 Right, thanks so much for that, and thanks for inviting me. What I want to do here is to share some preliminary findings from the early phase of a research project in the field of history. But I am so angry that I feel I have to say something on what's going on in the world right now. So during his first week in the White House, Donald Trump managed to sign orders to restart the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines and to build a border wall against Mexico and to start imposing his Muslim ban. On the climate front, he has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove all content related to climate change from its website, promised to terminate all research on the topic at NASA, and of course, appointed the person who personifies the business of extracting fossil fuels, who has led ExxonMobil, the corporation that has made greater profits than any other, from delivering oil and gas to the fireplaces, the most reliable candidate for protecting the interests of fossil capital into the end of times, Rex Tillerson, as his Secretary of State. This president seeks to turn the most proudly illiterate climate denialism and white nationalism into the official state ideologies of the United States. He wants to drill and burn with one hand and torture, keep out, and quite likely kill Muslims, in particular, with the other. He is, in short, enacting with all his feeling for spectacle a public marriage between the agenda of fossil capital and that of the racist far-right between climate denialism and Islamophobia, fusing them into one great, indivisible blitz of aggression. This convergence has been underway for some time, and I want to give just a few glimpses from its recent history, because I think it will keep us preoccupied for the next few years. In the early years of the 21st century, the spurt in Islamophobic ideology production spelled out a choice of threat. Global warming is a hoax. It's the Muslim invasion that is drowning us. In its bestseller from 2006, America alone, the end of the world, as we know it, Canadian writer Mark Stein, combines all the central tropes of contemporary Islamophobia. The Muslims are having too many babies. They are imposing sharia on Europe. They might appear assimilated on the surface, but always hatch plans for a violent takeover. Their religion is a manual in theft and rape. This is, quote, the dawn of the new dark ages, end quote. And then it goes on to write, unlike the eco-condriac's obsession with rising sea levels. This isn't something that might possibly conceivably hypothetically threaten the Maldives Islands circa the year 2500. The process is already well advanced as we speak. Long before the Maldives Islands are submerged by rising sea levels, every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under. But sure, go ahead and worry about climate change. And two pages later, Stein offers his central policy recommendation, quote, if you can't outbreed the enemy, the Muslims, column, end quote. In 2015, Stein contributed to the anthology, climate change, The Facts. Featuring all the luminaries of denialism published by the Australian ThinkTag Institute of Public Affairs, among whose generous donors in recent decades we find Shell and ExxonMobil. In the past decade, organized Islamophobia has dispatched some of its forces to the second front. In 2008, Steve Jensen, leader of the Norwegian Främskrittspartiet, or Party of Progress, coupled the suggestion that the borders of the homeland should be closed to anyone from Muslim countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan with denunciation of the climate hoax. In 2013, Nigel Farage of this country opened that quote, we may have made one of the biggest stupidest collective mistakes in history by getting so worried about global warming, end quote. In 2014, the Front National launched a new ecology movement to oppose international climate negotiations, branded a communist project by the front. And in my own country, Sweden, since it took off the nausea boots around the turn of the millennium, Sverige demokraterna, now the third largest party, its eyes firmly set on government power, has denied climate change only a little more frequently than it has lashed out against Jews, although hatred of Muslims, hatred against Muslims is its main vocation. And a few weeks ago, this party copied Trump and proposed that the Swedish Metrological Institute should have its budget slashed or translated into the sort of plain language that rules the day. Climate change is for Muslim-loving, politically correct pussies, they will get what they deserve, we shall drive our SUVs in freedom and so on. These are the political forces that right now, in the very moment when global warming is accelerating as never before, when the Arctic ecosystem is in a stage of collapse, when unprecedented wildfires are eating their way through Chile and villages in the Bangladesh Delta, or abandoned one after the other, these are the political forces that are winning election after election after election in our advanced capitalist countries. They now hold the most powerful state apparatus in world history. And they believe as Trump's advisor, and head of his transitional team at EPA, Myron Ebell said yesterday, quote, the environmental movement is the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world. End quote. And they say this while they take away the most basic freedoms of Muslim people. A visitor from the future might marvel at this irrationality. At the most critical moment, the fear was about Muslims and Mexicans and other non-white others, not about the planet catching fire. But is this mere happenstance? Is this an accident of our conjuncture or are there perhaps some deep subterranean roots shared by the two phenomena? This takes us to another question at the heart of much of the debate on climate change and at the center of the rest of this lecture. And I'll try to be a little less emotional and more academic from now. Whose fault is all of this? Who has lit this fire? Who established what we now know as business as usual? Who has benefited from it? Who has been the central agent in the past two centuries of ever more rapidly accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere? And one common and popular answer is all of us. In discussions on the Anthropocene, there is often a slide from the observation that the human species has overtaken natural forces in determining the state of the climate and other aspects of the earth system into a story about the human species as such, as a whole being responsible for this mess. Humans in general have dug up fossil fuels, consumed too much, had too many children, wished for two lofty living standards, thereby inadvertently bringing about the era of climate catastrophe. I could give many, many examples of this narrative, but I'll just pick one. Dipesh Chakrabarty, probably the most influential interpreter of the Anthropocene in the humanities and social sciences, has in a series of articles argued that the issue of climate change renders concerns about human justice void. In fact, he tends to the view that justice is the problem. I quote, the lurch into the Anthropocene has also been globally the story of some long-anticipated social justice, at least in the sphere of consumption. This justice among humans, however, comes at a price, end quote. Or in even clearer terms, referring to the process of the human species taking such destructive control over the climate, quote, the poor participate in that shared history of human evolution just as much as the rich do, end quote. The poor participate in that shared history of human evolution just as much as the rich do. There are other answers, of course. Research into the historical responsibility for climate change has produced some fairly unambiguous numbers. Of the 107 parts per million by which the CO2 concentration rose between 1815 and 2006, the OECD countries accounted for 86. In the year 2000, the advanced capitalist countries of the North held 17% of the world population but were responsible for 77% of the CO2 pumped out since 1850. The share of the US alone stood at 28% while Nigeria had 0.2%, Turkey 0.5%, Indonesia 0.6%, Brazil 0.9%. These being countries where the historical responsibility is sufficiently large to make it on a top 20 list. Most left even smaller marks. Figures such as these have prompted some scientists and activists to speak of a climate debt. And the standard definition of a climate debt says something like this. While developing their economies and burning fossil fuels, some countries have used more than their proportional share of the atmosphere understood as a carbon sink belonging to all of humanity or all human beings have an equal right to utilize the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon emissions, but some have overused it, taken more than their legitimate piece of the pie in the course of their economic development, leaving precious little space for others to develop in the same way and causing harmful climate change. And so these people, by snatching away the ecological space for development from others and inducing a rise in global temperatures have accrued a debt. The creditors are those countries or peoples that will suffer the worst consequences of climate change without having developed in the same way and that are barred from doing so in the future because absolute biospheric limits make it impossible for everyone to as much as the average American or English has done. Now, I want to interrogate these various answers by turning back to one particular moment in time, namely the very first encounter between the fossil economy and people in the rest of the world. We can think of the fossil economy as one of self-sustaining growth predicated on the consumption of fossil fuels and therefore generating a sustained growth in CO2 emissions. This is the sort of economy that has brought us into our rapidly warming world. It is the singular creation of the country wherein the fossil economy first emerged in the United Kingdom and as I have argued elsewhere, the key moment was the adoption of steam power as a propulsive force for driving machinery. For the first time, the combustion of a fossil fuel, coal, was directly coupled to the production of commodities. But steam engines did more than power machines in the midst of this country. In the period of the most concentrated shift towards steam in the manufacturing industry, the second quarter of the 19th century, the British Empire also launched steamboats on the high seas and rivers of the world, carrying them to people who had never before come into contact with the practice of large-scale combustion of fossil energy. And I shall focus on three frontiers and I will inevitably have to condense and simplify the episodes and emit many aspects that I will do this to bring out a certain pattern and then we can discuss the details later. In 1839, the drums of war rumbled over the Middle East. Tensions between the British Empire and the Egyptian Pasha Muhammad Ali, who at that point also controlled present-day Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, were coming to a head. One of Muhammad Ali's sins, perhaps his greatest affront to the British Empire, was his campaign for building a domestic manufacturing base centered on cotton. And this at precisely the moment when the British cotton industry descended into its first crisis of overproduction, burdened by a surplus of goods, it couldn't sell, it clamored for foreign markets more desperately than ever before. Ali slapped an embargo on all British cotton imports. He set up state-owned factories for spinning and weaving cotton. And by the late 1830s, Egypt had the largest mechanized cotton industry outside Europe and the US. Counting in spinels per capita, it reached a level of industrialization equal to Spain, near that in France. Feeling not only the markets under the military control of Ali, exports from the Egyptian factories also began to make inroads into Italy and Germany and even India, markets hit a two controlled by Britain. So here was an Arab country on the verge of a breakthrough to industrial development. Indeed, Muhammad Ali challenged Britain with the first process of industrialization outside the Western world. In 1838, Britain negotiated a fabulously favorable free trade agreement with the Ottoman Empire. Egypt was nominally a part of that empire, but in practice Muhammad Ali was fully independent and even at war with the Sublime Port. Britain wanted Ali's territories back under the Ottoman fold and London became more and more belligerent by the month. The Consul General in Alexandria warned the Pasha, no, it is in the power of England to pulverize you. End quote. Or as the British ambassador to Istanbul wrote home quote, we must strike at once rapidly and well and the whole tottering fabric of what is ridiculously called the Arab nationality will tumble to pieces. End quote. The key weapon of the war was the steamboat and it ran of course on coal. Now coal took up much space on ships and commanded a high price and so had serious disadvantages in the competition with the traditional energy source wind, which could be captured with sales and came for free, but steam had one edge, independence in time and space because the energy source came from under the ground and was completely detached from the weather conditions where the boats navigated. The steamboat could be steered at any moment to any desired point regardless of the winds and the waves. Before 1840, steamboats had never been tested on the battlefield of a major war but now London resolved to prove their metal. In September 1840, British steamboats bombarded first Beirut and Saida and then swiftly proceeded to the decisive battle at the Palestinian town of Akka. The Egyptians had garrisoned the old crusader capital of Akka with thousands of soldiers and made it the sturgest front on the Levitine coast. Using it as a regional depot, they had also filled it with ammunition. In early November, a squadron of four steamers reached Akka, followed some days later by sailing ships. The fleet was arrayed in front of the town with steamers in the center so as to make maximum use of their mobility. Massive shelling commenced, the Arabs returned the fire from within Akka but the steamboats constantly shifted their positions and easily evaded the shells. Then a deafening detonation ripped through the scene. Like a sudden volcano eruption, a column of smoke and debris rose from within Akka. One of the steamers had hit the Great Powder Magazine and correspondents between the British commanders suggested that they were in fact aware of the position of the magazine and had planned to target it. The explosion concluded this battle. A report to London said, two entire regiments were annihilated and every living creature within the area of 60,000 square yards ceased to exist, the loss of life being computed, variously computed from 1,200 to 2,000 persons. When the British soldiers entered Akka, they were greeted by utter devastation, I quote one testimony, corpses of men, women and children blackened by the explosion of the magazine and mutilated in the most horrid manner by the cannon shot, lay everywhere about, half buried among the ruins of the homes and fortifications, women were searching for the bodies of their husbands, children for their fathers, end quote. The Battle of Akka marked the onset of a new era when the British Empire would deploy its superior weapon across the globe. The steamboats were praised for their efficiency in battering down the Palestinian town. None of the four steamboats had a single man killed or wounded but another resource was nearly exhausted in the action coal. Afterwards, none of the steamers had more than one day's supply on board. Practically all their coal had been burned in the polarization of Akka. The battle determined the outcome of the war and one fell stroke. The Egyptian armies beat a disorderly retreat. Moving on to Alexandria, the British squadron of steamers threatened to deal with it like it had dealt with Akka and faced with this threat, Muhammad Ali surrendered. He prostrated himself before Istanbul and London. The free trade agreement was promptly extended to all of the Middle East and the Egyptian cotton industry immediately collapsed. Once that industry lay in ruins, the export of British cotton goods could grow in leaps and bounds while Egypt was reduced to the role the Empire had assigned to it, producing raw cotton only for export to the metropolis. So there was a straight path from the body strewn on the beaches of Akka to the cotton grown on the fields of the Nile Delta. That cotton was soon picked up by British steamboats due to the relatively short distance between Britain and the Middle East. The merchant navies could afford to run on coal and so Egypt was the first international trade route to shift from wind to steam. Within two decades after the war, the Alexandria cotton trade was exclusively steam powered. And due to this turn of events, Egypt underwent the most extreme deindustrialization experienced anywhere in the world in the 19th century. Around the year 1900, nearly 100% of its exports consisted of one single crop, an unusually extreme specialization. In other words, Muhammad Ali's bid to create a modern industry outside of the Western Sphere was smashed by the British Empire through the mastery of the fossil economy. First mobilized to crush Egypt militarily, then deployed to exploit its resources at full speed for a century to come. And so Egypt was reduced to a typical periphery locked into the function of raw material provided to the advanced core. A legacy that has, of course, determined the development of the country ever since. The war against Egypt was the first when Britain unleashed its steam power, but it was soon followed by the more famous contributions of the steamboat Nemesis to the victory over China in the First Opium War. And after those two astounding triumphs, the observer exclaimed, quote, steam almost realizes the idea of military omnipotence and military omnipresence. It is everywhere and there is nowithstanding it, end quote. The Mechanics Magazine in this country was even more excited and explicit, quote, let war come to a conflict of steam engines and all the barbarian rabble of the world, Turks and Tartars, Arabs, Indians, Africans and Chinese must obviously be out of the question at once, end quote. Another crucial frontier in this offensive was of course the crown colony of India. And following the occupation of Assam in 1825, the empire resolved to fill India's rivers with steamboats. The vessels of the new age would serve the Raj in several ways. They could ferry treasure that is chests containing tribute extracted from peasants with greater speed, safety and protection than saving ships. They allowed collectors, commanders and soldiers to tour the territories and establish a permanent presence. Last but not least, they would the agents of the empire hoped, finally open the subcontinent to commerce. As one sanguine report put it, the rivers would be, quote, turned into great steam highways for bringing cotton and other products of the interior to the coast and for transmitting English manufacturers in return, end quote. So Britain would be supplied with both an abundance of raw materials apart from cotton, also silk, indigo, hemp, timber, rice, opium, tea and all the rest of it and a teeming market on which the surplus of manufactured goods from the homeland could be done. But steam boats required fuel. Coal had never been used on a large scale in India before. The subcontinent was known to contain reserves and so the Raj instructed all officers to keep their eyes open and send expeditions into the hills and jungles. In this moment of history, coal suddenly became the most highly priced resource of the Indian soil. Some rather astonishing reports reached the headquarters of the East India Company. In the Khasi Hills in the Northeast, for instance, local tribes were in the habit of manufacturing beads and amulets out of coal, they had no interest in exploiting the deficits on a large scale. Apparently and incomprehensibly to the British, they were content with the life they led. It was the introduction of imperial steam boats that called the Indian coal industry into existence. As the vessels were launched for the two general purposes of stabilizing control over the subcontinent and draining it of wealth, exploration continued in search of yet more seams. The railway networks constructed largely in response to the great rebellion of 1857 and proved more effective than the boats and sparked a cold boom of another magnitude. But who would go underground to bring forth all of this few? Here we lay the greatest obstacle to the industry. In the case of the Khasi Hills, the reporter of the East India Company saw a race little accustomed to labor and predicted difficulties in reconciling a sufficient number of them to a continued effort, the object and importance of which they can be so little expected to understand. And this was the common situation facing the rudge. The people inhabiting the coal districts had no desire to go into the pits. The only solution was forced labor. By acquiring so-called zamendary rights, the British capitalists investing in the mines also became landowners with the right to force peasants and other villages to work underground. And if they did not, they would simply be expelled from their homes. These were the means by which the fossil economy extended to India, only by constant application of extra economic coercion over more than a century could the Indian coal industry be conjured out of the ground. How am I doing for time? I've done 25 minutes. Okay, good. Now let's turn to Nigeria. A steam engine required more than coal from the mines of Britain. A steam engine was built of various metal parts rubbing against each other, and this produced friction. And to minimize that friction, the owner of the engine had to apply oil as a lubricant. Otherwise it would simply break down. From where then did the British owners of steam engines get their oil? From the Niger Delta. By far the most important lubricant in early 19th century British industry was palm oil, almost exclusively imported from West Africa and predominantly the Delta of the Niger River. The British like to think of the steam engine as the epitome of their ingenuity, the ultimate proof of their unique mechanic and scientific genius, but in fact it depended on the constant flow of palm oil, laboriously processed from the palm nuts by Nigerian women. Without all that labor, the steam engines, as well as the railway carriages, the spinning mules, and most other machines in this country would literally come to a standstill. As the adoption of steam power and the mechanization of the British cotton industry proceeded to pace in the second quarter of the 19th century, the importation of palm oil exploded. As all other forms of world trade, before the steam engine, this trade was powered by wind and this severely restricted the latitude of imperial control over the trade. Sailing upstream on the Niger was virtually impossible for the British and as a consequence, the merchants had to stay at their posts on the coastline and deal with native middlemen and brokers backed up by autonomous chiefs and kings who delivered the palm oil as and when they saw fit. When the demand for palm oil exploded, this system of trade turned into a source of deep frustration. The quantities were simply not forthcoming as the metropolis desired. The solution, of course, was penetration straight into the interior of the Niger Basin where the palm trees grew and the knots were collected, bypassing the coastal states and reaching the producers directly so that palm oil could be poured freely into the British boats. The steam engine incidentally made this possible. A steamboat could travel upstream, flying in the face of even the strongest gale or current. The brothers Richard and John Lander, the first British explorers to map the course of the Niger in 1830, laid out the plan, quote, steamboats will penetrate up the river. The steam engine, the grandest invention of the human mind, will be a fit means of conveying civilization among these uninformed Africans who incapable of comprehending such a thing will view its arrival among them with astonishment and terror, end quote. The first steam powered expedition on the River Niger set out in 1832. Naturally, the inhabitants on the river banks were not happy about this. They ambushed the British boats several times and the expedition ended in disaster but its leader survived and published a manifesto for fossil empire. The power of steam, he wrote, quote, has made easy what it would have been difficult if not impossible to accomplish without it. We are the chief repository of it. Our mineral wealth, meaning the coal reserves of Britain and the mechanical habits of our people give us a superiority over all others, end quote. It's the privilege of bourgeois visionaries to be able to see their visions come true only by swimming with a tide of history and in the early 1850s, entrepreneurs commenced the first regular steamship service between Britain and the Niger Delta. Soon the steamers were applying up and down the river and back and forth between the coasts and the metropolis and the result was a second, even more marvelous explosion in the palm oil trade. The steamboat boats transported the oil faster than the sailing ships of old reduced the freight rates, increased total tonnage and moved with greater ease between different ports to pick up goods causing the price of palm oil to plummet from the 1850s onwards and the volumes imported to spike. The steamboats really did open the gates to an unrestricted flow of raw materials from West Africa. Just as in vision, they undermined the position of the native states cutting straight through their strongholds on the seaboard outmaneuvering the middlemen by picking up the produce directly from the inland. This caused a lot of resistance. That resistance had to be drenched in blood and incidentally steam power itself proved the decisive weapon when Britain achieved that goal by occupying and colonizing all of Nigeria. We begin here to see a pattern. It developed through a certain dialectic of time and space which can be summed up in the following way. On the basis of an energy source external to local time and space dug up from the fossilized landscapes of the past, steamboats compressed time and space for the benefit of their masters free to move with greater speed and freedom, thereby allowing them to appropriate time and space like never before, appropriate that is the labor of people in the peripheries and the land from which all sorts of biophysical resources sprouted. Over the course of the 19th century this dialectic of externality, compression and appropriation helped to engender the modern division of labor between an industrially developed core and raw materials supplying underdeveloped peripheries. One need not be any sort of Marxist to see this. In his book Trade and Poverty when the third world fell behind entirely based on mainstream bourgeois economics, Geoffrey G. Williamson observes that quote, the 19th century looks like a period of exceptionally rapid divergence between core and periphery and that divergence was most dramatic over the half century 1820 to 1870, end quote. During this period industrial growth in the third world was outright negative. In passing Williamson notices that people in these parts of the planet were not at all enthusiastic about submitting to imperial trade, but quote, the naval muscle of the industrial leaders made them comply, end quote. Those muscles were nourished by a fossil few. Steam power, I submit, gave a critical contribution to the modern divergence and it did so above all through the exercise of violence. What kind of line do these early episodes shed on the question of historical responsibility? Quite the opposite to the claim that the poor have participated just as much as the rich. Malcolm X famously said on the slave trade, we were kidnapped and brought here against our will. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, the Plymouth Rock was landed on us. The peoples of the peripheries, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Nigerians and many, many others could say we had the fossil economy imposed on us against our will. We didn't land on Newcastle coal, Newcastle coal was landed on us. As for the statistics on historical responsibility, they obviously tell us something extremely important about the distribution of the blame, but I think they can come across as stylized and anemic at times, unable to convey the brutal dynamics of this history. They need to be complimented with the stories of how the fossil economy was actually globalized at the hands of the British Empire. Stories still only scratched on the surface and then we can begin to see that the history of this economy was written in letters of blood and fire from the very beginning. As for climate depth, finally, I don't think there is anything wrong with the standard view of it. I just think the notion could be taken one step further or perhaps one notch deeper into a more radical and realistic picture of the very long-term injustice that is being committed here. To some extent, the standard definition of climate depth remains embedded in a developmentalist conception of climate change. The underlying assumption is that economic development over the past two decades has been tied to the combustion of fossil fuels and that it remains thus tied, but only some have developed while others have not. The train of development has run on fossil fuels, some have had tickets to the train while others have missed it and now it's too late to jump on the bandwagon. But the fossil economy was never only about development. From the start, it produced under development as much as development. It shouldn't be conflated with development in any universal, neutral sense. It is only because we have grown accustomed to seeing this particular form of self-sustaining growth rush by day and after day that we are inclined to identify it with development as such. If we take the historical data seriously, the developmentalist conception reflects at best one side of the coin. It should be supplemented with a recognition of the co-production of development and under development by means of the mobilization of fossil energy or to continue with the train metaphor, the fossil fuel train was originally designed to run some people over. And now, they're suffocating from the smoke. Along the northern Egyptian coastline, where the steamboats paraded after the pulerization of Akka, the rising sea is invading the porous Nile Delta soil. The salty water penetrates into the land and then rises to the surface, killing crops further and further inland. Storm surges are getting stronger. People in Alexandria can feel the waves lap higher and higher. In summertime, the heat waves in Cairo are longer and more intense, it's hot, and all indications are that the future will only get more extreme. The water in the Nile will evaporate faster in the rising heat, and while swathes of the northern Nile Delta might have to be abandoned to the sea, Upper Egypt seems to be approaching agricultural disaster. One fresh study in natural climate change, calculating how much the global wheat yield will decline per centigrade increase in temperature, puts Aswan on top. While the average yield loss will be 5.7%, here it will probably be 11 to 20%, and try to contemplate what that means. Up to a fifth of the wheat yield loss for everyone Celsius of rising temperatures, and we are on track for something like four degrees around the middle of this century. In India, the impacts already underway and projected in the near future are almost too many and mind-boggling to grasp. The glaciers and the Himalayas are melting fast and could leave the main rivers empty in dry periods. The monsoons are becoming more erratic and might eventually fail altogether. Mumbai has the world's largest population exposed to coastal flooding. Rice and wheat will wither in the heat during the drought last summer, when more than 300 million people were plunged into acute water shortages, armed guards had to be stationed around the dams to prevent desperate farmers from stealing water. There will be more scenes of that kind. Nigeria is being squeezed between the sea rising from the south and the desert expanding from the north. Lake Chad is drying out, the seasons are being mixed up, the oceans are chipping away at Lagos, and then I've only mentioned three countries. There is a permanent state of emergency settling over more and more of the global south, and it remains sorely unreported. The people suffering most have seen precious little benefit from the fossil economy. Indeed, one could argue that that economy has run over their bodies from the start and are now suffocating them in smoke, or the impacts of climate change are the latest injuries in a series of functionally integrated injustices. When climate change strikes the earth, the vulnerability of poor people is determined by precisely the legacy of centuries of underdevelopment. Why is Egypt more vulnerable to sea level rise than the Netherlands? Why is most of Lagos left unexposed to the ocean surges while Venice builds new mega walls to protect itself? The climate depth goes deeper than a mere denial of full development. Now, the objection from people like Chakrabarty would be that things have changed obviously since the 19th century. It's obviously not only Britain that burns fossil fuels today, and people in most parts of the world clearly aspire to the living standards associated with coal and gas and above all oil. And yes, one of the greatest post-colonial tragedies is surely that the independent states have so slavishly imitated the fossil economy, the empire imposed upon them. There is reason to read Fanon anew with an eco-critical lens. I quote, let us decide not to imitate Europe. Let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. If we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. Unfortunately, in the field of energy, as in so many others, those potentials of liberation have not been realized. Just look at Nigeria, where independence coincided with the transition to petroleum as the one valuable commodity, which has quite literally torn the nation apart. Or look at India, now the third largest consumer of coal in the world whose output has more than doubled since the turn of the millennium, where new coal fighter power plants are still shooting out of the ground. Indeed, the British empire was supremely successful in implanting the fossil economy in territories across this planet. But the great error here is to conflate this process of globalization with one of justice and species being and shared responsibility. If we look at the landscape of the global fossil economy, justice is still nowhere to be seen. As for India, the average citizen still consumes 7% of the energy consumed by the average American. 7% and the country is responsible for 3% of cumulative CO2 emissions so far in history. Globally today, on conservative assumptions, one tenth of the human species accounts for half of all CO2 emissions, half of the species for one tenth. The richest 1% have a carbon footprint, some 175 times that of the poorest 10%. The emissions of the richest 1% of Americans, Luxembourgians and Saudi Arabians, are 2,000 times larger than those of the poorest, Hondurans, Mozambicans, and Rwandans. This is not justice in the sphere of consumption. The world that is catching fire is the world where eight men own as much as the poorest half of our species. Some ecological class hatred is warranted. What has happened is that the injustices inherent in the fossil economy have been replicated in a fractal manner, reproduced within the global south on all scales from the Adivasic communities, evicted to make Rome for coal mines, and Niger Delta people soaked in crude oil, up to the investors in government swimming in the ensuing fortunes and further on to the front lines of climate change. The global pattern of uneven protection is reflected inside these countries. Rich Egyptian farmers can still acquire sufficient amounts of sand and fertilizers to elevate their lands above the salty water table, and the affluent resort towns along the coast are encased in seawalls, while poor Egyptians have nothing to set against the salt and the storms. All of this suggests, I think, that the fate of poor people in the peripheries of this rapidly warming world is more than bad luck. It is structurally determined by the fossil economy as it has operated since the start. And conversely, what is going on at the top of the pyramid in the global north is also more than a coincidence. And one of the greatest pathologists of this moment is precisely the inexhaustible superabundance of energy thrown into the demonization of refugees, Muslims, Mexicans, various otherwise coded others, while climate change receives barely a sliver of the attention. The non-threat of immigration tops the headlines and debates every day in our countries, while the super threat of actually unfolding global warming struggles to make it there even when the most sensational records are reported. How is this possible? In her new book, Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics, Donna M. Orange suggests that an unprocessed history of enslaving non-white others predisposes privileged white people to indifference, I quote, blindness to our ancestors' crimes and to the ways we whites continue to live from these crimes keeps the suffering of those already exposed to the devastation of the climate crisis impossible for us to see or feel, end quote. And the crimes might be duplicating now against non-whites as immigrants and as victims of climate change. And very soon these might not be two different categories of people, but one and the same. I'm soon finished. We should keep in mind here that it is now so very late, temperatures are already so dangerously high, the concentration of CO2 is rising so precipitously that any meaningful mitigation with at least some chance of avoiding the most catastrophic scenarios must by definition take on revolutionary dimensions and Trump and his gang know this. They are right, as Naomi Klein has argued, the demands of the climate movement based as they are on the science do constitute the greatest threat to capitalist freedom and the prosperity of the ruling classes of this world, hence the aggressiveness of the denial. We know from an extensive body of research that conservative white men of the demographic segment most likely to deny climate change, particularly in the U.S. And the explanation for this is simple. They are the winners of business as usual and they have always been. Now is the moment of truth when their privileges in so far as they are linked to fossil fuels have to be eliminated for human civilization to survive and more particularly for multitudes in the global south to survive. And so they say it's all a lie. It's a hoax the Chinese invented. In a twisted way, this is perfectly logical and rational, climate denialism is a preemptive strike against the revolutionary implications of mitigation and so it is not so surprising after all that fewer Americans, conservative white men in particular, believe in climate change now than 20 years ago. This is what we should expect. The hotter it gets, the more conclusive the science, the more radical, the required measures, the more confident and the more belligerent the denialism of the winners will be. And as it happens, this agenda fits hand in glove with that of the racist right whose general pursuit is, of course, a superiority over all others. And so we get the formula for this wealthy, white, narcissistic, nihilistic fascism of which Trump is such a consummate representative. The earth is ours to own and trash as we wish. And then I haven't even mentioned oil and the role it has played in the history of the American empire and its dealings with the Muslim world. All I have done is tried to hint at the shared roots of the two facets of the ongoing aggression. They deserve much more scrutiny and analysis but to sum up what I've said, the fossil economy was a creation of white men deployed to exploit non-whites more efficiently. And perhaps that past is now coming back to haunt us in the form of a final push to burn as much fossil fuels as possible, deny the problem and systematically attack the very people that have been and remained, remain and will be the main victims of it all. One day, perhaps those people will rise up and say, you have done this to enrich yourselves, now we are paying with our lives. You have invaded our countries to take the cotton and the coal and the palm oil and the petroleum. You have trampled upon us for centuries and now here comes the accumulated fallout, the sum of all consequences burning and inundating and flooding and burying our homes. Now it's time for you to pay. There is, of course, resistance going on against fossil fuel extraction across the global south but so far very little in the way of coordinated and clearly articulated revolt against climate change as such. But I think some types of rebellion are likely to break out when the seas have traveled many miles into the heart of the Nile Delta or the Ganges run dry or the slums of Lagos are washed away. I find it unlikely that people would suffer this in silence and never vent their rage on the sources of the problem. Here in the north, it's now eminently clear that any sensible climate policy will have to rest on a foundation of resolute anti-racism and militant anti-fascism only if the forces of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Sweden, and all the others will be kept at a safe distance from power can any reasonable measures be taken. I can only end by quoting public enemy's album, Apocalypse 921, The Enemy Strikes Black, where the opening line says, the future holds nothing else but confrontation. Thank you. Evening all. How do I follow that? First, just to thank Andreas for the passionate critique of the fossil fuel powered business as usual model. This business as usual model that's based on exploiting both the planet and the planet's people. And it's not just a passionate critique, but it's one that's based on this incredibly rich historical detail. I'm gonna start with a confession. My maternal grandmother's great, great, great grandfather was a man called William Murdoch. He was born in Scotland, in Ayrshire, and he walked, at the age of 23, he walked to Birmingham, where he found employment in the form of Bolton and Watt. Working with James Watt, my six times great grandfather, contributed to the Industrial Revolution by inventing the oscillating cylinder steam engine, which is also known as a wobbler. It's a design of steam engine that has no valve gear, and therefore it's often used on steamships, on account of its simplicity and small size. So though James Watt and also my six times great grandfather would have been entirely unaware of this, it's possible to trace a historical connection from this sort of invention to, in Andrea's words, the extent of arctic sea ice, the salinity of the now-adelted soil, and the intensity of the Punjab monsoon. So this is what science tells us, that globally the climate is undergoing unprecedented change. Temperatures are going up, sea ice and glaciers are retreating, the sea level is rising, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. The science also tells us that the cause of this is human action. Obviously people talk about the natural cycles and solar activity, but the predominant cause is anthropogenic. The science has made enormous inroads in understanding climate change and its causes. It's capable of delivering understandings of the current and potential impacts also that will affect people today and in coming decades. What science is less good at is explaining how we got into this mess. It can identify the points of which greenhouse gas emissions accelerated, but it's less good at explaining why. And this is what Andrea sets out to do and does very successfully, to how we became hooked on a fossil fuel-fired economy. Turning to the politics of climate change, we find debates often bogged down in attempts to attribute historical responsibility, which nations emitted in the past, how much they're emitting now, and bizarrely who wants to emit in the future. Questions about whether consumers or producers are to blame, how they should alter their behavior. These debates somewhat simplistically try to identify who's responsible, but in pointing to the who, they also forget to ask why. Okay, these are processes, these are things in Andrea's work, not just in the talk today, but in his work more generally, who he seeks to transcend these debates over immediate responsibility, and said he sets out to locate the forces that assist the introduction and the expansion of a fossil fuel-based economy. So here we move from an attribution of climate change to general human activity, to a specific recognition that it's certain forms of activity that are to blame. Initially, the expansion of fossil fuel-based capitalism assisted by European imperialism in the 19th century, so this is a steamships, but more recently looking at how this is achieved by other means through globalization, through the shifting of production, through systems imposed on developing countries often by the developed world. So climate change may be anthropogenic in that it's caused by humans, but it's a product of some humans rather than others, or rather it's a product of certain types of human organization and economic production, but not of all types of human organization and production. So I wanted to ask whether this offers hope that a viable alternative exists, that we can organize our technologically advanced and complex global civilization in ways that don't depend on burning fossil fuels. Here, we have to move beyond the diagnosis of the problem to the possibilities of transformative change, so from critique to pers-pers-persful action. So my question to Andreas is, how do we get out of this mess? You know, that simplification is coming, things are going to change in one way or another. Having identified the forces that perpetuate this dangerous addiction, how can they be defeated, how can they be overcome? This term I'm co-teaching a course on natural resource management, development and change, and we often refer to Eric Olin Wright's book on envisaging real utopias, which sets out to identify alternatives that are desirable, that are viable, but most of all that are achievable. So while it's clearly desirable to wean ourselves off this addiction to fossil fuels, do viable alternatives exist, and are they achievable? Can the study of history help us to identify other possibilities? And how do we actually transition to these? What obstacles stand in our way and how can they be removed? I did want to sort of get through this five-minute response without mentioning Donald Trump or Rex Tillerson, but I don't think they can be ignored. The point I want to make though is, you know, what was being done before Trump? You know, it's only been 11 days. Already, two degrees is unrealistic, three degrees, four degrees is more probable, possibly more. I'll finish with the question. Is it better to burn quickly or burn slowly? Okay. Okay, so why don't we open it up to the floor and then Andreas will come back once before he sums up. Okay, yeah, hand over there. You might want to wait for the mic, yeah, from Sammy. Okay. Hello, good evening. Thank you for the talk, Andreas. My question is sort of concerning alternatives to the fossil economy. In your opinion, is sustainable development, whether it's through water dams, whether it's through hydroelectric power plants, are they actually viable alternatives to sort of historic use of fossil fuels and resource extraction, or do the practices actually still fall into capitalist modes of production through displacement of indigenous people, et cetera, et cetera. So in your opinion, is it viable? If you just indicate I can get together a list. What was a really interesting and exciting talk? I just, I want you to kind of expand on something that you might have glossed over. I think you covered the first half of the night, that's the second half of the 19th century with the coal expansion and the fossil fuel expansion. And then you came on to the present. There's the first half of the 20th century when potentially the replications between, or at least the relationships between empire and colony were being replicated within the colony itself. In other words, forms of labor control, forms of property control from the fossilized economy were being replicated amongst natives themselves. And I wanted to invite you to kind of expand on that period where then it becomes very difficult to get out of this conundrum where it seems to be far more a problem of capitalist relations, which are implicated in class, class, gender divides, rather than simply a question of, so in other words, if elites today are negotiating, it seems to suit most of their interests to actually perpetuate this fossil economy and there seems to be a colonial and post-colonial history to that. That's the first one. The second one is a far more kind of broad question. How did the fossil economy become this kind of, well, at least in the colonies, become this speculative investment that so many people were interested in in a way that, yes, there's the palm oil trade, but in a way that kind of defined the 20th century world and obviously with oil, there's the whole question of imperialism and the, such a desired quality, thank you. Thanks. The woman in the gray scarf. Hello, thank you for this very rich historical analysis. In bringing your historical analysis back into international climate policy, I wanted to ask a question about mitigation versus adaptation. Obviously, adaptation and mitigation should be implemented or measures should be implemented simultaneously, but which moral arguments in relation to social justice and what you mentioned about climate debt, which of these arguments should be given most weight in making priorities between mitigation versus adaptation in international climate policy. Thank you. The woman in the yellow there and then you. Hello, I wanted to ask, do you think that the only thing really holding us back from renewable energy being globally, commercially available is the lack of economic system change? Do you think that's the one thing that we actually need to achieve before anything's going to happen? Thanks, thank you. The woman in the gray jacket. Have you got your hand up? Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Based on what you said, do you think that capitalism needs to be overthrown before we can actually take climate change seriously? Because obviously most of us are consumers and consumer driven, so long as we're enjoying wealth, do you really feel like we're ever going to take it seriously because we don't see how it affects us? Like, yeah, the animals dying, that's really sad, but on a day-to-day basis, I just feel like until it hits us where it hurts and that is materially, I don't think any of us are really going to wake up and take it seriously, so. Thanks, okay. We will get Andreas to answer some of those and then we will take another round. I'll try to go through the questions from the floor first and then address some of the points that Richard made. Thanks for them, by the way. Thanks for all the questions. First of all, on the question of hydropower and renewable energy, if those are sustainable viable alternatives. Well, nowadays no one really believes in hydropower as having much of an expansion potential. So what really does have potential is solar power and wind power and potentially some wave power and geothermal, but most models for how the world economy could shift completely away from fossil fuels don't include much expansion of dams because dams had proven to be so harmful to ecological and social systems. So hydropower I wouldn't bet on, but I definitely do think that other renewable energy sources are the only conceivable alternatives. Well, some would say that they will only lock us again into a capitalist mode of production. What we need to do is reduce energy consumption and perhaps even return to some form of, I don't know, muscle power or animal power or things like that. I have difficulties with that argument. I'm having it with people in my own department back home and some on the radical French of the climate movement make those kind of arguments as well. I think it's important to keep in mind that we have still a very big problem with energy poverty in the world. I think still it's a third of the Indian population, for instance, that is off grid that doesn't have access to electricity and we cannot depart from the assumption that people without access to electricity should stay there and not get that kind of living standard that we in the affluent North take for granted. So I think, yes, rich people need to reduce their energy consumption, but quite a lot of poor people in the world need to increase their energy consumption and how are they going to do that? Well, there must be some other way than burning fossil fuels because we simply cannot continue extracting fossil fuels and emitting CO2. We need to get rid of that completely within a matter of decades if we're going to avoid the most catastrophic scenarios. So that means energy expansion by means of renewable sources. And then of course, technologically it can be done. This has been demonstrated conclusively again and again on a world scale and on national scales, you can have a complete shift, a complete decarbonization of the economy within a matter of decades, but that requires very serious intervention into the standard normal operation of the market economies. And that's why it's so difficult for many to imagine that we can actually do that. That's why it's so much more convenient for lots of people to imagine that geoengineering will be the solution. I think this is also something we need to discuss much more because I can easily see someone like Donald Trump switch from one day to the other from saying this is all a hoax to saying we'll solve this by means of geoengineering. Rex Tillerson has already made gestures in that direction. And the logic of geoengineering is that it's easier to imagine the manipulation of the earth system than of the economic system nowadays. This is why there is such a buzz around geoengineering at all. That powerful interests and lots of scientists find it more conceivable that we'll actually deliberately intervene in the operation of the climate system then seize control over the economic forces. Yeah, so yes, a shift to renewable energy is technologically possible, but it faces lots of economic and social obstacles and I don't have time to go into them in any detail. But on the question, do we need to have capitalism overthrown before we can solve the problem of climate change? Well, I'm a little bit hesitant to endorse this position because getting rid of capitalism is something we've tried for quite a long time and it hasn't turned out to be that easy. So saying that we first have to have, I don't know, a worker's republic or something like that then we can deal with climate change. I'm not ridiculing a position, but the logic makes just the task even more difficult. I don't think it's a productive way of posting the solution. I think we need to realize that a transition to renewable energy will undermine lots of vested interests and will face serious resistance from those interests that will have to be overcome, but that is more of the traditional logic of the transitional demand, if you see what I mean, then from the program that won solution revolution and then we'll walk into the renewable paradigm. I don't know if I'm getting the point across here, but on the issue of adaptation or mitigation, well, both are important, obviously, but there is a sense in which adaptation is futile in the end because there's not really a way to adapt to four degrees or five degrees or six degrees. I mean, civilization as such is not likely to withstand, to be able to withstand the pressures that will mean. And if you take a country such as Egypt, the only one where I've studied adaptation in some detail, there is some adaptation that can be done and that should be urgently offered to the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the population, but there are also some impacts that Egypt cannot adapt to. So a rise in sea level, for instance, will inevitably lead to saltwater intrusion into the delta. You can't build seawalls to stop that because the rising pressure of the sea will only push the water deeper into the delta, whatever walls you build. So the only way to defend the Nile Delta in the long term would be mitigation. And I think this holds for a lot of other countries as well. There is no adaptation to business as usual in the end. There has to be mitigation for these countries to survive, but then there will also be a lot of negotiations around loss and damage because there will be serious losses and damages, there already are, and there will be conflicts around who will compensate for them. And I think that those conflicts will intensify over the next years in the climate negotiations. So on the reproduction of those patterns in the first half of the 20th century, as I said in the beginning, I'm only in the very early phases of this research project and I'm focusing mostly on the 19th century. So I don't think I'm qualified to say much about the first half of the 20th century. And I should stress that these processes are so large that it's not the task for any single individual researcher to track them. This has to be a collective process. And I think many of you in this hall know much more about this than I do. Shall I address some of the questions that you raise as well? Yeah, so does this whole thing offer hope or not? Well, yeah. In one sense, my instinctive reaction to this whole discussion from the start was that if this is a matter of the human species as a whole acting out its dispositions, then we're by definition doomed. If there's going to be any hope, we have to be able to envision a humanity that can live sustainably, that isn't predetermined to destroy the climate. So delinking humanity as such from the problem of climate change is, as I see it, a premise for any kind of progress. So it's meant to induce some kind of hope that at least there is a hypothetical possibility that we might shift away from the fossil economy. It's not something that is written into our genes or evolutionary heritage or some other kind of nasty aspect of what it is to be human. There are lots of versions of this narrative. I don't want to believe it. I want to make a leap of faith that humans could potentially do differently and that it's a contingent, historically specific system that has brought about this mess. How do we get out of it? Well, that's the big discussion. And again, I'm not sure I know more about this than anyone else here. I could give lots of examples of what I think need to be done. A first obvious measure would be to impose a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants or pipelines or any other kind of infrastructure for extracting and burning fossil fuels. This is something that was mooted before COP 21 in Paris but it didn't make any headway. And I think what's so obvious now in the Trump era is that all of this is politically determined. It's determined through political conflict. It should be evident to everyone now that with Trump, what we're doing in the energy field is purely a matter of political will and interest. And they're taking it in the wrong direction. It should be possible to take it in another direction. Can the study of history help in this? Well, on the margin perhaps, but I'm under no illusion that historical study as such will give any critical contribution. Of course, it's actual movements by actual people that can make a difference and the role of academic research is tangential to what happens. Is it better to burn fast or slow? Well, I mean, if I take that question to mean, shall we now just watch as the whole thing goes up in flames? I think no. I think the resistance should be very much intensified. If it has been feeble up to now, it should become ferocious. I mean, we should be able to say even after all of this, you still continue to build pipelines and explore for more oil in the Arctic and wanting to bring the whole climate negotiation structure down and all of that. I mean, it should only inflame people's anger if we are rational human beings. Then is it better to actually take up fossil fuels and burn them fast or slow? Well, science tells us that the faster we do it, the more destructive the impact on climate change. So from a purely natural scientific basis, it's better to burn them slow, although we shouldn't burn them at all. Yeah. Okay, more questions? Yeah, at the back. Do you want to just wait for the mic? Yeah. Perhaps all those years ago, the inventors of the steamboat did not think about the repercussions that we would face today. So when it comes to alternate sources of energy, I want to know where you think nuclear energy fits in this discourse and what is the sort of responsibility our generation should exercise in terms of using it as an alternative to fossil fuels. Thank you. Thanks and one over here in the front. With all the discussions of the big political system changes, I'm just wondering, because these types of talks usually end up depressing me with, well, I'm not in a position of political power. So what can we as individual people, obviously beside voting, do in our daily lives to help fix this? Okay, the man over there in the orange sweater. Yeah, thanks for your talk. I was wondering, and I guess this is connected to your critique of Chakrabarti and the Anthropocene discourse today, in what way, if your injunction is one of, let's say, inserting conflict into the discourse of holism, which characterizes contemporary ecological discourse very often, in what way do you see this as already in a way a problem in the holistic ecological discourse as it emerges in the West, at least, in the 60s and 70s? Around, for instance, this notion of the whole Earth, kind of like everyone knows the iconic image when the planet, the blue planet was first kind of recorded from outer space. So I wonder in which way this is also a problem of ecological discourse and the origins of that discourse in the West. Thanks. Yeah. The man in the blue sweater, and then I'll take you in the yellow after that, yeah. Thanks, Andreas, for your thought-provoking talk. I like the way you connected the dots between the different struggles and how you demonstrated that the problem is systemic. Climate, we cannot understand the climate crisis without addressing the questions of class, race, gender, and colonial history. So that brings me to my questions about the Anthropocene. As you said in your talk, the Anthropocene usually tends to say that all the human race is responsible and we are all in it together. So some other people advanced the concept called Capitalucine, and I wonder what you thought about that. The woman in the yellow top. Hiya. I just wondered, actually, do you think that it would be possible to apply circular economy principles to remaining fossil fuel resources? By that, of course, you were talking earlier about historic responsibility. The United Framework for the Convention on Climate Change talks about developed countries taking the lead. The debates around that have been so excruciatingly slow as to, excuse me, possibly disable us from actually making the transition in time. Do you think that we might be able to get countries to actually agree to impose something kind of carbon mechanism so that it wouldn't have to be about each country going, oh, we've got to tax, find this money somewhere to transition to renewables? And it's not about, well, you guys started it and any of this, because that's just clearly slowing things down. But let's say countries agreed, as a global society, that some kind of carbon tax would be imposed on the super rich. This tax would then just be applied fairly across the world. That's kind of a couple of questions in one, but I think they kind of tie in in terms of an exit strategy for fossil fuels and the transition to renewables. I hope that was kind of clear. Yeah, do you want to say one more question? Yeah, the woman again. Yeah, I don't think I got it when you were talking about. I want you to know if developing countries, third world countries, aren't responsible for what's going on now, how come? Well, they get the brunt of it. I don't think I got that from your talk. Sorry, could you repeat that? I didn't get that, really. So why do third world developing countries suffer the most, even though they're not responsible for the climate change that we're seeing now? Why do third world countries have to do the most? Suffer the most, won't they? Suffer the most, aha, aha. Yeah. Yeah, right, nuclear energy, first of all. Well, I'm personally of the position that nuclear energy in this particular situation is not the problem. It's not the solution either, but it's not the problem. That's also the position outlined by Naomi Klein in her book, and I agree with that. I still find it, to be honest, a little bit provocative or provoking, annoying that some on the environment movement, particularly in Germany, still think that nuclear energy is the big enemy. And there have been calculations of how many people in the world that will likely die because Germany shut down its nuclear power plants after Fukushima and expanded its coal. I think that was absolutely disastrous because coal is proven to kill people on a mass scale through its impact on climate change. Nuclear, by comparison, has killed very few people. That doesn't mean that I think it's the solution. The most obvious drawback of nuclear power is that it's so difficult to rapidly expand. It takes a long time to build nuclear power plants, and it's very expensive, and there are limitations when it comes to uranium and things like that. That's why nuclear power isn't the way to go, but the climate movement, the environmental movement, should focus its efforts and concentrate its scarce resources and not at this moment face out nuclear power. We have a debate about this in Sweden because it's a very traditional left position in Sweden to be against nuclear power and try to get rid of it. But if we were to do that in Sweden, we'd probably have to import more coal-fired electricity from Germany and other countries, and I think that would be disastrous. So that's my position. On the question of what can we do as individuals, this question was raised to Bill McKibben when he visited my university a couple of years ago, and he responded, the most important thing you can do as an individual is to cease to be an individual. That is, join a movement, join an organization, go on a collective action or something like that. Now, it's not an option that is available for everyone because there aren't so many movements around us there should be, so that isn't necessarily an inspiring message to you, go and join a movement because where is the movement? I don't know exactly the state of the climate movement here in this country right now, and if there is anything that you can go and do together with others, but at the end of the day, that's where we have to look because as individuals, we are locked in the system and feel by definition powerless and quite unable to do anything on our own. Of course, I mean, so for instance, I didn't fly here and that's not because I think that I make a massive change by taking the bus and the train here. It's just because I think that we should try to have some kind of consistency between our individual actions and what we're recommending for everyone. I might in fact fly home for practical reasons. So you have to negotiate with yourself all the time and the solution cannot be found on the level of the individual. That doesn't mean that you can do anything. You can lavishly indulge in fossil fuel consumption just because you can say it's not for me as an individual to do anything about, so I'll leave it to the collective. That would also be some kind of bad consciousness, what's it called? False consciousness, something like that. I don't know if this is an answer, but yeah. On the question of wholism in ecology, you're absolutely right that mainstream Western ecology as it emerged in the United States, perhaps in particular in the 1960s and 70s, was, and through all the, it was, yeah, developed this perspective of the whole earth and humanity as a whole and all of that stuff. The thing is that since then there has been a lot of progress in the direction of focusing on environmental justice, but there is in some academic circles a kind of backlash from people like Chakrabarty who say that it's not about justice any longer because climate change is so urgent. So in his most recent article, which is influenced heavily by Bruno Latour, he makes the argument that because climate change threatens the survival of other species, animals, we can no longer focus on human justice. But I think that is not so convincing because for animals as much as for humans, it's a very serious problem that we have this extreme concentration of biophysical resources at the top of the human pyramid for burning. So I mean, one of the most effective climate policies would probably be to expropriate all the assets of the richest one to 10% of the human population and then we had emissions slashed by half in a single stroke. And I mean, the polar bears would be very much benefited by such a policy as much as human beings. It's just that they don't have any capacity for making it happen even hypothetically, which means that for other species as much as for humans, we need to act on our capacity potentially to attack absurd overconsumption at the top. So I think the reasons that have so far been adduced to abandon environmental justice in the climate crisis are weak on the capital scene. Yeah, I like this concept, but I don't think it's a matter of using the one term or the other necessarily. I know lots of brilliant scholars and activists who want to use the concept of the Anthropocene while focusing on issues of justice. And if they can do that, I'm fine with it. To me, it's not a matter of using the term as such. It's about how you tell a story about the problem and draw the lines of conflict. And if you can do that while remaining loyal to the Anthropocene concept, I'm fine with it. I personally don't like to use the Anthropocene, but I don't use the capital scene that much either. I mention it sometimes. On the carbon tax, I'm not a great fan of the carbon tax idea, to be honest. I don't think that price mechanisms will solve this for several reasons. I think that we cannot rely on market signals to remove fossil fuel consumption from the world economy. You can see in the world oil markets over the last years these enormous swings between high oil prices and very low ones. And if we'd had a carbon tax that wouldn't have made much of a difference in terms of those oscillations, they would still be massive. And it turns out that if you have a high oil price, then the dirtiest unconventional oil projects such as the Alberta Tarsans are very profitable. So a high oil price will induce people to go for the most dirty oil, while a low oil price will make them unprofitable, but will instead stimulate demand for oil in many sectors of the world economy. So whether you have a high or a low oil price, it doesn't really make much of a difference. So a carbon tax would, I think, just marginally affect this dynamic. And by definition, it wouldn't be progressive unless you combine it with some intricate system of redistribution, some suggest that. But I think it's more promising at this very late stage. I mean, if we would have started attacking the roots of this problem in the 1990s, then perhaps we could have solved it with the carbon tax or something like that. But now that we need to make emissions cuts of in the rich countries maybe five to 10% per year until we're completely free from fossil fuels in the next few decades, by 2030, 2040, something like that. Market signals, taxes are not enough. The most promising model for how this could be done, in my view, is the analogy with wartime mobilization. And there's a brilliant book recently published by an Australian scholar, Lawrence Delina, called Rapid Climate Mitigation, Wartime Mobilization as an Analogy, or something like that. And it shows that advanced capitalist countries could use the same methods as in the Second World War for defeating Hitler to face out fossil fuels. So the most famous analogy is that the US, from one day to the other, ordered all car factories to seize producing cars and instead only produce tanks. And governments could do something similar today. They could command producers to shift from fossil fuels to renewables. They could command in Sweden, for instance, this has been suggested, the government could order car factories to start producing wind turbines instead of cars. And I think these are more the methods that we can conceive of as adequate to the task rather than taxes. Yeah, so why do people in poor countries suffer most? Well, if you look at the drought in California, for instance, that is going on right now and has been going on for many years, that drought is scientifically proven that that is an effect on climate change. And it causes serious problems in the US, but we're not seeing mass migrations from California. We're not seeing serious thirst or starvation. And why is that? It's because California is a center of capital accumulation in this world that has built up a buffer of biophysical resources that allows people there to protect themselves from these effects. So precisely those centuries of uneven and combined development allow some people to shield themselves from the impacts for the time being. While if you look at similar processes of drought in say the Horn of Africa, there you see people actually starving because of very similar natural conditions that are also caused by climate change, but they don't have the buffer to protect themselves. So the distribution of the impacts of climate change is a function of uneven and combined development over the past two centuries. Did I make this more clear? Yeah, then also of course, the tropics are geophysically extremely vulnerable to rising temperatures. For instance, the reason why agriculture in Upper Egypt is so sensitive is that it's already on the threshold of, I mean, there isn't much of a margin left until the temperatures get too high for the agriculture to continue. It's already on the ecological edge, if you see what I mean. And you find similar situations in other parts of the Middle East because of the natural aridity and high temperatures, it isn't very far before life becomes unviable. So I don't want to say that it's only a matter of resource distribution, but clearly that's very important. Yes, so excluding the buffers, do countries in the North do developing countries? Is there a difference in the effects? So, yeah, so what I'm trying to say is, irrespective of resources and the opportunity to protect themselves, do both parts of the world still feel the same effects equally, or does the global south tend to feel the brunt of it based on where it is? I don't know. Just in addition to that, let's just take two last questions and then get Andreas to answer those and sum up. Yeah, take one over there and you over there, great. Hi, Andreas, thanks for the great talk. You've kind of touched on this issue indirectly, but I was wondering, how far do you think that the consumption of fossil fuel has become a kind of essential part of the capitalist mode of production and therefore any vision of transition would imply quite radical changes and challenges to the mode of production? Because certain sections of the bourgeoisie clearly think that a solarization of capitalism is indeed possible and not everyone has fallen for Trump's tiny listen, even though it seems to be trending right now. So, yeah, what do you think about that? Is it possible to think of capitalism beyond fossil fuels or it's a... Thank you, and this woman over here. Regarding carbon emissions trading, would you propose it to be abandoned or do you think it can be actually helpful if it's altered or something? On the question again of why the global south is bearing the brunt of this whole, I'll just try to get my point across by taking an example. I was in the far north of Sweden in early January and it should have been minus 30 degrees and it was raining. The Arctic is the part of the world that is heating up fastest. I mean, we had some absolutely insane anomalies this winter in the Arctic where it was 20 to 30 degrees hotter than it should be. And I mean, we're not talking about one, one and a half degrees, two degrees, 20 to 30 degrees. So that whole ecosystem, as I said, is actually in a stage of collapse. And this is, of course, extremely worrisome. It changes weather patterns. So while we were in the far north of Sweden and it was raining, refugees in Greece and Siberia were suffering from extreme cold and dying because it was 16 to 20 degrees cold and they were living in tents. So the jet stream and lots of currents in the climate system are disrupted because of this extreme heat in the Arctic. But the heat in the Arctic in Sweden doesn't cause anyone in Sweden to go hungry or thirsty. And why is that? Again, because Sweden is part of the advanced capitalist core that is independent on the resources that are being wrecked by this extreme heat. The ones that are are the Sami people, the indigenous population of northern Sweden whose reindeer suffer from this extreme heat and their traditional lifestyles are being heavily impacted. But Sweden being a country of the global north, we can still enjoy our relative affluence even though it's 20 degrees hotter than it should be in the far north. And that's not the case in the global south, precisely because those margins have been destroyed over the past two centuries. Okay, on the question of the motor production. Well, this is a very important question. And I think we first have to recognize that capitalism as a motor production, however you want to define it and date its onset, whether you're of the world system school that you think it started in 1492 or your political Marxist or anything else, capitalism as a motor production preceded the fossil economy, however you define it. So there isn't apparently any absolute essential link between the two, if you see what I mean. What could make the argument as you're hinting that historically the two have become so integrated that they are, they cannot be detached from one another. And I don't know the answer to that question. I mean, I wouldn't say that I know for sure that a 100% renewable energy economy in this world would be non-capitalist, would by nature, by definition be socialist or communist or something like that. I wouldn't dare to say this because I don't know. I think capitalism is an amazingly flexible, plastic adaptive system that can encompass and absorb many changes. It has shown its ability to do so throughout history. So a fully-solarized capitalism is perhaps conceivable. But I think we should recognize that Trump and those things are not just mere coincidental surface phenomena. I think there are very deep interests in actually existing capitalism for sustaining business as usual. And one obvious case of such an interest is precisely the type of corporations that Rex Tillerson represents, the type of corporations that profit from the extraction of fossil fuels and selling it on the world market. There is no equivalent to be found in the field of renewable energy production because the sun comes for free and the wind comes for free and the waves come for free. There is no way you can extract them and sell them as a commodity. So that whole department of accumulation of capital is out of the question if you shift to renewable energy. And I think that is one of the main reasons that we are seeing such a big resistance and why the fractions of the capitalist class in this world that are linked to renewable energy remain so weak. I mean, they do exist, but they're very, very weak. If you look at centralized solar power plants around the world or offshore wind farms, the kind of central renewable energy facilities that have the greatest potential for rapidly increasing energy production, they are virtually always financed by public investment. We are seeing some changes here, some signs that private capital is becoming more interested in that in certain parts of the world, India for instance. But so far, I mean, it's a drop in the fossil bucket. We're seeing still much, much more private capital flowing into the accumulation of capital through the production of fossil fuels than anything comparative in the renewable energy sector. So I think it needs to be investigated much more concretely in detail the link between the capitalist motor production and fossil fuels historically and in the present. And we need to much more specifically try to identify the enemy in this transition. Carbon trading, I don't like the idea of carbon trading. We have an expert in the room, Larry here, who's demonstrated again and again how harmful it is. So my simple answer to that is ditch carbon trading. And if you wanna know more about it, ask Larry. He's the expert, not me. Okay, that's brilliant. Just wanted to thank everyone for coming. Also to let you know that we'll be meeting in the normal room, ALT 110 next week, Tuesday 7th, where Kavita Krishnan will be coming and she will be talking about power and patriarchy in India, how state led women's empowerment undermines women's movements. And also just to invite everyone to a reception up in the main building on the first floor in the staff common room, so you're all welcome. And join me in thanking Andreas.