The U.S. midterms are next week and there’s been a lot of talk about how climate is not on the ballot, but with data centers, gas prices, inflation and technofascism “on the ballot” so to speak, can we really say climate isn’t there? All of these issues are deeply entwined with the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry and with the government’s inability to keep that power in check.
As Big Tech steamrolls ahead with its plans for global AI domination and 24-7 surveillance (and, let’s not forget, much more oil drilling!), people are beginning to recognize this industry for what it is: fascist. What seems to have escaped the attention of all but a few, though, is that we have seen this film before. I’m talking, of course, about the fossil fuel industry and its successful effort to stop the world from acting on climate change.
In every way, climate change was the canary in the coal mine for the technofascist push, a stark warning of what happens when corporations are allowed to capture the government and the information ecosystem. As we live through the resultant fires and floods, people seem more willing to fight against the tech version of this strategy, its boldness as offensive as tech leaders’ gross displays of wealth. But while, like most people who aren’t tech billionaires, I find the successful pushback against data centers heartening, I’m terrified that the public will fall for a bandaid when what we need is an amputation. If we don’t understand that it’s not this or that industry that’s the problem, it’s all of them, if we don’t shift from protecting one community at a time from data centers to protecting the whole world from technofascism, we’ll never come to the sort of systemic change required to wrestle back democracy.
The tech bros are the latest flavor of wealthy industrialists in the U.S., a group that has been fighting back against democracy almost since it began. Which is not necessarily when the Declaration of Independence was written or the Constitution ratified, but rather when the vote began to expand first along class lines, then along racial lines, and finally along gender lines, when the government moved to regulate business for the first time, and when journalists stopped talking about the men growing the country’s industries as “captains” and instead began to focus on corrupt business practices. Amidst all this creeping democracy, a new industry emerged in the U.S., one that existed solely to help other industries: the propaganda industry, which later rebranded as public relations. PR developed various tools and techniques to help companies avoid regulation or accountability, ranging from the press release to the creation of fake expert bureaus to churn out credible-sounding reports on behalf of industry.
In the late 1800s, as the U.S. passed its first-ever law on business—the Interstate Commerce Act—the country’s first corporate PR guy, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, leapt to action on behalf of his clients, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and created the Bureau of Railway Economics. The Bureau hired real economists who put out report after report about how bad regulation was, not just for industry but for anyone who used the railroads. Though nominally aimed at reining in railway monopolies, the Interstate Commerce Act was largely inspired by complaints about Standard Oil and its founder John D. Rockefeller, which was growing its monopoly in the oil industry by forcing railroads to give it secret rebates, allowing Rockefeller to ship oil much more cheaply than smaller independent competitors. It wasn’t long before the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was “loaning” their PR guy to the Rockefellers. He went on to help the Rockefellers and Standard Oil deal with labor strikes and with a certain pesky fuhrer, and to inspire a whole industry that has only added more bells and whistles to the propaganda machine.
The discourse around disinformation these days gets very caught up in which industry did what first, was it Big Oil or Big Ag or Big Tobacco, and which playbook is Big Tech following? This obscures the root of the problem, which is that the information ecosystem has been warped in its entirety to serve industry, period, and it has enabled all of them to circumvent democracy for decades.
When the tech industry couldn’t control absolutely every part of the information ecosystem, it took things one step further and built its own parallel system that it could control. It claimed for itself all the benefits of a publisher, with none of the liabilities or responsibilities, then used it to erode the credibility and financial sustainability of journalism, an age-old enemy of industrialists and, annoyingly, the only group protected by name under the First Amendment.
The natural end of this trajectory, if left unchecked, is fascism, the end of democracy. Both Big Oil and Big Tech have made it clear that they have no problem with that. Peter Thiel may have laid it out a lot more directly in his famed 2009 essay, but many of his ideas for keeping the plebes in line are inspired by the petro state of Saudi Arabia. Oil executives might not use the nerd lingo of “network state,” but they’re certainly in favor of the idea of special economic zones and of companies governing the world rather than politicians. They have been operating as their own empires for decades.
There’s still time to do something about climate change. There’s always time. The great and terrible thing about it is that it is a slow-moving trainwreck. A certain amount of pain is locked in, but so is the potential for diverting to a new track. The same is true of saving democracy. But we must correctly identify the source and size of the threat and act accordingly.
| Today on The Spill |
| Another COP — the United Nations’ annual climate summit — is coming, and a strange thing has happened. The new, separate, conference on transitioning off of fossil fuels—held first this year in Santa Marta, Colombia with a second planned for Tuvalu next year—has reinvigorated the process. COP’s problems are still there, but folks seem to be approaching it in a different spirit, eager to embrace multilateralism while we still can and hopeful that progress can still be made. This week, The Spill features a preview of what’s to come in Türkiye next month. First, climate journalists and sometimes COP-heads Nina Lakhani, Royce Kurmelovs, and Amy Westervelt talk about what they’ll be following this year. Then Nina brings us a conversation with Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, and global convenor of the Fill The Fund campaign, about where loss and damage, and climate justice more broadly, will turn up on the COP agenda. |
| This Week’s Climate Must-reads |
|---|
| [News] “US Forces Accused of ‘Weaponising’ Somalia’s Floods by Trapping Women and Children in the Path of El Niño,” The Guardian—An absolutely horrific story by Mark Townsend for The Guardian looks at U.S. air strikes on Somali territory controlled by al-Shabaab and whether they are deliberately moving civilian populations towards a rising river. The U.S. military has discussed climate as a threat multiplier and an element in military strategy since at least 2013 |
| [Newsletter] “California: Climate Haven,” Snap Forward Newsletter—Alex Steffen is a futurist who focuses largely on climate. In his latest newsletter he looks at California’s 5th climate assessment, places it in the context of various other data points about the state, and wonders aloud if California might be more climate-safe than previously thought. |
| [News] “Indigenous Communities, Activists in Africa Gird for Legal Battles with Governments over Climate Harms,” Drilled – Diana Taremwa-Karakire walks us through the climate litigation boom in Africa. |
| [Report] “World Bank Report Puts US$11.4 billion Price on Pff-Grid Solar,” Bloomberg News – A handy report for the next time and oil major claims that we must keep expanding fossil fuel production in order to make sure everyone in the world has access to energy. |
| [News] “What the Pre-COP in the Pacific Tells Us About What to Expect at COP31,” Drilled – We sent Royce Kurmelovs to Fiji (calm down, he lives in Australia) for a preview of what to expect at COP31 in Türkiye next month. Spoiler alert: all the ministers want to talk about solar and batteries and electrification. no one wants to talk about cutting fuels and paying for damages. |
| [Analysis] “UK Accused of Relying on ‘Questionable Accounting’ to Meet Key Climate Finance Target,” The Independent – New analysis from Carbon Brief suggests around £2.1bn of the funds the UK counted towards its climate target did not come from new spending—without it the UK would have fallen nearly £1bn short of its target. |
