Joanne Nova has a really fine essay on Naomi Klein. This is
great writing, easily as fluent as Klein herself, only rational. An
excerpt:
By building her whole argument on un-scientific quicksand, Klein
makes mindless statements that unwittingly apply more to her own
arguments than anyone elses. She explores "how the right has
systematically used crises-real and trumped up-to push through a
brutal ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that
created the crises but rather to enrich elites."
No one uses trumped-up-crises better than the left: Which team is
demanding billions to "stop the storms"? And which elites will be
enriched? The carbon traders and financiers.
The so-called victims of right-ideologies are theoretical
postulates of the future. The victims of the left are here and now.
Which brutal ideology fed corn to cars instead of starving Haitian
children? Which fantasy-team thinks bat-chopping rotors in Denmark
will stop floods in Bangladesh?
Though hopelessly irrational and unpleasant, the Klein essay does
have one small political truth in it, namely that the only way we
will cut carbon emissions drastically is by dismantling
civilisation:
The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing
conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived
at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to
lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate
science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by
radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways
antithetical to their "free market" belief system. As British
blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out,
"Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes
dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater
government intervention, regulation." Heartland's Bast puts it even
more bluntly: For the left, "Climate change is the perfect thing….
It's the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do
anyway."
Here's my inconvenient truth: they aren't wrong. ...When it comes
to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings,
specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our
energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic
system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel [Heartland
Conference] may be in considerably less denial than a lot of
professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of
global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert
catastrophe by buying "green" products and creating clever markets
in pollution.
