EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- One American Who Isn't For Sale
- Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
- Major Loss to Organic Farmers as Court Rules in Favor of Monsanto
- The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning
- Remembering Satyajit Ray’s Hirok Rajar Deshe: On Edward Snowden, Resistance and Inverted Totalitarianism
Popular content
Today's Top News
Beyond Extreme: The Illusion of a New Climate Centrism
I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of media reporting that deceives the public about the climate crisis. Andrew Revkin disappointingly presented a grotesque distortion of reality recently as if it were news. He is a science correspondent for the New York Times and frequent author of quality work. However, in his article, Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming, he paints concerned citizen activists as childish, irrational, out-of-touch, America haters who want to turn our democracy into a dictatorship. He does this by accepting a number of conservative frames.
To give credit where credit is due, the idea that environmentalists are "alarmists" trying to impose a Soviet model of government on the populace gained prominence through Michael Crichton's anti-climate crisis novel, State of Fear.
Revkin perpetuates a similar fiction by disseminating many of the lies concocted in conservative think tanks that demonize environmental activists. In their place, Revkin gives us free-market saviors, described as "environmental centrists," who claim markets can save us without causing any pain if we just provide government subsidies to private corporations to encourage innovation. His "moderate" voices in the environmental debate are neither scientists nor environmental leaders. They are:
- Newt Gingrich, architect of the arch-conservative Contract with America;
- Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician who skews results to support his anti-green agenda;
- Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, so-called 'post-environmentalists' who criticize the environmental movement for promoting regulation.
The "center" Revkin is referring to is smack dab in the middle of radical "free" market elitism. To these "centrists," government regulation is always harmful. This conservative fairy tale overlooks the vital role that laws and regulations, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, have played in reining in corporate polluters. Further, they ignore that the "free" markets could not exist in the first place without laws, regulations, and government institutions, like the courts, to enforce them.
It is the excesses of market capitalism, the absence of community action through government regulation, that is responsible for the failure to deliver an adequate response to the climate crisis. Nevertheless, this is where Newt Gingrich, Bjorn Lomborg, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Schellenberger come together. They all promote continued entrenchment in the exploitative market economy that, if left unchecked, will continue to drive humanity toward extinction. Free-market liberals and free-market conservatives have united.
How can Revkin lump these extremists together under the label "centrist?" Conservative think tanks have bombarded the media with stories that frame environmental activists as doomsday alarmists. At the same time, they have framed climate contrarians as "prudent skeptics" who "don't believe" the mythical tale of climate disruption. It appears that Revkin is passing on these distorted characterizations.
Should we take away all benefits of a thriving economy to keep the world from being destroyed? Should we wallow in denial as if global warming were not a problem? This false choice between "extremes" sets up the "moderate" position of recognizing global warming as a threat, but not doing anything that requires us to change how markets operate. Thus paying the biggest polluters with government subsidies seems like a reasonable compromise. (Newt Gingrich's history of taking money from businesses that benefit from the policies he promotes might make us suspicious about the motives behind this recommendation.)
Revkin deploys the He Said, She Said news technique to lead readers into accepting the false dichotomy he creates between anti-economy environmentalists and pro-economy "centrists." Then, he uses phrases like "rhetoric of catastrophe" and "entrepreneurial environmentalism" which give the misleading impression that environmentalists are bad and free-marketeers are good.
I've previously shown how linguistic analysis reveals deception in articles like this one through other works like When Climate Message is Strong, Attack the Messenger!, The 'Feel Good' Approach to Climate Distortion , and Climate and the Psychology of Loss. This trend of media irresponsibility has gone on too long.
We must get past this array of shallow deception. It is a disservice to humanity in the face of a real threat. Time is of the essence and we must be taking action. All of us must mobilize and act together. Now.
This is what Bill McKibben is doing with his Step It Up campaign. Betsy Taylor is hard at work with her 1Sky organization. Megan Matson is mobilizing thousands with her Mainstreet Moms action campaign. These efforts take advantage of the major glitch in free-market ideology, namely that it is incapable of recognizing the power of community.
These activists and the millions of people involved in their campaigns recognize that we are more than mindless consumers seeking to maximize our economic interests. We are people with families and friends whose well-being is threatened by the myopic profit motive driving the "free" market. This compassion for loved ones compels in each of us a sense of social responsibility that is absent among free-market "centrists." Our moral values are not for sale.
It is time to be the change you wish to see in the world. Luckily, you don't have to be a hero. It is not lone heroes who save the day when community fails. Rather, it is community that pulls together when moral leadership is absent. We don't have to wait for a hero to slay the dragon. It wouldn't work for global warming anyway. This is a problem that threatens all living things on this Earth. We all contribute to the problem and we must come together to solve it.
For starters, we could have a media that empowers people with reliable information about real alternatives for solving the climate crisis we face. Alternatives that include government regulations that limit greenhouse gases, community projects to promote sustainable practices, and the belief that Americans are willing to work together to make the world a better place. That shouldn't be too much to expect.
Joe Brewer is a fellow at The Rockridge Institute.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
9 Comments so far
Show AllI used the edit function on my previous post to correct spelling and it worked fine. So I must apologize for my previous criticism. I found that the edit function works, but you only have one shot at it.
There is always that discussion of how much greenhouse gases are spewed into the atmosphere but nowhere does anyone see any mention of how much oxygen is produced by the planet's biomass and how much is used by modern society. Although a disturbing pollution, our real problem is not the carbon dioxide level but the oxygen level. No doubt, we have to reduce pollution levels, but paramount is adding more oxygen to the atmosphere because if the holes in the ozone are not closed then what's the use of doing anything else?
Perhaps some brain out there can compute how much oxygen an airliner burns in a day and how much land area is required to sustain the biomass which will produce an equivalent amount of oxygen. With such computation we would be able to determine the extent of our permissable development. It must be understood, of course, that we have had millions of years of oxygen production stored in our atmosphere with relative little depletion by the human species, but it should never be forgot that the reserve of oxygen is no different in it's status as a resource than is oil.
"It is time to be the change you wish to see in the world. Luckily, you don't have to be a hero. It is not lone heroes who save the day when community fails. Rather, it is community that pulls together when moral leadership is absent. We don't have to wait for a hero to slay the dragon. It wouldn't work for global warming anyway. This is a problem that threatens all living things on this Earth. We all contribute to the problem and we must come together to solve it."
I am so glad to read this. On the one hand, we strut and prate about our greatness in being democracies. On the other, we blame our inability to do anything effective about the terrible injustices in our world on the absence of leaders. Those leaders are ourselves - if we are a democracy, we should be the ones doing effective things. Our failure to step up and take responsibility is a moral one, a cowardice based on our reluctance to make the sacrifices we know are necessary.
It works everywhere. Look at the Nuremberg Trials. They established an essential principle - that each individual is responsible for his or her actions. That we cannot justify crimes by asserting that we were just following orders. We shirk this responsibility daily as well. It is far easier to fall into line with the narrative of patriotic duty than to exercise our divine duty to disobey. Laziness, convenience, a fear of not conforming with a bullying status quo? All of these no doubt: but it is time we challenged them.
The only way to finally overcome the free enterprise, free market delusions is to compel the pseudo-science of economics to recognize its subordination to the science of thermodynamics. Contrary to the theory of Adam Smith (and Karl Marx) there cannot be surplus value to draw from production because there cannot be surplus labor – there are only unrecognized participants in the transaction who can be victimized without recourse under the law (this is an all-important aspect of enforcement by the courts). Full thermodynamic throughput accounting is beyond the knowledge of any particular individual, but basic scenarios have been described. See:
www.eco.uni-heidelberg.de/ng-oeoe/research/papers/Faber%20et%20al%20AEE%201998.pdf
and
http://dieoff.org/
GET RID OF CELL PHONE TOWERS,STOP USING OIL AND NUCLEAR POWER(TOO MUCH HAZARDOUS WASTE)STOP CUTTING DOWN TREES AND RAINFORESTS!!GET RID OF GREEDY WARMONGERING NABOBS !! EMBRACE THE SUN,THE WIND AND THE RAIN AND WE WILL BE JUST FINE !!
Oh, I see... so government regulation, even to avery potential catastrophe is the "soviet model" And presumubly FDR, JFK, LBJ and even Nixon were little Stalins or something. Can the abusrdity of these capitalist neoliberals of the NYT go any further?
But what really bothers me is the whole argument is that it shows the degree that post-modernist, deconstructionalist ideas have slipped into mainstream thinking. These Critchtonian arguments are just same the post modernist idea that objective scientific theories don't really exist. Science is just a cover for ideological agendas that are divined by examining the the "hermenutics" of the "text" and are not otherwise real.
The NYTimes has earned the hate of conservatives and liberals alike. If they stuck to the truth, they would only stand to lose half their subscribers, conservatives all.
The New York Times exists to prop up Wall Street and the concept that wealth and power should be concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Currently about 1% of the populace controls 80% of the wealth which might as well be all of it. Conversion of the economy to a carbon-negative system removes much of that control from the overclass.
After all if your sitting in your straw-bale house, snug and warm, eating home grown veggies and locally produced meat it's hard to convince you to shift your labor to the benefit of others. It gets a bit harder still if there's a solar panel up on the roof. You could just tune "them" out. Electric cars are easy to repair and hemp fabric lasts long enough that trips to WalMart aren't needed as often as they used to be. If it doesn't last and isn't well designed people can't afford the carbon tax to buy junk like they used to.
The worst nightmare of Wall Street is people able to profit from the fruits of their labor. The only sane response to climate change is relocalization. The insane response would be to build nuclear plants so that the Bush family could play games with the lights come election time like his buddy Putin does with natural gas.
I was surprised (but maybe should not have been) that the NYT also urged passage of the "free" trade pact with Peru, even after hundreds of Peruvians took the bold step of asking Congress not to pass it. Those hundreds likely represent even more. And our "progressive" Dems are passing it, too.