The Pro Wrestling Climate Summit; A Predetermined, Carefully Scripted Appearance Of Action
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The summit is a little like a professional wrestling match: There appears to be action but it’s fake, and the winner is predetermined. The loser will be anyone who expects serious government movement dictating industry reductions in emissions.
There was a time when governments dealt with international threats. Now, as the columnist George Monbiot says, they “propose everything except the obvious solution — legislation.” Rather, they will talk, commission panels, invoke market-based solutions and even offer subsidies to industry, rather than say, for example, “Wealthy nations are reducing emissions globally by 8 to 10 percent per year, beginning now.” By Klein’s estimates, that’s precisely what it will take to avoid catastrophe and that is precisely what we are not going to see.
As Monbiot points out, when the ozone layer threat emerged, an international protocol was established, ozone-hole-making chemicals were banned, and that threat was drastically reduced. And just as we knew how to repair the ozone layer, we know how to combat climate change: Slow the burning of fossil fuels, speed up the development of alternative energy sources, and mandate that at least two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves be left in the ground. It’s simple, even straightforward and, as my colleague Justin Gillis wrote in yesterday’s Times, not even expensive.
But carbon polluters clearly have more political clout than makers of hair spray, and there’s another tragic element at work here, a hole in the heart of government that developed at about the same time as that in the ozone layer: Neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has given us a “system” in which corporate power is stronger than ever and government controls weaker than they’ve been in a century. The net result is that some corporations are more powerful than governments, both domestically and globally. To fix, or combat, or deal with a threat to the wellbeing of citizenry like climate change is the business of government, but governments are no longer able to dictate what industry does. (No one has said this more eloquently than Monbiot: “Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address.”)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/opinion/mark-bittman-lets-reject-the-inevitable.html?_r=0
