MICHAEL WINSHIP, BILLMOYERS.COM via Salon
Highlights:
"we find ourselves in this moment where there are no non-radical options left before us. Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don’t change course, if we don’t change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world. And that is what climate scientists are telling us when they say business as usual leads to three to four degrees Celsius of warming. That’s the road we are on. We can get off that road, but we’re now so far along it, we’ve put off the crucial policies for so long, that now we can’t do it gradually. We have to swerve, right? And swerving requires such a radical departure from the kind of political and economic system we have right now that we pretty much have to change everything."
"We have to change the kind of free trade deals we sign. We would have to change the absolutely central role of frenetic consumption in our culture. We would have to change the role of money in politics and our political system. We would have to change our attitude towards regulating corporations. We would have to change our guiding ideology."
"we are not going to do the things that we need to do unless we engage in a battle of ideas."
"We have examples of this working. Germany has created 400,000 jobs in their energy transition. And so much of it is decentralized and community-owned, 900 new energy cooperatives in Germany."
And this is why I think when we think about shifting our energy from fossil fuels to renewables, it isn’t just sort of flipping a switch. It really is a paradigm shift because what fossil fuels sold was the illusion that it doesn’t matter where you live, the illusion of separateness from nature and dominance.
"So we’re not talking about reversing climate change. We’re talking about preventing catastrophic climate change, which is the road we’re on. At the same time as we can do everything possible to get to 100 percent renewable energy. It does mean reducing demand. But the issue around energy demand is much more about the consumption habits of a small minority of the world’s population than it is about numbers of people on Earth. It is a relatively small percentage of people on this planet who are responsible for the vast majority of emissions. Thomas Piketty has done a really interesting breakdown of the connection around wealth and emissions, showing that we really are talking about 10 percent of the world’s population being responsible for the vast majority of emissions.
"And it’s not about saying, “Well, don’t worry about fighting for $15 dollars an hour, you should care about climate change.” It’s about saying, “We can create millions of living-wage jobs in public transit and in renewable energy, in reimaging our cities, we can improve our services, if we take this crisis seriously, if we engage in this battle of ideas.”
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| Naomi Klein (Credit: naomiklein.org/Ed Kashi) |
READ the entire interview here: Naomi Klein: “There are no non-radical options left before us”
