Intro to Climate and Sustainability

Climate Change Politics: the right is right

Misha Velthuis

m.velthuis@uva.nl

Thu 7 Nov 2024

Today:

The conference

What are these institutions?

"Many of these institutions were created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when U.S. business elites feared that public opinion was turning dangerously against capitalism and toward, if not socialism, then an aggressive Keynesianism. In response, they launched a counterrevolution, a richly funded intellectual movement that argued that greed and the limitless pursuit of profit were nothing to apologize for and offered the greatest hope for human emancipation that the world had ever known. Under this liberationist banner, they fought for such policies as tax cuts, free trade deals, for the auctioning off of core state assets from phones to energy to water—the package known in most of the world as “neoliberalism.” At the end of the 1980s, after a decade of Margaret Thatcher at the helm in the U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the United States, and with communism collapsing, these ideological warriors were ready to declare victory: history was officially over and there was, in Thatcher’s often repeated words, “no alternative” to their market fundamentalism."

"… from their perspective, the scientific reality of climate change must seem spectacularly unfair. After all, the people at the Heartland conference thought they had won these ideological wars — if not fairly, then certainly squarely. Now climate science is changing everything: how can you win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the planet depends on intervening?"

What is the mechanism?

"This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical cudgels with which they will attempt to club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also fly from the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential hopefuls all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches … that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”"

The outcome

The process in more detail

The main argument of the chapter

Climate change cannot be solved with the market. It needs state intervention.

"We need to plan and manage our societies" to reflect our values"
People who are ideologically married to the market (either because they strongly believe it's the best for everyone, or because it's the best for themselves, or some mix), have effectively fought the facts behind climate change.
There are also more religious undertones about subduing the Earth.

The "right is right":

"…when it comes to the political and economic consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our liberalized and profit-seeking economy, they have their eyes wide open. The deniers get plenty of the details wrong (no, it’s not a communist plot; authoritarian state socialism, as we will see, was terrible for the environment and brutally extractivist), but when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money."

"They know very well that ours is a global economy created by, and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations—the list of ideological outrages goes on and on."

Then what is their idea?

Let it happen. We'll be fine.

Write off large amounts of people.

MVR: Maybe deep down and disbelief that we will manage. Because they look into themselves, and cannot imagine that they themselves would be able. So they believe that others are also not able.

Insurance industry providing private firemen to protect property against wildfire, while public fire department is struggling.

"For a long time, environmentalists spoke of climate change as a great equalizer, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. It was supposed to bring us together. Yet all signs are that it is doing precisely the opposite, stratifying us further into a society of haves and have-nots, divided between those whose wealth offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather, at least for now, and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states."

https://www.privaira.com/the-advantages-of-using-a-private-jet-to-escape-hurricanes/

Racism. White supremacy. Tribalism/

https://octodon.social/@Taweret/113439644572597733

What can be done?

"Coddling conservatives"

Option 1: warn for larger government intervention

Option 2: sell it as something attractive

Klein: both not working.

The answer can only be social movements

"The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right. And rather than twisting yourself in knots trying to appease a lethal worldview, you set out to deliberately strengthen those values (“egalitarian” and “communitarian” as the cultural cognition studies cited here describe them) that are currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature."
[This] "… is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving."
"But if there is a reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed and unchangeable but to offer other ways to live—to wage, and win, a battle of cultural worldviews. That means laying out a vision of the world that competes directly with the one on harrowing display at the Heartland conference and in so many other parts of our culture, one that resonates with the majority of people on the planet because it is true: That we are not apart from nature but of it. That acting collectively for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects of mutual aid are responsible for our species’ greatest accomplishments. That greed must be disciplined and tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable. It also means defending those parts of our societies that already express these values outside of capitalism, whether it’s an embattled library, a public park, a student movement demanding free university tuition, or an immigrant rights movement fighting for dignity and more open borders. And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy."