Page 91. Capitalism versus the Climate. “There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the process.”
116. A succinct description of the political divide on climate. “Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion on corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus. “
127. “As 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu put it, “If Wall Street is occupying President Obama’s State Department and the Halls of Congress, it’s time for people to occupy Wall Street.”
153. On applying the ecological concept of mismatch to the social landscape: “...just when we needed to gather, our public sphere was disintegrating, just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up; and just when we needed longer time horizons, we were able only to see the immediate present, trapped in the forever now of constantly refreshed social media feeds.”
156. “Shielded from the elements as we are in our climate-controlled homes, workplaces, and cars, we can find the changes unfolding in the natural world passing us by. We might have no idea that a historic drought is destroying the crops on the farms that surround our urban homes, given that the supermarkets still display miniature mountains of imported produce, with more coming in by the truck all day. It takes something huge--a hurricane that pass all previous high-water marks, or a flood destroying thousands of homes--for us to notice that something is truly amiss. And even then, we have trouble holding on to that knowledge for long, as we are quickly ushered along the next crisis before these truths have a chance to sink in.”
157. Out of Sight is out of Our Minds. “So much of our economy relies on the assumption that there is always an “away” into which we can throw our waste. There’s the away where our garbage goes when it is taken from the curb, and the away where our waste goes when it is flushed down the drain. There’s the away where the minerals and metals that make up our goods are extracted, and the away where those raw materials are turned into finished products. But the lesson of the BP spill, in the words of ecological theorist Timothy Morton, is that ours is “a world in which there is no ‘away.’”
158. “This is one of the ironies of being told that we live in a time of unprecedented connection. It is true that we can and do communicate across vast geographies with an ease and speed that were unimaginable only a generation ago. But in the midst of this global web of chatter, we somehow manage to be ‘less’ connected to the people with whom we are most intimately enmeshed: the young women in Bangladesh’s firetrap factories who make the cloths on our bodies, or the children in Democratic Republic of the Congo whose lungs are filled with dust from mining cobalt for the phones that have become extensions of our arms. Ours is an economy of ghosts, of deliberate blindness.”
161. Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself “The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate is completely nuts.”
164. “Let’s stop making the same old mistakes. Here are a few, but I trust that you will silently add your own: Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians. Thinking the market will fix it. Building a movement made up entirely of upper-middle-class white people and then wondering why people of color don’t want to join “our movement.” Tearing each other to bloody shreds because it’s easier to do that than go after the forces most responsible for this mess. These are social change cliches, and they are getting really boring.”
“We don’t have the right to demand perfection from each other. But we do have the right to expect progress. To demand evolution. So, let’s make some new mistakes. Let’s make new mistakes as we break through our silos and build the kind of beautifully diverse and justice-hungry movement that actually has a chance of winning--winning against the powerful interests that want us to keep failing.”
“With this in mind, I want to talk about an old mistake that I see reemerging. It has to do with the idea that since attempts at big systemic change have failed, all we can do is act small. Some of you will relate. Some of you won’t. But I suspect all of you will have to deal with this tension in your future work.”
166. Regarding Naomi’s book, No Logo “I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to rewire our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet, at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience reliably was “What kind of sneakers are okay to buy?” What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Answer? Nothing. “You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized movement.”
167. “The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small--the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes, the policy and legal work, to others.”
“This is not to belittle local activism. Local is critical. Local organizing is winning big fights against fracking and oil pipelines. Local is showing us what the postcarbon economy looks and feels like.
And small examples inspire bigger ones. College of the Atlantic was one of the first schools to divest from fossil fuels.”
168. But local is not enough. “I got a vivid reminder of this when I visited Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Red Hook was one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods and is home to an amazing community farm, a place that teaches kids from nearby housing projects how to grow healthy food, provides composting for a huge number of residents, hosts a weekly farmers’ market, and runs a terrific community-supported agriculture program. In short, it was doing everything right: reducing food miles, staying away from petroleum inputs, sequestering carbon in the soil, reducing landfill by composting, fighting inequality and food insecurity.
But when the storm came, none of that mattered. The entire harvest was lost, the fear was the storm water would make soil toxic. They could buy new soil and start over, but the farmers I met there knew that unless other people were out there fighting to lower emissions on a systemic and global level, then this kind of loss would occur again and again.”
Conclusion. Do local and global at once.
169. Regarding life choices when the world on your shoulders “...I was contacted recently by a twenty-one-year-old Australian science student named Zoe Buckley Lennox. At the time she reached me, she was camped out on top of Shell’s Arctic drilling rig in the middle of the Pacific. She was one of six Greenpeace activists who had scaled the giant rig to try to slow its passage and draw attention to the insanity of drilling for oil in the Arctic. They lived up there in the howling winds for a week.
While they were still up there, I arranged to call Zoe on the Greenpeace satellite phone, just to personally thank her for her courage. Do you know what she did? She asked me, “How do you know you are doing the right thing? I mean, there is divestment. There is lobbying. There’s the Paris climate conference.”
And I was touched by her seriousness, but I also wanted to weep. Here she was, doing one of the more incredible things imaginable--freezing her butt off trying to physically stop Arctic drilling with her body. And up there in her seven layers of clothing and climbing gear, she was still beating herself up, wondering whether she should be doing something else.
What I told her is what I will tell you. What you are doing is amazing. And what you do next will be amazing, too. Because you are not alone. You are part of a movement. And that movement is organizing at the United Nations and running for office and getting their schools to divest and trying to block Arctic drilling in Congress and the courts. And on the open water. All at the same time.
And, yes, we need to grow faster and do more. But the weight of the world is not on any one person’s shoulders: Not yours. Not Zoe’s. Not mine. It rests in the strength of the project of transformation that millions are already a part of.”
That means we are free to do the kind of work that will sustain us, so that we can all stay in this movement for the long run. Because that’s what it will take.”
196. How othering and land-grabs are linked; we basically need to get over ourselves “...our fossil fuel-powered economy requires sacrifice zones. It always has. And you can’t have a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to Manifest Destiny to ‘terra nullius’ to Orientalism, from backward hillbillies to backward Indians. We often hear climate change blamed on “human nature,” on the inherent greed and shortsightedness of our species. Or we are told we have altered the earth so much and on such a planetary scale that we are now living in the Anthropocene, the age of man. These ways of explaining our current circumstances have a very specific, if unspoken meaning: that humans are a single type, that human nature can be essentialized to the traits that created this crisis. In this way, the systems that certain humans created, and other humans powerfully resisted, are completely let off the hook. Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy--those sorts of systems.
Diagnoses like this also erase the very existence of human systems that organized life differently, systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment the cycles of regeneration. These systems existed and persist, against all odds, but they are erased every time we say that climate disruption is a crisis of “human nature” and that we are living in the “age of man.” And they come under very real attack when megaprojects are built, like the Gaulcarque River hydroelectric dam in Honduras, a project that, among other things, stole the life of the land defender Berta Caceres, who was assassinated in March 2016”
200. On the Syrian civil war. “...1.5 million people were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played a role.”
202. “Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanizing the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. Tactics refined on the West Bank and in other occupation zones are now making their way to North America and Europe. In selling his wall on the boarder with Mexico, Donald Trump likes to say, “Ask Israel, the wall works.” Camps filled with migrants are bulldozed in Calais, France. Thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean every year. And the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus. Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that last month an Iranian migrant died after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world’s attention. Another migrant, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Somalia, set herself on fire a few days later.”
204. On the Paris Agreement. “The Paris Agreement commits to keeping warming below 2C. It’s a target that is beyond reckless. When it was unveiled in Copenhagen in 2009, many African delegates called it “a death sentence.” The slogan of several low-lying island nations is “1.5 to Stay Alive.” At the last minute, a clause was added to the Paris Agreement that says countries will pursue “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C
Not only is this nonbinding, but it is a lie: we are making no such efforts. The governments that made this promise are now pushing for more fracking and more mining of the highest-carbon fossil fuels on the planet, actions that are utterly incompatible with capping warming at 2C, let alone 1.5C. This is happening because of the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries in the world think they are going to be okay, that someone else is going to eat the biggest risks, that even when climate change turns up on their doorstep, they will be taken care of.
When they’re proven wrong, things get even uglier. We had a vivid glimpse into that future when the floodwaters rose in England in December 2015, inundating sixteen thousand homes. These communities weren’t only dealing with the wettest December on record. They were also coping with the fact that the government has waged a relentless attack on the public agencies and the local councils that are on the front lines of flood defense. So, understandably, there were many who wanted to change the subject away from that failure. Why, they asked, is Britain spending so much money on refugees and foreign aid when it should be taking care of its own? “Never mind foreign aid,” we read in the Daily Mail. “What about national aid?””
205. We must act in solidarity. “”Why,” a Telegraph editorial demanded, “should British taxpayers continue to pay for flood defenses abroad when the money is needed here?” I don’t know--maybe because Britain invented the coal-burning steam engine and has been burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale longer than any nation on earth? But I digress. The point is that this could have been a moment to understand that we are all affected by climate change and must take action together and in solidarity with one another. But it wasn’t, because climate change isn’t just about things getting hotter and wetter: under our current economic and political order, it’s about things getting meaner and uglier.”
205. The challenge of ideological and group fragmentation. “...there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatization, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersection between them are glaring, and yet so often, resistance to them is highly compartmentalized. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change; the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too many of us fail to make the connection between the guns that take blaack lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world.
Overcoming these disconnections, strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements, is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice.”
206. Proposalish. “We need ‘integrated’ solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.”
217. The Leap conference Toronto May 2015. “At the time that we met, a federal election campaign was just gearing up, and it was already clear that none of the major parties was going to run on a platform of a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy. Both the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP), then vying to unseat the governing Conservatives, were following the playbook that you needed to signal your “seriousness” and pragmatism by picking at least one major new oil pipeline and cheering for it. There were vague promises being offered on climate action but nothing guided by science, and nothing that presented a transition to a green economy as a chance to create hundreds of thousands of good jobs for the people who need them most.
So, we decided to intervene in the debate and write a kind of people’s platform, the sort of thing we wished we could vote for but that wasn’t yet on offer. And as we sat in a circle for two days and looked each other in the eye, we realized that this was new territory for contemporary social movements. We had all, or most of us, been part of broad coalitions before, opposing a particularly unpopular politician’s austerity agenda, or coming together to fight against an unwanted trade deal or an illegal war.
But those were “no” coalitions, and we want to try something different: a “yes” coalition. And that meant we needed to create a space to do something we never do, which is dream together about the world that we actually want.”
218. The Leap “Largely because of the diversity in the room, we were also conscious that if we wanted a genuinely broad “yes” coalition, we couldn’t fall back on a vision that was nostalgic or backward looking--a prelapsarian yearning for a seventies-era nation that never respected Indigenous sovereignty and that excluded the voices of so many communities of color, that often put too much faith in a centralized state and never actually reckoned with ecological limits.”
“So, rather than looking back, we started our platform with where we wanted to end up:
“We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.”
219. On being (Canadian) moderate. “...by framing our project as one of transformation, not incrementalism, we also put ourselves in a hood-on collision with a story cherished by a lot of powerful interests in this country: that we are a moderate people, steady-as-she-goes kind of folks. In a world of hotheads, we like to tell ourselves that we split the difference, choose the middle path. No sudden movement for us, and certainly no leaping.”
“...when it comes to climate change, incrementalism and moderation are actually a huge problem. Because they will lead us, ironically, to a very extreme, hot, and cruel future. When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.”
220. Still not evoking the “R” word. “If we had listened to them [the first intergovernmental talk on climate change in 1988], if we had all started cutting our emissions three decades ago, we could have taken it nice and slow: chipping away at our carbon footprint, knocked it down a couple of percentage points a year. A very moderate, gradual, centrist type of phaseout.
We didn’t do that”
221. “...nor is the planet some special interest to satisfy. The kind of transformation that is now required will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational ‘mission’, in our country and in every major economy on earth.”
This is what put me off environmentalism in the past, including an anti-technology bent Klein herself seems to hold onto. “There is a long and painful history of environmentalist, whether implicitly or explicitly, sending the message that “Our cause is so big, and so urgent, and since it encompasses everyone and everything, it should take precedence over everything and everyone else.” Between the lines: “First we’ll save the planet and then we will worry about poverty, police violence, gender discrimination, and racism.”
222. On “green jobs” “...we talk about them a lot--most of us picture a guy in a hard hat putting up a solar array. Sure, that is one kind of green job, and we need lots of them. But there are plenty of other jobs that are already low-carbon. For instance, looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching kids is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued, underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks. So, we decided to deliberately extend the usual definition of a green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said, “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.”
223. Public ownership of energy. “Another key plank in the Leap Manifesto is what is known as “energy democracy,” the idea that renewable energy, whenever possible, should be public or community-owned and controlled so that the profits and benefits of new industries are far less concentrated than they are with fossil fuels. We were inspired by Germany’s energy transition, which has seen hundreds of cities and towns taking back control over their energy grids from private companies, as well as an explosion of green energy cooperatives, where the profits from power generation stay in the community to pay for essential services.”
More than energy democracy: energy justice; energy reparations. “...the Leap states that “Indigenous Peoples and others on the front lines of polluting industrial activity should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects.”
We need to repair the land and our relationships with one another.
224. “Holistic transformation… has never been tried on a national scale.”
225. “We worked closely with a team of economists to come up with a parallel document that showed exactly how we would raise the revenues to pay for our plan.”
More than 200 organizations signed the Leap document. (page 226 says 20 percent of conservatives supported it)
229. Resources are not infinite. “Looking back at early European accounts of what would become Canada, it becomes clear that explorers and early settlers truly believed that their scarcity fears were gone for good. The waters off the coast of Newfoundland were so full of fish that they “stayed the passage” of John Cabot’s ships. For Quebec’s Father Charlevoix in 1720, “The number of [cod] seems equal to that of the grains of sand that cover the bank.” And then there were the great auks. The feathers of the penguin-like bird were coveted for mattresses, and on rocky islands, particularly off Newfoundland, they were found in huge numbers. As Jacques Cartier put it in 1534, there were islands “as full of birds as any field or meadow is of grasse.
Again and again, the words ‘inexhaustible’ and ‘infinite’ were used to describe the Eastern forest of great pines, the giant cedars of the Pacific Northwest, all manner of fish. Another common refrain is that the natural bounty is so great, there is really no point in worrying about managing this treasure trove to prevent depletion. There was so much that there was a glorious freedom to be careless. Thomas Huxley (the English biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog”) told the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition that “the cod fishery...are inexhaustible; that is to say nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. Any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently...tobe useless.””
232. “...the stakes grow larger with each boom-bust cycle. The frenzy for cod crashed a species; the frenzy for tar sands oil and fracked gas is helping to crash the planet.”
237. Concerning Trump and the far-right. “If there is a single, overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate.”
238. Trump “Build a wall. Lock ‘em up. Deport them all. Grab ‘em wherever you like and show ‘em who’s boss.”
“Only a bold and genuinely redistributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs: to the politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air, and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.”
245. If we burned all fossil fuel fields and mines in production today we would likely pass 2C. Yep.
247. Canadian postal workers come together for a visionary plan “...for every post office in the country to become a hub for the green transition--a place where you can recharge electric vehicles and do an end-run around the big banks and get a loan to start an energy co-op; and where the entire delivery fleet is not only electric and made in Canada but also does more than deliver mail: It delivers locally grown produce and checks in on the elderly.”
248. “These are bottom-up, democratically conceived plans for a justice-based transition off fossil fuels. And we need them developed in every sector (from health care to education to media) and multiplied around the world.”
“The bottom line is this: As we get clean, we have got to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations: Land theft, genocide, slavery. Yes, the hardest stuff. Because we haven’t just been procrastinating climate action all these years. We’ve been procrastinating and delaying the most basic demands of justice and reparation. And we are out of time on every front.”
250 “...this is a fight, one in desperate need of a warrior spirit.”
251. The war on environmental defenders. “According to Global Witness, this worldwide war is getting worse: They report that “More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries….These numbers are shocking, and evidence that the environment is emerging as a new battleground for human rights. Across the world industry is pushing ever deeper into new territory….Increasingly communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.” About 40 percent of the victims, they estimate, are Indigenous.”
253. Monopoly capitalism in regard to solar in India. “...the biggest barrier is the nexus of Big Government and Big Carbon: When people can generate their own electricity from panels on their rooftops, and even feed that power back into a micro grid, they are no longer customers of giant utilities; they are competitors. No wonder so many roadblocks are being put up: Corporations love nothing more than a captive market.”
266. Wild fire deaths. “A global 2012 study estimated that more than three hundred thousand people die annually as a result of the smoke and air pollution from wildfires, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.”
Structural racism. “...in British Columbia this summer [2017], we learned still more about the way inequalities play out against a burning backdrop. Several Indigenous leaders raised concerns that during fire emergencies, their communities do not receive the same level of urgent response as nonindigenous ones, whether for fighting the flames or fo rebuilding afterward. With this in mind, several Indigenous reserves directly threatened by fire refused to evacuate, and a portion stayed behind to fight the flames--some with their own teams of trained firefighters and equipment, others with little more than garden hoses and sprinklers. In at least one case, the police responded by threatening to come in and remove children from their families, words with traumatic reverberations in a country that not so long ago systematically took Indigenous children from their homes as a matter of policy.
In the end, no First Nations homes were raided, and many were saved because of self-organized fire brigades. Ryan Day, chief of the fire-threatened Bonaparte Indian Band, said, “If we all evacuated, we would have no houses on this reserve.”
270. “Since the 1970s, fire season in the United States has lengthened by 105 days, according to an analysis by Climate Central.”
271. “Mike Flanningan, a University of Alberta wildfire expert, is blunt. “The increase in area burned in Canada is a direct result of human-caused climate change. Individual events get a little more tricky to connect, but the area burned has doubled in Canada since the 1970s as a result of warming temperatures.” And according to a 2010 study, fire occurrence in Canada is projected to increase by 75 percent by the end of the century.” However one projection of 7C warming, if trends continue, by end of the century, may mean no fires, as the majority of trees may be gone by 2100.
273. Naomi educating her child on climate change. “Avi [her husband] and I don’t talk to Toma about climate change, which may seem strange given that I write books about it and Avi directs films about it, and we both spend most of our waking hours focused on the need for a transformative response to the crisis. What we do talk about is pollution, though on a scale Toma can understand. Like plastic, and why we have to pick it up and use less of it because it makes the animals sick. Or we look at the exhaust coming out of cars and trucks and talk about how you can get power from the sun and the wind and store it in batteries. A little kid can grasp concepts like these and know exactly what should happen (better than plenty of adults). But the idea that the entire planet has a fever that could get so high that much of life on Earth could be lost in the convulsions--that seems to me too great a burden to ask small children to carry.
This summer marks the end of his protection. It isn’t a decision I’m proud of, or one I even remember making. He just heard too many adults obsessing over the strange sky and the real reasons behind the fires, and he finally put it all together.
At a playground in the haze, I meet a young mother who offers advice on how to reassure worried kids. She tells hers that forest fires are a positive part of the cycle of ecosystem renewal--the burning makes way for new growth, which feeds the bears and deer.
I nod, feeling like a failed mom. But I also know that she’s lying. It’s true that fire is a natural part of the life cycle, but the fires currently blotting out the sun in the Pacific Northwest are the opposite--they’re part of a planetary death spiral. Many are so hot and intransigent that they are leaving scorched earth behind. The rivers of bright red fire retardant being sprayed from planes are seeping into waterways, posing a threat to fish. And just as my son fears, animals are losing their forested homes.”
274. Feedback loops. “...burning carbon leads to warmer temperatures and long periods without rain, which leads to more fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere, which leads to even warmer and drier conditions, and even more fires.
Another such lethal feedback loop is playing out with Greenland’s wildfires. Fires produce black soot (also known as “black carbon”), which settles on ice sheets, turning the ice gray or black. Darkened ice absorbs more heat than reflective white ice, which makes the ice melt faster, which leads to sea level rise and the release of huge amounts of methane, which causes more warming and more fires, which in turn create more blackened ice and more melting.
So, no, I’m not going to tell Toma that the fires are a happy part of the cycle of life.” Lol
304. Reflecting on the late 80s lack of climate action “...what at first seemed like our best shot at lifesaving climate action had in retrospect suffered from an epic case of historical bad timing. Because what becomes clear when you look back at this juncture is that just as governments were getting together to get serious about reining in the fossil fuel sector, the global neoliberal revolution went supernova, and that project of economic and social reengineering clashed with the imperatives of both climate science and corporate regulation at every turn.” The rest is worth reading.
308. Democratic eco-socialism. . .
322. The New Deal was a counter-revolutionary act.
323. Criticisms of the Green New Deal. “Ocasio-Cortez and Markey resolution is a loose framework, and as much as it has been criticized in the press for including too much, the reality is that it still leaves a lot out. For instance, a Green New Deal needs to be more explicit about keeping carbon in the ground, about the central role of the US military in driving up emissions, about nuclear and coal never being “clean,” and about the debts wealthy countries like the United States and powerful corporations like Shell and Exxon owe to poorer nations that are coping with the impacts of crises they did almost nothing to create.
Most fundamentally, any credible Green New Deal needs a concrete plan for ensuring that the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates aren’t immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions--a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.
This is the problem with what we might call the emerging “climate Keynesianism”: the post-World War II economic boom did revive ailing economies, but it also kicked off suburban sprawl and set off a consumption tidal wave that would eventually be exported to every corner of the globe. In truth, policymakers are still dancing around the question of whether we are talking about slapping solar panels on the roof of Walmart and calling it green, or whether we are ready to have a more probing conversation about the limits of lifestyles that treat shopping as the main way to form identity, community, and culture.”
324. Less work means less junk consumption, ect. “...shorter work weeks allow people the time for this kind of enjoyment, and that they are not trapped in the grind of overwork requiring the quick fixes of fast food and mind-numbing distraction.” I’m rather blown away when I imagine how amazing the world will be if 8 billion of us are no longer tied to work a job for survival; the amazing wonders to come (if we make it).
325. Scarcity vs. abundance. Less “air travel, meat consumption, and profligate energy use--but there will also be new pleasures and new spaces where we can build abundance.”
226. Green New Deal challenges “...the Green New Deal will necessarily be a work in progress, one that is only as robust as the social movements, unions, scientists, and local communities that are pushing for it to live up to its promise. Right now, civil society is nowhere near as strong or as organized as it was in the 1930s, when the huge concessions of the New Deal era were won--though there are certainly signs of strength, from movement against mass incarceration and deporations, to #MeToo, to the wave of teachers’ strikes, to Indigenous-led pipeline blockades, to fossil fuel divestment, to the Women’s Marches, to School Strikes for Climate, to the Sunrise Movement, to the momentum for Medicare for All, and much more.
Still, there remains a long way to go to build the kind of outside power required to win and protect a truly transformational Green New Deal, which is why it is so crucial that we use the existing framework as a potent tool to build that power--a vision to both unite movements that are not currently in conversation with one another and to dramatically expand all their bases.”
337. A vision under capitalism beyond it. “Ursula K. Le Guin, who delivered a searing speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, four years before her death. “Hard times are coming,” she said, “when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom--poets, visionaries--realists of a larger reality….We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.””
“The power of art to inspire transformation is one of the original New Deal’s most lasting legacies. And interestingly, back in the 1930s, that transformational project was also under relentless attack in the press, and yet it didn’t slow it down for a minute.”
338. How the New Deal drove the Arts / Why the New Deal continued “...the elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal was that its programs were helping people. But another reason had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era’s transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins famously put it, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
Through programs that included the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theatre Project, and Federal Writers Project (all part of the WPA), as well as the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and several others, tens of thousands of painters, musicians, photographers, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, authors, and a huge array of craftspeople found meaningful work, with unprecedented support going to African American and Indigenous artists.
The result was an explosion of creativity and a staggering body of work. The Federal Art Project alone produced nearly 475,000 works of visual art, including more than 2,000 posters, 2,500 murals, and 100,000 canvases for public spaces. Its stable of artists included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Authors who participated in the Federal Writers’ Project included Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and John Steinbeck. The Federal Music Project was responsible for 225,000 performances, reaching some 150 million Americans.
Much of the art produced by New Deal programs was simply about bringing joy and beauty to Depression-ravaged people--while challenging the prevalent idea that art belonged exclusively to the wealthy. As FDR put it in a 1938 letter to author Hendrik Willem van Loon, “I, too, have a dream--to show people in the out of the way places, some of whom are not only in small villages but in corners of New York City...some real paintings and prints and etchings and some real music.”
340. New Deal & The Arts. Expressing the shattered world, but only providing a utopian vision “Some New Deal art set out to mirror a shattered country back to itself and, in the process, make an unassailable case for why New Deal relief programs were so desperately needed. The result was iconic work, from Dorothea Lange’s photography of Dust Bowl families enveloped in clouds of filth and forced to migrate, to Walker Evans’s harrowing images of tenant farmers that filled the pages of 1941 book ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, to Gordon Park’s pathbreaking photography of daily life in Harlem.
Other artists produced more optimistic, even utopian creations, using graphic art, short films, and vast mural to document the transformation under way under New Deal programs--the strong bodies building new infrastructure, planting trees, and otherwise picking up the pieces of their nation.”
Green New Deal futuring. “Just as [Molly] Crabapple and I started mulling over the idea of a Green New Deal short film, inspired by the utopian art of the New Deal, ‘The Intercept’ published a piece by Kate Aronoff that was in the year 2043, after the Green New Deal had come to pass. It told the story of what life was like for a fictionalized “Gina,” who grew up in the world that Green New Deal policies had created: “She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid family leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.” After free college, “she spent six months restoring wetlands and another six volunteering at a day care much like the one she had gone to.”
The piece struck a nerve, in large part because it imagined a future tense that wasn’t some version of Mad Max warriors battling prowling bands of cannibal warlords. Crabapple and I decide that our film could do something similar, but this time from Ocasio-Cortez’s vantage point. It would tell the story of how society decided to go bold rather than give up, and paint a picture of the world after the Green New Deal the congresswoman had championed became reality.
The final result is a seven-minute postcard from the future, codirected by Crabapple’s longtime collaborators Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt, and cowritten by Ocasio-Cortez and filmmaker and climate justice organizer Avi Lewis (who also happens to be my husband). It’s a story about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving.
Crabapple’s paintbrushes depict a country both familiar and entirely new. Cities are connected by bullet trains, Indigenous elders help young people restore wetlands, millions find jobs retrofitting low-cost housing--and when superstorms drown major cities, the rsidents respond not with vigilantism and recrimination but with cooperation and solidarity. Over those lush painting, Ocasio-Cortez’s voice is heard:
“As we battled the floods, fires and droughts, we knew how lucky we were to have started acting when we did. And we didn’t just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane, too. By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future. We stopped being scared of each other. And we found our shared purpose.”
343. “We are surrounded by ancestors whispering that we can do what our moment demands just as they did, and by future generations shouting that they deserve nothing less.”