Democrats need to take a stand for the natural world

We live in increasingly artificial times.

The most obvious sign of this is the rise of Artificial Intelligence, A.I. While A.I. has a lot of potential to improve human life, the dangers are obvious: gosh, what could go wrong if Artificial Intelligence is in control of society's crucial elements — the internet, power production, business, education, the military, politics?

Answer: a lot.

What's especially worrisome, stepping back and looking at our current situation more broadly, is how technology is separating us from the natural world. An article by Jill Lepore in the November 11, 2024 issue of The New Yorker, "The Artificial State," speaks about this.
Download The Artificial State | The New Yorker

Excerpts:

The artificial state is not a shadow government. It’s not a conspiracy. There’s nothing secret about it. The artificial state is a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse. It is the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement.

An entire generation of Americans can no longer imagine any other system and, wisely, have very little faith in this one. (According to a Harvard poll from 2021, more than half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believe that American democracy either is “in trouble” or has already “failed.”)

Within the artificial state, nearly every element of American democratic life—civil society, representative government, a free press, free expression, and faith in elections—is vulnerable to subversion. In lieu of decision-making by democratic deliberation, the artificial state offers prediction by calculation, the capture of the public sphere by data-driven commerce, and the replacement of humans with machines—drones in the place of the demos.

…The building of the artificial state came at the expense of the natural world. “The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen,” Rachel Carson warned in the preface to a 1964 book called “Animal Machines,” the “Silent Spring” of factory farming, which involved the raising of animals from birth to death in cages hardly bigger than themselves.

“Yet the evils go long unrecognised,” Carson wrote. “Even those who create them manage by some devious rationalising to blind themselves to the harm they have done society.” The artificial state is the factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community. Meanwhile, the immense energy and water consumption required to build, expand, and maintain the coming A.I. infrastructure threatens to roll back gains made by environmental regulation in the past half century.

This election season, even as hurricanes battered North Carolina and Florida, the natural world has been notably absent from both the Trump and the Harris campaigns. Trump, who used to describe climate change as a hoax, has not substantially altered that position. (“You know, they have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said this summer. “It’s weather.”)

Harris, despite having been part of an Administration that produced perhaps the most important environmental law in a generation, has seemed to distance herself from environmentalism as she attempts to take back the language of freedom from her opponent.

But, as the historian Sunil Amrith writes in his essential new book, “The Burning Earth: A History,” the rhetoric of freedom has become bound up with the triumph of the artificial over the natural: “Into the pursuit of freedom there crept, over time, a notion previously unthinkable: that true human autonomy entailed a liberation from the binding constraints of nature.”

I worry about lots of things the Trump administration is doing. What concerns me the most is Trump's efforts to dismantle the federal government's efforts to combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

While Americans are transfixed by whether the Epstein files will be released, the Trump administration is preparing to eliminate limits on carbon pollution, as described in a recent Politico story.

The Trump administration plans to argue that federal law does not require agencies to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, in a move designed to derail virtually all U.S. limits on climate pollution, according to three people familiar with the upcoming proposal.

The Environmental Protection Agency will as early as this week unveil its plan to undo the so-called endangerment finding, which in 2009 laid out a comprehensive case for how human emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare.

…The effort to repeal the endangerment finding, if successful, would represent President Donald Trump’s most sweeping attempt to dismantle climate change policies and push his “energy dominance” agenda, which focuses on expanding U.S. fossil fuel production.

The move, combined with the Trump administration’s planned effort to ditch vehicle tailpipe pollution rules governing transportation and its proposal to end U.S. power plant emissions limits, would deliver a major blow to the U.S. effort to halt global temperature rise. The United States has contributed more than any other nation to the 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming that the world has experienced since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it is currently the second-largest polluter, behind China.

So far, congressional Democrats have been annoyingly silent about this. They warn about cuts to Medicaid, which indeed is a looming problem. But preserving the ability of our planet to maintain human civilization as we know it is a much more important problem. 

Democrats, and indeed everybody, need to focus on the health of the natural world, because nature is the source of everything needed for life. We can live without Artificial Intelligence. We can't survive if climate change continues at the rate it is going.

Currently Democrats have few levers of power in Washington D.C. One lever they do possess is the requirement to pass a federal budget prior to the start of the next fiscal year on October 1, 2025. This will require Democratic votes in the Senate, as the budget bill is subject to a filibuster. 

My hope, which I realize is more of a fantasy, is that Democrats will refuse to keep the federal government functioning unless the Trump administration reverses its effort to trash regulations that enable carbon pollution to be reduced.

I think the American people would back Democrats, because polls show that most people recognize that global warming is real, is human caused, and needs to be controlled. Stand for something, Democrats! Fight for something! Take a stand for what needs preserving most of all: the health of Planet Earth.