Sleepwalking Over the Cliff

The Right-wing has made "wokeness" the thing that must be avoided at all costs. And along with concern for social justice and the rights of minorities they have now included concern about climate change as a symptom of woke. It is more awesome, more American to be asleep. More manly. States that produce fossil fuels are now protesting that attempts to pull investment from polluting industries is to buy into wokeness culture and since wokeness is a program pushed by liberal, effete intellectuals, it is to succumb to fragility and weakness. In other words, the opposite of hyper-phallic Trumpism. Large investors such as Blackrock who wanted to be responsible, conscious, green capitalists are being told in no uncertain terms that their fiduciary duty is to make money, period. In other words, even the fake simulation of green capitalism was too much wokeness for the conservative "base". We should not kid ourselves. Neither the State nor Capital gives a rats ass if there are no insects, no coral reefs, laborers dying of heat stroke. As long as there are profits and tax revenues on the short-term horizon they are prepared to see forests go up in smoke and bodies pile up. The global head of responsible investment at HSBC lifted the veil when he gave a presentation at the Financial Times Conference titled : "why investors need not worry about climate risk". Of course he was hustled off the stage amidst apologies but he delivered the unvarnished truth; there are immense profits in misery. How strange to live in a time when it is bad to be awake. We are supposed to slumber through the American Dream, which might be what Timothy Morton was getting at with "hyper-reality". When things get too real, we can retreat into fantasy and disavowal. On the "social cost of carbon" battlefront, the Highest and Most Sacred Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government can continue assigning a "cost" to emmissions or “estimates of the monetized damages associated with incremental increases in greenhouse gas emissions.” In the next breath we get: “An accurate social cost is essential for agencies to accurately determine the social benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions when conducting cost-benefit analyses of regulatory and other actions,” the order said. The question I've been asking is are we talking "estimates" or "accurate" accounting? It matters if you insist on using markets to regulate behavior.