8 page essay due 4.13
Nancy 00001
week11.pptxSpace VR
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“What a contradiction? That our planet protects us from the harshness of space but we don’t protect it from the harshness of us? That while everyone knows we live on Earth, you can believe it only by leaving?” (Foer, 2019: 115)
The human energy company
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Teen Vogue
Kids these days.
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“Are those protestors paid to be there?” – Darren’s mother
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Findings
1) Failed to cover news about the climate crisis.
2) Failed to localize international news about the climate crisis, reporting on what those stories mean for Canadians, as well as holding governments and corporations to account for them.
3) Failed to routinely contextualize news about the climate crisis. (7.7% of news stories about BC wildfires made a demonstrable connection to climate change).
The Response
“CBC’s director of journalistic standards Paul Hambleton said the national public broadcaster wouldn’t be instituting a similar change, explaining that “the ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate emergency’ are words that have a whiff of advocacy to them. They sort of imply, you know, something more serious, where climate change and global warming are more neutral terms.”
A quick and non-exhaustive Tyee search revealed that CBC appears to have no problem referring to “Hamilton’s identity crisis,” the Granville Island “parking crisis,” the “Rohingya refugee crisis,” and Canada’s “overdose crisis.”
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So, welcome to the risk society
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Daisy
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Meth Gators
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Marty Bot
“Everyone is always saying these days that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Everyone is always saying it, in my view, because it’s obviously true. The perception, paranoid or otherwise, that billionaires are preparing for a coming civilisational collapse seems a literal manifestation of this axiom. Those who are saved, in the end, will be those who can afford the premium of salvation. And New Zealand, the furthest place from anywhere, is in this narrative a kind of new Ararat: a place of shelter from the coming flood.”
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Technocracy – rule by experts and the logic of efficiency
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“Eclipse of the public” – John Dewey
A world in which the average citizen will no longer be able to comprehend the world around them, and will lack the necessary expertise to make decisions.”
This will lead to a “technocracy.”
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Risk Society
After WW II, consciousness of the structural/systemic risks of technology and industrial development occupy a bigger space in the public sphere. Ulrich Beck describes such risks as generating a risk society.
Anthony Giddens: “… a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk.”
Ulrich Beck: “… a systemic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself.”
KPMG
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqeC8_Yh-Ss
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Reflexive Modernization
Reflexive modernization involves modernity thinking (reflecting) upon itself.
Concern about the risks of capitalist development have existed since the industrial revolution. But for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, such sentiments were marginalized, drowned out by utopian visions of modernity, scientific progress and technological advancement as unequivocal signs of human progress.
Two key forces generate/intensify this reflexivity:
1. impact science (e.g. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962)
2. social movements (e.g. environmentalism).
Reflexive modernization stimulates government intervention in the interests of environmental protection. By the 1970s, this perspective had become broadly hegemonic.
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Corporate response
Corporate leaders were concerned about the impact of expanding regulations up their profit margins and their economic ‘freedom’.
Corporations, wealthy elites and conservative foundations launched a ‘war of ideas’ to shift the ideological landscape to the right, and undermine the hegemony of ‘reflexive’ modernization. The centrepiece was a network of think-tanks that produced research, analysis and opinion that could be used to lobby politicians and governments, influence media and shape public opinion. The goal was to promote the virtues of capitalism and free markets, and attack government regulation as an assault upon freedom and democracy.
A primary target was the environmental movement, described by the Heritage Foundation as “the greatest single threat to the American economy” (Cited in Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World, p. 82).
A key tactic was to attack the credibility of the impact science upon which the environmental movement was based, including the representation of such science as a fundamental threat to people’s core values and beliefs (e.g. personal freedom).
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Merchants of Doubt
Not a battle over science, but a battle over regulation (aka ideology).
ExxonMobil and the Climate-Change Counter Movement
Precautionary Principle
Shift the burden of proof from those impacted to the powerful.
Prove it is save rather than the impacted having to prove it is dangerous.
Laws about safety look different when the people impacted get to decide what an acceptable amount of risk is.
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Article Activity
“The Unihabitable Earth”
“Okay Doomer”
“When Science Says That Political Revolution is our Only Hope”
“Raising My Child in a Doomed World”
“Why Hope is Dangerous When it Comes to Climate Change”
“Glimpses of Ourselves”
Article activity
What is this story about?
How does it make you feel?
How do you think it will make others feel?
One question to ask the class.
