Slowly but surely and at an ever-accelerating pace, the leading issue of our or any time – anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – shapes our experience and limits our future. Don’t kid yourself (no pun intended): things don’t look good for your grandchildren at the current pace of relentless capitalist carbon emission, but significant negative climate changes are underway right now, not just in some distant dystopian future.
Buried in Snow in New England
Look at the off-the-charts snowfall in New England this winter. Counter-intuitive as it might seem, the record winter precipitation in the Northeast is a predictable outcome of global warming. The temperature measures on the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean are balmier than ever, something that carries huge atmospheric significance. As Penn State climate researcher Michael Mann recently told the Washington Post, “Sea surface temperatures off the coast of New England right now are at record levels, 11.5C (21F) warmer than normal in some locations… There is [a] direct relationship” Mann noted, “between the surface warmth of the ocean and the amount of moisture in the air. What that means is that this storm will be feeding off these very warm seas, producing very large amounts of snow as spiraling winds of the storm squeeze that moisture out of the air, cool, it, and deposit it as snow inland.” At the same time, a warmer ocean raises the temperature contrasts that winter storms encounter when they hit the East Coast, something that increases their strength.
Record snowfalls might seem to suggest a world getting colder but the opposite is actually true. Good luck trying to explain that to one of the many Americans who have been conditioned to respond with instantaneous and idiotic skepticism towards the findings of climate science.
Weakened Polar Vortex and Wavy Jet Streams
It gets even more directly counter-intuitive. Consider also the prolonged episodes of extreme Arctic cold that have broken out in recent winters across North America, Europe, and Asia. (Washington DC recently set new records for cold, as did many other cities across the US South.) Recent climate-science suggests that these “polar vortex” incidents are actually an ironic form of collateral damage from global warming. Here’s how it works: abnormally warm waters in the tropical Atlantic migrate via the Gulf Stream toward Europe in the late summer and fall. This produces the radical melting of sea ice in the Barents and Kara Seas north of Scandinavia and Russia. Open water there releases warmth into the air in November and December, creating an extended warm blocking pattern over the Ural Mountains. By midwinter, as more and more heat is being transferred to the Arctic, the “polar vortex” (an area of very low pressure marked by very low temperatures that spins over the North Pole during the winter) is destabilized, weakening the planet’s great northern jet streams and sending giant waves of cold air southward.
Miami Sinking
Then there’s the sinking of Miami. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that oceans could rise more than three feet by 2100, creating water-logged cities around the world, if humanity does not drastically cut carbon emissions. The process is already underway in Miami. At the University of Miami’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences last week, researchers reported that sea levels around the Miami coast have already gone up 3.7 inches just over the last 19 years. Worse, the sea-level rise is accelerating faster than the IPCC has projected. Predictions about daily tide levels are less accurate than ever, endangering Miami’s capacity to prepare for extreme weather events. Beyond the certainty of increased flooding, the sea-level rise is already creating saltwater intrusions into the region’s freshwater aquifers – no small hazard to a metropolitan area containing 5.5 million people.
Escape From New York?
Miami is just one of numerous US and global coastal cities threatened with inundation and other grave risks linked to global warming in coming decades. The New York City Panel on Climate Change (a committee of scientific experts convened by former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg) recently issued a report warning of dire consequences for the nation’s leading city by 2100 if AGW goes unchecked: a six foot rise in the sea-levels; massive flooding every 8 years; an increase of the city’s flood zone to 99 square miles; a 13% increase in rainfall; an average temperature increase of 9 degrees Fahrenheit; seven major heat waves per year; repeated incidents of extreme precipitation. It’s a future likely to make Hurricane Sandy (Mother Nature’s futile attempt to interject climate change into the 2012 presidential election “debates”) look like a mild event.
Beyond the Dust Bowl
There’s also a recent study suggesting that the recent and ongoing drought in California and the Southwestern US is going to look like a little dry spell compared to what’s due later this century in much of the Central and Western US. According to leading climate scientists, the US Southwest and Great Plains has an 80 percent chance of experiencing a “megadrought” worse than anything seen over the last 1000 years between 2050 and 2100. Think of the 1930s Dust Bowl over three to four decades, with dire implications for food supplies. The dry conditions will be “driven primarily” by AGW, the scientists said.
To the Brink of Collapse
Things are much worse in the global South, where drought and water shortages and food crises related to AGW are already an established fact of life. In the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, currently experiencing a third consecutive year of soaring temperatures and drastically reduced rainfall, “the main water reservoirs are are operating at their lowest capacity. The Cantareira reservoir system, which serves more than nine million people in the state, is only 5% full,” The Guardian reports. “At the Alto Tietê reservoir network, which supplies three million people in greater Sao Paulo, water levels are below 15%. State officials recently announced a potential rationing program of five days without water and two days with, in case the February and March rains do not refill the reservoirs.” An “extreme climate scenario” has “combined with a series of management flaws, political negligence and a culture of waste and pollution” to “bring…the largest metropolitan region of Brazil to the brink of collapse,” the Guardian concludes.
An Unsustainable Future
I could go on with numerous other examples of the catastrophic – yes, catastrophic – change that is coming and that is already underway to some degree. It’s all part of a much bigger Eco-exterminist story. As Naomi Klein notes in her important new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. The Climate:
“We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts…the World Bank [warns]…that ‘we’re on track for a 4 degrees Celsius warmer world [by century’s end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening seal level rise.’…Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai…Meanwhile, brutal heatwaves that can kill tens of thousands of people, even in wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic yield losses across the globe…When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires, fisheries collapses, widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained…” (Klein, This Changes, pp. 4, 13-14)
“Ill fares the land,” Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1775, “to hastening ills a prey. Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
The Really Inconvenient Truth
Solutions? A path beyond the malignant decay and death of land, water, air, and humanity? They absolutely exist. What’s clearly and urgently required is a gigantic “Marshall Plan for the Earth” (Klein’s phrase) – one that “mobilize[s] financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce emissions while raising people’s quality of life. We have only a decade” (Klein, This Changes, p.5).
The solution (the US-specific version of which is what the US Green Party calls “The Green New Deal”) must not, Klein wisely counsels, be framed in terms of the stern demand that people “make do with less.” The command reinforces the neoliberal austerity that has been advanced by financial and corporate elites and their many agents in state power for the last three-plus decades. It’s hard to expect calls for a more austere lifestyle to be received favorably by a working class majority whose standard of living has been relentlessly assaulted for more than a generation. Mass and wasteful consumerism is a giant problem, but the point is not to call for more mass self-denial. It’s not about more versus less; it’s about better versus worse. The task is to create qualitatively different and better material and social lives beyond the authoritarian and ecocidal rule of capital.
The good news is that the technology to save livable ecology without undermining mass life quality and living standards exists and is fully viable. Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and University of California-Davis research scientist Mark Delucchi have shown that humanity could convert to a completely renewable-based energy system by 2030 if nations would rely on technologies vetted by scientists rather than those promoted by industries. Jacobson and Delucchi’s plan to have 100% of the world’s energy supplied by wind, water, and solar (WWS) sources by 2030 calls for millions of wind turbines, water machines, and solar installations. “The numbers are large,” they write, “but the scale is not an insurmountable hurdle: society has achieved massive transformations before. During World War II, the U.S. retooled its automobile factories to produce 300,000 aircraft, and other countries produced 486,000 more. In 1956, the U.S. began building the Interstate Highway System, which after 35 years extended for 47,000 miles, changing commerce and society.”
The chief barrier is social and political: the global rule of a highly organized, wealthy and plutocratic capitalist corporate and financial elite that can brook no serious public and populace interference with the unfettered reign of the so-called free market, even where and when such interference is desperately and urgently required to save prospects for a decent human future.
Klein is right. “The really inconvenient truth,” she writes, “is that [global warming] is not about carbon – it’s about capitalism.” Klein hedges her argument a bit with qualifications, suggesting that the problem is “unregulated capitalism” and “free market fundamentalism” and the like. In reality, through the problem is in fact chaotic, competitive, global, and growth-, really accumulation- and profit-addicted capitalism itself.
Beyond Letter Grades
This is no time for Mandarin-like historical patience. There’s no more room for waiting like some kind of dispassionate academic observer for Karl Marx’s supposed iron “laws of history” (always a great Hegelian myth) to show us how “capitalism is the midwife of socialism.” Capitalism is cancer, literally and figuratively: an eco-exterminist system of endless upward wealth and power accumulation that is literally wired to destroy life on Earth. And things are moving far too quickly and dangerously to knowingly entertain analogies and reflections on how many centuries it took for Europe to make the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comrades: capitalism is transitioning humanity and countless other living things into extinction over a shockingly short period of time.
If I’m right about that (I am) and if Klein (reflecting the conclusions of many top climate scientists) is right about us having “a decade” (she probably is) to make the leap, then (considering that Klein published This Changes Everything last year) we have nine years to make an international radical-environmentalist anti-capitalist revolution to preserve the chances for a decent future. We are beyond letter grades and gaining a few yards on a flat field of history at this stage. We’re in pass-fail territory now. We either leap across the chasm or we fall into an abyss. Call me a “catastrophist,” but, to paraphrase Che Guevara, it’s not my fault that reality is urgently Eco-Socialist.
Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).
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21 Comments
Mr. Street,
After an attempt to restrict my comment to reasonable length for posting here, I just converted it into a long letter. Attached here, and coming to you via your personal e-mail too.
Re: Nine Years – to Avert Catastrophe with Revolution
Dear Mr. Street,
You’re right, the solution to climate disruption must not be framed in terms of “make do with less”. Even the comfortable citizens of USA would not willingly accept that prescription, to say nothing of people in developing countries. That’s why your good news is so important “… the technology to save livable ecology without undermining mass life quality and living standards exists and is fully viable”.
The danger is that humanity won’t recognize the proper technology in time to avert ecological disaster because we will squander 2 to 3 decades on a wild goose chase involving wind, water and solar, per Jacobson and Delucci.
Our ecological crossroads can be described as a choice between Plan A – rapid rollout of wind, water, and solar – WWS, enabled by revolutionary action to displace predatory free marketering, versus Plan B, which can operate within the capitalist rubric while aiming solely at fixing earth’s chemistry problem. Because environmentalism worldwide seems determined to put all its bets on WWS, I here dub Generation-4 nuclear fission as Plan B.
In my opinion there is a compelling case to be made for plan B precisely because it doesn’t require difficult and unlikely revolutionary action to yank away political /economic power from the fossil-fuel industry. Plan B can, I will try to persuade, effect a rapid displacement of fossils without having to win a preparatory wrestling match with fossil-capital.
To begin my persuasion on a positive note I will first praise Plan B before examining the deficiencies of Plan A. Either plan must deal with two user-demands; that is, two forms of energy: 1) Electricity; and 2) Transportation. So four discussions in all.
Electricity from Plan B: Gen-4 Nuclear
Nuclear fission creates heat which in turn produces hot gas to spin a turbine-generator pair, correctly called a turboalternator. This is like a coal or natural gas combustion plant, with the only difference being the source of the heat.
The electrical infrastructure that has been working quite well for the past three-quarters of a century will not need to change. We can continue to use the same grid (wires and transformers), the same turboalternators (with due regard for the fact that the turbine gas might be something other than steam), and the same plant heat-exchangers (some metallurgical replacements will be necessary, but no conceptual change).
That’s all there is to it! Remove the coal combustion chamber at the plant site, put a Gen-4 reactor in its place, and electrified human civilization can go forward. This will entail no economic fight with the electric utility capitalists. They don’t care where their heat comes from, just so it’s cheap and reliable. And doesn’t cause a waste-disposal headache. More on that later.
Electricity from Plan A: WWS
Wind, water and solar will aggravate the electric utility capitalists because it makes their job more difficult, but more importantly it will violate your maxim of “… without undermining … living standards”. That’s referring to the living standards issue of electricity being always available [“always” here taken to mean 99.9% up-time (only eight hours of lights-out per year) and very few voltage glitches that necessitate computer-restarting].
The Jacobson & Delucci (J&D) study is a frequent touchstone for renewables boosters, as are the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s RE Futures study (NREL – RE Futures), and several others (Budischak & Kempton, etc). Such references are often accompanied by mention of the progress that Germany has made integrating renewables into its electric grid. Widespread referencing of these studies gives a false sense of confidence, in my opinion.
The J&D idea of connecting tens of thousands of intermittent devices to a common grid over geographic areas of thousands of square miles is very unlikely to supply electric energy to all users all the time. This is due to technical reasons that I expound upon in links below.
The J&D-type studies consider only the availability of energy, statistically analyzed using historic data for wind and insolation. They do not give adequate consideration to the deliverability of that energy. Though they do acknowledge that the electric grid must be enormously expanded in order to provide sufficient transport capability.
What J&D-type studies do not consider are 1) Frequent-switching stresses on the wind & solar converters; and 2) Oscillatory behavior among multiple small voltage sources, some of which are dc (PV solar panels) and some of which are poor-quality ac (wind generators). These frequent-switching and oscillatory conditions have never before been experienced because the 20th-century electric age has relied on constant-speed turboalternators almost exclusively.
There are compelling reasons to expect that the reorganization of our electric system into tens of thousands of on-again /off-again energy sources can never replicate the performance of a few dozens of large turboalternators. The above links to my blog provide technical discussion.
Germany’s current renewables installation is not relevant to this grid stability issue because Germany’s wind and solar penetration levels are still so small that they demonstrate only the ability of small intermittent sources to piggyback on large stable sources – turboalternators. The value of 30% renewables is popularly quoted for Germany’s grid but it must be recognized that only 16% of that is actually intermittent (9% wind plus 7% PV solar). The other 14% consists of biomass combustion powering a turboalternator (10%) plus river-run hydro (4%). Biomass and hydro behave almost like stable baseload. Moreover, biomass is a false friend since it emits CO2 and diverts carbon from its proper destination – back into the soil.
The German experiment has a long way to go before it gains relevance to Plan A’s prospects. In 2014 it’s still riding the coat-tails of Germany’s baseload coal, nuclear, and natural gas (respectively 47%, 18%, and 6%).
Here’s my take. Although many Left environmentalists anticipate that fossil-fuel capitalists will stand opposed to Plan A, the real opposition will come from 1) The electric utility capitalists because they have the responsibility to keep their grid operating safely; and
2) Consumers, both societal segments, the heavy-user industrialists and us plain folks who just want to watch our TVs. Not only will electric reliability be degraded, but Plan A will also be more expensive because J&D requires vast overbuilding of WWS capacity in order to make the availability statistics attractive. I’m pretty sure that Plan A will turn out to be an ingenious experiment that has application for niche markets like islands and remote locations, but incapable of replacing mass amounts of coal and natural gas.
Another remark: An electricity plan that requires any natural gas, even for fast-starting emergency backup per the NREL’s RE Futures plan (20% gas), is indefensible. At our current consumption rates for space heating, fertilizer, plastics, fabrics, and medicines, the USA has only a 150-year supply. That’s if the fracking proponents are correct in their estimate of recoverable reserves (they claim 2000-2500 Trillion Cubic Feet – TCF). Of course they will turn out to be not correct, like Shell Oil in 2004.
For a lay person’s explanation of the most promising Gen-4 concept, the Molten-Salt Reactor – MSR, nearly synonymous with the Liquid-Fuel Thorium Reactor – LFTR, you are invited to visit my website http://www.dirkpublishing.com. Please inspect the Thorium Nuclear Slideshow download, slides 45 through 58 especially. I am available for presentation /discussion to any interested group, examining the operating safety, waste handling, sustainability, and estimated cost of LFTR technology.
Mr. Street, I don’t think the fossil-fuel barons are able to mount much of a defense against Gen-4 nuclear, their successful lobbying in the 1980s against Long Island’s Shoreham plant notwithstanding. The public is much better informed now about the dangers of coal, so less likely to accept the coal industry’s Shoreham-style scaremongering.
But the main reason for their impotence against Plan B is that commercial development and initial installations will almost certainly take place in China or India, where their writ doesn’t run. Once LFTR gets a foothold in Asia, making manifest its reliability and low cost, the utility capitalists will be headlong to abandon the fossil capitalists, as Marx described.* World-wide communication being what it is, a small fleet of LFTR plants in Asia is bound to break through quickly to the consciousness of the electric utility managers. Once that ball starts rolling the fossil capitalists will have to get out of the way.
* “The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface”, part III
Transportation by Plan B: Gen-4 Nuclear
To undermine the petroleum market we must offer one or more of these alternatives: P) Electric battery propulsion; Q) Synthetic fuel for internal combustion engines; or R) Plentiful hydrogen for fuel-cell propulsion.
Nuclear fission is compatible with all three of these technologies because it works at night to: P) Charge automobile batteries, or Q) and
R) Dissociate water molecules – H2O – to produce hydrogen – H2. Once elemental H2 is available in a collection vessel, the fission reactor’s 1000°C process heat can combine it with nitrogen from the air – N2 – to make NH3 – ammonia. N2 + 3(H2) = 2(NH3). Ammonia is a satisfactory synthetic substitute for gasoline or diesel in an internal combustion engine. 4(NH3) + 3(O2) = 2(N2) + 6(H2O) – with not a CO2 molecule in sight.
Or, for those who prefer the latest technology, ditch the combustion engine and switch to a fuel-cell running on raw hydrogen.
Large transport vessels, ships and rail locomotives, can mount their own small modular reactors – SMR. Like U.S. Navy submarines and Russian ice-breakers.
With P), Q) and R) fueling cars, trucks, locomotives, and ships, it looks like petroleum fuel’s only remaining market will be airplanes. That ought to take our opponents down a few notches, and no social revolution required.
Transportation by Plan A: WWS
Renewables can do P) Battery-charging; and R) Hydrogen from water; but they can’t do
Q) Synthetic ammonia. Wind and PV solar aren’t hot at all, and concentrated thermal solar – CSP – isn’t hot enough. The ammonia chemical reaction needs a temperature of about 1000°C.
But Plan A’s problem with P) is obvious. We want to charge our car batteries at night so we can go to work in the morning. Solar’s out. J&D-type people do say that wind is statistically greater at night than during daytime, but that’s not very reassuring. We need to guarantee that the battery will be ready for the morning commute .
Regarding R), the difficulty is that water dissociation is extremely energy intensive. That drawback, combined with the electrical energy required for hydrogen storage compression, is chiefly what renders the entire hydrogen energy cycle so inefficient – about 20%. Therefore to make any sense at all, hydrogen fuel-cells have got to be supported by great generation capacity, very inexpensive, working 24 / 7. But J&D’s Plan A acknowledges right off the bat that it already requires a huge overbuild of generating capacity in order to get the statistical situation in its favor. That’s just to keep everybody’s lights on. To ask for another additional huge overbuild dedicated to hydrogen production, well… we should probably just admit that Plan A can’t do R) any better than it can do P) and Q).
Where Do We Go from Here?
The theme that has been running through Left commentary for a while is perceived by me as: “Discredit capitalists so that we virtuous people can pursue Plan A, which will save the ecosystem. Furthermore, because Plan A is sure to work there is no reason to allow nuclear energy to enter our deliberations”.
My message to my fellow Left environmentalists is twofold. 1) Don’t have so much confidence in Plan A, because it probably won’t work the way you expect. If you insist on trying to make it work, well, okay – good luck. But don’t allow your quest to detract from support and funding of Plan B. 2) Don’t put the cart before the horse. We have a chemistry problem that is likely to wreak havoc soon. It so happens that we also operate under a social-economic paradigm, neoliberal capitalism, that is gradually harming human potential. But the acute chemistry problem can be fixed without fixing the protracted social problem. So let us set aside the capitalism issue for the time being in order to focus all our attention on carbon chemistry.
In 1933 H.G. Wells pointed the way in The Shape of Things to Come. First, stop fighting wars (1950s, Wells’ prediction); second, make your energy supply and transportation systems secure (1978 through early 2000s, per Wells); third, gradually reconfigure your social /educational system (leading to final success in year 2059, per Wells).
We’re behind schedule. We’ve passed the early 2000’s and we still haven’t secured our energy supply (still fighting wars too). At this rate we won’t be rid of capitalism even by 2159, let alone 2059.
Sincerely,
Timothy J Maloney,
Hau mitakuyepi, Greetings my Relatives! Wopila Paul for your writing on Life’s behalf. The western perspective is abjectly defective. Capitalism, from an Original Peoples perspective, is just polish on a turd –the turd being Greed.
Unfortunately, the societal institution most responsible for addressing Greed (the Church) is corrupted by Greed itself. My Ancestors dealt with Greed as a living being and “destroyed” it. The evidence for that is the pristine wilderness that Greed/Colonialism found wherever Original Peoples lived.
Greed is not an abstraction if it resides within you! Get a handle on that shit!
While I might find some issue with many points noted above, my inclination now is to acknowledge some weariness of leftists condemning one another with what might pass for worthy counterpoints, but in the big picture strike me as pointless bickering.
Much of what Paul has written resounds with me. As a professional biologist — not one with any corporate affiliations — I do have some experience with scientific process. The fact that so many climatologists are in agreement, roughly, on the impacts of human-influenced atmospheric carbon inputs, should be more than ample warning for humanity to stop and think.
Apparently that option is not an alternative, and that failure to think critically, to question authority, IS a direct consequence of Capitalism — the religion of the financial gods, the deluded, and the governed. Most people are not to blame because their avenues to enlightenment and information have been waylaid by proto-fascists delusions and manipulation. Corporations, the corporate media, their proxies in government, and their security-state thugs (military and police) are very much responsible for betraying the people of this nation and the world. The real war is about class and ideology and ecophilosophy.
I try to live my daily life as an optimist, limiting my driving, gardening for good food, bees, healthy trees, playing music, volunteering to educate others about the local environment, but I spend many waking moments in sheer terror about what is unfolding, often within a hair of condemning myself to a life in prison for attempting one final plunge towards ecological justice. Life shouldn’t hang on such a fragile hinge, when the every day miracles of life should be all that matters to anyone. But the greedy few have consumed even the ability to think from the many, and that includes plenty of “leftists,” “liberals,” and “progressives,” who haven’t a clue about what’s at stake.
I’m just really glad I don’t have children.
Thanks very much for that reflection, Peter Warren. And yes, we on the shadows of a US Left are plagued by endless and typically futile and pointless bickering – a tragedy.
Thanks, Philip. You are correct. It was A.E. Housman, from “A Shropshire Lad.” My apologies.
While I do agree that there is a utterly valid perspective that industrial capitalism is to blame for global warming, there are other valid perspectives. One can point to a society that emphasizes a lack of compassion and collective action from an anthropological and cultural perspective, or do as Tim Wise does and tie racism and other aspects of our culture does into demonstrating a narrative of dismissing the humanity of people, or connect it with patriarchy and the entitlement complex that results from that.
And I think the argument leads to an inaccurate conclusion. One could have state capitalism and have massive investments into this infrastructure. Elon Musk shows that: Individual corporate cultures matter as do national cultures. I think capitalism should be ended and replaced with more thoroughgoing and equitable economic system, and I think it will always have a tendency towards waste and accumulation, but it’s important to note that societies are more complex and more flexible than we can give them credit for.
I agree Paul, worrying about whether it is too late or how effective we can be is wasted energy. Just show up and do what has to be done.
I would, however, tie the “making do with less” to climate justice (as you have written about extensively) . Unlike Val, I don’t think we can expect everyone to go “sit in nature” and become enlightened but we can imagine the allocation of energy based on a rational carbon budget. This means some will find their material conditions more “austere”, sorry.
I believe the moral argument of “doing (more) with less so that future generations have a viable existence” can be made effectively, as long as it is progressive.
James: That bunker mentality already exists up here where I live. My comrades are doubtful about non-violent civil disobedience in the face of right-wing reactionary militias but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Interesting times though.
that scientific american essay is old and now irrelevant; perhaps 20-30 years ago it would’ve been feasible, but only with a massive energy reduction program as well…klein is wrong: it is about carbon and not about an abstraction like ‘capitalism’, which is just a buzzword for ‘how we live and what we (all) do day to day’…she’s probably also wrong in saying that we have a decade to do something; more realistically, we are already out of time, since the only answer trotted out again and again is the old chestnut of the WWS, which will only further add to the problem at this point, and be the final nail we insist on driving into our collective coffin…the problem is not exxon or chevron or monsanto or apple or google or microsoft…the problem is that we are collectively addicted to the crap they brainwash us into incessantly consuming, and cannot conceive of life without their products, which reinforce the illusion of having some sort of relation to reality when in fact they divorce us from any connection to the reality of the consequences of our daily lifestyles, which are readily evident, and have been for the 50+ years i’ve been around…the first Marshall Plan was bad enough; let’s not make a similar blunder again…”The task is to create qualitatively different and better material and social lives beyond the authoritarian and ecocidal rule of capital.” The key word being ‘qualitative’…follow that thread, sitting somewhere in nature without any surrounding man-made contraptions/devices, and the non-sense of millions of turbines and solar panels usw should become a little more clear…a society that equates ‘making do with less’ with ‘austerity’ is a society that has equated its own superficial lifestyle as the only desirable one, the only one that can be rightfully be called human, and one that thinks they are expressing/experiencing the fullest flowering of human potential…such is truly hegelian solipsism…it shows not only a lack of imagination, but, more crucially, lack of human experience and understanding…finally, mercifully, the IPCC is rather conservative in their prognoses and predictions, which is why every few years their reports get a little more stringent and are already outdated by the time they’re downloaded and read…climate scientists are not a happy lot, at this point…the sky is falling; we’re too busy posting our latest selfie to notice, or care…
Hey Joseph, stop dancing with the devil and get out do your bit dude.
Maybe the chances of averting catastrophe are 1 in 10. So let’s bring them down to 0 in 10 in a cynical celebration of our futility? I continue to be astonished at the ubiquity of the suicidal advance-surrender impulse in the shadows of what isn’t quite a US Left. This lifeless fatalism is always chilling to behold….a cold wind blowing through the soul.
Maybe you are right Paul, but considering the inability of the Left to get even remotely close to a revolution up till now and your article, a jump from 1 in 10 to 0 in 10 isn’t all that great a leap. Maybe Klien’s book is important but she should have written it decades ago, along with all the others who already have. It’s not that there will not be a rev of sorts, it may just arrive to late.
The question is HOW to get a successful rev up in nine years. Maybe the PSUV and Syriza could get together and show the way? What are the odds of that happening. 1 in 10 or 0?
Great article, Paul. One thought. Lately I’ve been recalling a stanza from Thomas Hardy’s poem “On Wenlock Edge.”
The gale that plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone.
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
Sadly, Hardy’s comforting reflection on history is now stale-dated. Our trouble will hardly be evanescent.
That’s A.E.Housman, not Hardy.
Well, if that’s the case, I’d say we’ve lost and catastrophe here we come. So grab some Heinz baked beans, a twelve gauge, bandoleer and tin dog food, and will eat your dog, bury our dead or eat them instead, it’s entirely up to you. Oh my, I hear the sound of horses hooves come the middle of the night, and oh my, so from now until your grand kids finally get what you deserve I’m gonna be stuck here with you wookies eating fortune cookies until my guts churn.
What you just said isn’t a sober assessment. It’s giving up.
It’s as I often tell Christians who accept apocalyptic logic: “The difference between you and me isn’t that you believe that the apocalypse is inevitable. The difference is that I refuse to sit idly by while my neighbors are cast into perdition and you aren’t”.
If things are going to go into chaos, it’s going to define who we are if we choose to grab some baked beans or if we choose to try to help our neighbors.
There’s a reason solidarity has to be emphasized by the Left: Without it, we become indistinguishable from market libertarians or angry hermits in the woods.
No it’s not giving up at all. What I wrote is the last verse of a song written several years ago and IS a fair enough assessment of what may transpire in the worse hit regions of the world or at least of what exists in the minds of some. The bunker mentality, as Dave suggests, exists and always has. It’s not mine. Maybe a more comprehensive assessment along the lines of what you suggest is of value but that’s not going to help get shit done in nine years. I agree with Paul and others that it IS capitalism AND markets, predominantly and the disparate power those two institutions and their machinations entrench. The ruling elites are not going to give up their short term greed, and nine years is extra short term, to shift focus and retool. Obama has made it clear where he stands. Small groups of libertarian socialists or anarchists and a fragmented Left aren’t going to get things done in nine years. Nine years is bugger all time and I doubt very much ANY “revolution” will get up in that time or even a radical reformist green new deal. Left Unity in England suggest that to get a green new deal up may even require a period of increased energy use in order to make the necessary changes.
Just because I may lean in the pessimistic direction doesn’t mean I believe people won’t help one another after the catastrophe or crisis. I believe the majority of people are by nature helpful and compassionate. What Paul writes and Klein too, is nothing new (maybe the time line?) and has been written by many others long before and we are no closer to a solution.
People keep pulling the time line back, from fifty to forty to thirty to twenty to ten years. Now we go by single years. Then there’s always mister real optimistic Joey Val who says it’s too late. (I’m not sure what contraption he’s using to read all this stuff on Z and post comments but I hope it only requires Joe to rub two sticks together to get it going.)
Did we really need Klein to write yet another “important book” to get us going by suggesting we’ve only got ten years? Is that the spark we needed, is it? Really? So what are we going to do, right now? My football team won the grand final ten years ago and it feels like a sixtieth of a finger snap ago. More than likely we will have to wait until it is really clear, even to the ruling arseholes that change is necessary, but I reckon even then it won’t be easy.
Do the maths. 2030 as a possibility for complete conversion to renewables is fifteen years away (six years too late?) and probably based on the best case scenario and working like the clappers. But let’s get real and pragmatic, the bosses and robber barons of the world won’t sit idly by. They’ll push that out to as far as they can. Like the tobacco barons did. Do ya think all those Sheiks and Oil moguls will let it all happen easily. They probably own all the patents and copyrights, all the IP on the new technologies anyway or have those that do over a barrel. Pun intended. Violence of all kinds rules!
No, it’ll be more than likely slow going. Crisis after crisis affecting those who don’t really matter, then some good old geo-engineering (patents and IP important here as well) to top things off. I read or scanned though the world bank report before Klein’s “important book” came out. Four degrees by end of century. They know it’s coming. They’re smart. They plan ahead. That’s what capitalism is, a planned economy, it’s just a whole bunch of plans pitted against each other. One private tyranny’s top down undemocratic plan to get an edge over another. Unregulated capitalism has never existed. It has always been regulated in favour of those who matter. The conservative nanny state. Syriza will and are having trouble negotiating their way out of austerity, and that’s nothing in comparison to climate catastrophe.
Maybe all that is true, and yet you have outright said that a 1 in 10 chance instead of a 0 in 10 chance is not a big shift. But that’s exactly the point: It’s what’s possible and it is a colossal shift. Anyone who actually cares about the humanity of all those people who will be obliterated and their lives overturned if we don’t succeed should view that 10% as being worth the world, not blase dismissal.
Where’s the blase dismissal?
Actually Fred I will go again. You can think all you like about me and my little comment. I was reacting to yet another essay about the same stuff I’ve been reading for ages now. Nothing different but the time line. NINE YEARS. 2030 is 15 years away. Street wrote that I didn’t. You say I’ve given up because I quoted the lyrics of a song written several years ago about attitudes that exist. Writing another essay about impending catastrophe, fine, but how’s that change things? Seriously how? Hope won’t change a goddamn thing. Syriza has an environmental package. Did Street send his essay to them? Has a copy of Klein’s “important book” been sent to them so they know what is really required. PSUV? Left Unity? Podemos? Die Linke? My government? Your government? NINE YEARS.
I don’t even really know what exactly that means. Does it just mean it’s too late? Will great loads of shit hit the fan and nothing we do after will fix anything? To jump from 1/10 to zero may be a colossal leap to you, but when I put this to others, who don’t even read this sort of stuff, Street’s sort of stuff, much less belong to any organisation trying to ameliorate the situation, they pretty much throw their hands in the air. Perfectly understandable reaction. I didn’t produce the figure of 1 in 10, Street did. Pulled it out of a hat. It doesn’t really mean anything. But NINE YEARS does.
Further, just because someone may believe there is a snowflakes chance in hell of fixing such a dire situation, in NINE YEARS, and even says so, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try, why not? Only got NINE YEARS.
There is no cognitive dissonance here. One can quite easily lean towards the pessimistic and still try or even think there is a slight chance. We’re human, not robots. Street may be flummoxed by the “suicidal advance-surrender impulse” but after reading his essay and considering where the world is at present regarding these matters, 1 in 10 to zero is NOT a big shift at all. It is after all just an “impulse”. And it’s not really the 1 in 10 that matters, it’s the NINE YEARS.
I haven’t said we have NINE YEARS, Street did working backwards from Klein’s TEN and when she wrote those words. The figures enough to drive anyone to drink. Find an alley and knock back enough absinthe with Gareth Liddiard, who penned the song, to forget.
Where have the world’s concerned “left” governments been or the the “shadows of what isn’t quite a U.S left” been so we could have had a 2/10 chance or 3/10? that would have been “worth the world” too. 20 years or thirty instead of NINE?
“[W]e on the shadows of a US Left are plagued by endless and typically futile and pointless bickering – a tragedy.” You bet it’s a tragedy given we now only have NINE YEARS.
I absolutely agree with Street’s assessment of the reasons we are in this mess. And Peter Warner above as well. And Dave Jones for that matter. And the plethora of other insightful people who have been writing on these matters for decades. CAPITALISM AND MARKETS SUCK.
There most definitely should have been a more concerted effort by such writers in the past to spruik vision. Serious vision. Serious discussion on serious vision. Now we are it seems at the mercy of the current political environment with. The need for current governments to pull their fingers out and get a new green deal up faster than you can say Jack Robinson. What are the odds on that one within NINE YEARS? A mass movement from below driven by a firestorm of awareness, what are the odds on that happening anytime soon? Pull those figures out of a hat.
Joseph Val is the perennial pessimist here. He’s the one not offering a solution, or at least any thing of any real substance other than stop working, driving, buying or using a computer NOW. But then again, what’s Street’s solution? Eco-socialism at the back end of a green new deal. Is that it? What sort of a vision is eco-socialism? Try getting unity and numbers behind that. The green new deal isn’t even close!
Much smaller numbers than 1 in 10 have heard of Parecon, Inclusive Democracy, P2P vsionary efforts or even what Gar Alperovitz is doing, or even David Schwiekart’s version of market socialism. So forget all that wirthin a NINE YEAR time frame. Most people do not even know what eco-socialism means let alone what it looks like. Eco-villages or Transition Networks are also not well known. Even if they were, do they really offer solutions? Just withdraw and build just fair and equitable communities and people will flock to them? Street doesn’t believe so. The working classes, oppressed for so long, won’t want to give up what they don’t and never have had. Do the above offer real practical solutions on a world wide scale? Parecon as an economic alternative at least tries, but how often does Street or anyone really mention its existence? It’s hard enough to get enough on the left to see the devastating effects on the world markets have had. Many still just can’t let go of the bloody things. “Look they’re OK in some respects, aren’t they?”
So all we have for a solution is/are the current abominations we call existing governments and the shadow of not quite real participatory democratic processes available to us, now. Maybe if enough writers wrote what Street wrote above and sent the essays to enough mainstream publications and possibly then got asked onto enough mainstream media and managed to bust through the constraints of concision to get their serious and necessary message out to enough people, one might see a firestorm of awareness build and the mobilisation of a mass movement from below put a rocket up the arse of government to get the green new deal up and to lock up all the capitalists dicks and private tyrannies who don’t make a 100% effort to retool and rebuild our energy system with alternatives and then to push on further for further gains so we don’t have to see that beast of a leviathan that really functions and feeds off the blase dismissal of humanity ever again.
But I ask again, what are the odds of that happening? Joseph Val may be the real perennial pessimist, cynical judge of our pathetic natures to make the necessary change as he sees it, immediate withdraw from the current system, but Street’s essay above and conclusion that we have NINE years to make the adjustments aint that far different really. You may see it as colossal but I don’t. That’s not blase dismissal on my part at all, but Street’s essay, and therefore Klein’s book, and that “[t]he chief barrier is social and political: the global rule of a highly organized, wealthy and plutocratic capitalist corporate and financial elite that can brook no serious public and populace interference with the unfettered reign of the so-called free market, even where and when such interference is desperately and urgently required to save prospects for a decent human future,” gets pretty close to, if not a blase dismissal, a dismissal nonetheless of any real chance to avert catastophe without completely giving up.
And by the way I do care and always have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6T1Xzda6cM
James Wilson. You’ve some drinking to do: http://dailynewsdig.com/strongest-alcoholic-drinks/
Please get to it.
Don’t drink, but thanks for the list Paul. Can hardly get through a beer these days. No, my real concern is to reassert to my daughters that they really shouldn’t have kids (because unlike Peter Warner, I have two of ’em). More immediately because of climate catastrophe but mainly because market/capitalism is still here!