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NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, M A Y/JU N E 2007
A TERRIFYING TRUTH
BY DAVE LINDORFF
It wasn’t too long ago that the death of socialism, the
triumph of capitalism and the end of history were widely hailed.
What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a
degree in world temperature change makes!
We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of
a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the
pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth's sake
and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off.
Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable
doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave the
likes of which hasn't been seen in hundreds of thousands and
perhaps tens of millions of years — the kind of killing heat that
in the past has led to mass extinctions — it is ludicrous to talk
about things like carbon trading and raising vehicle mileage
standards.
We need a revolution in the way we human beings live
and the way we treat each other.
There is no way that the world’s 6.5 billion people —
and especially the 2 billion of them who live in wealthier societies
— can continue to consume energy at even close to the level
that we have been consuming it. There is no way we in the
developed world can continue to live the way we have been
living, in oversized houses, heated in winter and cooled in
summer. There is no way in the northern hemisphere we can
continue to have teakwood or mahogany-floored living rooms
and eat strawberries in December.
There is no way we can continue to squander trillions of
dollars on war and military spending every year.
No way, that is, if we plan on leaving a livable world for
our children and grandchildren.
The so-called “green” politicians who talk about institut
ing carbon-trading schemes, about driving hybrid automobiles,
about buying fluorescent light bulbs, and about turning down
the thermostat and wearing sweaters, are deceiving us or them
selves.
None of this is going to save us.
What will save us is recognizing the age of consumer-
driven capitalism is over.
We either come up with a new way to organize society,
in which production is based upon real needs, not upon manu
factured needs, and in which scarce resources are made avail
able to those who need them, not just to those who can afford
them, or we will all be doomed — or at least our progeny.
The peoples of the world — especially of the developed
world, but really everywhere — need to recognize that unless our
expectations are changed, unless our selfish desire for more is
curbed, unless wasteful production is ended, we are all likely to
be on that extinction list.
So where are the leaders of boldness and vision in
politics, media and academia who are ready to tell the truth?
Where are the people who are willing to listen to, and reward
that truth telling?
This is not an “inconvenient" truth we need to confront.
It's a terrifying truth.
We need to change everything, and we need to do it
quickly, too.
Here in America, that means an end to subsidies for
suburban sprawl. There should be no more federal or state
funds for road building and road repair. If people want to live
miles away from where they work, let them pave their own roads.
That's the only way to get people to realize they’re going to have
to start supporting funding for mass transit, and to start thinking
about living near where they work. We need to end subsidies
for agribusiness, which has virtually decimated local agriculture
to the point that prime farm states like Pennsylvania and New
Jersey now import all their food from the West Coast. Ridiculous!
We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no
one will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive
only rarely. Large, heavy vehicles for personal use should be
outright banned. Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that
products will reflect the true cost of the environmental damage
that shipping them around costs.
Electricity and home heating fuels should also be heavily
taxed, with some kind of a rebate program for low-income famil
ies, so that people will stop heating and cooling large homes.
As these things are done, there clearly will be massive
dislocation. People who live in hot climes like Florida or Arizona
will no doubt decide they can't afford to cool their homes, and will
move north. People in cold regions may decide it’s too expensive
to heat their homes and will move to more temperate zones.
Companies like the Detroit automakers will go bust or shrink
enormously. Power plants will be shut down. Oil companies will
go bankrupt.
That all has to happen, but it doesn't mean people have
to starve. We as a society need to demand a government that
will help those who are displaced by the crisis to relocate and
to find new productive ways to earn a living. A huge government
program of investment in alternative energy systems would be
able to hire many of those whose jobs are lost by the shutdown
of the carbon economy.
A new ethos needs to be developed. Conspicuous con
sumption, egoism and the so-called “American Dream” of having
it all for one’s self and one’s family need to be replaced with a
new — actually a very old — concept: communalism.
A V A gallery
ASTORIA VISUAL ARTS
DOWNSTAIRS
AT THE ELKS IN ASTORIA
4 53 1 JTH STREET
SETH TOBOCMAN
Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers and com
petitive free agents, we need to start thinking of ourselves as
passengers on a boat that is sinking. If we all run for the lifeboats
and life preservers and fight to see who can be saved, the life
vests will be torn and ruined and the lifeboats will fall into the sea
and sink. In the end, we'll all go down. If, on the other hand, we
change tack, recognize that we’re all in this together, and make
orderly plans to save ourselves collectively, we may all be able
to get away.
To succeed, we need to acknowledge that everyone is at
risk, everyone is contributing to the common goal of survival, and
everyone will be taken care of.
The same approach needs to be taken in the larger
world. If the poorer nations believe that they are going to be
abandoned to catastrophe and famine, they will do two things:
continue to try and survive by the old strategies of wasteful
energy use and environmental destruction, and of mass
migration to safer havens. The first response — for example,
the continued destruction and burning down of rainforests for
wood and cropland and ethanol feedstocks — will threaten us
all with ever worsening global warming. The second will lead to
overcrowding of more fortunately situated nations, and a drain
on their resources.
The only answer is again for all the wealthy nations, and
those that are better situated by geography to survive climate
change, to commit themselves to helping the more threatened
nations and societies. This is not a matter of altruism; it is a
simple logic of survival.
But before we can start making the huge changes that
are called for — really the dismantling of the whole capitalist
system and the free-market ethos — we need to start hearing,
and demanding to hear, the truth — from scientists, from politi
cians, from business leaders, from the media, and ultimately
from ourselves.
For starters, let’s stop kidding ourselves that the latest
United Nations report on climate change is the real story. That
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report, ominous as it sounds, doesn’t tell the half of it.The report
was first watered down by the scientists who reviewed it, and
then it was censored by the governments that feared its findings.
For one thing, it didn’t even mention that all the projections for
warming during this century don’t even take into consideration
the role that hundreds of billions of tons of methane gas under
lying the Arctic and Antarctic permafrost and trillions of tons
of methane lying in the form of frozen hydrates deep under the
ocean could play if that super global warming gas should start
pouring out into the atmosphere
We are in a situation where it is wholly inappropriate
to act on optimistic assumptions. Rather, we need to consider
worst-case scenarios, and start planning and acting with those in
mind. That means, for example, that to keep the methane fiasco
from occurring, we don’t want the permafrost to go away in the
polar regions, we don't want the oceans to warm precipitously
and we don’t want the ice caps to melt away. That means we
have to act much more dramatically than just worrying about
coastal erosion and lowered crop yields might lead us to do.
This is a crisis that isn’t going away. It is a crisis that
isn’t going to be solved with band-aids. It is a crisis that isn’t
going to be solved by smooth talk. And it is a crisis that will get
worse the longer we take to recognize its true gravity, and the
longer we take to recognize its true gravity, and the longer we
take to face up to the revolution that needs to take place if we
are to prevent it.
And that is the truth.
David Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based investigative
journalist and columnist whose work is available at www.this
can tbehappening.net and www.counterpunch, org. His latest
book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is The Case for
Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President
George IV Bush from Office (St.tin’s Press, 2006). His home
will be submerged when the Greenland icecap melts.