Open Thread: What are you reading?
It's bad karma chameleon time.
PRESENTED BY ANGRY CHAMELEONS
I went out last night and interacted with humans in person at a Data for Progress happy hour at a rooftop bar, which was attended by several Hill Heat subscribers, even some of the paying ones! (Thank you!) That might be connected to this newsletter not arriving in your inbox first thing in the morning.
It was lovely to see old friends and make new acquaintances. People are worried about fascism. Good thing to be concerned about! I recommended to several folks that they read White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective. It’s really helped me have a better handle on the contours of historical and present-day fascistic politics.
The very good people at Oil Change International, Earthworks and the Center for International Environmental Law dropped another chapter of their mega-project Permian Climate Bomb, a multi-part multimedia series on the meteoric rise in oil and gas extraction from west Texas, unleashed by a new system of liquid natural gas and oil exports. This “story of runaway toxic infrastructure, environmental injustice, and climate overshoot” is very worth your time. The reportage is linked with a comprehensive campaign to defuse the bomb by passing the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, denying new oil and gas permits, banning fracking, ending new drilling on public lands, and supporting the grassroots community resistance.
And grassroots community resistance works! After years of community organizing, the Jordan Cove LNG export terminal and fracked gas pipeline project in southern Oregon is dead.
The carbon bombs of yesteryear are now going off: A record-shattering, fossil-fueled heatwave has brought heat up to 35 degrees above the already global-warming-influenced normal from the Pacific Northwest through the Dakotas—heat paleoclimatologist Cathy Whitlock says has not been seen in December for over 10,000 years. This freak heat, environmental journalist Jim Robbins writes, has sparked a series of “unusual” December prairie fires in Montana, fueled by the coal, oil, and gas fracked and mined out of the region.
Friday is Open Thread day! I’d really love to know what people are reading or have read recently and recommend. I’m continuing my Andreas Malm kick right now with Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-first Century, a gripping account of the roots of climate destruction and pandemic:
"It is unrestrained capital accumulation that so violently shakes the tree where bats and other animals live. Out falls a drizzle of viruses."
What are you reading?
I'm reading (along with the rest of the world) David Graeber & David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, which is a nerdy, fascinating deep-time history. And just starting Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse. Next up is Thane Gustafson's Klimat, which is about climate change in Russia.
I'm nearly done with A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit (need to find where it is); my fun reading is going to be Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock - I know he doesn't usually manage great endings but I do like that it starts with feral pigs.