(Article changed on November 26, 2012 at 14:58)
What follows
here is a synopsis and interpretation of a discussion Bill Moyers recently
had with Naomi Klein.
The fossil
fuel industry business model is based on them selling, and us burning, five
times more coal and oil-based fuels than is compatible with the continuance of
healthy human life on earth. This means
their business model is at war with human life on this planet.
We're up
against the very, very powerful fossil fuel lobby whose paymasters have every
reason in the world to do whatever
they can to prevent this from ever
becoming the most urgent issue on our agenda.
This includes spending billions on a very corrupt corporate media, and
on academic and intellectual whores whose "professional opinions" are
essentially for sale to the highest bidder, and who will testify on their
behalf.
Climate change requires collective action
It requires
that we somehow manage, in spite of what was just stated, to regulate extremely
powerful corporations including oil and coal companies. It requires that we plan collectively and
effectively, as a society. Problem is, at the historical moment that climate
change hit the mainstream, all "collectivist"/regulatory ideas fell into
disrepute. All solutions had to be "free-market'
solutions. Governments were supposed to "get
out of the way (of corporations)." Among
right-wingers, "collectively' remains a dirty word -- "that's what communists
did." Anything "collective' was tainted
and suspect. Libertarians like Margaret
Thatcher even went so far as to claim that "There's no such thing as society."
Now if you
believe that, of course you can't do anything about climate change, because climate
change is inherently a collective and societal problem -- there's no denying
that this is our collective atmosphere. We can only
respond to its gradual poisoning and alteration collectively. Otherwise we
cannot respond in any effective way. Yet
some parts of the environmental movement foolishly respond to this dilemma by personalizing the problem and cheerfully
saying, "Okay, let's recycle. Let's
all buy a hybrid car." In an effort
to get along with the powers that be, they treat this problem like it could
have business-friendly solutions -- things like cap-and-trade and carbon
offsetting. But those "solutions' aren't
nearly enough.
For this
reason and others we ended up with a movement that every once in a while would
rear up, and people would get all excited and say, "this time we're really going to do something about this." And whether it was the Rio Summit or the
Copenhagen Summit, or that moment when Al Gore came out with Inconvenient Truth, the movement would then,
after a brief period of mild public optimism, just recede into the background
of most peoples' consciousness. Why so? Because it (the movement) didn't yet have the collective social support and
political-economic support it needed.
On top of
that, we've had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby (with the help
of their academic/scientific & journalistic whores) to both buy off the
environmental movement, to defame it, to infiltrate it, and to spread lies within
the larger culture about it. And, quite
sadly, the entire climate-denial movement has been doing all this very
effectively.
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