Extreme time and extreme policy go hand in – billionaires like Musk push both | Jonathan Watts

IIf it was not already clear, the biggest far-right manifestation in the history of the United Kingdom is a reminder that the battle for a just and habitable planet cannot be led only in the silos of science or environmentalism.

This can be a source of dismay for anyone who still believed that the argument for a clearer, safer and fair future can be won by reason. But there is also an advantage of the recently witnesses alarming scenes in London: the alliance between billionaires, thugs and other opponents of change came out of the shadows.

The global environmental context is essential to understand what is happening in the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries where the far right becomes more and more vocal, violent and financed with sumptuous than in memory. But this climate analysis was lost in a large part of the cover of this phenomenon, which focused on narrow and local concerns that provided the spark but not fuel.

To return to my distant point of view in the Brazilian Amazon, which is also short -sighted as to blame the record hatch of forest fires here in the last 12 months only on those who have lit the matches, while ignoring the most significant fact that decades of drought and heat went up in particular in history.

Biologists tell me that when trees become too hot or too stressed for prolonged periods, their main adaptation mechanism is to close their periphery. They lose leaves so that any remaining humidity can be cycle inside the trunk and branches. This can support certain individual species for a short period, but only at the risk of their long -term health and forest resilience.

The loss of leaves weakens the ability of a tree to interact with the outside world. He loses the ability to cycle water and carbon. It also opens the forest canopy, allowing more sun and heat to reach the sub-settlement and suck the humidity of the soil and the fallen leaves. This degrades the ecosystem at even more stressful levels and normally transforms humid undergrowth into Tinderbox. The only hope of salvation is rain.

When human societies become too hot or too stressed for prolonged periods, we are theoretically intelligent to bring together and invent a range of survival techniques and technologies. Recent history, however, suggests that the first instinct of many people is also to close their periphery – “close borders”, “build walls”, “impose prices”, “stop boats” – to try to keep jobs, food and money for themselves. Having hatred against foreigners is a manifestation typical of this logic, which in turn risks becoming ecological-fascist.

A consideration of a moment reveals that this is self-deficit. When the savings ceases to cycle and goods bicycle, the reduction in declines and prices increase. When societies stop exchanging ideas and support, they become more exposed and less likely to find solutions to the biggest problems that are behind their stress. Left isolated too long, they wilt and die. Or Selfombust.

Unlike trees, movement is one of the most effective survival strategies available for humans, which shows that analogy has only been going so far. But forests and societies are more stressed due to the climate crisis. And the two become more combustible, which is why the incendiary rhetoric of the American billionaire Elon Musk is not only reprehensible, but sinister.

As I wrote elsewhere, extreme weather conditions and extreme policy are linked. First, because the latter feeds on fear and uncertainty caused by the first. Secondly, because the global climate action against major issuers caused the resistance of billionaire individuals, companies and petrostats, who pay money in campaigns to deny, delay and distract. And thirdly, because many of the ultra-rich are indeed apocalyptic in their visions of the future, but they have abandoned global solutions and prefer to invest in their individual doomsday bunkers.

Given in this light, the rarely of far -right demagogues makes it perfect – so grotesque – the meaning. Donald Trump publicly declares the climate crisis a “huge hoax”, which plays well with its donors from the oil company. However, many of his actions as president comply with the most apocalyptic visions of a greenhouse land. He threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, two regions of the world likely to escape the worst effects of global heating. He has closed or financed many American government’s climate science programs, which will keep the public in ignorance of what’s going on. And he increased the internal security forces, which increasingly criminalize climate protests. In action, if not in words, his climate denial appears be opportunistic or downright false.

The great fear of Trump and its billionaire donors in the petrochemical and Infotech industries seems to be that humanity could come together to find a solution to shared problems. For them, this would mean regulations, stagnation and higher taxes on the rich.

This helps to explain what is happening in the United Kingdom, where a foreign billionaire – Musc – risks arouse hatred against foreign asylum seekers. Speaking by video link during the “Unit the Kingdom” rally earlier this month, the American told the London crowd: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence comes to you. You fight or die, it’s the truth, I think. “

It is also Musk who paid the legal costs of the far-right anti-immigrant activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon-which bears the name of Tommy Robinson-and then used his social media platform X to enhance the public profile of the founder of the Application English Defense League. He doesn’t always need to be manifested. X is also one of the social media which accelerates clips of inter-racial conflicts before the main elections. The constant repetition of the images that we live in a climate of violence is sufficient to arouse fear, hostility and support for “strong leaders”.

The reason seems to be to divide and distract, in particular with regard to polycrisy of climate, nature and inequalities. Billionaires such as Musk have disproportionate responsibility for these existential global problems, which has aroused increasing criticism from the Pope and anti-gauven NGOs, especially Oxfam.

It’s a shame because Musk was once a champion of climate action. But the intellectual ethics of Silicon Valley has changed while technological billionaires feel more and more under pressure for their accumulation of wealth and carbon emissions. Some have built spaces of space, others invest in doomsday bunkers or mega yachts – which can all double in exhaust pods if the climate becomes too hot or the masses too rare. Increasingly, they also finance social media sites, information companies, lobbies groups and far-right politicians to resist any suggestion that the global economy could extend beyond the landing capacity of the earth.

Take Musk’s trading partner, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Silicon Valley of Paypal, Palantir and the founders. He was recognized as the “manufacturer of kings” for the first victory of the Trump elections and was described more recently as “the intellectual architect of contemporary ethics of Silicon Valley”. In an apocalyptic interview with the New York Times this summer, he reprimanded “peace and security” of the last 50 years, assimilated the climate activist Greta Thunberg to the Antichrist and warned that Europe was in the grip of an environmentalist ideology, which he called a “green thing”.

Armageddon’s speech is not new in American policy, but – given the worsening of the climate and the context of extinction – this adds to the feeling that the debates on the energy transition and the ecological limits can enter into an end game.

Optimists see Trump, Musk and Thiel diatribes as the dying howls of a system that has survived its usefulness. Apart from the United States and the United Kingdom, there are signs of change and resistance, especially in the world South. The enormous investments in China in the renewable powers should begin very soon to lead the world’s carbon emissions on a downward path, which will vanish many assets in the petroleum industry. The Brazilian government and the Supreme Court have defended its forests and democracy with rigor, punishing seizures of illegal land, locating its former leader Jair Bolsonaro for having plotted a coup and successfully faced the musk on respect for local laws. Around the world, a vast majority of people want their governments to take stronger measures on the climate crisis, as shown in the 89%project.

Here in the forest, it is obvious that community action is essential. As an individual, there is simply no viable path to survival. Simple trees can withstand drought a little longer by eliminating the leaves and closing some of their interactions with the outside world. But to recover and prosper, they finally need rain and nutrition – which can only come from healthy ecosystems. The same goes for humans. Be that as it is Musk, Thiel and Trump might want people to think, the future depends on interdependence.

Rather than whipping the flames, the citizens of the responsible world should attenuate the embers. If you want democracy, you have to defend it. If you want a healthy environment, you must defend it. It has never been more true as now, although this historical lesson seems to be better understood today in the Amazonian forest than in the mother’s house, or the self -proclaimed land of free.