August 2, 2018
Dear Friends and Family,
In Segment 9 we turn away from climate science and its potential consequences to gain some insight into the politics that have emerged in addressing climate change. Segment 9 is an Advocate view of such politics. Segment 10 will focus on the skeptic side.
All the excerpts for the advocate view are taken from the book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein, published in 2014. As a lead-in to this segment, below is the caption on the back cover of the book.
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon – it is about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better – A Marshal Plan for Earth.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein author of the global best sellers “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo,” tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
The next segment will focus on the counterpoint to the perspective of Naomi Klein in this segment. The book which will be utilized for the upcoming segment is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming by Christopher C. Horner.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
In Segment 9 we turn away from climate science and its potential consequences to gain some insight into the politics that have emerged in addressing climate change. Segment 9 is an Advocate view of such politics. Segment 10 will focus on the skeptic side.
All the excerpts for the advocate view are taken from the book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein, published in 2014. As a lead-in to this segment, below is the caption on the back cover of the book.
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon – it is about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better – A Marshal Plan for Earth.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein author of the global best sellers “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Logo,” tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
The next segment will focus on the counterpoint to the perspective of Naomi Klein in this segment. The book which will be utilized for the upcoming segment is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming by Christopher C. Horner.
Happy Learning,
Harley
CLIMATE CHANGE – SEGMENT 9
ADVOCATE VIEW: POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXCERPTS
NOTE: Excerpts in this segment: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate by Naomi Klein
WE NEED A MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE EARTH: We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme drought.
The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just surviving or enduring climate change. It is a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now. It could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite the old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructures; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights – all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them. If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
The bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. Only one of these rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature. So, we are left with the stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fare. Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us will have to give up, whole industries that will disappear. And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do.
The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews – they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way they have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known. Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average income. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false.
THE BATTLE OF WORLD VIEWS: All of this raises the question of whether I am doing the same thing as the deniers – rejecting possible solutions because they threaten my ideological worldview. But there are a few important differences to note. First, I am not asking anyone to take my word for the science. I think that all of us should take the word of 97% of climate scientists and their countless peer-reviewed articles, as well as every national academy of sciences in the world, not to mention establishment institutions like the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, all of which are telling us we are headed toward catastrophic levels of warming. Why are so many of us not doing the things that must be done to keep warming below catastrophic levels? The short answer is that the deniers won, at least the first round. Not the battle over climate science – their influence in that arena is already waning. But the deniers and the ideological movement from which they sprang, won the battle over which values would govern our societies. Their vision – that greed should guide us – has dramatically remade our world over the last four decades, decimating virtually every countervailing power.
One of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. By the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects – modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams – all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words – and a climate nightmare. The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce. So, when the factories moved to China, they also got markedly dirtier. But, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.
HOW TO PAY FOR IT: It’s no mystery that public money needs to be spent. Much of it should go to ambitious emission-reducing projects – the smart grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our lives in traffic jams.
As we all know, public spending is going in the opposite direction almost everywhere except for a handful of fast-growing so-called emerging economies. So, if we accept that governments are broke where is all the money supposed to come from? Since we have only a few short years to dramatically lower our emissions, the only rational way forward is to fully embrace the principle already well established in Western law: the polluter pays. The fossil fuel companies, the arms companies, the car companies, the shipping industry, and the airlines. They should be forced by law, just as the tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people quit smoking.
When climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not only because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE: Each country’s fair share should be determined by two factors: responsibility for historical emissions and capacity to contribute, based on the country’s level of development. In an illustrative scenario, the United States’ share of global emission cuts needed by the end of the decade might be something like 30%. But not all of those reductions would need to be done at home – some could be met by financing and otherwise supporting the transition to low-carbon pathways in the South. With every nation’s share of the global burden clearly defined and quantified, there would be no need to rely on ineffective and easily gamed market mechanisms like carbon trading. Much of the cost does not need to come from regular taxpayers; it can and should come from the corporations most responsible for driving the crisis.
CONCLUSION: It’s a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism. By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, lending new confidence to the demands for a more and just economic system.
The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat – to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid – is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ADVOCATE VIEW: POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXCERPTS
NOTE: Excerpts in this segment: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate by Naomi Klein
WE NEED A MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE EARTH: We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme drought.
The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just surviving or enduring climate change. It is a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now. It could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite the old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructures; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land rights – all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our nations and between them. If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
The bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. Only one of these rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature. So, we are left with the stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fare. Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us will have to give up, whole industries that will disappear. And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do.
The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews – they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way they have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known. Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average income. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false.
THE BATTLE OF WORLD VIEWS: All of this raises the question of whether I am doing the same thing as the deniers – rejecting possible solutions because they threaten my ideological worldview. But there are a few important differences to note. First, I am not asking anyone to take my word for the science. I think that all of us should take the word of 97% of climate scientists and their countless peer-reviewed articles, as well as every national academy of sciences in the world, not to mention establishment institutions like the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, all of which are telling us we are headed toward catastrophic levels of warming. Why are so many of us not doing the things that must be done to keep warming below catastrophic levels? The short answer is that the deniers won, at least the first round. Not the battle over climate science – their influence in that arena is already waning. But the deniers and the ideological movement from which they sprang, won the battle over which values would govern our societies. Their vision – that greed should guide us – has dramatically remade our world over the last four decades, decimating virtually every countervailing power.
One of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. By the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects – modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams – all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words – and a climate nightmare. The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce. So, when the factories moved to China, they also got markedly dirtier. But, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.
HOW TO PAY FOR IT: It’s no mystery that public money needs to be spent. Much of it should go to ambitious emission-reducing projects – the smart grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our lives in traffic jams.
As we all know, public spending is going in the opposite direction almost everywhere except for a handful of fast-growing so-called emerging economies. So, if we accept that governments are broke where is all the money supposed to come from? Since we have only a few short years to dramatically lower our emissions, the only rational way forward is to fully embrace the principle already well established in Western law: the polluter pays. The fossil fuel companies, the arms companies, the car companies, the shipping industry, and the airlines. They should be forced by law, just as the tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people quit smoking.
When climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not only because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE: Each country’s fair share should be determined by two factors: responsibility for historical emissions and capacity to contribute, based on the country’s level of development. In an illustrative scenario, the United States’ share of global emission cuts needed by the end of the decade might be something like 30%. But not all of those reductions would need to be done at home – some could be met by financing and otherwise supporting the transition to low-carbon pathways in the South. With every nation’s share of the global burden clearly defined and quantified, there would be no need to rely on ineffective and easily gamed market mechanisms like carbon trading. Much of the cost does not need to come from regular taxpayers; it can and should come from the corporations most responsible for driving the crisis.
CONCLUSION: It’s a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism. By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, lending new confidence to the demands for a more and just economic system.
The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat – to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid – is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to follow independence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 09_cc_long_advocate_political_view_--_segment_9.pdf |