For many, Yearly Kos ’07 may be already fading into memory, just a week and a half after the Kossacks left Chicago. But I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the atmosphere around the subject of climate.
I’m one of several Kossacks trained to give a live, updated version of the slideshow from An Inconvenient Truth. On Sunday, after the Interfaith Service, four of us removed our orange lanyards and presented, tag-team style, as part of The Climate Project for an audience of around 30 good souls (who had gotten the word the night before and managed to get up and going for this unofficial event on the very last day of the conference).
Personally, I find a parallel between the fight to take power back from the lunatics who’ve had it these last six and a half years, and the fight to get us safely out of the climate crisis. It is going to take the same tenacity in the face of naysayers and strength to protect all that needs protecting. And if there’s any group I’d put faith in to be a force for goodness and light, it’s this one. So let’s talk about climate, Kossacks, and Chicago.
As progressives, we know all about bad things happening that seem unchangeable. When I first joined daily KOS, it was a dark time for us all. Another Democratic presidential bid had just been inexplicably lost to the Bungler-In-Chief. Condoleeza Rice and Alberto Gonzales were just being handed their current cabinet-level positions, the Republican rubber-stamp Congress was in full swing, and the next couple years would see the confirmation of Alito and Roberts to the highest court in the land. Insanely, the public supported the war. There was no Colbert Report, Air America was not yet a year old, and the Rush/O’Reilly ratings seemed to just keep going up.
Three words started to surface:
Permanent Republican Majority.
And at the time, this was close to accepted wisdom in many quarters. But we here on the internets, we looked around. Looked (through our various tubes) at one another and said This Will Not Stand. As you know, we stood up and fought with everything we had. Because letting the Republicans have our country would have such varied, horrible, and far-reaching consequences that were too terrible to contemplate.
Nowadays, in the wake of the ’06 elections, the phrase "Permanent Republican Majority" is almost laughable. More impressive, perhaps, and what we heard over and over again in Chicago is that we’re still fighting. Which just goes to show that when dedicated people get together, get organized, and get motivated, things that seem permanent, impossible to change... well, they’re never what they seem.
But I’m not actually writing this diary to talk about the netroots’ growing influence, or the dedication that catapulted Democrats back into the halls of power in Washington last year. As I said, I actually do want to talk about climate.
The climate presentation at Yearly Kos was an interesting experience for me, not least because to be ready and at the right hotel, I personally had had to be up at the excruciating hour of 6:15 - as any attendee can tell you, sleep is always scarce at Yearly Kos.
Giving the talk itself was rewarding, as usual, especially when done for a receptive audience. But speaking outside my official capacity, one thing concerned me, and still does: the degree to which the subject of climate change at the conference, indeed, as a progressive issue in general still seems to be last-minute and tacked-on.
Let me digress, briefly. After the Presidential Leadership Forum, I went to Dodd’s breakout session. Someone asked him about his plan for combating climate change and, in his characteristic way, he (most refreshingly, as usual) unflinchingly answered the question asked of him --- turns out he has possibly the most ambitious plan out there, and I’d urge you all to visit the MoveOn town hall and/or the Grist interviews with the candidates for more info about everyone’s stances. Before Dodd started his answer however, he expressed surprise. Not surprise at the question but surprise that it hadn’t come up during the Forum with all the candidates, especially since he’d noticed (as had I) that the text messaging-response-polls posted in the main ballroom had indicated that more people were concerned about that issue than about any other.
Here’s the thing: I went to a talk on sustainability a few months ago, and one of the speakers put forth the idea that climate change is not just another issue. The realization of what we are doing to the global climate is a lens, through which all other issues are seen. Indeed, at Yearly Kos the First in 2006, I noticed that our reliance on fossil fuels came up in many sessions – foreign policy and economics as well as the panels on energy and the environment. Current forecasts for the future indicate that climate change is also poised to drastically affect health and health care, not to mention ramifications to things like food production and travel. There are very few issues that this issue does not touch, and the consequences for treating it as separate from other issues are dire. In fact, this is probably why it has been a political hot potato for so long.
The reality is that climate change is secretly everyone’s pet issue.
I think we need to let the secret out.
This is critical, because in order to deal with Iraq, with job creation, with corporate welfare, energy, or farming, to deal even with the scary influence of Christian extremists in this country or to deal with poverty – in short, to deal with just about anything that any of us cares about – we have to first view the future of all of these issues through the lens of how they are going to be affected by the changing climate.
We are the reality-based community. So let’s consider the reality. Face some hard truths about what’s coming down the line. And then, fix in our heads the way we want reality to look in the future, and roll up our sleeves and get to work. After all, the image of a better world is why we fight.
Thank you to everyone who came out to our talk, and for everyone fighting on the side of goodness and light. This seems like a good spot to send a shout-out to Step It Up and The League of Conservation Voters’s The Heat Is On project, both aimed at pushing climate change into the political spotlight while we still have a chance to avert the worst impacts and keeping it in the spotlight as long as it takes but especially through the next presidential election.
The actual climate is changing. It’s up to us to make sure that the political climate does too.