It’s Not Those Pushing the Green New Deal Who are Naïve About Our Current Crisis

The Moderate Threat to Climate Action

By Jim Miller

As heartening as the emergence of the Green New Deal as a political rallying cry and litmus test of sorts for the early field of Democratic presidential candidates is, the predictably negative response in other quarters is equally dismaying.  Of course, the most obvious naysaying comes from the Republicans and the rightwing media following the lead of a president who suggests that snowstorms and cold weather are evidence that climate change isn’t happening.

But that’s not the real problem.

Indeed, one might argue that Trump’s knuckle-dragging anti-intellectualism on climate science and the environment combined with his administration’s war on nature in the form of the corporate takeover of the Environmental Protection Agency and the increasingly reckless gutting of environmental regulations have rallied a significant portion of the public to recoil from his nihilism.

On the subject of climate change, for instance, the most current polling shows that, as the Atlantic recently reported,

“Even as President Donald Trump has cast doubt on climate change, most Americans have rejected his position. Record numbers of Americans describe climate change as a real and present danger.”

In fact, with 73% of Americans now agreeing that global warming is happening, according to the New York Times , there is real reason for optimism that the public might be ready for a response commensurate with the existential threat we face despite Trump and company’s ridiculous bluster.  That’s why it’s not so much Trump’s dismissal of climate action as “radical” that’s worrisome as it is the feckless grumblings of “centrist” Democratic pundits and politicians who can’t quite seem to grasp the gravity of our moment.

Just as the fear of being labeled “socialist” scares this stripe of Democrat away from talking about progressive taxation and/or Medicare for All, the religion of cautious incrementalism also makes it impossible for them to embrace an aspirational policy goal like the Green New Deal that challenges the current neoliberal hegemony.

Yes, “moderate” Democrats acknowledge climate change and embrace the Paris agreement (which is not enough), but they just can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that calling for bolder, game-changing action on the climate is not evidence of ideological extremism or political naiveté but rather the only reasonable chance we have to address the crisis in the 12 years scientists tell us we have to stop the worst impacts of the catastrophe facing us.  In this regard, physics doesn’t care about political “realism,” and the consequences of runaway climate change won’t politely wait for our presumed pragmatic saviors to get their ducks in a row.

In sum, if we don’t act boldly and quickly on climate and the environment it will be too late.

End of story.

Thus, while one might reasonably take a gradualist approach to healthcare, economics, or a host of other issues, in this case arguing that it’s not “realistic” to push for zero carbon emissions in a decade–so we shouldn’t even try–is a kind of suicidal blindness in the name of moderation.  But what if being “moderate” in this case is really simply the victory of our current ideological paralysis (which does not allow us to imagine anything outside of market-based solutions) over reality?

Consider just one of a number of stories of late about the disturbing signs of an ominous future, this one in the Guardian, “Plummeting-Insect Numbers Threaten Collapse of Nature’” :

The world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are “essential” for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

As this piece notes, the race to ecocide is on in earnest,

“The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is ‘shocking’, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: ‘It is very rapid. In 10 years, you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.’”

While industrial agriculture as we currently practice it is a central factor here, climate change is also key as it is with regard to a host of other dire outcomes such as sea level rise, extreme heat, health care crises, poisoned oceans and air, and much more.  And one thing is certain: insects aren’t waiting for proper political circumstances to die. The ecosystem isn’t polling Midwestern states to see when the right time is to collapse. The natural world we depend on, dear reader, doesn’t care if we aren’t ready to address its impending demise.

Maybe it’s time that people of good will left their smug political comfort zones and came to terms with our deadly serious non-political reality which constitutes the real national/global emergency.

If they don’t, we’ll all be toast soon enough.