[P2P-F] strongly recommended article on climate strategy

Fri Dec 15 00:15:20 CET 2017

see
https://thenearlynow.com/the-real-politics-of-the-planetary-crisis-216229324deb

some quotes to give you a taste:

"We’re winning too slowly. If we can only achieve incremental progress when
large-scale change is needed, we lose. If we set large-scale action in
motion, but only after such a prolonged fight that it’s no longer possible
to meet the curve ahead of us, we fail. Indeed, winning too slowly is the
same thing as losing.

This last point is really critical. What the steepening curves of climate
action tell us, above all else, is that when we act matters as much —
arguably, even, far more — than the specific set of actions we take. Speed
is everything.

Our best-paced efforts today will leave our children with a planet 3.5º C
hotter; in effect, a different planet, a strange planet, a world where
nothing is ever “normal” again."
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[image: Michel Bauwens]
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Michel Bauwens*Group Admin*
<https://www.facebook.com/mbauwens?fref=gc&dti=145538675490320> "The delay
in action the Carbon Lobby has so successfully worked means paradoxically
that a transition away from fossil fuels is now impossible. To head off the
planetary crisis, we have to stop emitting carbon. That means we have to
stop burning coal, oil and gas. It also means that systems that depend on
fossil fuels will have to radically change or end, too. There’s no time
left for gradual-but-eventually-ambitious plans. All real climate action
demands fundamentally dismantling the fossil fuel economy over the next
three decades."
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[image: Michel Bauwens]
<https://www.facebook.com/mbauwens?fref=gc&dti=145538675490320>
Michel Bauwens*Group Admin*
<https://www.facebook.com/mbauwens?fref=gc&dti=145538675490320> "“A crisis
in investor confidence is the biggest threat to fossil fuel companies — not
environmentalists, regulations, clean energy competitors or climate
agreements.
For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then,
they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors
believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from
popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable
future, so their stock is worth buying.”

All the Carbon Lobby needs to do to reap gargantuan profits is to forestall
serious climate action for another decade or so. All they need to do is to
lose slowly.

That same decade, of course, is the last one we have to avoid catastrophic
losses."
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[image: Michel Bauwens]
<https://www.facebook.com/mbauwens?fref=gc&dti=145538675490320>
Michel Bauwens*Group Admin*
<https://www.facebook.com/mbauwens?fref=gc&dti=145538675490320> "what we’re
seeing is the overt embrace of gradualism. Having long opposed any action,
now dirty companies are appearing to moderate by conceding the need for
“reasonable” action, paced “responsibly.” So now you have oil companies
lending tentative support to pricing carbon, encouraging the use of natural
gas to replace coal, acknowledging that climate science is real, and so on.
They’re ready, they say, to start negotiating.

This is how they make sure they lose only slowly: engage, but ask for
compromises and draw out the process. Climate gradualism — “we all want to
act on climate, but we also have to be slow, incremental and realistic” —
is the new climate denialism.

It’s a brilliant (if vile) move: As long as we believe that climate is a
collective action problem, we will easily fall prey to gradualism. If we’re
all in it together, if we need everyone moving forward to solve this
problem, then we must meet our opponents in the middle and hope to nudge
them forward. If oil companies are ready for a low carbon price implemented
sometime in the future, well. that’s at least a start (or so the thinking
goes). The idea that the planetary crisis is a negotiation of equally
good-faith players all trying to solve a set of complex challenges leaves
us defenseless to this sort of sociopathic manipulation.

If, on the other hand, we understand the planetary crisis for what it truly
is — a zero-sum game with everything at stake; one in which a a relatively
small group of investors and executives have the chance to make trillions
of dollars, but can only do so at the cost of massive losses in the rest of
the economy, destruction of the living fabric of much of life on Earth and
the diminishment of opportunity for billions of others, for generations —
then the whole debate shifts. We then see gradualism as the threat it is.

When we see clearly, we understand that the only strategy that can work to
save humanity from the nightmares it has set in motion is a strategy of
making the Carbon Lobby and their supporters lose, and lose as fast as
possible."

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

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