The term “black pill” was coined by the incel subculture, meaning a type of nihilistic and defeatist acceptance of their lonely fate. If “red pilling” is a misogynist awakening, “black pilling” is a grim desire for annihilation. Nothing will get better, so enjoy your hopelessness, indulge it at every turn until it consumes you to suicidal despair. Nothing matters. It’s a particularly brutal self-inflicted misery through collective delusion and a reinforcing community of false victimization. It is a destructive lie. Mostly, it ends in someone putting a gun in their mouth, or a lifetime of slow implosion. Almost always, it results in a hateful spite towards the outside world they feel have rejected them unfairly. This is a group of deeply damaged individuals, and it’s suffering they cause to themselves, trapped in their own vortex of loathing and disgust.
This type of narcissistic toxicity has a big brother, one far more destructive, and instead of a handful of lonely weirdos, threatens billions of people. The October 2018 report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) laid out the stakes as clearly as anything you’ve seen on the subject: the world needs to drastically change the way it does industry, energy, and social structure. Outside of coffee-stained leftwing manifestos and my crappy Twitter feed, the IPCC report is the most damning rebuke of global capitalism.
“The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.”
An adorable carbon tax and recyclable toilet paper is not going to cut it. There is no way to reach this goal and keep the neoliberal order in place. It’s just not feasible. The reality of the changing climate is about to smash into global capital with gale force winds. Yet in the face of a global emergency that require immediate action, the most powerful industrialized nation in the history of the world has blackpilled itself on climate change.
Before the IPCC released its own findings, the Trump administration’s National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) itself released a report in July 2018 titled Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule to Model Year 2021-2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks. Not exactly a banger, but inside there was a real doozy: by 2100, there will be a 7* Celsius increase in global temperature. It would be apocalyptic with no exaggeration.
The result? All sea life as it currently exists would die off in a mass extinction event, resulting in 70% of the Earth’s oxygen vanishing. Methane released from permafrost in a great enough quantity could be ignited by lightning, sending massive fireballs into the air. Fun. All the oceans would smell like fart gas from hydrogen sulphide all the time. We’re all dead by this point, by the way, even the techbros who want to party on Mars.
Not without a drop of irony, the 2018 hurricane season, which began just a few weeks earlier on June 1st, became another record breaking storm season in the Atlantic. Hurricane Florence formed on August 31st, and mandatory evacuations were ordered in North/South Carolina and Virginia on September 11th. Mother Nature really doesn’t give a fuck about your little American flags.
The NHTSA report makes an unconscionable argument: that limiting the emissions from shitty trucks alone isn’t enough to stop this, so why bother at all? Less than 2 months after these morons dropped this turd of a report, Hurricane Florence made landfall, killing 53 people and causing $18 billion in damages. So that’s why you should bother, NHTSA.
To say this current government has any will to tackle this issue is to play the world’s largest practical joke on itself. President Large Wet Toddler will order his army of cult followers to immolate themselves with fine American gasoline before he fires a single neuron to contemplate an answer. This is a serious warning: do not attempt to compromise with these sociopaths on a solution. Do not go to the private sector or their elected vassals for help. They do not even see the climate disaster as a problem at all: more like the Earth is one giant lib they’re all about to own.
In the present and recent past, America has luxuriously entertained decades of bipartisan inaction, non-binding resolutions, a continual subsidy of fossil fuels, and cheap oil dominating our globalized economy. This batch of ingredients is a recipe for economic and planetary suicide. Any jubilation at this dire situation is similar to the euphoria from a suicidal person who has finally committed to act.
Hot Air
We need a new definition for theft.
Currently, the only definition that sticks is stealing someone’s wallet at gunpoint. A sane society would immediately place organized polluters under arrest and convict them for crimes against humanity, appropriate their assets, and build the new renewable energy grid using the profits of their destruction.
A sane world would lock out the United States from all trade agreements and force the government to comply with enforceable standards. A sane world would look at Jair Bolsonaro’s psychotic desire to consume the Amazon rainforest with the same disgust they reserve for Venezuela’s attempts to resist capitalist imperialism.
The generations that built suburbia and the futureless system we’re all forced to live under will be dead long before the real crash hits, spared its drought, its raging wildfires, its hurricanes, its desolation. They slammed their SUV into death drive and floored the gas pedal, heading straight towards a brick wall. Meanwhile, the rest of punditry and the elected clueless elite are all arguing about where they want to sit, how comfy the seats are, and the choice of road music.
The professional environmentalists are all tapping screens earning eco-dollars to buy little green leaf stickers for their avatars. In other words, almost nothing at all. The well-meaning large scale climate change marches are advertising for an issue everyone already knows about, and the sides are already decided. There are lots of Tweets, selfies, fundraisers, abstracted outrage, fragmented and commodified to maximize social media reach. As if to ask, “what does the climate crisis mean for my brand?”
If only we could harness smugness and meaningless gestures, the fatuous hot gases of the aging hippies are an infinitely renewable energy source. We don’t need any more political marketing in this way, no more publicity stunts. When I see a bumper sticker that says “War is not the answer”, I remember that to sustain the current “growth at any cost” system, war is most certainly the answer.
Meanwhile Puerto Rico drowns, Houston drowns, New Orleans drowns, the Maldives drown, 3 million Syrians displaced in a conflict started by drought. The concern is about the elephants. The concern is about the whales. A single turtle gets a documentary. There is toxic algae blooming called a “red tide”. To go with the storms, there will also be dry, deathly silence.
Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House likened the psychotic suicidal denialism of the GOP to “school shooters on a planetary scale.” You couldn’t find a more apt description of the nihilism and helpless rage of a political ideology that borders on anti-natalism. They will demand a birth, then slowly murder the child; the end result of decades of weaponized cynicism, colonial racism, and endless, endless, endless greed.
You know what worked in terms of moving the needle? Standing Rock and #NoDAPL. The convergence of historical trauma of the Sioux Tribe from colonial exploiters, capital, and the climate crisis created a perfect moment. Lead by those affected by the exploitation with a wide, diverse allyship, the Sioux Tribe put the climate crisis in a modern and historical context. Ironically, the current government shutdown means environmental reviews of the resurrected pipeline is on hold.
The climate crisis is a slow-motion catastrophe that feels abstract to most Americans, save those in the path of an actual hurricane. Even then, they have trouble connecting the dots, or perhaps they’ve segregated their minds just like their schools.
Middle-class America seems comfortably isolated from the disaster, floating like a liferaft that will only exist as long as that sweet crude keeps flowing. Trust me, it will not. The ones consuming the media, the audience for op-eds and cable news, are comfortable enough to see this as existential theoretical problem and not a serious, immediate crisis with real world implications.
“We just need to invent our way out of it!” they yelp. Optimistic science fiction provides plenty of technological solutions, but few political ones. We may be presented with a utopia, but none of the sacrifice and work it took to create it.
Almost all imagery of climate change destruction is dramatic images of glaciers breaking apart, as if arctic ice and polar bears are the only victims. A more realistic depiction would be CCTV video of a patient dying of cancer over a number of years, being told by a procession of corporate doctors that they do, in fact, not have cancer, or if they did, their time in the radioactive Walmart did not cause it.
The response to the oncoming climate refugee crisis is already visible: militarized border police, right-wing nationalism, corporate consolidation, luxury climate bunkers, hallmarks of a new eco-fascism just waiting for the go-ahead. We’re know what they’re going to do.
The family separation policy for refugees at the US/Mexico border (aka mass child abductions and imprisonment), is a small glimpse of the terror that awaits the non-industrialized world dare they ask for help from the people causing the destruction. If we don’t change. If we don’t make them change.
Bleached Whitewash
Currently playing at the Great Lake Science Center in Cleveland is a documentary called Great Barrier Reef. I visited the museum recently with family for the holidays, choosing the reef documentary as a conscious experiment. I wanted to see how they would frame the current coral bleaching, reported as late as April 2018. How would a public attraction claiming to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge handle the largest environmental crisis in our collective civilization’s history?
The answer is not at all.
I had an inkling that’s what would happen. Even standing in line to buy tickets, I felt anxious that I would just be blasted in the face with a withering, dying ecosystem; the slow murder of one of the largest natural formations on earth. I felt a type of climate grief in advance, hoping against hope that they would make a passionate argument to save this natural splendor. Nope, director Stephen Amezdroz decided to focus on a bourgeois yuppie eco-resort built on the ruins of a strip mined guano pitstop called Lady Elliot island. We get the Instagram friendly, postcard version of the natural world, something to be enjoyed as an attraction, not treasured as an integral part of all our lives.
The narrative focus is on a woman, Jemma Craig, who saves a single turtle, even taking it to a turtle rehab center to be given an MRI due to plastic ingestion. Not a moment is given to contemplate why a turtle would ever have the opportunity to eat plastic. Meanwhile, its ecosystem is being ravaged by local factory farm runoff nearby. There’s even a shot of the runoff delta in the movie itself.
Her website for the resort tells you everything you need to know about how serious these people are about saving anything:
The closest thing we get to a critique of disposable consumerism is this: stop using single use plastics, this is your fault, along with a bland, thinly veiled ad for Water3, another “innovative” market solution to what is essentially an app for refillable aluminum water bottles. You can use the app to geolocate a “refill station”, otherwise everywhere known as a “water fountain”. Oh, and it’s not free to fill up at these stations, either. It’s the same cost as a disposable bottle of water.
Why the fuck does a glorified WATER FOUNTAIN need an FAQ page?
Even showing the destruction of the reef in full color on a 100 foot screen in 70mm, the filmmakers couldn’t bring themselves to tackle the issue at hand. They even had the balls to use digital color correction to show what the reef would look like had it not been decimated by capitalist industrial activity. And not once, NOT ONCE during the entire hour do they mention the words “climate change” or even “global warming”. Astounding. The documentary uses soft, safe language like “environmental concern” and “warmer temperatures” without a single solitary reason as to why it is happening.
This is a big part of why meaningful action is not taking place. Corporate media doesn’t sound the horn, because its survival depends on the very same system that created the problem. Island Jems needs elite eco-tourist liberals who can jetset to pretend to care about nature. Those who can enact big changes are afraid of facing down industry and telling them no, or they’re in the pocket of Big Oil. The environmental movement’s various factions insist on safe political marketing and toothless protests, jockeying for scarce donation funding.
To show this documentary in a place that claims to dedicate itself to knowledge is an act of scientific malpractice and an insult to the public’s right to know. I assume they wanted to avoid the “controversy” (vomit noises), the media-perpetuated fake debate bought and paid for by fossil fuel industry, and parroted by dumbshit suburbanites who just want to drive to the mall.
Modern media has an allergy to attributing causes to problems because it might offend a red-faced hog American wearing a Disney World fanny pack. Those idiots deserve to be offended and pissed off, because their behavior, their suicidal denialism is going to kill thousands and displace millions they couldn’t give two shits about.
The giant toddlers of America need to be told no, get this fucking nihilist asshole out of the White House, and the 100 companies responsible for 71% of all global emissions need to be curbstomped by a hyper-aware and militant eco-socialist movement to remake the world economy. Simple, huh?
But the tourist resort of Island Jems means well. Everyone means well, it doesn’t mean it’s more than applying a Band-Aid to a gushing artery. Oh, and there’s this:
Green Raw Deal
Not everyone is playing it so safe. Not everyone took the black pill and resigned themselves to their grief. Not everyone built Instagram Island you can only get to by plane.
There is a growing awareness in left communities that eco-socialism is not just another brand of liberal environmentalism, but a comprehensive answer to the endless hunger of capital to consume and destroy. It cuts to the meat of the issue: capitalism’s inevitable destruction of the natural world. There is no market-based solution when the function of the market is part of the problem.
As encouraging as it is to see the concept of a Green New Deal being floated, such a program a: probably doesn’t go far enough to solve the core problem and b: faces all the same obstacles an actual socialist movement would face. Massive social investment in green energy, retrofitting the disaster of suburbia, building new mass transit are net goods, those need to happen. Capital still runs the show, though. Until the economy is run by the people who work it, what we’ll get is aggressive leashing of a beast that really just needs to be put down.
I want to be excited about the Sunrise Movement, but I feel cautious optimism is the best tack to take. It’s very youth-oriented, slick, and branded, something that feels more like a media blitz or a lobbying effort than a genuine movement to change society. They have one tool: lobby Congress to enact legislation; which has a mixed track record at best in dealing with large, international issues. It’s extremely focused on Democratic lawmakers signing onto it, which I guess is their pragmatism in action.
Their press releases appropriately shame the new Democratic majority in the House for basically having no plan whatsoever, but what did they expect exactly? The only way they’re going to succeed is if they focus on electoral politics second, their moral authority first, and ditch this whole “capitalism but kind” angle they’re going for. Time will tell, and the clock is ticking.
I’ve seen these types of movements rise up and burn out quickly, or get co-opted into the Democratic Party machine. Social democratic reforms have a very hard limit, and that limit is 1.5* Celsius. Like, does Sunrise Movement know the people they’re trying to convince? The National Democratic Party is a collection of fossilized perverts, grifters, clapback machines, and quaffed app millionaires. As always, any real movement on this is going to come from the bottom up and most certainly from the left.
The issue here is that this heavily top-down lobbying organization doesn’t fundamentally challenge the cause of the problem. The DSA Rust Belt Convention from last year is a much better example of something that feels more grounded, regional, and bottom-up. Climate change was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, along with the required systemic changes. That was a collection of leftists who scrambled together a 200 person convention in Wilkinsburg, PA, and, out of sheer force of will, invented a Great Lakes regional water protection network in a weekend.
The future here is not certain, and although many have swallowed the black pill; many, many more are staring this dark possibility right in the face, refusing to take it.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.