Klein writes: "We can save
ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn
to work with nature - respecting and harnessing its intrinsic capacity for
renewal and regeneration."
Photo from outside the climate conference at the Vatican. (photo: CIDSE)
People and
Planet First
By
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
02 July 15
Naomi delivered the following remarks at
a press conference introducing “People and Planet First: the
Imperative to Change Course,” a high-level meeting being held at the
Vatican this week to explore Laudato Si’, Pope
Francis’ recently-released encyclical letter on ecology. The
gathering will take place on July 2-3, and is being convened
by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the International
Alliance of Catholic Development Organisations (CIDSE).
Here is video of the full press
conference, followed by the prepared text of Naomi’s statement. Other speakers
included Prof. Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-Chair of Working Group III of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Bernd Nilles, Secretary
General of CIDSE.
Thank you. I want to extend my heartfelt
gratitude to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and to CIDSE for
hosting us here, and for convening this remarkable 2-day gathering that I’m
very much looking forward to.
It’s also a real honour to be here
supporting and indeed celebrating the historic publication of the Pope’s
encyclical.
Pope Francis writes early on that Laudato
Si’ is not only a teaching for the Catholic world but for “every person
living on this planet.” And I can say that as a secular Jewish feminist who was
rather surprised to be invited to the Vatican, it certainly spoke to me.
“We are not God,” the encyclical states.
All humans once knew this. But about 400 years ago, dizzying scientific
breakthroughs made it seem to some that humans were on the verge of knowing
everything there was to know about the Earth, and would therefore be nature’s
“masters and possessors,” as René Descartes so memorably put it. This, they
claimed, was what God had always wanted.
That theory held for a good long time.
But subsequent breakthroughs in science have told us something very different.
Because when we were burning ever larger amounts of fossil fuels—convinced that
our container ships and jumbo jets had leveled the world, that we were as
gods—greenhouse gases were accumulating in the atmosphere and relentlessly
trapping heat.
And now we are confronted with the
reality that we were never the master, never that boss—and that we are
unleashing natural forces that are far more powerful than even our most
ingenious machines. We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of
dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature—respecting and harnessing
its intrinsic capacity for renewal and regeneration.
And this brings us to the core message
of interconnection at the heart of the encyclical. What climate change
reaffirms—for that minority of the human species that ever forgot—is that there
is no such thing as a one-way relationship of pure mastery in nature. As Pope
Francis writes, “Nothing in this world is indifferent to us.”
For some who see interconnection as a
cosmic demotion, this is all too much to bear. And so—actively encouraged by
fossil-fuel funded political actors—they choose to deny the science.
But that is
already changing as the climate
changes. And it will likely change more with the publication of the encyclical.
This could mean real trouble for American politicians who are counting on using
the Bible as cover for their opposition to climate action. In this regard, Pope
Francis’s trip to the U.S. this September could not be better timed.
Yet as the encyclical rightly points
out, denial takes many forms. And there are many across the political spectrum
and around the world who accept the science but reject the difficult
implications of the science.
I have spent the past two weeks reading
hundreds of reactions to the encyclical. And though the response has been
overwhelmingly positive, I have noticed a common theme among the critiques.
Pope Francis may be right on the science, we hear, and even on the morality,
but he should leave the economics and policy to the experts. They are the ones
who know about carbon trading and water privatization, we are told, and how
effectively markets can solve any problem.
I forcefully disagree. The truth is that
we have arrived at this dangerous place partly because many of those economic
experts have failed us badly, wielding their powerful technocratic skills
without wisdom. They produced models that placed scandalously little value on
human life, particularly on the lives of the poor, and placed outsized value on
protecting corporate profits and economic growth.
That warped value system is how we ended
up with ineffective carbon markets instead of strong carbon taxes and high
fossil fuel royalties. It’s how we ended up with a temperature target of 2
degrees which would allow entire nations to disappear—simply because their GDPs
were deemed insufficiently large.
In a world where profit is consistently
put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do
with ethics and morality. Because if we agree that endangering life on earth is
a moral crisis, then it is incumbent on us to act like it.
That doesn’t mean gambling the future on
the boom and bust cycles of the market. It means policies that directly
regulate how much carbon can be extracted from the earth. It means policies
that will get us to 100 per cent renewable energy in 2-3 decades—not by the end
of the century. And it means allocating common, shared resources—like the
atmosphere—on the basis of justice and equity, not winners-take-all.
That’s why a new
kind of climate movement is
fast emerging. It is based on the most courageous truth expressed in the
encyclical: that our current economic system is both fueling the climate crisis
and actively preventing us from taking the necessary actions to avert it. A
movement based on the knowledge that if we don’t want runaway climate change,
then we need system change.
And because our current system is also
fueling ever widening inequality, we have a chance, in rising to the climate
challenge, to solve multiple, overlapping crises at once. In short, we can
shift to a more stable climate and fairer economy at the same time.
This growing understanding is why you
are seeing some surprising and even unlikely alliances. Like, for instance, me
at the Vatican. Like trade unions, Indigenous, faith and green groups working
more closely together than ever before.
Inside these coalitions, we don’t agree
on everything—not by a long shot. But we understand that the stakes are so
high, time is so short and the task is so large that we cannot afford to allow
those differences to divide us. When 400,000 people marched for climate justice
in New York last September, the slogan was “To change everything, we need
everyone.”
Everyone includes political leaders, of
course. But having attended many meetings with social movements about the
COP summit in Paris, I can report this: there is zero tolerance for yet another
failure being dressed up as a success for the cameras. Until a week later, when
those same politicians are back to drilling for oil in the Arctic and building
more highways and pushing new trade deals that make it far more difficult to
regulate polluters.
If the deal fails to bring about
immediate emission reductions while providing real and substantive support for
poor countries, then it will be declared a failure. As it should be.
What we must always remember is that
it’s not too late to veer off the dangerous road we are on—the one that is
leading us towards 4 degrees of warming. Indeed we could still keep warming
below 1.5 degrees if we made it our top collective priority.
It would be difficult, to be sure. As
difficult as the rationing and industrial conversions that were once made in
wartime. As ambitious as the anti-poverty and public works programs launched in
the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
But difficult
is not the same as impossible. And giving up in the face of a task that could save countless and lives
prevent so much suffering—simply because it is difficult, costly and requires
sacrifice from those of us who can most afford to make do with less—is not
pragmatism.
It is surrender of the most cowardly
kind. And there is no cost-benefit analysis in the world that is capable of justifying
it.
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of
the good.”
We have been hearing these supposedly
serious-minded words for more than two decades. For the entire lifetime of
today’s young climate activists. And every time another UN summit fails to
deliver bold, legally-binding and science-based polices, while sprinkling empty
promises of reshuffled aid money, we hear those words again. “Sure it’s
not enough but it’s a step in the right direction.” “We’ll do the harder work
next time.” And always: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
This, it must be said inside these
hallowed walls, is pure nonsense. “Perfect” left the station in the mid-1990s,
after the first Rio Earth Summit. Today, we have only two roads in front
of us: difficult yet humane—and easy yet reprehensible.
To our so-called leaders preparing their
pledges for COP 21 in Paris, getting out the lipstick and heels to dress up
another lousy deal, I have this to say: Read the actual encyclical—not the
summaries, the whole thing. Read it and let it into your hearts. The grief
at what we have already lost, and the celebration of what we can still protect
and help to thrive.
Listen, too, to the voices of the
hundreds of thousands who will be on the streets of Paris outside the summit,
gathered simultaneously in cities around the world. This time, they will
be saying more than “we need action.” They will be saying: we are already
acting.
We are the
solutions: in our demands that institutions
divest their holdings from fossil fuel companies and invest them in the
activities that will lower emissions.
In our ecological farming methods, which
rely less on fossil fuels, provide healthy food and work and sequester carbon.
In our locally-controlled renewable
energy projects, which are bringing down emissions, keeping resources in
communities, lowering costs and defining access to energy as a right.
In our demand for reliable, affordable
and even free public transit, which will get us out of the cars that pollute
our cities, congest our lives, and isolate us from one another.
In our uncompromising insistence that
you cannot call yourself a climate leader while opening up vast new tracks of
ocean and land to oil drilling, gas fracking and coal mining. We have to leave
it in the ground.
In our conviction that you cannot call
yourself a democracy if you are beholden to multinational polluters.
Around the world, the climate justice
movement is saying: See the beautiful world that lies on the other side of
courageous policy, the seeds of which are already bearing ample fruit for any
who care to look.
Then, stop making the difficult the
enemy of the possible.
And join us in making the possible real.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325
E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject
class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and
nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything
to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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