WolfeNotes.com

A Profile of Failure: The Moderates Are Part of the Problem

Real Leadership Yet To Emerge in NJ

One way or another, it’s going to be revolutionary change, not evolutionary change

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.  ~~~ Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative To Act (2012)

The collapse of civilization.

Got that?

These are harsh truths that we are not hearing from our so called “environmental leaders”.

Instead, as Naomi Klein observes, they were responsible for this blunder: [my bracketed inserts noted]

A different kind if climate movement would have tried to challenge the extreme ideology that was blocking so much sensible action, joining with other sectors to show how unfettered corporate power posed a grave threat to the habitability of the planet. Instead, large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself [Wolfe: think Corporate Partnerships, voluntary consumer behavior, sustainability, RGGI]. (Though it was only years into this project that I discovered the depth of collusion between big polluters and Big Green.)

[…]

For a quarter of a century, we have tried the approach of polite incremental change, attempting to bend the physical needs of the planet to our economic model’s need for constant growth and new profit making opportunities. The results have been disastrous, leaving us all in a great deal more danger than when the experiment began.

So, in light of today’s NJ Spotlight story – which ignores all the above and even praises the epitome of failed “leadership” and “polite incremental change”  –  I need to followup on my post about the pending renewable energy bill, which would mandate that 80% of NJ’s electric power come from renewable sources by 2050.

Both the 80% rate and the 2050 date track the 2007 NJ Global Warming Response Act aspirational goals.

Frankly, scientists are warning that we don’t have that long to wait to act aggressively if we are to avoid catastrophic climate impacts, and exceed tipping points, triggering potentially runaway warming that would render the planet inhospitable to agriculture and human civilization.

During last week’s Senate Environment Committee hearing on the bill, Chairman and prime sponsor Smith made a critically important distinction in the fundamental approach.

Smith grouped the various lobbyists into two camps: those who supported what he called an evolutionary approach (incrementalism) versus a revolutionary approach.

Smith put himself in the evolutionary camp. I didn’t hear anyone from the revolutionary camp.

But the science is clearly in the revolutionary camp.

I think this quote by climate scientist Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, from Naomi’ Klein’s book “This changes everything”  frames the rate of reduction issue very well:

Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2 degrees Celsius levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post) industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the “evolutionary change” afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2 degree Celsius carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2 degree Celsius budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony.  (emphasis mine, @ p. 56)

Yet remarkably, NJ environmental activists are not even focused on climate change in the emerging debate on the renewable energy bill.

That lack of focus is what has allowed even quality journalistic outlets like NJ Spotlight to totally ignore the climate issue.

That’s right – NJ Spotlight wrote a story today on the wind energy mandates of the renewable energy bill that failed to even mention climate change! Read it yourself to confirm that.

The best the environmentalists could muster up were metaphors that reinforce the greed and economic logic that is causing climate chaos:

Doug O’Malley, executive director of Environment New Jersey, agreed. “New Jersey is sitting on a gold mind (sic) of potential for offshore wind,’’ he said, referring to studies that cite the tremendous wind resources off the Jersey coast.

And Dave Pringle seems to not understand the urgency of the issue and the need to make dramatic emission cuts in the next decade:

“We are talking about policy over the next 36 years,’’ said David Pringle, campaign director of New Jersey Clean Water Action.

We don’t have 36 years, Dave.

Ironically, the Spotlight story was published the same day that they did a profile on Mike Catania, a so called “leader of NJ’s environmental movement”. Catania said:

Biggest challenge New Jersey faces: “The biggest issue is climate change; it really dwarfs everything else. If a great meteor is heading to the Earth, people would put aside their differences to confront the problem. The choices we make now are going to have a great impact (on climate change) in the future. It is difficult to understand why our elected officials are not responding to that.’’

Difficult to understand? Corporate power and greed are difficult to understand? Government deregulation is difficult to understand?

The abject failure of the “polite” “third way” model of pro-corporate advocacy you have championed is difficult to understand?

Mike is exactly the kind of “polite moderate” that Naomi Klein absolutely skewers in her book as a big part of the Big Green problem.

But there are even more deeply cynical forces operating.

Take for example, The Godfather of NJ Toxics, Hal Bozarth, head of the NJ Chemistry Council.

The corporate polluters he represents have been poisoning people for decades, with disportionate impacts on poor, urban and black people – while waging war on government’s attempts to regulate his chemical polluters to protect those people.

Yet after all that, Hal has the balls to say something outrageous and disgusting like this: (NJ Spotlight)

“I’m sure the poor people in the urban centers will be ready to subsidize the excesses of offshore wind,’’ said Hal Bozarth, executive director of the Chemistry Industry Council of New Jersey, an organization that has often railed about the high costs of electricity and gas in the state.

And Hal was not alone in that disgusting and racist cynicism – virtually all the corporate lobbyists cried crocodile tears for the urban poor, including the BPU Ratepayer advocate.

Funny, we never heard squat from these people as Gov. Christie diverted over $1 billion of Clean Energy Fund money that would have helped these poor urban folks weatherize their homes, install energy efficient appliances, and reduce electric and gas bills.

And in closing, the entire thrust of the NJ Spotlight piece was to create a lame and false narrative –  i.e. that the renewable energy bill is not politically viable and the environmental community’s failure thus far to organize support for it was somehow OK because it was laying the groundwork for the next Governor:

The proposal is part of a bill that would require 80 percent of New Jersey’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, by 2050. But even its advocates acknowledge the legislation stands little chance of being approved anytime soon, although they hope to lay the groundwork for passage in the next administration.

That’s just an excuse for failure.

Put the bill on the floor of both houses of the legislature.

Make legislators vote – make Christie veto the bill. Use that failure to hold people accountable ad build public support.

As a wise man wrote:

“The artist and the revolutionary function as they function,” Baldwin wrote, “and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it. Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.” […]

“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice,” Orwell wrote. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” […]

[Cornel West said] But in the end, Samuel Beckett is right. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. When they put us in the grave, even following the charge, we are still a relative failure, because we fell on our faces. But most importantly we bounced back because we wanted to be part of that love train, that quest for the Kingdom of God, that humility that our dear brother professor James Cone was talking about at the center of the Gospel, which is inseparable from memory and inseparable from tenacity.

Got all that, Mike Catania and Tom Johnson?