Wednesday
Mar252015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Quote of the day, political power edition
Mar 25, 2015 Climate: Parliament Ethics I believe that climate moralists are impervious to the adverse impact of their policies because their morality is closely interwoven with misunderstanding of economics, distaste for capitalism, lack of interest in history and the overwhelming desire of their psychic elephants to dictate how other people should live.
The climate issue has to be seen as the latest chapter in the two century long battle to use the alleged moral shortcomings of capitalism to justify political power.
Peter Foster places the climate debate in its historical context
Reader Comments (59)
Mar 25, 2015 at 10:59 PM | Ben Pile
Ben, what happens in the Australian Parliament is a direct consequence of previous socialist/communist political regimes of which Julia Gillard was the ringleader ... her connections to communism are deep and well documented.
Perfect!
Spot-on, Bish.
There's a longer exposition of the same ideas here: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/thoughts-from-leo-smith/
Recommended!
Andrew Duffin on Mar 26, 2015 at 8:51 AM
So we really are doomed:
Russell Brand voted world's fourth most influential thinker
Comedian voted on to Prospect magazine’s annual list, topped by economist Thomas Piketty, after year that saw him publish a book advocating the eradication of the nation state
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/26/hot-prospect-russell-brand-voted-worlds-fourth-most-influential-thinker
"... advocating the eradication of the nation state" :)
I am sure I have read that:
"... having political islands of national ideologies at least allows for some diversity of political thought, and if the West becomes so decadent not because of Capitalism, but because of Marxism and its descendants itself, that it is in danger of falling to a stronger culture, maybe one of those political islands will have the tools and the strength to resist and prove to have the next line of fashionable bigotry to deal with the new reality."
but Not A Lot Of People Know That!
Geoff Chambers
"Philip Foster 'Mar 25, 2015 at 10:39 PM)
So what's your answer? (I'll get off my elephant if you'll get off yours)."
This could be regarded as off topic, but as you ask, my answer lies in two opening phrases:
"In the beginning God ...." (Genesis Ch.1)
"In the beginning was the Word...." (John Ch.1)
Unless there is a Mind (the Logos) behind this universe giving both purpose and rationality to its creation (by whatever processes), all thought and reason is ultimately a mere froth on a sea of meaningless chaos.
Either position (God or chaos) requires a step of faith.
The most distressing thing about framing the "discussion" in such terms is that the last two centuries have destroyed hundreds of millions of lives allegedly trying to stop capitalism.
Streetcred - Ben, what happens in the Australian Parliament is a direct consequence of previous socialist/communist political regimes of which Julia Gillard was the ringleader ... her connections to communism are deep and well documented.
No doubt she has, like many people in similar parties throughout the world, variously moved through or near organisations that are left wing in origin, outlook or mission.
But that's not enough to make the claims that seem to be the norm, that two poles on a single axis are sufficient to explain two centuries of history, nor to explain why Labour or left parties and politicians are where they are today.
Don't read this as a defence of the left. My argument is that left and right are redundant, empty categories -- hollow nouns -- and I am ambivalent about these categories of thought in and of themselves. There is no ideological divide as there was in the first half of the previous century, and much of politics has been depoliticised in that sense. This inert, sterile political landscape -- where there are very few defences of capitalism or socialism as such in the political mainstream -- better explains the phenomenon of climate change alarmism or environmentalism than would the continuation of any political movement.
For example, we have on the (nominal) left, arguments which appeal more to scientific authority than to the interests of the masses (to put it crudely). Similarly, we have arguments from the (nominal) right for green capitalism to save the planet, because such adherents too are similarly incapable of articulating an argument for capitalism as such -- capitalism having lost its moral authority in the same way as the left has. For the most part, climate change is a post-political phenomenon. Of course the arguments will take vaguely left or right forms from time to time... For instance, cap and trade makes private property out of the atmosphere on one argument, or turns it into a regulated commons on the other angle... But in neither instance is the argument made on its own terms -- they both use the authority of science.
The interesting recent development in Australia was Abbott's attempt to make the climate issue a political line. But the question here is whether the public felt that the climate issue itself was decisive, or whether the intransigence of Gillard and co in particular on Carbon Tax made it possible to draw that line. Here in the UK, there is no such line -- there is a consensus between the old parties, in the form of a written agreement not to put the issue to the test in the polls. At some point, that agreement will break or become a decisive political issue as it has in Australia. But even when it does, it won't necessarily be a line that divides on left-right lines. The public could equally end up seeing it as representing leftish political ambitions by stealth as it could see it as an attempt to protect business or wealth in the same way. The real answer is both. And this is what makes today's politics unique in its character, compared with previous political eras -- the level of disconnect between politics and the public, to the extent that the putative differences between left and right politicians dissolve in the consensus between them to protect themselves from the public.
Ben, while I know that the "political vacuum/disconnect" argument is very popular in the UK as an explanation for everything (see Spiked, for example), it's simplistic at best.
Name a single government run by a party of the nominal Left that has stood up to the climate change scams. There isn't one. Those that have, such as Harper's in Canada and Abbott's in Australia and Key's in New Zealand, have all been from the conservative side of politics. And that's no accident. Even where the leaderships all broadly agree across the parties, the only public sceptics are on the conservative side of politics, as can be seen in both the UK and the US. That's no accident either.
Green and Left politics are now so inextricably intertwined that they have become largely indistinguishable.
There's a fair bit of it in conservative parties as well, but the saving grace is that at least some conservative politicians still believe that governments should not pretend to be able to solve every problem everywhere via government intervention. That is, assuming that there is a "problem" in the first place, rather than a confected issue du jour, as is often the case.
Johanna - Green and Left politics are now so inextricably intertwined that they have become largely indistinguishable.
But the contemporary 'left' is decoupled from its history. Red and green (and much blue, for that matter) are indistinguishable for the reason of their indistinctness, not for their convergence on the same ground. There is not the continuity that some are imagining -- Foster, in this case. You complain that the observation of a contemporary disconnect is 'simplistic', but you seem to be defending the notion that two centuries of history can be explained with just two, binary opposed categories. The 'green' is intertwined with virtually nothing of substance, which furthermore appeals to very very few people indeed in the wider public.
I think it is too soon to call the defeat of climate-centricism in Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- i.e. whether climate scepticism has been sufficiently decisive to persist. One reason I have argued that it was much easier for these parts of the Anglosphere to reject climate policies is that they are more broadly commodity-based economies, not because they have a more healthily-constituted conservative movement. The stakes are simply different in Australia, for example, compared with the economy of the UK. Notice it is the hi tech sectors -- Google, and the kind -- which seem to believe in niceties like 'small is beautiful, but which have the profitability to power their servers by wind turbines and so on. Equally, it is easier for large financial corporations to find themselves interested in the green sector.
Here in the UK, all a politician needed to do to get a standing ovation from the party faithful was to boo-hiss at energy companies. Yet such companies themselves have, for far too long, indulged environmentalism at the minimum as PR opportunity (BP re-branding itself as 'Beyond Petroleum', for e.g.), but more consequentially by financing various green campaigning outfits such as the Green Alliance. Even the nascent fracking industry here sells itself on being a 'bridging technology' between fossil fuels and renewables. If the situation were different, such that millions were employed by the energy sector, it might be a harder sell. One of the characteristics of the left's embrace of environmentalism here is that whereas union membership was commonplace amongst industrial workers, unions are these days more inclined to green ideas. Can you imagine anyone selling environmentalism to a bunch of shop floor workers in the 1960s? It seems far-fetched to me. Yet it is a preoccupation of today's unions. The left, its constituency, its ideas and its institutions have changed. It is a mistake to not note or understand that change in trying to understand environmentalism's purchase on politics, whether you want to make a leftish or conservative argument.
the saving grace is that at least some conservative politicians still believe that governments should not pretend to be able to solve every problem everywhere via government intervention
Are there enough of them? Is it enough to merely not pretend that government is the answer to every problem? Every UK PM since the 1970s has emphasised personal responsibility in their grand speeches. But none have been able to deliver it. Blair, for instance, complained that he couldn't be there to be the parent of every child. Yet he set in place the most far-reaching interventions into the private sphere ever seen. That same government, and the next, proposed to measure the emotional well-being of the public, as a rival metric of their performance to GDP -- the 'hapiness index' and 'quality of life barometer' -- both heavily drawing from environmental ideas about subjective feelings.
Although you think it simplistic, the paternalistic turn taken by politicians represents a transformation in the relationship between individuals and the state, which follows the disconnect between them. Politics is now far less about ideological contest than it is about the mere management of public (and private) affairs, which is increasingly understood in terms of risk. No matter how many charismatic mavericks conservative parties are host to, until they can set the agenda meaningfully, I see no substantial difference.