Even climate action at home looks suspiciously like socialism to them; all the calls for high-density affordable housing and brand-new public transit are obviously just ways to give backdoor subsidies to the undeserving poor. Never mind what this war on carbon means to the very premise of global free trade, with its insistence that geographical distance is a mere fiction to be collapsed by Walmarts diesel trucks and Maersks container ships. More fundamentally than any of this, though, is their deep fear that if the free market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught. With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good at all. And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time -- whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market. Imagine, for a moment, how all this looks to a guy like Heartland president Joseph Bast, a genial bearded fellow who studied economics at the University of Chicago and who told me in a sit-down interview that his personal calling is freeing people from the tyranny of other people. To Bast, climate action looks like the end of the world. Its not, or at least it doesnt have to be, but, for all intents and purposes, robust, science-based emission reduction is the end of HIS world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and deepening the crisis. - Naomi Klein
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:24:05 +0000
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