— Introduction —
I’ve written a number of climate change diaries at Orange, here — but I didn’t write any of them recently. But I was provoked by a diary which discussed Supreme Court review of some sort of proposed regulation of carbon emissions from coal plants.
Since the Supreme Court’s earlier (2/9/2016) issuance of a stay, Justice Scalia has died, which has perhaps changed that situation. The bigger problem with climate change, however, is that the overall discussion of climate change in America today is not yet appropriate to an understanding of the bare minimum necessary for real climate change mitigation. Climate change mitigation has been made to seem easier than in fact it is.
This thesis derives from an earlier thesis, explained in an episode of “Democracy Now” late last year: climate change is more extreme than what we’ve been told:
So if they’ve been underestimating the problem it’s highly likely that the solution has been misrepresented too.
This diary hopes to remedy that problem of thinking about climate change mitigation by presenting what I see as the bare minimum necessary to get the job done. Without this bare minimum, “climate change mitigation” will be a mere public relations effort, harmful to the capitalist economy, the working class, and the planet as a whole.
This issue is especially important in the primary campaign, in which the candidates will feel obliged to present “plans” to mitigate climate change. I’ve been looking at the Sanders plan recently — but I don’t want to go over it here, and as for Clinton, I’m just not sure. If we’re going to discuss climate change in the context of the Democratic Party primaries, let’s start by discussing how the candidates themselves have discussed climate change far more often than the moderators of the debates between them. If anyone in this election is reluctant to discuss climate change, it’s the self-appointed election gatekeepers.
At any rate, readers should approach all candidate plans skeptically — it hardly makes sense to take a candidate’s plan at face value if the basis for climate change mitigation is poorly known. In this regard, I’ve written these precepts without regard to what is “politically realistic”— rather, what’s important to me, here, is whether or not actual climate change mitigation can take place, as an alternative to the “climate change mitigation” we are likely to see, which will be merely a public relations gesture.
Here are some precepts to follow in understanding what will be required: