There is an abundance of sources on the Web on climate change.
I shall post a selection later today. A good one is Jay Hanson's website:
http://www.dieoff.org/page1.htm
(he has around 200 pages). A similar debate is going on at Pen-L
where the subject of tradable emissions permits is being debated. I am
therefore posting this to Pen-L too. I am strongly of the opinion that
'tradable permits' is not just a corporate scam or a way of getting
the US off the greenhouse hook by 'selling' its pollution 'rights' to
countries like Russia which has now experienced the 'benefits' of becoming
a wholly post-industrial society. There is a moral issue: creating
markets out of pollution, especially planet-wrecking greenhouse emissions,
is intrinsically wrong. I have the same feeling about the 'valuing natural
capital' theoreticians. Putting a price on nature is not going to save it.
It is just another way of eternising (or anyway, giving another lease of
life to) capitalism. It is capitalism that is the problem.
There has been a very full debate on the issues, focussing on the hard
science, on Marxism-International, and prompted by the presence on the
list of Living Marxism supporters. LM are global-warming denialists,
fond of quoting the likes of Fred Singer and other eco-nihilists.
I very much appreciated Adam Webb's posting 'Misunderstanding the
enemy'. World capitalism as a social order is buttressed by large masses
of what used to be called the petty-bourgeoisie, and by a metropolitan
proletariat which is both cowed and corrupted. These are decisive facts
of the era. It is simply useless to suppose that some kind of educative
process is going to change these people; it is not. In any case, the
education is all in the opposite direction. Large numbers of people in
these social groups actually consider themselves to be Greens, but they
have no conception of what the issues involved really are, and will go into
denial when they do begin to understand. Because it is simply useless to
imagine that 'sustainability' is an option. What has happened to Russia
must happen throughout the west, ie, industrial capitalism must be
destroyed. Perverse as it seems, only major socio-economic collapse can
save the planet now. It's that simple.
As Peter Grimes properly says, the fate of the planet has
very possibly already been decided by changes to the ocean conveyor,
which are likely to trigger self-amplifying feedback mechanisms so that
even if we don't get runaway warming (which is more possible than many
suppose) we are still likely to have wrecked the climate ireversibly in
other ways. I shall post more data on these issues, and I thank Peter
and Tom for raising it now.
When climatologists began to home in on the the fact that global warming
will manifest itself chiefly in the form of intensified and more exteme
weather events, making it necessary to construct regional as well as
global climate models, understanding of the whole issue and the dangers
global warming presents moved on a notch. But the downside to
this more refined understanding is that it has taken the focus away from
the longer-term but more dangerous effects of anthropogenic
climate-forcing on the world climate as a whole and the biosphere as a
whole.
In particular, this localising of focus has enabled the strategists of
capital to focus on the possibility of local, partial solutions (now
they've tacitly accepted that it will happen). And the greens, who lack
a coherent politics, are following in their footsteps. Greenpeace in
the UK at least is now firmly in bed with big corporate partners
like Shell, BP, Dow, ICI etc.
The first truly GLOBAL effect of global warming is not going to show up
in the climate, but in the aggravated and multiform crises which are now
already deepening the chaos and disarray into which whole regions are
sinking. The population of the earth has increased by one billion since
1982, and most of them live in ecologically-vulnerable regions, coastal
floodplains and the like.
War or revolution? Disease, famine, or militant, disciplined socialism,
fought for in the form of peoples' wars and popular risings? Organising
the masses and seizing state power in the disintegrating peripheries, or
succumbing to US fascism? Those are the issues.
The metaphor of the frog boiling is a common one, and it has a social
as well as ecological significance. The triumphalism of hurrah-
capitalism is tinged with despair. Who now even remembers the optimism
surrounding decolonialisation and development of half a century ago?
Then the air was full of talk about the Non-aligned movement,
development in the ex-colonies and the like. It is hard to recall the
atmosphere in the UK of optimism (as well as pain among imperial
sentimentalists), that attended decolonisation when almost every week
the queen watched the flag come down for the last time over some new
corner of empire.
Post-independence leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah had vast and
plausible plans for economic progress; they echoed the Bolshevik dreams
of economic progress in Russia. Everywhere and without exception those
dreams have turned into contemporary nightmares and the life-chances of
the multimillioned masses in the peripheries have been destroyed by the
rapacity of the metropoles.
But the underlying reason is the chronic secular under-production of
capital, and its material consequences: the inability to transform its
technical basis to overcome the limitations of the original,
hydrocarbon, non-renewal industrial model, that plus the grotesque
inflation of the reserve army.
The geophysiological limitations on this model
are what climate-warming is about and they put a final seal on any
hope that western living standards are attainable outside the west.
They are not, and are only sustained in the west itself by savage and
predatory forms of combined and unequal development.
Socialism on a world scale cannot bring with it the benefits
of industrialism. Depending on the scale of the next century's die-off
and the particular legacy left by capitalism, it will be barracks
socialism for decades, perhaps longer than a century, until the world
population falls to a sustainable level.
That's what you get when you eat the seed-corn.
Even China is no exception to looming crisis: development is as
chimerical as the neon signs over Shanghai, as the next downturn will
prove.
Industrialisation, affluence, consumer goods, large public health and
education programmes: all are fanciful dreams become cruel jokes at the
expense of two-thirds of the world's people.
Only socialist planning on a global scale, organised through the
dictatorship of the proletariat, can provide solutions and then only in
the context of a massive and fundamental redistribution of resources,
and an irresistible historical tidal wave pushing post-capitalism
towards sustainable social systems. That, as I say, seems inconceivable
short of major breaches in the world system and the engulfing immiseration
of large tracts of the metropolitan working class, in short a calamity
worse than either world war. Yet such a calamity is not only likely, it
seems inevitable, as Wallerstein says.
This is where Julian Simon may not end up the
clear winner in his famous bet. Even the most persistent and pernicious
deflationary policy, pursued on a world scale without regard for the
devastating consequences to peripheries, cannot compensate for impending
absolute energy shortages resulting in a permanent militarisation by the
US of the Gulf and the Caspian, with almost incalculable internal
political consequences in the metropoles and the mid-East, leaving aside
the real risk of a general war with China and its Islamic allies.
In any event enormous efforts (which are highly likely to be too late,
because like it or not the damage is already done) will be needed to
restore the radical global environmental disequilibria - for example,
attempting to correct the changes in the deep ocean circulation,
organising the sequestration of carbon, etc.
Perhaps we shall need exotic, heroic measures indicative of last-resort
desperation, such as spreading reflective kevlar screens in earth orbit
to keep the sun off and help stop the ice-caps melting and the trapped
methane hydrates from releasing enough methane to trigger runaway
warming -- these are the kinds of things which only a world socialist
state can mobilise the resources of a post-national, global human
society for.
Mark