Desdemona going dark

7 November 2024 (Desdemona Despair) – My work here is done.

After more than 13,000 posts warning of the end of the Phanerozoic eon and the imminent extinction of the human species, I’m calling it quits. The first Desdemona blog post was on 14 November 2008 and was titled, Rising CO2 accelerates coral bleaching: study. It was inspired by an experience in a Native American ceremony and the hope that maybe, if people could see the science behind global warming and other anthropogenic disasters, we could turn the tide of industrialized ecocide and save some of the natural world for future generations. But 16 years later, almost to the day, here we are.

One of the themes explored by Desdemona is the global rise of neo-fascism. The tacit thesis of this blog is that as abrupt climate change wrecks the planet, and millions of climate refugees from the tropics flood the Global North, human societies will resort to brutal, anti-immigrant politics, as vividly dramatized in the brilliant dystopian film, Children of Men. Personally, I’ve been warning about the U.S. drift toward authoritarianism for more than half of my life, since I watched the Oliver North / Iran-contra trial with horror in 1989. As my wife sometimes says, “It will end in madness.”

Now that fascism has firmly taken root in the U.S., the nation will abandon any pretense of dealing with abrupt climate change. Trump’s Project 2025 agenda plans for the elimination of multiple energy- and environment-related offices and rules. It calls for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the nation’s oceans, weather, climate, and fisheries science agency, to be “dismantled.” The plan will eliminate offices within the Energy Department that focus on renewable energy, climate technology, and energy technology research. The U.S. now aligns with other authoritarian powers, like Russia, in denying climate science. In the words of Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, “They’re coming in with sledgehammers and scalpels to try and dismantle any barriers to the fossil fuel industries.” With the U.S. abandoning its carbon reduction commitments, any hope of holding global warming to below 1.5°C or 2°C is lost.

It’s tempting to continue posting on Desdemona as the worst of the technogenic eco-cataclysm bears down on us. But now, I must focus on how to survive the fascist collapse of the U.S., and this means setting aside my hobby of doom blogging. In the future, I may add the occasional posts for doomy stories that are too juicy to let pass. But these posts are time-consuming, and with two months before the regime begins implementing the fascist policies of Project 2025, I can’t spend any more time documenting the doom.

One of the great doom blogs of the Before Times, The ApocaDocs, ceased publication on 12 November 2016, when Trump was elected the first time. It seems fitting that Desdemona goes dark in a similar way, eight years later.

Also, I recall with immense fondness Gail Zawacki, the late, great doom blogger, who once told me, “How many different ways can you say, ‘We’re fucked’?”

In her final essay, In Praise of Themis, Gail wrote: “I will no longer refer to myself as a doomer, but rather as a Themist – which, to me, means struggling for the capacity to endure the unbearable lightness of being, that great paradox of being human, to have the knowledge that we are hurtling towards the Endocene but can do nothing to slow the trajectory…to see our death looming and to realize it cannot be prevented…to face the soul-crushing tragedy of the horrendous truth that our fate is sealed – and like Democritus, still be able to laugh.”

To the loyal readers who have stuck with Desdemona these 16 years, I say thank you. In the words of the great journalist Edward R. Murrow, who was quoted frequently by Keith Olbermann during the terrible years of the George W. Bush presidency:

“Good night, and good luck.”