Stories about Less of What We Don't Need.
A systemic critique of 'luxury communism' & other recent techno-utopias, both liberal and nominally leftist ones, from the leading-edge Uneven Earth blog.
Lately I’ve been struck by a picture of Melinda Tillies, a Louisiana homeowner recently featured in an article by Julie Dermansky in DeSmogBlog.* Tillies is standing in front of her house. In the background (not more than “25 feet away”) is a crane, its arm lifted, ready to plunge into the earth.
Tillies looks into the camera. She appears at once angry, fed-up, resigned, and defiant.
One of my first memories of watching TV during the early 1950s was ads promoting leaded gasoline for reducing engine knock. Little did I suspect the strange history of that gas.
Faith that environmental catastrophe can best be avoided by technological gadgetry rather than a change in social relationships received a big shot in the arm with the May 2018 publication of Energy: A Human History by prolific author Richard Rhodes.
Pilots from the US Department of the Navy returned from World War II flush with pride at winning the war in the Pacific. So, in 1946,the Navy established a base of naval air operations on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico where the Blue Angels began doing air showsfor the public, partly for recruiting future pilots and partly for raising unit morale.
Within a few years the US Air Force established a base in Texas, where the first USAF Thunderbird team began doing air shows in 1953.
Our job, as ecosocialists is to put forward a practical plan to slam the brakes on emissions, an EMERGENCY RESPONSE TO THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
A missing piece from most critiques of modern capitalism revolves around the misunderstanding of ecology. To put it bluntly, there will be no squaring the circle of mass industrial civilization and an inhabitable Earth. There is no way for energy and resource use, along with all the strife, warfare, and poverty that comes along with it, to continue under the business as usual model that contemporary Western nations operate under.
There is also the problem of constructing millions of solar panels and gigantic wind farms to attempt to bring the entire world’s population to a middle class existence based on a North American, or even European levels of energy use. All of the hypothetical robots and artificial intelligence to be constructed for such a mega-endeavor needed to enact such a project would at least initially rely on fossil fuels and metals plundered from the planet, and only lead to more rapacious destruction of the world.
Mark Twain famously wrote that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This insight is relevant to examining the apologetics of modern-day academics in the rising neoliberal assault on the public. This subservience to power is evident in efforts to rationalize governmental attacks on the most basic of human needs: access to clean water. In seeking to numb the public to basic facts and reality, the New York Times has published an op-ed analysis piece by Hernán Gómez and Kim Dietrich: “The Children of Flint Were Not Poisoned” (7/22/2018).
