Earth News: More than News of the World

Once Brexit goes into effect, whatever formation takes hold of the government will enjoy free reign to scale back the environmental regulations they were roped into by the European Union….

 

UKIP’s victory on Brexit emboldens the worst of the world’s racist and authoritarian right. Allowed to take power, those same forces could doom us all to a world warmed beyond reversal, leading their governments even farther away from course-corrections on climate than they already are. As rising tides loom, far-right responses to them – for many communities – could prove as dangerous as the crisis itself.

 

Brexit is by no means game over for the climate. It does, however, make the challenge for progressives in a warming world eerily clear. A low-carbon future can also be a more inclusive and democratic one. But not without one hell of a fight. If the atmosphere at Trump rallies – or leading up to the E.U. referendum – is any indication that will be harder now too.

 

Like most other changes for the better through history, progress on the environment thus far has been the result of sustained pushes from below, whether the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline or the wave of global marches and blockades that made the Paris Agreement – however modest – possible. Now, more than ever, the fight for a better environment is a fight against an ascendant far right – not the working-class Leave voters that registered their disaffection with austerity, but men like Farage and Trump, who twist pain into violence and division.

The British referendum marks the beginning of a new politics in Europe, a politics of new opportunities, in which the masses are beginning to play an independent role. Yesterday, the idea of exiting from the European Union was deliberately excluded from the list of “serious” possibilities, its supporters ridiculed and marginalized. The fact that this “fringe”, turned out to enjoy the support of society forces us to reassess our idea of what is possible and what is impossible, in the modern world.

 

Neoliberal reformers – from Maggie Thatcher to Anatoly Chubais [a key figure in the days of Yeltsin who led the privatization of the former Soviet economy] always insisted on the “irreversible nature” of the measures they carried out. It did not matter what people thought, or how institutions work. Decisions are irreversible, reforms are irrevocable. Any political, social, economic or even personal strategy must from now on be built within these narrow limits. Most “serious” left intellectuals and politicians adopted the same logic, because otherwise the establishment would not recognize them as “serious.” The manipulation of mass consciousness through propaganda is an essential element of this order. Despite the intensity of the debate, the really important issues remain outside the public discourse.

 

But supporters of the EU could not offer anything other than maintaining the status quo. And people accept this state of affairs less and less every day. The system accumulates problems, and defiantly refuses to address them, since any attempt to really fix something by changing the direction of development, would create a meaningful precedent, overturning the logic of irreversibility.

In the midst of the hottest year in recorded history, tens of thousands of people on 6 continents did something that politicians have not: they took bold, courageous action to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

 

Each action was unique: from the coal fields of Germany [pictures above], to the oil wells of Nigeria, to defiant actions against new coal power plant in Indonesia and the Philippines – and many places beyond.

 

But the purpose was the same: keep fossil fuels in the ground. Build a just transition to a new kind of 100% renewable economy. Do it now.

 

During Break Free, people tried new things, pushing the boundaries of what movements had done before. Or they did old things bigger than ever, putting more people in the streets (or in the way of the industry) to show that the time for action is now.

 

There has never been a better time than now to break free from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and gas companies are in a financial crisis, the planet is overheating, and – thanks to you, a global resistance is growing to confront the industry wherever they turn.

The call to Break Free from Fossil Fuels envisioned “tens of thousands of people around the world rising up” to take back control of their own destiny; “sitting down” to “block the business of government and industry that threaten our future”; conducting “peaceful defense of our right to clean energy.” That’s just what happened.

 

Such a “rising up” amounts to a global nonviolent insurgency – a withdrawal of consent from those who claim the right to rule – manifested in a selective refusal to accept and obey their authority [JF:  Brexit, anyone?]. Break Free from Fossil Fuels represented a quantum leap in the emergence of a global nonviolent climate insurgency – its nonviolent “shot heard around the world.” It was globally coordinated, with common principles, strategy, planning, and messaging. It utilized nonviolent direct action not only as an individual moral witness, but also to express and mobilize the power of the people on which all government ultimately depends. It presented climate protection not only as a moral but as a legal right and duty, necessary to protect the Constitution and the earth’s essential resources on which we and our posterity depend. It represented an insurgency because it denied the right of the existing powers and principalities – be they corporate or governmental – to use the authority of law to justify their destruction of the earth’s climate.

 

The Public Health Advisory Panel on Coal in Oakland report offers 145 well-researched and footnoted pages of reasons to distrust assurances that grievous hazards can be magically neutralized by technology that is unproven, uneconomic, or ‘optional’ at the discretion of profit-motivated coal proponents.

 

There is only one way to protect our workers and communities from coal hazards: banning its transport through Oakland and its port.

As worldwide headlines have proclaimed, California’s Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) says it will shut its giant Diablo Canyon reactors near San Luis Obispo, and that the power they’ve been producing will be replaced by renewable energy.

 

PG&E has also earmarked some $350 million to “retain and retrain” Diablo’s workforce, whose union has signed on to the deal, which was crafted in large part by major environmental groups.

 

On a global scale, in many important ways, this marks the highest profile step yet towards the death of U.S. nuclear power and a national transition to a Solartopian green-powered planet….

You do whatever you can to try to put out the fire or exit the house.  You make a plan about how you can put out the fire, or how you can best exit the house.

 

Your senses are heightened, you are focused like a laser, and you put your entire self into your actions. You enter emergency mode.

 

The climate crisis is an unprecedented emergency. It is, far and away, the United States’ top national security threat, public health threat, and moral emergency. Humanity is careening towards the deaths of billions of people, millions of species, and the collapse of organized civilization. States under severe climate stress, such as Syria, are already starting to fail, bringing chaos, violence, and misery to the region and political instability to Europe. America’s political system is also starting to convulse as the two-party system is showing signs of fragility.

 

How we react to the climate crisis will shape centuries and millennia to come. Given the stakes, and the extremely short timetable, it is imperative that we strive to maximize the efficacy of our actions – from ourselves as individuals, from our nation, from the global community of nations, and from the organizations that are trying to avert this catastrophe. 

 

In this paper, I will introduce the concept of “emergency mode” which is how individuals and groups function optimally during an existential or moral crisis – often achieving great feats through intensely focused motivation. I will argue that the goal of the climate movement must be to lead the public out of “normal” mode and into emergency mode. 

 

This has huge implications for the climate movement’s communication style, advocacy, and strategy. Because emergency mode is contagious, the best strategy is for climate activists and organizations to go into emergency mode themselves, and communicate about the climate emergency, the need for emergency mobilization, and the fact that they are in emergency mode, as clearly and emphatically as possible.

In its most recent synthesis report, published in early 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) laid out estimates of how much CO₂ we can emit and still keep global average temperature rise to no more than 1.5C, 2C or 3C above pre-industrial levels.

 

That same year, Carbon Brief used these estimates to calculate how many years of current emissions were left before blowing these budgets.

Updating this analysis for 2016, our figures suggest that just five years of CO₂ emissions at current levels would be enough to use up the carbon budget for a good chance – a 66% probability – of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5C….

The Bramble Cay melomys have vanished from its 350m-long cay home in the Torres Strait due to sea-level rise and weather events. Photo credit: Queensland Government.

Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would “act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.” And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.

 

When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is “legally binding.” That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.

 

In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: “Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets.” And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.

 

“Because of the United States.” More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.

Renowned political economist Samir Amin, engaged in a unique lifelong effort both to narrate and affect the human condition on a global scale, brings his analysis up to the present – the world of 2013. The key events of our times – financial crisis, the emerging nations, globalization, financialization, political Islam, Eurozone implosion – are related in a coherent, historically based, account….

 

Ultimately, Amin demonstrates that this system is not viable and that the implosion in progress is unavoidable. Whether humanity will rise to the challenge of building a more humane global order free of the contradictions of capital, however, is yet to be seen.

The Arctic Ocean may not be a typical venue for a piano performance, but it’s a prime setting for making a point about climate change. Ludovico Einaudi, an Italian composer-pianist, performed an original piece while stranded on an “artificial iceberg” (or rather, a floating platform made of white, wooden triangles) as Norway’s Wahlenbergbreen glacier collapsed in the background.

 

Greenpeace shipped the baby grand piano from Germany to the Arctic for the stunt, which was meant to draw attention to a proposal to create a sanctuary in 10 percent of the Arctic Ocean, protecting it from oil drilling, fishing trawlers, and other exploitation.

 

There are no promises it will work, but enjoy the exciting performance on a stranded iceberg – no polar bears needed.