This guy is straight up dangerous. I'm not sure if his role is to expand the Overton Window of climate discussions or if he actually believes what he says but either way he's going to get someone killed.
From Jacobin Magazine, June 15, 2020:
Despite the obvious parallels with coronavirus shutdowns, states still show little determination to put in place the measures we’ll need to deal with the climate emergency. For Andreas Malm, we need to stop seeing climate change as a problem for the future — and use state power now to impose a drastic reordering of our economies.
On the final day of 2019 — a year marked by record high temperatures, wildfires, and tropical storms — China reported to the World Health Organization that a new virus had broken out in the city of Wuhan. Initially dismissed by many Western observers as an unfortunate event in a far-off land, COVID-19 quickly grew into a full-blown pandemic, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, rapidly intensifying class and racial inequalities, and ushering in the greatest worldwide recession since the Great Depression.
In the space of a few short weeks, received economic wisdom on the bounds of state intervention was turned upside down, as were the day-to-day lives of billions of workers worldwide. Factories and schools have been shuttered, borders closed, and whole populations confined to their homes under threat of hefty fines and imprisonment. Otherwise mundane technocratic leaders have recast themselves as wartime commanders doing battle with an invisible invader.
The dominant media discourse concerning the pandemic has been to cast it as an exogenous shock to business as usual, the origins of which lie either in natural processes divorced from human influence or in the failings of a specific state or culture — generally meaning China’s. Calls have arisen to punish a still-unknown perpetrator, conspiracy theories have abounded, and the international radical left — almost everywhere bereft of actual power — has been reduced to cheering on the draconian lockdowns and dreaming ineffectually of a better world to come.
At the same time, the ongoing climate crisis has been largely erased from the mainstream narrative. Social media has been flooded with images of blue skies over normally smog-eclipsed cities, dolphins skipping through waterways, and wild animals foraging for food in deserted cities. Many environmentally minded observers have expressed hope for a green recovery from the crisis — but also remained largely silent regarding the structural constraints that bar its way.
In an attempt to make sense of the pandemic, its origins, and its consequences for the climate justice movement, Jacobin’s Dominic Mealy sat down with Andreas Malm, a world-leading scholar on human ecology. Author of half a dozen books and innumerable essays on the political economy of climate change, anti-fascism, and struggles in the Middle East, Malm’s works include The Progress of This Storm and the Deutscher Prize–winning Fossil Capital. He is also the author of an upcoming book on COVID-19 entitled Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, to be published by Verso Books.
Dominic MealyCan you begin by explaining the relationship between the current COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change?
Andreas MalmFrom quite early on in the course of the pandemic, commentators began to draw comparisons between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis. However, I argue that such direct comparisons are flawed in the sense that the current pandemic constitutes a specific event, whereas global warming is a secular trend. Nevertheless, we miss the essence of the COVID-19 outbreak if we fail to recognize it for what it is, namely one extreme — but long expected — manifestation of another secular trend: the rise in the rate of infectious diseases jumping from wild animals to human populations. This is a trend that has increased over past decades and is projected to accelerate in the future.
The most important driving force behind the production of pandemics is clear in the scientific literature and it is deforestation — which is also the second biggest contributor to global climate change. The place in which you find the greatest biodiversity on Earth is in tropical forests, and this biodiversity includes pathogens. These pathogens, which circulate among nonhuman animals in wild habitats, do not generally pose a problem to humanity as long as humans stay away from them. However, the problem arises as the human economy makes deeper and deeper incursions into these habitats. The clearance of forests for logging, agriculture, mining, and the construction of roads creates new interfaces where humans come into contact with wildlife. Through these interfaces, animal pathogens are able to mutate and leap into human populations through a process called zoonotic spillover....
....MUCH MORE
Malm is also the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. If interested see yesterday's ""Should the Climate Movement Embrace Property Destruction?"".
....To repeat:
"―Eliminationism claims a moral purpose, holding that political opponents are ―a cancer on the body politic that must be excised—either by separation from the public at large, through censorship, or by outright extermination—in order to protect the purity of the nation."
The phrase is used in Holocaust and other genocide studies, as here re: the study of the Einsatzgruppen, the Ordnungspolizei "German Order Police" and their henchmen, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Trawniki Men in the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland; and in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian SSR.....
