Climate Change and the Emergent Global Ideology
Politics / Climate Change Aug 01, 2019 - 04:47 PM GMTwhether one is or is not convinced of anthropogenic global warming just isn’t the point. The point is that it’s the emergent global ideology, the perfect opportunity for discredited communists and bureaucrats to posture as saviors. (And we’ll discuss below The Other (Actual) Environmental Emergency: species loss, groundwater depletion, plastics, peak oil.)
But there’s a huge fly in the ointment: the west’s economic dependence on China, the brutal capit-ommunist dictatorship that keeps us in tube socks. China is – seems to be – in the final phase of biggie big big currency debasement.
However, the BRI (‘OBOR’) is a genius way of extending that debasement. Basically, a ‘re-set.’
It couldn’t work in the west, where some scraps of political and media objectivity remain. An MMT-fueled consumerist quantum leap forward to bright sunlit uplands of sustainability is nonsense. But the Chinese can just lie about/cover up. The BRI action will happen in poor, corrupt, isolated nations eager to develop and happy to join in the lying and covering up. It’s just too easy to envisage a steady infrastructure-development-driven annexation of swathes of these behind-the-scenes nations while virtue-signaling environmentalists and bureaucrats jet across overhead on their way to eco-conferences in Brussels and Washington.
Next: everything above is mundanely obvious. But what if this model were extended to the polar regions and space? These are also ‘behind the scenes.’
So, instead of any *actual* achievement of a sustainable economy, we’ll see a sort of ‘split’ model whereby endless blah blah blah will flow out of the west while cheap goods flow out of China until reality kicks the front door in.
That reality – okay, it’ll be incremental – will be a collision between social and environmental deterioration, and governments’ increasingly authoritarian attempts to keep the show on the road.
And in closing: why so bleak a prognosis? Well, in recent decades, evolutionary psychologists have given us insight into the question of why humans manage to be simultaneously smart and dumb: our species has a very narrow focus. Stewarding the environment for future generations is now clearly a goal that has little traction for our present-focussed minds. (Talking about it makes us feel good. But *doing* it is clearly way to hard.)
Mark Blair has been involved in libertarian/anarchist politics since 1982, with a particular focus, in recent years, on biological predisposition. He is ‘IMZ Noo Account’ here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1502028.1600
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