Re: [Marxism] Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

2019-04-28 Thread Ralph Johansen via Marxism

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Of course, being who they are, the NYT misses the crucial sequence that 
defines the prospects: capitalism is a system of producing goods which 
depends totally on profitable return on investment, without which 
investment is pointless and will not take place. In which case 
capitalism, predicated on continued expansion from successive increments 
of accumulation, would collapse. There is no room within such a system 
for the drastic measures which are essential to preserving our 
environment, among which foremost is no further growth, in the sense of 
the incremental accretion of commodities on which capitalism depends, no 
further capital accumulation. Which is why, under the spell of 
capitalism and its distortions and misinformation about results and 
prospects, most of the rest of us have hardly a clue as to what must be 
done, more than likely until it is way too late. That awareness is 
indispensable to the task of system change. It certainly won't emanate 
from the corporate boardrooms or their governmental satraps. Figure that 
out and we might have reason for the hope that NYT reassures us about.


Louis Proyect wrote

NY Times Sunday Book Review, April 28, 2019
Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis
By John Lanchester

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH

   Life After Warming
   By David Wallace-Wells

   LOSING EARTH
   A Climate History
   By Nathaniel Rich

   Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively
   faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also
   poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are
   arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have
   to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your
   own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so
   that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that
   beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of
   recognition, representation and rights.

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[Marxism] Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis

2019-04-28 Thread Louis Proyect via Marxism

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NY Times Sunday Book Review, April 28, 2019
Two New Books Dramatically Capture the Climate Change Crisis
By John Lanchester

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells

LOSING EARTH
A Climate History
By Nathaniel Rich

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively 
faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses 
a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged 
around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with 
class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By 
asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a 
collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we 
construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, 
representation and rights.


The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to 
humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics 
doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding 
action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas 
first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of 
earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on 
our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant 
them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.


The demand climate change makes on us is to feel empathy for the unborn 
poor of the global south, and change our economies to act on the basis 
of their needs. That’s something humanity has never done before.


Pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. It leads only to despair, 
despair to inaction, and inaction to a future world David Attenborough 
has described as “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction 
of much of the natural world.” To avoid the most terrible possible 
versions of our future, we have to stay positive; it’s the only moral 
response to this crisis. And there are grounds to do so, as David 
Wallace-Wells argues in his brilliant new book, “The Uninhabitable 
Earth: Life After Warming”: “We have all the tools we need, today, to 
stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively 
phase out dirty energy, a new approach to agricultural practices and a 
shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment 
in green energy and carbon capture.”


Global emissions could be cut by a third if the richest 10 percent of 
humanity cut their use of energy to the same level as affluent, 
comfortable Europe. One prospective technique to scrub carbon from the 
atmosphere would cost $3 trillion a year, a colossal amount — but 
significantly less than the current level of subsidies paid out globally 
for fossil fuel, estimated at $5 trillion. Taken all in all, solutions 
are “obvious” and “available.” The only obstacle to implementing them is 
political will.


This litany of ideas might make “The Uninhabitable Earth” sound upbeat. 
That would be misleading. At the heart of Wallace-Wells’s book is a 
remorseless, near-unbearable account of what we are doing to our planet. 
Climate change is “not just the biggest threat human life on the planet 
has ever faced but a threat of an entirely different category and 
scale,” he writes. Even if collective action manages to keep us to 2 
degrees Celsius of warming — a target it looks like we are currently on 
course to miss — we would be facing a world in which “the ice sheets 
will begin their collapse, global G.D.P. per capita will be cut by 13 
percent, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major 
cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and 
even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer.”


But remember, he writes, “this is our best case scenario.” Wallace-Wells 
takes us through a compendium of the ways in which things could get so 
much worse, from simple “heat death” through catastrophic storms, 
droughts, flooding, wildfires, pollution, plague, economic collapse and 
war. We will see migration on a scale the world has never experienced: 
United Nations and World Bank estimates of how many people will be 
forcibly displaced by the middle of this century range from the tens to 
the hundreds of millions. All of this will affect the world’s poor far 
more than the world’s rich. The innocent, who have done the least to 
damage the environment through the consumption of fossil fuels, will 
suffer more than the guilty.


“The Uninhabitable Earth” gives readers’ emotions a thorough workout 
along that pessimism-to-despair spectrum, before we are brought