What do conservatives have against global warming theories? On first glance, it appears to be politically neutral. Nothing to do with taxes, abortion, redistricting, wars in Iraq (well, maybe it does).
Naomi Klein, the author of "The Shock Doctrine," explains to really deal with climate change in a meaningful way, changes need to be made that go way beyond recycling or carrying cloth bags to the grocery store. She said that liberals need to acknowledge that. Real changes would mean strong government intervention in industry, and conservatives believe that this would undermine the free market.
Too often the liberal climate movement runs away from the deep political and economic implications of climate science, which is why I wrote the piece. I think we need to admit that climate change really does demand a profound interrogation of the ideology that currently governs our economy. And that’s not bad news, since our current economic model is failing millions of people on multiple fronts.
She said that to deal with the environmental problems, government has to reject popular programs like the Keystone pipeline and put more money into infrastructure to improve public transportation. These measures are NOT going to go down well with conservatives. Liberals need acknowledge that environmental politics is ideological and start fighting the fight.
So, are you ready to fight the fight?
Apt. 11d 
In my experience, a great many liberals don’t acknowledge the actual full costs of envirnomental programs. Or at least, a great number of the people that liberal candidates need to vote for them in order to win don’t acknowledge the actual costs so the candidates don’t acknowledge the actual costs.
It seems locally that the biggest gains in the envirnoment could be had by ending or slowing sprawl. However, the Democrats are nearly as suburban as the Republicans. Eight years of Rendell (Democratic governor) did nothing at all for Pittsburgh and was worse than nothing for public transit in Pittsburgh.
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Anyway, the Keystone pipeline is opposed (at least in its routing) by a great many Republicans for fear of a spill that would pollute the irrigation water for their farm land. Which brings us to another truism about the costs of envirnomental programs. Everybody is willing to have somebody else pay more.
I think an extra $1/gallon of gas tax to pay for infrastructure would be just fine. But, it wouldn’t cost me much and what it did cost me would probably be repaid in terms of the increase in the price of my house and making the roads less crowded.
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I’m liberal, and I’m not going to fight Wolf’s fight because it’s made of lose. Like an obverse Ivory soap, it is 99 and 44/100 percent pure fail.
Profound interrogation of ideology is going to appeal to about as many people for green reasons as it does for all the other reasons already available. And then the US will have missed its chance to play a positive public role because the one party that might give a rat’s ass — the strategy of the conservative party in our system, as far as I can tell, amounts to “drill baby drill” — spent its time in profound interrogation instead of actually doing something.
Fighting consumer desire is a mug’s game, has been for probably centuries if not longer. Christianity has a long and good record of getting people to do improbable things, and yet what share of the population has given away all of its worldly goods and worn the hair shirt? About as big a share as will engage in Wolf’s profound interrogation.
Further, any political question for which my dead grandfather is by definition a more virtuous citizen than I am (and if it’s all about reducing greenhouse emissions, being dead is pretty much top of the league) is going to have a difficult time finding a constituency among the living.
Add it up, and this approach is all about setting oneself up to fail nobly. No thanks. Let’s win instead.
Bruce Sterling was all over this more than a decade ago; I stole the dead grandfather reference from him because he’s a better polemicist:
“Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume. What is required is not a natural Green, or a spiritual Green, or a primitivist Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic Green.
“These flavors of Green have been tried, and have proven to have insufficient appeal. …
“The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. …
“The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that the twentieth century’s industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy. This approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth century lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before the advent of germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded in superstition and miasma. …
“The current industrial base is outmoded, crass and nasty, but this is not yet entirely obvious. Scolding it and brandishing the stick is just part of the approach. Proving it requires the construction of an alternative twenty-first century industrial base which seems elegant, beautiful and refined. This effort should not be portrayed as appropriate, frugal, and sensible, even if it is. It must be perceived as glamorous and visionary. It will be very good if this new industrial base actually functions, but it will work best if it is spectacularly novel and beautiful. If it is accepted, it can be made to work; if it is not accepted, it will never have a chance to work.”
Emphasis added. But read, as they say, the whole thing.
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I’m liberal, and I’m not going to fight Wolf’s fight because it’s made of lose. Like an obverse Ivory soap, it is 99 and 44/100 percent pure fail.
Profound interrogation of ideology is going to appeal to about as many people for green reasons as it does for all the other reasons already available. And then the US will have missed its chance to play a positive public role because the one party that might give a rat’s ass — the strategy of the conservative party in our system, as far as I can tell, amounts to “drill baby drill” — spent its time in profound interrogation instead of actually doing something.
Fighting consumer desire is a mug’s game, has been for probably centuries if not longer. Christianity has a long and good record of getting people to do improbable things, and yet what share of the population has given away all of its worldly goods and worn the hair shirt? About as big a share as will engage in Wolf’s profound interrogation.
Further, any political question for which my dead grandfather is by definition a more virtuous citizen than I am (and if it’s all about reducing greenhouse emissions, being dead is pretty much top of the league) is going to have a difficult time finding a constituency among the living.
Add it up, and this approach is all about setting oneself up to fail nobly. No thanks. Let’s win instead.
Bruce Sterling was all over this more than a decade ago; I stole the dead grandfather reference from him because he’s a better polemicist:
“Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume. What is required is not a natural Green, or a spiritual Green, or a primitivist Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic Green.
“These flavors of Green have been tried, and have proven to have insufficient appeal. …
“The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. …
“The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that the twentieth century’s industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy. This approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth century lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before the advent of germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded in superstition and miasma. …
“The current industrial base is outmoded, crass and nasty, but this is not yet entirely obvious. Scolding it and brandishing the stick is just part of the approach. Proving it requires the construction of an alternative twenty-first century industrial base which seems elegant, beautiful and refined. This effort should not be portrayed as appropriate, frugal, and sensible, even if it is. It must be perceived as glamorous and visionary. It will be very good if this new industrial base actually functions, but it will work best if it is spectacularly novel and beautiful. If it is accepted, it can be made to work; if it is not accepted, it will never have a chance to work.”
Emphasis added. But read, as they say, the whole thing.
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oh dang, my longish comment on this post seems to have landed in moderation. it may even be in there twice. anyone want to let it out for time served and good behavior?
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Sorry, Doug. Fixed.
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Christianity has a long and good record of getting people to do improbable things, and yet what share of the population has given away all of its worldly goods and worn the hair shirt?
There is a very considerable share of the Christian population that has consumed less because of Christian beliefs. Whether this has lowered overall consumption is doubtful, since giving money to other people probably increases consumption in a society.
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No worries, Laura. Feel free to drop the double post. And indeed this one.
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“Sometimes he gets his info from Power Line. When that happens, I don’t bother to click on the link. (Sorry, dad.) ”
I follow that rule, to, with the unnamed people I have this debate with. I will say that one issue with the debate is that it is a complex and complicated one — the scientific phenomenon is complicated, up there with the genetics of autism and free will in the human brain and immune responses and vaccinations. They are complicated topics to explain and if people don’t want to believe them, it’s easy for people to find a poky part to hang their hats on (because the theories are poky and not smooth and spherical).
And, as we point out, even understanding the science does not even begin to enter the morass of economic and government and regulation and politics required to address the science.
I think a lot of important questions now require that kind of complex analysis and that’s part of the reason that we’re at political impasses about so much these days.
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free will in the human brain
Free will in the human brain is easy. If we don’t have free will, arguing about whether or not we have free will is pointless since nobody can change their minds. If we do have free will arguing about whether or not we have free will is pointless since we have free will.
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If you reduce this to “conservatives are blinded by their ideological love of the free market”, you’ll just lose in a different way.
Absent a breakthrough, the fundamental issue is consuming radically less. Radically less than you do. Radically less than I do. It’s tiny, crowded houses that aren’t so well heated or cooled, less food, less clothing, and so forth. “Better public transportation” is a smallish downpayment on the changes that would need to be made in the West.
If you think this is all about conservative free market ideology, ask yourself why the European carbon emissions regime failed. Kyoto is ending and virtually no one has hit their targets. Most of the energy efficiency in Europe was accomplished by a) a small legacy built environment and b) 1970s energy taxes that were in response to OPEC, not the plight of generations hence.
It’s very, very hard to get people to radically cut their consumption for unclear benefit to future generations. It’s hard whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, or for that matter, a communist.
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Pfff. I just solved the problem if free will. Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll see what I can do about carbon.
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Actually, Germany will either hit or come very close to hitting its targets. This is mostly the result of E. German emissions being relatively high in 1990, the benchmark year and collapsing utterly with the wipeout of centrally planned industrial enterprises shortly thereafter.
Don’t know off-hand what targets are like for Russia, Ukraine, etc., but I suspect they may be close and for the same reasons. Rapid and radical deindustrialization puts a lot of people back toward subsistence farming (seen it first-hand in the Caucasus) and wrecks many lives quite thoroughly. Not a model to emulate.
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If the Euro collapses, that would probably improve Germany’s chances.
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Yes, Germany and Britain hit–but Germany because of East Germany, and Britain because they ran out of cheap coal.
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The author of this article was annoyed with liberals as much as conservatives. She said that liberals like that recycling is something that everyone can agree, so they are pretending that it will improve climate change.The author is saying that radical changes need to be made. Pretty much the only way that we’ll see improvement (without becoming subsistence farmers) is by limiting people’s ability to consume. No more big McMansions on my block. And through extreme involvement in industry. And, you’re right, probably nobody wants this. People want their stuff and their warm houses. They want to drive their cars. But perhaps the first step is to be brutally honest with people.
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“There is a very considerable share of the Christian population that has consumed less because of Christian beliefs. Whether this has lowered overall consumption is doubtful, since giving money to other people probably increases consumption in a society.”
Indeed. Ditto redistributive taxation, of course.
A related issue is our friends in the developing world who have lacked the finer things in life, but are enjoying more and more of them today (for instance, the explosion in Chinese car ownership). Any modest decrease in Western consumption will be more than offset by the effect of growing wealth in the developing world. Russians LOVE cars every bit as much as Americans do. A car is the first thing you buy (maybe after an apartment) if you are a middle class person on the way up.
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“Pretty much the only way that we’ll see improvement (without becoming subsistence farmers) is by limiting people’s ability to consume. No more big McMansions on my block.”
I don’t think that’s half of it. Try no car and go back to living in a walkup. Suburbs and detached houses are incredibly inefficient. New Jersey and Westchester have got to go back to being produce and dairy producers for the city, and everyone who works in the city must live in the city. That’s energy efficiency.
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I don’t think liberals like the thought of giving up their convenient, consumer life any more than conservatives. We just like to feel guilty about it and point our fingers at conservatives for not doing the same.
My uncle would never believe that capitalism, industry and our way of life have any kind of negative impact anywhere in any way. It would be like saying he is wrong if he admitted there was a even a tiny downside. Every year in the winter when we are freezing for a few days, he’ll say “global warming my ass” at a family function. Sometimes we take the bait, sometimes we say “pass the potatoes”.
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Y81 and McMegan have it: everybody overconsumes relative to ‘sustainable’.
The greenies have done themselves a huge disservice with their overstatements of the evidence (see the emails of Climategates I and II for their discussions of how to hide the problems). When folks see that there’s some fraud in the IPCC it encourages them to think the whole enterprise is fake – and in particular when the recommendation is meat once a week, bicycles, wear your clothes til they wear out, and you never take that dream trip to New Zealand, much less going to the Caribbean every winter. It’s icing on the cake when the recommendation comes from that sour prig Al Gore with his half-acre house and big money from the carbon-offset market.
My own belief is that overuse of energy is a problem simply because of prudence and thrift, and that the evidence even after you correct for IPCC overstatements is pretty good for human-caused climate change. Politically, I don’t believe that India and China and Chad are going to cut back on energy use to any lower level than they see in London and Houston – Kyoto was a high water mark of coordinated international action on this and it’s going down from there. I like Doug’s comment, but I’m not at all sure how you get there, and I really want to take my dream trip to En Zed before they shut down the airlines.
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“My own belief is that overuse of energy is a problem simply because of prudence and thrift…”
Right. It’s not that hydrocarbons are bad. They’re wonderful as a fuel material. The problem is that eventually, you run out of this miracle fuel.
I can’t find it now, but there was an interesting study that said that when given the traditional environmental sell, conservatives use more energy, so that continuing the same environmental campaigns but bigger is like talking louder and louder in English when visiting a foreign country. What I would suggest is the following mental exercise (for Parks and Rec fans): what argument would work on Ron Swanson? I think RS is persuadable, but you’d need to bracket the entire traditional green ethos, because he would find it off-putting and alien. Now, if you told him, we can cut your gas bill in half so you’ll have money to buy that new drill press you’ve been talking about, I think you’d have an interested listener. Repeat as needed.
Another issue is that in a lot of cases, people are already making real trade-offs. They live in far-flung suburbs, but for their efforts, they don’t have crack heads for neighbors and they don’t worry about safety when their kids are in public school and the educational process is less impeded by violence, disrespect and difficult to educate children and the housing stock is newer and more energy-efficient. They are getting real benefits for their gas dollar. Likewise, I’m teetering on the edge of buying a really big house (2700-2900 sq. ft.), but once again, the issue is trade-offs. There are suddenly a lot of close-in city houses for sale in that size range due to middle-aged and elderly downsizers. I never really expected to buy a house of that size, but the commute would be very convenient, we’d have someplace to put visiting relatives or an extra kid, my husband could have an office that I could close the doors on and not look at, and we might even have a place to put exercise equipment. It’s not sheer bloody-mindedness–we really could really improve our quality of life and the functionality of our home. And these houses already exist and some of them are architecturally very interesting and worthy of preservation (although the more architecturally interesting, the worse to heat and cool).
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On a topical note, the sushi at Whole Foods now comes on compostable trays.
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