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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Environmentalism for the War-Profiteering Swinging-Dick Set

While fishing around the internets this morning in my quest for references to Monty Burns and "geo-engineering," I found an interesting observation from Everypundit Ezra Klein:
Geoengineering tends to be favored by conservatives rather than liberals. In part, that's simply because it's an effective retort to a policy liberals support…. Conservatives tend to be very wary of government efforts to intervene in the economy or in social policy. Health-care reform, for instance, is considered far beyond federal capacities. But invading Iraq and rebuilding its government was seen as a perfectly sensible effort for the government to undertake. So too with deploying untested technologies to refashion the reflectiveness of the upper atmosphere. Liberals, conversely, tend to pale at the complexity of these interventions.

I don't think anybody really believes that liberals pale at "complexity" -- if anything we are wont to revel in it to the cost of expedience -- but I do think the difference Klein may be onto here involves that strange Republican paradox of hating the very idea of government, you know, doing things effectively at all, while at once loving declaring war on stuff, even though that is something only governments can really do.

"Geo-engineering" is, after all, the equivalent of a declaration of war on climate change, involving corporate-military actors brute-forcing outcomes without much worry about ecological side-effects or regulatory niceties or real oversight. It's environmentalism for the war-profiteering swinging-dick set. Sure, it doesn't make a lot of sense as a working concept, sure it's really just a bunch of futurological CGI cartoons, sure it's just inviting disaster, sure it can't work if history is any kind of guide. If you’re a Republican, what's not to like?

Intriguingly enough, Klein (not a Republican) actually begins his post confessing "I've long been a proponent of exploring various 'geoengineering' responses to global warming."

His reasoning? "[B]ecause I'm a pessimist about our political system's ability to address the issue in anything even approximating a timely manner." This is of course the usual declaration of pre-emptive political defeat that almost inevitably accompanies "geo-engineering" proposals. As always, I really have to wonder just why pessimism about our political system somehow makes people optimistic rather than pessimistic about "geo-engineering" prospects, after all? Why on earth would Klein think corporate-military mega-engineering projects could succeed at their work without our political system's regulation and oversight of them when such projects have never yet managed such a thing before at scales more modest than those typically imagined by "geo-engineering" futurologists, or else why he thinks our political system can indeed function in respect to the regulation and oversight of "geo-engineering" projects and yet, somehow, nowhere else?

I don't think Klein's observations indicate he has really given the topic much thought, when all is said and done, and it's not as if this is really his main area of expertise or anything. But the chilling thing is that I rarely get the feeling anybody has really given "geo-engineering" a lot of deep thought, very much including the more enthusiastic cheerleaders for junking the demanding frustrating environmentalist politics of education, agitation, organization, regulation, legislation and leaping without looking into bazillion dollar science fictional corporate-military boondoggles helping the rich and powerful who got rich and powerful trashing the planet stay rich and powerful by cleaning up their mess for profit on their terms.

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