Here is my response to Carrol. I wrote originally:
> This movement must become powerful enough to sweep the suicidal oil > and coal interests off the table now, and then, after the big > investments for the energy and transportation switch have been done, > it must discard the economic growth paradigm and fight for a > rational steady-state economy. Carrol responds: > The proposition,"The movement must become powerful enough" blithely > assumes nearly a whole historical epoch; for me, it provokes > something like the old saw, "If wishes were horses, beggars would > ride." We are looking at an extremely strong movement. A large and increasingly vocal fraction of the population are very concerned about climate change. This concern is not going to go away but will become stronger as the gravity of the present climate emergency becomes more apparent. The fossil fuel industry and their hired climate deniers are clearly on the wrong side. A combination of litigation and growing mass protests will probably finish them off. This is not pie in the sky, this is a realistic prospect. > And of course, a m9vement that powerful would not do anything at all > with this or that sector of "the econolmy" but rather begin the > building of a socialist society, since that level of strength is > what we call Revolution. Socialism is not on the agenda of this strong and growing movement, global warming is on their agenda. They are trying to combat global warming by a better regulated capitalism. The most effective policies for renewable energy (Feed-In Tariffs) make every homeowner a petty commodity producer selling renewable energy to the grid in an artificial government-created market. This is not socialism, it is policy-makers using the market to achieve their goals. > Put another way, if handling the problems of ecology require a movement > that strong, then in fact we should just forget about ecology, renewable > energy, global warming, and focus on building a revollutionary movement, > since nothing short of a revolution will give us what Hans says is the > necessary power to do anything with these problems. The demands of the movement are incompatible with capitalism, but most in this movement are only dimly aware of this. They try to transform capitalism into something which is really socialism under a capitalist shell. Such a transformation is for them the obvious thing to try first, and they may succeed, for two reasons: (a) even the agents of capital and the state are, as people, interested in a livable planet. (b) leadership in the world wide switch to renewable energy is one way for the US to shore up its declining hegemony. The energy companies try to bamboozle this movement into supporting solutions which look like they do something about the climate but in reality are efforts to prop up capitalism (cap and trade, carbon capture and sequestration). Waxman-Markey is such a mixture of real solutions and bogus solutions. The contradictions which Carrol mentions are present but right now the battle against bogus solutions is on the agenda, not the open call for socialism. Hans. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
