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Gardenworld Politics

Author: Douglass Carmichael Issue: 2022-06-01

Gardenworld Politics

by Douglass Carmichael

I am very involved with a number of groups, individuals and institutions focused on climate change and the economy and politics that surround it. Some of you have read much of this because it is either from my blog at douglasscarmichael.substack.com or the draft of my book Gardenworld Politics, linked off that same page. But this is a good opportunity to share my evolving and always incomplete thinking. Here is a summary from one of the seminars.

Impossible to come to conclusions of what to do. For example, what would we want the heads (management teams) of the top five oil companies to do?

Are these plausible without dire secondary consequences?

So much writing about climate divides into two views:

  1. Need to grow and climate is an investment opportunity.
  2. Growth, on balance, needs energy which contributes to CO2 given current and near term, and maybe long term impossibilities. However clean a solar panel factory is (to say nothing of building the factory),  simple things like trucking silicon puts CO2 into the atmosphere that will remain there for the near and mid term future. But we must cut CO2.

We looked at Fullerton, Pollin and Rifkin,  and concluded that their approaches skim the surface and avoid dealing with the lack of implementation protocols  of policies, leaving us empty handed for proposals as to what to do.  “who will do what and when will they do it?”

Our politics looms large, mostly because it seems fraught. Combining, bringing together, political science and economics looks fruitful and kind of classical but daunting. The logic is that big problems (much bigger than ozone holes) require centralized government, but that means more authoritarian.  Paradox.

Here are some recent posts from the blog.

2566. Beware and be thoughtful, even analytical

There are key words or phrases that are Trojan Horses for no change. For example,

require scrutiny by all of us.

hint: is natural gas (which is methane) clean (i.e. no co2) ?

What are the two terms in calculating net- zero?

2578. Democracy and climate change

The difficulty we face is a defining moment in history, maybe the defining moment for our species (and all species). We are mostly democratically inclined, but the needed approach (especially cutting co2, are not going to be popular because the the needed actions to cut co2 will (are) tearing apart most lives.

Well, well so we need a central command, a dictatorship. How the hell did we get here?

In wiser times there was an understanding (see the histories of Polybius, an ancient Greek historian) who built on the idea, widely held in Greece and Rome, that forms of governance are cyclical A to B to C, as in democracy to oligarchy to monarchy (or, in the negative, mobs, kleptocracy, tyranny), and that wisdom is seeing the need to alter the form of government as the key issues change. For example, democracy is good when the issue is internal, like distribution of income, but bad when the issue is external threat to which democracies would divide the state in factions.

Are we capable of such thinking? It is really difficult because we almost have no political thinkers. Western society, now imitated elsewhere, outsourced political thinking to economics which cannot get past investment and growth.

With a little hard thinking you can work out how this applies to our own time.

2581. No founding fathers to continue the conversation

The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution report together by mostly self-selected men who wanted to create an alternative to dependency on the British monarchy. They did a terrific job and spent hours studying and I’m debating what could be learned from the history of republics and other forms of government.

But, when that government proves inadequate to our challenges we have nobody who can say “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…” We are trying to titrate the current system And we have no idea how to craft a new one just as it is being a swamped by catastrophes. It looks to me as those smart people going to college for the last five decades or so did not study history or poetry or literature. Berthold Brecht wrote in the mouth of Galileo, “As a scientist I set a bad example. Now the best we can hope for is a race of inventive dwarfs for hire by anybody.”

The “anybody” turns out to be a coterie of billionaires seemingly prepared to declare their sovereignty over the earth. For us, it is a little like the New York Times crosswords which start simple on Monday and end very difficult by the weekend. In the past of our political economy, we have squandered the early days and are skidding around on the difficult clues from Saturday’s puzzle.

But there are clues and if we work hard we can figure this out.

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