Consistent with his view that the world will soon run out of oil and natural gas, Berman has put himself on record, as recently as this spring, in support of a ban on the use of cars and trucks: “The other piece that nobody wants to hear is that we can’t go on living like we are. … The idea of private transport needs to go away. The idea that you can just drive yourself anywhere you want to, whenever you want to, and – oh, well the answer is, ‘I’ll just get an electric car.’ No, that’s not the answer.” >>

And from my student, ” When he says the thing about getting rid of private transportation, the audience erupts into an ecstatic frenzy.  Then when he adds that “the answer is public transport” the crowd again goes wild.  And he says that anyone who disagrees with him is “living in a fantasy world.”

Never mind that these comments are so devoid of economic and environmental understanding as one wonders why folks are not embarrassed that this stuff is out there for public consumption. After all, if the government provides electric taxi-cabs to every single one of us, that would qualify as “public transport” but of course there would be not a single iota of difference between that and every one of us buying those fantasy world electric cars. There is a very large literature demonstrating that the cost of almost all public transport (politically unpopular buses being the exception) is far higher than the use of cars – but this does not seem to matter to these folks. Maybe I’ll blog it when I return from my travels.

But what does he mean by public transport? If he had his wished and banned all cars and trucks, but we turned over “public transport” to profit making and cost-effective private “mass-transit” companies, it would seem to violate this guys notion of “reality-world.” So his choice of language is either mistaken, or typically devilish. You see, “public transport” is now used as a synonym for “mass transport” and there is no reason for that aside from once again using the environment as cover for statism.

Finally, I don’t even need to comment on the obvious part of the above quote, do I? I’ve now spent over 6 weeks this summer reading “E”nvironmental books and this is the most common theme I see in all of them. And it seems that establishing the transportation Gulag here in the U.S. is to be done because that is the only way to enforce localism on people and to attack the global free market economy without having to say, the idea of capitalism needs to go away.

Such tactics are not new in the “E”nvironmental community. Keep a close eye on how much the “green” community turns against new “clean” energy sources once it looks like they will be able to power up global capitalism. Wind is already moving rapidly down the list of preferred technologies, and so too will others. The capital “E” environmental movement has nothing at all to do with the environment, and everything to do with ending modern commercial society as we know it. I have no problem with people wanting to end it, just don’t wrap the idea in an expensive, environmentally unfriendly piece of organic green lettuce.

And people clap? Would they clap if the President forced all of us to start producing pig iron in our backyards? Seriously, think about what they could possibly be clapping about.

People are searching for security as the world becomes a less certain place and as the agitation of transition gets under way. Local economies, like gardens out back, are a first step toward remaking our societies to be less about industrial consumerism and more about environmental sustainability, justice, and persistence?

Do you notice the trick here? For chapters in the book the author discusses the impending problems a warmer planet confronts us with. The book is nominally about how we as individuals can adapt to a warmer world in the likely situation that we are not able to mitigate CO2 emissions (i.e. reduce them, and ambient CO2 levels in the atmosphere). But what does this paragraph tell us? It is telling us, rather bluntly, that the reason to have local economies is to get rid of “industrial consumerism” — which I simply take to mean the economic “system” we have today. But I thought the buy local thing was a way to reduce emissions and our impact on the planet? What if technologies emerge, namely “clean, renewable energies” that reduce the carbon impact of our modern “industrial consumerist” world to zero? Is it not hot the case that some locavores wish to impose that lifestyle on all of us? “No!” would should many an opponent. And perhaps they are right, this is what follows a paragraph later:

Further, local economies support many of the practical considerations of self-reliance, and they provide a way forward for people frustrated by the plodding pace of federal regulation.

OK, so if federal regulations somehow manage to reduce CO2 emissions (how?) then what? Is industrial capitalism cool? Are all of us still “complicit” in some other kind of degradation if we don’t adapt a local lifestyle? I really just don’t understand it. Readers looking for answers can find it a few pages later, as the author quotes Eileen Crist is saying, “Climate change is the bullet that threatens extinction but industrial-consumer society is pulling the trigger.” If that does not support my point from above, then I do not know what better evidence there could be. Perhaps this will help:

But it is the scale (small) as much as the ingredients (mostly  local) that deepens my satisfaction with Dean’s Bakery. Like my patronage of the farmers’ market, the general store, the library, and the physician with an office in town, consumption at Dean’s feels like a relationship of mutual support. There is nothing faceless or demeaning about it. Being a customer there benefits not only Dean but the people he supports in turn and the principles each of those entities agree upon. This is where the fruits of localization are realized and translated into progress for civil society well beyond the individual.

We have our answer. Aside from the economics being wrong, we are told that industrial capitalism is faceless, demeaning and not one of mutual support. Great. We have discussed these in class and on this site hundreds of times. I have no reason to dispute the locavore feelings about this, it is not for me to do that. My point simply is that this is the reason locavores support the idea, which is fine, and it if it so happens that saving the planet goes along with it, great. And by the way, by this logic, what if buying globally, and buying from multinational corporations with workforces spread around this magical, diverse world, just feels like a relationship of mutual support to me? What if I find it the opposite of faceless and demeaning? What if I find dealing with my immediate neighbors to be demeaning? To invoke those “feelings” that you may have for a particular type of consumption carries no moral imperative.

Finally, here’s a way to get myself uninvited to the last few dinner parties I may have been considered for: what if I don’t want to have an intimate relationship with my neighbors and people in my community? After all, 90% of them send their kids to public schools on my dime, and I am sure most would consider me some kind of moral beast for most of my views of the world. The beauty of faceless, nameless capitalism is that I cooperate with millions of such people all the time, with none of our differences getting in the way. The more I have “intimate” interactions with the people around me, the less I like being a part of such a community. Further, I get pleasure knowing that my purchase of this book on Amazon provided some income to a programmer in India. I get pleasure knowing that the financial adviser working for the global company has a support network there which enables him a level of security that he would not have if he went out on his own. I get pleasure thinking about the incredible journey all of the component parts of my new fishing pole must have made on their way to my campsite. I get pleasure from the fact that LL Bean, once a small, local outfitter up in Maine, now is able to deliver me all kinds of fun goods and services? I get pleasure from having students from all over the world come into my classes, and to share their stories of their home towns and families with me.  Yep, all of that is horribly demeaning to both me and the people I cooperate with from outside my local community.

But to pull back from the misanthropy, the point is this: self-published authors game the system. You set your e-book price at $0.99, get a hundred friends to buy it in a short window of time, and shoot into the best-seller list where sales breed sales, and Terry Gross has only a momentary impact.

My gut reaction is that this is BS. That it cheapens the art of writing. That . . . and I’m probably old and out of touch with pop culture. And for those reasons I never wanted to get involved in this whole e-book thing. Not. At. All.

However, what if those who criticized crass consumerism took to heart what Adam Smith said about our economic lives – that the sole and only purpose of production is consumption. Would those who criticize mass materialism also slap bumper stickers on their cars that read:

• It is preoccupation with possessions producing goods and services,  more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. –Thoreau
• “The love of money Producing goods and services is the root of all kinds of evil. –Jesus

• Materialism Producing goods and services others value coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false. Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881) Swiss writer.

The changes I made do not change the meaning in any way. To consume, even crassly, one must produce. And even if you argue that I consume ludicrous and useless goods, in order for me to be able to do that, I must have produced something else that people want. Producerism and consumerism are two sides of the same coin. They can only be separated when the state or some charity redistributes resources from the productive class to the consumptive class. They are the same thing. Doesn’t make for catchy bumper stickers does it?

CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM is an online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change, and the ecosocialist alternative. It has three goals:

To provide news and analysis to inform, educate and develop the green left;

To contribute to building an international movement against capitalist destruction of the environment and for ecosocialism;

To encourage and facilitate collaboration and exchanges of views among socialists and ecology activists.

…

I am the Ian Angus who wrote Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of The Communist Party of Canada, and who used to host a blues music program called “Let the Good Times Roll” on CIUT-FM in Toronto. My most recent book is The Global Fight for Climate Justice: Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Ecological Destruction.

My other online political projects include Socialist Voice, the Socialist History Project , and Reading from the Left. I am a founding member of the Ecosocialist International Network.

I live in a geo-thermally heated/cooled farmhouse in eastern Ontario, south of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. When I am not “doing politics,” I listen to blues, classic R&B and soul music, read mystery novels and occasionally science fiction, and watch more television than I ought to.

I wished these guys would be more honest. Funny to see this guy sampling the best of the environment along with the best of modern society. Somehow I think he believes that we’d get good R&B, good television and good mystery novels in an eco-socialist cabal cave.

Here is the latest:

Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era

Filed under: Antarctic, Climate Changes, Glaciers/Sea Ice, Polar —

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.

Figure 1. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).

The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.

It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).

My emphasis added. I ask students regularly, why are we concerned about climate change? Isn’t it because of the expected negative impacts on humans and animal life? If warming does not seem to be impacting those things, then what is the concern? And if there is concern, does it make sense to remake the entire world economy? Sadly, the more I think about this issue, the more I lean toward believing that some in the climate change community simply WANT it to happen because that is their next death sentence against a free-enterprise society. And believe me, when climate change doesn’t pan out, or if we are somehow able to mitigate the damages efficiently, some other crisis will come along that requires unprecedented global action, and a rethinking of how we live our lives.

But ideas and merit no longer matter. “Consensus” does … and all consensus means is that many people who do not have the slightest clue about how the world works, agree with each other that their superstitions are correct. That is why there is a consensus that the minimum wage helps the poor. That is why there is a consensus that labor regulations protect workers. That is why there is a consensus that when I respond to higher taxes by working less, there is really no loss to society. All bunk.

If I had a genie, I would not ask for wealth or fame or any of that. One of my wishes would be to have access to an unbiased and temperate source of scientific truth. I don’t believe we human beings are generally capable of producing it, or recognizing it if it were there.