On the backburner

Has a perfect storm of events robbed advocates of a green economy the moral and tactical high ground?

It would seem so, at least temporarily.

The combination of an economy turned south, an unusually frigid winter, evidence of massaged climate data, the Wall Street meltdown, and alarming budget deficits has clearly chilled the plans of climate change activists and emboldened global warming deniers.

It’s fair to say the prospects for a stronger governmental role in shaping market incentives for alternative energy and industry-wide carbon mitigation appear to have significantly cooled.

In fact, the promises of green technology, a green jobs boom, reduced carbon dioxide emissions, and renewable energy for all, a kind of clean power Shangri-la, seem as far away from realization as ever.

Witness the deflation in Congress over cap-and-trade legislation, once thought to be possible economy-wide, is now only talked about in minimalist terms of a phasing-in over many years, with utilities being impacted first.

And then there’s the ideological counteroffensive of climate change naysayers who call the connection between man-caused emissions and potentially catastrophic warming patterns and other environmental impacts “one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on the American people.”

This blog remains open to contrary views, so, against type, I picked up the latest issue of Newsmax, the cover story devoted to showing the IPCC has it all wrong, that we’re actually in a cooling phase, not a warming one.

The evidence for the contrarians is well-known: cloud science is too complicated to base predictions on, deep ocean currents may do more to counteract warming than is acknowledged, and sun spot activity may be helping plunge us into a new ice age.

Interesting points all, and they should prod us to redouble our efforts to understand and be careful about the science and scientific method undergirding our theories.

But let’s be clear: the reversal of fortune, and the change of public mood, have more to do with the bad economy, an upswing in anti-tax and anti-big government sentiment, and the politics of reaction than anything else.

Stakeholders in the status quo smell blood. And analogous to the health care reform debate, doing nothing about a subject as complex and controversial as climate change (and a scheme as difficult to understand as cap and trade) looks better than doing something.

They were wrong about health care reform, and they are wrong about the necessity of government devising strong market-driven incentives for a low-carbon economy.

Ecologism

With a protracted economic downturn stymieing efforts to combat global warming, it might be time to reflect on the spirit of the times and whether, as some say, the ecological movement, or that part of it believing industrial civilization should be re-ordered, is the "Communism of the twenty-first century."

Take this passage lifted from a passage lifted from French writer Guy Sorman:

"No ordinary rioters, the Greens are the priests of a new religion that puts nature above humankind. The ecology movement is not a nice peace-and-love lobby but a revolutionary force."

While Sorman is actually critiquing environmentalism (or what he calls "ecologism") from the socialist left--for its failure to confront capitalism as the real cause of planetary spoliation--it is hard to miss how his caricature of the green lobby might complement the picture drawn by free market Republicans in Congress trying to deep-six cap-and-trade legislation.

One of the most interesting debates today, so far largely unacknowledged by the mainstream media, is over the question of whether world capitalism is equipped to solve the enormous challenges of global warming and climate change. Marxist philosophers, of course, think not, owing to the inexorable raw material-exploiting, profit-maximizing logic of the capitalist system.

Most thinkers who are taken seriously on the subject of the climate crisis fall squarely into the capitalist camp, vowing to mitigate things by only modifying the existing rules of the game. The thought of changing the game doesn't occur to them.