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      Amy Coney Barrett: key moments from the supreme court confirmation hearings – video

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      Amy Coney Barrett spent most of her time avoiding key questions during three days of Senate hearings to confirm her as a supreme court justice. 
      Barrett would become the third justice on the court to be appointed by Donald Trump – and her confirmation would give conservatives a bulletproof, six-justice majority on the nine-member court, which decides cases by a simple majority.
      Barrett, a conservative Christian who has criticized the high court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA), who has publicly opposed reproductive rights and who was a trustee at a school whose handbook included a stated opposition to same-sex marriage, is seen on the left as part of a power play by Donald Trump 

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      in World Politics

      As Climate Change Worsens, How Far Will We Tip?

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      Although there are still those who deny it, the countdown for the planet under the threat of global warming began some time ago. If we were to seek an official starting point, it would probably be in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial age. We now receive confirmation of melting at the poles and warming in the depths of the ocean on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

      The constantly accumulating evidence has overwhelmingly convinced the scientific community not only that the trend is real, but that the consequences will be particularly dramatic for human societies. Humans happen to be the only living species on Earth obsessed by the idea of controlling their environmental habitat for the sake of their own comfort and profit. The rest of the biosphere tries simply to get by with the hand it is dealt.

      Warren Buffett’s Struggle With Class Struggle

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      But now the dual goals of comfort and profit appear to be dangerously at odds. Responding to the demand for comfort of those who can afford it provokes increasing levels of discomfort for those societies and individuals that cannot. That simple fact has become one of the contributing factors to the increasingly evident revolt against growing income and wealth inequality.

      A report by the insurance company Swiss Re cited by The Guardian informs us that we are quickly approaching a point of no return. “One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats,” The Guardian reports. If 20% of the nations of the world succumb, it won’t be long before 30%, 40%, 50% and more are affected as well. It appears that Australia, Israel and South Africa are particularly exposed. The report also cites India, Spain and Belgium.

      In other words, this time it won’t be only the forgotten and neglected developing nations (Donald Trump’s “shithole countries”) that are the first to pay the cost. If people used to luxury and accustomed to thinking of themselves as sheltered from disaster are the ones who may suffer first, alarm bells will quickly start ringing.

      The Guardian cites some worrying figures: “More than half of global GDP — $42tn (£32tn) — depends on high-functioning biodiversity, according to the report, but the risk of tipping points is growing.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Tipping point:

      For capitalists, an abstract target to both aim for and avoid, since on the positive side it represents the maximum reward expected from any endeavor designed to exploit and eventually exhaust a market or a body of resources, while, on the negative side, it threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The balancing act consists of finding the point of equilibrium between maximum exploitation and braking before reaching the tipping point.

      Contextual Note

      In the year 2000, which marks the beginning of the age of internet marketing and social media, tipping points became something to aim for rather than avoid. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” was released in that year. It reads like a recipe book encouraging the kind of viral development successful marketers manage to achieve for a new product or a new practice. 

      Gladwell praised and encouraged business models aimed at creating “social epidemics.” Though it may seem absurd and even macabre today, as the world battles an incomprehensible and unpredictable pandemic, Gladwell’s book offers advice on how to go viral. He even formulates laws and rules that describe the process: the “Law of the Few,” the “Stickiness Factor” and the “Power of Context.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic may have put a serious dent in the prestige our culture allotted to tipping points two decades ago. In the era of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good,” epidemic change represented seemed like a complementary and rather more respectable ideal. 

      The year 2000 marked the summit of the dot.com craze that quickly turned into the dot.com crash. Venture capitalists were hurting, but that was only temporary. Social media hadn’t yet taken off, but Gladwell clearly sensed its imminent arrival and understood its deeper logic. Global warming, with its threat of disastrous tipping points, had become an issue but it was already being dismissed by climate change deniers, who preferred to focus on a rapidly rising stock market.

      The rise and more recent fall of the image of tipping points raises a fascinating question about contemporary culture. If we admit that, in the year 2000, the idea of the tipping point promoted by Gladwell had mainly positive connotations and that, today, the prospect of a tipping point sets off alarm bells evoking the fear of imminent disaster, can we identify the tipping point that pushed us from the positive appreciation to the negative one? 

      There seem to be two candidates for the tipping point about tipping points: the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. If the dot.com crash of 2000 felt more like a thrilling roller-coaster ride than a traumatizing event, the 2008 crisis was an earthquake that leveled some institutions and seriously attacked the credibility of some of the previous decade’s ideals.

      The Gladwell version of a tipping point was associated with the inebriation that accompanies sudden commercial success and the rapid achievement of a monopoly position. That had become the goal of every economic actor’s ambition for the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. The current perception of a tipping point, as cited in The Guardian’s article, is one of a risk to be anticipated and avoided. The sense of having a mission of conquest eventually gave way to a simple hope for stability and survival.

      Historical Note

      A tipping point indicates a critical threshold beyond which the return to a previous state of equilibrium becomes impossible. Before Europe’s scientific and Industrial Revolution, people regarded tipping points as fatalities, the result of uncontrollable forces or trends. Since the industrial age, developed countries have evolved a culture of control that supposes human societies will have the ingenuity and the technology capable of fending off catastrophes and avoiding catastrophic tipping points.

      But that belief has recently been shaken by various uncontrollable events. And instead of ensuring mastery, the post-industrial culture of control has developed a perverse tendency to magnify its fear of tipping points. That is what’s behind the “science” of risk management and its method of contingency planning. Intended to increase our security, in the wrong hands it can become an irrational obsession. Instead of discovering solutions, it magnifies problems.

      In 2004, The Guardian broke a story about a secret Pentagon report warning “that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.” The Pentagon’s pessimism — or would it be more accurate to call it paranoiac optimism? — seems laughable today. It tells us more about the psychological climate inside America’s war machine and the budgeting rituals of the military-industrial complex than it does about the reality of the threats the world is facing.

      Today’s more realistic report by Swiss Re reveals that the trends the Pentagon identified are real and increasingly threatening, even if they don’t follow the logic of a Hollywood catastrophe movie that seemed to inspire the authors of the 2004 report. The threat is real, but the timeline was off by several decades. 

      In 2004, the Pentagon recommended to a refractory Bush administration that climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern.” What better way to secure funding from Congress than to amplify their dread of unmanageable catastrophe? Alas, the Pentagon’s fearmongering had no effect on the Bush administration’s policy, though it probably did enable them to slightly pad their budget.

      Swiss Re announced that its objective is “to help insurers assess ecosystem risks when setting premiums for businesses.” This is bound to be more realistic than the Pentagon’s speculation, but the motive similarly focuses on getting other people to pay for what they are told to fear. That principle seems to be baked into the mentality of control cultures. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrated, understanding tipping points is all about getting richer.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

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      The World’s Election

      Trump and Biden offer starkly different visions of US role in world

      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      The world is anxiously watching the election, with the candidates far apart on issues such as the climate crisis and nuclear weapons
      by Julian Borger in Washington

      Main image:
      The security council chamber at the UN headquarters in New York.
      Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS

      Foreign policy barely gets a mention in this US election, but for the rest of the world the outcome on 3 November will arguably be the most consequential in history.
      All US elections have a global impact, but this time there are two issues of existential importance to the planet – the climate crisis and nuclear proliferation – on which the two presidential candidates could hardly be further apart.
      Also at stake is the idea of “the west” as a like-minded grouping of democracies who thought they had won the cold war three decades ago.
      “The Biden versus Trump showdown in November is probably the starkest choice between two different foreign policy visions that we’ve seen in any election in recent memory,” said Rebecca Lissner, co-author of An Open World, a new book on the contest for 21st-century global order.
      In an election which will determine so much about the future of America and the world, the Trump campaign has said very little about its intentions, producing what must be the shortest manifesto in the annals of US politics.
      It appeared late in the campaign and has 54 bullet points, of which five are about foreign policy – 41 words broken into a handful of slogans such as: “Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans”.
      The word “climate” does not appear, but there are two bullet points on partnering with other countries to “clean up” the oceans, and a pledge to “Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air”. (The phrase ignores a series of US scandals about poor water quality – and the fact that millions of Americans can no longer afford their water bills.)
      The US remains the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and the average American’s carbon footprint is twice that of a European or Chinese citizen. More

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      Former Republican congressman says Murdoch's media outlets fuelling 'climate rejectionism'

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      A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. More

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      The Guardian view on Boris Johnson's Cop26: ask if GDP growth is sustainable | Editorial

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      Saving the planet ought to be a goal for, not a cost to, humanity. Yet this insight appears lost in the discussion about the climate emergency. Last week, it emerged that the Treasury was thinking about levying a UK-wide carbon tax. This approach, it was suggested, could be sold as a way of “raising revenue while cutting emissions”. Properly targeted taxes can change behaviour. But “revenue raising” green policies invariably end up being valued by the amount of taxes they produce rather than on their effectiveness in combating the climate crisis. UK governments have frozen fuel duties for a decade because it is politically easier to rake in cash than deter driving.A carbon tax is superficially appealing. The Treasury desires taxes to offset government spending. No 10 would like to align, rhetorically, with the green agenda. But without careful thought a carbon levy could backfire. A maladroit attempt to tax fuel on environmental grounds kindled France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests.By law, Britain has to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050. To get there, life in the country will have to change. For example, for the next stage of a net-zero transition, the public should shift away from heating their homes with gas boilers. Raising taxes on voters until they squeal and switch to lower carbon intensive heating systems would not be popular or necessarily progressive. A better strategy would be for the state to finance new green technologies and to regulate energy companies to recoup the investment. The Treasury dislikes spending and then taxing. Rightwing governments resist interfering in markets. But a focus on ecological sustainability would provide a reason to act in such a way.The UK government requires an environmental sense of purpose that specifies the appropriate ends for economic activity. The economist Kate Raworth has pointed out that a failure to do so has left a gap, which politicians fill by maximising national income. They are not obliged to ask if additional economic growth is sustainable. Governments ought to confront whether the growth of real GDP is too destabilising for global ecosystems. For decades the planetary boundary for resource use has been exceeded because conventional economics has encouraged political leaders to concentrate on goals that are largely irrelevant to human welfare.A confluence of world events provides a rare opportunity to change such thinking. Owing to the pandemic, global greenhouse emissions are forecast to drop by about 5% this year, compared with 2019. If sustained this would be the largest year-to-year drop since the second world war, and it could mark a turning point. If Joe Biden wins the US presidential election the world’s top three emitters, China, the US and the EU, which account for nearly half of global emissions, should all have mid-century net-zero targets, placing the 1.5˚C warming limit of the Paris agreement within reach. Preparations for the postponed Cop26 climate summit, to be held in Glasgow, are the ideal way for Britain to take a lead in a global discussion. Boris Johnson should use the platform to frame UK policy proposals boldly in terms of their impact on people and the planet, not just the economy. More

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      A second Trump term would be 'game over' for the climate, says one of the world's top climate scientists

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      This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of 400-plus news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The Guardian is the lead partner of CCN.Michael Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be “essentially impossible” if Donald Trump is re-elected.A professor at Penn State University, Mann, 54, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, testified numerous times before Congress and appeared frequently in the news media. He is also active on Twitter, where earlier this year he declared: “A second Trump term is game over for the climate – really!”, a statement he reaffirmed in an interview with the Guardian and Covering Climate Now.“If we are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit,” Mann said. “Another four years of what we’ve seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible.”None of Mann’s 200-plus scientific papers is more famous than the so-called “hockey stick study”, which Nature published on Earth Day of 1998. With two co-authors, Mann demonstrated that global temperature had been trending downward for the previous one thousand years. Graphed, this line was the long handle of the hockey stick, which surged abruptly upwards in about 1950 – represented by the blade of the stick – to make the 1990s the warmest decade in “at least the last millennium”.In 1999, Mann became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he was targeted by the climate denier crowd, an experience detailed in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. He received death threats, he says, and had emails stolen. Virginia’s former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a hard-right Republican, subpoenaed documents related to Mann’s research funding in an effort to prove fraud. A Washington Post editorial blasted Cuccinelli for “mis[using] state funds in his own personal war against climate science”. In 2014, affirming a lower court’s decision, the supreme court of Virginia ruled against Cuccinelli, who now serves as a top official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.Mann denies that it’s a partisan statement to say that four more years of Trump would mean “game over” for the climate. More

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      What does the first climate question at a US debate in 20 years reveal?

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      The long-awaited climate question in last night’s presidential debate broke a 20-year silent streak from moderators on the crisis – thrusting it into prime time but also revealing just how stuck in the past much of the US is on the issue.After more than an hour of chaos as the candidates talked over each other, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Donald Trump: “What do you believe about the science of climate change and what will you do in the next four years to confront it?”Former vice-president Al Gore – who was the last candidate asked directly about climate change in a general election debate, in 2000 – praised Wallace in a tweet for “asking serious and well-researched questions about the climate crisis”. In 2008, the vice-presidential candidates were asked to debate what is true and false about the climate crisis and the presidential candidates were asked about reducing US dependence on foreign oil.The exchange was the most substantive discussion yet of the climate crisis in a general election presidential debate, said Bracken Hendricks, co-founder of the climate group Evergreen Action. But, that is not necessarily saying much, given the previously low bar.“However, Chris Wallace also fell into several common traps of asking whether climate change is real and discussing the cost of action without the crucial context of the cost of inaction,” Hendricks said. “The moderators of future debates should build on this foundation and investigate the candidates’ divergent plans on the climate crisis.”The debate could have focused on the starkly contrasted futures Americans must choose between – tackling the crisis that global leaders call the biggest ever threat to human rights, or fueling it.Instead, Wallace framed the existence of a human-made climate crisis as something that is for some Americans still debatable, asking Trump “What do you believe about the science of climate change” and “[Do] you believe that human pollution, gas, greenhouse gas emissions, contributes to the global warming of this planet”.Science unequivocally shows humans are the predominant cause of global warming.Trump fell back on his common refrain that he wants “crystal clean water and air”, argued we have “the lowest carbon” and said China, Russia and India send up “real dirt into the air”.Wallace pushed Trump to explain his views on climate science, asking if he believes human pollution contributes to global warming of the planet.“I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes,” Trump said.Despite that response, Trump refused to acknowledge the impacts of climate change, which include worse wildfires. And he said climate action would drive energy prices “through the sky”.Trump proudly cheerleads fossil fuels. His administration has torn down essentially every federal climate action the US has ever undertaken. And his position on climate science waffles from thinking it’s a flat-out “hoax” to questioning that humans are the main cause and confusing it with air pollution.Biden, on the other hand, has laid out a $2tn plan to invest in green infrastructure that will try to eliminate US climate pollution by the middle of the century.Wallace queried Biden on his climate plans, and the former vice-president spoke at length about his proposal. He said it would create “millions of good-paying jobs” and that the cost of inaction is more severe weather. He took a jab at Trump for suggesting dropping a nuclear weapon on hurricanes – which are intensifying because of the climate crisis.Biden said he does not support a Green New Deal – a vision for large-scale spending to fight the climate crisis and inequality that has become a buzzword for Republicans who see Democrats as radical.“You just lost the radical left,” Trump said.Biden would put 40% of climate investments toward environmental justice, including in communities of color that are more likely to be surrounded by polluting fossil fuel infrastructure. But it stops short of progressive calls for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, two key components of the Green New Deal.While many climate advocates were elated that a climate question was asked at all, others were disappointed.“Hot and unpopular take: I would have been OK with Wallace skipping,” said RL Miller, political director of Climate Hawks Vote. “He asked a very shallow question with limited follow-up.” More

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      in World Politics

      Climate Disruption and the American Obsession with Control

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      For this week’s debate between US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the moderator, Chris Wallace, has ambitiously proposed six topics. They presumably represent what he believes are the most important and urgent issues to clarify for the two candidates. The topics are: Trump’s and Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election.

      John Branch and Brad Plumer may feel that something is missing in Wallace’s list. They are the authors of a lengthy New York Times article that appeared last week under the title “Climate Disruption is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.” Perhaps Wallace reasoned that attempting to debate climate change would make no sense since everyone knows Trump simply denies that there is an issue to debate. In such a debate he might just follow Jordan Peterson, who in five minutes dismissed the entire climate issue as “an absolutely catastrophic nightmarish mess” on which it is not worth wasting our precious time.

      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

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      But there may be another reason for Wallace’s hesitation. It raises other more important issues, too complex to evoke in the type of reality TV show we call a presidential debate. Branch and Plumer describe the severity of the problem: “Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Epochal shift:

      The one type of historical event that modern democracies have no means of dealing with and no hope of addressing even if the entirety of their voting populations acknowledged the need.

      Contextual Note

      After listing some of the types of disasters — droughts, fires, tropical storms — that are observable today and whose frequency is increasing, the authors raise the most fundamental question that concerns “humanity’s willingness to take action.” In other words, like politics itself, it is all about the resolution to act. The proverb reassures us: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The problem the authors evoke but never really address lies in identifying the agent with the will and how it might be empowered to act.

      The article claims that “climate disruption” has now appeared on “center stage in the presidential campaign.” Trump denies there is a problem, but Biden has announced the measures he would take to address the issue. They include “spending $2 trillion over four years to escalate the use of clean energy and ultimately phase out the burning of oil, gas and coal,” building “500,000 electric vehicle charging stations” and “1.5 million new energy-efficient homes and eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035.”

      Sophie Austin reports for Politifact that most environmentally sensitive commentators have expressed approval of Biden’s plan. But she adds that “some climate activists say his plan doesn’t go far enough to reduce carbon emissions and protect Indigenous lands from fossil fuel pollution.” Dan Gearino notes on the Inside Climate News website that, while the Biden plan is praiseworthy on paper, it doesn’t appear to be the candidate’s highest priority: “This doesn’t mean climate change and clean energy are top-tier issues for the candidates,” Gearino writes. Branch and Plumer call the next moves “crucial.” Biden appears to consider talk about the next moves crucial.

      Historical Note

      The Times authors maintain that the only solution will be an epochal shift. That means reversing historical trends embedded deep in the culture. They should be looking well beyond politics toward changes in culture, lifestyle and the rules that govern economic relationships. But, as often happens with The New York Times, its perspectives never seem to go beyond national policies and politics. “Nations,” they write, “have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.”

      Nations cannot cut emissions. They can legislate by establishing quotas. They can tax certain activities and commodities to discourage emissions. But, apart from, for example, reducing the size of their bloated militaries, champion consumers of fossil fuel, nations and their governments do not have the power to cut emissions. People have that power. But at the very minimum that means, as the authors have insisted, “rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life.” 

      Thinking and rethinking may be enough to satisfy journalists, but if it doesn’t lead to action. It serves no other purpose than to provide copy for the media. Don’t journalists spend most of their ink transcribing what politicians “think” before agreeing that nothing ever gets done? Thinking things through, Hamlet style, can sometimes aggravate the problem, creating the equivalent of social melancholia.

      Doing rather than simply thinking implies radically redefining relationships with other people and the environment, including reframing our dependence on technologies and consumable goods most people may not be ready to relinquish. The authors insist that while the problem is grave, it’s not too late. Something can be done. They reassuringly quote an environmental historian: “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”

      Some analysts of US culture have identified establishing and maintaining control as the culture’s dominant core value. This nevertheless creates an unsustainable paradox. For three-quarters of a century, Americans have used the dollar to establish control over the global economy. When President George W. Bush pulled out of the timid resolutions for climate control of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, he cited as his compelling reason that “mandates in the Kyoto Treaty would affect our economy in a negative way.”

      Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party have never veered from Bush’s logic, justified with this specious line of reasoning: “We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.” In other words, Americans don’t like to think about what they can’t control. They prefer to focus on the one thing they believe they control: the economy. Of course, those who observed how well Bush controlled the economy in 2007-08 or Trump did in 2020 may object that if that’s what they mean by control, maybe they should just give up their global military empire, retreat to their bunkers and let Adam Smith’s invisible hand retake control.

      Embed from Getty Images

      After reassuring readers that everything is “in our control,” the article makes its own “epochal shift” when it tells us that “climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.” The authors reassure us that even if control isn’t total, we can be satisfied with partial control, which could be deemed a good enough solution for control-obsessed Americans: “The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.” By invoking “humanity,” they also seem to be admitting that it is no longer about the US running the show on its own. Returning to the theme, largely neglected in the article, of accepting to change our lifestyle, the authors then pinpoint the real problem: “Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.” The rest of humanity has no choice because, unlike Americans, they have no reason to believe in their capacity to control everything.

      Unsurprisingly, The Times article ends with a reassuring conclusion, though in this case it retains a timid touch of ambiguity. After admitting that “climate change’s biggest problem may be the sense that it is beyond our control,” the authors cite a climate scientist who offers this philosophical wisdom: “What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate. We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed. If we choose.” In other words, endowed with free will, we are beautifully free to retake control. The only remaining question is this: Who precisely is the “we” with the “agency to take courageous decisions”?

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More