Naomi Klein’s long term focus has been an attack on capitalism, and this latest inclusion of GE and climate change in her repertoire sits, as I see it, over her underlying theme. I personally have found her, in the little contact I have had with her work, to be both shallow and tendentious. This leads me to focus on more productive uses of my time than plowing through her work to find the point at which capitalism will be the real enemy.
I find an irony here in that epidemiologists looking for the progress of emission caused illnesses went into eastern Europe after the fall of the iron curtain, because failure to shut down or control polluting industries created large numbers of cases of illnesses not experienced in the west, which had avoided them by more effective regulation. My brief encounter with this thread about NK has reinforced my prior view. Peter Peter Flynn, P. Eng., Ph. D. Emeritus Professor and Poole Chair in Management for Engineers Department of Mechanical Engineering University of Alberta [email protected] cell: 928 451 4455 *From:* [email protected] [mailto: [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Greg Rau *Sent:* September-20-14 11:44 AM *To:* [email protected] *Cc:* [email protected]; [email protected] *Subject:* [geo] More Naomi Klein http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/09/16/whether-we-engage-or-do-nothing-changes-everything NK - "A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke (“more signs of the Apocalypse!”). Which is another way of looking away. Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun. Which, I was to discover while researching this book*, is yet another way of looking away." * *http://thischangeseverything.org/book/ <http://thischangeseverything.org/book/>* GR - GE = looking away = climate denial? What fantasy world is she talking about, and for what purpose, entertainment or propaganda? In an earlier interview: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/naomi_klein_big_green_groups_are_crippling_the_environmental_movement_partner/ Salon - "You were talking about the Clean Development Mechanism as a sort of disaster capitalism. Isn’t geoengineering the ultimate disaster capitalism?" NK - "I certainly think it’s the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that’s the appeal of it. I think we will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn’t threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch. So all the stories that got us to this point, that flatter ourselves for our power, will just be scaled up." [There is a] willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people in the way we respond to climate change – we are already showing a brutality in the face of climate change that I find really chilling. I don’t think we have the language to even describe [geoengineering], because we are with full knowledge deciding to allow cultures to die, to allow peoples to disappear. We have the ability to stop and we’re choosing not to. So I think the profound immorality and violence of that decision is not reflected in the language that we have. You see that we have these climate conventions where the African delegates are using words like “genocide,” and the European and North American delegates get very upset and defensive about this. The truth is that the UN definition of genocide is that it is the deliberate act to disappear and displace people. What the delegates representing the North are saying is that we are not doing this because we want you to disappear; we are doing this because we don’t care essentially. We don’t care if you disappear if we continue business-as-usual. That’s a side effect of collateral damage. Well, to the people that are actually facing the disappearance it doesn’t make a difference whether there is malice to it because it still could be prevented. And we’re choosing not to prevent it. I feel one of the crises that we’re facing is a crisis of language. We are not speaking about this with the language of urgency or mortality that the issue deserves." GR So if failure of emissions reduction is genocide and GE has a chance of mitigating that genocide why is considering and evaluating GE a bad thing? It is precisely because we are failing to do the hard work of emissions reduction and genocide avoidance that makes considering alternative actions essential. Contrary to her statement otherwise, geoengineering clearly does threaten her worldview: that humans can and will reduce their CO2 emissions in time and any suggestion of alternative actions are a threat to emissions reduction and humanity (or Klein's book sales). Given that despite considerable technical and political effort our CO2 emissions continue to grow (rather than decline), a world view that only relies on emissions reduction to avoid genocide would seem an increasingly flawed and dangerous one. Meantime, from her website: "Please note her Fall tour itinerary is full and she is currently unable to add any other tour dates or events." Go figure. Greg Rau ps See you at the Lake Merritt (surrogate for NYC) Climate Rally tomorrow? Something tells me that GE won't be on the agenda there either. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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