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Recently, I stumbled across an old book project of mine, long forgotten. It was something I had been writing in perhaps 1998 and 1999 but never finished. In reading through it, I was surprised to discover a reference to climate change ("...even the unlikely removal of every nuclear weapon from this earth wouldn't come close to purging the planet of exterminatory consciousness or return it to a pre-global warming, -ozone depleting, -iceberg-melting, -rogue-nation threatening state"). Honestly, if you had asked me before I saw that, I would have said that I wasn't truly aware of climate change until at least sometime early in this century.
Now, admittedly, when it comes to such knowledge, 1999 isn't really such a distant date. After all, in 1965, a science advisory panel prepared a report for President Lyndon Johnson (undoubtedly too involved in the disastrous Vietnam War to pay attention) that was remarkably prescient on the dangers of burning fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So, long before I knew of it, while I was still out in the streets protesting that very war, those dangers were already significantly grasped, at least in the world of science.
And yet here we are, so many years later, living through what is indeed a growing hell on earth of fire and flood, storm and, as I said then, iceberg melting. And despite that knowledge, the preparations for climate change in the U.S. and globally have been pathetic. I mean, lurking in the wings is actual good news. The price of renewable energy has dropped so radically that a non-greenhouse-gas future is imaginable in which the transition to green energy and a green economy, as Bill McKibben wrote recently, promises the possibility of saving us trillions trillions! of dollars. But that transition" oh, yes, there's the problem. In a world in which none of the nations that matter has even come close to meeting their commitments to the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, what can we expect?
At the very least, if we're to have a hope of transitioning to a world which remains habitable for us, it's time to focus on that transition-to-come and what might truly be possible. As he so often does, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the all-too-timely climate-change-themed novel Songlands (the final volume of his Splinterlands series), takes on that hard task today in a thoughtful, if grimly realistic, way. Tom
Climate-Change Transition in the Age of the Billionaire
A World of Solidarity Economics or Climate Profiteering?
By John Feffer
It was supposed to be the greatest transition of modern times.
Practically overnight, a dirty, inefficient, and unjust system that encompassed 11 time zones was to undergo an extreme makeover. Billions of dollars were available to speed the process. A new crew of transition experts came up with the blueprint and the public was overwhelmingly on board. Best of all, this great leap forward would serve as a model for all countries desperate to exit a failed status quo.
That's not what happened.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Russia emerged from its wreckage as the largest successor state, government officials in the newly elected administration of Boris Yeltsin teamed up with a cadre of foreign experts to chart a path into a post-Soviet system of democracy and free markets. The West offered billions of dollars in loans while the Russians generated more funds through the privatization of state assets. With all those resources, Russia could have become an enormous Sweden of the east.
Instead, much of that wealth disappeared into the pockets of newly minted oligarchs. During the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic catastrophe, with the equivalent of $20 to $25 billion leaving the country every year and the gross domestic product (GDP) falling nearly 40% between 1991 and 1998. The Soviet Union once had the second largest economy on earth. Today, thanks only to a reliance on Soviet-era fossil-fuel and arms-export industries, Russia hovers just outside the top 10 in total economic output, ranking below Italy and India, but still manages only 78th place that is, below Romania in per-capita GDP.
The failures of the Russian transition can be chalked up to the collapse of empire, decades of economic decay, the vengeful triumphalism of the West, the unchecked venality of local opportunists, or all of the above. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss such a cautionary tale as a mere historic peculiarity.
If we're not careful, the Russian past could well become humanity's future: a transition bungled, a golden opportunity squandered.
After all, the world is now poised to spend trillions of dollars for an even more massive transition, this time from a similarly dirty, inefficient, and unjust economy based on fossil fuels to" what? If the international community somehow learns the lessons of past transitions, someday we will all live in a far more equitable, carbon-neutral world powered by renewable energy.
But don't bet on it. The world is slowly replacing dirty energy with renewables but without addressing any of the industrial-strength problems of the current system. It should remind us of the way the Russians replaced state planning with free markets, only to end up with the shortcomings of capitalism as well as many of the ills of the previous order. And that's not even the worst-case scenario. The transition might not happen at all or the decarbonization process could be so endlessly drawn out over decades as to be wholly ineffectual.
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