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In the chaos of changing climates, the racialized extinction imperatives of the state of emergency become even more literally, and literarily, evident. The disparities attending the state of emergency are frequently implied in the literary mode of apocalypse as it habitually links to crisis, catastrophe, and environmental disaster. From the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning “something revealed or uncovered,” the apocalyptic mode of storytelling is often associated with a Judeo- Christian tradition that narrates revelation and judgment day, the promise of the end of the world and a new beginning for a particular people. This genealogy of apocalypse tellingly traces the same colonial and capitalist epistemologies associated with the anthropocentric Western literary tradition that Amitav Ghosh recently credited with the lead role in “our” tragic failure in the face of global climate chaos.4 Though Ghosh diagnoses this as a universal epistemological deficit he deems the Great Derangement, the insufficiency is more precisely placed within the story of catastrophe that is, according to René Girard, a formula bound to the martial logics of Western politics.5 In truth, while the apocalypse can refer to an immense variety of storytelling traditions, in the one specific to Western literature, apocalypse remains exceptionally consistent with the racialized realities of the state of emergency. Fictional appeals to the apocalypse that rely on a state- of- emergency logic are wedded to the exceptionalism of the white settler state. The state of emergency is more often than not the primary political cover for the unequal distribution of resources, the disproportionate deployment of militarized police in fights over fossil fuel extraction, and the uneven consequences of armed occupation. The state of emergency extends, and makes more acute, the political stakes of a literary tradition often only understood to emerge with the same colonial history. As the primary descriptive template for both fictional and factual accounts of accelerating climate chaos, as well as the increasing visibility of white nationalism, the emergency event perniciously endures. The seeming ubiquity of emergency appeals suggests that what Toni Morrison deemed American literature’s “literary whiteness”— where whiteness is consistently, invisibly, implied— applies to spaces beyond the figurative —the racialized realities of the state of emergency lurk in the literary mode of the apocalypse.6 When fixated on the emergency, apocalyptic appeals entrench Western political structures, limiting our landscapes to the narrow slats of settler sovereignty continuously whitewashed in the economies of racial capitalism. Much about the Malheur occupation exemplifies the ways Western apocalyptic appeals erase, embolden, and ultimately acquit the white violences of settler colonial capitalism. The occupation maintained some its most intimate affiliations with the “apocalyptic manhood” of the Far Right, continuing a history of government- militia clashes that stretch from the “apocalypse- minded white separatist” Randall Weaver (of the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident) forward to LaVoy Finicum, CCF spokesman of the Malheur takeover and author of the postapocalyptic novel Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom. 7 Finicum’s title substitutes “suffering” for “soil,” thinly disguising its eugenicist dog whistle in part of the plausible deniability created in “the speculative fiction of the paramilitary right.”8 The novel narrates the “standoff at the Apocalypse Ranch of Finicum’s imagination,” a fictional allegory for the apocalyptic fervor fueling fantasies of “the white republic,” to echo Alyosha Goldstein’s characterization of the standoff.9 Lengthening the shadow of Weaver’s legacy with Finicum’s fiction and Ammon Bundy’s claims to divine revelation, the occupation acted out an anointed quest to reclaim white freedom, at once lost and yet still under threat. The Malheur occupiers took further inspiration from two fringe Mormon apocalyptic texts, The Nay Book and the white horse prophecy, two texts that link the occupiers’ apocalyptic habit to the white nationalist innocence secured through the state of emergency.10 Though denounced by the Mormon Church, The Nay Book is a collection compiled by Keith Allen Nay, a Bundy family friend and fellow rancher. It offers religious justification for rejecting federal rule of law through “a scrapbook mix of letters, founding documents of both the United States and the Church of Latter- day Saints of Jesus Christ mixed with ideas that have existed in the antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement for decades.”11 The book is often associated with the white horse prophecy, a disputed Latter- day Saints text that tells of an imperiled, divinely inspired US Constitution saved by Latter- day Saints elders riding on the white horse of the four horsemen of the apocalypse from the Book of Revelation.12 Both the white horse prophecy and The Nay Book have close ties to the John Birch society, a Far Right white supremacist organization that boasts Fred Koch among its first eleven members. Koch was one of its primary financial backers and the father of the billionaire funders of climate change denial David and Charles Koch, who were themselves John Birchers.13 This network is exemplary of the apocalyptic narrative’s political, racial, and environmental analogs. Within this apocalyptic habitus, the armed Malheur occupiers marshaled the rhetoric of frontier masculinity, anxieties about federal overreach, and subtextual fears of white genocide to bolster declarations of their own sovereign authority over the homelands of the Burns Paiute.14 In their apocalyptic prophecies and state- of- emergency declarations, the occupation performed a type of “settler apocalypse”— stories that tell of the end of the whole world but are, in reality, specific to white settlers.15 While it is important to avoid collapsing all paramilitary activity under the label of white nationalism, it is equally vital to recognize the ways the rhetoric of apocalypse, especially the state of emergency that often defines its logic, works to secure the innocence of its white settler subjects, even as they reject state power.16 That recognition clarifies how the state of emergency, or state of exception, functions as the legal paradigm for a “settler move to innocence,” what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call an “attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land.”17 The occupiers were, after all, found innocent. Their acquittal suggests that the blamelessness of settler sovereignty is not merely a story; it is structured into the legal and political landscapes of the settler state. The state of emergency’s white- innocence- making mechanics were thrown into sharp relief by the rhetoric of apocalypse, ongoing emergency, and continuous resistance that circulated at Standing Rock. Standing Rock Sioux leadership shared their prophecy of apocalypse, telling of a time when the Zuzeca Sapa, the black snake, would slither across the earth, poisoning water before destroying the world.18 Recognizing this prophecy in the fossil fuel flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline, elders, water protectors, and their allies galvanized to defend their people and the other eighteen million living downstream.19 The protests, then, belong to a long narrative tradition guiding Indigenous resistance to the “apocalyptic death worlds of rape, genocide, poaching, trespass, theft, and smallpox” that have always accompanied the extraction economies of the settler state, to follow Nick Estes account in Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline. 20 Estes situates these apocalypses in the broader conditions of Indigenous refusal, because “while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories.”21 As typical of this dynamic, the #NoDAPL movement surged after “Jack Dalrymple declared a state of emergency on August 19, 2016— to safeguard the pipeline’s final construction.”22 Estes notes that Dalrymple used the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which grants powers typically reserved for natural disasters but, tellingly, were also deployed in Baltimore “to crush a black- led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray.”23 Pairing #NoDAPL and #BlackLivesMatter, Estes describes, but does not draw out, the state of emergency insulating extraction economies through the creation and maintenance of racialized threats to the settler state. Indeed, in Malheur, Standing Rock, and Baltimore, alike, the state of emergency secures white settler innocence, even or especially amid its fuel- thirsty apocalypses.24 In stark proximal contrast, only a week after Dalrymple’s August 16 declaration, on August 26 the Standing Rock Tribal Council declared a state of emergency to protect their rightful claim to land based on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.25 Soon after, prayerful water protectors were met by state and federal police and privately contracted mercenaries, all clad in riot gear. Drones and planes constantly surveilled; guns scoped over warlike barricades. This spectacle compelled many media outlets to compare the illegal, armed, and violent threats of the Malheur occupation with the unarmed Oceti Sakowin and allies in order to highlight the incommensurable responses from local and federal officials.26 Many called the Bundy occupation an instance of “white terrorism” deserving of a militarized police response.27 Still, only the water protectors at Standing Rock have been charged with terrorism or targeted by the FBI terrorism taskforce.28 These disparities were, and remain, foreseeable.29 They are embedded in the functions and fictions of the state of emergency in the settler state.

(Sam Bliss, Grist fellow, “No, economic growth and climate stability do not go hand-in-hand,” Grist, September 30, 2014, http://grist.org/politics/no-economic-growth-and-climate-stability-do-not-go-hand-in-hand/)

But this growth-oriented thinking doesn’t actually create a road map for saving the climate, and even the New Climate Economy writers acknowledge it:

(George Monbiot, columnist for the Guardian, MA in zoology, “The Great Impostors,” August 6th, 2012, http://www.monbiot.com/2012/08/06/the-great-impostors/)

Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.

It sounds like something out of science fiction: A country suffering from heat, flooding or crop failures decides on its own to send out a fleet of aircraft to spray a fine, sun-blocking mist into the earth’s atmosphere, reducing temperatures and providing relief to parched populations. Other countries view it as a threat to their own citizens and ready a military response.

But members of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security officials were worried enough last year to plot how to avert a war triggered by this kind of climate engineering. In a role-playing exercise, they practiced managing the tensions that would be unleashed, according to people familiar with the exercise, a sign that they see it as a credible threat in need of a strategy.

With global temperatures rising, policymakers are increasingly desperate for easy solutions to climate change. A report released by the Council on Foreign Relations validates a scientifically and politically controversial hypothesis— man-made solar geoengineering.

Also known as sunlight reflection, this is the process of reflecting sunlight away from Earth to reduce rising temperatures. Two approaches to climate alleviating geoengineering have garnered the most attention, Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) and Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB). SAI has attracted the most attention as it mimics a volcanic eruption by dispersing man-made aerosols into the atmosphere. It would be causing a cooling effect due to the aerosols’ reflective properties. While MCB reflects sunlight by spraying salt crystals from the ocean into low-lying clouds.

Solar geoengineering—the idea of using technology to reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight away from Earth to partially offset climate change—poses many problems, including its potential to discourage emissions cuts, its uncertain distributive consequences, and the possibility that suddenly stopping implementation might result in dangerously rapid warming. And yet available evidence shows that moderate use of solar geoengineering may offer an opportunity to mitigate climate hazards beyond what is possible even if all emissions could be eliminated tomorrow. In our view, the prospect that solar geoengineering could significantly reduce risks for the world’s poorest, reducing income inequality, is a strong basis for pursuing research and international governance.

Debate on solar geoengineering, however, is haunted by a concern that such technology might be weaponized. This concern stems from longstanding military interest in weather modification technologies, most notably the U.S. use of cloud-seeding during the Vietnam War, which led to adoption of the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) restricting hostile use of environmental modification techniques. It also stems from suggestions that governance of nuclear weapons may serve as a useful analog for governance of solar geoengineering.

Some scientists believe that geoengineering, the idea that we could spray reflective particles into the atmosphere to reverse global warming, may especially reduce suffering in the hottest, poorest parts of the world.

A new paper in Nature Communications goes further, concluding that such measures could accelerate economic growth in nations most vulnerable to climate change. That would narrow global inequality, at least relative to what would happen if we simply allowed the world to heat up.

For too long, sunlight reflection has been the third rail of climate change politics, a relegation that has severely crippled its basic research and discussion in diplomatic circles. This situation, however, is starting to change as the devastating implications of a fast-warming planet become impossible to ignore. Today, the Council on Foreign Relations released a new Special Report on the topic: Reflecting Sunlight to Reduce Climate Risk: Priorities for Research and International Cooperation. It calls on the United States to launch a robust sunlight reflection research program and spearhead international negotiations to advance multilateral scientific assessments of and collective decision-making regarding these novel techniques and their potential future implementation.

Sunlight reflection, also known as solar climate intervention (SCI) or solar geoengineering, would entail reflecting a tiny percentage of sunlight back into space to reduce the heating effects of solar radiation on greenhouse gases, thus limiting—and conceivably even reducing—the rise in global temperatures that would otherwise occur. The two simplest and most cost-effective means of doing so would be either dispersing aerosols in the stratosphere or spraying salt crystals from ocean-based platforms to brighten low-lying marine clouds.

The average global temperature is increasing faster now than at any time in the last 2 million years. This has fueled record-breaking droughts, heat waves, and wildfires, and has intensified weather patterns, causing more extreme and damaging hurricanes and rainfall. Human activity is driving this change, primarily through the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, which are released when fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas are burned to produce energy.

When sunlight strikes the Earth’s atmosphere, around 30% of it is reflected back out to space, and 70% is incorporated into the climate’s energy system. The Earth radiates some of this absorbed heat out to space, but greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prevent it from escaping. Greenhouse gases are necessary to keep the planet warm enough for living things, but very high concentrations are increasing global temperatures beyond the normal range (Figure 1). Although the best way to slow climate change is to reduce greenhouse emissions by switching to clean energy sources like solar, wind, water, and nuclear energy, the CO2 already in the atmosphere can persist and continue to exert warming effects for centuries. Geoengineering, the large-scale modification of Earth’s climate, is worth exploring because countries have been cutting their emissions too slowly to make any near-term impact on climate change.

Climate scientists have been warning for decades of global warming's devastating consequences.

Now that the effects of climate change are being experienced around the globe -- droughts, rising sea levels and stronger storm systems -- scientists are exploring how geoengineering technology can help to alleviate the effects of rising temperatures.

Solar geoengineering is the process by which humans deliberately reduce the effect of heat-trapping greenhouses gases by reflecting a small fraction of sunlight back into space.

It sounds strange, but it isn’t as odd, or as difficult, as it might seem. And we know that it works because it happens every time a huge volcano erupts. And we’ve been studying those for over 100 years.

Two linked and frequently raised concerns about putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions in the United States are whether such a tax would unintentionally advantage foreign competitors and, as a result, lead to increased emissions outside American borders. The tax could make American products more expensive than those made by companies in countries not imposing comparable climate regulations, which could lead to shifts in production overseas. Because a central aim of climate policy is to reduce global emissions, the “leakage” of production overseas would run counter to this goal. To avoid this outcome, carbon tax proposals commonly include a border carbon adjustment (BCA), which would impose the carbon tax on imported energy-intensive and trade-exposed products and provide a tax refund for exports of the same products.

This commentary, part of a series of joint research on carbon tax policies by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and Rhodium Group, highlights an alternative way to ensure that US firms remain on a level playing field with foreign competitors: output-based rebates (OBRs). While a BCA would focus on imports and exports, an OBR would instead compensate vulnerable US firms based on their production—a simpler process. Both BCAs and OBRs have their benefits and drawbacks, but nearly all carbon tax bills recently proposed in Congress included a BCA, and none included OBRs. This commentary reintroduces outputbased rebates as an alternative to BCAs, analyzes US industries that could be compensated with OBRs, and estimates the costs of doing so.

But it is not the open-and-shut case that the consensus in current proposals might suggest. Policy makers may wish to consider output-based rebates, which are not included in the recent proposals to Congress, as an alternative to BCAs for the following reasons:

OBRs avoid the complexities of determining the carbon content of foreign goods;

A border carbon adjustment is an appealing concept: simply apply the same carbon tax to foreign firms that is applied to domestic firms. The key advantage of OBRs is avoiding the most significant administrative hurdles of BCAs, including the complexities of determining the carbon content of foreign goods and providing foreign firms credit for climate regulations in their home countries.

Specifically, the literature suggests at least three major challenges.

First, while in theory a BCA would tax imports and provide a rebate to exports based on carbon intensity, in reality, a BCA would only apply to a small subset of imports and exports because it would be administratively infeasible to apply the BCA to thousands of internationally traded products.[5] But application to only a portion of products would create unintended consequences; for example, if a BCA covers imports of steel but not imports of cars made with steel, then it might provide an incentive to shift car manufacturing outside of the United States.[6]

Another possibility is that an OBR program could transition into a BCA program in the future, allowing more time to set up a complex administrative structure and/or enable other countries to adopt similar programs.

EITE: core industries, primarily manufacturing, that release large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and face significant national or global competition for their products.

Are there other anti-leakage instruments?

Advocates for free trade say the looming carbon tariffs are a threat to American consumers and businesses—and draw a clear line from Trump's abuses of Section 232 to Biden's abilities to do the same.

"Section 232 will haunt us like a protectionist Frankenstein unless Congress acts to rein in executive abuse of the law," then-Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Pa.) warned in December during his final remarks on the Senate floor. In an interview with Reason last month, Toomey said Biden was taking Trump's "abuse and the misuse of the Section 232 provision to a new extreme" by proposing the carbon tariffs.

First and most obviously, a carbon tariff would impose significant new costs on American consumers, companies, and workers. For example, recent U.S. tariffs on more than $350 billion worth of imports have been found to cost Americans over $50 billion per year. The PROVE IT Act targets over $600 billion worth of imports, suggesting the cost of carbon tariffs could be even higher than the Trump‐​Biden tariffs. Import taxes hurt Americans by increasing prices, particularly those in the lowest income brackets, and U.S. companies’ competitiveness by raising their production costs or insulating protected firms from market competition. For example, President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on imported steel inflicted significant damage on steel‐​consuming U.S. companies (like nail manufacturers)—the new taxes cost their workers directly through layoffs and the companies became less competitive as they were forced to either share the costs with their customers by raising prices, reduce production, or decrease investment. As a result, the tariffs did little to “level the playing field,” instead the President surrendered home‐​field advantage and gave the edge to foreign competition, who faced no such taxes.

From a legal perspective, import charges in WTO-compatible BCAs may not be sufficient to bring many pollution-intensive countries into a carbon-pricing coalition51,78. Moreover, the use of BCA as leverage for country-specific actions, as opposed to leakage prevention, could violate common but differentiated responsibilities principles. In international climate negotiations, BCAs could lead countries to reduce their voluntary commitments under the Paris Agreement, which would undermine the strategic value of BCA as a sanctioning instrument. China, as a prime example, responded to the EU’s proposal for import adjustments by saying such a policy would seriously undermine international efforts to fight global warming; other large non-OECD countries, such as India, Indonesia and Thailand, share the view that BCA is a protectionist and discriminatory policy measure that they will oppose81.