Global Warming and Progressivism

Progressivism has always been postulated on making the world better for the mass of people. That central icon of the 19th century, Progress, was built into the movement. America’s multicentury exploitation of a continent provided an abundance of resources thus facilitating our society’s predisposition to reify the concept of progress generation after generation. With global warming, and all that it entails, we know this is coming to an end. My mother’s child-raising maxim was to leave the world a better place than you found it. This will be increasingly impossible for future generations. How will we understand progressivism over centuries of declining resources? What now for progressivism?

In broad outline, will progressivism have to redefine itself as making the world less worse as distinct from making it better? If so, what is the vision for “less worse?” I suggest it may be preserving the best in humans as we struggle to survive. If we do not emphasize both we may well return to the barbaric dog-eat-dog days of prehistory. We must preserve civilizations as we seek to preserve ourselves. And this has to be done on a planetary scale.
One way of addressing this problem has already been offered. With the objective of progressively lowering human-produced greenhouse gasses, it has been proposed that the wealthy most- polluting nations transfer wealth to the poorer less-polluting nations in exchange for the right to keep polluting at an ever diminishing scale as they seek to adjust their societies to the altered living conditions. This transfer of wealth has long been viewed as necessary to global democracy, but now the poorer nations of the world have something to offer that is of fundamental value to the wealthier nations. That there are significant problems with this is evident, e.g. what happens as the poorer societies increase their standard of living? How does a wealthy society react when it sees its living standards declining while those of poor societies are increasing, albeit still much below that of the wealthy? Any such agreement would require that whatever poor societies do with this influx of wealth it would not contribute to global warming. This is just one meager example of the complexity that will be involved in the many well-motivated proposals that will be forthcoming. . Let us not be too sanguine about these efforts to move wealth to the poor in exchange for reducing the pollution of the wealthy at a slower rate. We must keep in mind how resistant the wealthy nations have been to adequately assist the poor. An occasional disaster such as the Indian Ocean tsunami can elicit an immediate outpouring of aid as the media plays it up, but we have not been in it for the long haul – and it is the long haul that matters with global warming
In addition to the well-motivated we have the devious who will udoubtedly be even more prevalent. Bush’s energy proposal contained in his State of the Union address focuses on biofuels, especially corn.
President Bush asked Congress to help solve "one of the great challenges facing our generation" by approving proposals he says will cut U.S. gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent over 10 years.
"Every member of Congress who cares about strengthening our economy, protecting our national security and confronting climate change should support the energy initiatives I have set out," the president said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "We can leave behind a cleaner and better world for our children and grandchildren."
Bush's energy proposals, made in his State of the Union address last month, include ramping up the production of alternative fuels such as ethanol made from new, non-corn feedstocks. The president wants to require the use of 35 billion gallons a year of ethanol and other alternative fuels, such as soybean-based biodiesel, by 2017, a fivefold increase over current requirements. The ethanol would be in gasoline blends of 10 percent to 85 percent.
The call for sharp increases in ethanol use will get bipartisan support in Congress. But production of ethanol from corn is expected to fall far short of meeting such an increase. So Bush envisions a major speedup of research into production of "cellulosic" ethanol made from wood chips, switchgrass and other feedstocks. (AP report) The major producer of ethanol in the United States, Archer Daniels Midland, is a major player in political influence and is a major polluter, including pollution associated with producing ethanol. This piece of corporate greed has other dimensions. For a fuller account see http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646&printsafe=1.

Additionally, the skyrocketing price of corn because of its use to produce ethanol is already causing food shortages. The poor in Mexico have been rioting because the price of tortillas, a Mexican staple, has gone beyond their reach. We must keep in mind that the United States produces food for much of the rest of the world.

Violence, of course, will always be there to play a major role as resources diminish. Bush’s Middle East adventures to control oil are a prime example. What happens when two major nuclear powers instead of a small and large state face off for this diminishing resource?
This is a dead serious complex business. We must do everything we can to keep the various efforts transparent, to point out the greed and self-interest that will permeate these efforts and above all exert ourselves to understand as much of this hideously complicated problem as we can.

Bob Newhard