If the climate is the economy, then there is a political economy of climate. In the past few days, that politics has become noticeably visible in the U. S., reminding us once again why we occupied Wall Street and not, say, City Hall. The Wall Street Journal has aggressively launched a campaign of absolute climate ignorance–meaning both that they refuse to know what is patently known and also that they are campaigning for us to simply ignore the climate. It is no coincidence that Republicans are again pushing for the disastrous Keystone pipeline–and, big surprise, the Democrats are beginning to cave.
Thanks to the U.K. Guardian, I became aware that the Wall St Journal had launched a manifesto under the unintentionally hilarious title “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27, 2012. Yesterday, scientists published a rebuttal, which, while absolutely right on the substance, once again failed to take the measure of the political economy of climate. Their call is for respect for their expertise. A look at the brazen effrontery of the Journal‘s claims should have made it clear that this is a waste of time.
The piece begins with a long palaver, familiar climate denier rhetoric, that there are a “large and growing number” of scientists that disagree with climate change: in fact 97% of published refereed articles support the diagnosis, making it clearly settled science. The WSJ takes it up a notch by claiming that there is no perceived warming of the planet, flying in the face not just of all data but now of common sense.
However, they are just getting warmed up. Their next move is to go into Michele Bachmann territory:
the fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth.
There is no point in rebutting this kind of argument because it has departed from the norms of public debate, as has so much neo-liberal rhetoric in this election year. However, they have still more to say. Why, they ask are scientists afraid to question global warming, as they call it:
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have detailed how cold war ideology and those promoting it have been co-opted into climate denial. Nonetheless, even by red-baiting standards, this is pretty exceptional stuff.
It might seem that this piece doesn’t matter, it’s just more red meat for the Republican base: but the Tea Party does not read the Wall Street Journal. And this denialism has now produced its own “policy” proposal:
the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now.
That’s right–no controls at all because the “modest” warming will be beneficial anyway and cost-benefit analysis is always right, right?
In the rebuttal, the real climate scientists rightly observe:
most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert
It would be like asking your dentist about cardiology, they say. Forced to waste space rebutting the various allegations, it is only in the last paragraph that the group can hint at an alternative political economy:
In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.
Whether by choice or, more likely from space or editorial restrictions imposed by the Journal, they don’t give specific examples.
The neo-liberals, however, have one: the Keystone XL pipeline. While taking a break from throwing filmmakers out of Congress yesterday, Republicans launched yet another bid to have the pipeline approved. Opposing the pipeline are “hard-left environmentalists,” according to this logic, using the WSJ rhetoric, standing in the way of American jobs and energy security for ideological reasons. Even according to the pipeline’s most enthusiastic proponents, the maximum job creation would be some 20,000 jobs. The reality might be less than half that.
Obama and the Democrats are stuck: having fudged the issue of climate change into so-called energy security and “green” jobs, they have little space to maneuver. Yesterday the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid started talking about a deal. Expect a “sensible” compromise in which the pipeline is routed away from the Sand Hills in Nebraska and there’s some boiler plate about not exporting the oil. None of the politicians will talk about the huge increase in carbon emissions that will result from using this heavy oil. For James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first detected global warming, if we go there, it’s “game over” for efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Pipeline Protest, Nov. 2011
Keystone activists already undertook a successful action of civil disobedience at the White House last November, when 12,000 demonstrated and many were arrested, including Bill McKibben. Now it’s important to realize that “Keystone” has become the symbol of a political economy that actively chooses to ignore all questions of climate. Remember, Transcanada, the promoters of the pipeline, are also the owners of Zuccotti Park. The lesson is that we cannot “demand” the cancellation of the pipeline, we have to make it an impossibility by our own actions.
I’m going to say this again and I’m going to keep saying it: occupy climate change.