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Climate Change and the Politics of Interdependence

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The same political challenges apply for the developing world. The Western world is sending a message to India, to China, to Brazil, to Russia, to Indonesia, and saying: "We just spent 200 years developing and modernizing without any concern for what happened to the environment. But guess what. You can't do that. We know what we're talking about when we say you're not allowed." That's actually the message we gave to China and to India. And their message back to us is: "Go to hell. You did it, we're going to do it, and if you want us not to do it, you're going to have to share the costs of not doing it,"--which would mean massive east-west and north-south wealth transfers, which again are politically almost impossible. A questioner this morning referred to the trade and dividend campaign that works so nicely because checks are sent directly to people, but what we're calling for in terms of north-south transfers is raising taxes--not to pay for services for ourselves but to help the Chinese and the Indians modernize and develop on a non-fossil-fuel basis. You try to sell that to Americans as part of your campaign to get elected to Congress. Try to sell that even in Stockbridge, let alone in Detroit and Cleveland and Atlanta.

We have to look at the political realities across the world and figure out how to proceed. I suggest that we go back and re-examine our economic and political foundations. This means looking briefly at capitalism and its role, returning to this morning's question about the adequacy of capitalism and to Michael Moore's question in "Capitalism: A Love Story"--is it a love story or a hate story? Then go back to something even more essential to democracy itself: there are many political scientists and political leaders who say democracy is ill-suited to meeting the urgency of climate change. If you think about it, President Hu Jintao of China is in a much better position, if he wants to make a decision in this regard, to do what he wants to do than we are, because whatever government tries to do in this country and in Europe and in Japan has first of all to be sold to the voters, who then have to vote into office people willing to do what the voters want. It's not a matter of just snapping one's fingers and saying, "Here's what science dictates, let's do it."

Mr. Bush didn't believe in science, which was probably the most dangerous thing about him. We had a president who quite literally did not believe in or understand the nature of science, the methodology or epistemology associated with it. To him science was another set of opinions. There were religious opinions and there were science opinions, all equally valid, and he was essentially saying, "Sure I respect people who believe in science, but as for me, I don't believe in science." Bush was actually right in saying it doesn't really matter what science says--as long as people who vote for their representatives and for their president cannot be persuaded that the science option is the right one and they will not have costs that come back to haunt them--because here's the problem: 10 or 15 years from now, when there are 450 or 500 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and we've lost the battle for 350, if you say to an auto worker living in Detroit: "You can help stop global warming or you can stay employed for the rest of your life. Which would you rather do?" you tell me what the auto worker is going to say and what he's going to vote for. He's going to say, "Give me a job so I can take care of my family and send my kid to college and have medical insurance. Then I'll worry after that about what I can do to stop global warming." He will not make that trade.

Politicians understand this. That's why President Obama has not taken a strong, intractable stand on climate change and has not said the United States of America is going to do x, y, and z in Copenhagen, no matter what. He knows he'll be lucky if just a little health care without any public option is passed by Congress, and there's no way he's going to get even a moderate market-based cap and trade bill, certainly not by December in time for the meeting in Copenhagen. He also knows, by the way, that if anything comes out of Copenhagen, it will depend entirely on the good will of those who sign whatever protocol is there to pursue. The United States never signed the Kyoto Agreement; Canada did sign, but do you know that Canada has fallen 35 percent short of its obligations under Kyoto? Nobody can do anything about it, and no one knows how much any other government has fallen short because there's a serious problem of measurement and monitoring. When a state says, "We're going back to a 350 parts per million standard for CO2 emissions," how do you measure that? Measured by whom? And how? And in what places? How do we know where the excess carbon is coming from in order to punish those who are out of line? Those are the questions that politicians, bureaucrats, and presidents face.

We need to think in these terms; otherwise we will constitute ourselves as a small, self-congratulatory group that knows what's right and knows what needs to be done, and when it isn't done, we can say, don't blame us. In the 1972 presidential election when the only state won by George McGovern was Massachusetts, bumper stickers appeared saying: "Don't blame me. I'm from Massachusetts." Similarly, we will say: "Don't blame us for global warning. Not our fault. We're from Massachusetts, and on October 24 we were in Times Square supporting 350.org; we did the right thing." That's fine for your own sense of salvation, and if we believe what the folks who attend this church believe, we'll do very well in the afterlife, which will be coming up pretty quick if global warning continues. But if what we're interested in is genuine political and economic change that creates a context and a foundation in which responsible, thoughtful, science-heeding politicians and economists can do what needs to be done, then we have to understand fully the underlying politics and economics and figure out how to make what we know is right--and it is right, no doubt about that--work under conditions of democracy.

We could concede our sovereignty to the Chinese and let President Hu decide for the United States as well as for China. That would actually work. Forty percent plus of carbon emissions come from the United States and China combined. We're 20 to 22 percent, the Chinese 20 to 21 percent. The Chinese pollute at a rate exacerbated by the scale of their population; we do it by the amount that each of us is responsible for. If the Chinese ever reach the point where we are in terms of the carbon footprint of individuals, the game will have been long over, and that's counting only their 1.4 billion people. India has another 1.3 billion, and Indonesia" This brings us back to the question Bill McKibben was asked: What about capitalism? Bill, you may have noticed, was nicely oblique in his response. He said it may be that capitalism is to blame, but we can't change it in time, so we've got to find a solution that works within the system. On the one hand I disagree with Michael Moore, who says that capitalism is the problem because it's a corrupt, defective, degenerative system based on greed, but I also disagree with Bill that you can't change it, because I think the kind of capitalism we have today is the problem, and that is not capitalism as New England theologian Jonathan Edwards, the pastor of this very church, understood it in the 18th century when an extraordinary mixture of capitalism and Puritan Protestantism helped create this country.

I'd like to talk about how capitalism itself has changed in ways that make it much more dangerous, much more corrupt, much less able to respond to a sustainable economy than it might once have been able to do. I suggest that capitalism over the past century has been changing slowly in ways that make it much less compatible than it once was both with the Protestant values that Jonathan Edwards represented and with sustainability. One of the problems today is that we tend to divide people into altruists, who want to do good, and selfish people who want to make money. Well, most human beings want to do both. They say: "I want a good life for myself, and I also want to make some profits and take care of my family, but I don't want to do that at the expense of my community, my family, or my nation." Capitalism in its origins had a formula that went something like this: If you can take your energy and resources, invest them, and come up with entrepreneurial solutions that meet real human needs, whether it's with goods or services, you will be rewarded for doing that by making a profit. But here's the kicker: society will prosper as well. There will be new inventions to satisfy people's needs and create not just capitalists but capital, new wealth.

 It isn't hard to defend capitalism as it used to be. That odd yoking of selfishness and the public good, of narcissism and altruism, worked very well, given what we are as human beings, which is people who live in communities and believe--often in God, certainly in society and the community. But we also live in individual bodies and the narrow circles described by our families, and we want to make sure we survive and prosper and flourish inside those small families and communities. We don't want to give up family or community, and capitalism once tried to say we don't have to make that choice. You can do well for yourself by doing good for the world if you address real human needs in an ingenious and inventive and productive way, particularly if you then take the profits and put them back into your firm and continue to create new wealth. The firm will grow, productivity will grow. This is a formula that worked very well. It worked from the 15th into the 18th century, and by the time capitalism had reached America, it had developed a deep practical connection with the Protestant ethic. About a hundred years ago Max Weber wrote a book called The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethos in which he noted that the values of Protestantism--deferred gratification, hard work for the good of God, support of the community--were consistent with the values of capitalism--investment, hard work for the good of men, doing for others but also prospering yourself. Many historians argue that this country, marked by theologians like Jonathan Edwards, was destined for greatness because it brought together a powerful and productive Protestant ethos and a powerful and productive economic system.

Capitalism was very good at production, at meeting real human needs, and at producing wealth, but it was less good at producing jobs, and it was really bad at producing justice and equality. As a result, from very early on it was clear to most people that capitalism worked best when it was linked with democracy and democratic oversight, with a philosophy of the public good, and with people watching, regulating, and overseeing it. Although capitalism was first introduced in a form that was relatively unregulated, so that after the Civil War, for example, it was a pretty wild and anarchic affair, capitalism was so inefficient when left to its own devices that it not only didn't produce jobs well or produce equality but didn't even produce competition, which was supposedly its great strength. Within 20 years of the end of the Civil War, what had started out as rival firms working in oil and coal and railroads and barrel making all were owned by Standard Oil alone. Capitalism left to its own devices tends to destroy the underlying premise of its operation--competition. It was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, who understood that. If you've been watching the Ken Burns television series about our national parks, you know that Roosevelt also understood the role of the public good in defining a democratic nation. He didn't say that capitalism is an evil system, although he did talk about the great malefactors of wealth; what he said is that for capitalism to work it has to be regulated and overseen by a democratic government, by the people, for the sake of the public good.

If we want the public good to be a guiding light for private markets, then we need anti-trust laws, we need regulatory laws, we need to be looking over the shoulder of capitalists. They can do their own thing: invest, produce new goods, try to find out where the needs are, and make money based on meeting those needs. Thus, it was not just a matter of Protestant values and meeting real needs with real goods and services; capitalism also had a vital relationship with democracy, although it did not always acknowledge this. It has always worked best in states that are deeply democratic and deeply engaged in oversight; it has worked least well when left to its own devices. Think of Moscow in 1995 or China in 2008. China is remarkable as the last standing totalitarian one-party state in the world that has yielded its command economy to capitalism in order to create extraordinary productivity and rapid development, all the while ignoring major problems of inequality and environmental pollution. A weird set of disconnects. First, there is the disconnect between capitalism and its originating Protestant ideology (if you do well providing goods and services, you will be rewarded and you'll do good for your society); second, there is a disconnect between capitalism and democracy and the intimate relationship required between them. Franklin Roosevelt was accused, just as Obama is today, of being a socialist. Roosevelt insisted he was saving capitalism, which he did. Saved it from itself, because the contradictions of capitalism when left to its own devices are such that they not only undermine democracy, they undermine capitalism itself. This is what has happened with the collapse of the global financial economy.

In the past 30 or 40 years we have seen a deep disruption between capitalism as a real- economy producer of goods and services to meet real needs and capitalism as a paper economy devoted to making paper profits without any particular relationship to the real economy, which is why today the banks and the stock market have made a comeback while the economy has not and jobs have not. Wall Street is thriving. The banks that were bankrupt just a year ago are doing terrifically well, and you all know that the bonuses are back too, but that's because there's no relationship between the paper economy and the real economy.

There was a story in The New York Times last week about Simmons Mattress Company, which in the 1960s was a genuinely successful, first-rate, old-style capitalist company that made fine mattresses. The company paid its employees well, and they all had health insurance and pensions. Many of them had been working there 20 or 30 years. Best of all Simmons had no debt. Then, along came the new paper capitalists, interested not in providing comfortable beds for people to sleep in but providing profits for their shareholders. They made an offer that the original owners of Simmons, who were growing older, could not refuse. One imagines a conversation something like this:

   "We'll buy you for how about $20 million." (Prices for purposes of illustration only.)

   "We're getting ready to retire. That's a good price. We'll sell. Where's the $20 million?"

   "Oh, we have only $2 million."

   "Well, where are you going to get the other $18 million?"

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The mission of the New Economy Coalition (formerly the New Economics Institute) is to build a New Economy that prioritizes the well-being of people and the planet. 

The stakes are high. Climate change is accelerating. Inequality is at historic levels. The financial industry continues to teeter on the brink of collapse, threatening the global economy. And all the while, our political system has proven incapable of effecting the structural transformations necessary to — quite literally — save the planet. The time is now for a new approach, a New Economy.

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