Month: April 2007

Climate change denial, in thin leftist wrapping paper

I just read (briefly) an interview with Denis Rancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who claims climate change is not happening and that talk of climate change serves oil companies. My quick reaction is that this is like Michael Deibert on Haiti or Irshad Manji on Israel/Palestine and terror – reactionary politics wrapped up in some thin progressive language to either dupe or confuse leftists who would otherwise be the most solid advocates of progress (or decent survival). It will take more looking into his work to know the details, but I find his explanation for lay people unconvincing:

“I argue that there is no reliable evidence that the global average Earth surface temperature has increased in recent decades. I argue this by making a critique of how such trends are extracted, inferred and extrapolated from incomplete and artifact-laden data. I explain melting glaciers and receding permafrost as more probably arising from radiative mechanisms, linked to particulate pollution, land use/cover changes, and solar variations, rather than global warming. And I argue that atmospheric CO2 does not control climate, but is at best a witness of global changes. These arguments are technical but I have tried to present them as simply and clearly as possible in the article.

Radiative mechanisms, land/use cover changes, and solar variations – rather than global warming? And that the ice isn’t melting because of increases in temperature? Science advances through counterintuitive results, but that doesn’t make counterintuitive results true.

“More importantly, I argue that the real threat (the most destructive force on the planet) is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might and that you cannot control a monster by asking it not to shit as much. I argue that non-democratic control of the economy and institutionalized exploitation of the Third World (and all workers) must be confronted directly if we are to install sanity.”

This is a nonsequitur. It gets into political strategy, and what he says here is partly obvious and partly dubious (since no one serious is really saying what he is arguing against), but in any case has nothing to do with climate change or his claims about why the ice sheets are melting or that the average temperature has not increased.

Monbiot’s book, Heat, opens with four questions:

1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide raise the average global temperature?
3. Will this influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

To get the answers they have liked to these questions, the denial industry has had to pay PR people to falsify scientific claims to set progress back a decade. Now someone like Rancourt comes along and answers them negatively, dismissing climate scientists as “political” and “consensus-driven” but from the left, instead of from the right. I suppose the timing was ripe for something like this, but I truly hope that people do not get fooled.

Two more books (with good titles)

“American Fascists” by Chris Hedges. A couple of little things annoyed me – like his tossing Hamas in with other fascist groups. But overall a very good and very scary book, whose title is descriptive. A good sequel to “what’s the matter with kansas” by Thomas Frank, and things have advanced since then. The main thing that I like is that he doesn’t advocate dialogue and recognizes that these people have to be fought. They have contempt for us, and there’s nothing to be gained by tolerating them.

“The Failure of Political Islam” by Olivier Roy. This is no anti-imperialist as far as I could tell, but some interesting stuff. Good title, anyway. Roy has an interesting argument: that as a political movement Islamism is based on reforming the individual, and because it’s based on reforming the individual it doesn’t develop comprehensive programs for transforming society, which limits it. It has gotten somewhere because of the failure of previous ideologies, nationalism, secularism, and socialism, but it too has failed, leaving the third world in an unresolved crisis. Fits with Vijay Prashad’s book’s idea about how the fall of the third world idea left the poor countries without a way out of their crisis. Vijay Prashad’s sequel, “Poorer Nations: A People’s History of the Global South”, promises to be a bit bleaker than his latest book…

Reading List

I have been reading books lately, and they’ve been great. Some environmental reading and some political reading. I’ll be reviewing some of the political ones, soon. Here’s the list.

-The Humanure Handbook by JC Jenkins. I have been reading about water issues and about things like the treatment wetlands and living machines developed by John and Nancy Jack Todd and written about in their popular recent book, “A Safe and Sustainable World” (also a recent read). But there is an alternative, JC Jenkins suggests, to trying to treat shit that’s in water – and that is to not put it there in the first place. To practice what Jenkins advocates you need some space – a backyard of your own, at least, and perhaps a garden for use of the compost. But by using thermophilic composting, using ample amounts of sawdust and other organic material, pathogens are removed and nasty odors dealt with, and the end product is good, non-toxic, non-dangerous compost. Doing this kind of thing in a city would require a public system, but more importantly it would require a change in attitudes, which leads us to the next book.

-Heat, by George Monbiot. An absolute must read for everybody. Everybody who saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and found Gore’s final lines about political will being a renewable resource insufficient is ready for Monbiot. Monbiot shows decisively that Kyoto is too weak and will not stabilize the atmosphere. Instead we need a 90% cut in emissions by 2030. Next he shows how this could be done, evaluating proposals for political as well as technical feasibility. This book is a major contribution to humanity. If we’re actually doomed, it won’t be thanks to George.

-Darker Nations, by Vijay Prashad. The word ‘beautiful’ applies. Vijay Prashad is someone whose books I always learn from and who always sends me thinking in interesting directions. He also always impresses me with how big he thinks too. It’s always the whole world, though that doesn’t mean he ever misses any details. He’s building a really stellar body of work and “Darker Nations” is an incredible contribution. It’s ‘a people’s history of the third world’, by which he doesn’t mean the history of all of the places (though he provides an impressive amount of that) but rather a history of the idea of the ‘third world’: independent, nonaligned, secular, socialist, nationalism. He traces the rise and fall of this idea and this movement, and he does so using a brilliant structure. Each chapter is the name of a city, usually a city where an important third world meeting took place, and he uses each chapter to delve into the politics of the time, as well as of the place.

-Holding the Bully’s Coat, by Linda McQuaig. A long overdue book about the recent changes in Canada’s foreign policy and our craven elites. McQuaig sees through the deceptions and she has both a wit and an indignation that is really refreshing. Especially after reading someone like George Monbiot, with his constant understatement, or Vijay, whose depth of analysis can make you feel like things couldn’t have gone any other way, it’s nice to read Linda and remember that this is actually an appalling situation and it shouldn’t be! I’m not done her book yet – in fact I think I’ll be going back to it tonight.

-I’ve also been reading some of the people Linda critiques in her book: JL Granatstein (Whose War Is It?), Andrew Cohen (While Canada Slept), Sean Maloney (Enduring the Freedom), David Bercuson (a book a year). They can make for demoralizing reading, so it’s especially nice to read Linda’s critiques.

-Anna Politkovskaya on Russia’s war on Chechnya. A friend recommended her to me and I picked up her book, which was very good. She was clearly a person of tremendous integrity and conscience. Amira Hass is the best comparison that comes to my mind.

Next to Politkovskaya in the library was the amoral and always useful analysis of the RAND Corporation, so I picked that up as well. Why should Americans read about Russia in Chechnya, the book asks? Because Americas enemies will look more like the Chechens than the Russians, and better that we learn from their mistakes than make our own, the book answers. RAND’s book came out a year or two before 2003.