Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse
Posted: Sat Jul 13, 2019 1:22 pm
I think that, since your context derives from your experience in North Korea, it is excessive to apply 'communist' to people who promote economic conservatism (my own coinage) as necessary to neutralize our impact on the climate. Essentially, this conservatism is a reaction to the free-market liberalism that exalts growth as the highest value. This liberalism has indeed reduced poverty, but if we continue to rely on it to lift all boats (including those of the already-rich), we are working at cross-purposes to the goal of managing climate change, preventing mass extinctions, and avoiding plasticizing the planet.Robert Tulip wrote: I have been a staunch anti-communist since I visited Seoul and Pyongyang thirty years ago in July 1989, representing the World Student Christian Federation at the North Korean World Festival of Youth and Students, just after the Tian An Men massacre and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. My previous leftist sentiments were destroyed by comparing the free dynamism of South Korea with the stagnant autocracy of North Korea.
So my language about communism may seem excessive, as it is coloured by this ‘end of history’ optimism about neo-liberal economics from 1989. Even so, I have adopted the economic thinking of the Austrian economics of Hayek and von Mises, and even to some extent Ayn Rand, in recognition that free market growth is the only way to create the wealth that can reduce poverty, and that state power can be a pernicious cancer.
But is progressive thinking wrong just because it may have come from communist thinking? It is communist societies that have failed, not necessarily all the idealism that went into them, and the failure seems to have resulted largely from the brutal power used to remake humans in the image of the state and from the emergence of a small ruling elite. Redistributionist societies may have succeeded in using what was good in the communist model. You can make this case for some northern European countries, which are capitalist to the core yet have chosen to fund a generous welfare state. Less abject poverty and wealth inequality apparently combine to create more content societies. That a portion of the population will respond to perverse incentives is an acceptable negative.Communist logic is the view that poverty can be reduced by using the power of the state to redistribute wealth, ignoring the perverse incentives and effects created by that policy. To some extent communist logic may be needed and justified, as in progressive tax systems. But I still think it is important to note the communist origins of progressive thinking, with the dangers of excessive reliance on the state.
No, I have to think that it's not that environmentalists are conducting a stealth attack on capitalism that accounts for their opposition to geoengineering. I would bet that none of us even think of geoengineering as a big opportunity for the capitalist system. There is fear of hubristic manipulation of the earth, and there is a feeling that geoengineering will be used as a get-out-of-jail-free card, making basic changes in habits and lifestyles unnecessary. We can even tell ourselves that continuing to burn everything in sight will be okay. I think you are pretty convincing that geoengineering is something we need to begin to seriously test. I just don't see the animus against it in the same way you do.With climate change, communist logic is the idea that a political attack on the capitalist system and its representatives is the only way to fix the problem. That seems to me central to decarbonisation arguments, with the UN Secretary General the cheerleader. Communist logic rejects geoengineering precisely because it enables the capitalist system to prosper.
I can't deny that what you say about motive-suspicion has a lot of truth. However, I think that in the U.S., nationalism as we've come to view it in the Trump era has more to do with denying need to act on climate change than does revulsion of socialists. It's clear as can be that for the U.S. president winning is the only international goal. If we believe we can do relatively better than the rest of the world, we have an advantage through climate change. (After all, the president has said that our climate is the "cleanest it's even been," so why worry?) Pure fantasy, of course, in the longer term, but politically effective.Climate response has a major problem with public trust. There is a widespread suspicion that advocates of emission reduction are socialists masquerading as environmentalists, as former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. This concern is a severe stumbling block for climate action. It enables a range of conspiratorial memes about the real motives of climate activists, as to whether their main agenda is social justice through big government and high taxes. Are they just using public fears about global warming to achieve these concealed socialist political goals, since they know that arguing their real views will be unelectable?
Whether leftist or not, a popular front is necessary. The problem is that if it only accepts actions on emissions reduction, its program will fail, as you keep saying. That is the impasse, but popular will is still key. I can't have much faith in "sit back, relax, go about your business while we put our global strategies in place."I have a lot of sympathy for this conservative critique, which is why I pitch climate change as a planetary security problem that can only be fixed in alliance with the fossil fuel industry and other capitalist industries such as insurance and agriculture who will be badly affected by global warming. That makes me unpopular in climate circles that assume a ‘popular front’ leftist political strategy, when I point out their emission reduction strategy cannot work.
The energy companies, that is the fossil fuel companies, harm their own interests if they don't become major players in renewable energy. Oil and gas are not plentiful at world consumption rates, and most coal is best left in the ground anyway. But it's also barely conceivable that we can let the fossil companies continue to burn until supplies run out, and take care of the carbon through geoengineering. It's likely to place an impossible burden on geoengineering. In my view you are too sanguine about what geoengineering can accomplish, and for certain we should use the minimal amount necessary.Energy companies are mostly adamantly opposed to increasing their prices through carbon taxes, despite their lip service to that model. So I propose geoengineering as a way to address climate change that does not harm their economic interests. That leaves emission reduction as a small factor in climate response, maybe 10% of the required 35 GTC removal needed each year.
But really, I'm not suspicious of world government. It's something that can't come about in time to help with the climate crisis, anyway, but over the long term to maintain climate stability, maybe it can. What if greater international power is the only way to get around the obstacles of nations fighting over geoengineering measures whose benefits won't be equally shared across countries? It might be that some of our cherished notions will need to be on the table if we are to succeed. On the other hand, maybe giving up what we think of as our freedoms will be too high a price to pay (better dead than red), and instead we will take our chances with the climate. Human societies have made choices like that before.I completely get your suspicion about a world government agenda. This fear is widely held and reasonable. To my analysis the fear of world government is something that applies much worse to the non-feasible model of addressing climate change through carbon pricing, whereas geoengineering can be designed to minimise this problem. The need to prevent the upward creep of government size is a major reason that I am opposed to carbon pricing, even though taxing carbon has economic benefits. It is more important to get the political right on board by rejecting the tax and spend logic of the left.
I am suspicious about solutions that smack of having our cake and eating it: We can continue to place no limits on growth of the economy and population, while halting global warming, while protecting species, while keeping the planet green. That thinking comes from evolution, but we need to resist it. What better mechanism for the spread of a species could there be than this powerful need to rationalize our impact on the planet? This has "worked" splendidly to make us the most dominate megafauna of all time. But we have come to a point of much destructiveness as a result. Can we ever admit that to ourselves?