Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024

WE APOLOGIZE for the tardiness and brevity of today's MCT, due to an extended power outage.

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’SPLAININ' THE VET'S OFFICE MOVE

Editor,

There have been a lot of emotions regarding the move of the Veterans Service Office from a small house to within the Public Health Building. We, Supervisors Haschak and McGourty, recognize that the move was conducted without appropriate communication between the County and the veterans and staff affected. In no way was disrespect intended. All involved have the utmost respect for our veterans and the service and sacrifice that they have given to our country.

The primary purpose of the Veterans’ Services Office is to help sign our local veterans up for benefits and programs that they qualify for, find service records and any help that may be required to assist both veterans and family members. This is a county program with match funding by the United States Department of Veteran Affairs. The program website can be accessed here: https://www.mendocinocounty.org/departments/social-services/veterans-services

The move was precipitated by the Board’s directive to staff to downsize the number of county buildings and reduce costs. The Veterans Services house on Observatory Ave. in Ukiah had a homey feel. Veterans and staff felt comfortable in that setting. Yet there were some issues such as parking, public safety and space.

Recently, the rent being paid for Air Quality’s present building increased dramatically. The decision by staff was to get out from under the high rents. There existed unutilized space in the Public Health building which was sufficient for the Veterans Services staff but not enough for Air Quality. On that basis, the decision was made to move Air Quality and its employees to the Observatory Ave. space and move Veterans’ Services to a wing of the Public Health building.

Supervisors learned about this from constituent outrage. Concerns have been raised about the move and we are trying to address these concerns as best we can. Some will say that we should just move the Veterans’ Services Office back to the house on Observatory. With the domino effect of the moves and considering that the new facility has some advantages, our perspective is that let’s make this new space the best it can be and that it be a space welcoming to veterans while fulfilling the needs of staff and veterans alike.

Supervisors and staff have been in communication since. Supervisor Haschak led a tour of veterans and staff of the new facilities. Veterans did not like the sterile feel of the reception area and office space. They had suggestions for “owning” the area.

Working with staff, we have come up with accommodations to make a more comfortable and welcoming Veterans’ space. The entry will have a Veterans sign to replace the Public Health sign. Dedicated Purple Heart and Veterans only parking spaces will be assigned. The doorway will have an automatic entry feature for wheelchairs. The glass enclosure for the receptionist desk will be removed. A couch and coffee machine will be installed in and a mural and/or artwork will adorn the waiting area. Doorways and privacy screens are being installed in the hallway. We will be asking veterans about what they want in the outdoor quad area to make it a social environment. The planter boxes that were at Observatory will be moved to the quad.

Again, we express our apologies for how this move was communicated to veterans but also feel that working together, we can make this a better place for our veterans and staff. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Sincerely,

Supervisors John Haschak & Glenn McGourty

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SUPERVISOR MULHEREN (facebook):

“I have always thought a Supervisor needs two or three terms to accomplish all of their goals, as I review what has happened in the last three years I’m so proud of the progress that Mendocino County has made but of course there is more work to do. As I complete questionnaires for local organizations and present my ideas and accomplishments to small groups I’m reminded that not only have I been a Supervisor for three years, I was also on the City Council for six years. I can’t believe I’ve spent ten years in local office. While that wasn’t necessarily my plan for life I am excited about the opportunity to continue. I’ll be sharing a little bit more about the work I’ve done on this page because it’s so easy to forget. I’ll also go back and review old questions to see if we’ve accomplished specific goals or if we have more work to do and what we can do to get there.”

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JIM SHIELDS RESPONDS:

Mulheren’s Retro-Progress?

I find Supervisor Mulheren’s self-congratulatory-high-fiving assessment of her “progress” serving on the Board interesting, to say the least. As you are probably aware, since late Spring of last year, I’ve repeatedly requested the Supes call in former officials responsible for fiscal matters (Treasurer-Tax Collector, Auditor-Controller, Assessor, CEO) and interview/question and, hopefully, learn from them how they did their jobs. This is critical information the BOS admits it is lacking. Since no one has explanations or answers to what caused the ongoing, untenable fiscal mess the county was/is in, you need to conduct an inquiry and start finding answers to all of the current unknowns prior to launching a substantially, momentous alteration to your organizational structure with this idea of a Department of Finance. By the way, if the Board does decide to hold an inquiry, it won’t be necessary for former officials to attend in-person. That’s the beauty of zoom meetings.”

Here’s a short list of former County finance-related officials who should be called into a public hearing to share their information and insights on how they did their jobs over the years:

Shari Schapmire, Treasurer-Tax Collector

Lloyd Weer, Auditor-Controller

Meredith Ford, Auditor-Controller

Dennis Huey, Auditor-Controller

Tim Knudsen, Treasurer-Tax Collector

Carmel Angelo, CEO

Jim Anderson, CAO

Anyway, after this topic was first raised, an agitated Mulheren advised her colleagues, “We should not take another elected official to task. That’s something for the Grand Jury!”

Fast forward a few months later, and we find Mulheren in mid-October joining with her colleagues in suspending “another elected official” from office. I believe that action qualifies — in spades — as taking “another elected official to task.”

What happened to her commandment of “That’s something for the Grand Jury!”

What caused her apparent set-in-stone dicta to be violated so quickly?

—Jim Shields

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DISPUTE OVER RESPONSIBILITY FOR CREEKSIDE CABINS SINKHOLE CONTINUES A YEAR AFTER FRANTIC EVACUATION

Not quite a year after the chaotic evacuation of Creekside Cabins following the appearance of a sinkhole between the community and Highway 101, Mendocino County and the property owner are in a dispute over abatement costs, and who is responsible for allowing the sinkhole to develop. The parties presented arguments at an administrative hearing before Anthony Farrington, a Lake County attorney serving as the hearing officer, on December 13. …

https://mendofever.com/2024/01/15/dispute-over-responsibility-for-creekside-cabins-sinkhole-continues-a-year-after-frantic-evacuation/

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ED NOTES

LIVING IN THE LAND with no generally transmitted history, where every day the world begins anew — “Say, wasn’t that the year the Love Boat re-runs began?” — we often see references to historical events that make no sense in the context in which they appear.

IN AN obituary for a Hopland woman named Mary Rita (Slavin) Brennan, this paragraph appeared: “Mrs. Brennan taught first grade at St. Anthony’s in Washington, D.C., and was involved in social work for Catholic charities. Along with General John J. ‘Blackjack’ Pershing, she was involved in getting children out of Lafayette Park for smallpox vaccinations and to attend school. She also was the only woman allowed into Preston Prison for a child adoption case.”

MRS. BRENNAN graduated from Trinity College in D.C. in 1932, right about the time General MacArthur, Patton and Ike led a cavalry charge on the World War One vets camped out near the White House where they’d come in the teeth of the Great Depression to cash in the bonds they’d been issued to get them to sign up to fight The Great War. The Bonus Marchers and their families, some 20,000 people in all, needed the money NOW. The government told them to go home and wait for the bonds to mature. When the Bonus Marchers refused to leave, MacArthur rooted them out as if they were an occupying army. But I don’t think ol’ Blackjack, slayer of Apaches, Moros and Huns, was involved in that one, and I doubt Mrs. Brennan was on horseback swinging a sword at defenseless women and children, but good things to her in the next life for seeing to it that the children of the Bonus Marchers got to school while MacArthur rode down their parents in the streets.

SO WHY BRING it up? Because local obits frequently include cryptic allusions to important historical events significant in the life of the deceased who was either a witness or a participant without getting the facts straight. One should be able to expect an accurate and well-written final notice, but on the Northcoast not only do the corporate papers charge grieving families exorbitant fees for obituaries, those same papers carelessly assemble the obits.

ERRONEOUS and badly written obits insult the memory of the departed, and the mercenary stupidity of the papers they appear in add to the grief of those left behind. I'm writing my own obit, not only because my many journalo-enemies will certainly take their revenge when I'm safely dead, but because I want to make sure the basic facts are accurately reported, and because I have zero faith they will be.

MARSHALL FRADY’S MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.: A Life, Penguin edition. (By far the best bio of King.)

ANOTHER REASON for restoring the institution of dueling in America: People might not be so casually insulting if they risked mortal combat.

ON AN AVERAGE of once a month, versions of the following encounter happen to me. So, I’m minding my own business in the Mendocino Book Company the other day when a smiley-face walks up to me. Local libs always smile when they serve up the insults. They seem to think if they smile while they’re being nasty they’re still nice people. They also may think it keeps them from getting smacked in the mouth which, given that the warm, wonderful human beings always do their thing where there are witnesses, it probably really does safeguard them.

“Still putting out your rag?” he asks, wanting me to know that a high-minded person like him of course doesn’t read it but he's also unable to keep himself from commenting on my weekly work product because, as a person wholly convinced of his own righteousness, when he does read the paper it annoys him no end because it’s often critical of him, and his smarm-dipped friends. I’d rather spend a month in an iso-cell than five minutes with any of them. But here he is, in my face, as the young people say,

“Yes,” I say, “I continue to publish the Anderson Valley Advertiser. I hope that fact doesn’t distress you too severely.”

“You know,” Mr. Lib says, his smile getting wider, “when I’m reading your paper I never know if I’m reading journalism or satire.”

“There’s night school for adults with reading disabilities,” I reply.

He doesn’t stop smiling.

“But how do your readers tell the difference?” he asks me, getting in what he undoubtedly thinks is a drop-fall zinger.

“Maybe they don’t, maybe they buy the paper for the pictures.”

“But you don’t have many pictures in your paper!” he exclaims.

I knew the guy was stupid, but I didn’t think he was this stupid.

“Your readers,” he says. “Do they know the difference between truth and fiction?”

“Beats me. I’ve never done a poll, and mandatory reading comprehension tests would be misunderstood, wouldn't they? I try not to condescend to the paper’s readers, though. I assume, perhaps erroneously, I’m publishing a weekly paper for adults.”

And then, just as I’m trying to decide whether or not to hook him one in his uncomprehending, passive-aggressive puss and take my chances with the DA, he startles me by saying like he means it, “Well, nice seeing you again, Bruce,” and he walks on out the door.

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OPUS CONCERT THIS SUNDAY!

Experience the captivating beauty of tango music like never before with Kacey Link, a pianist and scholar who brings her extensive knowledge and passion to her every performance. With a program featuring classic and contemporary tango pieces, Link's virtuosic playing will take you on a journey to the heart of Buenos Aires, the birthplace of the tango. Her unique perspective and authentic interpretation of the music will leave you feeling inspired and moved.

Sunday January 21st, 3 PM at Preston Hall, Mendocino. Tickets online at symphonyoftheredwoods.org, in person at Out of this World in Mendocino, and Harvest Market in Fort Bragg.

Tea, coffee and cookies available when the doors open at 2:30 PM and at intermission.

More information at symphonyoftheredwoods.org

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, January 15, 2024

LIZBETH BARRALES-GONZALEZ, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

TRAVIS CARROLL, Upper Lake/Ukiah. Controlled substance sales.

VANESSA ELIZABETH, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

THOMAS GUYETTE, Lakeport/Ukiah. Vehicle theft with priors.

CASEY IRELAND, Willits. Paraphernalia, probation revocation.

JORDAN LYONS, Stockton/Ukiah. Grand theft, unspecified misdemeanor.

RAMON MACIEL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

MARCO MARTINEZ-RODRIGUEZ, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ANGEL MILLER, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, parole violation.

MICAEL OLVERA-CAMPOS, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, parole violation.

CYNTHIA PHILLIBER, Ukiah. Vandalism, probation violation.

ERICK RUIZ-PABLO, Rohnert Park/Ukiah. Taking vehicle without owner’s consent, stolen property.

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DRIVE, CRAIG SAID

Free at Last.

Good Morning, America. Cloudy and mild at Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center in the Mendocino county seat. The Ukiah Public Library will reopen on Wednesday, and everything else is closed or semi-closed, except all of the gasoline stations which are always ready to serve truckers and those constantly driving all over the region in search of that which will end their suffering and set them free. If you are driving, the Express Mart at South State Street and Observatory Way is run by a wonderful family from Nepal. Meanwhile, gotta answer several responses to my sending out Sri Nisargadatta’s quotation stating that he is not a person, but of course is the Immortal Self, or the Radiant Atman, or Brahman, based on his own spiritual inquiry and experience. For everyone else, just tell your mind to shut and keep silently chanting: “I am not the body, not the mind, Immortal Self I am!” You too will be “free at last, free at last”, and you may “thank God almighty” that you are “free at last”. ~OM Shanthi~

Craig Louis Stehr

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COSTCO FOOD COURT DUMPS CHURROS FOR A NEW DESSERT

by Katie Dowd

Costco’s food court choices are so limited that any change is a big deal for fans. Recently, rumors began swirling that one of its few dessert options was headed for the fast food graveyard. The change is indeed happening nationwide, as the churro, which went for about $1.50, is being replaced with a giant chocolate chip cookie for $2.49.

I went in search of this food court treat at our local Bay Area Costcos. Sure enough, the Concord location already dumped the churro in favor of this 750-calorie behemoth. That’s more calories — and more cash — than a slice of pizza. Astonished and a little wary, I put in my order at the kiosk. When the worker took my receipt and said, “Another cookie,” I detected a hint of weary resignation. It seemed I was not the only person testing out the new arrival.

The cookie was as heavy as a large smartphone, as thick as a deck of playing cards and immediately soaked greasy streaks through its parchment paper bag. The sign promised the cookie was “all butter,” and it smelled like it — warm, fresh-out-of-the oven brown sugary goodness.

If you prefer chewy chocolate chip cookies to the crispy Chips Ahoy style, you’ll probably enjoy this. It tastes exactly as billed. There are no off-putting artificial flavors, and the bitter and semisweet chips are pleasantly melty. The edges were a bit too hard for my liking — kind of like they’d been under a heat lamp for too long — but the bulk of the cookie was dense and soft. It was, however, so sweet I could feel it compromising my molars. It tastes every bit of its 750 calories.

Unless you’re splitting the cookie with the rest of your party, you’ll likely have leftovers. I put mine in an airtight container. The next day, the cookie had hardened into a hockey puck, but about 15 seconds in the microwave had it nice and melty once again.

Is it an adequate substitute for the churro? Well, not really. But that’s not the cookie’s fault. If you had your heart set on a churro, this isn’t one. The reverse is true, too. If you really wanted a chocolate chip cookie and all they had was a churro, that wouldn’t exactly scratch your itch. They’re just different flavors and textures.

Would I get the cookie again? Probably not, to be honest. It was pleasant but unremarkable, and paired with an oily slice of Costco pizza, that seems like a recipe for pain. In the end, these desserts are merely sad replacements for Costco’s greatest-ever sweet treat: the hand-dipped ice cream bar. And until the day that returns, you’re better off picking up a pizza slice and an ice cream sundae to accompany your 36 rolls of Kirkland toilet paper back home.

(SFgate.com)

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THE RUSSIAN'S GLASS BEACH:

During Soviet times, Ussuri Bay near Vladivostok was used as a dumping ground for discarded beer, wine, and vodka bottles, as well as porcelain. Over time, the North Pacific's powerful waves washed the shattered glass and porcelain into millions of smooth, colorful "pebbles." Today, this once-barren and polluted area has become a beloved tourist attraction, known as Glass Beach. Visitors from around the world pay to experience its extraordinary beauty.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Can anyone on this site provide data supporting the claims of excess deaths, blood clots, and spontaneous abortions? I’m not denying that it has happened but it certainly doesn’t seem to have been significant enough to get the world’s attention. Show me the money….why aren’t the ambulance chasers all over this. They should be suing the pharmaceutical companies for every penny they have. Yeah, I know about the waiver but that doesn’t stop lawyers from trying to get a settlement.

The scary part is the real danger of low birth rates. That is happening in real time and we will start seeing the effect in a short time….especially if we don’t go back to a merit-based system.

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MARTIN LUTHER KING DIDN’T JUST DREAM. HE ORGANIZED!

by Jim Hightower

It’s time once again for America’s annual sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” in celebration of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. As even school children know, he famously had a dream. His dream was that over the long arc of history, America will someday achieve racial harmony — if Black people will stop being pushy about racial injustice.

Oh, wait — that’s the right-wing’s current whitewashed version of King’s dream, scrubbing out his condemnation of brutally-racist White leaders and institutions (which still repress Black progress and foment racial hatred). And far from meekly waiting on “the arc of history,” King rallied people to take immediate action, calling it “the fierce urgency of now.

He sought “a grand alliance of Negro and White [to] eradicate social evils [that] oppress both White and Negro.

At the time of his assassination, he was actively forging that populist coalition to battle plutocratic wealth.

Indeed, King knew the history he sought to revive. The post-Civil War Populist Movement, he said, “began awakening the poor White masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that [both] were being fleeced by [Southern aristocrat interests].

That movement, he noted, intended to write a Black-White voting block “to build a great society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away.…”

But the unifying, democratic promise of Populism, King rightly explained, so terrified the aristocracy of wealth that its leaders made it “a crime for Negroes and Whites to come together as equals at any level.

Thus moneyed elites effectively killed the people’s Populist party in the 1890s — but not the people’s Populist spirit.

So rather than merely celebrating a birthday, let’s recommit to King’s real dream of a multi-racial, democratic Populism.

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WYATT EARP (March 19, 1848 - January 13, 1929)

Photographed by his wife Josephine Earp.

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CHEERS TO YOU, WEFers of Davos

by James Kunstler

“I have decided to unilaterally rebrand Disease X! It is now Disease DIC! Debt Implosion Cover-up” — Edward Dowd

The nabobs and panjandrums of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meet up at Davos, Switzerland, the next several days to lay plans for their latest assault on humanity. This year’s theme is “Rebuilding Trust.” Did you just blow your coffee through your nose? The outfit that coordinated the world-wide Covid-19 response (that perhaps birthed the very concept of Covid-19 itself), and especially pushed mRNA vaccines on the credulous global public — this gang of super-wealthy, super-connected, super-important celebrity punks, poohbahs, pricks, and predators wants a cuddle.

This Davos crowd — moiling around the opening soirée amid drool-worthy trays of crab puffs, asparagus gougères, lobster crostini, wagyu morsels, Prosciutto-Fig bites, chickpea panisse, stuffed castelvetrano olives, wild boar and quinoa dolmas, fava bean puree toasts, pigeon pea fritters, and Nürnberger rostbratwurst pigs-in-a-blanket, all washed down by bottomless flutes of Roederer Cristal Millésime Brut— could not stop chattering about the debut of the latest viral confection, “Disease X,” said to be twenty times deadlier than Covid-19.

Imagine the opportunities this one will provide for the WEF’s Davos prom date, the World Health Organization (WHO). And just in time to create enough hysteria for the May vote on the new WHO treaty binding the world’s governments to its pandemic diktats. In that new disposition of things, whatever Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says, goes! Lockdowns. Quarantine camps. Mandatory (improved) safe-and-effective vaccines. Nevermind what the actual citizens of Countries A, B, or C might otherwise decide for themselves under the obsolete system of national sovereignty. Follow the science, useless eaters of the world! (And please quit carping about it!)

Any resemblance of “Disease X” to the remaining global free speech platform (Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter), is just another bothersome conspiracy theory. Of course, theories imply the discovery of proofs, and it so happens that the unelected European Commission, under its Digital Services Act (passed in Nov., 2022), has already threatened Mr. Musk’s X to remove so-called hate speech, illegal content, and disinformation or face a fine amounting to 6-percent of its annual global revenue. Hate speech and disinfo are whatever the EU says it is, including information that is true but disagreeable to the agenda of all supranational orgs such as the EU, the WEF, and the WHO. Reminds us of something Pete Hogwallop once said to Ulysses E, McGill.

Last time around, those mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna proved to be super-effective at one thing: disordering all the cells and organs in the human body so as to produce a severe auto-immune reaction resulting in death and disability. The artificial spike protein replication induced by the vaxxes has a special yen for heart tissue, the linings of blood vessels, and the reproductive organs — thus, all those world-class soccer players dropping dead in mid-kick, all the massive clots the size of shipworms discovered by the morticians, and all the spontaneously aborted babies over the past three years.

By the way, having seen all this, the CDC Director, Mandy Cohen, is still pushing “updated” mRNA shots, down to six-month-old babies. No, I’m not making this up. Read the CDC’s latest recommendations, released five days ago.

It happens that Belgian virologist Geert Vanden Bossche warned a month ago that — per his earlier warnings about the dangers of vaccinating into the teeth of a pandemic — the world can expect a soon-to-come crisis of 30-to-40 percent mortality in highly vaccinated countries with the emergence of a new Covid variant that won’t be stopped by vaxx-damaged immune systems. Let that sink in. It means not just a bone-chilling, unprecedented mega-wave of deaths, but the likely dysfunction of every complex system that advanced nations depend on for normal operation as the people who know how to run them succumb. That is, farewell to normal modern life as we have known it. Geert’s just sayin’.

It’s even possible that some of the things that cease operation will include the WEF, the WHO, the EU, and the CDC, considering their presumably multi-vaxxed and boosted members. Enjoy the scrumptious canapés while you. can, ladies and gentlemen of Davos. We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

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PALESTINIAN SELF-DETERMINATION, TRUCE

Dear Editor,

As October 7, 2023 happened, no one could believe the number of Israeli civilians killed, raped, and taken by Hamas terrorists to Gaza. Because he knew that an attack could happen, Beebe Nitanaho suddenly felt anger and guilt. Because he was head of state and because he’d been through such crises before, he knew he had a green light to retaliate brutally.

Peace loving Jews everywhere, including many in the U.S., had no idea the Israeli military would become such a killing machine. Not since the WWII Allied bombing in Bresden, or the Hiroshima bombing would civilians die in such numbers. Barely three months later, over 23,000 now lie dead, over 60,000 have been injured, maimed so badly in many cases they would be better off dead. Using 2,000 lb. bombs Israel has been bombing indiscriminately.

While our government blocks a cease fire, as Israel’s ally Pres. Biden backs their right to self-defense, while children starve. Doesn’t Palestine have an equal right to self-determination? There should be an immediate truce to allow food, water, medicine, nurses and doctors into Gaza.

Frank H. Baumgardner, III

Santa Rosa

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HOW THIS CLIMATE ACTIVIST JUSTIFIES POLITICAL VIOLENCE

by David Marchese

With the 2021 publication of his unsettling book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Andreas Malm established himself as a leading thinker of climate radicalism.

The provocatively titled manifesto, which, to be clear, does not actually provide instructions for destroying anything, functioned both as a question — why has climate activism remained so steadfastly peaceful in the face of minimal results? — and as a call for the escalation of protest tactics like sabotage. The book found an audience far beyond that of texts typically published by relatively obscure Marxist-influenced Swedish academics, earning thoughtful coverage in The New Yorker, The Economist, The Nation, The New Republic and a host of other decidedly nonradical publications, including this one. (In another sign of the book’s presumed popular appeal, it was even adapted into a well-reviewed movie thriller.) Malm’s follow-up, “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown,” written with Wim Carton and scheduled to be published this year, examines the all-consuming pursuit of fossil-fuel profits and what the authors identify as the highly dubious and hugely dangerous new justifications for that pursuit. But, says Malm, who is 46, “the hope is that humanity is not going to let everything go down the drain without putting up a fight.”

(Just to be explicit about this: Malm does not endorse or advocate any political violence that targets people. His aim is violence against property.)

It’s hard for me to think of a realm outside of climate where mainstream publications would be engaging with someone, like you, who advocates political violence. Why are people open to this conversation?

If you know something about the climate crisis, this means that you are aware of the desperation that people feel. It is quite likely that you feel it yourself. With this desperation comes an openness to the idea that what we’ve done so far isn’t enough. But the logic of the situation fundamentally drives this conversation: All attempts to rein in this problem have failed miserably. Which means that, virtually by definition, we have to try something more than we’ve tried.

How confident are you that when you open the door to political violence, it stays at the level of property and not people? You’ve written about the need to be careful, but the emotions that come with violence are not careful emotions.

Political history is replete with movements that have conducted sabotage without taking the next step. But the risk is there. One driver of that risk is that the climate crisis itself is exacerbating all the time. It’s hard-wired to get worse. So people might well get more desperate. Now, in the current situation, in every instance that I know of, climate movements that experiment with sabotage steer clear of deliberately targeting people. We might smash things, which people are doing here and there, but no one is seriously considering that you should get a gun and shoot people. Everyone knows that would be completely disastrous. The point that’s important to make is that the reason that people contemplate escalation is that there are no risk-free options left.

(To cite one example, last March in western France, thousands of people arrived at a site of a “megabasin” water reservoir for agricultural use and sabotaged a pump. The action was against what the protesters believe is water hoarding. Malm has been particularly influential in France, where the authorities have questioned arrested activists about their feelings on his work.)

I know you’re saying historically this is not the case, but it’s hard to think that deaths don’t become inevitable if there is more sabotage.

Sure, if you have a thousand pipeline explosions per year, if it takes on that extreme scale. But we are some distance from that, unfortunately.

Don’t say “unfortunately.”

Well, I want sabotage to happen on a much larger scale than it does now. I can’t guarantee that it won’t come with accidents. But what do I know? I haven’t personally blown up a pipeline, and I can’t foretell the future.

The prospect of even accidental violence against people —

But the thing we need to keep in mind is that existing pipelines, new pipelines, new infrastructure for extracting fossil fuels are not potentially, possibly — they are killing people as we speak. The more saturated the atmosphere is with CO2, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere causes more destruction and death. In Libya in September, in the city of Derna, you had thousands of people killed in floods in one night. Scientists could conclude that global warming made these floods 50 times as likely as if there hadn’t been such warming.

We need to start seeing these people as victims of the violence of the climate crisis. In the light of this, the idea of attacking infrastructure and closing down new pipelines is a disarmament. It’s about taking down a machine that actually kills people.

(To reach this conclusion, scientists working with the World Weather Attribution research group employed computer simulations to compare weather events today, including the Syrian flooding, with the weather that was most likely to have occurred if the climate had not already warmed, as it has, by 1.2 degrees Celsius above the average preindustrial temperature.)

I’m curious: How do you communicate with your kids about climate?

(I knew Malm had children because in setting up our discussions, he explained that we had to talk in the evening on Swedish time, after he had put his kids to bed.)

I’m not sure that I’ve had any deliberate plan, but it has been inevitable, with my 9-year-old at least, that we’ve had conversations.

Do you anticipate having the conversation where you explain the radical nature of your ideas?

Well, yeah. Both of them have watched the film, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”

(The film, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, uses Malm’s book as a launching pad for a story about young radicals who plan to blow up a pipeline in Texas. From The Times’s review: “A truly radical film wouldn’t go out of its way to concoct sympathetic motives, or to keep its plotting so clean.”)

Your 4-year-old?

Yes. There were a couple of scenes that stayed with them, particularly when people were wounded. They found this fascinating. They know that their father is a little politically crazy, if I can put it that way.

Generally we teach kids that violence or breaking people’s things is bad. Do you feel you can honestly give your kids the same message?

I hope that I communicate through my parenting that generally you shouldn’t break things. But I hope that they get the impression that I consider there to be exceptions to this rule. My 4-year-old, for instance, when we were biking around Malmo, where we live, he would be on the lookout for S.U.V.s. He knows these are the bad cars. I think they have an awareness of the tactic of deflating S.U.V. tires.

(Malm teaches at Lund University, near Malmo, where he’s an associate professor of human geography. Malm was among a group of activists who used this protest tactic in Stockholm in 2007. Deflating S.U.V. tires in protest has not been uncommon in Europe. In 2022, the tires of roughly 900 S.U.V.s were deflated in a single night of coordinated protest, according to the protesters. For 2022, the Saudi state-controlled Aramco reported a record profit of $161.1 billion; Exxon reported a record profit of $56 billion; BP reported a record profit of nearly $28 billion. (Full 2023 profits have not been reported yet.)

Is there not a risk that smashing things would cause a backlash that would actually impede progress on climate?

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that there is progress happening and that we might ruin it by escalating. In 2022, we had the largest windfall of profits in the fossil-fuel industry ever. These profits are reinvested into expanded production of fossil fuels. The progress that people talk about is often cast in terms of investment in renewables and expansion in the capacity of solar and wind power around the world. However, that is not a transition. That is an addition of one kind of energy on top of another. It doesn’t matter how many solar panels we build if we also keep building more coal power plants, more oil pipelines, and on that crucial metric there simply is no progress. I struggle to see how anyone could interpret the trends as pointing in the right direction. Now, on the question of what kind of reaction would we get from society if we as a climate movement radicalized: There might be more repression of the movement. There might be more aggressive defense of fossil-fuel interests. We also see signs that radical forms of climate protest alienate popular audiences. But the kind of tactic that mostly pisses people off, and I’m talking about the European context, is random targeting of commuters by means of road blockades. Sabotage of particular installations for fossil-fuel extraction can gain more support from people because these actions make sense. The target is obviously the source of the problem, and it doesn’t necessarily hurt ordinary people in their daily lives. We have to be careful about not doing things that alienate the target audience, which is ordinary working people.

Don’t you think, with companies as wealthy as the oil giants, if activists smash their stuff, they’ll just fix it and get back to business?

Here’s a big problem that we deal with quite extensively in the “Overshoot” book: stranded assets. ExxonMobil and Aramco and these giants exude this worry that a transition would destroy their capital and that this shift could happen quickly. So in this context, the rationale of sabotage is to bring home the message to these companies: Yes, your assets are at risk of destruction. When something happens that makes the threat of stranded assets credible, investors will suddenly realize, there’s a real risk that if I invest a lot of money, I might lose everything.

Explain the term “overshoot.”

The simplest definition of “overshoot” is that you shoot past the limits that you have set for global warming. So you go over 1.5 or 2 degrees. But the term has come to mean something more in climate science and policy discourse, which is that you can go over and then go back down. So you shoot past 1.5 or 2, but then you return to 1.5 or 2, primarily by means of carbon-dioxide removal. I think this is extremely implausible. But the idea is that you can exceed a temperature limit but respect it at a later point by rolling out technologies for taking it down.

And your argument is that overshoot just provides a cover for business as usual?

Yes. What’s happening now is that you see ExxonMobil or Occidental or ADNOC9, The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company — these companies are at the forefront of expanding DAC10, Direct air capture, a technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air capacity. What Al Jaber is talking about all the time is that the problem isn’t fossil fuels; the problem is emissions. So we can continue to have fossil fuels; we’re just going to take down the CO2 that we emit by DAC. It isn’t a reality. It’s like an ideological promise that we’re going to be able to clean up the mess while continuing to create the same mess.

(Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the chief executive of ADNOC, who somewhat counterintuitively was president of the recent COP28 climate conference. Where, it must be said, more than 200 countries agreed to a pact that calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” Al Jaber was criticized for saying, shortly before COP28, that “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5.”)

A few minutes ago, you said you’ve never blown up a pipeline. If that’s what you think is necessary, why haven’t you?

I have engaged in as much militant climate activism as I have had access to in my activist communities and contexts. I’ve done things that I can’t tell you or that I wouldn’t tell others publicly. I live my life in Malmo, pretty isolated from activist communities. Let’s put it this way: If I were part of a group where something like blowing up a pipeline was perceived as a tactic that could be useful for our struggle, then I would gladly participate. But this is not where I am in my life.

I don’t want to encourage you, but if people did only the activism that was congruent with where they were at in their life, hardly anybody who lives a comfortable life would do anything.

Like I said, I’ve participated in things that I can’t tell you about because they’ve been illegal and they’ve been militant. I’ve done it recently. But I can do that only as part of a collective of people who do something that they have decided on together. We shouldn’t think of activism as something that is invented out of thin air, deduced from abstract principles, and then you just shoot off and do something crazy. I can’t tell you what things I have done, but the things that I do and that any other climate activist should be doing cannot be an individual project.

Greta Thunberg went by herself and sat in front of a building instead of going to school.

(In 2018, rather than go to school, Greta Thunberg, then 15, sat alone in front of the Swedish Parliament with a sign announcing that she was on a school strike for the climate. The act is widely credited for kicking off a global wave of peaceful climate activism.)

Sure, sure, sure, and she became the person she became thanks to the millions who joined her. Maybe I should do something similar.

In “Overshoot,” you write this about the very wealthy: “There is no escaping the conclusion that the worst mass killers in this rapidly warming world are the billionaires, merely by dint of their lifestyles.” That doesn’t feel like a bathetic overstatement when we live in a world of terrorist violence and Putin turning Ukraine into a charnel house? Why is that a useful way of framing the problem?

Precisely for the reason I tried to outline previously, which is that spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at an excessive scale — and when it comes to luxury emissions, it is completely excessive — is an act that leads to the death of people.

But by that logic, unless we live a carbon-neutral lifestyle, we should all be looking in the mirror and saying, I am a killer.

I don’t live a zero-carbon lifestyle. No one who lives in a capitalist society can do so. But the people on top, they are the ones who have power when it comes to investment. Are they going to invest the money in fossil fuels or in renewables? The overwhelming decision they make is to invest it in fossil fuels. They belong to a class that shapes the structure, and in their own private consumption habits, they engage in completely extravagant acts of combustion of fossil fuels.

(According to a 2023 report by Oxfam, The Guardian and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 1 percent of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest two-thirds. The report drew on data from 2019.)

On the level of private morals: Do I practice what I preach? I try to avoid flying. I don’t have a car. I should be vegan, but I’m just a vegetarian. I’m not claiming to be any climate angel in my private consumption, and that’s problematic. But I don’t think that is the issue — that each of us in the middle strata or working class in advanced capitalist countries, through our private consumption choices, decide what’s going to happen with this society. This is not how it works.

We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.

Of course we can. Why not?

That is moral hypocrisy.

I disagree.

Why?

The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using.

But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?

Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — it doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected.

Could you give me a reason to live?

(I just blurted this out. I don’t even think Malm’s pessimism is wrong, but I find it suffocating. People need hope.)

What do you mean?

Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project.

I’m not an optimist about the human project.

So give me a reason to live.

Well, here’s where we enter the virgin territories of metaphysics.

Those are my favorite territories.

Wonderful.

I’m not joking.

Yeah, I’m not sure that I have the qualifications to give people advice about reasons to live. My daily affective state is one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in this world — not only at the level of climate. What has been going on in the Middle East just adds to this feeling of destructive forces completely out of control. The situation in the world, as far as I can tell, is incredibly bleak. So how do we live with what we know about the climate crisis? Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you are overwhelmingly strong. This often requires some kind of religious conviction, because sometimes it seems irrational.

I think all you need to do is look at your children.

Yes, but I have to admit to some kind of cognitive dissonance, because, rationally, when you think about children and their future, you have to be dismal. Children are fundamentally a source of joy, and psychologically you want to keep them that way. I try to keep my children in the category of the nonapocalyptic. I’m quite happy to go and swim with my son and be in that moment and not think, Ah, 30 years from now he’s going to lie dead on some inundated beach. You know what I mean?

Which of your arguments are you most unsure of?

I cannot claim to have a good explanation for what is essentially a mystery, namely that humanity is allowing the climate catastrophe to spiral on. One of my personal intellectual journeys in recent years has been psychoanalysis. Once you start looking into the psychic dimensions of a problem like the climate crisis, you have to open yourself to the fundamental difficulty in understanding what’s happening.

Is it possible for you to summarize your psychoanalytic understanding of the climate crisis?

Not simply, because it’s so complex. On the far right, you see this aggressive defense of cars and fossil fuels that verges on a desire for destruction, which of course is part of Freud’s latent theory of the two categories of drives: eros and thanatos.

(In Freud’s writings, he argued that individuals wrestle with the desire to live, eros, and the desire to die, widely known as thanatos.)

Another fundamental category in the psychic dimension of the climate crisis is denial. Denial is as central to the development of the climate crisis as the greenhouse effect.

What about you, psychoanalytically speaking?

I have my weekly therapy on Thursday.

But what’s your deal?

You mean in my private life?

Yeah. On a deeper level, the point for the psychoanalysis is that you go back to your childhood and try to process your relation to your parents and how they have constituted you. Do you really want me to go there?

Yes. I have to try to figure out how this ties in with my climate activism. I guess this is some sort of a superego part of it: a strong sense of duty or obligation; that I have to try to do what I can to intervene in this situation. That’s a very strong affective mechanism. For instance, I constantly give up on an intellectual project that would be far more satisfying, a nerdy historical project, because I feel that I cannot with good conscience do this when the world is on fire.

(That project is about what Malm calls a “people’s histories of wilderness,” with a focus on how some have withdrawn “into the wild to get away from oppression and potentially fight back.”)

But I’m asking what caused your impulses.

Now we’re into the deep psychoanalytic stuff. I had a vicious Oedipal conflict with my father. One way that this came to express itself was that in the preteen years, I clashed with my father — even more violently during my teenage years. My way to defend myself against what I perceived as his tyranny was to become as proficient as he was in arguing and beat him in his own game by rhetorically defeating him. I think I did. I think he accepted that I’m his superior when it comes to writing and arguing. Psychoanalytically, of course, the things that I’ve continued to do can be understood as an extension of my formative rebellion against my authoritarian father in a classically Oedipal setting, if you see what I mean.

(Malm also wanted to point out the following: “My father and I have generally been on good terms and have become quite close in our worldview — with remaining differences — over the past decade or two.”)

I asked why you aren’t blowing up pipelines, and you gave this answer about how action has to happen in the context of a community and “Oh, but I have done very serious stuff” — there’s something fishy. You have actually engaged in property destruction? Or are you just scared of somebody calling you a hypocrite?

There are things that I have done when it comes to militant activism recently that I, as a matter of principle and political expediency, do not reveal. Part of the whole point of it is to not reveal it. Sure, someone could accuse me of being a hypocrite because I don’t offer evidence that I have done anything militant. But those close to me know. That’s good enough for me.

I also said, “Give me a reason to live.”

I will always remember this. No one ever asked me this before.

And I said that one of the reasons to keep going is kids. But you said their future is rationally going to be terrible. If you think your children’s future is going to be terrible, why keep going?

One of the arguments in this “Overshoot” book is that the technical possibilities are all there. It’s a matter of the political trends. This feeling that my kids will face a terrible future isn’t based on the idea that it’s impossible to save us by technical means. It’s just, to quote Walter Benjamin, the enemy has never ceased to be victorious — and it’s more victorious than ever. That’s how it feels.

(This is a paraphrase of a line from the visionary German-Jewish cultural critic’s 1940 essay “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin died from suicide that same year.)

(New York Times)