Warlords, Inc.
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24 The political economy suggested by ecological modernization theory (and Third Way politics) might have been viable if its working out and implementation had begun immediately after WWII—if the New Deal had continued in a green vein, leading to the greening of the Marshall Plan and Truman’s Point Four program. This kind of program might still have had a chance of success if launched strongly in the 1960s or early 1970s and continued uninterrupted from there. But the scientific and technical knowledge of the earlier period was insufficient, and Right, Left, and Center all had other priorities and other trajectories throughout those years. Instead, we got the glorification of suburban home-ownership, the automobile, electric appliances, and consumerism in general as central to the good life. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a hopeful moment of critique of the affluent society and its culture and politics flowered, only to be overtaken by the conflicts over the Vietnam war, black power, and women’s liberation. After some strong environmental beginnings in the 1970s, the subsequent rise of the New Right, carried forward by the Reagan/Thatcher revolution with its glorification of private wealth and denigration of public goods, and followed by post–Cold War neoliberal triumphalism, left both ecological modernization and the Third Way largely bottled up in “old” Europe and scattered local refugia (e.g., Portland, Oregon). Now it is simply too late for the half-measures of ecological modernization theory (even if there has been a substantial resurgence of innovating green livlihoods in the last several years, as Schor 2010 reports).
25 See note 3, above.
26 Of course the choice between production cutbacks, on one hand, and improvements in renewable-energy and materials sciences and technologies on the other hand, is not either/or and presumably will come in the form of some combinatory mix. But even if technology can make up half of what needs to be done, that still implies a 40% cut in production and consumption across the global economy – presumably most of which will need to be borne by wealthy economies. Such a drop in industrial output is far greater than any industrialized economy has ever experienced, even during the Great Depression.
27 How much per capita decline is required depends on global population growth. The “official future” calls for global population to max out (and then stabilize) around 9 billion around 2050. It’s worth noting, however, not only that the accuracy of population projections over that time span have a notoriously poor track record, but also (and not coincidentally) that the theory of the demographic transition is entirely tied up with modernization theory; see Simon Szreter, “The Idea of Demographic Transition and the Study of Fertility Change: A Critical Intellectual History,” Population and Development Review 19, no. 4 (1993): 659–701. For a lower estimate on probable population growth, see Jorgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).
28 Griffith quoted in Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 2009), 14.
29 Griffith himself is convinced that, while a monumental undertaking, such a remaking of the world’s energy infrastructure is technically perfectly feasible, were the political will and funding forthcoming (which we regard as so highly unlikely as to be utopian—and note that we have not included the additional task of transitioning the world’s vehicle fleet from hydorcarbons). In any case, political issues aside, there is significant debate about the theoretical and practical feasibility of current and emerging green technologies as full replacements for existing conventional energy infrastructure. But what’s striking is how hedged even the most optimistic arguments are. Consider the reasonable case made by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A Delucchi, “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables,” Scientific American (November, 2009). To make the numbers work, Jacobson and Delucchi make sanguine assumptions about efficiency gains during the conversion process. They also concede that dire new materials shortages are likely to arise (for uranium, as well as various rare minerals required to build batteries, gears, and photovoltaic cells), and they wring their hands about the political challenges associated with trying to replace the large majority of the world’s energy generation, transmission and consumption infrastructure. For more, see Benjamin K. Sovacool and Charmaine Watts, “Going Completely Renewable: Is It Possible (Let Alone Desirable)?” The Electricity Journal 22, no. 4 (2009): 95–111. Vacliv Smil criticized the Jacobson and Delucchi 2009 Scientific American article in the below-quoted post. Jacobson and Delucchi maintained their 2009 posture without change in their (with coauthors) fifty-four-page May 2013 paper “Evaluating the Technical and Economic Feasibility of Repowering California for All Purposes with Wind, Water, and Sunlight” (subsequently published in Energy Policy), as did Jacobson in a presentation at UC-Berkeley on September 11, 2013, in the face of sharp challenges from the audience (including from Barnes). But see the Jacobson and Delucchi interviews in Wiseman et al., Post Carbon Pathways.
30 When we communicated to Griffith that his calculation of the necessary land-footprint was being sharply challenged by critics of our earlier paper, he stuck to his guns in that respect. We have not attempted to resolve this particular issue as we do not see it as a main point.
31 Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species (Earthscan, 2010), 159–67.
32 See N. P. Myhrvold and K. Caldeira, “Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change and the Transition from Coal to Low-Carbon Electricity,” Environmental Research Letters 7 (2012), www.stacks.iop.org/ERL/7/014019. “The use of current infrastructure to build this new low-emission system necessitates additional emissions of greenhouse gases, and the coal-based infrastructure will continue to emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases as it is phased out. Furthermore, ocean thermal inertia delays the climate benefits of emissions reductions.… We show that rapid deployment of low-emission energy systems can do little to diminish the climate impacts in the first half of this century” (from abstract).
33 Ibid.
34 See Wiseman, et al., Post Carbon Pathways interviews and discussion paper.
35 Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010) 119, 134–35, 142, 146, 148.
36 “A Skeptic Looks at Alternative Energy,” by Vaclav Smil, IEEE Spectrum, (July 2012). See also Robert W. Fri, “The Alternative Energy Future: The Scope of the Transition,” Daedalus (Winter 2013): 5–7.
37 In fact, the world of environmentalism is broader, more diverse, and more complexly internally conflicted than we have explained in either version of this chapter. A crude summary maps three coalitions, overlapping at the margins: (1) radical Greens, romantic left antimodernists, radical antiglobalists, and anarchists; (2) centrist, high-modernist science-and-technology enthusiasts, ecological modernization theorists, policy intellectuals, and green capitalists, who see themselves as the only pragmatists; and (3) an “in-between” grouping of critical modernist radical reformists, largely in academia and nongovernmental organizations—with which we identify.
38 See Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 3; Roger E. Kasperson and Bonnie J. Ram, “The Public Acceptance of New Energy Technologies,” Daedalus (Winter 2013): 90–95.
39 New age radical environmentalists often envision a worldwide simple-living, back-to-the-farm-and-village movement that will naturally exfoliate across the landscape in the wake of the self-inflicted implosion and collapse of existing nation-states and political economies. We don’t know of any version of this scenario that takes realistic account of the threats to such an idealistic lifeworld posed by the warlords and other deviant actors discussed in this volume.
40 This seems to us to also apply to the somewhat less radical hopes of a rapid transition to the “plenitude” model. Juliet Schor, Plenitude (New York: Penguin, 2010).
41 The ideology of endless growth is the common assumption across all modern political syste
ms; it is the fundament of how modern societies and polities understand what they are all about; it is baked into the core of virtually all contemporary social contracts. See Bjorn Hettne, Development Theory and the Three Worlds: Towards an International Political Economy of Development (London: Longman, 1995). The ideology of endless growth has long been challenged by counterculture environmentalists, without, until recently, much impact on the mainstream social sciences. “Economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies: the source of individual motivation, the basis of political solidarity, the ground for the mobilization of society for a common purpose.… If there is no commitment to economic growth, what can the Soviet Union–or Japan, or the United States–hold out as a social goal for its people?” (Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976). “If one were to choose a single word to characterize [what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century], it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.” (Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power, 2008).
42 Kevin Drum, “The Rationing Canard,” Mother Jones (August 28, 2009), http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/08/rationing-canaard.
43 Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). See Naomi Klein, “Climate against Capitalism,” The Nation, November 11, 2012.
44 Minxin Pei, “Communist China at 60,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 30, 2009), www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=23922.
45 Some are inching this way, see the interviews in “Post Carbon Pathways,” especially the interviews of Mark Delucchi and Mark Jacobson, co-authors of the widely noted Scientific American article “A Plan to Power 100 percent of the Planet with Renewables,” in John Wiseman, et al, Post Carbon Pathways: Conversations with Leading Climate Change Researchers, Policy Makers and Activists, Center for Policy Development, April 2013, http://cpd.or.au/2012/03/post-carbon-pathways, 32–37, 92–95. Still, among most the emphasis is always on don’t be pessimistic, one must be optimistic, particularly in public, one absolutely must not talk apocalyptically.
46 See Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” Daedalus (Winter 2013): 40–58; Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time, chap. 3. For a more equivocal (if not schizophrenic) version of this conclusion, see Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011).
47 See Charles Tilly’s classic piece, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 169–91 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
48 For strong arguments on the need for alternative political economy, see Nick Brooks, Natasha Grist, and Katrina Brown, “Development Futures in the Context of Climate Change: Challenging the Present and Learning from the Past,” Development Policy Review 27, no. 6 (2009): 741–65, and the literature cited therein.
49 As to what we don’t yet have, even in the lab, first and foremost is viable, effective CCS that might—realistically—be brought to scale. See Clive Hamilton, Nor do we have the technology to deal with fresh water issues in that way.
50 See Patrick Heller’s chapter, “Kerala: Deepening a Radical Social Democracy,” in Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects, edited by Richard Sandbrook, Marc Edelman, Patrick Heller, and Judith Teichman, 65–92 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Patrick Heller and T. M. Thomas Isaac, “Decentralization, Democracy and Development: People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning in Kerala,” in Developing Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Democracy edited by A. Fung and E. O. Wright, (London: Verso, 2002).
51 See the discussions of the “social economy of Quebec,” and the Mondragon cooperative conglomerate in Spain, in Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010), 204–16, 234–46; discussion of Costa Rica in; discussions of Seattle, Washington; the Netherlands; and “farmer-managed natural regeneration” (FMNR) in Africa in Mark Hertsgaard, Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
52 Mike Davis: “Although forest clearance and export monocultures have played fundamental roles in the transition to a new geological epoch, the prime mover has been the almost exponential increase in the carbon footprints of urban regions in the northern hemisphere. Heating and cooling the urban built environment alone is responsible for an estimated 35 to 45 per cent of current carbon emissions, while urban industries and transportation contribute another 35 to 40 per cent. In a sense, city life is rapidly destroying the ecological niche—Holocene climate stability—which made its evolution into complexity possible.” “Who Will Build the Ark,” New Left Review (2010): 41.
53 There are many relevant (if piecemeal) suggestions, such as small-scale flexible specialization in production, worker and artisan cooperatives, revitalization of family farming and local sourcing of food, decentralized electricity generation via distributed wind and solar technologies, major elaboration of non-fossil-fueled public transportation, and community organization dedicated to local green education and responsible practices. See, for example, Juliet Schor, Plenitude (New York: Penguin, 2010), and the literature cited therein; Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (New York: Times Books, 2007); Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009); David Holmgren, Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009); Shaun Chamberlin, The Transition Timeline: For a Local, Resilient Future (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009). At a policy level, as the scientific evidence of approaching catastrophe has become stronger, and as scientists have taken it upon themselves to speak out more strongly, we’ve seen a spate of books from such authorities offering comprehensive descriptions of necessary radical reforms of policy in the advanced world. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); David W. Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Lester T. Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).
54 To get an idea, look at the content—both the articles and the advertisements—of any recent issue of the high-modernist establishment flagship journal Foreign Affairs. You will find never-ending optimistic pumping of high-end modern middle-class professionalism and related educational and policy programs and institutions as the answer to everything and the guarantee of a bright future. This is less rabid and dishonest than what we saw on Wall Street during the recent great bubble, but no less cavalier—and ultimately no less delusional—than those who really believed that the 2004–2007 housing market and Dow were crash-proof.
55 But there are lessons, both positive and negative, to be learned from the practices and experiences of such revolutionary movements, particularly from the Maoist “Yenan Way” of the 1940s; the Cuban revolution before, during, and after the “Special Period”; the Nicaraguan revolution; and the Salvadoran revolutionary struggle. See note 64, below and the accompanying text.
56 Of course, Marx and liberal modernization theorists were right in insisting that Jeffersonian small-producer capitalism of the nineteenth century—proto/early-industrial petty bourgeois radicalism and utopian socialism—was bound to be defeated by capitalist accumulation and industrial concentration. But that doesn’t mean that that outcome is irreversible. Something like that outcome was inherent in the capitalism of that time, but that do
esn’t mean that there is any such thing as “Capitalism” as a transhistorical political economy that must continue to exist in that form—or not at all.
57 For stimulating discussion of underlying theoretical and epistemological issues, see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially 155–65, 220–29. On general historical background, see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Picador, 2012). On particular countries: Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1980); Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Richard Sandbrook, Marc Edelman, Patrick Heller, and Judith Teichman, Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Patrick Heller and T. M. Thomas Isaac, “Decentralization, Democracy and Development: People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning in Kerala,” in Developing Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Democracy, edited by A. Fung and E. O. Wright (London: Verso, 2002).
58 We need not go as far in praise as Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) or Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991). The more recent scholarly work is more balanced, while maintaining a positive judgment: Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007), vii–viii: