PI Briefing | No. 39 | The path to paradise begins in hell

Anyone with ears to hear has heard the warnings. And anyone with eyes to see has seen them.

“Carbon emissions are heating our planet, killing people, destroying communities and devastating economies,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres desperately warned the UN General Assembly this week. But millions around the world don’t have to be told these facts: it’s already their reality.

Guterres told the assembled world leaders in New York that “humanity has opened the gates of hell” by unleashing worsening heatwaves, floods and wildfires around the world, with global heating on track to reach over 2.5 degrees celsius over pre-industrial levels.

The devastation we are witnessing is just the heat that reaches the gates. We are in the vestibule, not yet in the bowels, but we are plunging down fast. Rather than linear change, we are seeing leaps in sea temperature, melting ice and methane release from wetlands. These are the signs of our existing climatic niche changing radically — and with frightening speed. The loss of sea ice in the Antarctic is so extreme this year that it is six standard deviations away from the average: a once every 2.7 million years event.

When we look back, 2023 could be the year when gradual climate change switched into a process of climate breakdown.

And next year is set to be even hotter.

Guterres says “humanity” has opened the gates. But who actually has? Not the overwhelming majority of people on earth who have neither owned, seen, touched or traded a single barrel of oil. It is the countries of the Global North that have drilled the ground to release hell’s sulphurous odour. According to research published in Lancet Planetary Health, the Global North was responsible for 92% of total excess emissions — those that exceeded the safe planetary threshold. In other words, the old colonial powers have colonized the atmosphere.

But pointing at the “Global North” offers little more by way of clarity. As PI Council member Jayati Ghosh co-wrote in a piece we published last week, “the richest decile in North America is made up of the most extravagant carbon emitters in the world, with an average of seventy-three tons of carbon emissions per capita each year, which is seventy-three times the per capita emissions of the poorest half of the population of South and Southeast Asia.” The ruling class in the imperial countries holds the lion’s share of the responsibility.

Rather than reversing course, the truly powerful among Guterres’ audience offer the peoples of the world the prospect of annihilation by other means: nuclear war. As Guterres, reduced to pleading with the powerful, said, “nuclear sabres are again being rattled. This is madness.” The potential for a civilization-ending thermonuclear exchange is now greater than it has been in decades.

We know that no matter the warnings, the logic or the science, the war machine and big oil will keep charging humanity towards utter destruction. In fact, the two issues echo darkly through each other. Just as Exxon and other big oil companies tried to cast doubt on the climate science, the United States has led a long-term campaign to discredit the theory of “nuclear winter”. Models developed by both US and Soviet scientists predicted that even a relatively small nuclear exchange — say, between India and Pakistan — would ignite firestorms producing enough smoke and soot to envelop the atmosphere within two weeks. The result: global cooling and near-total famine as crops collapse worldwide.

Just as doubt was cast on climate change to expand the drilling of the fossil fuels beneath our feet, so too doubt was cast on nuclear winter to justify the expansion of the US nuclear umbrella. In the late 1970s, the US moved its Pershing-II missiles to NATO states in Europe as part of a new doctrine of “counterforce power”. Replacing the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction”, this new nuclear strategy was premised on the insane idea that it is possible to win a nuclear war with an overwhelming first strike on the enemy’s nuclear capacities — a policy that remains largely intact to this day.

In the 1970s, that decision ignited a historic movement against nuclear weapons on the European continent. Today, the twin threats of climate collapse and nuclear holocaust demand an even greater mobilization of popular movements and society — a global revolutionary movement grounded both in ecology and peace, and the radical understanding of how the two interrelate. We are called to stand with and unite those with most to gain from overthrowing the hegemony of those who colonize our atmosphere and our future: the workers and peasants of the Global South and the workers of the Global North.

In Inferno, Dante tells us that the gates of hell bear the inscription “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But, as he remarks elsewhere, “the path to paradise begins in hell.”

As our rulers thrust us down to hell, let us find each other and build our path to paradise.

Image: Two textile artworks by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto depicting the Indus River and mangrove forests in AD 750 (left) and the river today, with extensive canal system and a decline in the forests (stitched in green).