THERE’S A SCENE in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” where an embattled dust-bowl sharecropper struggles to defend his land. He threatens to shoot the man sent to demolish the farm buildings on behalf of the bank. Don’t blame me says the demolition man. The farmer then threatens to shoot the bank president who signed the foreclosure papers. Patiently, the driver explains that the bank manager is only carrying out the instructions of the bank’s owners back East. Utterly defeated, the propertyless sharecropper cries plaintively: “But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.” To which the demolition man replies: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t human at all.”
It’s an exchange I always recall whenever I hear people advocating going after “the man that’s starving me”. The latest target of this “who can we shoot” proposition are the 100 companies allegedly responsible for 71 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, the first of these planetary polluters to fill the gunsights of Earth’s angry sharecroppers are the oil companies.
Former One Tree Hill-feller, Mike Smith, now working for the Iwi Leaders Forum, is aiming to bring Rainer Seele, CEO of the Austrian oil-giant OMV, before the International Criminal Court for “genocide and other climate crimes impacting on indigenous communities now and in the future”. It would be churlish not to wish Mr Smith well, but the chances of Mr Seele being convicted (or even indicted!) by the ICC are about as good as Steinbeck’s sharecropper bagging a New York banker with his gopher gun.
The Iwi Leaders Forum may have deep pockets, but they are unlikely to be as deep as OMVs when it comes to keeping a team of international law experts on retainer for the length of time between Mr Smith launching his legal case – and its inevitable abandonment. Inevitable? Of course. The idea that the CEOs of those 100 companies will ever be brought before a criminal court for doing what their billions of customers and clients around the world demand of them is ludicrous.
That’s the nub of the problem, isn’t it? Those giant corporations would wither and die in just a few months if the peoples of the world unanimously agreed to stop purchasing their products and services. What could be simpler? Just throw away your lap-top and cellphone. Junk your car – and your ready-to-wear wardrobe. Leave the city you’re living in. Stop using electricity. Throw away your prescription medicines. Easy-peasy! Take away the demand, and rest assured, there will be no more supply.
Except, the demand for all those goods and services isn’t going anywhere – is it? In fact, it is set to grow, exponentially, as all the peoples on earth currently shut out of the Western lifestyle determinedly amass the wealth needed to acquire it. Now, the Mike Smiths of this world will undoubtedly urge the people of India and Brazil, and the poorest nations of Africa, to embrace their poverty as the surest means of saving the planet, but I would advise them to put on their running shoes before they start making their pitch.
There will be many who object that this is nothing but a crude exercise in victim blaming. Most people really do want to save the planet, but the relentless battering of journalists, advertisers, public relations consultants, lobbyists, corporate fixers, corrupt politicians – many of them on the payrolls of those 100 companies – keep us all running, like so many consumerist hamsters, on the great wheel of capitalism.
But, once again, all they have to do is stop. Except, they don’t stop – do they?
This civilisation we have built (we being the whole human species) is the most astonishingly wonderful thing homo sapiens has ever seen. We love it. We cannot imagine how awful life would be without it. And, we most certainly are not going to co-operate with anyone who advises us to throw it away.
We like our lap-tops and our cellphones. We like our cars and our cheap RTW clothes. We like living in vast, vibrant cities built out of concrete and steel. We like being able to flick a switch and get all the energy we can use. We like turning on a tap and being able to drink the water that comes out. We like it that there are hospitals and clinics full of clever doctors and nurses, and pharmacies full of clever drugs. And we don’t actually care if every last Polar Bear in creation is reduced to a pathetic heap of skin and bones – just so long as our super-civilisation, powered by its indispensable and irreplaceable (at least for the foreseeable future) fossil-fuels, keeps on a-rockin’.
So, much and all as Mr Smith might wish it were otherwise, Mr Seele and all the other CEOs of those miscreant 100 companies have nothing to fear from virtue-signalling activists. They know, just as the demolition man in Steinbeck’s novel knew, that there’s nobody to shoot.
Because the thing that is frying the planet – and all our futures – isn’t human. It’s a vast and impossibly complex economic machine, and it absolutely does not care what we think or say – only what we buy.
To borrow a line from Vasily Grossman, our present capitalist-industrial civilisation resembles a magnificent automobile built by a brilliant scientist but driven by a hoon.
Who are the hoons Politicians? The entitled wealthy? Bankers?
Vasily had been around and seen a lot. His books about the Eastern Front are very harrowing.
Spon-on Chris! Please explain that to the silly 16-year-old girls protesting the climate.
Meanwhile, it’s amusing that you bring up the Grapes of Wrath because that was the US dust bowl era, when the continental US its highest temperatures ever.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It’s a quote routinely attributed to Edmund Burke. But it turns out falsely so. Apparently, he never uttered these words. At best, the essence of the quote can be traced back to the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, who delivered an 1867 inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews and stated: “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Thomas Paine no doubt could attest to the validity of the statement. He observed two revolutions close up and personal.
Another thought provoking article @ Chris Trotter, A fine example of our insatiable need for consumeristic trinketry and junk are the mountains of empty shipping containers piled up on land adjacent to our major ports, apparently growing every month as it becomes uneconomic for the shipping companies to retrieve them empty.
Your article also brings to mind the saying.. Remember when you point your finger at someone or something, there are three more pointing back at you.
Only one thing for it I guess is to go out and buy another pair of Nikes!
As long as chainsaw Mike isn’t using taxpayers money I’m happy for him to waste his time chasing shadows rather than mindlessly wrecking things that mean a lot to other people and getting off scot free. The first sight of that tree on the drive back to Auckland used to say welcome home, now it’s just another mound.
As an aside I took one book with two Steinbeck novels on an international flight and read both. Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men. Each was a mere 100 pages or there about, very slim when compared to the 500 page dross we are regularly served today. Its not the size, its the quality.
The machine is the toxic mimic of life. Taking a living planet and feeding the machine. This is a death cult.
The result of our current practice:
1. Our lives are vastly improved.
2. The technology doesn’t yet exist to achieve carbon zero without slaughtering most of the population and reverting to a hunter gatherer existence. (Although we can go part way to reducing emissions without a lot of pain)
3. Those CO2 emissions have promoted plant life globally, in that the scientists say there’s a 15% increase in greening. This is also making our crops more abundant and feeding millions of mouths. It’s also reversing desertification (the science of which I can explain if you wish).
4. In general life is really happy with a warming planet. Consider the greater degree of animal and plant speciation in lower latitudes compared to high. Life likes it warm.
5. We are a tropical species whose origins are in Africa. We struggle to exist in high latitudes, requiring vitamin supplements to reduce the chance of depression and dementia.
don’t worry Andrew. Stephen is willing to give up his cell phone, lap top, home etc etc and go back to pre colonial times where Maori lived to 150 years old! Good for him. That will help save the plannet.!
Incredibly ignorant Andrew, you’re ignoring the exponential warming that evolution is not able to adapt to quickly enough, and you’re ignoring the fact we are already well into the 6th Great Extinction.
Perhaps Oswald Spengler was on to something. But likely the end of it all will take time, stretched over a couple of centuries. Wait for the implications of AI to kick in!
@Bozo,
Well the West is declining and the printing of money, the never ending wars, the shuddering of banks, shored up and ‘to big to fail’ are all part of the scenario.
Spengler was prophetic and worth dipping into. He wrote: ‘and these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents and tensions. There bodies become ever more and more immaterial,ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.’
He talks about how Faustian man has become the slave of his creation and on a path where there is no standing still and no turning back.’Nature becomes exhausted, the the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies.’
……. ‘But titanic, to, is the onslaught of money upon this intellectual force. (engineering) ….. ‘Only high finance is wholly free.’ ….’And now something happens that is intelligible only to one to has penetrated to the essence of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be forever – but, as it is a form of thought, it fades out as soon as it has thought its economic world to finality, and has no more material on which to feed.’ From the final chapter in Vol. II, chapter XI5 pages 503 -507. First German edition 1917.
Good stuff @ CT. Lots to think about. Reminds me of the sociological distinction between agency and structure. The hapless dustbowl farmer took it upon himself to shoot who he thought to be responsible for his misery only to be told that his anger and frustration was misdirected and futile.
What will it take in the current global capitalist structure for human agency, individual and collective, to triumph?
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