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it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the ...
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Low-carbon sectors of our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-carbon secto...
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we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.
Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global.
“In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.
Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for
it challenges something that might be even more powerful than capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism—of reasonableness,
seriousness, splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly excited about anything.
For any of this to change, a worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.
The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming.
“The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.”
In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our
human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities,
This is a shift that challenges not only capitalism, but also the building blocks of materialism that preceded modern capitalism,
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. Telling us that we need to evolve.
I agree that it would be reckless to claim that the only solution to this crisis is to revolutionize our economy and revamp our worldview from the bottom up—and anything short of that is not worth doing.
context has been slowly created in which any muscular response to climate change seems politically impossible, especially during times of economic crisis (which lately seems to be all the time).
think big, go deep, and move the ideological pole far away from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become the greatest enemy to planetary health.
If we can shift the cultural context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible reformist policies that will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction.
Boo!
have no doubt of their necessity, but I question their political feasibility every day, especially given that climate change puts us on such a tight and unforgiving deadline.
members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation told me about how the moose had changed—one woman described killing a moose on a hunting trip only to find that the flesh had already turned green. I heard a lot about strange tumors too, which locals assumed had to do with the animals drinking water contaminated by tar sands toxins.
“Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose Graveyard,” reads a May 2012 headline in Scientific American. A year and a half later, The New York Times was
reporting that one of Minnesota’s two moose populations had declined from four thousand in the 1990s to just one hundred
some 100,000 dead and dying bats raining down from the sky in the midst of record-breaking heat across part of Queensland, Australia.
“sea star wasting syndrome,” multiple species were disintegrating alive, their vibrant bodies melting into distorted globs, with legs falling off and bodies caving in.
we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralyzing.
the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.
it’s not too late to avert the
Yes it is!
the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand.
Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, held in late June 2011,
Marc Morano,
Climate Depot.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
(the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels).
Larry Bell
Climate of Corruption
calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even choosing a name, the International Conference on Climate Change, that produces an organizational acronym, ICCC, just one letter off from that of the world’s leading authority on climate change, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical cudgels with which they will attempt to club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come.
Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches . . . that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these
2007, the three major U.S. networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—ran 147 stories on climate change; in 2011 the networks ran just fourteen stories on the subject.
Morano—whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid—led the audience through a series of victory laps. Climate legislation in the U.S. Senate: dead! The U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even projected on a screen a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorted the audience to “celebrate!”
A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number was down to 44
Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People & the Press, described the statistics in the United States as “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion
recently as 2008, tackling climate change still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States. That year, Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich did a TV spot with Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, in which they pledged to join forces and fight climate change
According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual
Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,”
“cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain
immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.
“People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.”
it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered,
