Is this a typical example of the left being so wound up in its own politics
that we miss the point? I have tons of my own personal politics if anyone
wants to hear... in the meantime, any COMMENTS on the positions I
submitted?! Mary
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:03:46 +0200
> From: Khadija Sharife <kalebron at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Debate] 10 positions on water and climate change
>
> Hi Jessie!
>
> That sounds exciting! What sort of stuff are you investigating?
>
> Khadija
>
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Jessie Lazar Knott wrote:
>
> > Mary,
> >
> > Hi, long time, hope you're well.
> >
> > I would strongly urge you to remove your personal details, such as phone
> > number, and address from public listings on the internet. I've mentioned
> > before that friends, and their children were targeted by those hacking
> into
> > me; it appears, and so I'm informed by the forensic operatives, as well
> as
> > evidence, that this was intentional, as well as co-incidental, i.e.,
> those
> > thought to be 'vulnerable', or important to me, became part of a
> snow-ball
> > effect of 'hacking'. My neice, and others have been severely effected by
> > the process.
> >
> > Otherwise, look forward to seeing you, sometime in the future, when I'm
> > not in the 'hell' of investigations.
> >
> > Take care, and love,
> >
> > Jessie
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 1:24 PM, M Galvin <galvinh2o at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello All
> >>
> >> It seems that the climate change and water linkage has not received much
> >> attention and has not been seriously thought through by governments or
> >> civil society (EMG's recent book is an exception, let's note any
> >> others?)... but it is clearly central to CC discussions!
> >>
> >> Soooo here is a first shot at some positions that we could develop at
> COP
> >> People's Space-- see below or attached.
> >>
> >> Please comment/ edit/ add and I will incorporate (with your name and org
> >> if ok).
> >>
> >> Also is anyone hosting a water and climate change strategy session-- how
> >> do we create a water agenda to take Cochabamba forward over the next
> >> year(s)? Umphilo is still keen-- anyone interested in co-hosting? We
> can
> >> follow with a water reality tour to local areas, which we are planning.
> >>
> >> Thanks
> >> Mary
> >>
> >>
> >> Mary Galvin
> >> Umphilo waManzi
> >> 115 Sir Duncan Rd
> >> Durban
> >> tel 072 463 8854
> >>
> >>
> >> *10 POSITIONS ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER (version 2)*
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 1. Funding for climate change fund/ debt that is:
> >>
> >> ? Provided through Basic Income Grants to ensure Direct Access
> >> reaches ordinary people, and through community-based organisations with
> a
> >> track record of ? or potential for - appropriate alternative water
> >> technologies.
> >>
> >> ? Non-profit (so as to avoid profiteering by suppliers) and both
> >> compensatory for those harmed by climate change, and transformative
> insofar
> >> as new systems of water management, extraction, production,
> distribution,
> >> consumption and disposal are encouraged ? for household consumption,
> >> agricultural irrigation and commercial/industrial use.
> >>
> >> ? For additional costs that climate change brings to water
> >> provision (new sources, re-enforcing infrastructure, etc.)
> >>
> >> ? NOT based on extending or ?offsetting? the carbon economy
> >> (although carbon taxes are acceptable).
> >>
> >> ? NOT run through the World Bank or carbon markets.
> >>
> >>
> >> 2. More attention and funding to make sure that public systems are
> >> functional and can cope with the additional pressure from climate
> change,
> >> eg new infrastructure, maintenance/ leaks, boreholes and spring
> protection.
> >> Public institutions must also be responsive to citizens and allow for
> >> deep community participation.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 3. Use water rationing as a means of water allocation in times of
> >> scarcity, and ensure water pricing prevents price hikes for the smallest
> >> and poorest users. Use funding to push municipal and other water
> >> service agents to impose a steeply redistributive water pricing system
> to
> >> disincentivise high consumption and waste.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 4. No false mitigation solutions such as large hydro-power dams and
> >> biofuels that have a harmful impact on water and people?s livelihoods.
> No
> >> false adaptation solutions, such as energy-intensive desalination, or
> water
> >> conservation strategies that exacerbate social inequity.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 5. Pressure for mitigation to avoid excessive water consumption,
> >> such no new coal stations, recycling industrial water, and higher
> pricing
> >> of water to industry and agriculture. Mitigation is also essential
> *within
> >> *water sector, such as solar pumps and alternative waste-water
> >> treatment such as algal ponding.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 6. Take action nationally and locally to protect existing water
> >> resources and the ecosystems they form part of.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 7. Protect and plan around Africa?s water sources, reach and
> >> formalise agreements around use and conflict management (to prevent
> >> conflict once water scarcity is severe).
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 8. Provide support for alternative water technologies at the local
> >> level, including rainwater harvesting at school and clinics, and ram or
> >> solar pumps for small scale farming.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 9. Train and promote household/ small scale permaculture or
> >> ecological agriculture that uses water wisely and select crops that are
> >> appropriate for climate change.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> 10. Assist at the community level with drought and flood planning, and
> >> strengthen all levels of disaster management assistance.
> >>
> >>
> >> *Drafted by Mary Galvin (Umphilo waManzi), edited by Jessica Wilson,
> >> Environmental Monitoring Group, and Patrick Bond, Centre for Civil
> Society
> >> UKZN*
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Debate-list mailing list
> >> Debate-list at fahamu.org
> >> http://lists.fahamu.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debate-list
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > An Fh?rinne in aghaidh an tSaoil
> >
> > *swish and swish*
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Debate-list mailing list
> > Debate-list at fahamu.org
> > http://lists.fahamu.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debate-list
> >
> >
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:58:04 -0500
> From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
> Subject: [Debate] (Fwd) Naomi Klein on the politics of climate
> To: DEBATE <debate-list at fahamu.org>, "CJN!SA"
> <climatejusticesa at googlegroups.com>, cjn-KZN at yahoogroups.com,
> durbansocialForum at yahoogroups.com,
> energyCaucus at googlegroups.com
> Message-ID: <4EBD0DCC.7030001 at mail.ngo.za>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> (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 gr?ce.
>
> 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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