#geo-engineering

Leninism: Why Not

Red Fascism has its roots in Leninist thought, an analysis dating back to critiques in 1939 with The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism by Otto Rühle[28] and 1921 The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party by “Four Moscow Anarchists”.[29] The latter states:

[State Communism] is not and can never become the threshold of a free, voluntary, non-authoritarian Communist society, because the very essence and nature of governmental, compulsory Communism excludes such an evolution. Its consistent economic and political centralization, its governmentalization and bureaucratization of every sphere of human activity and effort, its inevitable militarization and degradation of the human spirit mechanically destroy every germ of new life and extinguish the stimuli of creative, constructive work.

As Gabriel Kuhn declares in his review of Malm’s recent publications:

As long as it is not clear how future Leninism of any stripe – anti-Stalinist, ecological, whatever – will be able to avoid these pitfalls, I really don’t find it terribly reassuring to suggest that, well, somehow it’ll turn out alright this time.

In a similar fashion, Malm does not add new elements to the discussions on escalation of tactics in the environmental movement, contrary to his book’s promise. It might be this hollow radicality that entertains bourgeois circles and will grant him a broad audience separate from the core of radical change.

Furthermore, his ability to brag about his own past flirtations with direct action, from the comfort of middle-class existence in a social democracy, shows that he really has no understanding of ecological struggle. People who actually risk themselves struggling for their land, their survival, our planet, face death or decades in prison. They do not get to put their actions on their resumé to sell books after just a few years. To put it plainly, Malm does not know the meaning of struggle. His expertise is in writing academic papers, securing a comfortable, privileged existence for himself, and climbing the class ladder.

I have written fairly extensively here on Continuations about climate change, including several times as part of Uncertainty Wednesday. I have also previously stated my support for geo-engineering research as far back as 2009 and again more recently in 2016. A common objection to geo-engineering is that the earth is a complex highly non-linear system. So the argument goes, anything we might do will likely be a cure that’s worse than the disease.

There are two flaws with this argument. First, we are already engaged in geo-engineering on a global scale. That’s exactly what our massive industrial emissions of CO2 are. So to argue that we should not geo-engineer is to really say we should not engage in “additional geo-engineering” (it really doesn’t matter that our initial “experiment” was inadvertent, we are fully engaged in it nonetheless).

The second flaw with the argument is that the most interesting geo-engineering proposals all draw on existing natural processes. This is true for both the dispersal of aerosols to reduce the amount of solar radiation entering the atmosphere and for iron fertilization to spur the growth of phytoplankton as a way to turn atmospheric CO2 into oxygen. Both of these processes have occurred naturally many times in the past as a result of volcanic eruptions.

Now does that mean we know exactly what will happen if we recreate eruption conditions? No, because human made alternatives will be slightly different. But that is why it is all the more important to run experiments both in labs and in situ and observe what happens so that we can come as close as possible to the naturally occurring conditions. We have already donated some money to lab research on stratospheric aerosols and I would be excited to do the same for ocean fertilization.

If you don’t think this is urgent, I want to leave you with two chart that show what is happening to emissions growth:

And here is a breakdown by country