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 Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big GovernmentPosted on Jan 28, 2012
By Christian Parenti, TomDispatch This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch. Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion—and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over. In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005. Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world’s largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever. And that’s just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it. Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important implications for how we think about the role of government in our future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our survival. Advertisement By now, this viewpoint has taken on the aura of folk wisdom, as if the essence of democracy were to hate government. Even many on the Left now regularly dismiss government as nothing but oversized, wasteful, bureaucratic, corrupt, and oppressive, without giving serious consideration to how essential it may be to our lives. But don’t expect the present “consensus” to last. Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won’t help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups—each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change. Consider Hurricane Irene: as it passed through the Northeast, states mobilized more than 100,000 National Guard troops. New York City opened 78 public emergency shelters prepared to house up to 70,000 people. In my home state, Vermont, where the storm devastated the landscape, destroying or damaging 200 bridges, more than 500 miles of road, and 100 miles of railroad, the National Guard airlifted in free food, water, diapers, baby formula, medicine, and tarps to thousands of desperate Vermonters trapped in 13 stranded towns—all free of charge to the victims of the storm.
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By gerard, January 30, 2012 at 2:56 pm Link to this comment
Seems to me a clear and helpful article. There is always that tug-of-war between “public” and
Report this“private” to deal with, but it’s (IMO) a self-evident fact that we need both. At the same time, we need an ever-changing, always cooperative balance between the two. Nothing too much, as the Greeks used to say.
That balance can always be figured out by people with differing viewpoints coming together to reach an agreement satisfactory to all sides - give or take a little here and there—never perfect, but do-able.
What we dare not lose (and are in grave danger of losing) is the willingness to work things out together, the faith in democratic values and in the ability of agencies to self-correct and change.
All is not lost yet, if we can exchange real information freely, say what we think, work for what we believe in, and resist authoritarian manipulation.
These are the very issues that are being muddled and endangered by super-managing agencies drunk on their own power and trying to manipulate outcomes. They even propose to dominate Nature!
Unless they can be brought back to reality, the outcome is doubtful. Balance is vital. Integrity is essential. Blah, blah and blah ... but there it is, as usual, as always. Buena ventura.
By LocalHero, January 30, 2012 at 2:16 pm Link to this comment
What baseless, blatant idiocy.
The solution is to turn the problem over to the same corporatocracy that caused the problem in the first place?
Needless to say, there’s no reason to check into Parenti’s TomDispatch any time soon if this is the kind of fuzzy, statist thinking he produces. What dreck.
Report thisBy D.R. Zing, January 29, 2012 at 11:10 pm Link to this comment
Hi balkas,
We don’t have a century.
The UN predicts the population will reach 9 billion by 2050; by 2100
the population is expected to be 10 billion.
Make no mistake, by that time the leading cause of death everywhere
will be starvation and thirst.
The ecosystem is collapsing. Our children will endure it. Our
grandchildren will probably die from it. It’s very serious.
We’re fighting a war on terror against our fellow human beings but the
real terror will be the ecological collapse unfolding as we speak.
Dig peace. Don’t bury it. We’re gonna need it.
D.R. Zing
Source for the UN predictions:
Report thishttp://esa.un.org/wpp/Other-Information/Press_Release_WPP2010.pdf
By D.R. Zing, January 29, 2012 at 10:56 pm Link to this comment
Hi vironmentalman,
Stunning as it seems Monty Python produced a song for
you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cNsmt2YZXA
Report thisBy D.R. Zing, January 29, 2012 at 10:51 pm Link to this comment
Damn! This is an awesome article. TruthDig has found
another author of Hedges caliber.
Here’s a suggestion for public investment: Build
dikes. Produce productive pumps. We’ll need them
around Florida, New York, the coast of Texas, etc.
Sea levels are rising. Put an ice cube on a table.
The whole thing doesn’t melt before it slides off.
That’s what will happen with Greenland as the planet
warms: Its icecap will plunk off into the sea.
If we don’t start investing in climate protection,
Report thiswell, Tool’s got it right: “Learn to swim, I’ll see
you down in Arizona Bay.”
By Morpheus, January 29, 2012 at 9:35 pm Link to this comment
Nothings going to change if we keep talking about it and doing nothing.
FIGHT THE CAUSE - NOT THE SYMPTOM
Report thisRead “Common Sense 3.1” at ( http://www.revolution2.osixs.org )
By me1, January 29, 2012 at 7:34 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Yes, the violence of helping people. Don’t you
Report thislibertards have anything better to do?
By dhaab, January 29, 2012 at 5:33 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
BIG government is the answer to our climate change problems? Really? What a horribly flawed article.
Report thisBy Matthew Rogers, January 29, 2012 at 3:38 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Although I believe the evidence for anthropogenic global climate change is
strong, this sort of article does nothing but make Alex Jone’s rants about GCC
being a plot to strip us of our freedoms seem sane and plausible.
The only solution to the big corporatism that got us into trouble in the first
place is EXACTLY “voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity
groups,” and other LOCALC solutions for mutual aid that aren’t reliant on large
scale corpratism or statism, that requires a large carbon heavy infrastructure to
maintain.
Fail and badly so!
This sort of utter failure of imagination by state centralist loving liberals/progs
Report thisis the sort of thing that makes me believe that only alliance between the
anarchist left and Libertarian right will save us from the suffocating iron cage of
bureaucracy and corpratism Max Weber tried to warn us about a century ago.
By balkas, January 29, 2012 at 12:19 pm Link to this comment
for me, it is painful to think about what is coming our way even in next
Report thisfew decades, let alone in a century or two.
By Anarcissie, January 28, 2012 at 5:32 pm Link to this comment
As to the title, nothing will make me love violence.
Report thisBy vironmentalman, January 28, 2012 at 4:22 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The article is premised on the idea that global warming is happening (but there hasn’t been any since 1998) that man has something to do with it, or to do about it, and that “extreme” weather events (no standards for what qualifies here; the writer sited a hurricane in an unusually quiet hurricane season that fizzled out, but what IF) are related to climate change (climate change which used to be global warming but had to be changed because it stopped warming which was changed from man-made global warming because that was just too much of a stretcher to keep up with a straight face). Slipping the climate change nonsense in as a premise isn’t very subtle but trotting it out as a right/left issue is. Don’t fall for it.
Report thisBy Miko, January 28, 2012 at 4:12 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The two largest polluters in the U.S. today are the
Report thisDepartment of Energy and the Department of Defense.
The largest non-governmental polluters in the U.S. do
so with explicit governmental sanction. Contrary to
what Parenti assumes, when climate change becomes more
serious, the people responsible (which is to say the
people in charge of those departments) are unlikely to
be hailed as heroes.
By entropy2, January 28, 2012 at 3:29 pm Link to this comment
Great idea…let’s not empower individuals and communities to nimbly and effectively cope (and even thrive) under rapidly changing conditions. No, let’s have a monolithic, centralized techno-bureaucracy lurching and lumbering from one crisis to another, while, at the same time, causing the next one.
And that’s the best case scenario, assuming that we weed out the crooks, megalomaniacal sociopaths and idiots out an all-powerful state.
Yeah…that’s the ticket.
Report thisBy didactic1, January 28, 2012 at 1:49 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Little or no evidence that climate change, as defined by those now alarmed by recent temp increases globally, can be reversed by controls on power and industrial production or switch on massive basis to noncarbon based transit.
Report thisBy Night-Gaunt, January 28, 2012 at 1:00 pm Link to this comment
Can’t reach part four, it gives a “can’t find data base” error.
Report thisBy Night-Gaunt, January 28, 2012 at 12:58 pm Link to this comment
The costs of the future of climate change will be our freedoms too. As things get worse there are those who would want to institute authoritarian measures an desperate people will gladly have it. That is one of the many dangers we face.
Sooner or later the gov’t as it is starved because of allocation to the war machine will toll here higher an higher. Free Enterprise will close up shop where it costs too much of their bottom line.
FEMA was originally set up as a post war logistical unit. They weren’t designed originally to help anybody in a disaster which is why they had to be altered to do so.
Report thisBy Night-Gaunt, January 28, 2012 at 12:47 pm Link to this comment
I can’t reach part 4. It gives me “data base error.”
If we actually lived the way the Free Market Capitalists had their way we wouldn’t be the leader of the world in many things but multiple civil wars between the states-nations an corporations. Such things as democracy would be mostly unknown.
Report this