Month: December 2018

Five (More) Things You Can do Now to Address Climate Change

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Recycle. Eat less meat. Buy electric cars. Have fewer kids. Reduce consumption. Install solar panels on your home.

These are just a few of the (primarily middle-class oriented) ideas that the media have offered over the last year to help you figure out “what you can do now” to address climate change and to avoid its most devastating impacts.

Yet, in view of the 24th Annual Conference of the Parties (COP24) in Katowice, Poland–a fiasco that produced no binding commitments by nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid catastrophic climate change–these actions are clearly not enough.

They never were enough.

So, that being said, here are a few more things you can do:

1) Join the Extinction Rebellion.

Started this year in the UK, the Extinction Rebellion–which has spread to at least 35 countries–is a movement dedicated to taking radical, nonviolent direct action in rebellion against government inaction on climate change.

If the Extinction Rebellion is not your cup of tea, however, then find or start a rebellion that is, because by now it should be incandescently clear that radical, massive, strategic nonviolent civil disobedience, disruption and noncooperation are precisely what are called for in the face of governmental elites’ intransigence regarding climate change. We must disrupt, disrupt, disrupt until they surrender their allegiances to fossil fuel interests and neoliberalism, go back to the negotiating table, and then in good faith hammer out a robust, binding, enforceable and equitable global climate agreement.

2) Organize where you are.

An existential crisis demands more than signing petitions and climate marches.

So, take responsibility for canvassing at least 25 homes and apartment complexes where you live. Recruit concerned neighbors to help with canvassing and to organize neighborhood events and climate resistance. Leave literature! (In other words, be like the Jehovah Witnesses who, without fail, knock on doors every Saturday morning. Except talk about climate change, of course.) Converse with and organize members of your family, your faith community, and others with whom you socialize as well as work.

3) Support and demand, by every nonviolent means necessary, a Green New Deal.

Not a neoliberal/neocolonial Green New Deal, but an ecosocialist, global justice, labor-oriented, equitable, bottom-up Green New Deal, one that presumes not only that we need a “command and control” economy to effectively address the climate crisis; but also that we need to end further military spending and, ultimately, war itself.

That Green New Deal.

4) Join, expand, and/or create radical, self-determined, non-hierarchical, decentralized, and intentionally diverse (class, race, sexuality, gender, species) transcommunity networks, co-ops, coalitions, and other forms of organizing designed to meet people’s everyday needs as well as to respond–with food, work, medical care, housing, and other means of support–to climate catastrophes as they arise.

Why?

Because not only must we be ready should our governments fail us (or increasingly turn against us–in proper COINTELPRO fashion–in order to secure the interests of corporations and economic elites in the midst of growing unrest); but we must also prefigure the kind of world we want.

Moreover, if dystopia is our future, then at least we can make it a just one.

5) As you recycle, eat less (or no) meat, use public transportation rather than drive, cut down on how often you fly, purchase local produce, and vote during every election cycle–as you do all of these things, desegregate and decolonize your personal life. Question and transform your commitment, at the level of everyday acts and habits, to private property, national identity, militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, speciesism, and other global hierarchies of power.

In other words, if what you hold dear keeps you tethered to systems that will kill us all off, then you need to forget about it anyway. After all, it is extraordinarily difficult to change what you personally support.

 

This article was originally published in Counterpunch.

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Climate Activists Must Organize Like It’s 2099

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Though Donald Trump’s Black Friday release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (FNCA) completely backfired–the media relentlessly covered the report, and with devastating detail–Trump nevertheless managed to escape being held to account for what is (arguably) the Assessment’s most damning observation:

“Current trends in annual greenhouse gas emissions, globally, are consistent with RCP8.5.”

What does this mean?

RCPs, or “Representative Concentration Pathways,” are “possible scenarios” scientists use to “evaluate the implications of different climate outcomes and associated impacts throughout the 21st century,” as the FNCA notes. RCP8.5 is the highest scenario, meaning that it “represents a future where annual greenhouse gas emissions increase significantly throughout the 21st century before leveling off by 2100.”

In other words, RCP8.5 is the worst possible scenario. It describes a world in which the global annual temperature will be, by the end of this century, 9°F higher (or more) than it is today.

We cannot survive such a world.

Trump was not held to account for the FNCA’s claim–or, rather, for what the claim suggests about his pro-fossil fuel environmental policies–because it was widely overlooked in news reports and FNCA “take-aways.” Consequently, when the White House bemoaned the fact that the report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario,” the media, the administration’s critics, and even scientists typically offered the retort that the Assessment addresses other scenarios; that it was properly vetted; and, that RCP8.5 was just one possible future we are facing.

In other words, not one mention of the fact that current trends are consistent with the worst case scenario, trends to which we are contributing significantly.

According to research recently published by the Global Carbon Project, the world “is on pace to release a record 37.1 gigatons of planet-warming emissions in 2018, led in large part by China, the United States and India.” Moreover, our nation’s emissions “are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year.”

The environmental policies of the Trump administration–as well as those championed by many state governments–are nothing less than RCP8.5 in the making. In fact, given that these policies have been formulated in the context of an overwhelming scientific consensus concerning climate change, they are an intentional production of accelerating species extinction, extreme weather, climate migration, climate-related social and economic inequalities, water and food scarcity, sea level rise, ecosystem collapse, climate change related illnesses, disease, and death, ocean dead zones, and polluted air.

They are policies at war with all life on earth.

We could say, then, that RCP8.5 is here and now.

And why not? After all, that “extreme scenario” the White House complained about is not something that will appear suddenly, out of thin air, in the year 2100. No, it will unfold, inexorably, through one deregulation after another, one fossil fuel tax break and subsidy after another, one pro-coal conference and promotion after another, until the water inundates our coastal cities, the pollinators die off, the aquifers dry up, and our food supply runs out.

Of course, even as we are in the process of creating a RCP8.5 world, that world is not inevitable. It is not our fate because we can change course.

But for that to be true, not only must we resist and organize; we must also do both like its 2099.

 

This article was originally published in Common Dreams.

 

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