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(Article changed on November 26, 2012 at 14:58)
What follows
here is a synopsis and interpretation of a discussion Bill Moyers recently
had with Naomi Klein.
The fossil
fuel industry business model is based on them selling, and us burning, five
times more coal and oil-based fuels than is compatible with the continuance of
healthy human life on earth. This means
their business model is at war with human life on this planet.
We're up
against the very, very powerful fossil fuel lobby whose paymasters have every
reason in the world to do whatever
they can to prevent this from ever
becoming the most urgent issue on our agenda.
This includes spending billions on a very corrupt corporate media, and
on academic and intellectual whores whose "professional opinions" are
essentially for sale to the highest bidder, and who will testify on their
behalf.
Climate change requires collective action
It requires
that we somehow manage, in spite of what was just stated, to regulate extremely
powerful corporations including oil and coal companies. It requires that we plan collectively and
effectively, as a society. Problem is, at the historical moment that climate
change hit the mainstream, all "collectivist"/regulatory ideas fell into
disrepute. All solutions had to be "free-market'
solutions. Governments were supposed to "get
out of the way (of corporations)." Among
right-wingers, "collectively' remains a dirty word -- "that's what communists
did." Anything "collective' was tainted
and suspect. Libertarians like Margaret
Thatcher even went so far as to claim that "There's no such thing as society."
Now if you
believe that, of course you can't do anything about climate change, because climate
change is inherently a collective and societal problem -- there's no denying
that this is our collective atmosphere. We can only
respond to its gradual poisoning and alteration collectively. Otherwise we
cannot respond in any effective way. Yet
some parts of the environmental movement foolishly respond to this dilemma by personalizing the problem and cheerfully
saying, "Okay, let's recycle. Let's
all buy a hybrid car." In an effort
to get along with the powers that be, they treat this problem like it could
have business-friendly solutions -- things like cap-and-trade and carbon
offsetting. But those "solutions' aren't
nearly enough.
For this
reason and others we ended up with a movement that every once in a while would
rear up, and people would get all excited and say, "this time we're really going to do something about this." And whether it was the Rio Summit or the
Copenhagen Summit, or that moment when Al Gore came out with Inconvenient Truth, the movement would then,
after a brief period of mild public optimism, just recede into the background
of most peoples' consciousness. Why so? Because it (the movement) didn't yet have the collective social support and
political-economic support it needed.
On top of
that, we've had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby (with the help
of their academic/scientific & journalistic whores) to both buy off the
environmental movement, to defame it, to infiltrate it, and to spread lies within
the larger culture about it. And, quite
sadly, the entire climate-denial movement has been doing all this very
effectively.
Where, why, and how the climate-change
denial movement is most entrenched
Environmental
writer Glenn Scherer has pointed out that over the last two years, the lion's
share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunder
storms, wind storms, heat waves, wildfires, has occurred in Republican-leaning
red states. And yet, quite
paradoxically, those states have sent a whole new crop of climate-change
deniers to Congress.
Explanation:
If you are deeply invested in free-market ideology, if you really
believe with your heart and soul that everything
public and anything the government does is evil, and that our liberation must
and will come from liberating corporations,
. . then climate change
fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because the truth is that the
big corporations (which have the biggest hand in creating the problem) must
be regulated!
Climate change is the greatest single
free-market failure.
It is what happens when you don't regulate
corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn't just "Okay, the fossil fuel
companies want to protect their profits." It's that climate-change science threatens the
free-market worldview. And when you
drill deeper into the drop-off in belief in climate change, what you see is
that the large majority of Democrats
still believe in climate change -- in fact their rate of belief in it is up in
the 70th percentile. This means that the
whole drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political
spectrum. So it turns out that the most
reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is
real is what their views are on a
range of other political subjects -- things like abortion and taxes. What you find is that people who have very
strong conservative political beliefs simply cannot face the science behind climate change. Why not?
Because it threatens the ideological structure within which everything
else they believe is anchored.
Yes the market can play a role.
There are
things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better
job. Could that ever be a replacement for preventing the fossil
fuel industry from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? No, of course not. But it could help our efforts to stop carbon-induced (CO 2 -induced) climate
change.
