Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come from Mass Popular Action,” Not Pols

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/noam-chomsky-climate-change-afghanistan-anarchism-china

44 56 5 years ago

el_oni3• 5 years ago

This is why I find the "x% of emissions are caused by 100 companies so there's nothing an individual can do" counter productive.

Those 100 companies are fossil fuel companies, they distribute fuel and petroleum products to every other industry/sector. The only way to get those 100 companies to stop being the biggest polluters is to stop using their products. Which relies on us all changing our habits, to stop the supply chain upstream of us from using their products

cplusplusfellow• 5 years ago

I too have always found this argument to be a non sequitur, for the exact reasons that you identify. If you attribute the emissions and pollution of the entire fossil fuel economy to the people who refine the products that go into the fossil fuel economy, there is nothing that can be accomplished with the analysis.

On the other hand, if we are serious about global warming and pollution, we need nuclear energy immediately (including the safe nuclear fission technologies which we've had for a few decades now, as well as continued research into fusion).

dangoor• 5 years ago

I do think nuclear energy is part of the picture, but it is not immediate. TerraPower is working on a reactor in Wyoming that will be ready in 7 years at a cost of $1B, which is considered quick and cheap for the industry[1][2].

Based on everything I've read, I think we need to do a bunch of different things all at once to address global warming and reduce emissions as quickly as possible. Yes, solar and wind are intermittent sources, but they're cheap and available now. Yes, we need to upgrade our grids to be able to handle all of the new electric vehicles. We also need to change over building heating/cooling. Find better means of making concrete.

You may not have meant only do nuclear, but I see politicians saying "nuclear & carbon capture" as if that's going to get the job done, but I haven't seen any analysis that supports those things alone doing the job.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/scientists-pour-cold-water-on-bill-gat... [2] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/bill-gates-fund...

bryanlarsen• 5 years ago

Nuclear takes too long to build and is too expensive.

Renewables are quicker, cheaper and sufficient.

A 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability over an entire year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

spencerflem8• 5 years ago

Boycotting all unethical companies is simply not possible, by design

OldManAndTheCpp• 5 years ago

How is it designed and by whom?

ben_w2• 5 years ago

We don’t need to all boycott all of them for this to be effective; creating a (sufficiently strong) gradient where their profits go up if businesses act better (for whatever value) is likely to work.

el_oni3• 5 years ago

It's not, you are completely correct. But I try to buy from companies that align with my values, I run my tech and things into the ground before I buy new. But it doesn't take a few people being perfect, it takes all of us to imperfectly do our best.

jhanschoo2• 5 years ago

You don't have to do a complete boycott, just like if you want to change your diet for environmental reasons, you don't have to go full meatless.

assbuttbuttass2• 5 years ago

Chomsky's not talking about "changing our habits," he's talking about mass protests. The examples he gives are the climate strike and the sunrise movement.

The whole neoliberal period was basically class war. It had nothing to do with the markets or anything else. Just class war.

jhanschoo2• 5 years ago

I do think mass protests are more fundamental than individually-pursued "changing our habits". Mass protests will start a conversation not just against the institutions that can effect change, but also organize the interests against climate change.

readonthegoapp3• 5 years ago

i don't know exactly what Chomsky means by 'mass popular action', but i suspect that 'mass protests' are just one of literally innumerable -- practically-speaking, hundreds or thousands (??) -- of things/tactics/campaigns/'actions' that whole lots ('mass popular') of people can do.

farisjarrah• 5 years ago

I agree with much of your sentiment, but a top down approach with government regulations is absolutely necessary to assist with stopping harmful emissions and pollution. It's extremely difficult to tell everyone to walk to McDonalds to not waste gas and to not grab a plastic straw. Most everyone will not follow through with those requests when McDonalds is quite literally giving it away straws for free and gas vehicles are so readily available. But if you force McDonalds to use a recycled paper lid that doesn't require a straw, and force their suppliers to deliver those products with electric vehicles, and we force car manufacturers to only produce electric vehicles: then we can stop the emissions and waste generation at the source. People will have no choice but to take more green options if thats all that is available to them.

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years ago

The trouble is governments don't have the stomach for a top down approach either. Where does that leave us?

el_oni3• 5 years ago

Yes, absolutly, it needs to come from the top down as well as the bottom up. In a world where we give subsidies to polluters which artificially decreases the price, it makes it harder for consumers to make the right choice.

If we instead subsidised green industries and technologies, we could artificially lower the price of making the right choice.

hackeraccount• 5 years ago

Government regulation produces things like CAFE and Energy Star. They can work to some degree but the incentive to create back doors around them (I don't drive a car I drive a light truck) is enormous - doubly so because people have no commitment to the principle they try and serve because they aren't asked to have any commitment instead government tries to trick people to go along with the principle. I'm buying an energy efficient furnace that costs more then it otherwise might because those are the only furnaces available to be purchased.

It can work but only to a limited degree, if you really push the thing then it becomes more likely that people will catch on to the "trick" and elect people who will undo it. They'll do that happily because there's no commitment.

throw_away• 5 years ago

I think the reason why the stat was computed in the first place was also to show that an overwhelming majority of emission sources are in turn controlled by 100 * (avg board size) human beings. Changing consumer behavior and incentives is one side, but one should also consider the behaviors and incentives of those 1000-ish people.

jl63• 5 years ago

Yes. Companies can conduct themselves unethically, but that doesn’t absolve customers who are the source of demand for unethical products.

We must condemn equally the rhino poachers and the horn-buyers.

spencerflem8• 5 years ago

This is much harder to do when Rhino Horn is included in every product you need to live. It is simply not feasible to expect individuals to research the supply chains and environmental impact of every product we buy. Not to mention that with most products being made buy a few large companies for many classes of item there just aren't reasonable green alternatives.

godshatter• 5 years ago

This is my thought when I see people railing against the fossil fuel companies like they are purposefully trying to force a product on us we don't want or need solely in an effort to watch the world burn.

Oil is a dense fuel source that is easily transported. If we somehow magically permanently capped all current and future oil wells today we'd be in the middle of a crisis that would dwarf any concerns we might have about climate change down the road. We're making great progress on renewable energy sources, but we're not there yet. More protests isn't going to change that. Personally I wish we'd go all-in on nuclear power and work to remove the road blocks that make that so expensive and take so long to bring up new power plants, so that we could add that to the mix and get to the point where a complete loss of the flow of oil wouldn't end civilization as we know it.

marginalia_nu• 5 years ago

Sitting in a ring and pointing fingers is ultimately extremely toxic and counterproductive. The consumers can blame the producer supply, the producers can blame the consumer demand, the politicians can blame the the voters, the voters can blame the politicians.

Just where is that getting us? How is this search for who is most to blame going to do anything to help solve the problem? Seems like it's a tactic for avoiding the very real truth that each and everyone needs to do something, what needs to be done doesn't care about what is fair or what is convenient. The reason assigning blame to someone else seems to work is that we are all to blame. Almost whoever you point to, you are almost certainly correct: They are to blame. But so are you.

Productive change always starts with individuals making changes to themselves. We are all humans. The consumers are humans. The producers are humans. The politicians are humans. The voters are humans. It is humans that need to act.

OneTimePetes• 5 years ago

Lets build a problem accelerator and see what exotic particles are created when the problems crash into each other at light speed..

rdedev• 5 years ago

But there is only so much a person can control. And it mostly lines with how much money they have. If I'm poor I can't afford to buy a more expensive but less carbon polluting product than one that was built overseas and shipped here. You could try boycotting a certain company till they change their mind but you have to convince an lot of people to do the same. Not to mention companies whose clients are other businesses. The ones heading the companies that use of fossil fuel can make decisions that have a much greater impact. This is whybi believe a top down regulatory approach can get you much quicker results

MickerNews2• 5 years ago

Th notion of "Ethical Consumption" is a completely unworkable concept that's been long debunked.

See here for example, there are many others:

https://www.marxist.ca/article/why-there-is-no-ethical-consu...

MomoXenosaga2• 5 years ago

Lately I'm seeing a lot of Americans start blaming China and other Asian countries. Denying them the economic growth and increased living standard.

pwned1• 5 years ago

Politics always lags societal change.

whytaka• 5 years ago

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.

yeetaccount2• 5 years ago

This is necessary, but how do you expect people to do this when a lot of climate solutions puts them out of work? We need a coordinated effort that addresses the immediate economic problems of the working class created by taking serious climate action, because that’s where a lot of the resistance comes from, among voters. Somebody who has worked their whole life mining coal can’t suddenly pivot to working in a battery or solar panel factory without very specific conditions being met by the economy and regulators. To say otherwise is handwaving.

mental1896• 5 years ago

If being put out of work could be made to be less of a dire situation for the worker, some of these climate solutions might still be viable.

3pt14159• 5 years ago

For me, this type of reasoning goes out the window when the way someone makes their living is actively hurting millions of people. I'm not quite callous, I think we should help them transition to a new line of work, of course, but don't expect me to have a whole lot of sympathy for people who actively poison the air for a living. Their line of work is literally killing people. Nuclear power is not so expensive. Especially for westerners.

We got rid of coal power where I live:

https://www.ontario.ca/page/end-coal

It can be done and the stakes here are too high for this handwringing. We didn't let slave ship workers stop emancipation from happening.

javajosh• 5 years ago

What if "putting them out of work" is actually a viable solution? Keynes thought we'd have short work-lives by now, and given the productivity gains in every industry, he should be right. It's not like that because those productivity gains have gone to the owners of industry.

This subject is quite close to home to the HN crowd, since software is capable of replacing a large number of human workers. Not even with AI, just by simplifying and streamlining paperwork-heavy administrative tasks. And yet our industry does nothing to protect the people who's work we displace.

Of course, there is still lots of work to do, even if you don't have a job, taking care of yourself and your family. Plus, if we extend the notion of family, an aging population is going to need lots of labor-intensive help, so that's something else they can do.

readonthegoapp3• 5 years ago

the Green New Deal (GND) (now mostly dead) included a lot of real support for oil workers and others who would lose their jobs without this plan -- so, since we didn't get the GND, I would presume a lot of these folks will be losing jobs, but presumably a bunch of them will get jobs to help destroy the planet in other ways -- building highways, etc.

https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/

A just transition for workers. This plan will prioritize the fossil fuel workers who have powered our economy for more than a century and who have too often been neglected by corporations and politicians. We will guarantee five years of a worker’s current salary, housing assistance, job training, health care, pension support, and priority job placement for any displaced worker, as well as early retirement support for those who choose it or can no longer work.

martythemaniak• 5 years ago

Two points:

1. Climate Change and Environmentalism are usually conflated and used interchangeably. They are two different concepts - climate change is about putting excess carbon in the atmosphere, faster than the earth can re-absorb it. Environmentalism is a moral judgement on how much resources humans are entitled to consume.

For example, I can drive an EV powered by nuclear power and live in a large detached house. There are no carbon emissions, but I consume lots of resources. People may disagree with my taking up so much land, but that doesn't mean I'm changing the climate while taking up land.

2. We do not need to emit carbon to enjoy high standards of living. Our usage of fossil fuels to power our lifestyles is a historical leftover. We did it because our primitive technology made it easy and and cheap to level-up civilization by burning them. And we did. But today, we can use more advanced technology to stop emitting carbon.

So climate change will be solved with advanced technology, allowing us to replace all instances of carbon in all areas of the economy, which will take decades, but is quite doable. We will still take up land, consume resources etc. Asking (and eventually mandating) that people switch technologies is reasonable. Asking that people give up their lifestyles isn't. It is so unreasonable, you can take it as a given that it just won't happen.

Moral judgements are important and we should consider our broader impact, but such a thing cannot be "solved", we can only work on convincing other people of our position gradually over time.

threatofrain• 5 years ago

Climate change is a subset of environmentalism, and climate change and environmentalism are both moral issues because they both involve narratives of escalating harms to human life. This is the impact by which they call others to action.

jorgen123• 5 years ago

This narrative is not bad, but also not quite good.

It is good because it is positive and expresses confidence that we can do this.

It is bad in where it ignores the emissions caused by land use and resource consumption. Those are not addressed with advanced technology. Those are addressed oftentimes by going back from advanced technology - but in a way that does improve life styles and wellbeing of the people providing you with resources. You can play a role by choosing those resources - which does put you in the place of having to do some amount of moral judgement.

Source: https://regeneration.org

tonyedgecombe3• 5 years ago

For example, I can drive an EV powered by nuclear power and live in a large detached house.

Not yet you can't. There is a lot of embedded energy in both of those products.

So climate change will be solved with advanced technology

I'm not sure the same thinking that got us into this situation will get us out of it.

drukenemo• 5 years ago

“Ending climate change”. As in, the climate will no longer change. How omnipotent these intellectuals think men are.

sleepysysadmin• 5 years ago

“Ending climate change”. As in, the climate will no longer change. How omnipotent these intellectuals think men are.

Then you have jerk klingons coming along and breaking the climate machine. Paradise is much better.

BashiBazouk• 5 years ago

After watching COVID and cryptocurrency mining the last couple of years, any solution to climate change that does not take in to account that 30-40% of the population is not only not going to participate but a sizable minority will actively work against the solution is destined to fail.

goatsneez• 5 years ago

I respect N. Ch. very much for his work, enjoy and learned from his books tremendously, although, we would find things to debate easily. However, his opinion to "climate change" is just paddling water (so typical of an academic) and not contributing any real idea or analysis.

Are we so full of ourselves to buy into this with seriousness? Do you see a profit opportunity in any sector (energy, finance, industry,..) while "..improving the nature of society" (as N. Ch says) ? Why dont you start a business in that sector and just simply out-compete the "big bad wolfs" where ever you tend to see them? If you are right, and your ideas sound, you are so competent to know how to arm-wrestle other man with their skin in the game into given mode of operation, and all the renewables so cheap and profitable, lets just do it. Please, do it, and "blow us all away".

But it is cowardly, weak, ignorant and pathological to stand "shouting" at, or using the terror of government, or herd-activism, to push feel-good-agendas which you yourself are not sure are viable, cannot yourself implement into business idea, or properly manage.

teslabox• 5 years ago

Read the link, came back to HN to find the discussion. The article’s title is a poor summary of the article’s focus. I went back to the article - the submission here indeed uses the article’s actual title.

It actually covers a lot of ground: How the US FUBAR’d Afghanistan, United States as the only country that can impose sanctions, China does its own thing, Australian nuclear submarine deal is saber rattling with China, climate change, Abraham Lincoln as a classical liberalist, (quote below).

I made a note of this quote:

Now it’s supposed to be a wonderful thing if you can subordinate yourself to a master for most of your working life. It’s called “getting a job.” It was considered a horrible attack on human dignity for millennia. Millennia, literally, up through the nineteenth century. It’s taken a lot of work to impose on people the idea that it’s a wonderful thing to spend your waking hours following somebody else’s orders.

Climate discussion is the least important part of this article.

readonthegoapp3• 5 years ago

I would have potentially used a different title but i thought HN had pretty strict guidelines around _not_ changing titles.

You say the climate discussion is the least important part of the article -- which part do you think is the most important?

The 'job' stuff is funny. If people still believed now what they did back then, I wouldn't always have to explain my wantrepreneurial ways to family, friends, employers, etc.

gremlinsinc• 5 years ago

Greatly respect Chomsky, Mass Popular Action could definitely end climate change it's just not likely to happen. Govt's on the other hand have a much bigger chance of success should they require commerce to adapt.

In Utah for example consumer water use is <2% of all water use in the state. There's plenty of ads to cut your water use, or water after 7pm, etc... but wouldn't it be nice if maybe we outlawed alfalfa farming that uses 80% of the water (in a desert)? Of course the governor is an Alfalfa farmer, so good luck passing that.

I've been thinking a lot about humanity needing to maybe form small communal living spaces where power tools, cars, toys, etc are maybe shared and stored in a common warehouse. Things that maybe we like to have around, but don't necessarily use everyday. This gives more room in our homes for the things that are necessary in our homes, so we can build smaller homes, or even just build an earthbag studio for every member in the family... or something that leaves a low footprint.

TLDR; less consumerism would be huge, and we should strive for that, but it won't happen organically because people are people. Not unless it becomes a 'fad', then maybe... but a combination of 'some people' trying eco-villages, and the govt enforcing stricter rules and rolling out carbon-taxes, would maybe be the better option.

Hopefully thinking mankind will just organize and fix what the politicians can't... is too optimistic for my blood.

Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come from Mass Popular Action,” Not Pols

Related Stories