Happy Groundhog Day Earth Day everybody! You can see how it is possible to confuse the two, since Earth Day is the same every year—we’re doomed unless you hand over complete power to the government to manage people and resources.
Think I exaggerate? Well, here’s The Guardian to remind us once again:
Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
By Phil McDuff
limate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on.
Well yes, it is true that climate alarmism is increasingly fit only for children. But to continue:
Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo. . .
We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. The impact of a dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly large changes to the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public works programmes, everything has to be on the table to ensure that the oncoming system shocks do not leave vast swathes of the global population starving and destitute. Perhaps even more fundamentally, we cannot continue to treat the welfare system as a tool for disciplining the supposedly idle underclasses. Our system must be reformed with a more humane view of worklessness, poverty and migration than we have now. . .
Silly me: I used to think the agitation about climate change was about . . . climate change. But as always environmentalists can’t help themselves. This has been true since the beginning. As The New Republic wrote at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970: “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of seeming to remake society . . . [and] developing a more coherent central state. . .”
Or, if you want another example of the academic dementia on the issue, take in this abstract from an article published last week in Nature and Space, by Mount Holyoke Prof. Kevin Surprise:
Stratospheric imperialism: Liberalism, (eco)modernization, and ideologies of solar geoengineering research
Abstract
Once a fringe notion, solar geoengineering via Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is gaining traction as a climate management tactic within mainstream institutions and factions of the climate justice movement. Cautious considerations of SAI are driven by the layered realities of climate urgency, political inaction, and the potential for climate impacts to harm the most vulnerable. This narrative is difficult to dispute, yet it originates from leading centers of SAI research—particularly the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (HSGRP)—that construct the ‘‘necessity’’ of research, experimentation, and potential deployment under ideological pretenses aimed at maintaining the hegemony of liberal-capitalism. Hence, advanced under the auspices of HSGRP, SAI would constitute a form of imperialism rather than a tool for climate justice. I link SAI to theories of capitalist imperialism, and situate HSGRP within Harvard’s legacy shaping U.S. imperialism and position as a nodal point of liberal-capitalist power. In this context, I identify three dominant ideologies undergirding SAI research at Harvard—ecomodernism, Realist International Relations theory, and Keynesianism—that construct a specific narrative whereby established climate solutions (liberal-capitalist ecomodernism) are frustrated by ‘‘anarchical’’ international politics, leaving the poor vulnerable to near-term climate impacts. SAI is thus positioned as a mechanism capable of buying time for market-driven policy and reducing near-term climate risk. HSGRP directly counter poses this approach to radical elements of the climate justice movement that address capitalism as the root cause of both climate change and global poverty.
Still awake? I suppose it is fun, though, to see Harvard slagged from the demented left.
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