Saving the Planet, American Style — A Critical Review, and Some Thoughts
Saving the Planet, American Style — A Critical Review, and Some Thoughts
Greetings Reader: If anyone is reading this weekly “What You Can Do” posting, I’d appreciate receiving comment and suggestions for future posts, including first hand accounts. Please email ianrwhyte@gmail.com
This week’s post references an essay by Saral Sarkar, a prominent eco-socialist. Wait! Before you leave because of the dread “socialist” word, please read on. “Planet Earth, our habitat, is in dire straits And our world is suffering from various crises, conflicts and problems. There is hardly any sign that something is seriously being done to solve these problems.” While the post is moderately long it is well worth reading.
Sarkar discusses the ideas of a prominent climate advocate Bill McKibbon for a War on Climate Change and is much less than enthusiastic about it:
“McKibben compares the whole effort that he calls for with a “war” effort, with the huge American military and industrial mobilization for World War II. Now, you cannot fight a war without knowing your enemy! Here McKibben makes the initial big error in analysis, although “war” is here only a metaphor. The enemy, he thinks, is climate change; he imagines this enemy is committing a huge aggression against us, the world, as if it has some Satanic will. Once he calls it an “enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics.”
Nothing can be more absurd than this analysis of the situation. Any person with some common sense, including McKibben, knows that climate change is only the result of something else. Of course, the extreme weather events that are so regularly happening are largely being caused by climate change, which in turn is being caused by global warming. But even global warming is not the ultimate “enemy”. We know today that it is man-made. For a moment McKibben also recognized his error. He himself mentions in a half-sentence “our insatiable desires as consumers,” but he failed to spell it out as the right diagnosis of the malady.
McKibben belongs to the camp of Bernie Sanders, who boldly and openly called himself a democratic socialist. But he, like Sanders, is not willing to condemn, let alone openly fight against, capitalism, as Engels did. He however accepts Engels’s other idea quoted here and fights only against climate change by technological means. Blinded by optimism, such people believe that a 100 percent transition to renewable energies is possible. They say we need more technology, not less; they assert we could overcome all crises and problems of mankind by means of technology. I already heard in 1984 that the intermittency-and-storage problem of renewable energies has been solved, namely by means of liquid hydrogen.”
Leave a Reply