Tag: abrupt climate change

Encore presentation: better management won’t change society

(previously published over at Orange, where they ignored it)

Here is an essay for those of you who are clinging to the status quo, who imagine that a few mild reforms, instituted by a managerial elite, will change society significantly enough to “make a difference” and “put America on the right track.”  Let me be clear about this: I’m sure we have a lot of the same goals — but I am looking for a clear and unequivocal repudiation of “progressivism.”

Better management won’t change our society.  Its problem is the one John Lennon sang about forty years ago: how can I go forward if I don’t know which way I’m facing?

If society is “facing the wrong way,” and headed for crisis for reasons internal to its functioning, then the point of planning within that social context is lost.  Better management will then merely mitigate the resultant disaster without offering any real resistance to its happening.  The fundamental reality is this: global capitalist society, which organizes the world economy to benefit 793 billionaires and ten million millionaires while marginalizing that half of humanity which lives on less than $2.50/day, is headed toward more growth, more intensive and more extensive exploitation of resources, toward an ultimate crisis of exhaustion.  These tendencies are all built into the system.  And you are all going to “plan around” this?

Below the fold I will give you all a short list of reasons why our managers don’t know which way they’re facing, and also of why real social change is more effectively accomplished by social movements than by managers.

Environmentalism and the cycle of commodities

One of the main reasons our era is faced with intractable environmental problems is that we tend to look at the world with capitalist eyes, as an ensemble of commodities.  Specifically, our world is forced into a cycle of commodities, in which the ultimate end of things is determined not by regeneration but by commodification.  When something can no longer be a commodity, then, it is “externalized” — made into trash.  This diary will explore the cycle of commodities, and suggest an alternative way which doesn’t present such intractable environmental problems.

(crossposted at Orange)

Breathe deeply… clear the mind of distractions… and focus

So what would count as doing something effective about abrupt climate change?  This diary, then, is a thought experiment: what if we actually made abrupt climate change itself a priority rather than mere window-dressing for another legislative report?

(crossposted at Orange)  

No future for you

This is an attempt to assess how political life has been foreshortened by the fact that “the horizon of the future has contracted.”

(Crossposted at Orange and Firedoglake)

Preparing for the new era of domination

Since neither we nor our legislators plan to do anything about it, and since our adherence to progressive ideology apparently outweighs our willingness to exercise our power, it is time to state with determination where this is all going to hit bottom.  The ecological dilemma of a society dependent upon not-so-cheap and not-so-clean oil provides a starting-point for my argument that the capitalist system has reached a cul-de-sac.  In this respect, predominant policy initiatives anticipate a post-capitalist world in which an elite of special interests uses government as a gatekeeper for public access to limited slots in a relatively tiny consumer society.

Crossposted at Orange and at Firedoglake)

A question for the “realists”:

Why not aim for disaster?

It’s the most “realistic” possibility, after all.

Or, more specifically:

How minimal are your aspirations?

How static is your picture of the future?

(Crossposted at Orange)

Why techno-fixes won’t solve the eco-problem by themselves

My last diary brought up the idea of global solidarity around the idea of global solidarity across classes as a necessary framework for the solution of the abrupt climate change problem.  But invariably when I write such diaries I encounter those who think a techno-fix will solve the problem of abrupt climate change by itself.  Society need not change; some new gadget will come along to solve the abrupt climate change problem, and we just need to wait until the world’s nerds invent such a gadget, and all of our eco-problems will be solved.  This diary intends to examine the arguments against such an assertion.

(crossposted at Orange)

To solve the climate change problem, end the class divide

In honor of the diary queue which is going on now on Orange, I’ve decided to put this diary together, perhaps too quickly.  Its thesis is this: if we are to find an effective solution for the climate change situation, we will have to end the division of humanity into social classes.  This won’t take overnight; but its main impediment at present is a lack of unity across social classes, and that can be resolved.

(Crossposted at Orange)

Obama: Accomplished leader or corporate shill?

The wandering eye of media-based attention over at Orange seems to have opened its focus upon the accomplishments (or lack thereof) of President Barack Obama.  Whereas some on this blog would trumpet 90 accomplishments of President Obama which the media fail to report (*media* being a plural noun), others would emphasize Obama’s failure to elicit change on the big-ticket items.  Whatever this diary is, it’s not an attempt to substitute the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down for sober evaluation.  You’ll have to read it to find out its thrilling conclusion.

(originally written for the wandering eyes over at Orange)

The McKibben-Hedges “Debate” — a thought

The point of this diary is to alert the Orange-reading public to the “McKibben-Hedges debate,” from a recent piece in Alternet.  Yeah, I know, it’s not really a debate.  The Alternet piece makes some important connections and I think you should all read it carefully.  What this core contention between the two writers is really about, I argue, is power.  

The history of power is a record of how various forms of power consolidated themselves into the current global state of domination.  The outcome which the history of power has been preparing up until now will be a sort of massive humanity-wide global murder-suicide.  The fundamental leap which will make the drama of human self-extinction possible, I argue, was capitalism.  Capitalism made capitalist discipline possible as a form of power, and capitalist discipline will bring power to a point of confrontation between the global complex of control and the simplification of the biosphere which will signal our failure as a species at the art of taking care of nature.  Thus it’s time to end capitalist discipline.  Capitalism will take care of itself.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

Keeping the grease in the ground: a challenge

If the state of public opinion were to reflect the research on abrupt climate change, billions of people would be in a state of panic.  The problem is not merely that the proposed measures to deal with the problem will be inadequate, nor that Copenhagen will wind up with no agreement or be a farce, although both of those predictions will come true; it’s that the intelligentsia, that class of individuals who should be asking the right questions and coming up with the right answers, is not yet talking about what needs to be done.  

What we will need is an agreement to limit fossil fuel production, and a new concept of economy to replace the neoliberal one, which is structurally incapable of making such a solution real.  This essay is intended to  promote debate about such a change.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

Ecopsychology for capitalism’s spell: Andy Fisher

Book review: Fisher, Andy.  Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life.  Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002.

This is a book review, really some ruminations, upon Andy Fisher’s Radical Ecopsychology.  Here I wish to explore the subtext of capitalism’s spell in Fisher’s book.  Our separation from the world-ecosystem in equilibrium and our joining with the machines of industrial development under the spell of capitalism is what is at stake; Fisher speculates upon the possibility of “making sense of suffering in a technological world” so we can “hear our own inner voice” (183) in a naturalistic sense.  In short, Fisher wishes to break the spell.  Fisher intends ecopsychology as a therapeutic support to an ecology movement which must win something for our “human nature” if any of us are to survive.

(Crossposted at Orange)

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