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by Dave Lindorff
It wasn’t too long ago that the death of socialism, the triumph of capitalism and the end of history were being widely hailed.
What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a degree in world temperature change makes!
We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth’s sake and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off.
Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave the likes of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of thousands and perhaps tens of millions of years — the kind of killing heat that in the past has led to mass extinctions — it is ludicrous to talk about things like carbon trading and raising vehicle mileage standards.
We need a revolution in the way we human beings live and the way we treat each other.
There is no way that the world’s 6.5 billion people — and especially the 2 billion of them who live in wealthier societies — can continue to consume energy at even close to the level that we have been consuming it. There is no way we in the developed world can continue to live the way we have been living, in oversized houses, heated in winter and cooled in summer. There is no way in the northern hemisphere we can continue to have teakwood or mahogany-floored living rooms and eat strawberries in December.
There is no way that we can continue to squander trillions of dollars on war and military spending every year.
No way, that is, if we plan on leaving a livable world for our children and grandchildren.
The so-called “green” politicians who talk about instituting
carbon-trading schemes, about driving hybrid automobiles, about buying
fluorescent light bulbs, and about turning down the thermostat and
wearing sweaters, are deceiving us or themselves.
None of this is going to save us.
What will save us is recognizing that the age of consumer-driven capitalism is over.
We either come up with a new way to organize society, in which
production is based upon real needs, not upon manufactured needs, and
in which scarce resources are made available to those who need them,
not just to those who can afford them, or we will all be doomed — or at
least our progeny.
The peoples of the world — especially of the developed
world, but really everywhere — need to recognize that unless our
expectations are changed, unless our selfish desire for more is curbed,
unless wasteful production is ended, we are all likely to be on that
extinction list.
So where are the leaders of boldness and vision in
politics, media and academia who are ready to tell the truth? Where are
the people who are willing to listen to, and reward that truthtelling?
This is not an “inconvenient” truth we need to confront. It’s a terrifying truth.
We need to change everything, and we need to do it quickly, too.
Here in America, that means an end to subsidies for suburban sprawl.
There should be no more federal or state funds for road building and
road repair. If people want to live miles away from where they work,
let them pave their own roads. That’s the only way to get people to
realize they’re going to have to start supporting funding for mass
transit, and to start thinking about living near where they work. We
need to end subsidies for agribusiness, which has virtually decimated
local agriculture to the point that prime farm states like Pennsylvania
and New Jersey now import all their food from the West Coast.
Ridiculous!
We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no one
will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive them only
rarely. Large, heavy vehicles for personal use should be outright
banned. Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that products will
reflect the true cost of the environmental damage that shipping them
around causes.
Electricity and home heating fuels should also be heavily
taxed, with some kind of a rebate program for low-income families, so
that people will stop heating and cooling large homes.
As these things are done, there clearly will be massive
dislocation. People who live in hot climes like Florida or Arizona will
no doubt decide they can’t afford to cool their homes, and will move
north. People in cold regions may decide it’s too expensive to heat
their homes and will move to more temperate zones. Companies like the
Detroit automakers will go bust or shrink enormously. Power plants will
be shut down. Oil companies will go bankrupt.
That all has to happen, but it doesn’t mean people have to
starve. We as a society need to demand a government that will help
those who are displaced by the crisis to relocate and to find new
productive ways to earn a living. A huge government program of
investment in alternative energy systems would be able to hire many of
those whose jobs are lost by the shutdown of the carbon economy.
A new ethos needs to be developed. Conspicuous
consumption, egoism and the so-called “American Dream” of having it all
for one’s self and one’s family need to be replaced with a new—actually
a very old—concept: communalism.
Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers and
competitive free agents, we need to start thinking of ourselves as
passengers on a boat that is sinking. If we all run for the lifeboats
and life preservers and fight to see who can be saved, the life vests
will be torn and ruined and the lifeboats will fall into the sea and
sink. In the end, we’ll all go down. If, on the other hand, we change
tack, recognize that we’re all in this together, and make orderly plans
to save ourselves collectively, we may all be able to get away.
To succeed, we need to acknowledge that everyone is at
risk, everyone is contributing to the common goal of survival, and
everyone will be taken care of.
The same approach needs to be taken in the larger world.
If the poorer nations believe that they are going to be abandoned to
catastrophe and famine, they will do two things: continue to try and
survive by the old strategies of wasteful energy use and environmental
destruction, and of mass migration to safer havens. The first
response — for example the continued destruction and burning down of
rainforests for wood and cropland and ethanol feedstocks — will threaten
us all with ever worsening global warming. The second will lead to
overcrowding of more fortunately situated nations, and a drain on their
resources.
The only answer is again for all the wealthy nations, and
those that are better situated by geography to survive climate change,
to commit themselves to helping the more threatened nations and
societies. This is not a matter of altruism; it is the simple logic of
survival.
But before we can start making the huge changes that are
called for — really the dismantling of the whole capitalist system and
the freemarket ethos — we need to start hearing, and demanding to hear,
the truth — from scientists, from politicians, from business leaders,
from the media, and ultimately from ourselves.
For starters, let’s stop kidding ourselves that the latest
UN report on climate change is the real story. That report, ominous as
it sounds, doesn’t tell the half of it. The report was first watered
down by the scientists who reviewed it, and then it was censored by the
governments that feared its findings. For one thing, it didn’t even
mention that all the projections for warming during this century don’t
even take into consideration the role that hundreds of billions of tons
of methane gas underlying the Arctic and Antarctic permafrost and
trillions of tons of methane lying in the form of frozen hydrates deep
under the ocean could play if that super global warming gas should
start pouring out into the atmosphere.
We are in a situation where it is wholly inappropriate to
act on optimistic assumptions. Rather, we need to consider worst-case
scenarios, and start planning and acting with those in mind. That
means, for example, that to keep that methane fiasco from occurring, we
don’t want the permafrost to go away in the polar regions, we don’t
want the oceans to warm precipitously and we don’t want the ice caps to
melt away. That means we have to act much more dramatically than just
worrying about coastal erosion and lowered crop yields might lead us to
do.
This is a crisis that isn’t going away. It is a crisis
that isn’t going to be solved with band-aids. It is a crisis that isn’t
going to be solved by smooth talk. And it is a crisis that will get
worse the longer we take to recognize its true gravity, and the longer
we take to face up to the revolution that needs to take place if we are
to prevent it.
And that is the truth.
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