Critical Terminology

Climate Change and the Green New Deal

Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin

A literal countdown to the estimated likelihood of complete human extinction by a man-made catastrophe. Examples of this include nuclear weapons and carbon emissions, which greatly affect Earth’s environment.

“That led to the setting of the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at two minutes to midnight—meaning global termination” (Chomsky and Pollin 2).

Describing an ideologically extreme group, opposing compromise with other groups, and dismissive of all political opposition. This term is used in the context of the Republican Party’s withdrawal from several treaties with other countries—which were established to combat climate change and nuclear war—in favor of creating treaties that cater more to their political agendas.

“[N]ot a normal political party but a "radical insurgency" that has largely abandoned parliamentary politics” (Chomsky and Pollin 4).

A new geological period in which humanity is having a significant impact on the state of the environment. Geologists mark the beginning of this period around the end of World War II.

“Geologists generally take the early post-World War Il period to be the onset of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human activity is having a profound, and devastating, impact on the environment” (Chomsky and Pollin 4).

A person who denies the existence and/or factors that cause climate change. Many conservatives are denialists.

“[T]he prime minister—a dedicated denialist-returned grudgingly from a vacation to assure his constituents that he felt their pain. Meanwhile the opposition labor leader toured the coal plants, calling for expansion of Australias role as world champion coal exporter and assuring the country that this was quite consistent with Australias serious commitment to combating global warming-a commitment that, according to international monitors, places it last among fifty-seven countries on climate change policy” (Chomsky and Pollin 12).

The assumption that something is likely to go wrong, and therefore have a plan to prevent the damages. Used in the context of climate change, when Robert Pollin suggests that rather than waiting to experience or know for certain the consequences of climate change, the world should act now to start preventing those consequences in the first place.

“In fact, we need to take decisive action now on climate change, not based on 100 percent certainty as to its consequences, but rather through estimating reasonable probabilities” (Chomsky and Pollin 17).

A proposal advocating for a transition to one hundred percent renewable energy in the U.S. to reduce the effects of global warming

“[W]e should think of a global Green New Deal as exactly the equivalent of an insurance policy to protect ourselves and the planet against the serious prospect--though not the certainty—that we are facing an ecological catastrophe” (Chomsky and Pollin 18).

The study of how humans make decisions in the face of scarcity, as well as how economics are taught and viewed in society. According to Robert Pollin, recent years have shown that people favor neoliberalism despite the effects of climate change.

“[T]he basic premises of orthodox economics that free markets, left to their own devices, will produce outcomes that are superior to government interventions”(Chomsky and Pollin 19).

The idea is that the free market should be separate from—and even more influential than—the government in the daily life of the populace. This idea has devastated the climate due to the advocation for the free range of unsustainable businesses, such as oil companies.

“Neoliberalism is a driving force causing the climate crisis. This is because neoliberalism is a variant of classical liberal-ism, and classical liberalism builds from the idea that everyone should be granted maximum freedom to pursue their self-interest within capitalist market settings…what really occurs in practice under neoliberalism is that governments allow giant corporations to freely pursue profit opportunities to the maximum extent. But then government fixers arrive on the scene to bail out the corporations whenever their profits might be threatened. This amounts to socialism for capitalists, and harsh, free market capitalism for everyone else” (Chomsky and Pollin 20).

Neoliberalism is a political system that shifts resources from public to private, supporting free-trade, capitalism, and deregulation. Neoliberalism supports the idea of  self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-reliance, which for example, lead to social services being cut from the government. 

"Motivated by both a sense a outrage and hope, it attempts to identify

neoliberalism as a threat to democracy at home and abroad as well

as and to offer a productive series of analyses of how to stop its

poisonous affects on all aspects of public and private life" (Giroux IX).

Authority or influence over others, can especially be seen with the biopolitics. 

"Global hegemony now became synonymous with national security as official policy proclaimed that any challenge to U.S. power and supremacy would be blocked by military force" (Giroux 3). 

Fundamentalism is a conservative religious movement following strict laws based on scripture and religious ideologies.

" Its supporting political culture and pedagogical practices also put into play a social universe and cultural landscape that sustain a particularly barbaric notion of authoritarianism,

set in motion under the combined power of a religious and market

fundamentalism and anti-terrorism laws that suspend civil liberties" (Giroux XXIII).

Fascism is a political movement supported by the far-right. Supporting dictatorships, centralized autocracy, and militarism. Fascism supports private over public, and wants to be regulated by the state. 

"Both individuals have argued that the specter of a creeping fascism is becoming a reality in the United States and that democracy is not just being challenged but transformed by a form of authoritarianism that, almost unnoticed, is shaping political culture and daily life" (Giroux 11).

A government that favors centralized power, which means full power is in the hands of one person. Authoritarianism allows the decline of separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. An example of an Authoritarianism government is Russia under Vladimir Putin.

"Put differently, the embrace of anti-intellectualism and distrust of critical thought and intellectuals supports authoritarianism over and against democracy. Such rhetoric cannot be dismissed as an aberration" (Giroux 7).

To manage or build something solely of financial gain. 

"Citing how democracy is undermined by the commercialization of public space, the control of the media, the ongoing erosion of civil liberties, the rise of repressive state power, and the

 emergence of an era of systemic automated surveillance—all of which is reinforced by the war against terrorism" (Giroux 11).

Biopolitics are the organizations that control or influence aspects of our lives, like the government or corporations. 

“By biopolitics, I mean those powers that organize life, even the powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations through governmental and nongovernmental means” (Butler 196). 

An ungrievable life can be seen as a life lived in fear or uncertainty, for example not knowing when you will eat next. An ungrievable life is a life that can not be lived in the present moment.

"This is someone who understands that she or he will not be grieved if his or her life is lost, and so one for whom the conditional claim “I would not be grieved” is actively lived in the present moment. If it turns out that I have no certainty that I will have food or shelter, or that no social network or institution would catch me if I fall, then I come to belong to the ungrievable" (Butler 197).

A "good life" has so many definitions that may be controversial depending on different lifestyles and the need for a "good life" is up to social determinates. Judith Butler examines that a "good life" will be embracing the vulnerability of needing to be dependent on others. 

“If I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others, a life that is no life without those others; I will not lose this I that I am; whoever I am will be transformed by my connections with others, since my dependency on another, and my dependability, are necessary in order to live and to live well” (Butler 218).

A "bad life" in context to this reading refers to a life that is morally wrong. A "bad life" is ignoring the bad like poverty, and not trying to help. 

"When Adorno queries whether it is possible to lead a good life in a bad life, he is asking about the relation of moral conduct to social conditions, but more broadly about the relation of morality to social theory" (Butler 194).

Describes a state of being uncertainty. Butler uses precarity to describe unlivable lives to  a precarity life. For example, people who live in constant violence. 

"Perhaps we cannot use one word to describe the conditions under which lives becomes unlivable, yet the term “precarity” can distinguish between modes of “unlivability”: those who, for instance, belong to imprisonment without recourse to due process; those who characterize living in war zones or under occupation" (Butler 201). 

The idea of right or wrong. 

"And though I do not think that the question of morality can be posed outside of the context of social and economic life, without presupposing something about who counts as a subject of life, or as a living subject" (Butler 213).

The ability to move between different positions of advantage within the social hierarchy. Meyers notes a decrease in social mobility due to neoliberalism, and “[an] increase in global economic inequality.

“[Neoliberalism] has led to an increase in global economic inequality and a concomitant decrease in social mobility as ‘inequality and commodification mutually reinforce each other.’ Critics of neoliberalism note that it is inherently anti-democratic in that it legitimizes government by a wealthy elite rather than a representative citizenry” (Meyers 3). 

The othering of minorities due to qualities of one’s inherent identity—such as race, ethnicity, gender orientation, sexual orientation, and disability—is built into a government's base.

“Under a neoliberal regime, governments no longer have a practical or ethical responsibility to their citizens and have abdicated any obligation to level the playing field for women, people of color, gender- and sexually non-conforming people and others who have been disadvantaged by systemic discrimination. Instead of instituting policies to promote social and economic equality, neoliberalism calls for individual choice and personal responsibility as antidotes to the barriers of bias and prejudice” (Meyers 3).