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The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why?
Charles J. Hanley, AP, Post-Tribune
... “The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows,” concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.

He and others who track what they call “denialism” find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.

... In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today’s warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.

“Ninety-eight percent of the world’s climate scientists say it’s for real, and yet you still have deniers,” observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House’s science committee.

... The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.”

In an interview, he said he found a “transformation” from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial “has now become a marker of cultural identity in the ‘angry’ parts of the United States.”

“Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism,” he said, a movement that has “a visceral loathing of environmentalism.”
(23 September 2011)
Nice summary. -BA

The Third Industrial Revolution: Toward A New Economic Paradigm (EXCERPT)
Jeremy Rifkin, Huffington Post
... In the mid-1990s, it dawned on me that a new convergence of communication and energy was in the offing. Internet technology and renewable energies were about to merge to create a powerful new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that would change the world. In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy in their homes, offices, and factories and share it with each other in an "energy Internet," just like we now create and share information online. The democratization of energy will bring with it a fundamental reordering of human relationships, impacting the very way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

I introduced the Third Industrial Revolution vision at the Wharton School's Advanced Management Program (AMP), at the University of Pennsylvania, where I have been a senior lecturer for the past sixteen years on new trends in science, technology, the economy, and society. The five-week program exposes CEOs and business executives from around the world to the emerging issues and challenges they will face in the 21st century. The idea soon found its way into corporate suites and became part of the political lexicon among heads of state in the European Union.

By the year 2000, the European Union was aggressively pursuing policies to significantly reduce its carbon footprint and transition into a sustainable economic era. Europeans were readying targets and benchmarks, resetting research and development priorities, and putting into place codes, regulations, and standards for a new economic journey. By contrast, America was preoccupied with the newest gizmos and "killer apps" coming out of Silicon Valley, and homeowners were flush with excitement over a bullish real estate market pumped up by subprime mortgages.

Few Americans were interested in sobering peak oil forecasts, dire climate change warnings, and the growing signs that beneath the surface, our economy was not well. There was an air of contentment, even complacency, across the country, confirming once again the belief that our good fortune demonstrated our superiority over other nations.

Feeling a little like an outsider in my own country, I chose to ignore Horace Greeley's sage advice to every malcontent in 1850 to "Go West, young man, go West," and decided to travel in the opposite direction, across the ocean to old Europe, where new ideas about the future prospects of the human race were being seriously entertained.
(25 September 2011)

Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster: A `realistic’ answer to the ecological crisis
Liam Flenady, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Resolving the ecological crisis is incompatible with capitalism. We must build a movement that works against capitalist logic with the aim to overcoming it in favour of a properly sustainable and egalitarian form of society. This is the contention persuasively presented by Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster in their recently published book What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism.

Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of soils in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont. He has written a number of books on sustainable agriculture and on the economic crisis. John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and author of a prolific output of books on Marx and ecology, Marxian economics, capitalism and crisis, imperialism and the ecological revolution.

The Australian situation at the time of writing this article is a very bleak one

... Probably the most disturbing aspect of the Australian context is the weakness of our green movement, much of which has been co-opted directly or indirectly into the "Say Yes!" mindset, in which the carbon tax is seen as a win. Some of this has to do with a general demoralisation of the movement as a whole, but it is also influenced in part by less than innocent funding sources.

False solutions

Let’s first examine some other diagnoses and proposed solutions that do not attempt to escape the capitalist framework. In Environment, Capitalism and Socialism (1999), Dick Nichols identifies three of the most prominent broad arguments in contemporary debates as to the root cause of climate change: population growth, overconsumption and technology.

Each misses the point.

• Population fails to take into account the fact that, as Stephen Pacala of Princeton Environmental Institute says, “the 3 billion poorest people … emit essentially nothing” and “the development of the desperately poor is not in conflict with solving the climate problem”, whereas “the rich are really spectacular emitters … the top 500 million people [about 8 per cent of humanity] emit half the greenhouse emissions” (Magdoff and Foster 2011, pp. 32-33). Population growth cannot be examined apart from the economic system in which it arises. For instance, if population growth were to be stopped or become negative across the world, this would pose serious problems for an economy “always in search of new markets for its goods and requiring a continual expansion of the labor force” (ibid., p. 31) and of the “reserve army” of the unemployed whose existence keeps wages down. Unfortunately, the population argument is used so often for nationalistic and racist purposes that are aimed at “preserving our way of life”.

• The overconsumption argument fails by assuming that people’s consumption habits are not ultimately born from a societal structure, not a result of a profit-driven model of business that requires the people to consume more in order to expand the market for commodities.
• Seeing technology itself as the problem, as many “ecomystics” or utopians do, and promulgating a return to local, communal, agrarian, sustainable ways of life – a return to simpler times – misses the fact that technology has played an important role in liberating humankind from enslavement to nature and need not be used totally in an unbound Promethean hubris of technological domination of nature. Again, the question is: how might technology function if its development and implementation were not driven by the desire for profit?

None of these explanations deal with the economic system that determines the way production and consumption are structured, or the way that technology is used.
(25 September 2011)