Dennis Perrin: Will To Power

For pure shits and giggles, this post by Dennis Perrin on the Samantha Power affair is not to be missed. It's also pretty much all that needs to be said.

A Cold Wind Blows

For the same reason that rising temperatures in the 1990s is not proof positive of pending climate disaster, this winter's intense global chill isn't straightforward reason for to warm up the skeptic arguments. In fact, I think the debate over this bit of evidence misses the important point. What's important about the devastating cold snaps of the past few months is not that they discount the global warming science, but that they discount the argument over the science itself. In the report linked above, it is mentioned that:

"In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call 'the Winter Snow Disaster' has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation."

The same weather events would not have had the same impact in the US, or in any other industrial society. With our greater resources, we are able to dampen the impacts of these weather events. And when we don't, it is due to social and political neglect, as in Katrina, not due to any necessary threat the weather poses. The social and political change indicated by these weather events is the same indicated by any extreme weather event. Industrial development is not the problem, it is a partial solution - one whose potential is only fully realized in conditions of social and political equality. We must look to the social, not natural, causes of natural disasters.

Environmentalism and the Left

(Readers: sorry for the absence - jury duty and paper-writing got in the way)

Climate-Resistance has a nice post on the difference between the left and environmentalism, or at least, on why criticism of environmentalism is not inherently conservative. (Shameless self-promotion, they also quote an article I wrote.) The question of whether environmentalism is conservative or radical is I think one of the most important questions for us to think about these days. Environmentalism is the dominant ideology on the left, but it crosses political boundaries with ease, and draws as much of its thinking from the status quo as from any challenge to it. It's not just that mainstream institutions like the Nobel Prize committee and the United Nations have celebrated its ideas. It is also the embrace of its ideas by downright conservative politicians, like John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in the United States. Both the rapidity with which environmentalism was accepted by the mainstream (essentially one generation), and the ease with which it crosses traditional divides, contrasts strongly with left wing thinking of the past. Socialists, for instance, had to struggle for decades even to win small victories and to spread their ideas; and they were never accepted on the right. A thorough-going critique of environmental ideas from the standpoint of left political thinking is still wanting, but Climate-Resistance is right to emphasize the point that "the Left is not characterised by opposition to economic growth; its goal has been to distribute its riches more rationally amongst those who actually generate capital, rather than just those who simply own it."