Getting
A Bit Anti-Climatic
By Michael Major
01 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Possibly,
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.