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

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Apr 26 09:03:57 PDT 2007


On Apr 25, 2007, at 7:10 PM, James Heartfield wrote:


> But seriously, if you believed what you say, I think you would
> inconvenience
> yourself a bit more. I don't mean wear a hair shirt, necessarily,
> but I
> think it would be incumbent on you to abandon your commitment to
> social
> betterment and embrace the programme of austerity, income
> reduction, and
> probably population reduction as well that flows from the belief
> that we are
> burning up the planet.

We are burning up the planet, there's no two ways about it. You can deny it, but you're wrong. Even the U.S. auto industry has given up fighting the science; about the only major pocket of dead-enders left consists of parts of the oil industry and part of the Republican party leadership. Even grassroots Republicans have given up the fight. You are keeping very strange company.

And, James, this is really a demagogic position you're taking. Doing nothing about the climate will lead to disease, floods, crop failure - all things that will lower our living standards considerably. Doing nothing will ultimately prove more costly, even in purely monetary terms, than doing something. This point is the major contribution of the Stern Review. But I'm not interested in hair shirts or austerity or reduced living standards. The U.S. wastes colossal amounts of energy. I work in an office that's overheated in the winter and poorly ventilated, so they authorities run the air conditioning all the time - even when it's 20 degrees out. (And this is the high- minded, progressive New Press, not the Republican National Committee.) You can multiply that wasteful instance by millions. Ditto motor vehicle fuel economy, wasteful packaging, and a hundred other things. Commodities are shipped long distances that would not be economical were environmental damage fully internalized in the cost. We could get a good start on reducing GHG emissions just by reducing waste, before any technological breakthroughs could arrive.

Doug



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