The new politics of fire: The climate crisis demands a different way of governing | The planet is burning, whether from fires like the one that ravaged Los Angeles or from the clashes stoked by the far right

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1. One of the key sections from the start of this piece:

   >The prospects of the entire planet going up in flames are at their highest. Global heating, well in excess of internationally agreed-upon limits, and continued reliance on massive incineration of matter for energy production; the warming not only of the atmosphere but also of the oceans; hybrid warfare, now involving AI, and the recently reignited nuclear arms race; inflammatory rhetoric immediately going viral thanks to the pervasiveness of information technologies are so many signs of a devastating fire swallowing up not (only) the world but the earth itself, with its atmosphere and ecosystems, habitable places and previously inaccessible fossil reserves. The forest fires raging everywhere, from LA in 2025 to Spain and Canada in the summer of 2024, are a case in point here.
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   >We are no longer sensing the transformative, positive effects of fire, be it the flames of technology or be it a revolutionary conflagration capable of instituting another economic and political mode of existence. In combination, the reignited arms race and the non-enforceable nature of international climate treatises amount to a scorching heat devoid of any light.
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   >The contemporary flames have a decidedly apocalyptic feel to them. This is the case, in part, because the ashes they produce are not fertile; they suffocate, rather than nourish, the very possibility of the future. The byproducts of mass-scale industrial activity and nuclear waste are just two examples of such death-bearing ashes. Devastating as they were, “scorched earth” warfare tactics still contained the promise of a new beginning in the future, bearing as they did a close resemblance to the myth of the phoenix, reborn from the smoldering remains of its previous life. Today’s “scorched world” no longer sustains this hope.
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   >The world comes into view as a whole precisely when it is ready to burn up all at once. And the technologies responsible for global heating as much as those that may result in a thermonuclear war are making this terrifying vision of the finite world sharper than the catastrophic history of the two wars in the twentieth century known as “world wars.” The end of globalization is heralded by ultra-nationalist far-right movements that nonetheless maintain clandestine ties among them and represent the old-new face of capital. Is it by sheer chance that this contrived end coincides with the technological potential to wreck the world as such in its planetary extent, rather than the separate worlds of particular civilizations or peoples?

   It’s good to be reminded here that the climate crisis is not just a physical one but a cultural and social one as well.

2. The planet is both socially and physically in fire. I wonder if its like the species’ version of inflammation..

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