>John Thornton: "I still don't see how you can consider the work of
>Michaels, Balling, Lindzen, and Idso relatively unbiased."
>
>Ross Gelbspan, "The Heat is On":
>The skeptics are virtually unanimous in accusing their mainstream
>scientific colleagues of exaggerating the magnitude of the climate
>problem in order to perpetuate their own government research funding.
>
>But that argument cuts both ways. While testifying in St. Paul, Pat
>Michaels revealed under oath that he had received more than $165,000
>in industry and private funding over the previous five years'
>funding he had never previously disclosed. Not only did Western
>Fuels fund both his publications, he disclosed, but it provided a
>$63,000 grant for his research. Another $49,000 came to Michaels
>from the German Coal Mining Association. A smaller grant of $15,000
>came from the Edison Electric Institute. Michaels also listed a
>grant of $40,000 from the western mining company Cyprus Minerals.
>Questioned by the assistant attorney general about that grant,
>Michaels responded, "You know, with all due respect, you're going to
>think I'm not telling the truth. I'm trying to remember directly
>what came out of the project. . . I'm sure we were looking at
>regional temperatures in some way."
>
>In fact, Cyprus Minerals was, at the time, the largest single funder
>of the virulently antienvironmentalist Wise Use movement. The
>biggest organizational member of that movement was a group called
>People for the West!, whose largest funder, with at least $100,000
>in donations, was Cyprus Minerals. According to the Clearinghouse in
>Environmental Advocacy and Research, as recently as 1995 Cyprus
>Minerals' director of governmental affairs was a member of the board
>of directors of People for the West!.
At this moment in history, I think leftists -- especially Marxists -- should focus on creative ways of linking Red & Green analyses & activism, instead of wasting time upon futile "dialogues" with the productivist leftists who would rather, ostrich-like, bury their heads in the polluted sands. Only those who live in leafy prosperous neighborhoods with little exposure to toxic waste & no shortage of water, food, fuel, etc. can believe industry-funded "dissident" scientists (the word "dissident" is fitting, in that it evokes how the word used to be used in the heyday of anticommunism).
1. Debunking the myth of "sustainable capitalism." Green consumerism, pollution-credit trading, social-clause "fair trade," etc. are more problems than solutions. While the world remains imprisoned in the capitalist market, it continues to be driven by M-C-M', and in the absence of socialism it is no wonder most nations -- with a temporary exception of the rich social democratic ones that have the power to out-source toxic production overseas -- can see no alternative to cheap labor & lax environmental regulations in a desperate attempt to export their way out of peripheral status. The debunking of the myth of "sustainable capitalism" should go together with the historicizing of the "East Asian Miracle." I don't mean to deny the spectacular industrial & other developments of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.; I mean that the conditions under which East Asian nations developed their economic powers -- to say nothing of the industrial development of Euro/American powers -- are _historically specific_, so they cannot be replicated today. History does not repeat itself, not even as a farce, so the developmental path of East Asian nations cannot serve as a "model" for today's poor nations. To drive this lesson home, we need to frame the debunking of the myth of" sustainable capitalism" & the historicizing of the "East Asian Miracle" in a theoretical attack on the Hegelian dialectic & the liberal "History of Progress" (born in the nineteenth century). Both the Hegelian dialectic & the liberal "History of Progress" -- best summarized by the Hegelian husk, as opposed to its "raional kernel", in Marx's own words -- proclaim that "the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future" (in the preface to the first edition of _Capital_, Vol 1). Not so! Only by a racist & Eurocentric denial of *coevalness* of all human beings at any given time can we hold onto the idea that the so-called European is an elder brother of the so-called non-European (for more on the denial of coevalness, see Johannes Fabian, _Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object_, New York: Columbia UP, 1983; David Spurr, _Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse In Journalism, Travel Writing, And Imperial Administration_, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993).
2. It is a strategic error to tackle the question of global warming -- or anything else for that matter -- in separation from actually existing struggles. It is futile & dangerous to attempt to synthesize Red & Green analyses at a high level of abstraction, which I believe only adds to the widely spread despair & diminished expectations of the Left today. Instead, we need to clarify in theory & support in practice the struggles that arise in response to the *condensentation of multiple contradictions*. Take Columbia, for instance. Capitalism. Imperialism. The War on Drugs. The use of unsafe herbicides to kill Coca plants. Oil corporations seeking lands & displacing peasants. Pollution. Export monocultures that leave the working masses hungry & dependent upon food imports: "The United States is the principal foreign supplier of consumer-oriented food products to Colombia" at <http://ats-sea.agr.ca/public/htmldocs/e3007.htm>; "The food import bills of the NFIDCs and of the LDCs rose by US$ 200 million to reach US$ 7.2 billion in 1997/98 which, although lower than the high level of US$ 8.0 billion in 1995/96 is still much higher than US$ 5.9 billion in 1994/95" at <http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/W8456e.htm>); & "Bush's visions of equal trading partners forging Pan-American prosperity, however, soon proved disastrous for Colombian agriculture, which couldn't compete with the deluge of cheap grains and other foodstuffs that poured in from giant U.S. corporate producers. Not only did crop-dusting jobs vanish, but many of the now-bankrupt farmers whose crops they formerly dusted ended up either in the Andes tending poppies or right here in the Guaviare planting coca" (<http://www.tni.org/drugs/links/lt950924.htm>).
3. In pursuing 1 & 2, leftists need to learn from poets in order to improve our agit-prop. Deduction & induction do not exhaust the rhetoric of Marxism. Just as important is the rhetorical power of seduction. "Déjeme decirle, a riesgo de parecer ridículo, que el revolucionario verdadero está guiado por grandes sentimientos de amor," as the world's best-looking revolutionary said.
We'd have to write as powerfully as Allen Ginsberg:
***** I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
(Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California") *****
Yoshie