Betrayal
This summer, with its heatwaves and wildfires, droughts and floods, has left no doubt that climate breakdown is here and it's here to stay. All we have left to decide is how much worse it will become, who we will save and who will be left to fend for themselves.
Read Labour MP Ed Miliband's plea in last Friday's Guardian. The author pulls no punches in unmasking our real enemy - climate delay. It's the deliberate 'go slow' approach taken by our political caste, Justin Trudeau very much included. Miliband warns that future generations will look on 2021 as "the year they ran out of excuses."
The accompanying truth is that our biggest enemy is no longer climate denial but climate delay. The most dangerous opponents of change are no longer the shrinking minority who deny the need for action, but the supposed supporters of change who refuse to act at the pace the science demands. As Bill McKibben, environmentalist and climate scholar, says on climate: “Winning slowly is the same as losing.”Today it's New Yorker, Hamilton Nolan's turn to weigh in. He writes that it's not good to be too pessimistic but, "That said, it sure does seem like we're screwed."
It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”. When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion. Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.
It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”. When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion. Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.
...The core issue is capitalism. Capitalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic growth is what caused climate change, and capitalism’s inability to reckon with externalities – the economic term for a cost that falls onto third parties – is what is preventing us from solving climate change. Indeed, climate change itself is the ultimate negative externality: fossil-fuel companies and assorted polluting corporations and their investors get all the benefits, and the rest of the world pays the price.
...I don’t want to lean too heavily on the touchy-feely, Gaia-esque interpretation of global warming as the inevitable wounds of an omniscient Mother Earth, but you must admit that viewing humanity and its pollution as a malicious virus set to be eradicated by nature is now a fairly compelling metaphor. Homo sapiens rose above the lesser animals thanks to our ability to wield logic and reason, yet we have somehow gotten ourselves to a place where the knowledge of what is driving all these wildfires and floods is not enough to enable us to do anything meaningful to stop it.
...Capitalism is a machine made to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left. We can either fool ourselves about that until it kills us, or we can change it.
Nolan, echoing Miliband, is right. We need our governments to go on a wartime footing. We need our governments to put climate breakdown, to make this dire threat to our very survival not just a priority but the priority.
Miliband sums up our perilous moment by borrowing the words of Martin Luther King Jr. from 50 years ago:
What is unfolding at such a snail's pace is nothing short of betrayal.
I am currently reading a book which you have probably read, Mound, called Winners Take All. The author posits that we now have adopted a mindset that "thought leaders", a.k.a., venture capitalists and such, are the ones to look to for solutions to the problems that beset us, not government. The only problem is that their 'solutions' require that there be something in it for them. In practice, that means not dealing with the underlying problems but adapting to them. For example, they are less keen to tackle the climate-change crisis than offer innovations like floating bridges and micro grids, with their slice of the pie built in.
ReplyDeleteGovernment control and regulation? No. Private sector profits? Yes. Neoliberalism at its finest, eh?
I've not read the book, Lorne, but it sounds interesting. During times of grave emergency, governments treat the corporate sector as they do farmboys. They draft them to the cause.
DeleteCompanies, especially manufacturing firms, are put into service. Canada Car Foundry was put to producing Hawker Hurricane fighters. In the States, Ford was commandeered to construct a giant factory, Willow Run, to churn out B-24 Liberator bombers. Chrysler was delegated to mass produce Grant and Sherman tanks. Resources were rationed and that mean steel, rubber and fuel were not available for civilian market manufacturing.
CCF had no prior experience building front-line fighters. Ford knew nothing about designing and building long-range, four-engine bombers. Chrysler had never before built a tank.
In grave emergencies, nations mobilize their resources to answer needs, not market whims. Companies are commandeered "for the duration." Government and the military don't ask the corporations what they would like to do. They tell these firms what they are to do and that's an end of it.
Any government that gives the private sector the leeway described in "Winners Take All" is derelict in its duty. Either that government must go or the nation suffers.