Education environment: Bill McKibben book reviews economics Juliet Schor sustainability
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Two Good Books About The Future
We modern humans sure do love our conveniences. Most things in our lives are so convenient we’ve forgotten there ever was such a thing as inconvenience.
Look at some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten:
Having to procure our own food from start to finish.
Having limited quantities of untrustworthy water.
Being at the mercy of the climate.
Being at the mercy of the weather.
Having no easy access to large quantities of energy.
Assuming that some of our children won’t live to adulthood.
Living in a world where death is always immanent.
These are some of the big ones. Many of the conveniences we know and love are resolutions of one or another of this list, scaled to fit circumstances. Having to replace the steam nozzle on your cappuccino-maker is a tiny inconvenience to one person (you); the collapse of a coffee crop is a major inconvenience with repercussions all the way from farmer to consumer.
In the coming years, times are going to get harder. Some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten about are going to re-enter our lives. Weather-related mortality is going to increase (it already has). Our infrastructure is going to deteriorate (it already has). Our water supply is going to be less reliable (it already is).
Our current economy is built around convenience. Having ready credit is a convenience, as is having ready cash available at any ATM. Being able to fly anywhere in the world, is a convenience, as is having a place to stay when you get there.
You get the picture.
Education environment Politics: Bill McKibben economics Julliet Schor sustainability
by Warren
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Inconvenient Futures: Two Books You Should Read
We modern humans sure do love our conveniences. Most things in our lives are so convenient we’ve forgotten there ever was such a thing as inconvenience.
Look at some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten:
Having to procure our own food from start to finish.
Having limited quantities of untrustworthy water.
Being at the mercy of the climate.
Being at the mercy of the weather.
Having no easy access to large quantities of energy.
Assuming that some of our children won’t live to adulthood.
Living in a world where death is always immanent.
These are some of the big ones. Many of the conveniences we know and love are resolutions of one or another of this list, scaled to fit circumstances. Having to replace the steam nozzle on your cappuccino-maker is a tiny inconvenience to one person (you); the collapse of a coffee crop is a major inconvenience with repercussions all the way from farmer to consumer.
In the coming years, times are going to get harder. Some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten about are going to re-enter our lives. Weather-related mortality is going to increase (it already has). Our infrastructure is going to deteriorate (it already has). Our water supply is going to be less reliable (it already is).
Our current economy is built around convenience. Having ready credit is a convenience, as is having ready cash available at any ATM. Being able to fly anywhere in the world, is a convenience, as is having a place to stay when you get there.
You get the picture.
Traditional cultures have social rituals and mechanisms for coping with the procurement and preparation of food, the climate and weather, the difficulty of large tasks, the death or sickness of a community member. You could make a pretty strong case that a culture’s identity and uniqueness is encoded in its response to difficulty, to hardship, to inconvenience.
And we humans crave community. We are social creatures, and our cultures provide us with meaningful ways to relate in a wide variety of contexts. We need one another most when times aren’t good.
Which is part of the reason our communality has eroded concurrently with our inconveniences. An unintended consequence of the development of a quick-satisfaction consumer culture in which anything we want is available is the gradual disappearance of the things we really want: one another. Until pretty recently most human beings were always there for one another. Now, not so much.
Which brings me to two books I’ve been reading recently.
environment: Boston Herald economic justice economic recession economics
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Month 7, Day 4: Independence From What?
The Boston Herald ran an AP story noting that there was no increase in CO2 emissions in 2009, due to the worldwide economic slowdown. Well, that certainly links the good news and the bad news in an arresting way.
If increased greenhouse gas pollution is correlated with economic growth, there are two ways to interpret the news that worldwide recession has held atmospheric CO2 emissions steady for the first time since 1992. Either global warming is a welcome indicator of financial well-being, or our growth-fixated economy is literally killing the planet. Growth has its place. Rapid doubling of weight is healthy — if you’re a baby. For an adult? Not so much. With over six billion people living on a finite world, we need a new way of economic thinking that doesn’t require constant expansion to survive. “Growth for the sake of growth” brought us the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; gutted our national economy to line the pockets of wealthy speculators; increased global warming emissions without thought to the consequences. It’s an economic idea that is actually destroying the place we live! For all our sakes, we’d better find another way.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics GDP Genuine Progress Index Gross National Happiness measurement Redefining Progress
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The Tyranny of False Measurement
First, watch this.
Bobby Kennedy on “Gross Domestic Product”
“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
Yeah. What Bobby said.
The irrefutable fact of our environmental crisis is linked with the irrefutable fact of our economic crisis.
Our economy sucks for the same reason our environment is being destroyed: we’re measuring success with the wrong set of tools.
environment: Citizens United economics Richard Branson
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Month 2, Day 22: To The Super-Rich
My wife was watching a video about billionaires who are serious about tackling climate change. Bill Gates is one such; another is Virgin’s Richard Branson, who feels pretty strongly about it. So I wrote him a letter, which came out pretty well, I think.
I then spent the most frustrating time on the Virgin website trying to find a way to send it through their “Ask Richard” section. Signed up, got a password…and had my email address rejected by their system for (apparently) uncorrectable reasons. So after an hour, I gave up, and emailed it to the headquarters of the Virgin Green Fund, with the following request:
Dear Virgin Green Fund Staffer – after about an hour spent on the Virgin website trying to get the system to accept my information so that I could submit a letter to Richard Branson, I have given up on that avenue. The important work that the VGF is doing seems closest to the theme of my letter to Mr. Branson, and so I am taking the liberty of submitting it to you in the hope that you may be able to forward it up the line in the hope that it will eventually reach its goal.
Thank you for your assistance.
Dear Mr. Branson — I have read with considerable admiration about your work in educating the business community and the world to the dangers of global climate change. We need more businesspeople like you if we are to counter the pernicious denialism that has taken root in public perception. I applaud your plans for a “Carbon War Room;” while as a lifelong pacifist I dislike using the term “war” as an analogy, I recognize that it could capture the public imagination effectively.
I have a comment and a suggestion for you.
First, in the Time article of December 31, 2009, you are described as believing that “global warming will have to be solved by better technology and better practices, not by changing the way we live our lives.” Actually, we will have to change the way we live our lives very substantially. The point is (or should be) that these are changes for the better. Going back to neolithic lifestyles is what we don’t want to do; it is misleading to equate changing some of our culture’s most unhealthy habits with a lessening of quality. For example, lessening the carbon footprint of our food system cannot just mean trucks with lower emissions — it’s also got to mean more community gardens. Reducing the GHG output of our energy system cannot just mean shifting away from coal — it’s also got to mean living less wastefully. These are transformations in our lifestyles which work to our benefit, increasing the resilience of local communities and ecosystems.
Second, since the U.S. Supreme Court decided (in Citizens United vs. F.E.C.) that corporations have free speech rights in American elections, thinkers on all sides of the ideological spectrum have been apprehensive about the likelihood of greatly increased corporate spending and its influence on the political process. While I disagree strongly with the Citizens United decision, I would like to ask you to please take advantage of it: I urge you to buy air time before America’s November election, and to run political advocacy messages educating the electorate about the dangers of global warming. We need representatives who will help us confront the most pressing existential threat humanity has ever faced.
And finally, it is surely obvious to you that the biggest single obstacle to governmental progress on climate change issues is the obduracy of the modern U.S. Republican Party. The Party of No is also the Party of Climate Denial, as witness the obstructionist behavior of Senator James Inhofe. My question is — and this is only partially meant in jest — what would it take for you to buy a few Republicans? The evidence suggests that they come pretty cheaply. It might be money well spent.
Thank you for your consideration,
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: Barack Obama consumerism economics
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Month 2, Day 20: Dis is a system?
Continuing on the theme of economic reformation, and using a rather intellectual mathematical analogy to convey why our present system of economics is fatally flawed. Thanks to G2Geek at Kos for that; it’s not something I would have thought of, and it makes me look really really smart.
Dear President Obama:
I supported you vigorously in the election, volunteering, donating, phonebanking and advocating as strongly as I could over the course of the campaign. In the past year, however, you’ve hired a number of people who I believe compromise your Administration’s ability to strive toward the goals we all share.
Your economic advisers are locked into a faulty and destructive model of economics. Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, for example, are advocates of “limitless” economic growth as a universal good. But it is self-evident (or should be) that we live on a finite planet. Advocating indefinite and continual economic growth in a closed system like Earth is analogous to mapping an infinite plane onto a Euclidean solid. Which is impossible. An infinity cannot be a subset of an integer.
Leaving aside the ethical questions of putting the same people who broke the economy in charge of fixing it, leaving aside the obscene profits accrued by individuals and firms who are closely linked to Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, the most important thing is that you need economic advisers who understand that “limitless” economics does not work on a limited planet.
If we remain a society of consumers, we shall all of us be consumed. It’s happening now, Mr. President, and it’s not pretty.
Respectfully yours,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: apocalypse economics edward abbey oceanic acidification
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Month 2, Day 18: “…Heard the Roar of a Wave That Could Drown the Whole World”
I was reading about oceanic acidification in another alarming piece at DK — the diarist FishOutOfWater specializes in ocean stuff that’s hair-standing-on-end scary. Another commenter made some powerful suggestions about what humans have to do if we are to head off this catastrophe, and eventually that comment turned into a substantial diary, which you should definitely read. Anyway, I was thinking about all that when I sat down (rather late in the day, actually) to write my LOTD.
I didn’t sleep a lot last night, and I’m too beat to think of a new recipient for this one…so I’ll send it to Time Magazine, and after they don’t print it, I’ll send it somewhere else.
Edward Abbey said it well: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Our national models of prosperity are built on a foundation of quicksand: the notion that endless economic growth is both possible and a good idea. It is a sad commentary on political realities that simply stating the obvious truth that we live on a finite planet is electoral suicide. But if we don’t face that inconvenient fact sooner rather than later, we will be facing a much messier suicide, as the Earth’s resources fail us. Take the world’s oceans, for example.
Oceanic acidification is indisputably caused by human CO2 emissions, and has already reached levels not seen on this planet for fifty-five million years; the entire marine food chain is at risk — and half of humanity depends on the sea for sustenance. If excess acid kills the phytoplankton that provide significant proportions of our oxygen, we can add mass suffocation to the mix. How many people would die? Give or take a few hundred million, we’re looking at something like three billion. That’s a hundred and fifty times the size of the Nazi holocaust; one hundred and fifty Hitlers.
Americans were ready to go to war in the aftermath of 9/11, a tragedy that cost us around five thousand lives. Are we prepared to make drastic changes in the way we live to forestall a slow-motion tragedy equivalent to six hundred-thousand 9/11’s? Are we prepared to radically re-evaluate the way we understand success? Prosperity? Progress? Humanity in general, and America in particular, must effect a profound transformation in our economic thinking if our species is to survive.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama Ben Bernanke climaticide economics Lawrence Summers Timothy Geithner
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Day 23: To the White House
It seems that watching my daughter swimming is conducive to epistolary composition. As she splashed happily, this emerged from my pen. I’d brought lined paper today, and that seemed to shrink my penmanship, resulting in a longer piece.
For a long time, I was reluctant to address economic issues in my letters, emails and blog posts. I felt that I had inadequate background to be able to speak with any authority. However, recent events have demonstrated that the people who are speaking with authority either don’t have a fucking clue or are eager participants in the undeclared class war against the economically disenfranchised.
So I figured, “why the hell not?” and wrote a screed addressing climate change in economic terms.
Dear President Obama,
It is increasingly apparent that the people you appointed as economic advisors are not operating in good faith. Messrs Geithner, Summers and Bernanke are obviously working against the best interests of both the American people and their American president. Mr. Summers’ near-complete denialism on the economic necessity of addressing global climate change in a substantial and meaningful way is just one example of this — an example which highlights the potential for an apocalyptic confluence of economic and environmental crises in the not too distant future.
The economic impact of climate change will be felt most severely by the world’s poor. By the time the wealthiest among the planet’s population are severely affected, it will be too late for any attempts at remediation or mitigation. “Disaster capitalism” can only succeed if there is a human population left to rob!
By aligning themselves with the big banks and the multi-national corporations, Geithner, Summers and Bernanke have lent their support to an undeclared class war: the wealthy against the rest of us. Uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism is the engine driving runaway climate change — a slow-motion catastrophe whose ultimate impact will be the annihilation of whole populations. Corporate climaticide’s impact on the world’s poor is the smallpox-infested blanket writ large — a toxic gift from the oligarchy to the everyone else. This gift will have your signature on it (along with all the rest of the world’s apologists for government of, by and for the supremely wealthy) unless you take the necessary steps — steps which will also help America’s middle-class and poor recover their economic footing. Fire Geithner and Summers. Withdraw Bernanke’s nomination. It may not be enough, but it’ll be a good start.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Warren Senders