that it's been sixteen years since i was here locking down streets and getting gassed and running away through past police cars that were had been spray happened one of the things was a war that i served in for reasons that i'm not going to go into now and when i got back from the war and when i got out of the army i went it was sort of this you know distant vague threat that i thought would you know we'd have to deal with someday affect us maybe our kids but then a couple years ago  caught up on the situation climate change and i realized that we're we're screwed well you know looking at documents like the i p c c reports and reports from the world bank we face catastrophic climate change that threatens to undermine the very basis of civilization as we know it and i had a kind of existential crisis thing about this coming to terms with it you know here i you know i was in the army and went back to school and spent all this time we're going to graduate degree and the world's ending you know i didn't know what to do and so i did what i what i often do is i wrote i wrote my way through it thinking about it and i went back to some of the things i learned in iraq and the things i learned before about coming to terms with with mortality come to terms with the end of things right so when i when i was a soldier in iraq when i was driving a humvee around baghdad  was you know their i d s snipers they were all i was there two thousand through two thousand and four there's a lot there was a lot going on and at first i was terrified and i didn't know how to handle in fact that i was i g so worked up about watching for i d s on the road i was often in the lead humvee so felt like the responsibility was on me if anything happened that it started to keep me from being able to do my job i was just i was so nervous freaked out and how i got through that was coming to this seventeenth century samurai manual by  says in there is that you know a samurai should meditate on death every day and i took that to heart and i spent every morning before we went out on patrol thinking about thinking about all the different ways i could i could die and imagining it working through it and owning it really coming to terms  and doing that practice having that meditative practice that reflective practice opened up a space in a kind of liberation for me to be able to do my job as a you know imperial occupier still had to do my job to get out of there and that was him came back to me through buddhism through spinoza through all kinds of western philosophy through a long tradition of  philosophy going back to plato that argues that philosophy itself is learning how to die and so that's that's how i developed this idea and came to the essay that then became this book learning to die and the anthropocene coming to terms with climate change and this idea of the anthropocene which you know you may or may not know it's this it's this idea that some geologists are floating that we've entered a new geological epic in the earth's history one characterized by the advent of human beings as a geological force right so we were affecting the very geology of the earth and will for hundreds of thousands of years that's the idea the anthropocene so i put these two things together and thought about it and  as a way of dealing with the fact that it doesn't seem like there's any good good way out with climate change you know we had our first it was it was almost thirty years ago it was one nine hundred eighty eight when james hansen former nasa scientists stood before the u s congress and told them that the science was ninety nine percent certain that the earth was warming is ant and that it was a dire threat and and nothing has changed since that in fact our carbon emissions have only increased year after year year after year so i'm going to read some from this book and and deal with this question and then we'll have a conversation when a honey bee colony needs to find a new home it sends out wave after wave of scouts to search for a new hive site when the scouts return they dance for the other bees each scout's dance communicates a possible location for the colonies future as new waves of scouts go out and return they align themselves with one dance or another depending on what they found soon and a vast rollicking caucus masses of bees are all dancing to a variety of distinct rhythms each dance offering a different vision of tomorrow one dance may be for a nearby oak another for a distance one dance offers an ambitious journey another is more conservative over time a single dance grows more and more popular until a majority of bees are doing it the swarm has made its decision and takes flight politics whether for bees or for humans is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems this is where the ideas of the vote the town hall meeting and the public debate get their power humans come together to resonate on one frequency or another arrangements of bodies and systems don't arise from ideal notions of how governance should work but emerge rather out of the vibrating bodies themselves the systems they inhabit and the interactions between the two the key is energy energy production and social energetics just as a beehive is structured around the production of honey so our human society is structured around labor horses we coal and oil how bodies harvest produce organize and distribute energy determines how power flows shaping the political arrangements of a given system a given collective organism behind whatever idiology the ruling classes may use to manufacture consent obscure the mechanisms of control or convince themselves of their infallible i'm nation's humanity has undergone three major revolutions in the political structures of energy production in the past two hundred thousand years agricultural revolution the industrial revolution and the great acceleration the transition from coal to mixed fossil fuels the agricultural revolution shifted human social organization from the pack to the heard from nomadic life to sedentary life and argue rating politics as we understand it meaning the life of the polis the city urban existence civilization with the advent of the farm and the city humans no longer followed migrating energy stocks tracking the sweeping herds of that were once a primary source of food but cultivated stocks in place sheep wheat corn dates the distribution of bodies in fields pastures canals and cities gave rise to new forms of social internet superceded tribes and tribal confederations in ancient iraq despotism an empire emerged as political technologies to deal with the intricate demands of flood based irrigation single farmers or clans couldn't manage the intensive mass labor required to dredge canals and harvest grain at critical moments in the growing season so centralised absolute systems in idiology as were invented to control production elsewhere as i recall troll technology spread fertile areas less dependent on annual floods and complex area geisha and less centralized political technologies were developed such as feudalism around twelve hundred twelve thousand years after the invention of agriculture the industrial revolution shifted human social organization from photosynthetic stocks to fossilized carbon stocks this freed us from our dependence on plant and animal energy and opened up incredible new flows of power while the organization of bodies around coal pits railroads and teeming conurbations the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave rise to mass social democracy state nationalism and industrial capitalism as timothy mitchell argues in his book carbon democracy the ability of  organized coal miners to interrupt energy flows gave them significant leverage and what had been previously essentially feudal and absolute systems rulers were forced to listen to workers because coal miners at the forefront of the labor movement could interrupt the op the operation of an entire country through labor unions general strikes and sabotage sustained by the ability of coal miners railway railroad workers teamsters and longshoreman to paralyze national economies working people in the industrial west acquire power that would have seemed impossible before the late nineteenth century timothy mitchell rights workers were gradually connected together not so much by the weak ties of a class culture collective idiology or political organization by the increasing and highly concentrated quantities of carbon energy they mined loaded carried stoked and put to work the coordinated acts of interrupting slowing down or diverting its movement created a decisive political machinery a new form of collective capability built out of coal mines railways power stations and their operators that collective capability waned with the great acceleration in the middle of the twentieth century as industrial society shifted from reliance on coal to mixed use of coal oil and natural gas unlike a coal based economy which relies on raw labor in numbers oil and gas production requires relatively few workers labor retained vestigal power for decades but the realignment of energy flows from solid coal to liquid petroleum and natural gas severely weakened the effect of political power that coal miners and their allies could leverage substantially undermining mass social democracy as a technology of power liquid carbon stocks come to us through decentralized networks managed by small crews of highly trained technicians and owned by a handful of corporations nations and individuals coal must be physically dug out of the ground and transported by fixed rail lines to distribution centers but oil and gas are mechanically pumped by pipeline from remote wells to ports where the liquids are loaded on to tankers they can be sent practically anywhere and rerouted in transit with ease as mitchell explains whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks with branches at each end but a single main channel creating potential choke points at several junctures oil float along networks that often have the properties of a grid like an electricity network where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or go or overcome breakdowns populist movements that used to be able to organize around the centralized flows of coal civilization or all the powerless when it comes to interrupting the much more flexible flows of oil and gas isolated high profile cases like that keystone x l pipeline notwithstanding growing and resonating with the flows of material power the sustain them are political arrangements today our collective organisms of consuming bodies and decentralized systems managed by technicians for the profit of the few at the top there is an oligarchy of owners who control the lion's share of world energy production they rule through technocratic administrative class of operators and politicians and run mass media elections to jockey for control amongst themselves manufacture ritual consent most people participate if at all as consumers watching the election games and voting for one of the handful of officially sanctioned candidates the few activists who try to effect reform o hobbled by systemic constraints protest politics and web based outrage may send signals to the ruling elites but these strategies exert no effective pressure no matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches or in targeted direct actions they cannot put their hands on the flows of power because they don't help produce it they only consume take the people's climate march on a mild overcast sunday morning in september two thousand and fourteen more than three hundred thousand people gathered along the west side of central park in new york city for what was billed the largest climate march in history the marches being held in advance the united nations climate summit organized by secretary general ban ki moon where more than one hundred heads of state planned to make public commitments to investing in renewable energy supporting green development in the global south developing legally binding regulations on carbon and working together to help the world's most threatened countries adapt to climate related risk i was there as a freelance journalist to talk to marchers and get a feel for the event but i was also there is one of the people whose march is supposedly was i concerned global citizen worried and guilty american i marched in new york before against the war in iraq for veterans day for gay pride how wayne and west indian day and this march like those was a carefully managed event indeed the people's climate march was a logistical behemoth involving more than fifteen hundred organizations each with its own interests and concerns in order to keep those various organizations united the marches leading groups of oz and three fifty dot org decided to forgo message unity concrete demands or a clear target the main message of the march was going to be the march itself yet the message the march was supposed to embody was never clear if the intent was to raise awareness we'd be right to ask what a march is supposed to do the preponderance of scientific data decades of research almost daily articles in major media outlets worldwide and nineteen united nations conferences on the issue since the united nations framework convention on climate change first met in berlin in one thousand nine hundred five cannot if the plan was to convince conservative and mainstream americans to pay attention to climate change it's hard to see how a bunch of environmentalists marching through city most americans consider a bastion of rich liberals might be expected to accomplish that if the intent was to demonstrate the political power that the umbrella organizations could motivate in terms of voters we should ask which voters where they're from how they usually vote and how many there were none of that information was collected so one's left to wonder exactly what kind of pressure this march was supposed to put on the american political process or for that matter any political process the march was tightly constrained by police barriers directed through low traffic streets far from the united nations you know far from the meeting it was supposed to influence and dumped out in the empty blocks along the hudson river west of men town with no closing rally to unify the protesters the march ended with an incoherent whimper as thousands of adam ised individuals scattered back to their subways cars and digitally wired but politically disconnected lives in truth the people's climate march was little more than an orgy of democratic emotion and activist themes street fair a real world analogue to trigger twitter hash tag campaigns something that gives you a nice feeling says you belong to a certain group and it's completely divorced from actual legislation and governance given the march is tremendous built in weaknesses the best we might have hoped for is that it published nothing what's more likely though is that it siphoned off organizing energy they could have been more useful elsewhere made a public display of climate activism and political impotence and soothed hundreds of thousands of people with a false sense of hope at the u n climate summit two days after the march attendees didn't even get that spurious elixir the only cure on offer there was bureaucratic anesthetic i made it to the upper balcony of the general assembly hall just in time to catch the last few minutes of united to caprio as melissa was opening speech and sat through much of the day with other journalists and observers in the nosebleed seats watching the statesman dull pageant take place far below while a range of development finance schemes were presented as solutions what the summit came down to was a bleak ritual of stalemate as if the world's leaders had been cast in a business class version of samuel beckett's and game one after another they stood at the podium mouthing vacuity boldly committing to two flues voluntary admission writs reductions that are too little too late the heads of russia germany india and china didn't even bother showing up barack obama delivered a stirring aeration about how everyone needs to work together chiding china while glorifying america's negligible emissions cuts ignoring the roles that american coal and american consumption play in stoking china's growth the president of tang's india jakaya kikwete day complained about how little african countries had contributed to the problem and how much they stand to suffer speaking poignantly about mt kilimanjaro disappearing glaciers barren waka president of now ruined chair of the alliance of small island states argued passionately for more investment to help existential threatened nations like his own adapt chinese vice premier shang address the united nations with a stiff and defensive speech in which he promised that china would peak its carbon emission carbon emissions as soon as possible and reduce it per capita emissions whenever it got around to it a position only notionally mitigated by the subsequent us china us china climate agreement between marching in the protest on sunday and going to the us summit on tuesday i rushed up and down manhattan all day monday shuttling between two other events that seemed to promise more concrete results down at the island's narrow southern tip a few hundred hard core activists put their bodies on the line to flood wall street while at the harvard club in midtown a group of and government administrators corporate representatives bankers and economists met to work out a global pricing mechanism at the international emissions enemy were all clearly identified the protesters were marching to wall street in a nonviolent direct action against what they saw as the real problem behind climate change capitalism signs name the usual suspects the villainous koch brothers exxon mobil and shell the protest parade of anarchists environmentalists and occupy veterans blocked traffic around our turret dimity cars charging bull for a few hours then made their way to the intersection of broadway and wall street the new york city police department maintained over control of the situation the entire time surrounding the marchers with a loose cordon from beginning to end helicopters buzzed low overhead while a nattily dressed to observe the situation up close wall street itself had been blocked off by barriers and horse mounted police long before the protests began the marchers never stood a chance of getting through in terms of its own expressed goal the action was a failure before it even began the protesters didn't give up though they held the intersection of broadway and wall under the steeple of trinity church all afternoon long once the sun set the cops closed and ordering the protesters to disperse one hundred four stalwart souls refused to leave and were arrested including one sweaty activist in a polar bear suit while the rabble faced off against the fuzz downtown power industry elites at the harvard club discussed how to profitably trade waste on international emissions trading or associations first panel government representatives talked about how carbon pricing schemes were working to reduce carbon emissions in california and europe anyone following tang harvard economist robert stevens delivered a brief executive summary of the carbon pricing study he headed facilitating quote facilitating linkage of heterogeneous regional national and subnational climate policies through a future international agreement according to stave ns the best result we could expect from the paris twenty fifteen united nations framework convention on climate change meeting this november would be a carbon market deal loosely linking various national regional local and corporate systems of carbon pricing and regulation through a unified monitoring system in which nations would quote specify their own targets actions policies or some combination of these to reduce greenhouse gas emissions this sounded obviously vague i was soon to understand how empty it really was the last panel featured spokes people from stadol oil the environmental defense fund g d s suez and bar offering more or less hopeful perspectives on the wondrous possibilities of carbon trading but the key message seemed to be the one delivered by david hone chief climate change adviser for shell retranslated stay vince bureaucracies into the much frank point that the only kind of carbon pricing agreement that had any chance of being signed in paris would have to be totally non binding which means totally on enforceable as with the  everyone in the room seemed to agree that somebody needed to do something about climate change and soon but unlike the protesters that flood wall street capitalism is the underlying problem the folks at the harvard club saw capitalism is the only possible framework for solutions for the e t a international legal agreements corporate management and market based mechanisms were the only functional machinery for forging a global response to a global crisis but this machinery was limited slow and trouble some that didn't mean that it was part of the problem rather such limitations were taken as the conditions through which concerned people had to work meaning failure wasn't an option even if the grandstanding at the united nations and technocratic equivocations t a offered direct evidence for what i think are thomas economist thomas schelling argues that the likelihood of the planet's almost two hundred nations drafting a binding emissions reduction plan is practically nonexisten nonexistent the only good odds are for more of the same business as usual which means a best of voluntary and therefore functionally meaningless agreement meanwhile the very same day that the people's climate march kicked off the global carbon project released a new report showing that the global the global greenhouse gas emissions rose two point three percent in two thousand and thirteen with china's emissions growing four point two percent india's growing five point one percent and america's growing two point nine percent so much for obama's oratory this seems to be the situation we're stuck in on the left and on the right among diplomats energy company executives investors scientists and artists clergy and activists serious people are worried about global warming and feel the urgent need to do something about it across the spectrum though nobody seems to have the tools clout or conceptual framework we need to fix it or even to come up with a good plan to protect ourselves from the greatest dangers there's no reset button for civilization and no viable plan for transforming global infrastructure agriculture and energy networks in the next ten to twenty years and while smart dedicated and thoughtful people fumble with political machinery that doesn't work such as carbon pricing markets protests in the united nations all of us in the global north go on about our business driving flying leaving lights on running heaters and air conditioners eating meat charging our devices living on sustainable lives predicated on easy consumption in a perverse irony one of the main things that connected the disparate parties of the united nations flood wall street that week was people on their i phones and androids checking email tweeting taking pictures the global information and communications ecosystem that they were plugged into is now estimated to use about ten percent of the world's electricity that eco system relies heavily on coal every time you check your email your heating up the planet we do it every day we can't stop we won't stop the problem with the people's climate march wasn't really that it lacked that goal there was distracting superficial and so superficial and vacuous the problem with the united nations isn't that the politicians are ignorant hidebound self interested or corrupt the problem with our response to climate change isn't a problem with passing the right laws or finding the right price for carbon or changing people's minds or raising awareness everybody era t know the problem is that the problem is too big the problem is that different people want different things the problem is that nobody has real answers the problem is that the problem is us now you've heard the call we have to do something we need to fight we need to identify an enemy and go after them some respond march and chant some look away deny what's happening and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrow a life off the grid space colonies immortality in paradise explicit denial consumers say shitty and a wireless robot staff three d printed techno utopia meanwhile the rich take shelter in their fortresses trusting to their air conditioning private schools and well paid guards fight flight flight fight the threat of death activates our deepest animal drive the aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats or some of the most intense emotions we ever experience for human society to function at all these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and channel outbreaks  panic and hate are dangerous but lower levels of aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows while constant generalized anxiety he people serve unwilling to take risks and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter or the dulling sane sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods fear comes to us every day fear comes to us every day in our counters with an increasingly militarized police and our humiliating interactions and metal detectors and body scan machines fear comes to us in the absence of job security and our want of appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality and in our mistrust of corrupt institutions here comes to us in widespread surveillance in the form of a homeless woman or hospitalized friend without adequate financial support in the constant nagging worry that we're not working hard enough not happy and never going to make it here comes to us and whether porn unpredictable shifts and formally stable climate dynamics and massive storms more than in any other way fear comes to us in images and messages as social media vibrations products of cultural technologies that we've interpreted into our lives going about our daily business we receive constant messages of apprehension and danger ubiquitous warnings insistent needling jabs to the deep lizard brain somebody died something blew up something might blow up somebody attacked somebody somebody killed somebody guns crime immigrants terrorists arabs mexicans white supremacists killer cops demonic thugs rape murder global warming the bowl of ice is that that that sociologist tom since he writes people will do almost anything to avoid being afraid when despite the best efforts fear and anxiety do breakthrough people go to incredible lengths to shut them down sometimes when these vibration shake us we discharge them by passing them on retreating the story re posting the video hoping that others will validate our reaction thus assuaging our fear by assuring ourselves that collective action has been alerted to the threat other times we react with aversion working to dampen the vibrations by searching out positive reinforcements pleasurable images and videos something funny something anything to ease the fear we buy something we rude we pop a pill make love and either passing on the vibration or reacting against it we let the fear short circuit our own autonomous desires they verging us from our goals and loading ever more emotional static in toward daily cognitive processing we become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible to such distraction and whether we retransmit or react we reinforce channels of thought perception behavior and emotion that over time come to shape our habits and our personality as we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same fight or flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary purposes increases alertness and adrenaline and adrenaline flow and generally works to keep the human animal alive as we proceed into the anthropocene though capitalisms cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks what cultural theorist lauren brillant has identified as the cruel optimism of a system sustained by hopes that can never be fulfilled is dangerously with an atmosphere of beleaguered anxiety increasing frustration with working class and middle class economic stagnation and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by what it well america's fra social infrastructure holds together our fear and aggression can be channeled the labor and sanction and economic competition with professional sports hyper violent television and protests to let off steam once the social fabric begins to tear though we risk on leashing not only rioting rebellion and civil war but homicidal politics the likes of which should make our blood run cold consider iraq today is being torn apart between a corrupt trucker see a breakaway kurdish enclave and a self declared a sonic fundamentalist caliphate well a civil war in neighboring syria spills across its borders these conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the middle east has seen in modern history since two thousand and six syria has been suffering crippling water shortages that have in some areas caused seventy five percent crop failure and wiped out eighty five percent of livestock left more than eight hundred thousand syrians without a livelihood and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into syria cities now into europe this drought is part of a long term warming and drying trends that are transforming the middle east not just water but oil too is elemental to these conflicts iraq sits in the fifth largest proven oil reserves in the world meanwhile the islamic state has only been able to survive because it has taken control of most of syria's oil and gas production we tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena but is retired navy rear admiral david tilly argues you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call isis right now meanwhile thousands of miles to the north russian backed separatists are fighting fascists paramilitary forces defending the elected government of ukraine which is also suffering drought russia's role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through ukraine from russia to europe cannot but the key issues in the conflict elsewhere droughts in two thousand and fourteen sent refugees from guatemala and honduras north to the us border devastated crops in california and australia and threaten millions of lives in eritrea somalia ethiopia sudan uganda afghanistan india morocco pakistan and parts of china across the world massive protests and riots have swept bosnia and herzegovina venezuela brazil turkey egypt and thailand while conflicts rage on in colombia libya the central african republic sudan nigeria yemen and india and while the world burns the united states is playing chicken with russia over control of eastern europe in the melting arctic and now syria and with china over control of southeast asia in the south china se threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years this is our present and future droughts and hurricanes refugees and border guards war for oil water gas and food we experience this world of strife today in one of two modes either it's our environment and we're in it or it comes to us as images social excitation retransmitted fear people are fighting and dying in ruin cities all over the planet neighbors are killing each other old women are bleeding to death in bomb rubble and children are being murdered probably as we sit here right now to live in that world is horrific constant danger strains every nerve the only things that matter there are survival killing the enemy reputation and having a safe place to sleep the experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge i remember living in that world many years ago in occupied baghdad today that world seems impossibly distant yet every day it presses in on me in a never ending stream of words images appeals and reports i see videos i read stories i see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and i moved to act perhaps more accurately to emote to react to feel to perform we don't usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve but we all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these effective vibrations are not neutral news outlets shape information to fit their owner's prejudices while facebook twitter and google google shape our perceptions through hidden algorithms the specialisation and demographic targeting of contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point they receive only those images  vibrations which era to harmonize with our own prejudices our own preexisting desires that's intensifying our particular emotional reactions long and increasingly limited band and pulling us to discharge our emotions within that same field ready listeners for which we are rewarded with likes and favorites our consciousness is shaped daily through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we just charge that feeling by provoking it in others social media like facebook crowd source catharsis creating self contained wave pools of aggression and fear pity and terror stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing pictures of children killed by bombs or police or pictures of the devastation left in the wake of a tropical storm a move me to sadness and horror retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and or my act of transmission marks me as someone who has feelings about these things and who condemns them i can rationalize my retransmission by saying that i'm raising awareness or trying to influence public policy i want my fellow citizens to be as horrified as i am so they'll think like i do or so they'll vote for representatives representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening or maybe so that if enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align themselves along our vibrations the way honey bee colony will pick a site for a new hive through the dads of its advance guard scouts these are perfectly reasonable human assumptions because that's how physical human collectives function anyone who's been in a crowd a basketball team and i club choir or protests knows how bodies resonate together but politics is the energetic distribution of bodies and systems and we live in a system of carbon fueled capitalism that we should expect to work in physical human ways especially when it comes to responding to the threat global warming first are political and social media technologies are not neutral but have been developed to serve particular interests most notably targeted advertising concentration of wealth and ideological control and the vibrations that seem to resonate most strongly along these channels or envy i jus lation outrage fear hatred and mindless pleasure second the more we pass on or react to social vibrations the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought with every protest chant retreat and facebook post we become stronger resonat and weaker thinkers third however intense our social vibrations grow they remain locked within machinery that offers no political leverage they don't translate into political action because they don't connect to the flows of power finally while the typical collective human response to threat is to identify an enemy take sides and mobilize to fight global warming offers no apprehensive that hasn't stopped people from trying to find un bureaucracy that's holding us back barack obama has implied that it's china tea party republicans would blame barack obama i'm sure if they admitted that global warming was actually happening caused by human activity meanwhile n listening liberals want to believe that the tea party republicans are responsible so that they can frame the problem as one to mean a bill to solution by moral education in light and consumerism as if it were all a matter of convincing people to eat more kale and drive electric cars one climate activist has argued that just ninety companies are responsible for almost two thirds of all historical greenhouse gas emissions which conveniently absolves billions of automobile drivers airline passengers meat eaters and cellphone users of responsibility enemy isn't out there somewhere the enemy is ourselves not as individuals but as a collective a system how do we stop ourselves from fulfilling our fates as suicidally productive drones in a carbon addicted hive destroying ourselves in some kind of psychopathic colony collapse disorder how do we interrupt the perpetual circuits of fear aggression crisis and reaction that continually protestant ever more intense levels of manic despair one way we might begin to answer these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of peter stothard the german philosopher peter idea of the philosopher as an interrupt or relive constantly in collective fields of excitation he writes this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings the input of stress and evidently enters me thoughts are not free each of us can divine them they come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper my sovereignty if it exists can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or should this fail by it and it totally metamorphosed verified filtered or recoated form it serves nothing to contest it i am free only to the extent that i interrupt escalations and i am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion precisely this continues to be the philosopher's mission in society if i may express myself in such that it terms he writes his mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupt or not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it the classics express this with the term pondering with this concept ethics and energetics enter into contact as a bear of a philosophical function i have neither the right nor the desire to either to be either a conductor in a stress or mantic chain or the atomic tang of an ethical imperative the consumption of political function as collective vibration to a philosophical function of interruption as opposed to disruption which shocks the system and breaks holes into pieces interruptions suspends continuous processes it's not smashing but sitting with not blockage but reflection slotted oxys the role of the philosopher and the human swarm as out of an apparent anti drone slow dancing to its own rhythm neither a tune to the collective beat nor operating mechanically dogmatically the ontologically but continually self immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life so long as one allows oneself to be a conductor in a stress semantic chain when a strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass a society making all of us all the more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism scapegoating panic and war fever interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive like all good philosophy if it works it helps us stop and see our world in new ways reacting to it not passing it on but interrupting it then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely responding freely to constant images of fear and violence responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror responding freely to the ongoing alarms of war environmental catastrophe global destruction and global warming demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed while life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife interrupt or learns how to die thank  light that it's basically integrated into our lives to the point where it's inseparable from us and and not of not burdensome and i think about that a lot i have to so i live in brooklyn and i have to commute to to teach in connecticut it's hard to drive there because there's no good train there's no train at all actually to where i have to go and so i have to drive through these you know interchanges and there's just all this infrastructure there's all these roads and and trucks and tankers and it's just stuff you know and i don't see any solar panels and i don't you know people are on people have phones and there's there's there's a great promise especially in the the immense leaps and bounds that have been made with  digital technology and internet and and our phones and all this stuff but you know it can only do so much it seems you know like it seems like with the way we have th civilization structured you know running on fossil fuels anyway there's the bricks and mortar right the pipes and oil aren't going away now you know sure i love this idea of shifting entirely to some sort of mixed renewable economy i think it's a wonderful wonderful idea i  the thing that worries me about that is that i question even if there was enough motivation and and will and energy directed energy directed toward  that you know best case scenario it would still take ten to twenty years to totally rebuild global energy infrastructure and we're screwed by that anyways yes so the question is  about militancy and and whether or not that's the only option and you know you're right if you look at the history and i talk about this in the book you know even if you look at you look at the labor movement you look at even the civil rights movement you know there were there are a lot of guns involved you know not just you know say with civil rights not just the national guard that were brought down or the military that were brought down to protect the marchers and to enforce federal legislation but also weapons around martin luther king to protect him and then other people as well important factor in how things how things came out yeah i mean it's a difficult situation because the fact of the matter is that people who have power don't give it away right and that's not likely to happen but there's two things i would say about that is i don't think it's that i don't think i'm the one hand i don't think the problem is that the left has lost its militancy i think as i suggested i think part of i think the problem has more to do with not having leverage right the reason why unions and labor militancy could shut everything down is because and i'm i'm sort of it's a sort of reductive this materialist argument but because you could say you know coal miners can shut down an entire economy and i don't know how however many streets we could block like you know i don't know how we would shut down an entire economy today there just the structure is much better rerouting and and  it's also you know the gasoline and oil you can just move it around much more easily the other thing is that you know i struggled i struggled in thinking this through and writing it because i don't i can't advocate violence as a political solution in this case because violence violence brings more violence violence opens more violence violence is uncontrollable violence intensifies the situation violence makes things more extreme and you know when it when it when it comes to you know when people have to protect themselves or else you know i can't make a moral judgment about the decision they make but where i'm at i think where we're at here in this room in this bookstore or whatever i guess it's hard for me to say that now is the time for violence i don't think i can do that so the question is is there any living human society that has it right and that's the thing is that there's it's not a yeah there's a problem with the way we live now and our government now and our energy systems now and all the carbon we've dumped into the atmosphere that's going to heat up the planet and make it unlivable but there's also like there's also the problem that we're we're mortal limited finite you know primates we think we're way smarter than we are and who don't like thinking about the fact that we're going to die you know and that problem is never going to go away that's always going to be a problem is being human right and there's no solution for that you can't google it like you can't out produce it you can't technologically fix it it's just being human we're mortal we're limited and you know i think there are societies in the p and some other societies still today that do way a better job of integrating that truth into daily life then we do in modern american consumer capitalism  but it's still a hard thing and it's still i think you know it's it's the fundamental thing we have to come to terms with is our eyes our limitation mortalities hum would i recommend the samurai choice yeah no i mean that's what i'm i mean it's learning how to learning to die in the anthropocene it's a it's hospice that's right yeah hospice for for us individually and as as a whole civilization