Meanwhile, Harvard Ph.D. student Vanessa Williamson suggests Tea Partiers are skeptical of anthropogenic climate change because of two beliefs: “First, the coastal elite looks down on people in Middle America; second, the government wants to exert ever-more control, and will use any pretext to do it.” The goal of the “global warming hoax,” Tea Partiers believe, is “to undo the American way of life — big cars, big homes, suburban sprawl — and make the heartland look more like the coasts” (Christopher Flavelle, “Climate Change is Stuck in the Culture War,” BloombergView, May 9).

What’s most striking is the belief that the Middle American lifestyle of SUVs, split-level ranches in cul-de-sacs, strip malls and Big Box stores is some sort of spontaneously emergent behavior in the free market, and that this could only be “undone” through increased government control. The truth is just the opposite.

Car Culture and the sprawl lifestyle was created by massive government intervention and only survives from massive ongoing government intervention. It lives, moves and has its being in big government. Local governments subsidize freeways from general revenues and get still more subsidies in the form of federal grants. Government — in cahoots with the local real estate industry — uses eminent domain to bulldoze low-income neighborhoods for new freeways. Building codes mandate giant golf-course front lawns. Zoning laws criminalize mixed-use development, corner groceries and affordable walk-up apartments downtown. Downtown gentrification projects replace large amounts of nearby housing with mandated parking, make much more of housing unaffordable to original residents, and destroy small businesses that previously served the ordinary daily needs of the surrounding neighborhood instead of out-of-town yuppies.

Federal government created and continues to heavily subsidize the Interstate Highway System, without which the Walmart “warehouses on wheels” logistics system that destroyed Main Street couldn’t exist (and, oddly enough, the Red State politicians who are most vocal about “big gummint leaving us alone” are also likely to see their main job as bringing home federal highway pork for the Chamber of Commerce). Government uses eminent domain to steal farms and Native American territories protected by treaty for pipelines. It sets liability caps for oil spills. Its courts, from the mid-19th century on, have weakened the earlier strict tort liability standards for corporate malfeasance (like pollution from fracking and mountaintop removal).

And don’t forget the murderous wars the US fights and the costly military establishment it maintains to keep fuel cheap. It’s amazing how many recent wars to “defend our freedom” involved creating military bases and installing puppet regimes around the Caspian Sea or Persian Gulf oil basins. By far the biggest portion of America’s “defense” [sic, sic, SICK] budget goes to maintaining a Navy of 11 Carrier Strike Groups, whose main purpose is to subsidize shipping via oil tanker and container ships by keeping the sea lanes open at general taxpayer expense (Adam Smith observed over 200 years ago that merchant shipping itself should justly bear the cost of its own protection).

Add to all this the fact that Red States are mostly net tax consumers. Their regional economies are dominated by military bases, military industries or extractive industries (mining, logging, fossil fuels, ranching) that are heavily subsidized by the federal government. So what Red Staters call “the American way of life” is nothing but corporate welfare, and the SUV and monster truck are its poster children.

The implications are obvious. Climate change is not something for the government to combat by prohibiting or taxing various activities that contribute to CO2 emissions. Just the contrary: The best way to combat anthropogenic global warming is for government to stop doing stuff like actively subsidizing or mandating sprawl, subsidizing long-distance shipping and transportation, and subsidizing energy consumption. Government is the problem, not the solution.

This study calls for pause and careful reflection. Rising sea level is a particularly dangerous aspect of global change which may eventually produce millions of climate refugees. Eustatic change could displace entire island nations, swallow coastal cities, increase flood damage and reduce the availability of important ecosystem services offered to our societies from coastal wetlands. Following such reflection, the natural question to ask is what exactly is human civilization to do about climate change?

Most discourse over climate change from the body politic simply asks after the role of the nation, or state, in addressing the problem.  There are many problems with this type of debate, not least of which is that actually existing capitalism is incredibly reluctant to change its ideology and abandon practices which perpetuate environmental degradation and social injustice. Take for instance the Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment, which warns that the effects of climate change are “immediate and widespread.” Obama himself touts the new assessment (in a solar paneled Wal-Mart surrounded by socks, gaudy flip-flops and other items produced for mass consumption) by announcing a series of corporate pledges to increase renewable energy use and boost solar generation. In his speech Obama declares: “Together, the commitments we are announcing today prove that there are cost-effective ways to tackle climate change and create jobs at the same time.”

There you have it: “Growth at any cost” economics and the corporate state championed as an answer to the anthropogenic influence on climate change. Obama’s speech was nothing but an endorsement of the status quo. Of course the administration also advocates cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and other regulations to slow anthropogenic change, but this rhetoric serves the sole purpose of green-washing the inherit reluctance of the current political economy to embrace real change.

As seas change there is an emerging necessity for a corresponding sea change in politics — enter the market left.

The market, or libertarian, left, largely endorses the idea that human-kind strives for the free, unhindered unfolding of the individual and social forces of life (to borrow from Rudolf Rocker) — and institutions that contain such development are illegitimate unless democratically (small d) justified. If any authority is illegitimate, which is usually the case, it is to be dismantled and only reestablished, if need be, from the grassroots. Under such a socio-economic order society would be freed from political guardianship, liberating individual labor from concentrated private capital.

The market left simply seeks the true market form — an alliance of liberated individuals based on co-operative, inclined labor and community interests. Such an order can only exist in a massively decentralized society. The market left envisions a society where political boundaries are dissolved thus leaving only natural boundaries — watersheds, landscapes and ecosystems. Here, the individuals relationship to community and the environment will be much more understood. Only in liberty will the body politic be empowered enough to manage a changing global climate.

The answer to the aforementioned climate question is the stateless society.