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After reading Farhad Manjoo's op-ed in the NYT, I wrote this on Facebook: One of the best op-ed writers in the New York Times and certainly the most radical is Farhad Manjoo. In a column today, he writes about the "end of California," the state in which he has lived most of his life. He says, "Now choking under the smoke of a changing climate, California feels stuck. We are BlackBerry after the iPhone, Blockbuster after Netflix: We’ve got the wrong design, we bet on the wrong technologies, we’ve got the wrong incentives, and we’re saddled with the wrong culture. The founding idea of this place is infinitude — mile after endless mile of cute houses connected by freeways and uninsulated power lines stretching out far into the forested hills. Our whole way of life is built on a series of myths — the myth of endless space, endless fuel, endless water, endless optimism, endless outward reach and endless free parking. One by one, those myths are bursting into flame. We are running out of land, housing, water, road space and now electricity. Fixing all this requires systemic change, but we aren’t up to the task. We are hemmed in by a resentful national government and an uncaring national media, and we have never been able to prize sustainability and equality over quick-fix hacks and outsized prizes to the rich." The question is, how will these multiple problems be dealt with. Should we go on a building spree: hundreds of thousands of windmills and millions of solar panels, with millions of high-paying jobs, so that growth can continue? Should we invest a trillion dollars or so to try to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? Or should we demand that production be communalized; that obscene financial wealth be confiscated; that agriculture be revolutionized (California is the country's most important agricultural state) through decentralization combined with agroecology and control by those who now do the actual farm labor; that unnecessary production and consumption be drastically curtailed; that the great desert cities like Los Angeles be wound down, so to speak; that air travel, cruises, shipping, and the like be greatly reduced; that we begin to convert those endless suburban tracts into livable and sustainable spaces; and so on and so forth. Let's take the best of any Green New Deal and push it as far left as possible. What, really, in this day and age, with the environment collapsing around us, do we have to lose? _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
