But is there more to the story on Republicans and science? Mooney thought so, and began examining the relevant research in psychology and neuroscience, particularly the role of cognition, emotion, and the brain in shaping our understanding of the world. His research has led to widely read articles like “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science” and his recent book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (Wiley 2012).

Mooney talked with Left Eye on Books about the science behind ideology and beliefs, the reaction to his book, and the Republican brain.

Christine Shearer: Your book The Republican War on Science was one of the first popular books to really lay out how the Republican party as a whole was veering farther and farther away from accepted scientific research, from the Newt Gingrich Congress through the George W. Bush Administration. And it looked at some issues that appeared to be more financial, like climate change, and others that were more religious, like stem cell research. Is it fair to say that you thought the crux of the issue at the time was corporate funding of misinformation and religious belief triumphing over science?

Chris Mooney: Yes. In fact, that was explicitly the argument of the book. It was that corporate influences and religious influences were creating an anti-science double whammy within the GOP. And by the way, although in the new book I go on to discuss the underlying psychology behind the denial of science, that is not to say that this analysis was wrong. The GOP clearly is the party of religion and the party of business — although recently, it has become so ideological that I would say it is becoming rather anti-business in many ways. And this has led it to dramatically undermine science.

Christine Shearer: Your next book Storm World (Harvest Books, 2008) looked at a group of scientists trying to determine whether global warming could be impacting the intensity and number of hurricanes. And there were a few scientists who were just adamant against making such a correlation, even as the supporting evidence mounted. Was it people like that who, in part, got you thinking that there might be more at work than money and religion in causing some to reject scientific evidence?

Chris Mooney: Huh. Actually I’d read that issue a little differently. This was a classic emerging science conflict under high uncertainty. It seems to me that skepticism about a climate-hurricane connection wasn’t necessarily beyond the pale at that time.

Certainly, though, the main character in the book, William Gray, does push the Republican War on Science analysis. Because the guy is a global warming denier, but no conservative. He wasn’t being driven by religion and he wasn’t being driven by corporate greed. Something else was going on there, having to do with a kind of turf battle between old-school meteorologists and computer-modeling climate scientists.

Christine Shearer: So let’s lay out the thesis of The Republican Brain – you draw upon a variety of studies suggesting that people identifying as Republicans and Democrats within the U.S. do not just think differently – their brains appear to be wired differently. For example, Democrats as a whole appear to be more open to new experiences and changing their minds, while Republicans more consistently value group solidarity and tradition, and these are differences that have correlations to parts of the brain?

Chris Mooney: Apparently they do. The brain stuff is very new, and controversial. But the personality and cognitive style differences from left to right are very real and well established, and it isn’t exactly radical to propose that those are going to have physical correlates in the brain. Right now, the search for them is on, and some tantalizing findings have already been published. But the only reason anybody went looking in the brain for differences is because they’d already manifested themselves in personality differences.

Christine Shearer: And of course the book is not arguing that biology determines political ideology, but perhaps there is a feedback effect: for example, the social movements of the 1960s created a backlash amongst U.S. conservatives that strengthened some of their core traits and values, not just in their ideas, but their physical brains?

Chris Mooney: Sure. I mean, living your life in a particular way—for instance, devoted to a set of ideas—changes your brain. We know that. So it is kind of common sense that getting conservative ideas reinforced a lot probably makes a brain more “conservative.” It appears there is both something “natural” about ideology, which is why genetics seems to be involved, but also a reinforcement effect emerging from life experiences.

Christine Shearer: How about conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute – do you think they believe in what they are doing, or are consciously trying to shape public opinion, even if that means promoting false or misleading studies?

Chris Mooney: Well, I think these are libertarian ideologues, often white and male. Their beliefs are very strong and they are very sure they are competent and in the right, and that global warming is hokum. I don’t think they’re conscious liars at all. They actually believe that they are rational — critical thinkers, even. Of course, this is a pretty inflated self-image.

Christine Shearer: How does religion fit into this? Or gender – for example, how conservatives like Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh appear to be quite misinformed when it comes to issues like birth control?

Chris Mooney: My view on religion is that there is conservative and liberal religiosity, just as there is conservative and liberal politics. In both cases, the conservatives crave certainty and flee from uncertainty and ambiguity. In religion this leads to fundamentalism; in politics, well, it leads to Tea Party-ism and authoritarianism. And the two overlap heavily of course.

There is clearly a gender gap in both religiosity and in politics. In politics, women are more liberal, and I think this has a lot to do with empathy. And of course many women are thankfully rejecting the authoritarian, man-controls-the-family view of the right.

Christine Shearer: Is it fair to say that this research and thesis fits best with the experiences and history of western nations, particularly the U.S.? How might these findings vary by country, particularly a country very different from the U.S.?

Chris Mooney: Much of the research has been done in the U.S., and most of it has been done in the West. For obvious reasons. I suspect that we are tapping into something very deep here about human beings, though—for instance, the Big Five personality traits have been studied around the world, and seem pretty close to a human universal. And if some of those traits have political implications in a western context, wouldn’t they also have political implications in other contexts? I’d be surprised if they didn’t.

But culture is going to be a huge factor here, and under culture I include political systems. For instance, if the regime is totalitarian and you don’t really have a choice of what political view to adopt, does your personality really matter as much in determining your “politics”? Probably not. In such countries people would not likely be very well “sorted,” ideologically, by personality.

So you will see wide diversity in human ideologies and political systems, but you will also see some core elements that look a lot like “left” and “right” in the West and that likely reflect elements of personality that are part of human nature.

Christine Shearer: For many on the left, the immediate reaction when faced with someone who believes in something that is demonstrably false is to challenge them with loads of supporting evidence, but the research is showing that this is exactly the wrong approach with many Republicans. What is the better approach?

Chris Mooney: The better approach is emotional. You have to take away the defensive reaction; more facts only strengthen the defensive reaction. The facts, then, have be made to seem non-threatening. This requires knowing the source of the defensive reaction—why the facts seem such a menace to a person’s worldview—and an understanding of framing, or, how to present the same facts, or similar facts, in a context that conveys a very different and less threatening meaning.

Christine Shearer: Many conservative media outlets have attacked your book, which you find highly unfortunate, because you think there is a lot that the left and right in the U.S. can learn from one another. How much do you think conservative media sees the book as a threat to their worldview, and how much do they see it as a threat to their material interests? Is it fair to say the Republican platform is in many ways firmly rooted in free market and Christian ideals that make some people very wealthy and powerful?

Chris Mooney: Oh I think it is largely a threat to their self image as people who are rational and reasonable and, in fact, more reasonable and rational than their political opponents. I’m completely taking that away from them. I’m showing that their reasoning is emotionally driven, and moreover, that their way of responding to the world isn’t so conducive to the kinds of reasoning that we see in the scientific community. That’s threatening on a personal level. I don’t know that it has much to do with money or power.

Christine Shearer: You have said Republicans can offer those on the left valuable lessons in the area of group cohesion and loyalty. Yet Occupy Wall Street, for example, might say that their cohesion and loyalty lies in their shared commitment to participatory democracy, rather than following a certain party or leader. Do you think there is a middle ground between increasing group solidarity and cohesion, while also expanding the number and kinds of people within that group?

Chris Mooney: Sure. But I mean solidarity and unity in achieving actual political objectives. AKA, effectiveness. This requires actually choosing a leader—one Occupy Wall Street chapter was so anti-authoritarian that they chose a dog as their “leader”—and follow that leader…faithfully.

The left hates this, but it also needs this. I don’t think the left will choose leaders who are non-inclusive, but the point is that there is a need to actually be organized and achieve concrete strategic objectives. Just throwing a protest doesn’t cut it.

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist, blogger, podcaster, and experienced trainer of scientists in the art of communication. He is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and most recently The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (April 2012). He blogs for Science Progress, a website of the Center for American Progress and Center for American Progress Action Fund, and is a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast.

Christine Shearer is a postdoctoral scholar in science, technology, and society studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch. She is Managing Editor of Conducive, and author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (Haymarket Books, 2011).

By Christine Shearer

What are we to make of Obama’s first term? In Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press, 2012), editors Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank offer their assessment: “The Barack Obama revolution was over before it started, guttered by the politician’s overweening desire to prove himself to the grandees of the establishment. From there on, other promises proved ever easier to break.”

Under this bold thesis, Hopeless brings together different voices from the Left to assess the Obama Administration’s actions on a variety of issues. Writers include journalist Jeremy Scahill on foreign policy, activist Ralph Nader on the nonprofit sector, and economist Michael Hudson on tax cuts and war spending, to name just a few.

Editor and co-writer Joshua Frank talked with Left Eye on Books about the book, Obama’s policies, and why he sees more promise for true hope and change with Occupy Wall Street than Obama or mainstream politics.

Christine Shearer: How did the idea for this book come about?

Joshua Frank: My co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair and myself decided to pursue this book project because we both felt their has been far too little left critique of the Obama years thus far. He was cheered into office by an overwhelming wave of popularity, but it didn’t take him long to leave the rhetoric of “hope” and “change” in the dust of the campaign trail. So we decided to document these failures and betrayals. Hopeless contains a host of voices and is set up in chronological order so that the reader can gaze at Obama’s arch as president. It’s a sobering read to be sure, but hopefully one that gets people thinking outside the voting booth.

CS: I don’t know if the timing of the book’s release – right before the 2012 election – was deliberate, but it’s provocative, because many Democrats and some progressives would say that right now we need to rally behind President Obama to avoid a Mitt Romney presidency. What do you say to that kind of argument?

JF: I would tell these well-meaning progressives that instead of rallying behind a particular presidential candidate, that instead they ought to continue rallying behind the causes they hold dear. Often what happens during an election hoopla is we see movements – say the anti-war movement – put their protest signs in the closet and stick their pro-Democrat sign in the front yard. This is especially dangerous when said Democrat doesn’t support the anti-war positions we support. If we don’t put any demands on these candidates to adopt progressive positions, then there is really no reason for them to ever heed our concerns. Instead, we ought to put a significant amount of pressure on Obama and hold his feet to the fire on the issues that matter the most to us – be it climate change or foreign interventions. That’s what our objective is with this book, to inform and engage. I am hopeful that the evolving Occupy movement will keep on it, mounting pressure on both parties as the election party hits full cylinder. If Occupy decides to end their campaigns to support Obama, that’d be death of one of the important social developments we’ve seen in this country in the last decade.

CS: A lot of Democrat candidates will use populist rhetoric in their campaigns, only to later govern more from the center or even center-right. Do you think there is a degree to which Obama is more guilty of this than say, for example, former President Bill Clinton?

JF: I totally agree that they use particular language in order to sway voters. I think Obama is guilty of this, but I would say he’s not quite as gifted at the art of public relations as Clinton was. He’s just not as smooth or as coy. He also probably doesn’t have as many lies to cover up as Clinton did. No really though, cutting through the jargon is half the battle. I much prefer to look at the actual record and dissect the policy than to analyze a particular speech or interview. Actions speak louder than words as the old cliche goes. And sadly, Obama’s policies, like those of Clinton, just don’t pass the progressive sniff test.

CS: Yes, tell us about some of Obama’s policies and the problems with them discussed in the book.

JF: We cover the whole array of issues, from the environment to the economy to foreign policy. Some of the brightest and most eloquent writers on the left reveal Obama’s ugly warts, such as Tariq Ali, Jeremy Scahill, Kathy Kelly, and Ray McGovern. The host of writers critique Obama’s management of the so-called War on Terror, his energy policy, attack on civil liberties, torture, and his bail out of Wall Street. One of the more interesting essays, in my view, is one by Andrew Levine who argues Obama is actually an economic libertarian. It’s a very damning, if not enlightening, must-read piece.

CS: One of the most interesting things about Obama, to me, is that there are often multiple and conflicting analyses offered for his motivations and actions. For example, in taking on economic liberalists like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner as financial advisers: did he choose them because he admires them, because he thought it was the only way to prevent a depression, to reach out to conservatives and financial institutions, or because he actually agrees with them? In the Introduction you and Jeffrey St. Clair write that at heart Obama is a “calculating pragmatist” that “doesn’t want to be stained with defeat.” Do you think that explains a lot of his actions in the first term?

JF: Absolutely. Obama is really a middle-of-the-road Democrat on most issues. In the end, he actually agrees with the likes of Summers and Geitner. He said as much while campaigning in 2008 and defends his Wall Street bailout to this day. He’s almost too pragmatic at times, which is exactly the opposite of what most progressives had hoped for when they ushered him into office. They thought he’d be bold and unflinching, the antithesis of George W. Bush. But what they got was a guy who is hardly a liberal and actually agreed with Bush on most big issues.

Take the hot news item of today: Obama’s new found support for same-sex marriage. While I certainly applaud him for finally taking a stand, it’s not at all a radical position. He’s made clear that he takes a states rights approach to the issue. Which means, if a state like North Carolina wants to outlaw same-sex marriage, he’ll accept that. Could you imagine if he had the same feeling about, say, segregation? Without the Civil Rights Act we’d still have lawful discrimination in most southern states. It took a federal law to move us forward. Without a similar piece of national legislation regarding same sex marriage, gays in this country will still be discriminated against in most states. Obama’s is not a progressive civil rights position on gay marriage – it’s pragmatic and calculated. Keep in mind, it’s also virtually the exact same position both Dick Cheney and Ron Paul have espoused. What Obama has endorsed is simply marriage equality federalism, to be wonky. He did not, sadly, embrace the notion that marriage for all ought to be a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.

CS: Another area where Obama has had a lot of overlap with former President George W. Bush is national security and foreign policy, including continuing some of the more Constitutionally questionable – some would say illegal – policies of the “War Against Terror,” such as extraordinary rendition, military tribunals, and domestic wiretapping. And he’s even taken it a step further by authorizing drone attacks in a host of countries. Can you tell us a bit about how the book addresses Obama’s national security policy, and do you think the writers were surprised by Obama’s policies in this area?

JF: I do think many of the writers were shocked at how far this administration has gone to extend Bush’s “War on Terror” into Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. The callous nature of drone bombings is perhaps the most frightening aspect of Obama’s evolving wars.  Drones are indiscriminate, and many would argue, absolutely illegal under international law. If Bush were carrying out similar attacks, with nearly weekly reports of civilian deaths, the US antiwar movement would be up in arms, out in the streets and camping out in front of the White House. But since it is Obama carrying out these murders, mums the word. Democrats have essentially co-opted the antiwar movement and it’s been very detrimental.

CS: You, Jeffrey St. Clair, and Darwin Bond-Graham also write about Obama’s nuclear power and nuclear weapons policies. Could you tell us a bit about those policies?

JF: Obama’s support for nuclear power is a pretty frightening thing. One reason he’s been so enthralled with nuke power, even after Fukushima, may have something to do with all the money he’s received from the industry over the years. For the first time in three decades Obama guaranteed loans for new nuke plants in the south. It’s a huge step backwards for our energy policy, and Obama has yet to feel the sting from the environmental movement for his nuke embrace. His policy on nuclear weapons is also more of the same, if not even worse. As Bond-Graham writes, Obama’s first term will go down in history as putting forth the single largest spending increases on nuclear weapons ever. So, even while he calls for a reduction in nuclear weapons globally – if not an all out elimination – he’s simultaneously boosting the industry at home.

CS: I think some people may disagree with many of Obama’s policies but still sympathize with him because – while members of the Right certainly attacked Clinton – it has just taken on a new flavor and intensity with Obama: they can’t decide if he’s an Islamic terrorist sympathizer from Kenya or a godless communist socialist, but it all implies that he’s fundamentally unAmerican. And many Republicans say very openly that they refuse to compromise with Obama or the Democratic party. Do you think what Obama has been up against should factor into critiques of his actions in the first term, or do you think that’s a separate issue? In the book you and Clair seem to suggest that, if anything, the attacks should have made Obama less receptive to Conservatives?

JF: Great question. I do think it should factor in, but not for the reason you imply. The Right is going to call Obama a socialist/Islamic fascist, regardless of the types of policies his administration actually carries out. So, in this cynical climate, why not fight back hard? Why not actually push a real progressive agenda? The Right is already blaming Obama for being a commie, so why doesn’t he stand up to their rhetoric? Instead of trying to convince the Tea Party types that he isn’t as bad as they say – that Obamacare isn’t really that radical, for example – why not stand up on principle and defend social and economic justice? He’s pandered and caved to the Right where Clinton employed the “art” of triangulation. We’re all waiting for the “real” Obama to step forward, but I think we are actually seeing the real Obama in action right now, and he’s timid and politically thin skinned.

CS: What do you make of the argument that Obama would be more receptive to progressive activists in his second term since he won’t have to worry about reelection?

JF: I think that’s a nice thought, but one based on perception rather than reality. What I can say is this: without consistent, uncompromising pressure from progressives, Obama will continue to ignore us. If he is victorious next November, I hope we turn up the heat on his administration and hold Obama’s feet to the fire. He may be receptive, but he’ll never hear us if we aren’t yelling.

CS: A recent Truthout article noted that Obama’s 2008 election campaign helped organize and galvanize a savvy group of activists who, after being neglected by the Obama Administration, used their skills to help create the 99% movement, with its emphasis on truly democratic over republic-an values. And a lot of those activists reported being uncertain about whether they would now help Obama turn out voters in swing states. So, in the spirit of your book, what should self-identified progressives do as we head toward the 2012 election?

JF: I think these activists, people committed to their issues, ought to continue working hard to make change. One of my biggest fears is that Obama will co-opt Occupy to the determine of that movement. We’ve seen it happen time and again. Most recently as I mentioned, in 2008, the Obama campaign successfully absorbed the antiwar movement into his campaign and as a result mass protests ceased to exist, despite Obama’s escalation of drone attacks and a massive troop increase in Afghanistan even after they killed Osama. Could you imagine the same thing happening under a McCain presidency? Occupy, I feel, is not going to just go away though. It sprouted during Obama’s first term and in order to stay relevant, will have to keep the passion and vigor alive and growing. Progressives this time around shouldn’t put too much energy into presidential elections. Instead they ought to continue to organize around their causes and build a movement that can be effective over the long haul, no matter which Twiddle Dee or Tweetle Dum ends up taking the electoral prize.

Joshua Frank is an environmental journalist whose investigative reports and columns appear in CounterPunch, Common Dreams, and AlterNet. Along with Hopeless, he is author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and co-editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland.

Christine Shearer is a postdoctoral scholar in science, technology, and society studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch. She is managing editor of Conducive and author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (Haymarket Books, 2011).

“Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences” and ”How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities” suggest that the 2008 economic crash was not just due to neoliberal policies that did away with oversight and regulation of the financial sector, but fundamental problems with neo-classical economics itself.

By Christine Shearer

Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences“  is a no-holds-barred take-down of the discipline of economics, particularly neoclassical economics. Keen is a Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and credited with predicting the 2008 financial crisis in December 2005. He argues that many economists failed to forecast the coming crash not only because of their devotion to hands-off, laissez-faire (neoliberal) policies, but also because of their unyielding faith in the economic theories and models behind the policies – which he goes to great length to show are not just flawed, but often wrong.

Reading “Debunking Economics” reminded me of another good book on the global financial crisis: “How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities” by John Cassidy. Cassidy is a journalist at “The New Yorker” who has a flair for offering very clear, succinct discussions of political-economic thinking. I recommend both of them, because they are illuminating, timely, and highly complementary.

Let’s start with “How Markets Fail,” as its first section lays out a very nice history of neoclassical economic theory and its entwinement with neoliberal political theory. Cassidy begins with Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” widely regarded as the precursor to the modern discipline of economics. Smith laid out a vision in which rational self-interest and competition can paradoxically lead to the greater good for everyone and national economic prosperity. As Smith put it, each individual “intends only his own gain, and he is in this [is] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” In making this argument, Smith’s vision of how societies and economies operate was highly utopian, as Robert Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” explores.

Yet Cassidy points out that Smith had some caveats about his vision. Contrary to how the invisible hand has come to be understood, Smith did see a role for government in providing public works and institutions, precisely because some projects might not prove profitable for an investor, but immensely valuable for the larger society. (Economist Michael Hudson has argued that a public utility “should be valued by the amount in which it lowers the cost of living and doing business.”) Smith also did not think his ideas applied to finance, which he saw as different from the buying and selling of material goods in a marketplace.

Smith’s conception that individual self-interest operating in a competitive marketplace produces the conditions under which a society thrives paved the way for utility maximization theories and general equilibrium theories, leading to models of self-equilibrating, rational markets balanced out by the forces of supply and demand. Yet Cassidy notes that many of these theorists were aware of the shortcomings of their ideas: that they often only held up under certain conditions (and often very restrictive ones), or could not be demonstrated empirically, making them grounded more in abstract equations and theory than observable reality. He argues that, in fact, it is well-established in mathematical economics that there are several problems with the theories, particularly that there is no guarantee that an economy will settle on an “efficient” rest point. These theorists, Cassidy argues, therefore rarely posed their studies as prescriptions for government policy.

Yet the theories received a new life with economist Milton Friedman, who championed a revisionist understanding of the invisible hand in which government has essentially no role to play beyond defense and law, lest it disrupt the natural balance of the market. He also helped extend this model of markets to finance, giving credibility to the “Efficient Markets Hypothesis” as the best approximation for how financial markets operate. Friedman got a break through historic chance when the stagflation of the 1970s seemed to delegitimize the view that government spending could stabilize the economy, helping usher in monetarist and neoliberal government policies. Cassidy then discusses what he calls “reality-based” economics and how it has been and continues to be used to examine, assess, and try to address current market flaws, including the 2008 crash.

Cassidy’s book therefore provides a nice historical context for Keen’s “Debunking Economics,” which is less interested in history and politics, and much more invested in thoroughly exploring – and of course debunking – economic theory.

The book begins by challenging the fundamental building blocks of micro-economic theory: supply and demand curves. Keen states that demand curves are derived by measuring an individual’s preferences and then aggregating that to the level of the social. Just thinking about this, the basic proposition seems a bit absurd, and Keen goes on to show how even its more advanced formulas have been discredited through peer-reviewed studies, empirical contradictions, logical fallacies, and even basic examples (if you put someone else on an island with Robinson Crusoe, that will inevitably alter production, income, and demand). Turning to supply curves, Keen examines the idea that firms supply goods at an output in which marginal cost equals price; he presents arguments that, rather than facing costs that increase with output, firms mostly face falling marginal costs, so that supply curves – when looked at empirically – are often the opposite of the situation that is taught in economic textbooks.

Keen goes on to analyze a mathematical flaw in the standard argument against monopolies, including the idea/assumption that monopolies are rare or not a problem or do not impinge on competitive markets. He also looks at labor and argues that, contrary to neoclassical arguments, labor is not just another commodity, and in particular that wages do not reflect contributions to productivity, undermining the opposition to minimum wage laws. But lest anyone think Keen is a Marxist, a later chapter also critiques Marx’s labor theory of value. As Keen told me in an interview, he does not not care if you are politically on the left or right: “if your economics are bad, you are still going to be wrong.”

Keen also examines economic models, and the way macro assessments of the economy were eventually derived almost wholly from micro-economic principles – the very ones “debunked” at the beginning of the book – leading to linear models that assume equilibrium and stasis. This, Keen argues, is key to why many economists say they did not “see” the 2008 financial crash coming: because their models treat such events as anomalies existing outside of the models, and even now are trying to understand the “exogenous” shocks that created the crash. Keen also cites the neoclassical view of finance and banks as another problem, as it does not adequately allow for consideration of speculative bubbles and financialization. Keen therefore advocates dynamic models of the economy, with his own models focusing on the ratio of private debt-to-GDP – which did forecast the 2008 crash.

I would think that more complicated macro-economic models by neoclassical economists have been developed; certainly complicated risk-hedging financial products and strategies for the financial sector have. But Keen’s main point is that the innate desire to believe in self-equilibrating, efficient markets inherently favors linear models – the models, he seems to suggest, are not due to a lack of technology or new knowledge, but a lack of will. Similarly, both Keen and Cassidy make clear that a lot of the arguments Keen makes are well established in peer-reviewed academic journals on economics; these problems are not unknown, they apparently just remain the province of a small group of economists and advanced graduate students, and are rarely discussed in high school or even college economic textbooks. And when the fundamentals of neoclassical economics are questioned, most economists argue that the models and ideas still offer the best approximations of the economy available.

It would be difficult for me to believe that our economy could be built upon such a flimsy edifice if not for “How Markets Fail,” because that book’s consideration of politics and power indirectly suggests neoclassical theories have risen to such prominence despite their problems for a very simple reason: there was a market for them. Private industries and investors of the 1970s no doubt embraced the Friedman doctrine of a fully self-regulating, equilibrating, efficient market, in which government could only play a negative role, and become a slippery slope toward inefficient, centralized [fascist, communist] government. Friedman also seems the materialization of an underlying faith in the United States: that if you work hard enough, the market – left to its own devices – will reward you in a manner consistent with that effort, which the government can only disrupt.

But we are arguably at the point where the soundness behind the neoclassical assumptions have shown their cracks – as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan himself said, there was a “flaw” in the model. These books make clear that, in fact, the entire model of economic orthodoxy today is flawed, and we are perhaps on the precipice of ushering in a new mode of economic and thus political thinking, if we can seize the moment and dare to think differently. Indeed, the biggest blind spot in contemporary economic thinking seems to be an unwillingness to admit that centralized concentrations of economic power can be just as disastrous and undemocratic (and unAmerican) as centralized concentrations of political power.

Christine Shearer is a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch. She is Managing Editor of Conducive, and author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (Haymarket Books, 2011).

Steve Keen (photo courtesy of author)

While many economists have argued that no one could have foreseen the 2008 financial crash, some economists were sounding the alarm well before the bubble burst. One of them was Steve Keen, a Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book “Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences” (Zed Books UK, 2011). Keen is credited with predicting the 2008 financial crisis in December 2005. He has argued that his foresight on the crisis is due to a little-known secret: that many widely believed economic models have been shown to be wrong, which many economists — particularly those in government policy positions — will not admit.

Keen argues that economic theory is particularly wrong when it comes to the “Efficient Markets Hypothesis,” which still dominates academic thinking about finance, even after the Global Financial Crisis. Since 1995, Steve’s main research focus has been the development of an alternative, empirically grounded theory based on Hyman Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis,” which argues that finance markets are not self-equilibrating but inherently unstable. Keen’s forthcoming book on the topic, “Finance and Economic Breakdown,” will be published in 2012. He also writes the blog Debtwatch.

Keen talked to Left Eye on Book‘s Christine Shearer about “Debunking Economics,” the problems with many economic ideas and neoclassical thinking, and his own work toward a new model — and theory — of economic systems.

Christine Shearer: You begin “Debunking Economics” with a critique of the fundamental principles of [classical] microeconomics: supply and demand. You argue that the equations around demand are flawed because they assume one consumer that is then aggregated to the level of the market, which you say does not hold up empirically or mathematically. Conversely, for supply, economists argue that firms exercising their profit-maximizing behavior will supply goods at a level in which it is not profitable to produce beyond that level – where marginal cost equals price – but its defining equations only hold up under demonstrably false assumptions?

Steve Keen: It’s more than just demonstrably false. The equation, first of all, with demand what they do is have a distilled explanation of an individual’s behavior. And that is deriving individual demand from a set of preferences, and then they say after you determine these preferences you can say what an individual’s demand will be, and they then jump straight from that point to talking about the market. And if any textbooks actually talk about that transition process then they simply say there can be conflict. What they’re leaving out at the very start of the exercise is assuming that you can change the prices without changing the distribution of income or level of income. Well, if you change the price of bananas, it won’t affect individual income all that much. But when you have an entire society involved, any change in prices necessarily changes not just income but the entire distribution of income as well. Some neoclassical economists have done this work, to get the foundations, and they’ve concluded that if you get consumers with different tastes and different prices, and different goods – some luxuries, some necessities – you can derive any demand curve; just a squiggly line across a sheet of paper without taking your hand off the page. Now of course they don’t teach that in the introductory courses because, as soon as you do that, good bye demand and supply. Because if you just draw like a sine wave, there’d be  absolutely no reason why that could not be a legitimate demand curve in a market.

That’s the first stage. The second, on supply, they argue that firms face rising costs of production and they therefore will, as volume rises, the increase in volume will push up the level of price for them, at a stage where the firm will say, ‘Well, I’m not going to produce any more – any more than this and I’ll produce at a loss.’ Well, if you actually empirically ask what sort of cost structures that they face – well, Alan Blinder, who was once vice-president of the Federal Reserve and a very influential neoclassical economist, went out and did precisely that in a book called “Asking About Prices.” And here’s a very rough conclusion of what he said: he said that 89% of firms for which he was reporting had constant or falling marginal costs, which is the opposite of the situation that is taught in the textbooks. So they are wrong about firms facing a rising point in terms of cut-off costs. But he said OK, let’s pretend that they are right even though we know that they are wrong, but let’s just look at the mathematical argument: the position that they find is profit-maximizing does not maximize the profits of the individual firm, the levels of output does.

So neoclassical economists are wrong about the shape of the demand curve, they’re wrong about there only being one possible shape being logical given what the shape can be, and they’re wrong about the point of profit-maximization. So the whole thing is a shambles, but it’s taught without those nuances in textbooks. So students have this would-be perfect vision if everything else is correct in the belief — and it’s not the students’ fault that they go this way — in the belief that everything else is in fact correct. But good neoclassical economics have proven that the demand curve does not look like what the textbook says it does, and I myself and other colleagues have argued that the supply function is completely different as well. So it’s a total shambles, but with that perfect picture the students go off believing the rest of that ideology: you know, that markets are perfect, markets choose the best possible point — when the theory, properly worked out, shows that markets cannot identify what the best point is anyway.

Christine Shearer: So supply and demand is the basis of free market economics because it assumes equilibrium – i.e. the government could only disrupt this natural balance? It is the equations behind the philosophy of economic liberalism?

Steve Keen: Yeah, and that’s the whole idea, that there is an actual balance out there. And that’s a very seductive thing for a student. I know I was seduced by it when I first learned it in high school and becoming a University student, and it’s a very seductive vision because what it actually communicates is that you can have an economic system that distributes to society resources without having any power – and you don’t have any power because the model argues in favor of competition rather than collusion. You have firms not colluding with each other, workers not forming unions, and you have the government keeping out of the way, and that would lead to the perfect situation rather than leading to political anarchy, etc., etc. So it’s a very seductive vision of an anarchist society that works well. And, strangely enough, I think most neoclassical economists without knowing it are effectively anarchists because they are arguing in favor of no government, and that is an argument that a lot of humans have had over time and the trouble is both left and right anarchy failed, in that anarchy when it did manifest on the left became centralized power in the socialist system – it had a lot to do with the economic failure of that society. And when you try to create society built on this model, that doesn’t work either because the actual ideas behind them are totally unsound as well, and you get the sort of canards we see now in financial markets, but it’s an essential part of why economists are so anti-government: they have a vision of society that doesn’t need government.

Christine Shearer: Yet the Great Depression of the 1930s arguably created an opening for new theories of the economy to be considered, such as John Maynard Keynes’s argument that government spending could bolster employment and thus demand, helping jolt economies out of a slump. Such economic theories were applied to the macro level to create models for numerical simulations of the economy, and were often linear and assumed equilibrium. The Investment-Saving/Liquidity preference model (IS-LM), for example, was informed by the work of Keynes, but took out his consideration of uncertainty and complexity (yet is still called neo-Keynesianism). But it did consider that government may have a role to play in stabilizing economies?

Steve Keen: Yeah, the whole way that Keynes was undermined by neoclassical themselves is remarkable, it’s one of the reasons that I am so aggressive about the case I make today because I am not going to let that happen to my arguments and the arguments that New Keynesianism and Complexity Theory also make. What was called Keynes’s theory, which was the IS-LM model, which was developed by John Hicks, and Hicks later in life, in fact 1979, 1980, or 1981, I think, wrote a paper for the “Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics,” said when looking back at the history of how he derived the model, he first developed that model in 1934 and, this is pretty much a quote: “Before I had written even the first of my papers on Keynes, and it was a general equilibrium model, it was a neoclassical model of economics.” But because he wrote it up in what was called a review of Keynes, economists accepted it as Keynesian, and there were ways in which you could see several of Keynes’s ideas in the general theory, I don’t think Hicks was entirely wrong to argue that, but it left out fundamental issues like uncertainty, money, expectations, ideas about the future affecting what you do today – all that from Keynes disappeared, it was a totally simplified vision.

Now if you take all that into account, which is what I have been doing and people in the post-Keynesian tradition have been trying to do, you get models that are inherently unstable and in some cases government spending can counteract that in the same way that a room that is subject to extremes of heat and cold from the climate, an air conditioning system can change the temperature inside by moving in an opposite direction from what is happening with the weather, like a stabilizer. So it is possible for the government to have that role.

Christine Shearer: But eventually the “monetarist” dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model took out the role of government policy altogether, beyond managing the money supply, on the premise that anything the government does will be counteracted and neutralized by the behavior of the economy — essentially creating a model of macroeconomics informed primarily by the microeconomic “laws” that you critique?

Steve Keen: Yes, and this is one thing I’ve done in the second version of “Debunking Economics” going through the history of using economic theory of what was the driving force of macroeconomics over time. It had nothing to do with making the models more accurate and everything to do with trying to create a model derived from microeconomic foundations. So they derived a model of one consumer using one product, who knows the future, and is rational about allocation of time and effort between labor and collusion and so on, has technology that functions perfectly, etc. etc., and as Robert Stoller, a staunch neoclassical economist said, how can anyone expect a sensible, short- to medium- term macroeconomic model to come out of that set-up? That’s what they’ve done. And of course it completely ignores the existence of money and the existence of banks. I mean, the financial crisis was considered an exogenous shock. But it’s only an exogenous shock because their idiotic models completely ignore the financial sector. That’s a sign of the total disarray neoclassical economics was in when the 2008 crisis hit because their models argued that there could be no crisis and then they had the gaul to say that, ‘Well, our models worked during the good times.’ It’s just bizarre.

Christine Shearer: So this is the model behind neo-liberalism, grounded in faith of neo-classical economics?

Steve Keen: Yeah. Neoliberalism is a political ideology that has been adopted in the last forty years because it seemed to be working with the growth of the financial sector and the power of recovery from the 1970s, 1980s, the 1990s crisis and so on, and it became dominant on both sides of the fence. I really try to distinguish my arguments from the political realm because I really don’t care if you are on the left or the right – if your economics are bad, you are still going to be wrong. And this is what has actually happened: we have adopted an economics that appeared to be correct because it was practiced at a time when there was an enormous debt bubble driving economic performance. And the debt bubble gave a huge growth to the financial sector and for a short term stabilized unemployment and inflation, with a little bit of help from China on the inflation front obviously, while at the same time driving debt to unsustainable levels. So we have both left and right throughout the world espousing neoliberalism and the elephant in the room behind it that drove the whole thing – the level of debt – has finally exploded the room, and we have really a barren political philosophy on both the left and right which is why, you know, there is such disarray in Europe right now. So, if you’re going to have left or right politics, you need to have a realistic model of economics, and because both often sustain unrealistic models, that is why we’re in a financial crisis right now and why politicians are paralyzed right now and why rather than neoliberalism – and I’m emphasizing the liberal part – we’re more likely to see a rise in neo-fascism, and neither left nor right nor the middle can afford to have that happen, but have set up the conditions by swallowing this theory.

Christine Shearer: Neoclassical economics assumes that, first, bank deposits are made, and then individual banks and financial institutions issue loans based on those deposits – the “Money Multiplier” model. But you and other economists argue that, in reality, loans are often issued first. Is that one of the main factors leading to debt bubbles?

Steve Keen: Yeah. And if people want to draw a mental picture in their head, I just worked this out for a conference presentation I’ll be giving in April, discussing why, for example, [Paul] Krugman‘s model of bank lending is so transparently wrong, because of how he thinks banks operate. So neoclassical economics, it’s not just that they leave money out, it’s that they leave banks out completely. So if you don’t have banks and you want to borrow, you’d have to knock on your neighbor’s door and say, ‘Can I have some money please? And I’ll include the rate of interest as well.’ Well, if your neighbor did that his stock of money would fall and your stock of money would rise and there would be no macroeconomic impact. The reality is you walk straight past your neighbor’s house and go to the bank and say, ‘I have this great idea, can you lend me a million dollars?’ And the bank says, ‘Yeah, it’s a good idea, here’s a million dollars and, by the way, you owe us a million dollars’ and, by attaching that condition, that bank increases spending power without changing the spending power of existing actors in the economy. So you have a boost in demand coming out of the loan, and this is the essential reason that the crisis occurred and that neoclassical didn’t see it coming, because they are still arguing that the level of debt doesn’t matter macroeconomically. Krugman has been arguing this in recent economic posts quite vociferously, saying debt is just money we owe to ourselves and therefore it has no overall impact. That’s the “borrow from your neighbor” model, not “borrow from your bank.”

So they are ignorant about the nature of banking, and when you take it into account, you find that loans are created and the creation of loans simultaneously creates deposits, and reserves generated or supplied by the Federal Reserve are necessary for banks, otherwise they would face credit crunches on a daily basis. And the money multiplier model is a mirror of what actually happens: rather than a reserve being created for a purpose by companies taking money from the economy and giving banks excess reserves and banks lend that way, or depositors going to a bank and giving banks excess reserves and loans are created out of excess reserves, loans and deposits are being created at pretty much the same instant, and reserves are generated by the repayment of loans. So it’s a bit like the solar system – we talk about sunrise and sunset, but we know what is really going on is the earth is spinning on its axis. So it’s not that the earth is sitting still, it’s the other way around. And we talk about that vision but know better. But economists talk about the money multiplier vision and they don’t know better.

Christine Shearer: If neoclassical economics assumes that, as you put it, “debt merely involves the transfer of spending power from the saver to the borrower,” then does that make its models unable to account for financialization?

Steve Keen: Yeah, exactly, because as far as they are concerned there is nothing really significant about a growth in the financial sector. It’s just that there is specialization going on – they don’t distinguish between industrial capitalism and financial capitalism, whereas I think it is extremely important to do that, because it’s industrial capitalism that ultimately gives you productivity, growth, technological progress, and so on. Financial capitalism is like the grist in some ways – it provides the cash flow necessary so that new ideas can be put into place, the Schumpeterian approach to what money should do, in which it does play a useful role, but anything above a certain scale is funding a Ponzi scam, which is what financialization was, and neoclassical economics – some neoclassical books still specifically argue assuming no Ponzi behavior, and we have just lived through the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, so assuming that is assuming that we live on a different planet.

Christine Shearer: You say that economist Paul Krugman argues that many macroeconomic models did not forecast the 2008 crash because they did not factor in the role of private debt. Yet you argue that the problems with the models are more fundamental and grounded in their assumptions — primarily that markets left to their own devices inherently strive for equilibrium. You therefore created a model (based partly on Hyman Minsky‘s financial instability hypothesis and others) with a particular focus on the ratio of private debt-to-GDP — and did forecast a crash? In other words, your model assumes the economy has a type of life cycle, not just stasis?

Steve Keen: Yeah, this is the bizarre thing about economists, they think they are doing really cool, hot-shot stuff, with models of what Krugman still calls “comparative statics0″ that start at a point of equilibrium and make a change and see how the “equilibrating variables” change in a given situation over a time path between the two. That is so primitive, it is so nineteenth century, because in the twentieth century in particular the real sciences continue using dynamic tools to model what they are talking about. Dynamic models are the rule in every other discipline, and there are computer software that let you do this quickly in prototype in dynamic modeling software, you don’t even have to build the thing. So economics is doing nineteenth century math and thinking it is hot shot. So all I’ve done is say, ‘Let’s look at how this is done in the genuine sciences like engineering, physics, biology, and so on’ and then adapted those dynamic modeling techniques for economics. And when I do it’s a life cycle – things change over time. And this is the importance of Minsky – his verbal vision of how that happens was pretty accurate. And that is that you have a debt-driven economy where entrepreneurs have to borrow money to do their investing or their Ponzi behavior, and banks supply the money most of the time, and you have a boom-bust cycle coming out of it, and once you put yourself in, for example, a “hysterical” time, banks make loans and most of those loans succeed, and they say ‘Hey, we should lend out more money, we have been too conservative,’ and you get a cycle out of it, a series of ratcheting up over time, and then a breakdown when the bubble bursts, and it is possible to model that relatively easily using dynamic tools. You can’t even see it if you are using comparative statics.

Christine Shearer: How does economic globalization factor into your work – i.e. the increasing ability of investors to move funds across borders at ever-increasing speeds?

Steve Keen: I’m still modeling because it takes a while to build complicated, dynamic models, I’m still building an aggregated banking sector and an aggregated economy and I’m not looking at the national, but the intention is to take that model and then split it to look at national economies and banks and so on. And I’m sure that once I do that I’ll show that globalization makes things worse because you have extra volatility, like when you have one country offering a high interest rate, people in other countries will sell their currency and buy yours and take advantage of higher returns, and when they do that not only do they get a higher return they also drive up the value of your dollar because they’re bidding it up in global markets. That then causes your own manufacturing to become uncompetitive over time, your economy will go into a crash and then you’ll start to lower interest rates, those same dollars flee out of your currency to avoid capital loss that comes with the currency falling and goes back to their own society, it’s then a destructive process. Add that to what’s happening at the global level when you ignore those international fluctuations, it simply makes things worse. So we’ve gone down a completely disastrous path of letting finance become an international plaything. One of the things that Keynes argued many decades ago that was forgotten was that, after the experience of the 1920s and 1930s, he said, “And above all else, let finance be national.”

Christine Shearer: Do you think economic globalization played a role in the “debt crisis” affecting Europe today and what happened to Latin America in the 1980s?

Steve Keen: Yeah, for sure. Latin America is a classic case of the banks finding that they could not lend to European or American borrowers anymore at the scale that wanted to, so they lent to the Third World, and you have the Third World debt crisis coming out of that and it was papered over until the next debt crisis and there was a whole series of debt crises until finally you can’t just keep on juggling it and it comes down and crushes the economies.

In terms of the European situation, for example, that’s another classic one where – not just globalization – but the attempt to expand the national economy to continental-scale itself set off crisis because, before the Euro, you had separate countries which could all use separate monetary policy, fiscal policy, and exchange-rate policy if they needed to, and those three variables could adjust if there were imbalances between one nation and another. Then when they formed the Euro, first they ruled out exchange-rate policy because it is one currency across the whole continent, and then they ruled out fiscal policy because they were told they could not have a deficit over three percent of GDP, and finally it ruled out monetary policy because rules were set by the European central bank. So, essentially, it said to countries like Greece, ‘We’re going to tie your legs to the Germans and you’ve got to keep up with them and you cannot use any other means to modify your performance. See how you go.’ And of course they failed. And of course we have the crashes coming out of that. So Europe going down this road of globalization being a good thing without thinking through the consequences has actually made the situation far worse than it would have been without the forming of the European Union.

Christine Shearer: Why are banks foreclosing on homes in the US rather than helping homeowners renegotiate terms to meet payments – is there a financial gain for them to foreclose?

Steve Keen: That’s a really good question. I think the best answer is that banks have systems set up that treat a fall as an episodic thing, not a systemic thing. So on an episode-by-episode basis, it is not in the interest of banks to reduce returns because if they do it for the few borrowers that got into trouble, the many borrowers that didn’t would say, ‘What about us?’  and there would be a clamor and they wouldn’t be able to do it. So the easiest thing for them to do is, when somebody can’t pay their debts, foreclose and swallow the losses, and keep the vast majority of your loans that are still solvent. What happens when it suddenly becomes a systemic crisis and 25 to 40 percent of your borrowers are effectively insolvent? Well, you’re still continuing  a practice that worked when it was an episodic crisis that is now a systemic one, and they would actually be better off if they would change their behavior to what you are talking about and renegotiate terms because at least they’d still be getting a cash flow. So in fact banks, by using a non-crisis model of what you do when somebody becomes insolvent, are actually making the crises worse, not just for the overall society, but even for themselves.

Christine Shearer: The 99% movement has highlighted the role of the increasing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else. While the movement has largely portrayed this as an issue of equality and fairness, I am wondering if you see the disparity more in terms of your models: as symptomatic of continuing economic decline, particular the level of private debt?

Steve Keen: Yeah, it’s something that’s driven by the rise in the level of financial wealth and therefore debt reduction backs it up. Because capitalism is always going to have inequality, and there is no social system that has not had inequality, and even one that claimed to bring equality like the Fidel Castro distribution of income where you might not have much money but you live in a palace, and everybody else does not have much money and they do not live in a palace – it is still inequality and is an essential aspect of the society and you cannot quite get away from it.

But you get an exaggerated level of inequality in a capitalist system when you allow financial bubbles to occur because the Ponzi speculators make a fortune out of it when it is going up and when it starts going down they run away with the money they made already and it’s really the growth of financial debt that matters.

One thing I found when I did my PhD in the early 1990s was I built a model based on Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis that just had three elements to it: workers’ share of income, employment rate, and the ratio of debt-to-GDP. Now, when I worked out the equilibrium of the model, and I worked out how the equilibrium would change with various shifts — and it was not an equilibrium model but a dynamic one, of course — but in equilibrium there were three economic variables: employment rate, the debt-to-GDP ratio, and not the workers’ share, it was the capitalists’s share of income that affected equilibrium. Workers’ share of income depended on the level of debt, so that if the level of debt rose, the workers’ share of income fell, and this is ironic because in the model itself I simply had capitalists doing the borrowing, workers didn’t do any borrowing at all, but it turned out that the essential group that paid for the borrowing by a change in income distribution was the working class, not the capitalists, not until the crisis hits and then they both lost money and the banking sector will go as the whole economy collapses.

So one thing when I look at the data is how this simple model captured what has happened in the past twenty years. As the level of debt has risen, workers’ income have fallen, capitalists’ haven’t, until the final crisis hit. So in that sense what we see is the playing through of a complex, financial system, where even though generally speaking it was the capitalists who took out the debt under the subprime bubble, the burden of that debt repayment ended up falling on what workers got in wages compared to output of the overall economy. So the fundamental problem comes down again to letting the financial sector get out of control. You can’t get rid of inequality in capitalism, you can certainly reduce it, and the best way to do that is stop the financial sector from taking over the economy in a Ponzi scheme.

Christine Shearer: You pose a seemingly radical solution in your book: jubilee, or the cancellation of private debts. But you make this argument as an economist: that it is the only way to free economies for productive growth, because the private debt-to-GDP ratio has just grown too large to be serviceable – is that correct?

Steve Keen: Yeah. [Economist] Michael Hudson put it beautifully in the simple phrase that “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid.” If you try to repay them all you do is increase, of course, the amount of debt you have to pay further down the track. We’re talking about private debt here because with private debt you have to borrow money from somebody else, the government in the US can in effect borrow money from itself, so it does not face quite the same limitations but the public sector does, and you keep rescheduling private debt and try to find ways to preserve levels of debt that should have never been offered in the first place, you accumulate more of the problem down the track.

So the best thing you can do is reduce the level of debt. but the trouble is not only did banks produce too much debt and give too many loans to borrowers, they also then sold that debt through securitization to the public, so in the past when you said, ‘Let’s eliminate the debts,’ only the banking sector would suffer. If you did that now, not just the banking sector but a large sector of the public would suffer as well. So what I’ve proposed is what I call a modern debt jubilee, where you have quantitative easing and rather than give money to the banks, you give money to the public, but it goes into their bank accounts, and the very first use of that money has to be paying the debt down. Now that would mean, for a start, is that anyone who was in debt would have their debt level reduced, and banks would be unaffected in terms of their solvency because their money-making assets like loans would fall, but their cash assets would rise, and anybody in the public who had no debt would suddenly have an injection of cash. Now their income strength would fall, because it would be reduced in the value of the loans, but they’d have less income coming out of the debt in the future, and they’d have a cash reserve they could send out in the meantime.

So the idea is to have a jubilee that focuses on a reduction in income simply on the group who should have a reduction in income, and that is the finance sector, while trying to minimize the damage being down to the rest of the economy, and try to minimize the damage done by massive deleveraging so that, if we don’t do anything systemic about it, it might give us twenty years of a downturn before we finally start to stabilize.

Christine Shearer is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch. She is Managing Editor of Conducive, and author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (Haymarket Books, 2011).

A memorial for the victims of the Bhopal disaster. photo: Luca Frediani/Creative Commons

Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” (Harvard University Press 2011) explores the slow, steady, and often ignored violence of socio-environmental degradation around the globe, and the writer-activists trying to bring it to light. 

By Christine Shearer

In “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” (Harvard University Press 2011), Rachel Carson Professor of English, Rob Nixon, explores the gradual and often ignored violence of environmental degradation, toxins, deforestation, and oil drilling in the Global South and Persian Gulf. The book is a well-written overview suggesting many years of thought, research, and analysis of many important ongoing socio-environmental crises, and the attempts by writers and activists to bring these “slow” issues to light.

I will begin with my academic quibble. The book’s title and thesis, slow violence, is clearly drawn from the research on structural violence — i.e. problems like hunger and malnutrition, inequality and poverty, and unequal access to health care that cause harm indirectly, rooted in the policies and practices of a society. Ignoring these issues or not addressing them therefore becomes a form of structural, rather than personal, violence. Nixon attributes the concept of structural violence to sociologist Johan Galtung, and writes: “Galtung’s theory of structural violence is pertinent here because some of his concerns overlap with the concerns that animate this book” (10). “Some” — really? Structural violence seems like a central organizing principle of the book.

But, OK, Nixon wants to differentiate the concept of structural violence from his slow violence to stress that in a society increasingly focused only on sensationalism and spectacle, how does violence that is slow—rather than immediate—cut through the noise and get the attention and action it needs? Nixon wants to therefore focus on the “attritional devastation” that takes place gradually over time and space. Slow violence may be less visible and get less attention, Nixon argues, but can still exact a lethal toll — maybe more so precisely because it is slow and out of sight.

To explore this, Nixon examines writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South and Persian Gulf, many of whom “exemplify in their work the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction” (25).

The book focuses on a number of ongoing environmental crises, and their entwinement with politics and power: the Bhopal disaster in India, oil drilling in the Persian Gulf and Nigeria, the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, megadams in “developing” nations, and the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq. Nixon takes a particular look at the literature and writer-activists that have emerged out of these struggles, such as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathi, and Arundhati Roy, as well as fictional books such as “Animal’s People” and “Cities of Salt”.

Nixon is a great writer: his writing is clear and at times almost poetic. This made me somewhat uneasy, as if the way he was writing about slow violence was so beautiful as to undercut its horror. On the other hand, the writer-activists themselves tend to strive for hope and beauty in the face of so much despair. The book is also informed by political, economic, sociological, and cultural theory, which Nixon weaves seamlessly with his discussion of literary texts and the writers who penned them.

The final result is a comprehensive overview of many different streams of environmental injustice, which can serve as a primer for those not familiar with these particular issues, while its discussion of both well-known and more obscure texts may offer something new to even those well-versed on the topic. In that regard, I can see how this would be a good book for both undergraduate and graduate studies across a broad range of humanities, social science, and environmental studies classes, as well as for those just interested in good writing on socio-environmental issues.

At the conclusion Nixon wonders if the growth and quickness of the Internet may offer a path toward making slow violence more visible and immediate. (Although in the Conclusion I have another quibble: Nixon ponders some of the potential pitfalls of the Net by suggesting that the “Climategate” emails were [initially] released by Wikileaks, which is just not true.) Maybe the Internet does offer a way to draw more attention to slow violence. Yet slow violence may be a relative term — the effects of rapid resource extraction and industrialization seem to be giving way more frequently and readily to sudden disaster. In an age of climate change, peak oil, and growing water scarcity, is slow violence really as slow as it used to be? If not, it might be fruitful to take the lessons from Nixon’s book to lay out a global map for not just attention to these issues, but quick and widespread direct actions, before it’s too late.

By Christine Shearer

Merchants of Doubt is a very well-researched book about a small group of scientists and scientific advisers to the U.S. government who transitioned from their role as Cold War warriors supporting nuclear weapons to ideologically-motivated “contrarians” battling anything they saw as a threat to liberty and free enterprise, even if that meant the science on acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer.

While many books have looked at the misinformation campaigns around issues such as tobacco and climate change, Oreskes and Conway take it one step further, locating some of the key players in multiple issues and situating them as products of a particular history: defenders of the American way of life against its perceived enemies, whether it be communists and socialists or environmentalists and science.

The authors are well-suited for the task as both are historians of science – Oreskes at UC San Diego and Conway at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They bring together considerable evidence to support the argument that a very small group of people have been particularly influential in shaping U.S. public opinion and policy on a number of very important issues.

Oreskes and Conway particularly focus on physicists Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and William Nierenberg, as well as a few other contrarian scientists, many of them connected to the politically conservative think tank, the Marshall Institute. The book starts off by describing the efforts of some of these scientists in support of nuclear weapons and, eventually, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1983, to strike down nuclear ballistic missiles in the air.

The book examines how these efforts split the scientific community, between those pushing for the phasing out of nuclear weapons (such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, founded in 1969) and the “political hawks” like Nierenberg and Singer who favored nuclear weapons and thought SDI was not only feasible but necessary for U.S. dominance. Oreskes and Conway lay out how the latter began to see those opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons as traitors playing into Soviet hands. This set the stage for the contrarian crusade against science that threatened their worldview, from insisting that SDI was feasible (despite all evidence to the contrary, with SDI eventually derided by many in the U.S. as “Star Wars”) to challenging the research on nuclear winter.

The book then looks at how this small group of scientists went on to battle the scientific consensus on a number of issues, including the effects of acid rain,  the hole in the ozone layer, the dangers of cigarette smoke, and the existence of anthropogenic climate change. The authors also present some of the revisionist arguments against Rachel Carson‘s Silent Spring (1962), showing how contrarians are casting doubt on even supposedly settled issues such as the harmful effects of the synthetic pesticide DDT, as part of a broader attack on the legitimacy of the environmental movement and government regulation.

With all these issues, the authors demonstrate how these scientists – and their connections to think tanks and industries – show up again and again, playing a key role in the “deliberate obfuscation” of public understanding of science to try and prevent or weaken government policy. Yet how much actual scientific research did these contrarians conduct on the subjects in which they disagreed with consensus? Little to none. The authors are therefore also critical of the media for its increasingly “he said, she said” style of reporting that often promotes the appearance of authentic scientific debate where it does not actually exist.

In exploring the history, Oreskes and Conway reveal deeper underlying motivations for challenging scientific consensus. One might be excused for thinking that the small group of people who have challenged the scientific consensus on tobacco smoke, the hole in the ozone layer, and the existence of climate change are motivated by money or attention. Maybe many of them are. But Oreskes and Conway show that some were and still are motivated out of a deep sense of political ideology, brewing during the Cold War years and eventually displaced onto any efforts to institute government regulation of the “free market” within the U.S. – the internal Cold War.

Oreskes and Conway note that, in delaying public understanding of science to prevent regulation, people like Seitz and Singer allow problems to fester, eventually resulting in exactly what they fear most: governmental regulation to prevent public health problems like runaway acid rain or ozone depletion, which might have been effectively dealt with if the science was acknowledged and measures were taken earlier.

But I would take it farther than Oreskes and Conway. As the authors note, the great irony is that most of these “merchants of doubt” oppose government regulation and yet have historically worked for the government. In other words, these scientific advisers have used their positions to stall or prevent democratic action on a host of serious issues, drawing upon their influence in government to try and impose their will. In that way, I think the book indirectly highlights that these scientists and advisers became what they claimed to hate most: government-connected bureaucrats deciding what was best for the people.

By Christine Shearer

Don’t be fooled by the title of Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial - this is not a book about people who reject the basic science of climate change (I’m looking at you, Koch brothers and Exxon). This is a book about many of us, and how we to varying degrees live in denial. Although focusing on a small rural community in Norway, Norgaard sheds light on how people systematically interact in ways that serve to downplay or ignore climate change, and avoid the unsettling emotions it raises.

In the Introduction, Norgaard says she is looking at climate change to build a model of socially organized denial, where denial is not just an individual, psychological process, but one that occurs through social interaction. By denial, she means Stanley Cohen’s three varieties of denial: literal, interpretive, and implicatory. Literal is outright dismissal of information (i.e. climate change deniers). Interpretive means reinterpretation of information (perhaps thinking climate change is natural, or will not be that bad).

Implicatory is Norgaard’s main focus, meaning the information is not rejected but the psychological, political, or moral implications are not followed. This is the heart of the book: why those who know about climate change fail to act on that knowledge. In that sense, Norgaard is not interested in climate change activists, but why so many who accept the science don’t act, and how this inaction becomes a cultural norm (similar to what political theorist Antonio Gramsci calls hegemony).

Norgaard explores the topic of social denial through interviews and ethnography in Bygdaby, Norway, from 2000-1. Bygdaby is a small rural community of about 14,000 people, with many farms and a strong sense of tradition, yet also firm roots to the modern world, including the fact that 34% of Norway’s national revenues came from petroleum in 2008.

Although gaining so much of its wealth from oil, Norgaard tells us that neither the country nor the town of Bygdaby has the well-financed climate denial operations that other countries have, most notably the U.S. That makes Bygdaby an interesting case study, since most of the residents, Norgaard tells us, accept the science of climate change, meaning much of the inaction here is apparently not due to simply literal denial.

In exploring the topic, Norgaard makes use of many different bodies of research in the social sciences and psychology. The work is nicely blended with her ethnographic research to illustrate the subtle ways in which individuals engage in social norms of selective attention to avoid uncomfortable feelings, crystallizing as cultural nonmobilization on climate change.

Much of these processes are not necessarily conscious nor deliberate, so in focusing attention on them, Norgaard helps make them conscious. In doing so, the book offers insights into underlying social and psychological barriers to action that – to my knowledge – have not been widely considered or discussed, yet arguably represent some of the biggest challenges to addressing climate change.

Norgaard notes many different ways that the social organization of denial works – she later calls it a kaleidoscope. Among them is the sheer enormity of the problem of climate change, one that can leave people feeling powerlessness, as individual actions appear insufficient and political actions seem so untenable. Thus bringing up climate change can feel like it accomplishes little more than bringing down the social mood of a group, kind of like Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live: “Sure, it’s a beautiful, sunny day, because the planet is cooking us alive.” Wah-waaah!

Acknowledging climate change also immediately invites questions over how you live. Unless you have a zero waste home run by solar power with an organic garden and a bike, then you probably use fossil fuels, which invites criticism about hypocrisy – criticism that is somehow null and void if you just do not bring up climate change at all.

The result is that climate change is often only discussed during socially sanctioned times and settings, like classrooms. Yet it is in the fabric of everyday life that the problem is woven and changes need to be made.

Though focused on denial, Norgaard’s work indirectly raises the question of how and why people become active and push for social change. Norgaard says that most people in Bygdaby probably understand at least the basics of climate change science: increasing greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the planet. But does level of awareness – both cognitively and emotionally – make a difference in individual response? What if more people connected increasing greenhouse gases with daily weather events? (How to change the minds of people who deny the science outright is an entirely different matter, as science writer Chris Mooney recently laid out.)

For example, a recent Yale study found significant differences in how groupings of people respond to climate change, suggesting more variation between individuals than Living in Denial explores. This could be a function of place (the Yale study looked at the U.S.) and also time, as the science on climate change grows more alarming, and its everyday effects become more apparent.

But Norgaard’s main point is showing how a group of well-meaning people can be both aware of climate change and not addressing the problem – how they interact in ways that push climate change out of the range of full attention and action. In that way, it speaks to many of us. As we become more aware of the subtle ways in which we collectively avoid the unsettling reality of climate change, will we change our actions to align with the knowledge? Or will we continue living in denial?

The Scientific is Political and Personal: NASA Scientist James Hansen Reaches Out in Storms of My Grandchildren

In June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate that global warming was underway and humans were a factor. As Hansen recounts in Storms of my Grandchildren, he thought U.S. politicians would do the logical thing: begin scaling down the use of fossil fuels and transitioning to alternative sources of energy. Over twenty years later the U.S. has yet to do either, even as climate change is occurring more rapidly and violently than many had predicted. Frustrated and alarmed, this book is Hansen’s scientific, political, and personal meditation on the issue, spliced with images of his grandchildren to remind us exactly what climate change is really about.

By Christine Shearer

The book begins with Hansen’s discussion of climate change science and his reports to U.S. and world politicians, eventually leading to his frustration that his research and findings were so often drawn upon haphazardly and selectively for political purposes, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney focusing on the role of soot in global warming as a way to potentially downplay the role of carbon dioxide, which remains the main contributor. Such inside peeks into politics and power based on Hansen’s first-hand accounts is interesting and illuminating. Even more interesting is learning about the history of the world’s climate from one of the top scientists in the world on the issue, whose calculations on climate change have proved remarkably accurate again and again.

Then again, this book suggests that Hansen has so often been accurate because he is so meticulous with his research. This means he will often interrupt really interesting discussions of the earth’s climate with really banal discussions about particularities of data, like accounting for both evaporation and ice sheets when calculating the ratio of oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 within ocean sedimentation to determine past ocean temperatures. And such discussions are often spliced with phrases that amount to, “I know this is boring, but…” which is almost always the surest way to then bore someone. Hansen, however, does this for a reason: he wants you to know exactly what data he is working with and how he arrived at his conclusions.

Further, such careful consideration is the only way to know what to expect on such an important issue as the future of our climate. And it does not look good. Like the majority of scientists involved in climate research, Hansen is particularly alarmed about the prospect of setting off methane hydrates from melting glaciers, which is believed to be the cause of a 5°C rise in global atmospheric temperature and subsequent cascade of extinctions 55 million years ago. Even more disconcerting is that such events could act as a catalyst to runaway warming and lead to an atmosphere like Venus, so saturated with carbon dioxide its surface can melt lead.

Just how many more emissions could we let off before reaching such runaway warming? Hansen points to several signs that we are already on the verge, and that continued “business-as-usual” fossil fuel use will most certainly tip us over, quite possibly within the next few decades. Calculating the degree of climate forces on the planet, Hansen argues we need to not only begin reducing fossil fuel consumption, but get back to a carbon dioxide level of 350 parts per million (ppm), down from our present (and steadily growing) 387 ppm.

How? Looking at various government and agency estimates of how many fossil fuels remain (an issue with little consensus, to say the least, with many arguing we may have already passed global peak oil production), Hansen determines that what oil and conventional gas remains is largely out of U.S. hands, but that runaway warming could be prevented by phasing out coal use, particularly since coal is more abundant and has a higher carbon output than oil or gas. To do so, Hansen calculates that we must half emissions by 2020, and phase out coal emissions by 2030.

Hansen then describes his attempts to get world leaders to phase out old coal plants, a process that went about as well as his attempts to get them to recognize climate change, and his frustration with their inaction and greenwashing. Hansen therefore decides to take his own action, and gets arrested for protesting mountaintop removal, the practice of literally blowing the tops off mountains to more “efficiently” dig out the coal inside. He takes faith in the people and communities who have worked so hard to help stop the new fleet of over 100 conventional coal plants proposed by the second Bush Administration, a little-known, national grassroots movement described in Ted Nace’s Climate Hope. At various points, Hansen calls out politicians on their empty promises and backpedaling, and it’s refreshing to see a scientist who accepts that the fight to save our climate has become – however sadly – an intensely political one, even as he chastises himself for not being “objective” when he does so (note to the physical scientists from a social scientist: NOT speaking up does not make you objective, although it certainly makes you ineffectual).

In the end, it is Hansen’s personal reflections that make this book so interesting: it is not just a detailed discussion of climate science, it is the personal journey of a scientist who begins applying the same calculations to politicians and their energy policy that he does to climate, and doesn’t at all like what he sees. He understands almost better than anyone what it would mean to not act, and this is not an option for him, because of his grandchildren. This is the common thread of humanity that Hansen is trying to draw upon in this book, and even though we may live in an age where such pleas are too often mocked, this is one we should definitely heed.

Jeremy Leggett has undergone quite a few large career changes, from oil industry consultant to Greenpeace scientist to solar entrepreneur. A geologist by training, he worked with the oil industry until his studies brought him face-to-face with the growing evidence of global warming. Within an industry refusing to change, Leggett moved to Greenpeace and was part of the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) talks up to the Kyoto Protocol. Seeing the strong resistance to renewable energy, Leggett decided to move in that direction himself, setting up SolarCentury, the UK’s largest solar energy company, which helps support the sustainable development organization SolarAid. Leggett shared his experiences with Conducive Mag’s Christine Shearer, including his thoughts on the upcoming IPCC meeting in Copenhagen, what he sees as promising developments for renewable energy, and why he regards culture as the key to tackling climate change.

Christine Shearer: You began your career as an oil industry consultant and professor at the Royal School of Mines, helping train petroleum engineers and geologists. Could you say a bit what that was like and why you left?

Exxon is beyond the pale, still is beyond the pale as an organization with a terrible culture and a terrible attitude to the future and the mortgaging of the future.

Jeremy Leggett: Well, it was a lot of fun. I was really into it. I loved geology, I loved the process of studying history, I loved the research part. I researched the history of the oceans so I came at the climate system through the research on oceans, the bottom up, as it were. My consulting, a lot of it was with the oil industry, I worked with the oil industry in Japan, in Pakistan, in other places, with BP and Shell, so I was very much, y’know, a part of the machinery and if anyone had ever said to me I’d be doing what I’m doing today I would really have doubted that. And the reason I ultimately grew disenfranchised was the emergence of the worrying climate science in the mid-1980s coming from the atmospheric guys studying the climate from the top-down. When I put those two things together, what they were saying about the heat-trapping ability of the atmosphere with what I knew about the behavior of the oceans, that’s when I got really worried about global warming and of course still am.

Christine Shearer: As you became alarmed about global warming, did you talk to your colleagues in the petroleum industry about it and, if so, how did they react?

Solar works particularly well with wind. Wind is most effective in the winter, solar in the summer, simple pairings like that are going to amplify [renewable] technologies as the growth rates continue.

Jeremy Leggett: Sure. All of the time. And in the mid-1980s there was growing concern. I thought it would all switch sooner than it did. As you probably know it took BP and Shell until 1997 to actually admit there was a problem as organizations and then of course they started doing good stuff. But that’s ten lost years in which they were battling very hard to hold everything back. Even though there were very senior people in those companies saying to me, ‘This doesn’t look good, does it, we should be doing something about it.’

Christine Shearer: But as a corporation they just couldn’t?

Jeremy Leggett: Well, of course Exxon is beyond the pale, still is beyond the pale as an organization with a terrible culture and a terrible attitude to the future and the mortgaging of the future.

Christine Shearer: You then went to work for Greenpeace, and were at the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meetings up to the Kyoto Protocol, which you describe in your book The Carbon War. What was that like?

[T]here are going to be some hard questions asked about the way we make group decisions and the way we create cultures, cultures that become impervious to logic, and I think that’s what the Carbon Club, as we call them, have succeeded in doing.

Jeremy Leggett: Yeah, really rather weird at the time. I came out of what was then one of the most conservative universities in the world, science and technology only, into what was then one of the most radical environmental groups. It was a strange culture shift, to say the least. But there were a few scientists in other environment groups with the kind of pedigree that I had built up, Dan Lashof in NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council], Michael Oppenheimer in EDF [Environmental Defense Fund], and we sat down at the table with all the hundreds of climate scientists and of course also the lobbyists from the fossil fuel companies, who also had very good scientists on their books, and we did “gentlemanly” battle, a battle of ideas, and it started then and it’s still going on today.

Christine Shearer: The book lays out the complete indifference of some nations and fossil fuel companies to the plight of small island nations, who were literally negotiating for their future livelihood, given rapid sea level rise. Having been part of the fossil fuel industry, did you see such strong and resilient opposition coming, or were even you surprised?

Jeremy Leggett: With the benefit of hindsight I was pretty naïve. I did think the battle of rational argument would hold more sway than it did in those days and still does today. I think collectively we humans, with the privilege of looking back and analyzing the mistakes that we made, in these crucial times, there are going to be some hard questions asked about the way we make group decisions and the way we create cultures, cultures that become impervious to logic, and I think that’s what the Carbon Club, as we call them, have succeeded in doing.

Christine Shearer: Do you have much hope for the upcoming IPCC Copenhagen talks?

Young professionals are moving out of the digital revolution into the solar and clean technology revolution generally for their vocation.

Jeremy Leggett: I’m neutral. I believe in hope but is it going to work? I don’t know. We went to Kyoto and no one thought it would work but it did produce a treaty of sorts [the U.S. never ratified it]. So I think we have to keep the faith. But a lot depends on what happens bilaterally between the United States and China. And if Washington and Beijing can in any way get their ducks lined up than the rest of us will have to fall into line. And I think what’s encouraging is that the Chinese are being told by all their top scientists, ‘Houston, or Beijing, we have a problem.’ They’re not going to sit there and just say, ‘No, climate change is not an issue, we’re not going to do anything about it.’

Christine Shearer: You have also tried to draw attention to peak oil, discussed in your book Half Gone. When did you became aware of it, and have you noticed oil companies moving to deal with it?

In all the years I’ve been at this business that’s what’s struck me is we create cultures that are really resistant to change and whether they’re just naked defense of vested interest or lack of imagination or a combination of the two,… they’re cultural problems more than technology problems.

Jeremy Leggett: I was late to that, I’m ashamed to say. Being one of them, when the first whistles were blown in the late 1990s I kinda took a look at it, I saw the first real public whistleblowing paper in Scientific American by Campbell and Laherrère in 1998 and I read it and thought, ‘No, that can’t be right.’ And later I thought, ‘Well, great piece of analysis there, Dr. Leggett.’ It was the Shell reserve fiasco in 2004 that really woke me up to the issue, and after that I started researching it and coming to what I hope is a considered opinion. And of course it’s different from climate change in that there are plenty of people coming out in and around the oil industry about peak oil. It’s still probably a minority view, but there are plenty of people blowing whistles. And this is one that is going to conflate with climate in a very interesting way and my hope is it will push us to accelerate what we know we have to do anyway, which is go fast and hard on low-carbon technologies, and where climate has failed the prospect of a steep descent in global oil production might do the job, hopefully.

Christine Shearer: After Greenpeace you started SolarCentury, the UK’s leading solar energy company, which helps finance the sustainable development organization that you also started, SolarAid. That is not an easy task – how did you make it happen?

Jeremy Leggett: I got lucky, really. Most people can have entrepreneurial ideals, but I wanted to set up some kind of candle for hope, which we see Solar Century as being, and I was able to finance it in the dark days of the dot.com era just before the crash. We’ve struggled on to the present position, where over the last five years we’ve been the fastest growing private energy company of any kind in the UK, and we’re based in several European countries, so it’s a candle for hope that continues to burn quite bright.

Christine Shearer: You advocate microgeneration technology. What would that look like?

A lot of people don’t realize that for the first time last year in the [United] States or Europe there was more renewable capacity brought onstream than nuclear and fossil combined.

Jeremy Leggett: Yes, I’m in the solar business but I don’t think it’s a magic bullet, I don’t think there are any magic bullets, and we need to mine all the numerous members of the renewable and efficient energy family so microgeneration is going to look great with strategies like strategic harness. Solar works particularly well with wind. Wind is most effective in the winter, solar in the summer, simple pairings like that are going to amplify these technologies as the growth rates continue.

Christine Shearer: You were part of the UK Renewables Advisory Board, yes?

Jeremy Leggett: I was until 2006, so for four years I was advising the government, but I think they got sick of the sound of my voice and I sure got sick of the sound of theirs.

Christine Shearer: So is the UK somewhat moving in the direction of renewables, or?…

Jeremy Leggett: They bumble along. But we’re third from bottom in the lead table of European countries in the percentage of renewables in the energy mix, which is a shocking, shameful statistic. The government came into power with that statistic and it’s not changed in all their period of power, which I think they should be thoroughly ashamed of.

Christine Shearer: What do you think could really help the use of renewables grow?

I think it’s encouraging the Chinese are looking so hard at what global warming will do to their economy. There’s no point in growing an economy if it’s going to get washed away, literally and metaphorically, by the marching armies of climate impacts.

Jeremy Leggett: I think it would help a lot if the vested interests and the cultures that have been created started listening to rational argument and didn’t go into default mode of defending their environmentally ruinous status quo. That’s a constant theme. In all the years I’ve been at this business that’s what’s struck me is we create cultures that are really resistant to change and whether they’re just naked defense of vested interest or lack of imagination or a combination of the two, to believe or see that things can be done differently, they’re cultural problems more than technology problems.

Christine Shearer: Yes, what do you say to people who say renewables are great but not technologically or economically feasible?

Jeremy Leggett: I say talk to the people in Silicon Valley. See where they’re going with their feet and their wallets. This is what excites them. Young professionals are moving out of the digital revolution into the solar and clean technology revolution generally for their vocation. So what do they know that officials in the White House or here in England or the old foggies in the oil industry don’t know? They have a different view of the world, the Silicon Valley folks, and they have the right one and the dinosaurs have got the wrong one.

Christine Shearer: Do you see any promising fronts on the struggle to mitigate climate change?

[Peak oil] is going to conflate with climate in a very interesting way and my hope is it will push us to accelerate what we know we have to do anyway, which is go fast and hard on low-carbon technologies, and where climate has failed the prospect of a steep descent in global oil production might do the job, hopefully.

Jeremy Leggett: I do. Many. That’s what gets people like me out of bed in the morning. The growth rates of clean technology is amazing despite all the problems. A lot of people don’t realize that for the first time last year in the [United] States or Europe there was more renewable capacity brought onstream than nuclear and fossil combined. You tell people that and they say no, it must be wrong. No, it’s not wrong, it’s in the statistics. So we’re working with the grain, those of us in and around the survival technologies. So all that’s encouraging. It’s encouraging the political regime has changed in the U.S., away from one that was blind to all the difficulties. It’s encouraging all the demonstrations for cleaner energy. I think it’s encouraging the Chinese are looking so hard at what global warming will do to their economy. There’s no point in growing an economy if it’s going to get washed away, literally and metaphorically, by the marching armies of climate impacts. All that is encouraging.

CONDUCIVEMAG.COM

Reprinted with permission from Conducivemag.com

While many may think about oil when it comes to climate change, the real struggle could be coal. Coal is used for half the nation’s electricity, which is the U.S.’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists warn that the continued use of so much coal could put us on the path to runaway warming, yet federal policy continues to subsidize and support its use. Discussing his books Gangs of America and Climate Hope, Coalswarm founder Ted Nace talks to Conducive about the rise of corporations and Big Coal, the growing network of grassroots movements against coal, and why, despite the non-binding resolution coming out of Copenhagen, we should have hope.

The Coal War: Interview with Climate Hope Author Ted Nace

Christine Shearer: You helped start the successful Peachpit Press, a tech publishing company, and then went on to write a book about the growth of corporate power, Gangs of America. Did something make you want to write that book?

Ted Nace: For a long time I had been thinking that there needed to be a different way of looking at corporations than I’d seen in academic disciplines like economics, sociology, etc. I wanted to look at them the way a science fiction writer or an exo-biologist would view an unusual dynamic phenomenon — say a strange cloud moving around on a recently discovered planet. Even if the phenomenon did not seem to fit the narrow definition of a “life form” in the way we are accustomed to thinking, the exo-biologist would be trained to realize that life forms might not necessarily fit our preconceived notions. Basically, it seems to me that the corporations we have today — defined by a structure that gelled about a century ago — are exactly this sort of thing: a sort of life form. They meet all the standard criteria that biologists use to define life: persistence, metabolism, reproduction, adaptation, etc. By life form, I don’t mean to use a metaphor: I really think these things are literally coexisting with us physically, socially, and politically, and we may be on a direct collision course with them for the use of this planet. There’s a legal philosopher named Meir Dan-Cohen who has written about how a corporation could actually exist that had no human participation whatsoever — a chilling thought until you realize that big corporations already function to a certain degree on automatic pilot, since the decisions that guide their behavior are actually determined not really by individual managers but by the programmed parameter known as profit. That’s what makes corporations distinct from other human organizations like governments or social clubs. I wanted to highlight this Frankenstein notion, and a natural way to do that seemed to me to juxtapose it up against the well-known judicial doctrine that a corporation is a “person” and up against the 1886 Supreme Court case that gave corporations their first actual Constitutional rights. The fact that these immense, profit-maximizing entities are afforded the rights of human beings is a blatant irony that practically begs to be explored.

Christine Shearer: Especially since in that 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, “corporate personhood” came not from the actual judicial decision but from the court reporter’s notes on the case.

Ted Nace: Yes, and that’s just the most well known of a long string of court decisions endowing corporations with greater and greater rights, none of which are grounded in the actual language of the U.S. Constitution.

Christine Shearer: Were you surprised by these findings, how corporate power expanded and came to take its modern form?

Ted Nace: The big surprise for me was to see that even from the very beginning – the eighteenth century discussions on how to arrange the American system of government – people were already expressing a great deal of nervousness about the dangers of the corporate form. The framers of the American system of government went to great lengths to limit corporate power, for example by requiring corporations to renew their charters every 20 years and requiring each corporation to adhere to a particular beneficial function. Those measures worked for nearly a century or so — until just after the Civil War. Then, due to Supreme Court decisions such as Santa Clara and an assortment of changes in state incorporation statutes, the corporate legal form began to morph and the “modern” corporation came into being, which was much more legally privileged and also much larger than what had come before. It was like a second American Revolution, and I think our society hasn’t even begun to cope with it.

Christine Shearer: Your most recent book, Climate Hope, describes a grassroots network of communities fighting – very successfully – the construction of new coal plants in this country. How prevalent is coal and the use of coal plants in the U.S.?

Ted Nace: There are about 600 coal-fired power plants around the country, supplying half our electricity. Recently there were plans afoot to add another 150 coal plants. From a climate perspective, coal is far and away our worst problem because the remaining reserves are so much larger than those of other fossil sources like conventional oil and gas. NASA climate chief James Hansen says that phasing out coal emissions is “80% of the solution to the global warming crisis.” In other words, phasing out coal is really the “silver bullet” for stopping global warming. Conversely, Hansen warns that if we don’t somehow constrain the burning of coal we risk triggering the “Venus Effect” of runaway feedbacks that would render Earth completely uninhabitable. (For the details on this scenario, see Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren.)

Christine Shearer: Do you see connections between the national use of coal and your research on corporations?

Ted Nace: We have a clear planetary crisis and a clearly defined solution, yet our ability to implement that solution is being blocked by the well-financed lobbying and PR sponsored by the coal and utility companies.

Christine Shearer: Could you tell us a bit about the communities discussed in your book, and why they focus on coal?

Ted Nace: Two communities affected by coal represent the diversity of those impacted by coal: one is Little Village, a Latino barrio in Chicago, the other is the Navajo reservation in New Mexico—both suffer very high rates of asthma and coronary heart disease caused by nearby coal-fired power plants. Wherever there are coal mines, plants, or waste dumps, there are health effects: 24,000 deaths per year nationally from fine airborne particles, hundreds of thousands of infants exposed in utero to excess mercury, toxic drinking water in areas near mines and power plant ash dumps. Mining destroys large amounts of forest land and agricultural land, and mountaintop removal—the most destructive type of mining—results in downstream flooding. In return for all this damage, the coal industry provides relatively few jobs. Only about 1 in every 1,000 workers are employed in coal mines or power plants in the United States. Study after study has found that phasing out coal in favor of renewables would create a large net gain in the number of jobs in the electricity sector. In fact, wind industry jobs actually surpassed coal mining jobs in 2008, so the comparison isn’t theoretical.

Christine Shearer: How many plants have been cancelled, and what have been some of the successful tactics to keep new plants from being constructed?

Ted Nace: At least 110 proposed coal plants have been stopped so far by local citizen opposition. Stopping a coal plant always involves a combination of tactics: regulatory interventions, direct actions like sit-ins and blockades, bank boycotts, lawsuits. In general, the idea is to scare away the financial backing for the plant, push regulators and judges to use whatever legal handles are available, and convince utilities that coal is simply too much trouble compared with attractive alternatives like efficiency measures, wind, and solar.

Christine Shearer: Many within these movements have been skeptical of “clean coal.” Could you explain why?

Ted Nace: “Clean coal” is like whack-a-mole. You can take the ash out of the smokestack, but then where do you dump the ash? Each time you clean up one pollution stream, you create a new one. Then there’s the problem of cost. Yes, it’s theoretically possible to separate out the carbon dioxide that causes global warming, compress it into a liquid, and pump it deep underground. But the development of this technology at a commercial scale is a couple decades away, and even then it’s estimated to be more expensive than wind, solar, geothermal, etc. So why not just adopt the clean alternatives?

Christine Shearer: Why aren’t we adopting the clean alternatives?

Ted Nace: Clean alternatives are definitely being adopted across the country, but federal policy still overwhelmingly tilts toward subsidizing “clean coal.” For example, the Waxman-Markey bill provides $60 billion in subsidies for clean coal, which is an astonishing amount considering that the aggregate value of the entire coal industry, as measured by the value of its stock on Wall Street, is about $50 billion. This sort of huge subsidy is a simple reflection of the political clout of Big Coal.

Christine Shearer: In addition to writing Climate Hope, you also started the wiki CoalSwarm – could you tell us a bit about it?

Ted Nace: The idea behind CoalSwarm is that information is power, and that making information about coal more accessible to the public could be a way to aid the movement to stop coal. CoalSwarm is an informational website about coal that uses the same wiki technology as Wikipedia. That means anyone can contribute information, and there are now over 2500 articles on the website. For example, you can find out the location of power plants in your state and college coal plants, see photographs and data on those plants, read about lawsuits and demonstrations, and see who’s organizing. People find the information via Google searches, and so far we’ve clocked over 3 million page views.

Christine Shearer: Climate change activists advocate regulating greenhouse gas emissions, so many were frustrated that a non-binding resolution came out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks in Copenhagen. What did you think of Copenhagen: a potentially promising first step, or a demonstration that reform will have to come from below?

Ted Nace: Copenhagen proves that reform has to come from below. That’s good news, because the grassroots climate movement is growing fast. For example, the number of protest actions quadrupled between 2007 and 2009. The chaotic fumbling that was on display at Copenhagen was depressing, but the amazing progress of groups fighting coal over the past several years – 110 coal plants stopped to date – shows the breadth and strength of the movement, and it also suggests that focusing on particular plants, mines, and waste sites is a productive way to work.

Christine Shearer: Within the U.S., the EPA has finally determined that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that threatens human health, giving them authority to regulate emissions, which they have yet to do. Yet the Waxman-Markey bill working through Congress would pre-empt the EPA’s authority with a cap & trade market for carbon emissions. Do you support Waxman-Markey, or would you rather see the EPA regulate carbon dioxide emissions?

Ted Nace: The Waxman-Markey “cap & trade” bill that passed the House and the parallel bill being considered in the Senate have some good features, such as tougher efficiency standards. But if this legislation passes it will actually hinder the work of phasing out of coal plants by eliminating the power of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and that means it would take away the one step that climate scientists have described as the “silver bullet” in addressing climate change. Having the EPA directly regulate power plant emissions may not be sufficient to solve the problem, but it’s definitely an important piece of the solution.

Christine Shearer: Some argue that any U.S. actions on global warming are negated because China is starting to put up so many coal plants, but in your book you dispute this. Could you explain why?

Ted Nace: China’s own reserves of coal are limited—comparable to those in the state of Montana. Analysts project that China’s use of coal, though alarming at this point, is going to top out soon and then decline. Fortunately, China is moving quickly towards renewables, and it’s already moving into the position of global leader in producing wind turbines and solar panels.

Christine Shearer: What are the next steps for the no-coal movement?

Ted Nace: Having stopped 110 coal plants, the next steps for the no-coal movement are to keep fighting the remaining proposals for new plants and to begin to work toward phasing out the existing fleet of 600 old coal plants. This means organizing in all parts of the country and also focusing on coal mining and coal waste sites. This is the year that mountaintop removal mining should finally be banned. It’s also the year to begin focusing on the federal coal leasing program.

Christine Shearer: What can people do to help move the U.S. away from coal? Are there alternative energy sources you see as particularly promising?

Ted Nace: The biggest potential lies in efficiency measures like stricter building standards, enhanced appliance efficiency, and weatherization programs. If the entire country were to become as energy efficient as California, we could retire 80% of the coal fleet. As for climate-friendly generation technologies, utility-scale wind turbines are now cheaper than new coal plants, and they’re especially attractive in offshore sites like Lake Michigan or the Atlantic coast. Rooftop photovoltaic arrays on warehouses, malls, and homes could become a significant provider of power if utilities adopted the sort of “feed-in tariffs” that have enabled photovoltaics to explode in Germany. Solar thermal plants – large arrays in sunny areas that can include onsite power storage – uses a decades-old technology and is currently being expanded very rapidly in California, Spain, and elsewhere. As for technologies still under development, one of the most promising is known as “enhanced” or “hot rock” geothermal. An MIT study of enhanced geothermal power, which involves drilling deep wells and injecting water that is then heated by hot rocks and then brought back to the surface to run generators, reported that this technology could economically power the entire country more or less indefinitely. For details on how all these technologies could replace coal and other fossil fuels, I recommend Google’s “Clean Energy 2030” website.

CONDUCIVEMAG.COM

Christine Shearer, PhD is Conducive’s Managing Editor. She is a researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara researching climate changes and law.

Reprinted with permission from Conducivemag.com