Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Is President Biden losing his base? 92 year old activist icon Noam Chomsky has accused Biden of placing politics before climate action, though Chomsky appears to suggest Biden’s inaction is somewhat redeemed by Congress, thanks to Bernie Sanders and young activists.
Noam Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass Popular Action,” Not Politicians
AN INTERVIEW WITH NOAM CHOMSKY
11.19.2021…
On Climate Change
BM
To change subjects: What do you see as the greatest obstacle in solving the climate crisis?
NC
There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe and the United States. We have just seen that very dramatically over the summer. On August 9, 2021, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] issued its last analysis of the climate situation. It was a very dire warning — much more than before.
The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth. Not immediately — we’ll just reach irreversible tipping points, and it goes on to disaster. Those are the options.
How did the great powers react? The day after the IPCC report, Joe Biden issued an appeal to the OPEC cartel [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] to increase production. Europe chimed in by calling on all producers, including Russia, to increase production. Increase production. This is a response to the IPPC warning that we have to start reducing right now.
That’s for political reasons, for profit for the oil companies. [The] political reason is that they want the price reduced. It’s better for them. [For] Joe Biden, if the gas prices are high, it harms his electoral prospects. [If] you read the major business press right now, [there’s] a big discussion going on: What’s the best way to increase production? Is it through the American shale oil — the fracking industry — or is it through OPEC? But how do we increase production best? That’s the business press. Turn to the petroleum journals. [They are] euphoric: “We just found new fields to exploit. Demand is going up. It’s great.”
Let’s go to the US Congress. The Biden program — under pressure from young activists, the Bernie Sanders movements, and so on — is actually a big improvement on any previous ones, on paper. It’s not wonderful, but it’s much better than anything else. Well, the [previous] negotiations in Congress over the “reconciliation bill,” initiated by Bernie Sanders, cut back very sharply from Sanders’s proposals. It’s a very valuable bill. It somewhat reverses the huge assault on the population during the neoliberal era.
…
Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/noam-chomsky-climate-change-afghanistan-anarchism-china
Its a fascinating dynamic. Chomsky appears to prefer Bernie Sanders over Biden, but I’m sure Chomsky prefers Biden over a Republican President.
Yet Chomsky believes Biden has shown willingness to throw climate action under a bus as soon as it becomes politically painful.
Chomsky must be aware, there is no reason for Biden to change course, so long as he can count on the grudging support of iconic activists like Chomsky and his followers. Time will tell how long Chomsky and friends will tolerate what must be for them a very unsatisfactory compromise.
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The Public is going bonkers (and rightly so) over Gas Prices going up 50% in the US.
That same public is probably going to notice their energy costs quadrupling in the coming years if the Leftist Idiot Mob keeps cutting off investment in energy reserves. Investors are hesitant to invest in sectors of the economy that the Government is actively targeting for extinction. That 400% inflation (plus related shortages) is 100% certain to occur before 2030 if this madness cannot be put down SOON…. because not enough of any kind of Energy Replacement for Oil (Renewable or otherwise) can possibly be installed in time.
An actual Crisis created by a made up Fake Crisis.
This is one of the best examples of the false-front, political climate Potemkin village displays that you can look at and learn from…..
They build it up without votes (but lots of donations) and take it back down when the jig is up, i.e. costs to consumers/voters.
———————————————
WSJ
By The Editorial Board
Nov. 19, 2021
The Northeast Climate Pact ImplodesConnecticut Governor Lamont withdraws amid soaring fuel prices.
Progressives say the only way to achieve their climate goals is to raise the price of fossil fuels. Their problem is that consumers don’t want to pay more for energy, and as the latest proof behold Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s retreat this week from a Northeast state climate pact.
Mr. Lamont finally gave up trying to pass the scheme this week. “Look, I couldn’t get it through when gas prices were at historic lows. So I think the legislature has been pretty clear it is a tough rock to push when gas prices are so high,” he said. Massachusetts GOP Gov. Charlie Baker then threw in the towel too, causing the climate pact to effectively combust.
But most northeast states have net zero by ’50 laws on the books. Meanwhile, here in MA, I see lots of greens bitching about solar “farms” built next to THEIR homes. They didn’t speak up when 20 acres of forest behind my house were destroyed for a solar “farm” back in ’12. The firm building it had a plan to build within 10′ of the back lines of the half acre lots in my proletarian neighborhood. I sued the firm and the town planning board and that pushed them back away and forced them to plant several hundred arborvitae trees to hide it. I was so pissed that I made a rank amateur video of the destruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYVZKgusU4&t=142s
You lose the will doncha, this falls off the <expletive> rails from the very outset..
Quote:”There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel companies”
No no no, it is the Consumers of the fossils that are to blame. Exxon and their ilk don’t *force* anyone to use their products.
..
Quote:”The end of organized human life on earth”
Nitpik but shouldn’t be Earth, capital ‘E’
But but but, nitpik self, Life on Earth does actually originate and predominately exist (by an impossibly huuuuuge margin, IN the earth (lowercase ‘e’)
(The ‘little’ things that HG Wells’ Invaders From Mars neglected to account for – as does most everyone sadly)
Apart from that, Organised Science has certainly ceased to exist so the whole goddam caboodle is certain to follow it down the pan shortly – we really are going to do, under the guidance of Junk Science, something soooo dumb as to exterminate ourselves
Biomass is an incredibly good start down that path
Sorry Noomy.. Vitamin B may help
seriously
Show us by example how we should live, Noam. Lead us to the promised land of freedom from fossil fuels. Divest yourself of these filthy relics of capitalism starting with home heating and cooling and transportation. Then purge yourself of everything made with fossil fuels like plastic and synthetic fabrics and move on to anything whose manufacture was powered by fossil fuels. Show us how wonderful it is to revert to life in the 18th century. We are looking to you for our salvation.
While you’re shivering in the dark, wrapped in your homemade wool blanket, you may have time to reflect on how the modest sea level rise of 3mm and warming of 0.014 C per year in recent decades may not actually signal the end of humanity.
What do we expect from a linguist professor, then spare-time-public-speaker on philosophy who fancies himself to be a climate guru and saviour of the masses ? When someone’s business card says “Philosopher, Exterminator, and Piano Tuner” you can be pretty sure it’s only advertising…
Our betters give hubris new life.
“ [For] Joe Biden, if the gas prices are high, it harms his electoral prospects.”
His electoral prospects? High gas prices now, will somehow effect his (imaginary ; ) electoral prospects three years from now? If his theory that language is innate were true, shouldn’t I have words to express how silly Mr. Chomsky’s stab at reasoning right there is?
Biden will lose Congress next year.
I don’t doubt it, but that’s not his electoral prospects. Could say it’s their electoral prospects, or just say electoral prospects . . or his legislative prospects, but they don’t elect laws last I checked ; )
Only after years of practice do great minds like Chomsky learn to speak so fluently out of their ass. Being a linguist, Noam has had the technique mastered for many years.
Chomsky was certainly right in his criticism of Skinner, and that was valuable. But he was wrong to think that the problem was about language.
Its hard to imagine now, but the behaviourist model of learning was really popular at one time. It was actually a considerable consensus, and people who tried to argue for other models found themselves accused of being unscientific and relying on sem–metaphysical and unobservable entities.
Chomsky howevr, having found a case which decisively refuted the behviourist stimulus-response model then turned his attention to it, rather than to the real problem, which was and remains getting a proper understanding of learning. That was logically prior to any specific learning. The problem is common to all kinds of learning. How, after all, do we learn math? How do we learn to drive? To get on with each other? To cook?
When he moved to focus on language he then was driven to look for, or invent, aspects of learning which were specific to language. And he conducted this search using an inexplicit model of learning which was actually the source of his problem.
This model made it impossible to account for language learning. Chomsky detailed the problem, that is, the skills we acquire, and the universality of the acquisition of them around the world in different cultures and different languages. But he never considered that very similar learning takes place of lots of other subjects.
The result is his account of language learning, in crude summary, that we are born with a kind of innate grammar, and we plug any particular language elements into it.
So, we might reason in the case of math, we must then be born with an innate kind of math structure, and we plug the different systems of arithmetic that have existed historically into that. The decimal system, the Babylonian system etc
As you proliferate these different supposed innate structures, you’ll come to a situation like phlogiston. Phlogiston was supposed to be a burning essence which all things which burned had in common. In fact of course there is no phlogiston, and when the chemical reaction of combustion was understood it vanished as a scientific concept. Its problem was that it added nothing to the account of combustion because it was impossible to specify independently of what it was supposed to account for.
The concept of innate structures is very similar. You end up hypothesizing that it exists in all cases of learning. This then becomes tantamount to saying that in all cases of learning there is this something, we know not what. A sort of learning essence in our brains.
What’s really going on is that we do not have a full understanding of learning. Of learning anything. So every time we ask how we learn a subject, the problem will come up. Its not specific to language, and to account for language learning by this sort of learning essence just calls the real problem by a different name.
Skinner actually could have used the same ineffective argument. He could have said, we know how learning works, its the stimulus-response model. But it cannot account for how dogs learn to do some of the things they do learn. Obviously this is because the learning element of these is innate to dogs. And he could have gone on, with equal justification, to propose his own learning essence, obscuring the fact that, like Chomsky, his problem was actually a theory of learning that was being refuted.
The invention of the concept of innate grammar is, when you look at it this way, a method of saving the assumed theory of learning from a decisive counter example. It is a bit like when you decline to accept a decisive counter example by offering some explanation in terms of the measuring process and thus exclude it, saving your hypothesis.
What Chomsky had found, but did not pursue, was decisive evidence that the theory of learning he was following was wrong. He should then have turned his attention to learning. Or, if he wanted to continue specializing in language, focused on observing and analyzing how we learn language, and then teased out from this an account of how learning must work for this to be possible.
Instead of which he went down the blind ad hoc alley of innate grammar, and took half philosopy with him
Ever heard of the Nim Chomsky ape language program? They also missed the point, using a straw ape to refute Chomsky.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-origin-words/201908/nim-chimpsky-and-noam-chomsky
Anyone who worked with Macaque monkeys can easily set up experiments showing Macaques can even learn verbs. Simply with buttons and food – only the sequence I want banana with 3 buttons in order produces a snack.
So one might think animals have some kind of innate grammar a-la Chomsky.
But note one very important point – these clever apes will NEVER teach that to another ape.
It is the intervention of us humans that seemingly elevates them.
It is a good example of the noetic, us, intervening in the biological sphere. No animal has noetic abilities. Another example is the development of maize from the wild weed teosinte by unknown Incas.
And that is where Chomsky faces the noetic and flinches, Hamlets-out in the face of something utterly outside his comfort zone.
His pursuit of a universal grammar is a parody of Hilbert and Russell’s pursuit of logic which was thoroughly and roundly refuted by Goedel’s Incompleteness theorems, already in 1931.
Another very important point: humans never *teach* a language to their children (at least the children’s first language); the children acquire it (sound patterns, vocabulary, grammar etc.) by listening and producing. But your point about apes is correct–not only do apes never teach other apes, for an ape to learn requires that a human explicitly instruct them, which is not true of humans. It is indeed, as you say, the intervention of humans that seemingly elevates the apes.
Your last two sentences I don’t understand at all. I don’t see what Chomsky’s notion of a universal grammar has to do with Hilbert and Russell, much less with Goedel.
I agree with some of what you say, but strongly disagree with your idea that (first) language “learning” is like (for example) learning math. But rather than repeat all my rant here, if you’re interested look for my long post a little ways above this. Bottom line: since acquiring ones first language is NOT like learning math, the need for innate grammar does not necessarily imply a need for innate math (Plato notwithstanding).
Yes, you make interesting points. But I don’t agree. First I think mothers do teach their children language. They don’t do it in the same way we learn a second language in school, but that there is teaching going on is not possible to doubt if you have been around young mothers and their kids.
As we get older we still have the ability to learn in this way – Berlitz drives educated adult learners crazy by refusing to teach them grammar and just doing it by the way infants learn, repetition and interaction.
Second, I think numbers and basic math is just as innate. Name a society without the concept of one two three etc.
I think we learn lots of things in the same way we learn languages. Language is an example of knowing how as contrasted with knowing that. Kids learn, for instance, bat and ball play without formal instruction. Running, jumping, tree climbing.
Its the wrong model of learning you’re using to claim that language is unique. Yes, not like learning physics or history. But like a lot of other things we learn.
Chomsky has sold millions of books so he’s probably a millionaire. The rich won’t suffer when inflation gets worse.
WaPo: Biden “reassured” Dems that he’s running in 2024
To answer the first question – there’s no chance Chomsky, or any of Biden’s base, do anything real to oppose him unless another leftist party gains traction. Much like McAuliffe in Virginia, his only real complaint about Biden is that he’s not doing bad things to the U.S. fast enough.
Noam Chomsky is frequently referred to as a “leading intellectual”. Based on that description, we should probably redefine what intellectual means. As an example, he refers to one of the two problems fundamental to climate change is fossil fuel industry, but that industry only provides the product, it is billions of people all around the globe consuming fossil fuels who drive the companies’ business, and they have every reason to continue doing so given the dependence on energy to preserve the good lives we have become accustomed to. Does being intellectual means an inability to see the obvious?
NC also states that the only alternative to turning our backs on fossil fuels (80% of all social energy consumption) by mid century is “cataclysm”. Clearly cataclysm is what will happen if we do stop using the only reliable, affordable energy sources that keep society running. Perhaps being an intellectual means stating the opposite of what is true as if it were true.
Finally it seems apparent an intellectual is incapable of diving below the surface of any argument to seek evidence supporting that argument, or NC would have know long ago there is no climate emergency, no strong evidence linking human derived CO2 emissions to dangerous climate change and abundant evidence that there is no rational alternative but to continue responsible use of fossil fuels and nuclear technology to power modern society.