A month ago, Keith wrote:
> There are several powerful currents which are now conjoining and
> carrying all of us along helplessly in advanced countries into a
> brand-new era.
and then itemizes seven points, purportedly instances of reality
proceeding on its way despite ideology or established notions.
I think some of his points are arguable but overall, Keith is
saying:
> Some sort of picture emerges in my mind and, maybe, one might have
> arisen in yours (or you may well dispute some of my projections!).
> Meanwhile, and quite separately from the above trends, WE'LL ALL
> HAVE TO EXPERIENCE WHAT IS LIKELY TO BE A CATASTROPHIC BREAKDOWN IN
> OUR PRESENT WORLD CURRENCY SYSTEM when governments finally realize
> that they can't get out of trouble any longer by printing more
> banknotes or inventing more varieties of pseudo currencies
> (e.g. special drawing rights [SDRs], troubled asset relief programs
> (TARPs), quantitative easing [QE] -- and the most risible one of
> them all so far, the European financial stability facility [EFSF]
> which, it seems, has died a death before it was able to be born!).
(Emphasis mine)
More recently, Mike G. forwarded Heather Mallick's piece from the G&M
on Harper's Kyoto/Durban and other moves.
hm> Harper does indeed have a Daily Mail plan.
hm> [snip]
hm> Yes, my country has gone tabloid, full of resentments we didn't
hm> even know existed until they were stirred up by this peculiar man.
I see climate change denial [1] in more or less the same light as
applied economics: both are exercised in the context of a commitment
to ideology, to a deeply held belief structure so ingrained that it
qualifies as a monolithic Weltanschauung or even a religion, that
simply cannot be allowed any contradiction, let alone tangible
failure.
And what do we have here? Naomi Klein [2] in an interview about her
article in The Nation:
I got interested after attending the UN climate summit in
Copenhagen in 2009. Like a lot of people who watched that train
wreck up close, I came away wanting to understand the massive gap
between the euphoric expectations of the environmental movement
and the real political outcomes. When I got home, I was stunned by
a new Harris poll that showed that the percentage of Americans who
believed in anthropogenic climate change had plummeted from 71 per
cent to 51 per cent in just two years. So here we were thinking
that the world was on the verge of some kind of climate
breakthrough while a large segment of the U.S. population was
rejecting the science altogether. I wanted to understand how that
could have happened.
I had a bit of an "a-ha" moment reading this paper by the
excellent Australian political scientist Clive Hamilton, in which
he argues that a great many American conservatives have come to
see climate science as a threat to their core ideological
identity. Then I read Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik
Conway, which explains that many of the key scientists behind the
denier movement hold a similar point of view -- they are old-school
Cold Warriors who came to see fighting environmentalism as a
battle to protect "freedom" and the American way of life.
But as I read all this, I found myself thinking that from within the
hard-right worldview, these responses were entirely rational. If you
really do believe that freedom means governments getting out of the
way of corporations and that any regulation leads us down Hayek's road
to serfdom, then climate science is going to be kryptonite to
you. After all, the reality that humans are causing the climate to
warm, with potentially catastrophic results, really does demand
radical government intervention in the market, as well as collective
action on an unprecedented scale. So you can understand why many
conservatives see climate change as a threat to their identity. Too
often the liberal climate movement runs away from the deep political
and economic implications of climate science, which is why I wrote the
piece. I think we need to admit that climate change really does demand
a profound interrogation of the ideology that currently governs our
economy. And that's not bad news, since our current economic model is
failing millions of people on multiple fronts.
In the header to article in The Nation, there's this:
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?"
Anyone looking at the real world, whether from the perspective of
physics or that of realpolitik, whether deeply informed or (as I
suppose am I) widely but fragmentarily informed, can see that radical
free-market corporatist capitalism is going to hit a wall at warp
speed or is going to morph into an appalling high-tech synthesis
combining the worst features of barbarian, Medieval and Third Reich
social structure.
Interesting reads, both as environmentalism and as observation on how
the people on the bridge aren't going to stand for news from soundings
or the engine room that threaten the shipboard status quo, however
well founded in fact they may be.
- Mike
[1] On the part of responsible people. We're not talking drooling
loonies here. Except, of course, to the extent that drooling
loonies are in positions of responsibility.
[2] From an interview at:
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/8809-naomi-kleins-inconvenient-climate-conclusions
about "Capitalism vs. the Climate" in The Nation, at:
http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate
or, to get all one page plus reader comments,
http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full
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