Friday, August 31, 2018
The Covenant is Broken: What Now?
In this richly researched piece, focusing on a few key figures (James Hansen and Rafe Pomerance are the good guys; John Sununu their chief nemesis), Nathaniel Rich argues that “we” had a chance during the pivotal decade for climate science and public policy (1979-89), but blew it. He sums his argument with this: “Human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties, or as individuals are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.” It seems we are wired to "obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the longterm out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”
Naomi Klein, the brilliant and passionate ecosocialist journalist, replied furiously that it was the neoliberals who “lost the Earth,” not the royal “we” of Rich’s piece, because the masses are disempowered, even in so-called liberal democracies. Climate research arrived at the moment between two political and economic paradigms, with the remnants of the New Deal, augmented by Rachel Carson, Earth Day and the Nixon Congress, replaced by neoliberalism. Any “deals” on the climate, would have to work within the new framework, viz carbon trading, carbon taxes, and that ugliest of terms, “ecosystem services.” Klein’s analysis - see her full-blown argument in This Changes Everything- is astute and well-researched, though her solution to the climate dilemma – a global socialist revolution by 2019 – is a progressive’s fantasy.
Though neoliberalism arrived during the Reagan presidency, it continued into the first Bush presidency, Clinton, and the presidents serving since the pivotal 2000 election. The Republican Party remains its primary champion, but it has captured the political elites of all sides and in all countries. I remember the amazement with which I read a short newspaper piece reporting on an Asian economic summit where Bill Clinton called the Market a “force of nature.” Here's an excellent history and critique of neoliberalism.
Peter Sawtell, whose Ecojustice Notes is a welcome weekly invitation to ecospiritual dialogue, also challenges Rich’s assertions about human nature, linking to a rich series of articles from the liberal press. More than one of them points out that, whereas Rich tries to show that some Republicans in Congress were ready to act on climate even before their Democratic colleagues, and that Exxon did early research which corroborated the claims of climate scientists, the Republican Party, above all other political forces on the planet, and the Big Fossil oligarchy, headed by Exxon, have done more damage in the political climate wars than any other players.
So, are Klein and Sawtell et al correct, that it is social, political and economic structures at work here, rather than something called “human nature?” From a broadly Marxist perspective, they are. But I’m afraid that both personal psychology and social behavior are aspects of the all-too-human. Industrial capitalism, which has extended its reach beyond liberal democracies to the state capitalism of China, has magnified the terrifying power of our crafty minds and vastly extended hands. Yes, Naomi, just as the necessary conditions for grappling with the dreadful awakening of the Climate Beast (Tim Flannery) came together, the perfect storm of the neoliberal inflection of economics, industry and politics arrived as well.
In This Changes Everything, Klein makes the case for a simmering global socialist uprising, which is the only thing that can save us. She is arguing for structural change, and she’s talking non-violent revolution. Precisely. The powers that be, even if they have a vise-grip, remain in power only as long as the masses tolerate them. Change must be born in the hearts and minds of human beings, which are immensely malleable, however noble their capabilities at the highest range. My mentor Joanna Macy has identified the key problem, which is that the self-reflexive consciousness that humans and a few other big-brained mammals have achieved, has not broken through to the level of social systems. We do have “esprit de corps” in various organizations, though it’s probably declining, and orators can stir mass passions - for good or bad. But the whole social system responding as one to all the feedback necessary for survival has not happened yet. The history of consciousness is full of such breakthroughs at the level of the individual personality, all the way to God-consciousness. Joanna suggests that the current crisis for the survival of higher life on Earth could be what engenders “self-reflexivity on the next holonic level,” that is at the level of social systems. She wrote this twenty years ago.
Rich’s focus on individual personalities satisfies our hunger for and identification with the hero’s quest – and James Hansen, who I have met twice, is one of mine. But this model is inadequate for the terrifying global moment in which we stand. As Larry Rasmussen says, we cannot solve anthropocene problems with holocene tools of imagination and morality. Some of these are part of the problem, especially our enduring tendency to measure everything in terms of its effect on humans alone, rather than the whole Earth community.
A perfect storm stopped effective climate action just as it was crystallizing. It was more than just “human nature” that caused humanity to miss the chance in the 80’s to prevent climate catastrophe. Neoliberalism both 1) undermined the devotion to social welfare of a world order where Keynesian constraints (“embedded liberalism”) reigned in unfettered capitalism and 2) led us more fully into the all-too-human characteristics of procuring as much as we can for ourselves and our tribe. Indeed, the “end of history” now has the ironic ring of the end of global civilization, rather than the triumph of the capitalist West.
However, underneath political and economic theory, anthropologists and primatologists have identified patterns which make escaping the endgame of civilization unlikely, and the exhaustive polymath Craig Dilworth has written a longterm history coming to the conclusion that we are Too Smart for Our Own Good (and too Dumb to Change), which I reviewed in this blog. Though it’s not fashionable these days, there is something one could call human nature, rooted in the genetic and behavioral matrix of the primate order. Evolutionary breakthroughs which might refine that nature may be more frequent at moments of great stress, but it’s getting awfully late in the game.
Labels: "Losing Earth", Anthropocene, catastrophic climate change, Exxon, Genesis Covenant, James Hansen, Joanna Macy, Naomi Klein, neoliberalism, Republican Party
Monday, January 18, 2016
A Global Climate Insurgency?
After
years of fraught negotiations, we have a climate accord. Just
getting 195 countries with different, often conflicting, interests to
agree was a miracle of sorts. The document breaks new ground by
aiming to hold the average temperature rise below 2C, to 1.5C, and
reaching carbon neutrality by the “second half of the century.”
The road map for how to get there is less clear. The INDCs (Intended
Nationally Determined Contributions – whew!) are not binding,
relying upon peer pressure at periodic reviews to curtail carbon
emissions even further than current pledges, which would take us down
to 3.5C, still well beyond the threshold of climate catastrophe. The
current pledges do not go into effect until 2020, though there will
be an opportunity for revising upward with a review process every
five years. This is not tough enough, fast enough.
In a
post this week at Common Dreams, Jeremy Brecher, a labor historian,
notes that the governments of the world accepted no accountability in
Paris, only going on record with a stronger common goal. Since they,
and to some degree the U.N. as well, are accountable to the vested
interests which put them in power, it is up to the people to stand up
and force them to be “accountable to the world's real owners,”
the people. In a more detailed piece, “A Non-Violent Insurgency for Climate Protection,” Brecher argues that there is legal ground
for the people to rise up in multiple acts of civil disobedience to
force governments, who are trustees guarding the air, oceans and
forests, to abide by the laws that safeguard these critically
endangered commons in a “global law-enforcing climate insurgency.”
The foundation for this is called in the US the public trust
doctrine, which is based upon
the Justinian code of 535 A.D., naming certain areas as res
communes, “common things”
that are not held by the state. Hence the beleaguered notion of the
commons. As Brecher puts it eloquently, “The governments of the
world may rule the world, but they don't run the world – that is
the common property of humanity.”
Fortunately, to defend that common property, an independent climate
protection movement has emerged, which Brecher dates to the mass
International Day of Climate Action in 2009, the most widespread
political action day in planetary history. This has grown in recent
years into the Blockadia movement, expertly documented by Naomi Klein. Increasingly, these actions are designed as civil disobedience
aimed at enforcing fundamental legal and constitutional principles
that are being flouted by the authorities they are disobeying. By
calling these abuses into question, they are performing their legal
duty, planetary citizens mounting what legal scholar James Gray Pope
calls a “constitutional insurgency.” This insurgency aims to
transform the world order, which Brecher argues is more attainable
than challenging individual nation-states, and has in fact happened
more than once in our lifetimes. Crucially, Brecher notes that the
current world order, which protects the global corporations,
especially Big Fossils, is “illegitimate but mutable.”
As
law-enforcing or constitutional insurgents, activists are now
invoking the necessity defence, which was unexpectedly
successful in the case of Friend Jay O'Hara, when he and Ken Ward blocked a coal vessel at Brayton Point, Mass with his lobster boat (see lead photo). Defendants who blocked an oil train in 2014 in Washington state
are mounting the same defense. We shall see what the court's
response is. Even if the courts don't accept their arguments, these
actions can “redefine what climate action is all about.” If
legal actions continue to fail, Brecher envisions civil society
tribunals chaired by senior retired judges and other respected
figures calling expert witnesses with publicly acknowledged
credentials. It's all about civil society moving into the black hole
of accountability which the current world order lacks. I am
convinced that civil society, in carefully strategized actions, their
trials managed by expert environmental lawyers, can affect the
misguided but mutable world order.
Since
governments serve as trustees of the commons, environmental lawyers
are working to utilize trust law to enforce the people's rights to
enjoying the benefits of these commons. It may seem far-fetched –
one environmental lawyer calls these kinds of challenges “hail Mary
passes” - but successful use of trust law could require fossil fuel
companies to pay damages for the colossal waste committed against the
public trust. Fair damages would pay most of what is required to
transition to a zero-carbon economy, and build the global Green Fund
to help poor nations adapt to climate change.
Governments
of the world need to be made accountable to the world's real owners.
Yes, Jeremy Brecher, according to the Justinian code. But nobody owns
the world, as the indigenous peoples will tell us. Ultimately, the
world is God's, and the building climate insurgency is about the
people rising up to return the Commons to Her. Or if you prefer, to
Gaia, the evolutionary miracle which brought this perfectly-placed
third rock to superabundant life. Earth stewardship in these
critical times means joining the insurgency to defend Gaia, with
whatever gifts we have.
Labels: civil disobedience, climate insurgency, commons law, constitutional insurgency, Delta Five, Jay OHara, Jeremy Brecher, Justinian Code, Naomi Klein, necessity defense, Paris COP 21
Friday, January 30, 2015
Paris and Beyond: from Personal Morality to a Global Carbon Price
Do all aspects of your life bear the same witness?
A few Sundays ago, Celo Friends Meeting
was presented with this query. We
were deeply challenged by the question, and some rich confessional
ministry followed. After struggling for most of the hour, I got up
and confessed that my wife and I had quite recently bought into a
Vacation Club, and were now regretting it. I spoke far too long, and
in too much detail, including a bit of rationalizing that some of its
use would be “good for the family.” After all, we would save on
our biennial family winter vacations with extended family to warmer
climes like Central America.
The
club is expensive, though part of what caught us was the saving if
we bought it right then. And
they would also forego the annual dues, something that had always –
mercifully – brought us up short with fully transferable
timeshares. The irony is that we had gone to Charleston courtesy of
just such a timeshare sales pitch, and had appropriately steeled
ourselves for it. This one was unexpected, a street pitch that
caught us off guard. Why not, we
said, especially when they were giving us $100 for dinner on the
town. We now had a lifetime wholesale travel discount, trips and
condos, and agents to ease our way.
Afterwards, Geeta
asked if anyone had eldered me for going into too much detail. After
all, a public confession in Meeting is not the same as talking to a
shrouded priest, where confession needs to be as exhaustive as
possible. I said no, but thanked her for doing so as gently and
indirectly as she had.
But the main thing
I felt as I sat down is that I was relieved of my burden. In the
midst of speaking, I realized that I was still free – free to
question any proposal for travel, for whatever purpose. Free, as I
have always been, to give up air travel (though that would mean not
seeing my son and his wife and baby in the Sierras nearly as much),
free to lose as much of the money we had put down as I was willing.
In other words, moral choice remained, which is the most important
attribute of freedom I can think of right now. And in affirming
that, I could turn away from past ecological sin, and from this
particularly egregious financial error. That it was also an
ecological mistake was not yet an actuality.
With a Paris Accord
in the works for this December, these complex individual choices may
soon have a measurable context, framed by an international agreement
that will surely involve expanding a carbon market that is already
set to grow to 25% of the world in the next two years. Carbon
will be priced, taxed, and our individual choices, either for
comfort, pleasure, or necessity, will be weighed, not in terms of
ecological morality, but by market forces. One may rail against the
capitalist impulse, as Naomi Klein does so eloquently in her recent book, but this looks like the way it's going to be. I have long
observed that, if individuals (like myself) who have strong moral
compasses and are educated in climate science continue to make
choices which produce excessive carbon, then we need laws to frame
those choices for all of us, bending them in the direction of
biospheric survival, not relying on the existential choice to “live
our values.”
Klein's This
Changes Everything treats
climate change as the perfect storm, with only a complete rebuilding
of the global political order – from the bottom up – capable of
addressing the scale of the problem. Her analysis is exhaustive,
about as well done as a non-ecologist could manage. And it may be
that her prescription for a solution is correct. However, flawed as
it may be, the international process under UN auspices, with
everyone, including the smaller nations as well as big business at
the table, finally has momentum, and will very likely yield some kind
of agreement in Paris this winter. Even in the laggard US, with its
politics heavily influenced by a denialism that has ambushed and
bamboozled the Christian Right, there is a groundswell of Republicans
beginning to favor pricing carbon, from GW Bush's Treasury Chief
Henry Paulson to SC representative Bob Inglis. In a recent
statement, even the American Petroleum Institute faces up to the
reality that this is on the horizon.
Human beings are
flawed, however principled a minority may be. This is why prudence
requires laws and security forces, rather than relying on charitable
tendencies predominating in our human relations and consumer choices.
This is why pricing carbon at this point in history is so crucial.
Rather than attempting a global socialist revolution, as Klein and
Chris Hedges have been promoting, it may be more
straightforward, and a more efficient use of structures either
already in place or rapidly becoming so, to shift from a world where
money is the bottom line to one where carbon expenditures are. This
is already the case in the biophyscial world. Wouldn't it be wild,
if, after pricing all the “externalities,” we ended up using
that catalogue of essentially priceless “ecosystem services” to
shift to a currency that is based on the carbon cycle, rather than
the exchange of extractable resources and human services? Herman Daly, can you help me with this?
Labels: American Petroleum Institute, Bob Inglis, carbon market, Chris Hedges, ecosystem services, Henry Paulson, Herman Daly, Naomi Klein, Paris Accord, This Changes Everything
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Not the Kind of World We Want to Live In
The Anthropocene is not the kind of world we want to live in. Is this not at the core of much Green rhetoric and supposed values? We want our bodies, already contaminated by over 80 chemicals, to be pure, and thus to eat organically raised foods. We want to preserve Nature, its viewsheds as well as watersheds. We want the predictability of slow evolution, though we are in the midst of accelerating cultural evolution that causes us great anxiety. We want a world that preserves enough habitat to be recognizable as the one our grandparents were born into. And we definitely don't want to be a “planetary power” (Brian Swimme), a geological force so powerful that the world's geologists are about to affix our name to the era.
Dear reader, do you not see that we
Greens are also falling into the trap of hubris? In our case, are we
not prescribing nineteenth century (or Medieval, or paleolithic –
though this is more true of Earth Firsters than the curious case of
the paleo-dieter,) values for the vastly more complex and challenging Anthropocene? Would not the greatest hubris be condemning much of
the present world population to starvation, because we prefer a world
with less humans? This could be the case if we prescribed organic
farming for all the world's farmers, if that would indeed require
twice the land to make up for producing half the yield of industrial
farming. To be honest, I have found myself rather moralistically
accepting the necessity of a huge die-off, primarily from starvation,
because I prefer a world with fewer humans, feeling the world is
too much with us. But until I
read Lynas' book I did not place myself in a Third World father's
sandals, watching my kids die, one by one. What about you?
“Can we not have peaceful
coexistence?” Lynas asks in terms of the conflicting values of
small organic farmers and industrial farming. There is plenty of
room for the wonderful growth of organic produce in this country and
others. But if we applied our strictest organic values to the
world's cereal crops, we would not only condemn the world's poor to
starvation, but threaten to make the current extinction wave, via
habitat encroachment, much worse. On the other hand, GM seeds have
already escaped into non GM fields (and Monsanto has sued the hapless
farmers who did not plant them), and current proposed federal
regulations would set up the same scenario for salmon. Peaceful
coexistence, mediated by markets, might well be impossible without
much more careful regulation of industrial farming, with human error
reduced virtually to zero.
Of course, it is highly likely that, as
we work to correct the excesses of technological overreach, we will
end up creating a situation of such complexity that it must crash.
But reading Lynas has caused me to at least ponder the wager that we
can buy more time, as Borlaug put it. We are not going to change our
species' imperative, deeply bred into us, to keep trying to maximize
our own growth, by resorting to moralism. And, short of collapse,
there will be no revolution of the kind that Naomi Klein suggests could come with the union of socialist and Green causes.
Might it just be possible that careful crafting of the present
industrial agriculture and global capital system could create
conditions for a barely tolerable (to the Earth) sustainability?
Once, teaching a humanities class where
we read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, I was surprised when a young
man, who had just discovered his Quaker roots and was attending our
meeting in Fargo, stood up to the entire class to argue against Quinn
and his telepathic ape. Tavis passionately spoke for our
evolutionary imperative, alarmed that the rest of us would give up on
our intelligent problem-solving prematurely. As a teacher who
encouraged democratic discussion, I was pleased for another point of
view to emerge, and respectful of his position as the discussion
proceeded. Though I have continued to hold the other view, I must say
that Tavis's defense of modernity stayed with me, now rekindled by
reading Lynas. I agree with the population biologists and the
ecologists that we are subject to the same laws as all other species,
and with the consensus figure of 1.5 – 2 billion figure for
maximum sustainable population – after all, it is in line with my
own figure. But I am open to Lynas' (and Donella Meadows) argument
that we could use our ingenuity, with safeguards in place for all the
physico-chemical boundaries we face, to continue to make agronomic
breakthroughs sufficient to feed 9-10 billion.
I am increasingly encountering Tavis' position from the more rational among my spiritually-oriented ecofriends. Slowly, they are coming out of the closet, academics and engineers and writers who still feel that, if we could just muster the political will, we could use the recommendations of policy analysts so create a soft-enough landing to muddle through. Of course, political will is at the crux of all approaches. Nobody in the environmental movement, whether they be back-to-the-land types or think-tank denizens who don't understand Greens' fear of technology, believes that unfettered capitalism and the resultant acceleration of the BAU curve (RCP8.5 – see note at bottom of current post) will bring us anything but catastrophic collapse. The point of the policy wonks is that we have a system that, with a few key adjustments (carbon tax, commiditization of all biosystem services), could bring us to the Promised Land of good enough. Doubters on the left will point out that this can't happen, won't happen without a more fundamental revolution, both in terms of the financial and world trade system and the related conditions of social (in)equality.
If we do crash, and it is the likeliest
scenario, our remnant will continue to develop, working to do the
best they can from the reduced level of complexity and comfort, at
least as long as we haven't totally shot all the boundaries Lynas
outlines. But the same problem that bedevils us now will continue to
challenge us. Though we have been able to engineer materials, and
now, for better or worse, the very germ material of life, we have yet
been able to engineer human behavior, try as we might. We are still
wired for tribal life with limbic patterns that trump reason almost
every time they are in conflict. Individual human beings can achieve
transformation, but this happening on a a societal scale appears to
be a California pipe dream.
Yet once, in what Lynas calls
“humanity's finest hour,” we were able to use international
diplomacy to engineer the Montreal Protocol, which protected one of
our boundaries (ozone), buying time until the next crisis. Now those
crises are coming thick and fast. We are not genetically prepared
for this, but instead of asking the world to stop and let us get off
at the next organic farm, we might put faith in the U.N., and the
continuing, patient work it will take to get us to the next
international protocol, leap-frogging past the failures of Kyoto and
Copenhagen. Expectations are low, but our hearts and wills need to
be with the challenged delegates at Warsaw, praying that they will
hear the passionate plea from the Philippine delegate Naderev Sano in
the wake of the most powerful storm ever to make landfall (a second
annual event for the beleaguered Philippinos), to “stop this
[climate] madness.” Sano has initiated a hunger strike until the
UN climate delegates achieve “meaningful progress” - and scores
in Warsaw have joined him.
Labels: Anthropocene, biosystem servics, carbon tax, GM seeds, human population limits, Ishmael, Mark Lynas, Montreal Protocol, Naderev Sano, Naomi Klein, Norman Borlaug, planetary boundaries, RCP8.5, Warsaw cop
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