[lbo-talk] The Planet is Fine

Gar Lipow gar.lipow at gmail.com
Wed Dec 14 14:55:07 PST 2011


On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote: Me: This is flat out wrong. First we are likely to see more like a 6 degree than a 3 degree increase. But regardless, one of the things you are ignoring is how this will affect our ability to grown food. We are looking not only at a changed climate, but an unstable climate, more droughts, more floods, more storms, more heat waves, more cold waves. Most of us who are not farmers don't know how fucking hard it is to be a farmer. I don't care if you are an industrial farmer or organic. Farming is not only hard work, it is vulnerable work. When a crop is planted with expectation of one climate range, and the weather fall outside that chance are you lose the crop. And yeah, that includes one-straw farming and alterantive agriculture. Can we adapt. Maybe there are certain organic methods that are less vulnerable to climate change than other organic. No one has tested them in planet greenhouse conditions so we don't know that they work in those circumstances. If
>  they do, they tend to be really labor intensive. One of the things our civilzation is based is the majority of people can do stuff other than growing food. If we end up needing half our population to work at growing food, forget capitalism or socialism. We are back to the material base for feudal ism.
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> Somebody: It's fine to say farming is hard. But the fact is, with modern technology, farming is less hard than it used to be. How do we know this? Because food consumes a smaller percentage of people's incomes than it used to. This is why the Occupy movement and other recent left-wing movements in the U.S. focuses upon concerns like college tuition, underwater mortgages, and health care rather than bread as socialist movements did in the past.

Yeah read what you are replying to. I specifically said that modern agriculture is less labor intensive. But it won't be so if weather conditions change enough.
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> To the extent that agriculture comes under pressure due to climate change, this will be expressed as increases in food prices. That's a major issue certainly, but in practical terms it means we'll be spending a greater percentage of our income than we otherwise would on food, and maybe less on consumer goods, travel, homes, and entertainment. It's a constraint on growth in living standards, but not exactly the apocalypse.

I don't think you get how big a problem this is. YOu talk about spain haviing he climate of Iran. But what you are looking at is Spain having the climate of Iran one year, and the climate of Spain today another, and the climate of Brazil another. And not knowing in advance from year to year which it will be. That is something a farmer is not going to easily use modern technology to adapt to.

Look it basically took until the invention of capitalism for growth to be something you could count on. Before capitalism a feudal population could go centuries without per-capita economic growth. Hunter gather populations could go millenia. And all the growth we get from capitalism depends (among other things) on improvements in agriculture - so that most of the population can do stuff other than agriculture. Change that, have a circumstance where most of the population has to engage in agriculture and the whole basis of capitalism and of what Marx meant by socialism collapses. Forget computers. If agriculture dominates our workplace enough we won't have the infrastructure for printed books that are cheap enough for most to afford.

Yes a large percent of the population never had access to the benefits of capitalism. But eliminating the material base for those benefits will spread the misery to rest of the population without benefitting those suffering the most.


>The problem I have with global warming alarmism is that it underestimates the real-life day-to-day apocalypse of, for example, 24,000 children dying from preventable causes everyday - not in 2100 or 2200 - but today. Strangely, people on the left concerned about global climate change seem to take it as a given that we'll have nations with Sub-Saharan levels of poverty in a century from now. If we really think that's the case, then global poverty is the issue that should be prioritized here over climate.

OK, you know for this among other reasons I normally avoid mentioning just how apocalypic the situation is. But when I meet straight-out denial I have to say something. And in fact I don't take that kind of future poverty for granted. In fact my new book , orignally scheduled for release in November, but now delayed by my publisher until March of 2012, makes the case that poverty, injustice, war and inequality are key cause of the climate crisis, and that we can't tackle the climate crisis with making those the priority. Solving the climate crisis will make us richer rather than poorer, because class warfare, gender and ethnic inequality, and the militarization that goes with the rich nations standing on the necks of the poor nations, is not only wrong, it is tremendously wasteful even in the narrow economic sense.

But we can't ignore the apocalyptic nature of the climate crisis, even though I often demphasize it. Because in addition to the fact the doing things we need to do anyway for other reasons are what will solve this crisis, if we don't tackle it we will close the door to socialism for at least millenia, possibly forever. As I said human extinction is unlikely, though not an impossible result.

What we've already locked in is already bad enough. But we really don't want to lock in 3 degrees centigrade or 6 degrees centigrade. I often describe myself as an optimist on the climate issue. But optimism on this question is a relative matter. Optimism means I think we can limit the damage from climate change to the point where it is a disaster rather than a catastrophe.



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