And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

and the old men still answer to the call

I’m feeling pretty ecstatic that Henry Kissinger is finally dead, and sad about Shane MacGowan. To confront loss, what we have—I guess—is memory. We can keep doing the work to make sure that three generations from now, everyone will remember that Kissinger was complicit in millions of deaths in southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. And in the meantime, I’m going to put on Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash and soak in the magic of how a little band of people can transmute pain and grief into beauty.

As for the newsletter, here are some additional teaching materials that might help if you’re trying to show anyone out there how the whole official climate framework (the Paris Agreement and the COP conferences, as well as their industrial counterparts in electric vehicles, green energy, and carbon trading) is a sham designed to help business, not to protect survival on this planet.

Every month or so, every newspaper or website that pretends to care about the environment, like The Guardian, puts out an article like this:

A solar farm where food used to be grown. Notice the missing photo of the mine in the Global South where elements for these solar rigs were extracted.

We can call it the “There’s Good News on the Climate!” article. Almost always, the “good news” is that the official framework is gaining ground. More countries are signing onto the agreements, more advancements in green energy or electric vehicle technologies, more investment in green industries. Growth on the political field. Growth on the technological field. Growth on the economic field.

Curiously, between the 4th and 12th paragraphs, these articles will always slip in a regretful mention that greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, breaking new records almost every year. (The only time in the last decade emissions have dropped? When the global economy almost collapsed during the global pandemic. What a coincidence.) More governments passing green laws, more profit for green energy companies, and more catastrophic pollution.

It’s like the underpants gnomes from South Park. Their plan is in place. More and more people are adopting their plan. The problem keeps getting worse. But the good thing is, more people are adopting the plan, so they shrug their shoulders and figure things will work out.