Words&Dirt

“The environmental crisis––if conceived sufficiently broadly––neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.  As Yotam Marom, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York, wrote in July 2013, ‘The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements.  We don’t need to become climate activists, we are climate activists.  We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment.’

The nature of the moment is familiar but bears repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly developing nations like China and India next decade.  That, in turn, will determine whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments have agreed are unacceptably dangerous.  In other words, we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory.  This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus––all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment.

Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.

And it is also worth remembering because it’s so very easy to forget: the alternative to such a project is not the status quo extended indefinitely.  It is climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism––profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders, and, quite possibly, high-risk geoengineering when things spiral out of control.”

––This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, pg. 153-4