It’s
Not About The Carbon
By Jim Miles
10 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
While there are still many people
debating whether or not global warming is occurring, or if it is caused
by human factors or just another of ‘nature’s’ natural
cycles (after all, are not humans a part of nature?), the most educated
voices are now saying: Yes it is human caused…and it’s all
too late.
Not necessarily too late
to try and do something about it, but too late to think we can stop
it. At best, the recently emerged view is that global warming, no matter
what we do, will increase for some decades before it is even slowed
down, let alone stopped; at best that means the varying societal interests
need to actually do something about the process rather than throw out
political homilies and platitudes that mean little.
Two recent conservative magazines
have produced articles that quite boldly say it is too late, we cannot
stop it. The National Geographic Magazine, which at times prides itself
on its non-advocacy of positions by presenting balanced reports, quite
plainly says, “No matter what we do now, that warming will increase
some – there’s a lag time before the heat fully plays out
in the atmosphere. That is, we can’t stop global warming.”
[1] More impressively in my mind is a similar article in Foreign Policy
(FP) magazine that says essentially the same thing, but in even stronger
language: “But the mounting scientific evidence, coupled along
with economic and political realities, increasingly suggests that humanity’s
opportunity to prevent, stop, or reverse the long-term impacts of climate
change has slipped away.”[2
Too late folks, the game
is over! But perhaps not as the articles indicate the solutions, as
per the Geographic, “in every case…will demand difficult
changes,” and from FP, “Riding out the consequences of a
warming world will be difficult, and we need to prepare now.”
Even more dramatically, if
one can look at the significance of the information, Britain’s
Stern Review [3] on the economics of climate change indicates, “Ultimately,
stabilization – at whatever level – requires that annual
emissions be brought down to more than 80% below current levels.”
80%? That figure is well beyond any political or environmental target
that has made it through public discourse. British columbia, Canada,
is talking about a 33% reduction in emissions by 2010 without having
any significant plans in place to do so, and while the national government
had initially heavily endorsed Kyoto, it has not produced even minimal
results from their statements on that accord. The United States never
even bothered to sign on to Kyoto, recognizing at least intuitively
the political uselessness of trying to change their own behaviour. The
answer from the Stern Review is based on economics:
Action on climate change
will also create significant business opportunities, as new markets
are created in low-carbon energy technologies and other low-carbon goods
and services. These markets could grow to be worth hundreds of billions
of dollars each year, and employment in these sectors will expand accordingly.
The Stern Review continues with its economic analysis and at least identifies
the reality of the current global economic structure between rich and
poor:
All countries will be affected.
The most vulnerable – the poorest countries and populations –
will suffer earliest and most, even though they have contributed least
to the causes of climate change. The costs of extreme weather, including
floods, droughts and storms, are already rising, including for rich
countries. Adaptation to climate change – that is, taking steps
to build resilience and minimize costs – is essential. It is no
longer possible to prevent the climate change that will take place over
the next two to three decades, but it is still possible to protect our
societies and economies from its impacts to some extent.
Can we really grasp the significance
of all this? Is it possible to really do something about it all? And
are economic answers the right way to go? My quick answers are no, maybe,
and definitely not.
FP provides a pessimistic
economic view:
given the scale and complexity
of modern economies and the time required for new technologies to displace
older ones, only a stunning technological breakthrough will allow for
reductions in emissions that are sufficiently deep to stop climate change.
The Stern Review is quite
optimistic, unrealistically so in my estimation:
Tackling climate change is
the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a
way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries.
The Geographic is much more
cautious and much more closer to the truth, whether intended or not:
Many of the paths to stabilization
run straight through our daily lives, and in every case they will demand
difficult changes.
Daily Significance
I doubt very much that the average person can truly comprehend the significance
of this information. In the west we live surrounded by global riches,
wealth beyond the carrying capacity of our own lands and, sometimes,
most people’s imaginations. Food and energy supplies are imported
daily from thousands of miles away. The transportation of food and its
initial production are energy intensive, and energy supplies are coming
increasingly under the gun, a situation I will come back to later. Yet
because of our riches we can afford the food and the energy. We can
afford to use more energy – and this is the big point missed by
all three commentaries on climate and economics – for our consumptive
lifestyle, for the purchase of many unnecessary, unneeded products that
both consume energy in their use and consume energy for their production,
for our leisure travel, for our status and emotional comfort. We live
in a society designed for the ultimate consumer, the automobile and
its related economic activities from the millions of units produced
annually to satisfy our status, greed, and need for speed and power,
to the malls where they transport us to consume even more of our environment.
The propaganda of consumption (some call it advertising) builds on the
rationale of greed and on the largely unsubstantiated need for ‘growth’
which in turn is almost purely defined in economic terms but not social
terms, on the right to deserve all these riches, and to flaunt them
to the rest of the world as our right and heritage and religious justness.
Ultimately, we can afford to survive the worst effects of global warming…or
so we think…or so we ignore.
The rest of the world struggles
with lack of food, poor water and sanitation, disease, lack of basic
education and medical services. Their economies struggle with equality
more so than ours do, aggravated by the disasters of ‘structural
adjustments’ and other accomplishments of the western based global
financial rulers of the Washington Consensus, the World Bank, the IMF,
WTO, OECD and other organizations related in kind and mind. The daily
significance of life for an increasing number of global citizens is
to try and put even one square meal on the table, to survive another
day waiting for medical attention they may never see, to live without
aspiration for sons and daughters to do more than continue in a similar
vein, to get an education that will permit them to make a healthier
more stable global social climate.
The rest of the world suffers,
essentially, from our grab for resources and riches, a grab that is
protected by the ‘hidden fist’ of the military, by the covert
actions of the CIA and other agencies operating clandestinely at their
will. People live in areas suffering from authoritarian rule because
the west, mostly the United States but also including its European partners,
could not tolerate any form of successful social democracy that did
not bend to the will of the more enlightened economies and philosophies
of neoliberalism and ‘free’ markets. These are not people
that are too much concerned with the global environment. How can they
be when their own environments are poisoned by industrial wastes, controlled
by transnational corporations that care little for the environment as
a living space or as a working space, when their indigenous crops are
replaced by global corporations and large scale factory farming, when
they themselves are reduced to poverty wages removed from the land that
once supported them. Ultimately, they will be the ones to suffer the
most from global warming as they can afford nothing or little beyond
their next meal.
I realize that this is an
overstated dichotomy, as there are gradations of economic and social
susceptibility between the two, and not just in separate countries but
within countries and regions as well, but the point I am obviously making
is that the developed countries control of the global riches, through
the force of military might and economically subversive tactics makes
it so that the rest of the world, and the poor everywhere, will suffer
significantly more from the still as yet fully unexpected and unanticipated
impacts as advanced global warming comes upon us. Most of us living
in the west remain wilfully or ignorantly removed from thinking about
the consequences of our lives as we see the good life perhaps diminished
but not gone. The others are too busy struggling for daily survival
to even be aware of the situation or at best have the leisure to contemplate
what it means. At either end of the spectrum and all along its continuum,
not many can grasp the significance of what is yet to come if these
predictions are correct.
It’s not just
the carbon
The effects of global warming
should be generally well known in a superficial intellectual level:
the loss of species, the invasion of species into new areas, bigger
and stronger storms, more heat and more moisture, rising sea levels,
changes in agricultural production, habitat loss, loss of the ice caps
and the surprising theory of a European ice age caused by the stopping
of the ‘Atlantic conveyor’ heat exchange system, and other
nuances along the same lines as the preceding. In our comfortable richness
we pay only lip service to these while doing ‘green’ activities
such as recycling, or cycling to work once in a while to assuage our
environmental consciousness into thinking it has done something positive,
or perhaps some have attended environmental protest to save a forest
or pond, only to drive home to their relative comfort in neighbourhoods
where forests and ponds have long since disappeared.
Governments talk at great
lengths about carbon and what to do with it. Cars need to go ‘green’,
carbon taxes can be applied, carbon credits can be traded, and new carbon
emissions goals are set but go unsupported with legislation and action.
Research for more climate resistant crops is encouraged, hoping to sustain
the previous centuries green revolution in agriculture. Transit is obviously
one of the better ways to reduce carbon, but cities continually plan
with major road expansions whose increased traffic will greatly offset
the smaller gains made by a weaker rapid transit infrastructure. The
government always turns to the people, urging everyone to reduce energy
use by shutting off light bulbs and computers to help clean up the air.
Neon lights are touted as being part of the answer without recognition
of the energy required to make them and then to dispose of them safely
and guard against chemical pollution from their retired carcasses. Nuclear
energy is becoming green again, as it does not add to global warming,
only to the radioactive pollution and contamination of large sectors
of the world while at the same time encouraging the nuclear industry
and all that it encompasses within our increasingly militaristic society.
Modern technologies of solar power, wind power, and tidal power are
encouraged but are far from eliminating our reliance on carbon derived
fuels. As always, the mantra of growth keeps raising its ubiquitous
head, keeping governments trapped in their own circular arguments of
not wanting to damage the economy and therefore not applying standards
as stringently as would be necessary to prevent carbon increases.
All those suggestions to
slow or halt the rise in carbon pollution sound impressive and good,
but as indicated at the beginning it is all too little, too late, except
for the Stern Review that sees a bright light with all the money to
be made from the new technologies. Unfortunately, leaving carbon cleanup
to the profit makers will probably be just as damaging to the ecology
and the economy (except for the very few on high) as the actions of
the IMF, WTO et al have been to the ecology and climate of the developing
and undeveloped countries of the world with their attempts to eliminate
poverty and create democracy. Corporate trading of carbon credits or
carbon ‘debts’ will only ensure more profits to the already
wealthy but will not help the polar bears keep the ice they need to
survive on, nor the indigenous populations of the Andes keep the glaciers
that provide the majority of their water.
Even with all the positive
actions compounded, we will not stop global warming. The actuality of
doing everything in our power to stop carbon emissions is limited by
the reality of societies’ momentum towards growth and consumption,
and it is this point where the argument turns – it is not about
the carbon. Carbon is simply the scapegoat, the ‘evil other’
that threatens us, the by-product for our societal destruction of the
environment. We are all looking for the solutions in the wrong area.
Certainly halting carbon emissions is the overall goal, but diplomatic
and economic attempts to change anything significantly will not succeed
within our current economic lifestyle.
Blame the consumers
– we’re all guilty
In one recent review, I was criticized for blaming the consumer, making
the consumer the victim of global warming in the manner that the empires
of the world blame the people being occupied as being the aggressor
and the fault for all their problems. It is a ridiculous comparison:
an occupying army labels itself the ‘victim’ of the occupied
peoples aggression through ideological rhetoric and control of the media;
the so-called ‘aggressors’ have no recourse to significant
media and must suffer the deadly effects of occupation in silent fear
– or in open rebellion. To label consumers as ‘victims’
in this comparison is bizarre as they have immensely more freedom to
complain and agitate for their wishes and desires within a safe society.
Are we ‘victims’
of anything? Well, one could claim to be a victim of our societies brainwashing
by way of all the corporate advertising/propaganda that is so omnipresent
as to be a constant background radiation, mostly unrecognized, to our
lives. We could be ‘victims’ of corporate and government
collusion to keep our consumptive economy growing because they cannot
visualize anything less then the perpetuation of their own power. But
compared to staring down the barrel of a machine gun, or listening to
the whine of incoming munitions, or watching approaching helicopters
with their made in America missiles, to have a consumer labelled a victim
is senseless.
Theoretically we are all
educated to have free choice and free speech and we only make ourselves
victims if, when we come to the realization that we are destroying our
environment and our lives, we do nothing about it except apply some
superficial activities to ease the guilt of our lifestyle. We are capable
of making choices, individually and collectively, using our intelligence,
social conscience and freedoms (admittedly increasingly limited under
the rubric of the ‘war on terror’) to change our personal
direction and our government’s direction. It is our lifestyle
that is to blame, and even if we somehow manage to arrest climate change
at a new static level we are still consuming way too much of our environment
to be able to reverse the overall affect of global warming and its co-protagonists,
pollution, resource exhaustion, and war.
Certainly, let’s reduce
our carbon emissions, but also let’s return to the Geographic
statement that bears repeating:
Many of the paths to stabilization
run straight through our daily lives, and in every case they will demand
difficult changes.
I find this a rather powerful
statement within its simplicity for all that it implies. “Our
daily lives” will have “difficult changes” not just
asked of them, but “demanded” of them and one way or the
other, the climate itself will “impose” these changes on
us.
Bring home the military.
Our economy, our huge consumptive
economy, our “daily lives” are based on the control and
extraction of wealth from the undeveloped or developing countries. Quite
naturally, at least at the peoples’ level, at the indigenous level,
they somehow do not see our enlightened benevolence and spiritual beneficence
that supposedly accompanies this extraction. Our control of these resources
then comes back to the ‘hidden fist’, again a rather powerful
phrase aided by the simplicity of its visual image. Routinely over the
course of Twentieth Century history, that fist has both been hidden
and revealed. When hidden, it sometimes is caught out as in the Iran-Contra
‘scandal’, but generally it is free to undermine democratic
governments, destroy indigenous democracy movements, and generally support
corporate initiatives be it for control of land for banana production,
for control of mineral resources, for control of oil resources, or more
technically for control of genetic materials of indigenous species as
well as the human genome.
When visible it is obvious
to the eye, but concealed behind the rhetoric of democracy, freedom,
liberal free markets, with the over-riding justification being the racist
and bigoted ‘war on terror’. But it is only concealed to
the home town crowd, those imbued with the rhetoric of justification
that argues constantly of good intentions, superior civilization (the
white man’s burden), and with the patriotic hubris of America
first, best, and always. It is time to engage in the viewpoint of the
‘other’: the indigenous peoples of the world who continue
to suffer under the subjugation of corporate and militarily supported
minority governments; the Islamic followers who are now universally
condemned in spite of rhetoric about freedom and equality, subject to
racist barriers promoted under the ‘war on terror’; and
all other faiths and peoples whose beliefs and values do not adhere
to the corporate free market perspective of the world.
As much as they are thought
to be the ones that will suffer most from future global warming, we
have much to regain from them, the most important being our sense of
balance in regards to our own self-importance in the world. In short,
we must change ourselves - our way of thinking and our way of acting.
Solutions –
‘growth’ or minimalism
There are two main routes
that we can follow as global warming increases. First, we do little
or nothing as we are currently doing – or little or nothing as
is envisioned by our brilliant far-sighted leaders – let nature
beat the crap out of everyone and then continue to run the same militarized
corporate economy for our own strategic security and the rest be damned.
It would not be a pretty world. Or secondly, we can change our thinking,
and more importantly change our actions, our lifestyle, and the kind
of society we support, an all-encompassing change that brings the recognition
that we can no longer continue consuming the planet as we are, that
we do not need all the ‘stuff’ that advertising creates
a ‘need’ for, that we do by necessity need to live a more
minimalist lifestyle. Unfortunately, in countries with minimal or no
social safety net, such as the U.S., the impact of decisions to change
lifestyles and change government operations will be felt most strongly
by the working poor and the shrinking middle class. It still might not
be pretty, but it would set exemplars for future generations to avoid
the same trap that we are currently in.
We need to end the militarist
conquest of the other peoples of the world in order to free them from
being regarded as the ‘evil’ other, that the ‘other’
has the same hopes, wishes, and desires as we do for a peaceful existence,
food on the table, a happy family life, a shelter to live in, and work
that makes a meaningful contribution to our families and society; and
free them from having their resources extracted and pollution and waste
and poor health be their inheritance, that their resources are for their
own use and benefit, and for fair trade with countries that wish to
purchase them.
We need to change our economic
views, such that in a finite world with an increasing population, the
distribution of goods and services trends towards egality. We need to
realize that the individualistic free-for-all of ‘free’
trade does not and will not promote equality and democracy, that the
majority of successful societies and countries have succeeded by not
following the free trade maxims, but by having strong social supports
in education, health, working conditions and workers rights, the rights
of women and children, and protection for the environment. It seems
bizarre that we still need to call for that kind of world.
Growth should no longer be
the mantra, nor should the slightly improved version ‘sustainable
growth’ be allowed to fool us any longer. This needs to be done
at many levels, within our personal lives at home, within the broader
framework of local communities, at federal political levels where leadership
change is a necessity if anything effective is to be done, and finally
at the international level where a reconditioned UN could be effective
to bring about more global equality, coordinated with the shutting down
of military alliances (NATO, SEATO et al) and other organizations that
are extensions of the corporate military western mindset.
The specifics come down to
personal actions, actions taken at home to consume much less in material
goods and in luxury services, to shop locally for food and entertainment.
The American economy, and those tied into it, are already in significant
trouble with the massive accumulated debt of “an unvisualizable,
indeed unimaginable, $37 trillion, which is nearly four times Uncle
Sam's GDP [italics added]" [4] It is also inconceivable that such
a debt supported economy, faced with growing international competition,
will be able to survive much longer. Instead of supporting the economic
debt by spending beyond personal means, we need a return to the idea
of saving and buying locally, an idea that supported the growth of the
‘Asian tigers’ before they allowed themselves to open up
to global speculative markets. Either way, economic meltdown, or atmospheric
meltdown, the economies and our lifestyles are endangered.
Will our economy suffer?
Of course it will, especially in the GDP measurement of things under
the growth mantra. But another personal change towards taking actions
to promote and participate in socially/globally responsible governments
will alleviate much of that discomfort. And besides, if the scientists
and environmentalists are correct in their conclusions as presented
at the beginning of this article, we will become very uncomfortable
anyway. Nature “will demand difficult changes.”
Conclusion
It is now recognized that global warming is happening, that it is happening
faster than expected, that in order to reduce carbon output we need
to make changes to our usage of carbon consuming compounds. I have argued
here that carbon is not the cause, it is simply the scapegoat. The real
cause, the real culprit is you and I, those of us within the huge consumptive
and unsustainable free market economy that obsessively quests for growth
in a finite world. The changes that need to be made need to occur at
all levels of society, from personal actions broadening out to civic,
federal and international actions that create a radically less consumptive
world with significantly more freedom and societal health for all humanity.
[1] McKibben, Bill. “Carbon’s New Math”, National
Geographic, October, 2007.
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-10/
carbon-crisis/carbon-crisis-p3.html
[2] Paul J. Saunders and Vaughan Turekian, “Why Climate Change
Can't Be Stopped,” Foreign Policy, September, 2007.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/
cms.php?story_id=3980
[3] Stern Review: The Economics
of Climate Change. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/
3/2/Summary_of_Conclusions.pdf
[4] Andre Gunder Frank, cited
in Auerback, Marshall. “Giant in decline,” Asia Times. January
25, 2005. www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GA25Dj01.html
Jim Miles
is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion
pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles. His interest in this
topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses
the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community
and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American
government.
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