The Guardian has part 2 of excerpts from
the Introduction to This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, [where] the author calls the climate crisis a civilisational wake-up call to alter our economy, our lifestyles, now – before they get changed for us.
The quick version:
if we do not radically change the world economy, by 2017 we will have passed the point of no return. A tipping point is at hand, where changes will be locked in. We had three decades to make gradual adjustments - now only two choices remain: sweeping changes to our global economic systems ASAP, or global environmental disaster.
The NASA footage below is a stunning visualization of global weather systems. (NPR has the details.) To look at it is to see how what happens anywhere, touches everywhere. It gives some idea of the scope of what we need to address. http://youtu.be/...
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
SIGNS & PORTENTS
The video above happens to be from an NPR story suggesting that air pollution from China may be making the winter storms hitting the U.S. worse. Dealing with that pollution would be a necessary part of any effort to address global climate change. An additional NPR story lays out the Chinese reaction to a film Under The Dome, examining China's lethal smog. The government has cut off on-line access to it, and arrested protestors. (BBC video here shows more on both the storms and how bad the air is in China - with automatic links to related videos that show even more of the same.)
Meanwhile, in America the Senate Majority leader, Mitch McConnell is engaging in a deliberate effort to block Federal action on Climate Change that would curtail the use of coal.
The administration has proposed regulations aimed at limiting emissions. Mr. McConnell urged the governors not to cooperate with a joint rule-making process aimed at developing final regulations under which Washington will set emissions targets while giving states flexibility to implement them. Sabotaging this process, he says, will give the courts time to find the plan illegal or give the Senate time to figure out a way to block it. “Without your support,” he said, the administration “won’t be able to demonstrate the capacity to carry out such political extremism.”
The spectacle of the majority leader of the Senate openly engaging in sedition is, as the Times says, shocking. (Diaries on McConnell
here,
here, and
here.) Meanwhile, one of those governors McConnell is encouraging in sedition, has allegedly
barred state agencies from even mentioning Global Warming or Climate Change. This is Rick Scott in Florida, a state at high risk from rising sea levels. (
Charles P. Pierce has the idiocy of it covered.)
These are supposed to be our leaders? The ones whose job it is to look out for us?
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
In the first part of Naomi Klein's series in The Guardian, she is quite clear on what happens if we do nothing..
We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our 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. And we don’t have to do anything to bring about this future. All we have to do is nothing. Just continue to do what we are doing now, whether it’s counting on a techno-fix or tending to our gardens or telling ourselves we’re unfortunately too busy to deal with it.
All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required.
The title of her book is
This Changes Everything - and it's a double meaning. Quite frankly, massive change is inevitable. The only question is,
what kind is it going to be? We can engage in full crisis mode (because that's what we are facing) and drastically rework the economy driving this disaster in progress, or we can continue half-measures and denial - and slide into disaster on a global scale.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
In the second excerpt from her book, Klein ponders what the difficulty is, keeping us from taking action. It's not that we lack for solutions. Every day, non-carbon sources of energy become more readily available, cheaper, more efficient. There are a myriad of ways to conserve energy, to use less of it, to waste less of it. We do NOT have to stay locked into fossil fuels.
Getting nations to cooperate is hard - but it can be done. We've seen international responses to disasters, threats like terrorism, or diseases like HIV and Ebola. There are mechanisms by which even drastically diverse nations can work together when they see mutual benefit and recognize necessity.
Is the cost too high? Are the sacrifices too great? This is where Klein begins to connect the dots.
...Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim – or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth is that we continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labour rights, our arts and after-school programmes. We accept that we have to pay dramatically more for the destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our lives. We accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or degenerates. We accept that a public university education should result in a debt that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a generation ago.
This is all defended in the name of austerity, the current justification for these never-ending demands for collective sacrifice. In the past, calls for balanced budgets, greater efficiency, and faster economic growth have served the same role.
emphasis added
And that's where Klein puts her finger on the core problem.
So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the dawning of what came to be called “globalisation,” with the signing of the agreement representing the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the US, later to be expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) with the inclusion of Mexico.
The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. Much has been written about the real-world costs of these policies – the instability of financial markets, the excesses of the super-rich, and the desperation of the increasingly disposable poor, as well as the failing state of public infrastructure and services. Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.
emphasis added
Once it is made clear where the source of the trouble lies, the choices become obvious.
What those numbers mean is that our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
Fortunately, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most responsible bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon sectors of our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-carbon sectors are encouraged to contract. The problem, however, is that this scale of economic planning and management is entirely outside the boundaries of our reigning ideology. The only kind of contraction our current system can manage is a brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable will suffer most of all.
emphasis added
There are those who will proclaim that this is a bridge to far, that it is simply not possible to take the necessary action on the global scale required. And yet that ignores the fact that the last three decades have been all about reshaping the world on a global basis. Here's just a small piece of that global transformation, one that has built up quietly but relentlessly, on a vast scale.
It’s been just over 45 years since the Apollo Moon landings, and some would have it that we are failing to build big anymore; that we've since become too fascinated with the small, too impressed by our tablet computers, games consoles, and smartphones that we don't invest in grand, world-changing engineering projects.
Stand on the bridge of a container ship docked in a mega-port in Korea, however, and it's clear that's just not true. The global supply chain that brings us those tablets and phones, and pretty much everything else from our clothes and food to our toys and souvenirs, is nothing short of a moon shot itself – a vast, unprecedented engineering solution to a truly astronomical logistics problem. The fact that it's hidden from most people's sight, and that it has become so utterly reliable and efficient to the point of transparency, doesn't make it any less of an achievement of human technical endeavour.
...If you were asked to name some multi-national corporate brands you could probably reel off half a dozen, from Apple to Coca-Cola, but chances are that Maersk wouldn't spring to mind. Yet the Danish shipping giant is the very definition of a multi-national corporation, with over 25,000 employees, 345 offices in 125 countries, 600 active ships, and more than 2 million containers moved every year. The company is estimated to be responsible for 20% of Denmark's GDP on its own. Maersk might not make any of the things you buy in shops, but it more than likely put a lot of them there.
That's just one element (read
the whole thing) of the economic machine that fills big box stores - and empties rain forests, that gives us cheap crap to buy - while transferring wealth upwards, that gives us amazing techno-toys - while using up the planet. That didn't just happen all by itself. It took trade deals, treaties, laws, international cooperation, financing, new technology. We can still do big things. They can be done when it's about money and power; now we have to realize it's about survival - and act accordingly.
We face a huge challenge - but there is nothing intrinsically impossible about meeting it. As Klein observes,
...There are all kinds of measures that would lower emissions substantively that could and should be done right now. But we aren’t taking those measures, are we? The reason is that by failing to fight these big battles that stand to shift our ideological direction and change the balance of who holds power in our societies, a context has been slowly created in which any muscular response to climate change seems politically impossible, especially during times of economic crisis.
On the other hand, if we can shift the cultural context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible reformist policies that will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction. And winning is contagious so, who knows?
Read both
Part 1 and
Part 2 - and
The Guardian's justification for featuring Klein's work. At the bottom of the Guardian link is a place to sign up for email updates on more climate-related news and events. And, a nod to
SeaTurtle for writing it up, and to Digby as well
for also pointing to it.
http://youtu.be/...