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Rob Hopkins: Why, for today at least, I’m celebrating Obama’s victory
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
I feel I just lived through a seminal moment in history. Yes, I know all the reasons why we ought not be excited about Obama’s election as President of the US (it will inevitably go sour at some point, his Afghanistan policies, he is still an economic growth man etc. etc. etc.), but just for now, for a few days, I want to bask in the glow of something really quite extraordinary having happened. In Naomi Klein’s seminal ‘Shock Doctrine’ (a must-read) she explores how neo-conservatism has pounced on (and actively engineered) moments of shock and social disorientation in order to intervene with drastic and self-serving measures that would have been otherwise unimaginable. The reverse of this is that times of disturbance also offer the potential to do positive things. Sharon Astyk put it beautifully when she wrote; …
… I never thought I would see a US President who actually took climate change seriously, talked about a Green New Deal for the US, and whose policies included;
- Reduce the US’s carbon emissions 80% by 2050 and play a strong positive role in negotiating a binding global treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol
- Withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months and keep no permanent bases in the country
- Establish a clear goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons across the globe
- Close the Guantanamo Bay detention center
- Double US aid to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015 and accelerate the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculoses and Malaria
- Open diplomatic talks with countries like Iran and Syria, to pursue peaceful resolution of tensions
- De-politicize military intelligence to avoid ever repeating the kind of manipulation that led the US into Iraq
- Launch a major diplomatic effort to stop the killings in Darfur
- Only negotiate new trade agreements that contain labor and environmental protections
- Invest $150 billion over ten years to support renewable energy and get 1 million plug-in electric cars on the road by 2015
I always used to think there was not much point in voting. I was struck by something Starhawk said when the spoke in Totnes recently. She talked about Hurricane Katrina, and how many hundreds of people are now dead who would have been alive had a different administration been in power, indeed pretty much any administration other than the utterly appalling, wretched and self-serving Bush administration.
Yes the Obama presidency won’t be perfect, it will undoubtedly disappoint, frustrate and infuriate. It has picked up a poisoned chalice in that it is taking a nation in economic freefall, at a time when it is no longer the powerbase it once was, and energy geopolitics are rapidly changing…
(6 November 2008)
Obama administration and eco-hope: business as usual with more road building?
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
… If the Obama administration is not to be a sort of environmental repeat of the Clinton regime — assuming the economy and nation could somehow stay in one piece thanks to secure petroleum supplies — what can be different this time around, and how? As we’ve already said this week in this column, the goal of “cleaner cars” compares very poorly with the FDR/citizenry spirit of “When you drive alone you’re riding with Hitler.” In fact, more cars is unrealistic and irresponsible when considering oil’s peaking in global extraction. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” may still be one of our highest laws. Is the new era of hope and change, when we get specific, dependent on more cars?
The ideal of compromise falls apart when we go in the wrong direction; cleaner cars may have been a great stride decades ago, but one effect of more efficient cars decades ago was the unintended, vast increase in per-capita miles traveled and in purchasing second or third cars, combined with human population growth.
Maybe Obama would secretly have loved during his campaign to call for automobile workers to be retrained, and factories retooled, to make bicycles instead of cars. Now we can find out his beliefs after he’s out from under competitive campaign attack, and he has received more briefings on cars vis-a-vis energy and ecological realities. We do know that Obama’s staff is thoroughly briefed on peak oil and petrocollapse (I was on Capitol Hill in February), but a new concept can take months to sink in.
… The excitement of the season’s political news — with the historic advent of a black man making it to the White House (for all the wrong that the White House innately represents) — has dominated the good news, and the financial meltdown has dominated the bad news, but all that has been a distraction:
We are in a terrible mess that cannot really be fixed by elections. More fundamental would be, normally, to fix the nation’s predicament of energy, overpopulation and ecocide; however, that can no longer be done by policy. We are already over the ecological and economic cliff, and have yet to feel the real impact of the fall.
(7 November 2008)
Sustainable food and ag folks offer their elevator pitches for Obama
Grist
Going up? Part 2
We asked a number of leaders in sustainable food and agriculture to imagine they found themselves in an elevator with the president-elect — giving them one minute of his undivided attention. Here are their messages to Obama about how he should approach environment, energy, climate, and food policy. (For more perspectives, check out Part 1 of our elevator-pitch series.)
Anna Lappé, author and co-founder of the Small Planet Institute: …
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: …
Anya Fernald, executive director of Slow Food Nation: …
[and more]
(7 November 2008)
