Re: Hijacking (was: Patrick Bond on climate change strategy)
On Apr 25, 2007, at 12:14 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
Doug, I think there is a kind of slippage in your language, despite
what you say to Wojtek.When you are in ‘climate change’ mode, you (demagogically?) lump
workers and elites together as “you, me and the rest of us in the handful of rich countries”. First off, handful implies few, but there are more than
a few rich countries if you count West Europe, Japan, Korea. And in
population terms, that is much more than a few.
It’s about 20% of the world’s pop, responsible for about 80% of its
GDP, and therefore its GHG emissions. It’s a big handful, but a
minority by any measure.
More to the point, though, if were were not in climate change mode,
but in income mode, I think you would baulk at the (Maoist?) assimilation of workers and elites in the first world. You were forthright in
rejecting the idea that US workers were well off in income terms. But when it
comes to energy consumption, it is a different tune.
I never denied that U.S. workers are well off in income terms. I’ve
cited more than a few times Branko Milanovic’s compelling factoid: a
poverty-line income in the U.S. is at the 98th percentile of the
world income distribution. What I’ve said, many times, is that U.S.
real wages have spent most of the last 35 years going sideways and
down, and that average household incomes have risen only because of
an increased work effort - that despite massive increases in recorded
productivity. The gains of economic growth are going mainly to the
upper brackets, especially over the last 5 years.
In any case, most greenhouse gases come from transportation,
buildings, industry, electricity generation, and deforestation.
Almost everyone, even the poorest among us, contributes, unless you
live like the Unabomber (while not using the U.S. mail). Elites use
more energy and generate more GHGs, but anyone who drives a car,
flips on an electric light, or uses wood products adds to the problem.
Do you think that climate change demands a reduction in working
class energy consumption? And assuming you think that that is a more serious
problem than can be achieved with a little home insulation, are you not calling
for a (further) reduction in wages? Or would you say that can be
mitigated by some kind of re-distributionist strategy?
Demagogy is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
I’m not calling for a reduction in average living standards. I am
calling for greatly reduced energy use and less polluting forms of
energy. This is a matter of the greatest urgency. It’s a lot more
convenient when you can dismiss human-driven climate change as either
a hoax or unproven, but to do that would be to reject science, and
I’m not about to do that.
Doug