PHIL210 UofM How Climate Change Crises Can Be Useful to Abuse Capitalism Values Discussion Writing question: Klein argues that free-market corporations and

PHIL210 UofM How Climate Change Crises Can Be Useful to Abuse Capitalism Values Discussion Writing question: Klein argues that free-market corporations and elites might carry over their abuses and exploitation with their solutions to crises such as climate change. With reference to Klein’s reading explain how climate change crises can be useful to abuse capitalism values?Need one citation from the reading, total word count 300 1/5/12
Capitalism vs. the Climate
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
Capitalism vs. the Climate
Naomi Klein | November 9, 2011
There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that
he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County
because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global
warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American
capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington,
DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire
movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red
Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”
Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on
Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying
the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is
warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking
a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy.
Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the
questioner just how right he is.
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Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits
and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic
over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he
says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.”
Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a rightwing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue
isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would
do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to
remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is
rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day
conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support
locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green
communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron
furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick
Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National
Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison
Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing
countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc
Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).
Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed
by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is
a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with
some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell
succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate
change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to
do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of
life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”
Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate
science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the
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organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific
conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method”
and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one
letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the
scientific theories presented here are old and long discredited. And
no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict
the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a
problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about
sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)
In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to
doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to
life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the
C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano
and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a
forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats
with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in
the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here
will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube
video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.”
They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing
commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential
candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down
to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview
outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute,
proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and
speeches…that were informed by or motivated by somebody
attending one of these conferences.”
The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to
“promoting free-market solutions,” has been holding these confabs
since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And the strategy appears to be
working. At the end of day one, Morano—whose claim to fame is
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having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that sank John
Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—leads the gathering through a
series of victory laps. Cap and trade: dead! Obama at the Copenhagen
summit: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projects a
couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as
progressives do so well) and exhorts the audience to “celebrate!”
There were no balloons or confetti descending from the rafters, but
there may as well have been.
***
When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes,
the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they
come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why
pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about
climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll
found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued
burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009
the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of
Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the
population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at
the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the
largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion
history.”
Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end
of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt
Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue
still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those
days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified
Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a
level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade.
In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have
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overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some
regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept
the science.
Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate
change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—
just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their
political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably
come in last.
But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care
passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what
they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by
liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style
tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers,
opposition to climate change has become as central to their
worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion.
Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors
of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy
conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a
book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of
my cold dead hands.”)
This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you
challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity,
facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily
deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new
study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially
funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to
the “skeptic” position.)
The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the
race to lead the Republican Party. Days into his presidential
campaign, with his home state literally burning up with wildfires,
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Texas Governor Rick Perry delighted the base by declaring that
climate scientists were manipulating data “so that they will have
dollars rolling into their projects.” Meanwhile, the only candidate to
consistently defend climate science, Jon Huntsman, was dead on
arrival. And part of what has rescued Mitt Romney’s campaign has
been his flight from earlier statements supporting the scientific
consensus on climate change.
But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far
beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute
on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media
and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities
were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair
launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US
networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the
networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in
style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green
issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.
This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest
decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural
disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil
fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in
new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of
the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion
Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the
Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of
Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the
industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.
If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the
atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will
increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone,
says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for
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the climate).
All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of
a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn
from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about
economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing
jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing
number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street,
many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of
lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the
economic terrain from the right. This would require making a
persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our
best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—
one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the
public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins
in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the
notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy
causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has
become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with
defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality
of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a
coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need
for real alternatives.
Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it
first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change
makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which
is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps
we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just
understand something the left still doesn’t get.
***
The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing
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conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at
this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower
global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science
demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by
radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways
antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger
and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern
environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to
the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government
intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly:
For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason
why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”
Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any
further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s
climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about
the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere
through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures
to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the
end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.
But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific
findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to
our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic
system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in
considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists,
the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then
assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products
and creating clever markets in pollution.
The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount
of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger
crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is
based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more
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of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly
replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is
not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to
recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to
topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset,
which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the
climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of
scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits
does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it
demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in
dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—
and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human
intelligence.
So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow
Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an
issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that
many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable.
These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on
Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our
ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the
statist left as well as the neoliberal right.
While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to
terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav
Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent
global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central
planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era
state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources
with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as
recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians
had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts
in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the
dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue
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that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done,
China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to
wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive megadams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects,
particularly coal.
It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong
government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones
that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve
power and control to the community level, whether through
community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or
transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.
Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid:
arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the freemarket ideology that has dominated the global economy for more
than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a
serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas:
public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation,
international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right
ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results
are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.
1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere
After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it
is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response
to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it
demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this
collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to
reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars
and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to
everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit
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lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable en…
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