It’s an absolute scandal: During tough economic times, a Virginia government employee has been caught red-handed misspending public funds to advance his political agenda on climate change.

If you think the allusion here is to former University of Virginia climate researcher Michael Mann, the author of the famous hockey stick graph on atmospheric temperatures and a favorite butt of climate-skeptic attacks, think again. Despite a hard-nosed corruption investigation led by Virginia Attorney General (and prominent climate denier) Ken Cuccinelli, every judicial body to examine the Mann case thus far, including several Virginia courts, the National Science Foundation [PDF], and a Penn State ethics panel, has rejected allegations that the professor fraudulently obtained public research dollars.

Unlike the case against Michael Mann, this scandal involves indisputable evidence of tax-dollar abuse. So, given his aggressiveness in the Mann case, how did Cuccinelli manage to let this more clear-cut case slip through the cracks?

Well, because people don’t tend to sue themselves, as a rule.

That’s right: When it comes to misusing public funds vis-à-vis climate change, no one is as blatantly culpable as Cuccinelli. For proof, we don’t have to look any further than his relentless prosecution of Mann. Despite the overwhelming lack of justification for the legal action, the attorney general continues to consume the resources of his office and the court system to perpetuate what is for all intents and purposes a personal ideological crusade against the climate scientist (and consequently climate science). And it isn’t just academics, climatologists, and voices on the left who have cried foul on Cuccinelli here. As New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin pointed out back in 2010, Cuccinelli has even caught flak from other prominent climate deniers such as Chip Knappenberger, who has warned of the chilling effect the attorney general’s “witch hunt” could have on university research work. But such wide-ranging rejections of his campaign against Mann haven’t deterred Cuccinelli in the least. After getting shot down in the lower courts, he’s now taken the case all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, which, according to a recent Virginia Times Dispatch article, is expected to hand down a decision by March.

In his state of the commonwealth address earlier this month, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell boasted of his administration’s meticulous fiscal responsibility, and efforts to slash state spending over the past several years. Along the way, the government had to make some difficult belt-tightening decisions, from cutting public sector jobs, to slashing funding to the public schools.

Cuccinelli’s climate crusade is a hypocritical contradiction of the governor’s claim to be running a fiscally responsible government. Given the tough times, there’s a wide variety of ways Virginia tax dollars could be much more responsibly employed: from paying teachers and troopers, to investing in schools and public infrastructure, to energy development, retirement benefits, unemployment assistance, and on and on. Moreover, in light of Virginia’s particular vulnerability to climate change, Cuccinelli’s waste of public funds in an attempt to fuel climate denial is all the more reprehensible. Instead of throwing away those dollars on this absurd climate witch hunt, the government might consider using the money to act on the findings of its own climate change commission, which, in a 2008 report, found that the commercially important “Hampton Roads region is considered to be the second most populated region at risk from sea level and related storm damage after the New Orleans region.”

So forget “Climategate”; in Virginia, the real scandal is “Cuccinelli-gate.” Virginians deserve better than what they’re getting from their attorney general, and should flood his office with messages to let him know.

This weekend, I spent a good chunk of time training to do civil disobedience at President Obama’s door in the desperate hope that he’ll fulfill the promise that drove me onto the streets for him in 2008. And in so doing I’ve found the same sense of pride, the same excitement, and the same energizing sense of virtue that I did three years back.
 
And just like in 2008, when I hit the streets today to fight for a brighter future, I was wearing an “Obama 08” button on my shirt. I didn’t wear it out of a sense of irony. I wore it for the same reason I wore it before: out of a sense of hope. Out of a sense of hope that this intelligent, idealistic man might actually take the reins of public power and stand up for the true national interest, stand up for a tomorrow that isn’t ruined and ravaged by the greed of fossil fuel companies.

Today I asked President Obama to give me a reason to knock on doors for him again next year.  Today I asked him to use the authority of his office to save the future from the massive, climate obliterating carbon bomb that’s bound to go off if the oil industry gets the go ahead to build the Keystone XL pipeline – the massive, 1700 mile fuse linking U.S. oil refineries to the catastrophic power of the Canadian oil sands. The power is in his hands. He doesn’t need Congress and he doesn’t need the courts; he just needs the courage to stand behind his convictions.

It’s a crying shame that it had to come to this. It’s a shame that we’ve reached a situation where every-day political activists like myself and thousands of others like me have found it necessary to break the law and face arrest in order to push this president to do what he promised to do, what he must do, what he knows is the right thing, the only thing to do. How is is possible that we should have to go to such dramatic lengths to stop this President from making the stupidest and most destructive decision for the climate that any president could ever make – much less one who promised to “roll back the specter of a warming planet”?

The answer is simple: bad political calculus. A calculus that ignores some very important variables like me and the hordes of committed grassroots activists who are ready to lay it on the line in the name of climate justice.  A calculus he’s been relying on for the past several years that tells him its better move to the right than to do what’s right, and consequently alienate the hardcore base of idealistic, energetic people who were so vital in propelling him to office.

Nothing speaks to the flaws of that calculus better than the tar sands protests. If the president’s got half the brains I think he has, he should be able to realize that.  And if it’s not clear to him by now, after the next dozen days and hundreds more arrests at his doorstep one could only hope that it would be crystal clear that the only political equation that will result in the best solution for him, for his reelection hopes, for our economy and for our global future is an equation where the variables X and L are firmly cancelled out.

The Koch brothers have now turned their firepower against offshore wind.

The opening salvo came in early July, when everyone’s favorite climate-hating, fossil-fuel-loving industrialist villains, the Koch brothers, released a so-called “cost-benefit analysis” of New Jersey offshore wind development plans through their front group Americans for Prosperity.

The focus on New Jersey is no big surprise. Fresh off their recent success in manipulating the state’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie into backing out of the Northeastern cap-and-trade system known as RGGI, the brothers grim are honing in on what they see as a weak spot in the clean-energy movement’s eastern front. Hoping to score a knockout blow, the duo have packed their offshore wind “analysis” with distortions.

Topping the report’s list of misrepresented facts are the jobs benefits. In fact, forget about misrepresentation; the report actually failed to represent those benefits altogether. Considering the impressive job-creation numbers cited in a range of other studies on offshore wind [PDF], it’s hard to imagine how any analysis that wasn’t commissioned as an intentional piece of fiction could have made such a glaring omission. Indeed, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that the 1,000 megawatts of offshore wind power New Jersey is planning to build could result in nearly 5,000 construction and maintenance jobs. Adding to the imbalance of the Kochs’ equations, their report completely discounts wind power’s benefit as a relief valve against foreign-oil dependence or New Jersey’s need to import electricity from other states.

Of course, this parade of misinformation should come as little surprise considering the track record of the key Koch crony in the Garden State: AFP New Jersey chapter director and Tea Party high priest Steve Lonegan. A longtime extreme-right gadfly of the New Jersey political scene, Lonegan earned his Koch-worthy credentials publishing false accusations about political opponents during his time as mayor of Bogota, N.J., and has been accused of violating state election laws and defrauding taxpayers in a 2008 run for governor. What’s more, as chronicled in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Lonegan was the local force behind the “dishonest scare-campaign” that led to Christie’s retreat from RGGI.

With Lonegan leading the offensive, it’s clear the Kochs are planning to make the fight over New Jersey’s coasts a particularly ugly and bruising one. The situation also bodes ominously for other states up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight that are considering wind projects, from Connecticut to North Carolina.

Thankfully, for all the dollars and deceitfulness the Kochs have in their arsenal, their victory is far from assured. As their failed attempt to cut down California’s climate law in 2010 proved, the Kochs can be beaten by a well-organized, grassroots-powered opposition with truth on its side. And that’s exactly what they’re up against in New Jersey and up and down the Mid-Atlantic Bight, where a robust coalition involving everyone from Google to the United Steelworkers to the League of Women Voters is ready to stand up for wind and smack down any BS Lonegan and the Kochs serve up.

Game on, boys. Bring it.

“(Untitled) St. Louis, 2005″Image: Alexis Rockman

It’s also a question one can’t help but ask after visiting painter Alexis Rockman’s exhibit, “A Fable for Tomorrow”, now showing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through May 8th, 2011. Many of the works in the exhibit seem to inhabit a zone somewhere between art and activism. They possess an energy that seems to reach out and pull you into the twisted and ruined worlds Rockman has documented and envisioned, before throwing you back into your life with a heightened urge to do something to stop the trajectory of destruction.

Indeed, much of Rockman’s oeuvre reads like a visual indictment against the vast catalog of offenses that humanity has committed against the natural world that we depend upon for survival. Among the particular transgressions Rockman has highlighted with his brush we find genetic engineering, factory farming, and of course, the mother of them all: climate change — a subject which Rockman addresses with particularly unnerving and humbling clairvoyance in his American Icons series. The Icons paintings depict symbols of American power and prestige ultimately undone by an abuse of the very powers that willed them into reality, such as a crumbling Gateway Arch, or the more fanciful, (Untitled) Mt. Rushmore with floodwaters lapping at the chins of the granite presidents. And our incoming freshman class of congressional climate deniers might want to go and check out a small canvass on which the U.S. Capitol Building emerges from an overgrown landscape, draped in a thick blanket of vegetation like the ruins of a Mayan temple.

Reflecting on the importance of Rockman’s work to our awareness of climate change, legendary climate organizer, author and activist Bill McKibben wrote in Orion Magazine that the paintings “complement the new satellite photos showing, for instance, that the North Pole has 20 percent less ice than it did when Apollo sent back those loving shots of our island Earth and we all pretended that we cared.” Yet for all their poltical potentcy, Rockman has a tendency to downplay his paintings’ real world political resonance. While readily admitting that “just about everything we do is political,” when asked if he views his work as a form of activism his response was self deprecating: “Only in the most marginalized sort of way.” As an example, Rockman pointed to his epic 2004 painting, Manifest Destiny — now on display at the Smithsonian exhibit — which depicts the flooded, decaying ruins of a climate-change-ravaged New York City.

“That painting,” he says, “came from desperation that people refused to see the reality of climate change.” With very little public discussion of the crisis, he felt compelled to make a statement about the consequences of our complacency, and he “felt a tremendous relief when Al Gore came in and made An Inconvenient Truth.” By bringing the climate issue to a mass moviegoing audience, Rockman felt that the Academy Award winning documentary, “let him off the hook,” suggesting that political inspiration is a job best left to politicians. He also suggested that film in general might be a better artistic medium for inspiring public action.

Rockman’s deference to film can be seen in his tendency to depict iconic locations as the victims of environmental collapse — a formula that comes right out of Hollywood disaster movies where major landmarks are always the first things to go. And no doubt he’s right that film does have a capacity to reach a larger audience; but that fact shouldn’t be used to discount the unique power of more “rarified” fine art like Rockman’s canvasses. Indeed, seeing those post-apocalyptic images set in frames and hung on the walls of a Smithsonian gallery seemed to imbue them with more gravity and reality than even the very best computer-generated sound and fury Hollywood could conjure.

Some visitors to the exhibit, such as Alan Braddock, agree. An assistant professor of art history at the Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Braddock explained how he has seen firsthand the power that Rockman’s works have to connect his students to the political and cultural issues that they confront. Addressing Rockman from the audience during the question and answer session at an exhibit lecture last week, Braddock insisted on the artist’s role as a force in the realm of political activism, telling him “I think you are the person that can bring [these issues] to a larger audience.”

Following the lecture, Braddock compared the political relevance of Rockman’s paintings to those of Diego Rivera, whose Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads stirred controversy that provoked its destruction in 1934. “Artists like Rivera were taking a risk and playing with fire, by addressing politically charged subjects,” Braddock said. “Through his work Rockman is playing with another kind of fire, and challenging the status quo. I think it will be interesting to see how his reputation as an important voice grows.”

Following his debut at a forum as prestigious as the Smithsonian, it’s likely that Rockman’s reputation will in fact only continue to grow. And it’s a good thing too. Though a somewhat reluctant player in the political arena, there is little doubt that he remains one of the world’s most inspiring and potentially influential creative voices regarding the environmental crises we are facing.

As those of us daily laboring within the trenches of climate activism know all too well, our movement needs all of the sources of inspiration and creative thinking that we can get. So as we look for new ways to motivate activists into action, we could do a lot worse than encouraging people to visit “A Fable for Tomorrow,” and we can only hope that there will be more of the same to come from Alexis Rockman.

That should be the major lesson that we take away from the gulf spill. Tougher industry rules are needed, but there is no way to effectively regulate an industry that has grown so large, and that is driven to keep growing and growing. 10,000 wells mean 10,000 opportunities for blow out preventer failings, 10,000 opportunities for human error – 10,000 chances for another catastrophe. And those risks only multiply as the rigs push into deeper and deeper water under the gun of consumer and investor demand for more.

Unfortunately though, as with so many of the other crises caused by capitalism from the recent financial crisis, the popular narrative ignores profound systemic problems to focus on the actions and failings of a few companies or individuals. Public villains like Tony Hayward or the Wall Street bankers allow us to wrap up complex issues in tidy packages and avoid confronting inconvenient truths. Even claims about lax regulatory systems, while true, distract us from the bigger picture.

But if we take just a few steps back, that bigger picture quickly emerges with startling clarity: we see that to end the spills, we need more than regulation; we need to take away the growth imperative. And not only because the industry has grown too big to regulate, but because regulation is a limit that it is systemically designed to circumvent. Just as sharks can never stop moving, under our current economic design, corporations have to grow in order to survive. Stock market speculators won’t tolerate a corporation or an economy that’s simply big enough, or even too big. It has to be ever bigger. Indeed, according to growth economists a “healthy” global economy has to maintain a constant rate of three-percent annual compound growth. In an infinite world where resources aren’t scarce and markets don’t get saturated with surplus dollars, such an approach might work. But we live in a world where resources like oil are rapidly dwindling, and where markets that produce real goods have become so saturated that speculators have few frontiers left where they can keep that three percent ‘healthy’ growth going.

In such a world continued growth depends on the invention of fictions. So with no real markets left that could produce the desired profit margins, Wall Street invented a fictitious market in mortgage assets. Similarly, the oil industry has run out of easily accessible reserves; only it doesn’t have the luxury of creating fictitious ones – though it sometimes tries. Instead, to get bigger, big oil has had to push drilling into ever riskier and costlier environments and invent the fiction that this can be done safely and profitably without cutting corners.

Unfortunately reality has a way of catching up with these fictions and smacking them down with devastating force, as we’ve learned the hard way with the biggest recession since the Great Depression and the worst oil spill in U.S. history.  

And herein lies the really frightening truth about our growth economy: because fictions are essential to its continuation, the crises those fictions unavoidably create are also essential to its continuation. In other words, oil spills, recessions and high unemployment are necessary evils that we must accept if we want to maintain the fiction of endless growth.

To stop the crises, we have to shift to an economic system that’s based in reality. And, again, it won’t be enough to try to try to limit growth capitalism, since that system is programmed to bulldoze its way through regulatory limits. Even a carbon cap won’t be enough to check the oil companies in a growth economy. Such retail fixes need to be pursued, but they won’t be effective until we’ve committed ourselves to a wholesale shift away from the growth model.

Fortunately, it turns out that the best alternative to the growth fiction – the steady-state economy – won’t just spare us the crises of growth, but help us build the truly prosperous global society that growth has been unable to deliver. As outlined in the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy’s (CASSE) recent report Enough is Enough, the pathway to a steady-state economy will be paved with an array of policies that will benefit us economically, environmentally and socially by dramatically reducing debt, stopping population growth, securing employment, distributing income and wealth, reforming the monetary system and limiting resource use and waste production among other things.

It’s a tall order, no doubt, but even though the odds may seem to be currently stacked against such a wholesale transformation, it turns out that the opportunities to realize it will eventually be handed to us by growth capitalism itself. The basis for such hope was, ironically enough, articulated well by one of the ultimate high priests of growth capitalism, Milton Friedman:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

If there’s one thing that we can count on, it’s that capitalism is sure to hand us another crisis before long. In the meantime, to ensure change, we simply have to do our best to pack the many cracks in the growth edifice with the ideas of a steady state economy. So when that edifice finally collapses under its own weight and we start to sift through the rubble, those bright ideas of the steady state will be lying everywhere, beckoning to be picked up.  

Get involved in efforts to promote the steady-state economy by reading Enough is Enough, and signing the CASSE position state
ment.

One leading light in the picture is the issue of adaptation funding. Last year, under the so called Copenhagen Accord, developed countries pledged to start shelling out 10 billion dollars a year (and 100 billion annually by 2020) to help the developing world cope with climate impacts and jumpstart their clean energy economies. This year, advocates are hoping for a breakthrough on the institutional mechanisms for financing that adaptation aid.

Given this hope it’s ironic that few issues besides adaptation funding better highlight the one fundamental obstacle to global climate action – that big gaping black hole at the center of the global climate talks that will inevitably devour any progress negotiators may make on the margins until we figure out how to plug it up. It’s the same black hole that has continued to suck the life from countless other vital global efforts from preserving bio-diversity to hitting the UN millennium development goals: Growth capitalism, the gravitational center around which our global civilization currently orbits.

If adaptation funding has typically taken a backseat in global climate talks to other issues like emissions targets or technological development, it stands to reason. Those other issues, while also hindered by growth capitalism, are more easily co-opted into its ideological framework. Both represent potential markets for capitalist profiteering, whereas adaptation funding revolves around a very different set of values. Adaptation means making investments not in the name of profit, but in the name of human welfare and development. It means denying the trickle-down myth of growth economics and focusing existing global wealth with laser like precision on growing the things it’s supposed to grow – not GDP but the real indices of human welfare like health, food security, and environmental integrity.

Moreover, real adaptation assistance is about social and economic justice – i.e. requiring wealthy developed states to take responsibility and pay for the global warming pollution debt they’ve passed on to the developing world. Such a notion doesn’t square with the ideology of growth-capitalist countries like the US, as Washington’s top UN climate negotiator Todd Stern reminded us in Copenhagen last year when he “categorically reject[ed]…the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations” for damages done by US historical emissions.

Indeed the only way to bring adaptation assistance within the rubric of growth capitalism would be to twist it into a way for developed countries to make a profit, say via debt financing facilitated by an institution like the World Bank. But if adaptation assistance means making countries more stable, secure and resilient it’s hard to see how it could be administered by an institution whose policies have historically undermined those very things. Scarily enough, negotiators in Cancun are considering just such an arrangement with the World Bank, prompting protests like the Climate Justice Now network’s “World Bank out of Climate Finance” campaign.

Even if rich countries ratchet up their adaptation commitments to the hundreds of billions required annually and the Cancun talks result in a just financing mechanism, it’s a safe bet that growth capitalism will make short work of those achievements. For proof, one has only to consider how quickly G20 leaders scaled back on their global AIDS funding promises following the recession so they could bail out the banks that caused it. Then there’s the fact that a bigger economy will be even more of a challenge to power cleanly, thus making it harder to stabilize the climate and even more costly to adapt to the impacts.

The bottom line: to have any serious chance of producing a meaningful global climate agreement going forward, the UN climate talks have to recognize and address that big gaping black hole of growth capitalism at their center. For instance, next year’s talks in South Africa should aim to reinvigorate the UN process by including a new working group focusing on finding an economic model that works for the climate like the one recently laid out in the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy’s new report Enough is Enough.

Of course, the scale and scope of talks to reconfigure the global economy extend far beyond the ambit of the UN climate process. Addressing the multiple crises of growth capitalism is the single biggest challenge facing the world today – a challenge that underlies virtually every other major challenge we face from stabilizing the climate, to ending AIDS and poverty and preventing future economic crises. So until we organize global talks to address the growth problem, we should stop scratching our heads and throwing up our hands in frustration as progress stalls and the lights of hope for climate and our other great challenges flicker dimly on edge of that insatiable black hole we call growth capitalism.

Well, for one possible answer let me take you back to a simpler time. The year was 2008, the Democrats had already initiated their retreat on offshore drilling policy, and a stupidly grinning Rudolph Giuliani stood at the podium at the Republican National Convention and uttered the words that would go down as one of the most memorable and moronic political catchphrases of all time – “drill, baby, drill”! The crowd as you may recall reacted with all the bawdy, hootin-and-hollerin enthusiasm of a Jerry Springer audience watching a guest take her top off.  

The sexual connotation of the phrase was definitely not an accident. “Drill, baby, drill” was much more than a juvenile campaign slogan. It was a pretty explicit effort to genderize energy politics. It succinctly described the Republican Party’s perspective on energy production as an inherently macho, dominant activity. For the most part, Republicans tend to see energy as something that should be obtained by brute force – by blowing up mountains, by drilling, or better yet by “extreme” drilling: in the arctic, a mile below the ocean’s surface, in the middle of a war-torn country. That, according to the GOP, is how powerful leaders and powerful countries get their energy; not by passively waiting for the wind to blow or the sun to shine. Only liberal wimps would do that. It even explains why their preferred carbon-free form of energy is nuclear – atoms are after all the most powerfully destructive force we’ve ever gotten our hands on, and the possibility of meltdowns only make things more hardcore.  

Seen from this perspective, Reagan’s decision to rip Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House makes a lot more sense. From Reagan’s point of view, the oil crisis had made America go all soft on energy policy and he was going to change that. Desolarizing the White House wasn’t just a financial decision; it was a powerfully symbolic act. It was Reagan’s way of saying “look out world, the big guns are back in the House now – there’ll be no more passive reception of energy under my watch. We’re going to flex our geopolitical muscles and go out and take all the energy we need by force, if necessary.”

And herein may lay the true secret to Obama’s reluctance on the solar panels. There’s a good chance he’s just worried that if he goes solar, Fox News and the GOP leadership will try to pin him with their tired caricature of Carter: a weak one-termer who doesn’t have the macho, rigid, unyielding, unthinking, world dominating resolve that Republicans so pride themselves on.  

Well sorry to break it to you Mr. President, but the right is already doing that anyway. And you’re not going to escape the sophomoric taunting by trying to hide from the bullies. You deal with bullies by standing up to them. You’ve got to be ready with some snappy comebacks to shut those morons down: tell them that real leaders approach energy policy with their brains, not with their drill bits. Tell them that powerful countries don’t have to abuse their Mother, or steal their children’s future to get their energy. Use your own bully pulpit to let everyone know that despite all their drill-baby-drill macho posturing conservatives are just covering up for their impotent energy platform.

Putting those solar panels back on the White House and making a big show of it would be a good way to get started. Hold a press conference up on the White House roof in front of a glistening array of ready-to-be installed solar panels. Tell the nation that you’re ready to really get to work on clean energy and climate change, then roll up your sleeves for the cameras and help fit a panel in place. Heck, as an added up-yours to the conservative hecklers, bring President Carter along – show them that you’re not afraid to stand beside him, or to stand behind his prescient approach to energy policy.

And if you do it this October 10^th – the day of 350.org’s Global Work Party – a coalition of more than a dozen fantastic organizations from the DC area will be there to get your back. We’re already planning on showing up at your place that day with a gift of solar panels, and we’ve already invited President Carter. All you have to do is join us to show the bullies you’re not going to take it anymore.

Of course, once you’ve gotten to work symbolically, you’ll have to get to work for real – championing strong climate policies. But taking a tough, principled stance on energy has got to start with the solar panels. Carter knew it. Regan knew it. It’s high time you figured it out too. Because if you can’t even mange symbolic energy leadership, it’s hard to imagine where you’ll ever find the courage to lead on the issue for real.

Each one of these problems no doubt played a role in finishing the bill off. But ultimately they weren’t much more than complications associated with the real killer – the disease which for all their poking around, the coroners somehow managed to miss.

It’s the killer that shall not be named. The killer the coroners don’t see because they don’t want to see it, even though it’s almost impossible to miss. It’s the biggest force in politics. It’s the top issue in almost every election, and especially this one. It’s mentioned in every stump speech. Top world leaders meet several times a year to discuss how to promote it.

It’s the economy stupid. And, no, not the recession. Not the lack of growth, but growth itself. Or, rather, the government’s unwavering devotion to advancing it. I’m not going to spill any ink here explaining how the paradigm of unending growth is incompatible with preserving life, prosperity and security on a finite planet. Far more authoritative voices such has Bill McKibben and Gus Speth have already articulated that argument far more eloquently than I could. But for the purposes of doing a proper postmortem on the climate bill it needs to be said that as long as growth remains the number one priority of governments worldwide any effort to by those governments to seriously address climate change will be doomed to end in failure.

And, of course, growth is without a doubt our government’s top priority, as its kneejerk reaction to the financial crisis makes abundantly clear. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek put it best in his book First as Tragedy then as Farce:

With the financial meltdown the urgency to act was unconditional; sums of unimaginable magnitude had to be found immediately. Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for special treatments, saving starving children…all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate attention.

And forget about “green growth”. That’s the biggest oxymoron since “clean coal”. Sure with efficiency and clean energy we can create less pollution per unit of economic output. But getting to the point where we can even maintain our current economic output without cooking the planet will already be an economic and technical challenge of incredible proportions; never mind trying to fuel an economy twice as big.

The government’s devotion to economic growth entails a devotion to the ultimate drivers of economic growth: corporations. And passing a carbon cap or a carbon tax means going up against the biggest, baddest corporations in the history of corporations: fossil fuel companies. Their formidability lies not just in the fact that they have tons of money to buy political favor but that they constitute the very life blood of the growth based economy; they literally and figuratively fuel the engine of growth. They are the holiest of holies in the corporate temple. Smiting them means smiting the entire growth model; it means blaspheming the Gods of Growth.

In short, the fossil fuel industry is not just another powerful special interest; it is arguably the greatest power in history, backed by enormous wealth, profound dogma, and the power of the global political system. It quite literally is the world order. Displacing it isn’t a matter of piecemeal reformation, but wholesale transformation – in other-words, a revolution.

Wow, okay, so we need a revolution. So how exactly does that help those of us trying to fight climate change? Well, for starters, it could help us avoid wasting energy on incremental reform. By understanding that our federal government may very well be systemically incapable of delivering real reform, we can redirect ourselves towards a more fundamental goal: changing the system; transformation, not reformation. A clean-energy revolution needs to be just that – a real revolution. The founding fathers didn’t get us from monarchy to democracy with baby steps. Accomplishing that change required a giant leap.

And what this means is that despite all of our political instincts, despite all of the wise counsel of pollsters and PR gurus, we have to take the ultimate leap and start directly campaigning against the global religion, economic growth itself – the myth upon which the power of the fossil fuel gods thrive. Kill the myths, kill the dogma, and the gods die with them.

Sound crazy? Not really. Mindbogglingly audacious maybe, but not crazy. It’s certainly no crazier than concluding that to address the symptoms of an illness, you’ve got to find a cure, not just fight the symptoms. Climate change is after all a symptom of our economic philosophy. That’s not to say we shouldn’t work to alleviate that symptom. Good progress on that front is still desirable. But ultimately it won’t save the patient. It won’t save our planet and our civilization. To do that we have to find a cure, and that requires diverting real time and resources from treating the symptom.

And fighting the growth disease might be easier than we think. In fact it might be easier to mobilize people to fight it than to fight the climate symptom. That’s because the economy and its impacts are much more visible, much more present and deeply felt in most people’s everyday lives than the climate crisis and its impacts. It has often been said that the lack of immediacy is the climate movement’s major handicap. The economic crisis we just faced certainly didn’t lack immediacy. There’s nothing more immediate than losing your house, your job, your livelihood, as so many did when the housing bubble burst.

Moreover, people weren’t oblivious to the fact that the crisis was caused by a bubble – by unsustainable growth in a certain sector of the economy. Public confidence in our economic model has already been shaken. To help precipitate its collapse, we need to start connecting the dots between the housing bubble and the much larger bubble that’s bound to burst when it collides in the very near future with the very sharp reality of a devastated planet.   

Of course to get people to disavow a dogma as strong as the growth dogma, we have to do much more than shake their confidence in it. We have to offer them an alternative paradigm that provides what the growth dogma promised but was never really designed to deliver on: true, abiding, globally shared prosperity. An economic system that focuses not on growing G
DP, but on growing the things that matter: security, opportunity, education, health, happiness, community, democracy. An alternative that transcends the old false dichotomy between capitalism and command-and-control communism. It’s a model top economists have been developing for years, but whose brilliance has long been obscured by the mirage of endless growth. It’s called the steady-state economy.

As defined by the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy (CASSE), a steady-state economy is one “with stable or mildly fluctuating size…[which] may not exceed ecological limits.” In other words it’s an economy that’s perfectly suited to a world beset by the bursting bubbles and ecological crises of uneconomic growth. It’s the only economy compatible with real climate solutions.

No wonder then that some of the world’s top climate advocates including Bill McKibben, Eban Goodstein, Paul Hawken, Wendel Berry and Gus Speth have endorsed the CASSE platform. But it is a wonder more have not. The steady-state economy is the cure for what killed the climate bill, and what’s killing our civilization. It’s the revolution we need. If we want to bring the world back from the brink, we’d all better start campaigning for it.

Of course kicking the offshore-oil habit will shed some jobs from the economy. Fortunately, though, with the right policies we can quit deepwater oil and actually grow new, better jobs to replace them.

That’s a story some opponents of the Obama Administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium don’t want us to hear. Just consider Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s recent tirade in which he called the moratorium an “economic calamity” that has jeopardized thousands of jobs. That’s right; according to Jindal it was the moratorium that resulted in the economic calamity, not the oil spill that necessitated the moratorium. In other words, the problem is industry regulation, not the lack thereof. That’s the same wrongheaded thinking that got us into this mess, but Jindal’s flawed logic doesn’t end there. More problematic is the premise of his argument: that the people of Louisiana have no future beyond oil, that everyone has to accept the risks of deepwater drilling to keep the economy going. It’s a strain of logic that really shows more contempt than support for working families.

A job is not a good job just because it offers money. And an industry is not a good industry just because it offers jobs. Like the drug trade, deepwater drilling offers no essential benefits to society except employment. You might argue that we currently need oil, but the same can’t be said of deepwater oil. It can’t free us from dependence on OPEC oil, it doesn’t cut the cost of oil, and if anything it’s a national security liability.

Economic justice for the Gulf coast means a lot more than the availability of jobs. It means the availability of sustainable jobs in sustainable industries that will always support and never imperil the health of communities, economies and the environment. The people of the gulf deserve an economy that does not necessitate the acceptance of unacceptable risks in order to get people paid.

Switching to a green economy won’t be easy for an oil state like Louisiana, but it is possible. The 2009 PERI report for example estimated that the clean energy bill passed by the House last year could result in a net gain of 30,000 green jobs for Louisiana. That’s good news for us oil junkies, and good news for the gulf coast. With congressional action we can kick the deepwater habit, and end up with more jobs than we had before.  

The report, compiled by pollster Joel Benenson and the League of Conservation voters, shows an unequivocal voter tilt in favor of policies and politicians that support a shift towards clean energy and outlines an energy-messaging strategy the authors claim will help those policies and politicians win votes in the coming months. The “pillars” of that strategy, along with their “key dimensions” are:

FRAME THE OPPOSITION

• Big Oil and corporate polluters who have blocked energy reform for decades
• Politicians protecting the special interests that fund their campaigns

ILLUSTRATE THE COST OF OUR DEPENDENCE

• Our dependence on oil hurts our economy, helps our enemies, puts our security at risk:
• $1 billion a day on foreign oil, oil spill destroying jobs and livelihoods

TAP INTO DEEPLY HELD VALUES

• Put America back in control of our energy situation:
• Cut foreign oil spending in half
• Invest in energy that’s made in America and creates millions of jobs for Americans

If, as Politico’s Mike Allen suggests, this briefing is the kind of thing the White House is using to shape its energy strategy, it’s no surprise that we were underwhelmed by the president’s speech the other night. While the oil spill may represent a potential turning point in US energy policy, the Benenson approach certainly doesn’t represent anything close to a potential turning point on energy policy messaging. Except for the bit about the “oil spill destroying lives and livelihoods” there is absolutely nothing in this messaging that politicians haven’t been saying for years. We’ve heard all about those big oil baddies and their buddies in Congress who have “blocked energy reform for decades” and kept us all dangerously dependent upon fossil fuels. And yet here we are with a stalled Senate clean-energy bill, a quickly changing climate and a Gulf full of oil.

Of course where this messaging really fails big time is on the “deeply held values” front. To win a policy debate it’s not enough to tap into values unless you tap into them in a way that gives you a rhetorical advantage over your opponent. But it’s hard to see how Benenson’s effort to tap values like independence or patriotism differs noticeably from the GOP approach. Sure, switching to clean energy would “put Americans back in control of our energy situation” and “cut foreign oil spending”; but according to Republicans so would expanded off shore drilling and mountain-top-removal mining. So where’s the rhetorical advantage?

It’s no surprise though that the value pillar should be the weakest of the three. The tendency to put far too much trust in the polls and far too little trust in their core progressive values, has always been the Achilles heel of progressive leaders like the President. This kind maddening political calculus is undoubtedly what informed the decision to turn the President’s speech into a hollow piece of rhetorical posturing, and it’s exactly the kind of political calculus that will prevent the President and his allies in Congress from passing any really meaningful climate and clean energy policies. Only by turning away from the pollsters and back to his core progressive values like empathy, as George Lakoff brilliantly argued recently, will the President find the political and moral strength he needs to successfully lead the country out of the oil- spill and climate crises and into a clean energy future.