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The climate movement was built for a world before climate change—it’s time for a new approach

October 6, 2022

The climate movement was built for a world before climate change—it’s time for a new approach

We need a mass movement that can deal with climate disasters by training people to both protect and mobilize their communities.

We are past the point where “stopping” climate change is really possible. With global temperature rise already above 1 degree Celsius and the window on keeping warming below 1.5 degrees rapidly closing, the consequences of decades of political inaction and corporate malfeasance are already making themselves known. Every month it seems like another part of the world is being hammered by one catastrophic climate impact or another, from flooding in Puerto Rico and Pakistan to the extreme heat that melted asphalt in Europe this past summer to the wildfires raging across western North America.

In the face of this new reality, climate organizing needs to evolve. For me, this reality really struck home last summer when extreme heat and wildfires ravaged the part of Canada that I call home. Watching devastation in my own backyard in real time, I realized that spending most of adult life as climate organizer had done little to prepare me to support my community in actually dealing with the impacts of climate change. Sure, we could organize around these impacts to demand more from the government, but that didn’t feel like enough. I spent a lot of sleepless nights thinking about this and, eventually, it led me to head back to school to become a paramedic.

Through my schooling, and now working as a first responder, I came to another realization: If we want to build the kind of mass movement that can tackle this crisis, we need to think about equipping communities with the skills and tools to deal with climate impacts…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Review of “The Production of Money” and Reflection on the Climate Movement

August 23, 2018

A Review of “The Production of Money” and Reflection on the Climate Movement

“…over the past few months the IMF has been sending warning signals about the state of the global economy. There are a bunch of different macroeconomic developments that signal we could be entering into another crisis or recession in the near future. One of those elements is the yield curve, which shows the difference between short-term and long-term borrowing rates. Investors and financial pundits of all sorts are concerned about this, because since 1950 every time the yield curve has flattened, the economy has tanked shortly thereafter.”

-Paul Sliker on Left Out Podcast

Ann Pettifor has a 160 page book that all serious people— organizers and activists, farmers, workers, intellectuals, teachers and students—should read; it’s called The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of the Bankers. At its core, the book’s guiding questions are: How does moneycurrently facilitate a despotic regime of finance and how can it facilitate, as a fiat currency, socially beneficial activity to set us on a better path toward Just Transition and equality?

The Production of Money emerges in a moment where larger movements are taking seriously the concepts of democratizing the economic sphere through initiatives such as public banking, Federal Jobs Guarantees, and the Solidarity Economy. This is a perfect book for the layperson (and latent activist) because it demystifies the currently authoritarian function of central and commercial banks in our world and how they have a stranglehold over our collective ability to address the massive global crises we face. Even more importantly, it presents a winning narrative about how we can begin to tackle financial oligarchy, climate chaos, inequality, and sexism precisely by framing a realistic horizon of dramatically better life conditions for ordinary people.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Strange

February 5, 2018

Climate Strange

The eco-obsessed often get labeled as weirdos — even by their peers. Weird, however, is looking better and better.

Alec Mitchell doesn’t like praise for what he’s doing. Not for loaning out reusable coffee mugs at farmers markets, nor running a compost collection service on a bike, nor renting out dishware at events to discourage disposable plates. Mitchell spent months sleeping in a tent on the beach to conserve housing-related resources. He never, ever gets in a car.

“Great job!” so many would say. “You’re doing such wonderful work!”

But the cars and the disposable coffee cups don’t seem to diminish, so the praise feels meaningless. “You try and you try and you try, and you don’t know what you can do, so you do what you can,” he told me over the phone. (We had to plan the call in advance, as Mitchell does not keep his cellphone on unless he knows he needs to use it, to conserve battery life.)

Why keep it up? Why be such a weirdo? What can you possibly change?

Even within the environmental movement, there’s a fraught and often ugly debate over people like Mitchell, who radically change their lives to fight climate change. Critics say they are wasting their time and scaring away the critical audience of the unconverted. Major voices in the climate movement are dismissive of the choice to, say, forego a major flight. Why sacrifice, they chide; focus on what matters.

But Mitchell has also worked on the kind of systemic change that many environmentalists would criticize him for distracting from. He’s volunteered for habitat restoration, worked at the local recycling facility, run for local office, knocked on doors for voter registration campaigns. He’s just upset that for so much talk about wanting to fight climate change, most people don’t reflect it in their daily lives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The state of the climate movement

September 22, 2015

The state of the climate movement

This is the text of a talk I gave today at Save the Children as part of their #changehistory series, organised by Campaigns Director (and fellow GlobalDashboard contributor) Kirsty McNeill. Kirsty’s opening talk in the series is here; see also @changehistory on Twitter.

I.

It’s the afternoon of 28 June 1988. NASA scientist Jim Hansen is testifying on global warming to Congress. Outside, it’s an oven. Temperatures are sweltering to an unheard-of high of 38 degrees Celsius. The legislators and journalists in the room are close to fainting.

It’s one of those moments when it all comes together. Next day, climate leads the New York Times. By September, 58% of Americans have heard of the greenhouse effect. Two months after that, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set up. Global climate policy is born.

Now it’s 1990. In Geneva, the Second World Climate Conference is taking place. Margaret Thatcher – herself a chemist – is lavishing praise on the IPCC, which has just published its First Assessment Report. And as if to anticipate the Stern Review 16 years later, she’s interpreting the IPCC’s findings very much through a rational lens of self-interest – telling leaders that “it may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.

Already, the terms on which climate policy will play out over the next two decades have been set. This is to be a technocratic agenda. Climate change will be owned by a ‘priesthood’ of experts, with its own language, rituals, gatherings, and assumptions. NGOs can be admitted as members, but only if they’re willing to adopt the priesthood’s worldview and profess its creed.

As for the public, their job is to listen to the experts and then remember to turn out the lights. It’s certainly not to participate, much less wield power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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