Sunday, July 21, 2019

Naomi Klein: If Enough of Us Stop Looking Away and Decide That Climate Change Is a Crisis Worthy of Marshall Plan Levels of Response, Then It Will Become One

These are quotes from one of our Earth's greatest authors, activists, and visionaries. She is an international treasure. And I have long felt this deep, deep respect and gratitude for the courage, integrity, truthfulness, and fierceness of Naomi Klein in empowering us to work towards a world that increasingly cares for all. Truly, her work and legacy to us all is a gift to everyone and to all of Earth's beings. May we listen. May we be informed and inspired. And may we act. NOW. Molly

 
 It doesn't have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: 'Where can I get my next fix?' It doesn't learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible... and then says: 'I want more'. Unfortunately we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict. —  Naomi Klein

There are lots of incredible people who are working in very flawed structures that are designed to keep us apart, so we're going to have to figure this out. The first stage is just talking about it openly: We are all working within structures where there is a disincentive to do what we most need to do, which is come together. I don't know what the answer is but I definitely think that that first stage is just being honest about it and trying to speak about it in a way that is not just accusatory.

That's what's happening now. The world is being held up a mirror: "All roads lead here. Do you like it?" A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people are saying, "Wait a minute, if our system can produce that, there's something wrong with this system." That opening is ours to seize. It matters how we name it: It's not called Donald Trump. It's called capitalism. 

It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message — spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions — telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.

The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

I do think that at this moment in late capitalism it is easier in our minds to imagine raising Florida 30 feet to escape the rising seas than it is to regulate capitalism to make it serve human beings.

This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I'm arguing is that, in fact, what we've been told is a lie. 

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! 

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.

Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we. 

Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons. 

This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. 

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.  

Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.  


Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

Trump walked into a media setting for which he was far better suited than the other contenders because he actually knows how to do reality TV and made them all look like pretenders. And I would argue that our news media has only gotten worse since Trump got in office. Trump is media crack. The ratings have never been higher. The reason CNN would run an hour of an empty podium waiting for him to show up during the campaign is because they were terrified if they turned away from Trump their rating would go down. 

We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. 

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles — asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

A lot of people voted for Trump because of the promises he made around jobs. And so it's a failed political strategy if the goal actually is to get Trump impeached. Trump's not going to get impeached if he's still useful to the Republican party, and the only thing that makes him not useful to the Republican party is if his base turns on him. And that's not going to happen over Russia. That's going to happen over economic betrayal. But that's not going to happen if no one knows that it's happening. 

The anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement.
 
We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.

I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.

In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality. 

In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely. 

Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
 
So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. 

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.

Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users. 

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.  

The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it's possible to change. 
   
The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.

[On climate change:] What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing? 

Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.

If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one. 

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself. 

 I highly recommend all the books by Naomi Klein.
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