Street roots
Nov. 21, 2014
KLEIN, from page 4
pledge vast amounts of money to find
solutions to climate change. Richard Branson
promised to spend $3 billion on finding an
alternative low-carbon fuel for jet planes.
Harnessing the profits from fossil fiiel-
dependent businesses to tackle climate
change is exactly what we need, believes
Klein. Such a pity then that her research
finds he s actually spent a fraction of this
money, come out against carbon taxes, set up
new polluting airlines and masked it all with
some green PR. And he’s continued to take
subsidies from British taxpayer to run his
train companies.
This is where Klein effectively makes a
link between environmentalism arid wider
political questions. Wouldn’t it have been
better if Britain hadn’t privatized its rail
service, she asks, and converted it entirely to
electric, with that power coming from
renewables?
Klein acknowledges that this link between
environmental and political concerns goes
back at least to the Seattle generation of
global justice activism that she documented
in her first book “No Logo.” “One of the
strengths of that movement was that it broke
down the barriers between labor and the
environment,” she says. “But climate was not
central to the movement”
At the time she felt that the lack of
organization and the rejection of leadership
and hierarchies was an advantage for young
social movements, but as climate change has
become ever more urgent, and more recent
moveirients like Occupy and the Arab Spring
have flickered but then faded, she says we
can ill afford a “fetish for structurelessness.”
She says: “It’s been a tough time and
there’s been a lot of despair. A lot of people
have given up because they’ve invested a lot
and either been smashed or not delivered.
The main weakness was in being simply
. oppositional.” .
ZZ T h e u rgency o fp re v e n tin g th e 2C rise is >
fearful. Klein particularly draws on the work
of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change and
its Manchester University-based deputy
director Kevin Anderson, which is “doing the
most important work on climate science
anywhere in the world,” using conservative
estimates and “following them honestly to
their conclusions.”
Klein finds hope in the work of Mark
Jacobson, professor of civil and
environmental engineering at Stanford
University, and Mark Delucchi of U.C. Davis,
who in 2009 published a study showing how
100 percent of the world’s energy could be
supplied by wind, water and solar resources
as early as 2030 — with political will. That’s a
tight timetable but sufficient to prevent the
worst of climate change. *
Given the political will, how would we pay
for such a transformation? A financial
transaction tax, closing tax havens, a 1 per
cent “billionaire’s tax”, slashing military
spending, a carbon emissions tax and the
phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies would net
$2 trillion annually, says Klein - “certainly
enough for a very healthy start to finance a
Great Transition”.
Klein refuses to guilt-trip individuals about
the carbon footprint of their lifestyles.
“A lot of people feel disqualified from
taking action because they don’t live the
perfect lifestyle. The people least able to
afford the green premium that’s put on so
many products, for example, are working
class people. But the scale of action needed
and the urgency mean they can’t be
excluded.
“If you only included those people whose
lives are a pure piece of carbon-related
performance art then you’d have a movement
of about 10 people.”
Instead, she draws hope from people who
are not only opposing the extraction of fossil
fuels where it threatens thefr livelihoods and
well-being, but also putting forward their own
economic and environmental solutions: the
farmers and indigenous people of Canada
resisting tar sands oil extraction, the Greek
anti-mining movement, French anti-fracking
activists, all of which she calls “Blockadia” -
“not a specific place on a map but a roving «.
transnational coriflict zone”.
She has also drawn hope from the way the
Occupy Wall Street moveftient didn’t
disappear just because it was no longer on
the front pages of mainstream media but
morphed into Occupy Sandy, an organized
relief effort to help victims of the 2012 ,
natural disaster in New England. That
started a conversation with local working-
class people about climate change and was a
“gamechanger,” she says, when
environmentalism is often the preserve of
the privileged.
Those hopescarfte to a head with the
People’s Climate March in New York and in
more than 160 countries last month.
“That was a real moment of hope. I’ve not
been feeling hopeful for a long time to be
honest with you but I saw lots of people '
there I’ve not seen for a long time. It wasn’t
just the amount of people but that it was so ‘
diverse. The march looked like New York,
and not Manhattan but the Bronx or Queens.
“We should also take inspiration from
Germany’s move towards renewables. One of
the differences about the current movement
is the focus on ownership, and in Germany
it’s small-scale locally owned energy schemes
that are growing. It’s not the case that this is
about utopian pastoral dreamers but rather
shows how bold national policies, well
designed, can roll out effective responses
effectively. Compare that with the U.K.’s
lumbering subsidised nuclear policy.”
Her book, concludes Klein, is about a
“path to science-based reductions. These
transformations are actually popular.”
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B e tra y a l’s B eefed-U p
B o o ty D an ces
by J.McCurdy
I wondered briefly
For a moment
If this ever got as old to others as it got to me...
Doesn’t the plot ever change?.
Oh, come on now
Gimme a twist or at least a space
Where maybe old school and loyalty got to dance...
StiU...
For reasons unknown
F remained rooted to the spot
As tihe familiar lines and faces changed places
Trust ducked and dodged
Then looked guiltily back at me
Wait for it
Wait for it
Ahhhh, here we go...
I watched without surprise
As goodbye consumed hello
And hope held my breath
Tightly in
Against a heaving chest
As betrayal swung heavily through
All I ever knew of you, of me, of she
Hell, yes
I did get right down to it
Visualized
Famine and flames dance
While I stood in the in-between space
Trying to decide
If barbarism and returned cruelty
Were worth the ride
Ego, pride and compassion
D ukeditout
In the split second
Our glances met
And I knew then that all we were
Ever gonna be was gone
And I gotta say
I’m still ribt sure
If I’m gonna miss any of us
Or the worn out parts we played
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