• This is artfully indistinct. If you mean to assert that the peculiar attraction of pre-millennial eschatology in American Protestantism makes environmentalism a tough sell in Christian America, where the idea of cataclysmic ruination of the climate seems to many a necessary event in sacred history leading to a welcome conclusion for the faithful, just come out and remind people that James Watt was an early example of the political use that the extractive industries made of the Christian Republican Right in the part of America where the federal empire is the overwhelming landowner.

• What would your policy recommendation be if the soberest view of the evidence suggested that irreversible processes of change were already in place, and that further emissions would hasten and make more severe what no mere remission of pollution could prevent? Is it always true that when in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging?

• Any President can put forward. The Clinton Administration talked about carbon taxes in its first budget, and they continued to advocate the "BTU tax" it turned into before it died altogether, as pretty much everyone knew it would. Mr Clinton had pretty much the same daring agenda as Mr Obama: health care, energy, education and deficit reduction. Mr Clinton was also going to end welfare as we knew it. Mr Obama still has nobody to work night and day to put his health care deal through. Mr Clinton had Mrs Clinton. Mr Obama, by contrast, has given her a job in which she can be a success.

• Unfortunately the executive plan will not be. Mr Obama has already made clear that he's willing to trade his cap and trade away, and boy will he ever have to. If he can't do it in year one, conventional wisdom would say, he can't do it.

The proposed solution does not reach the root causes of our global predicament: it’s just an effort to save the sinking ship. The talisman that we have waved around to fend off the demons of doubt is that capitalism, if left alone, will right itself, because self-interested rational agents will not choose to self-destruct. (That these so-called rational agents are most often corporations is not deemed relevant. Yet what is the corporation if not “an externalizing machine - moving its operating costs to external organizations and people”). This blind faith in the system ignores the evidence that our addled consumer society, broken education system, soaring global poverty, cities of garbage, and now crumbling financial systems present. The system works as a way to convert resources on a large scale. We, as a society, cannot rely on this same system to ameliorate the problems that it has created.

• You might want to point out that history is littered with civilizations that suffered obliterating man-made ecological disasters, which were also full of self-interested rational agents, and didn't even have any corporations. One has to believe that we are the only effectively rational people who ever existed to believe that our system cannot accumulate risks of ecological catastrophe against which it does not provide.

• You haven't explained why economic hard times, which necessarily introduce new subsistence crises for individuals, communities and nations, are going to produce a renewed focus on long-term sustainability problems. Subsistence crises usually deflect attention from long-term to immediate concerns. Extractive industries aren't counter-cyclical, but their reserve assets don't depreciate in deflationary conditions: they simply remain unextracted until it becomes profitable to exploit them. So they may have to shift political programs somewhat, but they tend not to lose but rather to gain power in straitened economic conditions. As global manufacturing slows drastically, emissions will slow too. Agricultural prices too will fall, reducing some ecological pressures created by too rapid expansion of farmland. But human deprivation will also immediately increase in some societies threatened by eventual suffering from ecological change. Existing global threats to public health will increase as economic damage worsens. Immediate problems will be more urgent, and distant problems will accordingly seem less crucial. Compromises at the expense of the future are more justifiable when the present exigency is great. And so on. No doubt there's another side. But, aside from the discrediting of financial operators and the presence of an incoming Democratic Administration with the usual set of program priorities to try for, you haven't explained that other side in detail, or explained why you are hopeful that it will have more success than it usually has in hard times.

A Wrench in the System

-- By LeslieHannay - 27 Feb 2009

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

What's Going On

A Case Study in Hope: Climate Change

This denial was greatly aided by a popular resistance to embracing the implications and form of such large-scale ecological harm. This lackluster global catastrophe offends the aesthetics of our expectant viewing audience, which has been primed to recognize the End of Days as a cataclysmic tumult of wind, hellfire and catastrophic floods. (Unfortunately, these expectations may not be disappointed.)

Climate Change: a Preview

The immediate effects of climate change are already being seen, and have far-reaching implications for the availability of food and water worldwide, and, especially in the warmer, most populous developing regions. Rising temperatures will diminish the viability of some of the world’s currently most productive agricultural regions. India will lose up to 1/3 of its agricultural capacity by 2050, while more arid countries such as Chad will be unable to support agriculture at all. Rising tensions over scarce resources will be accompanied by an increase in conflict. Indeed, conflict related to economic scarcity is already being seen across the developed and developing world.

Why I am Hopeful

Nothing seems clearer than that the attitudes of any given ruling class are so set that all the argument in the world will not change them.

As in Arnold’s description of resistance to adopting practical solutions to the waste of precious soil and other resources, the process of enacting workable solutions to address modern environmental issues has been at an impasse for years. At least for the present moment, the fear of total financial collapse has muted the entrenched partisanship and reflexive rejection of anything with the flavor of socialism that has hindered progress on environmental issues. Because of this, President Obama has been able to put forward an energy plan that will have potentially significant effects on global warming, and will be (if it makes it through Congress) a strong step in the direction toward dealing with the problem in a way that will actually make a difference.

Will It Be Enough?

Dénouement: Business As Usual?

If our religion continues to be the religion of buying and selling, it doesn’t matter whether we use clean energy or low-grade coal to produce our iPods and designer shoes. Without a corresponding revolution in our way of thinking about what it is, exactly, that we’re supposed to be doing here, our cheap fixes will merely serve to forestall the inevitable, ultimate collapse of the natural world, and the society that it supports.

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