Below is an excerpt from Naomi Klein's
remarks delivered at a press conference introducing “People and Planet First: the Imperative to Change Course,” a high-level meeting being held at the Vatican this week to explore Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical letter on ecology:
I have spent the past two weeks reading hundreds of reactions to the encyclical. And though the response has been overwhelmingly positive, I have noticed a common theme among the critiques. Pope Francis may be right on the science, we hear, and even on the morality, but he should leave the economics and policy to the experts. They are the ones who know about carbon trading and water privatization, we are told, and how effectively markets can solve any problem.
I forcefully disagree. The truth is that we have arrived at this dangerous place partly because many of those economic experts have failed us badly, wielding their powerful technocratic skills without wisdom. They produced models that placed scandalously little value on human life, particularly on the lives of the poor, and placed outsized value on protecting corporate profits and economic growth.
That warped value system is how we ended up with ineffective carbon markets instead of strong carbon taxes and high fossil fuel royalties. It’s how we ended up with a temperature target of 2 degrees which would allow entire nations to disappear—simply because their GDPs were deemed insufficiently large.
In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality. Because if we agree that endangering life on earth is a moral crisis, then it is incumbent on us to act like it.
That doesn’t mean gambling the future on the boom and bust cycles of the market. It means policies that directly regulate how much carbon can be extracted from the earth. It means policies that will get us to 100 per cent renewable energy in 2-3 decades—not by the end of the century. And it means allocating common, shared resources—like the atmosphere—on the basis of justice and equity, not winners-take-all.
That’s why a new kind of climate movement is fast emerging. It is based on the most courageous truth expressed in the encyclical: that our current economic system is both fueling the climate crisis and actively preventing us from taking the necessary actions to avert it. A movement based on the knowledge that if we don’t want runaway climate change, then we need system change.
And because our current system is also fueling ever widening inequality, we have a chance, in rising to the climate challenge, to solve multiple, overlapping crises at once. In short, we can shift to a more stable climate and fairer economy at the same time.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Bush is a badass:
You know, it's really easy to play cowboy from the safety of a Secret Service protective ring in the United States.
Our soldiers in Iraq don't have that luxury.
"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on."
Our Cowboy in Chief is now daring Iraqi irregulars to attack our men and women on the ground?
Is he literally out of his fucking mind?
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: Today’s show starts like everyone’s this morning, sorting out the report of a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard.
Greg Dworkin helps answer “Why is Donald Trump Polling So Well?” Maybe the GOP is ahead of the curve sometimes, but usually not. Is the value of hard work paying off a conservative value? And how the election will play out with our “Kaleidoscope Society”? Terribly written open carry laws lead to terrible results in Florida and Mississippi. Tech geniuses and business leaders that started out barking up the wrong tree.
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