(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Why I am a "Doomer" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-01
In liberal(ish) circles, it seems to be a popular new pastime to try to separate out different categories of people who are concerned about climate change, to label them, and try to dismiss their views if they are not the correct ones in the author's opinion.
It's sometimes accompanied with tone-trolling in the form of "don't say 'we are doomed' because that just gives the polluters an excuse to shrug, 'see, we are doomed!' and keep polluting." That is a bizarre argument because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to observe that the polluters have been shrugging just fine all along without the need for or benefit of an excuse. They have been subjected to plenty of protest, criticism, and attempts to regulate them, and have skillfully ignored them all and continued to pollute. In a few special circumstances they have used the apparently infinite pools of capital from their fossil fuels business to buy large stakes in renewable energy businesses, as a hedge, but that doesn't mean they have suddenly switched to the side of righteousness - it just means they intend to profit no matter what happens. That should have also been obvious all along.
I've also noticed a distressing trend in some places to argue that criticizing Joe Biden on his unexciting climate record is tantamount to supporting Trump. That's one of the most distressing failures of liberalism ever, since it ignores the fact that the only control a citizen can exert on the political process is to withhold support from a candidate they feel is not representing their interests. I'm going to go out on a limb and observe that using that false dichotomy to lock people's political opinions out of the process is promoting radicalism - after all, "terrorism is the voice of the voiceless" and some of us are leaning towards the viewpoint that even violence may have to be put on the table as an option to get our political leaders to take climate seriously. On forums such as Daily Kos, there are cheerleaders for Biden who resolutely ignore the fact that he encouraged the Saudis to pump more oil, so as to lower gas prices and therefore inflation, in order to defeat a republican "red tide" in 2022 and increase his chance of winning a second term in 2024. Cheerleaders for Biden ignore the fact that the US is the world's largest fossil fuel exporter, at this time, which Biden even patted himself publicly on the back, for. The Biden administration stealthily approved the construction of a new oil export terminal off the Texas coast, that will add 2 million barrels of oil/day to US export capacity [climate] oh, and we had to subject ourselves to the ridiculous spectacle of the democrats, who now control the senate, ceding that control to Joe Manchin and his fossil fuel investments while simultaneously turning a blind eye to his obvious corruption. The cheerleaders insist that this is all necessary political calculus, while deriding "doomers" who point out that this sort of thing runs exactly contrary to what many of us voted the democrats in to do.
Admittedly, the political calculus is complicated and full of gray areas: do we hold our noses and vote for the democrats, again, or do we actually raise climate change to a moral issue, and simply refuse to play along with this shit any longer? I am heartily sick of democrats telling me "we have to have Manchin, even if he's a piece of shit, because he's our piece of shit, but, oh, the republicans are morally flawed for not throwing George Santos out of their party because - don't you know, he's a piece of shit?" What this massive collection of pieces of shit don't understand is that there are some of us who see them all as what they are, while accepting that some of them are dangerous fascist pieces of shit besides. That does not translate to my undying support for democrats, though - it translates to me expecting better of the democrats and wow are they disappointing.
Sure, Biden was able to pass a massive stimulus aimed toward renewables, but I can't really calculate if that's offset by the damage that US states are suffering right now from fires, hurricanes, and drought. Oh, wait, what did I just say? Of course I can calculate that. It is a moral issue. It does not matter whether a lying piece of shit has a -D or a -R after their name, on the rolls, it matters what they do. And, if we're concerned about climate, that means ratcheting back on fossil fuel subsidies and spending that money on green energy. It also means ratcheting back on our absurd military budget and spending more money on green energy. It means promising to legislate against fossil fuels at the G7 meeting (which we did) and then - actually doing it. It means playing hardball with assclowns like Joe Manchin. What do I mean by "playing hardball"? As we saw from Trump and Mitch McConnell, motivated politicians can do all sorts of nasty things to jam an opponent's agenda. How about "if you extort support for your fossil fuel projects from the government, the government will provide amicus support for every lawsuit trying to stop you"? Seriously, folks, the government has an utterly pathetic record of not attempting to interfere with fossil fuel exploitation, while standing back and letting the oil companies lobby and push legislation to their hearts' content. Again, I am casting this as a moral issue. A politician who is serving the current two party system, with its lock on military spending and fossil fuel exploitation is killing us in many ways. They are not, and never can be our representatives. Yes, that means that if Joe Biden is the alternative to Trump we should vote for him but only because the democrats and republicans are both holding guns to our head and are screaming they are going to pull the trigger, whatever we do.
And that is why I'm a "doomer." The climate science speaks for itself. The remaining question is whether we are headed toward +2C and a couple thousand years of misery or +4C and extinction. I'm a "doomer" because I look at how the political situation around the world has locked the population into a fossil fuel death-spiral, and all the ways out look like they are synonymous with overthrowing capitalism (on the easy end of the spectrum) and overthrowing authoritarianism in China, India, and Russia (on the harder end of the spectrum). Anyone who can claim to be optimistic about that, simply does not understand the situation.
Wow, Marcus "overthrowing capitalism" sure sounds like a big ticket item! Yes. Here's the problem. In some ways, capitalism has helped with the climate crisis - costs of solar panels have been driving down, costs of windmills driving down, technology improving, etc. But, at the same time, we have companies that have decided their capitalist interest is to just simply lie about what they are doing. Perhaps you are familiar with Exxon Mobil's stated intent to go "carbon neutral in all operations" which is both a complete lie, and a really weird lie. First, the weird part: they're not saying they are going to be carbon neutral about the vast amounts of fossil fuel they intend to pump and sell - just that the pumping and extraction will be carbon neutral. And, they're not actually trying to be carbon neutral, anyway. Instead, they put up some nice ads and stuff, about technology that does not and will never exist. [greenwash] Exxon's low-emissions investments amount to $3 billion, which sounds like a lot, unless you compare it to the $250 billion of polluting fossil fuels, as usual. There are also investigations trying to uncover whether Exxon actually spent any of that money on researching for carbon neutral extraction, or whether they spent it on trying to develop more efficient extraction, which would certainly save some fossil fuel use, while making a lot more fossil fuels available.
The reason I say capitalism is a problem is because Wall St., knowing full well that such chicanery is going on, continues to invest in the fossil fuel extraction companies because, well, they're a good gamble. Basically, think of Wall St., as a bunch of inveterate gamblers who'll place a bet on anything up to and including whether a given uranium atom will decay within a certain time-window. Naturally, they will argue that their investments are morally neutral, but that's deceptive: they are investing in stuff that is killing everything and everyone on earth - is it plausible that "shareholder value" is the only moral dimension? Next up: investing in slavery as a morally neutral marketplace. No. Next argument: not investing in Exxon just means that British Petroleum will do better in the market. That's the same argument as "if you don't vote for Biden, you are voting for Trump" if you re-factor it a bit. None of this is acceptable. It's all reality, but that does not make it right.
Capitalism and government go hand in hand: the capitalists finance the political campaigns that control the system, and in return the government loosens its controls over the capitalists. It is organized corruption on a mega-scale. The system has evolved to defend itself against outside challenges and threats, which co-incidentally makes it impossible for non-billionaires to have significant influence. The end result is that response to the climate catastrophe is slowed down. Fatally slowed down. The same politicians who were negotiating with Joe Manchin watched their districts go up in smoke, or crops fail, or citizens die of heat - but that is not their real consideration: getting re-elected, is.
So, I want to say to any of you who might criticize someone for being a "doomer" - projecting an attitude of doom and gloom is barely enough: we are just trying to get you to understand the fucking situation. This is not a situation that will be solved by running Biden again (though that will certainly happen unless he dies in harness and they run a wax effigy like they do in North Korea) and this is not a situation that will be solved by choosing recyclable paper bags at the grocery store. This is not a situation that will be solved by speaking kindly to our enemies, or, perhaps, speaking to them at all - they have been studiously arranging the situation so that they do not have to listen to anyone, why expect they are going to have a sudden moral turn-around? In other words, the details of the CO2 levels, and burn rates are interesting - perhaps hypnotizing - but what we should be looking at is for the necessary profound changes in the system that got us here. Profound changes that are notable mostly by being absent. Anyone who is thinking of criticizing someone for being a "doomer" ought to consider that by doing so, they are aligning themselves with the status quo - they are doing the equivalent of telling the other passengers on Titanic "stop worrying and sit down and have a cigar, the captain and crew have no doubt got the situation well in hand and your running about yelling about lifeboats is just going to depress people into stopping struggling." Note, in that situation, who has stopped struggling - it's not the "doomer" it's the person advocating calm.
There are other consequences to treating climate change as a moral issue. For one, all advocating for business as usual is an immoral position, because business as usual got us into this mess. For another, we have to question the morality of bringing children into this world: how many of today's generation are going to watch their children and loved ones die because of climate change. That sound extreme? Tell it to the elderly Texas couple who died of heat because they could not afford air conditioning. [abc7] This particularly applies to Americans - it's a popular position for Americans to wring their hands and say "what is going to happen if India and China start exploiting fossil fuels as much as we do?" Good, question, but a better question would be "is it maybe time to stop making more Americans?" As a "doomer" I tend to just shake my head and walk on, because it seems to me that people utterly fail to understand that humanity has not merely fucked up the environment - they have fucked it up for thousands of years. We can argue about the estimates, but "thousands" is deliberately on the low side, it's more likely to be tens of thousands. Your kids aren't just going to have to worry about the price of Florida orange juice when Florida is a wreck, there won't be enough orange juice to share around until "deep time" - longer than human history has been written. You know how we sometimes shake our heads in despair at the immoral stupidity of the founders of the US, who embedded slavery into the foundation of the society, gifting its future with a dividing line that would be paid for in blood over and over again? Future people, if there are any lucky enough to spare a thought for us, will think of us boomers as the worst monsters in history: the people who had ample warning of impending disaster, but valued their bread and circuses more than the future of their own children. We valued the political practicalities of having Joe Manchin (sort of) a democrat, more than the moral dimension of negotiating with an agent of the global disaster. They will have thousands of years to hate this generation, especially the last few generations of Americans.
I'm going to drop two links here. One is Carl Sagan's 1985 testimony to Congress and the other is Margaret Thatcher in 1989 saying basically the same thing, except in an annoying British adenoidal drawl:
x YouTube Video
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/1/2190960/-Why-I-am-a-Doomer
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
