Its green they say

Green green
Its green they say
On the far side of the hill
     - New Christie Minstrels

When the light turns green
Put your foot on the gasoline
      - Lead belly

Greetings

       So many people seem unhappy with the candidates suggested by the two main parties.  Perhaps it's worth taking a look at an alternative.     I did take a look and I was quite surprised by what I found.   It turns out there are 2 Green Parties!    There is the Green Party of the US, which is the- one you hear about - Jill Steins party,  But there is another , called the Green Party USA. 

      Stein's party proposes a "Green New Deal"  ,  which looks to me like  the "progressive" wing of the Democratic party.   It's kind of warmed over Sanders.  In fact the Green Party of the Us has invited Sanders to run on their ticket.  To oversimplify, their platform is :   Green growth - fairer distribution.    

       There is also another Green Party.  (Green Party USA)  They promote "degrowth".   Here is what they say about the Green New Deal (GND)

"The GND cannot protect the environment because it is based on protecting corporate power just like the Green Revolution, Green 
Capitalism and Green Economy. It relies on two clearly false corporate myths: that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet, and that growth is necessary for everyone to have good lives.

The GND ignores the impossibility of endless growth and the 
horrible consequences of trying to achieve it. At a 2% growth rate, the economy would double at least every 36 years. At a 3% growth rate, a doubling would occur at least every 24 years. In a hundred years, 
production would be 16 times what it is now. In 200 years the economy would be 256 times what it is now. This would flood the world with 
toxins, collapse biodiversity, and cause uncontrolled climate change.

Suggesting that solar and wind power can meet not only all 
household energy needs but 100% of current industrial needs is a fantasy. Suggesting they could do so for an economy that is 256 times as large is silly"

     I heard a good interview with Kevin Anderson on KBOO  .(H/t Ruben)  .   He got asked point blank about whether we could rely on "green growth" to keep us from hitting 2 degrees.   He was pretty direct, essentially saying that the only way to avoid dangerous climate change, was for the rich people to take a pay cut - to stop growing, to de- grow.

       One might wonder -what is the purpose of a Green Party, if it is going to be one more flavor of the infinite growth paradigm.?   Paul Kingsnorth argues that the whole idea of green politics was to step away from that paradigm altogether .

"It was not part of the conventional argument about how to divide up the spoils of industrial progress. Its purpose was to argue that the definition of progress itself was the problem to be solved: that industrial society, as currently constituted, was a threat not only to the individual freedom cherished by parts of the right and the social justice cherished by parts of the left, but also to the global ecosystem - what both sides referred to as the 'natural world', as if somehow humans were 'unnatural' and apart from it -which both were frantically destroying in the name of that progress. In this sense, I said, green politics was more radical - and much older - than the teachings of either Marx or Hayek."

"One of the original aims of green politics was to go beyond the left/right dichotomy - to speak up for the wider world, for the non-human world, for its own sake, because no other ideology would. An accommodation with the left undermines the founding ethos of radical green politics: ecocentrism. The left, though it likes to lay claim to the green mantle, has no interest in ecocentrism. By definition it cannot have, for the point of the left is to struggle for social justice for human beings. The environment will always come a poor second to the achievement of this historical mission."

Both the mainstream parties as well as the "Green" party are caught up in the same perspective.    A truly "green" political movement would have a different philosophy.   

"It is a philosophy which sees humanity as part of the mesh of life, not as a separate entity which can control and direct something called 'nature' with no consequences for itself. It stresses that what is often regarded as political 'radicalism' is in fact a reordering of the same anthropocentric development paradigm, in which the fruits of the destruction of global ecosystems are simply distributed more fairly than before."

       At base, the problem is the anthropocentric view, that "we can have it all",  and deserve to do so, and any problem that creates for the biosphere can be dealt with by more technology.    

      But perhaps we don't need to "have it all"  .  Perhaps we might have more fulfilling lives if we had a bit less.   Perhaps if we paid attention to what we already had, rather than dreaming of the next thing to get or experience.    I recently read an interesting piece on Buddhism and ecology  (h/t   Susan    ), , pointing out that not only does "having it all" cause tremendous harm , it also is fruitless way to have real satisfaction 

"..... 

because of our constant desires, our mind and body cannot find peace. “At some point, we have to say enough is enough,” His Holiness advised, because desires can be limitless, and if we have strong desires, we will be unable to find contentment. Ultimately, we have to take a further step and turn our back on our desires and let go of attachment. This is renunciation"

Which political party reflects this view, I wonder.  It seems that in terms of political options,  our menu is pretty limited.   What we need, in the words of Barry Goldwater,  "A choice , no an echo."

A river in Egypt

Hey, you,
get off of my cloud
    - Rolling Stones

We don't need no education
     - Pink Floyd

Greetings

          Denial comes in many colors and flavors.    Plain  vanilla, I suppose is to deny the problem.  "There is no climate change, or if there is its not human caused"   That's pretty straight forward.  But,   there are also  more sophisticated methods.  .   "Yes, there's a problem but we can easily fix it, without disturbing economic growth". That's a little more insidious.   Here's a nice article from new scientist about the Paris accords.  While asserting both that the goal should be 1.5 or 2 degrees, it also repeats the view that there is "some way" to accomplish this while still maintaining the current level of affluence.

           We can't seem let go of the view that that technology  (renewable energy and efficiency)  will save the day.  That the "T" in I=PAT, will counter balance the continually growing "P" (population) and "A" (affluence) .    This faith gives us the psychological cover to go about our daily business.    A recent speech by William Reese on Degrowth, ( partially transcribed here ), explains in some detail how, we can easily be distracted by shining technological "green growth solutions".

        So, if green growth is not likely to reverse overshoot, and de-growth, ( for all its benefits)  is a political non starter,  what then?  

        Here is an NYT op ed piece from the front lines of our future, by Roy Scranton.   Interestingly, he served in Baghdad, and New Orleans (Katrina).  Unfortunately, he sees similarities.  His message is simple  "This civilization is already dead".  We just don't know it.  We refuse to recognize it.  Things will never be the same.as they were.   We should probably face the fact.  What to do? It's not that we should give up and "Do nothing".  But we should do what is appropriate, considering what is really happening. 

   

"The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.."

   Or here is most recent one

" There is little reason to hope that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point. We’re already one degree Celsius above preindustrial temperatures and there’s another half a degree baked in. The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquefying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s probably already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming. Meanwhile the world slides into hate-filled, bloody havoc, like the last act of a particularly ugly Shakespearean tragedy.

"Accepting our situation could easily be confused with nihilism. In a nation founded on hope, built with “can do” Yankee grit, and bedazzled by its own technological wizardry, the very idea that something might be beyond our power or that humans have intrinsic limits verges on blasphemy. Right and left, millions of Americans believe that every problem has a solution; suggesting otherwise stirs a deep and often hostile resistance. It’s not so much that accepting the truth of our situation means thinking the wrong thought, but rather thinking the unthinkable.

Yet it’s at just this moment of crisis that our human drive to make meaning reappears as our only salvation … if we’re willing to reflect consciously on the ways we make life meaningful — on how we decide what is good, what our goals are, what’s worth living or dying for, and what we do every day, day to day, and how we do it. Because if it’s true that we make our lives meaningful ourselves and not through revealed wisdom handed down by God or the Market or History, then it’s also true that we hold within ourselves the power to change our lives — wholly, utterly — by changing what our lives mean. Our drive to make meaning is more powerful than oil, the atom, and the market, and it’s up to us to harness that power to secure the future of the human species.

We can’t do it by clinging to the progressivist, profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism. We can’t do it by trying to control the future. We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility. We need to work together to transform a global order of meaning focused on accumulation into a new order of meaning that knows the value of limits, transience and restraint.

Most important, we need to give up defending and protecting our truth, our perspective, our Western values, and understand that truth is found not in one perspective but in their multiplication, not in one point of view but in the aggregate, not in opposition but in the whole. We need to learn to see not just with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.

We were born on the eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either. Some of us will even live through it. What meaning we pass on to the future will depend on how well we remember those who have come before us, how wisely and how gently we’re able to shed the ruinous way of life that’s destroying us today, and how consciously we’re able to affirm our role as creators of our fated future.

Accepting the fatality of our situation isn’t nihilism, but rather the necessary first step in forging a new way of life."