Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Some parts of the political Right argue that climate change is far less of a problem than Communism and consequent left-wing dictatorship. This might strike, non-righteous thinkers as a bit odd given that communism has passed into history. Cuba is tiny, and voted for a new constitution in February 2019. It has almost no influence. North Korea does not seem communist, in any form, other than name, and also has no influence – certainly I have never read a recent Western communist using North Korea as a positive blueprint for anything. China, which is the only possibly ‘communist’ country of influence, seems nowadays to manifest a form of authoritarian State based capitalism. When people want to praise Chinese progress they frequently say it is because of capitalism, when they want to condemn Chinese politics, they frequently blame communism.

So far, communists or left-dictatorships alone have made no real impact on global natural systems, so their legacy, however painful, has been short term.

However, climate change, assuming the predictions are correct (and the IPCC predictions have so far underestimated the rates of change), will be disastrous for the long term. You can see world wide firestorms already, record temperatures in the arctic and antarctic already, melting of land ice already (this will accelerate as the ice melts and with 68 degree Fahrenheit temperatures in the Antarctic ice will not stay frozen), and melting of the permafrost and the release of stored Greenhouse gases (which will make the situation even worse) already. We see no tendency for temperatures to return to ‘normal’, or for the system to be returning to any kind of stability. Indeed this January set quite startling temperature records. Global climate change is here already

We know the major causes of this problem, and that includes human burning of fossil fuels, and some human agricultural and building practices – and these practices happen in all kinds of political systems.

There is no sign these polluting practices are diminishing at the rates we need to diminish the threat of climate change.

Consequently it is pretty likely that we are going to see sea level rises of a couple of metres in a relatively short period of time in geological and historical terms (it is hard to predict when, but within a hundred years is certain, within 10–15 years is possible). These rises may end up being between 25–50 metre rises. It is extremely unlikely that governments will be able to deal with the flooding of coastal cities and the large-scale displacement of people that will result. The economy is likely to tank due to the losses, people are likely to starve while the financial elites try and save themselves.

We already know that the market (by itself) is unlikely to save us in time, as we have been pretty much leaving it to the market for the last 30 to 40 years. The market could quite possibly be more useful if it was not politically dominated and structured by fossil fuel companies and mining companies who are trying to prevent financial losses for themselves, through using disinformation and purchase of politicians and regulations. Crony capitalism is the natural form of capitalism, and it always values short term profit for the established elite over long term survival for everyone.

Normally we try to avoid possible disasters, even if we are not sure how and when they will arrive. The unusual thing (which shows the effect of corporate power) is that, with this probable disaster, we are trying to avoid dealing with it. We have politicised it to such an extent, that many people on one side of politics (not by any means all) refuse to acknowledge it and obstruct discussion and thinking about the problem – often by throwing around terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’.

As I have argued previously, neoliberalism tends towards authoritarian plutocracy. Capitalism can operate easily within a dictatorship which protects elite wealth from democratic processes such as climate action. So if we have to fear long-term destructive dictatorship it may well come from elite business operatives rather than from left-wing ‘communism.’

But even if these propositions are wrong, if we don’t act soon, then people will have a lot more to fear from climate change, while there is little to fear from communism.

Tags: climate change, Disinformation, politics

This entry was posted on February 18, 2020 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.