Just Fucking Stop Oil

As the years go by, it feels like humanity is picking up pace to cause its own demise. Many fictional works try to visualize what our actions mean in the present and future; Some of them offer a glimpse of hope, others are more realistic and show a very possible future if we stick to our current trajectory.

One such “hopeful” project is a book I got to read this year — The Ministry for the Future1 by Kim Stanley Robinson. At first it draws a carbon copy of the world we live in right now, albeit with a heatwave killing millions in India which thankfully hasn’t happened, yet. After a serious of large-scale disasters and many attempts at further playing with Earth’s atmosphere — something called climate engineering or more commonly known as geoengineering —, the working class overthrows the current order in an international revolution and begins cutting carbon dioxide from the source by not injecting carbon emissions into the atmosphere in the first place.

Funnily enough, skipping the geoengineering part is what scientists have been pleading with politicians to do for the last decade and especially since the inception of the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015. For more information and a much better explanation of the scientific and socioeconomic pillars they base their pleas on than I ever could deliver, I recommend reading the original article2 which itself inspired this post. Nonetheless, here is an excerpt of an analogy demonstrating the urgency of the situation and speculative nature of deploying geoengineering technologies:

“We can see the cliff edge rapidly approaching. Rather than slam on the brakes, some people are instead pushing their foot down harder on the accelerator. Their justification for this insanity is that we need to go faster in order to be able to make the jump and land safely on the other side.” (James Dyke et al., 2024)

On the other hand, we’ve got the more grimly accentuated projects like Extrapolations3 on Apple TV+ that had some panic-attack-inducing episodes. Still, most people in that show — besides the couple episodes taking place in India — were living lives not that different from us in the West. Not even past 2060 did living standards of the so-called middle class degrade when the Earth’s temperature had risen by over 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels. Yes, wildlife was pretty much eradicated, but the top third of humanity in capitalist hierarchy remained largely unaffected in comparison. Nonetheless, liberal idiots were trying to fight climate terrorists within the legal frameworks those same terrorists abused to achieve planetary destruction. As if this wasn’t enough of a shitshow, they had to make three AI computers judges on the case brought forth against the CEO of a company responsible for committing large scale ecocide and they ruled in his favor, possibly because they were easily fooled by his blatant lies. Anyway, could’ve happened with real judges as well, so “rule of law” my ass!

The law is only ever applied on the weak to strengthen the strong; anything else is the exception — no the rule. So why do we wait for Law and Order™️ to bring about the change we need, when it is put in place by those who we ought to fight? By those who rule us? By those who oppress us? It’s not like mother nature is all that patient. I mean, she’s been waiting on us for 50 years and her wrath is starting to show its signs. So what or who is it we’re waiting for to save us?

We can’t allow for oil companies to continue choking us into obedience with fear-mongering and downplaying the impact climate change has had, is having and will have on human and animal life. They’ve been doing it for decades now so it’s about damn time we show them that enough is enough!

❗️Disclaimer: This post is not intended to incriminate me by inciting violence on the defenseless and innocent fossil fuel companies, even in self-defense. Reader discretion advised, do with this what you will. #freedom #democracy #ruleoflaw🧎🏻#capitalism=freedom

  1. The Ministry for the Future 📚; It took me months to be able to finish this book. ↩︎

  2. The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C 📰 ↩︎

  3. Extrapolations 📺; I had to pause watching this show for a couple of months because it was affecting my mental health very negatively. Ironic, how it was produced by one of the biggest tech corporations right now. ↩︎

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