I want to write-up some thoughts on strategy, tactics and operations for those of us non-civilians in the Climate War.
- What would happen if we made the entire Carbon Cycle democratic. Not political, but democratic. Not just the science, but the industry too, the business of energy (oil, gas) and agriculture (food and fibre)?
- Or will we have a Carbon Dictatorship ?
- Is the Climate Circus in Copenhagen going to fix Climate Justice?
Climate Circus Update
My take on the great Climate Change Circus aka COP15 is looking like a really noisy place
Some of the main events
- Climategate (leaked emails and other disclosures of deleted data have given climate change denialists (Climate Denial Corporate Campaign) a huge boost, giving right-wing popularism, conspiracists and jealous peak oilers new energy. Monbiot “Suppressing Skeptics Unacceptable”
- a militant faction of activists (so called “anarchists”, probably of the “smash civilization” variety) a group called NTAC (never trust a cop) have put out inflammatory video - and seem to want to turn Dec into a big street battle - they have also dissolved the network so that it doesn’t exist formally
- a dodgy Carbon Trading regime is making its way through Australia federal parliament, called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an Australia academic from the Australian National University calls this a Big Ball of Mud, the Australian Green’s Senator Bob Brown describes the “Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme” is “locking in failure” on emissions. http://permaculture.tv/?p=1588
- the shadow banking system will have a field day establishing a global climate finance architecture in Copenhagen amidst the ultra-security and resulting secrecy and failing official process
- the Climate Camp TV crew, may or may not, be at Klimaforum, and so video coverage may be limited. PositiveTV people are going.
- Climate Change is real and getting worse i.e. The Copenhagen Diagnosis from UNSW, Australia
Democratic Carbon
- Democratic Science: Why cant ALL the emails of the IPCC be open and freely available ? why not ALL the data ? surely if we want democratic science we should demand such a thing ? if we insisted on democratic climate science then we would have a case for demanding democratic science in BIG pharma, agribusiness, old (oil, gas, coal) and new energy (wind, wave, solar) etc.. the Right are again using issues that the left pioneered, that radical critique of science by Thomas Kuhn in the 60s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and more recently David F Noble [America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation & the controversial article, The Corporate Climate Coup (ZNET) or Permaculture.TV including audio interview from Rabble.ca.]
- Genetic Science & Engineering: In the field of genetics and evolution, there is a hegemonic paradigm that justifies BIG Bio-Tech and BG Genetic-Engineering. In a recently published paper by Don Lotter, The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 1: The Development of a Flawed Enterprise (PDF) he thinks the basic science has been molded in the interests of Monsanto and other Gene Giants. Lynn Margulis whose work on Gaia Theory (with James Lovelock) and Endosymbiosis Theory with their implications that symbiotic relationships have driven evolution, describes mainstream geneticists such as Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene) “wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin - having mistaken him… Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations by gene-level natural selection), is a complete funk.” She thinks Dawkins-style of “Neo-Darwinism, excessively focused on inter-organismic competition, as she believes that history will ultimately judge them as comprising “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology.”
- Politics in the IPCC Process: science as it is now, is effected by politics, and so is the IPCC. There are stage in the IPCC Report Process where governments get involved. In this case, climate science has been structured so as to create conservative reports. In other words, if we made climate science, more democratic, as opposed to politicised, we would get better, and probably much more frightening science.
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“The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be ‘alarmist.’ Conservatives promoted the IPCC’s clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.”
Global Warming: How History Is Being Manipulated to Undermine Calls for Action
3. Democracy in Science would lead to Democratic Industry: if we had democratic science, it would open the way to more democratisation in industry and government.. the fuedalistic industrial arrangements of today would not withstand complete transparency.. The Corporation and The State would be transformed.
And the leading twentieth-century social philosopher, John Dewey, basically agreed. Much like ninetheenth-century working people, he called for elimination of “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Industry must be changed “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control, free association, and federal organization, in the general style of a range of thought that includes, along with many anarchists, G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism and such left Marxists as Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Mattick, and others. Unless those goals are attained, Dewey held, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business, [and] the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” He argued that without industrial democracy, political democratic forms will lack real content, and people will work “not freely and intelligently,” but for pay, a condition that is “illiberal and immoral”—ideals that go back to the Enlightenment and classical liberalism before they were wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, as the anarchosyndicalist thinker Rudolf Rocker put it 70 years ago.
Noam Chomsky: Crisis and Hope, Theirs & Ours
6. Science is not objective; it is embedded in a social and political mileu and reflects the interests of power. Admittedly in the hard sciences like physics and chemistry the science is more objective, but once you get into fields like the social sciences, the power dynamics become transparent.. i.e ECONOMICS. The economics departments of universities are unrepentant after the latest financial and economic crisis. why ? because its undemocratic. They are funded and influenced by The State, The Rich, The Corporations.
As David F Noble points out, modern environmentalism in North America was founded by Rachel Carson “Silent Spring” she wasnt a scientist.. nor was Al Gore with An Inconvenient Truth
7. Intellectuals (not just academics, but corporate and government managers) are a kind of “bought priesthood“. Chomsky The Responsibility of the Intellectual.. especially in the social sciences i.e. economics or in public relations, in which advertising is a subset, and media a subset of that, and news media a smaller subset still. There is a threat of a new class of Climate War Commissars like Monbiot or Flannery emerging, Gore Vidal talks about this in an essay from the 90s “Cue the Green God, Ted“
Wining the Battle Against Big Tobacco: Climate Change Denial campaigns are explicitly linked to the campaign against Tobacco. It’s often the same public relations firms, corporations, personalities involved in both Tobacco and Climate Change Denial i.e. The Heartland Institute. However, as far as I can tell, global Tobacco sales are increasing.. (except for a dip because of the recession. Volume is driving sales in the South, value-add driving sales in the North.. so to think we are winning that one is wrong
Denialism will Fade Away and Become Amusing: Denialism continues to this day, and its not just the big corporations, its everyone.. we are all (with the exception of the billions of poor in the South and the Transitioners and the permaculturalists in the North) addicted to mass-consumer society, which is causing climate change.. as addicts we are ALL in denial… especially the affluent middle classes. The Transition Towns Totnes (Transition Network) process is framed in addiction terms, and denial is a stage in dealing with the addiction.
Assuming climate denialism will simply go away and be amusing is hopeful.
Lets look at Holocaust denialism and the legacy of the Nazi’s and the institutions of fascism.
Have the institutions of Nazi Germany really disappeared and become amusing: (corporatism) The Corporation, Folk (Right wing Polularism), Big Brother (Google, NSA), National Security State (Homeland Security, Patriot Act), Propaganda (Fox News, CNN etc), Eugenics (social Darwinism and a focus on models and movies stars. See book Nazi Nexus on CSPAN
All of these institutions are with us still, bigger than before. Just with different faces and names and slightly better sales and delivery. Chomsky says that the history of the 20th century after the war would be called “How the Nazis Won the War” .. and no, I dont mean clones of Hitler, I mean ideas and institutional arrangements.
David Barsamian: You’ve said that if a real post-World War II history were ever written, this would be the first chapter.
Noam Chomsky: It would be a part of the first chapter. Recruiting Nazi war criminals and saving them is bad enough, but imitating their activities is worse. So the first chapter would primarily describe US-and some British-operations throughout the world that aimed to destroy the anti-fascist resistance and restore the traditional, essentially fascist, order to power.
9. If Climate Change is Real, It Doesnt matter, things will change anyway, there is Peak Oil, Gas etc. we just dont know, most energy “science” is internal to very dodgy regimes - tyrannical states and tyrannical corporations. There is very little democratic energy industry or science. Obviously Peak Debt and Peak Emissions are far greater and more immediate problems.. also, I am not convinved synthetic fuels cannot replace oil. See Nathan Lewis, Caltech; They Didn’t End the Stone Age Because They Ran Out of Stones.
10. Carbon Dictatorship; James Lovelock thinks a world-war style mobilization against climate change, a Climate War with a Churchill and everything, is a good idea. For me, I can’t help think about our existings Wars. The War of Terror, War in AfPak, Iraq, Against Drugs, Against Crime, Against Poverty and Communism. The Pentagon and other national militaries, the global military industrial complex is working on militarizing climate change. Its the reality behind commercialization and financialization of climate change. Tim Flannery, in The Weather Makers has a chapter called The Carbon Dictatorship.
That a failure to act on climate change may eventually force the creation of a global carbon dictatorship, which he calls the “Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control”, to regulate carbon use across all industries and nations - a level of governmental intrusion that Flannery describes as “very undesirable
10. Democratic Carbon: what would it really mean if we made the entire Carbon cycle democratic, not just the science but the industry ? if as a planetary civilization, as grass-roots activists we campaigned and worked for a democratic carbon cycle? what problems would it solve? what eco-systems? what industries ? quite a few, indeed most… isn’t that worth a some embarrassed climate scientists ? wouldn’t energy executives and war-mongering elites like the Cheney-Bush Junta have a far more difficult time?
It will be much more about building a political movement for broad-based, democratic, post-fossil, long-range social planning based on cooperative inquiry.
Ways must be found to find and enforce democratic consensus about what resources must be shared where and when for long-term collective benefit, what institutions will accordingly have to be phased out and what new institutions constructed to take their place, and how the political transition is to happen
One modest example from Europe is the Transition Towns movement, which is going some way toward rethinking demand with its ‘Energy Descent Action Plans’ even if it still lacks a political economy analysis of industrial energy use or an organizational focus on equitable energy distribution.
Larry Lohmann, Cornerhouse
Climate Circus or Climate Justice ?
I am not a policy wonk, a news junkie or a professional pundit. I have no salaried research position or tenure. My analysis is mostly inutuitive, sometimes with flashes of insight.
As such, my answer to the question, will the Copenhagen Climate Circus “fix”, “solve” Climate Justice
- Protests, demo’s and direct action could increase pressure on official COP15 delegates to do something. Hopefully reduce real emissions and regulate or remove “shadow” and official Carbon Finance. It could go some of the way of democratising decision-making and finance.
- There is a risk that COP15 is a kind of mousetrap for the Climate Justice movement. Copenhagen will be expensive, crowded, noisy, a kind of Climate Circus or maybe better, a Climate Bizarre. A market for corporations, NGOs and governments, capital and social entrepreneurs to sell their wares, there ideas, products, schemes and services.
- with Climategate pulling the rug out from underneath the Climate Change mandate, at least in the corporate dominated state and capitalist media (i.e. ALL of the mainstream media) police action could be severe.
- My own view, is that the Klimaforum09, at best, could become a democratic permaculture design process, a massively upscaled version of the open space and community design processes of Tony Andersen’s Scandanavian cooperative design, or the general approach of the Transition Movement
- A desireable outcome of this could be the 10 000 Trees Strategy, see my interview with Tony Andersen, co-founder of Klimaforum and key author of 10 000 Trees. Planetary Permaculture: A Global Strategy for Climate Change - Tony Andersen of Klimaforum
- The Climate Circus could become a source of Climate Justice, if the Klimaforum09, creates a global mandate, a global-local permaculture design for a return to indigienous (local) perennial polyculture Klimaforum09 Mandate - Local permaculture people create Gaia Permaculture
Further references