Andreas Malm: Violent Past, Hot Present, Extreme Future, SOAS University of London

www.soas.ac.uk...
This Development Studies Seminar titled "Violent Past, Hot Present, Extreme Future: Episodes of Fossil Imperialism and Climate Change in Egypt, India and Nigeria" was given by Andreas Malm at SOAS University of London on 31 January 2017
You can find out more about it at goo.gl/rw9OBU
Global warming is lapping the shores of countries in the global South with a whole fleet of existential threats. But this is not the first time fossil fuel combustion has visited them. This talk will focus on three places where the British Empire used steamboats to subjugate distant populations and appropriate their resources: Egypt, India and Nigeria, all targets of nineteenth-century imperial expansion powered by coal. What does this tell us about the historical responsibility for climate change? Drawing on debates around climate justice and the Anthropocene, this talk will argue that the concept of 'climate debt' can be radicalised, that postcolonial strategies imitating the fossil fuel-based development of the imperial core need to be challenged, and that climate resistance in the global South should be rapidly sped up. A long arch of violence spans the longue durée of the fossil economy, from the first appearance of steam-power into a future of climate chaos that has to be avoided.
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016), which received the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2016. He has conducted fieldwork on climate change adaptation and mitigation in Egypt and Morocco, is currently making forays into ecocriticism and environmental philosophy, and is working on a sequel to Fossil Capital entitled Fossil Empire.

[@MrDavidBFoster]

Some three thousand and something years ago, some people tried to warn us that if we kept up our relentless pursuit of fame, fortune and glory, that the world would end in flood, famine, earthquake, disease, and ultimately fire. But few people took them seriously, and those who _did_ tended to have them silenced by one means or another. Then they took their words, dressed them in robes and called it a religion; the very same religion they've been using to justify their actions ever since! You think they don't have it coming? Think again! Yeah it sucks that they'll be saved for last, but that's just how wealth works. I've always maintained that the final legacy of mankind will be _a handful of the world's richest elite, orbiting above a burned-out husk of a planet in their private space station, and preparing to kill each other over the last TV dinner_. I'm still waiting for someone or something to give me cause to believe otherwise.

[@larsetom1]

See 1.01.:55, If you don't agree with what Malm is saying here, then you're just another Malthusian (who wrote what he did as a defense of capitalism, a way of distracting people from the real causes of the suffering of the many, the violence that is concomitant with the way capitalism produces its profits for the very few.)