Sunny Climate Nonsense

By Tim DeChristopher, Tim DeChristopher's Website

13 September 15

omehow, Jonathan Chait’s New York Magazine article entitled “The Sunniest Climate Change Story You’ve Ever Read” left me feeling pretty dark. I knew why I was angry at Chait’s blatantly ahistorical article that attempted to erase the climate movement from the struggle against climate change. He was devaluing the people who have actually been fighting to stop climate change in order to make his point that we should all relax because capitalists and Democratic Party politicians have it all under control.

Chait’s timeline is that in 2010 Obama “tried to pass a cap-and-trade law that would bring the U.S. into compliance with the reductions it had pledged in Copenhagen.” When that failed, “environmentalists sank into despair — where many of them have stayed slumped ever since, having decided the battle is lost.”

Never mind that the cap and trade bill had no connection to the Copenhagen goal of no more than 2 degrees Celsius, but rather was a corporate welfare bill that would have had little or no impact on climate. The whole notion that the cap and trade bill was in response to Copenhagen commitments, when the bill actually passed the House of Representative six months before Copenhagen, reveals that Chait was not paying attention.

Most importantly, Chait’s assertion that “environmentalists” gave up after 2010 is insane. The very fact that he still thinks the activists fighting climate change are “environmentalists” indicates that he is completely oblivious of the actual climate justice movement, which has been consistently growing in scale, diversity and aggression since 2010. That growth was on display a year ago when 400,000 people marched through New York City. The 200 coal plant closures which Chait celebrates as progress did not magically shut down because of the invisible hand of the market or because of Obama’s yet-to-be-implemented Clean Power Plan. Every single one of them was shut down under pressure from local, frontline activists supported by a national movement. That same movement of interconnected, grassroots communities of resistance have fought off countless new power plants, pipelines, coal and gas export facilities, fracking and other new fossil fuel projects over the past five years.

In fact, much of that resistance has fought the fossil fuel expansion policies of President Obama, who Chait gives most of the credit for the shift away from fossil fuels. Just this summer, the Pacific Northwest has mounted fierce resistance toShell’s Arctic drillingthat was green-lighted by the Obama administration. That region had already witnessed years of activism against the opening of the Powder River Basin to coal development, a unilateral move by President Obama that willrelease far more carbonthan the Clean Power Plan will cut. After Obama vastly expanded offshore oil drilling in 2010, a move regarded asundermining the effortsof Senate Democrats to pass a climate bill, Gulf Coast activists fought for years to hold BP accountable for its despair inducing crime in the gulf.

And not even a willfully blind neoliberal like Chait could have possibly missed the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. The one where in 2011, rather than being slumped in despair, over 1200 activists were arrested outside the White House trying to wake up the President, who at that point religiously avoided even talking about climate change. The following year, grassroots activists with the Tar Sands Blockade didn’t “sink” into despair but rose into trees to blockade the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Obama “fast-tracked” while celebrating the massive expansion of oil and gas drilling and infrastructure under his administration. Perhaps most critically and most underrated, when Obama began his reelection campaign in the fall of 2011, young activists with 350.org disrupted every single campaign event to demand he stop Keystone XL. They sent the message that unless he stepped up his game on climate change, they would literally stand in the way of his election. If we’re looking for why the politics of climate change are beginning to turn around, we should start with that movement.

That’s why if Chait actually believed his narrative about a savior Obama and his corporate allies saving the climate in the face of activist apathy, he would indeed be insane. But I doubt he does believe it. His revisionist history is simply necessary to support his neoliberal position that the technocrats running the world are doing a good job, so the rest of us can relax. Jonathan Chait claims to be dispensing optimism and hope when what he is really selling is a dangerous brand of complacency.

The crux of Chait’s deception about the disappearance of climate activism is the claim that despair is paralyzing. In order to erase the climate movement of the past five years, his narrative is that once it became clear that it was too late to avoid catastrophic levels of climate change, those who acknowledged that reality plunged into despair and depression and have been stuck in a paralyzed fatalism ever since. He asserts that despair “renders us passive bystanders to history and, by hiding our agency, distorts our vision of the world.” He even lists Dr. James Hansen and Dale Jamieson among his examples of people who “seek the release of final defeat rather than endless struggle in the face of hopeless odds.” Even though Chait apparently didn’t read past the harsh subtitle of Jamieson’s book to his calls for continued action, it stands to reason that someone who is still writing books about climate change has not completely given up. And it is obviously absurd and disingenuous to imply that James Hansen, who has consistently escalated his struggle against climate change for the past 30 years, has somehow given up.

The thing is, myself and most of the people I know who are most committed to fighting climate change, from James Hansen and Bill McKibben to the college students blockading pipelines, have experienced despair and depression. And we are still fighting for climate justice. We have looked at our desperate situation and despaired. Many of us grieve on a regular basis. And yet we continue to struggle to defend the world we love. Chait rightly notes that the complexity of the climate crisis defies simplistic black and white thinking. But the easy dualism between optimism and pessimism displayed by Chait and many others is perhaps the most important kind of simplistic thinking that is found lacking in response to the climate crisis.

The utilitarian notion that people have to expect a positive outcome from their actions in order to act seems obvious. That notion might be obvious, but I believe it is also wrong. I don’t believe optimism is the only form of hope. In fact, I don’t even think it is a particularly strong form of hope. Optimism has a fickle dependency on shifting situations and often requires the kind of mental gymnastics displayed by Chait. The hope of many of the post-despair climate activists I know is grounded in something deeper and more resilient. Our hope is grounded in our love for the people and planet around us. The only way to be faithful to that love is to keep fighting for it, which we have been doing whether Jonathan Chait was paying attention or not.

Two Short Paragraphs That Summarize the US Approach to Human Rights Advocacy

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

13 September 15

n his excellent article on the unique guilt-by-association standard being imposed on newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, my colleague Jon Schwarz references a passage from a 2013 Washington Post article that I want to highlight because of how illuminating it is. That Post article describes the Obama administration’s growing alliance with human-rights-abusing regimes in Africa, which allow the U.S. to expand its drone operations there, and contains this unusually blunt admission from a “senior U.S. official” (emphasis added):

Human-rights groups have also accused the U.S. government of holding its tongue about political repression in Ethiopia, another key security partner in East Africa.

“The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass,” acknowledged a senior U.S. official who specializes in Africa but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.”

The Post article went on to note that the Bush administration “took the same approach” and that while “many U.S. diplomats and human-rights groups had hoped Obama would shift his emphasis in Africa from security to democracy . . . that has not happened.” In fact, “‘there’s pretty much been no change at all,’ the official said. ‘In the end, it was an almost seamless transition from Bush to Obama.'”

The italicized portion of the quote explains the crux of feigned U.S. concerns for human rights abuses: it’s never genuine, never anything more than a weapon cynically exploited to advance U.S. interests. The U.S. loves human-rights-abusing regimes and always has, provided they “cooperate”: meaning, honors U.S. dictates. On human rights abuses, such compliant regimes “get at least a free pass”: at least, meaning either passive acquiescence or active support. The only time the U.S. Government pretends to care in the slightest about human rights abuses is when they’re carried out by “countries that don’t cooperate,” in which case those flamboyant objections to abuses are used by U.S. officials as punishment for disobedience: to “ream them as best we can.”

This is not remotely new, of course, nor should it be even slightly surprising for people who pay minimal attention to the role of the U.S. Government in the world. But this nonetheless highlights what baffles me most about U.S. political discourse: how – whenever it’s time to introduce the next “humanitarian war” or other forms of attack against the latest Evil Dictator or Terrorist Group of the Moment – so many otherwise intelligent and well-reasoning people are willing to believe that the U.S. Government is motivated by opposition to human rights abuses and oppression.

Support for human rights abuses and tyranny – not opposition to it – is a staple of U.S. foreign policy. Standing alone: how can anyone believe that the same government that lavishes the Saudi regime with arms, surveillance capabilities and intelligence is waging war or using other forms of violence in order to stop human rights abuses? [Read this informative New York Times article today describing the central role played by the U.S. government in the ongoing, truly heinous slaughter of Yemeni civilians by its close Saudi ally, consistent with the months of Yemen-based reporting done by The Intercept on these atrocities].

If one wants to spout the Kissingerian “realist” view that only U.S. interests matter and human rights abuses are irrelevant, then fine: one can make that argument cogently and honestly if amorally. But to take seriously U.S. rhetoric on human rights abuses and freedom – we’re going to war against or otherwise sternly opposing these monstrous human-rights abusers – is totally mystifying in light of U.S. actions. The next time you’re tempted to do that, just read what U.S. officials, in their rare, candid moments, themselves say about how they cynically concoct and exploit human rights concerns.

Aside from accuracy for its own sake, this most matters because of what it means for proposed American “humanitarian wars.” Even if you accept the extremely dubious proposition that the U.S. could manipulate political outcomes for the better with bombs and military force in complex, far-away countries, it utterly lacks the desire, the will, to do that; it wants only to ensure those outcomes serve its interests, which more often than not means supporting despotism or, at best, chaos and disorder.

That’s why the feigned U.S. concern for humanitarianism in Libya – we are so very eager to protect the Libyan People from abuse and tyranny and bring them freedom – extended only to dropping bombs on that country and completely disappeared the moment that fun, glorious part was over. Even though it’s self-satisfying to believe your government is some sort of crusader for human rights and freedom, it’s not asking too much to just be as honest about U.S. exploitation of human rights concerns as this “senior U.S. official” was when talking to The Washington Post.