Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come from Mass Popular Action,” Not Pols
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
Those 100 companies are fossil fuel companies, they distribute fuel and petroleum products to every other industry/sector. The only way to get those 100 companies to stop being the biggest polluters is to stop using their products. Which relies on us all changing our habits, to stop the supply chain upstream of us from using their products
If we instead subsidised green industries and technologies, we could artificially lower the price of making the right choice.
It can work but only to a limited degree, if you really push the thing then it becomes more likely that people will catch on to the "trick" and elect people who will undo it. They'll do that happily because there's no commitment.
Just where is that getting us? How is this search for who is most to blame going to do anything to help solve the problem? Seems like it's a tactic for avoiding the very real truth that each and everyone needs to do something, what needs to be done doesn't care about what is fair or what is convenient. The reason assigning blame to someone else seems to work is that we are all to blame. Almost whoever you point to, you are almost certainly correct: They are to blame. But so are you.
Productive change always starts with individuals making changes to themselves. We are all humans. The consumers are humans. The producers are humans. The politicians are humans. The voters are humans. It is humans that need to act.
On the other hand, if we are serious about global warming and pollution, we need nuclear energy immediately (including the safe nuclear fission technologies which we've had for a few decades now, as well as continued research into fusion).
Based on everything I've read, I think we need to do a bunch of different things all at once to address global warming and reduce emissions as quickly as possible. Yes, solar and wind are intermittent sources, but they're cheap and available now. Yes, we need to upgrade our grids to be able to handle all of the new electric vehicles. We also need to change over building heating/cooling. Find better means of making concrete.
You may not have meant only do nuclear, but I see politicians saying "nuclear & carbon capture" as if that's going to get the job done, but I haven't seen any analysis that supports those things alone doing the job.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/scientists-pour-cold-water-on-bill-gat... [2] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/bill-gates-fund...
Renewables are quicker, cheaper and sufficient.
A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability over an entire year.
> The whole neoliberal period was basically class war. It had nothing to do with the markets or anything else. Just class war.
For products with no green alternative, what do you expect people to do? How to do you compare the supply chains of products given they are intentionally as opaque as possible.
Everything is shipped over polluting airplanes stored in polluting plastic containers and manufactured with polluting nonrenewable power.
Not to mention there are other ethical concerns to care about. I don't want to support companies with bad labor practices either. But once you filter out the companies doing obviously horrible things the remaining list is terribly short.
And I shouldn't have to worry about this! It's not my job to audit every company. If you can't make a product without shoving externalities on everyone else you shouldn't be making a product, period.
The normal solution people have been hoping for is regulations: a carbon tax makes so much sense, as does outright banning particularly harmful practices like we have with old refrigerants. But this hasn't worked yet, and a wishy washy consumer-driven market solution hasn't worked either
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
We must condemn equally the rhino poachers and the horn-buyers.
There are plenty of choices that are obviously better. Buy a bike rather than a car. A small house rather than a big one. Holiday locally rather than flying.
Everyone can make some positive change. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to move the needle, and in doing so we can unlock the next layer of feasible actions.
To be clear, I do think everyone is capable of making positive change in this way but just 'moving the needle' isn't nearly enough and I don't see why we can't simultaneously push for a very sensible carbon tax and additional environmental protections.
Especially since the biggest polluting companies are so big because everyone buys from them and there are not many alternatives. Saying the problem is that we are buying from these companies seems as much a "darn consumers, amirite?" shrug.
Point is- we should do both. But expecting all consumers to be able to make an informed choice about the entire ecological effects of every product is not possible when there often isn't information or a choice. Especially since under the current system companies are actively incentives to pollute as much as possible since they don't pay the cost of cleanup, and to lie about it with glitzy ads and campaigns.
Oil is a dense fuel source that is easily transported. If we somehow magically permanently capped all current and future oil wells today we'd be in the middle of a crisis that would dwarf any concerns we might have about climate change down the road. We're making great progress on renewable energy sources, but we're not there yet. More protests isn't going to change that. Personally I wish we'd go all-in on nuclear power and work to remove the road blocks that make that so expensive and take so long to bring up new power plants, so that we could add that to the mix and get to the point where a complete loss of the flow of oil wouldn't end civilization as we know it.
Why are these not worth protesting over? And yes, oil companies are forcing it on us by blocking progress for renewables paying off politicians and using fracking which is one of the most polluting things possible.
Nobody is suggesting we turn off all oil wells immediately. But the pace of progress is FAR too slow given that we've known the issues since the 60s.
How do you suggest getting renewable energy plants constructed if not via protests
See here for example, there are many others:
https://www.marxist.ca/article/why-there-is-no-ethical-consu...
1. Climate Change and Environmentalism are usually conflated and used interchangeably. They are two different concepts - climate change is about putting excess carbon in the atmosphere, faster than the earth can re-absorb it. Environmentalism is a moral judgement on how much resources humans are entitled to consume.
For example, I can drive an EV powered by nuclear power and live in a large detached house. There are no carbon emissions, but I consume lots of resources. People may disagree with my taking up so much land, but that doesn't mean I'm changing the climate while taking up land.
2. We do not need to emit carbon to enjoy high standards of living. Our usage of fossil fuels to power our lifestyles is a historical leftover. We did it because our primitive technology made it easy and and cheap to level-up civilization by burning them. And we did. But today, we can use more advanced technology to stop emitting carbon.
So climate change will be solved with advanced technology, allowing us to replace all instances of carbon in all areas of the economy, which will take decades, but is quite doable. We will still take up land, consume resources etc. Asking (and eventually mandating) that people switch technologies is reasonable. Asking that people give up their lifestyles isn't. It is so unreasonable, you can take it as a given that it just won't happen.
Moral judgements are important and we should consider our broader impact, but such a thing cannot be "solved", we can only work on convincing other people of our position gradually over time.
Not yet you can't. There is a lot of embedded energy in both of those products.
>So climate change will be solved with advanced technology
I'm not sure the same thinking that got us into this situation will get us out of it.
It is good because it is positive and expresses confidence that we can do this.
It is bad in where it ignores the emissions caused by land use and resource consumption. Those are not addressed with advanced technology. Those are addressed oftentimes by going back from advanced technology - but in a way that does improve life styles and wellbeing of the people providing you with resources. You can play a role by choosing those resources - which does put you in the place of having to do some amount of moral judgement.
Source: https://regeneration.org
It actually covers a lot of ground: How the US FUBAR’d Afghanistan, United States as the only country that can impose sanctions, China does its own thing, Australian nuclear submarine deal is saber rattling with China, climate change, Abraham Lincoln as a classical liberalist, (quote below).
I made a note of this quote:
> Now it’s supposed to be a wonderful thing if you can subordinate yourself to a master for most of your working life. It’s called “getting a job.” It was considered a horrible attack on human dignity for millennia. Millennia, literally, up through the nineteenth century. It’s taken a lot of work to impose on people the idea that it’s a wonderful thing to spend your waking hours following somebody else’s orders.
Climate discussion is the least important part of this article.
You say the climate discussion is the least important part of the article -- which part do you think is the most important?
The 'job' stuff is funny. If people still believed now what they did back then, I wouldn't always have to explain my wantrepreneurial ways to family, friends, employers, etc.
Are we so full of ourselves to buy into this with seriousness? Do you see a profit opportunity in any sector (energy, finance, industry,..) while "..improving the nature of society" (as N. Ch says) ? Why dont you start a business in that sector and just simply out-compete the "big bad wolfs" where ever you tend to see them? If you are right, and your ideas sound, you are so competent to know how to arm-wrestle other man with their skin in the game into given mode of operation, and all the renewables so cheap and profitable, lets just do it. Please, do it, and "blow us all away".
But it is cowardly, weak, ignorant and pathological to stand "shouting" at, or using the terror of government, or herd-activism, to push feel-good-agendas which you yourself are not sure are viable, cannot yourself implement into business idea, or properly manage.
In Utah for example consumer water use is <2% of all water use in the state. There's plenty of ads to cut your water use, or water after 7pm, etc... but wouldn't it be nice if maybe we outlawed alfalfa farming that uses 80% of the water (in a desert)? Of course the governor is an Alfalfa farmer, so good luck passing that.
I've been thinking a lot about humanity needing to maybe form small communal living spaces where power tools, cars, toys, etc are maybe shared and stored in a common warehouse. Things that maybe we like to have around, but don't necessarily use everyday. This gives more room in our homes for the things that are necessary in our homes, so we can build smaller homes, or even just build an earthbag studio for every member in the family... or something that leaves a low footprint.
TLDR; less consumerism would be huge, and we should strive for that, but it won't happen organically because people are people. Not unless it becomes a 'fad', then maybe... but a combination of 'some people' trying eco-villages, and the govt enforcing stricter rules and rolling out carbon-taxes, would maybe be the better option.
Hopefully thinking mankind will just organize and fix what the politicians can't... is too optimistic for my blood.
Then you have jerk klingons coming along and breaking the climate machine. Paradise is much better.
We got rid of coal power where I live:
https://www.ontario.ca/page/end-coal
It can be done and the stakes here are too high for this handwringing. We didn't let slave ship workers stop emancipation from happening.
This subject is quite close to home to the HN crowd, since software is capable of replacing a large number of human workers. Not even with AI, just by simplifying and streamlining paperwork-heavy administrative tasks. And yet our industry does nothing to protect the people who's work we displace.
Of course, there is still lots of work to do, even if you don't have a job, taking care of yourself and your family. Plus, if we extend the notion of family, an aging population is going to need lots of labor-intensive help, so that's something else they can do.
https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/
A just transition for workers. This plan will prioritize the fossil fuel workers who have powered our economy for more than a century and who have too often been neglected by corporations and politicians. We will guarantee five years of a worker’s current salary, housing assistance, job training, health care, pension support, and priority job placement for any displaced worker, as well as early retirement support for those who choose it or can no longer work.