Pirate's Cove

The subhead on this is great, though it doesn’t stand up to the call for an authoritarian style government

The Case for a Coercive Green New Deal
Only a massive, democratically elected administrative apparatus can stop climate change.

Perhaps the very far left The Nation means for a government democratically elected should become authoritarian, then be democratic like Saddam Hussein’s type of voting, or the Nazis. Stick with me for a long excerpt to make it perfectly clear their intentions

At its best, Earth was once likened to a spaceship that sails through the heavens with a crew working together for the common good. Thanks to climate change, this metaphor no longer works. Our planet is now more like a lifeboat that’s sprung a major leak. People onboard are beginning to panic and the clock is ticking.

It is, however, the perfect environment to test out the best way to deal with life-and-death situations.

For such a test, imagine not one but two lifeboats of survivors bobbing in an endless, empty sea. Both contain the same number of people and a limited amount of food. Based on some educated guesses by one knowledgeable crewmember, the boats are at least five days from land, if everyone rows together and they don’t veer off course.

In the first boat, the survivors debate the problem: Should they stay in place and conserve their energy or strike off in search of land? They divide into three committees to address the different aspects of the problem and present their findings, making sure everyone has input. They debate for hours, growing weaker and weaker until they no longer have the energy to do anything and the issue decides itself.

In the second boat, one person takes control, believing he alone has the skill and knowledge to steer the lifeboat toward land. Not everyone agrees, but dissenters are silenced. The others agree that there’s no time for more discussion. The new leader imposes rules on who rows and who eats. When someone falls deathly ill, he orders the incapacitated man thrown overboard.

On Lifeboat Earth, time and resources are similarly limited. According to most climate scientists, the window of opportunity to prevent irrevocable climate change is about a dozen years. Opinion is divided, however, on how to address this problem with the urgency it requires.

The international community has tried, in a roughly democratic fashion, to avoid the apocalypse. In 2015, the countries of the world came together in Paris and negotiated a non-binding climate accord that was a victory for compromise but a failure for shrinking the planet’s actual carbon footprint. In a number of countries around the world, democratic elections subsequently brought climate-change deniers like Donald Trump to power, further compromising that accord.

In this way, the planet risks following the first lifeboat scenario: talking ourselves to death.

So, wait, the Paris Climate Agreement is now bad? I thought it was historic? No? Of course, it really was part of lifeboat 2, since it was written in a way to avoid having to put it in front of most legislative bodies, especially the US Congress.

The second lifeboat option—think of it as eco-authoritarianism—seems to better fit the temper of the times. The current climate emergency coincides with a profound disillusionment with the liberal world order. Authoritarianism has become significantly more popular these days, even in otherwise democratic societies like India, Brazil, and the United States.

Writer John Feffer does sort of attempt to walk balk wanting an authoritarian style green government

Ultimately, they want to eliminate what Garrett Hardin identified as the only way to avoid the tragedy of the commons: “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.” To push through a Green New Deal in the United States, for instance, a distinctly non-Republican Congress would have to coerce a range of powerful interests (coal companies, oil and gas corporations, auto manufacturers, the Pentagon, and so on) to fall into line. And for any global pact that implements something similar, an international authority like the UN would have to coerce recalcitrant or non-compliant countries to do the same.

Something as transformative as the Green New Deal—a democratically achieved Climate Leviathan—will not come about because the Democratic Party or Xi Jinping or the UN secretary general suddenly realizes that radical change is necessary, nor simply through ordinary parliamentary and congressional procedure. Major change of this sort could only come from a far more basic form of democracy: people in the streets engaged in actions like school strikes and coal mine blockades. This is the kind of pressure that progressive legislators could then use to push through a mutually agreed-upon Green New Deal capable of building a powerful administrative force that might convince or coerce everyone into preserving the global commons.

Coercion: It’s not exactly a sexy campaign slogan. But if democracies don’t embrace moonshots like the Green New Deal—along with the administrative apparatus to force powerful interests to comply—then the increasing political and economic chaos of climate change will usher in yet more authoritarian regimes that offer an entirely different coercive agenda.

Except, what of those who do not believe in what the climate cultists are pushing? That’s why this is authoritarian. Feffer tries to paint the coercion as totally democratic, but, it’s not. And this is what they want. And you will be forced to comply.