Meeting in Santa Fe 5:30 pm this Friday -- important postscripts!

January 8, 2019

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This letter (7 Jan 2018)"Meeting in Santa Fe 5:30 pm this Friday Jan 11; why LANL cannot host a plutonium pit factory; will Governor Grisham’s energy policies help, or hurt?"
Previous letter (25 Dec 2018): "All I want for Christmas is a Green New Deal which is actually green and actually a new deal"
Previous Bulletin (#252, 1 Jan 2019): "Fundraising reminder; why LANL cannot be any kind of plutonium factory, in a nutshell"

Postscripts:

1. Meeting this Friday January 11 in Santa Fe: Please help us with outreach
   
2. A new energy economy requires higher taxes on upper income brackets
   
3. Our energy descent: inevitable, & necessary for survival, justice
4. The fracking industry is driven in no small part by the same imperial policies that animate the US nuclear weapons enterprise
   
5. Pope Francis just summed most of this up rather concisely

Dear friends on our New Mexico activist list --

1. Meeting this Friday, January 11, in Santa Fe, 5:30-7:30 pm, St. John's United Methodist Church, 1200 Old Pecos Trail (map).

It's about a) nuclear weapons, pits, and LANL update; b) energy and climate in the coming legislative session.

    Please help us with outreach for this event.

2. A new energy economy requires higher taxes on upper income and/or wealth brackets

An astute friend reminded me last night that I had forgotten to say anything about the need for a state revenue source to replace oil and gas revenue.

Obviously the state will do nothing to curtail oil and gas production or address climate change (which is the same thing) as long as fossil fuel production funds so many of the state's needs.

As you may recall, Governor Richardson and the legislature "reformed" income taxes 2003 by lowering the top marginal rate from 8.2% to 4.9% (or 7.2% to 4.9%). Reliable sources tell us this lowered state revenues from personal income tax by roughly $350 million (M) annually. Undoing that disastrous decision would be a good start.

Economist Gerry Bradley at New Mexico Voices for Children estimated in 2015 that raising the rate back to just 5.9% would raise $130 M per year, based on 2012 tax return data. He also showed that persons with annual incomes over $100,000 then had an overall tax rate lower than middle- and lower-income New Mexicans, because of other, regressive, taxes.

Wikipedia, for what it's worth, calls New Mexico "one of the largest tax havens in the U.S."

We need to go much farther. Without much higher taxes on higher incomes, I don't think we have a social contract. That's what I see around us here in New Mexico: no social contract. It shows, in everything.

To survive the coming years we will need more solidarity, both material and attitudinal. The latter requires the former. To foster a social contract we, not extractive industries, need to fund the state's needs, in a far more progressive way than at present.

Oil and gas revenue is an addiction that keeps New Mexico from having to face the reality that we actually need a social contract that includes everybody.

Dependence on resource extraction is usually a political and social curse around the world. New Mexico is no exception.

Recently, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez spoke (with analysis here) of "70%" taxation on the uppermost US incomes, to fund a Green New Deal. Under Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate was 91%. In 1944-45 it was 94% for couples.

Without a radical shift in burden-sharing, efforts to build a new energy economy will very likely come to naught. Many public goods are scarce and/or of poor quality in New Mexico (e.g. public education). In the relative absence of sound public goods, privatization, neoliberal attitudes, and semi-predatory economic actors and entire sectors have made life pretty tough for most people. Life will get a whole lot tougher as the inevitable recession arrives, probably soon.

We face physical limits to growth (water, for example) and an energy descent in net usable terms -- not a Black Swan kind of event, but a much more serious Dragon King. The descent is being made far worse than it needs to be by denial and violent, dominating responses and narratives (see 4. below). The unfolding decline of fossil fuel civilization is shaking the foundations of our world.

In the absence of solidarity, those who benefit most from the status quo in terms of profit, power, or prestige will be able to successfully propagandize (and thereby politically weaponize) the poor and the precarious near-poor for their political purposes, which include maximizing fossil fuel extraction.

3. Our energy descent: inevitable, necessary for survival, justice; no new energy economy without it

"In with the new, out with the old!" is a New Year's saying. In terms of energy transition, too few really mean it. To have a new energy economy we need to leave behind the old energy economy. Otherwise it's not new, just the old economy with a few solar panels on top.

We read in today's New York Times that US carbon dioxide emissions -- presumably not counting net forest and agricultural land losses -- increased dramatically in 2018 according to preliminary estimates. As the NYT explains, this is not because of Trump's wholesale deregulation, the effects of which will come later, but because the economy grew. This is why we said yesterday that supplying New Mexico renewable energy so that California and Arizona can grow will do nothing good for the climate.

George Monbiot explains:

It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things. Given that economic growth, in nations that are already rich enough to meet the needs of all, requires an increase in pointless consumption, it is hard to seehow it can ever be decoupled from the assault on the living planet....When a low-carbon industry expands within a growing economy, the money it generates stimulates high-carbon industry.

Martin Heinrich is not dumb -- surely he understands this. Surely Governor Martinez understands. Surely the Bingaman family understands this. They need to be held to that understanding by environmental groups. Renewable energy cannot be used to support economic growth. We need to "cap the grid."New Mexico should not be used by other states as an energy "mine." We should not prostitute ourselves in this way.

There are strong limits to economic growth (for example, Brian Davey lecture notes, Feasta). We have reached them. It now takes $4 of new debt to push $1 of new GDP growth in the US, or should we say the illusion of growth. We are evidently willing to load a huge debt on our children and older selves in order to move future consumption to the present so we can luxuriate better, indulge our feelings in immature ways, and paper over social problems and rising inequality.

We have arrived at “a slow and shocking cancellation of the future.”

Unless we courageously face our problems it is likely that the "morbid symptoms" (Gramsci) that come at the end of growth will result in more fascism, more war, and more politics of disposability.

Shaun Chamberlin:

In this context, then, it’s no surprise to be hearing increasingly shrill, desperate alarm from scientists around the world as they observe the natural world crumbling under the impossible, ever-growing pressure.  As I write, the latest report announced that 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles have been annihilated since 1970.  Put starkly, most of the wild nature that was here fifty years ago is gone.  And still we seek to grow the human economy, and cheer when that growth accelerates.[ix]

Similarly, the inherently conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their Global Warming of 1.5ºC report, which makes it abundantly clear that the unfolding physical realities studied by climate science are dramatically outpacing the policies notionally intended to address them.  They find that we must halve emissions in the next twelve years, and so feel forced to call for “rapid and far-reaching … unprecedented” transformation in the economy.[x]
...
Unfortunately, in such times, when more and more people are struggling to support their families, and losing faith in the dominant stories of what is important, the far right has a track record of providing simple answers.  It is important to remember that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler didn’t only consolidate power on the basis of lies and fear—they also raised wages, addressed unemployment and improved working conditions.

To effectively challenge the drift into fascism, then, we need to present an alternative politico-economic vision that can restore identity, pride and economic well-being. We need to tell a beautiful story of how we will make the future better for the desperate, rather than a fearful one. 

Material and imperial decline are not optional. They are certain and they are happening. We do not know what scope for choice remains, but whatever freedom we have lies in the forms into which we may guide our descent, and our attitudes and actions toward each other and the living world. Much is already gone, but much remains in our care.

There is a big literature on degrowth, simplicity, and the reorganization of society along more resilient lines. Three recent articles, all republished at resilience.org, chosen somewhat at random:

• "Degrowth: the Case for a New Economic Paradigm," Riccardo Mastini, June 12, 2017, openDemocracy.
• "Stability without Growth: Keynes in an Age of Climate Breakdown," December 5, 2018, Center for Economic and Policy Research.
  
• "Hickel Response [to Dean Baker] on Degrowth," December 17, 2018, Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Degrowth would be smart but is unlikely. Stepwise collapse is another narrative frame for the events we are experiencing.

4. The fracking industry is driven in no small part by the same imperial policies that animate the US nuclear weapons enterprise

Florentine physical chemist Ugo Bardi has just written an insightful post at his Cassandra's Legacy blog: "'Energy Dominance,' what does it mean? Decoding a Fashionable Slogan." 

In short, "energy dominance" means military dominance. Bardi is quite correct about that. The fracking obsession is very closely related to the "need" to keep Russia from supplying Europe with gas (a failed effort which will fail further), as well as to "win" the economic war against China in East Asia. And these are the "peacetime" needs.

So we and the climate pay the price. Or as the Oil and Gas Association (and both NM political parties, and the President) say, "derive the benefit."

Bardi's insight, not new but here expressed in his clear way, needs to be more widely disseminated.

The eagle of dominance has two wings: exports to support alliances and prevent market penetration by Russia especially; and the US war machine itself, the largest user of petroleum on the planet even in semi-peace or semi-war, whichever this is.

The political problem is not just that oil and gas provide so much money. To maintain our alliances, and hence our empire, we need to reliably export these fuels. This sets us all up for an enormous increase in the number of wells. Why? Because shale gas and oil wells decline very quickly, and the higher the production rate to be maintained, the more replacement wells have to be drilled, fracked, and pumped. At present production rates in the Permian, it takes about 300 new wells per month just to keep production constant.

The "need" for military and economic dominance that is a hidden imperative behind the fracking industry is the same "need" that drives our nuclear weapons enterprise, our military bases, our international sanctions, and our wars. It also drives Trump's proposed border wall, which is the defensive part of the same Heimat und Weltreich (homeland and empire) way of thinking. They go together, and they are not the unique property of this particularly buffoonish president.

And they all come together in New Mexico.

5. Pope Francis just summed most of this up rather concisely

From His Address to the members of the diplomatic corps, 7 Jan 2018:

Rethinking our common destiny

Finally, I would mention a fourth feature of multilateral diplomacy: it invites us to rethink our common destiny. Paul VI [Pope from 1963-1978] put it in these terms: “We have to get used to a new way of thinking… about man’s community life and about the pathways of history and the destinies of the world… The hour has come… to think back over our common origin, our history, our common destiny. The appeal to the moral conscience of man has never been as necessary as it is today, in an age marked by such great human progress. For the danger comes neither from progress nor from science… The real danger comes from man, who has at his disposal ever more powerful instruments that are as well fitted to bring about ruin as they are to achieve lofty conquests”.[10]

In the context of that time, the Pope was referring essentially to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. “Arms, especially the terrible arms that modern science has provided you, engender bad dreams, feed evil sentiments, create nightmares, hostilities and dark resolutions, even before they cause any victims and ruins. They call for enormous expenses. They interrupt projects of solidarity and of useful labour. They warp the outlook of nations”.[11]

It is painful to note that not only does the arms trade seem unstoppable, but that there is in fact a widespread and growing resort to arms, on the part both of individuals and states. Of particular concern is the fact that nuclear disarmament, generally called for and partially pursued in recent decades is now yielding to the search for new and increasingly sophisticated and destructive weapons. Here I want to reiterate firmly that “we cannot fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use – I am minded to say the immorality of their use – as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race. International relations cannot be held captive to military force, mutual intimidation, and the parading of stockpiles of arms. Weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of security. They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful coexistence between members of the human family, which must rather be inspired by an ethics of solidarity”.[12]

Rethinking our common destiny in the present context also involves rethinking our relationship with our planet. This year too, immense distress and suffering caused by heavy rains, flooding, fires, earthquakes and drought have struck the inhabitants of different regions of the Americas and Southeast Asia. Hence, among the issues urgently calling for an agreement within the international community are care for the environment and climate change. In this regard, also in the light of the consensus reached at the recent international Conference on Climate Change (COP24) held in Katowice, I express my hope for a more decisive commitment on the part of states to strengthening cooperation for urgently combating the worrisome phenomenon of global warming. The earth belongs to everyone, and the consequences of its exploitation affect all the peoples of the world, even if certain regions feel those consequences more dramatically. Among the latter is the Amazon region, which will be at the centre of the forthcoming Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to be held in the Vatican next October. While chiefly discussing paths of evangelization for the people of God, it will certainly deal with environmental issues in the context of their social repercussions.

Greg Mello, for the Study Group