Date: Thu, 06 Nov 1997 23:30:06 -0800
From: Mark_Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-I: Global Warming


Another source additional to Rachel's is Jay Hanson's website at
http://csf.colorado.edu/ecolecon/authors/Hanson.Jay/page1.htm
(he has around 200 pages).


When climatologists began to home in on the the fact that global warming
will manifest itself chiefly in the form of intensified and more exteme
weather events, making it necessary to construct regional as well as
global climate models, understanding of the whole issue and the dangers
global warming presents moved on a notch. But the downside to
this more refined understanding is that it has taken the focus away from
the longer-term but more dangerous effects of anthropogenic
climate-forcing on the world climate as a whole and the biosphere as a
whole.

In particular, this localising of focus has enabled the strategists of
capital to focus on the possibility of local, partial solutions (now
they've tacitly accepted that it will happen). And the greens, who lack
a coherent politics, are following in their footsteps. 

We need to demonstrate that counter-strategies which ignore the forms of 
emergent crisis and the proletariat's poltical responses, are puerile,
utopian. 

Approaches to sustainability which ignore these two moments nonetheless 
dominate green debates.

The first truly GLOBAL effect of global warming is not going to show up
in the climate, but in the aggravated and multiform crises which are now
already deepening the chaos and disarray into which whole regions are
sinking. 

War or revolution? Disease, famine, or militant, disciplined socialism,
fought for in the form of peoples' wars and popular risings? Organising
the masses and seizing state power in the disintegrating peripheries, or
succumbing to US fascism? Those are the issues.

40 years ago the air was full of talk about the Non-aligned movement,
development in the ex-colonies and the like. It is hard to recapture the
atmosphere in the UK of optimism (as well as pain among imperial 
sentimentalists), that attended decolonisation when almost every week 
the queen watched the flag come down for the last time over some new 
corner of empire. 

Post-independence leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah had vast and 
plausible plans for economic progress; they echoed the Bolshevik dreams 
of economic progress in Russia. Everywhere and without exception those
dreams have turned into contemporary nightmares and the life-chances of
the multimillioned masses in the peripheries have been destroyed by the
rapacity of the metropoles. 

But the underlying reason is the chronic secular under-production of 
capital, and its material consequences: the inability to transform its 
technical basis to overcome the limitations of the original,
hydrocarbon, non-renewal industrial model, that plus the grotesque
inflation of the reserve army. 

The geophysiological limitations on this model 
are what climate-warming is about and they put a final seal on any 
hope that western living standards are attainable outside the west. 
They are not, and are only sustained in the west itself by savage and
predatory forms of combined and unequal development. 

Socialism on a world scale cannot bring with it the benefits
of industrialism. Depending on the scale of the next century's die-off 
and the particular legacy left by capitalism, it will be barracks 
socialism for decades, perhaps longer than a century, until the world
population falls to a sustainable level. 

That's what you get when you eat the seed-corn.

Even China is no exception to looming crisis: development is as
chimerical as the neon signs over Shanghai, as the next downturn will
prove.

Industrialisation, affluence, consumer goods, large public health and
education programmes: all are fanciful dreams become cruel jokes at the
expense of two-thirds of the world's people.

Only socialist planning on a global scale, organised through the
dictatorship of the proletariat, can provide solutions and then only in
the context of a massive and fundamental redistribution of resources,
and an irresistible historical tidal wave pushing post-capitalism
towards sustainable social systems. That seems inconceivable short of
major breaches in the world system and the engulfing immiseration of
large tracts of the metropolitan working class, in short a calamity
worse than either world war. Yet such a calamity is not only likely, it
is already inevitable. 

This is where Julian Simon may not end up the
clear winner in his famous bet. Even the most persistent and pernicious
deflationary policy, pursued on a world scale without regard for the
devastating consequences to peripheries, cannot compensate for impending
absolute energy shortages resulting in a permanent militarisation by the
US of the Gulf and the Caspian, with almost incalculable internal
political consequences in the metropoles and the mid-East, leaving aside
the real risk of a general war with China and its Islamic allies.

In any event enormous efforts (which are highly likely to be too late,
because like it or not the damage is already done) will be needed to
restore the radical global environmental disequilibria - for example,
attempting to correct the changes in the thermohaline ocean circulation,
organising the sequestration of carbon, etc.

Perhaps we shall need exotic, heroic measures indicative of last-resort 
desperation, such as spreading reflective kevlar screens in earth orbit 
to keep the sun off and help stop the ice-caps melting and the trapped 
methane hydrates from releasing enough methane to trigger runaway
warming -- these are the kinds of things which only a world socialist
state can mobilise the resources of a post-national, global human 
society for.



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