ACTIVIST CLIMATE GUY

The Problem with Scientist Denyers…

2007-12-18T21:45:00.000-05:00

Are scientists who are not on the corporate payroll objective and disinterested?

This may be a purely theoretical question since even universities are corporations directed by board members with corporate and finance allegiances and since government scientists are managed via a corporate-friendly political apparatus (that’s an understatement). But let’s pretend that tenure and government grants might confer some measure of independent thought.

Are scientists who are not on the corporate payroll objective and disinterested?

The fact that many “independent” scientists are either for or against interpreting “the data” as showing CO2-driven global warming suggests that independent thought may exist among scientists, on at least one side of the climate change debate. But let us not draw premature conclusions.

David Noble, in The Corporate Climate Coop, recently exposed some of the corporate scheming that has boosted and supported mainstream global warming alarmism. Likewise, in Global Warming: Truth or Dare? I have analyzed some of the motives that unaligned scientists have for trumpeting global warming as a dominant threat to human kind. But what motives do unaligned scientists have to be so-called denyers?

Part of the answer is the same as for the scientist believers. Both believers and denyers are drawn to popular themes, powerful players, and media attention. Public scientists want to be useful beyond blatant corporate servitude and beyond training the obedient and indoctrinated service intellectuals of tomorrow. They, like most professionals, often seek meaning and societal recognition beyond tenure and a pay cheque.

And they know an opportunity when one smacks them in the face… In the words of Dick Peltier, Director of the University of Toronto’s newly funded Centre for Global Change Science (InterActions, Fall 2007, p.11):

“Faculty engaged in scientific research on the ongoing environmental crisis came together to discuss how best to take advantage of this exciting opportunity.”

Crisis as opportunity… Finally, public science is learning from high finance and corporate exploiters. A healthy business ethic has now completely permeated the ivory tower. The world can sleep a little more soundly.

The corporate ideology of profit as a cure and trickle down as the best of all possible solutions is not only a justification for planetary destruction, however. The ideology itself, although barely developed beyond a mantra, is also the motivating thread for most “independent” scientist denyers.

This was made abundantly clear in a recent open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations signed by over one hundred top “independent” scientist denyers (National Post, December 12, 2007): LINK.

The letter’s first paragraph explains that:

“We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.”

Somehow, these brilliant minds have come to the observation and conclusion that “economic growth and wealth generation” is a recipe for environmental preservation and amelioration. The spectacular correlation between mass poverty and associated environmental degradation and increased profit and wealth for the wealthy has somehow escaped their quantitative analysis.

Could these hard-science practitioners have strayed into the make-believe world of economists – the same economists who now propose carbon credits as something other than a scam that will benefit global finance racketeers and a tool that will serve the most powerful global players?

As protectors of the now-abandoned corporate stance, the signatories of this open letter to the UN are truly exemplary:

“the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity.”

Whose prosperity? A large faction of elite corporate and finance power want this – they have engineered it. Wake up.

“attempts to cut emissions will slow development”

Burning fossil fuel equals “development”? Well then, let’s burn more. Wouldn’t bigger hummers be safer?

“Attempts … constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems.”

Who said anything about allocating resources? Some corporations would make less profit, the largest would make more, and massive government subsidies to corporations (such as those that keep the US military economy afloat) and to private capital managers (such as those inherent in the fractional reserve banking system) might be modestly redistributed. These hard scientists seem to think that “society” makes resource allocation decisions.

The open letter’s last paragraph closes on a humanitarian note:

“National and international planning for such changes is needed, with a focus on helping our most vulnerable citizens adapt to conditions that lie ahead.”

Hey! How many of the signatories of this open letter have ever made moves to help “our most vulnerable citizens”? Let’s see, our most vulnerable First World citizens would be “our” aboriginal peoples… Our most vulnerable world citizens would be Third World citizens displaced from their lands by corporate “development” that serves Third World debt, the most powerful lever of extortion on the planet…

Our most vulnerable citizens can now breathe a sigh of relief knowing that scientist denyers have noticed their plight. I expect this will help them as much as carbon credits and emission ceilings.

Are Physicists Smart?

Politics of Climate Change

Scientist’s blog cited in US Senate speech on global warming turning point

2007-10-27T22:46:00.000-04:00

US Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, delivered a more than two-hour floor speech on October 26, in which he cites Professor Denis G. Rancourt (University of Ottawa, Editor/Manager of the Climate Guy and Activist Teacher blogs), in some detail here…:

EPW-Senate.gov/Inhofe-speech

The citations are drawn from (and linked to) Rancourt’s February 2007 article Global Warming: Truth or dare? which will be print-published in part in the next issue of DESIGNER/builder magazine.

This may be the first time that authoritative material is used in the US Senate directly from a scientist’s blog; thereby circumventing the scientific peer review process, that has recently been severely criticized.

The complete citation is as follows.

‘Unverified, remote, and abstract dangers'

The global warming scare machine is now so tenuous, that other liberal environmental scientists and activists are now joining Giegengack and refuting the entire basis for man-made global warming concerns.

Denis G. Rancourt professor of physics and an environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, believes the global warming campaign does a disservice to the environmental movement.

Rancourt wrote on February 27, 2007: "Promoting the global warming myth trains people to accept unverified, remote, and abstract dangers in the place of true problems that they can discover for themselves by becoming directly engaged in their workplace and by doing their own research and observations. It trains people to think lifestyle choices (in relation to CO2 emission) rather than to think activism in the sense of exerting an influence to change societal structures." (LINK)

Rancourt believes that global warming "will not become humankind's greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around." He also noted that even if C02 emissions were a grave threat "government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world."

Most significantly, however, Rancourt -- a committed left-wing activist and scientist -- believes environmentalists have been duped into promoting global warming as a crisis. Rancourt wrote: "I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized."

"Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass," Rancourt added.

Finally, Rancourt asserted that in a warm world, life prospers. "There is no known case of a sustained warming alone having negatively impacted an entire population," he said, "As a general rule, all life on Earth does better when it's hotter: Compare ecological diversity and biotic density (or biomass) at the poles and at the equator," he added.

Indeed, 2007 has turned into the "tipping point" for the unsubstantiated fears and gross distortion of science by activists who have committed decades trying to convince the world it faced a man-made climate crisis. Rancourt so eloquently summed up the movement as one featuring "Unverified, remote, and abstract dangers."

One theme of the Senator’s speech is that 2007 is a turning point in becoming conscious of the fabricated nature of the global warming threat.

Climate Guy and Activist Teacher have argued that such consciousness would be a contributing small step in the overall turning point towards global fairness and democracy that must occur, if it is accompanied by deep activism of the heart rather than replaced by another superficial myth of the mind again intended to divert our attention and energy. Examples of past and present such superficial myths of the First World middle class mind are: acid rain, ozone depletion, soil depletion and peak oil. These sanitized and distributed-responsibility abstracted phenomena replace the real problems of continental-scale profit and power driven finance and corporate extortion and exploitation, enabled by genocidal destruction and backed by military might.

9-11 and global warming are both inside jobs

2007-10-01T16:19:00.000-04:00

Glimate Guy has recently come across the most remarkable and in-depth article on how and why the Twin Towers collapsed…! It was published in the November/December 2001 issue of the print magazine DESIGNER / builder: A Journal of the Human Environment and has not previously been posted on the web, but HERE IT IS.

DESIGNER / builder (Db) is a gem of a small-circulation radical magazine out of Santa Fe, NM. Db’s publisher Kingsley Hammett located and interviewed now 67 year old Jim Malott, a welder, architect, and jet crash expert who followed the birth and rise of the Twin Towers with the passion of an investigative photo journalist and materials engineer enthusiast… His analysis is unparalleled and puts the mainstream scientific community to shame.

The article contains dozens of historic photographs – a must read for all 9-11 activists.

In a nutshell, the business lobby transformed building code regulations in order to maximize profits for powerful interests, while covering their asses with made to order safety tests… Sound familiar?

First World activists turn to tenuous 9-11 conspiracy theories about homeland threats while the real crimes are the murderous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the broader global stranglehold that they enforce and the profits that they directly generate…

First World climate change activists turn to tenuous model predictions anchored on CO2 while the real crime is the global-scale exploitation and resource extraction monster that feeds financial lust at the cost of everything.

They’re both inside jobs, performed by the power insiders that compulsively strive to generate continuously growing returns on capital, here on this finite planet.

Let’s get away from the red herring details and take down the beast. Capital concentrations that change human and geographical landscapes are tyrannical. Profit predation is democracy’s main enemy and the planet’s worst scourge. People need to control their own spaces: We don’t need landlords. We don’t need maximum profit.

Fight it where you can: At work, at home, at school. Don’t let capital, corporations, institutions, or anyone be the boss of you. Fight back. Don’t drop out. Don’t cooperate. Don’t hide. Fight the machine! That’s something we can all do that’s good for everybody and good for the soul. Risk it. Do it. You can’t learn it from a book!

First World wimps and gatekeepers are accessories to murder and genocide.

RELATED LINKS
Gradual Change Is Not Progress
Balance Kills
Global Warming: Truth or Dare?
DESIGNER / builder magazine
Archive.org posting of the full original article with pictures

Put your global warming glasses on!

2007-08-12T09:40:00.000-04:00

That's right! Let's all change our incandescent light bulbs to these expensive, unreliable, impossible to recycle, made in Third World slave camps, mega manufacturing-packaging-transportation footprint, mercury-gas-loaded kind... Let's trust the manufacturers on this one. Better to be safe than sorry, right? (Yet another victory for the precautionary principle.)

In addition, there is that wonderful psychological side benefit that you have empowered ordinary citizens by training them to participate in solving problems via add-campaign-induced consumer choices. (And they can spend the projected electricity savings on credit now.) Luckily for the planet, it's easy to market green responsibility.

How Many Scientists?

2007-06-19T20:47:00.000-04:00

David Noble asks: How many scientists does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: A consensus.

Regression on the Left

2007-05-30T12:19:00.000-04:00

David F. Noble

Sometimes the Left is its own worst enemy, particularly when it uses its enemy’s tactics to silence internal dissent. In response to recent challenges to the current crusade against global warming, this dogmatic tendency of the left, here rooted in a naive scientism, has resurfaced with a vengeance. In its resolute repudiation of corporate “deniers,” the left has allied itself wholeheartedly with the “advocates,” adopting a stridency intolerant of doubt or dissent. Those on the left who dare to disagree are instantly denounced as deluded or, worse, deniers themselves. Perhaps most importantly they are accused (by Justin Podur in his response to challenges by Denis Rancourt, David Noble, and Alexander Cockburn) of launching “an attack on science,” of adopting an “anti-science tone”, and taking “anti-science positions.” George Monbiot, admitting his own scientific incompetence, repeatedly derides Cockburn for not grounding his dissenting views upon the allegedly irrefutable foundation of "peer-reviewed scientific journals," for only then, he avers, could we be sure "that they are worth discussing." The source of this new orthodoxy is an exaggerated reverence for science, which has in fact marked socialism since its inception, when supposed scientific verities served as the antidote to religion and religion-based power. Among the earliest socialists, for example, the followers of atheist Robert Owen, turned their devotion from God to steampower: “science was heard and the savage hearts of men were melted; the scabs fell from their eyes, a new life thrilled through their veins, their apprehensions were enobled, and as science spoke, the multitude knelt in love and obedience.” The so-called “scientific socialism” of Marxism followed this furrow for over a century. But such primitive faith in science has long since been powerfully challenged on the left, by fifty years of sustained critical analysis of, and direct confrontation with, the social construction and political realities of presumedly objective scientific enterprise. It is thus indeed remarkable, and alarming, how readily the left regresses into reflexive reliance upon its formative substitute religion.

From the late nineteenth-century on, the professionalizing practice of science was increasingly monopolized by a privileged elite and harnessed to the pecuniary ends of corporate capitalism, both subverting whatever liberatory potential it might ever have had. But periodically there have emerged popular challenges to this class-bound institutionalization of science. Taking the United States as a prime example, following the First World War and throughout the 1930's there was continuing criticism of the nefarious military uses of science, the corporate command over the agenda of science, and the private monopolization of the patented fruits of science. World War Two constituted a pivotal moment for this popular challenge, with its unprecedented government-sponsored mobilization of the nation's scientific resources for the war effort. For the first time, and forever thereafter, the taxpayer became by far the major source of funds for scientific endeavor, through a new system of government contracts and grants. And, in a democracy, if the taxpayer was paying for science, the taxpayer would have to have a degree of control over the content and agenda of science. Indeed, corporate and scientific leaders had in the past eschewed public support of their activities precisely for that reason, out of fear that reliance upon the public purse would bring with it public interference and oversight. Now, however, the scale of the financial support available made it too good to refuse, or ever give up. The problem was what to do about democracy.

During the war the problem was solved through military security. Under wartime pressures, the direction of science was vested in a civilian agency but dominated by leaders of the elite academic and professional institutions with close ties with major corporations. The chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), Vannevar Bush, an official of MIT and a director of Raytheon and AT&T, was the embodiment of this elite assemblage. Predictably, the lion's share of contracts and grants went to the elite private universities and the largest corporations, along with patent rights to the most lucrative inventions. But by the middle of the war, just when the privileged few had begun to plan for the postwar continuation of this largesse, those left out of the arrangement and opposed to the wholesale corporate subsidy it entailed, had begun strenuously to object, and to propose a more egalitarian and democratic peacetime scientific establishment. Led by New Deal senator Harley Kilgore they put forth a plan for a postwar National Science Foundation that emphasized lay control over science and political accountability. It was to be headed by a presidentially appointed director advised by a board whose members would include citizens representing consumers, labor, and small businesses as well as large corporations and scientists. The agency would let contracts to firms and universities on an equitable basis and would retain public ownership of all patents. Kilgore envisioned the new agency as a democratic means to socially responsive science.

This democratic proposal alarmed Bush and his elite academic and corporate colleagues who formulated a counter proposal, for National Research Foundation (later, also called the National Science Foundation). Central to this plan was an agency that guaranteed professional rather than lay control over science, was insulated from political accountability, and gave its director discretion over the awarding of patent ownership. In essence, the Bush agency was designed to guarantee public support for scientists – and, indirectly, for the corporations they served as well - without public control, a regime of science run by scientists and paid for by the taxpayer. The two proposals for a postwar agency were debated in Congress for several years after the war. Kilgore's bill was backed by President Truman. The Bush bill was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1947 but was vetoed by Truman, who stated, "the proposed National Science Foundation would be divorced from control by the people to an extent that implies a distinct lack of faith in democratic processes." In 1950 a compromise version of the Bush bill was passed and signed by Truman, now once again under (cold)wartime exigencies. The new agency included a presidentially-appointed director but a board composed only of scientists committed to continuing the comfortable patterns established by the OSRD during the war. As a bulwark against democratic oversight and lay involvement in the awarding of scientific contracts and grants, the agency adopted a new mechanism of exclusion: "peer review." Only peers - fellow privileged professionals, whatever their unacknowledged ties to commercial enterprise - could be involved in deciding upon the merits and agenda of science.

Peer review was a relatively novel concept. Editors of journals had in the past, at their own discretion on an ad hoc basis, referred manuscripts to anonymous reviewers before publication to aid them in their decisions, but this would now become required and routinized into standard practice. Peer review certainly had its benefits, such as credibility (peer review as PR), convenient credentialling (no need to read it if it has been peer reviewed), and consensus-building (through mutual back-scratching). But it also had its costs, such as prior censorship (by interested parties), and, especially, the coercive encouragement of conformity. If peer review served to immunize science from democratic scrutiny and intervention, it also imposed a measure of like-mindedness upon the scientific community itself, mistakenly celebrated as consensus. Invariably, this tended to narrow the scope of respectable discourse and, hence, of the scientific imagination, inbreeding often entailing a degree of enfeeblement. A safeguard against error, it might also eliminate eccentric approaches and illuminating mistakes, often the key to significant discovery. And if intended to insure that only correct papers were permitted to be published, why then the need for the community of science at all? Peer review before publication would suffice to guarantee that only the truth prevailed. Such perils of peer review were early detected and condemned by the physicist Albert Einstein, after his arrival in America. Having submitted a co-authored paper to the journal Physical Review, he was dismayed to learn that it had bean sent by the editor to an anonymous reviewer. "We had sent our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed," an irate Einstein wrote the editor. “On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.” Einstein never again contributed to that journal. In Germany he had published in a journal edited by Max Planck, whose editorial philosophy was “to shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than of having been too gentle in evaluating them.”

Despite its defects, peer review became the hallmark of the exclusive scientific establishment (and, eventually - and disastrously - of all of academia), and for a short while the hegemony of the elite remained relatively secure. But it did not long remain unchallenged. By the late 1950's growing concerns about the abuse and misuse of science and its deleterious effects, both intended and unintended, focused increasing attention on the responsibility of scientists, ultimately crystallizing into something new: criticism of science itself. Campaigns against the atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear power, radiation, pesticides and other petrochemicals, as well as pollution and environmental degradation, thus gave rise to unprecedented scrutiny of scientists themselves and, eventually, to critical studies of the historical, social, political, and cultural context, and epistemological framework, of western science.

In 1962 Rachel Carson, mother of the modern environmental movement, published Silent Spring, her landmark expose on the dangers of pesticides. Carson's enormously influential book, serialized in the New Yorker, directly and courageously challenged the then sacrosanct petrochemical industry and the complicit scientific establishment that supported it. Carson had no Ph.D. and her work was not peer-reviewed. That same year 1962 Thomas Kuhn published his equally influential critical study of the history of western science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Introducing the concept of scientific "paradigm" and "paradigm shift," Kuhn argued that scientific theories were not the product of some detached, disinterested community of truth-seekers, but of more familiar social and cultural forces and contexts, which tended to encourage conformity and discourage dissent and bold departures. While Carson's work heightened ecological awareness and propelled the environmental movement into popular focus, Kuhn's work, wittingly or not, opened the pandora's box on the politics of science, giving rise to troublesome questions about supposed truths and paving the way for popular challenges to the authority of the expert. The convergence of these developments was epitomized by the audacious efforts of “ordinary housewife” Lois Gibbs and her neighbors in the Love Canal community of upstate New York, who came to their own independent, and correct, conclusions about the dangers of the toxic waste dump in their midst, rejected the dismissive reports of state and federal scientists and, ultimately, after gaining national media attention and taking federal authorities hostage, succeeded in their demands for subsidized relocation.

Throughout this period, the left newly informed by ecological and feminist sensibilities, belatedly came to understand that the verities of science and technology were in fact contingent, like everything else. Scholars and activists on the left played a major role in opening up and exploring this newly revealed realm of power and ideology. Their efforts implicated science in the depredations and deformations of corporate capitalism, and, at the same time, disclosed a more expansive and emancipatory understanding of the range of scientific possibilities, of alternatives, of different kinds of science, of a "science for the people." By the late 1970's, however, with the launching of a broad corporate counter-offensive against government regulation, in the name of competitiveness and marked by a strident reaffirmation of faith in science (renamed “innovation”) and the authority of experts, this new critical comprehension of the nature of science came under sustained attack for being “anti-science.” The corporate agenda and corporate propaganda dominated the terrain and the discourse for a decade and a half, marginalizing the left and drowning out its new critical voices. Ultimately, the corporate message congealed into a single word, which hinted at a unified corporate-controlled world: "globalization."

Alas, to the delight of the dialecticians, this unity invariably elicited its opposite, the “anti-globalization” or “global justice” movement. Erupting worldwide in the wake of the Zapatista rebellion against neoliberalism, this new movement took aim against all manifestations of the corporate agenda as well as its institutional and ideological foundations. Once more the critical voices re-emerged, amplified, against the ravages of capitalism, the market, and the corporation. And here again science and technology came under critical surveillance and challenge, with a particular focus on genetic engineering and genetically-modified organisms. As Rachel Carson had confronted the petrochemical industry and its scientific penumbra so now activists confronted agribusiness and the so-called “life science” industry and their academic attendants, exposing the error of their ways and, in the process, the politics of science.

In the midst of the corporate globalization movement, the giants of the oil and gas industry, fearing a threat to their soaring profits, launched their campaign of denial against the spectre of global warming. At the height of the anti-globalization movement, other corporate players, seeing new profit-making opportunities in the same spectre, launched their opposing campaign of advocacy and alarm. (For a fuller discussion, see my article "The Corporate Climate Coup.") Meanwhile, in the face of mounting repression, a war on terror, corporate cooptation, and the need to divert energies into an anti-war movement, the global justice movement eroded. With the dissipation of that movement, its critical revolutionary voices were once again marginalized, along with its radical critique of science. In remarkably short order, debate within the left on the issue of climate change became a mere reflection of the orchestrated duel between corporate rivals, deniers and advocates, shorn of any radical substance of its own. Regressing instead, in apparent disarray and desperation, to the false securities of its former innocence, the left has all but abandoned the field on its own terms, avoiding any confrontation with power. Relying now upon the weapons of the left's erstwhile enemies to defend their own witting or unwitting complicity, its mainstream mavens, ever protective of their respectability astride the corporate wave, condemn and dismiss the remnant of critics of science as “anti-science” and disregard dissenting arguments on the grounds that they have not been subjected to “peer review.” In light of such a dismal display, it is perhaps time for the left once again to put science in perspective, and aside, and return to the revolution.

Historian David F. Noble teaches at York University in Toronto. His latest book is Beyond the Promised Land (2005). Like all of his other publications, this article has not been peer-reviewed.

DGR's suggested related links:
The Corporate Climate Coup
Global Warming: Truth or Dare?
Taking CO2 Seriously
Are Physicists Smart?

TAKING CO2 SERIOUSLY

2007-05-07T15:13:00.000-04:00

David F. Noble and Denis G. Rancourt

The Swift Institute on Global Warming
May, 2007

Life is deadly. All living things that breathe oxygen burn their food and emit poisonous CO2 as a pollutant. With every breath they contribute to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and, hence, to global warming. And yet, for all the frantic formulas floating around aimed at the reduction of CO2 emissions, particularly through limitations on the burning of fossils fuels (dead living things), little attention has been paid to this obvious other source (still living things). Rough calculations suggest that CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dwarfed by the emissions from these living things, including human beings. Emissions from human metabolism alone, assuming a world population of six billion people and an averaging of their state of activity, are estimated to be equivalent to approximately half of 1990 fossil fuel emissions. Add to these human sources the CO2 emissions from all other creatures on the planet, including plants which respire as well as photosynthesize, and the total amount of emissions from living things is staggering.

To forestall the forecasted calamities of global warming, there must be a reduction of “living things emissions” (LTE’s). This can be approached in two ways, by reducing the number of living things, through their humane or not so humane elimination, and by reducing the amount of respiration of each living thing, through enforceable limits on exertion. With regard to the first, we appear to be well on our way. The loss of habitat through development, deforestation, and agribusiness has contributed greatly to loss of life and species extinction. Warfare will continue to contribute significantly as well, along with genocide. Human and animal population control and sterilization further limit LTE’s. All of this is a good start, but just a start. It’s time to let go of our pets. The number of livestock on farms, which has swelled enormously, could be cut back substantially with the elimination of meat from our diet. We must also begin to give serious consideration to euthanizing expendable members of our family and community. With regard to worklife and lifestyle, we must work hard at not working hard, thereby lowering our metabolism, respiring less, and reducing our CO2 emissions. The impulse to exercise must be exorcised, along with fitness clubs, marathons, and organized sports. Caffeine, which speeds up metabolism, must be banned. The work ethic must be replaced by yoga and meditation. Only by minimizing all effort will we survive. If we are serious about reducing CO2 emissions, we must all do our part, as little as possible.

Questioning Climate Politics

2007-05-06T16:25:00.000-04:00

Denis Rancourt says the "global warming myth" is part of the problem

Dru Oja Jay of The Dominion interviews Denis Rancourt about his article Global Warming: Truth or Dare?

This interview, with introduction and comments, is posted HERE.
[The Dominion, April 2007 - Issue #44, p.14-15.]

An Inconvenient Truth Is Too Convenient

2007-05-06T16:12:00.000-04:00

Denis G. Rancourt
June 2006

[Edited version: Peace and Environment News (PEN), vol.21, no.6, July-August 2006, Insider, p.2.]

I recently saw Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It was exactly what I expected, in every detail, like getting the Big Mac you expect when you go to Mac Donald’s. What I did not expect, however, is how the theatre filled and how everyone in the theatre seemed to swallow it down. That’s why I am writing this critique of what is an American mainstream film that serves the same political purpose as any Hollywood blockbuster – to neutralize political awareness and response.

Yes, the atmospheric trace gas CO2 has the highest concentration it has had in the last million years. Yes, this is due to fossil fuel burning. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Yes, there have been intense weather events in recent years and yes glaciers are melting.

Therefore, let us abstract away the greatest assault on the planet and its people in the history of humanity, namely finance-driven corporate devastation and exploitation backed by military might, and change our light bulbs to the energy saving kind!

Make no mistake. No change in superficial personal lifestyle choices or even voting Democrat instead of Republican or even sending post cards to your representative is going to noticeably slow down the beast. Do these things because they make you feel good but don’t be fooled that you are making a significant difference or even that you are acting morally.

It’s important to feel good by securing the necessities and by integrating a nurturing community (even a media-based one) but if you want to be worried about global problems start with global-scale exploitation of the third world and the crimes against humanity that our governments participates in, both at home and abroad. Start by looking beyond the agenda rags we call newspapers, Hollywood productions, and the planet as a religion.

Our moral responsibility extends far beyond checking out Al Gore’s web site, and has relatively little to do with lifestyle choices; including vegetarianism, fair trade purchases, renewable consumer choices, not owning a car, etc. Our responsibilities instead include getting informed (not only on the web but on the streets also), and demanding moral accountability of all those who should serve people (including the corporations and private banks).

To demand is to put yourself out there. To demand is to show what you stand for. To demand is to risk. We must risk as much as will make us as effective as possible in producing justice.

Economic, human, and animal justice brings economic sustainability which in turn is always based on renewable practices. Recognizing the basic rights of native people automatically moderates resource extraction and preserves natural habitats. Not permitting imperialist wars and interventions automatically quenches nation-scale exploitation. True democratic control over monetary policy goes a long way in removing debt-based extortion. Etc.

Concentrated power and capital are not about to give up their practices or their imperative for profit. Resistance to the insane return-on-investments hydra that inhabits our planet is our main responsibility if we are concerned about future generations. It’s time to declare bankruptcy and start again, in collaboration, without debt or interest.

One cannot control a monster by asking it not to shit as much. The monster is the problem, not the fact that it shits, no matter what colour the shit is.

In Al Gore’s masterpiece there is not a single questioning at the root. A sanitized problem of atmospheric chemistry is used to funnel attention into lifestyle choices or filling out feedback forms for the monster’s suggestion box.

The way to help people is to help people. And the first way to do that is to stop f&%king them over.

My burger made me sick.

Global Warming is Causing Extinction of the Political Species

2007-05-06T15:43:00.000-04:00

Denis G. Rancourt
February 2006

[Caucus, The Political Magazine of the Students, University of Ottawa, Vol.6, Issue 3, February-March 2006, page 10.]

A castrated animal looses its territorial and reproductive drives to become primarily concerned with its consumption. Environmentalism is being used to neutralize citizens that would normally be politically engaged in proportion to the magnitude of current problems. Mainstream treatment of global warming, from media reports to Discovery Channel documentaries to Canada’s Two Ton Challenge, and its measurable influence on public opinion and concerned citizen involvement are records of an effective program of indoctrination, away from direct challenges to concentrated and institutionalized power and towards personalized involvement that is in harmony with capital’s undemocratic control of the economy and resources.

Consciousness regarding environmental problems leads to a large array of reactions on a multidimensional continuum that includes at least two end points: To concentrate on one’s own consumer and lifestyle choices and to encourage others to do the same, to treat the problem from the perspective of individual psychology, or to act politically to remove the power structures and institutions that are the societal root of the problem. While it is true that ecological lifestyle choices and effective political commitment are not necessarily contrary, just as one can be a meat eater and a dedicated environmental activist or a vegan vegetarian enrolled in an MBA program, environmental consciousness can be and is manipulated away from any consequential attack on the status quo. The apolitical variety of environmental involvement is strongly encouraged by capital and its government shadow, via everything from foundation funding to media coverage to government programs to responsible corporate citizen endorsement, etc.

And let us be clear, the status quo is a world run by profit-driven investors and corporations, backed by military might, that are by far the main destructive forces on the planet. If we shed our privileged perspective for a moment and let go of the absurd notion that the greatest threat to humankind is global warming and associated climate changes, we might see the Empire and its satellites for what they are, we might see war crimes and exploitation on a scale that would perturb even a global circulation model theorist.

The best measure of these crimes is not anthropogenic CO2 emission. There are more graphic statistics than that. There are real and immediate regional and continental-scale environmental consequences that are best measured by their impacts on life, human life in particular since we inhabit every environment. These include: the effects of economic sanctions on national populations, declared and undeclared wars of occupation, US state-sponsored terrorism (most other terrorist networks pale in comparison), the effects of capital mobility (in both First and Third Worlds), the effects of First World financed corruption, the effects of capital exploitation via national debts, the effects of First World imposed economic structural adjustments, the effects of forced market, work-force, and resource access on the terms set by capital (i.e., so-called globalization), the consequences to native inhabitants of being in the unfortunate situation of living on resource-rich territories, the effects of television, mass media, and advertising on the human spirit and on family and community, etc. These translate into traditional environmental measures such as: depleted uranium pollution on regional scales (ugly stuff if you plan on having a family in the next thousand years), chemical industry accidents in populated areas, deforestation and associated water table losses, agri-business impacts on soil depletion, water pollution, food safety, habitat destruction, etc., ecological, biological, and societal consequences of human pharmaceutical use, etc.

Communities based on the quality of human connections, not serving corporate greed or manufactured dreams of wealth, fame, and immortality, and tied to the needs of others and their dependence on a shared environment, are sustainable and environmentally sound. The environmental movement itself is an expression of this vital human thrust but, as informed First Worlders, we cannot simply behave as though an ideal world of collaborating communities of sensitive individuals were possible under the present regime of madness. We need to force our governments and corporations to stop destroying the web of such communities that spontaneously wants to create itself. We have a responsibility to sustainably risk as much as we can in being as effective as possible in dismantling the power structures that will otherwise turn our planet into an illusion of heaven for few and a real hell for everybody.

The enemy is not individual stupidity or any human trait. The enemy is the very real network of exploitation and mind control that we have allowed to take root in our society. We must take it out, action by action, reaching deeper and deeper with every new tactic and strategy. We must be as conscious of our mental and political environments as we have become knowledgeable of atmospheric chemistry. Let us be environmental at home and political – far beyond voting and postcards to MPs – at work. Consider that we are at war. This is a war, literally. It is insane. It could destroy the planet. It’s time to be radical; to uproot the cancer of undemocratically controlled investment capital and to disallow capital and military invasions.

Radicals needed. Environmentalists go home.

Epilogue: I have received some rather harsh criticism for this piece. By "Environmentalists go home" I mean go to the source; the fact that environmentalism can be an expression of community building but is not activism in itself. I explain this in detail in Activism and Risk - Life beyond altruism. These writings are intended to jolt community builders into realizing the need for activism.

The Corporate Climate Coup

2007-05-06T15:07:00.000-04:00

David F. Noble
May 2007

This article reports the hidden side of the present media frenzy surrounding global warming: How large financiers and corporations have promoted and appropriated the warming movement...

This article was first published on Activist Teacher HERE.

It is a companion article to DGR's Global Warming: Truth or Dare?

Global Warming: Truth or Dare?

2007-05-06T14:06:00.000-04:00

Denis G. Rancourt
February 2007

This article is a broad radical analysis of the global warming social, media, and scientific phenomenon. It was first published on Activist Teacher HERE.

It was reviewed and critiqued in The Dominion HERE.

It inspired collaborator David Noble to research and write The Corporate Climate Coup.