Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction
A good conservationist sent around, Sunday, on Mother’s Day, very appropriately, a New Yorker magazine article interview with Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert. They are perhaps our two very best writers about climate disruption and the collapse of biological diversity. Here’s the article: www.newyorker.com/…
The article follows immediately in the wake of yet another devastatingly bleak, and alarming, scientific report on the threats to Nature from our globalized economy, putting the collapse of Nature, and therefore, us, civilization as we know it, on the policy table, maybe in the starkest terms yet. The report adds to the two other scientific jolts to the status quo, political and economic, from late 2018: one from the U.N., the other from the US government agencies’ requirement to report to Congress on the threats from Global Warming. Here are the two brief opening paragraphs of the new U.N. report, which you can find online at www.un.org/…
PARIS, 6 May – Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April – 4 May) in Paris.
“The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture,” said IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
So that’s what’s on my mind, along with how these dire assessments from science will continue to drive the political dynamics — or not — in the coming presidential election in 2020.
Therefore I feel I have to address the competing forces, and strategies, within the Democratic Party, especially the entry of the current polling leader, Joe Biden, into the race a short time ago, and the stance of Speaker Nancy Pelosi towards Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal back in February. So I have done that in a return letter to the sender of the McKibben/Kolbert interview, and added a McKibben article from a day earlier, which addresses the political economy of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in regards to what the great melting in the Arctic means.
Truly, thank you for this piece, a great summary of where we are, and very appropriate for Mothers Day.
I would like to share a piece that Bill McKibben wrote, solo, just a day before that, about the meeting of the Arctic Council and the views of Mike Pompeo, our Secretary of State, on the vast melting up there. He's so Reagan like, he sees only greater access to diamonds, gold, oil and gas, and shorter shipping times for manufactured products from China.
He's been inspired since the age of 15 by Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead. McKibben's rejoinder is that "...of all the scary spectacles on our Earth, none tops a fast thawing north."
Here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-un-report-on-extinction-vs-mike-pompeo-at-the-arctic-council
And I have to think to myself: Bernie Sanders says his philosophical grounding is in FDR's Second Bill of Rights from 1944 (with the Rights of Nature, missing, of course, given the year) and he's treated as a radical by the Republican Right and the Democratic Center. Do the readers here know where Ayn Rand stands on the history of the political spectrum? Far, far more extreme Right than the Second Bill of Rights, or Bernie, is Left.
I like McKibben's deep framing on politics: we're trying to change the Zeitgeist, the intellectual and political "climate" of the times, which in turn shapes the "common sense" meaning of the policy arguments at the street level. In that spirit, let me take a swipe at the accommodationist, incremental approach of Democratic Party leaders, primarily Nancy Pelosi and now Joe Biden.
Greenpeace just sent an Email asking me to sign a petition against Biden's open opposition to the Green New Deal, which I did. Yet months ago, Pelosi set the tone for business as usual within the party - keep the corporate wing happy with policy moderation - and work on turnout, the same old strategies which avoid asking the crucial question: what times are we living in? - other than answering that all that matters is that it's Trump Time, and we want him out.
I make no apologies for having criticized Biden's career in two consecutive postings, here https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/4/30/1854318/-Where-Have-You-Been-Joe-Biden-That-was-a-Labor-Day-Speech-you-never-gave-when-workers-needed-it and here -https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/1/1854605/-The-Key-Dynamic-in-the-Dem-Primary-Beat-Trump-at-all-Costs-Biden-vs-Sea-Change-Policy-Bernie.
As for Speaker Pelosi, she did real damage to achieving that "Sea Change" in the Zeitgeist when she mocked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Proposal back in February. The subsequent Resolution, and the policies that might flow from it, deserved a full standing committee's attention, not the piecemeal approach of business as usual.
Here's a very fair summary from New York magazine of the pluses and minuses of the Green New Deal Resolution, which says it was a positive, not perfect, giant leap forward, and crucially sides with the 29 year old Ocasio-Cortez over the Speaker: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/democrats-should-embrace-flawed-ambitious-green-new-deal.html
And the last two paragraphs from the author of the article, David Wallace-Wells; it appeared on Feb. 9, 2019. AOC deftly handled the Speaker’s cruel put down — that’s what the “swallowing pride” words refer to...
"There are legitimate questions about next steps for the Green New Deal. But this sounds like one politician who wants to see action on climate, and who is swallowing pride and seeing advantage wherever she can; and one who is just … not that interested in taking the problem seriously. On Twitter, Grist’s Eric Holthaus called Pelosi a “climate denier,” which I think goes too far, factually. But she is certainly not showing herself to be a climate leader; as the New Republic’s Emily Atkin put it, “Nancy Pelosi has officially redirected the ‘fuck you clap’ toward @AOC.” But when you’re staring down a threat of this size, is it more responsible to roll your eyes at ambition, or take your cues from the science, which says that what is necessary — a global-war-like mobilization — is well outside the bounds of everyday American politics?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been called a lot of things since she got to Washington, diminished and infantilized in a number of unforgivable ways. Yesterday, she out-grown-up-ed the 78-year-old Speaker of the House."
And for the same reasons Pelosi is criticized for here, I'm remaining seated for Joe Biden, whose poll results don't square with the polling I'm seeing on how the public feels about Global Warming, and which for Democrats is their priority issue. Sea Change-Zeitgeist transforming he's not.
When I looked at the You Tube reruns of the appearances of AOC on the Colbert Show before and after her election, you could feel the electricity surge through the audience. And at 29, she’s a “renewable” resource...
I know charisma when I see it, and nothing can drain that magic out of someone better than the Democratic Party establishment. Charisma alone is rare enough, but to see it matched with the ambitious policy directions — now that's the rarest of lanterns.
Sadly, however, the drift of Democratic Party politics now is to flatten that building Sea Change, and go back to mechanics, the safety of the middle which has been failing national and state progressive politics for more than thirty years. And the bottom 60 percent of our citizens. I don't think that direction will work politically, or in formulating the massive policy response needed to salvage what’s left of Nature, and, I better add, the drift of democracies to the populist Right in Europe and Central and South America. So there are competing “Sea Changes” in motion, and the Right’s goes back to Thatcher-Reagan and the “Springtime for Neoliberalism.”
Now I hope Joe Biden’s yet to be announced climate policy proposals prove me wrong, but his long time ally at the head of the AFL-CIO has just inflamed things by denouncing the Green New Deal, substantively and because of alleged poor outreach to labor. I’m still trying to find out more about that failed outreach, I called Senator Markey’s office this morning, but again, read the Green New Deal Resolution, and if there’s ever been a policy proposal of that scope which better laid out labor’s long-standing grievances over the national drift to the Right, Globalization, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of Neoliberalism, I’ve missed it.
Old Labor- and remember Trumka comes from the Miners Union - can side with the fossil fuel industry if it so chooses, but if it does, it’s putting itself once again on the wrong side of history, as it did on the Vietnam War and as so many of its members, if not the organization itself, did by backing first George Wallace and then Richard Nixon. Ghosts of George Meany. If Mr. Trumka, and perhaps Joe Biden after him, can ignore language such as this, from page 12 of the Green New Deal Resolution, and if such language could not serve as basis for serious dialogue...then heaven help the Democratic Party:
(G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training an advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition;
(H) guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the Untied States;
(I) strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment;
Best,
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD 21532
PS Locally, in Western Maryland’s small town of Luke, Verso corporation has announced the shuttering, by the end of June, of its 675 employee paper mill, a heavy blow to the area, it being the largest industrial employer “still standing.” I may have something more to say about this sad event, and how a Green New Deal, once enacted, might help, but it would be a huge undertaking to retool the plant to process recycled paper, alter the local recycling patterns and contracts, and to pass laws to require more recycled paper products on the shelves in Maryland; of companies like Staples and Walmart, to give two prominent examples where the vast majority of consumer paper products have no recycled content at all. That’s why the Green New Deal is so relevant: the job guarantee, justice for workers and communities, state green banks and green capital, all policy pieces we don’t yet have — might help in the Luke situation and where the usual remedies will not. And let’s add in the new complication: China is now a major force in the field, rejecting allegedly “dirty” American waste products, and buying up production facilities that have gone under, or are about to. As I wrote above, it’s Sea Change/ Zeitgeist change time; the old piecemeal tinkering is not going to address the wrongs to Nature or to workers from the “Ancien Regime.”
The Status quo does have its own answer, driven by the politics and intellectual resources of West Virginia and broader regional politics: the Appalachian Regional Storage Hub will create new storage and manufacturing of natural-fracked gas products, for a multi-state operation along western West Virginia and southeastern Ohio, Kentucky, and the southeast corner of Pennsylvania. The map at this site show how sprawling the infrastructure for this project will be: analysis.petchem-update.com/… It’s a long network of pipelines, storage facilities, and processing systems, including “cracker” towers...
Greens can’t just keep saying no to fossil fuel projects : we need an aggressive and well funded environmental and economic alternative which only a Green New Deal’s scope can supply. That’s something that the Democratic Party in these states, and Republican Larry Hogan in Maryland, aren’t up to tackling.