Changing Everything

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From my front window I can watch the neighbourhood kids on the playground equipment across the road. Some seem to have bodies made of flicky elastic bands. Some are a bit more earthbound, but they too have hopes of the grand, fearless leap.
This has been my summer of Naomi Klein. I’ve been reading, obsessively, the four books written by this remarkable Canadian journalist. And watching kids has shaped some of my response to her latest book (2014), ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate.’ In this, she asks a question most of us will have asked again and again. If the way we live is sending us towards cataclysmic weather chaos, towards danger, famine and an increasingly unliveable future, why have the big changes we need to make not even begun? What is wrong with us? Klein says nothing is wrong with us, emphatically, nothing is wrong with us.
What is desperately wrong is the economic and political thinking that dominates most of the developed and developing world. For over three decades, we have been fed a doctrine as rigid as any fundamentalist religion. It has been described to us as ‘freedom’ – free markets, free trade, commercial activity free from regulation by governments. In practice, this has meant the freedom of a very few to become obscenely rich, while the rest of us wait for wealth to ‘trickle down’. In practice, the gap between rich and poor has widened almost everywhere, and especially in New Zealand. In practice, greed is honoured, community wellbeing and cohesion, not so much.
It’s the nub of our problem. We can’t stop climate change. It’s already well under way. But we can slow it down and limit its severity. Another big question – surely it’s too late even for that? Klein says no, not too late, but it soon will be. She quotes the International Energy Agency who warns that if we don’t get carbon emissions under control by 2017, extremely dangerous warming will be ‘locked in’.
Much has to happen. The oil, gas and coal corporations have to stop digging, stop drilling. They won’t. They are part of the culture that’s addicted to extreme wealth. So politicians, responsible for the wellbeing of their nations, have to look them in the eye and say, ‘No. Here are the new rules.’ They won’t. Huge money, huge power pulls them into the pockets of the corporations, as does their own devout faith in unregulated money-making.
But here, Klein draws a distinction between international, national politicians, and those in the local sphere. She points out that councils, various community bodies, are taking the lead. Around the world many cities have pulled investment funds out of the fossil fuel industries, as have universities, churches and more. In New Zealand, both the Presbyterian and the Anglican churches have divested. It’s a responsible start. But as Klein stresses, only a start. As a strategy, divestment must then be followed by investment in clean energies, solar, wind, water, and other projects like insulated housing.
Klein is convinced that hope lies only in a global mass movement, ordinary people like you and me getting pretty damned stroppy, pretty damned fast. The detail she presents here is marvellous. Tiny communities standing up to oil giants and saying, ‘How dare you!’ Indigenous people using treaty rights to block the desecration of land and water by fossil fuel extraction. Of course there are failures among the successes, and some give up. Some don’t. And saying ‘no’ is only part of it. The ‘yes’ has to be big and getting bigger. Everywhere she finds small local initiatives to shift a way of living to one that’s clean and sustainable. Examples in Dunedin that I’m aware of are the Blueskin Resilient Communities Trust in Blueskin Bay and the Transition Valley 473 group in Dunedin North. Much of this hope-giving work is small and mostly known only to the locals. Naomi Klein has documented an astonishing number in every part of the world.
She says, ‘Love will save this place.’ I agree. It won’t be fear or panic. It won’t be anger, except insofar as anger arises from love of home, family, community. Especially it will be love of children and keeping faith with that child who trusts you. How fierce is our love?

Climate: Fight Back

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On June 15 2013 I sent this opinion piece to the Otago Daily Times. They turned it down.

Urgent! What side are you on?

On one side the fossil fuel industries; on the other side the well-being of life on earth. It is that stark. It is that absolute. On one side, well-groomed, politely spoken, are those whose greed for short-term but enormous wealth make them prepared to change the composition of earth’s atmosphere. Facing them, without the gloss and the clout that money gives, are the rest of us.

On Wednesday I went to the public meeting to hear US environmental campaigner, Bill McKibben. He gave us the bad news, graphically, in colour. Of course. My feeling is that anyone who hasn’t got the rough idea by now, is choosing ignorance. Many do. But the context of the discussion matters and has to be spelt out again, again, especially as wild weather events keep coming and killing and destroying and verifying the abstract data. Again and again.

But Bill McKibben was there to give hope. Not a lot of hope, but some. He said that something has changed. He would not have said this a few years ago, but now, travelling the world speaking, he now believes: ‘There is going to be a fight.’ Ordinary people are standing up to the fossil fuel industries. A hopeless fight you might think, a David and Goliath battle, but he reminded us of how that story ends. And he suggested weapons that have been used successfully before.

One weapon: investment choices. When Nelson Mandela was released from prison and visited the US, before he called at the White House, he went to the University of California to say thank you. That university had been part of a global campaign to take investment funds out of South Africa. Mandela was acknowledging the role that campaign had had in bringing down the apartheid regime. Divestment worked.

Who invests in the fossil fuel industries? Our government gives them huge sums. It’s hard to believe that our politicians have no conception of  what pouring more carbon into the atmosphere is doing. Theirs is a short term plan. Most of us hope to live longer than the short term and certainly intend that our children and grandchildren will. Their investment is morally bankrupt. In numbers, we can do something about this. We can tell them, in whatever way we can, to pull our money out of an industry that is destroying the kind of world that has sustained us for millions of years.

We can tell our local councillors the same thing. There are local body elections coming up. Let’s make it an issue. Do we want to welcome the oil companies into our beautiful city? Do we want to expose our stunning coast-line to any botch-ups they might make? Do we want to defer to them because there might be short-term jobs, short-term economic gain? What side are we on? Sanity, surely. Does Otago University invest in this industry? What about our banks, churches, and funds whose purpose is public good, such as ACC, Kiwi Saver providers, Superannuation?

Who else support the fossil fuel industries? As well as governments and investors, the advertising and public relations industries help to give them huge power to manipulate and to position themselves as the good guys. They are not the good guys. I’d like to call on divestment also from these industries that tell the lies. We could ask them what side they’re on.

Another weapon: question their good name. Bill McKibben cited the example of the tobacco industry. He talked about the astonishing cultural change that has happened in our attitude towards smoking. The truth was told about this industry, the harm they were (and still are) prepared to do for the sake of their own enrichment. Telling the truth is always a powerful weapon. The truth about the moral degeneracy of the fossil fuel industry, its pathological disregard for even the future of their own grandchildren must be repeated, repeated, until they are disdained and disbelieved, as has happened with tobacco.

I’d ask the media: what side are you on? In theory, they’re on the side of telling the truth. But recent figures showing that 97% of the world’s scientists agree that the changes in the global climate are man-made, and that only 45% of the general public understand this,  shows there has been a massive failure in the dissemination of vital information.

To be fair, a section of the public isn’t listening. Fear of the facts is understandable. Anyone who isn’t afraid hasn’t grasped the situation. A debilitating rage and grief are also understandable. But the media have a serious responsibility which, in my opinion, they are not meeting. This is particularly true of television. But I am unaware of hard questions being asked anywhere of politicians or the representatives of the fossil fuel industries themselves about current policies and their long term consequences. Long term, they are being allowed to get away with murder.

So, specifically, Otago Daily Times, what side are you on? We all must ask ourselves that. I have to ask myself. It’s urgent. The Earth needs to know.

*****

In response to the polite, friendly rejection, I sent a letter to the editor:

…  but the opinion piece about it that I sent to the ODT was turned down. That is your prerogative. But your reason stuns me:  that there has been enough about this, that you suffer accusations of bias against the alternative side of the debate.

This is a society with a particular world view. We value an evidence-based understanding of reality, evidence that emerges from research, and is peer-reviewed. This view shapes our science, judicial system, education system, health system.

So I question your notions of ‘debate’ and ‘bias’. There is no debate. I read in your paper that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human actions, but that 45% of the public understands this. I’d suggest that part of the reason for this dangerous level of ignorance is media failure.

This is the greatest moral issue most of us will face. It requires moral courage from all of us.

****

They declined to publish this as well.

I don’t want to single the ODT out here. They have published a significant number of reports, articles and letters on the topic. Last Saturday there was an extended, informative and thoughtful report by ODT writer Tom McKinlay about the airline industry and its current position on climate change.

Their approach seems to be one shared by the media at large, that the issue is contentious and therefore equal space must be given to the contrary view. But why is it contentious, given the scientific consensus? Who is shaping the argument? To the degree that the media fail to ask this question, they put their considerable weight behind the short term interests of the rich and powerful who are prepared to sacrifice everything of true value. Their choice makes them complicit.