Re: Hijacking (was: Patrick Bond on climate change)
On Apr 25, 2007, at 7:10 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
But seriously, if you believed what you say, I think you would
inconvenience yourself a bit more. I don’t mean wear a hair shirt, necessarily,
but I think it would be incumbent on you to abandon your commitment to
social betterment and embrace the programme of austerity, income
reduction, and probably population reduction as well that flows from the belief
that we are burning up the planet.
We are burning up the planet, there’s no two ways about it. You can
deny it, but you’re wrong. Even the U.S. auto industry has given up
fighting the science; about the only major pocket of dead-enders left
consists of parts of the oil industry and part of the Republican
party leadership. Even grassroots Republicans have given up the
fight. You are keeping very strange company.
And, James, this is really a demagogic position you’re taking. Doing
nothing about the climate will lead to disease, floods, crop failure
- all things that will lower our living standards considerably. Doing
nothing will ultimately prove more costly, even in purely monetary
terms, than doing something. This point is the major contribution of
the Stern Review. But I’m not interested in hair shirts or austerity
or reduced living standards. The U.S. wastes colossal amounts of
energy. I work in an office that’s overheated in the winter and
poorly ventilated, so they authorities run the air conditioning all
the time - even when it’s 20 degrees out. (And this is the high-
minded, progressive New Press, not the Republican National
Committee.) You can multiply that wasteful instance by millions.
Ditto motor vehicle fuel economy, wasteful packaging, and a hundred
other things. Commodities are shipped long distances that would not
be economical were environmental damage fully internalized in the
cost. We could get a good start on reducing GHG emissions just by
reducing waste, before any technological breakthroughs could arrive.
Doug