First Environmentalism—Then Socialism!

First Environmentalism—Then Socialism!

1/27/2012 4:55:00 PM

by Keith Goetzman

Tags: climate change, capitalism, environmentalism, socialism, communism, fascism, environment, Naomi Klein, The Nation, Reason, Keith Goetzman

To the power brokers of America’s right, climate change poses a dire threat to business as usual. Environmentalism, in fact, is seen by many of them as a stalking horse for an even more sinister force: socialism. Progressive thinker Naomi Klein expertly dissects this dynamic in her Nation article “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” explaining why the average modern conservative is terrified silly by the prospect of confronting human-caused climate change:

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. …

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.

Klein’s essay is well worth reading for anyone with an environmental consciousness who’s trying to understand why saving the planet sounds so damn scary to some people. I would say it undermines everything they believe in, but as Klein makes abundantly clear, they don’t believe in much of anything except preserving their own privileged, comfortable lifestyles.

After reading Klein’s piece, I didn’t have to go far to find someone willing to buttress her argument from the other side of the spectrum. James Delingpole, the London Telegraph reporter who set off the whole ridiculous “Climategate” imbroglio that allegedly exposed the climate hoax—but in fact did nothing of the sort—is now trotting out a book, Watermelons, apparently meant to capitalize on his hero status to climate-change deniers. He tells the libertarian magazine Reason, apparently without a trace of irony:

I call the book Watermelons because they’re green on the outside but red on the inside. After the Berlin Wall came down, the communist movement, the global leftist movement, was left in a bit of a quandary. They pretty much lost the economic argument. They needed somewhere else to go, and global warming has become the great proxy issue. It enables them to achieve many of the same aims as before but under a cloak of green righteousness. This book, although it is about global warming, is about something in fact much, much bigger than that. It is about a global takeover by fascism, communism, call it what you will; their aims are much the same. It is about control.

So, let’s review. If you’re concerned about the future of humanity and the natural world, and you accept the scientific experts’ consensus that we’re rapidly degrading the planet, and you believe we need to take immediate corrective steps, you’re basically a control freak trying to resurrect communism. Wow. I’m going to go for a walk in the woods and try to wrap my head around this one. Care to join me, comrade?

Sources: The Nation, Reason

Image by scottfeldstein , licensed under Creative Commons .

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Wild-Green/First-Environmentalism-Then-Socialism.aspx#ixzz1lC6neYtG

Capitalism vs. the Climate

Capitalism vs. the Climate

Naomi Klein

November 9, 2011 | This article appeared in the November 28, 2011 edition of The Nation.

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.

WSJ Non-Climate-Science Propaganda Eviscerated by Climate Science Facts

By Zachary Shahan On February 1, 2012

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a horrid op-ed last week on the inane idea that global warming doesn’t pose any threat to us and we don’t need to do anything about it.

Top sites Media Matters and Skeptical Science quickly counter-argued the nonsense put forth in the WSJ piece with some thoughtful pieces looking at the simple facts of the matter and the bias of the op-ed contributors.

“After reportedly rejecting a climate change essay by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, the Wall Street Journal has published a flawed op-ed by 16 scientists and engineers instructing public officials not to fight manmade global warming. But most of these individuals do not actually conduct climate research, and their credibility is further undermined by the misleading and unscientific arguments presented in the op-ed,” Media Matterswrites in its intro. The site’s piece is aptly titled, “The Journal Hires Dentists To Do Heart Surgery.”

“In fact, it only includes four scientists who have actually published climate research in peer-reviewed journals, and only two who have published climate research in the past three decades,” Skeptical Science adds.

The Usual Suspects

Media Matters continues on: “Of the 16 scientists who signed the op-ed, no more than 4 have published peer-reviewed research related to climate change, according to the Scopus database. While they may be prominent in their own fields, their credibility on the science of global warming is not comparable to that of researchers who specialize in this area. For instance, Jan Breslow is a physician, Burt Rutan is a retired airplane designer, Harrison Schmitt is a retired astronaut and former Republican politician, and Edward David is a retired electrical engineer, among others whose expertise lies elsewhere. ”

“Nearly half of the list (at least 7 of 16) have received fossil fuel industry funding, and the list also includes an economist, a physician, a chemist, an aerospace engineer, and an astronaut/politician,” Skeptical Science adds. “These are apparently the best and brightest the climate denialists can come up with these days?”

The especially funny (read: absurd) thing about this WSJ op-ed is that it is on the same matter as an op-ed written by 255 Members Of The U.S. National Academy Of Sciences (that was actually based in the scientific consensus) that the publication rejected. Peter Gleick covers that over on Forbes.com.

But, more from Media Matters on the fossil fuel connections: “Six Of The Scientists Have Been Linked To Fossil Fuel Interests. Roger Cohen and Edward David are both former employees of ExxonMobil. William Happer is the Chairman of the Board for the George C. Marshall Institute, which has received funding from Exxon. Rodney Nichols is also on the boards of the George Marshall Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which has been funded by Exxon and the Koch Foundations. Harrison Schmitt was the Chairman Emeritus of the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, which was funded by oil refiners and electric utilities in the 1990s, according to a Wall Street Journal report (via Nexis). Richard Lindzen also served on the Economic Advisory Council of the Center, was funded by ExxonMobil through the 2000s.”

Exxon top guns claiming global warming isn’t a threat. Hmm, surprised?

For more on the absurd claims these folks have made about all manner of things, from HIV/AIDS, to second-hand smoke risk, to U.S. government going sociaist, check out the Media Matters piece linked above.

Skeptics Increasing or Dwindling?

Something denier trolls and bots commenting here on Planetsave like to say is that their side is growing. To be honest, haven’t noticed that, even in the comments here.

From the WSJ op-ed: ”…a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.”

“The fact that only 16 scientists and engineers signed this letter casts serious doubt on this assertion. The fake skeptics were able to get ~100 signatories on a similar letter 5 years ago - this seems more like a small and dwindling number of fake skeptics,” Skeptical Science chimes in.

Should You Listen to a Dentist When You Have Heart Trouble?

And this is the real point, one far too often overlooked. “If I need heart surgery, I’m not going to allow a dentist to perform it, even if it’s the best dentist in the world. Virtually all of the climate science experts agree that actions to address global warming are needed. Their informed opinions are the ones we should heed when it comes to climate science, not those of astronauts and physicians.”

Climate Science, for Real…

Media Matters included a good section on the either ignoble or ignorant claims the writers made regarding climate science and global warming, including the graph above, but I’m going to shift over to Skeptical Science‘s coverage of that to continue on here. The remainder of this piece, in fact, is straight from Skeptical Science (I don’t want to stick it all in block quotes, as that would make it harder to read and knock the images off center). So, enjoy this partial repost from that top site, if you actually care about the science:

Global Warming Continues

The first myth in the article is the well-worn “global warming stopped in [insert year]“. In this case, the fake skeptics have inserted “the last 10 years.” This myth is easily debunked with the escalator graphic (Figure 1).

Figure 1: BEST land-only surface temperature data (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, 1998 to 2005, 2002 to 2010 (blue), and 1973 to 2010 (red).

Not-So-Missing Heat

The second myth is that Kevin Trenberth’s quote-mined comment ”The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” is an admission that global warming stopped. In reality, the quote simply referred to the fact that while the planet is warming, we do not have adequate global monitoring to determine where all the heat is going. However, recent research by Loeb et al. (2012) has concluded that there may no longer be any “missing heat,” so this particular myth really has no leg to stand on.

Positive Feedbacks

The denialist op-ed continues to confuse the issue by claiming

“…the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.”

Aside from continuing to misunderstand that the “missing heat” is about having an inadequate global climate observational network (mainly because we don’t have good measurements of deep ocean heat), observational data have demonstrated that water vapor, and likely clouds, are indeed positive feedbacks.

Earth Has Warmed as Expected

The fake skeptics then repeat one of Lindzen’s favorite myths, that the Earth has warmed less than predicted by the IPCC. This is simply untrue – in fact, the IPCC climate predictions have been amongst the most accurate thus far, much better than Lindzen and his fellow fake skeptics have done (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Various global temperature projections vs. observations

CO2 is a Pollutant and Not Necessarily Beneficial for Plants

The op-ed then repeats the old “CO2 isn’t a pollutant” myth. In reality, because its emissions endanger public health and welfare through its impacts on climate change, by definition CO2 is a pollutant according to the US Clean Air Act.

They couple this with the grossly oversimplistic “CO2 is plant food” myth. While it’s true that in a controlled setting like a greenhouse, increased CO2 levels will generally improve plant growth, the global climate is not so simple. Increasing CO2 in the climate also changes temperatures, precipitation, drought and flood frequencies, and a number of other factors which impact plant growth.

The global increase of CO2 is a grand biological experiment, with countless complications that make the net effect of this increase very difficult to predict with any appreciable level of detail. To gloss over these complexities with the simplistic “CO2 is plant food” argument is an insult to the readers’ intelligence. It also ignores the other adverse impacts of increasing CO2, like ocean acidification. Apparently these “concerned scientists” don’t think very highly of their audience.

Follow the Money Indeed

Just when we thought the op-ed letter couldn’t get worse, these fake skeptics have the gall to suggest that we “follow the money,” because climate “alarmism” supposedly brings bountiful research funding, “an excuse for governments to raise taxes”, “big donations” for environmental groups, and other similar tinfoil-hattery. Considering that at least 43% of the letter’s signatories have received money from the fossil fuel industry, being given large sums of money just for being climate “skeptics” and publishing error-riddled nonsense like this op-ed, the sheer nerve it must have taken to make this “follow the money” argument is astounding. Do follow their advice: research the signatories of this letter and follow their money trail, which leads straight to the fossil fuel industry.

CO2 Limits Will Help the Economy

The “concerned scientists” then follow with the myth that CO2 limits will harm the economy. This particular myth is primarily based on ignoring the fact that failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have a tremendous cost, much greater than the cost of action (Figure 3). Relative to the alternative (inaction and trying to adapt to the damaging consequnces of climate change), CO2 limits will help the economy. This is why there is a consensus among economists with expertise in climate that we should put a price on carbon emissions (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Approximate costs of climate action (green) and inaction (red) in 2100 and 2200. Sources: German Institute for Economic Research and Watkiss et al. 2005

Figure 4: New York University survey results of economists with climate expertise when asked under what circumstances the USA should reduce its emissions

The article references work by economist William Nordhaus to try and justify climate inaction. When we actually listen to what Nordhaus has to say, the picture looks very different:

“We’ve got to get together as a community of nations and impose restraints on greenhouse gas emissions and raise carbon prices. If not, we will be in one of those gloomy scenarios.”

Although he tends to be quite conservative about the costs of climate change relative to other economists, Nordhaus still supports putting a price on carbon emissions. Nordhaus not appreciate his name being invoked to justify foolish calls for climate inaction,telling Andrew Revkin:

“The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.”

About The Author

Zachary Shahan

If you couldn't guess, I spend most of my time on CleanTechnica and Planetsave. I'm the director/editor of both sites and am a little obsessed with them. I'm also Publishing Services Manager at Important Media, which means that I do everything I can to support other Important Media writers, editors, and directors (as well as the network as a whole) in the good work they are engaged in. You can also find my written work on Scientific American, Reuters, Change.org, and most of the sites in the Important Media network. For a full list of my author pages on sites around the internet, or to connect with me on common social networks, go to zacharyshahan.com

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