Climate, technology and chaos Blog

People often seem to talk as if some form of democracy was inherent in the future, whether it is based the current neoliberal form of energy use, or whether it becomes based in renewable decentralised energy. There is no necessity for this assumption. It is probably more accurate, and analytically useful, to assume the politics of transition will be complicated.

The Right, Climate & Ecology

Rightwing politics, and in particular right wing authoritarianism is often tied in with climate denial, postponement of climate action, support for ecological destruction and support for fossil fuels. They will not even accept that their sacred market seems to be in favour of renewables, they just plough taxpayers money into fossil fuels, and try and inhibit development of renewable energy through regulation and legislation. They also repeal regulation that stops ecological destruction. Conservative politics in the UK and Germany, can assume that conservation is possible, while the supposed Left in the English Speaking world (ie the Democrats, Labour and Labor), are less hostile to climate action but are still rarely pro-active. In Australia climate action can be joined to support for coal which endangers limited and precarious water supplies for major cities, and the Labor party can support the Narrabri coal seam gas project, and coal for export. It risks much less powerful opposition from the mining sector.

It would appear that many people think neoliberal capitalism cannot survive without its modes of pollution and destruction, or even if those modes of pollution and destruction are restrained. For them, capitalism is about liberty (even if that liberty, in practice, is limited to the wealth elites), and that includes the liberty to destroy, which appears to be the basis of the other liberties, as is the classic capitalist view of property (if something is yours you can destroy it with complete liberty). That would appear to justify a liberty to suppress others, who object to the destruction.

The neoliberal Right is not consistent about this. They sometime claim a care for the environment. Trump is well capable of saying he has produced the best air and the best water, [1] (although he seems to have had little to nothing to do with it), and that he wants to lower emissions, while removing nearly all boundaries and penalties for polluting and destroying, opening national monuments and national parks for drilling and destruction and shoveling taxpayers’ money to fossil fuel companies to keep them buoyant – especially during the Covid Crisis and the oil shock of early 2020. After the election he rushed to confirm the opening of the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska to drilling for oil and gas [2], [3], as part of “advancing this administration’s policy of energy independence.”

Trump implies that you can have both rampant ecological destruction and a good ecological result, which could be a pleasant fantasy. However, more consistent thinkers have put forward a similar view, saying that capitalist countries tend to have gained cleaner environments over the years, and suggesting that only people who are financially prosperous can afford environmental care [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. The problem is that even if this is true, then do we have the time for it to work all over the world? and do we advance this movement by opening more land and country to destruction? Especially when the destruction is easily concealed?

There is also the possibility that, like many other risks, the risks of climate change are not equally distributed and will hit the poor and racially vilified first. Racism could be built into the current system, and not likely to be unwound deliberately. Apparently:

A disproportionately high number of poor and non-white people live in the hottest neighborhoods across the [USA]. It’s often the result of discriminatory practices by banks and local governments.

Climate racism is real. Researchers found it in U.S. cities

The other right wing approach to ecological protection is simple and based in a similar kind of discrimination. They suggest that there should be less population elsewhere in the world. It is the poorer countries who are to blame, not the wealthier ones.

However, between 1990 and 2015:

The richest one percent of the world’s population [were] responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth…

The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

Carbon emissions of richest 1 percent more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity. Oxfam, 21st September 2020

The argument about poor populations being the problem, is often joined with an attempt to reinforce borders and keep out refugees, because they supposedly spread the problem, producing ecological destruction because of their rampant preproduction, poor origins, or foreignness – the foreignness is part of the pollution of the national purity. The nationalist authoritarians don’t have to do anything in their own countries, except keep people out, no matter how much pollution those countries issue.

One US mass murderer is supposed to have written, mixed up with attacks on ‘migrants’: “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable” [9], [10]. This kind of attitude is likely to become more prevalent the more that climate refugees become common.

Like many contemporary conspiracy theories, this population argument deflects attention from the normal action of the wealth elites, and the corporate sector, with their unsustainable and destructive consumption, extraction and pollution, and puts the burden on people who individually, or even collectively, do very little damage and have very little power. In the US, it has been indigenous people who have been resisting fossil fuel pipelines, and who face the penalties of action, sometimes enforced by police and troops and sometimes by private military contractors (mercenaries).

Discounting the extremism, from my experience, the reality seems to be that many people think that by opposing climate action, and by supporting fossil fuels, or dawning imaginary technology (without use having to change anything, including power relations), they are supporting prosperity and liberty, and moving against potential tyranny, and that authoritarian tactics are sometimes necessary – especially against outgroups such as native Americans.

This move does not seem to be declining. The Left, such as it is, has to face up to the fact that there has been no boom in Left voting, and little acceptance of Left ‘common sense’, over the last 20 years. Trump increased his vote considerably, despite all his failures and despite the Covid deaths. Morrison won his miracle election, and shows no sign of being able to lose the next. Boris Johnson won. Bolsonaro won. Modi won and so on… While Greens in Australia occasionally increase their representation, so do One Nation and the Shooters and Fishers Party; there is no likelihood of a Greens government at either State or Federal level.

The anti-fossil fuel movement is not like the anti-nuclear movement, in terms of its effects or popularity. This is despite what can be considered ‘elite’ defunding and divestment movements – you have to be reasonably elite to own shares and attend corporate meetings. Likewise, no current international agreement is strong enough to prevent dangerous climate change – and action seems resisted, despite UN exhortations (it hints at the loss of some national sovereignty, for the global good).

Liberty and Energy

There is a sense the Right could be partly correct about fossil fuels. Available Energy does give freedom and capacity, and renewables simply don’t produce similar availability to fossil fuels as yet, and probably never will. Fossil fuels do increase capacity, but with cost to other people and the environment, which is primarily a problem if theses issues are counted, or if you wonder about the destruction resulting from climate change in the future. If you discount the unintended side effects, then in the present, fossil fuels could easily be thought to generate new jobs, and jobs generate the only liberty capitalism allows, namely consumption.

Fossil fuels have also allowed production of the energy, steel, transport and weaponry needed for conquest, extraction of resources and control over cheap labour, and the imposition of stability. Fossil fuels allowed the world wars and truly massive violence, which ties together with the authoritarian project. What do you do with all the people you have encouraged to be violent, when there is little violence to use at home?

Energy transition also requires excess energy, or excess pollution, to produce the new sources of generation in quantity. This is a further incentive to open more coal.

On the other hand, renewables do possibly break down centralised energy generation and allow people to make their own energy, independent of the corporate structure – but that form of energy is not widely promoted, and most renewables (at scale) are installed by standard neoliberal processes with non-consultation, non-care for the environment, and non-care for workers. They do not generate community involvement or enthusiasm when built that way.

The connection of the possibility of new forms of liberty with small scale energy generation is not obvious, and it may not happen, because capitalism appears to need, and profit from, large scale energy generation, and large scale is more likely to produce simple and stable pricing structures.

If Mitchell’s argument is correct, that modern democracy grew with coal, and the capacity of coal workers to hold the country to ransom and demonstrate workers’ power, then the abolition of coal based energy may indeed mean the end of that democracy, unless we approach transition with care.

Autonomism and renewable energy

The Autonomists argued that there was a process of interaction between workers and bosses in the use of technology. Bosses would introduce technology to control workers and to extract more labour, and workers would respond by finding ways to play the technology, take over the technology, control the technology, steal bits of the technology, or use the technology for their own purposes – “the street has its own uses for things” to quote William Gibson. Then the bosses would respond to worker’s creativity by trying out new technologies, and new processes of discipline, and so it went on for cycle after cycle.

The processes are more confused than this skeleton suggests because technologies have unintended consequences, which might end up producing new social results – as for example when workers have to develop ‘work arounds’ and an organisation around those work-arounds, to actually do the job they are expected to do, and which the technology no longer allows them to do. However, the point is there is a place for workers to insert power and creativity.

This is inherent in Mitchell’s argument mentioned above. The bosses’ energy technology used for the factories, disciplining labour and making it mindless and perfectly replicable, could be commandeered against the bosses, to extract concessions for workers in general.

The problem with renewables is that dynamic seems to be almost completely lost. Solar panels don’t require labour, after construction and installation, other than cleaning and a little maintenance. The same is largely true of windfarms. If so, then renewables have the capacity to eliminate the autonomist cycle – there are few workers to subvert the technology. Maybe people can steal a bit of free energy, or build a bit for themselves, but usually the panels are not near people’s homes and the theft would be obvious (wires leading to your house). Renewables, at a large scale, eliminate the need for many energy workers; the companies are not that dependent on workers or upon difficult to replace workers. The workers cannot easily withhold supply. This is part of the system’s profitability. Renewables, have the potential to make energy companies dominant with few checks, other than legislation and regulation, and that is controlled by neoliberals, and as the renewable companies gain wealth and control, what might stop them filling the gap in the socio-political ecology previously occupied by oil and coal? There is none of the Autonomist interactive construction of liberty that could be present in previous technology.

This implies that renewables are not inherently ‘popular’ in the sense of giving power to the people, unless the people commandeer the processes of production and organisation. And that is a situation which goes against the ways that the modern world is organised. The modern world is largely organised by the actions of the corporate sector, followed by the adaptation of the people to those actions. We no longer have community solidarity or self organisation as normal. When popular action occurs it is motivated by people like Trump, who misleadingly use that action to support himself and most of the rest of the dominant groups. He shares the dominant interests, and shows no sign of supporting the people in general – with the possible exception of tariffs, but even that seems geared at protecting particular types of industry or exerting commercial power on other countries.

We cannot dismiss either the possibility that politics will become more authoritarian to support capitalisms current destructions, or that it will stay as authoritarian as it is now, because of the way Renewable Energy is organised.

The Authoritarian and Anti-Democratic Background

It seems more or less indisputable that we are in a growing phase of authoritarianism. This authoritarianism generally is being put forward, by people who are also engaged in climate denial, or who support fossil fuels. There is no reason to assume that the two cannot link together powerfully. There is also the possibility of anti-climate change authoritarianism, to overcome resistance to necessary changes, but I’ll talk about that elsewhere – and I’ve just mentioned the possibility renewables could become an authoritarian technology. However, at the moment the authoritarian threat seems to be largely promoted by neoliberals and the Right. Neoliberalism always acts in an attempt to boost the power of the wealth and power elites to begin with.

In the US, neoliberals like Trump are currently dismissing election results and either encouraging or turning a blind eye to threats of violence against election officials or other Republicans who refuse to overturn, or throw out, the votes for Biden. This report may be exaggerated, but:

Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said the president had called her to declare there was fraud in the voting. But she said she had not been shown the letter to Congress, which was pulled together hastily, before its release.

Asked if she would have signed it, she indicated that the Republican base expected party leaders to back up Mr. Trump’s claims — or to face its wrath.

“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said about signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”…

Even in Defeat, Trump Tightens Grip on State G.O.P. Lawmakers. New York Times, 9 December 2020.

In the Supreme Court, Trump allies:

sought to invalidate the state’s 2.6 million mail-in votes, 77 percent of which were cast for Mr. Biden…

Republicans argued that a 2019 state law authorizing no-excuse mail voting was unconstitutional, although it passed the Republican-led legislature and was signed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat….

Rudolph W. Giuliani aired false charges about the election, including an assertion that mail-in ballots in Philadelphia were “not inspected at all by any Republican.” The claims were debunked in real time on Twitter by a Republican member of the Philadelphia elections board.

Even in Defeat, Trump Tightens Grip on State G.O.P. Lawmakers. New York Times, 9 December 2020.

It seems that Republicans are basically saying election results, and votes, are only valid if they give Republicans victory, probably because they think Democrats are not truly American, but are truly monstrous, in all possible ways. That is what their media tells them, and it helps explain a distressing loss. Republicans who disagree with them are made outgroup. A tweet from the Arizona Republican Party suggested that people should be willing to die for Trump and to overturn the election, and another (later taken down, officially because of copyright concerns) said “This is what we do, who we are. Live for nothing, or die for something” (apparently a quote from the film ‘Rambo’). It is hard to see this as anything other than a call for violence on behalf of the party, or a call for people to sacrifice themselves for the party.

For what its worth, I suggested that the Republicans were trying to prepare for, and encourage, a Civil War back in July. Since then, Trump has been preparing his supporters by repeatedly arguing that the only way he could lose was through fraud, and that there is some massive Democrat plot against him. No one can guarantee election results unless they are successfully trying to fix them. This ‘protest’ against the result was not an unforeshadowed event, but one involving some long term planning. Trump warned he would protest the results and he did.

If Trump has real evidence of electoral fraud, then why is he generally presenting ambiguous, or hearsay, evidence to the public and not presenting solid evidence to the courts? The Courts have asked for evidence, and been refused or ignored. One possible theory is that Trump’s teams do not have any such evidence, and his lawyers do not want to face perjury charges by putting faked evidence to the court. Another is that he does not need success. Indeed the court cases he is putting forward and supporting have largely seemed engineered to be rejected by the courts, perhaps to give the impression that he is being victimised by the system or the ‘deep state’. He may just be trying to build up suspicion about, and resentment over, the results. That is much easier, it does not require real evidence, and appears to have a massive persuasive impact on his followers, and will keep them motivated.

Even William Barr, after displaying massive support for Trump, has determined “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Another official, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said “I’m here to tell you that my confidence in the security of your vote has never been higher… because of an all-of-nation, unprecedented election security effort over the last several years.” Krebs was sacked.

Trump may be planning to leave the Covid crisis and the likely economic collapse, to his enemies, and come back arguing everyone was prosperous under him, which shows how bad Biden and crew are. This could be why he seems to be ignoring Covid in his last months. Why should he try and fix it? Why not let deaths increase exponentially to make it harder for the incoming administration?

There is also a double standard. Trump is not complaining about Republican attempts to fix the election or his own attempts to sabotage mail voting during a pandemic, as he had reason to think that mail in voting would favour Biden, as Biden voters would be more likely to believe in the Pandemic. (Indeed, mail in voting did favour Biden, by a considerable margin, which Trump then used to suggest it was fake.) Similarly, it appears if armed protestors threaten death to people who are standing up for the Elections and not following the Republican line, then that is not a big deal at all.

Likewise when people drew up to shoot paintballs into protesting crowds, this was not a problem. How did the crowds know there were no bullets in amongst this? Paintballs can injure, that is why players wear protective clothing and goggles (dye in the eyes may not be pleasant never mind the impact), and paintballs can certainly vandalise clothes and property – which normally you would expect the right to complain about, but nothing.

This is authoritarianism displaying its muscles.

In some states in the US, we reportedly have armed right wing groups seeking non-existent Antifa arsonists, and threatening people photographing or fleeing the climate induced fires. Some people risked staying in their homes to protecting them from equally non-existent marauding Antifa terrorists. [11], [12], [13], [14], [15],[16], [17]. The point here is that the misinformation machine easily seizes on the fear of fellow Americans in the outgroup, and this suspicion is now normal.

The violent Right is in action, the democratic Right is largely silent, and the action is not likely to dispel if Biden gets past all the hurdles, or even if Trump manages to persuade the electoral college to vote for him, or if he persuades congress to refuse the vote for Biden. If Trump ‘wins’, he will have the violent Right to deal with any protests against his denial of the electoral process, assuming the Democrats do not cave in as usual. If Trump loses, then the Violent Right has all the excuse it needs to fight against a supposedly stolen election.

There is no reason to assume that if Trump is successful in building up a popular disturbance, whether he gets back into power or not, that the techniques will not be emulated elsewhere in the world.

While it is not evidence, of much except the building oppositions, and fears the following comment seems reasonably accurate to me.

It turns out that Trump wasn’t an aberration. He was the result of long-building extremism and reality-denialism on the right. And when he came to power, far too many in the Republican party didn’t see a cruel, incurious, dictatorial madman, but a kindred spirit – and the kind of leader who would happily override inconvenient democratic norms, basic standards of human decency, and even the rule of law. That became increasingly clear the longer Trump was in office; yet, out of naivety or perhaps just misplaced trust in other human beings, too many Democrats, pundits, and average citizens chose to believe that Republicans were simply caught between a rock and a hard place, and that Trumpism would end with Trump…..

[However] a request that a high court disenfranchise millions who voted according to the rules and overturn the will of the people – isn’t an issue on which reasonable people might disagree.

Filipovic Republicans are trying to get the supreme court to overturn democracy itself. The Guardian, 12 Dec 2020.

This kind of aggressive attack on political processes, meets up with attempts to criminalise protests against fossil fuel pipelines in the US, and the hardening of penalties for protests in Australia. This is a violence aimed at suppressing even mild dissent against the neoliberal establishment.

While the wealth elites can well support, encourage or turn a blind eye to this violent authoritarianism in the belief it can, and will, protect them, they can also find out, as they did with Mussolini and Hitler, that once violence is established, the supportive elites can be threatened along with anyone else.

Weaponising hatred

I’ve argued elsewhere in this blog [18], [19], [20] that fascism needs to find or manufacture vile enemies at home and abroad, to be successful and to give its supporters the ability to excuse their side’s violence. Fascism’s rhetorical process requires hardening social identity categories and that has been building up in the US, Britain and Australia over the last 40 years of normal political action, providing a good basis for fascists to work from. The election fuss works for them, in that it delegitimates anything other than a Trump win, suggests the left cannot be trusted, allows authoritarian right to plough on in its quest for liberty for some, and allows the potential threatening of Republican officials in future elections – they now know what happens if they stand up to agree a Democrat won, and the positions will attract those who are determined that their side shall win.

Earlier in this post I remarked on the righteous idea that it is the size of population in other countries that is to blame for climate change, should it be happening. This seems to be linked to the increase in ingroup political identities, racial tensions, and that general collapse in dialogue between political groups. Naomi Klein suggests that it is no coincidence that “these two fires, the planetary one and the political one, are raging at the same time.”

What all of these demagogues understand, is the power of fear. They are tapping into feelings of profound unease and scarcity, in their respective countries. Some of that scarcity flows from decades of neoliberal economic policies, the attacks on labor protections, the shredded social safety nets, the opened chasms of economic inequality…. [but]

We all know on some cellular level that life on this planet is in crisis. That our one and only home is unraveling. No one, no matter how much Fox News they watch, is protected from the feeling of existential terror that flows from that. And that is what men like Trump and Bolsonaro know. Their one true skill is how to make other people’s fear work for them. And so they rile up hatred and they weaponize desperation and they run campaigns on building walls and stopping pending invasions. And most of all they sell their respective in groups the illusion that they will finally be secure in our age of rampant insecurity….

all of this leaves them free to get on with a real business at hand, which is plundering the last protected wildernesses on this planet, from the Amazon to the Arctic.

Berkeley Talks transcript: Naomi Klein on eco-fascism and the Green New Deal

Generating enemies, gives the leaders the excuse they need to declare martial law, to declare elections that reject them rigged, to declare war on the outgroups – which are those that oppose them – and support violent people on their side (if indirectly at the beginning). It gives them the power to stop speech in the name of protecting their own speech. It makes it patriotic to continue the economic war which siphons money from ordinary people and protects the neoliberal elite and their liberty, and which destroys the environment and makes people more insecure.

This potential fascism is a destructive positive feedback loop, and it is hard to evade.

Conclusions

Neoliberalism generates the conditions in which authoritarianism becomes natural, and fights against it can also become authoritarian.

Democratic Communists thought they were winning in the 1920s and 30s, partly because they refused to take fascism seriously, or thought the workers would recognise that their interests were not served by fascism and would join the parties on their side. They also failed to win the middle class. They forgot the effectiveness of orderly violence which was deployed by fascists, and they thought the process of history would inevitably lead to workers’ revolution. It didn’t.

This lesson should not be ignored.

The future is never guaranteed. We cannot assume climate democracy is inevitable or even likely.