As I made clear in a recent post, I am not in favor of "degrowth." The benefits of modernity have been vast, the world remains a place where most people need more rather than less in the way of material comfort, and if anything, we will need more wealth and technology, not less, in order to combat and reverse climate change, along with our other problems, environmental and otherwise.
None of this, however, is to deny that there is much that we would be better off without. I am well aware that our diets are not so healthy for us (let alone the planet) as they might be. I am not convinced that personal transport has no part to play in our future, but there is much that is wrong with our car culture, our consumer culture, our advertising culture.
However, I find myself remembering Uncle Ben's famous words to Peter Parker: "With great power, comes great responsibility."
That piece of wisdom is, I think, indisputable--but society lives by the opposite principle, each and every day, in each and every way. Those who have all the power declaim responsibility for anything; while those who have no power are held responsible for everything. White collar criminality on a global, genuinely supervillain scale is shrugged off, while a bank teller who cannot account for a five-dollar bill finds her low-paying job at risk, and very possibly her life destroyed.
Thus does it go with neoliberal environmentalists. They condemn the environmental impact of animal product consumption--rather than the producers of these goods, who have taken so little interest in alleviating or eliminating that impact (let alone thinking of the stressful lives that drive them to stress eat so much of them, generally chosen for them by those who set the terms of work and the mechanisms of support for the disadvantaged, people far richer and more powerful than they). They condemn motorists for driving gas-guzzling cars--rather than condemning the business interests that fight against sane urban planning and the provision of walkable cities and decent public transport, while on top of that, holding back alternatives to the internal combustion engine and insisting on selling more and more vehicle per consumer. They condemn consumers for shopping so much--rather than condemning the corporations that opt for built-in obsolescence and throwaway goods rather than their refusal to produce durable, low-maintenance goods that non-specialists can cost-effectively repair themselves. Condemn consumers for responding to pointless product differentiation, advertising and the innumerable pressures business places on them to buy new goods when the old ones are still working--rather than the businesses that engage in those practices.
At every point, they condemn those who had the least say in the matter for their choices--while letting those who had far, far more say off the hook. I have discussed where this comes from in the past enough times and in enough ways to feel no need to enlarge on it here, but I do not think the essential point can be overstated enough. What we need is not to deprive the millions and billions of comfort and choice, but rather to give them real choices--the choice of more leisure rather than more things, the choice of a walk or transit instead of a car, the choice to not keep buying throwaway items--while taking sustainability into account when determining the production methods by how which industry meet their needs, as they and not an elite telling them "You don't need that!" in the tone haves have always used with have-nots, determine them.
Saturday, April 13, 2019
The Moral Equivalent of War
Originally posted at RARITANIA on July 17, 2013.
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter declared the energy crisis the "'moral equivalent of war'--except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy."
This seems a plausible outlook given the sheer scale of the task of moving beyond fossil fuels, and the broader ecological crisis more generally. Yet this challenge has consistently failed to draw forth such an intensity of response--or anything close to it--among either the public, or its "leaders." Hurricane Katrina, which left some eight thousand dead and missing, evoked no analogies with Pearl Harbor in the press--and nor did the more recent Hurricane Sandy.
One does not have to search very far to find explanations for the gap between such rhetoric, and what actually followed it. There is, for instance, the character of the problem, a process apprehended only with the capacity to connect numerous manifestations with a vast, complex process unfolding over decades and centuries, and doing so largely outside the view of the comfortable--such that there is room (however minute or rapidly shrinking) for doubt about its even existing at all. As the bombs fell on London during the Blitz, no one doubted that Britain was at war. But watching hurricanes careen like pinballs about the Gulf of Mexico, or ravage Manhattan twice in as many years, some still find it possible to dismiss such events as "weather" rather than evidence of climate change.
There is also something about a struggle with a human opponent, however simplistically given a human face and conceived as "evil" and made a socially sanctioned target for aggressive and hateful feelings that engages the passions in a way that other, more impersonal problems do not, least of all our environmental problems, which are far too complex to be convincingly presented as a simple tale of heroes and villains.1
And of course, the familiar reward of an epic battle against such a villain is absent. In modern times wars have been fought with the promise of a better life afterward--a world safe for democracy; a country fit for heroes; broad, sunlit uplands. (Even the "New World Order" of which Bush the First spoke after Cold War and Gulf War, while hardly on a level with the soaring rhetoric which gave the world the phrases listed above, reflected the tendency.) The "and then what?" of grappling with our environmental problems is far less clear than any of these. "Sustainability" may be the only sane principle for our relationship to the environment, but it leaves much to be desired as inspiration.2 And what some hold sustainability to require, learning to live on less, is certainly uninspiring, especially to the vast majority who have never had very much. One might in fact say that environmentalism has lacked a sense of the utopian (in that term's best sense).
And of course, there is the sheer "inconvenience" of the truth, meeting an ecological challenge less than congenial to innumerable vested interests. It is certainly the case that there are plenty of opportunities to make money in the course of rebuilding the world's energy base--but old, established, powerful parties would see accustomed activities changed or curtailed, and the short-term profits on which they focus to the exclusion of nearly all else threatened.
At any rate, such a response to the problem is a challenge to the premises of business in general given the implicit subordination of the forms of growth business values (of firms, of incomes, of markets), and the autonomy and prestige it enjoys now as in few other eras, to other goods and imperatives. It is worth remembering, too, that growth has long been a solvent for social tensions, one which has not been perfectly satisfactory but nonetheless effective to a considerable degree (even as it has become increasingly illusory), and that the prospect of the disappearance, or even diminution, of that solvent can only raise fears about seeing those tensions intensify.
Naturally there is not only resistance to acceptance of the problem's existence, but active effort on the part of powerful groups to obfuscate it, to minimize it, to trivialize it--something all the easier to do given the issue's ambiguities. And so in the end we have wound up in a position where there is widespread anxiety about the prevailing state of affairs, but the expectation of meaningful action on the problem all too often seems like wishful thinking.
1. Of course, that is not to deny the culpability of vested interests and the responsibility of numerous personally powerful individuals in causing avoidable damage and thwarting efforts to solve the problem. As C. Wright Mills observed, the idea that "we all possess equal powers to make history . . . is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility." Yet the problem deeply involves a whole way of thinking about the world, and a whole system for dealing with it, far bigger than any one individual.
2. Economist Herman Daly defined sustainable use as one's not consuming a resource at a greater rate than that that at which it might be renewed (in the case of renewables); substitutes found for it, which would themselves be subject to that same consumption standard (in the case of nonrenewables); or "recycled, absorbed or rendered harmless" (in the case of pollutants). See Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), p. 54.
Why I Do Not Support "Degrowth"
The idea of "degrowth" has never sat well with me--and it increasingly astonishes me that people who think of themselves as "progressives" can have ever espoused it. The simple reality is that, however little a good many patterns of production and consumption contribute to human well-being or happiness (and indeed, however repugnant we may find aspects of contemporary culture), by and large, a life in which we have more has really been a life in which we live better than we would otherwise do.
No reasonable person comparing the way we live now to the toil, want, dirt, ignorance, violence, insecurity, ill health, mortality of pre-industrial times--when parents buried the great majority of their children long before they reached adulthood--can possibly think the old days were "good old days." No reasonable person considering the world as it is now, with a billion people not having enough to eat, and many billions more lacking adequate shelter, education, medical treatment, and other necessities as a world where the biggest and most common problem is that people have too much. (The billionaires, who number two thousand on a world approaching eight billion, are not the standard here, nor the tiny minority of McMansion-dwelling, SUV-driving bourgeois, and anyone who thinks so only shows how far removed they are from any kind of social reality, and have not earned the right to speak of these matters at all.)
Far from wanting to revert to the harsher conditions of pre-industrial life, what we should want is to extend the benefits of modernity to all, broadly speaking, and deepen them for everyone. A world where everyone has their needs met, and indeed, can think beyond merely meeting need--because, after all, the realm of freedom lies only beyond that of necessity.
Of course, we are living through an ecological crisis, at the root of which is the Industrial Revolution's geometrical intensification of our consumption of our world's finite natural resources, which has reached grossly unsustainable proportions, and as things are, seems likely to get only worse as we suffer the problem's increasingly severe effects. All of that seems to moot the hope of that more prosperous, more comfortable word--until one considers the last, critical part of that preceding sentence "as things are." Why could things not be otherwise? We have technology. We have social knowledge as well. Between the two we could come up with solutions. Yet it is commonplace for writers on these subjects to treat them as if they offer no hope whatsoever.
Is this view based on a thorough assessment of our technological and organizational potentials?
This does not generally seem to be the case--those potentials just about never discussed. It seems to me that the "cowspiracy" crowd is exemplary of the tendency. They make claims (and highly disputable ones at that) about the contribution of livestock- and especially cattle-raising to the very real problem of climate change--and insist that people must give up animal products, rather than asking whether those products can be produced in more sustainable ways. A recent study, for instance, suggests that the addition of a small amount of seaweed to cow feed can virtually eliminate cows' methane emissions, while cellular agriculture raises the prospect of having beef without cows entirely, with even more impressive results--but all of this is commonly ignored in discussion of these matters (as the Cowspiracy missionaries endlessly demonstrate).
To the extent that such possibilities do enter the dialogue, there is a tendency to consider them in the most negative possible terms--as in one BBC report baldly asserting in its title that "Cultured Meat May Make Climate Change Worse." An examination of the article, however, shows that it simply compared estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from cattle to those they projected from the production process required for "alt-meat"--and that the "may" here rested on an understanding of the situation that I will summarize as follows:
It does not.
One might also point out that besides the direct output of emissions from the production process there are other factors worth considering, not least the implications of cultured meat for land use. Presently over a quarter of the world's ice-free land area is utilized for grazing. Eliminating that use would create enormous potential for, for example, reforestation efforts that could do a great deal to offset our greenhouse gas emissions. Does this come up? No. The article instead acknowledges in the abstract that numerous other environmental factors would have to be considered in a proper appraisal of the environmental impact of the two possibilities, but offers as its only specific example a negative one, namely cultured meat's possible production "of organic or chemical molecule residues" in waste water (apparently considered in isolation from how this stacks up against the considerable water pollution resulting from today's industrial farming).
Taken altogether the piece looks like an exercise in bad science and technology reporting (in which it often seems we are drowning) that can come off as all but intended to quash the hopes reports about the technology may have raised. Were such exercises a rarity I would not take it as significant, but it seems to me that such pieces are quite commonplace, and highly influential, while they raise the question--Why should such a tendency be so widespread?
Alas, at this point we must consider a bit of political history. Optimism about what we can do with technology and organization is the legacy of the Enlightenment, and its argument for the potentials of human reason to understand and master the world. This has taken two forms--the liberal, and the radical, in the classical sense of these terms. The "liberal" conception, exemplified today by Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism, holds that technology will, in a society at least minimally consistent with its ideals of secure property rights and broad latitude for business, automatically make the world a better place. The "radical" conception (which not so long ago did not look so radical) thinks it will take some help from politics--at the very least, a social system where societal decisions are not all based on the individual short-term interest of the rich as they try to get richer and to hell with everything else.
The liberal conception, already looking questionable in the nineteenth century, looks very threadbare today, not just in its results but in its intellectual premises (TANSTAAFM, after all), while the radical conception has been thoroughly persecuted, and marginalized for decades. The resulting vacuum has been filled by ideas that were already reactionary in Victorian times--Malthusianism, Luddism, and the rest--which hardly make them likely to try and seek out those who can picture a different and happier kind of modernity, or "reinvent the wheel" to envision such possibilities on their own.
And so they feel themselves faced with a choice between believing in Silicon Valley's promises of broad sunlit uplands of super-modernity if the billionaires are allowed to continue calling all the shots, which seem none too convincing, or try to picture us not being modern at all, which means going back to what existed before the modern, more or less ("postmodern" all too often meaning "premodern"). Rather than trying to reengineer large, modern systems, they try and picture life without large, modern systems. Trade that car for a bike! Eat beans instead of something you would actually like (especially at the end of that exhausting bike ride)! Let us have composting communal toilets and just one square of toilet paper per visit! Use local currency! And so on and so forth.
Almost at once one anyone alert to the scale of the problem is struck by strain, by desperation, in such pronouncements--such as there always is when someone is trying to make much less suddenly go round, especially when the cost of everything is rising sharply. When we take the approach and its implications as a whole, globally, it appears probable that those who have little will have still less as the world's population continues to rise from seven and a half to ten billion as the climate change already locked in and unchallengeable by anything but large organizations and new technology drives billions of them from their home and rising seas and hotter summers and more extreme weather events wreak havoc with their ability to feed themselves with current methods, let alone the less productive, localist, "organic" kind so beloved by the degrowth crowd. Some, generally the poorest and weakest, will suffer more than others, in cases much more--and it is only the most simple-mindedly secure and entitled who imagine that they will passively starve to death rather than fight to survive. Can anyone imagine that our living in the thermonuclear age would be totally irrelevant in such a scenario?
Never mind the long-term flourishing of the human species and the planet on which we live. This won't get us through the short term, let alone the long, that older spectre of war getting us before the environmental catastrophe does. Fortunately I am unconvinced that the bright-sided optimism of the techno-libertarians and degrowth are the only two choices. In fact, everything I have learned looking at society, history, the technical potentials available to us, and the severity of the crisis at hand (there has already been too much damage to the environment for anyone to take seriously the hope that just doing less will save us), convinces me otherwise--and that it is only the third choice that not only holds out the hope of a world worth living in, but any hope of survival at all.
No reasonable person comparing the way we live now to the toil, want, dirt, ignorance, violence, insecurity, ill health, mortality of pre-industrial times--when parents buried the great majority of their children long before they reached adulthood--can possibly think the old days were "good old days." No reasonable person considering the world as it is now, with a billion people not having enough to eat, and many billions more lacking adequate shelter, education, medical treatment, and other necessities as a world where the biggest and most common problem is that people have too much. (The billionaires, who number two thousand on a world approaching eight billion, are not the standard here, nor the tiny minority of McMansion-dwelling, SUV-driving bourgeois, and anyone who thinks so only shows how far removed they are from any kind of social reality, and have not earned the right to speak of these matters at all.)
Far from wanting to revert to the harsher conditions of pre-industrial life, what we should want is to extend the benefits of modernity to all, broadly speaking, and deepen them for everyone. A world where everyone has their needs met, and indeed, can think beyond merely meeting need--because, after all, the realm of freedom lies only beyond that of necessity.
Of course, we are living through an ecological crisis, at the root of which is the Industrial Revolution's geometrical intensification of our consumption of our world's finite natural resources, which has reached grossly unsustainable proportions, and as things are, seems likely to get only worse as we suffer the problem's increasingly severe effects. All of that seems to moot the hope of that more prosperous, more comfortable word--until one considers the last, critical part of that preceding sentence "as things are." Why could things not be otherwise? We have technology. We have social knowledge as well. Between the two we could come up with solutions. Yet it is commonplace for writers on these subjects to treat them as if they offer no hope whatsoever.
Is this view based on a thorough assessment of our technological and organizational potentials?
This does not generally seem to be the case--those potentials just about never discussed. It seems to me that the "cowspiracy" crowd is exemplary of the tendency. They make claims (and highly disputable ones at that) about the contribution of livestock- and especially cattle-raising to the very real problem of climate change--and insist that people must give up animal products, rather than asking whether those products can be produced in more sustainable ways. A recent study, for instance, suggests that the addition of a small amount of seaweed to cow feed can virtually eliminate cows' methane emissions, while cellular agriculture raises the prospect of having beef without cows entirely, with even more impressive results--but all of this is commonly ignored in discussion of these matters (as the Cowspiracy missionaries endlessly demonstrate).
To the extent that such possibilities do enter the dialogue, there is a tendency to consider them in the most negative possible terms--as in one BBC report baldly asserting in its title that "Cultured Meat May Make Climate Change Worse." An examination of the article, however, shows that it simply compared estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from cattle to those they projected from the production process required for "alt-meat"--and that the "may" here rested on an understanding of the situation that I will summarize as follows:
Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it cycles out of the atmosphere more rapidly. A shift to cultured meat would eliminate the methane emissions, but mean more carbon emissions because of the industrial process. While having less warming effect, their lingering longer in the atmosphere would mean an accumulation over time that could make the larger contribution to the climate change we want to avoid.That long-run carbon emissions from cultured meat production may offset the benefits gained from the reduction in methane emissions is a more nuanced, qualified, claim than the title seems to me to imply (it did say "may," but I suspect that for most this was secondary to the "make climate change worse"), and the piece's problems do not stop there. Why, for example, should it be the case that cultured meat would mean more carbon emissions? The piece is rather vague on this point. The most that I can say is that it seemed to assume that the cultured meat production process would rely on fossil fuels. However we are in a world beginning to move away from such sources, a movement that anyone slightly concerned for the environment hopes can and will be quickened. One would expect our powering the process through renewables (or nuclear energy) to make a difference. Does the article mention this?
It does not.
One might also point out that besides the direct output of emissions from the production process there are other factors worth considering, not least the implications of cultured meat for land use. Presently over a quarter of the world's ice-free land area is utilized for grazing. Eliminating that use would create enormous potential for, for example, reforestation efforts that could do a great deal to offset our greenhouse gas emissions. Does this come up? No. The article instead acknowledges in the abstract that numerous other environmental factors would have to be considered in a proper appraisal of the environmental impact of the two possibilities, but offers as its only specific example a negative one, namely cultured meat's possible production "of organic or chemical molecule residues" in waste water (apparently considered in isolation from how this stacks up against the considerable water pollution resulting from today's industrial farming).
Taken altogether the piece looks like an exercise in bad science and technology reporting (in which it often seems we are drowning) that can come off as all but intended to quash the hopes reports about the technology may have raised. Were such exercises a rarity I would not take it as significant, but it seems to me that such pieces are quite commonplace, and highly influential, while they raise the question--Why should such a tendency be so widespread?
Alas, at this point we must consider a bit of political history. Optimism about what we can do with technology and organization is the legacy of the Enlightenment, and its argument for the potentials of human reason to understand and master the world. This has taken two forms--the liberal, and the radical, in the classical sense of these terms. The "liberal" conception, exemplified today by Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism, holds that technology will, in a society at least minimally consistent with its ideals of secure property rights and broad latitude for business, automatically make the world a better place. The "radical" conception (which not so long ago did not look so radical) thinks it will take some help from politics--at the very least, a social system where societal decisions are not all based on the individual short-term interest of the rich as they try to get richer and to hell with everything else.
The liberal conception, already looking questionable in the nineteenth century, looks very threadbare today, not just in its results but in its intellectual premises (TANSTAAFM, after all), while the radical conception has been thoroughly persecuted, and marginalized for decades. The resulting vacuum has been filled by ideas that were already reactionary in Victorian times--Malthusianism, Luddism, and the rest--which hardly make them likely to try and seek out those who can picture a different and happier kind of modernity, or "reinvent the wheel" to envision such possibilities on their own.
And so they feel themselves faced with a choice between believing in Silicon Valley's promises of broad sunlit uplands of super-modernity if the billionaires are allowed to continue calling all the shots, which seem none too convincing, or try to picture us not being modern at all, which means going back to what existed before the modern, more or less ("postmodern" all too often meaning "premodern"). Rather than trying to reengineer large, modern systems, they try and picture life without large, modern systems. Trade that car for a bike! Eat beans instead of something you would actually like (especially at the end of that exhausting bike ride)! Let us have composting communal toilets and just one square of toilet paper per visit! Use local currency! And so on and so forth.
Almost at once one anyone alert to the scale of the problem is struck by strain, by desperation, in such pronouncements--such as there always is when someone is trying to make much less suddenly go round, especially when the cost of everything is rising sharply. When we take the approach and its implications as a whole, globally, it appears probable that those who have little will have still less as the world's population continues to rise from seven and a half to ten billion as the climate change already locked in and unchallengeable by anything but large organizations and new technology drives billions of them from their home and rising seas and hotter summers and more extreme weather events wreak havoc with their ability to feed themselves with current methods, let alone the less productive, localist, "organic" kind so beloved by the degrowth crowd. Some, generally the poorest and weakest, will suffer more than others, in cases much more--and it is only the most simple-mindedly secure and entitled who imagine that they will passively starve to death rather than fight to survive. Can anyone imagine that our living in the thermonuclear age would be totally irrelevant in such a scenario?
Never mind the long-term flourishing of the human species and the planet on which we live. This won't get us through the short term, let alone the long, that older spectre of war getting us before the environmental catastrophe does. Fortunately I am unconvinced that the bright-sided optimism of the techno-libertarians and degrowth are the only two choices. In fact, everything I have learned looking at society, history, the technical potentials available to us, and the severity of the crisis at hand (there has already been too much damage to the environment for anyone to take seriously the hope that just doing less will save us), convinces me otherwise--and that it is only the third choice that not only holds out the hope of a world worth living in, but any hope of survival at all.
The Dark Roots of Neoliberal Environmentalism
I recently took up the issue of neoliberal environmentalism in a post on this blog (and other places, like a recent book review for Strange Horizons). Central to the discussion has been the way in which environmentalism, emergent in the neoliberal era, accommodated itself to neoliberal thinking, shrinking from even mild reformism of capitalism in favor of a fixation on individual conduct and "market"-friendly solutions that can be nicely summed up as "agonize over your carbon footprint while the corporations actually responsible for climate change (a mere hundred of them account for 71 percent of emissions) do what they want" (and the same going for every other environmental problem as well).
Still, one must acknowledge that this was not merely a matter of deference to orthodox economic ideas on the part of environmentalists in an era generally uncongenial for progressive politics, but also a matter of the ideas on which many environmentalists have elected to build their movement. There is the Malthusianism that began with its namesake's attack on provision for the poor and the possibility of alternative to capitalism on behalf of tax-hating property owners, and which has ever since continued to fulfill the same purposes in other hands (like Jack Goldstone's writings). There is the "localist" and "small-is-beautiful" ethic that is nothing so much as a petit bourgeois fear and hatred of modern scale--the attitude not of the working person, but the small business owner who incessantly talks rugged individualism but really thinks the world owes them prosperity. And there is the suspicion of technology and deep social critique (Luddism, disbelief in "grand narratives"), and outright misanthropy, that at a glance is recognizably derived from the darkest and most brutal of the counter-Enlightenment tradition (think the inanities of wannabe Nazi court philosopher Martin Heiddeger) by way of the ultra-reactionary force that has been postmodernism.
The receptiveness to such ideas seems enhanced by a host of unfortunate proclivities that I do not think can be called "ideas" per se, and certainly not ideas about the environment, society or anything else. One is, to borrow Emmanuel Todd's term, a "zombie religiosity" to which the wearing of hairshirts, not least environmental hairshirts, appeals (especially if they are the kind to be more concerned with expiating a sense of personal guilt with gestures than actually addressing a problem). There is the detestation of "consumerism" and modern convenience that is largely a matter of the distaste the affluent have for the consumption choices of those less well-off than themselves, whom they choose not to understand and for whom they have, in the end, little to no sympathy, so that they readily begrudge them any and all comfort and pleasure and choice. This often goes hand in hand with the light-mindedness that thinks a reversion to pre-industrial life will be like one long camping trip and wouldn't that be fun!--or the blend of simple-mindedness and selfishness that takes it for granted that the sacrifices will be borne by others while they somehow go on being comfortable in some oasis of modern convenience. (They will keep their McMansions, SUVs and cell phones, but those Third Worlders--tough luck.)
And, quite frankly, there are those who seem to have an appetite for what Leigh Phillips terms "collapse-porn," with James Howard Kunstler exemplary in his having a "veritable hard-on for the end of the world, imagining with relish the coming Peak Oil collapse, a retreat from modernity, and an embrace of the Medieval."
Say what one might about judging ideas by their sources, these are profoundly unpromising sources of or premises for a meaningful solution to any large problem, let alone the one we face now, and I often find myself wondering if the publicity accorded these ideas does not in itself reflect their awfulness. Neoliberal environmentalism is not a perfect fit with the other kinds, one reason why right-wingers' denunciation of even this kind of environmentalism is deep and genuine. However, it not only diverts the public from other, more threatening approaches, but it also looks deeply unappealing itself. Given the choice between neoliberalism, and its techno-utopian PR, and Kunstler, and only these, a great many people, even those well-aware of our predicament, and alert to the failings of the techno-utopian view, will hope that the techno-utopians are right and things will just somehow work out in the end.
Still, one must acknowledge that this was not merely a matter of deference to orthodox economic ideas on the part of environmentalists in an era generally uncongenial for progressive politics, but also a matter of the ideas on which many environmentalists have elected to build their movement. There is the Malthusianism that began with its namesake's attack on provision for the poor and the possibility of alternative to capitalism on behalf of tax-hating property owners, and which has ever since continued to fulfill the same purposes in other hands (like Jack Goldstone's writings). There is the "localist" and "small-is-beautiful" ethic that is nothing so much as a petit bourgeois fear and hatred of modern scale--the attitude not of the working person, but the small business owner who incessantly talks rugged individualism but really thinks the world owes them prosperity. And there is the suspicion of technology and deep social critique (Luddism, disbelief in "grand narratives"), and outright misanthropy, that at a glance is recognizably derived from the darkest and most brutal of the counter-Enlightenment tradition (think the inanities of wannabe Nazi court philosopher Martin Heiddeger) by way of the ultra-reactionary force that has been postmodernism.
The receptiveness to such ideas seems enhanced by a host of unfortunate proclivities that I do not think can be called "ideas" per se, and certainly not ideas about the environment, society or anything else. One is, to borrow Emmanuel Todd's term, a "zombie religiosity" to which the wearing of hairshirts, not least environmental hairshirts, appeals (especially if they are the kind to be more concerned with expiating a sense of personal guilt with gestures than actually addressing a problem). There is the detestation of "consumerism" and modern convenience that is largely a matter of the distaste the affluent have for the consumption choices of those less well-off than themselves, whom they choose not to understand and for whom they have, in the end, little to no sympathy, so that they readily begrudge them any and all comfort and pleasure and choice. This often goes hand in hand with the light-mindedness that thinks a reversion to pre-industrial life will be like one long camping trip and wouldn't that be fun!--or the blend of simple-mindedness and selfishness that takes it for granted that the sacrifices will be borne by others while they somehow go on being comfortable in some oasis of modern convenience. (They will keep their McMansions, SUVs and cell phones, but those Third Worlders--tough luck.)
And, quite frankly, there are those who seem to have an appetite for what Leigh Phillips terms "collapse-porn," with James Howard Kunstler exemplary in his having a "veritable hard-on for the end of the world, imagining with relish the coming Peak Oil collapse, a retreat from modernity, and an embrace of the Medieval."
Say what one might about judging ideas by their sources, these are profoundly unpromising sources of or premises for a meaningful solution to any large problem, let alone the one we face now, and I often find myself wondering if the publicity accorded these ideas does not in itself reflect their awfulness. Neoliberal environmentalism is not a perfect fit with the other kinds, one reason why right-wingers' denunciation of even this kind of environmentalism is deep and genuine. However, it not only diverts the public from other, more threatening approaches, but it also looks deeply unappealing itself. Given the choice between neoliberalism, and its techno-utopian PR, and Kunstler, and only these, a great many people, even those well-aware of our predicament, and alert to the failings of the techno-utopian view, will hope that the techno-utopians are right and things will just somehow work out in the end.
Friday, April 12, 2019
What Might a Green New Deal Involve? Additional Notes
Previously I raised the issue of what a Green New Deal might look like--the scale on which it might work, the speed with which it might attain its goals, and the manner in which it might be resourced. Today I am writing about the principles to which such a plan might adhere. I would argue that there are four.
1. Scale.
As previously discussed here, climate change is a colossal challenge that, in light of its severity, profundity and pace, demands a colossal response. Such challenges quite naturally lead Americans to historical analogy with World War II. A look at the production effort seen in World War II (what it suggests about how rapidly the U.S. could rebuild its infrastructure, industrial plant, and other systems) suggests that it is a logical starting point for such consideration. The reality is that the circumstances in which a Green New Deal would be carried out would be far more congenial, not least because of the greatly increased productivity of modern industry, and one can well imagine that as a result even a total, short-order rebuild needed to, for example,w reduce emissions by 2030 to a small fraction of present levels, and perhaps establish a negative-emissions program, might actually be considerably cheaper than waging and winning that conflict (in relative terms). Still, any Green New Deal worthy of the name would be massive in scale, enough so that I would expect a commitment of at least a double-digit percentage of GDP for a period.
2. Global Thinking.
Massive as the program would be relative to the budget and the economy the U.S. is only one country, one economy, accounting for only a fraction of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. An American Green New Deal cannot be expected to save the world by itself. Other countries will have to do their part. A U.S. Green New Deal should encourage others to do the same, and where possible, help them to do so, while at the same time benefiting from the benefits of other countries' own efforts--like such technologies as they develop. The result is that while an American Green New Deal cannot be made contingent on other countries' conduct, it should be backed by a diplomatic effort aimed at bringing about, if not a Global Green New Deal, then many other Green New Deals (Chinese and European and the rest), while being attentive to others' progress in the same area, and providing such foreign aid as is affordable to the developing nations accounting for a rising proportion of global emissions.
3. Pragmatism.
Carrying out such an unprecedented program will necessarily mean doing "what the job takes," even where this may seem unpalatable. Previously I noted the World War II effort's massive remaking of America's plant, power grid and other physical capital. It is worth remembering that of the massive construction of plant during World War II, close to two-thirds was government-built and government-owned, because that seemed in the circumstances the only way to get so much built so quickly, with the achievements of the "arsenal of democracy" ultimately validating this logic (not least, when compared with the more market-oriented, slower mobilization of World War I).
In short, the power of government to solve problems was utilized to a very great degree in these years, because nothing else would serve. So does it appear to be the case again when we consider climate change--with the idea of major government action in regard to the energy base in particular less unprecedented than it may seem. The Federal government has in the past owned a significant share of America's electrical generation and distribution, with the Tennessee Valley Authority only the most famous instance, and it has proven competent to run it--along with a good deal of other energy-related infrastructure (whether nuclear fuel production, the armed forces' massive utility infrastructure, oil production at Naval Petroleum reserves, and everything else), the partial privatization of which was a matter of ideology, not necessity. The decisions were questionable at the time, but what matters most now is that neoliberal pieties such as the superiority of the private to the public in all things, or the worship of balanced budgets as an idol besides which one shall have no others (which, alas, neoliberal Republicans have been the most contemptuous of in practice), have not only been shown up as wrong time and time again, but have no place in a serious effort to resolve the problem at hand.
4. Equity.
One of the greatest weaknesses of the modern environmental movement, emergent as it was in a neoliberal era, has been its lack of concern for power, social class, equity. As the situation stands, after half a century of neoliberalism the poor have done all the sacrificing--while the rich have pocketed what was taken from them, as the growth in the size of their yachts shows.* Attempting to redress climate change in this manner, as the government of Emmannuel Macron so stupidly did, is not only morally repugnant, but bad politics at a moment when long-battered working people are beginning to assert themselves. Concern for equity--for protecting society's poorest and weakest, and to the extent possible in the circumstances, actually uplifting them--must be part of the plan. Indeed, it is promised in the very name of a proposal recalling what, for all its failures and limitations, was far and away the single greatest attempt of government in the United States to act on behalf of the people in the wake of capitalism's most dramatic failure--the Green New Deal.
So there you have it. A Green New Deal must be of a scale appropriate to the problem, which ultimately means that it must not only be a massive initiative by U.S. standards, but also part of a global solution. It must be pragmatic, with this pragmatism demonstrated by a readiness to do what the situation demands, rather than what neoliberal shills and their owners think pleasant. And it must be equitable, not only for the sake of that principle, but the aforementioned need to be pragmatic as well. Any plan that fails to meet even of these criteria is sorely incomplete. Any plan that fails to meet all of them is unworthy of being called a plan at all. As always, be watchful, be skeptical, and DO NOT be impressed by compromised mediocrities who will lecture you on the "art of the possible" or bully you with sanctimonious, contemptuous, let-them-eat cake drivel about your "wanting a pony" while unapologetically heading off to Goldman Sachs to take more money for one speech than the median American household will see in a decade.
*In the '80s the Trump Princess was the world's biggest, and thought so extravagant the makers of the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again thought it worthy of being the base for a SPECTRE villain. The last time I checked there were seventy-five boats bigger than that, with the largest making it look a rowboat.
1. Scale.
As previously discussed here, climate change is a colossal challenge that, in light of its severity, profundity and pace, demands a colossal response. Such challenges quite naturally lead Americans to historical analogy with World War II. A look at the production effort seen in World War II (what it suggests about how rapidly the U.S. could rebuild its infrastructure, industrial plant, and other systems) suggests that it is a logical starting point for such consideration. The reality is that the circumstances in which a Green New Deal would be carried out would be far more congenial, not least because of the greatly increased productivity of modern industry, and one can well imagine that as a result even a total, short-order rebuild needed to, for example,w reduce emissions by 2030 to a small fraction of present levels, and perhaps establish a negative-emissions program, might actually be considerably cheaper than waging and winning that conflict (in relative terms). Still, any Green New Deal worthy of the name would be massive in scale, enough so that I would expect a commitment of at least a double-digit percentage of GDP for a period.
2. Global Thinking.
Massive as the program would be relative to the budget and the economy the U.S. is only one country, one economy, accounting for only a fraction of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. An American Green New Deal cannot be expected to save the world by itself. Other countries will have to do their part. A U.S. Green New Deal should encourage others to do the same, and where possible, help them to do so, while at the same time benefiting from the benefits of other countries' own efforts--like such technologies as they develop. The result is that while an American Green New Deal cannot be made contingent on other countries' conduct, it should be backed by a diplomatic effort aimed at bringing about, if not a Global Green New Deal, then many other Green New Deals (Chinese and European and the rest), while being attentive to others' progress in the same area, and providing such foreign aid as is affordable to the developing nations accounting for a rising proportion of global emissions.
3. Pragmatism.
Carrying out such an unprecedented program will necessarily mean doing "what the job takes," even where this may seem unpalatable. Previously I noted the World War II effort's massive remaking of America's plant, power grid and other physical capital. It is worth remembering that of the massive construction of plant during World War II, close to two-thirds was government-built and government-owned, because that seemed in the circumstances the only way to get so much built so quickly, with the achievements of the "arsenal of democracy" ultimately validating this logic (not least, when compared with the more market-oriented, slower mobilization of World War I).
In short, the power of government to solve problems was utilized to a very great degree in these years, because nothing else would serve. So does it appear to be the case again when we consider climate change--with the idea of major government action in regard to the energy base in particular less unprecedented than it may seem. The Federal government has in the past owned a significant share of America's electrical generation and distribution, with the Tennessee Valley Authority only the most famous instance, and it has proven competent to run it--along with a good deal of other energy-related infrastructure (whether nuclear fuel production, the armed forces' massive utility infrastructure, oil production at Naval Petroleum reserves, and everything else), the partial privatization of which was a matter of ideology, not necessity. The decisions were questionable at the time, but what matters most now is that neoliberal pieties such as the superiority of the private to the public in all things, or the worship of balanced budgets as an idol besides which one shall have no others (which, alas, neoliberal Republicans have been the most contemptuous of in practice), have not only been shown up as wrong time and time again, but have no place in a serious effort to resolve the problem at hand.
4. Equity.
One of the greatest weaknesses of the modern environmental movement, emergent as it was in a neoliberal era, has been its lack of concern for power, social class, equity. As the situation stands, after half a century of neoliberalism the poor have done all the sacrificing--while the rich have pocketed what was taken from them, as the growth in the size of their yachts shows.* Attempting to redress climate change in this manner, as the government of Emmannuel Macron so stupidly did, is not only morally repugnant, but bad politics at a moment when long-battered working people are beginning to assert themselves. Concern for equity--for protecting society's poorest and weakest, and to the extent possible in the circumstances, actually uplifting them--must be part of the plan. Indeed, it is promised in the very name of a proposal recalling what, for all its failures and limitations, was far and away the single greatest attempt of government in the United States to act on behalf of the people in the wake of capitalism's most dramatic failure--the Green New Deal.
So there you have it. A Green New Deal must be of a scale appropriate to the problem, which ultimately means that it must not only be a massive initiative by U.S. standards, but also part of a global solution. It must be pragmatic, with this pragmatism demonstrated by a readiness to do what the situation demands, rather than what neoliberal shills and their owners think pleasant. And it must be equitable, not only for the sake of that principle, but the aforementioned need to be pragmatic as well. Any plan that fails to meet even of these criteria is sorely incomplete. Any plan that fails to meet all of them is unworthy of being called a plan at all. As always, be watchful, be skeptical, and DO NOT be impressed by compromised mediocrities who will lecture you on the "art of the possible" or bully you with sanctimonious, contemptuous, let-them-eat cake drivel about your "wanting a pony" while unapologetically heading off to Goldman Sachs to take more money for one speech than the median American household will see in a decade.
*In the '80s the Trump Princess was the world's biggest, and thought so extravagant the makers of the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again thought it worthy of being the base for a SPECTRE villain. The last time I checked there were seventy-five boats bigger than that, with the largest making it look a rowboat.
What Might a Green New Deal Involve? A Few More Notes
Recently I presented two pieces offering some thoughts on what a Green New Deal might look like--the scale on which it might work, the speed with which it might attain its goals, the manner in which it might be resourced, and the principles to which it would adhere. They were not even the pretense of a complete plan, just notes.
Here are some additional notes, limited to mentioning four items that are not usually discussed as part of a Green New Deal, but which warrant some attention in any such planning process as objects for continued research, development, and ultimately deployment efforts alongside the more familiar matters of electrical transmission, energy efficiency, carbon offsets, etc..
1. Cellular Agriculture.
The massive, negative environmental impact of current methods of agriculture; the vulnerability of key croplands and grazing areas (generally along coasts and rivers) to inundation and salinization by encroaching seas, the disruption of key water resources, and extreme weather events endangering food production; the possible alternative uses of land in ways needed to stem the crisis, like reforestation for carbon capture; and the reality of a burgeoning world population--makes it highly desirable that we reduce our reliance on open-field agriculture, or even shift away from it altogether. A Green New Deal should accordingly invest in cellular agriculture, extending even beyond the replacement of livestock-raising through cultured meat (the current focus of such efforts), to the production of all needed foodstuffs.
2. Materials Science.
The most obvious example is carbon nanotube production, which is of particular interest because of the multiple ways in which it can contribute to the alleviation of the problem. The prospect of producing nanotubes from carbon captured from the air can tie in with broader direct air capture efforts, while helping resolve the problem of what we are to do with the recovered carbon. The production of carbon-based materials of this kind raises the possibility of substituting for other materials whose production entails high environmental costs (iron and steelmaking may account for almost a tenth of GHGs). And the production of vehicle bodies from those materials may enable weight reductions affording massive energy savings. (Picture cars more robust than those we have today weighing fifty pounds. How much more feasible would electric car production be then?)
3. Fourth-Generation Nuclear Energy.
In my view the ideal is the derivation of 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy sources, while the technology provides a basis for continued growth in production and consumption (especially if a higher premium is placed on easily realizable gains from energy efficiency). I also expect that this goal would be attainable with a properly backed, "moonshot"-type effort. Yet, it is far from proven that there will not be gaps, while in decarbonizing our energy production it will be impossible to ignore questions of speed and cost, with nuclear energy possibly offering at least a partial answer to those questions. Meanwhile, fourth-generation nuclear reactors hold out substantial promise of sharply reducing the problems and risks entailed in the use of the 1950s-era technology on which the nuclear power sector has continued to rely. While caution will be required, especially given the industry's unhealthy influence on the debate, appropriate consideration for the technology has its place in a Green New Deal.
4. Megastructure Construction.
It appears that in coping with climate change and its consequences, particularly the melting of polar ice, large-scale structures, including walls to prevent the run-off of water into the sea, or cooling tunnels to thicken ice and keep it from sliding into the ocean, will prove indispensable to avoiding some of the worst effects. A Green New Deal should study and develop the requisite, substantially automated, technologies, that will be needed to realize such plans.
In addition to these four items I would add that in facing the colossal challenge of climate change we have to be prepared for the possibility of resorting to still more radical action. Especially if the problem worsens even more rapidly than the current dire estimates anticipate they will, or the plan for remedial action proves belated or inadequate (none of which seems impossible), the world may have to consider such extreme recourses as solar dimming. No Green New Deal can be considered complete without preparation for the contingency.
Here are some additional notes, limited to mentioning four items that are not usually discussed as part of a Green New Deal, but which warrant some attention in any such planning process as objects for continued research, development, and ultimately deployment efforts alongside the more familiar matters of electrical transmission, energy efficiency, carbon offsets, etc..
1. Cellular Agriculture.
The massive, negative environmental impact of current methods of agriculture; the vulnerability of key croplands and grazing areas (generally along coasts and rivers) to inundation and salinization by encroaching seas, the disruption of key water resources, and extreme weather events endangering food production; the possible alternative uses of land in ways needed to stem the crisis, like reforestation for carbon capture; and the reality of a burgeoning world population--makes it highly desirable that we reduce our reliance on open-field agriculture, or even shift away from it altogether. A Green New Deal should accordingly invest in cellular agriculture, extending even beyond the replacement of livestock-raising through cultured meat (the current focus of such efforts), to the production of all needed foodstuffs.
2. Materials Science.
The most obvious example is carbon nanotube production, which is of particular interest because of the multiple ways in which it can contribute to the alleviation of the problem. The prospect of producing nanotubes from carbon captured from the air can tie in with broader direct air capture efforts, while helping resolve the problem of what we are to do with the recovered carbon. The production of carbon-based materials of this kind raises the possibility of substituting for other materials whose production entails high environmental costs (iron and steelmaking may account for almost a tenth of GHGs). And the production of vehicle bodies from those materials may enable weight reductions affording massive energy savings. (Picture cars more robust than those we have today weighing fifty pounds. How much more feasible would electric car production be then?)
3. Fourth-Generation Nuclear Energy.
In my view the ideal is the derivation of 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy sources, while the technology provides a basis for continued growth in production and consumption (especially if a higher premium is placed on easily realizable gains from energy efficiency). I also expect that this goal would be attainable with a properly backed, "moonshot"-type effort. Yet, it is far from proven that there will not be gaps, while in decarbonizing our energy production it will be impossible to ignore questions of speed and cost, with nuclear energy possibly offering at least a partial answer to those questions. Meanwhile, fourth-generation nuclear reactors hold out substantial promise of sharply reducing the problems and risks entailed in the use of the 1950s-era technology on which the nuclear power sector has continued to rely. While caution will be required, especially given the industry's unhealthy influence on the debate, appropriate consideration for the technology has its place in a Green New Deal.
4. Megastructure Construction.
It appears that in coping with climate change and its consequences, particularly the melting of polar ice, large-scale structures, including walls to prevent the run-off of water into the sea, or cooling tunnels to thicken ice and keep it from sliding into the ocean, will prove indispensable to avoiding some of the worst effects. A Green New Deal should study and develop the requisite, substantially automated, technologies, that will be needed to realize such plans.
In addition to these four items I would add that in facing the colossal challenge of climate change we have to be prepared for the possibility of resorting to still more radical action. Especially if the problem worsens even more rapidly than the current dire estimates anticipate they will, or the plan for remedial action proves belated or inadequate (none of which seems impossible), the world may have to consider such extreme recourses as solar dimming. No Green New Deal can be considered complete without preparation for the contingency.
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
What Might a Green New Deal Involve? Some Notes
Thus far talk of a Green New Deal (a resolution rather than a bill for now) has been essentially a matter of broad aspirations and statements of principle. Still, it has got me thinking about what such a program might actually look like in its concrete details, particularly its scale, the speed with which it might go about its work, and the source of the needed funds.
In considering these matters it is common for people to refer to World War II. They tend not to know very much about the conflict, but they have a sense that it was a period of extraordinary efforts and extraordinary results--and as it happens, the numbers bear out this impression. As the official Wartime Production Achievements report shows, in a mere four years (1940-1944, between the Fall of France and D-Day), the U.S. built the equivalent of sixty percent of its pre-war manufacturing capacity, new, modern plant geared toward the most high-tech production, along with commensurate increases in the associated infrastructure needed to make it work. (Even electricity generation, given a low priority by wartime planners, expanded 26 percent in the relevant time frame.)
Of course, a Green New Deal is not about a headlong enlargement of output for its own sake. But all the same, there is no question but that a greening of the economy will require a massive, rapid production of modern infrastructure, vehicles, plant, with which to replace what exists now, and the World War II example does demonstrate that the U.S. successfully accomplished this in the past. Indeed, there are at least three excellent reasons to think that a Green New Deal conducted in the present could actually do much, much more at any given level effort than the wartime effort accomplished in the 1940s.
#1. The remaking of the U.S. economy was not the goal of the World War II effort. This was all secondary to supplying the biggest war effort in history, as the U.S. successfully did during the more than five years in which it was embroiled in the conflict. Had the U.S. economy's modernization been the object, much more of the resources mobilized would have been directed toward that end, with greater effect, as may be expected today.
#2. The World War II effort took place not only for the sake of a war effort, but in wartime, "siege" conditions. As the U.S. went about its role as the "arsenal of democracy," virtually all of Europe was under Nazi domination, the other great industrial center that was northeast Asia also firmly in the Axis camp, and, especially in the earlier phases of the conflict, Nazi U-boats stalked the seas. American and global resources could have been utilized much more fully in conditions where normal, peacetime trade was possible, for the sake of any conceivable end, and it is reasonable to expect that this, too, will be the case. (Still more helpful, and far from implausible, would be an American Green New Deal alongside, or coordinated with, other nations' efforts--or even a global Green New Deal--potentially achieving great synergies.)
#3. Manufacturing productivity--our ability to make physical things--has exploded. There do not seem to be many data sets which offer a comprehensive view of manufacturing growth between the 1940s and today, but it seems safe to say that per-hour output in this area has risen sixfold overall since that time. Impressive in itself, it is worth noting that this considerably outstripped the growth of the economy overall (per capita GDP rising more like three-and-a-half times since 1945), which at least hints that a given amount of time and proportion of resources would go further toward rebuilding the base (especially as it would be more a matter of replacement than of any and all possible addition in the interest of maximized wartime production). Moreover, given the realities of capacity utilization, product differentiation, and other factors business finds commercially expedient, but which obstruct efficient output, it may be that the means to hand actually confer still more productive capacity than the more mainstream statistics acknowledge, for any desired purpose.
We should also consider the host of extraordinary technological possibilities recently emerging but far from properly exploited as yet, and whose development a Green New Deal could sharply accelerate--for instance, in the area of materials that could replace an energy and greenhouse gas-intensive steel and iron industry, and the synergies they make plausible with regard to rebuilding the manufacturing base along greener lines. (What could we begin to do if we started mass-manufacturing carbon nanotubes out of captured atmospheric carbon, and then used these to build radically strong but light structures and vehicles and machinery--for instance, more efficient new wind turbines?)
Indeed, I will come out and say it--when it was possible to build the equivalent of a quarter of existing electricity generation in four years, when this was a low priority, under wartime conditions, with 1940s-era resources, when this is made a very high priority, with open access to the global market, and the fullest possible use of twenty-first century resources, it seems possible that such an effort thoroughly rebuild the electric grid, and transport, industry, agriculture too, between now and, say, 2030.
Of course, having established this people will ask "How will we pay for it?" I will say up front that this sniveling response says more about those asking the question than anything else. This is, after all, a matter of SAVING CIVILIZATION, AND MAYBE LIFE AND DEATH FOR THE ENTIRE PLANET, and the question indicates that they do not understand this--and are trying to dismiss the plan. (After all, how many of those who whine "How will we pay for it?" where environmental initiatives are concerned ask those questions when the matter is war and peace? When it is tax cuts and other goodies for the rich?)
Making them look even more foolish is the reality that paying for the project is not the impossible obstacle that opponents of a given idea always make it seem. One could easily imagine some redirection of government resources--not least, the diversion of the colossal resources devoted to subsidizing fossil fuels (depending on the mode of calculation, at the very least many tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps as much as $1 trillion a year) toward moving past them, shifting a field long, massively tilted in favor of established energy resources in favor of renewables, yet again quickening their progress. Of course, only a portion of the funds the action would raise would be conveniently at government's disposal (oil subsidies substantially consist of tax breaks and the tolerance of externalities), but the point is that it would at least create room for maneuver.
Taxes on corporations and the rich generally are also at historic lows--and one could picture significant additional funds raised by bringing back the tax levels that, we actually had back during the war, possibly helped by a crackdown on offshore tax havens. (Indeed, even without such, France's government has succeeded in taking over half its Gross Domestic Product annually in government revenue for decades, in contrast with under a third in the U.S. at all levels, a figure that if proportioned to the U.S. economy would come to $3-5 trillion a year.)
Admittedly each and every one of those possibilities makes right-wingers seethe, but their hating them is not the same as saying they would be unworkable, while the scale of the resources in questions means that even a partial capture of resources through such action could be significant. One might easily imagine a trillion dollars or more a year being raised on top of Federal infrastructure spending and other relevant orders that might be made in line with such a program, and the Federal government's capacity to induce state and local governments and private business to shift their spending along those lines it finds desirable, one would have an unprecedented, "game-changing" program in this area (orders of magnitude greater than the highly touted investments of the early Obama years).
One might also seek a measure of supporting action from the monetary system, the flexibility of which seems to be much greater than is widely appreciated. The 2008 bailout is open to very serious criticism on a great many scores. Still, reading accounts of it I cannot deny the ingenuity and dash with which portions of it were carried out--the manner in which the U.S. Federal Reserve raised and deployed nearly THIRTY TRILLION DOLLARS in support for the financial system (roughly 200 percent of U.S. GDP at the time). While the situations are not identical, there is no reason why, should it be necessary, the central bankers could not do a great deal for other purposes, with few worthier than a Green New Deal.
All the same, this would likely fall short of a true World War II level effort, which amounted to about twice the country's pre-war GDP spent in the 1941-1946 period--about $40 trillion in today's terms. And while a Green New Deal could achieve much more of its goals at any given level of investment than the World War II-era effort because of its different purposes, circumstances, and the greatly increased productivity and technological possibilities of the present, it is not inconceivable that the resources scraped up in the way discussed above might not seem enough to buy all that is desired, as desired, as quickly as desired, given the scale and severity of the environmental challenge. Deficit spending--the same deficit spending at which Green New Deal opponents do not balk for the sake of war, upper-class tax cuts, corporate welfare--is an option, the more so as spending of such a kind, on such a scale, can be expected to translate to a boom which, if World War II is anything to go by, substantially paid for itself over the longer run.
Counterintuitive as this may sound, the figures are undisputed. The U.S. economy grew by 75 percent during the war years, and the productivity increases that war effort achieved contributed to a generation of boom afterward (4 percent a year growth 1950-1973). As a result, in spite of colossal Cold War expenditures that included two major "hot" wars (Korea and Vietnam), and massively enlarged domestic spending (these were the years of the Great Society), America's debt-to-GDP ratio was actually much lower in the early 1970s than it was before the war (32 percent versus the earlier 52 percent of GDP figure). Of course, that is not to deny the fact that the U.S. was heavily indebted at war's end (with the debt-to-GDP ratio about 120 percent), but history has demonstrated that countries can, if necessary, bear a far higher debt burden than the U.S. is doing for long periods. Japan's debt, at 236 percent of GDP, while far from enviable, shows that life can go on quite comfortably under such conditions--far, far more comfortably than if we were to suffer the full brunt of the rapidly unfolding climate-energy-environmental crisis.
In considering these matters it is common for people to refer to World War II. They tend not to know very much about the conflict, but they have a sense that it was a period of extraordinary efforts and extraordinary results--and as it happens, the numbers bear out this impression. As the official Wartime Production Achievements report shows, in a mere four years (1940-1944, between the Fall of France and D-Day), the U.S. built the equivalent of sixty percent of its pre-war manufacturing capacity, new, modern plant geared toward the most high-tech production, along with commensurate increases in the associated infrastructure needed to make it work. (Even electricity generation, given a low priority by wartime planners, expanded 26 percent in the relevant time frame.)
Of course, a Green New Deal is not about a headlong enlargement of output for its own sake. But all the same, there is no question but that a greening of the economy will require a massive, rapid production of modern infrastructure, vehicles, plant, with which to replace what exists now, and the World War II example does demonstrate that the U.S. successfully accomplished this in the past. Indeed, there are at least three excellent reasons to think that a Green New Deal conducted in the present could actually do much, much more at any given level effort than the wartime effort accomplished in the 1940s.
#1. The remaking of the U.S. economy was not the goal of the World War II effort. This was all secondary to supplying the biggest war effort in history, as the U.S. successfully did during the more than five years in which it was embroiled in the conflict. Had the U.S. economy's modernization been the object, much more of the resources mobilized would have been directed toward that end, with greater effect, as may be expected today.
#2. The World War II effort took place not only for the sake of a war effort, but in wartime, "siege" conditions. As the U.S. went about its role as the "arsenal of democracy," virtually all of Europe was under Nazi domination, the other great industrial center that was northeast Asia also firmly in the Axis camp, and, especially in the earlier phases of the conflict, Nazi U-boats stalked the seas. American and global resources could have been utilized much more fully in conditions where normal, peacetime trade was possible, for the sake of any conceivable end, and it is reasonable to expect that this, too, will be the case. (Still more helpful, and far from implausible, would be an American Green New Deal alongside, or coordinated with, other nations' efforts--or even a global Green New Deal--potentially achieving great synergies.)
#3. Manufacturing productivity--our ability to make physical things--has exploded. There do not seem to be many data sets which offer a comprehensive view of manufacturing growth between the 1940s and today, but it seems safe to say that per-hour output in this area has risen sixfold overall since that time. Impressive in itself, it is worth noting that this considerably outstripped the growth of the economy overall (per capita GDP rising more like three-and-a-half times since 1945), which at least hints that a given amount of time and proportion of resources would go further toward rebuilding the base (especially as it would be more a matter of replacement than of any and all possible addition in the interest of maximized wartime production). Moreover, given the realities of capacity utilization, product differentiation, and other factors business finds commercially expedient, but which obstruct efficient output, it may be that the means to hand actually confer still more productive capacity than the more mainstream statistics acknowledge, for any desired purpose.
We should also consider the host of extraordinary technological possibilities recently emerging but far from properly exploited as yet, and whose development a Green New Deal could sharply accelerate--for instance, in the area of materials that could replace an energy and greenhouse gas-intensive steel and iron industry, and the synergies they make plausible with regard to rebuilding the manufacturing base along greener lines. (What could we begin to do if we started mass-manufacturing carbon nanotubes out of captured atmospheric carbon, and then used these to build radically strong but light structures and vehicles and machinery--for instance, more efficient new wind turbines?)
Indeed, I will come out and say it--when it was possible to build the equivalent of a quarter of existing electricity generation in four years, when this was a low priority, under wartime conditions, with 1940s-era resources, when this is made a very high priority, with open access to the global market, and the fullest possible use of twenty-first century resources, it seems possible that such an effort thoroughly rebuild the electric grid, and transport, industry, agriculture too, between now and, say, 2030.
Of course, having established this people will ask "How will we pay for it?" I will say up front that this sniveling response says more about those asking the question than anything else. This is, after all, a matter of SAVING CIVILIZATION, AND MAYBE LIFE AND DEATH FOR THE ENTIRE PLANET, and the question indicates that they do not understand this--and are trying to dismiss the plan. (After all, how many of those who whine "How will we pay for it?" where environmental initiatives are concerned ask those questions when the matter is war and peace? When it is tax cuts and other goodies for the rich?)
Making them look even more foolish is the reality that paying for the project is not the impossible obstacle that opponents of a given idea always make it seem. One could easily imagine some redirection of government resources--not least, the diversion of the colossal resources devoted to subsidizing fossil fuels (depending on the mode of calculation, at the very least many tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps as much as $1 trillion a year) toward moving past them, shifting a field long, massively tilted in favor of established energy resources in favor of renewables, yet again quickening their progress. Of course, only a portion of the funds the action would raise would be conveniently at government's disposal (oil subsidies substantially consist of tax breaks and the tolerance of externalities), but the point is that it would at least create room for maneuver.
Taxes on corporations and the rich generally are also at historic lows--and one could picture significant additional funds raised by bringing back the tax levels that, we actually had back during the war, possibly helped by a crackdown on offshore tax havens. (Indeed, even without such, France's government has succeeded in taking over half its Gross Domestic Product annually in government revenue for decades, in contrast with under a third in the U.S. at all levels, a figure that if proportioned to the U.S. economy would come to $3-5 trillion a year.)
Admittedly each and every one of those possibilities makes right-wingers seethe, but their hating them is not the same as saying they would be unworkable, while the scale of the resources in questions means that even a partial capture of resources through such action could be significant. One might easily imagine a trillion dollars or more a year being raised on top of Federal infrastructure spending and other relevant orders that might be made in line with such a program, and the Federal government's capacity to induce state and local governments and private business to shift their spending along those lines it finds desirable, one would have an unprecedented, "game-changing" program in this area (orders of magnitude greater than the highly touted investments of the early Obama years).
One might also seek a measure of supporting action from the monetary system, the flexibility of which seems to be much greater than is widely appreciated. The 2008 bailout is open to very serious criticism on a great many scores. Still, reading accounts of it I cannot deny the ingenuity and dash with which portions of it were carried out--the manner in which the U.S. Federal Reserve raised and deployed nearly THIRTY TRILLION DOLLARS in support for the financial system (roughly 200 percent of U.S. GDP at the time). While the situations are not identical, there is no reason why, should it be necessary, the central bankers could not do a great deal for other purposes, with few worthier than a Green New Deal.
All the same, this would likely fall short of a true World War II level effort, which amounted to about twice the country's pre-war GDP spent in the 1941-1946 period--about $40 trillion in today's terms. And while a Green New Deal could achieve much more of its goals at any given level of investment than the World War II-era effort because of its different purposes, circumstances, and the greatly increased productivity and technological possibilities of the present, it is not inconceivable that the resources scraped up in the way discussed above might not seem enough to buy all that is desired, as desired, as quickly as desired, given the scale and severity of the environmental challenge. Deficit spending--the same deficit spending at which Green New Deal opponents do not balk for the sake of war, upper-class tax cuts, corporate welfare--is an option, the more so as spending of such a kind, on such a scale, can be expected to translate to a boom which, if World War II is anything to go by, substantially paid for itself over the longer run.
Counterintuitive as this may sound, the figures are undisputed. The U.S. economy grew by 75 percent during the war years, and the productivity increases that war effort achieved contributed to a generation of boom afterward (4 percent a year growth 1950-1973). As a result, in spite of colossal Cold War expenditures that included two major "hot" wars (Korea and Vietnam), and massively enlarged domestic spending (these were the years of the Great Society), America's debt-to-GDP ratio was actually much lower in the early 1970s than it was before the war (32 percent versus the earlier 52 percent of GDP figure). Of course, that is not to deny the fact that the U.S. was heavily indebted at war's end (with the debt-to-GDP ratio about 120 percent), but history has demonstrated that countries can, if necessary, bear a far higher debt burden than the U.S. is doing for long periods. Japan's debt, at 236 percent of GDP, while far from enviable, shows that life can go on quite comfortably under such conditions--far, far more comfortably than if we were to suffer the full brunt of the rapidly unfolding climate-energy-environmental crisis.
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Why Do (Some) Democrats So Vehemently Deny Their Party Was Neoliberal?
Telling us that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not neoliberal seems a denial of the meaning of the word, and the reality of their well-known policy record--to such a degree that anyone espousing this political position can seem like a flat-earther. That being the case, why do people ready to so vehemently promote such a position seem so common now?
The simple answer is that the term "neoliberalism," completely uncontroversial in the past (and still completely uncontroversial among serious students of society, politics and economics now), entered wider, more popular use among a public that had always been to the left of the party, that was becoming more so, and which seemed more assertive of its leftishness. In the process it became a threat, one the party's Establishment could no longer abide. One supposes that they could have opted to apologize for their past, and declare a break with their prior conduct, but they elected to do so. This is not only because "We were wrong" are three of the hardest words in the English or any other language; not only because after their longtime embrace of such ideology and policy they must doubt that they will be believed; but because the party's past is also its present. It has been neoliberal before; and its leaders intend to go on being neoliberal.
When one moves past the oddity and incoherence of the claim to its underlying motives, one gets the impression of an Orwellian attack on the English language, on history, on the memory of the recent past. And perhaps unsurprisingly, while I have run into people making this claim online many, many times, not one of them argued in good faith. In fact, just about every single one of them showed themselves to be a troll.
For that reason I will no longer answer the questions of anyone who takes issue with my characterization of the administrations of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or the Establishment Democrats more generally, as neoliberal. If they really are interested in what they have to say, I have already got in my two cents and they can look at that. If they are uninterested in what I have to say (I remember referring one particularly stupid and vehement troll to one of the items, and their snapping that they weren't "going to help [my] self-promotion"), then there is no reason for us to talk--and anyway, all the means for educating themselves on this matter, which would in no way contribute to my "self-promotion" (if that prospect is indeed so disturbing to them) are just a few keywords away. In either case, my days of humoring their demands for "debate" are done, and none too soon because I have too, too many other and better things to do with my time.
The simple answer is that the term "neoliberalism," completely uncontroversial in the past (and still completely uncontroversial among serious students of society, politics and economics now), entered wider, more popular use among a public that had always been to the left of the party, that was becoming more so, and which seemed more assertive of its leftishness. In the process it became a threat, one the party's Establishment could no longer abide. One supposes that they could have opted to apologize for their past, and declare a break with their prior conduct, but they elected to do so. This is not only because "We were wrong" are three of the hardest words in the English or any other language; not only because after their longtime embrace of such ideology and policy they must doubt that they will be believed; but because the party's past is also its present. It has been neoliberal before; and its leaders intend to go on being neoliberal.
When one moves past the oddity and incoherence of the claim to its underlying motives, one gets the impression of an Orwellian attack on the English language, on history, on the memory of the recent past. And perhaps unsurprisingly, while I have run into people making this claim online many, many times, not one of them argued in good faith. In fact, just about every single one of them showed themselves to be a troll.
For that reason I will no longer answer the questions of anyone who takes issue with my characterization of the administrations of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, or the Establishment Democrats more generally, as neoliberal. If they really are interested in what they have to say, I have already got in my two cents and they can look at that. If they are uninterested in what I have to say (I remember referring one particularly stupid and vehement troll to one of the items, and their snapping that they weren't "going to help [my] self-promotion"), then there is no reason for us to talk--and anyway, all the means for educating themselves on this matter, which would in no way contribute to my "self-promotion" (if that prospect is indeed so disturbing to them) are just a few keywords away. In either case, my days of humoring their demands for "debate" are done, and none too soon because I have too, too many other and better things to do with my time.
Reviewing Obama's Record
I recently decided to follow up my study of Bill Clinton's record in office as President of the United States with a study of Obama's administration. I approached the matter somewhat differently in his case. Rather than tracking down authoritative listings of major policy actions and systematically working through that, I focused more tightly on what were indisputably the key three areas of policymaking in his administration--Obama's handling of the Great Recession, his energy policy and his health reform.
I was struck by the curious echoes of the Clinton record in Obama's.
Clinton promised economic stimulus, infrastructure spending and health care reform. All of these initiatives fell by the wayside early in the Clinton administration. By contrast Obama realized something of them, but consistently underdelivered, with an undersized, brief, tax cut-reliant stimulus aimed only at avoiding completely "catastrophic failure" rather than getting the country over the crisis; a small portion of the work that the American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently pointed to as needed after decades of neglect; and a health care reform limited to requiring everyone to buy private care (an approach Obama himself earlier compared to eliminating homelessness by requiring everybody to buy a house), with a mix of consumer protections and government subsidies sweetening the deal (but still leaving 30 million uninsured).
Where Clinton proved a deregulator of finance Obama proved a pseudo-regulator, with Dodd-Frank taking the obsequiously business-friendly spirit of Clinton's Reinventing Government initiative to parodic extremes, even after enabling the continuation of the largest financial bailout operation in history.
Clinton, despite much rhetoric about the environment, presided over an extraordinary, heavily government-subsidized expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption as he signed an international agreement regarding the curbing of climate change that, in spite of its mildness, the Senate never ratified, and Obama, while directing a measure of government resources toward renewable energy and energy efficiency, by and large did the same (the U.S. adopting the 2015 Paris agreement by executive order, not Senate ratification).
Yet, if Obama produced more in the way of results than Clinton, the situation also demanded more than it did in Clinton's time. The crash of 2008 was far more severe than the recession of the early 1990s. In 2015 the necessity for action on the climate crisis was far more apparent than in 1997. And the burden of the health care system weighed still more heavily on America's economy and people in 2010 than it did in 1993 (up from 13 to 17 percent of GDP, while thanks to wage stagnation, per capita health expenditures rose from 11 to 17 percent of median household income).1 And needless to say, the goal and means were, on each occasion, consistently, deeply neoliberal.
1. In 1993 it was 13.4 percent of GDP and $3,400 per capita; in 2010, 17.3 percent of GDP and $8,400 per capita. This made for a 29 percent jump in health care's share of GDP, and a still bigger jump in its share of household income. Health spending figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, household income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
I was struck by the curious echoes of the Clinton record in Obama's.
Clinton promised economic stimulus, infrastructure spending and health care reform. All of these initiatives fell by the wayside early in the Clinton administration. By contrast Obama realized something of them, but consistently underdelivered, with an undersized, brief, tax cut-reliant stimulus aimed only at avoiding completely "catastrophic failure" rather than getting the country over the crisis; a small portion of the work that the American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently pointed to as needed after decades of neglect; and a health care reform limited to requiring everyone to buy private care (an approach Obama himself earlier compared to eliminating homelessness by requiring everybody to buy a house), with a mix of consumer protections and government subsidies sweetening the deal (but still leaving 30 million uninsured).
Where Clinton proved a deregulator of finance Obama proved a pseudo-regulator, with Dodd-Frank taking the obsequiously business-friendly spirit of Clinton's Reinventing Government initiative to parodic extremes, even after enabling the continuation of the largest financial bailout operation in history.
Clinton, despite much rhetoric about the environment, presided over an extraordinary, heavily government-subsidized expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption as he signed an international agreement regarding the curbing of climate change that, in spite of its mildness, the Senate never ratified, and Obama, while directing a measure of government resources toward renewable energy and energy efficiency, by and large did the same (the U.S. adopting the 2015 Paris agreement by executive order, not Senate ratification).
Yet, if Obama produced more in the way of results than Clinton, the situation also demanded more than it did in Clinton's time. The crash of 2008 was far more severe than the recession of the early 1990s. In 2015 the necessity for action on the climate crisis was far more apparent than in 1997. And the burden of the health care system weighed still more heavily on America's economy and people in 2010 than it did in 1993 (up from 13 to 17 percent of GDP, while thanks to wage stagnation, per capita health expenditures rose from 11 to 17 percent of median household income).1 And needless to say, the goal and means were, on each occasion, consistently, deeply neoliberal.
1. In 1993 it was 13.4 percent of GDP and $3,400 per capita; in 2010, 17.3 percent of GDP and $8,400 per capita. This made for a 29 percent jump in health care's share of GDP, and a still bigger jump in its share of household income. Health spending figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation, household income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Remembering the Kosovo War
The Wars of the Yugoslav Succession (1991-1999) are little remembered today in the United States, and this may seem to go especially for NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War, which began twenty years ago (on March 24, 1999). Part of it would seem to be that they did not fit in with the more general focus on the Middle East, the larger, more intense, more precedent-breaking conflicts in which overshadowed them (the 1991 Gulf War fought just a few years earlier, the near-continuous action against Iraq ever since, the wars that followed from 2001 on); did not involve the boots on the ground that raise the specter of high U.S. casualties and public questioning; did not ever command much enthusiasm among the American public.
Still, in hindsight, the conflicts seem a watershed, in ways extending far beyond the war's hugely important local consequences. The wars in the Balkans, along with the contemporaneous wars in Central Africa (Rwanda, and the two Congo Wars), sounded the death knell for those short-lived, early '90s, post-Cold War visions the mainstream held of multilateral humanitarian interventions setting the world to rights.
Looking back, the conflict between the West and Russia over the action, which entailed the denial to it of United Nations authorization, and a measure of nuclear saber-rattling many would seem to prefer not to remember, and the confrontation between their forces at Pristina airport that came so close to a shooting war (one of the odder legacies of which is the idea some have that singer James Blunt SAVED THE WORLD FROM WORLD WAR III), seem less a last gasp of the Cold War than a foreshadowing of NATO's disregard for Russian opinion bumping up against a renewed Russian assertiveness--of what we have since seen in Georgia (2008), in Ukraine (2014-), in Syria (2015-). Likewise, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by a B-2 bomber during the campaign was also far from the last worrisome incident in Sino-American relations, which have similarly become more adversarial.
It also seems that the manner in which the 1999 war was fought--that style of slow-motion, drawn-out, gradually escalating, all-aerial warfare campaign conducted in support of one side against another in another country's internal conflict without the American public paying much attention to it--has been routinized in the years since. Libya is perhaps the most obvious case, but one can say the same of Syria as well, and Somalia, and Pakistan, and wherever else the drones fly.
This past not even being the past, we overlook it at our peril.
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Still, in hindsight, the conflicts seem a watershed, in ways extending far beyond the war's hugely important local consequences. The wars in the Balkans, along with the contemporaneous wars in Central Africa (Rwanda, and the two Congo Wars), sounded the death knell for those short-lived, early '90s, post-Cold War visions the mainstream held of multilateral humanitarian interventions setting the world to rights.
Looking back, the conflict between the West and Russia over the action, which entailed the denial to it of United Nations authorization, and a measure of nuclear saber-rattling many would seem to prefer not to remember, and the confrontation between their forces at Pristina airport that came so close to a shooting war (one of the odder legacies of which is the idea some have that singer James Blunt SAVED THE WORLD FROM WORLD WAR III), seem less a last gasp of the Cold War than a foreshadowing of NATO's disregard for Russian opinion bumping up against a renewed Russian assertiveness--of what we have since seen in Georgia (2008), in Ukraine (2014-), in Syria (2015-). Likewise, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by a B-2 bomber during the campaign was also far from the last worrisome incident in Sino-American relations, which have similarly become more adversarial.
It also seems that the manner in which the 1999 war was fought--that style of slow-motion, drawn-out, gradually escalating, all-aerial warfare campaign conducted in support of one side against another in another country's internal conflict without the American public paying much attention to it--has been routinized in the years since. Libya is perhaps the most obvious case, but one can say the same of Syria as well, and Somalia, and Pakistan, and wherever else the drones fly.
This past not even being the past, we overlook it at our peril.
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