- Erstwhile GM Chairman "Engine" Charlie Wilson
once famously opined, back in the '50s, that "What's good for General
Motors is good for America."
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- What to make, then, of the latest announcement that GM
is planning to set up a plant in China to produce Aveo cars--200,000 a
year to start--and to become "a household word" in China?
-
- No doubt, before long, they'll be talking like Chrysler,
which is planning to co-produce cars with China's Cherry Automotive Co.
for the global market, including the U.S.
-
- Obviously, having Chinese workers making American cars,
whether for the Chinese domestic market or for the global or US market,
is a bad idea for American workers, and ultimately for America. It might--though
not necessarily--mean cheaper cars for Americans, but the cost would be
yet another hammer blow to one of the country's major industries.
-
- But there's a much bigger problem with this picture.
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- It's global warming, which is looking scarier by the
day. The latest bad news is that the vast tundra expanses above the Arctic
Circle, stretching from northern Scandinavia, across Siberia, and on to
Alaska and Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories are losing their permafrost.
As a result, millenia's worth of decayed vegetation and peat are suddenly
being thawed and exposed to the atmosphere, and are already spewing out
ungodly quantities of methane--a gas that is over 20 times as potent a
global warming blanket as is carbon dioxide.
-
- What this means is explained in some recent articles
that have run in the Canadian and European media--but not in the U.S. media,
which is too focussed on Barbaro's latest injury to pay attention. (For
more on this nightmare scenario, check out: <http://www.blog.agoracosmopolitan.com/?p=56>The
Hydrate Hypothesis in The Canadian, <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1869000,00.html>Siberian
Thaw to Speed Up Global Warming in The Observer, as well as<http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-henderson300906.htm>Runaway
Global Heating in Countercurrents)
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- Scientists warn that the methane phenomena means the
predictions regarding the pace of global warming--both optimistic and pessimistic--are
way too conservative. Global warming is not, as was formerly thought, going
to slowly creep up on us over the course of the century, but will more
likely be sprung on us, perhaps over the next 5-10 years. It may even be
too late to do anything about it, since there's nothing that can be done
in terms of cutting gas emisions that will re-cool the earth and refreeze
the permafrost.
-
- Is it just me, or is there something obscene about the
American car industry, which did so much to ruin America over the last
century and to create the global warming crisis in the first place, going
to China with the goal of ruining the world altogether by putting a car
in every Chinese home?
-
- I'm not sure what can be done at this point. We need
not just a union, but a shareholder rebellion at Chrysler and GM. No more
damned cars spewing out exhaust into the air. Make 'em so they use hydrogen
or just shut the assemblylines down! But we need more than that. We need
a new political movement that targets parents and grantparents, and makes
them focus on what is facing their offspring, instead of on how much gas
costs, or whether their 401 K is growing fast enough.
-
- It's time for a new paradigm. One that doesn't start
with: "Growth is good."
-
- Not any more it isn't. Growth is deadly.
-
- Al Gore made a nice film, but it has an unrealistically
upbeat ending: we can turn this around if we act in the next ten years.
In that he's wrong. Al didn't factor in the methane problem, and other
positive feedbacks that are making a bad situation worse.
-
- The truth is--and you can say you read it here--we are
past the point of avoiding global warming. It's here and it's trying to
kill us all.
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- Now it's about survival and minimizing the scale of the
disaster.
-
- The first step is to stop making things worse, and that
certainly means not helping and encouraging China to become a car society.
-
- From there, we need to start thinking about a new kind
of society--one where people live frugally, eat locally, work where they
live, share what they have--and where they plant a lot of trees.
-
- Capitalism is finished, folks. It won't do to base a
social system on the idea that people can invest and make a profit through
growth, because growth for growth's sake means encouraging demand, and
that just means more energy and consumption. End result: more global warming.
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- Socialism, at least the socialism of our era, is dead
too, because it simply boils down to the notion, in one way or another,
of making all citizens in a society stakeholders in the national corporation.
It's still premised on the idea of growth as a positive good.
-
- We need to give that all up and think about a society
built around the concept of sustainability and about sharing in ways that
will permit us to downsize our demands. No more pool in every yard, no
more car in every driveway, no more house for every family. We need to
start thinking collectively.
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- This, I'm sure, all sounds crazy in an American context.
It would sound pretty crazy in China too, I know. But check out that methane,
and tell me you want the alternative. We are all on this globe, and we're
going to survive collectively, or die collectively.
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- As for GM, let's tell them if they go build those cars
in China, they won't be seeing us in their showrooms.
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- Pathetic, I know, but hey, it's a start.\
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