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- 'Putting Hippies on the Payroll'
- Dennis Perrin: Will To Power
- A Cold Wind Blows
- Environmentalism and the Left
- Latour Redux
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- Search Gorby's Corner
"Everyone has gone green. Even reprobate oil corporations have stopped funding the ‘global warming sceptics’, as they retool their operations to cash in on the bonanza of carbon-trading. Bewildered by the sudden desertion of their corporate allies, a few isolated libertarians fight a rearguard action against the green tide. With the publication of Green Capitalism, James Heartfield has launched a powerful new critique of green supremacy – but from a Marxist rather than a libertarian perspective. This distinctive outlook allows Heartfield to show that the various political positions taken in this debate are not what they seem."
Read on...
For pure shits and giggles, this post by Dennis Perrin on the Samantha Power affair is not to be missed. It's also pretty much all that needs to be said.
For the same reason that rising temperatures in the 1990s is not proof positive of pending climate disaster, this winter's intense global chill isn't straightforward reason for to warm up the skeptic arguments. In fact, I think the debate over this bit of evidence misses the important point. What's important about the devastating cold snaps of the past few months is not that they discount the global warming science, but that they discount the argument over the science itself. In the report linked above, it is mentioned that:
"In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call 'the Winter Snow Disaster' has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation."
The same weather events would not have had the same impact in the US, or in any other industrial society. With our greater resources, we are able to dampen the impacts of these weather events. And when we don't, it is due to social and political neglect, as in Katrina, not due to any necessary threat the weather poses. The social and political change indicated by these weather events is the same indicated by any extreme weather event. Industrial development is not the problem, it is a partial solution - one whose potential is only fully realized in conditions of social and political equality. We must look to the social, not natural, causes of natural disasters.
(Readers: sorry for the absence - jury duty and paper-writing got in the way)
Climate-Resistance has a nice post on the difference between the left and environmentalism, or at least, on why criticism of environmentalism is not inherently conservative. (Shameless self-promotion, they also quote an article I wrote.) The question of whether environmentalism is conservative or radical is I think one of the most important questions for us to think about these days. Environmentalism is the dominant ideology on the left, but it crosses political boundaries with ease, and draws as much of its thinking from the status quo as from any challenge to it. It's not just that mainstream institutions like the Nobel Prize committee and the United Nations have celebrated its ideas. It is also the embrace of its ideas by downright conservative politicians, like John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in the United States. Both the rapidity with which environmentalism was accepted by the mainstream (essentially one generation), and the ease with which it crosses traditional divides, contrasts strongly with left wing thinking of the past. Socialists, for instance, had to struggle for decades even to win small victories and to spread their ideas; and they were never accepted on the right. A thorough-going critique of environmental ideas from the standpoint of left political thinking is still wanting, but Climate-Resistance is right to emphasize the point that "the Left is not characterised by opposition to economic growth; its goal has been to distribute its riches more rationally amongst those who actually generate capital, rather than just those who simply own it."
After I posted a review of Bruno Latour's lecture on Ecology and Democracy at the blog 'French Politics,' an observer of the French scene wrote:
"I'm pretty skeptical about the PP, which to my mind has always been a peg to which all kinds of political posturing can be attached. The recent banning of GMO corn is a good example. José Bové and his minions went on a hunger strike, it was making big headlines, so Sarko jumped all over his own review panel and strong-armed the chair into saying that there was "sufficiently grave doubt" to invoke the PP and ban the stuff. Easy enough to do, since it accounts for less than 1 pct of French corn production and all of it was going to Africa anyway. And who likes Monsanto, an American corporation. So, for me, this "democratic" use of the PP was just a cover for "screw the Yankee corporation" and shut up some troublemakers at low political cost. But Bové is the head of an authentic social movement, so I guess if you want to call that democracy, I'd have to agree.
Meanwhile, the Rhône is so polluted with PCB that you can't eat fish from it anymore, but nobody's about to invoke the PP to shut down Péchiney, DuPont, Alstom, CGE, etc."
Where I agree with the commenter is on the difficulty of doing what Latour argues. While there is merit to the way the precautionary principle forces us to think about the uncertain and unpredictable side of human intervention into nature, a democratic appropriation of the PP is a bridge too far. Not only is it too closely wedded to the pessimistic 'precautionary' ethos of environmentalism to be prized away, towards a more humanistic approach. The other side of the political spectrum for the PP is, as the commenter notes, not democracy but opportunism. Nonetheless, if Latour is wrong to suggest we can democratically re-appropriate the PP, he is right to argue that the discussion needs to be less about what scientific experts tell us (though not ignorant of science), and more about the values and ideologies that often hide behind the science.
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