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2020/2/24 Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals | Martin Lukacs | Environment | The Guardian
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Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate
change as individuals
Martin Lukacs
Stop obsessing with how personally green you live � and start collectively taking on corporate
power
Mon 17 Jul 2017 15.56 BST
W ould you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatterto a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be moreout of sync with the nature of the crisis.The email in my inbox last week offered thirty suggestions to green my office
space: use reusable pens, redecorate with light colours, stop using the elevator.
Back at home, done huffing stairs, I could get on with other options: change my lightbulbs, buy
local veggies, purchase eco-appliances, put a solar panel on my roof.
And a study released on Thursday claimed it had figured out the single best way to fight
climate change: I could swear off ever having a child.
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These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and
the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural
as the air we breathe. But we could hardly be worse-served.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering
these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies
alone are responsible for an astonishing 71%. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go
on torching the planet.
The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response –
is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last 40 years, against the
possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it.
The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has
pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of
unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any
democratic public will.
Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have
liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage
dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our
collective welfare.
Anything resembling a collective check on corporate power has become a target of the elite:
lobbying and corporate donations, hollowing out democracies, have obstructed green policies
and kept fossil fuel subsidies flowing; and the rights of associations like unions, the most
effective means for workers to wield power together, have been undercut whenever possible.
At the very moment when climate change demands an unprecedented collective public
response, neoliberal ideology stands in the way. Which is why, if we want to bring down
emissions fast, we will need to overcome all of its free-market mantras: take railways and
utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil
fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and
renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who
can afford it.
Neoliberalism has not merely ensured this agenda is politically unrealistic: it has also tried to
make it culturally unthinkable. Its celebration of competitive self-interest and hyper-
individualism, its stigmatization of compassion and solidarity, has frayed our collective bonds.
It has spread, like an insidious anti-social toxin, what Margaret Thatcher preached: “there is no
such thing as society.”
Studies show that people who have grown up under this era have indeed become more
individualistic and consumerist. Steeped in a culture telling us to think of ourselves as
consumers instead of citizens, as self-reliant instead of interdependent, is it any wonder we
deal with a systemic issue by turning in droves to ineffectual, individual efforts? We are all
Thatcher’s children.
Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had thrived on people
believing that being afflicted by the structural problems of an exploitative system – poverty,
joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency.
Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you
should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are
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too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the
burden of potential ecological collapse.
Of course we need people to consume less and innovate low-carbon alternatives – build
sustainable farms, invent battery storages, spread zero-waste methods. But individual choices
will most count when the economic system can provide viable, environmental options for
everyone—not just an affluent or intrepid few.
If affordable mass transit isn’t available, people will commute with cars. If local organic food is
too expensive, they won’t opt out of fossil fuel-intensive super-market chains. If cheap mass
produced goods flow endlessly, they will buy and buy and buy. This is the con-job of
neoliberalism: to persuade us to address climate change through our pocket-books, rather than
through power and politics.
Eco-consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power
to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from
the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.
The good news is that the impulse of humans to come together is inextinguishable – and the
collective imagination is already making a political come-back. The climate justice movement
is blocking pipelines, forcing the divestment of trillions of dollars, and winning support for
100% clean energy economies in cities and states across the world. New ties are being drawn to
Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels
of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.
None more so than Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour Manifesto spelled out a redistributive
project to address climate change: by publicly retooling the economy, and insisting that
corporate oligarchs no longer run amok. The notion that the rich should pay their fair share to
fund this transformation was considered laughable by the political and media class. Millions
disagreed. Society, long said to be departed, is now back with a vengeance.
So grow some carrots and jump on a bike: it will make you happier and healthier. But it is time
to stop obsessing with how personally green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate
power.
Twitter: @Martin_Lukacs
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CLIMATE CHANGE FOSSIL FUELS PEAK OIL MAY 12, 2014 ISSUE
By Chris Hayes
APRIL 22, 2014
The New Abolitionism
Averting planetary disaster will mean forcing fossil fuel
companies to give up at least $10 trillion in wealth.
B
efore the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the
Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty
rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United
States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of
the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words
was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of
dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the
property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth
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stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be
taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day
political movement that contended that mutual funds and
401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil
institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or
less overnight. This was the fear that approximately
400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the
Civil War.
Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves
as property. It was precisely this ontological question—
property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But
suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the
numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves
worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which
comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in
1860 by the number of slaves and then using the
Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as
economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue,
using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t
really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there
were no national surveys to figure out what the average
consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in
Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.
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In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South
held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery
in terms of the percentage of total economic value it
represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal.
In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total
household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire
country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.
Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to
comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely
geographically focused. According to calculations made by
economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented
nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of
secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more
than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country
put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me.
“Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks,
factories and railroads with no compensation.”
* * *
In 2012, the writer and activist Bill McKibben published a
heart-stopping essay in Rolling Stone titled “Global
Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” I’ve read hundreds of
thousands of words about climate change over the last
decade, but that essay haunts me the most.
The piece walks through a fairly straightforward bit of
arithmetic that goes as follows. The scientific consensus is
that human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable
form a temperature increase this century more than 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Given that we’ve
already warmed the earth about 0.8 degrees Celsius, that
means we have 1.2 degrees left—and some of that warming
is already in motion. Given the relationship between
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carbon emissions and global average temperatures, that
means we can release about 565 gigatons of carbon into
the atmosphere by mid-century. Total. That’s all we get to
emit if we hope to keep inhabiting the planet in a manner
that resembles current conditions.
Now here’s the terrifying part. The Carbon Tracker
Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and
environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon
contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world’s
energy companies and major fossil fuel–producing
countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is
in the ground that we can, with present technology,
extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number
that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is… 2,795
gigatons. Which means the total amount of known, proven
extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is
almost five times the amount we can safely burn.
Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably
to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate
movement is to find a way to force the powers that be,
from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and
shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the
carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you
own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into
your stocks? You can’t have it.
Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put
an exact price tag on how much money all that
unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial
analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20
trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet,
we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most
profitable corporations and the nations that partner with
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them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of
these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say,
for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the
total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2.
Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.
The last time in American history that some powerful set
of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth
was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than
600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve
ever fought.
It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political
issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American
history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone
misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the
obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral
comparison between the enslavement of Africans and
African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our
devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules.
The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the
political economy of slavery and the political economy of
fossil fuel.
More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben,
the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must
confront the fact that the climate justice movement is
demanding that an existing set of political and economic
interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of
wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other
than abolition.
* * *
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The connection between slavery and fossil fuels, however,
is more than metaphorical. Before the widespread use of
fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy
(if not the main source) for societies stretching back
millennia. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all
energy to power societies flowed from the natural
ecological cascade of sun and food: the farmhands in the
fields, the animals under saddle, the burning of wood or
grinding of a mill. A life of ceaseless exertion.
Before fossil fuels, the only way out of this drudgery was
by getting other human beings to do the bulk of the work
that the solar regime required of its participants. This
could be done by using accrued money to pay for labor, but
more often than not—particularly in societies like the
Roman Empire that achieved density and scale—it was
achieved through slavery. Slavery opened up for the slave
owners vast new vistas of possibility. The grueling
mundane exertions demanded of everyone under a solar
regime could be cast off, pushed down on the shoulders of
the slave.
In this respect, the basic infrastructure of energy
distribution and exploitation in the plantation South was
not so different from feudal Europe or ancient Egypt.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, coal, whale
oil, pneumatic power and all manner of mechanization
penetrated the more urbanized North, while the South
remained largely mired in the pre-industrial age. In 1850,
only 14 percent of the nation’s canal mileage and 26
percent of its railroad mileage ran through slave states,
and the industrial output of the entire region was only
one-third that of Massachusetts alone.
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Not only that, but as time marched forward, the South
lagged further and further behind. In Battle Cry of Freedom,
James McPherson notes that while in 1850 slave states had
42 percent of the population, they “possessed only 18
percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity, a decline
from the 20 percent of 1840.” The same holds true for the
South’s percentage of railroad miles, which was declining
as the war approached. In 1852, James D.B. DeBow, a
vociferous advocate of diversifying the Southern economy,
lamented that “the North grows rich, and powerful, and
great, whilst we, at best, are stationary.” (This
underdevelopment would haunt the South well into the
twentieth century: in 1930, only 38 percent of residents of
the former Confederate states had electricity, compared
with about 85 percent in states that had been free.)
This lagging wasn’t just happenstance: many historians
argue that it was, in fact, the availability of the cheap,
plentiful energy resource of slavery that meant the South
faced less pressure to urbanize, electrify or industrialize.
Slavery, and the energy it provided, was a kind of crutch
giving the antebellum South its own version of what
modern-development economists now call, in a very
different context, a “resource curse”—that is, an
overreliance on a resource (in this case, enslaved human
beings) that stunts economic diversification and
development.
Crucially, as slavery became more profitable to the planter
class and ever more central to the economic health of the
South, the ideas about slavery grew increasingly
aggressive, expansionist and reactionary. “Very few people
at the time of the Revolution and the Constitution publicly
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affirmed the desirability of slavery,” Foner observes. “They
generally said, ‘We’re stuck with it; there’s nothing we can
do.’”
Even in much of the South, slavery was at first seen as a
necessary evil, a shameful feature of the American
experience that would necessarily be phased out over time.
Many slave-owning founders shared in this consensus.
Slave owner and Virginian Patrick Henry referred to
slavery in a private letter as an “abominable practice…a
species of violence and tyranny” that was “repugnant to
humanity.” His fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee called
the slave trade an “iniquitous and disgraceful traffic” in
1759 while introducing a bill to try to end it. Thomas
Jefferson, at times an ardent defender of slavery and the
white supremacy that undergirded it, confessed in 1779
that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a
perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the
most unremitting despotism on the one part, and
degrading submissions on the other.”
When Jefferson wrote those words, slavery had nowhere
near the economic grip on the South that it would have
during the cotton boom in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Between 1805 and 1860, the price per slave grew
from about $300 to $750, and the total number of slaves
increased from 1 million to 4 million—which meant that
the total value of slaves grew a whopping 900 percent in
the half-century before the war.
This increase in the price of slaves was due largely to two
factors. In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
took effect, permanently constraining supply. From then
on, all new slaves came as the offspring of existing
slaves.
And then there was cotton. It’s hard to overestimate the
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impact that cotton had on the South during the decades
leading up to the war. No place on earth produced more
cotton, and the world’s demand was insatiable. Economic
historian Roger L. Ransom writes that “by the mid-1830s,
cotton shipments accounted for more than half the value
of all exports from the United States.” So lucrative was the
crop that the planter class rushed into it, leaving behind
everything else. As McPherson notes, per capita
production of the South’s principal food crops actually
declined during this period.
All of this led to a heady kind of triumphalism. In 1858,
Senator James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina
plantation owner, took to the floor of the Senate to inquire
mockingly:
What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three
years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine,
but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry
the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you
dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to
make war upon it. Cotton is king.
It is perhaps not surprising that under conditions of
stupendous profit and accumulation, the rhetoric of the
South’s politicians and planter class changed to a florid
celebration of the peculiar institution. “By the 1830s, [John
C.] Calhoun and all these guys, some of them go so far as
to say, ‘It would be better for white workers if they were
slaves,’” Foner tells me. “They have a whole literature on
why slavery should be expanded.” Indeed, here’s Calhoun
in 1837:
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I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races
of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other
physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought
together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States
between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive
good.
Here’s Hammond in the same “Cotton is king” speech,
playing the same notes:
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial
duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class
requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its
requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must
have, or you would not have that other class which leads
progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the
South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand.
A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper,
in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer
all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them
slaves.
“Our negroes,” according to Southern social theorist
George Fitzhugh, “are not only better off as to physical
comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is
better…. [They are] the happiest, and, in some sense, the
freest people in the world.”
So the basic story looks like this: in the decades before the
Civil War, the economic value of slavery explodes. It
becomes the central economic institution and source of
wealth for a region experiencing a boom that succeeded in
raising per capita income and concentrating wealth ever
more tightly in the hands of the Southern planter class.
/
During this same period, the rhetoric of the planter class
evolves from an ambivalence about slavery to a full-
throated, aggressive celebration of it. As slavery becomes
more valuable, the slave states find ever more fulsome
ways of praising, justifying and celebrating it. Slavery
increasingly moves from an economic institution to a
cultural one; it becomes a matter of identity, of symbolism
—indeed, in the hands of the most monstrously adept
apologists, a thing of beauty.
And yet, at the very same time, casting a shadow over it all
is the growing power of the abolition movement in the
North and the dawning awareness that any day might be
slavery’s last. So that, on the eve of the war, slavery had
never been more lucrative or more threatened. That also
happens to be true of fossil fuel extraction
today.
* * *
America is in the grip of a fossil fuel frenzy almost without
precedent. By 2015, the United States is projected to
surpass Saudi Arabia as the largest producer of oil in the
world. After sixty years of being a net importer of fuel, we
are now a net exporter, and it’s possible that we will break
our 1970 record for peak oil production. This comes
thanks to both deepwater drilling and shale fields like the
Bakken formation in North Dakota, whose previously
inaccessible reserves have been unlocked by horizontal
drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies, also known
as “fracking.”
These same technologies have also produced an
unprecedented natural gas surge, as fracking wells are
sunk into the soil of ranches and parks and hillsides across
the country. Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale alone
produces about 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day
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—the equivalent of more than 2.4 million barrels of oil.
Shale extraction has quadrupled in the past four years and
now accounts for about 40 percent of the annual natural
gas yields in the United States, which recently surpassed
Russia as the world’s largest natural gas producer.
At the very same time that extraction has come to play an
increasingly dominant role in the US economy, we have
seen a dramatic reversal in the politics of fossil fuel and
climate change. Whereas high-profile Republicans once
expressed ambivalence about our reliance on fossil fuels,
viewing it as a kind of necessary evil that would ultimately
be phased out, in the last five years the extraction of fossil
fuels has become—to steal a phrase—“a positive good.”
During the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Dan Quayle
argued that “the greenhouse effect is an important
environmental issue. It’s important for us to get the data
in, to see what alternatives we have to the fossil fuels…. We
need to get on with it, and in a George Bush
administration, you can bet that we will.”
That wasn’t quite the case, but in 1989, Newt Gingrich was
one of twenty-five Republican co-sponsors of the Global
Warming Prevention Act, which held that “the Earth’s
atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by
pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and
wasteful fossil fuel use, and the effects of rapid population
growth in many regions” and that “increasing the nation’s
and world’s reliance on ecologically sustainable solar and
renewable resources…is a significant long-term solution to
reducing fossil-generated carbon dioxide and other
pollutants.” In 1990, President George H.W. Bush said at an
/
IPCC event, “We all know that human activities are
changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in
unprecedented ways.”
While his son did little to curb carbon emissions when he
took his turn at the presidency, he did at least give it lip
service. Speaking ahead of the 2005 G8 Summit, George
W. Bush said, “It’s now recognized that the surface of the
earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases
caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” As part
of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, he
signed into law minimum efficiency requirements to begin
to phase out the use of incandescent bulbs in 2012. (A law
that would, in the Obama era, become a top conservative
target, as the Tea Party rallied to support the incandescent
bulb as if it were a constitutionally enshrined right.)
And in 2008, somewhat miraculously, John McCain’s
platform featured support for a cap-and-trade bill that
would have effectively put a price on carbon. But even by
that year, you could already feel a seismic shift in the
rhetoric. I sat in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul in 2008
and watched Sarah Palin lead thousands of people in a
thunderous chant of “Drill, baby, drill!”
After Obama’s election, things moved quickly: McCain
dropped support for his own legislation to regulate carbon
pollution. In 2010, Bob Inglis, a conservative congressman
from South Carolina, was soundly defeated by a Tea Party
challenger in the Republican primary, due chiefly to
Inglis’s refusal to deny the science on climate change. A
year later, Gingrich called his appearance alongside Nancy
Pelosi in a 2008 ad urging action on climate change the
“dumbest single thing I’ve done in years,” recanting his
acceptance of the science and embracing denialism. He
/
was not alone—in fact, outright denialism is now more or
less the official Republican line. In 2011, and again in
January of this year, Republicans on the House Energy and
Commerce Committee voted to block the EPA from
regulating carbon emissions and against amendments that
would acknowledge that climate change is, in fact,
happening.
And it’s not just denialism: extracting and burning carbon
is now roundly celebrated by conservative politicians, as if
plunging holes into the earth to pull out fossilized peat is a
sign of the nation’s potency. In 2012, Mitt Romney said he
would build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline
himself. Texas Representative Steve Stockman tweeted in
March 2013 that “the best thing about the Earth is if you
poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”
Remember, all of this is happening at the same time that
(a) fossil fuel companies are pulling more carbon out of
the ground than ever before, and (b) it’s becoming
increasingly clear that those companies will have to leave
80 percent of their reserves in the ground if we are to
avert a global cataclysm. In the same way that the
abolition movement cast a shadow over the cotton boom,
so does the movement to put a price on carbon spook the
fossil fuel companies, which even at their moment of peak
triumph wonder if a radical change is looming around the
corner.
Let me pause here once again to be clear about what the
point of this extended historical comparison is and is not.
Comparisons to slavery are generally considered
rhetorically out of bounds, and for good reason. We are
walking on treacherous terrain. The point here is not to
associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral
The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.
— Steve Stockman (@SteveWorks4You) March 21, 2013
/
bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians
who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels
today.
In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the
opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels.
Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all
too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was
at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the
country would have to give up their wealth. That
liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what
today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding:
that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is
an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-
eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also
recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may
be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion.
There is no way around conflict with this much money on
the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy.
No use trying to persuade people otherwise.
* * *
If I’ve done my job so far, you should, right about now, be
feeling despair. If, indeed, what we need to save the earth
is to forcibly pry trillions of dollars of wealth out of the
hands of its owners, and if the only precedent for that is
the liberation of the slaves—well, then you wouldn’t be
crazy if you concluded that we’re doomed, since that result
was achieved only through the most brutal extended war
in our nation’s history.
So here is why we’re not doomed. Among many obvious
differences between the slave power and the fossil fuel
cabal is this definitive one. Slaves were incredibly valuable
in large part because they produced huge amounts of value
/
with relatively little capital required. Slave owners merely
had to provide food, water and shelter (often wretchedly
insufficient) and maintain a system of repression and
surveillance to guard against the ever-present threat of
rebellion or escape. Compared with many other kinds of
investments, unlocking the value of slaves required very
little of the plantation owners.
Such is not the case with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel extraction
is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world.
While it is immensely, unfathomably profitable, it requires
ungodly amounts of money to dig and drill the earth,
money to pump and refine and transport the fuel so that it
can go from the fossilized plant matter thousands of feet
beneath the earth’s surface into your Honda. And that
constant need for billions of new dollars in investment
capital is the industry’s Achilles’ heel.
A variety of forces are now attacking precisely this
vulnerability. The movement to stop the Keystone XL
pipeline is probably the largest social movement in
American history directed at stopping a piece of capital
investment, which is what the pipeline is. Because without
that pipeline, a lot of the dirty fuel trapped in the Alberta
tar sands is too costly to be worth pulling out.
The divestment movement is pushing colleges,
universities, municipalities, pension funds and others to
remove their investment from fossil fuel companies. So far,
eighteen foundations, twenty-seven religious institutions,
twenty-two cities, and eleven colleges and universities
have committed themselves to divestment. Together, they
have pledged to divest hundreds of millions of dollars from
the fossil fuel companies so far.
http://gofossilfree.org/commitments/
/
Of course, that’s a drop in the global pool of capital. But
some of the largest funds in the world are sovereign wealth
funds, which are subject to political pressure. The largest
such fund belongs to Norway, which is seriously
considering divesting from fossil fuels.
Investors, even those unmotivated by stewardship of the
planet, have reason to be suspicious of the fossil fuel
companies. Right now, they are seeing their investment
dollars diverted from paying dividends to doing something
downright insane: searching for new reserves. Globally, the
industry spends $1.8 billion a day on exploration. As one
longtime energy industry insider pointed out to me, fossil
fuel companies are spending much more on exploring for
new reserves than they are posting in profits.
Think about that for a second: to stay below a 2 degree
Celsius rise, we can burn only one-fifth of the total fossil
fuel that companies have in their reserves right now. And
yet, fossil fuel companies are spending hundreds of billions
of dollars looking for new reserves—reserves that would be
sold and emitted only in some distant postapocalyptic
future in which we’ve already burned enough fossil fuel to
warm the planet past even the most horrific projections.
This means that fossil fuel companies are taking their
investors’ money and spending it on this extremely
expensive suicide mission. Every single day. If investors
say, “Stop it—we want that money back as dividends rather
than being spent on exploration,” then, according to this
industry insider, “what that means is, literally, the oil and
gas companies don’t have a viable business model. If all
your investors say that, and all the analysts start saying
that, they can no longer grow as businesses.”
Please support The Nation. Donate now!
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/
In fact, in certain climate and investment circles, people
have begun to talk about “stranded assets”—that is, the risk
that either national or global carbon-pricing regimes will
make the extraction of some of the current reserves
uneconomical. Recently, shareholders pushed ExxonMobil
to start reporting on its exposure to the risk of stranded
assets, which was a crucial first step, though the report
itself was best summarized by McKibben as saying,
basically, “We plan on overheating the planet, we don’t
think any government will stop us, we dare you to try.”
That is the current stance of the fossil fuel companies: “It’s
our property, and we’re gonna extract, sell and burn all of
it. What are you gonna do about it?”
Those people you see getting arrested outside the White
House protesting Keystone XL, showing up at shareholder
meetings and sitting in on campuses to get their schools to
divest are doing something about it. They are attacking the
one weak link in the chain of doom that is our fossil fuel
economy.
As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it
never will.” What the climate justice movement is
demanding is the ultimate abolition of fossil fuels. And our
fates all depend on whether they succeed.
Read more of The Nation’s special #MyClimateToo
coverage:
Mark Hertsgaard: Why TheNation.com Today Is All About
Climate
Naomi Klein: The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face
Are Not Just External
Dani McClain: The ‘Environmentalists’ Who Scapegoat
Immigrants and Women on Climate Change
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MyClimateToo&src=hash&f=realtime
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-thenationcom-today-all-about-climate
http://www.thenation.com/article/change-within-obstacles-we-face-are-not-just-external
http://www.thenation.com/article/environmentalists-who-scapegoat-immigrants-and-women-climate-change
/
Chris Hayes Chris Hayes is the Editor-at-Large of The Nation and host of
“All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC.
Mychal Denzel Smith: Racial and Environmental Justice
Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Earth Day’s Founding Father
Wen Stephenson: Let This Earth Day Be The Last
Katha Pollitt: Climate Change is the Tragedy of the Global
Commons
Michelle Goldberg: Fighting Despair to Fight Climate
Change
George Zornick: We’re the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Cheap
Date
Dan Zegart: Want to Stop Climate Change? Take the Fossil
Fuel Industry to Court
Jeremy Brecher: ‘Jobs vs. the Environment’: How to
Counter the Divisive Big Lie
Jon Wiener: Elizabeth Kolbert on Species Extinction and
Climate Change
Dave Zirin: Brazil’s World Cup Will Kick the Environment
in the Teeth
Steven Hsieh: People of Color Are Already Getting Hit the
Hardest by Climate Change
John Nichols: If Rick Weiland Can Say “No” to Keystone,
So Can Barack Obama
Michelle Chen: Where Have All the Green Jobs Gone?
Peter Rothberg: Why I’m Not Totally Bummed Out This
Earth Day
Leslie Savan: This Is My Brain on Paper Towels
Take Action: Stop Cove
Point
https://www.thenation.com/authors/chris-hayes/
https://twitter.com/@chrislhayes
http://www.thenation.com/article/racial-and-environmental-justice-are-two-sides-same-coin
http://www.thenation.com/article/earth-days-founding-father
http://www.thenation.com/article/let-earth-day-be-last
http://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-tragedy-global-commons
http://www.thenation.com/article/fighting-to%20despair-fight-climate-change
http://www.thenation.com/article/were-fossil-fuel-industrys-cheap-date
http://www.thenation.com/article/want-stop-climate-change-take-fossil-fuel-industry-court
http://www.thenation.com/article/jobs-vs-environment-how-counter-divisive-big-lie
http://www.thenation.com/article/were-asteroid-elizabeth-kolbert-species-extinction-and-climate-change
http://www.thenation.com/article/brazils-world-cup-will-kick-environment-teeth
http://www.thenation.com/article/people-color-are-already-getting-hit-hardest-climate-change
http://www.thenation.com/article/if-rick-weiland-can-say-no-keystone-so-can-barack-obama
http://www.thenation.com/article/where-have-all-green-jobs-gone
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-im-not-totally-bummed-out-earth-day
http://www.thenation.com/article/my-brain-paper-towels
http://activism.thenation.com/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=13567
/
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By Dave Zirin
TODAY 12:05 PM
Mask Off: The 1980 US Olympic
Hockey Team Has Long Been a
Symbol of Reaction
Like it or not, the “Miracle on Ice” team has long allowed itself to
be used by the worst actors in our politics.
T
he 1980 underdog, gold medal-winning “Miracle on
Ice” US Olympic hockey team has long been heralded
as perhaps the greatest sports story of the 20th century,
but it was always more than that. Forty years ago, the
victory was held up as a symbol of a new, and much craved
for, “national unity.” After the scarring divisions in the
United States caused by the war in Vietnam and the loud
and proud movements for civil rights, the 1980 team said
Captain of the 1980 US men’s Olympic hockey team Mike Eruzione
speaks during a Trump campaign rally. (Patrick Semansky / AP Photo)
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to the country that we could proudly unite once more and
achieve the impossible—and over our enemies, the Soviets,
no less.
It was national pride for a group of all-white, unknown
college kids as they defeated a big, badass Soviet squad—
think Ivan Drago on skates—during their impossible
journey to gold. A sister of one of the US hockey players—
as people shouted “The Russians! I can’t believe we beat
the Russians!”—said that she hadn’t seen so many flags
since the ’60s. “And we were burning them then.”
The memories of that universal unity and joy have now
been ripped to shreds and, tragically, it’s been done by
many of the players themselves. At a Trump rally in Las
Vegas, most of the members of the 1980 team took the
stage, many wearing the bright red Make American Great
Again caps, and praised Trump, as he basked in their
worship. Trump asked team captain Mike Eruzione,
bizarrely, to tell the crowd he was a good golfer, and
Eruzione responded, “Whatever you say, sir.”
The team proceeded to smile while Trump blasted the
South Korean film Parasite for winning Best Picture. They
grinned along as Trump whined that they don’t make films
like the plantation slave epic Gone With the Wind anymore.
Trump also “joked” about serving an endless number of
terms. As he waxed nonsensically about autocracy, the
players from the 1980 team provided the backdrop.
Following the shock, outrage, and, it must be said,
mourning of seeing this beloved team joyously consent to
being props for the Mad King, the team’s Twitter account
offered a meek defense, writing: “This is about proudly
https://www.si.com/vault/1980/03/03/824423/the-golden-goal-the-us-went-bonkers-when-mike-eruziones-shot-beat-vladimir-myshkin-for-the-winning-goal-as-americas-team-stunned-the-once-invincible-soviets-en-route-to-the-olympic-title
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/02/23/miracle-ice-team-wears-keep-america-great-hats-while-being-lauded-trump-rally/
To us, this is not about politics or choosing sides. This is about proudly representing the United States of America. Whether your beliefs are Democratic, Republican, Independent, etc. we support that and are proud to represent the USA. It is an honor and privilege! 🏒🏅🇺🇸
— 1980 Miracle Hockey Team (@1980MiracleTeam) February 22, 2020
/
representing the United States of America. Whether your
beliefs are Democratic, Republican or Independent, etc.
we support that and are proud to represent the USA.”
One could certainly argue, as many have over social media,
that this is yet another example of Trump poisoning
everything he touches: that he can take even something as
pure as the 1980 US Olympic hockey team and turn it into
something ugly. This perspective, however, ignores the fact
that this is not the first time the 1980 team has been a
symbol of right-wing propaganda. We forget that 40 years
ago, their victory was less a symbol of unity than a pivot
towards reaction.
When they won the gold, their triumph was broadcast as
an opportunity to turn the page on the previous decades
when people actually fought an unjust war and pushed for
civil rights. This rosy-cheeked team was pumped
throughout the media as a reminder of better days. It was a
cultural projection that fit like a glove, with the
presidential campaign of the first person to use that “Make
America Great Again” slogan, Ronald Reagan. As Reagan
preached national unity, while ruthlessly rolling back
recent victories, the 1980 team was the symbolic
touchstone. Reagan loved to wax rhapsodic about a Leave
It to Beaver era before people questioned their
government. For him, this team was catnip, and the
players were glad to be part of it. As he said in remarks to
the US team in 1987 in the Rose Garden:
I think Americans see in this team a national symbol, a
symbol of what might be called the corny, homegrown
conviction that victory can come to those who live by the
amateur spirit, who play fair and by the rules, that nice guys
in a tough world can finish first.
To us, this is not about politics or choosing sides. This is about proudly representing the United States of America. Whether your beliefs are Democratic, Republican, Independent, etc. we support that and are proud to represent the USA. It is an honor and privilege! 🏒🏅🇺🇸
— 1980 Miracle Hockey Team (@1980MiracleTeam) February 22, 2020
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/092487f
/
Dave Zirin Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation.
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COMMENTS (2)
The game was also used by Reagan as a way to symbolize
the breaking of détente with the USSR and entering a
much more militant mindset: reheating the Cold War,
putting the nation, we now know, dangerously, close to
nuclear war.
Like with so many things Trump, the rally pulled off the
mask and revealed where the team actually stands. As in
1980, the team is using their victory less to bring the
country together than to drag it into the past. They aren’t
dupes. They are doing this of their own free will. They
want to have their cake and eat it too: to cozy up to
reaction while insisting that the attendant mud doesn’t
tarnish their gold. It doesn’t work that way in 2020. As
with anyone who stands too close to Trump, they leave
that rally visibly stained, for all to see.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/new-abolitionism/
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Comparison/Contrast Essay
• Analysis through comparison
• Must have some reason for comparison—have
some basic similarities
• Must be fair
• Needs careful organization
Strategies for organizing comparison essays
Introduction
Ist point of comparison
essay #1
essay #2
2nd point of comparison
essay #1
essay #2
3rd point of comparison
essay #1
essay #2
Conclusion
Example:
Introduction
Use of experts and sense of credibility
Lukacs
Hayes
Structure of argument (logos-how the argument logically
progresses)
Lukacs
Hayes
Use of language (pathos)
Lukacs
Hayes
Conclusion
Strategies for organizing comparison essays
Introduction
Essay #1
1st point of comparison
2nd point of comparison
3rd point of comparison
Essay #2
1st point of comparison
2nd point of comparison
3rd point of comparison
Conclusion
Example:
Introduction
Lukacs
• Use of experts and sense of credibility
• Structure of argument (logos-how the argument logically
progresses)
• Use of language (pathos)
Hayes
• Use of experts and sense of credibility
• Structure of argument (logos-how the argument logically
progresses)
• Use of language (pathos)
Conclusion
Your essay
• Will refer to two papers
• Will examine “how” the paper and argument is constructed (I’m not
asking you which paper you preferred)
• Does require quotes, paraphrases and/or summaries, all of which
must be cited
• Please refer to the grading allocation in your assignment sheet
What goes into your introduction?
• A hook
• Your thesis statement
• Any context that is necessary
Marking Criteria
Content:
• Clearly indicates which two articles are being compared.
• Is thoughtful and goes beyond what was said in class about each reading.
• Shows an understanding of the readings.
• Demonstrates an understanding of how the articles were structured, what the goals of the authors
were, and what types of rhetorical tools the authors used.
Technique:
• Uses strong thesis statements and topic sentences.
• Uses appropriate evidence to strengthen and support topic sentences.
• Is well organized.
Expression:
• Uses clear, well constructed sentences.
• Uses words appropriately to create the desired tone.
Mechanics:
• Uses grammar, punctuation and spelling correctly.
• Is properly formatted according to given instructions.
Today
• Exercise
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01GY7zYN-ps
• https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x354ycl
• Decide on what criteria you would use to compare these two films