I've been tangling in the comments section of a couple diaries lately:
Bill McKibben's The Most Important Thing I've Written
and
A. Siegel's Pres Obama Those Who Have Looked At The Science
Looking at the number of recommends on people who reply to my comments compared to the number of recommends my comments receive, it's clear to me that my opinion is a very unpopular one here at DKos. I hardly think this diary will make the rec list, for example. However, I thought I would write it to be able to link in the future for those who want to read a full explanation of my reasoning. When I'm the wrong side of someone I respect as much as Meteor Blades, I think it's important to make my full position known.
The basic question is how best to stop global warming. The trap that progressives fall into is assuming that people always act from a position of rationality. Surely, we think, if we can persuade enough people to see that our point of view is the correct one, then the zeitgeist will carry us over into the majority opinion at the voting booth and we will both elect politicians who support our views and sway incumbent politicians to either have the courage to vote their conscience or alter their own backwards views and see it our way.
This has worked beautifully with the gay rights movement, and much faster than I think anyone expected. Public opinion has changed dramatically, and I feel confident that within my lifetime gays and lesbians will have full equal rights, including the right to marry, in all of the United States. Democratic movement on gay rights issues has helped motivate our base to turn out the vote and get people fired up and wallets open.
If global warming were a normal political issue, the same process should work just as well. But global warming is far from a normal political issue. Global warming is THE political issue, and I will explain the difference below the fold.
I deliberately picked the term "homosexuality" for my title, because the Republicans love to use the word "homosexual" as a button-pushing term, rather than the word "gay". Gay rights was never a core issue for the 1%. The 1% is the 1%, so while they have all the money, in a democracy they don't have the votes needed to elect politicians supporting their views. Gay rights was simply a tool to bring out the Republican base at election time. As gay rights activists were able to change the zeitgeist, so now a majority of Americans and even many Republicans support gay rights, the tool lost its usefulness and was cast aside. Now even some Republican politicians vote on the right side of history.
The gay rights movement certainly does have some genuine political opponents. The Catholic Church and the Mormons oppose it because it threatens their power. Let's face it, if it weren't for closeted gay men, both groups wouldn't have the hierarchy they do. Their power is built on sexual guilt. Of course, back in the day the Catholic Church was the 1%, and the Mormon hierarchy was and still is the 1% in Utah. Those habits of power encouraged both to try to exert their power on this national movement. But both organizations are powers in decline. We were able to beat them in a fair fight, particularly once we got sunlight on our side.
While the base of the Republican party is gullible, easily tricked believers, the real power in the party is the 1%, and they are the smartest people in the room. While there are some people in the 1% who actually created something of value, they are the minority--the 1% of the 1%. Most of the 1% either gained their money through rent-seeking or by inheritance. Frankly I wish that more of them were heirs; that way the only pet causes we would need to fight would be estate taxes, income tax and carried interest. All are important causes, but there is no particular urgency to them.
Global warming is urgent. We have a deadline. We don't have time to dither around and find the best way. Originally we had the 1% on our side, except of course for Big Oil and Big Coal. Remember for a while even John McCain and Newt Gingrich were calling for action on global warming? And everyone's favorite way of solving it was an exchange for carbon trading. This would have been the ultimate rent-seeking boondoggle, and the 1% was salivating at the thought of the money that could be made. It would have made the derivatives market look like a soap bubble next to a hot air balloon.
What didn't occur to the rent-seeking 1% was just how fast technology would catch up. Solar and wind by their very natures are distributed systems. Even if Big Oil and Big Coal invested heavily in solar companies and solar plants, the inevitable downward trend caused by the exponential growth in technological innovation means that their traditional energy monopoly will be broken. Energy will inevitably become cheap, abundant, green and distributed. Big Oil and Big Coal will become IBM. They will become the whale oil companies of the new millenium.
Not just that, but all rent-seeking abilities will be hurt by the fight against global warming. Strict regulation of corporations by strong national governments is absolutely required in the short term. The 1% certainly do not want national governments strong enough to go up against them. That might lead to anti-trust legislation, along with regulation. And cheap, abundant, green, distributed energy means that the worker will own the means of production. Ultimately the only rent-seeking will be the old-fashioned kind, the actual ownership of land.
But the 1% didn't get that rich by ignoring changes in the market. They've awakened to the danger and are fighting like a cornered animal. As Bill McKibben stresses in his recent diary linked above, the 1% hold $27 trillion worth of oil rights. And La Feminista linked to this information in her recent diary:
La Feminista--Well I'm Stunned
Oil-rich states with an internationally mobile elite have been especially prone to watching their wealth disappear into offshore bank accounts instead of being invested at home, the research suggests. Once the returns on investing the hidden assets is included, almost £500bn has left Russia since the early 1990s when its economy was opened up. Saudi Arabia has seen £197bn flood out since the mid-1970s, and Nigeria £196bn.
"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.
And how many of the 1% are heavily invested in lucrative oil stock? We aren't talking about people fighting to protect millions of dollars, or hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, or hundreds of billions of dollars. The 1% is fighting to protect TRILLIONS of dollars. We are fighting against KGB-run Russia. We are fighting against Saudi Arabia. We are fighting against Iran. We are fighting against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and the Koch brothers. We are fighting against every Enron in the world, and every TEPCO too.
These people own the media, which was clearly shown by their continuous ad buys hawking clean coal or the wonderfulness of BP, and how global warming has completely dropped off the media radar once the powers that be woke up to the danger.
Now imagine that instead of the millions of dollars the Catholic Church and the Mormons spent fighting marriage equality, that they spent ten billion dollars fighting marriage equality. Do you think they would have been able to influence the zeitgeist in their favor? I do. Thankfully there is a certain end to the power of the fossil fuel 1%, thanks to the solar equivalent of Moore's Law. There are enough of the 1% who are innovators and who have enough power and wealth to invest in developing this new technology, and are content with the prospect of the small profit made from selling a new product, rather than trying for a rent-seeking permanent income from controlling energy sources.
With the amount of money we are up against, we will never win over the zeitgeist. But we don't have to. We just have to hamstring the enemy, the fossil fuel industry and all their enablers, and give tax breaks and encouragement to those who are working to develop green technology. So as I have said multiple times in my comments, I don't give a damn what President Obama says. He could say we are going to drill for oil all over the Arctic and mine the moon for coal. I don't care, as long as he keeps pushing regulations that slow down the fossil fuel industries and encourages green technology both in the public sector, like turning the military green, and the private sector, by providing venture capital to companies like Solyndra.
So it is my firm opinion that we should concentrate our energies not on consciousness raising or parades or publicity stunts to let people know that global warming is happening. Debating with paid denialist trolls online, while fun, will not have any real effect. We can expend our energy trying to get our neighbors to eat less meat or take public transit to work or reduce their trash, but the only activism worth a damn is getting more and better Democrats elected, defeating Citizens United, and shining a light on the nefarious propaganda and lobbying activities of the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry is our clear enemy and we need to bring it. The only activism truly worthwhile is activism that shows the world who the enemy is, and slows down that enemy.
It makes me irate that Duke Energy is funding the Democratic convention, and just goes to show that they consider Democrats a threat that must be bribed into inaction. I really don't know what to do there, but our only other choice is the Republicans, and they are certain to side with their fossil fuel masters.
My very long two cents.
Mon Jul 23, 2012 at 5:12 AM PT: This is a late update, but I thought a worthwhile one. From Bloomberg a couple months ago:
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co. (GE)
“If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said yesterday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Washington office. The 2009 average U.S. retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity ranges from 6.1 cents in Wyoming to 18.1 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.
Also, thank you all for your comments and the reclist. Was not expecting that. And from the comments, I want to emphasize that I fully support environmental activism, including protests and demonstrations. I just think that the environmental movement needs to take a page from the Occupy movement and focus their protests and energy directly at the 1%, the fossil fuels industry that is spending so much to slow down progress in green energy.