Getting A Bit Anti-Climatic
By Michael Major
01 March, 2007
Countercurrents.orgPossibly, we will decelerate and reverse the direction of human caused climate change, but not by implementing incremental solutions and certainly not by creating a whole new climate reversal rice bowl for the same banks, investors and corporations that have imprisoned civilization in an unrelentingly petro porno fantasy of short-sighted, profit driven, limitless growth.
If we attempt to make climate braking profitable for corporations then we greatly delay the date at which any real reversal may begin. Like peak oil we will see the occasion of reversal only in the rear view mirror. The climate is not broken. We cannot usefully act directly on the climate. Climate change is not a discrete illness but a valuable symptom reflecting a lethal underlying global disease.
The underlying global disease is not runaway climate --but runaway human activity. We have ignored the initial symptoms of this disease and we are long past the period for gradual lifestyle reform and incremental intervention. It is likely that we will waste the next ten years just as we wasted the last ten precious years, which is no different from the way we wasted the vastly more precious ten years before that. The only encouraging effect achieved todate is the high level of informed awareness that we are fatally addicted to wasting time, energy and resources and that we are evidently compelled by our addiction to destroy the remnant resilient capacity of the environment that receives our industrial waste.
If this informed awareness is capable of achieving a critical level of initiative for targeting the underlying disease, then we must realize that it is also a powerful attractor for useless diversion, displacement, substitution and the creation of mass resignation that will support a business as usual focus on political anaesthetics and symptomatic relief.
Global financial and industrial interests view climate mitigation and reversal as the largest gift ever contemplated from the world's poor to the world's super-rich. The business of reversing climate change is guaranteed to be as profitable as the petroleum industry and as dominated by industrial largesse, bribery, brutality and sleaze as the global arms trade. The new big business of climate change will compare well with the effectiveness of the arms trade in generating peace, justice, goodwill, prosperity and tranquillity among nations.
Governments see the demand for climate mitigation and reversal as a wonderful rationale not for taxing industry and constraining pollution but for taxing citizens and the collective climate weltsmerch to transfer income, expiate climate guilt, and create a whole new class of public utility contractors specialized in climate change adaptation and mitigation.Just imagine Enron running the climate credit system for a Halliburton cost-plus climate reversal infrastructure, incorporating Boeing stratospheric seeding technology, and audited by former Pentagon CPA's subbing-out from the Nature Conservancy with the whole operation being fronted by celebrity enviros who are ethically and pragmatically guided by Burson-Marsteller while contracting to Fox-TV for broadcasting to avoid misrepresentation in the media. OK, OK, I exaggerate, but to be effective a climate change industry will need to grow as powerful, pervasive and as profitable as the petro-fossil fuel industries that it is intended to purify and transform. Which means it will not fall far from the tree.
There is no known religious way that our civilization's economic growth paradigm predicated on externalizing and transferring the consequences of resource development and industrial waste to future generations can in real time neutralize the waste, reverse climate change and achieve no net loss of habitat.When we eventually get serious about climate braking and reversal, we will conclude that climate change can be reversed by reversing the economy, by rewarding sectoral contraction, by disallowing depreciation, and by fully taxing capital and capital gains. Someone else can work out the details, but it seems to me that all capital growth should be transferred not to private interests but in some real form of security to the future environment and for future generations who will most inequitably bare the consequences of our historic economic choices.
If capital growth is pruned from our economic decisions we will be creating an economy for survival rather than for growth. We can make these decisions while there is time for intentional reversal or we can allow climate change to delete anthropogenic factors from the planet's climate influences.
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