[✔️] June 18, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Inside China report, Kevin Anderson, Far-right politics and climate, The Big Myth - new book, 2015 MIT gets serious

[Richard Pauli]

/*June*//*18, 2023*/

/[ Inside China Podcast 28 min audio ] /
*China, climate change and El Nino: an emerging food, water and power 
crisis*
South China Morning Post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eD9JD0Dx_k



/[ Kevin Anderson opinion https://youtu.be/P7885tb_BiI audio ]/
*Is it too late for 1.5°C? Interview with Climate Scientist Kevin Anderson*
GND Media
May 3, 2023  GND Media
Find us on: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gndmediauk
Insta: gndmediauk
FB: gndmediauk

This week on the show we are delighted to have back on the podcast 
Professor Kevin Anderson. Kevin is a energy and climate scientist 
formerly of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change.  We discuss what is 
Net Zero and why it is hindering our ability to reduce emissions. Is 
1.5°C warming still viable? And what would that mean for the planet? 
Kevin also talks us through what governments of the world need to do 
right now to keep the planet safe.

Links
Climate Uncensored: Kevin's new climate science education project.
Shout outs
Michael Gove MP: for focusing the country on the government's disastrous 
fossil fuel projects, including the Cumbria coalmine.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: for their excellent work on climate change and 
colonialism. We'd love you to come on the show!
Everyone out there building and fighting for a better world in 2023.

https://youtu.be/P7885tb_BiI


/
//[ Beckwith video essay about climate and far-right politics essays in 
the Guardian  50 mins ]/
*Vicious Accelerating Feedbacks Between Far Right Politics and Climate 
Catastrophe*
Paul Beckwith
Jun 17, 2023
There is no denying it. There are vicious amplifying feedbacks in play 
between the far-right political mobs and accelerating climate change, 
and they love it.

As the far-right gains more and more political power, they trash climate 
change policies, and anybody working to reduce climate change. Thus, 
climate catastrophe worsens, and humanity experiences more and more 
extreme weather events, with higher intensity and impacts, for longer 
durations. This causes large numbers of people to migrate as they lose 
their homes, cities, and livelihoods. These climate refugees have to go 
somewhere, and they try to immigrate to safer havens. This, in turn, 
leads to many countries being inundated with hopeful would be 
immigrants, and after a while leads to far-right populous political 
parties blaming them for all the problems, so there is a backlash within 
many countries, with hard right parties gaining power, and then 
immediately trashing all climate policies. The vicious cycle gets 
amplified, over and over again.

Let’s use wildfires in Canada as an example, since these fires are on 
peoples minds.

Climate change has caused Canada, a northern country to warm about 2 
degrees C. This spring has been the warmest and driest in the 84 years 
of reanalysis records. No surprise then, that many wildfires have been 
triggered, mostly by lightning and human carelessness, or sparks, or 
cigarette butts, or hot mufflers.

The far-right never wastes an opportunity to lie and spread the most 
outlandish conspiracy theories. Without evidence, they blame arsonists 
for setting all these fires, and weather people for making up the heat 
waves and droughts, and immigrants for destroying the country. Their 
vicious echo chambers spread lies at the speed of light around the 
world, and there are more and more people believing their nonsense.

If this vicious cycle is not broken, we have zero chance to avoid a very 
dystopian world, much sooner than people think.

My call on the US election. Trump will win the election from his jail 
cell, then pardon himself and all the Jan 6 people, and then put Biden 
in jail.

Dystopia will rule.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDbRhDMqS1E



/[  New book from Naomi Oreskes  ]/
*Book Review | ‘The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe 
Government and Love the Free Market’ by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway*
An Exploration of Market Fundamentalism by the Authors of ‘Merchants of 
Doubt’
By Brian Tanguay
Fri Jun 16, 2023

“False information need not be coherent to be effective, and the 
specters of vanished liberty and tyrannical government regulation are 
easy enough to conjure.” So wrote critic A.O. Scott in the New York 
Times in 2015 about Merchants of Doubt, a documentary film based on the 
book of the same title by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

Merchants of Doubt chronicled climate-change denialism. Oreskes and 
Conway investigated “why intelligent, educated people would deny the 
reality of man-made climate change.” Why such people, predominantly men, 
some of them scientists, would wage a concerted campaign to cast doubt 
on settled science. Was it simply to obtain position and privilege and 
wealth?

Turns out the primary motivation was ideological. As the authors write 
in the introduction to their latest collaboration, The Big Myth, “these 
men feared that government regulation of the marketplace — whether to 
address climate change or protect consumers from lethal products — would 
be the first step on a slippery slope to socialism, communism, or worse.”

Market fundamentalism is a belief in the notion that free markets are 
not only the optimal way to run an economic system, but the only means 
of organization that will not ultimately destroy other freedoms. 
Generating wealth is part of economic freedom, but what distinguishes 
market fundamentalism is casting economic freedom and political freedom 
as inseparable. The authors spent a decade scrutinizing this notion and 
more than 400 pages unpacking and debunking it.

It’s an inquiry that ranges widely over 20th-century America, from 
machinations by the National Electric Light Association to hinder the 
government from delivering rural electrification, to the National 
Association of Manufacturers trying to influence the curriculum taught 
in universities, to the ultimate pitchman for market fundamentalism, 
Ronald Reagan, assuring the American people that big government was the 
root of our problems and the magic market the solution. Intellectual 
justification was provided by such notables as Adam Smith, Friedrich von 
Hayek, and Milton Friedman, with a significant assist from industry 
moguls who initially funded the Chicago School of Economics.

Creating the myth of the market as free, benevolent, fair, just, and 
infallible required nearly a century of concerted effort, money, 
propaganda, and ceaseless proselytizing. Ideas take root in society when 
they’re developed, sustained, and promoted by credible individuals and 
institutions. Capitalism and freedom were cast as two sides of the same 
coin, indivisible and conjoined, with the implied warning that 
communism, socialism, or tyranny would result, should they be decoupled. 
Before long, capitalism and democracy were synonymous, as was the idea 
that capitalism aligned with Christian values. Self-interest and profit 
were sanctified. One could feel justified in turning away from the poor 
and embracing the rich and come to believe that no such thing as the 
common good existed. As the authors note, “The captains of American 
industry had found a way to turn Protestant theology on its head, from 
embracing the poor to celebrating the rich.”

By the second half of the 20th century, the mantra of American 
conservatism was limited government, low taxation, personal 
responsibility, and personal freedom. This ethos filled the void caused 
by the weakening of the New Deal coalition, the War on Poverty, the 
Great Society, and the decline of organized labor. The world was 
changing; former adversaries like Germany and Japan were beginning to 
challenge America’s industrial and economic hegemony. According to 
Milton Freidman and others from the Chicago School, American business 
was overtaxed and excessively regulated; labor unions had too much sway 
and were an impediment to competitiveness; government at the state and 
federal level was bloated, slow, and inefficient when compared to the 
nimble private sector.

Historical memory tends to be brief. A new generation of Americans 
forgot that the Progressive Era and the New Deal were remedies for the 
failures of market capitalism.

Revolutions usually topple ruling elites. Not so the revolution ushered 
by Reagan, the former pitchman for General Electric. Reagan promoted the 
interests and ideology of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. 
But, as Oreskes and Conway make clear, the turn from the era of big 
government was a bipartisan project begun when president Jimmy Carter, a 
Democrat, deregulated the airline and trucking industries. Carter sought 
to lower prices and modernize sectors of the economy, a reasonable 
objective in the late 1970s. While it’s fair to note that Carter started 
the trend, by the time Bill Clinton’s administration deregulated the 
telecommunications industry in 1996, followed by the financial services 
industry at the tail end of his second term, deregulation was a mania.

The results? Consumers gained more choices, and in some cases lower 
prices, at least at the outset. But according to Oreskes and Conway, 
deregulation of telecommunications decreased competition, encouraged 
mergers and acquisitions, and virtual monopolies, while in financial 
services it laid the foundation for the 2008 subprime mortgage debacle, 
the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The financial 
markets failed and the government raced to the rescue of institutions 
that had become “too big to fail” at a cost to taxpayers of a half 
trillion dollars. So much for self-regulation and magic.

Like other types of fundamentalism, market fundamentalism bows beneath 
the weight of its many contradictions. The assumption that business can 
do no wrong and government no right has contributed to making the United 
States fabulously wealthy for the few and destructively unequal for 
many. In terms of life expectancy, health, education, and overall 
quality of existence, the United States trails behind much poorer 
countries. The intellectual proponents and cheerleaders for market 
fundamentalism as the only possible capitalist arrangement either didn’t 
recognize, or chose to ignore, that under regulated markets can be as 
tyrannical as a dictatorship.

I hope this book crosses the path of legislators, governors, mayors, 
bankers, CEOs, judges, and others, who know, on some level, that extreme 
inequality of wealth and opportunity will never be ameliorated by the 
market. As Oreskes and Conway put it, “In domain after domain after 
domain, overreliance on markets and under reliance on government have 
cost the American people dearly.”

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books. 
https://calirb.com/

https://www.independent.com/2023/06/16/book-review-the-big-myth-how-american-business-taught-us-to-loathe-government-and-love-the-free-market-by-naomi-oreskes-and-erik-m-conway/



/[ The news archive - looking back at when MIT got serious ]/
/*June 18, 2015*/
June 18, 2015:
The Boston Globe reports:

    "In a sweeping new report, a climate change committee at MIT has
    thrown its support behind targeted divestment from coal and tar sand
    companies and called for the creation of a new institute dedicated
    to global warming.

    "The 52-page report, released this week, described climate change as
    'society’s grandest challenge of the present day, possibly of all
    time,' and urged broad action in confronting it.

    "'The time has come for MIT to play a prominent, visible part in the
    action and solutions needed to confront the climate challenge,' the
    report stated.

    "Final recommendations will be presented to Massachusetts Institute
    of Technology President Rafael Reif this summer. Reif is expected to
    unveil a climate change plan this fall."

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/06/17/mit-panel-calls-for-targeted-divestment-coal-tar-sands/qBhGKWHP1VLv7orFP9qtsI/story.html# 



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