[Rantman] Capitalism vs. the Climate Naomi Klein in The Nation

[rPauli]

Naomi Klein's report on climate denialism and culture is strong,
disruptive, and radical. 
http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full
 Posted in The Nation - snips below:

    Capitalism vs. the Climate

    By Naomi Klein,

    16 November 11


    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?"

(Jeekers what a great question....)

    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.

...........

    The fact that the earth's atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount
    of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger
    crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model
    is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to
    find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be
    seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly
    extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited
    beyond its capacity to recover---we are doing the same to the
    oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The
    expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our
    relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into
    question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research
    showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand
    green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new
    civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature
    but in respect for natural cycles of renewal---and acutely sensitive
    to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

......................

    Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid:
    arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the
    free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more
    than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a
    serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas:
    public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation,
    international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right
    ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the
    results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

.......................

    *1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere*

    After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing,
    it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate
    response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective
    problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in
    which this collective action must take place is big-ticket
    investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale......

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

    In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a
    serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art
    that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market
    fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning..........
    ...

    *3. Reining in Corporations*

    A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid
    re-regulation of the corporate sector....

    ..

    *4. Relocalizing Production*

    If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change
    sounds somewhat radical it's because, since the beginning of the
    1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government
    is to get out of the way of the corporate sector---and nowhere more
    so than in the realm of international trade...
    ...But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not
    be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year
    trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power...
    ...

    *5. Ending the Cult of Shopping*

    The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization
    were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate
    profits. They were also a response to the "stagflation" of the
    1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid
    economic growth...
    ...
     The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in
    the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just
    by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the
    amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is
    anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy,
    which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater
    profits year after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable
    bind of, as Jackson puts it, "trash the system or crash the planet....
    ....
    So when the Heartlanders react to evidence of human-induced climate
    change as if capitalism itself were coming under threat, it's not
    because they are paranoid. It's because they are paying attention.

    .........
    *6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy*

    About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we
    going to pay for all this?...

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

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

    How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by
    increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we
    treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats?
    Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis
    from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech
    fortresses and adopt ever more draconian antiimmigration laws? How
    will we deal with resource scarcity?...
    ...
    The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement
    will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future.
    That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an
    alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the
    ecological crisis---this time, embedded in interdependence rather
    than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and
    cooperation rather than hierarchy....

    ....

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

    http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=full

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