Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The lesson here is straightforward. Building coalitions outside more narrow identity groups is essential to winning elections and later in the halls of legislatures and the offices of chief executives to enacting legislation.
It simply makes no sense to allow something you can control – money – to be a limit on your ambition to deal with something that your future existence depends on, like the climate crisis.
As the Climate Justice Alliance points out, “to truly address the interlinked crises of a faltering democracy, growing wealth disparity and community devastation caused by climate change and industrial pollution, we must reduce emissions at their source.
Instead of a climate mitigation plan that is shoehorned into the economic and political status quo, there is no time to taper-in mitigation to protect the economy: emissions must peak immediately and substantial emission reduction from the present high of more than 37 billion tons annually must happen immediately.
I will therefore take up Kallis’ (2019) conclusion and ask: ‘What about degrowth and a Green New Deal? The opponent is formidable and what we need are alliances, not divisions’.
I want to propose that we the people agree to change the meaning of the GND acronym to Green New Directions and start to consider seriously the crop of ideas—some old, many new—now being presented by Democratic presidential candidates and Republican and Democratic members of Congress as a starting point to reach a national consensus.
In framing the alternatives, I start from the assumption that our primary purpose is actually building the post-capitalist society, and that our engagement or lack of engagement with the state is a secondary course of action whose main purpose is to create a more conducive, less harmful environment in which to do the building.
In this post, I’m going to run through some of the key things that make this moment in history so unique when it comes to young people and climate change.
The main issue with the current Green New Deal narrative is that it banks on the feasibility of decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions and material throughput.
Unlike the Green New Deal, however, degrowth isn’t a policy platform – it’s more of a movement, or what participants call an “umbrella concept,” bringing together a wide diversity of ideas and social and environmental justice struggles.
Despite my ambivalence about the demands of UK Extinction Rebellion I am really impressed by the way it has shot the climate emergency and bio-diversity collapse up the political agenda and into the public imagination.
In a new study titled “A Global Deal for Nature,” led by conservation biologist and strategist Eric Dinerstein, 17 colleagues and I lay out a road map for simultaneously averting a sixth mass extinction and reducing climate change.
