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Shawn Redden wrote In all the hullabaloo yesterday, I missed the link Comrade Johansen sent out from one of those writers who has had his bread buttered for a couple decades by the "global warming" industry. Before stovepiping the bourgeois analysis of global warming true-believers like McKibben (he got Frank Lunz's memo and now calls it "climate change"), it's worth taking a look at what he supports. Going beyond his idiotic analogies and conspiracy theorizing, McKibben specifically cites, links to, and endorses a carbon-dioxide privatization scheme belched out of the Senate: Unlocking the Green Economy: How Carbon Pricing Can Open the Floodgates of Private Investment in Clean Energy http://cantwell.senate.gov/issues/Institute%20for%20Policy%20Integrity%20study.pdf I assume that you don't endorse the idea of CO2 privatization, Comrade Johansen? Am I wrong? If one doesn't endorse this AND takes issue with those of us who see red flags in the UN's IPCC hucksterism (i.e., funding the use of computer models in the manner of a derivatives merchant and publishing one's massaged, speculative 'findings' as Truth) what does one in such a position propose as a means of dealing with climate change? I am genuinely interested, but rather than answer this fairly straightforward question, only paeans to the objective, unbiased truth of "climate science", coupled with invective and name-calling have presented themselves. I have made it abundantly clear that those guilty of poisoning the earth, destroying the biosphere, and seizing the gene pool (including the court 'scientists' who facilitate this rapacity) should be put before a firing squad - a scenario that is, admittedly, unlikely to occur. But a guy can dream. Soldiarity, Shawn ------------------------------------------------- Shawn, I looked at this piece you refer to, How Carbon Pricing Can Open the Floodgates of Private Investment. No, I certainly don't agree with it and I didn't, still don't, know that McKibben does either, nor am I particularly concerned. McKibben, incidentally, doesn't appear on the Board of Advisors noted in this article you refer to, nor is he named in the footnotes. From what little I've read about it I think carbon pricing, CO2 privatization as you call it, is part of the problem in that it appears to be another way to profit from misfortune without mitigating the disastrous effects of CO2 in any significant way. And without question people like Inhofe and others on the right who are the principal climate deniers are profiting handsomely from siding with the energy corporations. Quoting McKibben: 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. But that doesn't speak to the issue. There'll be a whole lot of people who will figure out how to get rich off of any catastrophe. There probably were many who made book on aspects of Katrina or Haiti - certainly the charter school advocates in the case of New Orleans ,and no doubt real property speculators everywhere. But I don't see what it has to do with McKibben or his article or the merits of the general scientific consensus on global warming. I don't enough about the reliability of the specific computer technology or the hard facts on which scientists have reached this consensus; that's one of the problems, few of us do, and the argument from authority is never sufficient to convince many who perceive much of public life as deliberate deception; one thing that has bothered me is that it has been pointed out that there have been many chicken little type scares in the recent past which have turned out to be tissue-gossamer. But I have seen photos, heard from and read accounts from those who have seen with their own eyes the precipitate melting taking place in the Arctic seas and in glacial land areas. That takes this way beyond speculation based on programmed projections, and beyond reliance on authority alone - although the consensus among those who should know appears, not chicken little, but to be so impressively pervasive. I have read what Bellamy Foster, Burkett and others have written as well. And that to me makes it imperative that we pay close attention, because the prospects for the survival of countless species, including ours, is apparently riding on the outcome. As to the "idiotic analogies and conspiracy theorizing" that you ascribe to McKibben, what of the astounding allegation, from the right mainly, that all the scientists in agreement on global warming and its human causes are somehow simply furthering their career-chances? Do you really subscribe to that, and on what evidence? As Lou writes, the real debate is whether the science is valid or not and whether the solution can be found outside the elimination of the capitalist system. Ralph ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
