Home
D&D
Music
Banner Archive

Marvel Comics Timeline
Godzilla Timeline


RSS

   

« These Guys Have Cracked the Code on Asian Women | Main | Harris, Warren, Gillibrand, Booker... who's next? »

Double Down

Some more Naomi Klein on climate change for you.

AS ONE OF the most powerful storms ever recorded bore down on the continental United States, with much of Florida under evacuation order, President Donald Trump was focused on a matter of grave urgency.

He gathered his cabinet at Camp David and said there was no time to waste. With Hurricane Irma set to potentially devastate huge swaths of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, now was the time, he said, to rush through massive ... tax cuts.

...

Some have speculated that seeing the reality of climate change hit so close to home this summer -- Houston underwater, Los Angeles licked by flames, and now southern states getting battered by Irma -- might be some kind of wake-up call for climate change-denying Republicans.
...

But Trump's timing is even more revealing for what it shows about what's really driving climate change denial on the right. It's not a rejection of the science, but a rejection of the consequences of the science. Put simply, if the science is true, then the whole economic project that has dominated American power structures since Ronald Reagan was president is out the window, and the deniers know it.

Because if climate change is driving the kinds of catastrophes we are seeing right now -- and it is -- then it doesn't just mean Trump has to apologize and admit he was wrong when he called it a Chinese hoax. It means that he also needs to junk his whole tax plan, because we're going to need that tax money (and more) to pay for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. And it also means he's going to have to junk his deregulatory plan, because if we are going to change how we power our lives, we're going to need all kinds of regulations to manage and enforce it. And, of course, this is not just about Trump -- it's about all the climate-denying Republican governors whose states are currently being pounded. All of them would have to junk an entire twisted worldview holding that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.

And the Dems are not blameless either. I think they're even worse because they acknowledge climate change but refuse to get the hell out of our way so something can be done about it. They are driving 35mph in the fast lane.

And this isn't only about the right -- it's also about the center. What mainstream liberals have been saying about climate change for decades is that we simply need to tweak the existing system here and there and everything will be fine. You can have Goldman Sachs capitalism plus solar panels. But at this stage, the challenge we are up against is much deeper than that.

I think we're pretty much doomed. Mebbe dinosaurs will eventually come back and get a second chance. At least they were blameless in their extinction.

By min | September 11, 2017, 1:22 PM | Liberal Outrage