I recently ran across this article by Naomi Klein Why #Black Lives Matter Should Transform The Climate Debate.
At Daily Kos, I've learned we white progressives have a bad habit of thinking everyone is like us and shares our worldview. We don't grasp how economic populism intersects with race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, even age. The failure to understand that can cause us to believe a "rising tide lifts all boats." However, if we don't also address the way economic issues intersect with social issues, we will leave some people behind and nobody deserves to be left behind.
I know that's happened with economic issues. For example, we talk about FDR and the New Deal and how those policies created a mass middle class. How many people of color were included in that mass middle class? That rising tide from the New Deal and strong unions, Social Security, a growing safety net, etc. didn't lift all boats.
I wondered if racism might also be affecting the fight against climate change, so I looked it up and I found Naomi Klein's article.
Thinly veiled notions of racial superiority have informed every aspect of the non-response to climate change so far. Racism is what has made it possible to systematically look away from the climate threat for more than two decades. It is also what has allowed the worst health impacts of digging up, processing and burning fossil fuels—from cancer clusters to asthma—to be systematically dumped on indigenous communities and on the neighborhoods where people of colour live, work and play.
She's right. I was very familiar with how corporate greed and an oil industry decades long misinformation campaign has resulted in climate inaction. But I didn't realize just how powerful a force racism was. Yes, it's corporate greed that makes Trans Canada want to develop the tar sands. But would they have been politically able to if white people were living there instead of indigenous communities? Aji and PDNC have both written excellent diaries illustrating the impact of tar sands on indigenous people - here and here.
Would it have been politically possible for Trans Canada despite all its corporate greed to have developed the tar sands if it was having this impact on white communities? In the below You Tube video that's embedded in PDNC's diary, Celina Harpe correctly says that oil companies do not care how many people they kill.
In all the articles I've read, I was told we had to limit the global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius to save the planet. When I read Naomi Klein's article, I realized that 2 degree Celsius limit would save the developed world from a humanitarian crisis, but not some of Africa. And we haven't been able to reduce carbon emissions and are currently headed for 4 degrees warming.
As Naomi Klein notes, the African delegates were having none of the 2 degree Celsius limit, and began to shout “We Will Not Die Quietly” and “2 Degrees is Suicide.”
If 2 degrees Celsius warming wasn't sufficient to save everyone from a humanitarian crisis and possibly extinction, why wasn't the goal lower? To a level that would save EVERYONE?
And despite our not considering EVERYONE, we aren't currently on a path to even limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Yes, we seem headed for 4 degrees warming which would create a humanitarian crisis and possibly extinction in other parts of the world.
But the temperature target—pushed by wealthy nations in Europe and North America—would likely not be enough to save some low-lying small island states from annihilation. And in Africa, where drought linked to climate change was at that time menacing many lives in the eastern part of the continent, the target would translate into a full-scale humanitarian disaster. Clearly the definition of “dangerous” climate change had more than a little to do with the wildly unequal ways in which human lives are counted.
But African delegates weren’t standing for it. When the text was leaked, the dull UN bureaucracy suddenly fell away and the sterile hallways of the conference centre came alive with shouts of, “We Will Not Die Quietly” and “2 Degrees is Suicide.” The paltry sums rich countries had pledged for climate financing were angrily dismissed as “not enough to buy us coffins.” Black lives matter, these delegates were saying—even if this corrupted forum was behaving as if that was far from the case.
We're all impacted by climate change, but we all won't be impacted equally at the same rate. Yes, there are countries and even areas of the United States that will be impacted sooner than others. How will the world respond because its looking more like humanity is in for some
awful shit?
What will happen when one part of the world or one part of the United States faces a humanitarian crisis? Will we respond the way we did to hurricane Katrina? The same way we did to the War On Poverty and a lot of other humanitarian crises? Or will we realize we are our brother and our sister's keeper and that we are all equals? Will we learn to live as participants in nature rather than rulers of it?