By Ken Hemphill

In her book "The Shock Doctrine," Naomi Klein describes how governments and large corporations have made frequent use of what she calls “disaster capitalism” in which weather catastrophes and economic dislocations are exploited to ram through draconian austerity policies, privatize publicly-owned assets, and hand out treasury-busting government contracts.

These huge transfers of public wealth to private interests are made possible in the confusion and disorder caused by the disaster, which also provides cover for dismantling labor unions and social safety nets, and tamping down domestic dissent against the kleptocracy.

Some examples come to mind. In the aftermath of Katrina, the New Orleans public school system was largely privatized as hundreds of new “charter schools” came online. The result was lower wages for school employees including teachers, huge profits for the owners of the charter schools, and no appreciable difference in education quality. Hurricane Maria’s recent destruction of Puerto Rico was just used to justify a transfer of the ownership of that country’s Electric Power Authority to a private corporation whose for-profit delivery of electricity will lead to higher prices for customers but lower wages for employees (and fewer of them). Yet snatching up utilities, school systems, municipal authorities, or government-owned assets after weather and economic disasters is small potatoes for corporate behemoths looking to get their hands on public wealth, i.e. the U.S. Treasury. The ongoing disaster of climate disruption represents the mother of all opportunities, the exploitation of which will saddle taxpayers of the future with trillions of dollars in debt.

This future profiteering requires our government to keep us chained to the fossil fuel treadmill, but even in the current weak regulatory environment, it still might take another 30 years for sea levels to rise enough to flood low lying cities and create millions of American refugees; for summer heat to kill hundreds of thousands; for crops and orchards to be devastated; for heat-loving diseases and invasive species to wreak their destruction; for the economy and people to suffer on a large enough scale for the climate deniers in government and the corporate media to finally act. From the perspective of the disaster capitalists, this slow descent into an inhospitable world needs to be expedited, though. The threat to their current and future profits posed by renewables is real. Solar panel prices have dropped precipitously and can now compete with dirty energy.

The disaster capitalists are most certainly worried that we won’t arrive at their profitable future. The federal government has their backs, though. The current administration has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, proposed roll backs of fuel efficiency standards, proposed to eliminate methane regulations, removed any reference to climate change on government websites, removed incentives for alternative energies, placed tariffs on Chinese solar panels, and increased incentives for more oil and gas drilling both offshore and on public land. These pro-carbon policies not only benefit the existing fossil fuel industry, but the future carbon extraction industry as well. When the crisis is finally acknowledged, the Feds will fund a WW2-style buildout of carbon-removal infrastructure which will give away trillions to what will definitely be the most profitable industry in history: climate abatement and carbon removal. And the corporate media will lead the cheers for the swindle as they did for that other great transfer of wealth: the Iraq War.

There will be hand-wringing, of course, as when the government and media acknowledged there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They will say that they couldn’t have known that “wee” (sic) humans could affect such a huge system as the climate. “Who could have predicted such a calamity”? Nevertheless, they will say, “something drastic must be done.” “We need a carbon extraction program to remove CO2 on a planetary scale and America must do its part.” Of course, “our part” will require taxpayers to fork over several trillion dollars to the disaster capitalists in order to scrub the atmosphere of its excess carbon. But they will have known. They know now and they’ve known for a long time about the effects of adding carbon to our thin atmosphere.

Too little or too much CO2 is the difference between a mile of ice over your head and the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. Because it’s a trace gas, it’s better to measure it in terms of “parts per million” than as a percentage of the atmosphere (.04%). In 1900, there were 295 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. 120 years later, it’s at 410 ppm and climbing. Scientists estimate that 200 ppm triggered the last ice age. What unimaginable tragedy awaits us at 500 ppm?

Despite what you hear from corporate news, this indisputable relationship between carbon and climate has long been known by government and industry alike. Exxon, Shell, and other oil giants knew with certainty in the early ‘80s after they conducted their own in-house studies which found clear evidence between the burning of their products and atmospheric warming. Exxon’s internal report projected stark effects on climate, but Shell’s secret study showed even more calamitous results occurring sooner than Exxon had predicted. Shell’s assessment anticipated a one meter sea level rise and the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet which would then lead to an increase of five to six meters, enough to create hundreds of millions of coastal refugees. And considering the revolving door between government and the oil industry, the government can’t say it didn’t know. Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon and now former Secretary of State, is just one of many examples.

The effects of burning fossil fuels were even known much earlier than the 1980s. In 1965, even that lapdog of Texas oil billionaires, President Johnson, warned that within “a few short centuries, we are returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that was extracted by plants and buried in the sediments during half a billion years. Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment.” In a November, 1957 report in The Hammond Times, Roger Revelle described his research into the effects of adding CO2 to the atmosphere as likely to cause “radical” warming of the planet and an upsetting of the natural greenhouse effect. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, gave a speech in 1959 to the American Petroleum Institute in which he warned the industry that the burning of their products was warming the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, he noted, “transmits visible light but absorbs...infrared radiation...emitted from the Earth.” Svante Arrhenius, a 19th century Swedish scientist, was probably the first to conclude in 1896 that burning fossil fuels “may eventually result in enhanced global warming,” noting the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and average global temperature.

There is no real debate about these truths except in the echo chambers of corporate media. The science is settled. Climate change is real. It represents an existential threat to our civilization. But we have a choice of when and how much to pay to deal with it. We can pay the disaster capitalists treasury-bankrupting sums later and cope with a wrecked economy, or we can pay less now by heavily subsidizing solar and wind and funding research into making them and battery technology more efficient. And the money to do this is available. Instead of dropping $700 billion each year into the Pentagon’s bottomless pit, we could spend a part of that to ease and expedite our transition to renewables. As Eisenhower said, the military shouldn’t get one dollar more than it needs to defend this country. Having a budget larger than what the next 10 or more countries spend militarily certainly would have irked Ike. Since the Pentagon theoretically is in the protection business, perhaps it would even agree to diverting some of its funding to save America.

Ken Hemphill is an EX COM member and works as the communication coordinator for Save Marple Greenspace, Neighbors for Crebilly, and the Beaver Valley Preservation Alliance