INTRODUCTION: BUSINESS AS USUAL
1. Samuel Beckett to Tom Driver, Summer 1961, in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1997), 219.
2. In Hebrew, the word golem means “shapeless, lifeless matter.”
3. The basic constituent of Marxist theory, as Antonio Negri so fittingly remarks, is that “neither the concept of capital nor its historical variants would exist in the absence of a proletariat which, whilst being exploited by capital, is always the living labour that produces it.” See Antonio Negri, “Communism: Some Thoughts on the Concept and Practice,” in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), 156.
4. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002).
6. The name “Anthropocene” is a geological classification and was coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer. There is some debate when the period actually began, with some arguing that it started with industrialization, and others proposing that it commenced after World War II in 1945. For the sake of expediency, I refer to the more widely agreed upon definition that sets the date at the onset of industrialization. See Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Will Steffen, and Paul Crutzen, “The New World of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Science and Technology 44, no. 7 (2010): 2228–2231.
7. Johan Rockstöm, Will Steffen, Kenvin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009), 473.
9. James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (London: Bloomsbury, 2009) is essential reading for those who wish to understand the science of climate change.
10. For an excellent overview of the sociological aspects of climate change, see Joane Nagel, Thomas Dietz, and Jeffrey Broadbent, Workshop on Sociological Perspectives on Climate Change, May 30–31, 2008 (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 2009), at http://ireswb.cc.ku.edu/~crgc/NSFWorkshop/Readings/NSF_WkspReport_09.pdf, accessed July 5, 2011.
11. Johan Rockstöm, Will Steffen, Kenvin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2, art. 32 (2009), 2, at http://www.stockholmresilience.org/download/18.8615c78125078c8d3380002197/ES-2009-3180.pdf, accessed July 1, 2011.
12. David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2002); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
1. CLIMATE CAPITALISM
1. GHGs trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere. They include CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and three fluorinated gases (sulfur hexafluoride, perfluorocarbons, and hydrofluorocarbons). Although GHGs are produced and absorbed through natural cycles such as photosynthesis, it is now widely accepted that an imbalance has occurred as a result of human activities producing more GHG emissions than the earth’s carbon sinks can absorb. See James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Martin L. Parry, Osvaldo F. Canziani, Jean P. Palutikof, Paul J. van der Linden, and Clair E. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
2. IPCC, Climate Change 2007, 1000.
4. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
6. Thomas Heyd pointed out to me that at the March 2009 International Alliance of Research Universities Sciences conference there was agreement that the temperature should not be allowed to exceed even 2°C above preindustrial levels. So the solution that Rajendra Pachauri gives later in this chapter—slowing or reversing climate change through green technologies and green industry—seems to be conservative.
7. The World Bank devised the categories of low-, middle-, and high-income countries to classify countries on the basis of per capita gross national income. The groups are low income, $995 or less; lower-middle income, $996–$3,945; upper-middle income, $3,946–$12,195; and high income, $12,196 or more. These amounts are fixed during the World Bank’s fiscal year. See World Bank, “How We Classify Countries,” n.d., available at http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-classifications, accessed January 11, 2011.
8. Henry Shue, “After You: May Action by the Rich Be Contingent Upon Action by the Poor?” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 343–366.
9. E. Wesley and F. Peterson, “The Ethics of Burden Sharing in the Global Greenhouse,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 11 (1999), 191.
10. Peter Singer, One World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
11. Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2003); and George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2007).
14. Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson, Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Although I share many of Newell and Paterson’s political positions, I am less optimistic than they are that economic growth and the capitalist system can move us in a new direction.
15. Nick Dallas, Green Business Basics: 24 Lessons for Meeting the Challenges of Global Warming (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009); Rajendra Pachauri, speech at the opening ceremony for the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, December 1, 2008, at http://www.ipcc.ch/press/index.htm#, accessed March 4, 2009; and Stern, The Economics of Climate Change.
16. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: Northpoint Press, 2002).
17. L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen, Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 3, 11, 300.
18. The phrase green free market comes from Professor John Shellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and member of the Climate Congress 2009 team. See International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges, and Decisions Congress: Researchers Present Newest Update on Climate Change Science,” press release, June 18, 2009, at http://climatecongress.ku.dk/newsroom/synthesis_report, accessed March 27, 2010.
19. Pachauri, IPCC speech, December 1, 2008.
20. Adrian Parr, Hijacking Sustainability (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
21. Karl Marx explained: “The transformation of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power is the first phase of the movement undergone by the quantum of value which is going to function as capital. It takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second phase of the movement, the process of production, is complete as soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and therefore contains the capital originally advanced plus a surplus-value. These commodities must then be thrown back into the sphere of circulation. They must be sold, their value must be realized in money, this money must be transformed once again into capital, and so on, again and again. This cycle, in which the same phases are continually gone through in succession, forms the circulation of capital.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 709.
22. Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, “China Contributing Two Thirds to Increase in CO2 Emissions,” press release, June 13, 2008, at http://www.pbl.nl/en/news/pressreleases/2008/20080613ChinacontributingtwothirdstoincreaseinCO2emissions.html, accessed February 25, 2010. See also Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, “China Now No.1 in CO2 Emissions; USA in Second Position,” press release, June 19, 2007, at http://www.pbl.nl/en/news/pressreleases/2007/20070619Chinanowno1inCO2emissionsUSAinsecondposition.html, accessed February 25, 2009.
23. Susan Houseman, “Outsourcing, Offshoring, and Productivity Measurement in U.S. Manufacturing,” International Labour Review 146 (2007): 61–80.
24. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
25. Tamsin Blanchard, Green Is the New Black: How to Change the World with Style (New York: William Morrow, 2008).
28. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement Came Into Being and Why No-one Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007).
29. Chris Reidy, “Colgate Will Buy Tom’s of Maine: $100m Deal May Help Boost Sales of Leader in Natural Products Niche,” Boston Globe, March 22, 2006, at http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/22/colgate_will_buy_toms_of_maine, accessed May 1, 2006; Louise Story, “Can Burt’s Bees Turn Clorox Green?” New York Times, January 6, 2008.
30. McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle.
2. GREEN ANGELS OR CARBON COWBOYS?
1. For more on a cost–benefit approach to climate change, see David Maddison, “A Cost–Benefit Analysis of Slowing Climate Change,” Energy Policy 23, nos. 4–5 (1995): 337–346; and William Nordhaus, “The Cost of Slowing Climate Change: A Survey,” Energy Journal 12, no.1 (1991): 37–65.
3. Scientists have calculated the CO2 equivalent of a GHG based on its global-warming potential over a one-hundred-year period. CO2 has a global-warming potential of 1; methane’s potential is 23 times that of CO2; and nitrous oxide’s potential is 296 times that of CO2. Methane and nitrous oxide are therefore commonly described as “low-hanging fruit” because reducing emissions from these gases impacts climate change more than reducing CO2 despite the fact that on a ton-for-ton basis CO2 is causing the most warming. See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Glossary of Climate Change Terms,” n.d., at http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/glossary.html, accessed June 3, 2011.
4. The Kyoto Protocol became legally binding on February 16, 2005.
5. “The Conference of the Parties shall define the relevant principles, modalities, rules and guidelines, in particular for verification, reporting and accountability for emissions trading. The Parties included in Annex B may participate in emissions trading for the purposes of fulfilling their commitments under Article 3. Any such trading shall be supplemental to domestic actions for the purpose of meeting quantified emission limitation and reduction commitments under that Article.” United Nations, Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1998), Art. 17, p. 15, at http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf, accessed May 30, 2011.
6. The JI, as defined in Article 6 of the protocol, “allows a country with an emission reduction or limitation commitment under the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B Party) to earn emission reduction units (ERUs) from an emission-reduction or emission removal project in another Annex B Party, each equivalent to one tonne of CO2, which can be counted towards meeting its Kyoto target.” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “Joint Implementation,” n.d., at http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/mechanisms/joint_implementation/items/1674.php, accessed May 30, 2011.
7. The CDM is defined in Article 12 of the protocol. United Nations, Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 11–12.
8. In these countries, there are CDM-certified projects registered by the CDM Executive Board as of May 30, 2011. See United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “CDM-Certified Projects,” n.d., at http://cdm.unfccc.int/Projects/registered.html, accessed May 30, 2011.
9. Michael Wara, “Is the Global Carbon Market Working?” Nature 445 (February 8, 2007), 595.
11. The CCX was founded by Richard Sandor, an economics professor at Northwestern University, in conjunction with a grant from the Joyce Foundation.
13. The CCX and its affiliates were purchased by IntercontinentalExchange in July 2010.
14. At the 2007 EU Summit, EU leaders agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. In addition, the union committed to receiving 20 percent of all its energy from renewables.
17. For more on selling carbon offsets, see Ricardo Bayon, Amanda Hawn, and Katherine Hamilton, eds., Voluntary Carbon Markets: An International Business Guide to What They Are and How They Work (London: Earthscan, 2009), for which Al Gore wrote the foreword. Among such carbon-offset companies are Atmosfair, Climate Friendly, Climate Care, Native Energy, Carbon Counter, My Climate, eBlue, Green-switch, Green Seat, SilvaTree, and KlimaFa. In addition to everyday individuals, the list of investors in carbon offsets includes the corporate sector, celebrities (Al Gore, Jon Bon Jovi, and members of Coldplay, the Rolling Stones, and the Dixie Chicks, to name a few), and even sovereign states, such as Vatican City.
18. As Michael Jenkins and Ricardo Bayon point out in their introduction to Voluntary Carbon Markets, the U.S. acid rain scheme, when translated into the context of carbon control, does not effectively address the issue of scale. They write: “Protecting one species, one piece of land, one watershed may be important, but it is no longer enough. The solutions today need to be systemic, they need to change the way we do business, the way we eat, drink, sleep and think.” Michael Jenkins and Ricardo Bayon, “Introduction,” in Bayon, Hawn, and Hamilton, eds., Voluntary Carbon Markets, xxi.
19. Wara, “Is the Global Carbon Market Working?” 595, 596.
22. As reported in the Washington Post, “Other groups have looked on the company with less indulgence. The Surface Ocean Lower Atmosphere Study, an international research group, said last month that ‘ocean fertilization will be ineffective and potentially deleterious, and should not be used as a strategy for offsetting CO2 emissions.’ The International Maritime Organization scientific group, the Friends of the Earth and the World Wildlife Fund have condemned it. And a group called the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said its own ship would monitor the Planktos vessel and possibly ‘intercept’ it.” Steven Mufson, “Iron to Plankton to Carbon Credits,” Washington Post, July 20, 2007, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071902553.html, accessed June 4, 2011.
23. Philip Fearnside, Daniel Lashof, and Philip Moura-Costa, “Accounting for Time in Mitigating Global Warming,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 2 (1999): 285–302; Philip Fearnside, “Time Preference in Global Warming Calculations: A Proposal for a Unified Index,” Ecological Economics 41, no. 1 (April 2002): 21–31.
24. Suzlon Energy is the world’s third-largest wind turbine manufacturer.
26. Chris Lang and Timothy Byakola, A Funny Place to Store Carbon: UWA–FACE Foundation’s Tree Planting Project in Mount Elgon National Park, Uganda (Montevideo, Uruguay: World Rainforest Movement, December 30, 2006), at http://chrislang.org/2006/12/30/a-funny-place-to-store-carbon-chapter-3, accessed June 8, 2011. All quotes and material in the subsequent discussion of the Benet and Mount Elgon situation come from this source.
27. I am referring to the Benet as indigenous to the Mount Elgon forest based on the ruling by Justice J. B. Katutsi in the High Court of Uganda on October 27, 2005. He stated that the Benet people “are historical and indigenous inhabitants of the said areas which were declared a Wildlife Protected Area or National Park.” Quoted in ibid.
28. Katherine Hamilton, Milo Sjardin, Molly Peters-Stanley, and Thomas Marcello, State of the Voluntary Carbon Markets 2010 (New York: Ecosystem Marketplace and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, June 14, 2010).
29. World Bank, “Outlook Is for Steady but Slower Growth in 2011 and 2012,” in Global Economic Prospects 2011, a report (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, January 12, 2011), at http://go.worldbank.org/5AYIR3UW70, accessed June 1, 2011.
30. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 138–139.
33. Jenkins and Bayon, “Introduction,” xxii.
34. Marx did not specifically use the term false consciousness; Engels did in a letter to Fran Mehrings. The concept was later developed by the Marxist scholar Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).
35. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 114, 116.
36. Ibid., 117, parentheses added.
38. For more on the incongruities between a green lifestyle and continuing to live a life of high consumption, see Thomas L. Friedman, “Live Bad, Go Green,” New York Times, July 8, 2007; Amy Richardson, “Carbon Credits—Paying to Pollute?” 3rd Degree 2, no. 7 (October 10, 2006), at http://3degree.cci.ecu.edu.au/articles/view/781, accessed June 4, 2011; John Russell, “Are Emissions Offsets a Carbon Con?” Ethical Corporation, April 1, 2007, at http://www.greenbiz.com/news/reviews_third.cfm?NewsID=34804, accessed June 1, 2011.
3. POPULATION
2. I stipulate “human population growth” for the simple reason that at the same time that the number of people on earth is growing, we are also experiencing a mass extinction of species, which is in turn leading to a dramatic biodiversity loss. The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that the current species extinction rate is between one thousand and ten thousand times higher than the background rate. See International Union for the Conservation of Nature, “Species Extinction: The Facts” (Red List), February 26, 2009, at http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/species_extinction_05_2007.pdf, accessed July 6, 2011. Recent reports include: Brian O’Neill, F. Landis MacKellar, and Wolfgang Lutz, Population and Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Martha Campbell, John Cleland, Alex Eze, and Ndola Prata, “Return of the Population Growth Factor,” Science 315, no. 5818 (March 16, 2007): 1501–1502.
4. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 141.
5. This special report is included in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. Martin L. Parry, Osvaldo F. Canziani, Jean P. Palutikof, Paul J. van der Linden, and Clair E. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
6. Lovelock claims that the “root of our problem with the environment” comes from a “lack of constraint on the growth of population.” Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, 141.
8. China’s one-child policy was not consistently implemented. In rural areas, birth rates remained at 2.5 children per female, and in 2002 the government exempted rural areas from the law. The government also sometimes permitted a couple to have another child if their first child was female, in this way reinforcing the cultural bias against girls. The policy does not apply to Hong Kong, Macau, or foreign residents. Other exceptions to the one-child policy are if the first child is disabled, if both parents are from an ethnic minority, if both parents are themselves “single” children, if the couple divorces and the other spouse has not had a child of his or her own, or if the couple lived overseas and returns to live in China but had more than one child while they were residents overseas.
9. Some also claim that the imbalance between the number of Chinese men and the number of women “may have increased mental health problems and socially disruptive behavior among men.” See Terese Hesketh, Li Lu, and Zhu Wei Xing, “The Effects of China’s One-Child Family Policy After 25 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine 353 (September 15, 2005): 1171–1176, at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/353/11/1171, accessed March 31, 2010.
11. David Warwick, Bitter Pills: Population Policies and Their Implementation in Eight Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
12. Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, rev. ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1995). See also Marika Vicziany, “Coercion in a Soft State: The Family Planning Program of India, Part One: The Myth of Voluntarism,” Pacific Affairs 55, no. 3 (1982): 373–402.
13. Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “The Population Explosion: Why We Should Care and What We Should Do About It,” Environmental Law (December 22, 1997): 1187–1208.
14. Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals,” Global Environmental Change 19 (2009): 14–20.
16. John Bongaarts, Brian C. O’Neill, and Stuart R. Gaffin, “Global Warming Policy: Population Left Out in the Cold,” Environment 39, no. 9 (November 1997), 41.
17. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–1248.
18. A well-known thought experiment that tests the premise at the core of Hardin’s position is the prisoner’s dilemma. Players are presented with the following situation. You and your friend are going to commit a crime, and prior to the act you agree that if you are ever caught, you will not betray the other person to the police. The two of you are caught by police and placed in separate holding cells. Neither of you can communicate with the other. The police then present you with the following deal: if you confess to the crime and provide evidence against your friend, who remains silent, you will go free, and your friend will receive the full sentence (ten years). If neither you nor your friend confesses to the crime, both of you will receive a two-year sentence (insufficient evidence for a full sentence). If, however, both you and your friend confess, then each of you will receive a five-year sentence. The question posed to participants of this game is: What would you do? Do you trust your friend to stay quiet and honor the pact the two of you made? Responding to the problem in this way would be the “cooperative” approach. Or do you provide evidence against your friend so that you don’t serve any time and thus act out of self-interest? The dilemma arises when each person has to make a choice on the basis of not fully knowing what the other person will do. The lesson that the game teaches is that individuals usually act out of self-interest when it comes to distributing costs and benefits.
19. Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, 142–143.
20. Quoted in United Nations Population Fund, The State of World Population 2009 (New York: United Nations, 2009), 51, at http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2009, accessed March 31, 2010.
21. In this sense, I share the conclusion arrived at by Betsy Hartmann, who argues that the larger families of the poor are a symptom of “unequal distribution of resources and power.” Hartman, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, 62.
22. For an excellent analysis of ecological entanglement, see Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
23. Leiwen Jiang and Karen Hardee, “How Do Recent Population Trends Matter in Climate Change?” Population Action International 1, no. 1 (April 30, 2009): 7, at http://populationaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/population_trends_climate_change_FINAL.pdf, accessed March 20, 2010. Also of interest is Brian C. O’Neill, Michael Dalton, Regina Fuchs, Leiwen Jiang, Shonali Pachauri, and Katarina Zigova, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 41 (October 12, 2010): 17521–17526.
24. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 69, emphasis in original.
25. Rosi Braidotti, “Feminist Epistemology After Postmodernism: Critiquing Science, Technology, and Globalisation,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (2007), 67.
26. Nancy Fraser has developed a robust theory that argues in favor of pragmatically integrating three dimensions of justice. First, resources have to be equally distributed. Second, we have to tackle the ways in which cultural values work to marginalize women. Third, we need to strive toward achieving parity of participation. See Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).
27. Derrida writes: “A written sign, in the usual sense of the word, is a mark which remains, which is not exhausted in the present of its inscription, and which can give rise to an iteration both in the absence of, and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it.” Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 317. John Searle most famously criticized Derrida’s philosophy as nihilistic.
28. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
29. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 132.
30. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 70, emphasis in the original.
31. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 131.
32. Giovanni Arrighi has criticized Hardt and Negri for having an overly idealistic view of the potentia of the multitude. See Giovanni Arrighi, “Lineages of Empire,” Historical Materialism 10, no. 3 (2002): 3–16.
33. Marx writes: “But was not the caste regime also a particular division of labour? Was not the regime of the guilds another division of labour? And is not the division of labour under the system of manufacture, which in England begins in the middle of the seventeenth century and comes to an end in the last part of the eighteenth, totally different from the division of labour in large-scale modern industry?” Karl Marx to P. V. Annenkov, Brussels, December 28, 1846, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846–1895 (New York: International, 1935), 9.
34. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33.
4. TO BE OR NOT TO BE THIRSTY
1. Christopher L. Sabine, Richard A. Feely, Nicolas Gruber, Robert M. Key, Kitack Lee, John L. Bullister, Rik Wanninkhof, et al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropocentric CO2,” Science 305, no. 5682 (July 2004): 367–371.
2. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “Evidence: Climate Change, How Do We Know?” Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (a NASA online journal), n.d., at http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence, accessed July 2, 2011.
3. Species extinction is currently estimated to be occurring at rate of one hundred to one thousand times more than natural. Species extinction also erodes ecosystem resilience. See Johan Rockstöm, Will Steffen, Kenvin Noone, Åsa Persson, F. Stuart Chapin III, Eric F. Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009), 474. For more on this topic, see International Union for Conservation of Nature, “Wildlife in a Changing World: An Analysis of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,” n.d., at http://data.iucn.org/dbtw-wpd/edocs/RL-2009-001.pdf, accessed July 6, 2011.
4. Meena Palaniappan and Peter H. Gleick, “Peak Water,” in Pacific Institute (Peter H. Gleick and others), The World’s Water 2008–2009: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008), 4–6, at http://www.worldwater.org/data20082009/ch01.pdf, accessed September 1, 2010.
5. “Consumptive uses of water only refer to uses of water that make that water unavailable for immediate or short-term reuse within the same watershed. Such consumptive uses include water that has evaporated, transpired, been incorporated into products or crops, heavily contaminated, or consumed by humans or animals” (Ibid., 7).
6. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Global Environmental Outlook 4: Environment for Development (Malta: UNEP, 2007), 129.
8. It is predicted that the peak in population will be followed by a slight decline that sees the global population level off at 8.97 billion by 2300. See United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division, World Population to 2300 (New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2004), at http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf, accessed May 4, 2010.
11. Ibid., accessed May 5, 2010.
12. Access to improved water not only differs from country to country but changes over time as well.
13. Let us not forget the craze around drinking bottled water. If, as reported in Mother Jones, the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan pours only Fiji bottled water in its dog bowls, I think it safe to say that bottled water is without doubt a “craze.” World Economic Forum Water Initiative, “Managing Our Future Water Needs for Agriculture, Industry, Human Health, and the Environment,” draft for discussion at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, January 2009, 11, at http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_ManagingFutureWater%20Needs_DiscussionDocument_2008.pdf, accessed January 15, 2011.
15. Arjen Y. Hoekstra, Water Neutral: Reducing and Offsetting the Impacts of Water Footprints, Value of Water Research Report Series no. 28, UNESCO IH-E Institute for Water Education (Delft, Netherlands: Delft University of Technology, March 2008), 5.
16. Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis, eds., ¡COCHABAMBA!: Water Wars in Bolivia (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2004); Marcela Olivera, “The Cochabamba Water Wars: Marcela Olivera Reflects on the Tenth Anniversary of the Popular Uprising Against Bechtel and the Privatization of the City’s Water Supply,” interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, April 19, 2010, at http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/19/the_cochabamba_water_wars_marcella_olivera, accessed June 5, 2010.
17. Nick Buxton, “Economic Strings: The Politics of Foreign Debt,” in Jim Schultz and Melissa Crane Draper, eds., Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 174.
18. Jim Schultz and Melissa Crane Draper, “Conclusion,” in Schultz and Draper, eds., Dignity and Defiance, 293. As the chief trade negotiator for the Morales administration in Bolivia, Pablo Solón explained, “‘Free’ trade and debt are two sides of the same coin. Debt was used to impose structural adjustment programs that sought to privatize and generate benefits for multinational companies. Free trade agreements are used to lock in the rules to benefit multinationals. In some ways it is easier to get out of debt by paying it off, as Argentina has done, than it is to extract yourself from commitments within free trade agreements.” Quoted in Buxton, “Economic Strings,” 175.
19. Kenneth Surin pointed out to me that the privatization of water resources can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when the English industrial centers of Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester pumped water from Welsh lakes to meet their industrial needs.
20. Center for Public Integrity and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Promoting Privatization (Washington, D.C.: Center for Public Integrity and International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 2003), at http://projects.publicintegrity.org/water/report.aspx?aid=45, accessed May 10, 2010.
21. World Bank, Water Resources Management: A World Bank Policy Paper (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1993). Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke predict the growth of a water cartel that consists of transnational corporations, the World Bank, and governments. See Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (New York: New Press, 2002).
22. Center for Public Integrity, Promoting Privatization.
24. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (New York: Plume, 2006), 20–21.
25. Barlow and Clarke, Blue Gold.
27. For a detailed discussion of this situation, see Erik Swyngedouw, “Dispossessing H2O: The Contested Terrain of Water Privatization,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16, no. 1 (March 2005), 89.
28. The notion of the commons can be traced back to the British idea of Crown Land and systems of management used for land held in common as outlined in the British Charter of the Forest (first issued in 1217). Although not mentioned in Hardt and Negri’s book Commonwealth, it is important to point out that the idea of a “common wealth” was established for the protection of common pastures, as discussed in David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2002). For more on this history, see Peter Linbaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
29. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), xiv.
30. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
31. For the use of game theory in analyzing the commons, see T. R. Lewis and J. Cowens, Cooperation in the Commons: An Application of Repetitious Rivalry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1983).
32. Elinor Ostrom, “Public Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Ground Water Basin Management,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1965.
33. William Blomquist and Elinor Ostrom, “Institutional Capacity and the Resolution of a Commons Dilemma,” Policy Studies Journal 5, no. 2 (1985): 383–393.
34. Elinor Ostrom, James Walker, and Roy Gardner, Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
35. Elinor Ostrom, James Walker, and Roy Gardner, “Covenants with and Without a Sword: Self-Governance Is Possible,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 (June 1992), 404.
36. Ostrom has more recently been studying the role of trust in endogenous institutional arrangements, in particular those that assign property rights. See James C. Cox, Elinor Ostrom, James M. Walker, Antonio Jamie Castillo, Eric Coleman, Robert Holahan, Michael Schoon, and Brian Steed, “Trust in Private and Common Property Experiments,” Southern Economic Journal 75 no. 4 (2009): 957–975.
37. “The nations with the largest net water loss are the USA (92 Gm3/yr), Australia (57 Gm3/yr), Argentina (47 Gm3/yr), Canada (43 Gm3/yr), Brazil (36 Gm3/yr) and Thailand (26 Gm3/yr)…. The main products behind the national water loss from the USA are oil-bearing crops and cereal crops.” A. K. Chapagain, A. Y. Hoekstra, and H. G. Savenije, “Water Saving Through International Trade of Agricultural Products,” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 10 (2006), 460, at http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Chapagain_et_al_2006.pdf, accessed January 15, 2011.
38. Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “A Review of Research on Saving Water Through International Trade, National Water Dependencies, and Sustainability of Water Footprints,” in Virtual Water Trade: Documentation of an International Expert Workshop July 3–4, 2006 (Frankfurt am Main: Institute for Social-Ecological Research, 2006), 13.
39. See Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007).
40. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 137, viii, 288, emphasis in the original.
41. Karl Marx to Kugelman (first name unknown), London, July 11, 1868, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence 1846–1895 (New York: International, 1935), 246, emphasis in original.
43. This idea of equal representation is the third tier of Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice (alongside recognition and redistribution). It is also at the heart of Jacques Rancière’s definition of democracy as equality and of his argument that politics commences when the unrepresented disrupts the dominant political order. See Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
44. David Harvey’s tripartite notion of a complex geography—spatiotemporality, environment, and places and regions—has been especially helpful for my analysis here because it invites us to address critically how vertical and horizontal lines of governance are produced and at what scale. See David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 85.
45. Refer to table 5.2 in Arjen Y. Hoekstra and Ashok K. Chapagain, Globalization of Water: Sharing the Planet’s Freshwater Resources (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), and “Access to Safe Drinking Water by Country,” in Pacific Institute (Peter H. Gleick and others), The World’s Water 2008–2009: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources, data table 3 (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008), 214 and 217, at http://www.worldwater.org/data20082009/Table3.pdf, accessed May 5, 2010.
46. I address this process of signification in the chapter on slums in my book Hijacking Sustainability (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
47. These issues regarding desalination are identified as serious areas of concern in Heather Cooley, Peter H. Gleick, and Gary Wolff, Desalination, with a Grain of Salt: A California Perspective (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific Institute, June 2006).
48. As Marx noted, “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of capital.” Karl Marx, Wage-Labor and Capital, trans. Friedrich Engels (New York: International, 1933), 30.
49. Cooley, Gleick, and Wolff, Desalination, 11–12.
52. At the end of Governing the Commons, Ostrom briefly recognizes that the majority of her book has not “addressed the individual differences that exist among individuals involved in an institutional-choice situation.” She admits: “Benefits and costs have to be discovered and weighed by individuals using human judgment in highly uncertain and complex situations that are made even more complex to the extent that others behave strategically.” Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 210.
53. Cathy Green and Sally Baden, Gender Issues in Water and Sanitation Projects in Mali, briefing commissioned by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (Sussex, U.K.: IDS, Bridge, 1994).
54. Fraser, Justice Interruptus.
55. T. Van Ingen and C. Kawau, Involvement of Women in Planning and Management in Tanga Region, Tanzania (Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Conservation Union, 2003).
56. Theorists clearly situated in the camp that favors state regulation include Naomi Klein and David Harvey.
57. C. Rodriguez, Water Management in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Washington, D.C.: Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the United States, March 2010).
59. The idea of moving beyond the egoism of limited partialities and natural rights to the invention of a generous society is at the core of Deleuze’s discussion of David Hume’s empiricism. See Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 46–47.
5. SOUNDING THE ALARM ON HUNGER
1. Billy Walters, interviewed by Lara Logan, 60 Minutes, CBS, January 16, 2011.
2. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crisis (Rome: UN FAO, 2010), at http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en, accessed July 10, 2011.
3. Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008), 25–31.
5. Jarrod R. Welch, Jeffrey R. Vincent, Maximilian Auffhammer, Piedad F. Moya, Achim Dobermann, and David Dawe, “Rice Yields in Tropical/Subtropical Asia Exhibit Large but Opposing Sensitivities to Minimum and Maximum Temperatures,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 33 (August 17, 2010): 14562–14567.
6. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Stephen P. Long, Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Josef Nösberger, and Donald R. Ort, “Food For Thought: Lower-Than-Expected Crop Yield Stimulation with Rising CO2 Concentrations,” Science 312 (June 30, 2006): 1918–1921.
7. Liliana Hisas, The Food Gap: The Impacts of Climate Change on Food Production: A 2020 Perspective (Alexandria, Va.: Fundación Ecológica Universal U.S., January 2011), iii, at http://www.feu-us.org/images/The_Food_Gap.pdf, accessed July 9, 2011.
8. Aiguo Dai, “Drought Under Global Warming: A Review,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2, no. 1 (January–February 2011), 50.
10. Brian Fagan, The Great Climate Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
11. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Climate Change and Food Security: A Framework Document (Rome: UN FAO, 2008), 9.
12. WHO, Protecting Health from Climate Change, 7.
14. Quoted in UN FAO, Climate Change and Food Security, 3.
16. Christoph Bals, Sven Harmeling, and Michael Windfuhr, Climate Change, Food Security, and the Right to Adequate Food (Stuttgart: Diakonisches Werk, 2008), 24.
17. WHO, Protecting Health from Climate Change, 2.
19. UN FAO, Climate Change and Food Security, 42.
20. J. Dumanski, R. Peiretti, J. R. Benites, D. McGarry, and C. Pieri, “The Paradigm of Conservation Agriculture,” Proceedings of the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation, Paper no. P1-7 (August 31, 2006), 59.
21. Adam Barclay, “Conserving the Future,” Rice Today 5, no. 4 (October–December 2006), 22.
22. A. Ismail and B. Manneh, “Benin: Africa Component of STRASA Project Launches Second Phase,” STRASA News 4, nos. 1–2 (June 2011): 5–6.
23. R. M. Baltazar and M. H. Dar, “Stress-Tolerant Rice Seeds Get a Boost with NGO Multiplication in West Bengal,” STRASA News 4, nos. 1–2 (June 2011): 6–8.
24. See also Debal Deb, Beyond Developmentality: Constructing Inclusive Freedom and Sustainability (London: Earthscan, 2009).
25. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2007), 139.
26. A conversation between Debal Deb and me took place on Thursday, July 21, 2011, in which Dr. Deb recounted several instances of assault and harassment.
27. Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1997), 7.
28. “In relation to health, a rights-based approach means integrating human rights norms and principles in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of health-related policies and programmes. These include human dignity, attention to the needs and rights of vulnerable groups, and an emphasis on ensuring that health systems are made accessible to all. The principle of equality and freedom from discrimination is central, including discrimination on the basis of sex and gender roles. Integrating human rights into development also means empowering poor people, ensuring their participation in decision-making processes which concern them and incorporating accountability mechanisms which they can access.” WHO, “Human Rights–Based Approach to Health,” at http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story054/en/index.html, under “Trade, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and Health,” accessed July 8, 2011.
34. Lester R. Brown, Biofuels Blunder: Massive Diversion of U.S. Grain to Fuel Cars in Raising World Food Prices, Risking Political Instability, briefing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, 108th Cong., 1st sess., June 13, 2003, made available by the Earth Policy Institute at http://www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/senateepw07, accessed July 8, 2011.
36. Pimentel and Patzek summarize their findings thus:
Findings in terms of energy outputs compared with the energy inputs were:
• Ethanol production using corn grain required 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Ethanol production using switchgrass required 50% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Ethanol production using wood biomass required 57% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Biodiesel production using soybean required 27% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced ([n]ote, the energy yield from soy oil per hectare is far lower than the ethanol yield from corn).
• Biodiesel production using sunflower required 118% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced.
See David Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, “Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower,” Natural Resources Research 14, no. 1 (March 2005), 65.
39. National Corn Growers Association, Understanding the Impact of Higher Corn Prices on Consumer Food Prices (Chesterfield, Mo.: National Corn Growers Association, March 26, 2007), at http://eerc.ra.utk.edu/etcfc/sefix/dos/FoodCornPrices.pdf, accessed July 8, 2011; and Roig-Franzia, “A Culinary and Cultural Staple in Crisis.”
6. ANIMAL PHARM
1. Agricultural Statistics Board, National Agriculture Statistics Services, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Poultry Slaughter 2009 Summary,” February 2010, at http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/PoulSlauSu/PoulSlauSu-02-25-2010.pdf, accessed September 30, 2010; Agricultural Statistics Board, National Agriculture Statistics Services, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Livestock Slaughter 2009 Summary,” April 2010, at http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/LiveSlauSu/LiveSlauSu-04-29-2010.pdf, accessed September 30, 2010.
2. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.
3. Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and Cees de Haan, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006), xxi.
4. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lecture at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241.
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 135–150; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
6. Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Belmont, Calif.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003), 158.
9. Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review 56 (March–April 2009), 98–99.
12. Floyd Norris, “Off the Charts: In ’08 Downturn, Some Managed to Eke Out Millions,” New York Times, July 24, 2010.
13. The term income refers to earnings from work, rents, interest, dividends, and royalties.
14. Edward N. Wolff, Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze—an Update to 2007, Working Paper no. 589 (Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Levy Economics Institute, Bard College, March 2010), at http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf, accessed September 12, 2010.
15. This argument is one that Agamben makes. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 125–127.
16. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review, 1975).
17. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Regan’s argument is also one that is used by antiabortionists (of which Regan is one) who on the same grounds claim that the fetus’s right to life trumps the woman’s right to decide what happens in and to her own body.
18. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist–Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990). Aviva Cantor has also studied the linguistic connections between the oppression of women and the oppression of animals. See Aviva Cantor, “The Club, the Yoke, and the Leash: What We Can Learn from the Way a Culture Treats Animals,” Ms. 12, no. 2 (August 1983): 27–29. Another fascinating ecofeminist study that has contributed to this field is Greta Gaard, “Vegetarian Ecofeminism: A Review Essay,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 117–146.
19. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, 202.
20. Marti Kheel, Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 3.
21. Bob Torres, Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2007), 27.
23. In an effort to respond to these inconsistencies, Marti Kheel eats a raw-food diet.
24. Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2009).
25. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 410, emphasis in original.
26. Michael Broadway, “Meatpacking and the Transformation of Rural Communities: A Comparison of Brooks, Alberta, and Garden City, Kansas,” Rural Sociology 72, no. 4 (December 2007), 563.
27. U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Workplace Safety in the Meat and Poultry Industry, While Improving, Could Be Further Strengthened, a report to the Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GAO, January 2005). See also Jennifer Dillard, “A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress Through Legal Reform,” Geography Journal on Poverty Law & Policy 15, no. 2 (Summer 2008), 392.
28. Large slaughterhouses have grown, and from 1974 to 1997 the number of smaller plants decreased by nine hundred: “[From] 1974 to 1997 the number of packing houses employing more than a 1000 workers doubled from 24 to 48. During the same period, plants employing less than a 1000 workers dropped by over 900, and total industry employment fell by nearly 21,000 workers.” Broadway, “Meatpacking,” 562.
29. Hester J. Lipscomb, Robin Argue, Mary Anne McDonald, John M. Dement, Carol A. Epling, Tamara James, Steve Wing, and Dana Loomis, “Exploration of Work and Health Disparities Among Black Women Employed in Poultry Processing in the Rural South,” Environmental Health Perspectives 113, no. 12 (December 2005), 1834, at http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.7912, accessed June 1, 2011.
30. U.S. GAO, Workplace Safety in the Meat and Poultry Industry, 3.
31. Sara A. Quandt, Joseph G. Grzywacz, Antonio Marin, Lourdes Carrillo, Michael L. Coates, Bless Burke, and Thomas A. Arcury, “Illnesses and Injuries Reported by Latino Poultry Workers in Western North Carolina,” American Journal of Industrial Medicine 49 (2006), 349.
32. The culture of violence among slaughterhouse workers has led Jennifer Dillard to make a strong case in favor of treating slaughterhouse workers for post-traumatic disorder. See Dillard, “A Slaughterhouse Nightmare.”
33. Quoted in ibid., 402–403.
34. In 2005, the U.S. GAO reported that 43 percent of the workers in the meat and poultry industry were younger than age thirty-five. In addition, 65 percent of the workforce were male. U.S. GAO, Workplace Safety in the Meat and Poultry Industry, 3.
35. Amy Fitzgerald, “Spill-Over from ‘The Jungle’ into the Larger Community: Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates,” 22, paper presented at the 2007 American Sociological Association annual meeting, August 11, 2007, New York City, at http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/8/3/0/1/pages183018/p183018-24.php, accessed September 27, 2010. On the connection between slaughterhouse workers and domestic violence, see Gail Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhuman Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997). In their study of the industrialization of meat- and poultry-production systems, Donald Stull and Michael Broadway found that when “farm size increases, so does rural poverty.” Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues, 149.
36. Jamie Fellner and Lance Compa, Immigrant Workers in the United States Meat and Poultry Industry (New York: Human Rights Watch, December 15, 2005), 9–10.
39. Quandt et al., “Illnesses and Injuries,” 349.
40. Clifton B. Luttrell, The High Cost of Farm Welfare (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1989), 58.
41. B. Delworth Gardner and Carole Frank Nuckton, “Factors Affecting Agricultural Land Prices,” California Agriculture (1979): 4–6.
42. Steve Huntley, “Winter of Despair Hits the Farm Belt,” U.S. News & World Report 100 (January 20, 1986): 21–23; Bob McBride, “Broken Heartland: Farm Crisis in the Midwest,” The Nation 242 (February 8, 1986): 132–133.
43. A finding by the Economic Research Service further confirms this thesis: “The amount of debt held by farm operators has increased substantially since 1990 … [becoming] concentrated in fewer farm businesses.” See J. Michael Harris, James Johnson, John Dillard, Robert Williams, and Robert Dubman, The Debt Finance Landscape for U.S. Farming and Farm Businesses, a report from the Economic Research Service, AIS-87 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, November 2009), 1; the quote in the text also comes from this source (p. 1).
44. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 132–136.
45. From 1982 to 1997, the swine industry in North Carolina increased the number of hogs it produced fivefold, all the while reducing the number of farms from approximately eleven thousand to three thousand. See Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues, 58.
48. For a terrific ecofeminist analysis of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), see Greta Gaard, “Milking Mother Nature: An Ecofeminist Critique of rBGH,” The Ecologist 24, no. 6 (November–December 1994): 202–203.
49. Dolly was euthanized on February 14, 2006, after suffering from lung cancer and arthritis.
51. S. M. Willadsen, R. E. Janzen, R. J. McAlister, B. F. Shea, G. Hamilton, and D. McDermand, “The Viability of Late Morulae and Blastocysts Produced by Nuclear Transplantation in Cattle,” Theriogenology 35, no. 1 (January 1991): 161–170.
53. “The procedure of somatic cloning is associated with important losses during pregnancy and in the perinatal period, reducing the overall efficacy to less than 5% in most cases. A mean of 30% of the cloned calves die before reaching 6 months of age with a wide range of pathologies, including, for the most common, respiratory failure, abnormal kidney development, liver steatosis. Heart and liver weight in relation to body weight are also increased.” P. Chavatte-Palmer, D. Remy, N. Cordonnier, C. Richard, H. Issenman, P. Laigre, Y. Heyman, and J. P. Mialot, “Health Status of Cloned Cattle at Different Ages,” Cloning Stem Cells 6, no. 2 (August 2004), 94. Other reports that raise red flags regarding the health of milk and meat from cloned animals are: National Academy of Sciences, Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Animal Biotechnology: Science Based Concerns (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2002); Merritt McKinney, “Flawed Genetic ‘Marking’ Seen in Cloned Animals,” Reuters Health, May 29, 2001.
54. Although the Bayh–Dole Act is credited with stimulating university–industry collaborations, it did not result in the democratization of research findings. Instead, it led to the mass privatization of public-research outcomes. The declining state and increasing cost of health care in the United States is a case in point. In 2009, the Center for American Progress reported on the failing U.S. health-care system, noting that the cost of health care per person has more than doubled since 1994. It also noted that consumer inflation has averaged 2.6 percent per year; since 1994, per person health-care expenditure in the country has on average risen 5.5 percent per year. Research Foundation Technology Transfer Office, Colorado State University, “What Is Bayh–Dole and Why Is It Important to Technology Transfer?” October 1999, at http://www.csurf.org/enews/bayhdole_403.html, accessed October 2, 2010; and Center for American Progress and Ben Furnas, “American Health Care Since 1994: The Unacceptable Status Quo,” January 8, 2009, at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/01/health_since_1994.html, accessed October 2, 2010. For a detailed analysis of the impact of the Bayh–Dole Act on university research in the United States and the commercialization of university research, see David C. Mowery, Richard R. Nelson, Bhaven N. Sampat, and Arvids A. Ziedonis, “The Effects of the Bayh–Dole Act on U.S. University Research and Technology Transfer: An Analysis of Data from Columbia University, the University of California, and Stanford University,” paper presented at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, September 10–12, 1998.
56. As reported by the Colorado State University Research Foundation, “The Bayh–Dole act is also vital to the university as a whole. University gross licensing revenues exceeded $200M in 1991 and by 1992 that number had risen to $250M. In FY 2000, U.S. and Canadian institution and universities Gross Licensing Income is reported in the AUTM survey at $1.26 Billion.” Research Foundation Technology Transfer Office, “What Is Bayh–Dole?”
60. Diane Martindale, “Burgers on the Brain,” New Scientist 177, no. 2380 (February 1, 2003): 26–29.
61. “According to national studies, lunches meet requirements for nutrients such as protein, vitamins, calcium, and iron, but do not meet the required 30 percent limit for calories from fat.” See U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), School Lunch Program: Efforts Needed to Improve Nutrition and Encourage Healthy Eating (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GAO, May 2003).
65. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 122.
66. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2007), 1.
67. Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing (New York: Picador, 2009), 44–66.
68. Barbara Godoftas, “To Make a Tender Chicken,” Dollars & Sense (July–August 2002): 14–30.
69. As noted by Heather Lipscomb and her colleagues, modern U.S. poultry-processing plants employ “large numbers of black and Hispanic women.” Lipscomb et al., “Exploration of Work and Health Disparities,” 1834.
70. These ideas are drawn heavily from the work of feminist philosopher of corporeality Elizabeth Grosz. See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
71. Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow, xxi.
72. Grosz, Volatile Bodies.
73. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 133, emphasis in original.
7. MODERN FEELING AND THE GREEN CITY
1. Richard M. Daley’s father, Richard J. Daley, was mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976.
3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 310.
4. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 333.
6. Irving Mintzer, J. Amber Leonard, and Iván Dario Valencia, Counting the Gigatonnes: Building Trust in Greenhouse Gas Inventories from the United States and China (Washington, D.C.: World Wildlife Fund, June 2010, revised September 2010), vi.
7. Refer to figure 2.2 in United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges, and Opportunities (Malta: UNEP, 2007), 5.
9. I have chosen the term green cities for the sake of expediency. Many other terms by and large refer to the same thing—ecocity, sustainable city, environmentally friendly city.
10. The main energy source for high- and middle-income areas is fossil fuels. In low-income areas such as rural India and China and in the African nations, it is usually biomass (animal dung, wood, crop waste), kerosene, and paraffin. Many poor rural communities in low- and middle-income countries rely on wood for cooking purposes. This practice unfortunately contributes to the problem of desertification and deforestation (forest are important carbon sinks) as well as to health problems from the inhalation of smoke.
13. The USGBC was founded by Mike Italiano, David Gottfried, and Rick Fedrizzi.
14. Michael Zaretsky, “LEED After Ten Years,” in Adrian Parr and Michael Zaretsky, eds., New Directions in Sustainable Design (London: Routledge, 2010), 191.
16. The USGBC mission statement is quoted in ibid., 192.
18. Congress of New Urbanism, “The Charter of the New Urbanism,” 1996, at http://www.cnu.org/charter, accessed April 20, 2011. See also Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993); Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Towns and Town-Making Principles (New York: Rizzoli, 1991); and Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).
19. Michael Sorkin, “Can New Urbanism Learn from Modernism’s Mistakes?” Metropolis 18, no. 1 (August–September 1998), 39.
21. Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1979); Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—a Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (August 1988): 227–241.
22. Quoted in William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 3–4.
23. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992).
25. Loretta Lees, “Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?” Urban Studies 45, no. 12 (November 2008), 2449.
26. Pauline Lipman, “The Cultural Politics of Mixed-Income Schools and Housing: A Racialized Discourse of Displacement, Exclusion, and Control,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2009), 218.
29. Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 9. For a critique of Jencks, see Katherine Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (May 1991): 163–171.
30. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
31. Saskia Sassen, “A Global City,” in Charles Madigan, ed., Global Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 34.
32. Adele Simmons, “Introduction,” in Madigan, ed., Global Chicago, 7–8, 14, emphasis added.
33. Douglas Farr, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008).
38. “Crime Statistics,” CityRating, n.d., at http://www.cityrating.com/citycrime.asp?city=Chicago&state=IL, accessed April 6, 2011. On the deepening pattern of wage inequality throughout Chicago, see Marc Doussard, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore, “After Deindustrialization: Uneven Growth and Economic Inequality in ‘Postindustrial’ Chicago,” Economic Geography 85, no. 2 (2009): 183–207.
39. Labor figures can be found in Doussard, Peck, and Theodore, “After Deindustrialization,” 201, and are based on Chicago wage statistics from 1983 to 2004.
40. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seems, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1977), 250.
41. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
43. Dick Simpson and Tom M. Kelly, “The New Chicago School of Urbanism and the New Daley Machine,” Urban Affairs Review 44, no. 2 (November 2008), 232.
44. Lipman, “The Cultural Politics of Mixed-Income Schools and Housing,” 218.
45. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 137.
48. David Harvey, Limits to Capital, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 83.
8. SPILL, BABY, SPILL
2. Anthony Lake, Christine Todd Whitman, Princeton N. Lyman, and J. Stephen Morrison, More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2006), xiii.
3. George W. Bush, President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) (Washington, D.C.: White House, 2003), at http://www.avert.org/pepfar.htm, accessed June 23, 2011.
4. In 2008, BP produced 271.4 million barrels of oil for the United States. See U.S. Energy Information Administration, Oil: Crude and Petroleum Products Explained (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2010), 6, at http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_home#tab2, accessed June 22, 2011.
5. See, among other sources on the connection between oil and violence, Amnesty International, Oil in Sudan (London: Amnesty International, 2001); Larry Everest, Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (New York: Common Courage Press, 2003); Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Francisco Parra, Oil Politics: A Modern History of Petroleum (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2004).
6. John M. Broder, “Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Drilling for First Time,” New York Times, March 31, 2010.
7. “Oil Spill Alters Views on Environmental Protection,” Gallup Poll, May 27, 2010, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/137882/oil-spill-alters-views-environmental-protection.aspx, accessed June 22, 2011. It is interesting to compare data reported in a May 27, 2010, poll with data from a poll taken in April just prior to the spill. See Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans Prioritize Energy Over the Environment for the First Time,” Gallup Poll, April 6, 2010, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/127220/Americans-Prioritize-Energy-Environment-First-Time.aspx, accessed June 22, 2011.
8. Andrew J. Hoffman and P. Devereaux Jennings, “The BP Oil Spill as a Cultural Anomaly? Institutional Context, Conflict, and Change,” Journal of Management Inquiry 20, no. 2 (2011), 101.
9. That is, the violence of shock can be defused unless, as Slavoj Žižek so fittingly remarks in his use of Hegel, “there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing…. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity…. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.” Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 61.
10. Hoffman and Jennings, “The BP Oil Spill,” 109.
12. Sigmund Freud first used the term disavowal (Verleugnung) in 1914 in the Wolf Man case study.
13. William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling, Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 7.
14. Žižek’s work on the condition of alterity posed by the violence of an event is especially helpful in my thinking here. He writes: “Though it may appear that there is a contradiction between the way discourse constitutes the very core of the subject’s identity and the notion of this core as an unfathomable abyss beyond the ‘wall of language,’ there is a simple solution to this apparent paradox. The ‘wall of language’ which forever separates me from the abyss of another subject is simultaneously that which opens up and sustains the abyss—the very obstacle that separates me from the Beyond is what creates its mirage.” Žižek, Violence, 73.
16. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).
17. In this part of the discussion, I am leaning on Rancière’s concept of le partage de sensible (distribution or partition or sharing of the sensible). Such an interruption into everyday life completely reconfigures the sensible field people share in common with others around the world. By “sensible,” Rancière means that which can be apprehended through perception and the senses. The rules, regimes, and hierarchies that constitute the social landscape distribute the sensible as much as aesthetics dislodges the sensible from these configurations, producing openings through which the previously excluded emerges into view. The image of ecological disaster, as Rancière noticed in the work of Flaubert, “asserts a molecular equality of affects that stands in opposition to the molar equality of subjects constructing a democratic political scene.” Aesthetics, as sensory togetherness, is intrinsic to democratic politics because as the sensorium transmits the political energies of the social field, democracy takes on new meaning: it is “a form for constructing dissensus over ‘the given’ of public life.” Jacques Rancière, “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art: Jacques Rancière in Interview with Gabriel Rockhill,” in The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 56.
18. The incentive behind the Oil Pollution Act came from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, which was not long thereafter followed by oil spills off Rhode Island, the Delaware River, and the Houston Ship Channel within a three-month period. For more on the legal ramifications of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, see Robert Force, Martin Davies, and Joshua S. Force, “Deepwater Horizon: Removal Costs, Civil Damages, Crimes, Civil Penalties, and State Remedies in Oil Spill Cases,” Tulane Law Review 85, no. 4 (March 2011): 889–982.
19. I should point out that I use the term nature reservedly, even ironically here, as a way to parenthesize the quasi-mystical view of nature as the backdrop for human activity and as an entity that exemplifies an image of harmony and purity in contradistinction to the artificial and alienated existence of human beings (especially Westerners).
20. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. Note that, for Marx, “men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2, trans. and ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), 146.
21. Timothy J. Crone and Maya Tolstoy, “Magnitude of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak,” Science 330, no. 6004 (October 2010), 634.
23. Hussein Mahdavy developed the meaning of the term rentier state forty years ago in “The Patterns and Problems of Economic Development in Rentier States: The Case of Iran,” in M. A. Cook, ed., Studies in Economic History of the Middle East, 428–467 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
24. See Hazem Bablawi and Giacomo Luciani, eds., The Rentier State (New York: Croom Helm, 1987); John Clark, “Petro-Politics in Congo,” Journal of Democracy 8, no. 3 (July 1997): 62–76; Douglas A. Yates, The Rentier State in Africa: Oil Rent Dependency and Neocolonialism in the Republic of Gabon (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996); and Kenneth Surin, “The Politics of the Southeast Asian Smog Crisis: A Classic Case of Rentier Capitalism at Work?” in Adrian Parr and Michael Zaretsky, eds., New Directions in Sustainable Design, 137–151 (London: Routledge, 2010).
25. For an excellent quantitative analysis of this phenomenon, see Michael Lewin Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics 53, no. 3 (April 2001): 325–361.
26. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, U.S. Committee Mid Year Country Report—Sudan (Geneva: UNHCR, October 2, 2001), at http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,USCRI,,SDN,456d621e2,3c56c1161c,0.html, accessed June 23, 2011.
28. In 1980, the Numeiri government changed the North/South border, bringing the “oil provinces under central government jurisdiction, effectively disenfranchising the South.” Gaafar Numeiri was removed from power when popular opposition to his government mounted; the democratically elected government was eventually ousted, though, after a military coup in 1989 under the leadership of General Omar al-Bashir. Jason Switzer, Oil and Violence in Sudan (Winnipeg: International Institute for Sustainable Development and International Union for Conservation of Nature–World Conservation Union Commission on Environmental, Economic, and Social Policy, April 15, 2002), 6.
30. Michael Watts, Imperial Oil: The Anatomy of a Nigerian Oil Insurgency, Economies of Violence Working Papers, Working Paper no. 17 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 2008), 3, 11, 15.
32. Maureen Hoch, “New Estimate Puts Gulf Oil Leak at 205 Million Gallons,” PBS Newshour, August 2, 2010, at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/08/new-estimate-puts-oil-leak-at-49-million-barrels.html, accessed June 17, 2011. Data through 2009 for 217 countries indicate that the United States ranked number one in the world for oil consumption, consuming 18,771,000 barrels a day. China was ranked second, consuming approximately 8,300,000 barrels a day. See U.S. Energy Information Administration, Oil Consumption (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2009), at http://www.eia.gov/countries/index.cfm?view=consumption, accessed June 23, 2011.
35. See Lydia Saad, “Americans’ Worries About Economy, Budget Top Other Issues,” Gallup Poll, March 21, 2011, at http://www.gallup.com/poll/146708/Americans-Worries-Economy-Budget-Top-Issues.aspx, accessed June 22, 2011. The list of issues in order of ranking from highest to lowest were: environment, federal spending and the budget deficit, availability and affordability of health care, unemployment, Social Security system, size and power of the federal government, availability and affordability of energy, crime and violence, illegal immigration, hunger and homelessness, possibility of future terrorist attacks in the United States, drug use, quality of the environment, and race relations.
AFTERWORD: IN THE DANGER ZONE
1. This joke by stand-up comedian Mort Sahl is well known in the Jewish community.
2. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crisis (Rome: UN FAO, 2010), 8, at http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i1683e/i1683e.pdf, accessed July 1, 2011; Kevin Watkins, Summary Human Development Report 2005 (New York: United Nations Development Program, 2005), 18.
3. I thank my father, Mike Parr, whose views on climate changed helped shape my discussion here.
4. Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011), 128, emphasis in the original.
6. Although the goal of this book has not been to provide a blueprint for change (several other books out there do this in a more informed way than my training allows), I can at least announce where I stand on the issue. I say stop the endless back and forth over whether to institute binding global agreements on emissions reductions or not and move ahead in disagreement. Ensure that GHG concentration in the atmosphere peaks by 2015 and remains at a global mean of less than 350 ppm CO2e (as advised by Dr. James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; “CO2e” refers to “all the main greenhouse gases converted into their equivalents in impact to CO2, the key greenhouse gas of concern” [Gilding, The Great Disruption, 127]). Introduce a flat carbon tax the world over and apply serious penalties for those who do not comply. Keep fossil fuels in the ground. Revise immigration laws the world over in preparation for the mass exodus of environmental refugees. Governance on the basis of economic strength has to stop. Longer election cycles, especially in the United States, are needed to foster greater commitment toward long-term outcomes and more accountability. Social protection mechanisms have to be instituted across the board. Bring in annual restrictions on air miles traveled. Set up extensive public-transportation systems between and within all the world’s metropolitan regions, and mandate a limit of one car per household. Introduce meat rationing. And last but not least, stop the privatization of the commons. On the topic of where we need to be with regard to GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, see James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, David Beerling, Robert Berner, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Mark Pagani, Maureen Raymo, Dana L. Royer, and James C. Zachos, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” address to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, October 15, 2008, at http://arxiv.org/pdf/0804.1126v3, accessed June 30, 2011.