OWS, the Democrats and the survival of civilization.
Most on this website are aware that the economic elites have led us on an unsustainable path for the last 30 years. But are you aware that we have been careening toward environmental catastrophe that might well mean the end of civilization? The International Energy Agency recently gave humanity perhaps the most dire warning in world history:
Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.
"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum . The door will be closed forever."
If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget", according to the IEA's analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.
If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA's calculations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-changeWhat will a non-linear change mean for the global climate mean? It could be the catalyzing of a new Ice Age by the mechanism discussed by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth.” It could be the collapse of global commercial agriculture, which lacks the genetic diversity necessary to cope with the accelerated mutation of microbes in warmer climates. It could be dramatically higher ocean levels or ever more terrible natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, tornadoes, etc.) the kind which have become more severe and widespread in the last decades. It could be plague from the migration of tropical parasites into previously temperate zones. Certainly it could be an aggregate of these and other predicted effects. No one one knows exactly what will happen, but the risk that we will take a quantum leap in ecological disasters is a reality predicted by climate change models.
What are the major American parties doing about this? Essentially nothing since 1997, when Al Gore personally engineered the Kyoto Protocol. The last major climate treaty conference was held in Copenhagen in 2009. To paraphrase Wall Street Occupiers, in Copenhagen we got “sold out” by Obama and those G20 countries which followed his lead. Here is what Naomi Klein reported at that time:
Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone's fault. It did not happen because human beings are incapable of agreeing, or are inherently self-destructive. Nor was it all was China's fault, or the fault of the hapless UN.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn't use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the US economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the US took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him.
(The "deal" that was ultimately rammed through was nothing more than a grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/21/copenhagen-failure-obama-climate-changeRemember Obama's campaign promise to make climate change a high priority and Al Gore would be a key player in that policy? Big Lie. Of course, the GOP is even worse in that regard. Suffice it to say that BOTH parties are advocating for the death of billions of people on this issue.
Some will say that it's too late, let's all just be cynical about humanity. I say that while there is life, there is hope. What gives some of us hope? The Occupy movement and its attempt at raising global consciousness to a sufficient degree to begin fighting for the continuation of world civilization by starting with a paradigm shift. But meanwhile, we have taken a huge step backward in educating the public to this apocalyptic threat. Once again Naomi Klein:
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.
If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).
All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ci... The hope for a global change in consciousness now seems possible, given the momentum of the Occupy movement. I close with a relevant quote from the OWS Declaration:
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
http://www.nycga.net/resources/declaration/
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