aGlobal environmental change |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh96001848 |xEconomic aspects. |0https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh99005484 The deniers remain strong because "…they are protecting powerful political and economic interests …" (44) Climate change is the result of a system in action: the capitalist system, which also results in inequity and many injustices (at all scales, from individuals to countries). Left to its own, it will grind every bit of value out of the earth and our labors. We cannot just blame"bad guys", ignorance, or greed. Politicians, business leaders, and others implementing extractivist policies are acting as the system demands, so we must radically change the system. There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation." (252) Climate justice economic demands "represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. … Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth." (458)

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world. Read more Look Inside Details In short, the WTO encourages nation states to tear down each others windmills while encouraging them to subsidise coal burning power stations. For starters, in the wealthier countries we will be able to protect our cities from the effects of sea level rise with expensive flood barriers, and then there’s the fact that climate change will affect poor countries in the South more than rich countries in the North. The talk of environmental racism was great here and something I’d really like to read more on. I was interested in how Klein discussed how our capitalism feeds into our environmental issues and how governments are failing us and cleverly shifting blame to make themselves look better as the detriment of communities of colour. How free market fundamentalism helped overheat the planet. Free trade is pitted against climate action. As manufacturing moves offshore, those other countries are blamed for climate change. Some Big Green groups supported free trade agreements. Indiscriminate economic growth is fetishized at the expense of climate action, yet we need managed degrowth. Green capitalism won’t be sufficient, we must consume less. We cannot merely rely on lifestyle decisions; we need policy changes remaking our economies. There will be benefits, including strengthened safety nets and reduced inequality: "a just, equitable, and inspiring transition".Chapter five reminds us of the possible consequences of carrying on with the extractivist logic of the industrial era which underpins the neoliberal exploitation of the environment (chapter five). even more powerful than capitalism… is the fetish of centrism—of reasonableness, seriousness, splitting the difference, and generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the habit of thought that truly rules our era …" (22) And yet each of those rules emerged out of the same, coherent worldview. If that worldview is delegitimized, then all of the rules within it become much weaker and more vulnerable." (460-61) If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one’ New York Times

This movement is actually more widespread than Germany (there are even some cities in America have done this, such as Boulder in Colorado which have gone down this route), and is most prevalent in the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway, and these are the countries with the highest commitment to coming off fossil fuels and pursuing green energy alternatives. Scientists are helping us to understand climate change (part of a greater ecological crisis) and our role in it. The prognosis is dire—great suffering among humans, and harm to the natural world—so we must act to prevent disaster. We need "game-changing [policy battles] that don’t merely aim to change laws but change patterns of thought." We need to open up "a space for a full-throated debate about values—about what we owe to one another based on our shared humanity, and what it is that we collectively value more than economic growth and corporate profits. Resistance to high-risk extreme extraction is building a global, grassroots, and broad-based network the likes of which the environmental movement has rarely seen. And perhaps this phenomenon shouldn’t even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival—the health of the water, air, and soil. In the process, these place-based stands are stopping real climate crimes in progress." (295) You’re co-teaching an undergraduate course this term on the climate emergency. What advice do you give students and young people who want to advance climate justice in their own lives and work?

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Or we can choose to heed climate change’s planetary wake-up call and change course and steer away not just from the emissions cliff but from the logic which brought us that precipice. The first book for younger readers by internationally bestselling social activist Naomi Klein: the most authoritative and inspiring book on climate change for young people yet. The movement has been propelled by expansion of fossil fuel extraction, often into hostile territory, and by the heightened risk of extraction and transportation operations. Simple principles governed this golden age of environmental legislation [1960s and 1970s]: ban or severely limit the offending activity or substance and where possible, get the polluter to pay for the cleanup." (203) Confronting the neoliberal ideology advanced by President Reagan, many green groups chose to look friendlier and cooperate more with big business. The Environmental Defense Fund pushed the first full-fledged cap-and-trade system to combat acid rain. The gist of this section is that the public sector needs to put green jobs creation at the centre of its green strategy – investment in renewables and local agriculture, as well as the renationalising of private companies (like in Germany, but also extended to rail networks in countries like Britain) could create millions of jobs worldwide, many more than a continued dependency on fossil fuels.

The Yale researchers [of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project] explain that people with strong ‘egalitarian’ and ‘communitarian’ worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong ‘hierarchical’ and ‘individualistic’ worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus." developing countries [are] owed a debt for the inherent injustice of climate change—the fact that wealthy countries had used up most of the atmospheric capacity for safely absorbing CO 2 before developing countries had a chance to industrialize. …if wealthy countries do not want poorer ones to pull themselves out of poverty in the same dirty way that we did, the onus is on Northern governments to help foot the bill.

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we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology …" (18) Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (2014) is an important contribution to the discussion of strategy and tactics for climate action. Klein has covered a lot of bases in her description of the importance of climate change as an issue demanding concerted action, the social forces which are contributing to the problem or demanding climate action, the weaknesses of frequently touted remedies, the state of the environmental and climate action movements, and possibilities for organizing an effective mass movement. Indeed, if the movement has a guiding theory, it is that it is high time to close, rather than expand, the fossil fuel frontier." (304) Many of the companies funding climate change denial are at the same time insuring themselves heavily against the future consequences of climate change.

living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated …. The truth is, if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s." (91) Firstly, the WTO encourages more international trade which has meant a huge increase in fossil fuel burning container ships and lorries. Reduced carbon emissions would require less trade or more local trade. Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition – It is currently undergoing a ‘transition to green’ – with 25% of its energy coming from renewables. This is up from only 6% in 2000.

On the other hand, according to John Farrel, the attitude of most private energy companies has been, and still is ‘we’re going to take the money we make from selling fossil fuels and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way we do business’. lowering global emissions in line with climate scientists’ urgent warnings demands changes of a truly daunting speed and scale. … forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground. … coming up with trillions more to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations. And let’s take for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of road maps." (452) The government should also say no to projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline which is being built to pump shale gas from Canada to the US – this will require massive acts of civil disobedience to achieve. Space is opening up for a growing influence of Indigenous thought on new generations of activists … [so that] progressive movements are being exposed to worldviews based on relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world that are the antithesis of extractivism." (182)