As we go on, these kinds of stories are gonna come thick and fast, cascading one after another to build a rapidly coalescing picture: That of a planet convulsing from sustained trauma brought on by an economic model obsessed with infinite growth for the few at the expense of many. ‘For the many, not the few’ was the slogan of the UK Labour Party in the few, fleeting years in which it actually stood for something and during which I was a member. The connotation there was that a mild redistributive politics might be a good idea, considering the catastrophic places that forty years of rampant neoliberalism had brought us to. Though there were a huge number of forward-thinking green policies introduced in that era (policies that were ridiculed by all sections of the mainstream capitalist media but which are now being urgently called for by many of the same people), the connotation was that the ‘many’ referred specifically to people. Human beings. The thing about climate change, though, is that the ‘many’ there also refers to the rest of the world’s fauna—and flora. You can conceptualise capitalist climate change as a world-spanning class war: The Elite Capitalist Class vs Everyone And Everything Else. Jeff Bezos against Amazon workers. Elon Musk against working class and Indigenous Bolivians. Bill Gates against the billions upon billions of animals that are dying as a result of human industry. That last one might be a slightly less direct link than the previous two, but that’s the whole point: It’s a zero-sum game. It’s the interests of billionaires and millionaires up against the survival of unmeasurable amounts of life. Anthropocene extinction is accelerating, and it will only get worse unless we drastically reorient our economic models.

For the past few days I’ve been banging on about the extreme heat we’re facing in the UK at the moment because when you’re being baked alive in 40 degrees in buildings that were designed and built to retain heat that’s pretty much the only thing you can focus on, but it really has been drastic over here:

London's burning: 110 fire engines sent to blazes in Upminster, Wennington, Pinner, Southgate, Croydon, Dagenham, Hendon, Croydon and Eltham as major incident declared
pic.twitter.com/Ydzb8eNP1s

— Graeme Demianyk (@GraemeDemianyk) July 19, 2022

I said that at the start that these kinds of stories are gonna be coming thick and fast, but the truth is of course that they have already been coming thick and fast—they’ve just been coming from places that our racist and imperialist media and political system does not care about. If the coverage of those events had been proportional to their severity, it would have been wall-to-wall. As it is, only the really huge stuff is getting traction, and it’s coming much later than it should have. Now that we’re getting affected, though, and now that it’s become un-ignorable, we’ll be seeing the trickle broaden into a stream and then into a torrent. Which, I mean, good. I guess? The more info out there the better. Still, it’s hard not to consider it in the broader scheme of things and impossible to ignore the context.

All that is to say, here’s another entry in the We Need To Act NOW files, a report on how the Great Salt Lake is currently just one-third of its usual size:

Cool, cool, cool. All good.