19/07/2017

Neoliberalism Has Conned Us Into Fighting Climate Change As Individuals

The Guardian - 

Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start collectively taking on corporate power
Wimbledon, London, UK. 27th April, 2015. A waste management company named Dirty Harry uses a poster of Lord Kitchener to urge the public to recycle. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Alamy
Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the crisis.
The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breath. But we could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite: lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds. It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no such thing as society.”
Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become more individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture telling us to think of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? We are all Thatcher’s children.
Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural problems of an exploitative system – poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency.
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse.
Of course we need people reducing consumption and innovating low-carbon alternatives – building sustainable farms, inventing battery storages, spreading zero-waste methods. But individual choices will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options for everyone—not just an affluent or intrepid few.
If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than through power and politics.
Eco-consumerism may be able to expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is inextinguishable – and the collective imagination is already making a political come-back. The climate justice movement is blocking pipelines, forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for 100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a redistributive project to address climate change: by publicly retooling the economy, and insisting that corporate oligarchs no longer run amok. The notion that the rich should pay their fair share to fund this transformation was considered laughable by the political and media class. Millions disagreed. Society, long said to be departed, is now back with a vengeance.
So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you happier and healthier. But it is time to stop obsessing with how personally green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate power.

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Backlash Against Doomsday Article That Predicts A Climate Change Induced Apocalypse

NEWS.com.au - Benedict Brook

HUMANS boiled alive and “death smogs” are predicted for Earth. Some scientists are scathing, others say it’s spot on.
“Perpetual war” is predicted in the controversial article. Source: Supplied
 AUSTRALIAN scientists have said a hugely controversial article that predicts a climate change driven apocalypse is “scary” and “embellished” but entirely plausible despite the extreme scenario dividing climatologists worldwide.
David Wallace-Wells’ startling — and unashamedly doom ridden — essay in New York magazine, entitled ‘ The Uninhabitable Earth ’, has ruffled feathers.
“I promise, it is worse than you think,” he says in the opening line of the article published last week.
Even if Australians manage to survive major cities being in “permanent extreme drought” or poisonous sea “burps” it’s likely we’ll be finished off by “rolling death smogs” or “perpetual war” instead, the article states.
Doomsday could occur by the end of the century.
Mr Wallace-Wells’ piece has been heavily criticised. But not by the climate sceptics — it’s climate scientists who are up in arms, claiming it is “irresponsible” and “alarmist”.
Respected climatologist Michael E Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, has said the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence … [and this] article fails to produce it.”
Richard Betts, from the UK’s University of Exeter told website Climate Feedback,
the Earth becoming uninhabitable within the timescale suggested was “pure hyperbole.”
IMAGE
But Australian climate scientists news.com.au spoke to said while some of the descriptions of the future earth were fanciful (one called them “dramatised”), fanciful didn’t mean they were false.
“It’s absolutely true these things could happen,” said Dr Liz Hanna, President of the Climate and Health Alliance and a researcher into the health impacts of climate change at the Australian National University (ANU).
“It’s alarming but not alarmist.”
Professor Will Steffen of the Climate Council of Australia said the predictions were not from “ultra greenies” but were a sober assessment of the societal collapse extreme climate change could bring.
The cover of New York magazine issue which contained ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ article. Source: Supplied
The most dire predictions
In his essay, Mr Wallace-Wells says the effects of global warming were already happening.
The Global Seed Vault, surrounded by supposedly permanent ice, has flooded. On Wednesday, a trillion-ton block of ice twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory sheared off from the Antarctic ice sheet. The last three years have been the hottest on record globally.
The articles he said, “was not a series of predictions of what will happen. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action.”
How the size of the sheared Larsen C iceberg compares to Australian states and cities. Picture: Supplied
The outlook was dire. “No plausible program of emissions reductions can prevent climate disaster.
“Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century.”
He writes that the Earth had a mass extinction 250 million years ago when the planet warmed by five degrees triggering the release of methane encased in Arctic ice.
“This ended up with 97 per cent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a faster rate”.
That same melting ice could also release dormant deadly diseases frozen in time, such as smallpox and the plague.
IMAGE

Humans cooked from inside out
The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which the USA has withdrawn from, has an aim of holding the increase in global temperatures to “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels. Many climate scientists think this goal is already unachievable.
Mr Wallace-Wells said if global temperatures rose by around 4C, hot and humid equatorial regions would be unliveable.
“Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.”
Oceanic acidification could kill off fish creating “dead zones’ and poisonous hydrogen “sulphide burps” might bubble up from the sea floor.
In a 4C warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem — Australia included — will boil with a constant swarm of tornadoes, floods and droughts, “that not so long ago destroyed whole civilisations.”
A map showing sea level rise risk in Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. Source: Supplied
It’s depressing stuff and, in a Facebook post, Penn State’s Prof Mann, hit back claiming some of the data used was “just not true”.
“The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”
Prof Mann added, he “was not a fan of this sort of doomist framing,” which spread “a sense of doom and hopelessness”.
Mr Wallace-Wells has said his critics who paint the article as being just a worst-case scenario miss the point. “[That] is a factual description of the story and its explicit goals”, he said on Twitter.
Bye Miami, it’s been real. Picture: Istock Source: istock
Ultra greenies
Mr Steffen, an ANU emeritus professor, told news.com.au there were issues with the piece but it still painted a realistic picture.
“[The article] was dramatised and somewhat embellished but it did raise an important issue and that’s if you look at this one per cent to five per cent risk you get pretty scary and plausible scenarios.”
Despite the low probability of the various horrors coming true, we ignored them at our peril, he said.
“A one per cent risk to aviation industry would mean maybe ten planes crashing a day and that’s not a risk we would tolerate.”
Current projections suggested these far-fetched outcomes were becoming, if anything, more likely.
“These are not wild risks being put forward by ultra greenies — they are sober risks understood by people in the Pentagon and Australian military,” Prof Steffen told news.com.au. “It’s not far fetched if the Pentagon are looking at it.”
Wars where climate has played a role, such in Syria, could become the norm. Picture: AFP Source: AFP
Society could collapse
“When people can’t eat they fight, move or do both but they don’t just sit there and starve.
“It’s not at all too big a stretch to say society could collapse.
“By the end of the century the population could drop from seven billion to one billion because what you’re facing is a changing rainfall regimen that will wreak havoc with global food systems and see sea level rises which could inundate industrial areas,” he said.
Dr Hanna agreed the bleak future prophesied was more plausible.
“Could parts of the world become uninhabitable? A definite yes.
“Darwin is already problematic in the build-up and could become problematic for everyone aside from extremophile for much of the year.”
Darwin could become uninhabitable. Source: News Corp Australia
The “permanent extreme drought” predicted to afflict densely populated parts of Australia might not come to pass, she said, but devastatingly deep and longer lasting droughts certainly could.
There were brighter spots, she said, including the rise of renewables, despite them becoming a political punch bag,
Even Mr Wallace-Wells has hope pointing to the success in gradually depleting the hole in the ozone layer.
Dr Hanna says she has little time for the argument that such apocalyptic descriptions should be kept from the public.
“Some say that people will be paralysed by fear, ‘what can li’l old me do about it?’
“But if we tell people how grizzly it could become, it might not lead to paralysis — it could jolt them into action,” she said.
“By the time people go ‘shit we’re in real trouble now,’ it could be too late.”

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More Than Half Of Federal Liberal MPs 'Don't Trust' Climate Science: Think Tank

AFR - Aaron Patrick

Former prime minister John Howard said at a US Studies Centre forum last Thursday that he is becoming more sceptical about climate change. Daniel Munoz
The majority of federal Liberal MPs are not convinced the science behind climate change is settled and support reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases for political reasons, according to an prominent conservative think tank.
John Roskam, the executive director of the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs, said he hadn't conducted a formal count but found most Liberal politicians shared his doubts about what many experts say is the greatest global threat to mankind.
"More than 50 per cent are solid sceptics and more than 50 per cent feel they need to be seen to do something," he said in an interview. "The science is not settled."
The overwhelming majority of climate change scientists accept the atmosphere is warming and humans are responsible. The burning of fossil fuels contributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million before 1800 to 396 parts per million in 2013, according to the Australian Academy of Science.

Not convinced
But many right-wing politicians, commentators and voters aren't convinced the scientists are correct, or suspect the consequences of global warming are being exaggerated for ideological or economic reasons. Some Liberals unenthusiastically support climate change policies in the hope scientific opinion will shift in future years, Mr Roskam said.
The most senior Liberal expressing doubt is former prime minister John Howard, who remains an influential figure in conservative circles.
"I have become increasingly more of a sceptic on climate change," Mr Howard told a forum organised by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney last Thursday. "I was never a paid-up enthusiast."
Liberal MPs' doubts about climate change science explain why many are reluctant to favour renewable energy over coal, which is cheap and abundant in Australia.
A protest over climate change, which experts say is the greatest global threat to mankind, drew thousands of people on to the streets of Melbourne in 2015. Eddie Jim
Their scepticism is making it harder for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government to produce an energy policy that can get passed by the Senate.

'Climate theology'
The Coalition backbench is "deeply sceptical about climate theology," the former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin, wrote in the Daily Telegraph last week.
"Make no mistake, even his strongest supporters in Cabinet understand that climate change remains Malcolm Turnbull's kryptonite," Ms Credlin wrote.
Institute of Public Affairs executive director John Roskam, left, next to now-Melbourne MP Tim Wilson in 2016. Supplied
A failure of its energy policy would be a huge political blow to Mr Turnbull, who lost the Liberal Party leadership in 2009 because of his support for a carbon trading system.
Tim Wilson, a Liberal backbencher from Melbourne, said it was silly to ask if he believed in climate change science, which has found that each of the most recent three decades has been warmer than all preceding decades since 1850.
"Science is not something you 'believe' in," he said in an email. "It isn't a belief structure. That's religion. I accept the scientific evidence of anthropogenic contributions to a changing climate."

Overstated
Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg, who has said he accepts human activity is making the atmosphere warmer, declined to comment.
One senior Liberal Party official, who is not a climate sceptic, said Mr Roskam's 50 per cent estimate was probably too high. He put the true figure at 25 per cent, and said the sceptics were mostly Liberals from suburban, regional and country electorates.
Mr Roskam said 90 per cent of Nationals MPs were probably sceptics too. A spokesman for Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce didn't respond to a request for comment.
Some of Mr Turnbull's conservative critics cite his belief in global warming as evidence he is too left-wing for the Liberal Party.
"[I had] a long discussion I had with Turnbull on climate policy many years ago in which he dismissed my view that human activity had not caused global warming and refused to examine several highly questionable aspects of the dangerous warming thesis," Melbourne conservative Des Moore wrote in an email newsletter three weeks ago.

Internal split
The split within the Liberal Party is illustrated by its own think tank, the Menzies Research Centre. Executive director Nick Cater is a climate sceptic and vociferous critic of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body established to provide an objective assessment of global warming.
"The IPCC is a serial embellisher," Mr Cater wrote in The Spectator in 2015. "It never passes by a chance to inflate, embroider or lay it on thick.
"In such a climate of uncertainty, scepticism is the only rational response."
The think tank got a new chairman last month, businessman Kevin McCann. As a chairman of Origin Energy he backed the introduction of a carbon pollution reduction system under the Rudd Labor government, a push that failed.
"We support the policy decision that an emissions trading scheme is to be at the heart of the Government's plans and that a trading scheme is the best mechanism to move to a low-carbon future," Mr McCann said in 2008.
Asked for the think tank's current position on climate change, Mr Cater replied in an email: "Should we have one?"

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