Defining a Moral Choice

Richard North Patterson argues that

climate change is the quintessential test of moral character and imagination. Its ultimate impact will be more profound than nuclear war. Yet, like nuclear war, we can dismiss its menace in the moment ― or reason that the damage we now visit on the planet may foreclose the future of others but not our own.

So while the Pentagon reaffirms climate change as a national security threat, the Republican platform is all about denial.

In 2016, Republican voters got exactly what they voted for: an adamant climate change denier, the most relentlessly anti-environmental president in modern U.S. history.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers point to the underlying problem.

At the heart of the issue is capitalism, a root cause of many of the crises we face today. Capitalism drives growth at all costs including exploitation of people and the planet. It drives competition and individualism instead cooperation and community. It requires militarism as the strong arm for corporations to pillage other countries for their resources and militarized police to suppress dissent at home.

They describe the Green Party platform:

The Green Party divides the Green New Deal into four pillars: An economic bill of rights, a green transition, financial reform, and a functioning democracy. The economic bill of rights includes not only a job at a living wage for all who want it but also single payer healthcare, free college education, and affordable housing and utilities. The green transition to renewable energy sources includes building mass transit, "complete streets" that promote walking and biking, local food systems and clean manufacturing. Financial reform includes debt relief, public banks and breaking up the big banks. And the democracy section includes getting money out of politics, guaranteeing the right to vote, strengthening local democracy, democratizing the media and significant changes to the military.

It's a huge task--essentially impossible to imagine under our current political situation. Stan Cox injects a dose of reality into our moral decision.

A socialist transformation is necessary, but that in itself won’t be sufficient to reverse Earth’s ecological degradation unless it is also dedicated to drawing the human economy back within necessary ecological limits while ensuring sufficiency for all and excess for none.

Solving climate change is incompatible with capitalism and although proposals call for greater popular control, Cox has me wondering if solving climate change just might be incompatible with democracy itself.

Any effective strategy to drive emissions down to zero cannot also expect to spur aggregate growth; it would in fact curtail and even reverse the growth of GDP.

Although it really is possible to scale back our economy in a way that improves life for all Americans, such an effort will face stiff opposition at the top of the economic pyramid, the place where the fruits of GDP growth always tend to accumulate. That doesn’t mean just the 1 percent. I have argued that it’s the 33 percent of American households with highest incomes who would need to experience the steepest economic degrowth.

The impacts will come from several directions. An effective climate/equality strategy would reduce profits in industries not involved in green energy conversion or production of needed goods and services. Stock prices of companies not working toward the conversion would fall. Stockholders, owners, investors, and upper managers, the great majority of whom belong to the 33 percent, would bear the brunt.

If shortages and inflation were to strike, then allocation of resources could be adjusted, and price controls, subsidies, fair-shares rationing, and other policies would have to be put in place when and where they are needed. That would result in even greater shifts of income and wealth from the top toward the bottom of the economic scale.

Given a short timeline for taking action, can the wheels of democracy turn fast enough?

Update (January 26):  Sam Pizzigati explains how inequality inhibits combating climate change.

Limiting future global temperature rises ... will require “disruptive shifts” and heighten public anxieties. People will tolerate these disruptions, but only if they believe that everyone is sharing in the sacrifice — the wealthy and powerful included.

The more unequal a wealthy society ... the greater the power of the rich — and the corporations they run — to ignore their debt to Mother Earth.

Update (January 27):  Haydar Khan argues that our predicament is largely a consequence of biological senescence (essentially aging). Bret Weinstein describes it as "ideas that work in the short term but fail and cause vulnerability in the long term". Society favors short term economic benefits over long term survival.

Update (January 28):  Graham Peebles points to complacency as the underlying reason the climate problem isn't solved.

Complacency is reinforced by greed and ignorance, greed for limitless profits, short-term gain and material comfort and ignorance of the scale, range and urgency of the crisis, and of the connection between lifestyle and environmental ruin.

The system demands that irresponsible consumption not only continues, but deepens and expands into areas of the world hitherto relatively untouched by its poison; it obstructs environmentally responsible policies and lacks the flexibility required to face the challenges, certainly within the time-scale needed if the planet is to be restored to health.