The year has not ended well, even as there is some hope that 2020 will bring a reversal of the perfect storm of 2016 that elected a buffoon to the WH.
A recent article outlined the cascading possibility of connected tipping points in the Climate Crisis. This emergency cannot be unmet.
With the current electoral politics, the most likely outcome in 2020 could be some form of “Big Structural Change” where in the US, the Green New Deal (GND) is only a start. In a de facto binary contest the other option will be more of the same looting of the national economy with the threat of global economic chaos.
Capitalists’ response to this is to maintain their wealth by bureaucratic means beyond capturing the administrative state by manipulating law and economics no differently than how 25% of US federal judgeships will be occupied by Trumpists. In international policy, the path to the emergency is focused only on trade profit, with no expectation of altering environmental policies. Rather, four years of continued rollback of existing regulatory policies might hasten multiple tipping points.
Public policy canons depend on Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) bandaged by sensitivity analysis, and symptomatic of the limitations on neoliberal methodologies. CBA is always limited by scale and in a case of global crisis no reliance on policies constrained by CBA will solve a climate crisis.
In our view, the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute (see ‘Emergency: do the maths’).
EMERGENCY: DO THE MATHS
- We define emergency (E) as the product of risk and urgency. Risk (R) is defined by insurers as probability (p) multiplied by damage (D). Urgency (U) is defined in emergency situations as reaction time to an alert (τ) divided by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T). Thus:
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E = R × U = p × D × τ / T
- The situation is an emergency if both risk and urgency are high. If reaction time is longer than the intervention time left (τ / T > 1), we have lost control.
We argue that the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best. Hence we might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping — and hence the risk posed — could still be under our control to some extent.
The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action — not just words — must reflect this.
www.nature.com/...
We are way past worrying about persuasion ethics since it is now clear that malign elements would support anti-fracking movements only to ensure their own fossil-fuel profit margins.
Exposing and explaining the techniques of denial are crucial steps in neutralizing disinformation, not just from the fossil fuel industry but from any source. Once people know the ways they can be deceived, disinformation no longer has power over them. As Edward Everett once said: “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.” But it’s not enough to offer information – we also have to expose disinformation, so that people understand what we have been up against.
www.theguardian.com/...
The political economy of desire on which capitalism is based is tempered by the political economy of doubt - where indeterminacy and uncertainty always require the force of action rather the action of force. In the US example the action of Trumpian farce has its basis in a war against disinformation. Greenwashing is such an epiphenomenal example of capital’s attempt to mystify the environmental emergency by claiming to remediate events that will cascade beyond control. A metabolic rift could be another way to describe the oncoming cascade of tipping points.
According to John Bellamy Foster, who coined the term, metabolic rift is the development of Marx's earlier work in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts on species-being and the relationship between humans and nature. Metabolism is Marx's "mature analysis of the alienation of nature"[2] and presents "a more solid—and scientific—way in which to depict the complex, dynamic interchange between human beings and nature, resulting from human labor."[3]
As opposed to those who have attributed to Marx a disregard for nature and responsibility for the environmental problems of the Soviet Union and other purportedly communist states, Foster sees in the theory of metabolic rift evidence of Marx's ecological perspective. The theory of metabolic rift "enable[ed] [Marx] to develop a critique of environmental degradation that anticipated much of present-day ecological thought",[4] including questions of sustainability.
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In place of agricultural revolutions, (Jason) Moore emphasizes recurrent agro-ecological revolutions, assigned the historical task of providing cheap food and cheap labor, in the history of capitalism, an interpretation that extends the analysis to the food crises of the early 21st century.[28][29]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Capital’s socialized form of production simply stands in contradiction to its privatized forms of appropriation. That must change.
capital tends to degrade ecosystems (and the climate) because they are external to value circulation and profit.
Jason Moore takes this further to argue that capital not only degrades nature, but ultimately relies on the its unpaid “work” for accumulation (think of the uncommodified work of soil microbes). John Bellamy Foster argues if we dig deep enough in Marx we find he was ecological all along through his ideas around the “metabolic rift.”
is Marx and Engels's first contradiction unrelated to ecology and the climate crisis? I say no. ... climate change is just another expression of what Marx and Engels identified as the core contradiction of capitalism: namely a contradiction between the social basis of production with the private system of property and wealth appropriation.
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Neoliberalism has in many ways been a long 50 year period in which much of the left was convinced class and socialist politics is outmoded and a new left would be built through a kind of “movement of movements” of divergent social movements (see recent article by ecosocialist Michael Löwy which basically rehearses this talking point). Yet class struggle didn’t fade away. As Warren Buffet so famously put it, “There’s class warfare, all right… but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Rather than revising and “greening Marxism,” building an ecological politics that can win might benefit as much from revisiting the classical principles of Marx and Engels’s historical materialism. Climate change is only the last instance of the overwhelming evidence that capital’s socialized form of production stands in contradiction to its privatized forms of appropriation. This contradiction points to one solution: expropriate the expropriators.
marxistsociology.org/...
CBA’s reliance on utilitarian and neoclassical economics continues the asymmetry of value and welfare in ignorance of nature. We are beyond hoping that rationality will govern people’s willingness to pay.
CBA has been criticized in some disciplines as it relies on the Kaldor-Hicks criterion which does not take into account distributional issues. This means, that positive net-benefits are decisive, independent of who benefits and who loses when a certain policy or project is put into place. Phaneuf and Requate (2016: p. 649) phrased it as follows "CBA today relies on the Kaldor-Hicks criteria to make statements about efficiency without addressing issues of income distribution. This has allowed economists to stay silent on issues of equity, while focussing on the more familiar task of measuring costs and benefits".[70]
The main criticism stems from the diminishing marginal utility of income.[71][72] Without using weights in the CBA, it is not the case that everyone “matters” the same but rather that people who value money less (who are by assumption people with more money) receive a higher weight. One reason for this is that for high income people, one monetary unit is worth less relative to low income people, so they are more willing to give up one unit in order to make a change that is favourable for them.[73] This means that there is no symmetry in agents. A second reason is that any welfare change, no matter positive or negative, affects people with a lower income stronger than people with a higher income.
Taken together, this means that not using weights is a decision in itself – richer people receive de facto a bigger weight. As to compensate for this difference in valuation and in order to take into account distributional issues, it is possible to use different methods. The two most common ones are taxation, e.g. through a progressive tax, and the addition of weights into the CBA itself. There are a number of different approaches for calculating these weights. Often, a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function is used and weights are calculated according to the willingness-to-pay of people.[74][75]
en.wikipedia.org/...–benefit_analysis