CLIMATE CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN

GREEN ALERT

SURELY there is no cause ultimately greater than preserving the sustainability life on earth, preferably including humans; with every passing moment it is increasingly obvious that our planet is becoming less stable/familiar, and it is clear that we must change our ways of life accordingly. From powerful storms and flooding to droughts and lightening-sparked wildfires, the signs of a climate in transition are all around us.

As most people are by now aware, former Vice-President Al Gore has, in the wake of being denied the White House in 2000, been engaged in a campaign to fight against global climate change. His Oscar-winning 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth gained widespread attention and helped lead to Gore's selection in October 2007 as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work publicizing the "climate crisis." As someone who until recently had far more credibility in Washington than among activists, Gore may be a highly imperfect messenger for the environmental movement. Then again, he is neither an environmentalist nor a scientific "expert," but a politician who converted himself into a developer of mass environmental awareness while appealing to national and world leaders through such initiatives as wecansolveit.org.

On July 17, 2008 Gore delivered a speech at Constitution Hall in Washington, followed that Sunday with an appearance on Meet the Press, in which he put forth a challenge to the nation: shift to one hundred percent renewable (wind, solar, and other carbon-free) sources of energy by 2018. While gaining broad public and political support, there were also those who questioned whether Gore's 10-year plan was feasible while wondering how it would be funded, especially under current circumstances. In addressing this issue with Tom Brokaw, Gore spoke of needing to"tax what we burn, not what we earn." There is no reason why industry should not pay what amounts to a fine for polluting the atmosphere and contributing to the instability of the climate. Yet in order to raise the immense amount of money necessary to rebuild the national energy infrastructure, those in the highest income bracket--$250, 000 per year and up--will inevitably have to pay a significantly higher percentage of their salary in taxes (as they should).

The question of how to fund such initiatives is especially important since it relates to the idea of ultimately repairing a severely damaged economic system by creating "green collar" jobs that put people back to work installing solar panels and building high-speed railways, for instance. Through its various pronouncements about job creation and infrastructure repair programs, along with a stated commitment to urgent action on the issue of climate change, the incoming Obama administration seems poised to move in the direction of such a Green Deal. Obama's choice of California Rep. Hilda Solis as the next Secretary of Labor would seem to confirm this conclusion (Solis is considered a pro-labor, "green jobs" expert), as would his recent meeting with Gore in Chicago (while it is at the moment unlikely that he would accept the position, there has been speculation that Team Obama has offered to give Gore an official Cabinet post as Climate Change Czar).

In a recent article, "Why Obama's Futurama Can Wait: Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package," historian Mike Davis takes issue with Obama's stated priorities:

We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Davis' reference to the current Bush administration-engineered $700 billion "financial rescue package" is quite prescient, as no serious attempt to fix the economic meltdown can be successful if it begins be rewarding those who created the disaster to begin with. Beyond this, his argument is essentially that rebuilding the nation's infrastructure must take a back-seat to what he considers to be more humanitarian concerns: education and health care. Yet Davis does not fully explain why it makes sense to separate an immediate investment in schools and hospitals from a massive Green Deal-like socioeconomic program, especially since a growing green-collar job sector, along with higher taxes for the rich, would help fund the social services he thinks must be prioritized.

While not fully articulated, Davis' underlying premise is that a Green Deal might be utilized by elites to shore-up the system much like the New Deal is credited with having "saved capitalism." Progressive activists should therefore be wary of capital-intensive infrastructure development programs that do not offer immediate assistance to those being victimized by the economic crisis. This is an honorable sentiment indeed, yet it fails to consider the degree to which providing work for the jobless and preventing deaths as a result of collapsed bridges can be viewed as a humanitarian matter. Yet much more striking, given the particular focus of his work, is Davis' failure to clearly delineate how climate change should (or for that matter should not) be addressed in terms of socioeconomic policy.

He seems to be arguing--or at least implying--that climate change is not as serious a problem as many alarmists would have us believe, and that it fits the pattern of capitalism's tendency to cause environmental catastrophes that are subsequently manufactured into "natural disasters" easily exploited by those in power (See Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World). Still, Davis comes nowhere close to claiming that the global climate crisis is ultimately unreal or even unduly exaggerated. Indeed, the question of ongoing environmental devastation caused by human activity does not factor much at all into his pithy criticism of "Obama's Futurama." Instead, Davis refers to the incoming president's economic team as a "powerful and desperate coalition of interests...aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works," but he does not characterize such elite support for government spending as in any way related to environmental policies.

So even assuming that a Green Deal would ultimately amount to another attempt to save the capitalist ship before it sinks, it's difficult to make a strong case for that outcome being worse than what may happen if we don't do anything (or at least not enough) to address the climate crisis. Maybe this sentiment is attached to the fact that many leftists today--unlike during previous eras--have an easier time imagining the end of the world than they do imagining the end of capitalism. Perhaps Mike Davis is thus simply staying true to his Marxist roots by choosing to focus on socioeconomic conditions rather than fret over the decreasing size of the earth's polar ice caps.

Yet it seems logical that environmental and economic reforms should from now on be increasingly integrated in some context, whether it be a Green Deal or in another manner. Indeed, even military planners are very seriously examining the potential threats posed by climate change and preparing "national security" strategies accordingly. For instance a Pentagon commissioned study published in October 2003 and released to the public in February 2004, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security", warned that

Violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor.

By this account there is no telling exactly how the global political-economy will be affected by the climate crisis, and it could under the right conditions produce unprecedented levels of migration accompanying a frightening wave of "resource wars" that would make the invasion and occupation of Iraq seem quaint. Especially in this light: though not perfect, a Green Deal that would seek to divert money away from the military-industrial complex and send it towards a broad array of domestic necessities might be the wisest course of action to follow at this critical juncture.