Guest: Daniel Hennessy from Extinction Rebellion Oakland
Hot goss about Extinction Rebellion America. Fighting fires. NGOs. Filling jails and working with police. Jem Bendell‘s Deep Adaptation paper. Arctic sea ice. Social collapse. Alien archaeologists.
“If it’s the truth, you have to say it.”
Note: Daniel speaks on behalf of Daniel. His opinions do not, and are not intended to, represent XR America. This isn’t a friggin press release, just two dudes chatting about their own feels.
Music by Martin H. Emes plus “Ｂ Ｕ Ｒ Ｎ Ｏ Ｕ Ｔ” by Anonymous420 (CC BY 4.0) and “Air” by Lolique (CC BY 3.0).
Transcript
Jeremy: Season 2 Episode 8: When the Beer Gets Warm, with guest Daniel Hennessey.
Jeremy: How’s it going?
Daniel: I’m all right, man. Just going for it.
Jeremy: Just going for it. Sounds good.
Daniel: Just charging… charging forward.
Jeremy: That’s the way to do it, I guess.
Someone from XR Oakland reached out on Instagram and told me that we should talk. Do you know that person, or do you know how that connection happened?
Daniel: Yeah, that was me.
Jeremy: That was you.
Daniel: Yeah.
Jeremy: I didn’t want to ask if it was you, but I did wonder if it was you.
Daniel: Yeah. No, it was me. XR America as well. I mean, I don’t know. There might be some other people that log into it, but so far I’m the only person that’s posted.
Jeremy: So you’re the instagrammer for XR America, is that what you’re saying?
Daniel: At this time.
Jeremy: At this time. Oh, that’s cool. Well, welcome
Daniel: That’s, like, kind of a controversial thing. I don’t know how familiar you are with Extinction Rebellion in America. It was co-opted, basically, by a bunch of other environmental NGOs that believe that all these accomplishments that they have gives them say so for anything that has to do with environmental movement. They’re like “Mine!” You know what I mean? They’re not interested in getting arrested. Right? And that’s what Extinction Rebellion is all about. It’s about filling up the jails. Are you familiar with Extinction Rebellion?
Jeremy: I went to a couple meetings for a Extinction Rebellion that was just getting started in my area.
Daniel: Did they talk about getting arrested?
Jeremy: A little bit. And one of them definitely did get arrested. Like I saw his social medias about it. We have at least one arrest in there. Yeah. I imagine that the XR culture varies from group to group since it is so–
Daniel: It’s decentralized, so it’s very different.
It’s a big mess right now. Extinction Rebellion US just added a demand, right? It’s supposed to be a universal movement and, all of a sudden, they’re adding an demand that’s for reparations and indigenous land rights. And that’s fine, right? That’s fine. But, it’s nothing but white people that are just, like, virtue signaling, you know what I mean? I’m Native American. Like, and it was my area’s group what was the group that actually, I mean, from what I was told from them, that they created the indigenous land rights… But I’m the only indigenous person that’s showing up to meetings. Right?
It’s just all backwards and, it’s like, this is the one thing that could save us in the country with the most responsibility for the climate crisis. Right? And our cumulative emissions are like double China’s. And Extinction Rebellion in America is just, like, bass-ackwards.
Jeremy: All right. We’re getting some hot goss about XR right now. Well, first of all, let’s circle back to this in a second ’cause I want to get a little bit more about who you are, Daniel. So in your email to me, you said that you were a wild land firefighter for Lassen National Forest. And that was during the campfire–
Daniel: Not during, nah. This was about 10 years ago. I actually just had a 10 year Facebook memory from when I was last on a, on a fire last summer. But a lot of my friends were on the campfire.
The campfire, this city, 27,000 people, 95% of the structures burned to the ground. Just turned the whole city into moonscape. Just wiped it off the planet. I mean, there’s still missing persons today. There’s still unidentified remains two years later.
So yeah, I was on a hand crew. I used to fly in a helicopter. They’d drop us off in a helicopter. My first year, I was just on a tool. But my second year I was able to run the chain saw and saw pack, basically. We were digging. We would be just cutting fire line, right? Just down to mineral soil so that the fire could burn up to the soil and stop burning. Fighting fire without water, basically.
My last couple of years were closer to Paradise in Butte Meadows. I was on an engine, which meant we had water. More like a city firefighter kinda, ’cause we would be rolling on traffic collisions and stuff.
Jeremy: What got you into wild land firefighting initially?
Daniel: Well see, in high school, I wanted to be a firefighter. I thought I wanted to be a firefighter. So I went to Butte College and did the fire science program. I got hired my first year as a wildland firefighter.
And it was like… We all knew that we were in the right, you know… These fires are just going to get worse. And the thing that happened in Paradise, it’s not an anomaly. It’s just something that’s going to happen again. It’s going to happen this summer. Maybe Southern California.
But we never really, like, I don’t even think they even now realize that… It’s not just the fires, right? I mean, it’s hard to think, but just that one campfire was over a billion dollars of insurance damages and it sent a rippling effect across America with insurance companies. Like this place in Oakland, they’re worried about losing their insurance. Like, well, we don’t know if we can afford our insurance anymore pretty soon, so we might have to close down community center.
Jeremy: Yeah, that that’s an interesting point. I think a lot of people who haven’t spent too much time looking into climate change and what that might mean tend to think like the danger is eventually we’ll reach a point where it’s just too hot out. It’s just too hot out and we can’t do it anymore because it’s so hot.
But you’re talking about, you know, there’s all these little ripple effects. Like a big thing, like say increasing risk of fire damage, has all these tiny effects on things you wouldn’t even think about, including economic effects. Like where we’re seeing right now with COVID-19, how it’s going to impact the economy. And it is impacting the economy. There’s just like so many unforeseen side effects.
Daniel: Yes. And here’s the thing, like… Are you familiar with carbon masking, global dimming? Basically, we’ve been getting shaded by our pollution, right? It’s a peer reviewed paper, 2018. It’s not complicated. Well, first of all, IPCC, the United Nations said two degrees [Celsius] would be, that’s the limit, right? We can’t go over that two degree limit. We’re already over one degree. I mean, CO2 is still going up. It’s like almost 416 PPM right now. It’s a new record. But removing the carbon aerosols, removing the pollution without removing the carbon dioxide, the shade will go away, the sun will shine through. So it says an additional 0.5 to 1.1 C of warming if we remove the pollution without removing the CO2.
Jeremy: Yeah. You brought up the IPCC report, that warning, that like two degree, “we can’t go over this” warning is fairly conservative. There are a number of feedback loops that we know about now that I guess the studies weren’t really rigorous enough at the time to account for. And there’s also a political pressure to try to not make the report so apocalyptic. So… But the situation is actually much worse than we knew at the time.
Daniel: Oh man, it’s so much worse. The IPCC, it’s thousands and thousands of consultants and politicians and people that don’t even believe in global warming, you know what I mean? These are all people that are, you know, card carrying members of the IPCC. And the scientists are unpaid, right? They’re volunteer scientists and a lot of them have student loans, right? A lot of them have been spending their whole lives, the last 20 years, becoming what they are today, right? They’re official scientists. And it’s probably not very easy for them to come out and say, “Hey, everything is wrong, y’all” Like, “hey, I’m going to be the alarmist that can’t pay his student loans now because nobody’s going to hire me.” ‘Cause that’s what’s happening, right? The people that are telling the truth are getting shunned away. Like, “No, no, that’s not true. It can’t be true that we’re destroying the planet. “
I don’t know. This whole situation is, like… It’s heavy, right? It’s heavy.
Jeremy: It’s heavy and it’s so hard to process, you know. I’m getting, I’m feeling a lot of emotion of what you’re saying, and I’m, like, a hundred percent there with you. And then, so showing up for my day job is just like… What are we fucking doing here, you guys?
Daniel: Yeah, dude. Yeah. What are we… Like, for real. It’s like, I mean, ’cause that’s what I mean. Right now, Arctic sea ice started melting, like February, like there’s reasonable scientists that are saying, well, we’re going to have a ice-free Arctic, there’s a good chance that we might have it this summer. Like September. Like, that’s kinda… That’s kinda crazy. Like that’s… And the IPCC said the first one would happen by like 2100. Right? And at the earliest time they said, 2035 would be like, it was, like, very low likeli… Like, no, the people that are up there looking at the ice are like, “no,” it worked out to have no ice this summer. Like, what the F? That’s the, that’s the refrigerator of the planet, right? If you take the ice out of the refrigerator, the food goes bad and the beer gets warm. And that’s how social collapse happens. That’s how I like to think about it.
Jeremy: When the beer gets warm, it’s all over.
Daniel: It’s all over, dude. Social collapse. That’s climate chaos right there. That’s when the shit hits the fan.
Jeremy: So you said the “C” word before me. You’re starting to talk about social collapse. So I was a little curious… I’ve been kind of out of the loop with XR, but I don’t know what the temperature is as far as how collapse-aware XR is. ‘Cause I feel like there’s still a lot of neoliberal, “we have 20 years to solve the problem” kind of…
Daniel: Yes. Yes. So I got into… The only reason… I read Deep Adaptation a long time before I even found out about XR. I was like, whoa, people need to find out about Deep Adaptation!
Jeremy: That was that Jem Bendell–
Daniel: Jem Bendell. Dr. Bendell. Yeah. He’s awesome. He’s like the, one of the first guys that broke ranks out of academia like, “Can we talk about the probability that we’ve got this all wrong?” Right? That it’s now too late, right? And this guy’s written like, he was like one of the founding members of the peer reviewed table, University of Cumbria, he was one of the peers, right? That do peer review journals. And he’s written like 50 other peer-reviewed papers. It blows my mind, ’cause Deep Adaptation, they rejected it from his own peer reviewed journal. And the reasoning was like, the public can’t handle this inform– you can’t talk about collapse basically. Right?
Jeremy: You can’t say this. This is unsayable.
Daniel: You can’t say this! You can’t say this! Like, no, no. If it’s the truth, you have to say it. Right? I mean, if people aren’t scared of it, there’s nothing going to happen. Period.
[Musical interlude: Burnout by Anonymous420 with clips from Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation read aloud]
Daniel: What do you use to… Do you just record these calls?
Jeremy: Yeah. So I use something called Audio Hijack.
Daniel: You should use Audacity.
Jeremy: Yeah. I’ve used Audacity before. I use Audio Hijack to just record the calls and then I use Adobe Audition to cut together the podcast episodes
Daniel: Audition is sick. Right?
Jeremy: Yes, it is. It saved me a lot of time.
Daniel: Yeah, they’ve got those good filters. It has the male podcast filter that, like, just makes it just nice and easy.
Jeremy: I used Audacity and I was used to doing all these things to try to get the audio to sound okay. And then when I started switching over to Audition, I was just like, wait, is there just a fucking thing? Oh, there’s just a thing. Oh, that’s it.
Daniel: It’s just a thing.
Jeremy: I’ll just do the thing.
Daniel: Just gotta whoop. I did the same thing. ‘Cause I wanted to make … Do you know who Roger Hallam is? Roger Hallam is the one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion. He wrote the book Common Sense for the 21st Century. I like read the first couple of chapters, just recorded on my phone and then plugged it into Audition to make it sound good, you know? And I sent it to him and he was like, Oh, that’s great. Sounds great. And he sent it to me like every XR, all the regional people, it like pissed off his publisher. It is a, it was, it was kind of funny. I thought it was cool though. He’s like, “No more protests or petitions.” And he says, “These NGO are currently the biggest roadblock to meaningful change.” Which is the truth, right? These champagne environmentalists, man.
By the way, Miami is like… Isn’t Miami belt to be underwater? And there’s still people that don’t even believe in it, right? They just think everything is just fine. That’s bizarre.
See, the only thing that keeps me running is my faith in humanity that people… God. If people understood that their families were going to be starving pretty soon, and your kids aren’t going to grow up, period, like, if you understood that, then some shit would happen, right?
Jeremy: You’d think so. Yeah. We’ve talked about this a little on previous episodes where I feel like there’s kind of two kinds of denial. There’s the, like, climate change deniers who either say it’s not happening or it’s not our fault. Humanity’s not responsible for it. But then there’s, like, the more subtle form of denial which is just, I intellectually accept that this is true, but I can’t emotionally, like it doesn’t seem real. It’s not–
Daniel: Interpretive denial. Have you read Deep Adaptation?
Jeremy: Yeah.
Daniel: He talks about and there’s, yeah, just like you said, the regular denial, and then there’s implicit denial where it’s like, you’re just like, “Okay, well I need to start recycling more,” and then there’s interpretive denial. Interpretive denial is the most sinister kind, right? That’s like these NGOs, that are just like, ” Oh, we just need to have more protests, or we need to do another March, or let’s do a petition,” and then they just get to doing busy work, or “let’s do a beach cleanup.” I think that’s the worst. I mean, it’s the biggest roadblock right now.
Are you familiar with 350.org? Well, let me go on record, and this is not me, I’m not speaking for XR America, but me as Daniel Hennessy will go on record right now saying that 350.org is a mockery of its own… It was created because 350 is the limit, 350 parts per million carbon dioxide. And now we’re up over at 390, 400, 410, we’re at 416 now. And they’re still like, all right, well, we should we just keep doing the same thing? Yeah. Yeah. Let’s just keep doing it. Yeah. So at what point are you guys going to have to be like, okay, let’s try something new. Right?
Jeremy: Yeah. It’s like 20th Century Fox. Only more sinister and meaningful.
Daniel: Yeah. And these are the people that swear up and down, “Oh, we know the science,” right? “Those Trump people, they’re dumb” or “they’re stupid.” Oh, okay. But you know the science? What about social science, right? What about, like the obligations you have to the next generation? Like, what about your children? Right? What kind of people are you if you’re just going to sit by and let your kids just be fed into the meat shredder, right?
There’s going to be a lot of war. Once these crops start failing, and there’s not enough food to go around, there’s going to be a lot of war.
Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And then climate refugees, it’s not like they’re just going to be like, well, guess there’s no place for me. I guess I’ll die now.
Daniel: Guess I’m just gonna die. Guess I’ll die.
Jeremy: I guess I’ll die.
Daniel: I’ll just die now. No, they got families too, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. And they would be well within their rights to fight back against–
Daniel: Yeah. And look, it’s already happening, right? You look at Bangladesh, right? Bangladesh, it’s a country with like millions of people that live in poverty at, like, zero sea level, right? And India’s built a wall across the entirety of its border.
And it’s already happening. There’s already nasty pictures of, like, kids that got caught up in the barbwire. And there’s people standing on the other side and they’re holding pictures, right? They’re trying to hold pictures to her, “have you seen this person?” It looks like a Holocaust, right? It looks like pictures from the Holo– it’ll literally, like, you hold and you can’t tell the difference, like if I put a filter on one, it would be like, oh, Holocaust? India/Bangladesh?
It breaks my heart that people can’t… When they, you know… Some people just can’t see the forest but for trees, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. No, it does. You know, there’s a lot of people that talk about, like, “Oh my God, we could be headed toward an apocalypse.” But the apocalypse is already happening. For some people, the apocalypse has already happened. Like it’s basically over for them. It just hasn’t caught up to where you are now in your, like, socially privileged group. And it’s been happening for a while. Like it, it didn’t just start.
Daniel: For a long time, man. For a long time, man. Hey, like half of the living Nobel prize winners in 1992 signed this statement that said, you know, we’re, heading for a catastrophe. Right? And we do not even understand what we’re doing. Like, we’re just destroying our only home. I mean, I’m paraphrasing right. This was 28 years ago. Right? And the IPCC, that’s not a recent, that shit, that was, that was 32 years ago. Right? That was 1988 IPCC was formed. I mean, everyone on the planet, or at least all the leaders, knew that human-caused global warming was a problem, right? If they created a United Nations panel for it. I mean, 32 years. And I mean, what, since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in, what, the early nineties? Like 60% of the CO2 that’s been put in our atmosphere came after An Inconvenient Truth. It’s like, what is it going to take?
Jeremy: It is really amazing how little has really been done. And you talked about, like, groups like 350 demonizing the conservatives. But if we adopted Joe Biden’s climate plan, we’re still fucked. Like it’s still just quaint and impotent.
Daniel: Even if we adopted the Paris Agreement, if we stuck to the Paris Agreement we’re still fucked. The Paris Agreement was, they said “this is just a stepping stone,” right? “This is just to get our foot in the door.” And we just slammed it shut. But like everyone thinks like, okay, well, let’s go back to the Paris agreement and we’ll have net zero 2050, right? Let’s talk about the Green New Deal, right? All the green new deals across the planet, there’s not a single one that’s net zero before 2050. That’s the progressive platform.
I mean, I don’t know. It might be too late, right? It might be too late to… I mean, we might’ve set off these tipping points already. But this is just … It’s so… It’s so sinister, right? I mean, I don’t even know who to be mad at. I don’t know who to be mad at. Because the corporations are just going to be corporations, right? The oil and gas industries are just going to be oil and gas industries. The government? Who am I gonna be mad at, Gavin Newsome? Gonna be mad at Trump? No, this shit happened a long before Trump. I’m mad at these NGOs? Should I be mad at the environmentalists? They should have been learning about civil disobedience when they found out what they’re doing wasn’t working 10 years ago. I think I should be mad at all of them equally.
I honestly look at environmentalists on the same level as oil and gas industries, basically, in terms of who’s at fault. Environmentalists, I mean, they’ve seen it, right? They’ve seen our emissions haven’t changed for 30 years. And they’re celebrating. The councilor parties, after every council party, they have a big celebration and they take the photo ops and they’re all like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were going to do it! We’re gonna save the world!” And it’s nothing. They do a whole lot of, nothing. Right? There’s been zero, absolutely zero meaningful change,
Jeremy: Yeah. Oh, and they all get, they all go to get a tongue lashing from Gretta Thunberg. Their little, like, self-flagellation. “Yes, Gretta, great job. Tell us how despicable we are, okay, we’re a terrible. Let’s keep doing basically nothing.”
Daniel: Yo, Gretta Thunberg is so, so savage. I love it. Hey Gretta, Gretta is the only human on Earth that is effectively warning the planet of the tipping points. Right? Nobody else on Earth. This 17 year old, is just, just, you know, being the leader, right? Like if I was an alien and I just was just like, just, just came to Earth, I’d be like, “Oh, it looks like Gretta Thunberg’s the leader of planet earth.”
Jeremy: Yeah, except we’re not doing what she says. I mean…
Daniel: No, we’re not doing what she say and–
Jeremy: She definitely gets the right emotional tone, though. Like, “Fuck you guys.”
Daniel: Yeah. She’s like, “How dare you!” She’s like, “You look to us young people for hope? You stole my future!” This is not a joke. Like she, she was not being sensational. Someone has been telling her the truth. Right?
Jeremy: I can only imagine what growing up in generation Z would be like right now. Like as a millennial, I was told for my entire upbringing that it’s going to be on you to sort it out, buddy. Now I’m like 30 and I’m still basically broke. But generation Z, it’s like, it’s already fucked. It’s already too late. Sorry.
Daniel: Like, “What?!” I’d be so angry.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Daniel: I mean, I graduated high school in ’05, so by the time I was finishing up, we were like, “Oh my God, this is the worst time ever to be graduating from college.” “Oh my gosh!” 2008, 2009. Like the job market… We didn’t know how good we had it. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, we didn’t have it nearly as good as everyone else that came before us. But these kids growing up today, they don’t deserve this shit. They don’t deserve what’s coming.
Like even if we, let’s say, we prevent them from starving or dying of a violent death, let’s say they don’t die or for violent death for starve because of a multi-breadbasket failure. If we allow them to grow old, this world’s going to be unrecognizable anyway. Everything that they’re learning in school, that’s not gonna matter no matter what. Like either way, that’s all gonna change.
This is, it’s… It’s scary, right? It’s… I’m… I’m scared about this stuff, ’cause it’s like… And it makes me resentful. Like why am I having to organize, why do I have to do, like what happened the last 30 years? Weren’t these environmentalists, especially in the… And these are especially the ones in California, like they forgot, these groups that are like, “We’re activists,” right? “We’re activists, but we don’t want to get arrested.” You know, and we don’t want to respect the police either. Like, well, that’s the thing. Like the only way you’re going to be able to shut down a city is if you have cooperation with police, period. Period. Um.
Jeremy: Can you talk more about that? Cause I’ve seen some Twitter chatter chiding XR for working with the police.
Daniel: Yeah. Well, here’s the thing, right? Let me back up. Extinction Rebellion shut down all five bridges in London. They shut down the city of London, and the only reason they were able to do that was because Roger Hallam met with police beforehand and explained the climate crisis, said, “Hey, listen, this is what, this is what scientists are saying. This is a polar bear. This is what the public thinks that climate change is. This is starving children or something.” You know what I mean? Just basically put the fear of God and police department. And more importantly, he made sure the police knew that XR was nonviolent. They were disciplined and they would stay nonviolent. So when they started blocking the bridges, they didn’t have to come and crack down. Right? They didn’t think it was a violent thing. It was like, okay, they said that they were going to do this and they want to be arrested because that’s how you shine a spotlight on something, is by filling up the jails, right? That’s what Martin Luther King did in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s what Gandhi did. That’s how you disrupt business as usual. It’s not with protests and marches. It’s by shutting down a city, by filling up the jails.
Jeremy: So what would you say, not to like put you on the spot–
Daniel: Oh, about respecting police?
Jeremy: Oh, well, yeah. I mean, why is it important to coordinate with the police?
Daniel: Because if you don’t coordinate with the police, they’re going to come and flex on this kind of disruption. They’re just the middleman. They’re not there directly protecting fossil fuel companies. Their job description is public safety. Period. And if you’re not coordinating with police, they don’t know that you’re about public safety too. Right? The trick is to help them understand that we’re on the same team, right? There’s no police making enough money to build bunkers in Alaska. Right?
Jeremy: Well, what would you say to like people from the revolutionary left who I guess have a not as good of an opinion about police in general.
Daniel: Yeah. I mean, there’s people in XR that swear up and down that I’m a police agent because of my views. Right? It’s not just the radical left, right? It’s a huge mess right now. It’s all these people that don’t understand how serious the predicament really is.
I mean, the government has failed the social construct, right? The preamble says, “To protect the blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” Right? Says that right in the preamble. The preamble of the constitution is what the government’s for, right? That’s the purpose of government. The government, has failed, right? Police, police are part of the government, right? But then they’re only interested in public safety and they damn sure are interested in climate chaos, right?
I mean, I’ve already talked to some captains on LinkedIn, they feel just the same as us, right? And that’s the problem. I apologize to all those rebels out there that do not respect the police, but that’s not what Extinction Rebellion is about. Extinction Rebellion is about finding the best strategy to tackle this enormous problem, right? To have a planet that’s fit for the next seven generations. Whatever gives us the best chance of success.
I don’t want to have to go talk to police. Right? I don’t want to do that. But I’m in a position where I have a lot of friends that were police that that used to be firefighters became police. Right? So I feel like I have a responsibility to be that guy because I know that they’ll be able to identify with me.
Jeremy: Do you think it’ll work the same in the US as it worked in the UK though? Like, their police culture’s a little different than our police culture. We have a lot of weird, like, righteous warriors for Christ thing going on. You know what I mean? The militarization…
Daniel: Yeah. But I mean, here’s the thing. Extinction Rebellion, I mean, it’s a UK phenomenon but all their tactics come from America. Right? I mean, civil disobedience period was born in America. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, that’s what inspired Gandhi. And Gandhi inspired Martin Luther King.Have you seen that video? There’s a video on YouTube where he says “We were able to fill up the jail in Birmingham,” and he says, “and this was a dream I’ve had, was a fill up a jail.” Hee literally says this is a fulfillment of a dream, that we were able to fill up the jail, talking about filling up the jail with kids. Right? Birmingham children’s march, the Children’s Crusade. He’s like “This was a dream.” The video, it shows just a jail full of little kids. You know what I mean? Little kids in jail. You know what I mean?
It’s… It’s powerful. And it’s shameful because, back then, you know, when black people got arrested, there was a chance that you might not ever see them again. I mean, the bravery, right? But, now like, that’s not going to happen. The cops aren’t like KKK members in America, at least not in San Francisco, that’s for sure.
Jeremy: Not for the most part.
Daniel: Not for the most part, right? Mean, can we, like, I’m sure even the most radical left wing person can at least agree–
Jeremy: It may be true that some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses, but certainly not all or most of those who work forces are the same that burn crosses anymore. There has been some improvement there.
Daniel: Not all of the police are cross burning racist bigots, right? Like, they’re not, they’re not going on night rides. Not all of them. Not all of them.
I mean, it’s my understanding that mass participation nonviolent civil disobedience is the fastest, most efficient way to overthrow the government. And that’s what the goal is, right? That’s what the social science says. There’s plenty of research that shows that.
So they say, uh, we need housing for all, we want Medicare for all, we want this, this, that, and the other thing. Okay, how can we do that? Looks like the government’s not going to do it, so how do we fix that? How can we make the government do something? That’s called mass participation, civil disobedience, nonviolent.
Jeremy: My hope is that… There’s some interesting things going on with like electoral politics right now. I think the progressives within the Democratic party are getting increasingly disillusioned since, you know, Bernie Sanders basically had the whole party turn against him and everyone rallied around Biden in opposition to him and his Medicare for all and stuff like that. So I think there’s a lot of disillusionment there with–
Daniel: Bernie Sanders, I think he should have dropped out in 2016 when he knew he would cheated. Jill Stein from the Green Party offered to give up her candidacy. Bernie is like, no, no. He has literally said, I don’t want to end up like Nader. What about you don’t want to end up making a mockery of everything you’ve ever stood for? You’re just going to back down and just give up?
Jeremy: It will feel pretty shitty watching him endorse and then campaign for Biden only for Biden to stab him in the back when the dust settles, just like Clinton did.
Daniel: Yeah.
Jeremy: So, so there’s a lot of disillusionment there. And then at the same time, you have COVID-19 and people becoming disillusioned with the government’s ability to prepare for disasters like this, right? Yeah. This could be, once we can actually start organizing again, like, in the streets, this could work out in favor of anyone rooting for mass civil disobedience.
Daniel: Yeah, dude. So here’s the thing. San Francisco’s new district attorney, this guy, Chesa Boutine… His parents, they were part of the anti-Vietnam radical left wing. They got life in prison for being involved in a botched Brinks trucks robbery. That’s the new top cop in San Francisco. That’s the guy who decides who to press charges on, and he just closed down their San Francisco’s jail, right? He’s shipping all their inmates to Oakland jail and Santa Rita. And so all that San Francisco has right now is a drunk tank. They don’t have a jail to fill up. If we can get 20 people, we would shut down the city.
Jeremy: This is something I kind of wondered about from my brief experience in an XR group. It feels like there’s some kind of low key more revolutionary politics there that they’re not really highlighting. There’s like a targeted message, but there’s not a lot of, like, directly criticizing capitalism.
Daniel: Yeah, because it has to be universal right? We can’t be othered. We can’t be “here’s these environmentalist blocking the city.” “Oh, why are those environmentals blocking the city?” No, it has to be a “why are people blocking? Why…? Oh, Dang. They got some conservative, they’ve got all kinds of people blocking the street.”
It can’t be… I mean, I don’t even think it’s an environmental… It’s about doing the right thing, right? It’s about telling the truth and acting like the truth is real. What about your kids? Right? ‘Cause their future’s looking dark.
Jeremy: In your introductory email to me, you said that you had been grieving our predicament for one to two years now. Where are you at in that emotional side of your journey with processing all this.
Daniel: I don’t, I mean, I still don’t know how to proceed. I’m still grieving. I’m not… I go back and forth. I think I’m probably… I’m past, you know… There’s like five stages of grief, right? And I think I’m past denial but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to accept it. I won’t think I’ll ever be in acceptance that I’m not just not going to grow old. Right? I mean, cause this is… This is going to happen, right? These feedback loops, everyone thinks it’s something futuristic, right? Climate change is futuristic. “It’s going to be happening to our kids. I’m here for my kids. I’m here for my grandkids.” No. That’s incorrect. You’re not going to grow old. You’re not gonna retire.
Shit. Um.
Jeremy: I mean, mortality is maybe the hardest thing to accept. It’s a whole like life journey to… Yeah.
Daniel: It’s taboo to talk about death. I mean, it’s called hyperbolic discounting. It’s a cognitive bias, right? Cognitive dissonance. It actually causes pain to think about climate change. Thinking about climate change is like, it could be a year from now, it could be five years. Probably not 10 years. I feel pretty strongly we don’t have 10 years to change, because Arctic sea ice is the linchpin of civilization.
I think that grieving… I think that if more people were grieving about the climate crisis, fully trying to deal with that… I mean, that was like the tagline of Extinction Rebellion in the beginning. That’s what attracted me to it. I was in despair about this Deep Adaptation paper and I found out about Extinction Rebellion because their main tagline… Banksy, the artist, he had this tag that said, “Hope dies, action begins.” And that was like, yeah, that’s perfect.
Hope is denial. Having hope that we can continue without disruption of the way we live our, our society, our means of sustenance, means of our identities. If we think we’re just going to be the same people…
Jeremy: Yeah. It’s really hard to let go of that illusion that you’re going to grow up basically how your parents grew up and you’re going to have your retirement fund and…
Daniel: Yeah. We have this story where you just got to wake up and work hard and do the right thing [and] everything’s gonna be okay. Right? Like, no.
Jeremy: Yeah. I had a coworker recently who was stressing about her retirement fund because a lot of it was in stocks and the stock market crashed. She was like, “Oh no, what about my retirement money?” And it’s just so… She was asking me, well, what do you do? How do you have your retirement funds divvied up? And I’m just like, it doesn’t fucking matter. I’m not going to retire. Why are we even talking about that?
Daniel: And they probably look at you like you’re crazy, like… And you say, well listen, Arctic sea ice and a multi-breadbasket failure, they’ll look at you crazy. It’s not “What if that’s true?” It’s “It can’t be true.” It can’t be true.
Jeremy: Right. Exactly. Well, Tesla is going to give us all electric cars and then that’ll just solve the problem. Right? So…
Daniel: Yeah. Or yeah, no, there’ll be some smart person someday somewhere that just figures out the problem for us. Or the government. The government isn’t just gonna walk us off a cliff. That doesn’t make any sense!
Jeremy: Sure. That’s never happened before in the history of humanity. We’ve never had empires crumble.
Daniel: No, it’s hubris, right? It’s this hubris and it’s American exceptionalism, like this is just going to happen to the poor countries. So like, why are you worried about the poor countries?
Jeremy: Yeah, well that, that’s like our go-to. We’re so used to, like, the brown people off in fuck-knows-where having to deal with this shit and they’re like, we just keep giving all our entropy over to them and we’ll stay fine over here. Like, that’s just how we operate. It’s like this… Actually, I haven’t really thought about that particular assumption that’s baked into our cultural mythology right now. As much as I rail about our cultural mythology. The idea, the fundamental assumption that the brown people over there will have to deal with it and it’ll never catch up to us. That is like, that is pretty deep in there.
Daniel: That is deep, right? American exceptionalism. Americans from very young are just taught that we’re the leaders of the world and we’re exceptional and we’re the best and other people, they all look up to us because we’re the best…
Jeremy: Right? We have freedom and they want it. Like Trump’s shithole countries comment. That’s just…
Daniel: Shithole countries.
In America, we have worse inequality in America than in some third world — like we’re the very worst in inequality in all first world countries according to the Gini index. It’s the World Bank rating of inequality. America is dead last among all first world countries in inequality. Our democracy has been hijacked by political action committees and campaign finance… It’s all serving the rich.
Jeremy: Yeah. That’s one of the things that’s so frustrating about watching how this is all going down is watching all of these examples of how fucked the situation is and then nothing changes. Like the Panama papers. When the Panama papers dropped, it was like, oh shit, smoking gun, nail in the coffin. It’s over, motherfuckers. And then nothing happened.
Daniel: Nothing happened. What really bugs me the most is, I mean, what, say humans go extinct. There’s still going to be fossil evidence, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. Plastic, elevated radiation levels…
Daniel: Yeah. I mean, something someday is gonna… We were able to piece together the Roman civilization, right? Trying to figure out what happened. We’re going to be frowned upon. Right? America is going to be frowned upon by all future life on Earth. Germany in the forties, that’s like a footnote, but those Americans, holy crap. The hypocrisy.
Jeremy: Well, every time you look at what a previous civilization has gone through, or like Jared Diamond’s Collapse book and you go through these other civilizations that have collapsed and you think like, “Oh, that’s silly.” You know, “How did they not know to not eat all their things? How do they not know to just not cut down all their trees? That’s just absurd.” Like, “Dummies.” But here we are. We’re just doing the same thing on a global scale.
Daniel: We’re doing the same thing.
There is no greater crime, right? There’s no greater crime than what America is at the center of and is the most responsible for. There’s no greater crime in the history of the Milky Way since the Big Bang.
Jeremy: I hope so. I hope there’s not a whole solar system being wiped out the same way somewhere out there. Some, like, Admiral Ackbar out there wiping out solar systems…
Daniel: I need to stop talking about aliens because that’s just like, that’s just an easy cop-out. You know? It’s like, “Oh, well, he’s talking about aliens, so he’s probably crazy.”
Jeremy: I mean, so a couple of episodes back, and I was talking to Kim from the Collapse Support subreddit, and one of the things she was saying for how she’s able to process all this — she’s been kind of aware that we’re doomed, and I think she’s a little more on the we’re “definitely doomed” side than I am — but the way she thinks about it is like, she’s sort of given up on our survival. So now her justification for her ethical system is “How might it impact whatever comes after us?” Whether that’s like aliens, like at the end of Steven Spielberg’s AI, swooping in and doing like archeology on humans, or whether that’s just like another species that evolve, intelligent cockroaches or something that evolves after us… Like, what can we leave behind for them? Like if we pull back to a wide enough scale so we can still feel like we have some kind of karmic ripple for trying to do good in the world, because it’s kind of too late to worry about how it’s going to affect us.
Daniel: Yeah, we already know that it’s going to come to an end, but right now, like if it ended right now, America, we’re going to be frowned upon for the rest of eternity.
Jeremy: That’s very sobering. We’re the mustache-twittling villains of the story of the human species.
Daniel: Yes. Yes. Dude, isn’t that awful?
Jeremy: That’s true. It’s true. Oh, then I remember like reading about World War Two and the Holocaust in Germany and stuff and thinking like, how come they didn’t stop him? YHow come you didn’t stop Hitler?
Daniel: Yeah. And be like, “Oh, those bad Germans.”
Jeremy: And I remember being a shithead high-schooler, and being like, if that happened here, I would definitely do something.
Daniel: Right? Right? I think most people, if they knew they would do something about it. But they don’t. There’s no awareness. Right? And they think it’s something to do with the polar bears or something to do with the Amazon or, oh, something do with those cute, fuzzy creatures in Australia, you know? I’m not discounting the billion unique, rare animals that perished in Australia. I think that, what’s even scarier is that over 30 million acres have burned in Australia during their fire season. That’s more than all the acres burned in North America during 2016, 2017, 2018 combined. All three years combined through all North America was burned in Australia. So that’s a lot of carbon dioxide that was put into the atmosphere. It’s unfathomable.
So how do we know if you’ve already passed these tipping points? And even if we have passed the tipping points, should we just let this greatest crime of all time just go without holding anybody accountable for it, or at least rising up to try and do something about it? And I’m not talking about doing marches or petitions, right? I’m talking about really, like, just doing what historically causes disruption. Disobedience mass participation, nonviolent civil dis– filling up the jails.
Jeremy: Yeah. I’m hoping that movements like Extinction Rebellion get empowered. You know, anyone out there who has an idea for what they think they need to do, I’m going to say go ahead and just do it. Like, you know, we can sit around and talk about what’s the best thing to do all we want. We may have a million different ideas about what the best thing to do is, and we can have a diversity of tactics. But like, I definitely think filling up jails is not going to hurt. You know, if anyone’s out there, you feel called to fill up a jail, fill up a fucking jail man. It sounds like San Francisco right now is some low hanging fruit.
Daniel: Yes. Yes. Get in touch. XR Oakland. We’re going to fill up San Francisco’s jail. I think anything other than organizing to fill up a jail is busy work at this point. It’s just, it’s interpretive denial, right? If you’re having beach cleanups or, “Hey, I’m going to spend my time trying to do a petition.” Like, no.
Jeremy: Well, I have to cut this all out because we’re actually sponsored by Change.org so… Nah, I’m kidding.
Daniel, do you have anything you want to plug other than filling up jails before we wrap?
Daniel: XRO.Earth. XR Oakland and XR America. But yeah, this is not, I’m not XR America. But definitely support XR America. If you believe that filling up the jails would get on your local news channel, right? ‘Cause I think it would, I think if we shut down San Francisco it would get on your local news.
Jeremy: Even Sinclair Broadcasting would have to do some kind of–
Daniel: Yeah. They would have to do something. Like, “Whoa, look at these, they shut down the whole city. What the hell?”
Jeremy: Right on, man. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. It was a pleasure.
Daniel: I appreciate you. Appreciate you, Jeremy. Thanks for having me on.
Jeremy: Thank you for listening. Big thanks to our guest, Daniel. More stuff on the website, itsnoworneverpodcast.com. Big, big thanks to our new patron, Sonja. Sonja, you kick ass. Music by Martin H. Emes, Anonymous420, and Lolique.