value of that data and so if we even just started in those very simple ways of working with groups of workers to start to demand that they get a share of the productivity increases that result from them being managed by these systems that are run on data that they contribute in the first place like is that a place to start to frame create a framework where we can put value on the amount of data that's being extracted from systems from people and in a in a sort of creepy or instance of this there are a lot of this is more in the white collar sector but there's a lot of use of behavioral analytics software to mine you psychologically and categorize you and surveil your behavior in order to more effectively manage you it is often positioned as a means to find high performers and reward them for hidden influencers which is like my favorite phrase because that just means organizers um and again like this is this is a system that in the short term makes it possible for employers to start to not to share common gains with the means of the workforce but to select certain people based on their data profile for so if you have a profile that says you are a flight risk and you might quit some time they're much more likely to give you a raise than someone who isn't a flight risk because maybe they're a single mother or maybe because they're a person of color they have less job market mobility because hiring is racist and so it like sort of reinforces hierarchies around social exclusion it also allows for employers to be much more selective about the ways that gains and productivity gets shared across workforces and so again if we can think about ways in which workers are demanding access to that data that we start to treat that data as a commons as a common resource instead of something that is tied up and held by a few owners those are the places where we can start to then apply that shared knowledge to building technological systems that work for everyone and aren't built on this basis of extraction and i think a lot about this also because i think in our lake in like fever dream fantasies  post revolution we like get all of the platforms and all of the systems and then we use them for our purposes but like they are built on x flecked exploitation like i don't want amazon it's it ain't good then so some of the other work that we need to do in the long term is to really start thinking about the ways in which we would repurpose and rebuild or like start from scratch the same kinds of platform and networking technologies that have been used to create monopolies and to create domination in order to create more of a global commons and to do it from a perspective that isn't rooted in this idea of extraction but in an idea of abund play alright um just skip right to the next one um sooo actually looking at like i know a few people here have heard me talk about some of these things before this is a couple of like lessons or ideas from a much larger project that includes like all the political theory classics including like you know what are states and do we need them and like what could a political subject me for today but what i want to talk about here sort of briefly are a couple paradoxes  and this sort of difficulty of the situation i'm actually you know i guess it's fallen to me to do the like super dismal part of almost every ecological panel that ever happens which is like it's worse than you imagine every week and it's always worse and one of the things that you know i'm not gonna like bury you in these fucking horror stories but one of the things that's really interesting that a one reason i wanted to start with this chart in particular is that there can be a tendency to treat climate change and global warming as a sort of add on what and as a policy thing like oh we'll just tweak that down like ten percent less carbon next year it'll be good kate mentioned cap and trade even sort of some of like  carbon tax positions things like that it's not that simple you know the very famous you know people were really aghast when trump removed his signature from the paris climate accord a treaty that was not worth the paper it was written on not simply in terms of political enforcement but literally its own goals had been failed three years previous to its signing like as this sort of curve goes up you can't just nibble it down like if next year there was zero carbon that shit would still go up and it wouldn't actually start going down for like hundreds maybe even longer years so it's not right these are these sort of cascading effects it's not simply something you can tweak away on the right hand side of this which was not only the hottest day in april this year but in fact the hottest day in april ever in all of recorded human temperature on earth it was about and that's about one hundred and twenty two degrees fahrenheit that is actually hotter than you can live like if you're just like walking around like you will die pretty quickly and what's interesting about this is not only just like oh man that's really terrible horror story but tons of people this is like an area that's heavily populated right so if you're thinking about this not only in terms of just these sort of like raw data about ecology's but about social systems i mean that's a lot of people who are gonna have to move or die in the way the world is arrey arrange right now that is a really brutal reality that i think very few people are sort of prepared to deal with so okay that's the downer stuff it's actually a lot of downer stuff i'm sorry one thing that's super super interest at least to me and you you know alyssa mentioned a little bit that you know there are this sort of like techno opposites in this literature you can sort of like build your way out of the problem and there is like a large sort of mainstream literature that is sort of yet we can tweak our way out of the problem but there's a broad range and a weird sort of convergence among super disparate perspectives when people start digging into the natural scientific data on this problem like oh shit there are some real problems so what i have  foster because they start digging into this problem and realizing that they cannot live in a growth based economy anymore there's lots of different solutions across this spectrum of books i've put up here but one thing that they all agree on is we have to change our relationship to production and our relationship to growth next to it is kate roberts book this is a sort of pop economics book it's actually really quite billy and i highly recommend it but again she and you know she comes and  es around an idea of a steady state economy and getting off of growth and productivity for a different you know not abandoning development this is not primitivism but rather thinking about development differently doing it differently and on the right we are at a marx conference these are the some of the most famous marxian takes on the question and it's funny i know andres mom and jason moore don't think they agree on lots of things but i actually think they do guys if you're watching it's cool no iii teach these books together and all my students like see them as extremely complementary but the thing that's really really really important  is that bringing a marxian perspective can can be both challenging and quite illuminating to this question and the first big challenge though is that we can't write right you can't again you can't do the add on just like you can't do the liberal add on you can't do the wave the full communism wand like oh full communism and the world gets better it doesn't solve this problem in the current way we think about production okay so this is a very recent article i'm just giving you the like abstract you know i'm not gonna read it you can read it and you can find this online it's probably pay wold but it's from nature it's the nature family of journals this is the time they do think in fact we can get to things that are you know housing food clothing basic necessities for all people without like a die off we'll talk about die off a little bit without like a die off with current production capacities and curving things to stay within what they call planetary boundaries meaning within livable carbon ranges and using resources at a rate that doesn't deplete them  it's a there's a lot more in there but i'm trying to move quickly however they say high quality of life things and in this they list things like living in a democracy they also list things like having   tional infrastructure things like this these are too expensive as they say you can see right here two to six times more expensive than the sustainable level so here is but they are using i i think it's incumbent upon marxian thinkers left thinkers more broadly to take this literature seriously even though it's about it doesn't do what i'm about to say because these are people who are really trying to measure the actual amounts of stuff and this planetary but there's always been like a fear in marxist circles of like malthus and i'll talk about that in a moment but like this stuff's real like there's only certain amount of cadmium in the world you can't just make more of it like out of a replicator it just doesn't work that way  that there's basically it costs as much as markets deliver them for there's only one kind of market last night you know there was some discussion of a you know market capitalism market socialism this assumes markets as one kind of thing that's it  it also seems there's only one kind of state it's something i'm definitely gonna want to talk about bora i mean that tim mitchell book is so good because it also talks about the creation of other kinds of states like why do we have states like saudi arabia which are super weird is part of that story as well there's lots of different goods and we're gonna have to start thinking in this space not only about sort of communal luxuries is wonderful but by kristen ross came out a couple years ago about the paris commune but uh old a very old marxist dream also frankly an old keynesian dream an old smithian dream that temporal luxury having more time slowing down production slowing down growth might be something we actually want democratically we actually want as a political pro heard me do this before this is a thought experiment i like to do when i'm giving these talks just a sort of undermine both the difficulties and some of and some of the possibilities so i call it thinking as surplus start anywhere you like so increased atmospheric carbon contributes to ocean temperatures rising contributes to the depletion of livelihood and this is just one little circuit for nearly one million filipino fishermen fishing families rather whose labor then double shifted along mostly gendered lines onto both migrant laborers but working in petrol states in the gulf and care workers in the united states and the you freeing up hyper employ labor in advanced states to increase productivity which in turn demands more petrol energy and more chemical inputs as you can see this is a pretty vicious cycle but the other thing you have to note on here right is that one  other tendencies in the literature is to try to split off or think of ecological problems without dealing sometimes with the social ramifications but if you sort of look along this chain right you can see i actually didn't put this up here right everywhere along here is also a political and social crisis right there's a there's a crisis of gendered labor here there's a crisis of politics here right if you think about the current politics of the united states where i'm imagining our  our advanced sort of hyper employed worker lives or you think about the philippines or i'm imagining not really imagining where these fishing families live these are both now run by want to be sort of right wing hardcore authoritarians or honest to god right wing authoritarian those things are inextricable so if you aren't dealing with the political and social problems you're actually gonna fail in your challenge of dealing with the ecological ones thinking back to the slide before these costs are not quality of life cost per se it's because we have to keep these things profitable because we have to keep them private and because we are wanting accumulation and growth that keeps this little key example for today is the paradox of renewable energy so when you like read about renewable energy in i don't know like super mainstream publications i don't know new york times newsweek wall street journal whatever  usually the problems are framed as technological right it's like inefficient turbines or the photofit a excels won't give us enough power there's insufficient storage capacity batteries are often talked about are capacitors things like that but the really weird thing about this is virtually all these technological problems have been surpassed or are pretty close the really really of like funny bit of us actually jobs a lot with the biosphere story a lot of this research was done by bp exxon mobil in the so and this brings me on my final highly contentious slide so thus while there are real planetary boundaries our lodestar should be marks and not malthus right there are planetary boundaries but this is about social relations it's more about systemic stability and stressors than it is about running out of things altogether the shift from growth based development to sustainable redistributed development it's a problem for social relations and it is necessary and then i have here like this list and i will go through it real quickly of sort of everyone's dream and misconception about this problem like mainstream liberal policymakers there is no market based solution for this problem there just is not anyone who tells you the solution for climate crisis is lying to you to marxists sorry folks we can't wait for the revolution or the withering of the state again it's proven you the joke about really hard to colonize mars right it's also proven pretty hard to like have the world revolution i know people have noticed that and this problem that like first chart that that goes up every single year it doesn't stop  so we can trade around for this and and i'll get to the state again in a moment there's also sort of a techno futurist techno optimist the elon musk's there is a sort of left version of this as well but you know we what you what we want is to build ourselves into a future of shared temporal luxury not continuous growth this does not mean like asceticism i am like the most anti aesthetic person ever but actually we already live with a lot of technologies and a lot of subjectivity that appreciate things that actually are extremely low cost most of the stuff that even like so called advanced developed you know subjectivity isn't taste want now is like very easily and cheaply produced the stuff that's really expensive frankly based energy air travel there's a couple you can go down the list i have charts and other things but like that's the world of slowing down it doesn't mean like living with hair suits and like eating turnips all the time and finally that brings me to inner kiss them you know i think this is an interesting debate between a lot of anarchists who rightly criticized a lot of sort of super super excited and exuberant communists  for saying like look come on guys there's not enough stuff it's not gonna work it's unsustainable but at the same time any sort of feasible real term steady state or plan d growth economy is exactly that it is planned and what does that mean it means that it has a state it means there's a state of some kind is there and not just sovereign states i do you mean sovereign here and all that ugly word and that's why i've got our old friend thomas up there but  probably international bodies those ugly things treaty organizations and you know these will likely be necessary for any non die off based climate change scenario and i will say i've there's a growing body of sort of  now that's not true rex tillerson has a lifeboat there are winners in the climate change scenario just most of us aren't in the category so that is i'll stop there if that's part of bigger project but that's all i have to okay so i'll transition from talking to asking i think i'm gonna do almost the opposite of way last night you know we are opening panel i tried to sort of stitch everyone together i almost want to ask you all ever s different questions now if you don't mind and then we should and then if you have also questions for each other please and actually kate i think i want to start with you because i want to hear more you were talking proletariat but i would love to hear more about because you stopped right before you talking about puerto rico and you stopped right and and he does have so much to say about the formation of post colonial states and i just want to hear a little bit more about the story of colonialism in this conversation century after puerto rico became a territory and was treated as sort of a tax haven for corporations and so there were these very generous federal tax breaks which expired in two thousand and six and plunged the economy into a very very deep recession that it's still in and so almost overnight unemployment skyrocketed the bond rating for puerto rico plummeted and in steps wall street and banks but sort of the big players you know who you would think of as being these folks step in sort of after the financial crisis like sort of compounds the ongoing recession in puerto rico and engineer these these forms debt which are probably illegal there hasn't been an audit of the debt that kind of was a big demand before hurricane maria hat and and very quickly the the sort of really never meant in puerto rico and stopped any  debt that was was likely to be put on the table but wall street steps in makes most of its money actually underwriting bonds to us based hedge funds and mutual funds there's some other players in there too  drives the country into seventy four bill in dollars and in debt i think i'm getting the billion right there and including on things like prepa on the puerto rico electric power authority which is this sort of actually holdover from the new deal public utility corporation which which has sort of remarkable reach in in a sort of landscape of island island  basically everywhere is electrified the infrastructure is aging it's you know in some cases very you know has not been updated since the nineteen fifties but it's really sort of wide ranging in terms of how how far it reaches into  many parts of the island including places that are hard to hard to access and so there's a sort of like horrible i mean christian parenti uses this term the sort of catastrophic convergence and it's maybe a version of that which is you know basically like all these things sort of come together at once and so there when hurricane maria hits there have already been like successive hurricanes that have hit porto rico right there's colonialism going back hundreds of years there's a sort of financial you know vulture funds that have come in various just sort of taking and taking and taking and taking and so the storm comes in and then it's just that the island is and the governing structure sort of overseeing the island are totally unable to respond and so this sort of goes back you know it's it's hard to like look at any one origin point for this right it like keeps sort of going back and i think the there's a sort of way that like extraction is so is so deeply be worst hit by climate change are already being worst hit by climate change are either you know in colonial relationships like puerto rico are post colonial states or places that have had resources sort of just taken from them historically and and been really stopped from yeah i mean well i i was thinking when you were talking about west virginia as also a source of resource extraction i grew up there my whole family still there i'm very  connected and i think a lot about the ways in which i think that the reason i'm sort of obsessed with making claims on the wealth generated but from data extraction is that i grew up in a place where like we made no claims on the wealth generated from our resource extraction we had a union that made wage claims on some income shares but not on wealth and so i think that like if we can really start thinking about i think you're right that like when all of the all of the hard natural resources are extracted than capital just figures out another way to like keep taking and taking and not giving back and that we have to be really thoughtful about when we're making demands that we're not making demands on like the profit of the long term prep the end product of the extraction but the like the methodologies of the extraction and like what are the what is the other wealth generated from the systems that are built to pull whatever those resources are and whatever and if you look at the lake the ways in which technology okay so what we see of tech and specifically artificial intelligence is like kind of like just this magical process but in many post colonial places around the world there are these large farms of people who are working day in and day out on computers to actually make they're performing the labor of that magic so like you type a thing in that you're finding and you think that the machine like went and found it for you but actually there's someone in the philippines or in sub saharan africa or in india who's going and looking for it and getting it for you and they are completely unrecognized and completely uncompensated and so  there are so many places in almost that supply chain of delivery where we could be organizing workers or disrupting the ways in which that is currently designed and where we could be reallocating that wealth that we're just we're not doing and a lot of those places sort of line up with all of the other histories of extraction and debasement brought on by capital and the this is  a again a very very good pivot to the sort of question you know there's this tension right between the sort of you know technology nas and neutral medium right but as this expression of sort of social relations but also of limitations right we want to think dialect but we also have kind of eat there's not just a both an like a classic hegel there's also an eitheror and some of that's coming up here and this is where i think the the low modernist vision like i'm curious here more of that and how that fits in this sort of weird tension technology for like the service of the public in some way and i mean if people saw this rachel maddow commercial and msnbc but where she's like in front of the hoover dam and like this is what it means to think about we have to we have to figure out whether so a country that can think this big and like that's what using you know like the nation or at the state or whatever is this like think they can put this gigantic like concrete thing and i think you know so i'm trying to think about what other kinds of imaginaries we can have about like how to use technology and the state which i agree is necessary but like without just saying okay and so let's go out and dominate and like you know build these huge things and you know people have made criticisms ecological criticisms dams certainly for a long time there's been a ton of like ecological movements around dams or against dams and starting people are saying to like take them down and so on but i think there are also other you know these are obviously new deal era projects but they're not the only ones and i actually get the term low modernism restoration and there were different versions of it but one of the things he's interested in is this soil conservation district programs were they tried to organize farmers and importantly not just landowners which a lot of other new deal agricultural programs were oriented towards but tenant farmers as well which was really important because i you know like working class snow especially black farmers were left out of a lot of landowner projects they did not own land but and collectively managing land within like a watershed or some kind of naturally bounded area rather than county lines and to try to do this as like a project that had you know like state employed experts but also people who were working the land working together to what he calls economic democracy and agriculture and so it wasn't kind of just like the planners coming in and saying all right this is how it works like get you know get with the program and nor was it just kind of like the farmers know everything and so they can just you know it was kind of trying to manage different kinds of knowledge and across  within like an ecologically bounded space and so on i think it's an interesting example i also think that there are other ways to you know i actually do you think we are going to need some like big high modernist esque stuff but i think it should not be the only imaginary and i think that when we think about it and maybe could be applied to things like housing so i think like the barbican in london i love it's i don't people have been there or seen pictures of it but it's this very like huge like very modernist housing like concrete brutalist whatever housing project but there's also like a big you know it's a huge social project it's very utopian you're just like oh i can go here and do all of these kinds of you know i think as all of us have talked about in some way more like literally kinds of activities and it's using this big scale thing or like vienna social housing has this like also very beautiful kind of green like modernist thing and so i think thinking about like how we can use i guess like selectively use high modernism and also try to like but more generally aimed towards instead of just like high tech eco socialism like low key eco socialism and you know anyways think of like the idea marx this famous description of communism in the german ideology where you go and you hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon and a beer cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner like it's very he's like interacting with other species and all of these i mean admittedly he's trying to kill them and a couple but maybe we can update that and you know bird watch in the morning and snorkel in the afternoon and he can s like people hanging out and parks in the s they just rediscovered but i really love them because i think they're what daniel cohen who was in the audience here calls low carbon leisure and it's like very and i think these are also very like low modernist on technologies like a boom anyway and so i that's how i think about i guess trying to navigate these questions and like how and where we can use the state to do that so  require some kind of compensation for our data how that would actually actually work in practice be given that you know some other entity made made up of perhaps  are willing to mandate this kind of social control that we would have some kind of planning and no matter what you will be dragged kicking and screaming into complying with that plan then why not simply the authors that were already cited in the presentation i want to add vandana shiva who is an indian socialist feminist and i would say also an ecological feminist and  question and thinking about her is with all you could say more about how you see gender as a part of the  terrain that we are discussing here the contradictions of gender and the potentials for a truly intersectional truly global feminist movement and what that kind like thanks i'm wondering if anyone on the panel has thoughts about the way your comments relate to the way that neoliberalism or whatever we want to call the contemporary condition subjective eise's individuals as them personally being responsible for for transforming the climate or stopping or you know leaving less of a carbon footprint i'm thinking for example of recycling as something that really places the onus on the individual to to do better or you know to buy an  electric rather than a normal car but rather than talking about how these transformative policies and these huge carbon footprints are actually not being left by individuals but by these gigantic companies that  have much more of an impact on our on our environment so on the question around compensation for data there's i kind of have two ways of thinking about it there's the very specific current way that it could that we could imagine it which is like why i start with the workplace because there's a pre existing economic relationship between the entity extracting the data and the person that is that is having the data taken from them and then and that is to to claim some of the wealth generated more of the wealth generated from their productivity so like you use information that i deliver to you through the automated system that i use while i'm working and you gain more productivity from it so i i mean this very it's like very basic but if we're looking in the long term what i think is more interesting is so data really actually only works in aggregate and as the commons and  so a lot of folks have talked quite a bit about how most of the giant tech platforms and tecmo napoles are essentially municipal systems they kind of function as public utilities and so if you imagine a circumstance in which you're thinking about google as a public utility then the data is commonly owned and the aggregate value of the data goes back to the culture like you're able to use google without the ads because the the use of the data is going back into building a system that is commonly owned by all people which i think is actually like in the short term the individual claims on productivity from data is more of like setting up a mental framework for thinking differently about the fact that you are producing value through your participation in these systems but it gets you to a long term imagining of like my participation creates value in aggregate it's even more valuable could we all be sharing in that at an aggregate level  the second set of questions were given to me but i'm happy to share but i'll say quickly yes you're absolutely right you know that there's in that sort of jargon that is both academic jargon and also sort of activist jargon i am centering humans you know this morning a little bit we talked about sort of humanism anti humanism and i would say like i think part of this project for me is critical humanism and it does privileged human survival and i'm like okay with that there is a vast literature and there's a lot of people and i think and i'm not a hundred percent dismissive of it cuz like maybe that you know that super grim thing to me is actually like the optimistic version because like most likely actually it's insoluble and we all die but like are not all of us ever bob rex tillerson but no but like like there is a large and interesting and i'm not being trying to be submissive about literature about like yeah like why bother like we maybe i i will openly say there was a meta epical position here that privileges human survival and i don't know how to get a get around that that said the mandatory population thing i think is  everywhere then people will be happier right cuz this will be more stock to spread around i mean it seemed to me incredibly intuitive about it i think one of the things i was trying to get out with my little like cyborg circuit example is actually like that would just have the same stressors  scale perso perhaps maybe the carbon stuff is a little bit down but it's still pretty shit and the second point comes back to their protocol humanism which is i'm pretty sure that like this is not a heroic story and i do you think some people try to spin this as a heroic story we're like you know this it's sort of like the good version of mad max or something and like there's the survival people are super awesome but like i said the sort of people probably have like big it probably like the actual mad max thing it's like big private armies on resource hoarding which is kind of already what it is but people read octavia butler books you know like the world is just kind of octavia butler books like it's it's like and that's not great and that's already that's like it's the future world that's the now  do find it always sort of depressing that the way that these kinds of you know sort of like reproducers of the world unite you get this kind of like the way to solve like ecological regeneration crisis is to like limit reproductive freedoms and you know you have to pit th producers against each others that are figuring out the like social ecological reproductive future that we would i think have all described in various ways wanting to live in and so um you know i i'm trying to understand more about this like you can see it of happening in the  s when both of these like discourses are emerging and said you get like garrett hardin who's whose entire argument about the tragedy of the commons is about how the welfare state licenses over over you know too much reproduction and like as a piece of social science it's just like half of it is made up and but he's you know he's he's really explicitly saying that that you know the welfare state is is the reason for for overpopulation and so on  but so i think you see and you see this coming out in various ways and it's really i find it depressing so i would like to figure out how like contemporary socialists and communists and marxist can figure out how to not repeat that and you know i think the the personal responsibility well i guess i'll say one brief thing about she was just that i i think she's done really amazing work to often remind us of the the way is that like you know things like biotech and so on can be sites of you know and so on and the ways that like monsanto's seed control can just possess indian peasants of like their livelihoods and so on i do you think sometimes she can shade a bit and to you like you know more in tight technology stance and i would personally like i you know tend to and on the personal responsibility i mean a do you think there's both the question of you know thinking about collective consumption rather than just individualizing and that's very important and that you know kind of consumption in production or you cannot think about separately and it's we can't just say like well consumers especially given that like the american consumer household was like created to absorb production like and then it's like all consumers why are you consuming so much it's really maddening but i think there's also some they that make me nervous in lunch which he admits he takes from economics and you know it's it's supposed to describe this this problem that you're mentioning that there's no you can't just like come up with more cadmium from somewhere and it's right in many ways but i think the ways that it's like also a neoliberal slogan that like you can't get something for nothing there's no like free stuff like all of this has like become transmuted into the language like you can't have free public goods because someone's paying for them and it's like rich people yeah yeah totally so i think we need to figure out i don't know maybe we need some new language around us but i think there's there's been a blurring of this kind of like we need to account for all the costs which i think is rayon capitalism can't actually account for all its costs and be profitable but like that's become instead of a way to hold capital to account become like a way to like discipline individual people as consumers and you know who are trying to get about their life so i would like to you know i'm still thinking through this myself but i'm i think that's a really crucial thing for us to do yeah just briefly i mean to hop on to that i think there's a real language of austerity that kind of pervades many different parts of the climate debate and and you know this comes from like everything from like bike more to work you know these sort of like individual lifestyle choices which are great you know it might make your life better if you back more to work will it have a like world historic impact on parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere probably not and that's i think it's it's hard to i think it's hard to sort of decouple that from just the way that like neoliberalism has so sort of totally captured the policy to be in particular on climate change and really you know it's interesting to look at the sort of like the development of the of the green movement right and that the s sort of you know you have these activist lawyers going out and like suing states to like protect these like obscure bird species and then protect like i'm doing that protect like huge lots of land and really doing this like really interesting like activist lawyer work which was making claims of the state right which is making these really interesting things and and you know the clean air act comes out of that but the clean water act comes out of that these really powerful laws that actually today give us a lot of power to regulate carbon and and have you know yeah have given us this really powerful regulatory framework and that sort of starts to fade away as neoliberalism rises and so you know you have people who are like members of the mont pelerin society and the s talking about how it should be taxing pollution and then that has just become sort of common logic among even people like bernie sanders right like even yeah even sort of like center left figures and there's nothing you know i think a carbon tax is a good idea i think it should happen it's common sense but there's a way in which like the the sort of neoliberal project which you know is multifaceted there are many different parts to it but i think a really you know maybe the through line of it is that the market is sort of all knowing but the market is the best the best means of assessing information of processing information and of giving people you know the the information for how to live their lives and that has just totally captured the climate debate and i think has gone a little bit unquestioned in part because of how far the climate debate has been from the left historically and that a lot of folks in the green movement don't necessarily you know the language to talk about that and so yeah you get these very these various or there's neoliberal solutions that to talk to you know like policymakers about this stuff and i've interviewed you know folks who i think are very well intentioned but there's just the the  imagination is just so small in terms of what they can think about and that's for a lot of reasons and in part because of these you know really specific ways that any other so the neoliberalism has shaped our conversation about economic policy but yeah it's just i don't i don't think it's it's necessarily anyone's well it's it's like you know neoliberalism and capitalism's fault right but i don't i don't necessarily blame policymakers in the here and now or  working with a very limited set of tool when there really has not been very much on the table and the intellectual infrastructure around climate thought in particular is just so weak and that there just are very few think tanks or very few sort of people writing white papers some writing papers about climate change since for like fifteen years and writing about geoengineering for like you know years and years and years and i think the left sort of policy infrastructure is not quite caught up to that and so what we get is this sort of you know everything from individual to just wrote market based solutions yeah just super quick on this sort of ecology gender i mean this came up last night right like and i think and we've come up a few times here like you can't just sort of staple things on together and sometimes the way in which gender discussed in marxian conversations is like oh there's also social reproduction and there's a way in which the the climate conversation is like social reproduction is the primary thing like the other forms of production are part of social reproduction not the not vice versa so that's just a quick one on there the question about consumption choices which is in fact the way and individual behaviors i you know i'm not scared of the n word  neoliberalism there's other n words some there's like this popular now insane discourse that this doesn't mean anything you should really like people who believe that this word doesn't mean anything should tell the imf because they use it and they're working papers all the time  and part of the way in which it says is right we sort our meaningful choices through market mechanisms and of course this the climate sort of lens of climates but this is true for like basically everything join a cooperative distribution movement if like something you can make it you can amplify these things but like when you go to a store and choose to buy one thing or another it has no political meaning it might make you feel good and i actually believe in people feeling good that's why i'm actually scared of the sort of aesthetic side of the of the climate story and maybe making you feel good gets you to do other stuff but in the end the story that those things are political is just u and i wonder if you could expand on that and you mentioned climate displacement and if you could expand on maybe like that that seems to be a burden that has to be carried by the global south and not so so last night we had a really interesting conversation about forgetting and the work of capitalism enforcing forgetting and listening to y'all talk especially about what a good low carbon life might be i've been thinking about how the teachers movement is a way in which women are doing both the work of challenging petrol driven austerity in those particular states and doing the socially reproductive work of remembering and driving that conversation and so i wondered if you could think some about that i am like sort of like two questions they're sort of connected the first question is what is the left or response to obviously the ecological crisis it's going to cause a huge existential crisis for the concept of a nation state so do we have an answer for something like this and second you mentioned you know the dire issue of ecological problem and how it's also related to technology we do have the capacity to solve some of these issues with the technology as you said but because it's not profitable we don't implement it so how do we get around this  we have to like when we're thinking about intellectual property rights patents and stuff how are we able to get around this and is there a compromise for people that are innovative and creative on trying to figure out a way that works out for like the entire society and being able to at least get value for our labor taking what is anyone taking venezuela okay i would just say i don't i don't know very much about venezuela so will not get myself into trouble or just like drone on about things i can't speak to so i wish i  did i will say that you know the thread that i think is maybe true they are from what i understand of it and has been present in in in the teachers tricks that i was talking about and sort of resource heavy states is that tying just i think you know has been proven over and over again not to make very much sense and so as that as those fuel sources are set to sunset hopefully that that will make less and less sense and so you know just to reiterate what i said before that we really need to think of new ways to to new funding sources for a robust safety net in terms of the role of the role of women and sort of challenging sort of austerity i think that's exactly right i mean the protagonists of these fights have been have been women almost you know not not entirely certainly there are not only women who are teachers but it is a predominantly female workforce and i think that's you know  iii i think alissa's has probably done more work on on this kind of front than then i can speak to to well but i think there is sort of a new feeling really being crafted i think what's interesting about it is it's sort of a new a new intensive and are really good over the planet i think encourage a really different way of thinking about thinking about what valuable work entails and i think you know sometimes the conversation about like you know the conversation about like the job guarantee for instance is as orbited around like what is like really productive work look like and you know that could be like public archiving that could be like you know something like the federal theater project as part of the wpa it's like you know give people jobs like writing plays or like acting in plays  there was some there were some you know the oversight hearing for wa wpa projects in new york where one of the people who was like really critical of it it's like well you're like doing these like you're creating an archive of like a jewish encyclopedia it's like wow that's great work you know and and there are all these things that like we're considered really unproductive but there are you know as we're thinking about it today low carbon low carbon work and and sort of expanding their range valuable work and sort of looking toward that and maybe you know thinking of thinking of striking features as a low carbon protagonist to borrow from from my friend daniel cohen's work on that front and in terms of just quickly  nation states i think borders are the thing that comes to mind in there and sort of challenging how climate change challenges us to think about think about nation states we will you know really need to change the way we think about immigration and and  you know having that those two conversations are not separate conversations they haven't been historically and you know more more people are going to be sort of crossing borders than have at any point in human history displacement question it is the perfect follow up to that because i think you're absolutely right there's going to be these tremendous there have to be and there will be tremendous challenges to the sort of nation state model  and in the same way that kate was talking about you know the american enterprise institute is like way out ahead on this like in terms of like writing papers on it you know we talked this morning ever so slightly a bit about the eu right like then people will rail at the eu and complain about the eu and they rightly should the left doesn't like to talk about what it's version like i mean i'm new young it's very frak he says his one thing that no one else believes in but like like we don't like to talk about what our international framework with existing states would look like i mean my personal suspicion on this especially on the displacement question is both like hey there are gonna be like it's it's it's basically a foregone conclusion at this point there are certain places on earth that are currently quite socially important and also quite populated so pakistan is a very good example the arabian peninsula is another really interesting example of this place that probably within our lifetimes  very difficult to walk around in think about what that means for a billion something muslims in the world but that will probably need the sort of a international framework that might start to think about from a more left perspective might be something like greater mobility if not entirely actually would be for complete free mobility and greater controls and greater planning again i know it's a dirty word on where capital is moving right because part of this story right if we decrease our consumption choices magically or something like this and which actually has happened in certain parts of europe it just pops up in bangladesh in china and other places  and i do you think that will be an existential crisis as someone said back there but i think it's one that i'm not scared of that crisis i think the right will use it as a as a weapon of nationalism and that's why we must articulate a better vision the only other thing i'll say on this because i feel like you should take the off the author utopian buildings because that's one hundred percent the site of historical memory being a gendered site for the teacher strike is totally west virginia wore were from the early mine wars back at the at the beginning of the th century which by the way i only know about even though i grew up there because my grandma told me about them and not cuz i learned them in school because we weren't allowed to learn them in school but yeah i mean that was it was a really direct recall to what was happening and most of the the first counties that went out on strike in the west virginia teachers strike were the southern counties like logan and  that question a lot and i it it also west virginia related made me think about like a couple years ago there was an article in the new york times by this woman annie lowery who had gone to i think she went to visit like mcdowell or one of our southern counties and it seemed kind of bleak there and so she was like shouldn't the government just pay everyone to leave because they could go get jobs other places and there were a lot of us that were enraged at that suggestion because it was essentially an act of forgetting like well the place is done so like you should just say and of course the only important thing you can do is work and so like and and a lot a lot of discussion took place among like appalachian and appalachian diaspora people about like the value in people staying to hang on to a culture that existed and that if you leave you are essentially letting the coal companies ultimately win because you're leaving behind that culture and also a lot of times when i've worked at home when we talk about sustainability efforts or reclaiming land it is often talking it's it's spoken in the language of reclaiming the old ways like and so that like the use of memory and the refusal to forget or sort of ancestral practices is actually directly connected to thinking about the value of a mountain versus the value value of a job when you're forced to do that because often your grandparents are buried there so anyway i just like i i definitely agree that capital relies on forgetting and that there are all of these ways in which we see the value of cultural memory to preserve things coming up and it's actually quite a natural urge for people  that tends to come into a lot of movement building work that we do utopian buildings that set our question and once i can just have one short thing to add does i mean i completely agree with everything you've all said about the work of remembering and how exciting it is to see a new kind of labor movement recalling the history of the old and you know i think that's really great i think it's like help me but think of that as like remembering and a reef futuring or future visioning or something and like you know we don't have to just give coal miner jobs as like solar panel texts we can give them jobs as teachers or like as nurses working to like you know i don't know to heal people's black lung disease and you know there's like a lot of things like that to do i think always like the you select the civilian conservation corps is one of the kind of also like park building things of the new deal jobs programs where they you know build all these sort of national parks and things but national parks also how because there's their historical national park so you could do a like a like a monuments to labor and the land whatever like you can do these kinds of you know things that are remembering like the very rich history of political struggle in this country so they think it a lot of exciting potential things there but i think it's been very anything i mean even just remembering how many people are already doing this work like the pictures people saw other people saw those pictures from arizona where all of the teachers were out like in the streets and it was this humongous wave  a teacher is wearing you know their their red shirts and like out in the street scene you're like this is this is not like a like side you know thing this is you know there are a lot of people doing this work and we should pay attention to that so but on to the question of you know what  d i guess the consequences unintended i guess i guess they tricked into being a few different questions and those are concerns do you have about i guess like the consequences are sort of trying to make ecological choices and what kinds of unintended consequences there are and i think maybe there are a couple of different things going on there and one is around i guess like the utopian buildings of things like the barbican or something we're certainly you know i think and those people are somebody is selecting like what trees are we planting and like what is this you know kind of created landscape and so on and i think you know the more that that reflects the what the people who are going to be living there would like to live around the better that would be and i think some of the sort of like you know the the planning like democratic agricole agrarianism in this like low modernism book i was mentioning i think it's actually an interesting way to think about some of that but but that's i think a slightly different thing than the the question of thinking of doing that on a planetary scale in terms of global ecology right so like there's one that's okay building things and you know anything we build is going to have an environmental impact i think there's no way around that and it's important to recognize that but not expect that there can be you know you're not going to build like a big housing project and have it be like impact free or something and i think that it's important to recognize it and think about what those are and be conscious of the choices were making because we are always are making choices about how we are affecting you know the planetary ecology in which we live and if you look around but like that is already going haywire you know as you know there are like lyme diseases spreading because of the warming of the planet species are moving as like the temperature boundary in which they can live is moving and that's been happening but you know it's not only related to climate change it's also religious the global economy and the you know like species are you know there were waves on ships and so on but like there there are there have been i mean this is often described as invasive species which is a controversial term because it's like we're  s supposed to only belong in one place who knows but they but they have certainly moved outside of the the places that they usually live because of you know global trade and the the like material infrastructure and and  along with that and so i don't think that we can avoid thinking about these things that we do not live in a world you know we we have to be i think already conscious of that the first actually the first economist hired by the us government was an economic or and in and really in the history of like you know american lee an american i guess environmental resource policy whatever it's always been about oriented towards like what kinds of production you are concerned with so like do you kill all the wolves because  they're you know killing the cattle and cattle ranchers are upset about that or are you killing certain kinds of birds because they're eating one farmers crops versus another kind of bird because they're hopeful for it you know so they're they're always these questions and so far we've mostly made them on the basis of like trying to promote times so in in thinking about the ethical dimension of whether we value humans above other species you know it's it's i think it is unavoidable on some level to have to make some kinds of decisions if you know that like yes maybe we don't want people to have lyme disease maybe you eradicate like you know really you're trying to like not have as much like carrying lyme disease and like i'm okay with that but so you know i think these are all like important ethical and political questions that we need to be thinking about seriously and so i guess that's what i would say about that just super super quick on something that i think might tie a couple of these things together and it actually weirdly brings us back to marx that question of the like that something that can seem so immaterial the historical transmission of memory where's the sight of memory a that is of course the material process b you were talking about like tim mitchell's arguments about sort of development of a sort of coal miners subjectivity and it's not terribly dissimilar from the way in which marx talks about it in sort of factory conditions or angliss talks about in factory conditions in that story where it's historical memory doing the work as opposed to like majority in any particular country or worldwide and then just the last thing i was thinking of a member who said it someone on this panel said capitalism can't account for its own costs and if there's one thing that i would want to like sort of leave on the table for people to think about is that like leaving you know capitals volume one through three like on the table like forgetting that for a moment like everything you know some of the books that we've talked about some of the articles we've talked about some of the things but use the own you use like mainstream macroeconomic principles use arguments from liberal democratic theory use arguments from the inside which is a classic marxian right position it's imminent critique it