Doug Henwood wrote:
Time magazine????
Jealous? :-)
... I'd thought your mailer was configured to respond to you rather
than PEN-L, so I re-sent to the list manually. I was wrong, and I'm
sorry. At least neither of us was confessing to a plushie fetish.
No worries, mate, no harm done.
... I'm sorry the Sweet Crude filmmaker didn't teach you much,
What are you talking about? I watched the film, interviewed her, and
quoted you material from the film's website. There was little or
nothing of the sort of oil in the soil business in it.
She didn't teach you Environmental Rights Action's move from NIMBY to
climate justice via Oilwatch, that much is evident. Really, such a move
is something to celebrate Doug, not to deny. I don't understand you
sometimes, comrade, you're such a stubborn cynic that it blocks progress.
but there are plenty of other resources if you put your mind to
"Leaving fossil fuels in the ground" - not everything tomorrow,
obviously, but as a strategic multi-decade objective along the lines
Ivonne and Nnimmo have been doing, along with Alaskan and
Californians preventing tundra and offshore drilling, and First
Nation Canadians at the Alberta tarsands, and anti-coal activists
from West Virginia to Britain to South Africa to Australia and so
many others - is the only way to save our species. Why can't you get
that?
My first instinct would be a "fuck you,"
Well that's the problem, isn't it. Can you not do something about that
first instinct of yours? It's not worthy of you, comrade. Wouldn't a
better first instinct be to celebrate the people who have sufficient
foresight to try to save the planet for Ivan, eh?
but that wouldn't be constructive. I don't think there's any more
urgent task than getting off fossil fuels
Great, there we go now. Join us, comrade!
and switching to renewable forms of energy. But these sorts of
maximalist rhymed slogans won't get us there.
Of course they will, if they're backed by activism. When we were trying
to access AIDS medicines in 1999, the best slogan we had was "Al Gore's
Greed Kills African Babies!" - a slogan that when it appeared behind his
head on a placard in July-August 1999 when he was running for prez in
NH, Philly and TN, caused him to do a 180 degree U-turn because the
slogan was so damaging that it outweighed the benefits of $2.3 million
he was receiving for the campaign from Big Pharma. Slogans help!
And if you know better activists on this issue than the two I've
introduced you to, please say. If you don't, what are you waiting for -
get them on your radio show, comrade.
It's loopy to talk about leaving coal and oil in the ground in any
large-scale way.
No man, it's species-suicidal to NOT leave the coal and oil in the
ground in any large-scale way.
So sure, call us loopy today, but if we succeed you and your descendants
will be damn glad someone is doing this activism now.
Drilling offshore, or in national parks, or developing the Alberta tar
sands - all insane. But what next? How to get from A to B? By jetting
around the international do-gooder conference circuit issuing
communiques to no real effect?
Those jetting to Copenhagen with Seattle in mind next week will have a
positive impact, surely you'd agree? Otherwise you want the banksters to
game the climate through the carbon market, as Obama, the EU, the World
Bank and the UN have in mind?
I bet if you asked people in oil-producing countries to choose between:
A) Extracting the oil as cleanly as possible and using the proceeds to
build schools and clinics and provide electricity, or
B) Leave it in the ground
A) would win in a landslide.
Well Doug, let's try option C), the most reasonable given history:
C) Letting your country continue to suffer from such a resource-curse
that the more nonrenewable resources you extract, the worse dictatorship
you suffer under and the poorer you are in per capita wealth (as the
World Bank's 2006 book Where is the Wealth of Nations demonstrates by
correcting GDP for environmental factors).
So C wins in reality, pretty much everywhere. Hence A) and B) should win
in a landslide. But since A) isn't feasible due to C), then let's go
with B), ok?
Maybe I'm wrong, and if you can prove it I'll accept the proof, but I
doubt you could.
Right, this is not something you poll the masses about. So instead, look
to the leading organisations, like ERA in Port Harcourt and Accion
Ecologica in Quito and yes, here in South Durban, the South Durban
Community and Environmental Alliance (suffering the highest asthma rates
ever recorded in a primary school next to SA's largest petro-chemical
complex).
You're often writing about the inability of Eskom to deliver
electricity in SA, and the struggles of the poor to hook up to the
grid. What are they supposed to power their plants with?
The easy answer, aside from solar/wind/tidal/wave: the coal that we are
trying hard to redirect from the biggest mining/metals companies in the
world. Since those folks currently off-grid would add about 3% to the
grid at the level of consumption we recommend - 100 free kWh per person
per month - and we hope to redirect around 10% of the coal that fires
electricity for the minerals-energy complex in the short term (even the
deputy transport minister endorsed this idea last week, it makes so much
sense), then we've got a net gain. What else is needed? Getting the
mining/metals workforce reemployed doing equally well-paid Green Jobs
such as the construction and installation/maintenance of solar-powered
hot water heaters. That's the basic strategy, what's wrong with it?
(We've been saying this quite some time now; you aren't reading your
daily SA feed, I guess.)
Over the longer term, solar, wind, tidal, and modalities yet
uninvented. But for the immediate future, it's got to be carbon.
And to make the immediate future last into the medium term, we've got to
cut carbon. How can you possibly disagree?
Over the years, I've watched you embrace the whole "civil society"
discourse with enthusiasm.
No you haven't; give me some proof that I am biased to civilised
society. You may be glancing too quickly over the communiques, but look
closely and you'll see that the South African 'Centre for Civil Society'
(a name inherited) is actively promoting uncivil society. If for some
reason, you have failed to notice this, just check the top of our
homepage - http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs - which is our Social Protest
Observatory.
I never fully understood what that was all about - I'm sure it's not
Hegel's original definition of civil society, which is a horribly
brutish thing. The best definition I can come up with is that culture
where bunch of philanthropy-funded NGOs claim to speak authentically
for The People, without any evidence that they actually do. The only
mechanism of accountability for these organizations is to their
foundation program officers.
That's because you're simply not paying any attention, are you comrade.
We debate accountability relationships constantly.
I doubt you could get many Venezuelans to sign onto this agenda.
Hopefully they're moving from the pre-1998 period focused on active
protest in uncivil society - most notably the IMF Riot in March 1989
which radicalised Hugo Chavez at the expense of 1000 deaths - to
eco-socialism. We asked them, last year during a visit, 'Comrades, can
you keep the oil in the soil?' Chavez's environmental advisors said, in
effect, 'Go away companero, we're building petro-socialism'. (Mike L.
will remember and smile.)
So we failed there, and in email communications with you. But we'll keep
trying. There's really no other viable strategy, is there.
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