It’s Time to Act on the Climate Crisis September 21, 2014
Panel on Urgency of climate change
Click for Video of Climate Change Panel on The Real News Network
- Chris Hedges
- Naomi Klein
- Bill McKibben
- Kshama Sawant, Seattle Council member
- Senator Bernie Sanders
This sculpture by Issac Cordal in Berlin is called “Politicians discussing global warming.”
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SOLUTION = Fair world-level regulation of Climate.
Capitalism = Whole point is to find resources and exploit them = Extractivism
Politics = Law and democratic structures = Politicians must do what people want.
Capital learned = Disaster is a cash cow = IRAQ TWICE + Katrina + NOW Climate Change
Capital = Separates humans from the world around
Our great collective misfortune = Just as leaders started waking up to Climate Change in 1990s = in Parallel we had WTO + NAFTA + hyperactive deregulation + Tax-cutting + Privatization of public Duties + TERROR WARS = Climate movement, “struggling, sputtering, failing utterly” and corporate globalization, “zooming from victory to victory”.
Climate movement = Use capital to get real
“Sacrifice zones” = Places most depredated by climate: “Poor out-of-the-way places where residents lack political power = Race + Language + Class WARFARE
In Rich world = Most people ignore the dwindling of nature in their parks and gardens. OR They are so sickened, they have to stop noticing right away = People are WORN OUT!
Marshall Plan for the Earth = NOT an abstract, sciencey matter = Far too important to be left to the knit-your-owns.
SOLUTION = “a politics based on reconnection” involve real, ordinary, active humans, working in properly modern, complex societies.
Green industries = Renewable energy and public transport = More labor-intensive than fossil-fuels = Massive “job creator as well as a community builder and source of hope.”
“IS EARTH FUCKED?” by Brad Werner models the likely progress of “earth-human systems” towards various unpleasant outcomes unless “people or groups of people” resist.
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CHRIS HEDGES TELLS IT LIKE IT IS ON CLIMATE CHANGE!
The Last Gasp of Climate Change Liberals by Chris Hedges Sept 2014
Click for Source Article by Chris Hedges on TruthDig
Climate change March in NYC Sept. 21, 2014 = Last gasps of conventional liberalism’s response to the climate crisis = 2 days before UN gathering of World Representatives in NYC called by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to discuss the November 2015 U.N. Climate Conference in Paris.
Marchers = Will dutifully follow Route laid down by NYC Police.
No one will reach the UN BUILDING + NO speeches + NO List of demands = A climate-themed street fair. Some of the groups backing the march are little more than corporate fronts.
The Climate Group Endorsing March = Members = BP + China Mobile + Dow Chemical + Duke Energy + HSBC + Goldman + JPM + Greenstone
Environmental Defense Fund = “work[s] with companies rather than against them”
Faux environmental organizations = Designed to neutralize GOALS = Exposes the march’s failure to adopt a meaningful agenda or pose a genuine threat to power.
RADICAL GROUPS = Our only hope = Global Climate Convergence and Popular Resistance. = Real fight will come once people disperse on 11th Avenue.
Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance = We need direct action against the UN during the meeting = Blockades and Disruption of the meeting itself + Highlight the fact UN has sold out to corporate interests Logos on display + UN last meeting on climate change in Poland — Held a simultaneous conference to promote coal as a clean energy source. = UN meetings = Corporate trade shows hijacking meetings to promote corporate interests. Obama announced continuing USA stance of voluntary climate goals.
Fossil fuel industry = ExxonMobil to Koch author our legislation = Stacked the courts with their judges and the airwaves with their PROPAGANDISTS + Fund our scientific research and have effectively silenced dissidents = CONTROLUnited Nations setting up in UN exhibition halls to profit from the climate crisis = “clean” coal + biofuel + nuclear power + WORST OF ALL carbon trading.
Counter narrative = REPRESSED at 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen = Swiftly silenced by U.N. security = Fences + Security Barriers + Protesters herded by police + Controlled “free speech” zones outside = NYC ruthlessly dealt BLOWS TO OCCUPY + Physically removing journalists and Photographers = U.N. demands preapproved wording for T-shirts worn at its gatherings. = Elitists attending U.N. summits have no intention of GIVING AN INCH of their wealth, power and privilege = MONEY RULES and PEOPLE DO NOT FIT their equation.
FACT: USA + EUROPEAN democracy = Elaborate public relations charade = Ifwe accept this charade we are irrelevant.
Understand power = Waged on two fronts = Disrupt the machinery of corporate capitalism + Build parallel, autonomous structures for self-governance that address basic needs such as food and green energy.
Capitalism = System of economic exploitation justified by hijacking the ruling political and economic ideologies for ceaseless expansion and commodification of the natural world and human beings. = A battle for ideas as well as a battle for power.
BETTER SOLUTION = Peaceful incremental reform in which elected politicians representing the People that elected them will VOTE for laws that thwart corporate abuse + A United Nations that serves the interests of people around the globe rather than corporate profit + Vigorous, open and free debate in the public arena + A judiciary that is NOT a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state + Freedom to express dissent without GOV monitoring + Where Basic civil liberties are protected = But we do NOT LIVE in such a system.
MULTINATIONAL CORPORATE STATE = Response to climate change = Pass a series of Draconian laws and set up a vast security and surveillance apparatus that obliterates our privacy + Allows us to be snatched off the streets by the military and held without due process in indefinite detention + Criminalizes dissent + Criminal state holds in its hands the legal and physical tools to shut us down.
MULTINATIONAL CORPORATE STATE = Response to climate change is not to alter course, but to silence any who resist.
Sacrifice zone (West Virginia + Indian Reservations) activists have learned something many Americans have yet to understand—corporations are willing to poison Earth and all of its inhabitants for profit = NO limits. = Despair + Joblessness + High cancer rates + Loss of hope + Increased state repression + NO POWER = Often retreat into drugs and alcohol, the only way for many to blunt the pain
MULTINATIONAL CORPORATE STATE = As the environment devolves, the planet becomes one vast sacrifice zone.
NYT published a new UN report on Climate Change:
“Runaway growth on the emission of greenhouse gases is swamping all political efforts to deal with the problem, raising the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” over the coming decades..Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points… Higher seas, devastating heat waves, torrential rain and other climate extremes are also being felt around the world as a result of human emissions…The world may already be nearing a temperature at which the loss of the vast ice sheet covering Greenland would become inevitable..it would be unstoppable and could result in a sea level rise of 23 feet, with additional increases from other sources like melting Antarctic ice, potentially flooding the world’s major cities.”
The rising carbon emissions and the extraction of tar sands—and since the industry has figured out how to transport tar sands without building the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, this delivery seems assured—will continue no matter how many police-approved marches are held.
FACT: Play by the rules and we lose. ORGANIZED WORK STOPPAGE + Breach police barricades + Jail time + Direct confrontation + Physically disrupting the corporate machinery + Severing ourselves from the dominant culture to build small, self-sustaining communities + Refuse to do what we are told + Turn from a liberal agenda of reform to embrace a radical agenda of revolt.
Concise Politics -- Your Time should NOT be wasted. 