Fear and doubt is not a good thought process
Trump was in Davos today, pretending to be a grownup again. “Don’t worry about climate change,” he said, on the basis of nothing.
“This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism. Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action,” Trump said in his opening address at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Did they let him write it himself? That’s gibberish, and childish.
“But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” he continued. “They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers. And I have them, and you have them, and we all have them. And they want to see us do badly, but we don’t let that happen.”
We can see exactly where he went off script. I have them, you have them, he has them, they have them, you have them, we have them, I have them. It’s galling that someone this mentally vacant is in a position to give these “speeches.”
“These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives. We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty.”
Oh shut up. Climate change has nothing to do with “socialism” and vice versa.
The president also claimed that the U.S. is among the countries with “the cleanest air and drinking water on Earth”
Again – not the issue.
Trump’s remarks came shortly before a session titled “Averting a Climate Apocalypse” featuring teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, with whom Trump has publicly feuded.
No; whom Trump has repeatedly publicly maligned.
Fielding reporters’ questions after his speech, Trump said he thought it “was very well-received” and insisted that he is a “very big believer in the environment.”
“We, right now, are doing extremely well in the United States,” he said. “But what I want is the cleanest water, the cleanest air. And that’s what we’re going to have, and that’s what we have right now.”
I wish this were a joke, but it isn’t.
So, what is this book that he’s going to have read to him? Brace yourselves…
I’m beginning to think that there may be a god, and it’s trolling the fuck out of us.
Oops, linky thing!
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/10/21060410/trump-climate-change-book
You could not make this shit up.
Omar, we could (very sadly) say that about a lot of what’s going on these days.
As a reminder, Cassandra was right.
I have always found it amusing that the conservatives who don’t believe in global warming call those of us who do Cassandras – because Cassandra was right, and no one would listen, which lead to disaster.
The liberals who do believe in global warming refer to us as Don Quixote, which is also amusing, since he was delusional and saw giants where there were only windmills.
It’s a shame so few people understand classic literature.
‘Climate change has nothing to do with “socialism” and vice versa.’
One of Naomi Klein’s arguments in This Changes Everything is that anti-climate-change ideology is so intractable precisely because these people, if not necessarily the rest of us, realise the fundamental danger to capitalism itself of taking any action to address climate change.
Just started reading The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells. The public understanding of the full consequences is limited at best, they are too often charcterized as potentially bad stuff happening to people far away in space and time. We don’t know the half of it:
Just finished reading volume one of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, in which he doesn’t stop at condemning capitalism but indicts civilization as a whole itself. Probably the most disturbing book I’ve ever read, mostly because I think he’s not wrong. His basic argument is that civilization is inherently and inevitably destructive of human and nonhuman communities, and must be stopped, the sooner the better. The crash that is coming is going to be bad, and will be made worse the longer we let civilization continue. To quote Jensen “We are so fucked.” In order to unfuck things, he wants to bring down civilization sooner rather than later, while we still have some degree of choice in how to manage it, before that choice is taken away by the consequences heedlessly unleashed through the continued ecological devestation wrought by business as usual. It will not be long before the human population and its pressure on living systems is greatly reduced; the question is whether we achieve this of our own volition, or it is lowered for us.
I found myself quibbling with a few details here and there, but on the whole, I found myself in general agreement with his assessment of our current situation. He wants humanity to survive, but civilization has got to go.
As for Trump, he has no business being in the position he’s in, or having the power he has. He is a one-man warning that humans have failed to figure out how to manage their affairs in a sane, safe way. Any system of governance and organization that would allow someone like him to have even a fraction of the control and influence he has is fatally flawed and in need of complete, careful overhaul.
If capitalist societies allow their coal-mining sectors and fossil-carbon shills to call the shots, then dystopian anarchy could well take over, as in Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees.
And which could ruin many a business.
I had a cat which had used up 8 of its 9 lives in quick succession, lived on several years sadder but wiser, then finally cashed in its 9th.
If Lynas is anything to go by, humanity since the start of the Industrial Revolution (1750) has already used up one of its six degree-by-degree steps on its pathway to global Hell.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview32
https://climateanalytics.org/briefings/global-warming-reaches-1c-above-preindustrial-warmest-in-more-than-11000-years/
That’s definitely My impression as well. There is no intellectually honest way to reconcile the truth of climate change with belief in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. As Klein rightly points out, hardcore conservatives and libertarians know this and aren’t fooled by the prevailing “win-win” rhetoric or the promise of “market-based” solutions (that are pretty much all scams anyway) for a second.
Another point that I take to be one of Klein’s arguments (the reason why – one way or the other – this does indeed “change everything”) is that “Business as Usual” is not actually an option at all. We can either start a rapid managed transition away from fossil fuels, and hope to stay somewhat in of control of our own fates, or (and so far this is indeed the way we’re heading) we can wait and let nature do it for us, and be reduced to helpless spectators as the whole house of cards comes crashing down over our heads.
@8 I’ve been sitting with Derrick Jensen’s ideas for, I guess, decades now, and just don’t know what to do with them. I agree that he’s ‘not wrong’…but now that we know, what then? I honestly don’t see any redemption for those of us brought up in ‘WEIRD’ cultures–we literally have no conception of how to live in community with other people, other life forms, and the natural world, and that’s not something you can learn in less than a lifetime, or a culture’s lifetime. A couple of book recs, if you’re interested:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865476387
description of a completely different way of life and way of understanding the world.
https://www.adamfrankscience.com/light-of-the-stars/
a different perspective on how we’re changing the face of our planet and what that might mean.
@10 ‘Adam Smith’s invisible hand’ was, in a nutshell, social pressure–people living in a community were savvy enough to realise that dealing honestly with their fellow men was in their own individual best interest, and so therefore acting in one’s own self-interest by definition increases virtue. We’ve set up the modern economy to hide the fact that all economic interaction is social interaction, although it is still true.
It really does seem like we are going to ultimately end up as spectators, if we’re still around to see what happens next–taking action requires collective consciousness and collective action, and I personally think over the past 50 years or so we’ve managed to thoroughly destroy whatever ability we may have had to even understand what ‘collective’ means, let alone engage in collective behaviour.
Exactly. And Trump is the logical culmination of that – someone who doesn’t care about anyone outside his own skin, being voted for by people who don’t care about anyone outside their own skins (or at least not outside their own “tribe” or family).
Until they believe global warming is hurting them personally, they will not act. When they do act, it is most likely going to be survivalist – gobble up what remains of the goodies, horde them away from their neighbors (whether immediate or half a globe away), and hunker down to protect what is “theirs”. This is, in fact, exactly what I hear from too many people, people I once thought were good people, people I once thought had a decency that would surface once they were able to see how bad things could get.
Like stuff out of some dystopian novel: eg The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or a Hobbesian war of all against all.
But then again, history shows that human societies generally gravitate in the opposite direction. People become conscious that without preservation of what we now call the social norms and civil society, they are done for anyway. Monstrosities like Nazi Germany and Papa Doc’s Haiti are cited so often because they are so far out of normal experience and have themselves depended on rather special circumstances to arise in the first place and to survive thereafter.
Omar, the problem is that we are in special circumstances here. Nothing like this has happened in human history. Global warming is a new challenge, and we can’t be sure people will gravitate toward the better end of the spectrum of behavior. Especially since we are in a situation now where we neither know nor want to know our neighbors in many cases. We isolate ourselves in a digital bubble, and don’t interact enough with those around us, and often not in the ways that generate empathy, often not even tolerance.
With what I see, I’m not betting on the gravitation toward cooperation for the betterment of all. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I cannot see most of the people I know ready to sacrifice even a single cheeseburger for the sake of someone else. All our crowd-sourcing and donations to charity aside, I think when it is more than just a few quid on the line (that they can point to and demonstrate what good people they are), there will be little that people won’t do for their own survival. We seem to have lost something of our humanity; let’s hope we can get it back before it’s too late.
Iknklast,
I take your point.
Here in SE Australia right now we are in the midst of the worst drought in living memory, with the added complications of horrendous forest fires, much dust constantly in the air, the odd dust storm inland that turns day into night, and a federal government of the AGW-denialist persuasion and largely in the pocket of the coal industry and its shills; though there are signs that its unity is starting to crack.
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My wife and I went yesterday from Canberra across to Braidwood, because that latter town has been hard-hit economically from the bushfires and the closure of the road that links Canberra to Bateman’s Bay, gateway to the whole South Coast of NSW. There have been calls in the media for Canberra people to visit Braidwood and patronise its struggling economy.
Well, yesterday it was hard to find a place to park in the main street, and the shops were doing a roaring trade. So that is encouraging.
The animals I am most familiar with are domesticated species: cattle, horses, dogs, cats, poultry etc. They usually display pretty strong awareness of hierarchy and of their individual places in it. They tend in times of scarcity to live in (literally) a dog-eat-dog world, guarding their food with warning growls if others come too close; stealing food from each other, and so on. So re “…I cannot see most of the people I know ready to sacrifice even a single cheeseburger for the sake of someone else,” at least when one visits a restaurant or a fast-food outlet, fights are not breaking out an chairs flying in the course of patrons’ disputes over food. That would be the case if people had the mentality of dogs, cats and other such.
The capacity for empathy is a peculiarly human trait, though perhaps displayed in other mammalian species. It is embodied in Christianity’s Golden Rule, arguably derived from Confucius. It would have been a useless exercise for Yeshua bar Joseph aka Jesus Christ to preach it to people incapable of getting their minds around its most basic idea: ‘imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes.’ Yet society would be nightmarish without its general acceptance.
Pace ‘Guest’, two quotations about the ‘invisible hand’ from Adam Smith’s works (filched from Wikipedia:
The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part IV, Chapter I, Paragraph 10.
Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. … By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chapter II, Paragraph 9.
I think there’s rather more in that nutshell than our guest supposes. The questions remain whether the Rees-Moggs, the Bezos’s, the Koch Brothers et al are, by pursuing their private ends contributing to the greater welfare of humankind, and whether Adam Smith’s ideas and the conclusions people like Hayek and Rand have drawn from them, are in fact true, however attractively optimistic they may seem. They were not true at the time of the Industrial Revolution and the immiseration of the working classes and they are not true in the age of the ‘gig’ economy. The only savviness that such as the Koch Brothers and the others I have mentioned possess concerns how to pursue their own rapacious interests while making life miserable for others.
I’m not at all sure that Adam Smith’s kind sentiments towards the wealthy of his day were true then, and I’m damn sure they’re less true now. Look at the grand homes and estates are spread all over europe and the middle east. The owners of those estates lived lives of luxury and consumption unimaginable to the bulk of the population then or now. One of the biggest changes since that time is that there are in fact fewer people with access to that level of comparative wealth now. The massive estates are largely gone – broken up. Most grand homes are falling into ruins or have passed into public ownership. The cost of even maintaining such a building stretches the resources of the wealthiest, let alone the cost of building such structures. The modern economy has concentrated our civilisations wealth into the hands of a tiny number of people. I recall seeing an infographic a couple of years ago showing that the richest 8 people have as much wealth as the poorest 50% of humanity. Think of that. as many people can fit on a small bus with the wealth of ~3.6 billion people. I also think that people at this level of wealth are largely completely disconnected from all reality as to society at large, because they live within a society and world of their own creation and are largely impervious to mere nation states and common law.
Fundamentally, Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is a theological and not a scientific concept, and derives from the providential idea of history – the idea that things will always turn out for the better, no matter what happens along the way, since God’s providential plan drives the world. And because it is fundamentally theological it is held tenaciously, particularly in nations where certain kinds of Protestantism have been, and are, influential, even among those who are far from being Christian. Here’s something from an article in the Guardian that mentions Stephen Pinker, whose relentlessly blind optimism that he likes to pretend is based on science I have come to distrust more and more:
‘In a recent Financial Times essay reflecting on the coming decade, Steven Pinker hailed the dramatic recent gains made by humanity – the advances in science and medicine, the spread of democracy and human rights, the embrace of free trade and environmental regulation. He waved away authoritarian populism as a passing phenomenon, since its support “is greatest among rural, less-educated, ethnic-majority and older cohorts, all in demographic decline”.
‘In other words, the marginalized will die out, so there’s no need to worry about them. Pinker made no mention of inequality, the rise of the superrich, and the surging discontent with a global economy that has produced such grotesque imbalances.’
Kinda like WWII was a passing phenomenon.