-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        [TGC] Naomi Klein - great article - Capitalism vs Climate
Date:   Wed, 1 Feb 2012 21:31:30 +1000
From:   John Rainbird

CC:     'Andrew Glikson'

This is a great article - long but worth the read.
John

http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-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.

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
right-wing 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 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 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
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,
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 Fairgreen 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 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
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 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 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 mega-dams,
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 free-market
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 lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy;
and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best
methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services
because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be
genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable.
They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they
should come from the public sector.

Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as
conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without
limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond
our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out
for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different
understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as
dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural
systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all
of our collective muscle-to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to
shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.

2. Remembering How to Plan

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a
serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that
has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market
fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at
the national and international levels. Every community in the world
needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels,
what the Transition Town movement calls an "energy descent action
plan." In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility
seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory
democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls
to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower
emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well-particularly
for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off
fossil fuels. A few "green jobs" trainings aren't enough. These
workers need to know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the
other side. That means bringing back the idea of planning our
economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate
profitability-giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines
the tools and resources to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland's
worker-run green co-ops serving as a model.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to
address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and
dependence on fossil fuel inputs. Wes Jackson, the visionary founder
of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has been calling for "a
fifty-year farm bill." That's the length of time he and his
collaborators Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann estimate it will
take to conduct the research and put the infrastructure in place to
replace many soil-depleting annual grain crops, grown in monocultures,
with perennial crops, grown in polycultures. Since perennials don't
need to be replanted every year, their long roots do a much better job
of storing scarce water, holding soil in place and sequestering
carbon. Polycultures are also less vulnerable to pests and to being
wiped out by extreme weather. Another bonus: this type of farming is
much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means
that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment.

Outside the Heartland conference and like-minded gatherings, the
return of planning is nothing to fear. We are not talking about a
return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real
democracy. The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West
economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world.
These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt
against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption.
Climate change doesn't conflict with demands for a new kind of
economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative.

3. Reining in Corporations

A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-
regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives:
subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for
instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of
barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means
getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing
strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning
new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots,
to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar
sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion
plans).

Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on
corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek's road to serfdom
-and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the
population that is at the forefront of climate change denial.

4. Relocalizing Production

If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change
sounds somewhat radical it's because, since the beginning of the
1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government is
to get out of the way of the corporate sector-and nowhere more so
than in the realm of international trade. The devastating impacts of
free trade on manufacturing, local business and farming are well
known. But perhaps the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all.
The cargo ships, jumbo jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources
and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew
greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced-made to be
replaced, almost never fixed-are consuming a huge range of other
nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be
safely absorbed.

This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest
gains that have been made in reducing emissions many times over. For
instance, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesrecently
published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that
signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized,
that was partly because international trade had allowed these
countries to move their dirty production to places like China. The
researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced
in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six
times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of energy-
intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed-reserved for
those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local
production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in
greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy-
intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light rail.)

Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an
end to the reckless form of "free trade" that governs every
bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization.
This is more good news -for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to
compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their
manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with
big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project
should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-
year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

5. Ending the Cult of Shopping

The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization
were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate
profits. They were also a response to the "stagflation" of the
1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid
economic growth. The threat was real: within our current economic
model, a drop in production is by definition a crisis-a recession or,
if deep enough, a depression, with all the desperation and hardship
that these words imply.

This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably
approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce
emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is
"decoupling"-the idea that renewable energy and greater
efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its
environmental impact. And "green growth" advocates like Thomas
Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies
and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost,
sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to "make America
healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure."

But here is where things get complicated. There is a growing body of
economic research on the conflict between economic growth and sound
climate policy, led by ecological economist Herman Daly at the
University of Maryland, as well as Peter Victor at York University,
Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey and environmental law and
policy expert Gus Speth. All raise serious questions about the
feasibility of industrialized countries meeting the deep emissions
cuts demanded by science (at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by
2050) while continuing to grow their economies at even today's
sluggish rates. As Victor and Jackson argue, greater efficiencies
simply cannot keep up with the pace of growth, in part because greater
efficiency is almost always accompanied by more consumption, reducing
or even canceling out the gains (often called the "Jevons
Paradox"). And so long as the savings resulting from greater energy
and material efficiencies are simply plowed back into further
exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions
will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth,
"Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from the dilemma of
growth need to take a closer look at the historical evidence-and at
the basic arithmetic of growth."

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the
overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by
improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount
of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to
the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are
controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year
after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as
Jackson puts it, "trash the system or crash the planet."

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic
paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth
would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out
of poverty. Meanwhile, in the industrialized world, those sectors that
are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public
sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share
of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal
ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many
jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector,
with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have
to contract.

So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate
change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it's not
because they are paranoid. It's because they are paying attention.

6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy

About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going
to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we'll grow
our way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based
economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands
for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie,
eventually there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie,
as the current inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting
multiple ecological limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to
finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where
the money is.

That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means
increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated
military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel
industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so
that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust
international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when
they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister "world
government").

Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the
corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top
five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade;
ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter.
For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest
in a shift to renewable energy (BP's "Beyond Petroleum"
rebranding being the highest-profile example). But according to a
study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the big
five's $100 billion in combined 2008 profits went to "renewable and
alternative energy ventures." Instead, they continue to pour their
profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay and new
technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous
fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to
beat back every piece of climate legislation that has reared its head,
and to fund the denier movement gathered at the Marriott Hotel.

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of
helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup
in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the "polluter pays"
principle to be applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on
polluters, governments will have to negotiate much higher royalty
rates so that less fossil fuel extraction would raise more public
revenue to pay for the shift to our postcarbon future (as well as the
steep costs of climate change already upon us). Since corporations can
be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into their profits,
nationalization-the greatest free-market taboo of all-cannot be off
the table.

When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a
plot to "redistribute wealth" and wage class war, these are the
types of policies they most fear. They also understand that, once the
reality of climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be
transferred not just within wealthy countries but also from the rich
countries whose emissions created the crisis to poorer ones that are
on the front lines of its effects. Indeed, what makes conservatives
(and plenty of liberals) so eager to bury the UN climate negotiations
is that they have revived a postcolonial courage in parts of the
developing world that many thought was gone for good. Armed with
irrefutable scientific facts about who is responsible for global
warming and who is suffering its effects first and worst, countries
like Bolivia and Ecuador are attempting to shed the mantle of
"debtor" thrust upon them by decades of International Monetary Fund
and World Bank loans and are declaring themselves creditors-owed not
just money and technology to cope with climate change but
"atmospheric space" in which to develop.

* * *

So let's summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we
break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with
great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse
privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back
overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and
tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military
spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none
of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a
massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that
corporations have over the political process. That means, at a
minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their
status as "people" under the law. In short, climate change
supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive
demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a
clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political "I told
you so" since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of
Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism's "irreparable rift" with
"the natural laws of life itself," and many on the left have argued
that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of
capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And
of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers
of disrespecting "Mother Earth" long before that. The fact that the
airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm,
with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers
were right. And the people who said, "Hey, let's get rid of all the
rules and watch the magic happen" were disastrously, catastrophically
wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for
progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our
ideas-informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of
industrial state socialism-are more important than ever. It means
that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and
challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity's
best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.

But imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like
Heartland president Bast, who studied economics at the University of
Chicago and described his personal calling to me as "freeing people
 >from the tyranny of other people." It looks like the end of the
world. It's not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes,
the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological
scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply
no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and
venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective
action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the
market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.

* * *

At the Heartland conference-where everyone from the Ayn Rand
Institute to the Heritage Foundation has a table hawking books and
pamphlets-these anxieties are close to the surface. Bast is
forthcoming about the fact that Heartland's campaign against climate
science grew out of fear about the policies that the science would
require. "When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for
massive increase in government-. Before we take this step, let's
take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian
groups, I think, stopped and said, Let's not simply accept this as an
article of faith; let's actually do our own research." This is a
crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific
facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition
to the real-world implications of those facts.

What Bast is describing-albeit inadvertently-is a phenomenon
receiving a great deal of attention these days from a growing subset
of social scientists trying to explain the dramatic shifts in belief
about climate change. Researchers with Yale's Cultural Cognition
Project have found that political/cultural worldview explains
"individuals' beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any
other individual characteristic."

Those with strong "egalitarian" and "communitarian" worldviews
(marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice,
concern about inequality and suspicion of corporate power)
overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On
the other hand, those with strong "hierarchical" and
"individualistic" worldviews (marked by opposition to government
assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry
and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject
the scientific consensus.

For example, among the segment of the US population that displays the
strongest "hierarchical" views, only 11 percent rate climate change
as a "high risk," compared with 69 percent of the segment
displaying the strongest "egalitarian" views. Yale law professor
Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes this tight
correlation between "worldview" and acceptance of climate science
to "cultural cognition." This refers to the process by which all of
us-regardless of political leanings-filter new information in ways
designed to protect our "preferred vision of the good society." As
Kahan explained in Nature, "People find it disconcerting to believe
that behaviour that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to
society, and behaviour that they find base is beneficial to it.
Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and
their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject
it." In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to
watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was as true of die-
hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian
climate deniers today.

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real
world, they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike
and marginal. A few true believers always remain to tell one another
that the problem wasn't with the ideology; it was the weakness of
leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient rigor. We have
these types on the Stalinist left, and they exist as well on the neo-
Nazi right. By this point in history, free-market fundamentalists
should be exiled to a similarly marginal status, left to fondle their
copies of Free to Choose and Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are
saved from this fate only because their ideas about minimal
government, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so
profitable to the world's billionaires that they are kept fed and
clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, and
ExxonMobil.

This points to the limits of theories like "cultural cognition."
The deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview-
they are protecting powerful interests that stand to gain from
muddying the waters of the climate debate. The ties between the
deniers and those interests are well known and well documented.
Heartland has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together
with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife
(possibly much more, but the think tank has stopped publishing its
donors' names, claiming the information was distracting from the
"merits of our positions").

And scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost
all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell
the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute's Patrick
Michaels, who gave the conference keynote, once told CNN that 40
percent of his consulting company's income comes from oil companies,
and who knows how much of the rest comes from coal. A Greenpeace
investigation into another one of the conference speakers,
astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that since 2002, 100 percent of his
new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests. And fossil
fuel companies are not the only economic interests strongly motivated
to undermine climate science. If solving this crisis requires the
kinds of profound changes to the economic order that I have outlined,
then every major corporation benefiting from loose regulation, free
trade and low taxes has reason to fear.

With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate
deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal
and dysfunctional economic status quo. One of the most interesting
findings of the studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection
between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social
and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only
conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average
incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly
confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much-
discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap
(memorably titled "Cool Dudes") found that confident conservative
white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe
climate change "will never happen" than the rest of the adults
surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this
discrepancy: "Conservative white males have disproportionately
occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the
expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial
capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that
conservative white males' strong system-justifying attitudes would be
triggered to deny climate change."

But deniers' relative economic and social privilege doesn't just
give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason
to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first
place. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the
Heartland conference display what can only be described as an utter
absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell,
whose bio describes him as a "space architect," drew plenty of
laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn't so bad: "I
moved to Houston intentionally!" (Houston was, at that time, in the
midst of what would turn out to be the state's worst single-year
drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that "the
world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer
times." And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change
should do what the French did after a devastating 2003 heat wave
killed 14,000 of their people: "they discovered Walmart and air-
conditioning."

Listening to these zingers as an estimated 13 million people in the
Horn of Africa face starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling.
What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the
deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming
isn't something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to
worry about. ("When it rains, we find shelter. When it's hot, we
find shade," Texas Congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and
environment subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and
busy themselves getting unpoor. When I asked Michaels whether rich
countries have a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly
adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed that there is no reason to
give money to countries "because, for some reason, their political
system is incapable of adapting." The real solution, he claimed, was
more free trade.

* * *

This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate
denial gets truly dangerous. It's not simply that these "cool
dudes" deny climate science because it threatens to upend their
dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview
provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of
humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this
empathy-exterminating mindset is a matter of great urgency, because
climate change will test our moral character like little before. The
US Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental
Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a
petition that in the event of global warming, "populations can
acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral,
physiological, and technological adaptations." These adaptations are
what I worry about most.

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by
increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat
the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we
open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which
they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and
adopt ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How will we deal with
resource scarcity?

We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources
will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will
continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations.
Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push
genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will
attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky
technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of
our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and
intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those
conflicts ourselves. "Free-market climate solutions," as they are
called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism,
as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as
carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the
poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-
fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it's everyone
for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master
nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get
colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in
parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories
are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of
hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the
global South, and in predominately African-American cities like New
Orleans.

In The Shock Doctrine, I explore how the right has systematically used
crises-real and trumped up-to push through a brutal ideological
agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but
rather to enrich elites. As the climate crisis begins to bite, it will
be no exception. This is entirely predictable. Finding new ways to
privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current
system is built to do. The process is already well under way.

The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement
will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That
means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an
alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological
crisis-this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-
individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation
rather than hierarchy.

Shifting cultural values is, admittedly, a tall order. It calls for
the kind of ambitious vision that movements used to fight for a
century ago, before everything was broken into single "issues" to
be tackled by the appropriate sector of business-minded NGOs. Climate
change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of
Climate Change, "the greatest example of market failure we have ever
seen." By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive
sails with conviction, breathing new life and urgency into
longstanding fights against everything from free trade to financial
speculation to industrial agriculture to third-world debt, while
elegantly weaving all these struggles into a coherent narrative about
how to protect life on earth.

But that isn't happening, at least not so far. It is a painful irony
that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-
wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has
handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since
William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills" (and, of course, those mills
were the beginning of climate change). When demonstrators are cursing
out the corruption of their governments and corporate elites in
Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Madison and New York, climate change is often
little more than a footnote, when it should be the coup de gr?�ce.

Half of the problem is that progressives-their hands full with
soaring unemployment and multiple wars-tend to assume that the big
green groups have the climate issue covered. The other half is that
many of those big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision,
any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate
crisis: globalization, deregulation and contemporary capitalism's
quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for
the destruction of the rest of the economy). The result is that those
taking on the failures of capitalism and those fighting for climate
action remain two solitudes, with the small but valiant climate
justice movement-drawing the connections between racism, inequality
and environmental vulnerability-stringing up a few swaying bridges
between them.

The right, meanwhile, has had a free hand to exploit the global
economic crisis to cast climate action as a recipe for economic
Armageddon, a surefire way to spike household costs and to block new,
much-needed jobs drilling for oil and laying new pipelines. With
virtually no loud voices offering a competing vision of how a new
economic paradigm could provide a way out of both the economic and
ecological crises, this fearmongering has had a ready audience.

Far from learning from past mistakes, a powerful faction in the
environmental movement is pushing to go even further down the same
disastrous road, arguing that the way to win on climate is to make the
cause more palatable to conservative values. This can be heard from
the studiously centrist Breakthrough Institute, which is calling for
the movement to embrace industrial agriculture and nuclear power
instead of organic farming and decentralized renewables. It can also
be heard from several of the researchers studying the rise in climate
denial. Some, like Yale's Kahan, point out that while those who poll
as highly "hierarchical" and "individualist" bridle at any
mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies
that confirm their belief that humans can dominate nature. So, he and
others argue, environmentalists should start emphasizing responses
such as nuclear power and geoengineering (deliberately intervening in
the climate system to counteract global warming), as well as playing
up concerns about national security.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn't work. For
years, big green groups have framed climate action as a way to assert
"energy security," while "free-market solutions" are virtually
the only ones on the table in the United States. Meanwhile, denialism
has soared. The more troubling problem with this approach, however, is
that rather than challenging the warped values motivating denialism,
it reinforces them. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions
to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind
of short-term hubristic thinking that got us into this mess.

It is not the job of a transformative social movement to reassure
members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still
masters of the universe-nor is it necessary. According to McCright,
co-author of the "Cool Dudes" study, the most extreme, intractable
climate deniers (many of them conservative white men) are a small
minority of the US population-roughly 10 percent. True, this
demographic is massively overrepresented in positions of power. But
the solution to that problem is not for the majority of people to
change their ideas and values. It is to attempt to change the culture
so that this small but disproportionately influential minority-and
the reckless worldview it represents-wields significantly less power.

* * *

Some in the climate camp are pushing back hard against the appeasement
strategy. Tim DeChristopher, serving a two-year jail sentence in Utah
for disrupting a compromised auction of oil and gas leases, commented
in May on the right-wing claim that climate action will upend the
economy. "I believe we should embrace the charges," he told an
interviewer. "No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes,
we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our
vision about what we want to change-of the healthy, just world that
we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a
radical overhaul of our economy and society." He added, "I think
once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we
expect."

When DeChristopher articulated this vision for a climate movement
fused with one demanding deep economic transformation, it surely
sounded to most like a pipe dream. But just five months later, with
Occupy Wall Street chapters seizing squares and parks in hundreds of
cities, it sounds prophetic. It turns out that a great many Americans
had been hungering for this kind of transformation on many fronts,
 >from the practical to the spiritual.

Though climate change was something of an afterthought in the
movement's early texts, an ecological consciousness was woven into
OWS from the start-from the sophisticated "gray water" filtration
system that uses dishwater to irrigate plants at Zuccotti Park, to the
scrappy community garden planted at Occupy Portland. Occupy Boston's
laptops and cellphones are powered by bicycle generators, and Occupy
DC has installed solar panels. Meanwhile, the ultimate symbol of OWS-
the human microphone-is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.

And new political connections are being made. The Rainforest Action
Network, which has been targeting Bank of America for financing the
coal industry, has made common cause with OWS activists taking aim at
the bank over foreclosures. Anti-fracking activists have pointed out
that the same economic model that is blasting the bedrock of the earth
to keep the gas flowing is blasting the social bedrock to keep the
profits flowing. And then there is the historic movement against the
Keystone XL pipeline, which this fall has decisively yanked the
climate movement out of the lobbyists' offices and into the streets
(and jail cells). Anti-Keystone campaigners have noted that anyone
concerned about the corporate takeover of democracy need look no
further than the corrupt process that led the State Department to
conclude that a pipeline carrying dirty tar sands oil across some of
the most sensitive land in the country would have "limited adverse
environmental impacts." As 350.org's Phil Aroneanu put it, "If
Wall Street is occupying President Obama's State Department and the
halls of Congress, it's time for the people to occupy Wall Street."

But these connections go beyond a shared critique of corporate power.
As Occupiers ask themselves what kind of economy should be built to
displace the one crashing all around us, many are finding inspiration
in the network of green economic alternatives that has taken root over
the past decade-in community-controlled renewable energy projects, in
community-supported agriculture and farmers' markets, in economic
localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life,
and in the co-op sector. Already a group at OWS is cooking up plans to
launch the movement's first green workers' co-op (a printing
press); local food activists have made the call to "Occupy the Food
System!"; and November 20 is "Occupy Rooftops"-a coordinated
effort to use crowd-sourcing to buy solar panels for community
buildings.

Not only do these economic models create jobs and revive communities
while reducing emissions; they do so in a way that systematically
disperses power-the antithesis of an economy by and for the 1
percent. Omar Freilla, one of the founders of Green Worker
Cooperatives in the South Bronx, told me that the experience in direct
democracy that thousands are having in plazas and parks has been, for
many, "like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had." And, he
says, now they want more democracy-not just at a meeting but also in
their community planning and in their workplaces.

In other words, culture is rapidly shifting. And this is what truly
sets the OWS moment apart. The Occupiers-holding signs that said
Greed Is Gross and I Care About You-decided early on not to confine
their protests to narrow policy demands. Instead, they took aim at the
underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the
economic crisis, while embodying-in highly visible ways-radically
different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.

This deliberate attempt to shift cultural values is not a distraction
 >from the "real" struggles. In the rocky future we have already made
inevitable, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people,
and a capacity for deep compassion, will be the only things standing
between humanity and barbarism. Climate change, by putting us on a
firm deadline, can serve as the catalyst for precisely this profound
social and ecological transformation.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time.
The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they
are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that
their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of
us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different
worldview can be our salvation.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate