The Crisis Report - 71

Short Take #2. It's the "Doomer's Fault".

We begin to see how the Western Democracies are going to respond to the Climate Crisis

DEMOCRACY as we knew it, is probably coming to an end. The Climate Crisis is going change our world and the Elites are starting to realize that.

SO, if you needed any further proof that the CLIMATE CRISIS is BAD and getting RAPIDLY WORSE. I offer you these two articles.

One, from the “prestige” newspaper of our Nation’s capital. The other from an influential publication on foreign policy that is read globally.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

By the Editorial Board Washington Post April 28, 2024

and,

Democracy Has Run Out of Future — Foreign Policy April 27, 2024

https://archive.ph/5zODL#selection-2987.0-2993.94

The underlying reason for the West’s democratic crisis may be a lost sense of open-ended time.

OMG.

Here’s what WAPO has to say.

“For decades, “geoengineering” was a forbidden subject in climate circles.”

“Talking about adjusting the Earth’s energy balance by, for example, using mirrors, white roofs or aerosols to reflect solar radiation away from the planet and back into space could legitimize a strategy that should be a last resort. Fiddling with the Earth’s thermostat could have unintended effects on natural systems. Moreover, geoengineering might not address all the problems associated with rising carbon dioxide levels, such as ocean acidification.”

“Better simply to stop emitting heat-trapping gases.”

“But humans have not cut greenhouse emissions quickly enough.”

“As temperatures rise and extreme weather becomes more common, researchers have estimated that current greenhouse gas levels will result in economic losses from climate change of 11 to 29 percent of the world’s income by 2050 — and global emissions rates are still rising.”

“The world needs to know exactly what its options are.”

“It looks by now inevitable that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average, beyond which catastrophic impacts on the climate are expected. The U.N. Environment Program says the warming is on track to hit +2.9C degrees by the end of the century.”

(LOL, this is about 1/2 of what I think is probable at this point)

“Though permanent cooling requires pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, temporarily cooling the planet might be worth trying at some point in the future, given the likelihood of future warming past any acceptable benchmark.”

FYI- Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book “Under a White Sky” to get an idea of what the costs are going to be. No more “Blue Sky” for the next 200 years.

Here’s what “Foreign Policy” has to say.

THEY BLAME CLIMATE ACTIVISTS.

“It is at this point that the climate left ceases to be a friend of democracy — not because it is wrong in its judgment of the existential threat of global warming, but because its apocalyptic discourse prevents democracy from finding its necessary solutions.”

The argument is interesting.

“We live today amid the dregs of time. A sense of doom is shared on all sides of the political spectrum.”

Welcome to the “dregs”. That’s my new term for the 2020's.

“Democratic politics in the West has turned into a clash between two extinction rebellions and two nostalgias: an extinction rebellion of climate activists who are terrified that if we don’t radically upend our way of life, we shall destroy life on Earth, and an extinction rebellion of the “great replacement” right, which lives in fear that if something doesn’t change, it is the end of our way of life.”

“The right is nostalgic for the past. The left is nostalgic for the vanished future. Radically different in their goals, they share one common vantage point: an apocalyptic imagination.”

WOW, just wow. They are conflating the “extinction rebellion” of Climate Activists, aka “Doomers”, who are TERRIFIED that “Business as Usual” is going to crash Civilization and cause a MASS EXTINCTION EVENT. They are comparing that with WHITE Right Wing RACISM about “being replaced” by “colored people”.

SO, basically “Climate Activists” are as “delusional” as Right Wing Racists.

“It is in the context of this creeping eschatological position that one can assess the originality and importance of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. White, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers an original reading of the current crisis of democracy by defining it as a temporal regime and arguing that an “open future,” one that is not predetermined but is shaped by human agency, is a precondition for the successful functioning of democratic regimes.

OF course, this comes from a School of Economics. The same people who gave a Nobel Prize to William Nordhaus. The EVIL shithead who “proved” that GROWTH NOW, is the ONLY WAY to have an economy big enough in the future to “clean up” the mess we would be leaving.

Literally, this guy is the one behind the Republican position that we shouldn’t worry about the environment because “The FUTURE” will take care of it. They gave him a Nobel Prize for that.

What does Jonathan White have to say.

In his view, “When the future seems to be closing in, institutions organized around the idea of persistent disagreement and changing opinion start to look out of place.”

Yeah, when times get tough people start getting panicked and want “strong leadership”.

“By contrast, the reigning characteristic of our “age of emergency” is that there is no room for error. If certain decisions are not taken today, it no longer matters whether they will be taken up tomorrow. It will be too late.

True that. Unfortunately, he means that people will give up on SLOW Democracy in exchange for FAST Authoritarianism.

“White’s argument is that, just as humans die in the absence of air to breathe, democracy can die from the inability to dream collectively. What makes democracy work is a productive tension between a near future and a distant and utopian future.”

“The near future is the one we can plan for — the one that politicians promise to voters and remains at the center of democratic accountability. What the government did yesterday and what the parties pledge for tomorrow will always be the bread and butter of electoral politics.”

“White, however, is correct to insist that the distant and utopian futures, ones radically different from today’s reality, are also constitutive for democratic regimes. Distant futures are the basis for political hope today and the motivation for deferring the gratification of immediate political goals.”

“Take the future out of democratic politics and elections turn into civil wars with ballots or a never-ending crisis management.”

Sound familiar?

But today our relationship to the future is marked by collective distrust. The resulting imbalance between democracy as a project and democracy as a projection of futures — whether economic, demographic, or technological — is at the center of the West’s current crisis.

Yes, WHITE Right Wing RACISTS want a future of continued WHITE dominance of National and Global affairs. Everyone else wants something RATIONAL and “BETTER”.

Uncertainty about the future, and the resulting hope that tomorrow can be radically different from today, are the hallmarks of the democratic idea. The question is whether uncertainty is still possible in our current age of emergency.

“It is at this point that the climate left ceases to be a friend of democracy — not because it is wrong in its judgment of the existential threat of global warming, but because its apocalyptic discourse prevents democracy from finding its necessary solutions.”

“As White argues convincingly, “The sense of finality that fills today’s world is central to its volatility.””

Can you see an emerging pattern here?

Remember this paper?

Transformative narratives for climate action

Editorial, Published: 20 June 2020, Volume 160, pages 495–506, (2020)

“Narratives are socially constructed ‘stories’ that make sense of events,” thereby lending “direction to human action.”

“Climate-change narratives, the team notes, typically foreground “doom and gloom.” Often they emphasize risk. If they’re not retelling the latest warming-related disasters (fires, floods, food shortages), they’re predicting a future filled with even grimmer warming-related disasters (bigger fires, more severe flooding, famines that threaten entire regions).”

“Narratives of fear can become self-fulfilling prophecies.”

“If people believe that things will only get worse, they feel overwhelmed. If they feel overwhelmed, they’re apt to throw up their hands, thus guaranteeing that things will only get worse.”

They argue that a diet of bad news leads to paralysis, which yields yet more bad news. What’s needed instead, the paper goes on, are narratives that “empower people to act.”

“Such narratives tell a “positive and engaging story. They “articulate a vision of ‘where we want to go and outline steps that could be taken to arrive at this hypothetical destination.”

They argue that positive stories can become self-fulfilling.

“People who believe in a brighter future are more likely to put in the effort required to achieve it. When they put in that effort, they make discoveries that hasten progress. Along the way, they build communities that make positive change possible.”

“Optimism is a choice,” notes Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the effort to get the Paris climate accord approved in 2010.

“Do you know of any challenge that mankind has had in the history of humankind that was actually successful in its achievement that started out with pessimism, that started out with defeatism?”

However, I say, “False Hope is also Disinformation.”

“Doomers” are going to be SILENCED.

“Climate Optimism” is being PUSHED.

Officially, the U.S. is committed to reaching net zero by 2050. But no one really knows if this is possible in the real world.

Because Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy completely.

Most Americans don’t want to hear this reality. In early July of 2022, at a time when much of the country was baking in ninety-five-degree-plus heat, the NYT took a poll of registered voters.

Asked to name the most important problem facing the nation.

Twenty per cent of the respondents said the economy.

Fifteen per cent said inflation.

Eleven per cent said partisan divisions.

Only one per cent said climate change.

Among registered Republicans, the figure was zero per cent.

As I look back at the last 50 years I wonder whether optimism and false hope lies at the heart of the problem. For the last fifty years we have lived as if someone, or some technology, were going to rescue us from ourselves.

We have lived for the last 50 years as if the “FUTURE” would always be there for our children and grandchildren.

We are still living that way now. We are still “hoping” that things will “be OK”.

In a speech scolding E.U. politicians, Greta Thunberg observed.

“You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” “Then you’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.”

Whatever we might want to believe about the future, there are physical limits to how much we can “course correct” at this point. We have been monumentally stupid and let the Fossil Fuel Elites enrich themselves while destroying the planet we live on.

Now, we are up against the wall and things are about to get a lot worse.

These next few years are our last chance to shape what kind of world our grandchildren of 2100 live in. Right now, we are squandering them.

Right now we are letting the Elites LIE to us.

Because, if “The Sheep Look Up” they might DEMAND CHANGE.

It doesn’t end well in most of Brunner’s books.

That’s my “short take” on this.

• rc 04282024

Personal Note:

For a deeper discussion of this you can review my paper.

The Crisis Report - 22

We are moving too slowly. We need a coordinated plan.