Now unlocked: The European Nightmare
An increasingly relevant essay now released from its paywall
For a little while, I’d been regretting my decision to publish my essay on the EU and Utopian Socialism as a paid essay, as it felt really important. Since it was published, I’ve now read several recently published articles that made me realize that it really should have been public, so I’ve opened it up to everyone.
The first article was by Thomas Fazi, who is often quite on the techno-utopian side of things when it comes to climate change. Despite that, he published a very, very good (albeit paywalled) analysis of the problem with EU “carbon farming” plans at Compact:
To the extent that carbon credits allow companies to maintain, or even increase, their levels of greenhouse-gas emissions under the pretence that they are “offsetting” them, even though the sequestered carbon could subsequently be re-released into the atmosphere, carbon farming could therefore actually lead to a net increase in emissions in the long run. This is particularly worrying if we consider that one of the reasons big corporate polluters are interested in carbon farming is precisely the fact that they see it as an opportunity to generate great amounts of carbon credits that will allow continued emissions—a classic example of climate-washing.
On the other hand, Jacobin recently published a rather weak attempt to dismiss degrowth (which I think Fazi also opposes) and approvingly cited the EU and especially Ursula Von der Leyen’s position on growth as reason why leftists should also oppose it. That author foolishly seems to assume the EU is some sort of paragon of anti-capitalism, but as I note in my now-unlocked essay, it’s quite the opposite:
… the European Union constantly limits political resistance to its policies by punishing member states who listen to their people. To say this is all ultimately un-democratic isn’t really stating much at all, since this is anyway how Liberal Democracy has always worked. Any popular resistance to its “democratic” institutions is immediately re-narrated as anti-democratic, though the smears used more frequently now are “populist” and “far right.”
There were a few other lesser mentions of some of the problems I write about, and some of the recent NATO discussions about Ukraine are also relevant to this problem, though in a different way. But instead of discussing all that, I’ll just direct you to my essay:
