Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Whose agenda are you devoted to?

I have never seen George Monbiot’s bettered as career advice, though it will not lead to an easy life. For instance:

What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution. You can do what you believe only if that belief happens to coincide with the aims of the corporation, not just once, but consistently, across the years

Also:

How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?

What he cheers for and takes satisfaction from is inspiring too:

Most countries have a number of small alternative papers and broadcasters, run voluntarily by people making their living by other means: part time jobs, grants or social security. These are, on the whole, people of tremendous courage and determination, who have placed their beliefs ahead of their comforts. To work with them can be a privilege and inspiration, for the simple reason that they – and, by implication, you – are free while others are not. All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.

Autonomy, not authority, is the only way to escape the many traps of the status quo.

May Boeve ‘stepping back’ at 350.org

A few years after Bill McKibben, May Boeve is also ‘stepping back’ from the climate change activist group 350.org.

The first three items on her list of accomplishments are all things I saw firsthand. The global divestment movement was a focus of my activist efforts from 2012–16 and then for my PhD research. Keystone XL resistance is a big part of what drew my interest to 350.org after 2011. In some ways, the 2014 People’s Climate March was the high point for Toronto350.org.

I can’t say I am optimistic about the present state of climate organizing. Activists are distracted by all sorts of issues and have little focus on actually abolishing and replacing fossil fuels, or on building a large and influential political coalition. Meanwhile, in mainstream politics, the way things are going is characterized by incomprehension about what is happening and ineffectual efforts to recapture what people feel entitled to, without comprehending that the world that made those things possible no longer exists. Humanity has never been in greater danger.

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Peter Russell tributes

In January, my friend and mentor Peter Russell died. His son Alex invited me to give remarks at his funeral reception: Remarks at the funeral of Peter Russell

Yesterday, I spoke at Innis College’s memorial event: Remarks about Peter Russell at Innis College

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Canada’s origin in fraud

Over the next few years, as I got to know the Dene better, I learned about how emissaries of the Canadian government had first entered the Dene lands and the conditions under which they negotiated Treaty Eight in 1899 as the queen’s representatives and Treaty Eleven as the king’s representatives in 1921. These treaties had about as much to do with the queen or king as they did with your great grandma or grandpa. The mission of the Canadian treaty party in 1899 was to secure a safe shortcut for Canadians on their way to the Klondike goldfields, and in 1921 to prepare access for the oil industry to the petroleum discovered at Norman Wells, a way down the Mackenzie River.

These treaties, like the other numbered treaties before and between them, were designed to gain access for settler industries to resources in areas that had been Indigenous nations’ homelands for centuries and in which Native peoples were still by far the dominant if not the only population…

Sovereignty is not mentioned in these treaties, nor is the queen or king referred to as sovereign. But the text of the treaties, written in Ottawa, in English, in advance of “negotiations” and not translated into the Native people’s language, contained some killer language. In return from some up-front money and small annual payments of a few dollars to every man, woman, and child, flags, medals, suits for the chiefs, sometimes fishnets and farming equipment, plus some small parcels of their former homeland to be assigned to them by the queen or king as “reserves,” the Native owners are purported “to cede, release, surrender and yield up” all rights and priveleges to all of their territory. This language is in all the numbered treaties. It is what the lawyers call “boilerplate.” At the so-called treaty negotiations, the Crown’s representatives did not use those killer words at all. Instead, the Indigenous signatories (who may have lacked authorization to sign anything on behalf of their nation) were assured that they would have access to their traditional hunting grounds as long as the sun rises and the rivers flow.

When you read the treaty texts and think about the actual treaty process, the most apt word that comes to mind in answering the Dene’s question about how the Queen got sovereignty over them is surely trickery. And that is a polite way of answering the question. Fraud is closer to what actually occurred. The First Nations had not been conquered, and while there was a strong interest in establishing a peaceful relationship and getting some tangible benefits, no Native people was so desperate that it would knowingly sign away its rights and make itself totally dependent on the largesse of the white man.

Russell, Peter. H. Sovereignty: The Biography of a Claim. University of Toronto Press, 2021. p. 4-5 (italics in original)

How should we feel about Canada now, if we acknowledge that its origins were fundamentally illegitimate?

In practical terms, does sovereignty mean anything other than armed control over a population?

Our leaders are killing our kids

Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing that social media and smartphones are the reason young people around the world are not doing well.

While there may well be truth to that, to me the whole discussion seems like an evasion of the real issue: we are living in a world where our leaders are killing our kids, because they are unwilling to act on climate change even though it could bring about the end of our civilization. We live in a world where the people in charge are willing to condemn everyone who follows them to torment and destruction, all because they are unwilling to give up the conveniences of fossil fuels. The ‘leaders’ who are doing this are committing history’s most egregious crime against future generations and the natural world, yet our media and society keep treating them as the best of their kind: deserving of praise, wealth, and fancy state funerals when they reach the end.

The lesson that sends to young people is that the system does not value them in any way, and is happy to sacrifice their most vital interests for the sake of further enriching those who benefit from the fossil fuel status quo – which is not just billionaire fatcats, but billions of consumers in rich societies who take it for granted that big trucks and airplanes are the way to get around and who insist on political leaders who pretend to care about climate change, while being privately committed to keep supporting the fossil fuel industry.

Even the RCMP – an institution that sees itself as an ally (p. 41) of the fossil fuel industry – is warning about how our societal disregard for the interests of the young is fueling instability:

There is a notion of the social contract in which each generation is obligated to consider the interests of those who will come after. This covenant has been totally broken, with the almost inescapable consequence that intergenerational conflict will become more and more severe as the damage we have done to the Earth keeps destroying our ability to provide the well-off with what they feel entitled to.

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What if we never respond adaptively to climate change?

A central assumption of many climate change activists and advocates for climate stability is that once people experience how destructive and painful climate change will be, they will become more willing to take actions to limit its severity – chiefly by foregoing fossil fuel production and use.

The Economist reports on how this assumption may not be justified, in discussing the threat of sea level rise to The Netherlands:

The longer-term issue, of course, is climate change. The North Sea has risen about 19cm since 1900, and the rate has increased from about 1.7mm per year to about 2.7mm since the 1990s. This makes it ever harder for riverwater to flow into the sea. With a quarter of their country lying below sea level, one might think that Dutch voters would be exceptionally worried by global warming and choose parties that strive to end carbon emissions. Yet in a general election last November they gave first place to a hard-right candidate, Geert Wilders, who wants to put global climate accords “through the shredder”. Mr Wilders’s party got 23.5% of the vote; a combined Green-Labour list got just 16%.

All across Europe this winter, as the effects of climate change grow starker, the parties that want to do something about it are getting hammered. In Germany, where the floodwaters hit first, the Green party’s popularity has plunged. Portugal’s Algarve is parched by drought, but with elections due on March 10th polls show the green-friendly left running well behind the centre- and far right. Southern Spain has declared a drought emergency, yet the pro-green Socialist-led government is teetering. Snowless ski resorts in Italy have done nothing for the fortunes of environmentalist parties; Italy’s Green party is polling at around 4%. In winter the Swiss Alps appear on heat-anomaly maps of Europe as a streak of red, 3°c above historical averages. But the hard-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the biggest in parliament, won even more seats in an election last autumn, while the Greens shrank.

I feel like the norm in human civilizations is that we are incredibly badly governed. People are easy to fool and deeply divided into tribes, and that provides ample opportunities for political leaders to claim credit and avoid blame.

If politics as usual is the self-serving and incompetent ruling in their own interests while putting together enough of a story to sustain public support, politics when the world is coming to an end promises to be even more dysfunctional and incapable of resolving problems.

Pfeffer on the limitations of intelligence as a path to power

Furthermore, intelligence, particularly beyond a certain level, may lead to behaviors that make acquiring or holding on to influence less likely. People who are exceptionally smart think they can do everything on their own and do it better than everyone else. Consequently, they may fail to bring others along with them, leaving their potential allies in the dark about their plans and thinking. Being recognized as exceptionally smart can cause overconfidence and even arrogance, which, as we will see in more detail later, can lead to the loss of power. And smart people may think that because of their great intelligence they can afford to be less sensitive to others’ needs and feelings. Many of the people who seem to me to have the most difficulty putting themselves in the other’s place are people who are so smart they can’t understand why others don’t get it. Lastly, intelligence can be intimidating. Although intimidation can work for a while, it is not a strategy that brings much enduring loyalty.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. Power: Why Some People Have It — and Others Don’t. HarperCollins, 2010. p. 56

Reform bankruptcy to keep fossil fuels in the ground

One of the many challenges on the road to fossil fuel abolition is the US-style of bankruptcy, where any valuable assets of a bankrupt corporation or individual are sold to help compensate their creditors.

With fossil fuels, this risks setting up a perverse circumstance where coal, oil, and gas which we should not burn keeps getting shuffled to new owners whose only reason for buying it is to burn it:

Financing more digging at existing mines—the second link in the supply chain—is no problem either. Last year coal production hit a record 8bn tonnes. It is not quite business as usual. Since 2018 many mining “majors” (large, diversified groups listed on public markets) have sold some or all of their coal assets. Yet rather than being decommissioned, disposed assets have been picked up by private miners, emerging-market rivals and private-equity firms. New owners have no qualms about making full use of mines. In 2021 Anglo American, a London-based major, spun off its South African mines into a new firm that instantly pledged to crank up output.

If humanity is to have a safe and prosperous future, fossil fuels need to be abolished before we produce catastrophic climate change. This is a social objective far more important than refunding the creditors of bankrupt firms.

Bhargava and Luce on practical radicals

We wrote this book for a specific audience: the segment of the Left who might embrace the label practical radical. These are organizers who hold big visions for transforming society and are willing to do what it takes to win in the real world. Legendary organizer Bayard Rustin, a consummate practical radical, criticized two other dominant ways of approaching social change: “My quarrel with the ‘no-win’ tendency in the civil rights movement (and the reason I have so designated it) parallels my quarrel with the moderates outside the movement. As the latter lack the vision or will for fundamental change, the former lack a realistic strategy for achieving it. For such a strategy they substitute militancy But militancy is a matter of posture and volume and not of effect.” Practical radicals are not content to be on the right side without a plan to make their vision a reality. And they are not satisfied with working on small issues without an analysis of what’s wrong with society and a vision for how it could be better.

Bhargava, Deepak and Luce, Stephanie. Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World. The New Press, 2023. p. ix-x (bold and italics in original)

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