Injustice for All?

By Margaret Corvid, Jacobin

05 January 16

We can hate the Oregon gunmen’s worldview without wishing state violence on them.

group of armed men are holed up today in the tiny headquarters of the Malheur Federal Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon, camping with their food and guns in a handful of government buildings.

They are right-wing militiamen from across the country. They say they stand for liberty, property rights, and the state of Oregon, and that they are protesting against the mighty injustice that has been done to the Hammonds, a father, Dwight, and his son, Steven: ranchers who face a five-year sentence for setting illegal fires on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. In their eyes, the militiamen have occupied buildings that are the seat of illegal federal domination of area ranchers.

The Hammonds were arrested and jailed in 2011 for two arsons, in 2001 and 2006, which burned dozens of acres of federal land. The Hammonds say the fires were range management burns started on their own property, and though they were convicted, the judge in the case sentenced the elderly Dwight to three months in prison, and sent Steven to jail for a year and a day — terms far shorter than the federally mandated sentence of five years, as specified in the 1996 Federal Antiterrorism Effective Death Penalty Act. The federal government appealed the decision, and the Ninth Circuit Court upheld the mandated five-year sentence.

The Hammonds — due to enter prison today — have disavowed the militiamen, who are led by Ammon Bundy and his two brothers. The Bundy brothers are the sons of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who held his own standoff with the BLM in 2014 in protest of grazing fees for cattle. When BLM rangers tried to confiscate five hundred cattle they said were grazing illegally on public land, Bundy sought justice outside the courts, calling over fifty supporters, many armed, to defend them.

The standoff was reported widely and received support from Fox News and numerous politicians, including Rand Paul. Although the Hammond case and the Bundy standoff happened in different states, their grievances reside in a wider context of landowner dissatisfaction with federal land management. They adhere to an idiosyncratic legal interpretation of federal law which claims that individual states and their citizens hold rightful title to public lands, not the government.

For many supporters the cause of the Hammonds’ freedom represents a specific struggle — decades of rancher dissatisfaction with government — but the Bundy brothers claim to be equal opportunity patriots and present the occupation as a casus belli for right-wing radicals of many stripes.

The interpretation of the US Constitution and the armed strategy favored by the gunmen are both rooted in racist Christian militias like the 1970s Posse Comitatus, and the armed force that Ammon Bundy and his brothers have summoned through social media are likely riddled with white supremacists. The movement the Bundys claim to represent is suffused with racism, and while Ammon sounded somewhat bewildered during an early morning CNN interview, the militia members standing alongside him have links to known hate groups.

Ammon’s father, Cliven, shared his views on black people at a press conference during the 2014 Nevada standoff:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

On Twitter, Ammon shows his hand a bit more subtly; an account purporting to be Ammon has claimed the militiamen’s “peaceful protest” is morally superior to that of Black Lives Matter because it has disrupted no private property or commerce. By triggering a week-long school closure, it appears to have disrupted both.

But there is no doubt that these militiamen have the nation’s attention. The response from many progressives has been loud: clamoring for the world to call the Oregon gunmen terrorists. And while that term is a fraught one, it is essential for us to raise our voices, contrasting how the state and media treat these gunmen with how they treat the black women, children, and men gunned down by police, or the protesters that fight against police violence. Similarly, rebuking media who call the Oregon gunmen “protesters” offers an important corrective to widespread Islamophobia in the press.

But what we must not do is call for the police to move in with the tear gas and rubber bullets of Ferguson and Baltimore, or the live rounds of MOVE or Wounded Knee, because equal injustice is not justice done.

It’s no surprise that liberals are invoking state action, calling the gunmen seditious, traitors, implying their support of a violent government response. Esquire’s Charles Pierce writes:

This is an act of armed sedition against lawful authority. That is all that it is, and that is quite enough. This is not “an expression of anti-government sentiment . . . These are men with guns who have declared themselves outside the law. These are men with guns who have taken something that belongs to all of us. These are traitors and thieves who got away with this dangerous nonsense once, and have been encouraged to get away with it again.

The improbable logic of many liberals is that state violence can be held to a moral rubric, that the deeply corrupt American state, bound to the functional psychopaths of the one percent who rule it, can be induced to be fair.

It cannot. The current US state is racist and venal; it doesn’t call the Oregon gunmen terrorists and doesn’t mow them down because their occupation cannot threaten it even a fraction as much as Black Lives Matter actions have. The right-wing militia movement is virulent and dangerous, and its ideals nourish the worldview of people like Dylann Roof, but Black Lives Matter questions the very legitimacy of our society. That threat, and systemic racism, decides when the government pulls the trigger; mass action, not words, will hold it to account.

How we respond to those calling for blood in Oregon makes manifest the crucial dividing line between liberals and socialists.

A socialist approaches the state with critical caution. She might call for the incarceration of a rapist, but she knows only a people’s challenge to misogyny and capitalism can end rape culture. She demands that police be sacked and jailed for their racist murders, and she fights to reform the police to spare lives, but she also fights against the gentrification of communities and the criminalization of the marginalized that the police routinely enforce.

Though we hate and fear the worldview the Oregon gunmen profess, subjecting them to the same brutality the state metes out against black people would simply empower the militia movement. Ammon might call this occupation peaceful, but there are people hunkered in that refuge who are ready to die for their beliefs. Giving them their martyrs would only strengthen their cause.

The racist and radical right, while spared the crackdown experienced by the marginalized, the Left, and the poor have also been brutally put down in recent times. In Ruby Ridge, Idaho, a white supremacist waged a standoff that ended in the death of his wife and young son; in Waco, Texas a tense standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian doomsday cult led to conflagration and massacre in which seventy-six people died.

These events fuel the virulent, aggrieved entitlement of the Right; both names are legends on the lips of the militiamen and their supporters. Strategy and human mercy demand that we not add Malheur to this grisly list.

The Question Isn't of Saving the World Via Renewables but of How Much Can Be Saved

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

05 January 16

umanity is not abandoning fossil fuels fast enough to avoid some massive changes to our world’s climate, with all the implications that change has for sea level, coastal erosion, extreme weather, and desertification and drought. There have been impressive advances in adoption of solar and wind technology in 2015, but compared to the crisis, it is not nearly enough. I say this not to provoke despair but simply to underline that the crisis can be bad, or worse, or the absolute worst. We get to decide for future generations the kind of world they will live in.

The overriding question is how bad it will get. I am going to talk to an American audience, because the US is the one place where all this is still controversial (!), and this country produces 5.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, among the highest per capita emissions in the world. I am therefore going to use Fahrenheit, since the Centigrade system confuses the 315 million Americans and downplays the threat.

All this is on my mind because I’ve been teaching history and climate change, and I think a historical sense of relative change over time is useful here. There is no point in talking absolutes.

Basically, and despite the more optimistic goals adopted in Paris at COP21, the world is locked into a rise of 3.6 degrees F. (2 degrees C.) already. Note that that is an average rise of surface temperature, including Antarctica, the cold oceans (most of the world’s surface area), etc. So if you are on land in a warm place like Arizona or California, it isn’t just that instead of a hot summer day being 115 F. in the shade, it will be 118.6 F. in the shade. The 3.6 degrees increase on average could take you into the 120s F.

The only question is, will we go on up from there– to 7.2 degrees F or 12 degrees F. average increase? Because that could make Arizona south of Flagstaff uninhabitable in the summer.

So, will we keep to a 3.6 degrees F. average increase, or go on up to 5 degrees, 7 degrees (click on this link to see what that would mean), 10 degrees? That’s the question.

James Hansen, the founding father of contemporary climate change science when he was at NASA, believes that a 3.6 degrees F. increase is already potentially deadly– and that is what we are bequeathing to our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren; more would be deadlier yet.

The problem is that there are potential tipping points into new, complex or chaotic climate systems, and the hotter we make it the more likely we are to set off a tripwire. If we warm up the frozen methane clathrates on the sea floor of our continental shelves, they could burp up the most potent warming gas known, and lead to a one-two punch of warming, as may have happened in the distant past. Paleo-archeologists in Sweden found evidence in the soil of a 10,000-year-long stationary storm during a very warm period of the earth’s past. That might be hard on your roof.

Likely Miami and New Orleans are already gone. New York and Washington D.C. substantially gone. Don’t bequeath your grandchild a house in West Palm Beach. Southern Florida is where most of the state’s groundwater comes from, but the soil down there is limestone and porous, so rising sea water is going to seep up into the aquifers. Miami will be submerged, because no dike system can keep the water from welling up underground. A lot of Floridians will have to move north or the state will have to put in a lot of solar desalinization plants (but those will gradually be submerged, too, so you’d have to keep rebuilding them in each generation).

But then the question becomes, whether we will also lose cities at higher elevations– 10, 15, even 30 or 40 feet above sea level.

So I am arguing for a sliding scale. The more emissions we avoid now, the less bad it will be in the future.

There is no economical way to remove carbon from the atmosphere once it is there. About half of it will go into the ocean over the next few hundred years, causing increased salinity and a die-off of probably half of marine life, the fish on which many humans depend. The rest will be washed out of the atmosphere by binding with igneous and other rocks, over 100,000 years. If, because of celestial mechanics, we had another peak glaciation period in our future over that 100,000 years, as happened 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, it has been forestalled. The species homo sapiens sapiens is probably about 120,000 years old and largely evolved in relatively cold conditions. We have now set up a future as long as our own past of Hot World, a world very unlike the one we evolved to be adapted to.

Every ton of carbon dioxide we avoid now (and Americans put out on average 16 metric tons of CO2 a year per person) is a temperature increase that doesn’t happen. When I moved into my present home in the early 1990s I put in insulation, which substantially cut my natural gas heating bill. I put solar panels on my roof and got an electric car a couple of years ago. I figure in just those 2 years I’ve avoided something like 7 or 8 tons my household would otherwise have emitted. And the insulation was more carbon avoided. A gift to my, and your, grandchildren. Not everyone can do this; some people are renters or take public transportation and are probably already more virtuous than I. The task before us can’t be accomplished anyway by individuals, but that is no reason for us each not to do our part. That is part of my argument for scalability.

Germany shows that a mature, growing economy can move relatively rapidly to renewables for electricity generation. In 2015 about a third of German electricity came from renewables. While some complain that its price for electricity is high, that is a trick. Germans put in insulation and got more efficient appliances, so they actually spend less on electricity than Texans even if their cost per KWh is higher. Anyway those price comparisons always leave out the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Coal looks like it can generate electricity for 5 cents a kilowatt hour. The real cost if you look at lost real estate, health costs in cities like Beijing and Delhi, etc., is probably closer to 48 cents a kilowatt hour. So Germany’s electricity from renewables is much cheaper in reality.

Germany did it by providing financing for the soft costs of renewables– installation, etc., which are increasingly the bottleneck in the US. The state of Michigan gave me no help whatsoever with my panels and in fact apparently wants to punish me for putting them in. Michigan has lost a million people since I moved there in the early 80s, and could benefit from an enlightened energy policy. This situation shows that Mark Twain was wrong when he said, “Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.” Fleas would have the sense to respond to being cooked by high temperatures.

My own university, the University of Michigan, has among the more backward energy policies of any major university in the country. Ohio State leased a wind farm that will supply 25% of its electricity. The University of Hawaii is going completely green by 2045. The University of Michigan still plans on emitting like 510,000 tons of CO2 a year in 2025, down only slightly from today’s amount (there is a greenwashing element in the story, since this projected amount is a 25% decrease from 2006 levels– but the baseline should be 1990, since emissions increased enormously after Kyoto). If even universities, which ought to be centers of enlightened thinking and innovation, feels no more urgency than this, what can we hope from everyone else?

So, this thing is on a scale. We are going to a 3.6 degrees F. average increase. We could go to 5 degrees F or 10 degrees F. You or rather your great-grandchildren won’t like a 10 degrees F. increase. You won’t even like 3.6 degree F. very much (it won’t kick in for a while). It is up to you how bad it is going to get.