(crossposted at Humanitarian Left and at Firedoglake)
When I see headlines like this on my Facebook feed:
"Even if a small fraction of the Arctic carbon were released to the atmosphere, we're fucked," he told me. What alarmed him was that "the methane bubbles were reaching the surface. That was something new in my survey of methane bubbles," he said.What comes to mind, for me here, is the issue of argumentative appeal. Should we be trying hard to get everyone's attention merely by producing ever-scarier stories about global warming? Separate this, if you will, from the actual and ongoing catastrophe of climate change, which merits our full attention. The truth may be scary. But is that all we've got?
My question, more exactly, is pointed at those who would continue to scare us without proposing anything radically new. See for instance "Climate Tipping Requires Precautionary Accumulation of Capital and an Additional Price for Carbon Emissions," as posted on Naked Capitalism yesterday. Its initial analysis wrong-foots the whole idea:
Climate policy aims to internalise the social cost of carbon by means of a carbon tax or a system of tradable permits such as the Emissions Trading System set up in the EU. But how do we determine the social cost of carbon?Answer: we don't. Climate change is not going to be solved by further entrapping people in a system of "costs," i.e. commodities exchange.
Moreover climate change is not going to be mitigated if you place all of the onus for "doing something" (i.e. doing something effective -- there are plenty of Panicky Petes out there shouting "DO SOMETHING!!!" without having anything effective in mind to do) upon wealthy and powerful capitalists, who are still not likely to care. Capitalists don't care about the social cost of carbon, and more panic won't make them do so. Capitalists don't care about some ostensibly "far off" future (and that future will remain "far off" until it actually happens!) in which the social cost of carbon shows up on their balance sheets. Capitalists live in an extremely attenuated time horizon. The future is the next quarterly report, and the next interoffice memo. Capitalists struggle with questions like: should I sell today?
Talk about ending capitalism doesn't change this reality either: the capitalists' standard reaction to that kind of talk is "omigod my current privileges!" That would of course explain one important thing: why you aren't going to get the capitalists (and their clients in government) to care about the future. You aren't, at any rate not to the extent you want. This of course explains the current dilemma. I'm imagining a roundtable meeting in a corporate office, with the climatologists on one side and the business leaders and their officials-in-tow on the other. Here's the deal, explain the business leaders: first you guarantee us a profit rate, and then we'll "do something" about your whatever it was. 'Kay?
No wonder things have gotten so much worse. This thinking goes all the way down to James Hansen, whose populist attitudes are otherwise admirable. John Bellamy Foster argues:
Hansen’s climate-change exit strategy thus has definite limitations. Despite its progressive features it is mostly a top-down, elite-based strategy of implementing a carbon tax with the hope that this will spur the introduction of necessary technological changes by corporations. To be sure, Hansen stresses the democratic nature of the plan, and has argued that Obama could have mobilized the population around such a tax at the height of his popularity in his first term through a series of fireside chats. He also suggests that the 100 percent redistribution element in the fee-and-dividend strategy must be backed up by the threat of the wider public to “fight” if this is interfered with. And he has himself joined in mass mobilizations against coal and tar sands oil. Yet, his plan includes no call for a general ecological-cultural revolution against the U.S. power structureIn other words, Hansen's idea looks nice on paper but it should be pretty easy to shut down unless the public can be roused to support something even more radical. When we debate Hansen we are still in the paradigm that asks us to plead our cases before people who aren't likely to mitigate climate change. What is the alternative?