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m_d_hI know I can sound uncompromising here in my LJ when I write about politics, especially where politics, poverty, and the environment intersect -- my Green Communism and/or my Zero Population positions.
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With respect to the environment, looking just at the most prominent environmental issue of the day -- global warming -- the underlying reason or motivation for my position is that to stop global warming, to actually stop it, we'd have to cut global emissions by over 90%, perhaps by over 95%. The scale of our global emissions is so massive, it's perhaps a dozen or two dozen or even three dozen times what our atmosphere's "drain" can handle. The sustainable amount of greenhouse gas emissions is practically zero, from the perspective of our current emissions volume.
So if your "solution" is a product that only cuts net emissions by 1/3 -- which sounds like a lot to most people -- it's not really a solution. Especially if you consider that people could end up buying even more copies of this new improved product than they bought of the old product, as exponential global economic & population growth continues in the decades ahead. If you cut emissions by 1/3 per unit, but 30 years from now are selling 50% more units, then you haven't cut emissions at all!
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Right now, over the course of the entire lifecycle of an electric car in the US, accounting for manufacturing, maintenance, batteries, electricity generation, etc., driving an electric car reduces emissions by 1/3 compared to driving a gasoline car.
If you're like me and you barely drive at all, there's no difference in emissions, which is why I bought a gasoline car as my final lifetime car four years ago. Looking at how little I drive compared to the average -- I've driven 18,000 miles in 50 months -- an electric car would've cost more while affording me no net reduction in emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.
But let's say you drive the average 15,000 miles per year in the US. Yes, buying an electric car will save you 1/3 of the emissions had you bought a gasoline car.
1/3 is not a solution when we need to cut emissions by maybe 95%. You're still dumping new emissions into the atmosphere that will continue warming the planet for the next 1,000 years.
Many of you will say -- a 1/3 reduction is better than nothing. Others will look at the scale of the problem and give up entirely and drive a huge gas SUV everywhere they go. Others will wave the magic wand of science fiction and say we'll have better options in the future, so let's just go ahead and do the best we can right now, which is to cut emissions only by 1/3.
But what we really need to do is stop driving individual cars entirely. I've made a plan in my own life to do this. This is my last car, and sometime between now and retirement in 2027 I'm going to move out of this house and engineer a car-free lifestyle. Anybody's Green New Deal should be doing the same -- moving us toward a future without individually-owned cars. A future where we live near where we work and shop and recreate, able to walk, bike, or bus in between.
"Solutions" like electric cars imagine that we can continue living the same kind of lifestyle we live today, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by some fraction that isn't enough to solve the problem. All the while, population growth and economic growth mean we're emitting more next year than last. We're not actually solving the problem!
-----
What we need are enforceable global caps on emissions, that ratchet down year after year until we get down to a sustainable level. But this isn't what the Paris Agreement does. And it's not what any of your personal promises to cut emissions do. Apple can promise to go Net Zero by 2050, but that's worthless without an enforceable global cap on emissions. It isn't enough to be personally responsible, or organizationally responsible, or even nationally responsible. We need an enforceable global cap on emissions. If we achieve that, then I don't care what kind of car you drive or even if you drive a car at all -- because overall as a species we'll be cutting emissions year after year. That's the solution we need.
Biden calls for a net-zero emissions US by 2050. That's great! But we need an enforceable agreement that covers the entire planet, or we aren't actually fixing the problem. Emissions in Latvia will warm the planet the same as emissions in Oklahoma. And Biden is unlikely to get even a US/2050 plan passed by the Senate.
I'll still follow my own personal plan to net-zero my own emissions by 2050. But it won't work until it applies to everybody.
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And that's just one of the more prominent environmental problems we face.
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Meanwhile, there's the desperate poverty that hundreds of millions of humans face, compared to the skyrocketing wealth of a handful of elite capitalists, with a global middle class sitting in between -- many of us in this middle class enjoying 100x the income of the world's poorest, because our education, skills, geographic location, and purchasing power serve the purposes of the elite capitalists.
In the US on the Left we obsess about our relative inequalities between the races and sexes, and fight for a $15 minimum wage, while hundreds of millions of people in other countries live on less than $2/day, with dangerously polluted air & water, amidst proxy wars over resources, proxy wars paid for by oligarchs, multinational corporations, and our wealthier governments.
It's difficult to find anybody on the Left in the US who writes anything at all about the plight of the poor living in the Central African Republic, for example. "Foreign policy" on the Left is mainly about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. If you're really into foreign policy on the Left you also talk about ending human trafficking -- the export of unwilling women from poor countries to rich countries where they can be exploited for economic or sexual purposes -- modern slavery. But nobody is talking about a large-scale redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries with the goal of significantly reducing international inequality. At best, people talk about how to "develop" poor countries as though there is something wrong with those poor countries instead of something wrong with our global capitalist system of exploitation in which the middle classes of the wealthy countries consume mountains of products made by people who earn far less than they do.
I don't feel that I'm uncompromising, I feel that I'm looking at the problems we face and trying to come up with actual solutions to these problems. Even if the solutions are only in my head, and skimmed over by the five people who read my LJ.
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At the same time, I do see the real limits of politics in the US, that the best we can do is a bare Democratic majority in the Senate, where Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the swing vote. [It's why I seriously advocate for Democrats to physically move to other states.]
But I've always felt I can both imagine what would actually fix the world's problems, while also nudging us to become a tiny bit better than we would otherwise be. It's important to keep both modes in mind. The ultimate goal, and what we can do right now.
So if in your life you think you need a car -- do the math and see which kind of car will help you to limit your emissions. If in your political situation you would do best by voting for a centrist Democrat, thereby kicking out a conservative Republican, then do that. But in your conversations with people about the world and our politics, are you talking with them about what we really need to do to solve our problems, or are you pretending that your compromises are actually your solutions?
-----
I've got my own 30-year plan to do both -- go net zero on emissions, and share down my income until I'm living with the same resources as the median human. I may not even live for 30 years, but I've got a plan and I'm moving in that direction. And it's what I advocate for the entire planet, knowing full well it won't happen. Carbon fuels are too valuable for our political systems to ban them entirely. And rich people will never allow global socialism to happen, especially not in practice, although some countries may adopt the names and symbols of socialism as various elites continue their eternal scramble for power and wealth.
It's not that I'm uncompromising, because I compromise all the time in my life. It's that I'm setting out my goals here in my LJ based on a combination of reality and empathy. The reality of our destructive exponential population & economic growth, and empathy toward those who are not benefitting from the output of this destructive system.
-----
With respect to the environment, looking just at the most prominent environmental issue of the day -- global warming -- the underlying reason or motivation for my position is that to stop global warming, to actually stop it, we'd have to cut global emissions by over 90%, perhaps by over 95%. The scale of our global emissions is so massive, it's perhaps a dozen or two dozen or even three dozen times what our atmosphere's "drain" can handle. The sustainable amount of greenhouse gas emissions is practically zero, from the perspective of our current emissions volume.
So if your "solution" is a product that only cuts net emissions by 1/3 -- which sounds like a lot to most people -- it's not really a solution. Especially if you consider that people could end up buying even more copies of this new improved product than they bought of the old product, as exponential global economic & population growth continues in the decades ahead. If you cut emissions by 1/3 per unit, but 30 years from now are selling 50% more units, then you haven't cut emissions at all!
-----
Right now, over the course of the entire lifecycle of an electric car in the US, accounting for manufacturing, maintenance, batteries, electricity generation, etc., driving an electric car reduces emissions by 1/3 compared to driving a gasoline car.
If you're like me and you barely drive at all, there's no difference in emissions, which is why I bought a gasoline car as my final lifetime car four years ago. Looking at how little I drive compared to the average -- I've driven 18,000 miles in 50 months -- an electric car would've cost more while affording me no net reduction in emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.
But let's say you drive the average 15,000 miles per year in the US. Yes, buying an electric car will save you 1/3 of the emissions had you bought a gasoline car.
1/3 is not a solution when we need to cut emissions by maybe 95%. You're still dumping new emissions into the atmosphere that will continue warming the planet for the next 1,000 years.
Many of you will say -- a 1/3 reduction is better than nothing. Others will look at the scale of the problem and give up entirely and drive a huge gas SUV everywhere they go. Others will wave the magic wand of science fiction and say we'll have better options in the future, so let's just go ahead and do the best we can right now, which is to cut emissions only by 1/3.
But what we really need to do is stop driving individual cars entirely. I've made a plan in my own life to do this. This is my last car, and sometime between now and retirement in 2027 I'm going to move out of this house and engineer a car-free lifestyle. Anybody's Green New Deal should be doing the same -- moving us toward a future without individually-owned cars. A future where we live near where we work and shop and recreate, able to walk, bike, or bus in between.
"Solutions" like electric cars imagine that we can continue living the same kind of lifestyle we live today, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by some fraction that isn't enough to solve the problem. All the while, population growth and economic growth mean we're emitting more next year than last. We're not actually solving the problem!
-----
What we need are enforceable global caps on emissions, that ratchet down year after year until we get down to a sustainable level. But this isn't what the Paris Agreement does. And it's not what any of your personal promises to cut emissions do. Apple can promise to go Net Zero by 2050, but that's worthless without an enforceable global cap on emissions. It isn't enough to be personally responsible, or organizationally responsible, or even nationally responsible. We need an enforceable global cap on emissions. If we achieve that, then I don't care what kind of car you drive or even if you drive a car at all -- because overall as a species we'll be cutting emissions year after year. That's the solution we need.
Biden calls for a net-zero emissions US by 2050. That's great! But we need an enforceable agreement that covers the entire planet, or we aren't actually fixing the problem. Emissions in Latvia will warm the planet the same as emissions in Oklahoma. And Biden is unlikely to get even a US/2050 plan passed by the Senate.
I'll still follow my own personal plan to net-zero my own emissions by 2050. But it won't work until it applies to everybody.
-----
And that's just one of the more prominent environmental problems we face.
-----
Meanwhile, there's the desperate poverty that hundreds of millions of humans face, compared to the skyrocketing wealth of a handful of elite capitalists, with a global middle class sitting in between -- many of us in this middle class enjoying 100x the income of the world's poorest, because our education, skills, geographic location, and purchasing power serve the purposes of the elite capitalists.
In the US on the Left we obsess about our relative inequalities between the races and sexes, and fight for a $15 minimum wage, while hundreds of millions of people in other countries live on less than $2/day, with dangerously polluted air & water, amidst proxy wars over resources, proxy wars paid for by oligarchs, multinational corporations, and our wealthier governments.
It's difficult to find anybody on the Left in the US who writes anything at all about the plight of the poor living in the Central African Republic, for example. "Foreign policy" on the Left is mainly about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. If you're really into foreign policy on the Left you also talk about ending human trafficking -- the export of unwilling women from poor countries to rich countries where they can be exploited for economic or sexual purposes -- modern slavery. But nobody is talking about a large-scale redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries with the goal of significantly reducing international inequality. At best, people talk about how to "develop" poor countries as though there is something wrong with those poor countries instead of something wrong with our global capitalist system of exploitation in which the middle classes of the wealthy countries consume mountains of products made by people who earn far less than they do.
I don't feel that I'm uncompromising, I feel that I'm looking at the problems we face and trying to come up with actual solutions to these problems. Even if the solutions are only in my head, and skimmed over by the five people who read my LJ.
-----
At the same time, I do see the real limits of politics in the US, that the best we can do is a bare Democratic majority in the Senate, where Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the swing vote. [It's why I seriously advocate for Democrats to physically move to other states.]
But I've always felt I can both imagine what would actually fix the world's problems, while also nudging us to become a tiny bit better than we would otherwise be. It's important to keep both modes in mind. The ultimate goal, and what we can do right now.
So if in your life you think you need a car -- do the math and see which kind of car will help you to limit your emissions. If in your political situation you would do best by voting for a centrist Democrat, thereby kicking out a conservative Republican, then do that. But in your conversations with people about the world and our politics, are you talking with them about what we really need to do to solve our problems, or are you pretending that your compromises are actually your solutions?
-----
I've got my own 30-year plan to do both -- go net zero on emissions, and share down my income until I'm living with the same resources as the median human. I may not even live for 30 years, but I've got a plan and I'm moving in that direction. And it's what I advocate for the entire planet, knowing full well it won't happen. Carbon fuels are too valuable for our political systems to ban them entirely. And rich people will never allow global socialism to happen, especially not in practice, although some countries may adopt the names and symbols of socialism as various elites continue their eternal scramble for power and wealth.
It's not that I'm uncompromising, because I compromise all the time in my life. It's that I'm setting out my goals here in my LJ based on a combination of reality and empathy. The reality of our destructive exponential population & economic growth, and empathy toward those who are not benefitting from the output of this destructive system.