Climate, Dynamite, Doomedness…

The folks over at Political Dynamite wrote a blog post recently on “Why Campaigns against Cuts and Climate Change must be as one.”

I wrote the following in the comments:

I’m glad you are trying to tackle this topic. It’s one I have been despairing of for a while now. If climate campaigners are truthful about themselves and the landscape, I think they’d say that the wind has been knocked out of their sails by a variety of factors (the all-eggs-in-one-basket approach to Copenhagen that the NGOs and CaCC were guilty of, and the tactical repetition and strategic nullity of CaCC and Climate Camp). The last year has been particularly brutal for climate campaigners, and it really does look as if the “Issue Attention Cycle” (as described by Anthony Downs) has well and truly moved on. Some climate campaigners will just keep doing what they do. Some will give up. Some will “switch” to livelier campaigns like the anti-cuts thing. These decisions will be based on a host of different factors, and my point is not to blame or praise anyone for anything they do (least of all giving up).

A few propositions
a) the climate campaigners’ ‘golden years’ – roughly book-ended by Climate Camp 2006/An Inconvenient Truth and fizzling out in Copenhagen (i.e. 2006 to 2009)- are gone, not to return.
b) even if the “the cuts are ideological in nature” meme ‘wins’, that still brings us back to a growth economy. The NEF “Green New Deal” stuff that you like (and so do I, within its obvious inadequacies and limitations) is known as “Green Keynesianism.” Keynesianism is about growth.
c) what is needed (as you allude to with the Herman Daly quote) is a steady-state economy in the developed world that still somehow manages huge transfers of wealth and low-carbon technology to the Majority World (also known as Third World).
d) the groundwork for c) has not been done. There are very very few anti-cuts campaigners who would understand the why of this needs to be the case and would be willing or able to propound the case in their consensus meeting, to their family, their MP or whatever. I don’t think ANYONE, even proponents such as myself, really has the foggiest idea of *how*.

Me, I’m just delighted I had a vasectomy 6 years ago. We are in for very bumpy times indeed.