On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
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Read between May 28 - June 10, 2020
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radically new conception of realism, and a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.
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get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.
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Every city and community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition
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participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead.
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idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate profitability—giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources to get equally secure
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Cleveland’s worker-run green co-ops serving as a possible model.
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Wendell Berry
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These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages, an end to corruption, and real democracy. Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative.
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“decoupling,” the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And
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unchecked economic growth and sound climate policy, led by ecological economist
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the feasibility of industrialized countries making the deep emissions cuts demanded by science [getting to net zero before mid-century] while continuing to grow their economies at even today’s sluggish rates.
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by improving the efficiency of our economies, but also by reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume.
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plot to “redistribute wealth” and wage class war, these are the types of policies they most fear. They also understand that once the reality of climate change is recognized, wealth will have to be transferred not just within wealthy countries but also from the rich countries whose emissions created the crisis to poorer
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rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South.
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climate change supercharges the preexisting case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.
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informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism, are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises.
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opposition to the real-world implications of those facts. What Bast is describing, albeit inadvertently, is a phenomenon receiving
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The deniers are doing more than protecting their cultural worldview—they are protecting powerful interests that stand to gain enormously from muddying the waters of the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented.
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studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change, and social and economic privilege.
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dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing
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empathy-exterminating mind-set is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before.
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will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback.
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Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster are what our current system is built to do.
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one embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.
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Shifting cultural values
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community-controlled renewable energy projects, in community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, in economic localization initiatives that have brought main streets back to life, and in the co-op sector.
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In other words, cultural values are beginning to shift. Today’s young organizers are setting out to change policy, but they understand that before that can happen, we have to confront the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis. And that begins with embodying, in highly visible ways, radically different ways of treating one another and relating to the natural world.
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Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It has happened many times in our history.
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be most harmed by these technologies are already disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
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murky green to soak up carbon and bleaching the skies hazy white to deflect the sun, we take our influence to a new level.
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Wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior, to reduce our use of fossil fuels, before we begin fiddling with the planet’s basic life-support systems?
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calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people (along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, or Occupy Wall Street) represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow
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social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved,”
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Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s premier climate research institutions.
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we happen to have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).
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revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony
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“were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.” But there are many people
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climate-related mistiming, albeit in a cultural-historical, rather than a biological, sense. Our problem is that the climate crisis was hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely
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crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action on a scale that humanity has never actually accomplished.
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a dirty word just when we needed those powers most. It has meant that we are ruled by a class of politicians who know only how to dismantle and starve public institutions just when they most need to be fortified and reimagined.
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trapped in the forever now of our constantly refreshed social media feeds.
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create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves.
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is intensely local: an
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Noticing those kinds of subtle changes requires an intimate connection to a specific ecosystem. That kind of communion happens only when we know a place deeply, not just as scenery but also as sustenance, and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred duty from one generation to the next.
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where we reside. We live much of our lives through the portals of screens and navigate the physical world not with our senses but with miniature maps on our phones. Shielded from the elements as we are in our climate-controlled
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a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us and the future we are shaping with our actions. Climate change is about how what we did generations in the past will inescapably affect not just the present, but generations in the future. These time frames are a language that has become foreign to most of us in our digitized times.
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deeply interdisciplinary education in human ecology. You were made for this moment. No, that’s not quite right: you somehow knew to make yourselves for this moment.
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make new mistakes as we break through our silos and build the kind of beautifully diverse and justice-hungry movement that actually has a chance of winning—winning against the powerful interests that want us to keep failing.
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as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement.
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last, through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local, and boycotting big, evil brands.