May we listen to Naomi Klein and other powerful and essential truth-tellers, activists and authors, wisdom-keepers and visionaries. And may we act on behalf of a highest good for us all. This is truly the most vital work of our lifetimes. Our descendants are counting on us. 🙏 Molly
Naomi Klein: ‘I always think about climate justice as multitasking.’ Photograph: Adrienne Grunwald/The Guardian
Canadian author and professor of climate justice cautiously hails loss and damage agreements at Cop27
ByMadeleine de Trenqualye
Naomi Klein published her first book on the climate crisis, This Changes Everything, almost a decade ago. She was one of the organisers and authors of Canada’s Leap manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and justice-based transition off fossil fuels. In 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as professor of climate justice in the Department of Geography and co-director of Canada’s first Centre for Climate Justice.
What is climate justice?
I always think about climate justice as multitasking. We live in a time of multiple overlapping crises: we have a health emergency; we have a housing emergency; we have an inequality emergency; we have a racial injustice emergency; and we have a climate emergency, so we’re not going to get anywhere if we try to address them one at a time. We need responses that are truly intersectional. So how about as we decarbonise and create a less polluted world, we also build a much fairer society on multiple fronts?
Many environmentalists hear that and think: “Well, that sounds a lot harder than just implementing a carbon tax or switching to green energy.” And the argument we make in the climate justice movement is that what we’re trying to do is to build a power base that is invested in climate action. Because if you’re only talking about carbon, then anybody who has a more daily emergency – whether it’s police violence, gender violence or housing precarity – is going to think: “That’s a rich person problem. I’m focused on the daily emergency of staying alive.” But if you can connect the issues and show how climate action can create better jobs and redress gaping inequalities, and lower stress levels, then you start getting people’s attention and you build a broader constituency that is invested in getting climate policies passed.
You’ve been communicating the climate emergency for over a decade. How have your strategies changed over the years?
I date my awakening around climate change to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I saw how Katrina unveiled and exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and injustices, in the same way that the pandemic and other climate disasters have served as social unveilings. The people who had resources and cars left town and got a hotel. But those who didn’t – who were overwhelmingly poor and Black – were stranded on their rooftops holding signs that said: “Help.” And then, instead of investing in the neglected public services that had failed people, the government’s response was: sell off the school system; sell off the public housing; turn the city into this laboratory for the neoliberal wishlist. So the story I started telling was a very dystopian one: it was the story of the Shock Doctrine. The story was: If we stay on this road, it leads to a world of Katrinas. Every disaster will intensify pre-existing inequalities and then the vultures will come in to take advantage of the pain to further enrich themselves and deepen those inequalities. It wasn’t a very cheerful story, and I’m not sure it was very motivating.
Then, in This Changes Everything, the story I tried to tell was: What if we responded to these unveilings with an intersectional response that actually tried to change the system that was producing these overlapping crises? That’s the story I’ve been trying to tell for a decade now, along with many others. I think we’ve gotten a bit better at telling it, including in the “Message from the Future” films we produced with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Molly Crabapple and Avi Lewis. Our goal was to use the power of art and imagination to tell the story of a beautiful society we could live in if we responded in an intersectional way.
So do you think evoking hope is ultimately more effective in inspiring people to take climate action?
I have an ambivalent relationship with the word hope these days. We have to be realistic about the fact that we’ve locked in a very difficult future for a lot of people. We’ve screwed things up badly enough that even if we do everything right from here on out, we’re still looking at a future of staccato climate disasters.
But I don’t believe we have the luxury of throwing up our hands and saying: “We’re doomed, let’s just go Mad Max on this.” I think there are ways of preparing for those shocks, that build a way of living with one another that is significantly kinder and more generous than the way we currently live with one another, which is really quite brutal. That requires investing in the labour of care at every level, and guaranteeing basic economic rights, like the right to housing, food and clean water. If we build out that infrastructure, we can weather shocks with far greater grace. That’s where I place my hope.
You’ve written and spoken at length about how large-scale crises can either push societies backward or spark positive change. What impact do you think the pandemic has had on our response to climate change?
It’s too soon to tell. I think the isolation that was required to prevent further mass death during Covid damaged social relations in a significant way, and I don’t think we’ve quite rebuilt our connective tissue yet. I think our greatest barrier to believing we’re capable of the scale of change that this crisis demands of us is that we tend to think about what we can do as individuals instead of what we can do collectively. I don’t think the climate justice movement has gotten its fire back to the level we saw in 2019 with the student climate strikes that brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in Vancouver alone. But I think we will, and I think that the pandemic has exposed other things that will help us.
For instance, we now have a recent collective memory of a true emergency response, even if it was abandoned too soon. This is different from the climate response. Everybody’s passed their climate emergency declarations – whether it’s universities, cities, or nations. But we’ve never seen anything close to the level of urgency, spending, and doing “whatever it takes” that we saw during that first Covid year and a half. Nobody has responded to the climate crisis with the urgency the crisis demands.
Previously, I would have to harken back to the New Deal or the second world war mobilisation to be like: Look, way back in the black-and-white movie times there were these society-level responses to crises! Now I don’t need to – Covid showed us what it looks like when our institutions treat an emergency like an actual emergency. Climate demands different responses, but the same sense of urgency.
Climate Justice is often discussed in terms of rich countries paying their climate debt to poor countries. What does climate justice look like within British Columbia?
It’s inseparable from the Indigenous calls for land back and reparations for damage done. Because the reason land was taken in the first place was for extraction, including extracting fossil fuels. And that extraction and theft continues to this day.
Climate justice also means, at its most basic level, dealing with the wild overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor. Survival demands a correction because climate change keeps showing us that it’s inequality and injustice that kills.
It’s not just Katrina, think about the British Columbia heat dome in 2021: when you turn the heat up, it doesn’t affect everyone equally. Over 600 people died in the heat dome. We now know that there was a strong relationship between the lack of affordable, adequate housing and those fatalities. Almost all of these deaths occurred at home or in a hotel and disproportionately affected the elderly, disabled and poor. Many of those people were trapped in small rental units with very little air circulation and inadequate shade and weren’t physically able or didn’t feel safe getting to a cooling centre.
We have multiple emergencies here in British Columbia that are costing many lives, whether it’s a heat dome that kills 600 people, or a toxic drug supply. What we’re trying to understand is how are they feeding each other and how are they intersecting with each other?
Last year, you were involved in highlighting the human rights situation during the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt. What is the intersection between climate justice and human rights?
The way I put it is: we’re not going to win climate justice if we’re not free to fight for it, if we’re not free to research, if we’re not free to speak, if we’re not free to protest, if we’re not free to strike. And none of those freedoms exist for Egyptians under the current regime.
In the lead-up to Cop27, our internationalist approach to climate justice accelerated very quickly, because we realised that even within climate justice organisations, there wasn’t much discussion taking place about the justice implications of having the United Nations summit in such a repressive police state. Egypt is in a human rights crisis. It has more than 60,000 political prisoners. Those of us who have relationships with Egyptian civil society believed that it wasn’t ethical to treat this Cop like any other and just show up with badges and treat the country as a kind of backdrop for our PowerPoint presentations.
One of the big headlines to come out of Cop27 was the “loss and damage agreement”, which sets aside funds to compensate low-income countries for climate damages caused by wealthy polluting countries. Do you think this means climate justice is being taken more seriously than before?
There’s definitely been a breakthrough in accepting that there is a climate debt owed. I remember the first Cop I attended in 2009 when climate debt came up and it was flatly rejected by the American delegates. Acknowledging that there is a debt is the result of decades of work.
But the devil is in the details in terms of whether the financing actually arrives and, if it does, how it is spent. My concern is that if damage payments are finally breaking through at a time when more countries are slipping under authoritarian rule, and these governments are at war with their own people, then it isn’t really a political breakthrough. This is the point our Egyptian colleagues were making during Cop: A system that subsidises our military regime is not actually helping us.
That said, this in no way absolves historically large emitters like the US and Canada and the EU from our responsibilities. We can’t use authoritarianism in the global south as an excuse not to pay our international debts. And we have authoritarianism in the global north too of course, which is why Indigenous communities insist that land must be returned so reparation can come under Indigenous governance rather than reinscribe coloniality. What’s needed are structures that bypass authoritarian governments and get resources to the grassroots to be able to pay for projects like decentralised renewable grids and so on.
What are you watching out for in 2023 that will affect climate justice?
In Canada, I’m watching to see if Ottawa gives in to pressure from Alberta to drop its nascent and long overdue just transition plans for fossil fuel workers. Relatedly, I’m watching the ways that the war in Ukraine is both accelerating renewable energy transitions and making it more profitable to dig up the last remaining fossil fuels (because the price is so high), with dire impact on Indigenous lands and ways of life. I’m watching with growing concern the ways that Covid denialism and climate change denialism are intersecting and reinforcing each other. And I’m watching to see whether we, as a climate movement, do a better job of connecting human rights with climate action during the next Cop, which is scheduled to be held in the highly repressive United Arab Emirates.
You’re co-teaching an undergraduate course this term on the climate emergency. What advice do you give students and young people who want to advance climate justice in their own lives and work?
I think the most important thing is to just find other people. Trying to think through this by yourself is a recipe for feeling like a failure and getting dispirited very, very quickly. The benefit of being part of a broader movement is knowing that some people are doing some things, and other people are doing other things, and nobody has to do everything.
I always tell students to find a movement you feel comfortable in, make sure it’s interlinked with other movements, and then work in coalition as broadly as you possibly can.
And then marry your passion with need. Whatever you want to do, find a way to connect it with the climate crisis. Maybe it’s art, maybe it’s engineering, maybe it’s planning – it’s all needed. I don’t think people need to give up what they’re passionate about to tackle climate change. I think they need to figure out how to connect what they’re passionate about with the climate crisis. Because this is the work of our lifetimes.
Such an excellent program, speakers, and vitally needed rally! POWERFUL! Deepest gratitude for all who turned out! And we all need to be hitting the streets, being strong voices of truth again and again, exposing the evil that is continuing to be perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry and all who are in their pockets, and standing up in protection of life on Earth. It is so utterly essential that the dots are connected between fossil fuel industry and the continuous catastrophic record breaking human caused floods and droughts, wildfires and extreme heat, hurricanes and tropical storms, failing crops and starvation, rising seas and resource wars and millions of climate refugees and dislocations and deaths, and on and on. Everything, absolutely everything, that we love and cherish is at risk. — Molly
Tens of thousands of people filled the streets of midtown Manhattan Sunday to send a clear message to the world and leaders coming to the city for the U.N. General Assembly this week: End fossil fuels. As part of more than 200 actions around the world leading up to the first-ever United Nations Climate Ambition Summit this Wednesday, more than 700 grassroots groups together called on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, stop all federal approvals for new fossil fuel projects, phase out production of fossil fuels on federal public lands, and build a new clean energy future. Speakers at the massive march’s rally included New York Democratic Congressmember Jamaal Bowman, environmental justice activist Sharon Lavigne, former Irish President Mary Robinson, actor Susan Sarandon and climate scientist Peter Kalmus. “Every little bit of fossil fuel we burn makes the planet a little hotter,” warned Kalmus, while Bowman and Robinson condemned fossil fuel investment as “subsidizing” the planet’s “own self-destruction.” Added Kalmus, “This is a task of cosmic importance. … We are on the brink of losing absolutely everything.”
These are incredibly important speeches, including by Louisiana climate justice activist Roishetta Ozane and 16-year-old Fridays for Future organizer Helen Mancini. Biden needs to listen and ACT NOW. If he does not, this president is putting everything at risk. Everything. Truly, enough is enough! May he stop waiting and declare a Climate Emergency NOW! May the leadership in power cut their connections with the toxic fossil fuel industry and act to save life on Earth and preserve a habitable planet. — Molly
During the rally at Sunday’s March to End Fossil Fuels in New York City, activists decried President Joe Biden’s continued investment in fossil fuels and his refusal to declare a national emergency over the worsening effects of climate change. Louisiana climate justice activist Roishetta Ozane said Biden is “personally accountable” for climate change-fueled natural disasters, while 16-year-old Fridays for Future organizer Helen Mancini proclaimed, “There is not enough time to put this off another term.” Both emphasized the role of impacted communities — from those living in the shadow of toxic production plants to youth facing the prospect of an increasingly uninhabitable planet — in demanding climate action, a call echoed by Teamsters Local 808’s Chris Silvera, who declared that the fight for climate justice “is a workers’ fight.”
We continue our coverage of the March to End Fossil Fuels, where protesters noted the United States is projected to account for more than one-third of planned global oil and gas expansion from today through 2050. It is the top oil and gas producer in the world, one of just 20 countries that will be responsible for 90% of new fossil fuel production over the next few decades. We feature speeches from Sunday’s rally by Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate and Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They were among more than 75,000 attendees of what was the largest climate mobilization in the world since 2020. “We call upon countries, and in particular the United States, to end new development of fossil fuels that are destroying livelihoods and lives, because we cannot eat coal and we cannot drink oil,” said Nakate, while Ocasio-Cortez said ongoing grassroots mobilization “too big and too radical to ignore” is needed to end fossil fuels and begin a just transition to a green economy.
Coming out of ceremony this past weekend, I am moved to share once again this powerful poem by the deeply gifted Chelan Hawkin. Indeed, the Feminine Is Here! Blessed be. 🙏💗 Molly
As federal law enforcement opens an investigation into the Jacksonville, Florida, shooting where a white gunman killed three Black people at a Dollar General as a possible hate crime and act of domestic violent extremism, we speak with civil rights leader Bishop William Barber about the increasing number of racist attacks in America fueled by racism. “There is this history of not just who kills, but what kills and what creates the atmosphere,” says Barber, who calls for a political movement of love to force out hateful politicians. Barber specifically condemns the Republican Party and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for attacking cultural issues as a distraction for policy failures. “The racist rhetoric and the culture wars and the hatred toward women, the hatred toward immigrants, the hatred toward the trans community is a form of deflection,” says Barber. “He’s decided that this is his way to office: distraction, division, deflection, focusing on culture wars so that he cannot be labeled as a failed governor.”
A dedication to kindness offers us a chance to try to make a real difference despite the obstacles and unhappiness we might face. No matter what our belief systems, actions, or status, we are joined together in this world through the strands of relationship and interconnection. That suffering child, orphaned through a tsunami, who we see in Indonesia or Sri Lanka is part of our lives, as we must not forget that. There is nothing that just happens only "there" anymore - not a war, not an exploitation of the weak, not a disease, not a hope for change. We need to stop reinforcing the sense of dehumanization, of "us" and "them," of separation that leads to wanton cruelty in the first place. And if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, we must realize that the currency for compassion isn't what someone does, right or wrong - it is the very fact that that person exists. Commitment to the possibility of kindness cannot be discarded as foolish or irrelevant, even in troubling times when we often can't find easy answers. If we abandon the force of kindness as we confront cruelty, we won't learn anything to take into tomorrow - not from history, not from one another, not from life. Even if we are encountering cruelty, we must try to understand its roots and determine not to be the same as those acting it out. We must determine not to simply keep perpetrating the forces of separation and disregard. If we don't make the effort, what will we really have accomplished?... We can all keep on trying, through the extension of lovingkindness to others, and make the effort to pay attention to them in an inclusive way rather than splitting them off into the "other" - the "different" ones who can be hurt with impunity. This doesn't at all mean that we will like everybody or acquiesce to everyitng that he or she does. It doesn't mean that we become complacent or passive about naming wrongdoing as wrong or about seeking change, sometimes very forcefully, with our whole heart. Practicing lovingkindness does mean that we learn to see the lives of others, really see them, as related to our own lives. It means that we open up to the possibility of caring for others not just because we like them or admire them or are indebted to them in some way, but because our lives are inextricably linked to one another's. We use the practice of lovingkindness meditation as a way to recover our innermost knowledge of that linkage as we dissolve the barriers we have been upholding and genuinely awaken to how connected we all are.
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