The US Election

Like many I’m sure the result of the US election seems to be catastrophic both for America and for the world and nowhere less than in the area of climate change

How can it be understood?  Obviously one can point to mistakes by the Democrats who failed to mobilize their vote amongst Women, Latinos, the block population and Hilary who at times seemed not to be the actual candidate.

On the other side I’d like to suggest this all starts with Climate Change.  What I’ll call the ‘post truth’ bubble which now envelops much of the American congress, most American republicans and much of ‘middle America’ in addition to increasing swathes of the UK media including parts of the BBC (see for example how the head of Editorial policy is pushing for a post-truth treatment of climate change). This bubble was constructed based on earlier work to hide the dangers of things like smoking by oil and coal company lobbyists such as the Koch brothers and many more.  The goal could be argued to be subvert government policy by effectively surrounding policy makers with a web of untruths. The shameful participation of people from the UK was documented, for example, in Paul Nurse’s Horizon programme where the shameful antics of the likes of James Delingpole are laid bare.

Using this pre-prepared bubble and it’s techniques for undermining truth (by simply having apparently respectable people like Nigel Lawson- himself a prominent disseminator of non-truths about climate change through his web site) spread the misleading information) it was easy to disseminate the untruths propagated by the Trump campaign (and of course the Brexit used the same post-truth structures  and techniques campaign and coincidentally Ukip’s policy is climate change denial).

Climate change deniers also have fall-back argument here when confronted with real scientists – namely the Neoliberal ‘growth’ argument.  This argument essentially says we can ‘grow’ ourselves out of any problem – using theories such as discounted cash flow (DCF).  In these theories the idea is that if your actions today might cause problems in the future – for example carbon emissions might cause climate change, or a nuclear power station might need cleaning up at some point – you can invest a relatively small sum of money now (or some similar financial device) and it will grow (say at 5%) – becoming sufficient to pay off the cost of any mitigation of this problem.  Obviously I don’t need to tell anyone how preposterous this theory is – from the simple maths of a finite planet, the risks involved in such an ‘endowment policy’, and the fact that it’s about cleaning up, not avoiding problems.

The consequence of the Neoliberal argument is that it leads to short-termism because it gives a theory (if not actually put into practice) about how any activity, however harmful, now can be ‘handled’ by growth.  And of course these don’t need to be particularly efficient activity – for example North Dakota looked like a major population centre recently due to the flaring off of extremely useful natural gas in order to exploit fracked on faster.  So fabulous waste as well as ruinous destruction is fully acceptable for Neoliberals.

This leads to the second part of why Trump was able to win.  Because he doesn’t believe in climate change (thinks it’s a hoax created by China to slow the US economy) and subscribes to Neoliberal arguments he has no problem of proposing how to create new jobs and wealth – simply burn more fossil fuels – open up more domestic coal mines – this actually makes sense if we don’t care about our children’s future.

Personally I seriously doubt Trump cares about American workers – but maybe despearate people will clutch at any straw.