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.
Acidification is next up in the queue.
For science of global warming visit devbahadurdongol.blogspot.com
Global warming due to gases is impossible scientifically. The blog also explains
the cause and solution for GW scientifically.
But then the Peter Principle intervenes, and management becomes overweight with incompetents, and they collude to protect themselves.
After each 20 yrs, only about 20% of the Fortune 500 that started there are still on the list. GM is a perfect example; now a dead man walking, owned by its unions and the government.
I’m not sure if she understands what growth is. A corporation certainly doesn’t require growth to pay it’s shareholders. It requires profits to do that.
I suppose the continual struggle between world views is a natural part of social evolution and so should be welcomed and encouraged. The difficulty I have with Ms. Klein and those of her ilk is that market based democracy has got the world’s civilizations to this stage of development while their position would quickly reduce us all to being struggling serfs once more.
I have lived in a Marxist dictatorship and believe me all it does is concentrate money and power in the hands of a very small clique while everybody else lives in a constant state of anxiety and deprivation. Her cry against the 1% is obviously a contrivance but under the Marxist model she and others admire it would be the 0.1% we would be talking about.
CO2 is the tool de jour for these anti human types to limit everyone else’s opportunity to self actualize.
Peter Kovachev – from your comments above, please think about writing a piece on the parallels you’re seeing between the old “Bloc” and the modern “West”. I suspect you’d open a few eyes, if Anthony were kind enough to post it.
Naomi Klein – “what’s clear is that ideology is the main factor in whether we believe in climate change”? Oh, belt up. Meme, meme, meme. I’ve never been one of your evil “right wingers”, and I’m just as good at seeing through your evil “left wing” blather. All that’s necessary for climate scepticism is understanding and contact with reality.
I do agree that politics as we have it now is a problem (arguably the problem), but it’s not going to improve anything until “left” and “right” alike learn to be as critical of their own suggested “solutions” as they are of the opposition. A bit like Richard Feynman’s advice to scientists – look carefully for the problems in your own worldview. They’re there.
What BS! I’m still struggling with: “…choke points like corporate personhood…” What the hell is ‘personhood’? It still doesn’t make sense as ‘corporate manhood’ – assuming you were trying to neutralise a term…. BS.
After reading this article, ask yourself: Is her concern for the planet or for implementing social controls?
I didn’t have to read past her answer to the first question to figure that one out. The remainder of the article merely confirmed it.
Well she is a child of traitorous commies… So what else can you expect but cognitive dissonance and high contrast propaganda?
And they walk among us.
Scary indeed.
_Jim says:
April 24, 2012 at 9:43 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.
That was actually from my post, not from Mr Larkin, so allow me. Not much to answer, really. You do inderstand a “conceptual construct,” don’t you? You went on with “Sorta like the ‘decisions’ handed down by the justices on the Supreme Court, they’re just ‘conceptual constructs’ too (Miranda v. Arizona……” blah, blah, blah, blah. Judges are not conceptual constructs, they are judges, not personifications of “left” or “right.”
Learn the basics of thinking before you bore us further.
Steve C says:
April 25, 2012 at 2:19 am
Peter Kovachev – from your comments above, please think about writing a piece on the parallels you’re seeing between the old “Bloc” and the modern “West”. I suspect you’d open a few eyes, if Anthony were kind enough to post it.
———————————-
You flatter me, Steve, but the very idea terrifies me. Reminds me of essays and of submitting stories and articles in my student days for a campus publication. The first I solved by getting out of university ASAP, the latter by becoming the publication’s editor and assigning articles!
markx says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:56 pm
I have to run out for a while, so excuse me (or thank me!) for being brief. You said:
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.
This is where people here with economics backgrounds should comment, but my impression is that it is only regulations which can concentrate monopolies into the hands of the few. In a true, or at least justly set-up free market arrangement, the competition can always find ways to compete and makes such concentrations all but impossible.
Of course, everything is cool with people like Ms. Klein as long as: (1) the lights go on when you hit the switch, (2) your food shows up at your local grocery store, (3) the internet is available when they need it, etc. And, of course, they don’t every stop to think that all of these things and more are provided by the free market and corporations.
People like Ms. Klein scare me quite a lot. And to those citizens in the U.S. – please vote accordingly in November, lest we have people like her in positions where they could do some serious damage to our economy…
roberto says @ur momisugly April 24, 2012 at 11:43 am
….I trace some of this back to a century ago, when Americans started moving away from 90% farmers to mainly urban. You couldn’t charm a bigger yield out of the corn or the weather, so our values used to be reality-based. A lot of people don’t seem to think that way anymore.
_________________________
That is all part of the larger whole. So why should anyone care about family farms? Lenin, founder of the Russian revolution said it best.
“The Socialist Revolution in the US cannot take place because there are too many small independent farmers there. Those people are the stability factor. We here in Russia must hurry while our government is stupid enough to not encourage and support the independent farmership. ~ V. Lenin, the founder of the Russian Revolution Quote provided by Anna Fisher
So the destruction of independent farmership in the USA was carefully planned and executed by the group, called the Committee for Economic Development The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 was the final nail. However the plan does not end there. Naomi Klein tells us what the ultimate game plan is:
Another liberal, Rosa Koire, has spelled out exactly what Klein means by this. Rosa is a godsend for us because she has been a liberal activist for years and is a very knowledgeable and gifted speaker. Luckily she connects ALL the dots unlike most people who seem to operate as “Useful Idiots” with their minds sewn shut.
What we are describing is the New Feudalism. Neo-Feudalism. Peonage. UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development taken to its logical culmination. Remember, Revolution is bad for business.
You can see if your town/city/county/state signed onto the United Nations International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) the local manifestation of Agenda 21. For example United Nations ICLEI and The City of Spokane
Rosa Koire writes,
In Rosa’s talk at a Tea Party meeting she mentions one county in California with well over 1000 miles of paved roads. The county will no longer maintain all those road, only the ~ 150 miles within towns. If you have no roads the middle class can no longer own a home. Only the very wealthy with planes and helicopters can continue to be land owners and the middle class will be restricted to owning Flats or Condos in town if that.
One question is WHY are counties forced to skimp on road maintenance and other services? Rosa goes into more detail in her talk than at the website. In a nut shell any taxes over a certain amount (tax rate frozen at a specific year) get diverted from the General Fund into the Redevelopment Agency therefore the county/city has no way to raise the tax rate. This explains the doubling of the money supply. It halves the actual tax dollar available to the county and forces austerity measures like not paving roads.
Her information is backed up by the Wildlands Map, the Rewilding Institute and the legislation documented by the Klamath Bucket Brigade not to mention Scientific American Articles on “Rewilding”
Could Re-Wilding Avert the 6th Great Extinction?: Biologists and conservationists aim to restore habitat
Can Re-Wilding Work?: Introducing animal analogues of their extinct cousins might help repair otherwise irreparable ecosystem damage.
Rosa goes on to lay it all out.
If you do not believe this is progressing along very nicely all you have to do is look at the Department of Homeland Security’s Travel Redress Inquiry Program (DHS TRIP) where they talk of difficulties experienced during travel screening at airports and train stations such as denied or delayed travel.
U.S. no-fly list doubles in 1 year – USA Today
Markx,
Further bloviating on the previous point. To illustrate my point anecdotally, since I’m not an economist with figures and theories at my finger tips, a personal tale. After my parents and I made it across the border to Austria as refugees, my dad sought work as an engineer and my mom remembered enough of her family’s business in pre-commie times to look into opening a candy store. They thought we had come to the free West. Wrong. My dad’s German was insufficient, and he would’ve had to pass exams with the professional guild, and to own a candy store in Vienna, one had to belong to the….get this…honourable and holy guild of bloody candy store owners. This was done by apprenticing for a period as a lowly-paid employee in an existing candy store, I think ffor ive years or so, to pass an exam with the guild and then, to plead with the municipality and submit a business proposal because, God forbid, she may have intruded on someone else’s or turf, or horror of horrors, the business might have failed. My dad found work lugging bags of chemicals in a plant and mom was stuck at home. We managed to make it out to Canada. In Canada, dad was snatched by a head-hunter three weeks into his ESL programme while barely able to say “hello” in English, and eventually worked on the Darlington nuclear reactor and as a designer for Pratt and Whitney’s cruise missile engines. And the plant still stands and those cruise missiles blow away the jihadies quite nicely.
This is what rampant regulation looks like. It wastes talent, keeps people “in their place” and in poverty, favours privileged drones and rent seekers, and slowly chokes economies. It’s killing Europe and no amount of additional regulation will keep its talented people there, while only the desperate ones without skills or ambition will linger to feed off the nice welfare entitlements. Sayonara Europa. The Naomi Kleins of the world know that they’d be fighting an uphill battle in North America, where people still manage to hold back excessive over-regulation for now and salivate at the thought of an omnibus regulatory monster which out-of-control environmental reviews and caps on CO2 promise to provide. Already, she is spasing sand climaxing over mass transit and full oversight of the economy, first of the big nasty corporations, until they get to the candy store owners. People like her need to be fought, to be exposed, shamed and cut off from civilized society not as cute watermelons, but as malignant crypto-fascists with smiley faces who will turn our children into slaves. They need to be watched, exposed, challenged, ridiculed and messed-up in their attempts to creep into respect and power. And this is why they scream “the science is settled,” or “the debate is over” and why they work so hard on limiting freedoms of expression with speech codes, enforced PC-talk and attempts to control the one thing that stands in their ways, the Internet.
If you do not like Mrs. Klein’s politics, then denying the general conclusions of climate science, along with the National Academy recommendations for an emissions reduction plan, etc, is not the best idea. Essentially, you withdraw from the solutions policy debate, leaving it more open to folks like her.
Dr. Oreskes articulates my point more clearly at the 3:00 mark of this video.
Alright, way to go, Gail, secured my evening reads with the cup of hot chocolate. I’m starting to suspect that either you don’t sleep or you have a research team behind you.
Wait, isn’t she a feminist, too?
Otter17, I don’t intend to wastes life’s preious seconds by listening to gibberish from Oreskes. I’ve read enough from and about her. Both her and Klein are pretend opposites which are supposed to give us an illusion about a debate. Trying to frighten us as one blows and the other one sucks, into the same place will not work, no matter what millions of dollars in expert PR crap has led you to believe. The “debate is over” as the other muppets keep saying when challenged, so be it. This is, as Pointman said, an information war and we are winning it because we are independent, we are smarter and way faster. And we are winning it with pocket change, in our spare time, and enjoying ourselves as well. Your Academy can stuff it, and in a few years time it will either do a flip-flop or wind up in the trash heap…or the recycling bin, if that’s your thing.
Leftists and communalists always forget the one fact that destroys their entire argument, that taxation to pay for their grand schemes must always come from a healthy, productive, private economy. When governments take over the portions of the economy that run better as private concerns, inefficiency and cronyism begin to destroy incentive and innovation almost immediately. Total government control, as I suspect Ms. Klein would love to see, as long as she could become one of its apparatchiks, leads to shortage and want, suffering and misery, AND it has a horrible environmental record, to boot.
Our schools have failed the young over the past 60 years, and so many of them come out of their Western K-12 educations not even knowing they’re socialists, or why this is a bad thing.
Peter Kovachev says: April 25, 2012 at 4:42 am
People with an economic background always tell me exactly what you do above. My own observations and thinking it through tell me otherwise (and I was a great fan of ‘free market’ ideals until I’d worked in big organisations and watched as they quietly devoured nearby competitors, and watched how big they can get).
I’ve also observed how free trade agreements usually only favour one party in spite of the theories.
Major hole in that theory? It is based on paired commodities, presumes equal unemployment in both countries, and assumes complete portability of labour! (hence the clowns advocating the idea that trade skills and professional organisations are a barrier to free markets).
I also don’t think ‘free market’ vs ‘socialist ideals’ are opposite sides of the argument. BOTH end up putting all the money and power in a very few hands, and it is quite feasible that those few can and will align.
I think we have been brainwashed… again.
Peter Kovachev says: April 25, 2012 at 6:45 am
“…honourable and holy guild of bloody candy store owners..”
Peter, I wrote as you posted. Amazing we both touched onto ‘professional organisations’ … and here I must agree: that is a ridiculous example of over regulation and ‘turf protection’.
Having not experienced that level of bureaucracy, I have to agree we do NOT want to end up there!
Shooter says:
April 25, 2012 at 7:01 am
Wait, isn’t she a feminist, too?
Yes, of the cutsey, fashionable and moderate or mainstream kind. It’s how she started off her career. The mustachioed, short haired and bra-frees set in denim overalls don’t like her much, but they grit their teeth in a show of solidarity with a sister.
Gail Combs says: April 25, 2012 at 6:18 am
Gail, that is hyperbolic, dramatic and over the top. Most people will read that and snort.
But I’m starting to believe it all may well be true.
This, I posted on and earlier thread: