Tag Archives: climate change

Deathmatch 2020

Posted by Jason on

Alright, look, I really don’t want to do this, but this is the situation we’re in. The sky has cracked open and the fires of judgment rain down upon us. False prophets rise to glory, brain-eating parasites infest our homes and cities, beasts of the deep rouse from ageless slumber. Tiny sparks of hope gather and flash in the darkness, prevailing upon us exactly one course of action. For the sake of everything that lives, Bernie Sanders must be elected president in 2020.

For as much ink as has been spilled on this topic, the case for Sanders is radically simpler than anyone’s really making it out to be. There is exactly one thing that has to happen right now as a precondition for anything else – most importantly, for addressing global warming with any level of seriousness – which is that we need to form a political party capable of acquiring and wielding state power that is responsive to the needs of ordinary people, which necessarily means being actively opposed to the interests of rich fucks. Sanders is the only person who is even trying to do this, which is why it doesn’t matter how “good” he is or whatever. He’s literally the only horse available to bet on.

The One Rule of American politics is that you aren’t allowed to do anything that inconveniences rich fucks. In addition to this just obviously being the case, studies have demonstrated that, regardless of what politicians say they care about, the actions that in practice end up being taken by the government are those that accord with the desires of rich fucks and not the desires of anyone else. If, for example, you want to spend more money on education, you can do that, as long as you spend it on privately-owned charter schools where corporate consultants have their fingers in the till. You are not allowed to take the same amount of money and just give it to existing public schools, because that doesn’t give anyone the opportunity to extract profits.

It is sometimes possible to pass good policy in this situation. Passing Obamacare, for example, was probably better than doing nothing, in that it allowed more people to get health coverage. However, the policy was designed to maintain the economic power of insurance companies, which is why part of the result of implementing it was that premiums and deductibles went way up. Insurance companies had to cover more and sicker people, so they raised costs in order to maintain their profits.

Thus, on net, the effect of this type of policy is always going to be mixed: while the final sum might come out to be positive, it’s going to improve things for some people and worsen things for others. But we’re not in a situation where these sorts of tradeoffs are actually necessary. They aren’t happening because of scarcity or a lack of intelligent policy ideas; they’re happening because rich fucks have captured the political process and are using it to hoard resources. This is what it really means to say that 1% of people hold half the wealth: it means that we can make things much better for everyone else by only mildly inconveniencing the people at the top.

Now, it is coherent, in theory, to maintain that the best we can do with this situation is to acquiesce to it and continue to extract whatever tiny advantages we can, although I wouldn’t say that recent history provides any particular amount of supporting evidence for the proposition. However, there’s one case in which this is not even a plausible argument and we are absolutely required to come up with a substantive alternative, and it also happens to be the one that will kill everyone if we get it wrong: global warming. As you know, the amount of oil reserves currently owned by all of the oil-extracting companies and countries is several times more than the amount we can afford to burn if we wish to avoid total catastrophe. Because of this, even if we were to completely cease accruing new sources of carbon-emitting fuels tomorrow (which we won’t – emissions have been going up recently), no amount of green development would suffice to address the problem. The only way to preserve the existence of civilization is to keep it in the ground, which, because this stuff is already on the balance sheets, unavoidably means destroying a huge portion of the wealth of all the richest people in the world.

This dynamic is why the Democratic Party has taken no significant action on global warming, despite constantly crowing about how they accept “the science” and the need for “structural change” and slobbering all over Greta Thunberg. It’s because it is structurally impossible for them to do what is necessary. A party structurally dependent on its rich donors is never going to be able to advance policy which directly attacks those people’s wealth. The only tools available are hammers, but the problem has nothing to do with nails. We had plenty of advance warning about global warming, but we squandered decades of opportunity by allowing rich fucks to set the agenda, and now we’re out of time. We have about ten years left to get serious, which basically means one more president. If the next president is another do-nothing liberal who talks big and allows the oil to keep flowing, we’re all dead.

Also, the scale of the problem means that it can only be addressed by seizing and utilizing state power. That’s why we have to have a political party that does not maintain its existence by giving handies to rich fucks and is committed to doing what is necessary. We could, in theory, start a new party for this or use the Greens or whatever, but the entrenchment of the two major parties presents huge obstacles against doing so. There’s no inherent property of the Democratic Party that causes it to operate in the way that it does; the parties have modified their alignments in response to changing conditions before and they can be made to do so again. We’re also out of fucking time, and taking over existing infrastructure is a hell of a lot faster than building it up from scratch. Thus, the best available solution is to hollow out the existing leadership of the Democratic Party and replace it with people who don’t care about rich fucks and are only accountable to its base of voters.

The obstacle to doing this is not some kind of shadowy conspiracy or whatever. It’s the structure within which politicians operate. Rich donors provide basically all of the resources politicians require in order to run viable campaigns. (Again, rich fucks have so much unnecessary wealth that they can just straight up piss millions of dollars away on fucking political ads for the sake of slightly lowering tax rates that they were probably just going to evade anyway.) If you want to run for office as a Democrat, the DCCC will literally go through the contracts on your phone to see if you know enough rich fucks to be considered a real candidate, after which you will be expected to spend most of your time calling them up and schmoozing them for money. This dynamic has two equally important effects. First, because your existence as a politician is materially dependent on the largesse of your donors, you will be systemically disinclined to do anything they won’t like. If you were to try anyway, you would most likely be cut off and replaced with someone more pliable. Second, because you’re spending all of your time talking to rich fucks and hearing about their problems and their perspectives on things, you’re naturally going to come to understand issues in the way that they do and conceive of the same sorts of solutions that they would. Not only would you not be able to support nationalizing the energy companies, the idea would never occur to you in the first place.

This, then, is the true significance of Sanders’ small-donor fundraising operation. It is not that taking money from poorer people is more virtuous – in fact, it’s less, since you’re taking money from people who actually need it. Rather, it matters because it means that the Sanders campaign, and any campaign that follows the same model, does not talk to rich fucks, is not materially dependent on them, and does not take their interests into account when formulating policy. It is dependent on the approval of large numbers of ordinary people, which means it is only viable to the extent that it advances policies that people actually want.

Of course, the correct solution to this problem is for all elections to be publicly funded, so that this isn’t an issue in the first place. But that can’t happen right now precisely because rich fucks have already captured the process and they obviously won’t permit that sort of change. Thus, the only way to change things is from outside of the existing system: mass public pressure must be brought to bear on all politicians, such that those who remain on the side of rich fucks are either run out of town on a rail or have the fear of god put into them so that they vote correctly anyway. Doing this is explicitly the entire purpose of the Sanders campaign. It’s not just something he’s coincidentally adjacent towards; it’s specifically what he’s referring to when he talks about starting a “political revolution” and being the “organizer-in-chief.”

This is also the meaningful distinction between Sanders and Warren. Again, this is a lot simpler than people are making it out to be. Warren, as a smart person who was not always a politician, does have a decent understanding of what needs to be done to fix things. But she explicitly intends to work within the existing system to convince the current party elites to adopt better policies. She has in fact had some success with this, such as when she convinced the Obama administration, against its usual inclinations, to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But we’ve already seen how this strategy can easily be undone by adverse events and fails to penetrate to the underlying causes of the political dysfunction that makes it necessary. Warren could potentially be extremely effective as like Secretary of the Treasury or something, but her “plan for that” approach to politics simply will not work under current conditions.

Sanders, by contrast, is trying to change how things work such that it becomes possible for good plans to happen. You can see this distinction when, for example, Warren talks about abolishing the filibuster, while Sanders talks about enfranchising prisoners. Warren wants to change the rules so that the existing political establishment can more easily achieve its desired goals, while Sanders wants to fundamentally redistribute political power so as to change what those goals are. The reason Sanders is sometimes criticized for not having enough of a “plan” is because he realizes exact details of that sort are presently beside the point. As long as the Democratic Party itself is not willing to pass the sorts of policies that are necessary to address the problems we’re facing, the rules by which they would counterfactually do so are irrelevant. Sanders’ political revolution is a prerequisite to any of Warren’s plans actually being implemented.

The standard counterargument here is that this line of reasoning is self-defeating: if this is true, then it doesn’t matter who gets elected president, because there has to be a mass movement anyway. This argument is basically correct and also completely stupid. The fact that electing Sanders would constitute only one step in the process and not by itself achieve anything is the entire point. If there were already a mass movement there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. The fact that there isn’t is why we need some sort of dramatic intervention – something along the lines of electing someone with an absolute commitment to doing this exact thing to the most powerful and visible political office in the country. And because we have to start addressing global warming yesterday in order to retain some non-trivial percentage of a habitable environment, we need someone who is here right now, and Socialist Jesus isn’t here right now. Sanders is.

I’d like to be clear about how little I want to be making this argument. I don’t “like” Sanders. I don’t even understand what that’s supposed to mean. He’s a politician. Liking or disliking a politician is a category error. They either support policies that will improve people’s material conditions or they don’t. I really thought people understood this back when “George W. Bush seems like the kind of guy I could have a beer with” was a running joke, but it’s only gotten worse since then. It does not fucking matter whether Sanders reminds you of a guy you knew once or someone calls you a name. I can assure you that my hatred for bros, people who spend any amount of time on Twitter, and people who treat politics like sports fandom is uncompromised, but dorks on the internet are just not relevant data, even without taking into account the gravity of the actual situation we’re facing. As long as Sanders is not proposing to appoint Joe Rogan as Secretary of Political Incorrectness, this is just not stuff that matters, at all.

I don’t even think badgering people about how they’re going to vote is all that effective. People aren’t actually responsive to arguments and data; they form their opinions based on underlying ideological assumptions (which is in fact the correct way to do things, as otherwise it is much too difficult to avoid being bamboozled by selective data presentation. You actually would be susceptible to fake news, in that case). In order to change people’s behavior you have to either change their material conditions or change how they understand the world. But again, we absolutely do not have time for that shit. It would be great if we could hang around for 20 years building the ideal political movement with perfectly calibrated messaging that appeals to everyone equally, but if we’re actually trying to make something happen the arc of history is going to have to be a fuck of a lot shorter than that. We either take this chance now or we’re fucked.

So that’s it. I really am constitutionally opposed to telling people what to do, but in this case it actually is required of you as an individual that you go to the place and vote for the thing. Unless, of course, you’re some sort of purity-obsessed idealist who won’t vote for an imperfect solution to a real pressing problem, but I can’t imagine that’s the case.

Feel the burn

Posted by Jason on

The AP fact-checked all the presidential candidates on global warming. The results are exactly what you’d expect; the only important thing to note is that this has nothing to do with “scientific literacy” and everything to do with pandering. Clinton got the highest score because she’s currently pandering the hardest to establishment liberals; Cruz got the lowest score because he’s currently pandering the hardest to the know-nothing crowd. None of these people are actually going to do anything about the issue.

Aside from that, though, there’s something a little disturbing in the perspective of the scientists who performed the review. Sanders lost points for the following statement:

“The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable.”

This is apparently an “overstatement,” which I guess is technically true. There will probably still be a few places on the planet that are actually livable. Given the situation, though, it’s hard to argue that a little hyperbole isn’t justified.

Here are the scientists’ criticisms of this statement:

Dessler said, “I would not say that the planet will become uninhabitable. Regardless of what we do, some humans will survive.” Harvard’s Jim McCarthy also called the comment an overstatement, as did other scientists when Sanders said it. Recent research on the worst heat projections in the hottest area, the Persian Gulf, finds that toward the end of the century there will be a few days each decade or so when humans cannot survive outside, but can live with air conditioning indoors.

Talk about cold comfort. “Some” humans will still survive, probably! It will only occasionally be impossible for people to go outside! Like, I get it. The planet is not literally going to go up in flames, and it is important to have an accurate understanding of the specific things that are going to happen. But what’s actually disturbing here is the bit about air conditioning.

It’s disturbing because it reflects an assumption that we’ll be able to do an effective job of ameliorating the consequences of global warming, even though right now we aren’t doing shit to actually prevent it. Recall that not everyone has access to air conditioning under current circumstances, even in America. The scientists here are considering the worst-case scenario, but assuming a best-case response to it. This assumption is not justified.

Our collective failure to do anything about global warming has two root causes. The obvious one is that humans are terrible at long-term planning, especially when there short-term benefits to be had by ignoring it. Not much more needs to be said about this. But there’s another problem that gets much less attention, despite how fundamental it is to everything that’s wrong with society: humans care more about their relative status than their absolute status.

This fact explains how we got into this mess in the first place. It wouldn’t really be that hard for rich fucks to create a stable, sustainable society, given the sort of resources they have at hand. It would, of course, cost them a lot of money, but they’d get a lot out of it: there wouldn’t be any railing against the 1%, they wouldn’t have to bother controlling the political process or hiring mercenaries to shut down protesters, etc. Economic activity could be redirected toward more improvements in technology and medicine, which would benefit rich fucks the most even as they also benefited everyone else. Furthermore, this wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice in practical terms, since no one can actually use the amount of money these people have. They could spend like 90% of their wealth on this and still maintain their ridiculous standards of living. They’d just be normally obscenely wealthy instead of obscenely obscenely wealthy.

And that’s the problem. Being unfathomably richer than everyone else is what actually motivates these people. In other words, what they care about is their relative status. It isn’t just rich fucks either; everyone is like this. For example, this is why poor white people can be persuaded to abandon their class interests in favor of white supremacy: it gives them someone to look down on. If they united with poor black people, they could make themselves better off in absolute terms, but then they’d all be together on the bottom; poor white people would be worse off in relative terms.

So this is why pollution happens: people are willing to destroy their environment to gain a competitive advantage over their neighbors, even though they all have to live together in the same destroyed environment (note that “competitive advantage” is the actual term used in business). But that’s not all. This is also why global warming is going to get worse before it gets worse.

Everyone assumes that once really bad things starts happening, we’ll all get serious and start doing something about it. But if we aren’t doing anything now, why would we start once it gets harder to do so? Indeed, the opposite is true: as the overall situation worsens, there will be more to gain from minor competitive advantages; fossil fuels will become more valuable in a situation where fewer people have access to them. Ergo, people will keep burning them, and things will keep getting worse. And that will be humanity’s epitaph: we chose to be rulers of a wasteland rather than citizens of a decent society.

And Sanders isn’t going to do anything about this either. Here he is playing coy in Rolling Stone:

. . . His [Eugene V. Debs’] vision is a vision that I share.

Including an “overthrow of the capitalist system”?
No, no, no. Now you’re being provocative. If you follow my campaign, have you heard me talk about overthrowing the capitalist economic system?

I mean, obviously. The guy is running for President of Capitalism. What else is he going to say?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been consistently impressed by Sanders (excluding his position on gun control). I wouldn’t have thought the Democratic Party was capable of fielding this good of a candidate [update: in the least surprising turn of events ever, it turns out they’re not]. But in this case, “good” isn’t good enough, because “overthrowing the capitalist economic system” is the one and only thing that can stop global warming.

This is old news by now, but the amount of oil that is currently owned is about five times more than enough to push us over the brink. In order to avoid catastrophe, this oil must not be burned. But for the owners, this is equivalent to burning the amount of money that the oil is worth. This will never happen. This is also why “clean energy” isn’t going to do shit: the oil is already owned, so burning it in addition to using clean energy sources will still provide a competitive advantage, so it will still happen even in an ideal situation where there’s enough solar power to provide free energy for everyone. And, as mentioned, as things get worse, the incentives to use these resources will only increase. The only solution is for the government (that is, all the governments) to buy up or otherwise appropriate all of this oil and keep it in the ground.

And of course, this isn’t a one time thing. Even if some miracle invention fixes global warming (n.b. not happening), the incentives that caused the problem will still be in place. There will eventually be some other technology that destabilizes our environment in the same way, and the same thing will happen again.

It’s usually a sort of saving grace that our ruling class is totally incompetent. As Machiavelli pointed out when he wrote The Prince, just because someone happens to meet the current criteria for being a member of the ruling class doesn’t mean they actually know shit about ruling. And this is great, because the fact that there’s no master plan is what allows the rest of us to make our own lives in the cracks of the system. A competent ruling class would have already undermined us all so thoroughly that I wouldn’t even be able to conceive of any of the stuff in this post. In this case, though, it might be worth the tradeoff.