These are
rogue companies. So young people, whose whole future lies
ahead of them, must send a message to their universities, especially if the
university has a huge endowment -- for there isn't an endowment out there that
doesn't have holdings in these fossil fuel companies. Young people must say to the people who are charged
with their education, charged with preparing them for the outside world, for
their future jobs: "Explain to me how you can prepare me for
a future that with your investments you're demonstrating you don't believe in. How can you prepare me for a future at the
same time as you bet against my
future with these fossil fuel holdings?"
These are rogue corporations whose business
model involves externalizing the costs of their waste, passing it onto the rest
of us.
Their
business model is based on not having to pay for what they call an externality,
which includes the carbon dioxide that's spewed into the atmosphere that is, by way
of the greenhouse effect, warming the planet.
And that cost (of their
externalized waste), that ultimately we
have to pay, is enormous. How so? Because we absolutely know that the future is
going to be filled with many more super storms, like Sandy and worse, each of
them costing us anywhere from $50 billion to $150 billion, or more. Last year there were more multi-billion-dollar
disasters than any year previously. So
climate change is already costing us plenty.
And the cost will continue to increase as the total amount of greenhouse-causing
CO 2 in the upper atmosphere continues to pile up -- which it will
surely do, for just as long as coal and oil companies sell as much of their
product as they can possible sell, within our max-growth,
hyperproduction-hyperconsumption society.
When you try
to get wind farms set up, really big wind farms, there's usually a lot of
community resistance that happens in the United States. It also happens in Britain. Where it hasn't
happened is in Germany and Denmark. And
the reason for this is that in those places you have movements that have demanded
that the renewable energy be community controlled -- not centrally planned, but
community controlled -- so that
there's a sense of ownership, not by some big, faceless state, but by the
people who actually live in the community that is impacted.
Therefore, climate
change is tied to the state of capitalism and the necessary transformation that
must happen to the American political-economic system. And now there's an opening that's been
provided by Sandy following close on the heels of Katrina.
The Shock Doctrine
Whenever you
have this kind of destruction, there has to be a reconstruction. And what Naomi Klein documented in "The Shock
Doctrine" is that these right-wing think tanks (like the American Enterprise
Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation) have historically
gotten very, very good at is seizing these moments of opportunity and using
them to push through their wish list of policies.
Problem is,
their wish list of policies actually digs us deeper into crisis. After Hurricane Katrina, there was a meeting
at the Heritage Foundation, just two weeks after the storm hit. Parts of the city were still underwater. And there was a meeting on which the "Wall
Street Journal" reported, the minutes of which were obtained by Naomi Klein. The title of the central report presented at
the meeting was "31 free market solutions
for Hurricane Katrina." Here's a
sampling from the list of "solutions":
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