Climate change and the culture wars

“it seems likely that the global agreement on reached at COP21 in Paris will mark the turning point in efforts to stabilize the global climate”

I agree and have blogged about it here.

Parenthetically, the Greenhouse 100 (a list of the 100 top parent companies for direct emissions of GHGs in the U.S.) should be updated later this week with current data. I’d be interested in hearing from people who want to suggest improvements to it, since it’s possible that we might get a chance to work on it a bit more in coming months.

At least in the case of the US, its not just a culture war item, it is also about a few very large pro-fossil campaign contributors. With Republican voters not prone to vote for Democrats, because they are mildly pro-enviro, R politicians feel free to cater to the big money donars.

They’ve also mixed it up with what I call appeals to moocher-phobia. Moocher-phobia is the oft expressed feeling that having to give even a single penny to someone they deem unworthy is a horrible imposition -psychological torture apparently. So renewables are tarred as needing subsidies, and supporting them can therefore be cast as throwing constituents money at moochers.

Perhaps the right was defeated, but meanwhile a number of oligarchs managed to stave off the day for two decades, and socked away a *lot* of profits in the meanwhile. Profits that they will never disgorge willingly.

This looks to me like tobacco all over again. The tobacco companies stalled and lied and manipulated and lied for at least five decades after reasonable people knew the score on the dangers of smoking. Yes, at some point the forces of tobacco lost the long game. But they have never given up the profits, or paid any price for the millions they killed.

Who cares about being forced to retreat from stolen property when you get to keep all of the loot?

oldster: Tobacco companies are still cash cows. Maybe not as good “investments” as they would have been without legislation and the change in perception, but still they are making money. Now fossil fuel reserves, that money in the ground that is at least partly monetized by the stock market, so having to abandon it becomes a big deal for the ownership class.

Some form of oil and gas industry is going to survive even after we mostly switch over electricity generation and automobile power to renewables/renewable-generated electricity. It’s going to take a while to replace all those gas-powered furnaces, for example, and you’ll need oil for lubricants and plastics.

We shall “pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees”. Yep. The point has clearly been turned.

There is of course also this:
The Sixth Day: Creatures on Land
…26Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”…

The question of whether it is possible for societies to become environmentally sustainable while remaining (or becoming more) inequitable, is one I’m puzzling over at present. In the short term, maybe, in the longer term it seems unlikely, but that may be me believing what I want to believe, I suppose.

@14
There is a commenter on JQ’s Australian site saying similar things – solar panels are a problem because they absorb heat rather than reflecting it, and we should all be painting our rooves white instead of having solar panels. Presumably if we could just paint everything white, problem solved!

The argument from the left has always been too anti-Republican — concerned with scoring points against a strawman. They have missed the more reasonable point of view that, yes, burning coal makes the air smell bad; so now let’s turn to what to do about it. It’s that need to compromise that has kept this argument going on for years, just like the other arguments like gun control, education, the budget in general, and so on.

Compromise is a necessary evil in this world. In fact, having a situation where everyone was Democrat or everyone was Republican would be terrible — and in fact, that’s really not possible is it?

So let’s compromise on how we burn less foul-smelling things, and stop calling each other names.

“So let’s compromise on how we burn less foul-smelling things, and stop calling each other names.”

Yes, the smell is the problem. Let’s burn fragrant woods!

> The argument from the left has always been too anti-Republican — concerned with scoring points against a strawman.

It is increasingly becoming obvious that “conservatism” is a mental-health or possibly cognitive problem. It’s

What

The hard truth of climate change, overpopulation, global resource limits, ocean ecology collapse and general and diverse assaults on the assimilative capacity of the earth’s environment, is that the only path forward that doesn’t risk catastrophe entails a general reduction in all energy use, not just a switch away from fossil fuels. Only a path forward that includes conservation in the short-term to offset the effects of transitional investments in new infrastructure and a design for that infrastructure that leaves a modern world using a fraction the total energy per capita that the current developed world uses — a fraction of the current total even if that future total comes almost entirely from non-fossil-fuel sources.

That’s not a hard truth that most of the Left is ready to preach. Some, who are ready to renounce modernity, are willing, but their very readiness to renounce modernity limits their persuasiveness.

What Paris represents is a neoliberal path forward — “too little, too late” some would say, though I think the real sadness is that the neoliberal way to achieve that necessary degree of resource conservation is likely to evolve in the direction of policies of depression, marginalization and mass exclusion, as the party continues for a narrow, globalized elite even as austerity is preached and bombs are dropped, to make the numbers add up (and up and up).

Val, what do you think birth control pills are an example of, if not technological dominance over nature? As Simone de Beauvoir explained, only through modernity is woman’s liberation possible.

An agreement imposing no binding commitments, with no enforcement, and a target that is too high and far away. Color me unimpressed.

Bruce Wilder: “That’s not a hard truth that most of the Left is ready to preach.”

As one of the few commenters here who I’m still able to have a conversation with and learn something from, I sort of wish that you’d reconsider this. The “hard truth” that a reduction in use of everything is needed is *not* one that the left has been reluctant to preach. Of course, as soon as one says this, one has to ask which left is meant. All right then: the traditional or socialist left, which has been horrible on environmental issues generally, has not been willing to preach this supposed hard truth, but the environmentalist left has in the main been preaching some variant of zero population growth, reduced material use, lifestyle simplification and conservation since the 1970s. We developed the concept of sustainability, the whole science of conservation biology, and so on.

I don’t see any particular reason why many forms of renewable energy really are limited by ecological factors. Sure, we’re going to be limited by something, but we don’t have to deal with all problems at once. And the whole concept of “we’re going to be limited by something” assumes ever-increasing growth — it’s quite true that you can’t have unlimited growth on a finite planet, but it’s not true that current trends just continue upwards indefinitely even if no one plans to stop them.

So I think that this supposed hard truth is not a useful one for our time. Look at the reaction on this thread as an example. OK, we’ve gotten all of the world’s countries to sign up and say that this is important and we’re going to do what it takes for 1.5 degrees. People don’t seem to have any realization of what kind of machinery that sets in motion. So what if there is no enforcement mechanism — the Overton Window just shifted so hugely in the right direction that it’s now conventional wisdom that this is important, agreed upon, doable and is going to be done.

You’re counting your Australian chickens too early. Australia’s Westminsterial and that makes it more sensitive to volatile shifts in elite opinion, but the United States is not like that, and the US will continue to be influential.

There was a time when the center-left thought that it had tax-base-broadening-in-return-for-progressivity in the bag, too, but it turns out that people really don’t like sales taxes. Green types could be talked into carbon taxes because they are already deeply averse to car culture, but that’s not the same as talking the wider public into it. And:

Against that, the struggle to save the planet from dangerous climate change has chewed up a huge amount of energy and effort on the left. Arguably, that has distracted attention from economic issues, and allowed the steady rise of the 1 per cent to go unchallenged…

All petrol taxes are massively regressive, between the middle and 1%er classes. Atop that, legacy carbon permits entrench the already-existing gains of the shareholding class. Back in the wake of the GFC, CT’s own bloggers wrung their hands at length about the failure of the growth-and-redistribution consensus to sustain sufficient redistribution, but on this set of externality reductions, the redistributive anxieties have been easily forgotten.

At the moment the neoliberal/internationalist left has once again roared to power in the left coalition, as the populists have switched their attention to immigration, refugees, and global Islamism, and have therefore been politely expelled to the right – the Anglospheric left tent may tolerate many heresies, but crass racism is not one of them. If the tide turns back to antiglobalization, pacifism, and respectable insinuations about the foreign natures of the rootless 1%, the apparent consensus will readily collapse.

There is at least one environmental issue where market property rights cannot work, wilderness preservation.

Sorry spell check seems determined to treat revenue as a General in the army.

Also apologies to non-Australians – under the previous Labor government in Australia we had a package of legislation that set up a carbon price and a number of bodies to develop and support clean energy technologies (this is what I am talking about as CEFC, Arena etc). Their funding was not directly legislated to come from the carbon price revenue (otherwise they would have been automatically defunded when the Abbott government repealed the carbon price), but I thought it did de facto when we had the carbon price – so that’s what I am asking JQ.

I’m not trying to undermine your point either JQ, just a technical question I guess.

@jq

>On the first, point, the revenue from the Australian carbon price/tax was fully returned as tax reductions and inflation adjustments to pensions

we’ve had this discussion before, what part of “creating new entitlements is not lowering taxes” do you have trouble with?

>On the second, the Obama administration’s “all of the above” policy continued generous support to nuclear power, and has attracted little opposition from the left.

It’s attracted little opposition because it’s done little. But since almost everything obama does attracts little criticism from the left, what’s your point? Or do you sincerely think that tribalism is solely a right wing vice?

>if it weren’t for the opposition of unspecified leftists.

Are you really denying the going on 40 year left wing campaign against nuclear power? That takes some chutzpah.

>You might as well face the facts, of which you are clearly aware: your side of politics is committed to tribalism.

So is your side. Tribalism is human nature.

>the left adopts policies put forward by the right (eg Romneycare)

you mean the policy that was forced on the romney by one of the most left leaning legislature in the country? That the president had to bribe the right wing of his own party of accept? Yeah, that was a real generous wing offer.

Or do you remember the time when the Obama tried to pass a free trade bill and all the republicans voted against him out of spite? Yeah, I don’t either. Can we please put this absurd meme to rest?

The way you get around tribalism is by coming up with ways to accomplish your ends with the other tribe’s means. You want a carbon tax? great, make it part of a package that actually lowers taxes. Not that expands entitlements or creates new ones, one that means people see less taken out of their paycheck every month. Want cleaner energy? great, roll out a massive nuclear power program.

When you do that, you make tribalism work for you. It will ensure most of your side holds its nose and goes along with you, and taking up their pet issue will win you enough of the other tribe to make it over the hump. That’s how Obama passed the TPP vote, how bush passed no child left behind, and whatever you think of the quality of those laws, both presidents thought of them as important successes. What you don’t do is trot out the same tired cliches you’ve been preaching for 30 years then complain when only the choir likes them. That’s how you wind up with the ACA, a bill written by democratic senators, for democratic senators, that most people, even most democratic senators, don’t much like.

>reating new entitlements ” can mean here. Are you claiming that maintaining the real value of pensions in the context of a shift from income to consumption taxes is “creating a new entitlement”

No, that would be expanding an old entitlement.

The whole point of my strategy is you have to get this stuff right. you have to be able to sell your plan in language and using methods that the other side is predisposed to like. Dicking around with pension formulae is not something that the right cares about. You need to be able to get up there and say unequivocally “pass this plan and we’ll save the planet and lower your taxes”, and to do that you need a plan that cannot be spun as “another left wing boondoggle.”

And frankly, if you aren’t willing to cut government revenue pass something you claim will save the planet, then I doubt your sincerity on the cause anyway.

Certain individuals keep throwing out the idea, that the only way to have a green energy sector is to build lots of Nuclear plants, and blame the left for opposing that. There are two realities that need to be realized that affect this conclusion. The first is economic and engineering related, and that is that renewables technology has already reached the point where a claim that we can’t do it without nuclear is dubious. You need to mark your assumptions to the evolving technological landscape -not the landscape as it existed ten years ago. The second is concerns the interaction of politics, psychology, and engineering. And that is that Nuclear power strongly resembles the space shuttle. And that resemblance is that the technology cannot be made to have a politically acceptable perception of safety at an affordable price. We could argue until the cows come home whether the popular perception of risk/benefits is unfairly skewed in this case. But you have to design an energy policy with the risk perception your society has, not that risk perception that an unemotional engineer might produce. The nuclear option, is simply not present in any meaningful way.

cassander: if you aren’t ready to sacrifice one child to save the other, you’re just not a serious parent!

I’m with both JQ and BW. Solutions have to match scale. Climate change is a global problem, so a global solution is imperative. Paris is a good start. But many environmental problems are local – if you live by the Yangtze, it does you no good as you sip your poisoned water to know that the Thames is cleaner. Effective environmental management has, in the past, been both heavily statist and local – an affair of stringent government in areas no larger than a European province.

The local aspect undermines globalism; the government aspect does not appeal to the modern right (although it fits comfortably with conservative oligarchy). I expect we’ll see a cultural shift on both as the extent of the disrepair becomes ever more evident.

Bill Hamlin @17
??? Carbon di Oxide is odourless? What has smell got to do with anything?

Does all depend a little bit upon what you call “the right”. Greg Mankiw has been arguing for a gas tax (for carbon reasons) for near a decade now. I’m pretty sure on all other matters you’d consider him to be “right wing”.

Although entirely with you on the Oz carbon tax. It was the only one properly done so far and then the only one rescinded. Madness….

Al Gore has argued since much LONGER than a decade ago for carbon taxes, revenue-neutral by reducing US Social Security taxes.

Deafening silence ensued, even when mentioned in these comments threads.

I see Mother Jones has just published a report showing Republican/Democrat opinions towards AGW.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/12/republican-donors-climate-change

They broke supporters into three categories, donors, voters, and non-voters. The donors are hyperpartisans, whilst the voters and non-voters are more nuanced. But, I think as far as the power relationship goes, the parties can largely rely on their voters to continue to vote for them, regardless of whether they are at odds with them on this issue, so the donors largely get to determine party policy.

Rick @54
Yes Omega Centauri has the correct answer.

The important thing here is the distinction between marginal cost and average cost, there will be winners and losers even if it is revenue neutral, but the best thing about it is that it will be right winners and the right losers. With a straight extra imposition, even good guys (people making a genuine effort to reduce their footprint) might ve losers.

I don’t understand your answers, but it’s probably not worth thread space getting me to understand. I’m most confused about “So (in theory), the capital for the infrastructure transition comes from private investment”: are people aware, generally, what proportion of vital energy infrastructure worldwide was actually built from private investment? My offhand guess would be less than a fourth. Hell, utilities even in the U.S. often still get guaranteed profit margins, so I suppose that it’s “private investment”, but… I’m also confused about the sense in which individuals or even groups of individuals can be “good guys (people making a genuine effort to reduce their footprint) ” can exist. If you live in Texas and have to drive to work, how do you reduce your footprint? Starve? In my experience people who do the most genuine efforts to reduce their footprints are hobbyists with a lot of disposable income.

cassander
no you are wrong (if you said to SOME extent – true, but you didn’t).

Tim Worstall: “A perfectly useful solution too.”

Let’s destroy Social Security’s funding mechanism in order to have a carbon tax? Well that’s not regressive at all.

If something is truly revenue neutral for the government, and that “something” involves a large cost to be paid by someone, then either a) you must expect that the government won’t do it, or b) you expect that the government will do less of something else because it spent resources doing it. I don’t see how either of these end up as anything but highly regressive. If you expect the private sector to do it, they charge what the market will bear, and the lower and middle class has to spend a much higher proportion of their income on energy than the upper class. If you expect the government to spend less money on something else, then I suppose that in theory this could be progressive if the government spent a lot less money on defense, but that’s not how it generally works.

In short I think that this whole concept of “it’s revenue neutral, we just guide the market and the poor / middle class don’t end up paying for it” is mistaken.

magari: “Another way to put Bruce’s point, switching to wind and solar power will be useful to solving the climate problem, but will do nothing to address the material throughput problem. ”

1. We don’t have to address every problem at the same time. It’s better to address some problems than no problems.

2. “will do nothing to address” is not true.

Person A: How can we possibly handle the ozone depletion problem?

Person B: Well we could have an international agreement eliminating CFCs.

(years later)

Person A: How can we possibly handle the anthropogenic greenhouse problem?

Person B: Well there’s the Montreal Protocol as a model–

Person A: No, it can’t work, this problem is too big.

(years later)

Person A: How can we possibly handle the material throughput problem?

Person B: Well there’s the Paris Agreements as a model–

Person A: No, it can’t work, this problem is too big.

Person A’s objection progressively loses steam.

The Republican party will control both houses of Congress and most state governments for the foreseeable future. If a Republican wins the presidency next year, expect national policy to be a massive expansion in fossil fuel use, partially as a giveaway to the extraction industries but mostly because it’d piss off Democrats.

“how is removing one method and replacing it that you like better destroying anything?”

If the purpose of a carbon tax is to reduce carbon emissions – and it is – one could reasonably expect carbon emissions to eventually decline, and the resulting tax revenues to suffer. What then? Try to reinstate a payroll tax? I’d say Rich P. reads this right.

In any event, the idea of a revenue neutral carbon tax seems counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t revenues from a pollution tax be used to fund the reduction of said pollution, or the mitigation of its impact?

I only brought up Gore to show that this is entirely a political thing. NO matter who proposes it, the other side won’t go for it. I don’t think it’s the best idea. I don’t go for carbon taxes anyway, because it gets complicated. It’s clear that technological innovation is headed in the right direction already, and Paris should give it a nice PR boost. But most of the carbon users are the hardest hit by taxes already, so I think you’d have to make them revenue neutral. If you want to increase revenues overall, raise other taxes on the 1%, a policy that happens to be supported by 99% (minus a few knuckleheads who buy into the “makers vs. takers” bafflegab).

I am not so much in favour of a carbon tax; and I think a more general ghg tax would be better since then it would apply to land use and farming etc. And I think it should be levied at the point of consumption not production if the idea is to encourage behaviour change, which would make it an additional consumption tax based on greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services. You would need to train enough people to do this sort of ghg accounting before you could implement the policy though, so it will take some time, as ghg accounting at the consumption level is not quite accurate enough at the moment is my understanding.

Since the idea is to stop using fossil fuels I think it would be better to be giving assistance to the fossil fuel mining and energy companies and workers to transition the businesses where possible, and to make a path to shut down in a proper way in an appropriate time frame if it’s not possible to transition. This might be selling off the energy grids for example since they are still useful even if the coal power station and mines shut down in 15-20 years. It is already a difficult situation for those businesses and workers, they are being told their business is responsible for causing climate change and that they should change/shut down – taxing them is just going to make it more difficult for them, and it takes the responsibility away from consumption which is what needs to change more since most people are consumers not owners or workers in fossil fuel companies – so focussing on the small minority is not a good strategy when you need everyone to embrace change.

In terms of the increased regulation/expansion of the state/infrastructure building – I think everyone knows that the conservatives do have a relatively valid point about this that was accepted by the left about the issues with top down bureaucracy – in America the example is of Robert Moses and his highways versus Jane Jacobs.

I don’t think the solution is not having regulation and not changing infrastructure to be more sustainable – it is better to for the tiers of government to work with the community and businesses so that the result is more well rounded and accepted by the mainstream. I think it will be interesting to see what happens in Detroit in the US, they have a really good community centred director of planning now, and have started zoning for urban farming including livestock I think – and since there are so many empty/run down houses and other buildings it will be a really interesting slate for sustainable and people centred development. And because of its place in American history and culture if a renewal is achieved there it will seem achievable for other working class sort of places.

Val,

“…How would you get around things like that?”

I think Bruce Wilder made an important point above about the solutions needing to be integrated. The government can’t on the one hand levy a consumption tax based on greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time encourage GHG intensive consumption through things like infrastructure provision.

Public transport needs a lot of improvement in Melbourne, the easiest thing to change at the moment would be the bus system since you can address network issues reasonably quickly, and cities around the world are working to get bus makers move to make electric vehicles.

I agree there will need to be regulation, and I don’t think GHG consumption taxes could be phased in immediately. You could probably phase them in in the near term if you decided on using fairly coarse GHG accounting methods, and move to refine this accounting over a decade or more.

This would have the co-benefit of allowing people to see their GHG emissions associated with consumption as they get receipts and invoices, which takes the burden off individuals entering in consumption to apps, and means everyone would have this information, businesses would know the sort of GHG emissions associated with their products, and I think it would be a good thing in terms of transparency and encouraging behaviour change.

As you say it is regressive, but we already have the 10% Goods and Services Tax (GST) here, which I think replaced a more wide ranging sort of consumption/import duties and taxes. There is already a lot of discussion about either raising the GST or including more items in the GST like fruit and vegetables.

So the government could adjust the GST to account for GHG emissions (and other environmental factors related to consumption if it wanted) so as to give both price signals and information to consumers and businesses, and to raise revenue. So it could range from a low to high amount based on the emissions of products. This would initially raise more revenue than it would when it started to take effect on behaviour, when the revenue would decrease. It would also have an effect on consumption, which would effect businesses, so the policy would have to be developed fairly carefully, and resulting equity issues could be dealt with by adjustments to the taxation and welfare payment system.

I don’t imagine this would raise enough revenue to fund the necessary infrastructure transition, but I think it is better to make the GST relate to something like GHG emissions, rather than just have a GST based on consumption alone. And then you don’t have the carbon tax focused only on energy businesses instead of on the community generally.

To fund the sort of transition that is needed probably requires a similar amount of finance as the war and post-war reconstruction efforts. So you probably need to raise money through bonds and make a national development bank and so on. Since money is not linked to gold anymore, it should work out fine creating new money like this.

Fossil fuel mining in Australia is usually done by companies that are diversified in their mining interests (at least that was what I heard at a talk) — but it would mean writing off assets for these companies. Coal and Gas power plants would end up needing to be decommissioned which would mean the businesses will most likely fold in 15- 20ish years, with maybe selling off some infrastructure like if they own the grids.

I have never heard of a similar sort of situation where a type of business knows it is going to have to fold in 15-20ish years. There would be no reason for people to invest in them for the long term , and the existing shareholders would know their shares will become worthless and unsaleable. But at the same time no one wants them to shut down immediately, only in 15-20 wish years when renewables are ready to take over.

Even though the fossil fuel companies have plenty of warning, I don’t think that makes the business outlook any better for them and the shareholders.

I wish the Victorian government never privatised our energy utilities, it was very short-sighted.

The best thing to do would be for the government to work out the value of the companies in terms of their foreseeable use and income from bills for the next 15-20ish years, and then buy the energy utilities back again from the owners and shareholders, and plan to decommission them when the time is right.

But I doubt the government will do that, so I don’t know what will happen with these businesses.

We already have a consumption tax which works fine, so a GHG emissions based consumption tax would work fine as well. The main difficulty would be working out the GHG accounting, which as I said would be fair coarse in the near term.

This would be a way to avoid central planning, as I am always suggesting rationing like in wartime but no-one ever likes the idea.

I doubt it would result in more cronyism and corruption in Australia than the GST we already have.

This is an issue with Environmental Audits at the moment, since the auditors are appointed by the developers, so often they underplay environmental risks and damage. To avoid a similar sort of thing you would have the GHG accountants working for an independent authority, so they wouldn’t be subject to commercial or political pressures.

@JQ

> the question of whether the culture war could have been avoided with cleverer rhetoric from the pro-planet side, or by packaging policies even more obviously friendly to the market, is now academic in the pejorative sense of the term. The (Anglo-American) right chose to fight on this ground, and have now locked themselves into insane conspiracy theories – there’s no point in trying to reach them now, and no need to do so. The world community has reached agreement, and the issue, like the science, is settled.

This is such a bizarre combination of naivete and arrogance, I hardly know where to begin. First, the “world community” has not reached any agreement. Some diplomats in paris agreed on a pious statement that will never be meaningfully implemented. since agreeing on pious statements is basically the job of diplomats, this should not be surprising.

Second, regardless of what the world community decides, unless you have a plan for getting around the anglo american right, it won’t be implemented. I have such a plan. Maybe it will work maybe it won’t, but you refuse to even debate the topic. You seem to prefer insulting them, then wondering why they don’t listen to you. Do you really think this is a good method, despite it failing for going on two decades now?

Third, Dipper is exactly right about the science. The science of AGW tells you almost nothing about the best ways to respond to it in a policy sense. The left’s choice of AGW policies has been every bit as irrational as the right’s rejection of the idea. The cynicism he speaks of has not been earned unjustly, and the arrogance you display in this comment only earns more of it.

It was the best of accords, it was the worst of accords. I agree Paris represents a turning point, but the sand is pouring through the hourglass and time is rapidly running out for something more than symbolism.

The risk is patting overselves on the back and putting the issue on the shelf until the 2020 “review”. The equilibrium climate sensitivity is almost certainly not on the low-end of the 1.5->4.5C range, given that we’re not yet even halfway to doubling atmospheric CO2 and we’re already blowing past 1C over preindustrial temperatures (a significantly lagging indicator).

So, short of a global nuclear holocaust we’re likely already committed to 1.5C, and CO2 will continue to rise at least 10ppm every 5 years, rapidly committing us to > 2C warming. Combined with evolving science showing how dramatically we underestimated expected sea level rise, Paris looks like a plan to maybe narrowly avert abject apocalypse while committing us to a severely degraded planet and almost unimaginable turmoil as cities and entire nations fight and fight and finally lose against an ocean whose rise will accelerate with each passing year, as giant ice sheets are attacked from from warm ocean water eroding their grounding lines and moulins turning them into swiss cheese.

And that’s the middle-of-the-road scenario. If permafrost and clathrates begin large-scale destabilization, all bets are off.

‘Wanless, who is among the scientists whose work is cited in Hansen’s paper, told me that he and Hansen take issue with the current models for projected sea-level rise—most of which top out at around six feet as the absolute worst-case scenario for 2100—because they don’t account for how rapidly the world’s glaciers and ice sheets are going to melt in the decades to come. “If you ever fly over Greenland, which I’ve done, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “The ice sheet is already melting from global warming, and now it’s also dirty on top, because of dust and soot blowing in from other parts of the world.” The darkened ice absorbs heat more quickly than clean, white ice, hastening its melt rate. Given such factors, Wanless said, he predicts that Miami Beach will experience something in the range of 10 to 30 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century. I was so stunned by these numbers that I asked him to repeat them, to make sure I had heard him right. He did.’
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/miami-beach-global-warming

Naomi Oreskes is arguing there’s a new form of denialism – saying that renewables will never be sufficient http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/16/new-form-climate-denialism-dont-celebrate-yet-cop-21

I’ve seen that more times than I can count. In terms of culture wars, I think this is cultural – it’s an adapted form of the patriarchal, hierarchical, Man dominating Nature discourse that I discussed earlier.

Generally as I have written on my blog previously I notice two broad trends in how we should respond to climate change – the ‘fundamental social change is required, part of which is transitioning to societies that are much more egalitarian, that share more, and that aren’t dependant on growth in material production’ (my position) vs ‘technological change can get us there, such as improving renewables, battery storage, electric (not mentioning any need for major social change)’. There may well be some wishful thinking on both sides. However from a public health point of view, there’s a lot of potential health advantages associated with transitioning to a more equal society that eats less meat, uses less motorised transport etc

I’ve seen a whole lot of “but what about permafrost and clathrates they’re turning out to be worse than people think” sentiment. But really, the whole world has signed on to to address this because it’s consensus science. “Evolving science” is not consensus science. If / when it becomes that, we’ll respond. Saying that the IPCC consensus does not in fact take into account the especially bad scenarios that are still part of the range of informed scientific opinion is something that people like Michael Tobis have been saying forever (check out the helpful graph here) and it’s far too late to do anything about it now.

People should remember that doomerism is inherently conservative. As Bruce Wilder writes upthread, some people are willing to renounce modernity, but renouncing modernity is exactly what conservatives do. We can imagine left anti-modernisms, of course, but the way that our dominant cultures line up right now, they are mostly imaginary.

Re: a 1.5 degrees target, I think this means drawing down emissions.

Tim Flannery wrote a blog post that said the current amount of GHG emissions is already at the point of causing 1.5 degrees of warming, it is just that it takes 30-40 years for this to take effect. I think his latest book on climate, Atmosphere of Hope, was about the possible ways of drawing down emissions that don’t involve geo-engineering, that he also talks about here:

“Limiting greenhouse gas emissions to levels that are likely to result in less than either 1.5 or 2 degrees C of warming is now beyond our grasp. The full warming potential of greenhouse gases takes decades to be realised, and there is already enough gas in the air to take Earth’s average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees by mid-century. At the time of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009 it was remotely possible to cut emissions fast enough to avoid 2 degrees, but we’ve been following a worst-case scenario trajectory for emissions ever since, and it is widely recognised in the scientific community as impossible to cut emissions fast enough to achieve that now.

A world 1.5 degrees warmer is one without a Great Barrier Reef. It’s a world of rapidly rising seas, much more extreme weather, and rapidly declining biodiversity. A world of 2 degrees is one at risk of tipping into the abyss of climate chaos – a world in which our global civilisation is at increasing risk. This results from 21 years of failure to agree on climate action: it is hard to look such bad news in the eye and continue to strive for a better climatic future, which is perhaps why the negotiators continue to discuss ways of achieving the impossible.

There are measures we could take, however, that would allow us to stay within 2 degrees, but they involves actions not being discussed in Paris. Some of these measures are, in my view, highly undesirable, while others are essential to our future.

If the first way is emissions reductions, the second way is geoengineering. The temptation to use catastrophic geoengineering methods such as injecting sulphur into the stratosphere is increasing. Sadly we are not negotiating a treaty to ban such extreme measures at Paris. Nor are we discussing the ‘third way’, which involves drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a scale that makes a difference to our climate.

Third-way pathways are extraordinarily varied, from seaweed farming to the manufacture of carbon-negative cements and the production of carbon fibres and plastics from atmospheric CO2. Today, all such methods and technologies are nascent, and if we hope to have them operating at the gigatonne scale by mid-century we need to start investing in them now.

If we are serious about limiting temperatures to 2 degrees, they need to be high on the agenda of the first post-Paris meeting to review actions, hopefully in 2020. ”

http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/fake-debate

Lee A. Arnold @100
I think ZM @99 wrote a very good response to you.

Cassander: may I suggest you read the Paris Agreement before commenting on it? It has nothing about preparing a binding treaty in two years time. It is the binding treaty, or will be once it is ratified by 55 countries representing 55% of global emissions. It includes a compulsory process of reviews.

Cynics like you sneered at the Geneva Conventions. War is hell, how can it be civilised? But a lot of POWs owed their lives to them, and the national delegations to Geneva meetings include generals. The JAGs were among the few in the American national security establishment who put up a real fight against the Bush-Cheney torture policy.

@James Wimberley

“Requests the Secretary-General of the United Nations to be the Depositary of the
Agreement and to have it open for signature in New York, United States of America, from
22 April 2016 to 21 April 2017”

So, no, not yet signed, and not to be signed for, forgive me, not 2 years but 17 months.

“Reiterates its invitation to all Parties that have not yet done so to communicate to the
secretariat their intended nationally determined contributions towards achieving the
objective of the Convention as set out in its Article 2 as soon as possible and well in
advance of the twenty-second session of the Conference of the Parties (November 2016)

As far as I can tell, the largest carbon country that has done so is South Korea, so national plans are not yet written, much less reviewed.

those are just the direct quotes proving my claim. If you actually read the thing, you will find that it is full of words like “urges” or “requests” not “mandates” or “requires”. The final treaty will probably look a fair bit like this agreement, but there is no mistake, this agreement is a suggestion for a final treaty, not that treaty.

>It is the binding treaty, or will be once it is ratified by 55 countries representing 55% of global emissions. It includes a compulsory process of reviews.

Since the US and china alone account for about 45% of global climate emissions, their agreement is all but essential.

>Cynics like you sneered at the Geneva Conventions.

The history of such treaties is actually very interesting. Compare, say, the chemical weapons ban in the Geneva protocols to the unrestricted submarine warfare bans in the London treaty signed just a few years later . The former stuck, the later did not. The reason is fairly simple. unrestricted submarine warfare was, at least potentially, very useful. Chemical weapons were much less so due to the difficulty of employing them. Treaties like Geneva and Hague survive because they do not require countries to do things that are politically difficult or contrary to their national interests. Treaties like London or Kyoto fail because they do. A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.

“this move of liberal optimism that somehow transmutes and delegitimates radicalism, e.g. Naomi Klein and James Hansen and OWS, by characterizing radical social means and goals as somehow “conservative.””

I was in OWS, and doomerism isn’t “a radical social means”. Its goals can be considered to be radical in the sense that there can be radical conservatism that wants to return everyone to traditionally hierarchical systems, but thinking that we’re doomed has no left component to it that I recognize. I think that you’re doing the typical Marxist thing of attempting to appropriate any resistance to capitalism that anyone does whether you understand it or are a part of it or not.

Let’s take a typical example from a blog that Bruce Wilder mentioned liking, The Archdruid Report. It starts with items that almost any leftist would agree with — Obama’s flunkies are beating war drums over Ukraine, Greece is being destroyed by austerity, the system based on cheap abundant fossil fuel is cracking at the seams — and ends with: aren’t books better than Kindles? Shouldn’t we take up reenacting the skills of, say, blacksmiths working with forges? Wasn’t it better when people brewed their own beer?

There’s always been conservative resistance to capitalism, because capitalism destroys the existing order. Doomerism always proceeds through three easy steps: 1) we’re doomed and can’t save the existing system, 2) we’re inevitably going to fall back to an earlier system, so we might as well get ready for that, 3) weren’t those earlier systems really better anyways?

No. I’m saying that I criticized doomerism — something that pretty much inevitably becomes an anti-tech neo-primitivism: I’m not touching the “Luddite” part of that because then we’d have to get into why the historical Luddite movement was identifiably on the left — and you took this to be a criticism that includes Naomi Klein, James Hansen, and OWS. That is entirely typical of how Marxists talk about all non-Marxist resistance to capitalism: it all kind of blurs together.

Rich Puchalsky @ 107

You are certainly correct that the Archdruid is more than a bit of a reactionary in spirit. His motto is, “crash now and avoid the rush”, or something like that. He really likes sweeping historical theories like those of Toynbee and Spengler, which he mixes up with more materialistic ideas like those of Joseph Tainter and peak oil theories. He made himself an expert on millenarian cults that predict imminent apocalypse, which is certainly an interesting intellectual move for someone, who is prophesying the eventual fall of civilization into a new Dark Age (over the course of centuries, mind) and whose day job is as a leader of a revival of an imagined Druidic religion that disappeared into the last European Dark Age.

I think I could find lots of leftish intellectuals, though, who would happily lecture us all on the illusion of progress and the millenarian spirit in socialism may be exhausted at this late date, but not completely forgotten.

Millenarianism, in general, is the hobby of people who embrace being isolated and marginalized from a society or culture that they feel both alienated from and intellectually superior to. Like conspiracy theories, these ideas function as psychological defense mechanisms — you can feel like you know what is really going on and are the master of it, if only at a great distance and with a degree of forlorn hope.

Just to be clear, when I say that we should be trying to imagine a future in which we both get energy from “cleaner” sources, but also use less energy in total, I am not imagining the primitive per se. Primitive, in historical reality, was usually fantastically wasteful of energy. An actual steam locomotive crossing the American continent in the 1880s was a smoky devil; still, a railroad with its nearly frictionless steel wheels on a steel rail, is potentially at least an order of magnitude more energy efficient a method of transport than automobiles, trucks and highways. (Canals are another order of magnitude more energy efficient.) There isn’t much loss to the productivity of a networked economy of specialized labor in the use of such efficient means of transport. Similarly, we probably don’t need to heat and cool many buildings, to the extent that we do, if we are willing to re-think the architecture and systems involved. And so on.

What I am concerned about is that our neoliberal order is enamoured in an uncritical way with robots, driver-less cars and Elon Musk, and as the neoliberal order responds to climate change, an implicit aspect of its shaped response will be to jettison a large part of the population, conserving on resources by eliminating their access to resources. In the meantime, shiny. That a plug-compatible hybrid is doing vanishingly little to reduce anyone’s carbon footprint, while unemployment in a worldwide depression is carrying the bulk of the weight in constraining carbon emissions, and earnest bureaucrats are projecting scenarios of large-scale carbon capture by unknown means, in order to preserve their optimism is a bit concerning.

There are a lot of people in the world, with many varied and conflicting ideas. We can do many things at once to address our many and varied problems, and disagree at the same time. But, there may be one or two things we need to agree on, to move forward without our ambivalence and conflicts making our efforts collectively self-defeating, and it does seem to me that one of those over-arching general principles is that we will need to move toward less total energy use (a goal that may well be reached in welfare-enhancing ways, even if we humans characteristically disagree and fight over many details).

Obama is therefore preparing a second great photo-op on his home turf , a deserved victory lap, also boosting HRC or Sanders.

Right: but either (a) that has no legal effect (although we can expect the bureaucracy to ignore the law and act as if it did, as they did with Kyoto) OR (b) it’s a treaty that needs Senate confirmation.

I didn’t mean to pick on the Archdruid in particular, but I don’t think it’s accidental that he’s a bit of a reactionary. Other writers who I think of in this category are James Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. It’s probably not worth getting into more analysis.

Klein and Hansen are something else entirely, and I wouldn’t call them “doomers”. Hansen is a scientist and he’s publishing stuff in the peer reviewed literature. Other scientists who I also respect have different views that are within the broad area of scientific consensus, also in the peer reviewed literature. I’m not competent to say who’s right and I doubt that anyone else reading this is either. Klein is an activist, not an inactivist.

There was a last minute issue with the agreement due to the word “shall” being inserted where the word “should” was going to go, in one part.

This caused a great flurry, and some countries were a bit opportunistic to see if they could keep the word “shall”, or to see if they could get last minute changes — but after a bit it was replaced by “should”.

The difference between shall and should is whether it is a legally binding agreement.

But all in all, I think the Paris agreement is really positive, it is about as good as anyone could have realistically hoped for. The next thing is to get the national targets into line with a 1.5 degrees outcome, with the next big conference being in 2018.

Does anybody know anything about this clause in the Annex
The United Nations and its specialized agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as any State member thereof or observers thereto not party to the Convention, may be represented at sessions of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement as observers. …?

ZM @120 – that’s a really sad story, but it is good that the professor has responded like that. It does seem really irresponsible, especially in terms of the impact on young people and vulnerable people, to indulge in gloom and doom without trying to find positive paths that we can at least try to follow.

@Val 12.14.15 at 9:58 pm, Val 12.17.15 at 2:00 am

>all the major monotheistic patriarchal religions that arose in the last few thousand years had a similar attitude, that Man should be dominant over Nature … the patriarchal, hierarchical, Man dominating Nature discourse that I discussed earlier.

I don’t see why ‘dominance over Nature’ needs to entail suicide, I see nothing wrong with ‘dominance over Nature’ if that means sensible and humane manipulation and modification of the non-sentient part of the planet for humanity’s purposes, and I fail to see any connection with gender and patriarchy here.

If we are supposed to ‘rule over’ or ‘be dominant over’ our boat/house, that certainly doesn’t imply that blowing up our boat/house is a good idea – especially while we’re in it. The most drastic problem with catastrophic climate change is precisely that we *won’t* be able to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ if we cause it. For all my opposition to the Bible and religion in general, I don’t see how it can seriously be considered much of a culprit here.

Manipulating and modifying (the rest of) nature for human purposes is what humanity is all about and always has been (indeed, it’s what all living beings do to different extents, but we have been much better at it than others, at least in the short run). (Extra-human) nature is not a sentient being, so manipulating and modifying it is not intrinsically wrong. And, contrary to what some among the ‘greens’ seem to believe, it is neither our superior (an appropriate object of worship or emulation) nor our equal (someone we owe anything besides humane treatment).

As for gender and patriarchy, I don’t see how specifically the gender dimension of human hierarchies is relevant here at all. It can hardly be claimed that interacting with extra-human nature in a non-sensible, environmentally unsustainable way is somehow ‘a man thing’, or that a hypothetical hierarchy completely free of gender inequality would be less prone to irrational treatment of nature. I do agree that the problem is connected to hierarchy in that the desire of certain parts of society to maintain status at all costs motivates right-wing opposition and sabotage; but the conflict simply isn’t about the privileged status of men as a gender over women as a gender.

@James Wimberley

I can only assume your absurd nitpicking about the date means you have nothing to say about being wrong before, and I accept the apology.

@John Quiggin

achieving significant emissions reductions will, unquestionably, require legislation and appropriation to carry into effect even if the treaty does not. And considering that koyoto went down 97 to zero and republican opposition has only hardened since, the odds of that legislation passing are close to nil. But I am amused by how readily you disdain the mechanics of democracy when it suits your purposes.

@ZM

While that particular effort seems embarrassingly amateurish, I would not be entirely surprised to see such an effort succeed eventually, but not for at least another decade or two, long past the point at which we are currently being told it will be too late (not that I don’t expect that line to change). Gay marriage went from overwhelming bipartisan opposition to constitutionally protected right in about two decades, I have a hard time seeing climate change move any faster than that. At an absolute minimum, you’d need to replace a justice or two, maybe more if the current members are unwilling to “evolve” sufficiently quickly.

F Foundling @ 123
Your comment illustrates a problem that I have commented on previously – the level of engagement with feminist theory on CT often seems rather weak. (I suspect this is basically sexism – an assumption that feminist theory = women = second-rate thinking.) You might notice yourself how you moved from what I said, which was about discourse and history, to what you concluded with, which was “the conflict simply isn’t about the privileged status of men as a gender over women as a gender” – something that I have never claimed.

If you want to know more about ecofeminist theory, Greta Gaard ‘Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism’ in Feminist Formations 23 (2) is a thoughtful review of ecofeminist thought over the last 30 years. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Griffin’s Woman and Nature predates today’s gender studies in its exploration of the ways that the feminized status of women, animals, nature, and feminized others (children, people of color, farmers, slaves, as well as the body itself, emotions, and sexuality) have been conceived of as separate and inferior in order to legitimate their subordination under an elite and often violent and militarized male-dominant social order. Bridging socialist feminism and ecology, Merchant’s The Death of Nature provided historical documentation for the claim that the domination of women and of nature have shared roots in the logic of science and capitalism, an intertwining of economics and rationalism that Merchant traces from 1484 to 1716. Most provocative is her intersectional linkage of racism, speciesism, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, and the mechanistic model of science–nature via the historical co-occurrence of the racist
and colonialist “voyages of discovery” that resulted in appropriating indigenous
peoples, animals, and land; …
…
Merchant’s (1995) materialist account of the woman–nature connection— like those of Ynestra King (1989), Karen Warren (1991, 1994), Val Plumwood (1991, 1993), Ariel Salleh (1984, 1997), Lori Gruen (1993), and many other ecofeminist scholar- activists—described a socially constructed association among women (sex), femininity (gender), and nature that was contextual and fluid, not ahistorical and static (Thompson 2006). In the 1990s, this feminist analysis shifted from exploring associations among the objects of oppression to addressing the structure of oppression itself, exposing the “logic of domination” (Warren 1990) and the “master model” (Plumwood 1993) that had shaped Western culture’s relationship with nature. … ecological feminist works like Kate Soper’s What Is Nature? (1995), Karen Warren’s Ecofeminism (1997), Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) and Environmental Culture (2002), Stacy Alaimo’s Undomesticated Ground (2000), and Ariel Salleh’s Ecofeminism as Politics (1997) and anthology Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice (2009) all use a materialist feminist approach to explore the oppression of
women and nature …

@John Quiggin 12.18.15 at 4:32 am

>Relevantly to the current debate, it went there over the united opposition of the Republican Party.

Very true, the difference being one, gay marriage did not require trillions of dollars of government spending, and two, there was no time urgency on gay marriage the way I am repeatedly assured there is with climate change. If the climate problem is as bad as you say, you need a deal in the next 5 years, not 20.

@Rich Puchalsky

>It’s totally weird that the left got the job of preservation of humanity in toto. I suppose that the right’s attitude is only the natural continuation of the Falangist “¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte!”

To repeat myself, the right doesn’t think it’s a question of saving humanity. Frankly, they think you are lying to advance your agenda. And the only way to convince them that you aren’t is to stop treating it as an opportunity and to start treating it as a crisis.

cassander @ 133, JQ @ 129

I do not think the Republicans or conservatives broadly were as united in opposition to gay rights or gay marriage as their PR may have made out. There were highly placed gay Republicans — Reagan had a clique of gay insiders going back at least to his time as Governor. Many conservative libertarians were sympathetic. One of the most powerful gay lobby groups, Human Rights Campaign, was oriented to a donor base of conservative businessmen. The choice of gay marriage as a primary issue to fight was pushed by conservatives — Andrew Sullivan was a prominent early advocate of gay marriage as a political strategy and conservative ideological stance. Republicans as prominent as the odious Dick Cheney were supportive.

It is rewriting history and misunderstanding the political dynamics to paint the gay rights evolution as monolithically partisan or left.

The politics of climate change will not evolve in a one-sided way either, no matter how much Republicans enjoy expressing their culture wars bad attitudes in opinion polling, annoying their libturd antagonists.

Conservative ideas will emerge as contenders. This is true already for climate engineering interventions. Rich people will continue to believe their wealth and capitalist inventiveness will mitigate the worst effects and provide profit opportunities. In private, many will wonder why they won’t be able simply to turn up the air conditioning. Externalizing the risks and costs to the innocent will be acceptable to people of a conservative orientation, as it is the essence of their politics in general. They may be sadder to see Florida drown than Bangladesh, but they will advocate accepting both, I think.

We are going to get a neoliberal response to climate change, because that is where the balance of power is. And, that response will be shaped by conservative interests and ideas. We should not be fooled by Manichean kabuki political theatre into thinking the policy response is merely delayed by unthinking denialism.

Now cassander falls back on the conservative global warming polka: 1) deny that it’s happening; 2) admit that it’s happening but claim there’s no harm; 3) admit there’s harm but claim there’s nothing that can be done about it; 4) return to 1…

Oh, I missed the obvious (!?) that your 138 wasn’t meant to be an expression of your views, despite being framed as a more accurate analogue of your views; and that it didn’t deny the problem, despite denying the problem.

Zedblank: “Given that we still have a large sector of the population unemployed or underemployed, it seems like “more work” is exactly what we need.”

No. People shouldn’t need to work in order to live, and the planet can’t handle the volume of production that would result from fully employing everyone. In practice most people are given make-work to keep them under social control and told that they are worthless moochers if they don’t do it, while another segment of the population is kept unemployed — as in, the central bank raises interest rates if too many of them start to become employed, so it’s an official part of our policy and can not be escaped — to serve as a social underclass for the rest. “More work” means more make-work and the continuation of a method of social control that’s harmful to both individuals and the planet. With contemporary productivity we only need a small percentage of people to actually work: it should be done by those who like to do it for some kind of social status reward.

Against this the left has Marxism and its descendants, which hold that workers create value and therefore should be in charge of society, and the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, which are a mishmash of “individual rights, rational inquiry, justice” etc. etc. that are of such long-standing vintage that everyone claims to believe in them, but have a whole lot mixed in about individual rights to property and land and the value of one’s labor, a lot of which is going to have to quietly be tossed overboard if people are going to start to value ecosystemic “work”, which isn’t owned by any humans in particular.

If the largest single opposed camp to mainstream neoliberal economics was composed of Morrisians, you’d be right. There are a whole lot of strains of leftist thought that take into account everything I’ve written — this is why I still consider myself to be on the left. But they aren’t *popular* strains even on the left. And for every person who is in some way influenced by Morris there’s another one influenced by some source that really would be antithetical to his thought. As a result, I don’t think that there is actually much basic agreement about what we should do or why, other than “we don’t want lots of people to die” which just isn’t a leftist sentiment unless you define the left as being composed of everyone who isn’t a sociopath.

In the short term — we’re going to get a lot more work-as-social-control whether we want it or not. That’s implicit in my belief that the Paris agreement is an important step forwards even though it’s happening within a neoliberal system. We don’t have to tell despairing people to sit on their hands But calling for “more work” is kind of untheorized, in that it doesn’t address the questions of work by whom, for whom, doing what. Calling for public spending on green infrastructure (i.e. hiring people to work on that out of public funds) is a lot more specific.

“To the X
And the Y
And others
Who strove with Gods
Against their world’s destruction”

Political science and economics has managed to ignore the destruction of other peoples worlds by assuming away actual human beings from their models, it’d be a mistake for everyone else to do so.

lyman’s fire analogy doesn’t capture the full absurdity of cassander’s position. After all, he and everyone else are in the burning building.

It’s more like:

Travellers on a large ship discover there is a leak. The first-class passengers first deny there is a leak, then maintain that it’s not a problem as water is essential to life, then that people can adapt to an aquatic life (can’t be hard – dolphins did it). Finally, when the evidence is unmistakable, they barricade access to the site and demand that the lower classes offer up their children as indentured servants before they will allow repairs. As they put it, if you’re not prepared to make this small sacrifice, then you’re not serious about fixing the leak.

@Peter T

I didn’t realize it was possible to speak wholly in tired, inaccurate cliches, but you’ve managed it. How did you learn that conservatives are nothing but top hatted, monocled plutocrats who sit around discussing how to screw the poor? Did you sneak into one of our meetings?

I’ve seen college freshmen capable of more nuanced thinking.

= = = Seriously, that’s what I get. = = =

You missed one: any policy to address climate change proposed by “the left” [whatever that might be], whether mild or draconian, must also include implementation of the Norquist/Koch/Sinquefield policy of drastically slashing taxes to assuage the tender feelings of conservatives whilst also self-undermining policies preferred by “liberals” [ref: current public education situation in Kansas].

I’m not sure why you say ‘No, no, no’, and then repeat my assessment. If liberals don’t propose draconian measures, you think they aren’t seriously concerned about climate change. If they do, you think they’re mad, because you don’t think draconian measures are warranted. Thus, nothing liberals propose will change your mind on the subject. Fair enough?

@Layman

>I’m not sure why you say ‘No, no, no’, and then repeat my assessment. If liberals don’t propose draconian measures, you think they aren’t seriously concerned about climate change. If they do, you think they’re mad, because you don’t think draconian measures are warranted. Thus, nothing liberals propose will change your mind on the subject. Fair enough?

Draconian measures are things that, under normal circumstances, you would not consider doing. None of the progressive solutions fit that definition. So, to recap in your terms. Progressives propose doing things that non-progressives consider draconian, like abandoning fossil fuels. progressives insist that climate is very important and worth draconian solutions. Non progressives say fine, what about nuclear power or lowering taxes, and progressives go “oh god no, we can’t do anything like that!” the former is alienating, the latter makes them seem non serious. Two different behaviors, two different responses, not a catch-22.

There is no shuffle going on, I have said the same thing since the beginning, that progressives are not serious about climate change, they’re using it to justify doing things they already wanted to do. This is, sadly, rather typical human behavior, but I expect better from people who style themselves intellectuals and close observers of politics. So far, I’ve been disappointed.

I cannot make it any simpler that that. if you continue to misconstrue what I am saying, I will have no choice to conclude that either you’re too dense to read plain english or too ideological to realize that there are ideas in the world besides “yours” and “evil”.

@ 152 Bruce

The Paris meeting was a decidedly post modern affair, all about ‘signals:’ the power to develop a narrative. Modernity, at least in its ambitions, could have come up with proposals for institutions run by technocrats who would have had gears and levers at their disposal, even recourse to good old fashioned coercion if necessary. The ground for that, on an international level, doesn’t exist. Having ‘given up’ on modernity I don’t think it will exist, nor, more importantly, do I think it should exist.

On a national (and sub national in some cases) level, there will be levers, gears, and bureaucrats to be deployed. But the extent of their powers will be subject to hearts and minds. At both the international and the state levels soft power, the way people think, the way they frame problems, the narratives, matter. A lot. Technical knowledge plays a part in those soft power discussions, but it lacks the authority modernity once dreamt of having … and that’s a good thing. Given the choice between self serving plutocrats and technocrats with a tendency to hauteur, I’ll side with the technocrats, if only because their openness to knowledge makes them generally more amenable to appeals to epistemic humility.

Lawrence Stuart,

Yes I used Bakhtin and Latour in an assignment earlier this year, with Nancy Tuana’s work on interactionist epistemology as well. Although I am more familiar with Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais than Dostoevsky, and my friend who did her honours thesis using Bakhtin to interpret spaghetti westerns in the historical context of their production said she doesn’t know if Bakhtin can be made into something that is applicable in professional practice rather than in the interpretation of art, she said he sort of envisioned his work as a way that Communism could be maintained, as in Carnival in a way facilitated the strictures of the Roman State or Feudal European States to be maintained kind of as an escape valve — like in a way you could argue the escapist high po-mo media like Paris Hilton reality shows etc of the 2000s facilitated the Bush government’s wars in the middle east. So while I did use Bakhtin in my assignment, I am also somewhat wary of using Bakhtin in the climate change context, as some people already liken proposals to act on climate change to Stalinism.

I understand about the “wartime mobilisation” idea, but we have to go beyond that. We don’t have a common enemy, we have (or should/could have) a common cause. So we need to start addressing it in a way that is inclusive – we’re all in this together. Which means we have to start being egalitarian and that in turn means some pretty profound social changes.

Paris was a good start but it needs to go further – one of the immediate steps should be to get rid of historical inequalities based on gender or race/colour. So women and people of colour should be fairly represented. There should be equal representation of women and men for starters – not in ‘ideal’ but in reality. (The situation is not quite so simple in regard to people of colour/Indigenous peoples, but the principle of fair representation should guide this, which means historical factors like imperialism, colonialism, slavery and dispossession have to be taken into account.)

We should also get rid of hierarchies and structural inequalities and start having genuine democratic governance and genuinely fair resource sharing. People like Cassander will of course this is just trying to impose some crazy left wing fantasy, but I reckon it’s what we have to do in the long term, if we want genuinely sustainable societies. The question that should be asked of the cassanders, is why do they oppose democracy and equality?

And they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with the old chestnut about that’s just not how people are – we can be what to be, we can be what we can imagine. It’s a failure of imagination to think that we have to keep these tired old inequalities.

Bruce Wilder,

Diplomacy is quite old, but I am not sure it is eternal as it would have to be if it had no time dimension at all. I see what you are getting at though — that in say the 17th C there was nothing like the UN or the IPCCC and Conference of the Parties at this globally encompassing political level.

I think you could possibly move into a later period after modernism and post-modernism though, something like this is not really consistent with the qualities of post-modernism, and there was a historian giving a guest lecture this year (which I missed but might listen to the podcast over summer) about how historians are dating the end of post-modernism some time from the 2000s-2010s.

Bruno Latour’s Tweets on the Paris conference sort of attended to the idea you’re getting at by noting that Francis Hollande’s “vive la Planète!” marked something new(ish) “Nobody before yesterday could salute by saying ‘vive le globe’ because the globe is not a political sovereign”. I thinks it is a bit hyperbolic, since there has been earlier precedents, but…

I agree we should work with existing institutions, but I think we have to start questioning hierarchy and institutionalised inequality. I have become aware through my research that in my field we talk about equity and equality, but we don’t question those glaring forms of structural, institutionalised inequality that are right in front of us in our workplaces and educational institutions, for example.

They were questioned in the 70s but people found it difficult to change and work with or in flatter structures – so there was a backlash which coincided with the rise of neoliberalism. I think it’s time we tried again, recognising that it won’t be easy but it is worth doing.

As long as we have institutionalised inequality, we will have people competing for resources and wealth, which makes it difficult or impossible to achieve sustainable levels of consumption.

(Thinking of the debates going on elsewhere on CT, there are also basic conceptual problems with the way consumption and production are understood in most economic theory and popular discourse, but I won’t get into that now).

“that progressives are not serious about climate change”

This is not the shuffle to which I refer.

“I cannot make it any simpler that that.”

This I can believe.

>“The Agreement will be open for signature from 22 April 2015 [obvious typo for 2016], 4 months from now..”

and closed for signature a year after that. If you told students their paper was due between the 25 and the 30th, would they say it was due in 5 days or 10?

as for the far most substantive points on which you were completely wrong, that the agreement in paris is binding, it isn’t, that it contains national contributions, it doesn’t, you remain silent. If you won’t accept a correction on a simple matter of fact, we are done. I don’t debate with pig-headed fools and bullshitters.

@John Quiggin

>But since Cassander has hung on so long, it’s worth reminding any remaining readers that he is, or presents himself as, an example of the “reasonable Republican” : the kind of Repub centrists are always looking for as a party to some kind of “grand bargain” that would lock out the extremists on either side.

I am not a centrist, and I am personally not much interested in grand bargains. But unlike some, apparently, I am able to understand the perspective of those who are and who do. I am offering you a plan for how to win those people over, because I find your lack of interest in such a plan interesting. Not one of the commenters here has spoken of the feasibility of the plan I presented, neither technically nor politically. Instead you’ve repeatedly attacked my motives or misrepresented what I’ve said. It’s almost like you’re less interested in climate policy than you are in using the threat of climate change as a club to beat down a rival tribe……

>If you find Cassander frustrating, remember that the actual Republican base would regard his hypothetical willingness to do something about climate change, in return for unilateral surrender on everything else, as evidence that he is a RINO sellout in the pay of Soros and the United Nations (see eg Huntsman, Kasich).

“when it doubt, rely on bigotry” has never been a motto I much respected. I daresay I know a fair many more Republicans than you do, JQ, maybe you should try learning rather than sneering.

This extended discussion is an example of something so wrong that you can’t even approach what is true by correcting it. But I’ll try to go over a few things.

1. Romneycare / Obamacare, emissions trading permits, gay rights via access to traditional institutions like marriage and the military. All “conservative ideas” if viewed by an intellectual historian. All not “conservative ideas” in the sense that no living conservative can support them. There is no possible deal that can be made, even between the moderate and conservative wings of the Anglo right.

2. At least in the U.S., the right is a coalition based squarely around racism, with all of the bad conscience that that implies. Note that in the Falangist incident that I referred to previously, “Viva la Muerte” was said in response to a typically eliminationist statement about Basques and Catalans. I can’t resist quoting Unamuno in this political dispute in which one side believes in a global conspiracy of scientists: “”This is the temple of intelligence, and I am its high priest. You are profaning its sacred domain. You will win, because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack: reason and right in the struggle. I see it is useless to ask you to think of Spain. I have spoken.”

3. The right will not win, because it does not have enough brute force. On the contrary, it just lost. The neoliberal gears will grind on, and the same system that squashes hippie librarians who plaintively wonder whether literary works should remain protected profit centers forever will grind up the billionaire fossil fuel interests too — those that don’t just take their money out and reinvest in something else. As Bruce Wilder says, of course poor populations around the world are going to get ground up in a much more literally significant sense.

4. The “criticism” of right wingers is incoherent and seizes on anything available, even if that contradicts other criticisms. But in this case, the left’s disarray is something that’s available. The left has no real idea how to win this fight, as the left. It’s neoliberalism that’s doing it. If we successfully respond to this crisis, it will be neoliberalism’s response that does it, because there is no global radical movement on the horizon and we don’t have time for anything else. Of course, there could alternatively be a collapse, but the left has no real idea how to respond to that either.

Landru,
That’s actually a very contentious question here and on other sites with similar participants. For purposes of most comment threads (not necessarily main posts) it roughly means Clintonism: embracing Wall Street/the financial market, abandoning industrial policy and advancing the “free trade” agenda, ending any active defense of New Deal or Great Society programs, adopting Republican policies on “reform” in general and “welfare reform” and “entitlement reform” in particular, and not opposing military adventurism in general and military spending specifically. Reference the DLC and Third Way organizations, plus Charles Peters and the ‘Washington Monthly’ magazine.

Landru @ 180

I am not sure why neoliberalism seems vague to people. To me, it is surprisingly coherent — its very coherence is part of its rhetorical strength.

There are two threads to neoliberalism as a kind of political tradition. One begins with Charles Peters and the Washington Monthly (google his neoliberal manifesto for one of the ur-documents of neoliberalism), as Cranky says. And, this strain is identified with the DLC/new democrat politics of Bill Clinton. Another thread, that maybe resonates more with CT’s international readership, traces back to the Washington Consensus on economic development and international economic policy. Wikipedia has a decent article on the Washington Consensus.

I have sometimes made the point that what we call neoliberalism is a label for a closed dialectic or debate between conservative libertarians (in the tradition of Milton Friedman) and centrist/”left” neoliberals like Brad Delong. I suggested Brad Delong’s writings as exemplary of “left” neoliberalism on another thread, and Professor Delong helpfully confirmed that he considers himself a neoliberal. So, as a political philosophy or outlook: Delong. But, as a political movement that’s centered to Delong’s right, I would emphasize that dialectic. Neoliberalism as an outlook on policy is tied to a certain view that is legitimated by and legitimates mainstream neoclassical economics. Neoliberalism is all about Paul Krugman praising Ben Bernanke (Paul’s colleague at Princeton and Chair of the Fed under Bush and Obama) and Olivier Blanchard (formerly at the IMF) as serious people.

The closed dialectic is important because it becomes a way of legitimating a very narrow and self-defeating range of policy options, that entraps nation-state politics within technocratic bounds. “There is no alternative” (TINA) is the motto of neoliberalism, applied, for example, by Olivier Blanchard as an excuse for the visiting severe and prolonged austerity on Greece.

Bruce Wilder and I cross-posted, so I’m amused that we both picked the same motto / slogan. Charlie Peters as the right wing of neoliberalism, Brad DeLong as the left, and the Washington Consensus as agreed-on economic policy is still U.S.-centric, though. I think that there’s an argument that something like Deng Xiaoping Theory is, basically, neoliberalism.

Landru @ 181

I would agree with the above posters as to examples of neo-liberalism, but would look at it through a different lens.

Neo-liberalism is a variant of classic liberalism (Mill etc), with the same focus on “there’s no consensus around what’s good”, but with a focus on institutional actors. (Neo-conservatism is conservatism with institutional actors.) It’s sharply opposed by modern “liberalism” of the US variety, which tends to agree with classic conservatism that there is a knowable good, and to add that every institution ought to face a requirement from the state to pursue it, even if it has a differing conception of the good.

JQ #176: point taken. I would just add to your comments on the mirage of a grand bargain that it’s hard to compromise on the meaning of the Iliad with people who insist that it’s about Aeneas founding Rome.

I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of Bernanke or Blanchard but the idea that they’re not ‘serious’ seems a little implausible.

(‘Explanation above’ meaning various comments, not JQ’s posts)

How many neoliberals does it take to change a lightbulb? 3: one to privatize the grid, one to celebrate darkness, one to blame socialists
https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/status/678486243110449152

= = = I think the explanation of neoliberalism above is massively over-complicated. The ‘neo-‘ means a return to a paradigm of past, in this case liberalism of C19th century. = = =

I did note this was a contentious question, here on CT and elsewhere. This is a counter-definition that is often brought up to deflect criticism of current US neoliberalism (as noted above I’m less familiar with Euro-neoliberalism, but I’ll take JQ and Paul Krugman’s word for how it works) as practiced by the Democratic Party’s insiders and managers. It does not take into account either the definition of neo (‘a new or revived form of’) or the social structures put in place from the time of the original Liberals through 1980 (Dewey, Hopkins, Johnson, etc in the US; even Bismark’s program of social reforms in protection of industrialism). Since the post-1980 neoliberals have fought so hard to dismantle those structures (or supported the nominal opponents of their constituents in dismantling them) it strikes me as a bit slippery to try to turn the clock back to 1700 and Locke it there. YMMV.

Since the post-1980 neoliberals have fought so hard to dismantle those structures (or supported the nominal opponents of their constituents in dismantling them) it strikes me as a bit slippery to try to turn the clock back to 1700 and Locke it there. YMMV.

Don’t know what you’re on about mate

I don’t want to drift too far OT, but would like to note that much as with the “reform” of (= attack on) universal public education that while Chicago School-ization of the electricity system in the US [1] has had some positive and perhaps needed outcomes it has also had very bad outcomes for many consumers – unintended and intended – and IMHO has jepordized long-term stability of the system.

[1] and parts of Canada + Baja Mexico, to a certain extent

IIRC MISO is up to ~75 auction markets having time horizons ranging from 5 minutes to 30 years, with FERC and the “independent monitor” pushing at least three more. Every time a new wrong-headed aspect of Chicagoization is discovered a new auction market is proposed. Sayings about epicycles and can only be failed come to mind but as we know There Is No Alternative(tm)

“it strikes me as a bit slippery to try to turn the clock back to 1700 and Locke it there”

Who is being ‘slippery’ ‘trying to turn to turn clock back to 1700’, and ‘deflect criticism from US neoliberalism’ ? What are you on about?

SamChevre @ 204

Opportunities for looting are a success. Exposure of the looting in a crisis is the failure.

But, job 1 is to prevent reforms from precluding keeping most of the loot or getting more in the next round.

Did some Googling and still no idea where you guys are coming from. On second thoughts I’d allow two meanings

-neoliberalism qua ideology = free-market liberalism (/classical’/pure’ liberalism etc)
-nl qua system = hyper-capitalism / capitalism with the gloves off

Really don’t think it’s much more complicated than that. Iinsistence on novelty seems awfully like bending over backwards to deny that things you don’t like are fairly predictable tendencies of capitalism.

(PS I very much disagree that is the ideology of the ‘managerial class’ or that it’s not inherently pro- laissez faire but I agree about not _identifying_ it with (US) ‘libertarianism’ – that’s a Mickey Mouse firm of something that’s more widespread and respected)

Neoliberalism is inherently tied to globalism in a way that makes comparisons with previous eras not very meaningful

Umm you do realize they had globalisation in C19th

Er okay but not capitalism so irrelevant. Anyway so why is comparison with previous eras meaningless then?

James Wimberley @ 198

Privatised electricity providers have not been “phlegmatic” about renewable energy here in Victoria (Australia). Indeed I would suggest they have deliberately misrepresented its impact.

Our benighted conservative government under the former leader Tony Abbott held a “review” (as in the sense of attack) of the renewable energy target (RET) here in 2014. I wrote about it at the time on my blog:

I looked at some of the submissions on the RET review, including one from my energy provider, Origin. Origin is calling for the RET to be lowered – and I am thinking about whether I should change my energy provider! At least they are not calling for it to be abolished, but even lowering it is a foolish step backwards.

One thing that makes me quite angry about the position of Origin and also that of the Electricity Suppliers Association of Australia, is that they talk a lot about the costs of renewable energy to the general public, through the RET and the carbon price, but there are two things they don’t seem to mention:
-People on low to average incomes in Australia were in general over-compensated for the costs of the carbon price – they received more in payments from the government than the costs that the carbon price was estimated to cause households.
-Energy companies make a profit from current household solar. Early Feed-in Tarriffs (FITs), which are the price the energy companies pay people for the electricity that they feed in to the main grid from their solar panels, were quite high, to encourage take up of solar panels. However, they have now been reduced, and electricity companies now sell the electricity for more than they pay for it. For example, Origin pays me 8c per Kilowatt hour (KwH) for energy from my solar panels, and sells it to other people for 22c per KwH.
It seems to me that they are not being entirely honest.

However entrepreneurial capitalism has turned up alternatives, I must admit, and we now have a new company, Powercorp, that charges on what you actually use and is friendly to renewables.

so why is comparison with previous eras meaningless then?

You know I always thought the right-wing jibe that some people on the left use ‘neoliberalism’ as an all-putpose bogeyman (meaning roughly ‘stuff about contemporary world I don’t like’) was unwarranted — after reading this thread In not so sure.

(Defn s/b “the belief that” – and apologies for multiple comments)

I would like to ask if anyone can provide a succinct working definition, that we can keep in mind

Since I can’t hope to match the virtuosity of some of the other answers, I’ll try to focus on the “succinct” bit. (1) LFC et al are right about the two senses—or versions—of “neoliberalism”; (2) engels gets the more general sense pretty much exactly right, I think: neoliberalism in this sense is just the revival of classic 19th century liberalism; (3) for the US-centric “left neoliberalism”, “left” insofar as it descends from mid-century American liberalism, see this and this. But basically, it’s classic, laissez-faire liberalism with a bit of redistribution thrown in.

I haven’t read through the whole thread, but really, has no one here read Philip Mirowski on the genesis of “neo-liberalism” via the Mont Pelerin Society?

js: “neoliberalism in this sense is just the revival of classic 19th century liberalism”

And that’s why 19th century liberals would have done something like, let’s say, a global agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses that inevitably shuts down major privately owned industries.

Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde!

It is a symptom, a pathology of late capitalism that with the dispersion of subjectivity, agency is displaced onto the enemy/other. The enemy isn’t controlled by a vanguard.

Only labor, workers create value, from material circumstances not of their choosing. I am reminded everyday of how radical that idea still is.

@Rich Puchalsky — To be clear, I actually agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but I also think that the first wave of globalization in the mid-19th century is a lot more relevant than you seem to think (and with due respect to BW, I don’t think the 11th century is similarly relevant). So I think the historical comparison to the 19th century is quite apt.

js: “So I think the historical comparison to the 19th century is quite apt.”

The best 19th century comparison that I can think of is the abolition of the slave trade. And that had little or nothing to do with classical liberalism: classical liberals generally opposed social liberalism. You can blur them together if you look back at the 19th century because many prominent liberals supported elements of what later were labeled as different types of liberalism, but it’s kind of useless as a guide to understanding current day events.

“There is no alternative” only works if neoliberalism appears to be actually better than the alternatives to people with some degree of power. It’s a control mechanism, and it’s not some kind of rerun of the 19th century. It’s not simply hypercapitalism that gets worse and worse until inevitable immiseration followed by revolution: that’s the same braindead excuse for failure that the left has been running on for the last 30 years.

LFC @ 236

Definitely OT, but I’d be very happy to have some author names — it’s a place where my categorization says “there should be something, but I haven’t found it.”

correction:
Manuel (with an e)

What would Jesus say about . . . ?

Sorry, I don’t understand this at all.

The best 19th century comparison that I can think of is the abolition of the slave trade. And that had little or nothing to do with classical liberalism

It’s not about the slave trade, but I happen to be reading this right now (oddly). It rather makes me doubt that attitudes towards slavery had “little or nothing to do” with classical liberalism. (And slavery/the slave trade aren’t the only examples.)

Js. Point taken on the US-specific usage, I’d missed that (but do feel it’s a side issue and the US defn of liberal = social democrat which it presumably stems from is itself completely nuts…)

JS: “But I am honestly failing to see why anything you’re saying is supposed to be a response or objection to me.”

You wrote this: “[…] engels gets the more general sense pretty much exactly right, I think: neoliberalism in this sense is just the revival of classic 19th century liberalism; […]” Maybe you didn’t notice what engels was getting the general sense of right because you didn’t read what you were agreeing with?

engels’ story goes like this: capitalism is forever the same thing, gradually getting worse. So neoliberalism as ideology is just 19th century classical liberal, as system is “hypercapitalism / capitalism with the gloves off” and he “Really [doesn’t] think it’s much more complicated than that. Insistence on novelty seems awfully like bending over backwards to deny that things you don’t like are fairly predictable tendencies of capitalism.”

If people could read — which I know is a lot to ask — they might have noticed that this is pretty much the exact opposite of what I’ve been saying. My “insistence on novelty” is not an attempt to deny that things I don’t like are fairly predictable tendencies of capitalism. It’s an attempt to explain why something I *do* like — namely, a global agreement to pretty much eliminate fossil fuels by 2050 — is a result of capitalism.

I’m engaging with you, not engels, because responding to him is a waste of time. But you agreed with him, and I haven’t given up on responding to you. The result of not finding “novelty” — of saying that this is 19th century redux, or perhaps worse, “hypercapitalism” — is that you’re pretty much committed to seeing this agreement as a sham. But we’re all agreed that anthropogenic global warming is a real problem, and that if nothing is actually done, things will get steadily or perhaps catastrophically worse.

And I think that’s what the legacy of Marxism has committed us to. It’s not actually about historical materialism, or seeing different eras as different according to changes in methods of production. It’s about unvarying mental categories — capitalism is forever the same thing, neoliberals now are just the same as 19th century classical liberals — and insistence on the same story, which “this agreement is just a sham” is a part of. It’s one of the reasons why so many people react in a dismissive, purely negative way to this agreement, as if the agreement doesn’t give us a huge number of handles for political activism that weren’t there before.

248:I’ve often noticed that workers create the air that we breathe. Plus they run the water cycle, regenerate soil quality and so on.

Air and water are not values. They are valuable, things to care about.

I can’t believe I bothered to respond to that rabid drool.

“And I think that’s what the legacy of Marxism has committed us to. It’s not actually about historical materialism, or seeing different eras as different according to changes in methods of production. It’s about unvarying mental categories — capitalism is forever the same thing, neoliberals now are just the same as 19th century classical liberals”

I don’t think this is true, if you look at the book I mentioned in my last comment it covers Marxist thinkers who have looked at things in terms of history and change eg Jameson and Zizek, and David Harvey is maybe a bit more of an orthodox Marxist but he has as well.

engels’ story goes like this: capitalism is forever the same thing, gradually getting worse.

I don’t think that and didn’t say it but don’t let that in your way, it never does

I’m engaging with you, not engels, because responding to him is a waste of time

A small point, but may I point it that you are in fact responding to me, just in an extremely snotty way?

@Rich Puchalsky 254

I totally don’t understand what you are saying.
What has exchange value (prices) to do with the fact that we don’t die by global warming (use value)?

MisterMr: I totally don’t understand what you are saying.

Totally.

Why did you leave me here so long with Uncle Walter?
https://youtu.be/AYoB8zHhQuU

Fwiw I haven’t mentioned Marx.

t’s supranational capital above all. This is a new paradigm, I believe..

Why??

Gotta love the idea you should only be allowed to on posts that specifically refer to him though

That is not what I said, engels.

LFC, no, you just drew attention to the fact that Marxism tend to come up in the comments when it isn’t mentioned in the posts, and that these discussions ‘tend to be frustrating’

If anyone wants a more productive discussion, one was had up around 142-146 with ZedBlank. Like it or not Marxism is going to come up in any historical discussion of “core theories of the left”, given what it did to rival socialisms, along with Enlightenment thought. I’ve already alluded to how New Left thought, if considered as a third core source, is highly vulnerable to absorption by neoliberalism — there’s no question that, as various people at LGM take care to emphasize, the neoliberalism of Obama really is the lesser evil when compared with conservatism or classical liberalism.

The mention of Marx is only a problem in these threads because Puchalsky tends to froth and sputter at the name. I find it hard to avoid not because I am particularly ideological, but because the “legacy of Marxism” is critical, for instance in the historical or material or particularist turns in social science, in everything recent that I read.

Last book finished: Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory 2006, in which she discusses the use of identity to disguise class in a New Jersey High School, and at length why Jameson and Raymond Williams, along with Geerts and Giddens and James Scott, are important to her work.

Oh the humanity! Looking on from the sidelines while ruminating on my understandings of neoliberalism I find both BW’s and RP’s definitions pretty accurate. Yet the historical point or question engels’ has re: neoliberalism is not without merit. It doesn’t have to be either/or. It can be both/and.

Go back and read Lenin’s analysis of the machinations of German bankers in concert with German heavy industry and the German govt. in South America– a dynamic that was called imperial capitalism 115 years ago. It bears striking resemblance to the globalism of the contemporary moment.

A key point that Wilder has made however is how neoliberalism takes on a fierce ideological/class component that is masked by economics (math and models are objective!) and technocratic competencies ( or at least the sense that managerial/technocratic competency is necessarily devoid of politics). This too me is the real innovation of neoliberalism. Class and politics are passe in the neoliberal world order, indeed such categories are irrelevant. Neoliberalism’s achievement is that it has totally altered what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling.’ Politics, even just the recognition of class, is perceived to be vulgar and necessarily base in no small part b/c the dynamics of politics are constrained by collective interests. Whereas economic activity is FREEDOM.

A (seemingly necessary?) corollary to the neoliberal axiom that the economy will make you free is the reanimation of the classically liberal conception of the “individual.” Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics, I believe, does a pretty good job of delineating a genealogy of Anglo liberal thought that leads right up to Gary Becker–he of the pernicious “human capital” fame. We are all now supposed to be entrepreneurs of our own souls and our material conditions– responsible in the worst sense of the word. It’s an interesting dynamic–as economic activity and governance becomes increasingly impersonal and technocratic (devoid of politics) individuals are increasingly politicized and personalized. Again, another achievement of neoliberalism: shifting the political into the domain of the purely personal, the psychological even.

mcmanus @ 270 “Yes, the tree makes oxygen, but the tree doesn’t care, because the tree doesn’t have a perspective or consciousness. Only humans, through the creation of value or the directing of desire, can say oxygen is good stuff.”

I see what you are saying, but really, a little epistemological humility is in order. You have no idea what perspective or “consciousness” a tree might have. Bottom line, it matters vanishingly little that humans can SAY oxygen is good stuff while the tree can’t. Trees and oxygen are fundamental conditions of human existence. Our vaunted “value-giving” power is superfluous by comparison. And if we indeed give “values” to the tree and oxygen the first probably should be something like reverence and gratitude.

phenomenal cat: “Bottom line, it matters vanishingly little that humans can SAY oxygen is good stuff while the tree can’t. Trees and oxygen are fundamental conditions of human existence.”

Yes. Even if you take humans to be the source of all (human) ideas of value, without oxygen humans are not going to be valuing anything. Bob m. writes that “abstractions do not create or rank values”, but anyone who thinks that there is something abstract about the need to breathe should try holding their breath for, oh 5 minutes or so.

But really what’s important is that we’re talking about an *economy*. Bob m. writes sarcastically about “tree labor” as if he’s unaware that it takes ecosystemic resources to sustain a tree, that trees effectively do work, and that resources that sustain a human worker are inevitably taken from the same pool of resources that sustain trees. I don’t blame bob m. for not knowing any of this, because he’s immersed in a creaky old ideology, but his notion of limitlessness is the same as the capitalist idea of unlimited business expansion.

Karl isn’t wrong; he’s dead.

@phenomenal cat 12.23.15 at 8:04 pm
>You have no idea what perspective or “consciousness” a tree might have.

Don’t forget stones. How can you have any idea whether inanimate matter isn’t actually feeling and thinking all the time? Maybe it doesn’t want to be used and destroyed/transformed by us living beings? For all we know, we might all be committing murder each time we break an inanimate object! On the other hand, how can I have any idea whether *other humans*, such as, say, you, really *are* thinking? After all, that may not always seem equally obvious either. Clearly, all of my judgements and actions should be guided by a most healthy agnosticism in this respect…

>Bottom line, it matters vanishingly little that humans can SAY oxygen is good stuff while the tree can’t.

I suppose it also matters vanishingly little that Australia is demonstratively reachable by boat or plane, whereas Narnia for some reason seems to remain inaccessible. At least it matters vanishingly little to the Narnians, and that’s what counts, after all. Let’s not foeget that in the democratic self-governing community of fictional and non-fictional countries, the fictional ones have the overwhelming majority.

>And if we indeed give “values” to the tree and oxygen the first probably should be something like reverence and gratitude.

Reverence and gratitude make sense when directed towards conscious beings, because they are moral agents. Things that are beneficial or harmful without being moral agents do not deserve gratitude for the benefits or resentment for the harm. Newsflash: it makes no sense to be angry at the stone or chair that you stumble over, and to be grateful to the stone or chair that you use to sit on. Thinking, feeling and acting as if everything in our environment were human is just buggy cognition, or, let’s say, extraordinarily primitive and lazy thinking. You can’t survive if you consistently treat stones like humans, and if you try, you are only blurring the line that should prevent you from treating humans like stones.

Or, to put it in another way, trees have no respect for me and I see no reason to have any respect for them either. That doesn’t mean I have any intention of suffocating if I can help it.

it was Landru asking a question, not engels being a dick about the answers

Merry Christmas, Bruce, and a happy New Year

js: “When I said that neoliberalism in the general or global sense is a revival of 19th century classical liberalism, I was aiming to provide a “succinct, working definition of neoliberalism””

A succinct, working definition that is also wrong doesn’t help. Up at #182 I wrote a single paragraph as a succinct answer (the second one). If that’s too much, you can just take the first sentence: Neoliberalism is the ideology of the ruling global managerial class. As that sentence implies, neoliberals believe in managing problems in a way that classical liberals really didn’t. Since this whole thread was about a global agreement to effectively eliminate fossil fuel use — i.e. an agreement to manage a problem — it’s a critical distinction to make: merely saying that neoliberals are like 19th century classical liberals gives people no analytical resources for understanding what this agreement means and how it’s likely to be carried out both in its good and bad aspects.

Sorry, I haven’t spelled this out but I should. You seem to take it as obvious that the Paris agreement is an expression of neoliberalism (in some sense, still not totally clear to me which). This isn’t something I’m conceding, not because I disagree but because I really have no definite view about it. I’d at least want some argument for why the agreement is an expression of neoliberalism, which as far as I can see neither you nor anyone else on this thread has provided. So arguments from the premise that the Paris agreement is an expression of neoliberalism are flat out question begging from my perspective.

js: “I’d at least want some argument for why the agreement is an expression of neoliberalism, which as far as I can see neither you nor anyone else on this thread has provided.”

Sorry, that goes beyond the scope of what I’m willing to write for a comment thread. It would take either detailed textual examination of the agreement or an argument of the order “It would odd if a number of neoliberal governments got together within a neoliberal world system and came up with an agreement that was not, itself, neoliberal” and then I’d have to go through major governments in turn: is Obama’s left-liberal, or neoliberal? Does China act internationally in a way that is meaningfully described as neoliberal? Are the controlling institutions and political parties of Europe adequately described as neoliberal? Etc. If people are still really thinking that neoliberalism is to a close approximation a re-run of 19th century classical liberalism, I don’t see how that argument is effectively possible within this space.

I’ve offered a theory and sketched it out. If you don’t like the word “neoliberal” you can instead substitute something like “this agreement was made by the global managerial class, the same one that makes trade agreements”.

Yeah, part of what’s weird about this is that this is partly an argument about what “neoliberalism” means and it s partly an argument about how best to characterize the dispensation we live under, and some people, including you I think, thinks it’s pretty obvious that the answer to one is the answer to the other, whereas others are less sure about that. (I studied philosophy for too long, so I just can’t assent to anything.)

But honestly, the “managerial class” thing doesn’t make that much sense to me, but I need to think more to come up with a coherent objection.

Fwiw I originally said neoliberalism was ‘basically’ the same as libertarianism, classical liberalism, Thatcherism, etc, not that they were all identical, and this was a response to the (imo) massively over-complicated definitions given by Bruce and Rich in the comments above that which imo still read like laundry list of things that piss them off. I said it was advocacy of the pure market and for its extension into new domains and I stand by that. I disagree that it is ‘the ideology of the managerial class’ or it favours ‘credentialed’ state ‘administration’ over ‘laissez faire’ capitalism. I didn’t say capitalism today is the same as 150 years ago just disagreed that comparisoms between two are ‘not very meaningful’ or that C19th capitalism wasnt ‘globalizing’. Etc etc

Just as concrete and steel lurked unseen inside Victorian neo-Gothic buildings, so the practice of managerialism is the practice inside the neo-liberal ideology of freedom realised through the market. It turns out that freedom involves a great deal of repression, and the invisible hand is prone to writing rude words unless stringently guided. Neo-liberalism, like most revivals, bears only a distant resemblance to its original.

The original liberalism was a movement in opposition to landed wealth and aristocratic dominance on the one hand, and the socialist leanings of the lower classes on the other. If, as Piketty suggests, inherited wealth returns, the neo-liberals will be its apologists (or at best moderators), not its opponents.

(But happy to concede that statement in my initial comment probably over-emphasised the similarities between what I take to be different forms of capitalist ideology.)

@Bruce Wilder 257
In fact I totally didn’t but reading the following thread now I’ve got a petter idea.
It seems to me that RP is summing oranges and apples and obtaining pears as a result.
My opinion on “neoliberalism” is:
1) Neoliberalism is an economic regime – by wich I mean a system wich redistributes the fruits of production in a certain way;
2) N. was born as a revolt against what we could call the “postwar compromise” regime, and against the failure of the soviet system. As a consequence, it is just a going back at pre-war, or 19th century if you prefer, forms of capitalism.

But RP in my opinion is mixing up the “economic system” neoliberalism with the fact that today we have better grasp of the ecological problem, while in the “postwar compromise” system, in the soviet system, and in pre-war capitalist system nobody really cared so we didn’t have summits about global warming.
It is a very good thing that we have summits about global warming, and this is one of the most important issues of today (possibly the most imortant), but I don’t think that it has anything to do with neoliberalism as such, and everything to do with the fact that we are blowing up the ecosystem today much more that we were blowing it up in the 19th century.
RP made the whole discourse less understandable to me mixing two very different meaning of the word “value” (prices vs. things we should care of), hence my apparently total OT derailment about the technical sense of labor value.
passing:
1) No, carrots don’t feel pain, I know it for certain after many years or research made of intensive carrot torturing. Also, I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like to hurt animals, if vegetables also had consciousness I would be in a sea of problems.
2) I don’t think the world managerial class is really such a different development vs. 19th century capitalism, they also had a political class different from capitalists, but the political class of the time mostly worked in order to keep the capitalists happy.

@LFC 260
To be clear, I’m not an economist and I think 99% of economists would disagree with what I wrote. However I recently did read Sraffa’s “production of commodities..” and some articles by sraffian economists, and I totally read Marx too much, so I stand for my position that marxian economics is sraffian economics plus some other additional hipothesis, and as such is much more scientifically acceptable today than is usually credited for.

@Ze K 273
But in the 19th century there was a lot of nation building, for example Germany and Italy were unified and Japan underwent a similar process. I think that as the scale of production increases, former national borders become too small, and there is a slow process of building larger nations. I think we are moving to a system of bigger nations, eg. we could see the EU as an infant new nation state, we are not yet moving to a system of supernational capitalism (if the process goes on we can end up with a world-nation, but this is still far in the future).

“But I think we see the idea of “the renegade Kautsky” coming true. You can hardly tell American capital from German or Chinese capital anymore.”

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=proxy+war+in+Syria

In the U.S., this is not actually the case,

Am I right in thinking this is a completely different sense of the word that has nowt to do with the concept non-USians mean by ‘neoliberal’? (So this is a bit like disputing someone’s analysis of ‘bank’ as a financial intermediary on the grounds that actually a bank can be a grassy thing by side of a river
..)

Peter T @ 301: “Exploitation is a given (although how much and on what terms is a negotiation). What I’m getting at is that neo-liberalism embodies a major contradiction.”

Yes. I described neoliberalism as a capitalist system and ideologically as “a liberalism”, so I think that we can take all of the general characteristics of capitalism and of liberalism as read. The managerial aspect is one of the features that make it different in an important way from previous liberalisms. See a previous comment of BW here: neoliberals “give up” on class war — that is also, I’d say, one of their defining markers. But they are aware that they can’t let plutocrats win the class war to the extent that neoliberalism is no longer seen as a the best of a set of bad alternatives by people who matter.

MisterMr: “It is a very good thing that we have summits about global warming, and this is one of the most important issues of today (possibly the most imortant), but I don’t think that it has anything to do with neoliberalism as such, and everything to do with the fact that we are blowing up the ecosystem today much more that we were blowing it up in the 19th century.”

We’re all agreed that the problem exists (i.e. anthropogenic global warming) but why does an apparent solution exist? Why are those summits about global warming happening, and will they translate into actual solutions or not?

It seems to me that answers to those questions fall into three main possible areas: 1) our current world system is capable of handling this problem; 2) our current world system is not capable of handling this problem (i.e. these agreements are shams), 3) our current system is a mixture of systems within which the capability for world action exists as a sort of emergency capacity. It’s sort of important to have an idea of which of these it is (or there are other options too) because it affects actions going forward. Or one of the answers is that there is *no* action that will make a difference going forward: I’ve written about that upthread.

MisterMr: “RP made the whole discourse less understandable to me mixing two very different meaning of the word “value” (prices vs. things we should care of), hence my apparently total OT derailment about the technical sense of labor value.”

But all “things we should care about” are being converted into prices. How much does it cost to solve the problem of global warming? Neoliberalism is going to make that show up as a price for individuals.

That’s not even my main objection, though. The whole Marxist apparatus of exchange value and use value and so on is hopelessly ignorant from a contemporary standpoint. Our whole existence depends on an ecosystem “economy” that we’re drawing from. It’s an economy because economy is about scarce resources.

Puchalsky, just stop it, you are making a fool of yourself with this phobia toward a straw Marxism that is stuck in the 2nd Int’l. Part of the problem with responding to you is the wealth of Marxian material, including many opposing perspectives developed even within the last generation.

(Consider this link and quote a step toward what’s different about Neoliberalism. I find it near useless to concentrate on a top-down (Mirowski) model of Neoliberalism which ignores the Gramscian elements of hegemony and overlooks the need to develop a counter-hegemony. Hegemonies are importantly bottom-up, see Jacques Ellul. Goran Therborn did the best development of Althusser, see Erik Olin Wright over at Jacobin this week.)

Notes from Post-Fordism A Reader 1994

“Most people seem to agree that there has been a substantial transition since the 1970s. For some people, this is the information age, for others postmodernity, global interdependence, or a new mercantilism-based society (where the state aids new areas of technical expertise). It can also involve more corporate control with banks and corporations more dominant. Some people see as flexible specialisation, with a versatile work force, flat teams, new social movements, and a new social economy [all these terms arise from Sternberg, apparently]. All the models assume an end to centralism and mass markets.

There are lots of marxist criticisms available, especially via Capital and Class [a marxist journal and theoretical school] : for them, the approach is too functionalist and systematic, ignoring the ‘non path dependent, contested and open nature of change’ (3). There may be no clear breaks, or no binary contrasts (and this includes criticism of the view that there are now old and new times). There are many determinations instead. However, postfordism in the New Times project already attempts to synthesise the economic and the cultural, and is not without its critics (including Rustin and Sivanadan). Post-Fordism is clearly a floating metaphor, involving different emphases.

There are three broad models of the transition from the British economy of the 1970s to the present: there are also several other important models, including work by Bowles and Gintis, a class based version of regulation theory, Lash and Urry on disorganised capitalism, or Harvey on flexible accumulation.”

“this phobia toward a straw Marxism that is stuck in the 2nd Int’l. ”

Stuck in the First International — let’s get our ancient historical grievances right.

“Damn slacker lilies of the field toil not” is funny, but they do work. Lilies are there because of coevolution with bees: the plant “works” and grows this food-plus-advertisement so that bees will spread pollen around, and the bees are sustained and do “work” pollenating other plants. One third of our food is supposedly dependent on bee pollination.

So the proletariat is always already an appropriator of surplus value, to put it into your terms as well as I can. The capitalist thinks, if he or she thinks at all, “I organized these proles using capital that I own, so I created value and I get the value I created”, and the proles, if they think at all, think pretty much the same thing. But their labor isn’t creating value. Their labor is using ecosystemic value that might have been used for something else, and there’s a limited supply of it.

I think that I’m aware that hegemonies aren’t simply top-down. I’ve written a lot here about the basic leftist problem of “Democracies, in theory, allow a majority of people to vote in the government that they want. So why do left-of-center parties have such a difficult time if the left supposedly represents the interests of the majority of people?” One of these reasons is that the majority of people would seemingly prefer to be one-up on the people just below them than to really have an egalitarian society. But another reason — if anthropogenic global warming and similar problems have mysteriously appeared in the “left” basket of problems to solve — is a fatal flaw in majority left ideology.

oh, my gosh, an interesting discussion has broken out

this is a completely different sense of the word

On this thread, at least four distinct denotations of the word, neoliberal, have been identified. I pointed to the first two, and made a later reference to the fourth:

1.) Charles Peters (Neoliberal Manifesto). This might be called the American sense, since it is tied up with the peculiar dynamics of American two-party politics, in which “liberal” came to denote supporters of FDR’s New Deal and its institutionalized programs of social insurance, economic regulation, financial repression and trade unionism, a structure the neoliberals were willing to cooperate with Reaganites in “reforming” (aka dismantling).

2.) Washington Consensus. The End-0f-History consensus of international policy economists on international economic development. An important marker, as international institutions like the IMF, World Bank and GATT sought a post-Cold-War rationale for their function in governing the New World Order.

3.) Mont Pelerin Society (documented by historian, Philip Mirowski). The deliberate, planned revival of laissez faire, Chicago School economics as a reactionary ideology, commonly associated with Hayek and Friedman. (Surprisingly perhaps, I share many of bob mcmanus’ misgivings: though the administrative machinations are real enough, I see them more as epiphenomenal, then as causally important — making them into primary “causes” tends to make the explanation into a conspiracy theory and superficial.)

4.) The late evolution and corruption of postwar European ordoliberalism in the extension of the technocratic European project in an anti-democratic direction.

This is very complicated, I will grant you. Welcome to the world of actual word usage. Since local context — American partisan politics, Euro politics, international politics, ideological construction — matters, we could almost say that these different uses belong to different political dialects.

There is a real and very important (imho) sense, though, in which these various usages have come to blend together and to point to different aspects of a common, global cluster of political phenomena. Increasingly, “neoliberal” is commonly used in discourse on politics to label this common global cluster, even if individual voices may continue to attach the connotations of their dialect and experience. When I say, “neoliberal”, I tend to think of “Brad Delong” or “Matthew Yglesias” as exemplars of a viewpoint, peculiar to American politics, but when I hear “neoliberal” I try to guess what the speaker’s dialect might be.

Quiggin, in his linked pieces, pressed for the view that the peculiar American connotations have been superseded by European and global developments. Quiggin’s characteristic wishful optimism leads him see neoliberalism’s imminent demise in these developments, which hasn’t proven to be exactly prescient, but, otherwise, fair enough.

If you want a succinct definition, then the development of common or related political phenomena worldwide, is an aid to your cause. As the neoliberal programmatic agenda has evolved from NAFTA to TPP and TTIP, this is more than justified. Davos Man it is! (see the link js. @ 295)

I don’t think the idea that neoliberalism is simply a wholesale revival of the classical liberalism of Adam Smith -> J.S. Mill works though. Hayek-Friedman were self-consciously engaged in such a project, but neoliberalism (narrow American meaning) arose as a partisan reaction to Friedman-inspired Reaganism. The neoliberals entered into a dialectic with the conservative libertarians, a dialectic that conveniently marginalized any other ideas from establishment’s political discourse. This became the Third Way politics of Clinton and, I suppose, Blair: a reaction and antithesis to Reagan-Thatcher. (Within mainstream policy economics, the faction corresponding to the neoliberals were the New Keynesians, for whatever that’s worth; they opposed Friedman’s monetarism, which went up in smoke about 1982, as well as the New Classical laissez faire dogma.)

I think it is important to see neoliberalism as originating in an antithesis to the attempt to revive classical liberalism (or more accurately with respect to the history of economic ideas, to revive ideas of the late 19th century Marginal Revolution, that displaced classical economics) and as the label we now give to the resulting synthesis.

I agree that using “neoliberal” for both the antithesis and the synthesis is confusing — that’s not my fault, that’s just the way the word has been used. I am saying notice that that is the way the word has been used. See that that is how this political ideology called “neoliberal” (the phenomenon more than the label) has evolved or emerged.

It is important to see this distinction, even if it is now, 40 years later, a wonky sort of embryology, precisely because neoliberalism is not simply a linear continuation or revival of classical liberalism or the liberalism of the Marginal Revolution, it is an adaptation to the evolution of the global economy.

The reason I think my wonkiness can be worthwhile is that I think it helps in understanding something of neoliberalism’s imperviousness to criticism and the impossibility of organizing an effective political opposition cum programmatic alternative. There is No Alternative isn’t just a slogan; it is a design feature. How we got here is about tracing the co-evolution of architectures: the political economy and the political ideology that protects it.

I think it helps to see Charles Peters abandoning the class struggle, because it is a defining moment in that co-evolution. The working class is disappearing with the disappearance of the Fordist economy, as bob mcmanus points out, and concern about racism and sexism and so on actually fits nicely into the atomization of the individual needed by the managerialism of neoliberalism.

I know people think it is my hobbyhorse, and it is my hobbyhorse to be sure, but the fact that neoclassical economics is stuck in the 1880s, even more assuredly than is Marxism, is a critical support to neoliberal ideology. We cannot think about the economy we have, because we do not share a vocabulary of applicable concepts. Like the Mandarins studying the Confucian classics, our cadre of public experts are smart people with little relevant competence: a whole, vitally important profession with a possibly fatal case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.

Layman @ 320

There could be conflict between competing ruling classes and competing ideologies, as has been the case historically. Whigs v Tories becoming Liberals v Conservatives, for example, in 19th century Britain. Free Soil Republicans v the Slavepower in mid-19th century U.S.

The fact that there is a single, globalized managerial class emerging is kinda of important to notice — the homogeneity of outlook and perceived commonality of class interests becomes a factor in the dynamic. And, one that must be founded, somehow, in the structure of the global economy, which that class and its ideology is so assiduously shaping.

The fact that it is a specifically “managerial” class deserves notice. The policy of deregulation, introduced by nascent neoliberals in the Carter Administration, has evolved into a general corruption of institutions by their management, which espouses neoliberalism. Piketty and Saez have alerted us to the extent to which exploding C-suite “compensation” figures in the new inequality. The pious praise of education as a remedy by neoliberals might be an angled defense of credentialism by the class that benefits most from the legitimacy of credentials.

“Neoliberalism is the ideology of the ruling global managerial class.”

Later Veblen, and recently Nitzan & Bichler who use Veblen and his idea of “sabotage” might be useful here

Sandwichman at Econospeak

“Inequality and Sabotage: Piketty, Veblen and Kalecki (for anne at Economist’s View)”

(Ps. I think Peter’s point about class alliance with managers is important)

MisterMr @302
so I stand for my position that marxian economics is sraffian economics plus some other additional hipothesis, and as such is much more scientifically acceptable today than is usually credited for

I probably shouldn’t have expressed any view on M’s economics earlier since I’m really not competent to have a view on it.

Just to add some about the role of MPS, which actually coined the term “neo-liberalism”. There were 3 strands, the Austrian school since von Hayek actually called for the original meeting, the Chicago school, with Stigler and Friedman as founding members and the Ordo-Liberalismus school with Eucken as a founding member, but the joint project was to combat the “road to serfdom”. I didn’t mean to imply that they were somehow an all-powerful cause, since obviously the stagflation crisis of the 1970’s, itself caused by the breakdown of Bretton Woods, potentiated their program far beyond their wildest hopes. But the strategy of seeding the public sphere with business-financed think-tanks to promulgate their ideas was quite deliberate and began to be implemented in the 1950’s. And the shifting fuzzy boundaries of what they were proposing was a deliberate tactic, searching out alternative points for launching their general offensive. So it’s little wonder that the term “neo-liberalism” is a bit fizzy itself and ever shape-shifting, since that was the intent.

What not the case is that “neoliberalism” is 1) simply a term for whatever people dislike about capitalism, nor 2) a revival, rather than a transmogrification of, classical market liberalism,- (Polanyi, who was polemicizing against the Austrian school, ironically wrote a manifesto in reverse for the neo-liberals),- nor simply an ideological revolt against the welfare state compromise, (rather than a deliberate program to use the means of state power against itself). This is not to say that MPS was its single source, nor that it was perfectly prescient, but only that it was a gradually emergent program impelled by the global capitalist crisis of the 1970’s, a “war of position” across multiple fronts, that aimed at transforming the institutional infrastructure of capitalism and founding a new regime of accumulation, as much a techno-structure as an ideology, right down to the level of transforming subjectivities qua “technologies of the self” in terms of “human capital”.

It does little good to say that capitalism is always capitalism, as if it were ahistorical, (oddly imitating the static equilibrium and ahistoricality of neo-classicism), any more than to deny the potency and perplexities of the social transformations that have occurred, as if it were normal and inevitable. That state power is used against the regulatory and fiscal capacities of states and that the power of states is progressively weakened in the interests of the extra-territorial power of capital, (paradoxically, since corporations as legal creations, derive from the law-giving power of sovereign states), is something historically new. Everything is to be privatized, including the very idea of the public-political realm itself, by means of the power of states. (Would a classical liberal have advocated for the privatization of prisons, public schools, national defense, etc.?)

In its anti-political economic reductionism and authoritarianism, what neo-liberalism amounts to is the bolshevism of the capitalists.

…. Cont…

But wot about Communists?
There’s freedom! If a man insists
To take a day on Christmas Eve
Without no ‘let’s or ‘by your leave’ –
Well, blokes is equal, ain’t they, when
The world is ruled is ruled by workin’ men…
Wot? Commissars, am such like coots?
Think they’d start putting in the boots?
Well, I dunno; per’aps you’re right.
But, square an’ all, it don’t seem right.

‘Ow could a man get Monday free
With bosses over ‘im ? Wot? Me!
Me work o’ Monday? ‘Course I did!
Think I was goin’ to lose a quid
In overtime ‘an miss the bus?
They can’t put nothin’ over us!…
But all this gover’ments a blight
At Christmas time. It don’t seem right.

(This was the only politics and economics related Christmas poem I could find)

I think we’ve hit on a definitive definition. And on Christmas day, of all days.

If we’re quoting poems, here’s one of mine for Christmas. Except it’s not for you, ZM, since you’ll read it too literally.

@Rich Puchalsky 12.24.15 at 4:01 pm
>“Damn slacker lilies of the field toil not” is funny, but they do work. Lilies are there because of coevolution with bees … So the proletariat is always already an appropriator of surplus value, to put it into your terms as well as I can. … their labor isn’t creating value. Their labor is using ecosystemic value that might have been used for something else …

Well, I have to admit that this does begin to sound like a crucial disagreement within the left that can only be settled by force of arms, in a future full-scale civil war: one side thinks that workers are unjustly deprived of the fruits of their labour and should seize control of the means of production, whereas the other thinks that pandas are unjustly deprived of the fruits of their labour and should seize control of the means of production. Or perhaps this is just a rhetorical way to convey the message that the people who control the means of production would be well advised to moderate their economic activities by carefully taking account of their environmental effects. But that wouldn’t sound quite as radical and groundbreaking. Oh well… Whatever floats you boat, I suppose.

@Rich Puchalsky 12.25.15 at 10:57 pm
>>“The people who control the means of production”
>well, actually, people don’t.

Pardon me, I misspoke. Of course, I meant the part that isn’t *already* controlled by pandas.

There is a huge gap between “Everything gonna be fine, let the system work” and “We’re all gonna die” and in that gap is a projected level of casualties ( X million Bangladeshis, Pacific Islands) that many of us find unacceptable. Since as far as I can tell, the most optimistic still project a high level of localized catastrophe (although the subject is avoided as in “We have prevented species extinction, so everybody calm down and be patient), I see no reason not to amp up the pessimism and catastrophism at least to a level that generates public demand for a global Manhattan Project or Moral Equivalent of War, or if that isn’t possible, as much as is possible including a considerable immediate cost as long as it is less than projected midterm and long term costs.

Honestly, I think we are still approaching this in an economistic framework, which considers a certain number of lives destroyed an acceptable price for stable monetary policy. In the aggregate, of course.

We could do better, and until the streets are rioting and the economy is damaged (prove it isn’t necessary by giving a zero consequence scenario with present efforts) by directing resources to addressing the problem I will frankly tend toward the doomer side. I have no faith in this current regime.

There are things that can be done and that we need to do, individually and collectively. Here are my priorities, in no particular order:
Reduce consumption (I am not talking here about ‘consumption’ in the mainstream economics definition of ‘what households do’ which is just another old patriarchal leftover idea – I mean consumption in the sense of ‘using up’ finite resources) by, for example:
– reducing motorised transport – walk or cycle whenever possible and where motorised transport is needed, favour public transport over cars
– reduce consumption of meats and processed food – increase production and consumption of locally grown fresh food
– improve building sustainability eg by better building standards, retrofitting, external shading, green roofs etc
– improve urban planning to produce ‘green’ cities and towns
– improve appliance efficiency and switch to battery operated and solar powered appliances as far as possible
– increase sharing eg car sharing, food swaps, house sharing etc

Switch to renewable energy and phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.

It’s not about ‘going back to the stone age’ nor even the more (supposedly) leftist insults I’ve been subjected to here on CT such as ‘preaching individual moral virtue’ or ‘puritanism’. It seems to me a sensible program, as a start. However it clearly isn’t compatible with the current ‘economic growth’ paradigm, and that issue I think has to be tackled by the left, so I would add:
Critique the mainstream economic growth paradigm and show how stable state economies would work

Plus of course we should commit to working for genuine equity and equality, as I already advocated upthread.

So my request to CTers is, rather than arguing endlessly about abstractions, can you ground your arguments a bit? What do you think we should do (individually and collectively)? Can you improve my program?

I’m not opposed to discussion of abstract concepts, but from where I sit, in a part of the world that is steadily getting hotter and more bushfire prone http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/26/great-ocean-road-bushfire-destroys-more-than-50-homes
and where our government continues to be deceitful and incompetent on climate change http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/26/australias-carbon-emissions-are-increasing-government-report-shows
the discussion here has been somewhat frustrating.

Discussion and debate on the left are fine but let’s also have a program of action.

RP @ 341: I think it is inevitable that there will be a complex spectrum of reactions to the concept of anthropogenic climate change entering the political culture, both as part of an emerging world culture and as a baseline context for thinking long-term and globally. Politics, even prior to the expression of ideas and interests, is a projection screen for human ambivalence.

Some people are going to be pessimists about the efficacy of collective action, or hostile to the authoritarianism of simplistic command-and-control frames, or inclined to instinctively favor climate engineering schemes; some will resist mightily the suggestion that God isn’t responsible for the climate as he is the weather (in their minds) and nature in general, and then turn around and assert dominion over the earth and an ethic of stewardship, just to confuse everyone; some are sure that wearing hairshirts and drying them on clotheslines is key and others will feel repulsion from such ideas. I could not hope to enumerate the variety of points of view; political leadership will have to find a course of action that seems at least superficially plausible to working ‘majorities’ (aka a shared consensus), so as to give some order to the work of distributed elites and legitimacy among the masses for what the elites choose to do. The IPCC is the current institutional forum for the necessary staff work; the Paris accords, the ritual anointing of common leadership intent.

The Archdruid loves his Toynbee. I can’t say I am up on Toynbee or Spengler. I am interested in the civilizational cycles of rise and fall, but not the literary, seat-of-the-pants sweeping god’s eye judgments of cultural vitality that those guys favor as narrative explanators. I keep my eye out for political and economic “mechanism” of a more prosaic sort.

If there is reason to be optimistic about Paris as an inflection point in organizing the world’s response to climate change driven by carbon emissions, it lies not in the politics per se, but it seems to me that it lies in the apparently rapid progress with which solar and wind power sources are advancing, technically. As eliminating human additions to the carbon cycle from power generation and food production becomes more technically feasible within the loose bounds of surplus available for infrastructure and capital investment, it becomes easier to imagine even a feeble response from the “halting state” of neoliberal politics being sufficient to keep us from crossing some imagined threshold beyond which lies a terra incognita of dragons and a chaos of positive feedback carrying the climate to ecological collapse and general dystopia.

I’m sure the Archdruid sees that technological optimism about the technology-driven economic trajectory of solar and wind (aka “grid-scale renewable power”) is the current capstone holding together the opposing pressures of the political arch of cautious optimism. Which is why he tries his hand at attacking it directly with the scorn of a peak oil veteran well-schooled in energy return on energy investment. It doesn’t make his argument strong enough for the assault he wishes to make.

I really have no clear idea why Bronze Age civilization collapsed and don’t quite grasp why the Roman Empire fell. I have some partial guesses. I think I know why Chinese civilization sank from Tang and Ming glory into a hopeless morass, while the world waited for Western Europe (and Britain of all the unlikely backwaters) to generate an industrial revolution. In that perspective, I do not find the Archdruid’s hypothesis that our civilization is passing an inflection point toward a, say, 300 year slide into a new Dark Age entirely implausible. We don’t need to debate that assessment, though, to see that overall worldview is just a channel, or an isthmus, connecting to a whole ‘nother continent-sized spectrum of political ambivalence about what it is appropriate to do in response.

Simple-minded doomer-ism that writes lurid scenarios into Hollywood B-movie scripts is like paranoia, a psychological defense. I don’t worry too much about it inspiring political paralysis — the people who flock to such tales are not even potential activists, let alone elites; it seems to me that it is just the collective unconscious wrapping its dim-witted mind around what is becoming a background awareness for our world political culture — we sleep perchance to dream, at $14/ticket. The Archdruid self-consciously, and with earned expertise, rejects that sort of Hale Bopp and Well Met apocalypso (though he seems to enjoy spinning his own SF fantasies.)

It seems to me that the Archdruid’s overarching frame of long-term (300+ year) civilizational decline is one opening to that other continent of ambivalence about what to do — the one where we are “doomed” — His personal affection for primitivism, which I agree with you, is likely to be less than usefully foresightful, notwithstanding.

Just taking the IPCC as gospel, it seems to me we are well-justified in thinking that gentle constraints on CO2 and equivalent emissions will not be enough. Even in IPCC scenario land, a 2 degree warming scenario is only fully plausible if the world dedicates substantial resources in the second half of this century to extracting CO2 from the atmosphere — an activity unlikely to pay the immediate dividends that drove humans to dump the CO2 into the atmosphere on the scale it has, in the first place. The need to take CO2 out of the atmosphere during the second half of the century to compensate for our present dilatory policies is a signal admission.

In good liberal fashion, I suppose we are suppose to have some faith in an accelerating progress, so that the magnitude of current commitments at Paris mount steadily in later rounds toward meeting the necessary thresholds of restraint and substitution.

Realistically, there will be shocks to the global system. People who see the Syrian refugee mess as a synergy of climate change with neoliberal politics run amok, as opposed to those who greeted the Arab Spring as a hopeful demonstration of the power of the new social media and spirit of democracy, seem to me to have the better argument. In the nature of things, this symphony won’t be a single movement scored for a steady crescendo till the fat lady sings. So, I do think the Syria crisis will pass, at least for those it doesn’t kill or ruin. And, then there will be a new round. (When Bangladesh begins to drown again ? ? ?)

In addition to accelerating the effort and investment we make in a new energy infrastructure, the future world will have to cope with many effects, even if we never do cross the threshold into feed-forward processes that overwhelm our capacity to affect anything by mere human self-restraint.

As long as we are the little people sitting in the dark and staring up at the screen where the lurid Hollywood script is playing out, then political paralysis, I suppose, is a problem. But, I think that real life is that the demand for political decisions and programs will multiply. They won’t multiply steadily — not a one movement symphony — but they will multiply. More and more of the natural world will require active management of some kind, in order to sustain the productivity of those lilies of the field. The Archdruid’s scenario of long-term civilizational collapse — as I understand it — rests on anticipating that far from political paralysis setting in, a political hypermania eventually takes hold, with the multiplication of efforts and resource demands undermining the whole structure’s ability to maintain itself. I suppose he imagines the hyperactive Emperor Justinian on a late Empire-Strikes-Back spree of law-giving, monument-building and conquering territory from the barbarians, all of which ends in a de-populating famine and plague, followed by a Dark Age.

So, granting that civilization collapsing is a bit mesmerizing, even at a distance of 300+ years, it nevertheless is true that it would be politically helpful to direct our attention away from what the Center can do toward what the periphery of localities, so to speak, will be called on to do. Not the big over-arching guidelines concatenated in Paris, but the local regional priorities and coping strategies. You know things like, building reservoirs for when there’s no snow pack; thinking thru when to let Florida drown. Thinking thru how carbon taxes — if we are going there soon — are going to show up in tariffs under a neoliberal trade regime. (There’s a neat trick.) An intensive agriculture, with controlled spillover. Nurturing protected reservoirs of nature against the real possibility of global extinction events. Remedying regional income collapse due to industrial transitions and financial calamity.

Realistic doom scenarios are not prescriptive of paralysis, just a different kind of preparation and mitigation. Not the Archdruid’s “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush” primitivism, imho, but certainly a different part of the spectrum of political ambivalence — a part we need to see expressed more than we may need strained neoliberal optimism.

Val @ 344

Comprehensive programs are a bit above my pay grade and beyond the scope of blog comments, but I heartily endorse the idea that we have to reduce consumption of energy, and that we could do so, with a little imaginative planning, without damaging social welfare.

We can do a lot of various things, because collectively, we are not constrained to do only one thing at a time. We can experiment, if you want to think of that way. We don’t need to prescribe a homogeneity of policy, program or lifestyle. But, we do need to accept a few key parameters as common goals and hard constraints, so that our diverse efforts do not just cancel each other out, and one of those is reducing all energy consumption worldwide. Everything we do, centrally and peripherally, has to go in that direction, or be compatible ultimately with that direction.