Chuck, none of the stuff you talk about is going to happen in our imaginable lifetime, and we've got to cut greenhouse gas emissions starting tomorrow. Doug
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Stop and think about it. One of our (lefty) problems is how to conceptualize and form a serious and comprehensive public policy on the political economy, the best interests of the people (of the world) and the fucking environment, and then advocate it through whatever means necessary.
My inspiration was contemplating the detailed and technical model of the carbon cycle. Go to the sites and read a little and then you'll see what I am talking. This is a form of rational/organic/radical thinking. It links up all these goals and makes them coherent. It gives us positions, policy, justification, and puts science and radical politics on our side. It uses science for our ends for a change.
Maybe you just don't see it, and that's bad. It means I haven't explained it well enough.
At anyrate, on the practical end of things, the course is relatively clear to me. Just dig up the science---it's out there, like the short abstract I posted---and go with that for the time being. At least it contributes to the propaganda wars that the current US government is promulgating for the benefit of its capital owners. All I can say is the biological, geological, physical and earth sciences are on our side on this one. It is just a matter of seeing where and how. And exactly where and how is actually revealed when you look at supposedly arcane details like the carbon cycle and eco-systems.
Let me say, this is why Stephan Gould was a Marxist for Christsakes. He didn't just pull his political shit out his ass. It was intuitively embedded in his scientific understanding of the biological world. And this carbon cycle business is another of those cases.
Then too, approaches like using the carbon cycle to formulate public policy is a concrete form of collectivist thinking. It has nothing do to with individual gain or well being---probably a low point in its marketing portfolio. Oh, well.
The real selling point here is, that using something like the carbon cycle, provides a ready made template on how to comprehensively organize our knowledge, find its voids and weak links, and come up with concrete answers.
At the moment we are stuck with intiutive bits and pieces of ideas, facts, and opinions on this or that policy initative. We have no form of master plan or any idea how to form such a thing. I am telling you, that's what thinking along these lines does (templates to a carbon cycle in human society). It gives us a master outline. This is a fundamental change in how we think the issue of greenhouse gas emissions through. So yes, I know we have to start thinking and figure this out tomorrow. This how we do that. (Or at least my current, Sunday night theory on how.)
We educate ourselves on the obscure bio-sciences like the various ecologically important bio-chemical cycles of the planet and then use them as the lens through which we analyze, formulate, and concieve our positions, how we disect and expose all the various and sundry government and industry policy positions that are non-solutions, and how we come up with our own damned answers.
Part of the inspiration for Marx to write Das Kapital, was the French Revolutionary belief that the new rational sciences of Man would perform the ultimate liberation of Man. In some philosophical-political sense that's what Marxism is about. This carbon cycle business is right in sync with that inspiration and that direction. The sciences of the human world are supposed to liberate the human world, not enslave it. So, fucking-A, let's get started.
Here is an old Josh White lyric written to the classic Saint James Infirmary:
I went down to that Saint James Infirmary, I saw some plasma there, I up and asked the Doctor man, So was the donor dark or fair?
He laugh a great big laugh and puffed it right in my face. He said, a molecule is a molecule son, And the damned thing has no race.
Well, that was news, That was very, very special news, Cause ever since that day we've had those Free and Equal blues...
I am trying to figure out a way to make the political economy of carbon a form of liberation, radicalism and revolution, and I think I've figured that out. It really is like that long ago Josh White tune on blood plasma. It is fucking news and it really can be that kind of liberation, that kind of free and equal blues.
CG