ANS -- What's one of the WORST ways to motivate someone? Hint: You see it all the time.

This is a ten minute and 47 second animation about motivation. (you will probably have to go to the page to see it) It's really interesting.  Think about the implications: if we gave everyone enough money to live on, then many of them would go and do wonderful creative complex work for free and give it to the world for the sense of purpose, mastery, and autonomy.  This disproves the laziness theory that many people subscribe to these days.  Really interesting.  Then think of it in conjunction with the new research on drug addiction that I've sent to you before.  We actually could have a world full of creative, purposeful people doing great things on their own and sharing them. 
Find it here:   http://www.upworthy.com/whats-one-of-the-worst-ways-to-motivate-someone-hint-you-see-it-all-the-time?c=click  
--Kim

What's one of the WORST ways to motivate someone? Hint: You see it all the time.

 Curator: Megan Kelley

The surprising truth about what motivates us.

TRUE or FALSE: The best way to motivate a certain behavior in someone is simply to reward them for it.

False. Well, kind of.

Of course, it's not entirely that simple. The ideal motivation depends on what kind of task you're trying to get someone to accomplish. Author Daniel Pink cites a couple studies that prove this whole motivation thing is a lot more complicated than we thought. Let's take a look.

The experiment: Give people different levels of cash rewards to perform various tasks.

Seems pretty straightforward, right? People were asked to memorize numbers, solve crosswords, play basketball ­ all sorts of stuff. And they were promised cash rewards as motivation. Money money money money! So, what happened?

The result: For any tasks that called for cognitive skill, higher pay resulted in poorer performance.

Say WHHAAAAATTT!? Yep. As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as expected: higher pay = better performance. But as soon as the task called for cognitive skill, bonuses worked in the opposite way: higher pay = poorer performance.

OK, well then how do you motivate people to perform those tasks that do require thought?

Daniel Pink says the answer here lies in three fancy buzzwords: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

First, you gotta pay people enough that money is no longer an issue. Then they can actually focus on the work at hand. That's where autonomy (our desire to be in charge of our own lives), mastery (our desire to get better at stuff), and purpose (our desire to make a difference) come into play.



Purpose is kind of the kicker here. We all want to make the world a better place. Maybe the thing standing in the way of us making a better world is just the outdated way we think about motivation. How about that carrot for thought?

"If we start treating people like people, and not assuming that they're simply horses ... if we get past this kind of ideology of carrots and sticks and look at the science, I think we can actually ... make our world just a little bit better."

ANS -- Oklahoma Democrat Wants to Require Christian Businesses to Post Notice of Anti-Gay Discrimination

This is a very short article about an idea for a law.  It seems that if you are going to claim your religion makes you entitled to discriminate, it really ought to be posted publicly....
find it here:  http://www.alternet.org/oklahoma-democrat-wants-require-christian-businesses-post-notice-anti-gay-discrimination   
--Kim

Oklahoma Democrat Wants to Require Christian Businesses to Post Notice of Anti-Gay Discrimination

The bill aims to save couples from facing the indignity of being refused service.
By David Edwards / Raw Story
March 14, 2015
Print
COMMENTS


Oklahoma Democratic state Rep. Emily Virgin wants Christian businesses to post a public notice of discrimination if they intend to claim that they have a religious right to refuse service to LGBT people.

State Rep. Chuck Strohm (R) introduced a bill, the Oklahoma Religious Freedom Act, earlier this year that would allow businesses like wedding cake bakers and photographers to deny services if it was �against the person�s religious beliefs.�

State Sen. Joseph Silk (R), who introduced a similar bill in the Oklahoma Senate, told The New York Times recently that new laws were necessary because the LGBT movement was �challenging religious liberties and the freedom to live out religious convictions.�


The amendment to HB1371 introduced by Virgin on Tuesday would require religious businesses to come out of the closet.

�Any person not wanting to participate in any of the activities set forth in subsection A of this section based on sexual orientation, gender identity or race of either party to the marriage shall post notice of such refusal in a manner clearly visible to the public in all places of business, including websites,� the amendment states.

�The notice may refer to the person�s religious beliefs, but shall state specifically which couples the business does not serve by referring to a refusal based upon sexual orientation, gender identity or race.�

The Gayly noted that Virgin�s amendment �would save minority couples from facing the indignity of being refused service.�

�Thank you to Representative Virgin for calling out the level of segregation allowed under this legislation,� Freedom Oklahoma Executive Director Troy Stevenson said in a statement. �If the state of Oklahoma is going to protect discrimination, then at the very least, businesses should be required to own their bias, and post it publicly for the world to see.�

Ryan Kiesel, director of ACLU of Oklahoma, also praised the amendment, saying that it �very pointedly exposes the absurdity of creating a new era of legalized segregation.�

ANS -- The end of white Christian America is nigh: Why the country’s youth are abandoning religious conservatism

An interesting perspective on the coming demise of the Christian right.   I hope she's right. 
find it here:   http://www.salon.com/2015/03/13/the_end_of_white_christian_america_is_nigh_why_the_countrys_youth_are_abandoning_religious_conservatism_partner/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow  
--Kim


FRIDAY, MAR 13, 2015 03:15 PM PDT

The end of white Christian America is nigh: Why the country's youth are abandoning religious conservatism

White Christians are now a minority in 19 states. America's growing racial diversity only tells part of the story

AMANDA MARCOTTE, ALTERNET

Joni Ernst (Credit: AP/Justin Hayworth)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.



There's been a lot of media attention recently to the changing demographics of the United States, where, at current rates, people who identify as "white" are expected to become a minority by the year 2050. But in many ways, the shift in national demographics has been accelerated beyond even that. New data from the American Values Atlas shows that while white people continue to be the majority in all but 4 states in the country, white Christians are the minority in a whopping 19 states. And, nationwide, Americans who identify as Protestant are now in the minority for the first time ever, clocking in at a mere 47 percent of Americans and falling.

The most obvious reason for this change is growing racial diversity. Most Americans still identify as Christian, but "Christian" is a group that is less white and less Protestant than it has been at any time in history. The massive growth in Hispanic Catholics, in particular, has been a major factor in this shift in the ethnic and religious identity of this country. White Catholics used to outnumber Hispanic Catholics 3 to 1 in the 2000s, but now it's only by a 2 to 1 margin.

But another major reason religious diversity is outpacing the growth of racial/ethnic diversity is largely due to the explosive growth in non-belief among Americans. One in five Americans now identifies as religiously unaffiliated. In 13 states, the "nones" are the largest religious group. Non-religious people now equal Catholics in number, and their proportion is likely to grow dramatically, as young people are by far the most non-religious group in the country. This isn't some kind of side effect of their youth, either. As Adam Lee has noted, the millennial generation is becoming less religious as they age.

---

These changes explain the modern political landscape as well as any economic indicator. While not all white Christians are conservative, these changing numbers definitely suggest that conservative Christians are rapidly losing their grip on power. And while some non-white Christians are conservative, their numbers are not making up for what the Christian right is losing. And whether conservative leaders are aware of the exact numbers or not, it's clear that they sense that change is in the air. Just by speaking to young people, turning on your TV, or reading the Internet, you can sense the way the country is lurching away from conservative Christian values and towards a more liberal, secular outlook. And conservative Christians aren't taking these changes well at all.

To look at the Christian right now is to see a people who know they are losing power and are desperately trying to reassert dominance before it's lost altogether. The most obvious example of this is the frenzy of anti-abortion activity in recent years. Anti-choice forces have controlled the Republican Party since the late '70s, but only in the past few years have they concentrated so singlemindedly on trying to destroy legal abortion in wide swaths of the country. In 2011 alone, states passed nearly three times as many abortion restrictions as they had in any previous year.

None of this is a reaction to any changes in people's sexual behavior or reproductive choices. It's not like there was a spike in abortions causing this panic. In fact, the abortion rate has been declining. And despite continuing media panic over adolescent sexuality, the fact is that teenagers are waiting longer to have sex, on average, than in the past. Despite this, not only are you seeing a dramatic increase in attacks on legal abortion, the Christian right has expanded its attacks to contraception access, suggesting that something has worked them into a panic they believe can only be resolved by trying to reassert their religious and sexual values.

That something isn't changes in sexual behavior, but it's reasonable to believe it's because of changes in sexual values. People might not be having more sex, but they are feeling less guilty about the sex they are having. Since Gallup first started polling people in 2001 on moral views, acceptance of consensual sex between adults has skyrocketed. In a decade's time, acceptance of premarital sex swelled from 53% to 66% of Americans and acceptance of gay Americans grew from a mere 38% to a majority of Americans. Even polyamory has become more acceptable for Americans, rising from being accepted by 5% of Americans to 14%.

The fact that these changes in attitude are rising alongside the growth of irreligiosity is not a coincidence. More perhaps even than the 1960s, Americans are in a period of questioning rigid sexual and religious mores, and concluding, in increasing numbers, that they are not down with guilt-tripping people for victimless behavior and demanding conformity for its own sake. Some of them–now a whopping 22% of Americans!–are leaving religion entirely. Some are continuing in their faith but choosing to interpret their values differently than Christian conservatives would like.

And so we see Christian conservatives cracking down in a desperate bid to regain control. They claim that they're being oppressed by increasing tolerancefor religious diversity. They have latched onto, with some success, the claim that "religious freedom" requires giving Christians the right to oppress others. The Republican Party is in complete thrall to the religious right, to the point where giving the Christian right one go-nowhere symbolic bill instead of another one created a major political crisis.

The irony is that this panic-based overreach is just making the situation worse for the Christian right. One of the biggest reasons the secularization trend has accelerated in recent years is that young people see the victim complex and the sex policing of the Christian right and it's turning them off. And they're not just rejecting conservative Christianity but the entire idea of organized religion altogether. In other words, the past few years have created a self-perpetuating cycle: Christian conservatives, in a panic over changing demographics, start cracking down. In reaction, more people give up on religion. That causes the Christian right to panic more and crack down more. In the end, Christian conservatives are going to hasten their own demise by trying to save themselves. Not that any of us should be crying for them.

Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She's published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate's Double X.

ANS -- The Broader Net Neutrality Narrative

Here is a good article about the meaning of net neutrality, recommended by Sara Robinson.  The article explains why the win for net neutrality is a big deal -- the first regulatory law since the 1970s, so it signals a return to The People taking control again, or at least the beginning. That seems hopeful to me.
Find it here:  https://medium.com/@matthewstoller/the-broader-net-neutrality-narrative-1964d4a3780a   
--Kim

The Broader Net Neutrality Narrative

In early 2006, AOL and Yahoo announced plans to charge senders of email a small 'postage fee' to have their email delivered to AOL and Yahoo customers. This fee would cost roughly one fourth of a penny per email, so small as to be virtually insignificant. While not particularly onerous in the context of real space, where delivering mail has per item costs, this was a potential blow to the emerging politics of the internet world.

At the time, these companies argued that this postage fee was a measure that would help reduce spam and identity theft. It would ensure that legitimate email would be delivered, in the priority that recipients would like. Oh, and it would help email services place themselves as middlemen in the communications space, taking a slice of a penny here or there from senders while serving ads to their users. A quarter of a penny per email sounds like an insignificant sum, but there are roughly 100 billion emails sent every day. So it adds up.

This happened within a particular political context. Organizations that had captured the political energy from controversies over the war in Iraq, 9/11, and the Clinton impeachment had built themselves through large email lists. The organizers quickly realized that move by AOL and Yahoo could eliminate their ability to organize. They quickly make their opposition known, and this plan was beaten back before it had a chance to be implemented. The consequences of this scuffle were enormous, though it's hard to argue that what is important is what never happened. Yet, think for a moment. Had this attempt at postage pricing succeeded, it is unlikely that Barack Obama would have defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and it's possible that a whole bevy of interesting and important centers of cultural influence ­ Kickstarter, for example ­ would not exist today. I was a peripheral part of the group that worked on this postage fee problem, and it was the first indication I got that pricing laws were essential tools of political power.

Of course, I didn't think of it this way, because the underlying principle of a political movement takes time to emerge. But this was the first exposure the liberal space got to industrial policy, pricing power, and antitrust. And it trained a bunch of us to recognize the net neutrality problem as a similar, critical threat.

Almost immediately after this long-forgotten controversy disappeared, the net neutrality debate flared up very publicly. The Supreme Court had a few months earlier allowed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deregulate broadband in the Brand X case, which was quickly followed by statements by telecom CEOs that they internet was now theirs. AT&T CEO Ed Whiteacre said this clearly, when he argued that "anybody who expects to use pipes for free is nuts!" He didn't mean free, what he meant is that if Google wanted to move content through AT&T's pipes, AT&T would get to determine the price. And if that price happened to be higher that the price charged to a similar competitive product offered by AT&T or by a special favored product by a client of AT&T, well, too bad. Whiteacre wanted to engage in discriminatory pricing, and that was the essence of the net neutrality conflict. This would turn the internet into a cooler version of cable TV, with all content controlled from the center.

The Republican Congress then moved to enshrine the telecom's vision of a cable-ized internet into law. This is when the first public flare-up happened. Republicans introduced a telecom bill that would have prohibited net neutrality. A Democrat attempted to attach a pro-net neutrality amendment to this bill, but the telecom subcommittee in April of 2006 voted down this provision by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Prior to this, few except scholars and lawyers really believed the internet itself was under threat, or even that the architecture of the internet itself was political. This vote changed the dynamic entirely. It provoked outrage and awareness of a much broader scope than had commonly accompanied telecommunications legislation. This outrage confused the political establishment. After all, telecommunications deregulation had been going on for decades, without much of a murmur from anyone but nonprofits without deep wallets.

But what the telecoms didn't realize is that the institutional coalition that undergirded the support for letting them fix prices was falling apart. The public had lost faith in the regulatory apparatus organized to protect them. It was the height of the Iraq War, a war of choice marketed by a pliant media and opposed by millions of protesters. There was deep frustration at attempts to slash PBS funding, and anger at the Federal Communications Commission's willingness to tolerate increasing media consolidation. This was also the time when liberals began to realize that Fox News was a purely partisan political actor, after having been bludgeoned by the odd Clinton impeachment and 2000 election recount. The oligarchical structure of various media businesses had created policies that were widely disliked, and the public began connecting the dots in a way they hadn't done before.

From this stew of motivations came a desire to protect the one space which seemingly allowed for actual honest deliberation without gatekeepers ­ the internet. And for the next three years, writers and activists wrote and organized around the principle that telecommunications companies like AT&T and Verizon should not be able to block entities they did not like from displaying internet content to AT&T and Verizon customers. It was nine years ago, so I don't remember it that well, but I remember writing about net neutrality incessantly. Adam Green, who had pushed back on the postage fee plan (and then also on an early Facebook privacy violation called 'Beacon', which were other industrial policy choices), ran the net neutrality campaign for Moveon. Free Press, with a remarkable crew of talented thinkers and organizers (Ben Scott, Tim Karry, Jen Howard, Marvin Ammori, Craig Aaron, Josh Silver, Adam Lynn, and many others) along with a set of media reformers from earlier generations, began raising awareness of the net neutrality conflict as well. The coalition included Moby, Christian Coalition, Gun Owners of America, Credo (then Working Assets), small business owners, and video gamers. A guy who made a tron costure endorsed net neutrality, and his video endorsing it garnered 5 million views. So did Ask a Ninja.

My particular slice of the fight was to get Democratic Senate candidates in 2008 to endorse net neutrality. They all did, and then most got into office because it was a wave year. The publicity around net neutrality and the wave election helped transform the Democratic Party's approach to net neutrality, and telecommunications deregulation more generally. I also openly criticized what I perceived as bad faith lobbying by prominent Democratic operatives, and encouraged 'the netroots', such as it was, to think about net neutrality as a core agenda item.

It was all part of a really interesting momentum shift in the political approach to regulatory policy. Prior to this fight, the argument seemed to be organized around whether government should regulate an industrial sector, or not. The net neutrality fight saw a changed frame. It was not a question of whether government should regulate, but whether Verizon should arbitrarily regulate internet use or whether there should be clear rules of the road. The momentum seemed unstoppable. Candidate Obama endorsed the concept (as is recapped in this vide0). Senator Ted Stevens gave us a viral moment where he talked about the internet as a 'series of tubes'. I was actually the first person to write about his rhetoric at the hearing, but I was getting it from a person in the room and I didn't have the audio. It seemed like we were going to win this fight.

Last week, it looks like we did win, at least on the policy of net neutrality itself (whether we have overcome the centralizing and autocratic tendencies of monopolistic power centers is less clear). It was a much longer and more winding road than expected, and a whole generation of incredible activists, lawyers, historians, and thinkers amplified the fight after 2008, and actually won. And to be clear, this essayisn't meant to be a comprehensive history of the net neutrality fight. I hadn't yet been exposed to a lot of the people who had done deep intellectual and political work around net neutrality, and the lonely difficult work of opposing bad telecommunications policy in the 1980s and 1990s. I just named a few actors that I knew at the time. Looking back, though, if there's one person who really operated with superb strategic insight and tenacity this whole time, it would be superlawyer Marvin Ammori, who is the person that I hope will be a future FCC Chairman.

What I want to note is what this journey has meant, because the actual regulatory policy itself, while obviously a critical tool in terms of structural an open internet, is almost less important than the construction of a new political coalition of industrial interests and the creation of a new and sophisticated political consciousness for millions. This includes, by the way, me. Because while I knew I was fighting for something I thought was important, the actions themselves came before the ideological foundations of those actions.

So here's what I think the net neutrality fight means.

First, it is the reemergence of populist politics into the industrial sector. For roughly fifty years, the tradition of populism has been organized around important questions of ensuring that women, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, latinos have access to American middle-class institutions. This has coalesced into legislative agendas designed around important issues like pay equity, educational access, taxation, abortion, and so forth. In fulfilling the essential and beautifully meaningful promise to grant the same civil rights to all no matter one's race, color, creed, sexual orientation, age, or gender, populists did not necessarily understand how to address the crisis presented when the institutional basis for prosperity and property rights (a civil right in and of itself) were clearly falling apart. The New Deal worked to create institutions that supported a prosperous white heterosexual middle class, and a reasonable reform goal was to make sure that all get access to these institutions. But as we helped to build justice for all on top of a solid economic foundation, the foundation itself began to crumble. The middle class itself frayed in the face of increasing corporate power and globalization.

This slow boiling crisis wasn't entirely ignored, but liberal economists largely focused on macro-economic solutions, the ISLM model of demand management and redistributions of wealth via taxation (check out Piketty for a good example of this). The micro stuff, corporate power and industrial structures, was left wholly unattended. The net neutrality debate is the return to a populist tradition of looking at the specific foundations of our culture, not abstract concepts like GDP but specific institutions like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T. The net neutrality debate isn't being argued in isolation, there is also real popular interest in banking structures and in the energy space because of the financial crisis and climate change. Corporate power is no longer seen as monolithic, instead corporations are seen as political actors who must be balanced off so no one actor can be a king among commoners.

Second, the entities who emerged in this populist movement included a whole host of small businesses, internet businesses that have become attuned to power and the need for democratic processes to place checks on authoritarian threats that come from private monopolies. Being able to have a small businesses and use your private property without needing permission from private gatekeepers is an essential civil right and a training ground for political and civic talent. Remember, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in America, built his political base from his camera store.

Third, and this is connected to my first point about industrial politics, this is the first significant anti-monopoly principle affirmatively put into legal force since at least the 1970s. Net neutrality is a common carriage regulation, part of a tradition that dates back to Roman times, but it also is a historical spinoff of laws that were intended to constrain Standard Oil from destroying its competitors. Once again, this is not being done in isolation. What is "Too Big to Fail" if not cultural resentment at monopolistic corporate actors with too much power? It is not just that telecommunications giants are big companies that can their strategic positions as toll collectors in key bottlenecks of the economy, it is that they are perceived to be dominant politically. Anti-monopoly laws, as Zephyr Teachout notes, enshrine anti-corruption principles as much as they organize markets.

Fourth, and once again this is connected to both industrial politics and to my original opening anecdote, net neutrality is a pricing law. It is a law that says that telecommunications carriers may charge a price, but they may not charge discriminatory prices based on who you are. They can charge you for consuming or sending more data over their network, but they can't charge you for sending the same amount of data over their networks as someone else. It takes at least part of the ability to fix prices out of the hands of private powerful middlemen. Interestingly, when the FCC came out with its decision, telecom stocks popped up, because the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made it clear that 'rate regulation', or explicit pricing caps by the government, were not going to be included. I don't think usage caps are included either. These are both interesting problems, and there are additional possible problems with interconnection charges, which is a related question of sending content over networks. But the basic point remains, millions of people acted to make sure that at least some pricing power would be in the hands of the public rather than in the hands of monopolistic owners of cable and telecommunications networks. That's a really big deal. And once again, it's not isolated, you can see the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau coming out with rules on payday lenders and credit reporting agencies. These are also pricing laws. And pricing is about power.

There are many consequences yet to come. Legal precedents are being set, and hundreds of internet businesses have had their first experience in politics, and saw the political system affirmatively do the right thing. Hundreds or even thousands of scholars have looked at question of net neutrality. Some examples of historians whose work was prompted by these questions include Victor Packard's "America's Battle for Media Democracy"and Joanna Guldi's analysis of British history "Roads to Power: How Britain Built the Infrastructure State". And millions have had a taste of what it means to govern and restore some public claim over the industrial and institutional systems over which flow our resources, capital, information, and goods services.

That's a big deal.

Fwd: Re: ANS -- Naomi Klein: 'The Economic System We Have Created Also Created Global Warming'

Group -- Our expert formatter has formatted this one for printing.  So I am sending it along for you.
--Kim

An item formatted for you--good, I think.

PRC

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 10:43 PM, Kim Cooper <kimc@astound.net> wrote:

Here's a short interview with Naomi Klein on the twin subjects of capitalism and climate change.  Yes, they are intimately intertwined.  You might go to the page and read the discussion if you like that sort of thing. 

Find it here:  http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28820-focus-naomi-klein-the-economic-system-we-have-created-also-created-global-warming  

--Kim

 

Best selling author/activist Naomi Klein. (photo: Anya Chibis/Guardian UK)

 

Naomi Klein: 'The Economic System We Have Created Also Created Global Warming'

By Klaus Brinkbaumer, Der Spiegel

28 February 15

Â

 PIEGEL: Ms. Klein, why aren't people able to stop climate change?

Klein: Bad luck. Bad timing. Many unfortunate coincidences.

SPIEGEL: The wrong catastrophe at the wrong moment?

Klein: The worst possible moment. The connection between greenhouse gases and global warming has been a mainstream political issue for humanity since 1988. It was precisely the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of History," the victory of Western capitalism. Canada and the US signed the first free-trade agreement, which became the prototype for the rest of the world.

SPIEGEL: So you're saying that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?

Klein: Exactly. And it was at precisely this moment that we were also being told that there was no longer any such thing as social responsibility and collective action, that we should leave everything to the market. We privatized our railways and the energy grid, the WTO and the IMF locked in an unregulated capitalism. Unfortunately, this led to an explosion in emissions.

SPIEGEL: You're an activist, and you've blamed capitalism for all kinds of things over the years. Now you're blaming it for climate change too?

Klein: That's no reason for irony. The numbers tell the story. During the 1990s, emissions went up by 1 percent per year. Starting in 2000, they started to go up by an average of 3.4 percent. The American Dream was exported globally and consumer goods that we thought of as essential to meet our needs expanded rapidly. We started seeing ourselves exclusively as consumers. When shopping as a way of life is exported to every corner of the globe, that requires energy. A lot of energy.

SPIEGEL: Let's go back to our first question: Why have people been unable to stop this development?

Klein: We have systematically given away the tools. Regulations of any kind are now scorned. Governments no longer create tough rules that limit oil companies and other corporations. This crisis fell into our laps in a disastrous way at the worst possible moment. Now we're out of time. Where we are right now is a do-or-die moment. If we don't act as a species, our future is in peril. We need to cut emissions radically.

SPIEGEL: Let's go back to another question: Are you not misappropriating the issue of climate change for use in your critique of capitalism?

Klein: No. The economic system that we have created has also created global warming. I didn't make this up. The system is broken, income inequality is too great and the lack of restraint on the part of the energy companies is disastrous.

SPIEGEL: Your son Toma is two-and-a-half years old. What kind of world will he be living in when he graduates from high school in 2030?

Klein: That is what is being decided right now. I see signs that it could be a radically different world from the one we have today -- and that change could either be quite positive or extremely negative. In any case, it's already certain that it will at least in part be a worse world. We're going to experience global warming and far more natural disasters, that much is certain. But we still have time to prevent truly catastrophic warming. We also have time to change our economic system so that it does not become more brutal and merciless as it deals with climate change.

SPIEGEL: What can be done to improve the situation?

Klein: We have to make some decisions now about what values are important to us and how we really want to live. And of course it makes a difference if temperatures only rise by 2 degrees or if they rise by 4 or 5 degrees or more. It's still possible for us humans to make the right decisions.

SPIEGEL: Twenty-six years have passed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988. We have known at least since then that CO2 emissions from the burning of oil and coal is responsible for climate change. Yet little has been done to address the problem. Haven't we already failed?

Klein: I view the situation differently given the enormous price we will have to pay. As long as we have the slightest chance of success or to minimize the damage, we have to continue to fight.

SPIEGEL: Several years ago, the international community set a target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Do you still consider that to be achievable?

Klein: Well, it's still a physical possibility. We would have to immediately reduce global emissions by 6 percent a year. The wealthier countries would have to carry a greater burden, meaning the United States and Europe would have to be cutting emissions by around 8 to 10 percent a year. Immediately. It's not impossible. It is just profoundly politically unrealistic under our current system.

SPIEGEL: You are saying our societies aren't capable of doing so?

Klein: Yes. We need a dramatic change both in policy and ideology, because there is a fundamental difference between what the scientists are telling us we need to do and our current political reality. We can't change the physical reality, so we must change the political reality.

SPIEGEL: Is a society focused on economic growth at all capable of fighting climate change successfully?

Klein: No. An economic model based on indiscriminate growth inevitably leads to greater consumption and to greater CO2 emissions. There can and must be growth in the future in many low carbon parts of the economy: in green technologies, in public transportation, in all the care-giving professions, in the arts and of course in education. Right now, the core of our gross domestic product is comprised of just consumption, imports and exports. We need to make cuts there. Anything else would be self-deception.

SPIEGEL: The International Monetary Fund makes the opposite claim. It says that economic growth and climate protection are not mutually exclusive.

Klein: They're not looking at the same numbers as I am. The first problem is that at all these climate conferences, everyone acts as if we will arrive at our goal through self-commitments and voluntary obligations. No one tells the oil companies that, in the end, they are really going to have to give up. The second problem is that these oil companies are going to fight like hell to protect what they don't want to lose.

SPIEGEL: You seriously want to eliminate the free market in order to save the climate?

Klein: I am not talking about eliminating markets, but we need much more strategy, steering and planning and a very different balance. The system in which we live is overly obsessed with growth -- it's one that sees all growth as good. But there are kinds of growth that are clearly not good. It's clear to me that my position is in direct conflict with neo-liberalism. Is it true that in Germany, although you have accelerated the shift to renewables, coal consumption is actually increasing?

SPIEGEL: That was true from 2009 to 2013.

Klein: To me that is an expression of this reluctance to decide on what is necessary. Germany is not going to meet its emissions targets in the coming years either.

SPIEGEL: Is the Obama presidency the worst thing that could have happened to the climate?

Klein: In a way. Not because Obama is worse than a Republican. He's not. But because these eight years were the biggest wasted opportunity of our lives. The right factors came together in a truly historic convergence: awareness, urgency, the mood, his political majority, the failure of the Big Three US automakers and even the possibility of addressing the failed unregulated financial world and climate change at the same time. But when he came to office, he didn't have the courage to do it. We will not win this battle unless we are willing to talk about why Obama viewed the fact that he had control over the banks and auto companies as more of a burden than as an opportunity. He was a prisoner of the system. He didn't want to change it.

SPIEGEL: The US and China finally agreed on an initial climate deal in 2014.

Klein: Which is, of course, a good thing. But anything in the deal that could become painful won't come into effect until Obama is out of office. Still, what has changed is that Obama said: "Our citizens are marching. We can't ignore that." The mass movements are important; they are having an impact. But to push our leaders to where they need to go, they need to grow even stronger.

SPIEGEL: What should their goal be?

Klein: Over the past 20 years, the extreme right, the complete freedom of oil companies and the freedom of the super wealthy 1 percent of society have become the political standard. We need to shift America's political center from the right fringe back to where it belongs, the real center.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Klein, that's nonsense, because it's illusory. You're thinking far too broadly. If you want to first eliminate capitalism before coming up with a plan to save the climate, you know yourself that this won't happen.

Klein: Look, if you want to get depressed, there are plenty of reasons to do so. But you're still wrong, because the fact is that focusing on supposedly achievable incremental changes light carbon trading and changing light bulbs has failed miserably. Part of that is because in most countries, the environmental movement remained elite, technocratic and supposedly politically neutral for two-and-a-half decades. We are seeing the result of this today: It has taken us in the wrong direction. Emissions are rising and climate change is here. Second, in the US, all the major legal and social transformations of the last 150 years were a consequence of mass social movements, be they for women, against slavery or for civil rights. We need this strength again, and quickly, because the cause of climate change is the political and economic system itself. The approach that you have is too technocratic and small.

SPIEGEL: If you attempt to solve a specific problem by overturning the entire societal order, you won't solve it. That's a utopian fantasy.

Klein: Not if societal order is the root of the problem. Viewed from another perspective, we're literally swimming in examples of small solutions: There are green technologies, local laws, bilateral treaties and CO2 taxation. Why don't we have all that at a global level?

SPIEGEL: You're saying that all the small steps -- green technologies and CO2 taxation and the eco-behavior of individuals -- are meaningless?

Klein: No. We should all do what we can, of course. But we can't delude ourselves that it's enough. What I'm saying is that the small steps will remain too small if they don't become a mass movement. We need an economic and political transformation, one based on stronger communities, sustainable jobs, greater regulation and a departure from this obsession with growth. That's the good news. We have a real opportunity to solve many problems at once.

SPIEGEL: You don't appear to be counting on the collective reason of politicians and entrepreneurs.

Klein: Because the system can't think. The system rewards short-term gain, meaning quick profits. Take Michael Bloomberg, for example ...

SPIEGEL: … the businessman and former New York City mayor …

Klein: … who understood the depths of the climate crisis as a politician. As a businessman, however, he chooses to invest in a fund that specializes in oil and gas assets. If a person like Bloomberg cannot resist the temptation, then you can assume that the system's self-preservation capacity isn't that great.

SPIEGEL: A particularly unsettling chapter in your book is about Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin Group.

Klein: Yes. I wouldn't have expected it.

SPIEGEL: Branson has sought to portray himself as a man who wants to save the climate. It all started after an encounter with Al Gore.

Klein: And in 2006, he pledged at an event hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative that he would invest $3 billion in research into green technologies. At the time, I thought it was truly a sensational contribution. I didn't think, oh, you cynical bastard.

SPIEGEL: But Branson was really just staging it and only a fraction of that money was ever spent.

Klein: He may well have been sincere at the time, but yes, only a fraction was spent.

SPIEGEL: Since 2006, Branson has added 160 new airplanes to his numerous airlines and increased his emissions by 40 percent.

Klein: Yes.

SPIEGEL: What is there to learn from this story?

Klein: That we need to question the symbolism and gestures made by Hollywood stars and the super rich. We cannot confuse them with a scientifically sound plan to reduce emissions.

SPIEGEL: In America and Australia, a lot of money is spent on efforts to deny climate change. Why?

Klein: It's different from Europe. It's an anger that is similar to that held by those who oppose abortion and gun control. It's not only that they are protecting a way of life they don't want to change. It's that they understand that climate change challenges their core anti-government, free-market belief system. So they have to deny it to protect their very identity. That's why there's this intensity gap: Liberals want to take a little bit of action on climate protection. But at the same time, these liberals also have a number of other issues that are higher on their agenda. But we have to understand that the hardcore conservative climate change deniers will do everything in their power to prevent action.

SPIEGEL: With pseudo-scientific studies and disinformation?

Klein: With all of that, of course.

SPIEGEL: Does that explain why you are connecting all of these issues -- the environment, equity, public health and labor issues -- that are popular on the left? Is it out of purely strategic considerations?

Klein: The issues are connected, and we also need to connect them in the debate. There is only one way that you can win a battle against a small group of people who stand to lose a lot: You need to start a mass movement that includes all the people who have a lot to gain. The deniers can only be defeated if you are just as passionate as them, but also when you are superior in numbers. Because the truth is that they really are very few.

SPIEGEL: Why don't you believe that technology has the potential to save us?

Klein: There has been tremendous progress in the storage of renewable energies, for instance, and in solar efficiency. But climate change? I, in any case, don't have enough faith to say, "We'll come up with some invention at some point, so let's just drop all other efforts." That would be insane.

SPIEGEL: People like Bill Gates view things differently.

Klein: And I find their technology fetish naïve. In recent years, we've witnessed some really big failures where some of the smartest guys in the room screwed up on a massive scale, be it with the derivatives that triggered the financial crisis or the oil catastrophe off the coast of New Orleans. Mostly, we as people break things and we don't know how to fix them afterwards. Right now, it's our planet that we're breaking.

SPIEGEL: Listening to you, one might get the impression that the climate crisis is a gender issue.

Klein: Why would you say that?

SPIEGEL: Bill Gates says we need to keep moving forward and come up with new inventions to get the problem, and ultimately our complicated Earth, under control. You on the other hand are saying: Stop, no, we have to adapt ourselves to this planet and become softer. The US oil companies are run by men. And you, as a critical woman, are described as hysterical. It's not an absurd thought, is it?

Klein: No. The entire industrialization was about power or whether it would be man or nature that would dominate Earth. It is difficult for some men to admit that we don't have everything under control; that we have amassed all this CO2 over the centuries and that Earth is now telling us: Well, you're just a guest in my house.

SPIEGEL: A guest of Mother Earth?

Klein: That's too cheesy. But you're still right. The oil industry is a male-dominated world, a lot like high finance. It's very macho. The American and Australian idea of "discovering" an endless country and that endless resources can be extracted is a narrative of domination, one that traditionally casts nature as a weak, prone woman. And the idea of being in a relationship of interdependence with the rest of the natural world was seen as weak. That's why it is doubly difficult for alpha men to concede that they have been wrong.

SPIEGEL: There's one issue in the book that you seem to steer clear of. Although you revile the companies, you never say that your readers, who are customers of these companies, are also culpable. You also remain silent about the price that individual readers will have to pay for climate protection.

Klein: Oh, I think that most people would be happy to pay for it. They know that climate protection requires reasonable behavior: less driving, less flying and less consumption. They would be happy to use renewable energies if they were offered them.

SPIEGEL: But the idea isn't big enough, right?

Klein: (laughs) Exactly. The green movement spent decades educating people that they should compost their garbage, that they should recycle and that they should ride their bikes. But look at what has happened to the climate during these decades.

SPIEGEL: Is the lifestyle you lead climate-friendly?

Klein: Not enough. I bike, I use transit, I try to give speeches by Skype, I share a hybrid car and I cut my flying to about one-tenth of what it was before I started this project. My sin is taking taxis, and since the book came out, I've been flying too much. But I also don't think that only people who are perfectly green and live CO2-free should be allowed to talk about this issue. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to say anything at all.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Klein, we thank you for this interview.

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ANS -- Naomi Klein: 'The Economic System We Have Created Also Created Global Warming'

Here's a short interview with Naomi Klein on the twin subjects of capitalism and climate change.  Yes, they are intimately intertwined.  You might go to the page and read the discussion if you like that sort of thing. 
Find it here:  http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28820-focus-naomi-klein-the-economic-system-we-have-created-also-created-global-warming  
--Kim






Best selling author/activist Naomi Klein. (photo: Anya Chibis/Guardian UK)

Naomi Klein: 'The Economic System We Have Created Also Created Global Warming'

By Klaus Brinkbaumer, Der Spiegel

28 February 15

 

PIEGEL: Ms. Klein, why aren't people able to stop climate change?

Klein: Bad luck. Bad timing. Many unfortunate coincidences.

SPIEGEL: The wrong catastrophe at the wrong moment?

Klein: The worst possible moment. The connection between greenhouse gases and global warming has been a mainstream political issue for humanity since 1988. It was precisely the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of History," the victory of Western capitalism. Canada and the US signed the first free-trade agreement, which became the prototype for the rest of the world.

SPIEGEL: So you're saying that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?

Klein: Exactly. And it was at precisely this moment that we were also being told that there was no longer any such thing as social responsibility and collective action, that we should leave everything to the market. We privatized our railways and the energy grid, the WTO and the IMF locked in an unregulated capitalism. Unfortunately, this led to an explosion in emissions.

SPIEGEL: You're an activist, and you've blamed capitalism for all kinds of things over the years. Now you're blaming it for climate change too?

Klein: That's no reason for irony. The numbers tell the story. During the 1990s, emissions went up by 1 percent per year. Starting in 2000, they started to go up by an average of 3.4 percent. The American Dream was exported globally and consumer goods that we thought of as essential to meet our needs expanded rapidly. We started seeing ourselves exclusively as consumers. When shopping as a way of life is exported to every corner of the globe, that requires energy. A lot of energy.

SPIEGEL: Let's go back to our first question: Why have people been unable to stop this development?

Klein: We have systematically given away the tools. Regulations of any kind are now scorned. Governments no longer create tough rules that limit oil companies and other corporations. This crisis fell into our laps in a disastrous way at the worst possible moment. Now we're out of time. Where we are right now is a do-or-die moment. If we don't act as a species, our future is in peril. We need to cut emissions radically.

SPIEGEL: Let's go back to another question: Are you not misappropriating the issue of climate change for use in your critique of capitalism?

Klein: No. The economic system that we have created has also created global warming. I didn't make this up. The system is broken, income inequality is too great and the lack of restraint on the part of the energy companies is disastrous.

SPIEGEL: Your son Toma is two-and-a-half years old. What kind of world will he be living in when he graduates from high school in 2030?

Klein: That is what is being decided right now. I see signs that it could be a radically different world from the one we have today -- and that change could either be quite positive or extremely negative. In any case, it's already certain that it will at least in part be a worse world. We're going to experience global warming and far more natural disasters, that much is certain. But we still have time to prevent truly catastrophic warming. We also have time to change our economic system so that it does not become more brutal and merciless as it deals with climate change.

SPIEGEL: What can be done to improve the situation?

Klein: We have to make some decisions now about what values are important to us and how we really want to live. And of course it makes a difference if temperatures only rise by 2 degrees or if they rise by 4 or 5 degrees or more. It's still possible for us humans to make the right decisions.

SPIEGEL: Twenty-six years have passed since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988. We have known at least since then that CO2 emissions from the burning of oil and coal is responsible for climate change. Yet little has been done to address the problem. Haven't we already failed?

Klein: I view the situation differently given the enormous price we will have to pay. As long as we have the slightest chance of success or to minimize the damage, we have to continue to fight.

SPIEGEL: Several years ago, the international community set a target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Do you still consider that to be achievable?

Klein: Well, it's still a physical possibility. We would have to immediately reduce global emissions by 6 percent a year. The wealthier countries would have to carry a greater burden, meaning the United States and Europe would have to be cutting emissions by around 8 to 10 percent a year. Immediately. It's not impossible. It is just profoundly politically unrealistic under our current system.

SPIEGEL: You are saying our societies aren't capable of doing so?

Klein: Yes. We need a dramatic change both in policy and ideology, because there is a fundamental difference between what the scientists are telling us we need to do and our current political reality. We can't change the physical reality, so we must change the political reality.

SPIEGEL: Is a society focused on economic growth at all capable of fighting climate change successfully?

Klein: No. An economic model based on indiscriminate growth inevitably leads to greater consumption and to greater CO2 emissions. There can and must be growth in the future in many low carbon parts of the economy: in green technologies, in public transportation, in all the care-giving professions, in the arts and of course in education. Right now, the core of our gross domestic product is comprised of just consumption, imports and exports. We need to make cuts there. Anything else would be self-deception.

SPIEGEL: The International Monetary Fund makes the opposite claim. It says that economic growth and climate protection are not mutually exclusive.

Klein: They're not looking at the same numbers as I am. The first problem is that at all these climate conferences, everyone acts as if we will arrive at our goal through self-commitments and voluntary obligations. No one tells the oil companies that, in the end, they are really going to have to give up. The second problem is that these oil companies are going to fight like hell to protect what they don't want to lose.

SPIEGEL: You seriously want to eliminate the free market in order to save the climate?

Klein: I am not talking about eliminating markets, but we need much more strategy, steering and planning and a very different balance. The system in which we live is overly obsessed with growth -- it's one that sees all growth as good. But there are kinds of growth that are clearly not good. It's clear to me that my position is in direct conflict with neo-liberalism. Is it true that in Germany, although you have accelerated the shift to renewables, coal consumption is actually increasing?

SPIEGEL: That was true from 2009 to 2013.

Klein: To me that is an expression of this reluctance to decide on what is necessary. Germany is not going to meet its emissions targets in the coming years either.

SPIEGEL: Is the Obama presidency the worst thing that could have happened to the climate?

Klein: In a way. Not because Obama is worse than a Republican. He's not. But because these eight years were the biggest wasted opportunity of our lives. The right factors came together in a truly historic convergence: awareness, urgency, the mood, his political majority, the failure of the Big Three US automakers and even the possibility of addressing the failed unregulated financial world and climate change at the same time. But when he came to office, he didn't have the courage to do it. We will not win this battle unless we are willing to talk about why Obama viewed the fact that he had control over the banks and auto companies as more of a burden than as an opportunity. He was a prisoner of the system. He didn't want to change it.

SPIEGEL: The US and China finally agreed on an initial climate deal in 2014.

Klein: Which is, of course, a good thing. But anything in the deal that could become painful won't come into effect until Obama is out of office. Still, what has changed is that Obama said: "Our citizens are marching. We can't ignore that." The mass movements are important; they are having an impact. But to push our leaders to where they need to go, they need to grow even stronger.

SPIEGEL: What should their goal be?

Klein: Over the past 20 years, the extreme right, the complete freedom of oil companies and the freedom of the super wealthy 1 percent of society have become the political standard. We need to shift America's political center from the right fringe back to where it belongs, the real center.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Klein, that's nonsense, because it's illusory. You're thinking far too broadly. If you want to first eliminate capitalism before coming up with a plan to save the climate, you know yourself that this won't happen.

Klein: Look, if you want to get depressed, there are plenty of reasons to do so. But you're still wrong, because the fact is that focusing on supposedly achievable incremental changes light carbon trading and changing light bulbs has failed miserably. Part of that is because in most countries, the environmental movement remained elite, technocratic and supposedly politically neutral for two-and-a-half decades. We are seeing the result of this today: It has taken us in the wrong direction. Emissions are rising and climate change is here. Second, in the US, all the major legal and social transformations of the last 150 years were a consequence of mass social movements, be they for women, against slavery or for civil rights. We need this strength again, and quickly, because the cause of climate change is the political and economic system itself. The approach that you have is too technocratic and small.

SPIEGEL: If you attempt to solve a specific problem by overturning the entire societal order, you won't solve it. That's a utopian fantasy.

Klein: Not if societal order is the root of the problem. Viewed from another perspective, we're literally swimming in examples of small solutions: There are green technologies, local laws, bilateral treaties and CO2 taxation. Why don't we have all that at a global level?

SPIEGEL: You're saying that all the small steps -- green technologies and CO2 taxation and the eco-behavior of individuals -- are meaningless?

Klein: No. We should all do what we can, of course. But we can't delude ourselves that it's enough. What I'm saying is that the small steps will remain too small if they don't become a mass movement. We need an economic and political transformation, one based on stronger communities, sustainable jobs, greater regulation and a departure from this obsession with growth. That's the good news. We have a real opportunity to solve many problems at once.

SPIEGEL: You don't appear to be counting on the collective reason of politicians and entrepreneurs.

Klein: Because the system can't think. The system rewards short-term gain, meaning quick profits. Take Michael Bloomberg, for example ...

SPIEGEL: … the businessman and former New York City mayor …

Klein: … who understood the depths of the climate crisis as a politician. As a businessman, however, he chooses to invest in a fund that specializes in oil and gas assets. If a person like Bloomberg cannot resist the temptation, then you can assume that the system's self-preservation capacity isn't that great.

SPIEGEL: A particularly unsettling chapter in your book is about Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin Group.

Klein: Yes. I wouldn't have expected it.

SPIEGEL: Branson has sought to portray himself as a man who wants to save the climate. It all started after an encounter with Al Gore.

Klein: And in 2006, he pledged at an event hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative that he would invest $3 billion in research into green technologies. At the time, I thought it was truly a sensational contribution. I didn't think, oh, you cynical bastard.

SPIEGEL: But Branson was really just staging it and only a fraction of that money was ever spent.

Klein: He may well have been sincere at the time, but yes, only a fraction was spent.

SPIEGEL: Since 2006, Branson has added 160 new airplanes to his numerous airlines and increased his emissions by 40 percent.

Klein: Yes.

SPIEGEL: What is there to learn from this story?

Klein: That we need to question the symbolism and gestures made by Hollywood stars and the super rich. We cannot confuse them with a scientifically sound plan to reduce emissions.

SPIEGEL: In America and Australia, a lot of money is spent on efforts to deny climate change. Why?

Klein: It's different from Europe. It's an anger that is similar to that held by those who oppose abortion and gun control. It's not only that they are protecting a way of life they don't want to change. It's that they understand that climate change challenges their core anti-government, free-market belief system. So they have to deny it to protect their very identity. That's why there's this intensity gap: Liberals want to take a little bit of action on climate protection. But at the same time, these liberals also have a number of other issues that are higher on their agenda. But we have to understand that the hardcore conservative climate change deniers will do everything in their power to prevent action.

SPIEGEL: With pseudo-scientific studies and disinformation?

Klein: With all of that, of course.

SPIEGEL: Does that explain why you are connecting all of these issues -- the environment, equity, public health and labor issues -- that are popular on the left? Is it out of purely strategic considerations?

Klein: The issues are connected, and we also need to connect them in the debate. There is only one way that you can win a battle against a small group of people who stand to lose a lot: You need to start a mass movement that includes all the people who have a lot to gain. The deniers can only be defeated if you are just as passionate as them, but also when you are superior in numbers. Because the truth is that they really are very few.

SPIEGEL: Why don't you believe that technology has the potential to save us?

Klein: There has been tremendous progress in the storage of renewable energies, for instance, and in solar efficiency. But climate change? I, in any case, don't have enough faith to say, "We'll come up with some invention at some point, so let's just drop all other efforts." That would be insane.

SPIEGEL: People like Bill Gates view things differently.

Klein: And I find their technology fetish naïve. In recent years, we've witnessed some really big failures where some of the smartest guys in the room screwed up on a massive scale, be it with the derivatives that triggered the financial crisis or the oil catastrophe off the coast of New Orleans. Mostly, we as people break things and we don't know how to fix them afterwards. Right now, it's our planet that we're breaking.

SPIEGEL: Listening to you, one might get the impression that the climate crisis is a gender issue.

Klein: Why would you say that?

SPIEGEL: Bill Gates says we need to keep moving forward and come up with new inventions to get the problem, and ultimately our complicated Earth, under control. You on the other hand are saying: Stop, no, we have to adapt ourselves to this planet and become softer. The US oil companies are run by men. And you, as a critical woman, are described as hysterical. It's not an absurd thought, is it?

Klein: No. The entire industrialization was about power or whether it would be man or nature that would dominate Earth. It is difficult for some men to admit that we don't have everything under control; that we have amassed all this CO2 over the centuries and that Earth is now telling us: Well, you're just a guest in my house.

SPIEGEL: A guest of Mother Earth?

Klein: That's too cheesy. But you're still right. The oil industry is a male-dominated world, a lot like high finance. It's very macho. The American and Australian idea of "discovering" an endless country and that endless resources can be extracted is a narrative of domination, one that traditionally casts nature as a weak, prone woman. And the idea of being in a relationship of interdependence with the rest of the natural world was seen as weak. That's why it is doubly difficult for alpha men to concede that they have been wrong.

SPIEGEL: There's one issue in the book that you seem to steer clear of. Although you revile the companies, you never say that your readers, who are customers of these companies, are also culpable. You also remain silent about the price that individual readers will have to pay for climate protection.

Klein: Oh, I think that most people would be happy to pay for it. They know that climate protection requires reasonable behavior: less driving, less flying and less consumption. They would be happy to use renewable energies if they were offered them.

SPIEGEL: But the idea isn't big enough, right?

Klein: (laughs) Exactly. The green movement spent decades educating people that they should compost their garbage, that they should recycle and that they should ride their bikes. But look at what has happened to the climate during these decades.

SPIEGEL: Is the lifestyle you lead climate-friendly?

Klein: Not enough. I bike, I use transit, I try to give speeches by Skype, I share a hybrid car and I cut my flying to about one-tenth of what it was before I started this project. My sin is taking taxis, and since the book came out, I've been flying too much. But I also don't think that only people who are perfectly green and live CO2-free should be allowed to talk about this issue. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to say anything at all.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Klein, we thank you for this interview.

ANS -- The Individual and the Herd

Here's a good article by Doug Muder.  About the politicians' positions on vaccinations.  He makes some really telling points about balancing needs of individual freedom and community considerations.  There's some fun comments if you follow the link. 
Find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2015/02/09/the-individual-and-the-herd/#comment-188622  
--Kim

The Individual and the Herd

How the rhetoric of freedom can lead us astray.

---

The question Governor Chris Christie was asked seemed simple enough:

There�s a debate going on right now in the United States, the measles outbreak that�s been caused in part by people not vaccinating their kids. Do you think Americans should vaccinate their kids? Is the measles vaccine safe?

He could have just said: �The measles vaccine is safe and parents should get their kids vaccinated.� That appears to be what he believes, and the question required nothing more. But instead he decided to expand the context and give a more complex answer:

All I can say is that we vaccinated ours. That�s the best expression I can give you of my opinion. It�s much more important, I think, what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. And that�s what we do. But I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well so that�s the balance that the government has to decide.

In response to follow-up questions, he explained that vaccines for different diseases have different risks and benefits (which is true), so the government should be careful about which ones it mandates and which ones it leaves up to parents (which hardly anyone disputes). �I didn�t say I�m leaving people the option,� he protested. And when asked again whether vaccines were dangerous, he responded: �I didn�t say that.� But he also stopped short of saying: �The measles vaccine is safe.�

In short, if you parse Christie�s words very carefully and give him just a little benefit of the doubt, he didn�t say anything all that objectionable. But the question lingers: Why did he go there in the first place? Why not just give the simple answer, if that�s what he believes? After all, that�s the image Christie works so hard to project: a man who bluntly says what he thinks without a lot of political doubletalk. Why couldn�t �Is the measles vaccine safe?� get a �yes� answer, rather than a long-winded discussion followed by a denial that he was saying it was dangerous?

The obvious implication was that (as he progresses towards an as-yet-unannounced presidential campaign) Christie was trying not to offend some bloc of Republican voters. And many then jumped to the conclusion that the bloc in question is the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, who believe the scientifically groundless theory that vaccines cause autism.

The controversy Christie�s remarks started might have died out quickly, if rival presidential hopeful Senator Rand Paul hadn�t jumped in and said explicitly what Christie was accused of implying:

I�ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.

(He later backed off, claiming that after just means that vaccines and mental disorders are �temporally related�, not that one causes the other. So I�m sure he won�t mind if the media publishes a slew of stories of the form: So-and-so did something horrible after listening to Rand Paul. Or maybe a headline like �ISIS Beheads Hostage After Paul Speech�.)

But here�s the problem with the pandering-to-Republican-anti-vaxxers theory: First, there just aren�t that many anti-vaxxers. [See endnote 1]  And second, they aren�t all Republicans. There�s a liberal version of anti-vax that focuses the conspiracy theory on drug companies rather than government. [2]

So the theory that a Republican primary might be decided by anti-vaxxers casting a single-issue vote is a little sketchy. That�s why as soon as their position got labelled as pandering to anti-vaxxers, other potential candidates took the opposite side of the argument [3] and both Christie and Paul had to back down to a certain extent.

So who were they pandering to? The Libertarian/Theocrat side of my model in � The Four Flavors of Republican�.

Again Paul was the more explicit:

The state doesn�t own your children. Parents own their children. [4]

In other words, decisions about vaccinations shouldn�t be made by the American people as a whole through the democratic process, or by the medical experts that the people delegate those decisions to. Libertarians believe those issues should be decided by sovereign individuals, and Theocrats want them decided by the fathers that God made sovereign over their households.

When you look at the world through either one of those lenses, vaccinations aren�t the point, they just symbolize larger issues about authority. So sure, I�m going to vaccinate my kids, but the decision should be up to me. �It�s an issue of freedom,� Paul said, and when the CNBC interviewer pressed him, he got sarcastic. �I guess being for freedom would be really unusual.�

This ties vaccinations to other �freedom� issues, like your freedom to go without health insurance rather than accept ObamaCare, your freedom to let your kids grow up ignorant rather than send them to a government-approved school (or report their home-schooling progress to an education bureaucrat), or your freedom to take the low wages and poor working conditions an employer offers rather than negotiate through a union. Newly elected North Carolina Senator Thom Tillisdefended the freedom of food-sellers to set their own hygiene standards rather than be bound by government regulations:

�I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like �maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'� the senator said.

Tillis said his interlocutor was in disbelief, and asked whether he thought businesses should be allowed to �opt out� of requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom.

The senator said he�d be fine with it, so long as businesses made this clear in �advertising� and �employment literature.�

�I said: �I don�t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says �We don�t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,� Tillis said.

�The market will take care of that,� he added, to laughter from the audience. [5]

So in Tillis� ideal republic, you would have to study the diverse hygiene practices of all the places you eat, so that you can make an informed decision about whether it�s safe to eat there. Because freedom.

Taken to its logical extreme, the freedom agenda says that you should be free to drive on the left side of the interstate. You wouldn�t, of course, because it�s dangerous and you�re not stupid. At least, you wouldn�t most of the time. Most people wouldn�t, most of the time.

But it wouldn�t take many to screw everything up. What if, of all the drivers who would be traveling north during your next trip south down the interstate, you knew that only one would be using his freedom to drive on the left side and come straight at you? How would that change your driving experience?

Here�s what it boils down to: Human beings are simultaneously individuals and members of society, not fundamentally one or the other. Some issues (like free speech) are easier to understand from the individual point of view, while others (like traffic) require a  social point of view. [6]

Public health is fundamentally social. Germs pay no attention to your individuality; they just spread through the herd. You personally may do everything right, but whether or not you get sick also depends on social things like the quality of the sewage system, whether other infected individuals have access to health care or paid sick leave, how well your city controls rats and other vermin, whether restaurant workers wash their hands, and what percentage of people get vaccinated. In extreme cases, it depends on really draconian government interventions like quarantines and travel restrictions.

No matter what kind of intellectual contortions you do, you can�t square all that with a pure individual-freedom agenda. What if a free individual exposed to Ebola doesn�t want to be quarantined in a treatment facility? (Maybe he has his own theory about diseases and doesn�t believe all this germ-and-virus nonsense. Or maybe he was only probably exposed, and he�s willing to risk it.) If your ideology limits you to looking at everything from the individual-freedom viewpoint, your thinking about public health is going to be crippled.

So that�s who Christie and Paul were pandering to this week: people whose thinking about public health has been crippled by individualist ideology. If either becomes president, he may continue to pander to them.

---

[1] Anti-vaxxers only dangerous because it doesn�t take many to screw up herd immunity, which protects people who can�t use the vaccine. (In other words: Even if you can�t be vaccinated or haven�t been vaccinated yet, you�ll be safe because you are unlikely to come into contact with sick people.) According to the World Health Organization, as reproduced in Wikipedia, the herd immunity threshold for measles is 83-94% vaccinated, so as few as 6% in a local community might be enough to make that community vulnerable to an outbreak.

If you think of this in terms of the free-rider problem, the herd immunity threshold measures how many free riders the vaccination system can stand before it starts breaking down.

[2] Anti-vaccine liberals are sometimes used to prove that in their own way Democrats are just as much at war with science as Republicans who deny climate change or evolution. But here�s the clear difference: Anti-science liberals are on the fringe of the Democratic Party, and elected officials seldom pay much attention to them. Conversely, climate-change denial is a core position of the conservative base, so virtually every elected Republican has gotten in line.

[3] Marco Rubio demonstrated that a Republican presidential contender can give the simple, direct answer: �There is absolutely no medical science or data whatsoever that links those vaccinations to onset of autism or anything of that nature. And by the way, if enough people are not vaccinated, you put at risk infants that are three months of age or younger and have not been vaccinated and you put at risk immune-suppressed children that are not able to get those vaccinations. So absolutely, all children in American should be vaccinated.�

Also Ted Cruz: �On the question of whether kids should be vaccinated, the answer is obvious, and there�s widespread agreement: of course they should.�

But both avoided a direct endorsement of mandatory vaccinations, like Ben Carson�s.

[4] Rekha Basu of the Des Moines Register had the right response:

No, we don�t own our children. From slavery to child sexual abuse, the notion of owning another human has led to nothing good. Legally, we�re responsible for our kids and their care, feeding and safety until they�re old enough to take care of themselves. But they are autonomous human beings, which is why, unlike property, there are laws and standards governing what we can and can�t do to them.

[5] We�ve seen this two-step before. The same politicians who say that a well-informed public can sort things out without government help will also oppose any regulations that inform the public. Today, Tillis says he�d make Starbucks post that sign, but when the time came to vote on it he actually wouldn�t, for exactly the same reason: The market can sort out whether businesses should have to post their hygiene policies.

[6] It�s like the wave/particle thing with light, if that analogy makes sense to you. If not, forget I mentioned it.

ANS -- Saudi Arabia Sees End Of Oil Age On The Horizon

Here is a very interesting interpretation of what Saudi Arabia is doing to oil prices.  This could be a good thing. 
Read it here:  http://cleantechnica.com/2015/02/06/saudi-arabia-sees-end-oil-age-horizon/
--Kim

Saudi Arabia Sees End Of Oil Age On The Horizon

February 6th, 2015 by Guest Contributor

Originally published on EnergyPost.
By Elias Hinckley

Most analysts believe Saudi Arabia refuses to cut production because it wants to shake out its higher-cost competitors or because it wants to punish Iran and Russia. There may be some truth in those theories, writes Elias Hinckley, strategic advisor and head of the energy practice with international law firm Sullivan and Worcester, but they miss the deeper motivation of the Saudis. Saudi Arabia, he says, sees the end of the Oil Age on the horizon and understands that a great deal of global fossil fuel reserves will have to stay underground to avoid catastrophic global warming. "That's why it has opened the valves on the carbon asset bubble."

Saudi Arabia's decision not to cut oil production, despite crashing prices, marks the beginning of an incredibly important change. There are near-term and obvious implications for oil markets and global economies. More important is the acknowledgement, demonstrated by the action of world's most important oil producer, of the beginning of the end of the most prosperous period in human history – the age of oil.

In 2000, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:

"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil."

Fourteen years later, while Americans were eating or sleeping off their Thanksgiving meals, the twelve members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) failed to reach an agreement to cut production below the 30 million barrel per day target that was set in 2011.  This followed strenuous lobbying efforts by some of largest oil producing non-OPEC nations in the weeks leading up to the meeting.  This group even went so far as to make the highly unusual offer of agreeing to their own production cuts.

The ramifications of this decision across the globe, not just in energy markets, but politically, are already having consequences for the global landscape.  Lost in the effort to understand the vast implications is an even more important signal sent by Saudi Arabia, the owner of more than 16% of the world's proved oil reserves, about its view of the future of fossil fuels.

Since its formal creation in 1960 the members of OPEC, and specifically Saudi Arabia (and in reality the Kingdom's control over global oil markets is much larger than that 16% of reserves implies as its more than 260 billion barrels are among the easiest and cheapest to extract and before enhanced recovery techniques accounted for a much larger share of global reserves) have used excess oil production capacity to influence crude prices.  The primary role of OPEC has been to support price stability.  There are notable exceptions – like the 1973-1974 oil embargo and a period of excess supply that undermined prices and crippled the Soviet Union in the 1980s (though whether this was a defined strategy or serendipity remains in some question), but at its core the role of OPEC has been to control oil prices. As recent events show, OPEC's role as the controller of crude oil pricing is coming to an abrupt end.

But in a world where a producer sees the end of its market on the horizon, then every barrel sold at a profit is more valuable than a barrel that will never be sold

In acting as global swing producer, OPEC has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia, which can influence global prices by increasing or decreasing production to expand or reduce available global supply.  Saudi Arabia can do this not only because it controls an enormous portion of global reserves and production capacity, but does so with crude oil that is stunningly inexpensive to produce compared to the current global market.  A change, however, has occurred in Saudi Arabia's fundamental strategic approach to the global oil market. And this new approach – to refuse to curtail production to support global prices – not only undermines OPECs pricing power, but also removes a vital subsidy for global oil producers provided by the Saudi's longtime commitment to price support.

Understanding Why

The widely held conventional theory is that the Saudis want to shake the weak production out of the market.  This strategy would undermine the economic viability of a meaningful amount of global production.  The theory assumes that this can be done in some kind of orderly bring-down of prices where the Saudis can find an ideal price below the production cost of this marginal oil production but still high enough to maintain significant profits for the Kingdom while this market correction plays out. The assumption is that following the correction there will be a return to business as usual along with higher prices, but with Saudi Arabia commanding a relatively larger share of that market.   An alternative rationale is that Saudi Arabia is fighting an economic war with oil; a strategy designed to economically and in turn politically cripple rival producers Iran and Russia because the governments of these countries that depend on oil exports cannot withstand sustained low prices and will be significantly weakened.

While there may be some truth to both of these theories, the real motivation lies somewhere closer to Sheikh Yamani's 2000 prediction.  Saudi Arabia has embarked on an absolute quest for dominant market share in the global oil market.  The near-term cost of grabbing that market share is immense, with the Saudis sacrificing potentially hundreds of billions of dollars if low prices persist.  In a world of endless consumption, this risk would be hard to justify merely in exchange for a temporary expansion of global market share – the current lost revenue would take years to recover with a marginally higher share of global supply.

But in a world where a producer sees the end of its market on the horizon, then every barrel sold at a profit is more valuable than a barrel that will never be sold.  Current Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi had this to say about production cuts in late December: "it is not in the interest of OPEC to cut their production whatever the price is," adding that even if prices fell to $20 "it is irrelevant."  Implied, if not explicitly stated, is that Saudi Arabia wants its oil out of the ground, regardless of how thin its profit margin per barrel becomes.

Saudi Arabia is seeing a new and massively changing energy landscape. The U.S. and China have agreed to bilateral carbon reduction targets.  2014 is now officially the hottest year recorded in human history, a record set almost impossibly without the presence of El Nino.  And on January 7 a report released in Nature lays bare the fossil fuel climate change equation by concluding that to achieve anything better than a 50/50 shot at keeping global warming under 2 degrees centigrade (the most widely accepted threshold for avoiding catastrophic climate change) 82% of fossil reserves must remain in the ground.  That report puts hard numbers on the percentages of fossil fuels that must "stay in the ground" and calls for 38% of proven Mideast oil reserves to never to be pumped from the ground.  That 38% represents some 260 billion barrels of oil – worth tens of trillions of dollars – much of that not held in Saudi reserves.

Saudi Arabia no longer needs OPEC.  Global action on carbon dioxide emissions is gaining global acceptance and technological advances are creating foreseeable and viable alternatives to the world's oil dependence

All of these threats to oil use are occurring against a backdrop where the acceleration of costs-effective alternative technologies expands the potential of viable alternatives to our current fossil fuel-based energy economy.  Yamani's prediction no longer seems a fantasy where no one outside of science fiction writers could envision an alternative to the age of oil, but rather a stunningly prescient analysis of the future risk to the value the largest oil reserve on the planet by a man who once managed that reserve.

Saudi Arabia no longer needs OPEC.  Global action on carbon dioxide emissions is gaining global acceptance and technological advances are creating foreseeable and viable alternatives to the world's oil dependence. Saudi Arabia has come to the stark realization, as Yamani foretold, that it is a race to produce, regardless of price, so that it will not be leaving its oil in the ground.  The Kingdom has effectively open the valve on the carbon asset bubble and jumped to be the first to start the race to the end of the age of hydrocarbons by playing its one great advantage – a cost of production so low that it can sell its crude faster and hoping not to find itself at the end of the age of oil holding vast worthless unburnable reserves.

The end of the age of oil, of course, remains many years off (and almost certainly well beyond Yamani's timeline of 2030), but to Saudi Arabia, that end is clearly not so far away that the owner of the largest, most accessible crude resource is willing to continue to subsidize higher prices for other producers at the risk of leaving its own oil untapped one day in the future.

Collateral Fallout

Much has been made of the catastrophic economic consequences to Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other oil exporting nations caused by these low oil prices, as well as, the profound damage to their economies and impending political turmoil.  Meanwhile in the U.S., there has been endless analysis of the impact (or lack of impact) on the nation's resurgent oil production and speculation about the price at which U.S.  production will begin to decline.

Less well documented is the impact on access to capital for drilling operations (and given the disastrous economics of North American coal, perhaps fossil fuel extraction broadly).  Drilling for oil requires huge amounts of capital with a significant appetite for risk, as both production uncertainty and market volatility can undermine the value of investments.  In the current production boom, market volatility was wildly underpriced.  When combined with pent up appetite for yield due to persistently low interest rates, capital, including tremendous amounts of high-yield debt, has flooded into oil companies.  As low crude prices persist there will be substantial losses by investors.  This will cause volatility in crude oil markets to be re-priced, and access to low cost capital will disappear for all but a select group of oil production investments.

There is a much much bigger story unfolding: the carbon asset bubble is deflating

OPEC will continue to meet and hold itself out as a cartel that can control the oil markets, but that time has passed.  The cartel was dependent upon Saudi Arabia to use its outsized swing position to control spare capacity in the market.  With the Saudis no longer interested in that role, the influence of the cartel is gone.  It would be no surprise at all to see Saudi Arabia actually increase production (though how much additional output is readily available is unclear) as prices stabilize and begin to climb later this year because excess capacity will be shed from the market and global economic growth will accelerate.

The direct oil markets impact and the geopolitical fallout will likely be the defining headlines of 2015, but there is a much much bigger story unfolding: the carbon asset bubble is deflating.  The value of effectively every asset class on Earth is influenced by the assumption that a fossil fuel-based economy will persist for so long that any potential for future change to asset values can be ignored.  That assumption is wrong.  The global industrial economy operates on an assumption of available and relatively inexpensive energy, either in the form of electricity or liquid fuels.  If the form, availability of, or cost of, those energy sources changes it will fundamentally change the cost to use and produce virtually every other asset on Earth. And that will necessarily change the value of every one of those assets. There will be both positive and negative impacts, and understanding this change, in both scope and speed, will provide insight on one of the largest wealth shifts ever experienced.

The owner of the most valuable fossil fuel reserve on Earth just started discounting for a future without fossil fuels.  While they would never state this reasoning publicly, their actions speak on their behalf.  And that changes everything.

[Elias Hinckley (@eliashinckley) is a strategic advisor on energy finance and energy policy to investors, energy companies and governments. He is an energy and tax partner with the law firm Sullivan and Worcester where he helps his clients solve the challenges of a changing energy landscape by using his understanding of energy policy, regulation, and markets to quickly and creatively assemble successful energy deals.]

Reprinted with permission.

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