Mike Davis, the author of Planet of Slums, has a new piece up at The Nation about the science, economics, and politics of global climate change. If you haven’t yet read it, you should. But be warned: he paints a bleak portrait.
Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.
As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two constituencies with little or no political voice." Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policy-making in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living--none of which seems highly likely.
And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth's first-class passengers. We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.
Davis’ portrait of a world ravaged by climate change, with the worst effects being concentrated in already deprived and devastated areas of the globe, got me thinking some about priorities. The question of priorities has been a hot one in the left blogosphere over the past few weeks, as Obama’s moves to the center have sparked some soul-searching about what it means to be a member of the progressive net-roots, what our priorities as a movement should be.
Davis’ article should be a wake-up call, an illuminating flash that breaks us out of our narrow polemics about Obama. As Davis indicates, in order to head off a downward ecological spiral that could lead to the massive intensification of devastating floods, the exacerbation of misery in the global south, and the reduction of the global GDP by as much as 20%, we will need a concerted, long-term effort by independent international social movements.
Obama’s election alone, whatever you think of his politics, will not bring about the changes in terms of greenhouse gas emissions that we need.
And, as hard as it is to believe, the aforementioned horrific ecological and social effects of global climate change are merely the tip of the (rapidly shrinking) iceberg. Without concerted political action we could face a cascade of interrelated, devastating events over the coming decades.
The rise of China as an economic superpower – in the context of a petroleum based global economy – could lead to the intensification of resource wars between the US, Europe, Russia and China, turning the Middle East into a archipelago of Baghdads, and threatening the eruption of a global conflagration, a third world war. We should not be sanguine about this seemingly distant possibility, as the first two world wars were caused by a similar set of conditions – namely, the competition between global powers over finite, economically crucial, resources, and the collision of these imperial powers’ ever-expanding economic "zones of influence." If we aren’t able to mitigate or eliminate the causes of resource competition between the US, Europe, China, and other emergent world powers, "there will be," as John McCain says, "more wars."
Putting all of the above thoughts through the mincer that is my brain helped me to step back a bit from my recent investment in debates about Obama’s rightward turn and the role of the progressive blogosphere.
To put it bluntly, and in a way that is likely to spark some controversy in these parts: we have bigger problems to worry about and work to avert than telecom immunity. And, on the flip side, we have bigger goals than the election of Barack Obama.
As Howard Zinn recently said, presidential politics cannot be allowed to suck up all of the oxygen in the progressive world, lest we lose sight of what really matters:
No, I'm not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let's remember that even when there is a "better" candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.