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?
————————————————————————————————
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.
Robert says:
April 24, 2012 at 4:47 pm
boy, this lady has no problem at all separating science from politics…….
———————————
Alas, it’s mostly politics…and a crazy amount of money. The “science” of CAGW is only a distraction; when you smart folks dismantle those lies, they’ll move the goal posts again before you can lean back and finish a beer. If it cools, CO2 will threaten to bring an Ice Age…Planet Snowball. If nothing new happens, that too will kill us somehow. And then it’s back to another decade of hard labour for you guys. And the non-science camp-followers like me will still be around to carry the water, beat the drums, bind the wounds, clown around and do whatever it takes to cheer you eggheads on. As our friend, the Pointman, reminds us, this is an Information War. See: http://thepointman.wordpress.com/about/
I think the more appropriate way to state that is:
That Nature is not benign, and could care less if you live or die. Nature just does what it does, and if you get in its way your in big trouble.
Nature is not warm and fuzzy, it is lots of other things like hunger, exhaustion, wet, cold, hot, dry and only occasionally warm gentle breezes a full stomach and a feeling of safety.
Those latter three are almost always manufactured conditions thanks to technology, even if the technology was nothing more than an atlatl to kill a gazelle more efficiently, a fire created from flint and steel or a fire bow, and a wall of thorn bushes to keep out the predators, it was still human technology that created that safe bubble that humanity grew up in.
I wonder how loudly these elitists would howl if we did have the carrington event everyone talks about and their technological modern world stopped working for 6 months.
I wonder how anti-technology they would be after watching friends die because they got a blister on their foot and it got infected, or they were reduced to hunting down rats in the alleyway to eat.
Not that I would wish that sort of social collapse on any society but the fact that these folks think that they are some how above the technological world because they were an early adopter of energy saving bulbs or some other green initiative would be funny if it were not such a sad commentary on their willful blindness to all that things that make their life as pleasant as it is compared even to the life of their great grandparents let alone a third world existence. Maybe if they still had to pump water from the hand water pump in the yard and carry it into the house in tin buckets to take a bath they would catch on that technology is not so bad.
Larry
If I were scoring her on cliche-stringing, she’d be a 10. On her grasp of economics, I’d give her about a 1.
Scary.
“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?”
——————-
Easy answer: her redistributionist policies. If virtually no one pays enough into entitlements to fund their future withdrawals, then the only way to sustain them going forward is compound economic growth. But numbers were probably never her strong suit.
Naomi Klein is just an uneducated communist from a long line of communists. She is unconsciously incompetent. Anyone who pays attention to her, particularly on any matters related to science, is just an idiot.
Dang. And all this time I thought it was a right wing plot, with big finance and big business having a sort of mutual benefit in agreeing with government to filch more of our money.
I do however think she has a point about ‘perpetual growth’, but am surprised her solution is that ‘small business’ does not have to grow forever. In my mind the limits need to be put on big business.
A prime example is Australia (small pond, microcosm and all that) where ‘big banks’ are wanting to put their interest rates up as the economy falters, so they can maintain year on year growth (and, coincidently, management bonuses). Very obviously that will contribute to year on year ‘shrinkage’ for the businesses actually producing something in the faltering economy.
Another example in our small pond is that of the duopoly of big supermarkets, squeezing the lifeblood out of their suppliers to ensure they chalk up growth each year.
Naomi Kliene does not even bother to touch on the science, and is quite blatantly focused simply on the use of CAGW as a lever to further her socialist ideas.
It is interesting that she states carbon trading/taxation will not provide the answer.
The funny thing is, when I grew up under a bolshie regime, our script was slightly different from the one the Naomi Kleins are following. We were being regimented and kept cold, hungry and without luxuries for a purpose: To burry capitalism with our heroes of socialist labour, our huge industries and our brave armies, and after we’d won the world, we’d have set out on our rocketships to the stars to conquer the universe. I kid you not. Laugh if you will, but at least there was a goal and a purpose to all of that insanity. It’s when we were robbed by our leaders, left only with the cold and the hunger and without the jeans and Beatles music bit, that things came apart.
The useful idiots of the West got the sustainability, environmentalism and social justice version. The parts that would impoverish it and turn its population into frightened, passive and defenseless ninnies. I marvel at how wildly successful our old intelligence and propaganda experts were, because here we are, in the marvelous West and well into the 21st century, fretting over medieval savages half a world away and paying them gazillions in tribute while we seriously discuss how best to cut our own throats by declining to make use of the stupendous wealth under our very own feet and by hobbling the genius of our people. Nuts.
I believe it is Nietsche who is creditted with saying: “There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action”. And Ms. Klein exeplifies that ignorance perfectly. She has no clue about climate or global warming, and is an excellent example of why we engineering students used to make fun of the arts students (behind their backs, anyway…..)
IanM.
climatetruthinitiative,
Don’t fool yourself, buddy. Some of us artsies knew too well what you gear-heads were giggling about when you signed up for what you thought were breezer courses. The smart ones among you took women’s or social studies and did well, but a few of your overly confident types wound up in history or philosohy courses and in the seminar classes we taught them to be humble before they signed out real quick!
Peter Kovachev says: April 24, 2012 at 6:51 pm
There is a helluva lot of wisdom right there. THESE are the people we should be listening to: those who have lived through those ideologically brainwashed regimes. (well, lived through the more extreme and impoverished ones, we are obviously all brainwashed by our own ‘regime’ to some extent!)
Sam says:
April 24, 2012 at 12:35 pm
Read the second sentence of the following article on the UK Climate Change Act 2008:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_act
Peter Kovachev says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:51 pm
The funny thing is, when I grew up under a bolshie regime, our script was slightly different from the one the Naomi Kleins are following. We were being regimented and kept cold, hungry and without luxuries for a purpose: To burry capitalism with our heroes of socialist labour, our huge industries and our brave armies, and after we’d won the world, we’d have set out on our rocketships to the stars to conquer the universe. I kid you not. Laugh if you will, but at least there was a goal and a purpose to all of that insanity. It’s when we were robbed by our leaders, left only with the cold and the hunger and without the jeans and Beatles music bit, that things came apart.
The useful idiots of the West got the sustainability, environmentalism and social justice version. The parts that would impoverish it and turn its population into frightened, passive and defenseless ninnies. I marvel at how wildly successful our old intelligence and propaganda experts were, because here we are, in the marvelous West and well into the 21st century, fretting over medieval savages half a world away and paying them gazillions in tribute while we seriously discuss how best to cut our own throats by declining to make use of the stupendous wealth under our very own feet and by hobbling the genius of our people. Nuts.
—————————————————————
I remember reading something in Readers’ Digest a decade or so ago.
A man was recalling how when he was younger his family hosted a Rabbi visiting from the then Soviet Union. It was the holiday season. Wanting to treat him to something he probably wouldn’t have back in the USSR, his Dad deciding to take them all out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. After the meal, the waiter presented them all with their fortune cookie and a cheap, stamped brass ornament. His father, being in a Chinese restaurant, expected it to say “Made in China”. He was highly amused when it said “Made in India”. He pointed that out and they all laughed. That is, until his father noticed that the Rabbi was quietly sobbing. Concerned, he asked the Rabbi if he was insulted, being a Jew, at being given a gift commemorating a Christian Holiday. He answered was, “No! No! These are tears of joy at being in such a wonderful country where a Buddhist can give a Jew a Christmas present made by a Hindu.”
We have a great country founded upon the idea that government is there to protect and defend the freedoms of the individual. We’re losing that. This time the attack is wearing green instead of red.
If someone wants to buy an electric car with no resale value or pay more at the pump for bio-fuel, more power to him. (actually, probably less power) But don’t jack up the price of regular gas to try to force me to do the same.
Politics for sure.
But an alarmist recants? “‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate change”
Are Global warmists distinctly cooling?
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/23/11144098-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change
I’ve given up arguing with lefties like Ms. Klein. Her answers to the questions are an intertwined mix of truths, half truths, half lies, lies, and outright misconceptions. You can spend all your time trying to unravel the parts and get each piece straight. And you won’t even get through one topic before they ravel up another bunch of distortions.
What’s really scary though is that people like her believe they’re smarter than everyone else, have all the answers, and if they could just get control of people through government that they could implement their idea of utopia. It never occurs to them that their idea of utopia is another person’s idea of slavery.
Another thing these people believe is that group rights trump individual rights. Here they have a problem…. the U.S. Constitution, a document where individual rights are paramount and groups rights are nowhere to be found. This is a major problem for them and is why they hate the Constitution and try to bypass it or marginalize it whenever and wherever possible with the hope that it will eventually be discarded. They’ve been partially successful. Anyone who supports the Constitution is now branded a right wing radical.
I agree with other comments here that it is wrong to ever compare the U.S. with any small culturally and/or racially monolithic country. One often hears comparisons to various European countries like Sweden or Finland or even Singapore, but the U.S. is not can cannot be any of those countries.
I’ve not really followed what Klein has been saying much–maybe because I’m a Brit, but I have to say she didn’t sound too unreasonable. I’m very sceptical of CAGW, but also, of both right and left wing ideologies, though both may have underlying merits in specific instances. There has to be a third way, or at least, a different way.
For what it’s worth, I think it will require something else than “politics” as it’s currently conceived of. I’m not convinced that she would agree with me – I suspect that, despite seeing herself as a visionary, she is a political animal seeking political solutions in which people *like herself* would exercise control. God save us all from the tyranny of the well-meaning.
If a “third way” ever emerges, I think it will do so spontaneously, despite and not because of right- or left-wing ideologues. It will just emerge and become the de facto reality, in much the same way that the Internet has (and indeed, the Internet may have a role to play). We live in interesting times, and, I believe, are ripe for change. Change of the kind that no one can predict and only future historians will be able to look back on and analyse the reasons for.
markx says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:39 pm
————————
Ha! Wise? Hey, whoa, markx, that makes me sound too old….I still have my hair and teeth and I’m now only 15 lbs away from my weight at 18!
But really, believe it or not, this sort of stuff was talked about openly among everyone in the Warsaw Pact, which is what amazes me still. Not only no one in the West clued in, but those who reported it were laughed at. And while there was obviously a lot of propaganda we swallowed, it wasn’t North Korea kind of brain-washing; it was stuff we participated in, wanted to believe in and felt good about believing because we felt better about ourselves. We had Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin and olive green nukes that were paraded on May Day, while your youth were chanting for peace and putting sissy flowers in their hair. They made damn good music, though and the tall American hippie women with the long hair and painted bell bottoms looked divine, even to eleven year old boys…but I digress. If there is a lesson in any of this it’s that we’re all navel-gazing suckers one way or another.
What brought our scary insanity to a stop is the achilles heel of all big conquest plans: Central planning, the inhumanity of authoritarianism and a stagnating economy. This brings me to your previous post, where you worry about the costs of growth. I hear you, and the idea of being able to lay back and bob gently in a warm pond is attractive, but it’s either perpetual growth or permanent, deadly stagnation. There is no calm pond, no stable economy in an unstable world. It’s kind of like walking being a controlled fall; miss a step and you’re on your face in the mid. Being an Aussie, you can’t forget that just to the north of you there are billions who would love to swarm your beautiful continent and take it for themselves. Uncle Sam and his nasty Navy is the only thing that keeps them from trying. So much for relaxing, right?
And the growth part applies to everything. Every mom-and-pop operation whines about the “big box” stores and huge supermarkets. But no one stops the little guys, who are so into independence and petty competition among themselves, from teaming up and setting up co-ops for purchasing goods in volume so that they can compete with the big ones on the basis of location, convenience and personability…and the most important bit, price.
As for Naomi Klein and her sneering at the carbon credits, you had to be around people of her kind at some of the campus parties in the 90s. I went to U of Toronto as well, but never met Klein, at least not that I know, but crashed a few house parties where everyone got drunk and stoned and sat at the feet of the cool and sophisticated “progressive” types who bragged about how they would run the world. They discussed such strange schemes like pollution duties and I suppose carbon credits as well, which were apparently in the works then. The idea was to get the greedy capitalist and petty bourgeois types all excited about making a buck and to pay for the rope that’ll go around their own necks eventually. To me it was scary; it was as if I had crossed an ocean to find the buggers we escaped from right beside me. And guess what? It bloody well worked! My guess is that Klein and her friends probably think it’s time to drop the pretense and to tie the noose already.
You’re absolutely correct Dirk!
Michael Larkin says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:34 pm
——————————–
Ah, yes, the mythical “third way.” Everyone’s talking about it and waiting for it. And the crickets chirp. But there is no “third way,” and the left-right thing is just a conceptual construct. There are myriad of ways, but in the end it boils down to a system where either people are living under the direction of a powerful few or have the elbow room to explore. That’s been around for at least ten tousand years. People settled, their societies became stratified and either they succeeded or disappeared. And those who felt crowded, moved off and invented a new thing here and there because no one laughed at them or burned them at the stake for it. But let’s pause and look around at the miracle we live in today. It’s very, very new. There’s never been anything like it. The only reason we’re here typing away and sending electrons hither and yon is because we experienced a few rare and fleeting fleeting moments of freedom and liberty. Maybe that’s the “third way.” And whatever comes along that tells you to do with less, to be satisfied with your lot and accept misery cannot be the “third way”; it’s the same old shit from before the miracle, and we better run the other way.
Right.
Sorta like the ‘decisions’ handed down by the justices on the Supreme Court, they’re just ‘conceptual constructs’ too (Miranda v. Arizona , Roe v. Wade, FLORENCE v. BOARD OF CHOSEN FREEHOLDERS OF COUNTY OF BURLINGTON, the recent ‘strip search’ decision, all just ‘constructs’.)
Miranda case – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_v._Arizona
FLORENCE case – http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-945.pdf
No influence whatsoever on day to day life here in the land of the brave and the home of the free (or vice versa) …
.
Bigger sharper knives to gut the goose that lays the golden eggs? Thanks, but no thanks.
All that reasonable, freedom loving people need ever remember is that both Nazism and Communism are products of the political Left.
Nazi Party = National Socialist Democratic Workers Party (NSDAP), and we all know what the Communist ideology stood for until its demise in most places.
A Fascist is simply a Socialist in a hurry folks. You draw your own conclusions about the CAGW movement and its supporters.
That is a considerable overstatement, in that it is implicitly weighed-against by:
1) the number of apostates from the Climate Cassandra Camp.
2) The percentage of leftists (20%?) in the Climate Contrarians Camp.
3) The alternate explanation given below for the overlap between Contrarianism and Conservatism (basically, hardheadedness):
Here’s another quote from Klein:
The Left didnt start using greengas ideologically, British Conservatism under Thatcher did. She promoted the then insignificant issue of greenhouse gases presumably to weaken the powerful coal miners union and strengthn her nuclear strategy (commercial and defence). It was her who created the CRU, source of much of the world’s (adjusted) temperature record, raw data lost and all that.
The global warming craze polarizes, forces to take sides and definitely drove me from left-liberal to conservative-libertarian.
Peter Kovachev says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Don’t get me wrong, Peter, I’m not against growth, and know it is necessary. But I don’t think it should always come from ‘big business’. I feel the ‘free’ market has to be regulated somewhat, or inevitably we end up with only one or two big companies running everything. Then, in the longest projection, we either buy from them, or work for them, or both, there is eventually little choice.
Now, it should work as you say, and competitors should move in, but the big became big and keep get bigger because they are harder working , smarter , better organised, have better contacts, more access to cheap finance, more control over their suppliers… etc etc. The ‘big guy’ can undersell, out advertise, outbuy, and out borrow the new little guy.
And sure, they therefore deserve this success for being smarter etc etc. But is it good for everyone?
I always like to remember that the ‘free market’ we do have only works due to a myriad of laws, agreements and understandings, not because it is a ‘free for all’.
Climate Catastrophism will be the left’s Vietnam.