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Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government
A Secret History of Free Enterprise and the Government That Made It Possible
Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion -- and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.
In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.
Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world’s largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever. And that’s just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it.
Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important implications for how we think about the role of government in our future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our survival.
These days, big government gets big press attention -- none of it anything but terrible. In the United States, especially in an election year, it’s become fashionable to beat up on the public sector and all things governmental (except the military). The Right does it nonstop. All their talking points disparage the role of an oversized federal government. Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist famously set the tone for this assault. "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government,” he said. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." He has managed to get 235 members of the House of Representatives and 41 members of the Senate to sign his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” and thereby swear never, under any circumstances, to raise taxes.
By now, this viewpoint has taken on the aura of folk wisdom, as if the essence of democracy were to hate government. Even many on the Left now regularly dismiss government as nothing but oversized, wasteful, bureaucratic, corrupt, and oppressive, without giving serious consideration to how essential it may be to our lives.
But don’t expect the present “consensus” to last. Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won’t help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups -- each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.
Consider Hurricane Irene: as it passed through the Northeast, states mobilized more than 100,000 National Guard troops. New York City opened 78 public emergency shelters prepared to house up to 70,000 people. In my home state, Vermont, where the storm devastated the landscape, destroying or damaging 200 bridges, more than 500 miles of road, and 100 miles of railroad, the National Guard airlifted in free food, water, diapers, baby formula, medicine, and tarps to thousands of desperate Vermonters trapped in 13 stranded towns -- all free of charge to the victims of the storm.
The damage to Vermont was estimated at up to $1 billion. Yet the state only has 621,000 residents, so it could never have raised all the money needed to rebuild alone. Vermont businesses, individuals, and foundations have donated at least $4 million, possibly up to $6 million in assistance, an impressive figure, but not a fraction of what was needed. The state government immediately released $24 million in funds, crucial to getting its system of roads rebuilt and functioning, but again that was a drop in the bucket, given the level of damage. A little known state-owned bank, the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank, also offered low-interest, low-collateral loans to towns to aid reconstruction efforts. But without federal money, which covered 80% to 100% of the costs of rebuilding many Vermont roads, the state would still be an economic basket case. Without aid from Washington, the transportation network might have taken years to recover.
As for flood insurance, the federal government is pretty much the only place to get it. The National Flood Insurance Program has written 5.5 million policies in more than 21,000 communities covering $1.2 trillion worth of property. As for the vaunted private market, for-profit insurance companies write between 180,000 and 200,000 policies in a given year. In other words, that is less than 5% of all flood insurance in the United States. This federally subsidized program underwrites the other 95%. Without such insurance, it’s not complicated: many waterlogged victims of 2011, whether from record Midwestern floods or Hurricane Irene, would simply have no money to rebuild.
Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to 23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?
Facing Snowpocalypse Without Plows
The early years of this century have already offered a number of examples of how disastrous too little government can be in the face of natural disaster, Katrina-inundated New Orleans in 2005 being perhaps the quintessential case.
There are, however, other less noted examples that nonetheless helped concentrate the minds of government planners. For example, in the early spring of 2011, a massive blizzard hit New York City. Dubbed “Snowmageddon” and “Snowpocalypse,” the storm arrived in the midst of tense statewide budget negotiations, and a nationwide assault on state workers (and their pensions).
In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg was pushing for cuts to the sanitation department budget. As the snow piled up, the people tasked with removing it -- sanitation workers -- failed to appear in sufficient numbers. As the city ground to a halt, New Yorkers were left to fend for themselves with nothing but shovels, their cars, doorways, stores, roads all hopelessly buried. Chaos ensued. Though nowhere near as destructive as Katrina, the storm became a case study in too little governance and the all-too-distinct limits of “self-reliance” when nature runs amuck. In the week that followed, even the rich were stranded amid the mounting heaps of snow and uncollected garbage.
Mayor Bloomberg emerged from the debacle chastened, even though he accused the union of staging a soft strike, a work-to-rule-style slowdown that held the snowbound city hostage. The union denied engaging in any such illegal actions. Whatever the case, the blizzard focused thinking locally on the nature of public workers. It suddenly made sanitation workers less invisible and forced a set of questions: Are public workers really “union fat cats” with “sinecures” gorging at the public trough? Or are they as essential to the basic functions of the city as white blood cells to the health of the human body? Clearly, in snowbound New York it was the latter. No sanitation workers and your city instantly turns chaotic and fills with garbage, leaving street after street lined with the stuff.
More broadly the question raised was: Can an individual, a town, a city, even a state really “go it alone” when the weather turns genuinely threatening? Briefly, all the union bashing and attacks on the public sector that had marked that year’s state-level budget debates began to sound unhinged.
In the Big Apple at least, when Irene came calling that August, Mayor Bloomberg was ready. He wasn’t dissing or scolding unions. He wasn’t whining about the cost of running a government. He embraced planning, the public sector, public workers, and coordinated collective action. His administration took unprecedented steps like shutting down the subway and moving its trains to higher ground. Good thing they did. Several low-lying subway yards flooded. Had trains been parked there, many millions in public capital might have been lost or damaged.
The Secret History of Free Enterprise in America
When thinking about the forces of nature and the nature of infrastructure, a slightly longer view of history is instructive. And here’s where to start: in the U.S., despite its official pro-market myths, government has always been the main force behind the development of a national infrastructure, and so of the country’s overall economic prosperity.
One can trace the origins of state participation in the economy back to at least the founding of the republic: from Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States, which refloated the entire post-revolutionary economy when it bought otherwise worthless colonial debts at face value; to Henry Clay’s half-realized program of public investment and planning called the American System; to the New York State-funded Erie Canal, which made the future Big Apple the economic focus of the eastern seaboard; to the railroads, built on government land grants, that took the economy west and tied the nation together; to New Deal programs that helped pulled the country out of the Great Depression and built much of the infrastructure we still use like the Hoover Dam, scores of major bridges, hospitals, schools, and so on; to the government-funded and sponsored interstate highway system launched in the late 1950s; to the similarly funded space race, and beyond. It’s simple enough: big government investments (and thus big government) has been central to the remarkable economic dynamism of the country.
Government has created roads, highways, railways, ports, the postal system, inland waterways, universities, and telecommunications systems. Government-funded R&D, as well as the buying patterns of government agencies -- (alas!) both often connected to war and war-making plans -- have driven innovation in everything from textiles and shipbuilding to telecoms, medicine, and high-tech breakthroughs of all sorts. Individuals invent technology, but in the United States it is almost always public money that brings the technology to scale, be it in aeronautics, medicine, computers, or agriculture.
Without constant government planning and subsidies, American capitalism simply could not have developed as it did, making ours the world’s largest economy. Yes, the entrepreneurs we are taught to venerate have been key to all this, but dig a little deeper and you soon find that most of their oil was on public lands, their technology nurtured or invented thanks to government-sponsored R&D, or supported by excellent public infrastructure and the possibility of hiring well-educated workers produced by a heavily subsidized higher-education system. Just to cite one recent example, the now-familiar Siri voice-activated command system on the new iPhone is based on -- brace yourself -- government-developed technology.
And here’s a curious thing: everybody more or less knows all this and yet it is almost never acknowledged. If one were to write the secret history of free enterprise in the United States, one would have to acknowledge that it has always been and remains at least a little bit socialist. However, it’s not considered proper to discuss government planning in open, realistic, and mature terms, so we fail to talk about what government could -- or rather, must -- do to help us meet the future of climate change.
Storm Socialism
The onset of ever more extreme and repeated weather events is likely to change how we think about the role of the state. But attitudes toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which stands behind state and local disaster responses, suggest that we’re hardly at that moment yet. In late 2011, with Americans beleaguered by weather disasters, FEMA came under attack from congressional Republicans, eager to starve it of funds. One look at FEMA explains why.
Yes, when George W. Bush put an unqualified playboy at its helm, the agency dealt disastrously with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Under better leadership, however, it has been anything but the sinister apparatus of repression portrayed by legions of rightists and conspiracy theorists. FEMA is, in fact, an eminently effective mechanism for planning focused on the public good, not private profit, a form of public insurance and public assistance for Americans struck by disaster. Every year FEMA gives hundreds of millions of dollars to local firefighters and first responders, as well as victims dealing with the aftershock of floods, fires, and the other calamities associated with extreme weather events.
The agency’s work is structured around what it calls “the disaster life cycle” -- the process through which emergency managers prepare for, respond to, and help others recover from and reduce the risk of disasters. More concretely, FEMA’s services include training, planning, coordinating, and funding state and local disaster managers and first responders, grant-making to local governments, institutions, and individuals, and direct emergency assistance that ranges from psychological counseling and medical aid to emergency unemployment benefits. FEMA also subsidizes long-term rebuilding and planning efforts by communities affected by disasters. In other words, it actually represents an excellent use of your tax dollars to provide services aimed at restoring local economic health and so the tax base. The anti-government Right hates FEMA for the same reason that they hate Social Security -- because it works!
As it happens, thanks in part to the congressional GOP’s sabotage efforts, thousands of FEMA’s long-term recovery projects are now on hold, while the cash-strapped agency shifts its resources to deal with only the most immediate crises. This represents a dangerous trend, given what historical statistics tell us about our future. In recent decades, the number of Major Disaster Declarations by the federal government has been escalating sharply: only 12 in 1961, 17 in 1971, 15 in 1981, 43 in 1991, and in 2011 -- 99! As a result, just when Hurricane Irene bore down on the East Coast, FEMA’s disaster relief fund had already been depleted from $2.4 billion as the year began to a mere $792 million.
Like it or not, government is a huge part of our economy. Altogether, federal, state, and local government activity -- that is collecting fees, taxing, borrowing and then spending on wages, procurement, contracting, grant-making, subsidies and aid -- constitutes about 35% of the gross domestic product. You could say that we already live in a somewhat “mixed economy”: that is, an economy that fundamentally combines private and public economic activity.
The intensification of climate change means that we need to acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it. Think of what’s coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism.
After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change. We are already at 392 ppm. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades. In other words, according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly chaotic and violent weather.
In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d” democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold.
To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government. Who else will save stranded climate refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?
It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.
22 Comments so far
Show All"Even many on the Left now regularly dismiss government as nothing but oversized, wasteful, bureaucratic, corrupt, and oppressive, without giving serious consideration to how essential it may be to our lives."
I don't agree with Grover Norquist, but who wouldn't like to get rid of taxes or defund a corrupt government? The question is how?
We can get rid of taxes with a maximum wage that the 99% can determine by yearly referendum. It can be high enough to preserve the profit motive, but low enough to prevent wealth/power concentration. Personal net worth excesses can go to funding government. There would be no need for taxes. Excess wealth would fund rather than corrupt government. The 1% won't voluntarily give up the loot they bilked from the public. It has to take it back.
How are these personal net worth excesses obtained by government except through a tax???
So, you are proposing a tax schedule on net worth, where the tax rate is zero up to a certain amount, then 100% of all net worth over that amount? That is still a tax.
And, the way excess wealth is corrupting government not through taxes (???), but through politician campaign contributions. Taxes and political campaign donations have nothing to do with each other.
Indeed, politicians have little to do with the day-to-day vital services provided by government. I've been working for the US government for 17 years and except for a speech on new energy technologies Carter gave to the TVA employees way back in 1978, I've never seen a politician in my workplace.
Parenti's analysis is astute as far as it goes. Perhaps the book has a broader vision, but in this article Parenti seems arbitrarily constrained.
It is true that the Reagan-Norquist philosophy of small government has come to dominate public thinking, but Parenti scarcely ventures into the flip-side of loathing for big government: the worship of corporate efficiency - the infinitely corrosive idea that the sovereignty of financial power over everything will lead to the greatest good for most people.
It is true that national and international governance facilities will be essential in defending against more intense storms and droughts, but Parenti leaves unmentioned the more urgent concern of stopping the carbon emissions which drive current and future disasters. It is this essential task for humanity which most profoundly makes the point that world capitalism is on a collision course with world survival.
We not only need to stop prioritizing business over government, we need to start over, from the ground up, on a global economic system which is not predicated on the destruction of the commons.
Watch 131 Years of Global Warming in 26 Seconds
http://www.climatecentral.org/videos/web_features/nasa-finds-2011-ninth-warmest-year-on-record/
Your points are well-taken and thoughtful, and your suspicion that Mr Parenti deals more broadly with these issues, as well as that of reductions of emissions, in his book, "Tropic of Chaos," is correct. He does.
"Tropic of Chaos" is a highly sobering book for grownups only. Strongly recommended, but not for the simplistic minded who are content to wait for the likes of Wal-Mart and Goldman Sachs to save our asses.
Yikes that video was pretty sobering, especially the last 15 years. Another sobering thing is that we are under what I think is our third tornado alert here in NC in JANUARY! This once again pretty unprecedented. If this is going to continue until May a lot of peoples nerves are going to be pretty worn by then.
Parenti's point is totally valid but it is absolutely essential to face reality - the Interstate Highway system, suburban sprawl and the destruction of the US Green public transit system by the GM/Firestone/Chevron/et all conspiracy was a disaster.
Even today roads and highways are not paid for by gas taxes but cost over $140 Billion a year to maintain or even more foolishly expand while Green public transit was cut in over 150 communities since 2008. Vermont is an excellent case in point
with a number of totally viable existing and functional Rails which are used for
a handful of freight and "peeper" tourist trains but the rest of the time sit doing nothing to connect Main Streets across Vermont.
See http://www.vermontrailway.com .
Instead when I have traveled to Vermont I saw millions of dollars of work on I-91 which is paralleled by an existing Rail with no passenger service except for Autumn tourist trains and a few freights.
The venerable Bill McKibben at Middlebury College teaches right by a Rail line
with no passenger service.
The US uses 3 times the oil per capita of Europe and Japan primarily because of auto addiction which in turn leads DIRECTLY to almost 38% of US greenhouse emissions. I get sick and tired of hearing needs for infrastructure spending for
"roads and bridges' with public transit tacked on as an addendum.
It HAS to go the other way my friends if we are to survive Peak Oil and Climate Change - NO more roads, increased gas taxes so autos/truck pay their fair share,
the predominance of $140 Billion per year spent reviving and restoring rail service on our 233,000 miles of rail in the USA.
Green public transit has to come FIRST not an add-on nice to have.
When the US Federal and Corporate establishment made it a priority to save oil, rubber, iron and other materials wasted on auto addiction for the WW II war effort
auto production in the US was actually reduced to less than 400 cars while intercity rail bus and transit ridership increased by more than 4 times as auto miles driven decreased.
Please see "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil" ( http://transportrevolutions.info ) for details.
We need this same focus NOW to save civilization from economic collapse from Peak Oil and from Climate Change...
While falling down from over a cliff, the lemming started to question the conventional wisdom of things and subsequent choices he made... Perhaps he could cha--SPLAT!!! Oh well, perhaps not.
I agree that big government can help the people, but not when it's corporate controlled.
The government never should have backed insurance companies to allow people to build near the ocean in the first place. (Nixon in the 70s). Then there wouldn't be so much damage when hurricanes hit.
Katrina was not an example of FEMA incompetence. They were very competent at stopping rescue efforts, stopping the Red Cross from feeding people, and, after 3 days of hunger and misery, moving 200,000 black people out of New Orleans. Within a week, the Super Bowl was empty. And today, over 6 years later, New Orleans is still a whiter city.
Here in the Midwest, the government does not give money to people to rebuild after our floods last year. If you apply, and qualify, they give you what they call "low-cost" loans. Do they mean low-cost as in less than 1%, like they're giving the big banks?
Ha, ha. No.
I've heard and seen enough evidence to make me question all the computer models they keep throwing in my face. The environmental movement would be better off on focusing on the real threat to our environment, the uncontrolled proliferation of GMO seeds by the likes of Montsanto.
Before you call me shrill for big oil, let me explain a few things. 1) look up the Club of Rome documents. corbettreport.com is a good resource for this. He's written several articles on it. 2) Ken Lay of Enron and his likes are the ones coming up with the "accords" and "cap and trade" solutions. 3) There are much more pressing environmental problems that are a threat such as GMOs, flouride in the drinking water, and the ticking time bombs that are our nuclear plants.
Environmental movement, we've been had. I suggest youtubing "corbett enviromental movement." Mr. Corbett is emerging as an amazing alternate media journalist and he has found holes in most of the models, provided evidence, and has interviewed insiders who show how computer models are being manipulated.
Posts like these usually get me beat around, but the last 10 years have made me skeptical of practically everything. Nothing is quite what it seems.
Take a short course in climate modelling. It might not be as hard as you think. (Assuming, that is, that you are who you say you are - Nothing is quite what it seems, you know).
* You will get a full understanding of the simple models and that will have the effect of demystifying them, which is what you need.
* You will also come to appreciate that the more complicated models that account for much more than the simple models give more or less the same answers. You will come to understand that the expected result of carbon pollution is global warming. This has been known since the 1970s.
* Knowing what the models predict, the question in your mind will then become Does reality appear to reflect the model predictions? That is more difficult, and it is where most climate change denialists focus.
* You will begin to wake up and smell the ashes.
Climate change denial is an enterprise that is well funded by the likes of Shell and Enron. This has been documented by Greenpeace. Scientists have been given orders to not to tell the full consequences to their superiors, and theses have been given orders not to tell the full consequences to their politicians. Climatologists are not part of a conspiracy. Big oil and big coal, along with all their lackeys in the Rupublican party, are.
Climate change science has been well hammered and well challenged. There have been no shortage of people poking holes in every part of it. Your man Corbett is just another of these. Lots of people have pointed out weaknesses (found holes). Lots of people have provided "evidence" that sounds plausible so long as the listener, like most of us, is not in a position to judge. And lots of people have made claims of "manipulation".
The game is one of sowing the seeds of doubt, and delaying until global warming is "fait acompli", i.e. everyone knows it is too far gone to stop. It is a game they have all but succeeded in, with a little help from the like of you (assuming that you are who you say you are).
"Take a short course in climate modelling."
David Archer of the University of Chicago has just bundled his most popular course into a free online version, with a set of video lectures and a quiz tied to each chapter of his textbook "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast."
Enroll today at:
Open Climate Science 101
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/moodle/
Further details and some discussion of the course may be seen in Archer's RealClimate announcement:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/01/open-climate-101-online/
Thanks for the links on climate change modelling.
As usual, reading CD provides invaluable leads to resources.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY ezeflyer, remember that "modelling" isn't "science" no matter how complex the model.
And remember that "predictions" are not "science" either.
So, remember that someone "making predictions" based upon "modelling" is not a "scientist" in the sense that they are employing the scientific method.
They are a "scientist" in the sense of the religion of Scientism.
They are a "scientist" in the exact same way a priest with some oil and mutterings in a dead language is your "path to heaven" -they say so and everyone looks at you funny if you doubt it openly. ;)
The ACTUAL SCIENCE on climate and AGW IS very interesting however, and may even show a strong correlation in just a few more decades.
Not quick enough for middle-age-plus folks to get advice on an Apocalypse-as-stand-in-for-Mortality scare I know, but hey, that's what the priests are for, right? ;)
Predictions are not science? How about when Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that gravity would bend light? When this phenomenon was observed during a subsequent eclipse, relativity was confirmed as a more accurate model of the cosmos than Newtonian mechanics.
Models are not science? Relativity is a model, not an absolute description, because it entails singularities - impossible infinities. Wherever there is incomplete knowledge (which is everywhere) scientists work with somewhat abstract models to test the limits of the comprehensible.
Your pronouncements on that which does and does not qualify as genuine science emerge from an anti-scientific consciousness - as credible as the nutritional advice of a mortician.
priorities being what they are, the role of government to aid in disaster relief (and especially in the mitigation of disaster creation!) will continue to be insufficient, ineffectual and insulting to the many who will increasingly come to need it.
which, it turns out, is all of us.
This article is wonderful, in its recitation of the impacts of climate change and the way government is uniquely suited to deal with them. It also appears in HuffPo, where one of the commenters there posted this link:
http://www.chompingclimatechange.org/the-video.html
to a site that brings up the very important point that probably the easiest, most cost-effective (as in, actually profitable), and most healthy way to counter climate change is to go as vegetarian as you can (for me, thats only about 60%, but I'm trying). If about 1/4 of land currently used for animal products could be turned into forest land, much of the excess CO2 could be absorbed. This is important. As the consequences of climate change morph, as Parenti explains, into consequences society may be unable to pay, we may want to not just HALT CO2 rise, but actually reverse it. Growing more trees is the most cost-effective way to do that.
A government "of the people, by the people, for the people" cannot ever be large enough. It must keep growing as new people enter the world.
The problems we are now experiencing are the result of shrinking the government controls to a minority of people based upon monetary worth. Any notions about Equal Justice are now held in disdain by the corporate controllers of government.
Both major political parties support the corporate agenda. Money determines all for them.
As long as people keep supporting the corporate politicians, whether they masquerade as republican, democrat, or libertarian, they are helping to cut their own throats.
A very bizarre aspect of all of this is that so many foolish people simultaneously believe that they are superior to nature while they support a corrupt system of corporate governance which reduces them to "human resources."
Well said Mr. Parenti. United we stand. Divided we fall. We are divided. That isn't going to change by us. It's a free universe. Many have freely chosen to walk that wide and spacious (liberalization) road that has incorrect, but, crucially, improbable, signage on it. It's not leading to Life! It's leading to destruction.
Mr. Parenti would know better than I the details, but my understanding is that we cannot (and this is the consensus among all stakeholders) go beyond a global average increase in temperature of 2C by, at the latest, the 2030s. We are on track to easily blast past that 'tipping point'. (And we aren't even talking about a related tipping point, namely the global water crisis that captured governments aren't talking to people much or honestly about.) Gwynne Dyer (whose articles are helpfully free, archived and easily accessible online) says a lot about this problem. Those who have the power to prevent us from reaching that looming tipping point have indicated that they will not do what is necessary to keep us from reaching it. Talk about darkness!
This article depresses me just a bit.
The idea that this stunted thinking is what comes from the "best minds" of "our side" is just sad.
Allow me to quote Parenti's conclusion in an attempt to demonstrate:
"After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change."
Shaky, shaky. Do we care about what "scientists BELIEVE"? Shouldn't it be their observations that matter? This might pass except for the speculative "could" right next to the unreasonable "lock us into runaway...". But wait...
"We are already at 392 ppm."
Well, I guess that's that then? No.
"Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades. In other words, according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly chaotic and violent weather."
Parenti is arguing for Central Governments of existing States/Empires as the "only" way to deal with "climate change", but -seemingly from mental habit- he remembers to make it clear to everyone that we are past the point of no return and that any action now to mitigate pollution is essentially pointless. Hansen has been pulling this same trick -supposedly on accident- since I was in Middle School. Then again, maybe resigned fatalism to suffering and Central Government go hand in hand, just ask a Soviet Commisar. ;)
"In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat."
Strongest sentence in the conclusion. And thanks to the rhetoric of TV pundits of "the Right", it isn't a TOTAL strawman.
"And though small “d” democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold."
Uh, "democracy" does NOT equal "volunteerism" and "community" does NOT equal "'self-organization'" (which Parenti actually places in quotes because the very notion of such a thing is so alien to him) you jackass!
Feeling the subtext of repression and hopelessness yet kids? No? Really? Well, you asked for it...
"To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources."
Wait for it, that's just the set up...
"In other words, Big Storms require Big Government."
Ding, Ding, DING! There it is! Get it now? Or should spell it out?:
Humans "coming together on a large scale" = Big Government.
Humans "mobilizing society's full range of resources" = Big Government.
Forget that Big Government doesn't actually ever do either of these things. Forget that a tiny elite forcing everyone else into boxes is NOTHING AT ALL LIKE people "coming together on a large scale". Forget that the system that includes our Central Government takes 99% of our society's "resources", beats them to a pulp, and then tosses them in the garbage, never coming close to seeing them as anything but trash, let alone "mobilizing" them. Forget all of the examples from history of people "coming together on a large scale" and "mobilizing" that happened DESPITE Big Government, and how beautiful they were. Forget all of the examples from history of people "coming together on a large scale" and "mobilizing" that were at the behest of Big Government, and how they were mostly horrible wars. Forget that gigantism and rigidity have been the path to extinction for lifeforms in every drastic climate shift in the past.
Forget all of that.
Just whatever you do, remember that the ONLY way humanity can "come together on a large scale" and society can mobilize it's "full resources" is for us and they to first be divided up into 193 separate entities of radically different size and population -based on arbitrary or accidental or criminal pre-sorting- then for those 193 separate entities to be run as much as possible by a tiny few in a Big Government.
'Cause otherwise the weather is gonna kill us all in a hundred years (or maybe less, or maybe more, or maybe never).
Oh yeah, you were also supposed to forget that Big Government built the Big Industry that is being blamed for the disaster here. And forget that it is Big Goverment has failed to stop Big Polluters for the last 50 years. And forget that Big Governments just can't seem to agree with each other when it comes to stopping the "climate changing" pollution they have been allowing all of this time from the Big Industries they love so much.
Wow!
That's quite a bit of forgetting!
But why not FORGET to forget? ;)
'Puts a whole new -sorta threatening- color on these last lines for me:
"Who else will save stranded climate refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?
It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all."
Parenti wants you to assume that this last means Big Government (a label he conveniently drops here) WILL do "these tasks", whereas no one else will.
But on what possible basis of history would you rest such an assumption?!?!?!?
Other than planning "out the flow and ALLOCATION(!!!)of resources", if left to Big Government, these tasks "will not be done at all.".
Watch out folks, certain people in the "climate change environmentalist" wing of the house have gone anti-democratic. ;(
Thank you Christian, for reminding me of my childhood days of the early sixties. That big government was necessary, was common knowledge back then. Talk of "mixed economy" and "public sector/private sector" was ordinary talk from the grownups, from the school's "weekly reader" magazines. My dad was a union leader & business agent, then went to work for the federal government, in the Dept of Labor; utterly ordinary & acceptible life of a common "patriot" and servant to the community. I had a friend whose parents were "Birchers", and THEY were the weirdos back then, and now it is THEIR narrative that is the norm, and MY dad would be cast as some kind of subversive. There has already been a revolution in this country; a reactionary, COUNTER-revolution. The EMPIRE has, indeed, struck back, against all that was good & decent & NECESSARY to living a good life.
Climate change will be the occasion for bringing back big government intervention, AND to correct the evil depredations of the 0.1%ers (which THEY will try to use to effect THEIR agenda of exterminating the vast majority of the 99ers). I'm more inclined to believe climate change is cyclical in nature; another kind of "season" in addition to our common four seasons. In the cold cycle there is excess of snow & ice & shortened growing seasons & mass migrations & plagues. In the warm cycle there is desertification, starvation, mass migrations & plagues. Geodesic-domed Greenhouse cities, and massive desalination/irrigation programs can mitigate the effects of these "warm/cold" seasons, like heating & air-conditioning mitigates the effects of winter & summer. This would have been a common thought in those early sixties; indeed, the NAWAPA program was a design from the early sixties.
Wonderful summary by Christian Parenti as to why we will need major government coordination to deal with mitigating the most disastrous impacts of climate chaos.
In fact, it is partly the implications of this rational argument that compels right-wing free market fundamentalists to insist that 'global warming' is a conspiracy by big government socialists to destroy 'their' way of life.
Forced to choose between ideology and science, the choice is a simple one: the science is actually a sinister plot.
Ironically, this argument is made by a handful of 'leftists' who also think global climate chaos must be a conspiracy to distract them from community organizing, identity politics, consensus style democracy, organic farming -- whatever their personal projects or ideology demands of them.
For the record, Christian Parenti has stated that while he believes that ultimately capitalism is at war with nature and causes much of the poverty, exploitation, and violence on the world stage, he feels that impending climate chaos demands immediate & pragmatic responses. It may require compromises with our current systems of state power and corporate capitalism -- just to ensure human survival.
In his view, it is impossible to demand a complete overhaul of capitalism BEFORE we try to respond to an ongoing global catastrophe.
How many people are willing to believe that 98% of the major researchers in climate science are involved in a conspiracy to undermine their ideology?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-many-climate-scientists-are-climate-skeptics.html
Trying to get large numbers of scientists in lockstep is a bit like herding cats. They tend to be cautious, argumentative, and independent. Certainly science is influenced by funding. However, as a climatologist you will find it far easier to get funding from the petroleum and coal industry to denigrate 'global warming' than receive government funding to promote the threats -- especially in this semi-insane political climate.
http://www.minnpost.com/donshelby/2011/06/15/29151/background_claims_by_state_senates_global-warming_skeptic_fail_to_check_out
Take a look at the career of physicist S. Fred Singer, a paid mouthpiece of the coal industry and formerly the tobacco industry (he denied links between smoking & cancer) if you want to observe someone who is the archetypal 'kept' scientist.
http://desmogblog.com/s-fred-singer
Scientists are susceptible to getting locked into paradigms, (Thomas Kuhn) but the idea of anthropogenic climate change is an entirely new response to overwhelming evidence.
Anyone who tells you that the science of global climate chaos is simply based on speculative computer models is either ignorant or a propagandist.
The modeling, which improves all the time, is only one leg of the evidence. Hansen, for example, is not basing his arguments primarily on models and has offered various criticisms to try and improve them. For example, he suspects they may have underestimated the mitigating effects of aerosols in the atmosphere. (How do climate change denialists respond?)
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2722486.html
The strongest evidence is that climate change is happening right now. The world is getting warmer, ice and glaciers are in retreat, stable weather systems are becoming erratic, etc.
The only question is whether this is simply natural variability or anthropogenic in origin. Is it just a coincidence that as humans pump trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, etc. that the earth is warming?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=limits-on-greenhouse-gas-emissions
The chemistry and physics of greenhouse gases and feedback cycles are extremely well established.
Climatologists are carefully looking at past climate records as well as ancient CO2 levels. This is not based on speculative modeling and the results are sobering. More and more evidence suggests not only an overwhelming causal link between greenhouse gases and climate temperatures, but the possibility of rapid system shifts into new climate phases (ice ages, long term droughts, greenhouse feedback loops). In fact, most scientists strongly resisted the notion of rapid climate until the evidence forced them to consider it seriously.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/rapid-change-feature.html
My own take is pessimistic. There is no compelling reason to believe that human industrial societies will respond rationally to this crisis.
First, there are powerful economic interests totally opposed to any challenges to their short term profit 'maximizations'. These corporations dominate the present political response--especially in the U.S.
Second, when faced with a choice between clinging to their religions, ideologies, and belief systems-- or responding realistically to unpleasant and disruptive evidence-- the vast majority of people will cling to their beliefs until it is far too late.
Big government, FEMA, and the National Guard distributing blankets and meals-in- a-packet are not my idea of a good time. However, it seems even more grotesque to disparage the science in order to coddle your ideological and religious fantasies.
Great article! But do let the cat out of the bag. Governments created capitalism. We can fairly attack them for that. How about a left wing, maybe even Marxist or Trokskyite Tea Party?