Obama's
Choices:
The Planet’s Demands
By Jeff Berg
04 December,
2008
Countercurrents.org
There is already arising a grave sense of concern among some of the most articulate journalistic voices on the internet and elsewhere as a result of those selected to head the Obama administration. The recent article on Counterpunch by Damien Millet and Eric Toussaint, "Records of Failure", being a prime example. http://www.counterpunch.org/millet12012008.html
Joe Conason, New York Observer, on the other hand has recently written a quite hopeful view of Obama's team. "Obama's Unoriginal, Shrewd choices", posted at GNN. http://tinyurl.com/5oh9wg
In defense of Mr. Conason's thesis there is a certain sense to the notion that nobody should know better than the architects of this financial disaster what was done to create it. This, at least theoretically, may mean that they know best how to undo it. It may also mean that those most responsible will feel the least pull from the previous version of conventional wisdom and so be most able to change course radically.
Who among us has after all not yearned mightily for a chance to undo our greatest mistakes? Bill Clinton’s reversal on agricultural subsidies may for example mean that Obama’s administration will allow food security the same protections it had before the creation of the WTO. "May" of course being the operative term here.
It may of course also mean that the best you can hope from such folks is a nibbling around the edges. Time will tell. Though the following words by Obama advisor Larry Summers are certainly enough to give one pause.
"There are no limits on the planet's capacity for absorption likely to hold us back in the foreseeable future. The danger of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else is non-existent. The idea that the world is heading into the abyss is profoundly wrong. The idea that we should place limits on growth because of natural limitations is a serious error; indeed, the social cost of such an error would be enormous if ever it were to be acted upon." ~ Lawrence Summers, IMF - World Bank annual summit, 1991. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Admittedly this was some time ago. It is also true however that there has been no public recantation of these words at any time since. It also bears remembering that these words came twenty years after the publication of "The Limits to Growth", and three years after the 1988 Toronto Conference on global warming and climatologist James Hansen's testimony to the U.S. Congress. Where very different words were communicated to the public by those with the best understanding of the data.
"Mankind is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war." Mr. Summers words were chosen quite specifically as a rebuttal to the limits to growth analysis, and the purposefully forceful words chosen by James Hansen and the world's climatologists.
Which brings to mind what Conason's article and Obama's team do not address. Also what we in the peak energy, climate change and environmental degradation movements know all too well. It does not address the fact that the foundation for every economy, modern or otherwise, is energy capture and a fecund environment. We also know that hydrocarbon depletion is going to present us with both a challenge and an opportunity that is far more fundamental than the choice offered between Keynes and Friedman.
Perhaps most importantly what is nowhere spoken of in the mainstream media is the fact that we have left things too late to avoid all consequences for our past mistakes. The question is no longer will we become economically less active when measured by the usual metrics as our economies become less "energetic". The question instead is how best to avoid the grossest kinds of social injustice and environmental exploitation as this occurs.
The challenge before Obama, his team, and those of us who still possess the luxury to engage in this kind of work, is how best to engage the spirit of cooperation fostered by this financial crisis. How to harness the collective anxiety now being experienced by those at the very top to institute the changes that many at the very bottom have long sensed are essential. Essential changes that most now know will have to be instituted sooner or later. Either proactively out of the choices offered by enlightened self-interest or retroactively by the brute force of circumstances.
Essential in this case being defined as putting into place the infrastructure and social architecture necessary to insuring the greatest amount of creature comforts, leisure time, and opportunity for creativity and meaningful work. The logical corollary to this being avoiding the greatest amount of emiseration and desperation, and the accompanying social unrest that these twin evils always generate.
It will take twenty years at least to bring on line the amount of conservation and renewables necessary to power our economies at a level resembling what we in the modern industrialized world have become accustomed to during the hydrocarbon age. Even then if we do not at the same time reduce the amount of hydrocarbon inputs beyond what mere depletion dictates we will certainly invoke the feedback loops in the global climate that will take its trajectory out of our hands.
"In the summer of 2008 the journal Science published a study showing that one kind of carbon trapped in the permafrost called vedoma, is much more prevalent than originally thought and may amount to 100 times the volume of carbon released in the air each year by the burning of fossil fuels." ~ Tony Clarke, "Tarsands Showdown", page 182.
This is of course not the only bit of very bad news on the climate change front that we have uncovered in the last five years.
To cite a few.
Ocean sinks are filling up. This fact alone should be sufficiently terrifying to drive massive change. My guess is it would be if it was presented to us as powerfully and oppressively as were 9/11, 7/7, and the massacres in Mumbai.
Methane from the ocean floor is now starting to bubble up to the surface even in the most northern of climes. "Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes, through the winter." ~ George Monbiot, "One Shot Left", Guardian, November 25, 2008.
Warming soils in temperate zones are overwhelming the modest efforts that have been made at CO2 reduction. For example last summer it was discovered that the newly accelerated rate at which CO2 is being released from British soils more than matches the modest measures that had been taken as a nod to Britain’s Kyoto requirements.
Siberia is warming and releasing C02 and methane that was previously thought would be trapped for at least the remainder of this century. Artic sea ice is similarly disappearing at a rate much faster than the most dire projections.
Canada's boreal forest is being strip-mined for the purpose of generating tarsand oil. The boreal forest is the northern lungs of the planet in much the same way that the Amazon is the southern lungs of the planet. Of the tens of thousands of hectares that have been stripped less than 10% have been "reclaimed". Not to mention the fact that "No one really knows yet how to reclaim a fen, bog or peat land in the oil sands." ~ Lee Foote, University of Alberta wetland specialist.
Finally, news I caught on TV only this week. After a brief slackening the march of deforestation in the Amazon has once again quickened its pace. Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of all GHG’s.
In the face of politically significant global concern over climate change President elect Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown have claimed to want to see an 80% reduction in man made CO2 emissions by 2050. This translates roughly to a 2% reduction every year. Meanwhile the Tyndall paper and many climate scientists including James Hansen are saying that the data supports the conclusion that this approach is too timid and guarantees 4 to 5 degrees of warming. Aka. Engaging the global warming feedback loops that everyone is keen to avoid as they take the problem out of our ability to manage.
As I say these examples are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg of what we have learned about climate change over the last five years. So what to do?
As war is politics by other means so too is politics economics by other means. And the political problem that CO2 reduction presents is no small matter. Every reputable economic study on the subject of energy and economic growth shows the same thing. I.e. A greater than 1% reduction in energy use is always associated with a slow down or even contraction in economic growth. Russia saw a 5% drop per year in emissions during its economic collapse, not to mention a die-off of 11 million of its inhabitants, and a plunging longevity rate. This is hardly the stuff of winning electoral campaigns.
So yes Mr. Conason's p.o.v. about Obama's picks is legitimate from a limited perspective. A perspective limited by current economic orthodoxies be they progressive towards labour, neoliberal or corporatist, and the priorities that emanate from this orthodoxy. Unfortunately our challenges are not similarly limited. What is fortunate, or at least can be made so, is that the Bush agenda has failed so utterly and so spectacularly on every front. If there was ever a time that demanded great changes in the course of human history this is one. And if the last eight years have done anything positive it has been to increase the appetite for meaningful change. So yes, there will be change. But of what kind?
The problem before us is that economic growth is measured in such a way as to ensure that success on the economic front ensures failure on multiple far more substantive fronts. This problem was inadvertently perhaps best illustrated recently by the American writer Tom Friedman, who has made a bit of a specialty of inadvertent wisdom over the years. Perhaps most famously when he said in his 1999 “Manifesto for a Fast World”, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
More recently he has penned a book detailing the necessity for a green energy revolution and the perils of climate change, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." In it he states the health of the planet is essential to the health of the economy. A not unreasonable proposition. Despite this in the face of the current global economic slowdown he also felt compelled to pen a more recent piece titled "Go shopping to save the economy". http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_10996371 Such is the schizophrenia of our times.
This praise of shopping, along with the more meaningful economic stimulus measures being enacted around the world, perfectly exemplify the rock and the hard place between which we now are caught. To wit. Any politician in a modern economy who fails to foster significant economic growth, for whatever reason up to and including impossibility, will soon be fed to the media wolves.
This is true notwithstanding the fact that spending our limited financial reserves on "kick-starting" the global consumer economy will ultimately prove a pyrrhic victory. Not to mention a victory as short lived and economically costly as the economic "success" provided by the real estate boom, and the yields generated by the alphabet soup of mortgage securities. Every great crisis generates at least one perfect oxymoron. In this case it’s “securitizing debt”. Some security, some debt. According to Bloomberg news the numbers flying fast and furious out of the U.S. Federal Reserve now add up to over 8 trillion dollars.
The obvious answer to our conundrum is to change the way we measure economic success and to uncouple economic activity from hydrocarbon consumption. The less obvious answer is how to achieve this outcome. As to Obama's team if there is anything that we know for sure it is that Geitner, Volcker and Summers are very unlikely agents of this kind of change. It is doubtful that they can even conceive of such a change much less opt for it.
For such a revolution in basic economic theory things will unfortunately have to get worse before they can get better. This does not mean that a great many essential preparatory steps cannot be taken between then and now. To my mind there could be no better place to start this process than with the dismantling of the permanent wartime economic footing of America. Something we would all do well to remember was enshrined by America's last great charismatic president, JFK. Though to be fair this process was started by Truman, NSC 68, and the cold warriors, and it was LBJ, McNamara, and the escalation of the Vietnam war that sealed the deal with this particular devil.
Because of America's fundamental economic contradictions the demilitarization of its economy is guaranteed to happen sooner or later. Debtor nations cannot maintain military empires. Full stop. History is never repeated but it does contain lessons. It would be much better for us all however if this change was brought about within the next four years. This is unfortunately almost certainly not what is going to happen. Obama’s administration will instead to try and rescue the broken system they are inheriting. Military industrial complex and all. The re-launching of Camelot so to speak. This should come as no surprise. One need only look at the media coverage of the Kucinich and Paul campaigns to understand how the apostasy of demilitarization is still viewed in the U.S.
Which means the final irony and unintended consequence of the Bush Presidency could well be as follows. They will have done more to guarantee the end of the American empire and the military industrial complex than any other administration.
Ton confrere,
J.F. Berg
Jeff is a founding member of Post Carbon Toronto. His writing focuses on Energy & Emissions and their micro and macro implications ecologically, economically and socially. He can be reached at [email protected]
