How Conservatives Have Duped Us in the Global Warming Fight

[marmar]

from The Rockridge Institute, via AlterNet:



How Conservatives Have Duped Us in the Global Warming Fight

By Joe Brewer, The Rockridge Institute. Posted April 1, 2008.

We've let them decide how we talk about climate change and what's important.



The movie Field of Dreams had a wild idea -- that a person could build his dream in the corn field and others would come from miles around to take part. This attitude is not restricted to Hollywood: It is a common notion in government that if we build a good policy the people will come rally around it. But because most policy solutions are bureaucratic and technical, people are often uninterested. To get people to care and to rally around good policies, we need to advance the ideas from which the policies flow.

When it comes to the climate crisis, there's been plenty of talk about cap-and-trade, carbon offsets, taxes on fossil fuels, and investment plans for renewable energy. But there is hardly any talk about what all this means to everyday folks or why public understanding matters. What most people are missing is that the solution may well lie in the way people think about and understand the climate crisis.

Recently, my colleague George Lakoff and I released a report called Comparing Climate Proposals: A Case Study in Cognitive Policy. Our goal was to demonstrate the importance of human cognition in the policymaking process. We didn't set out to create an "ultimate solution" or anything like that. We simply suggested that a good place to start looking for solutions is in our own heads.

The cognitive dimension of climate policy is a big topic that needs to be unpacked carefully. But we can start by discussing two competing ideas. One has been advanced by conservatives for decades through a multimillion-dollar communications campaign. The other has appeared from time to time in discussions of environmental philosophy, especially about the ethics of management practices. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/80874/

[Ghost Dog]

1. I find these ideas very useful for organising strategies for thought and action

linking 'economics' with 'ecologics', contrasting the rightist agenda which claims that "Protecting the environment harms the economy" with the progressive (and indeed only rational) way forward which must be to be aware and act on the basis that "A healthy economy depends upon a healthy environment".

And nice to see the article leading (via the 'global warming'-related comments) here:

The central problem, it is becoming increasingly clear, is a mode of production whose main dynamic is the transformation of living nature into dead commodities, creating tremendous waste in the process.

The driver of this process is consumption - or more appropriately overconsumption - and the motivation is profit or capital accumulation: capitalism, in short.

...

This leads us to the dilemma of the South: before the full extent of the ecological destabilisation brought about by capitalism, it was expected that the South would simply follow the "stages of growth" of the North.

Now it is impossible to do so without bringing about ecological Armageddon.

...

These steps are important, but they should be seen as but the initial steps in a broader, global reorientation of the paradigm for achieving economic well-being.

While the adjustment will need to be much, much greater and faster in the North, the adjustment for the South will essentially be the same: a break with the high-growth, high-consumption model in favour of another model of achieving the common welfare.

...

Among other things, this will mean placing economic justice and equality at the centre of the new paradigm.

The transition must be one not only from a fossil-fuel based economy but also from an overconsumption-driven economy.

The end-goal must be adoption of a low-consumption, low-growth, high-equity development model that results in an improvement in people's welfare, a better quality of life for all, and greater democratic control of production.