[Debate] (Fwd) Naomi Klein on the politics of climate

[Patrick Bond]

(This excellent article will really irritate 'a lot of professional 
environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming 
Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying 
"green" products and creating clever markets in pollution.')

    *"/Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in
    the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We
    will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations,
    relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption,
    bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax
    corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military
    spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course,
    none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is
    accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the
    influence that corporations have over the political process. That
    means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping
    corporations of their status as "people" under the law. In short,
    climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually
    every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent
    agenda based on a clear scientific imperative./"*

*
*

http://www.thenation.com/signupad/164497?destination=article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate
November 9, 2011   |    This article appears in the edition of/The 
Nation/ dated November 28, 2011.
*Capitalism vs. the Climate*
by Naomi Klein

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he 
ran for county commissioner in Maryland's Carroll County because he had 
come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were 
actually "an attack on middle-class American capitalism." His question 
for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late 
June, is this: "To what extent is this entire movement simply a green 
Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?"

Here at the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on 
Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the 
overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the 
planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting 
of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the 
panelists aren't going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner 
just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute 
who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits 
and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic 
over to his mouth. "You can believe this is about the climate," he says 
darkly, "and many people do, but it's not a reasonable belief." Horner, 
whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson 
Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: "The issue isn't the issue." The 
issue, apparently, is that "no free society would do to itself what this 
agenda requires?. The first step to that is to remove these nagging 
freedoms that keep getting in the way."

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is 
rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day 
conference, I will learn that Obama's campaign promise to support 
locally owned biofuels refineries was really about "green 
communitarianism," akin to the "Maoist" scheme to put "a pig iron 
furnace in everybody's backyard" (the Cato Institute's Patrick 
Michaels). That climate change is "a stalking horse for National 
Socialism" (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison 
Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing 
countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc 
Morano, editor of the denialists' go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by 
the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a 
Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some 
kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts 
it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change "has little to 
do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling 
capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of 
global wealth redistribution."

Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates' rejection of climate 
science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the 
organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, 
calling the gathering "Restoring the Scientific Method" and even 
adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the 
world's leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are 
old and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each 
speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there 
warming but it's not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what's 
all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)

In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze 
off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only 
when the rock stars of the movement take the stage-not the C-team 
scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. 
This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for 
die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which 
they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and 
months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the 
comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains 
the phrase "climate change" or "global warming." They will also exit the 
mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians-from 
Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann 
all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an 
interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland 
Institute, proudly takes credit for "thousands of articles and op-eds 
and speeches?that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending 
one of these conferences."

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to 
"promoting free-market solutions," has been holding these confabs since 
2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be working. At 
the end of day one, Morano-whose claim to fame is having broken the 
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John Kerry's 2004 
presidential campaign-leads the gathering through a series of victory 
laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen summit: failure! The 
climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a couple of quotes from 
climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) 
and exhorts the audience to "celebrate!"

There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but 
there may as well have been.

* * *

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the 
trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are 
usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so 
surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over 
a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of 
Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would 
cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 
percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 
percent-well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, 
director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and 
the Press, this is "among the largest shifts over a short period of time 
seen in recent public opinion history."

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end 
of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich 
did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a 
veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are 
decidedly over. Today, 70-75 percent of self-identified Democrats and 
liberals believe humans are changing the climate-a level that has 
remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp 
contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have 
overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some 
regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the 
science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate 
change used to be something most everyone said they cared about-just not 
all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political 
concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care 
passionately, even obsessively, about climate change-though what they 
care about is exposing it as a "hoax" being perpetrated by liberals to 
force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements 
and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate 
change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun 
ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report 
receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as 
seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it 
to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, "You can pry 
my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.")

This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you 
challenge a person's position on an issue core to his or her identity, 
facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily 
deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study 
confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by 
the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the "skeptic" 
position.)

The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the 
race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential campaign, 
with his home state literally burning up with wildfires, Texas Governor 
Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that climate scientists were 
manipulating data "so that they will have dollars rolling into their 
projects." Meanwhile, the only candidate to consistently defend climate 
science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on arrival. And part of what has rescued 
Mitt Romney's campaign has been his flight from earlier statements 
supporting the scientific consensus on climate change.

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond 
the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the 
subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture 
industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing 
up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual 
green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on 
climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two 
climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; 
and the "annual" Vanity Fair green issue hasn't been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade 
in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters 
and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry 
is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure 
to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and 
highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL 
pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar 
sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the 
coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the 
climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the 
atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will 
increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, 
says NASA's James Hansen, would be "essentially game over" for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a 
comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from 
the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: 
action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and 
sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people 
agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that 
capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, 
there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the 
right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real 
solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a 
much more enlightened economic system-one that closes deep inequalities, 
strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, 
dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also 
require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one 
issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive 
attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on 
the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and 
wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, 
occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of 
unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first 
appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some 
kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely 
why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen 
to their theories more closely-they might just understand something the 
left still doesn't get.

* * *

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy 
by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis 
by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as 
drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have 
concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our 
economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their "free 
market" belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James 
Delingpole has pointed out, "Modern environmentalism successfully 
advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, 
higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation." Heartland's 
Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, "Climate change is the 
perfect thing?. It's the reason why we should do everything [the left] 
wanted to do anyway."

Here's my inconvenient truth: they aren't wrong. Before I go any 
further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world's 
climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about 
the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere 
through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to 
increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end 
of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific 
findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our 
energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, 
the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less 
denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint 
a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert 
catastrophe by buying "green" products and creating clever markets in 
pollution.

The fact that the earth's atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of 
carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one 
born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that 
nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we 
need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by 
another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the 
atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover-we are 
doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to 
biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long 
governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls 
into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research 
showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand 
green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new 
civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but 
in respect for natural cycles of renewal-and acutely sensitive to 
natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders 
that climate change isn't "the issue." In fact, it isn't an issue at 
all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of 
our culture's most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are 
profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment 
ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by 
natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the 
neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify 
Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a 
Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global 
warming are akin to "the ambitions of communist central planners to 
control the entire society"), the reality is that Soviet-era state 
socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as 
much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: 
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher 
carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada 
and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China's 
renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled 
regimes can get the green job done, China's command-and-control economy 
continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through 
massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based 
energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong 
government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones 
that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve 
power and control to the community level, whether through 
community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or 
transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving 
at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market 
ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three 
decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious 
climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public 
infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international 
trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those 
gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of 
intellectually cataclysmic.

*1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere*

After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it 
is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to 
the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it 
demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective 
action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our 
emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail 
systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; 
energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart 
electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research 
effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services 
because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be 
genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They 
are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should 
come from the public sector.

Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as 
conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit 
and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our 
economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a 
radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different 
understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as 
dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural 
systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all 
of our collective muscle-to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore 
up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

*2. Remembering How to Plan*

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious 
response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been 
relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: 
planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and 
international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how 
it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition 
Town movement calls an "energy descent action plan." In the cities and 
towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has 
opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing 
consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to 
reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience 
for tough times ahead.

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well-particularly for 
workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil 
fuels. A few "green jobs" trainings aren't enough. These workers need to 
know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the other side. That 
means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on 
collective priorities rather than corporate profitability-giving 
laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources 
to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland's worker-run green co-ops 
serving as a model.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to 
address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and 
dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder of 
the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for "a fifty-year 
farm bill." That's the length of time he and his collaborators Wendell 
Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will take to conduct the 
research and put the infrastructure in place to replace many 
soil-depleting annual grain crops, grown in monocultures, with perennial 
crops, grown in polycultures. Since perennials don't need to be 
replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job of storing 
scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering carbon. 
Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being wiped out by 
extreme weather. Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor 
intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once 
again be a substantial source of employment.

Outside the Heartland conference and like-minded gatherings, the return 
of planning is nothing to fear. We are not talking about a return to 
authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. 
The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is 
failing the vast majority of people around the world. These systemic 
failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their 
elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. Climate change 
doesn't conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds 
to them an existential imperative.
*
3. Reining in Corporations*

A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid 
re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: 
subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for 
instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of 
barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting 
in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps 
on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired 
power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down 
dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting 
with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans).

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on 
corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek's road to 
serfdom-and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the 
population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.
*
4. Relocalizing Production*

If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change sounds 
somewhat radical it's because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has 
been an article of faith that the role of government is to get out of 
the way of the corporate sector-and nowhere more so than in the realm of 
international trade. The devastating impacts of free trade on 
manufacturing, local business and farming are well known. But perhaps 
the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all. The cargo ships, jumbo 
jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products 
across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the 
cheap goods being produced-made to be replaced, almost never fixed-are 
consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing 
far more waste than can be safely absorbed.

This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest gains 
that have been made in reducing emissions many times over. For instance, 
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a 
study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the 
Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized, that was partly 
because international trade had allowed these countries to move their 
dirty production to places like China. The researchers concluded that 
the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but 
consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions 
savings of industrialized countries.

In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of 
energy-intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed-reserved 
for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local 
production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in 
greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more 
energy-intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light 
rail.)

Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an 
end to the reckless form of "free trade" that governs every bilateral 
trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more 
good news -for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with 
cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move 
offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the 
challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be 
underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of 
removing every possible limit on corporate power.

*5. Ending the Cult of Shopping*

The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization 
were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate 
profits. They were also a response to the "stagflation" of the 1970s, 
which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid economic 
growth. The threat was real: within our current economic model, a drop 
in production is by definition a crisis-a recession or, if deep enough, 
a depression, with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply.

This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach 
the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions 
while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is 
"decoupling"-the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies 
will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. 
And "green growth" advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the 
process of developing new green technologies and installing green 
infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring 
and generating the wealth needed to "make America healthier, richer, 
more innovative, more productive, and more secure."

But here is where things get complicated. There is a growing body of 
economic research on the conflict between economic growth and sound 
climate policy, led by ecological economist Herman Daly at the 
University of Maryland, as well as Peter Victor at York University, Tim 
Jackson of the University of Surrey and environmental law and policy 
expert Gus Speth. All raise serious questions about the feasibility of 
industrialized countries meeting the deep emissions cuts demanded by 
science (at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050) while continuing 
to grow their economies at even today's sluggish rates. As Victor and 
Jackson argue, greater efficiencies simply cannot keep up with the pace 
of growth, in part because greater efficiency is almost always 
accompanied by more consumption, reducing or even canceling out the 
gains (often called the "Jevons Paradox"). And so long as the savings 
resulting from greater energy and material efficiencies are simply 
plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction 
in total emissions will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity 
Without Growth, "Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from 
the dilemma of growth need to take a closer look at the historical 
evidence-and at the basic arithmetic of growth."

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the 
overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by 
improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of 
material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the 
large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are 
controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year 
after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson 
puts it, "trash the system or crash the planet."

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic 
paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would 
be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of 
poverty. Meanwhile, in the industrialized world, those sectors that are 
not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public 
sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share 
of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal 
ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many 
jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, 
with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have 
to contract.

So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate 
change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it's not 
because they are paranoid. It's because they are paying attention.
*
6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy*

About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going 
to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we'll grow our 
way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based 
economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands 
for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie, eventually 
there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie, as the current 
inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting multiple ecological 
limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to finance a meaningful 
response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is.

That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means 
increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated 
military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel 
industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so 
that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust 
international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when 
they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister "world government").

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the 
corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top 
five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; 
ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter. 
For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest 
in a shift to renewable energy (BP's "Beyond Petroleum" rebranding being 
the highest-profile example). But according to a study by the Center for 
American Progress, just 4 percent of the big five's $100 billion in 
combined 2008 profits went to "renewable and alternative energy 
ventures." Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder 
pockets, outrageous executive pay and new technologies designed to 
extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money 
has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate 
legislation that has reared its head, and to fund the denier movement 
gathered at the Marriott Hotel.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping 
people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup in the 
Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the "polluter pays" principle to be 
applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on polluters, governments 
will have to negotiate much higher royalty rates so that less fossil 
fuel extraction would raise more public revenue to pay for the shift to 
our postcarbon future (as well as the steep costs of climate change 
already upon us). Since corporations can be counted on to resist any new 
rules that cut into their profits, nationalization-the greatest 
free-market taboo of all-cannot be off the table.

When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a 
plot to "redistribute wealth" and wage class war, these are the types of 
policies they most fear. They also understand that, once the reality of 
climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be transferred not 
just within wealthy countries but also from the rich countries whose 
emissions created the crisis to poorer ones that are on the front lines 
of its effects. Indeed, what makes conservatives (and plenty of 
liberals) so eager to bury the UN climate negotiations is that they have 
revived a postcolonial courage in parts of the developing world that 
many thought was gone for good. Armed with irrefutable scientific facts 
about who is responsible for global warming and who is suffering its 
effects first and worst, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are 
attempting to shed the mantle of "debtor" thrust upon them by decades of 
International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and are declaring 
themselves creditors-owed not just money and technology to cope with 
climate change but "atmospheric space" in which to develop.

* * *

So let's summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break 
every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great 
urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse 
privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back 
overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax 
corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending 
and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has 
a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, 
broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations 
have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly 
funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as "people" 
under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing 
case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them 
into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political "I told you 
so" since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of 
Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism's "irreparable rift" with "the 
natural laws of life itself," and many on the left have argued that an 
economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital 
would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course 
indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of 
disrespecting "Mother Earth" long before that. The fact that the 
airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, 
with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers 
were right. And the people who said, "Hey, let's get rid of all the 
rules and watch the magic happen" were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for 
progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our 
ideas-informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of 
industrial state socialism-are more important than ever. It means that a 
green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the 
centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity's best hope of 
overcoming these overlapping crises.

But imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland 
president Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and 
described his personal calling to me as "freeing people from the tyranny 
of other people." It looks like the end of the world. It's not, of 
course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. 
Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which 
contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a 
belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market 
freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an 
unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that 
created and are deepening the crisis.

* * *

At the Heartland conference-where everyone from the Ayn Rand Institute 
to the Heritage Foundation has a table hawking books and pamphlets-these 
anxieties are close to the surface. Bast is forthcoming about the fact 
that Heartland's campaign against climate science grew out of fear about 
the policies that the science would require. "When we look at this 
issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive increase in government?. 
Before we take this step, let's take another look at the science. So 
conservative and libertarian groups, I think, stopped and said, Let's 
not simply accept this as an article of faith; let's actually do our own 
research." This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition 
to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but 
rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.

What Bast is describing-albeit inadvertently-is a phenomenon receiving a 
great deal of attention these days from a growing subset of social 
scientists trying to explain the dramatic shifts in belief about climate 
change. Researchers with Yale's Cultural Cognition Project have found 
that political/cultural worldview explains "individuals' beliefs about 
global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic."

Those with strong "egalitarian" and "communitarian" worldviews (marked 
by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern 
about inequality and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept 
the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those 
with strong "hierarchical" and "individualistic" worldviews (marked by 
opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong 
support for industry and a belief that we all get what we deserve) 
overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

For example, among the segment of the US population that displays the 
strongest "hierarchical" views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a 
"high risk," compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the 
strongest "egalitarian" views. Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead 
author on this study, attributes this tight correlation between 
"worldview" and acceptance of climate science to "cultural cognition." 
This refers to the process by which all of us-regardless of political 
leanings-filter new information in ways designed to protect our 
"preferred vision of the good society." As Kahan explained in Nature, 
"People find it disconcerting to believe that behaviour that they find 
noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behaviour that they 
find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could 
drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional 
predisposition to reject it." In other words, it is always easier to 
deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was 
as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of 
libertarian climate deniers today.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real 
world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and 
marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another that 
the problem wasn't with the ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who 
did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. We have these types on 
the Stalinist left, and they exist as well on the neo-Nazi right. By 
this point in history, free-market fundamentalists should be exiled to a 
similarly marginal status, left to fondle their copies of Free to Choose 
and Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this fate only 
because their ideas about minimal government, no matter how demonstrably 
at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world's billionaires 
that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of 
Charles and David Koch, and ExxonMobil.

This points to the limits of theories like "cultural cognition." The 
deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview-they are 
protecting powerful interests that stand to gain from muddying the 
waters of the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those 
interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received 
more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to 
the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife (possibly much more, but the 
think tank has stopped publishing its donors' names, claiming the 
information was distracting from the "merits of our positions").

And scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost 
all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the 
fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, 
who gave the conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his 
consulting company's income comes from oil companies, and who knows how 
much of the rest comes from coal. A Greenpeace investigation into 
another one of the conference speakers, astrophysicist Willie Soon, 
found that since 2002, 100 percent of his new research grants had come 
from fossil fuel interests. And fossil fuel companies are not the only 
economic interests strongly motivated to undermine climate science. If 
solving this crisis requires the kinds of profound changes to the 
economic order that I have outlined, then every major corporation 
benefiting from loose regulation, free trade and low taxes has reason to 
fear.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate 
deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and 
dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting findings 
of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a 
refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic 
privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but 
also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they 
are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, 
no matter how demonstrably false. A much-discussed paper on this topic 
by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled "Cool Dudes") found 
that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times 
as likely to believe climate change "will never happen" than the rest of 
the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for 
this discrepancy: "Conservative white males have disproportionately 
occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the 
expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial 
capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that 
conservative white males' strong system-justifying attitudes would be 
triggered to deny climate change."

But deniers' relative economic and social privilege doesn't just give 
them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be 
more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. This 
occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland 
conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of 
empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell, whose bio 
describes him as a "space architect," drew plenty of laughs when he told 
the crowd that a little heat isn't so bad: "I moved to Houston 
intentionally!" (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would 
turn out to be the state's worst single-year drought on record.) 
Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that "the world actually does 
better from our human perspective in warmer times." And Patrick Michaels 
said people worried about climate change should do what the French did 
after a devastating 2003 heat wave killed 14,000 of their people: "they 
discovered Walmart and air-conditioning."

Listening to these zingers as an estimated 13 million people in the Horn 
of Africa face starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What 
makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers 
are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn't something 
wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. ("When 
it rains, we find shelter. When it's hot, we find shade," Texas 
Congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and environment 
subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and 
busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels whether rich 
countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly 
adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to 
give money to countries "because, for some reason, their political 
system is incapable of adapting." The real solution, he claimed, was 
more free trade.

* * *

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate 
denial gets truly dangerous. It's not simply that these "cool dudes" 
deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based 
worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with 
the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the 
developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this 
empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because 
climate change will test our moral character like little before. The US 
Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental Protection 
Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in 
the event of global warming, "populations can acclimatize to warmer 
climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological 
adaptations." These adaptations are what I worry about most.

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by 
increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat 
the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we 
open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they 
are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt 
ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How will we deal with resource 
scarcity?

We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources 
will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will 
continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. 
Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push 
genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will 
attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky 
technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of 
our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and 
intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts 
ourselves. "Free-market climate solutions," as they are called, will be 
a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already 
seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And 
as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as 
well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the 
temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it's everyone 
for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master 
nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get 
colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in 
parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are 
not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to 
the largely blameless victims of climate change in the global South, and 
in predominately African-American cities like New Orleans.

In/The Shock Doctrine/, I explore how the right has systematically used 
crises-real and trumped up-to push through a brutal ideological agenda 
designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to 
enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will be no 
exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to privatize 
the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is 
built to do. The process is already well under way.

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will 
step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means 
not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative 
worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis-this 
time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, 
reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for the 
kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a century ago, 
before everything was broken into single "issues" to be tackled by the 
appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate change is, in the 
words of the/Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change/, "the 
greatest example of market failure we have ever seen." By all rights, 
this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, 
breathing new life and urgency into longstanding fights against 
everything from free trade to financial speculation to industrial 
agriculture to third-world debt, while elegantly weaving all these 
struggles into a coherent narrative about how to protect life on earth.

But that isn't happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony 
that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a 
left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science 
has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since 
William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills" (and, of course, those mills were 
the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing out the 
corruption of their governments and corporate elites in Athens, Madrid, 
Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often little more than a 
footnote, when it should be the coup de grâce.

Half of the problem is that progressives-their hands full with soaring 
unemployment and multiple wars-tend to assume that the big green groups 
have the climate issue covered. The other half is that many of those big 
green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on 
the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, 
deregulation and contemporary capitalism's quest for perpetual growth 
(the same forces that are responsible for the destruction of the rest of 
the economy). The result is that those taking on the failures of 
capitalism and those fighting for climate action remain two solitudes, 
with the small but valiant climate justice movement-drawing the 
connections between racism, inequality and environmental 
vulnerability-stringing up a few swaying bridges between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global economic 
crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic Armageddon, a 
surefire way to spike household costs and to block new, much-needed jobs 
drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With virtually no loud voices 
offering a competing vision of how a new economic paradigm could provide 
a way out of both the economic and ecological crises, this fearmongering 
has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the 
environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same 
disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the 
cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from the 
studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for the 
movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power instead of 
organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also be heard from 
several of the researchers studying the rise in climate denial. Some, 
like Yale's Kahan, point out that while those who poll as highly 
"hierarchical" and "individualist" bridle at any mention of regulation, 
they tend to like big, centralized technologies that confirm their 
belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and others argue, 
environmentalists should start emphasizing responses such as nuclear 
power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in the climate system 
to counteract global warming), as well as playing up concerns about 
national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn't work. For years, 
big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert "energy 
security," while "free-market solutions" are virtually the only ones on 
the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism has soared. The 
more troubling problem with this approach, however, is that rather than 
challenging the warped values motivating denialism, it reinforces them. 
Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological 
crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of short-term 
hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure 
members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters 
of the universe-nor is it necessary. According to McCright, co-author of 
the "Cool Dudes" study, the most extreme, intractable climate deniers 
(many of them conservative white men) are a small minority of the US 
population-roughly 10 percent. True, this demographic is massively 
overrepresented in positions of power. But the solution to that problem 
is not for the majority of people to change their ideas and values. It 
is to attempt to change the culture so that this small but 
disproportionately influential minority-and the reckless worldview it 
represents-wields significantly less power.

* * *

Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement 
strategy. Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year jail sentence in Utah 
for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented in 
May on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the economy. 
"I believe we should embrace the charges," he told an interviewer. "No, 
we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes, we do want to turn it 
upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to 
change-of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not 
looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and 
society." He added, "I think once we start talking about it, we will 
find more allies than we expect."

When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement fused 
with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely sounded to 
most like a pipe dream. But just five months later, with Occupy Wall 
Street chapters seizing squares and parks in hundreds of cities, it 
sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many Americans had been 
hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts, from the 
practical to the spiritual.

Though climate change was something of an afterthought in the movement's 
early texts, an ecological consciousness was woven into OWS from the 
start-from the sophisticated "gray water" filtration system that uses 
dishwater to irrigate plants at Zuccotti Park, to the scrappy community 
garden planted at Occupy Portland. Occupy Boston's laptops and 
cellphones are powered by bicycle generators, and Occupy DC has 
installed solar panels. Meanwhile, the ultimate symbol of OWS-the human 
microphone-is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.

And new political connections are being made. The Rainforest Action 
Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the coal 
industry, has made common cause with OWS activists taking aim at the 
bank over foreclosures. Anti-fracking activists have pointed out that 
the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth to 
keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the profits 
flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the Keystone XL 
pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the climate movement out 
of the lobbyists' offices and into the streets (and jail cells). 
Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone concerned about the 
corporate takeover of democracy need look no further than the corrupt 
process that led the State Department to conclude that a pipeline 
carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of the most sensitive land in 
the country would have "limited adverse environmental impacts." As 
350.org's Phil Aroneanu put it, "If Wall Street is occupying President 
Obama's State Department and the halls of Congress, it's time for the 
people to occupy Wall Street."

But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power. As 
Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to 
displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration in 
the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over the 
past decade-in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in 
community-supported agriculture and farmers' markets, in economic 
localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, 
and in the co-op sector. Already a group at OWS is cooking up plans to 
launch the movement's first green workers' co-op (a printing press); 
local food activists have made the call to "Occupy the Food System!"; 
and November 20 is "Occupy Rooftops"-a coordinated effort to use 
crowd-sourcing to buy solar panels for community buildings.

Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities 
while reducing emissions; they do so in a way that systematically 
disperses power-the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1 percent. 
Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker Cooperatives in the 
South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct democracy that 
thousands are having in plazas and parks has been, for many, "like 
flexing a muscle you didn't know you had." And, he says, now they want 
more democracy-not just at a meeting but also in their community 
planning and in their workplaces.

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly sets 
the OWS moment apart. The Occupiers-holding signs that said Greed Is 
Gross and I Care About You-decided early on not to confine their 
protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the 
underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the 
economic crisis, while embodying-in highly visible ways-radically 
different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction 
from the "real" struggles. In the rocky future we have already made 
inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people, and 
a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing between 
humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a firm 
deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound social 
and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. 
The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they 
are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that 
their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of 
us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different 
worldview can be our salvation.
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