People,
What now? Climate angst is here again ... where I think of fleeing with the kids someplace ....
Sure, there was some good news yesterday for a change. The XL pipeline will be delayed - much better than the straight-up approval that was expected. But what now? I was looking forward to continuing the public fight here - now the issue is off the table. Bill McKibben's congratulatory announcement raises questions about what next in the struggle to save the climate (Bill is doing an incredible job, don't get me wrong...).
Today the great Naomi Klein unleashed a bombshell article in the Nation on the politics of climate activism that touches on these questions. An absolute must-read, it frames the big issue - sustainability vs. capitalism - and points out what drives the deniers is their well-founded belief that to seriously address climate change we will need to chuck the right-wing economics they love. It adds miles of perspective.
Naomi Klein says we have to embrace fundamentals:
It is a painful irony that while the Heartlanders are busily calling climate change a left-wing plot, most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (and, of course, those mills were the beginning of climate change)
Fixing climate means checking capitalism. Yeah, it's a tall order. That means some serious activism. So ...
Back to Bill's letter for a sec. One of the best things about this victory is that the president actually mentioned climate.
But a few minutes ago the president sent the pipeline back to the State Department for a thorough re-review, which most analysts are saying will effectively kill the project. The president explicitly noted climate change, along with the pipeline route, as one of the factors that a new review would need to assess. There’s no way, with an honest review, that a pipeline that helps speed the tapping of the world’s second-largest pool of carbon can pass environmental muster.
Gotta be happy that the previous fishy review didn't stand.
But here's the thing:
The American people spoke loudly about climate change and the president responded. There have been few even partial victories about global warming in recent years so that makes this an important day.
While the XL Pipeline was pending, the American people SPOKE loudly. (Past tense.) It was a great target for organizing. It was all in the president's lap - none of that "60 votes" insanity. 350.org and Tar Sands Action did a great job with creative & attention-getting protests. They changed the conversation. They got the climate issue back into the public eye, where it needs to be if we are ever to gain the public support needed for seriously taking it on.
By sending it back for review the administration short-circuited all that. They pulled away the focus of action. The public dialog around it will deflate. Which is too bad - that's exactly what we need more of. And let's not fool ourselves - this victory does little to slow the assault on our climate. It doesn't bring a price on carbon. It doesn't bring public, outspoken presidential leadership. Above all, it doesn't lead to a nation committed to doing something big.
Somehow we have to get more of the OWS "we're pissed and we're staying here" spirit into the struggle to defuse climate change.
Naomi Klein speaks to the alarming lack of attention to climate despite the messed-up weather we've been having:
But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.
This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.
Is it? Tar Sands Action breathed life back into it. But with that on hiatus? Where now? What path do we take to get to where we're ready for the scope of change called for? (Again, Naomi Klein):
Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.
I absolutely agree with her - but this reminds me of the punchline to that old joke "Can't get there from here." In America? This is gonna happen?
What now, people?
PS - do read the whole Klein piece. Here's one last gem:
As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed.
9:04 PM PT: Update - link to video of Naomi Klein speaking about the postponement of the XL pipeline: http://www.democracynow.org/...