Comments Dave Ewoldt has made

Of course a realistic carbon reduction bill won't get passed with the focus shifted. The majority of the left isn't even willing to admit the "health care" plan being offered by Obusha doesn't actually change anything from the dysfunctional system we currently have. All it does is provide a few more victims for it at taxpayer expense. The profiteers continue to get their cut.

The Kleptocracy...Monetocracy...whatever term you prefer for the dominator elite who will do everything they can to protect the class hierarchy and their position at the top of it...have thrown the left YetAnotherDistraction which the left, as always, went for because the left is just as afraid of the necessary change as those who continue to profit from not changing.

The controlling mythology is that capitalism, profit, and economic growth in general must be protected at all costs. And we're about to find out what "at all costs" really entails.

Pentagon planners, Wall Street financiers, etc. know exactly where our current rate of collapse from catastrophic climate destabilization, resource depletion, and overall biospheric toxicity from Industrialism is taking us. But they think there's still more profit that can be squeezed out of the system, and refuse to let themselves admit that once collapse occurs all their money won't mean a thing. The sad truth, the one that is too awful to face, is it's the only game plan they have. As has been pointed out by many others, there is no Plan B.

And they've developed such mastery at offering distractions. Health care is such an emotional issue. Our Mad Max future if we don't change direction is still more ephemeral than asthma, cancer and all the other negative by-products of industrialism. We can't see ecosystems collapsing, but we can see hospital emergency rooms filling up. And of course corporate media ensures we all remain as confused as possible. Torture memos. FBI... err, I mean terrorist... plots to blow up America. Which silicon enhanced starlet is carrying who's baby. Etc ad nauseum.

So, I guess the bottom line is we (the Left) really are as stupid as the elites assume us to be. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that the health care issue will be the foot in the door (the red pill) we've been looking for to wake people up to what they really should be concerned about.

Neither energy nor greenhouse gases will be addressed realistically as long as the left continues to allow themselves to be so blatantly manipulated. The so-called partisanship in Congress is just another convenient distraction that helps us not have to face reality. We have Republican obstructionism to blame inaction on.

If, on the other hand, we were to adopt sustainability as our overarching goal, we could simultaneously address health, the environment, and turn democracy around from the fantasy role it currently occupies.

Let's move beyond status quo thinking

Another argument to maintain the status quo, spoken like a true free-market fundamentalist (or pro-business Democrat, not that there's a significant difference). According to Roberts, in the choice of whether or not we pass on a habitable planet to future generations, saving political capital is the prime consideration.

If the choice is to continue supporting an economic system based primarily on financial incentives (which I would argue against), then we should at least demand full cost accounting that is spread amongst both producers and consumers. Consumers should pay for their choices in the marketplace through taxes, and producers should have subsidies removed as well as be required to pay reasonable costs for the resources removed from the commons, for other environmental and social damages, and for end of life cycle costs for their products.

The argument for infrastructure change to protect automobile induced sprawl is also little more than status quo thinking. As Hirsch, Hansen and so many others point out, we don't have the time for that even if it were a good idea.

If price at the pump reflected full costs, gasoline would be $12-$15/gal. Anything less than this is merely whistling past the graveyard.

At the very least, gas taxes and realistic resource rents to oil producers should be used to fund high-speed intercity rail and the redesign of walkable cities.

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

Facing the truth

I simply feel compelled to reiterate the importance of beginning the process of telling people the truth.

We do need to create transition steps to a sustainable future where people are less reliant on automobiles, where the cars that do remain are in something like neighborhood car-share programs and burn clean fuels or no fuel, and where less of our fragile environment is buried under roads and parking lots.

But we must start getting people used to the idea that saving money at the gas pump moves us in the opposite direction of a sustainable future. Gas prices should be at least double of what they are now by removing fossil fool industry subsidies, and probably triple if we include social and environmental costs.

Since most of the proposals to mitigate global warming and decreasing energy supplies start with the assumption that the market economy must be protected above all else, and that only the market should determine price, let's call their bluff and take them at their word. Remove all subsidies and start fairly charging for resource extraction and cleanup costs.

But one way or the other, people must start getting used to the idea that pump prices are going nowhere but up. Fossil fuels are a finite resource whose overuse, misuse, and abuse is a major contributor in the overall project of killing the planet's ability to support life.

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

Guardians of Evil

If we really want to get down to brass tacks, how about calling the deniers/delayers the "Guardians of Evil"? After all, what is it they're denying, in order to delay action? They're denying that human activities are about to make the planet uninhabitable through systemic disruption and destruction of the web of life.

And what are those activities? Well, they can be summed up as the Industrial Growth Society and its dependence on usury; a philosophy of otherness nourished through economic cannibalism; all founded on dominator control hierarchies that promise its sycophants they can enrich themselves at the expense of those others.

In my cosmology/ideology, anything that separates or disconnects people from each other, from other aspects of the natural world or their own inner nature, that doesn't support the prime activity of living systems -- which is to self-organize mutually supportive relationships -- is evil. So, those who espouse delay because it threatens the economic growth of their special interest masters are the guardians of evil.

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

Common roots and a systemic solution

That global warming gets conflated with other environmental problems does make sense, but not for the reasons given. They are all the direct outcome of a cultural paradigm that is disconnected; that sees nature as an "other" to be exploited for personal benefit just as the affluent North does with what it considers to be third-world countries. Global warming and all other environmental problems are really a problem with human attitudes; with a lack of restraint in both human population and consumption; with the reliance on addictive substitutes for the natural fulfillments available in abundance for any species that stays within the carrying capacity of its ecosystem; with focusing all of our energy on competition and destruction instead of cooperation and creation. This is a choice for humans, it is not a hard-wired immutable natural principle.

The solutions to global warming and other environmental tragedies are one and the same. Quit overconsuming the Earth's limited resources and quit using the biosphere as a waste receptacle. Remember that the prime activity of all other living organisms is to self-organize in the creation of mutually supportive relationships that support the web of life in creating and sustaining more life. Remember that the same principles that create a sustainable ecosystem are an intimate aspect of who we are, and that if we are to ever have any hope of reaching our potential as individuals and as a species, we had best start acting like it. We must think and act the way nature works.

There is not just a problem with focusing on global warming to the exclusion of other environmental problems. There is a meta-problem with focusing on applying band-aids to symptoms of a culture out of balance--that has disconnected its relationships with the natural world, with each other, and with our own inner nature. As Paul Cienfuego of Democracy Unlimited points out, we must quit clipping branches and start digging up the roots.

This, of course, makes the proponents of growth economies very squeamish. By taking every proposed solution to global warming, other environmental problems, the energy crisis, etc., off the table if the solutions don't, first and foremost, protect economic growth, they ensure that the problems will remain intractable. Proponents of the status quo (the sycophants of free-market capitalism and its practice of economic cannibalism) reverse all the relationships they haven't severed. Profit is put above people and planet. However, nature neither produces waste nor grows beyond maturity. As Edward Abbey said, infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. We have been aware of the implications of what we're doing for a long time, e.g. Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" in 1949, and John Storer's "The Web of Life" in 1953.

Of course, once one reaches these inescapable conclusions, what is the actual process to implement these solutions? What is the alternative to the status quo that we're constantly told either doesn't exist or is utopian and thus unrealistic? The only systemic solution--the one that addresses the common roots of systemic collapse and can improve quality of life--that I'm aware of is to relocalize our communities with steady-state economies and reconnect all of our senses to their roots in the natural world.

Contact me for details :-)

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.

The Wrong Target is the Wrong Argument

It is true that chain stores as such aren't the real problem; over consumption and shopping to prop up a dying lifestyle is the problem. Big box retailers just exacerbate it, as well as killing off local retailers that generally pay closer
to a living wage and support more self-reliant local economies.

But to posit that chains might actually be good for the environment is to sink so low into the depths of denial that it's hard to know where to begin a serious rebuttal. If this was the April 1 issue I'd just ignore Daniel Akst's "The Wrong
Target" article.

Chains are indeed a logical outgrowth of the industrial mindset of efficiency over quality and mass production to increase profit as applied to retailing. However, since it is the mindset of the Industrial Growth Society that is destroying the planet and deadening the spirit, how can the Walmartization of the economy have anything good said about it?

Yes, it's true that chains can't be blamed for suburbia. But that hardly qualifies them for sainthood. Chains, almost by definition, kill innovation and personal creativity. The ability to buy everything under one roof (that's probably covering up what used to be a productive family farm) can hardly be claimed as a unique environmental benefit. Malls also provide one-stop shopping experiences, but so does a well-designed and vibrant downtown area. The one-stop shopping offered by Wal-Mart in particular is a toxic, plastic experience that embodies global environmental injustice at its worst.

Trying to put the onus on the retailers instead of the producers is also an ingenious way to shift blame. Yes, it is easier to picket Home Depot than a dozen local hardware stores and lumber yards. But this points to one of the things wrong with the environmental movement today: putting band-aids on symptoms and ignoring the cause. The lumber producers and importers are the ones who need to be targeted, so the local mom and pop shop isn't stuck in the hot seat in the first place as they try to provide what consumers want.

I don't have the time at the moment to dismantle Akst's fawning endorsement of a global free-market economy (others have already written books on the subject) so I'll only point out that if his premise of wealth sharing had a shred of truth to it, the American middle class wouldn't be disappearing, purchasing power wouldn't be decreasing, and the wealth gap wouldn't be steadily increasing. For some of the best counterpoints to Frankel's neoliberal economic apology, see anything by E. F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly's "Steady-State Economics" in particular.

And, oh yes, the chains really spread the wealth. In California, Wal-Mart spreads $86 million of it to the taxpayers of the state as Wal-Mart workers pick up their food stamps and health cards. To further say that workers in developing countries prefer working in toxic factories to subsistence farming and a healthy community life totally ignores the fact that they no longer have any choice in the matter as multinational corporations steal their land and American farm subsidies and trade policies make their own produce unprofitable.

The conclusion that the automobile and sprawl are here to stay is also unfounded. People are starting to wake up to the total bankruptcy of this myth, even as free-market cheerleaders and infinite growth economists continue to push this fantasy.On Could chain stores actually be good for the environment? posted 4 years ago 19 Responses