Here is a good example of a warmist really wanting to push social control and using global warming as the excuse.
Story submitted by John Kehr The Inconvenient Skeptic
I will gladly discuss the science of global warming with anyone. Interestingly enough there is a strong desire to avoid discussing the science from many warmists because they simply state that the issue is settled and it is time to act. With that mindset in place I am starting to see some disturbing attitudes developing. I recently came across an interview of Naomi Klein. She is an author and is a consistent social activist and strongly anti-corporate. Her work is consistently against the free market. Even with that in mind, her latest interview is rather disturbing. I will simply post the interview here.
The title sums it up well… Naomi Klein – Serious about climate throw out the Free Market Playbook.
After reading this article, ask yourself: Is her concern for the planet or for implementing social controls?
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Perhaps one of the most well-known voices for the left, Canadian Naomi Klein is an activist and author of several nonfiction works critical of consumerism and corporate activity, including the best sellers No Logo and Shock Doctrine. She is currently at work on a book about climate change.
Q. In your cover story for The Nation last year, you say that modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the political left, including redistribution of wealth, higher and more progressive taxes, and greater government intervention and regulation. Please explain.
A. The piece came out of my interest and my shock at the fact that belief in climate change in the United States has plummeted. If you really drill into the polling data, what you see is that the drop in belief in climate change is really concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. It’s been an extraordinary and unusual shift in belief in a short time. In 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change, and in 2009 only 51 percent believed — and now we’re at 41 percent. So I started researching the denial movement and going to conferences and reading the books, and what’s clear is that, on the right, climate change is seen as a threat to the right’s worldview, and to the neoliberal economic worldview. It’s seen as a Marxist plot. They accuse climate scientists of being watermelons — green on the outside and red on the inside.
Q. It seems exaggerated, but your piece was about how the right is in fact correct.
A. I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They’re ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology. They feel that any government intervention leads us to serfdom and brings about a socialist world, so that’s what they have to fight off: a socialist world. Increase the power of the private sector and decrease the public sphere is their ideology.
You can set up carbon markets, consumer markets, and just pretend, but if you want to get serious about climate change, really serious, in line with the science, and you want to meet targets like 80 percent emissions cuts by midcentury in the developed world, then you need to be intervening strongly in the economy, and you can’t do it all with carbon markets and offsetting. You have to really seriously regulate corporations and invest in the public sector. And we need to build public transport systems and light rail and affordable housing along transit lines to lower emissions. The market is not going to step up to this challenge. We must do more: rebuild levees and bridges and the public sphere, because we saw in Katrina what happens when weak infrastructure clashes with heavy weather — it’s catastrophe. These climate deniers aren’t crazy — their worldview is under threat. If you take climate change seriously, you do have to throw out the free-market playbook.
Q. What is the political philosophy that underscores those who accept climate change versus those who deny it?
A. The Yale Cultural Cognition Project has looked at cultural worldview and climate change, and what’s clear is that ideology is the main factor in whether we believe in climate change. If you have an egalitarian and communitarian worldview, and you tend toward a belief system of pooling resources and helping the less advantaged, then you believe in climate change. And the stronger your belief system tends toward a hierarchical or individual worldview, the greater the chances are that you deny climate change and the stronger your denial will be. The reason is clear: It’s because people protect their worldviews. We all do this. We develop intellectual antibodies. Climate change confirms what people on the left already believe. But the left must take this confirmation responsibly. It means that if you are on the left of the spectrum, you need to guard against exaggeration and your own tendency to unquestioningly accept the data because it confirms your worldview.
Q. Members of the left have been resistant to acknowledging that this worldview is behind their support of climate action, while the right confronts it head on. Why this hesitancy among liberals?
A. There are a few factors at work. Climate change is not a big issue for the left. The big left issues in the United States are inequality, the banks, corporate malfeasance, unemployment, foreclosures. I don’t think climate change has ever been a broad-based issue for the left. Part of this is the legacy of siloing off issues, which is part of the NGO era of activism. Climate change has been claimed by the big green groups and they’re to the left. But they’re also foundation-funded. A lot of them have gone down the road of partnerships with corporations, which has made them less critical. The discourse around climate change has also become extremely technical and specialized. A lot of people don’t feel qualified and feel like they don’t have to talk about it. They’re so locked into a logic of market-based solutions — that the big green groups got behind cap-and-trade, carbon markets, and consumer responses instead of structural ones — so they’re not going to talk about how free trade has sent emissions soaring or about crumbling public infrastructure or the ideology that would rationalize major new investments in infrastructure. Others can fight those battles, they say. During good economic times, that may have seemed viable; but as soon as you have an economic crisis, the environment gets thrown under the bus, and there is a failure to make the connection between the economy and the climate crisis — both have roots in putting profits before people.
Q. You write in your article, “After years of recycling, carbon offsetting, and light-bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis.” How do we get the collective action necessary? Is the Occupy movement a step in the right direction?
A. The Occupy movement has been a game changer, and it has opened up space for us to put more radical solutions on the table. I think the political discourse in the United States is centered around what we tell ourselves the American public can handle. The experience of seeing these groups of young people put radical ideas on the table, and seeing the country get excited by it, has been a wake-up call for a lot of people who feel they support those solutions — and for those who have said, “That’s all we can do.” It has challenged the sense of what is possible. I know a lot of environmentalists have been really excited by that. I’m on the board of 350.org, and they’ll be doing more and more work on the structural barriers to climate action. The issue is, why? Why do we keep losing? Who is in our way? We’re talking about challenging corporate personhood and financing of elections — and this is huge for environmental groups to be moving out of their boxes. I think all of the green organizations who take corporate money are terrified about this. For them, Occupy Wall Street has been a game changer.
Q. What comes after communism and capitalism? What’s your vision of the way forward?
A. It’s largely about changing the mix in a mixed economy. Maybe one day we’ll have a perfect “ism” that’s post-communism and -capitalism. But if we look at the countries that have done the most to seriously meet the climate challenge, they’re social democracies like Scandinavia and the Netherlands. They’re countries with a strong social sphere. They’re mixed economies. Markets are a big part, but not the only part, of their economies. Can we meet our climate targets in a system that requires exponential growth to continue? Furthermore, where is the imperative of growth coming from? What part of our economy is demanding growth year after year?
If you’re a locally based business, you don’t need continual growth year after year. What requires that growth is the particular brand of corporate capitalism — shareholders who aren’t involved in the business itself. That part of our economy has to shrink, and that’s terrifying people who are deeply invested in it. We have a mixed economy, but it’s one in which large corporations are controlled by outside investors, and we won’t change that mix until that influence is reduced.
Q. Is that possible?
A. It is if we look at certain choke points like corporate personhood and financing, and it makes sense for us to zero in on aspects of our system that give corporations massive influence. Another is media concentration. If you had publicly financed elections, you’d have to require public networks to give airtime to candidates. So the fact that networks charge so much is why presidential elections cost more than a billion dollars, which means you have to go to the 1% to finance the elections. These issues are all linked with the idea that corporations have the same free-speech rights as people, so there would also be more restrictions on corporate speech.
Q. Entrepreneur and writer Peter Barnes has argued that what’s missing is adequate incorporation of the “commons sector” in the economy — public goods like natural and social capital. “Capitalism 3.0,” he calls it, which we’d achieve not by privatizing these goods but by creating new institutions such as public-asset trusts. What’s your opinion of this approach?
A. I definitely think it’s clear that the road we’ve been on — turning to the private sector to run our essential services — has proven disastrous. In many cases, the reason why it was so easy to make arguments in favor of privatization was because public institutions were so cut off and unresponsive and the public didn’t feel a sense of ownership. The idea that a private corporation has valued you as a customer was a persuasive argument. Now it turns out both models have failed. So this idea that there is a third way — neither private nor state-run public — is out there.
There is no science without the politics…
So Klein is from a wealthy family of dictators of the proletariat, rather than being proletarian herself? I expect she will have the means to winter somewhere warm and sunny, while working class pensioners freeze to death in northern towns for lack of affordable energy.
“Klein’s difficulty is that she doesn’t have much more than the crude Left/Right political distinction”
She’s moving somewhere, she just hasn’t made the jump that her “solutions” are just as much the products of “corporations,” and their PR firms as anything she might criticize coming from Big Pharma, Military, etc. She writes, “A lot of them have gone down the road of partnerships with corporations, which has made them less critical”. Less critical for what? The only way this is not blindness to the “crisis capitalist” nature of 99% of the “climate change” camp, is if this is a comment on cap and trade and NGOs embrace of it. That would make her possibly a Hansenist of 350.orger. Hansen became the movement’s tacitly exiled Trotsky when he denounced cap and trade as a fraud (which, of course, it is). She could be a true believer, despite what I previously implied. A big chunk of the vocal, older global warming believers seem like they are searching for a replacement-religion for Marxian thought. They need the same strait-jacket of limited thinking Marxism supplied, all the while promising liberation and knowledge. Their rants about “deniers” sound like their elders’ rants about “false consciousness.” The rants are not really meant to change minds, but to keep their own thinking narrowly constrained.
Hey, go easy on Naomi. It is obvious she is extremely skilled at making her own beautiful clothes, jewelry and hairstyle. She surely wouldn’t get them from any kind of ‘free market’ now, would she?
Crony Capitalism is the problem. The lobby people and the commercial banks are a problem. The removal of the glass-steagall act was bad. The murderous invasions were bad, no welfare reform is bad and no taxes on the rich is bad.
There is no doubt that money is being made with the green scam also.
“She is right about the right wingers though, they really stink up the “debate” with their aims to eliminate the EPA or their total incomprehension about how the large business factions they idolize could support and sponsor global warming economic games. They have a total blindness to the fact business manipulates government mostly, not the other way around. ”
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The mainstream conservative view is that the EPA has vastly and illegally wandered outside its regulatory writ, and is now making industrial policy. THAT’s what mainstream conservatives say needs eliminating.
AS for conservative total blindness about business manipulating government: Hayek and others argued seventy years ago that socialism inevitably leads powerful corporations to exert undue influence and control over government. Say what you will about Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity et al, but they ALL understand and talk about how big business such as General Electric have used their influence to enrich themselves and freeze out competitors. So do conservative legislators. Why do you think conservatives have objected to the “alternative energy” boondoggles under Obama?
Klein is perfectly clear that the underlying science has nothing whatsoever to do with her thoughts, or the thoughts of many activists. They are already formed (or malformed) and are just looking for a horse to ride. Her honesty is refreshing. Her thoughts are not.
Did her publisher force her to take money for her book?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…
It’s the same Marxist planned economy, “dictatorship of the proletariat” shtick, simplified and sexied-up for the stupid OWS crowd and the tweeeting, sound-bites generation nitwits to whom this stuff seems profound and novel.
So, here’s Naomi’s “new” vision: A society of eco-friendly worker-bees eking out a sustainable living along the mass transit tracks, while the important intelligentsia and the necessary nomenklatura travel into the prohibited reserves to ostensibly study and protect the environment, but in reality, buggering off to well-deserved vacations at state-granted cottages confiscated from evil capitalists and posh youth camps for the deserving.
Been there, done that, actually, under slightly different layers of bullshit. Such were my halcyon summer days for a few years in the mid-60s when Gramps was still a big shot in the regional Party. Then, thankfully, the insane asylum fell apart because a planned economy doesn’t work, no growth means no competition and that means rapid decline, and the hungry and frightened peons, the ones whom we, snotty red-kerchiefed pioneers would lecture to, eventually pushed back…and then some.
Why are we even discussing this faux-intellectual celebrity here? O, yeah, because she’s now riding the “climate” wagon.
Yes many of us want to abolish the EPA, but not to eliminate the proper protection of the world we live in from excessive pollution, but to lance the boil and to purge the poison.
We recognize the simple truth that you cannot reform a nest of snakes no matter how you change their mandate they are still snakes. The EPA has become a magnet for people of totalitarian bent who see themselves as the saviors of the world. The sort of folks who have the chutzpah to declare someones property a navigable waterway and block their use of their own property to build a home, because portions of it are briefly flooded due to heavy rains.
Close the EPA down and fire the lot, then create a carefully crafted replacement that is firmly constrained to the sort of actions originally intended before they began to metastasize and began manufacturing problems to enlarge their scope and power.
Larry
Frankly the basic premises is dead wrong , the idea that only the left care about the environment and only the right doubt AGW is unsupported rubbish that owns more to the prejudice of Klien , of which there is plenty , than to the facts .
In reality people of the left and right support and are sceptical about AGW , but for the watermelons like Klien its automatic reaction to label others views that fail to agree with theirs, as either mad of bad. Which is facility uniquely limited to the right , well at least in their minds .
Its simply ‘ don’t support AGW and therefore don’t the use of this scare to achieve political goals , you must be mad or bad and therefore ‘right wing ‘ .
And the irony is that Klien like many of the lefts leaders , has background of privileged that could match the best , well they have little actual time and virtual no understanding of the actual ‘working class’
Reblogged this on TaJnB | TheAverageJoeNewsBlogg.
Klien is well versed in the world of ideas and completely ignorant of the world of reality.
Jonova has a post that seems fitting: “If I wanted America to fail”
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/04/long-live-free-speech/#more-21387
I suspect that if you dig deep into Naiomi Klien’s funding you will find many of those foundations she rails about in this interview. I’m not buying it. I don’t think she believes a word she says.
Politics. From the beginning. Longer than I’ve been alive.
And I don’t give her much credit for selective honesty about other leftists, people have political faction fights all the time, never stops “social revolutionaries” from creating cesspits of death and misery whenever they actually get real power.
The angry revolutionary and the calm revolutionary are going to do pretty much the same thing to you after the revolution.
Ms Klein is backtracking here from her original article in the Nation, where she said:
As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.” Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong.
My emphasis. This was a couple months before the Gleick affair, and it explains so much of why the left has bought the CAGW meme so strongly and why it is so hard to overcome with science and data. It has developed into pure belief.
What she hasn’t done yet is work this out, nor work out that the basis for the left’s claims about CAGW is fallacious. She’s either going to fall very hard when she comes to understand this, or she’ll sail off into that warm fluffy place where the layers of belief become so thick that no amount of truth can break through the delusion.
“…it makes sense for us to zero in on aspects of our system that give corporations massive influence.”
Like government?
“If you’re a locally based business, you don’t need continual growth year after year. What requires that growth is the particular brand of corporate capitalism — shareholders who aren’t involved in the business itself. That part of our economy has to shrink, and that’s terrifying people who are deeply invested in it.”
Well, if anyone’s suited for or deserves cave-dwelling, it’s Naomi!
Naomi Klein is right that a structural change to our society is required if we a) agree with CAGW and b) decide we will stop the CO2 emissions that CAGW says is causing the problem. Buying twizzler lightbulbs won’t do it. And she is right that the liberal must support global governance is they really, really want to “fix” the environment. Which is what the “right” have recognized all along.
Her acceptance of Scandanavian socialism is clear, too. I don’t agree and I don’t agree because I think Scandanavian socialism only works when elsewhere in the world there is a rip-roaring capitalist economy like the US of A dragging everybody else into the future.
Her mixed economies are stagnant. She admits that much business does not need continual growth – the type that generates a living income for those employed by it. Arms-length profiteers – the outside investors – don’t really need growth, either, as long as the profits are high enough for dividends. Generally they are not high enough, however: the cash flow has to be used to stabilize or grow the asset base because the internal costs, including salaries and CEO bonuses, are too high. If the multi-millions that CEOs etc. get were distributed as dividends, and debt were lower so that debt repayments were instead dividend payments, the dividending of profit outside the company might make current asset-growth not necessary for investor support. You do need growth, or back-and-forth growth among competitors, at least. There is no such thing as standing still in economies or personal lives: they and we go forward, or they and we go back.
There are some ways to improve the social benefit of capitalism, for certain. But Klein’s view is heavy on government input and regulation. She’s happy with her life, I gather. Many others are not, and want the opportunities of a free-market capitalist state. Look at all the Asian immigration: if socialist states worked, why are they here? You could ask the Eastern Europeans, too.
Klein gets points for honesty. Straight out. Good: now I can state exactly why I do not support Naomi Klein (though I read her books).
David Davidovics says:
April 24, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Jonova has a post that seems fitting: “If I wanted America to fail”
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/04/long-live-free-speech/#more-21387
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Nice find. Thanks. And here’s the video: http://www.freemarketamerica.org/ Take the few minutes to watch it, especially you Yanks. It’s worth your time.
She begins one of her answers by saying that free-market ideology is not under attack:
“I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They’re ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology.”
Then she ends by saying that climate change necessitates getting rid of the free-market:
“These climate deniers aren’t crazy — their worldview is under threat. If you take climate change seriously, you do have to throw out the free-market playbook.”
Is she unknowingly contradicting herself? Or is she doing what the left always does — telling different audiences different things? They say one thing to assure the right that they are not out to destroy the free-market system. Then they say the opposite to assure their friends on the left that they really didn’t mean what they just said. The ideology of the left would never make it out of academia if it wasn’t for their skill in practicing the Alinsky rules of deception.
boy, this lady has no problem at all separating science from politics…….
“These issues are all linked with the idea that corporations have the same free-speech rights as people, so there would also be more restrictions on corporate speech.”
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Would those additional restrictions on corporate speech also apply to the New York Times and MSNBC? Or would corporations that call themselves “the press” be given an exemption? Once you make exceptions, someone has to decide who qualifies for them and who doesn’t. Do we really want the government to decide who must have their speech abridged? I think the left would be perfectly happy to have the government make such decisions as long as they are in power. Let the right take power, however, and they would become the loudest opponents to any curtailing of free speech. So I have to conclude that their desire for corporate censorship springs out of a sense that it would allow the left to stay in power indefinitely.
Sorry, I couldn’t read all that crap. I don’t actually know if I’m right or left wing, probably tend to right, (not that that makes a difference here in the EUSSR!)
Scientific reasoning has no politics, much as some would like it to!
What I do hate is the townie/urbanite perception of nature.
If they were exposed to it, I suspect there would be a heap of Darwin awards.
Nature wants to kill you!
DaveE.