No power to the pundits?

There’s been a bit of talk over on LP about the demise or otherwise of neoliberalism, with a couple of side comments about the power or otherwise of conservative pundits like Bolt, Akerman, Devine et al. This is something I’ve been wondering about a bit lately. Last year, for example, I got Bolted (I first responded then when it became clear that he is in fact bonkers, walked away from the fight) and it had no after effects whatsoever. I subsequently did two months of solid media and public forums and not one person mentioned the piece, on air or off.

But still I waver between thinking they have no power and thinking that actually there is a complex dynamic at work here that gives them a large amount of indirect political power.

Whither neoliberalism? And the progressive future

Today I was supposed to be in Sydney to talk about ‘What next after neoliberalism – creating a progressive future’ to the Crunch Time conference organised by the Centre for Policy Development and other progressive organisations such as the Australia Institute. The session was a panel discussion with David McKnight and Sarah Hanson Young, But I came down with a bug earlier in the week and for the first time ever I simply wasn’t well enough to fly. Anyway, I’d prepared a few notes and here’s what I was going to say.

In perhaps typical academic style one might begin by questioning the topic. I’m not so sure that we are ‘after’ neoliberalism. Yes, there’s been lots of talk about government regaining the ascendency over markets, with ‘nation-building’ projects having been announced and ’stimulus packages’ that seemingly fly in the face of ‘hands-off’ market approaches to governance, but various forms of free-market thinking that owe much to neoliberalism remain embedded in just about all our civic and private institutions.

And now . . .

181 and more dead, fires still raging, temperature records shattered, country that I’ve ridden and driven through hundreds of times over decades in trips to the family farm (the 07 fires came within 2km of the front gate) destroyed; when is the penny going to drop that there is something seriously amiss with the climate?

Dear Kevin (why did we elect you?)

Dear Kevin,

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Melbourne, along with most of southern Australia, has lately busted all records. Last week we had three consecutive days of well over forty degrees, the last and hottest of which saw the mercury hit 45 degrees – the hottest January day for 70 years. Most of us had never experienced anything like it. Streets were deserted. Parks were empty. Traditional places of respite like cinemas, shopping centres and public libraries filled up with people then emptied out again as air-conditioning systems failed. Railway lines buckled in the heat and hundreds of trains were cancelled. 6 people died apparently simply because of the heat. Many people came home from work and school to find family pets dead, their noses pressed into shady airless pockets of the backyard. In Yarra Bend National Park the ground was littered with the corpses of dead bats and dead possums.

Unspinning Clean Coal

Stumbled across this earlier today – a v amusing pisstake on Clean Coal technology from a group called ThisIsReality. Yes, there may one day be something approximating Clean Coal, but for the moment it’s nothing but mining industry spin designed to legitimate a continued reliance on fossil fuels. A nice story to tell the kids at bed-time. Just think, if all the money spent on researching it was put into renewables . . .

Truly pathetic

The Rudd government has just announced it’s carbon reduction targets at a measly 5 per cent. Why did they bother with all the palaver of the Garnaut report? And why did we bother electing them? 5 per cent is hardly worth doing. 15 per cent, which is the maximum they’ll go to by 2020 but only if there’s a worldwide agreement, is less than half what most scientific opinion says is necessary to avoid the worst effects of warming. Meanwhile, Big Coal gets 4 billion dollars in compensation. Clearly it’s not for reducing emissions. Can someone please explain?

A global economic-environmental compact?

There’s a really interesting report from scientist Ian Lowe on the Inside Story site about the recent WEF forum on the economic crisis and climate change. It seemed to me as I was reading it that if the WEF hard-heads are at last starting to connect the dots, and to look at the failures of present economic assumptions re: growth etc, the environment, and the issue of governance, then the world really is changing. We can only hope!

Meanwhile, Brit comedy duo Bird and Fortune have done a very funny pisstake on the sub-prime crisis. Well worth a look.

Never the twain?

One of the many disturbing things about the global financial ructions of the past few weeks is that climate change has disappeared from the news agenda. We really do seem to be short term animals, interested only in what’s on this side of the horizon. Hardly a surprise, perhaps, at a time when many people really are worried about their immediate future. But one implication of the media silence is that addressing financial problems and addressing global warming are antithetical, when so far as I’m concerned they are one and the same thing. Both are driven by our belief that unlimited economic growth is necessary and somehow sustainable.

So it was with surprise that last night I found myself agreeing with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who I usually think of as an insufferable windbag, who was being interviewed by George Negus on Dateline. 

Melting down

‘Meltdown’ seems an appropriate metaphor for the week in which the world’s markets crashed then rose then crashed then . . . and in which Ross Garnaut handed over his final climate change report. The first should hardly have been surprising, and nor should the weakness of the second. If we are living in a global speculative economy founded on bad debt, then sooner or later something has to give. In effect the markets are holding people to ransom. If we don’t feed the beast by bailing them out, then they will ruin us. And if the government is pandering to business on all matters environmental, as satirised on last night’s wonderfully apt and timely episode of The Hollow Men, then a weak-kneed stance on climate change (25 per cent reductions at best), with anything stronger, or even that, being denounced by the usual suspects, is to be expected. Meltdown indeed. 

Meanwhile, commentators just as John Quiggin and Mark Bahnisch at LP have been talking about ‘the end of neoliberalism’, with varying degrees of skepticism. It’s a nice idea, but underestimates just how deeply embedded neoliberal ideas are in the global finance system. My sense is that the bail-out (just voted on in the US senate) will happen, even if it won’t necessarily work because there’s more to this than simply lancing a boil. Regulatory noises are being made and some tightening will take place. But the system will stay relatively unchanged because too much depends on it and because money and power have little respect, in the end, for principle.

Ideally, what we should see as the result of the past few weeks is a wide-ranging debate about just where we are and how we got here. A debate that took into account the history of radical conservative ideas, and their ultimate unsustainability, not merely on environmental grounds, but because ’shareholder value capitalism’, based on speculation and short-termism, doesn’t work especially well for non-finance business either. It’s up to us to start that debate, and that’s the hard bit. Get-up are giving it a go (and combining both economic and environmental issues), but right now people are thinking about the short-term future of their homes, interest rates, their superannuation, and the lines of credit they need to run their businesses. Meanwhile, amidst growing anxiety about matters economic, global warming has dropped down people’s list of concerns.

And who can blame them? What was it that Bertolt Brecht once said? ‘Grub first, then ethics.’

Blogging the Melbourne Writer’s Festival III

I’ve been meaning to write this post for over a week now, and even though the festival is long gone my third session of the Festival, on climate change, is worth a quick note. I was on with two famous Canadians, Maude Barlow and Gwynne Dyer, both renowned activists in their own ways. Maude, from her reputation, I had expected to be a total firebrand. In fact she was a real sweetie. I’d found her book, Blue Covenant, an excellent rallying call-to-arms on a crucial and underplayed issue, but a little black and white in its anti-corporate arguments. Gwynne is a tough, seasoned journo who spent his early years in the navy and made his reputation with a series of books and docos on war. More reserved than Maude and more skeptical about the possibility of change, his book Climate Wars is seriously bleak yet seriously readable.