THE CLOCK IS TICKING.

• Author: Chomsky, Noam
• Position: The doomsday clock or human-made global catastrophe

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock has recently been set to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has come to termination. The analysts who set the clock cited the two most salient reasons: the growing threat of nuclear war and the failure to take the required measures to prevent global heating from reaching a point where it will be too late, not a remote contingency.

We can add a third reason: the lack of public understanding of the urgency of these crises. This is illustrated graphically in a recent Pew Research Center poll that offered respondents a set of issues to rank in order of urgency. Nuclear war didn't even make the list. Climate change was ranked close to last; among Republicans, only 13 percent said mitigating climate change should be a top priority.

The poll's results, while disastrous, are not surprising, given the prevailing discourse. Nuclear war is mentioned now and then, but treated rather casually: If it occurs, so what? There is little recognition that nuclear war between major powers is pretty much the end of everything.

A major corporate propaganda offensive has sought for decades to downplay concern about an impending environmental catastrophe, if not to deny the threat altogether. The logic of unrestrained capitalism entails that species' survival is far outranked by concern for profit and market share. With the profitability of our suicide soaring, the oil majors are abandoning their limited efforts to add sustainable energy to the mix.

Within the current institutional framework, the choice of action is limited: governments must bribe those who are destroying the environment to desist. This is nothing new. As the United States was mobilizing for war eighty years ago, then Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained: "If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work."

The absurdity of the institutional trap is clear enough. It's akin to the Mexican government trying to bribe the drug cartels to cease their mass slaughter. It's not that alternatives are lacking; they are simply outside the framework of doctrinal orthodoxy--for now, at least.

Doctrinal orthodoxy registers other impressive achievements. February and March 2023 mark two important anniversaries: the twentieth anniversary of the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, and the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine...