[Peace-discuss] Alex Steffen on the "carbon bubble": "Trump, Putin and the Pipelines to Nowhere"

[Stuart Levy]

This article on the climate-change-denial culture (from Alex Steffen, in 
mid-Dec) is important I think.   It turns the 
gee-it's-so-difficult-to-all-come-together 
how-will-we-ever-come-to-agreement kind of discussion of climate change, 
and turns it into a class-struggle argument.

The idea: We are living in an economic carbon bubble, liable to burst.  
The (monetary) values of things we rely on to be stable, like land 
values in coastal cities, or the basis of shareholders' value in 
fossil-fuel companies which assume that fossil reserves can be extracted 
& sold, are subject to enormous shifts as climate change goes forward.  
This would be a far greater shift than the 2008 banking collapse.

With this framing, we understand that climate-change deniers in 
government and industry are playing a confidence game.   They may well 
understand that the bubble will burst in time, due to physical changes 
and political ones.  What they're trying to do is to keep the bubble 
inflated for as long as possible before people stop believing in it, 
because the longer it persists the longer they can profit from it.

So it's not us vs. the marshmallow of international consensus, it's us 
vs. fossil-fuel profiteers on a grander scale than the Wall St. bankers.

Steffen does take up the Dems' line on the Russians, using this as an 
explanation for why they'd be interested in the US election. But you 
don't have to accept that to find the rest of the argument illuminating.

(Thank you to environmentalist Katie Mimnaugh, Bcc'ed here, for pointing 
out this article!)

*Trump, Putin and the Pipelines to Nowhere**
*/You can’t understand what Trump’s doing to America without 
understanding the “Carbon Bubble”
/Alex Steffen/
/

https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd#.7xynwnxff 

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