Naomi Klein, Author & Activist: Polluting Industries, Climate Disruption and Justice

Speech by Naomi Klein

delivered on the day of the historic announcement that New York City is divesting from fossil fuels and suing five oil majors who knowingly deepened the climate crisis.

For a very long time, our movements have been insisting that principles of justice need to be at the center of the response to the climate crisis – a crisis that plays out in the most perversely unjust ways right now.

Justice means that people who did the least to create this crisis but are bearing the heaviest risks and most toxic burdens need to be first to benefit from green economic development and job creation.

Justice also means that workers in polluting industries are not sacrificed or left behind. And justice means something else too, something most politicians are loath to talk about because the wealth and power of fossil fuel companies is so vast.

It means that the corporate interests that did the most to get us into this mess – with their pollution and with their campaigns of wilful misinformation – are going to have to pay their true share of the tremendous costs of climate disruption, and of delayed transition. Because right now we have it upside down and backwards.

As it stands, the costs of sea level rise and ferocious and unprecedented weather events are offloaded on to the public, with taxpayers stiffed with the ballooning bills. And as governments absorb these costs, there is less money for schools, for affordable transit and housing, for health care. And, in yet another bitter irony, this hurts the people who are already impacted by climate change the most.

This city saw all this in dramatic fashion during Sandy, when it was the people in public housing who were left for weeks in the cold and dark.

Meanwhile, the extravagant profits from destabilizing our planet’s life support system, earned from ignoring and suppressing the scientific consensus – well, those are systematically privatized.

Earlier this decade, ExxonMobil alone made $45 billion in profits in a single year– more than any company in history. Enough to pay Rex Tillerson, then its CEO $100,000 a day.

In short, the status quo means the poor are paying again and again for the polluters to get even richer. It’s a world upside down. But that starts to change today.

By suing these five oil majors who knowingly deepened the climate crisis, and simultaneously beginning the process of divesting $5-billion from fossil fuel companies, New York City is taking a game changing first step in turning the world right side up. And not to overstate the case, but I actually think this could change the world.

There have been lawsuits before that have tried to sue the fossil fuel giants for climate damages. The tiny Arctic community of Kivalina, population 383, which attempted to recover the costs of having to relocate. Some citizens of the low-lying Pacific Island of Vanuatu– population 300,000 – that began a similar suit. A lone Peruvian farmer, suing a German coal giant for the risks to his home. A small group of Gulf Coast Mississippi homeowners, with the help of a scrappy lawyer, who tried to sue the fossil fuel companies after Hurricane Katrina.

These have been valiant attempts, but in every case, the industry has relied on the relative weakness and poverty of its accusers, sometime managing to quash suits before they were filed.

And that is why today’s news is so historic. Because bullying isn’t going to work here the way it has in the past. This lawsuit is coming from the largest city in the most powerful country on the planet, a city which also happens to be the financial capital of world.

And now that New York City has thrown down in such a big way – on divestment, on polluter pays — it’s going to embolden all kinds of other actors to step up as well. Other cities around the world. Universities. Foundations. Other states. Even entire nation states.

As of today, everyone needs to up their ambition. Be bolder. Move faster. It’s what our planet requires. And it’s what justice demands. No politician on the planet is doing enough. But there can be no doubt that the bar for what it takes to call yourself a climate leader has just been dramatically raised.

The full text is at GoFossilFree.org

Climate & Economic Justice - Conversation with Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and more

Hangout with Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and more

WHEN:    FRIDAY, Feb. 5, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

WHERE: Hangouts On Air - Broadcast for free

WHAT: No more small steps for the Climate and Economic Justice Movement. Now is the time to LEAP!

WHO: A conversation with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis (This Changes Everything), Bill McKibben (350.org) and Asad Rehman (Friend of the Earth UK) and special guests.

REGISTER: Click Here

To celebrate the Leap Year, people are gathering to mobilize towards new economic and energy systems. 

Learn more about Leap Year 2016

Naomi Klein, Author and Climate Justice Activist, to Speak

CAPITALISM vs. THE CLIMATE: 
Reflections on the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference

Featuring: Naomi Klein

Sunday, January 24, 2016 – 4:00pm

Finger Lakes Community College, Canandaigua [MAP]
 

Known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of corporate capitalism, Naomi Klein is the author of five books, including The Shock Doctrine, a bestselling critical analysis of the history of neoliberalism, which promotes a high-consumption, ­carbon-hungry system.

Her latest book is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Klein writes that “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.” 

“There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” 

MODERATOR: Michael Winship, an award-winning television writer and producer, will moderate the conversation with Ms. Klein.

Online Tickets $15 - PURCHASE HERE
 

CLIMATE CHANGE NEWS

Rapid carbon emission cuts vital to stop severe impact of climate change, UN IPCC Report says

Most important assessment of global warming yet warns carbon emissions must be cut sharply and soon -- Report says solutions are available and affordable.

Climate change is set to inflict “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and the natural world unless carbon emissions are cut sharply and rapidly, according to the most important assessment of global warming yet published.

The stark report states that climate change has already increased the risk of severe heatwaves and other extreme weather and warns of worse to come, including food shortages and violent conflicts. But it also found that ways to avoid dangerous global warming are both available and affordable.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in the message,” said the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, attending what he described as the “historic” report launch. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.” He said that quick, decisive action would build a better and sustainable future, while inaction would be costly.

Ban added a message to investors, such as pension fund managers: “Please reduce your investments in the coal- and fossil fuel-based economy and [move] to renewable energy.”

The report, released in Copenhagen on Sunday by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is the work of thousands of scientists and was agreed after negotiations by the world’s governments. 

It is the first IPCC report since 2007 to bring together all aspects of tackling climate change and for the first time states: that it is economically affordable; that carbon emissions will ultimately have to fall to zero; and that global poverty can only be reduced by halting global warming. The report also makes clear that carbon emissions, mainly from burning coal, oil and gas, are currently rising to record levels, not falling.

Read more at the The Guardian.
The IPCC's Summary Report intended for policymakers is Here.

The Military Takes on Climate Change Deniers

The idea that climate change poses serious risks to U.S. national security, long contested in conservative circles, is now an integral part of Pentagon planning. 

On Oct. 13, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made it official with the release of the Pentagon’s 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, a 16-page document that lays out the effects of extreme weather events and rising temperatures on military training, operations, acquisitions, and infrastructure.

Two previous editions, issued in 2012 and 2013, treated climate change as a future threat, but this year’s cast it as a reality that must be dealt with quickly. “Climate change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks,” the document begins.

The Pentagon’s move sets up a showdown between the military, a cautious institution run by some of the most conservative people in the U.S. government, and congressional Republicans, who continue to deny that climate change is real, let alone that it requires action.

Read more at BusinessWeek.com
The Pentagon's 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap is Here.

The IPCC is stern on climate change – but it still underestimates the situation

By Bill McKibben
 
UN body’s warning on carbon emissions is hard to ignore, but breaking the power of the fossil fuel industry won’t be easy.

At this point, the scientists who run the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must feel like it’s time to trade their satellites, their carefully calibrated thermometers and spectrometers, their finely tuned computer models – all of them for a thesaurus. Surely, somewhere, there must be words that will prompt the world’s leaders to act.

This week, with the release of their new synthesis report, they are trying the words “severe, widespread, and irreversible” to describe the effects of climate change – which for scientists, conservative by nature, falls just short of announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse plus random beheadings plus Ebola. It’s hard to imagine how they will up the language in time for the next big global confab in Paris.

But even with all that, this new document – actually a synthesis of three big working group reports released over the last year – almost certainly underestimates the actual severity of the situation. As the Washington Post pointed out this week, past reports have always tried to err on the side of understatement; it’s a particular problem with sea level rise, since the current IPCC document does not even include the finding in May that the great Antarctic ice sheets have begun to melt. (The studies were published after the IPCC’s cutoff date.)

But when you get right down to it, who cares? The scientists have done their job; no sentient person, including Republican Senate candidates, can any longer believe in their heart of hearts that there’s not a problem here. The scientific method has triumphed: over a quarter of a century, researchers have reached astonishing consensus on a basic problem in chemistry and physics.

And the engineers have done just as well. The price of a solar panel has dropped by more than 90% over the last 25 years, and continues to plummet. In the few places they have actually been deployed at scale, the results are astonishing: there were days this summer when Germany generated 75% of its power from the wind and the sun.

Read more at The Guardian.



Giving Up Fossil Fuels to Save the Climate: The $28 Trillion Writedown  

“We’re not going to be able to burn it all.” With those 10 words, Barack Obama uttered one of the most stunning, far-reaching statements ever made by a U.S. president. He also completely contradicted his own energy policy. Yet no one seemed to notice. 

Obama was asked about the international goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 deg.F) since the start of the industrial era. Going past 2 degrees, noted the interviewer, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, would “cross into some really dangerous, unstable territory: Arctic melting, massive sea-level rise, disruptive storms.” 

The International Energy Agency has concluded that meeting the 2 deg.C target will require leaving two-thirds of the earth’s known reserves of oil, gas, and coal underground, unburned, Friedman said. Did Obama agree with that conclusion?

“Well, science is science,” the president replied. “And there is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that’s in the ground right now, that the planet’s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire.”

This new scientific imperative—to leave the bulk of earth’s fossil fuels in the ground—has not yet penetrated most government or private-sector policy discussions, much less mainstream media coverage or public awareness. Its political and economic implications, however, are huge.

Read more at BusinessWeek.com


'This Changes Everything,’ by Naomi Klein: Book Review

Naomi Klein’s latest book may be the manifesto that the climate movement — and the planet — needs right now. Mainstream environmental groups and politicians alike support the notion of “green growth,” in which the world can continue with largely unfettered markets and still manage to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions. Klein argues that this is a fallacy, that capitalism and the climate are fundamentally at odds.

Because of its focus on the economic system, “This Changes Everything” stands

out from most books on climate change. Klein has spent the past couple of decades steeped in the fight against corporate power and free-market ideology, writing two best-selling books, “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine.” She shows how free-market, growth-above-all ideology has been built around World Trade Organization deals that stymie local action on cutting emissions, and into laws and norms that make corporations obligated to continue extracting more fossil fuels, as long as there’s profit in it. “The bottom line,” Klein writes, is that “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. … Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”

Those who deny the existence of climate change grasp this better than most liberals, Klein argues. The battle over climate change cuts to the heart of “the central ideological battle of our time — whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.” Deniers have to reject climate action — otherwise they’d lose this ideological battle.

Read more at SFGate