[lbo-talk] Hijacking (was: Patrick Bond on climate change strategy)

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Apr 25 09:14:38 PDT 2007


Doug, I think there is a kind of slippage in your language, despite what you say to Wojtek.

When you are in 'climate change' mode, you (demagogically?) lump workers and elites together as "you, me and the rest of us in the handful of rich countries". First off, handful implies few, but there are more than a few rich countries if you count West Europe, Japan, Korea. And in population terms, that is much more than a few.

More to the point, though, if were were not in climate change mode, but in income mode, I think you would baulk at the (Maoist?) assimilation of workers and elites in the first world. You were forthright in rejecting the idea that US workers were well off in income terms. But when it comes to energy consumption, it is a different tune.

Do you think that climate change demands a reduction in working class energy consumption? And assuming you think that that is a more serious problem than can be achieved with a little home insulation, are you not calling for a (further) reduction in wages? Or would you say that can be mitigated by some kind of re-distributionist strategy?

Just asking for clarification's sake.

"Woj, about 75-80% of the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already came from you, me, and the rest of us in the handful of rich countries, and we're responsible for the majority of new flows of GHGs as well. (China will surpass the US in the next year or so, but we have more than a century's head start on them.) Therefore the burden of adjustment should be on us - not only because of that record, but because we can take the hit, and we can afford to develop the new technology too. You may not like the vocabulary, but there's nothing demagogic about the issue."



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