Chris Hayes has a remarkable piece at the Nation, which makes rare sense of why its been so hard to mount a climate change opposition movement that has an impact. The math is striking. To stop the worst depredations of climate change you would have to make the fossil fuel companies and oil states keep a (conservatively estimated) $10 trillion in wealth they already claim in the ground! The equivalent in American history, Hayes points out, was slavery (which had a literal value in the south in something like the same range at a tune when slaves were energy of a sort) -- and it took the abolition movement, a civil war, and 600,000 deaths to end that atrocity. No one gives up wealth, weather measured in human bodies or fossil fuel reserves, easily. Its a striking point and yet Hayes offers some hope for the future as well. Its a major piece and well worth the time to read. Tom Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2. Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion. The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought. It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel. More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben, the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must confront the fact that the climate justice movement is demanding that an existing set of political and economic interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other than abolition. thenation/article/179461/new-abolitionism?page=full#
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 15:09:49 +0000
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