Jan. 12, 2018 08:39AM EST
Naomi Klein: 'New York City Is Taking a Game-Changing First Step
in Turning the World Right Side Up'
The following is a speech
given by Naomi Klein in New York City on Jan. 10.
I want to thank Mayor de Blasio for this
historic announcement that New York is divesting from fossil fuels and suing
five oil majors.
What's happening here is not only about
changing the economics of energy, speeding the transition from dirty to clean.
It's also about justice.
And it represents a collective victory
for the amazing climate justice movement around the world and in this city.
Groups like Uprose,
the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and New
York Renews, some of which are here today, as well as global groups
like 350.org,
which helped kick off the fossil fuel divestment movement about five years ago.
For a very long time, our movements have
been insisting that principles of justice need to be at the center of the
response to the climate crisis—a crisis that plays out in the most perversely
unjust ways right now.
Justice means that people who did the
least to create this crisis but are bearing the heaviest risks and most toxic
burdens need to be first to benefit from green economic development and job
creation.
Justice also means that workers in
polluting industries are not sacrificed or left behind. And justice means
something else too, something most politicians are loath to talk about because
the wealth and power of fossil fuel companies is so vast.
It means that the corporate interests
that did the most to get us into this mess—with their pollution and with their
campaigns of willful misinformation—are going to have to pay their true share
of the tremendous costs of climate disruption, and of delayed transition.
Because right now we have it upside down and backwards.
As it stands, the costs of sea
level rise and ferocious and unprecedented weather events
are offloaded on to the public, with taxpayers stiffed with the ballooning
bills. And as governments absorb these costs, there is less money for schools,
for affordable transit and housing, for health care. And, in yet another bitter
irony, this hurts the people who are already impacted by climate
change the most.
This city saw all this in dramatic
fashion during Sandy, when it was the people in public housing who were left
for weeks in the cold and dark.
Meanwhile, the extravagant profits from
destabilizing our planet's life support system, earned from ignoring and
suppressing the scientific consensus—well, those are systematically privatized.
Earlier this decade, ExxonMobil alone
made $45 billion in profits in a single year– more than any company in history.
Enough to pay Rex Tillerson, then its CEO, $100,000 a day.
In short, the status quo means the poor
are paying again and again for the polluters to get even richer. It's a world
upside down. But that starts to change today.
By suing these five oil majors who
knowingly deepened the climate crisis, and simultaneously beginning the process
of divesting $5-billion from fossil fuel companies, New York City is taking a
game changing first step in turning the world right side up. And not to
overstate the case, but I actually think this could change the world.
There have been lawsuits before that have
tried to sue the fossil fuel giants for climate damages. The tiny Arctic
community of Kivalina, population 383, which attempted to recover the costs of
having to relocate. Some citizens of the low-lying Pacific Island of
Vanuatu—population 300,000—that began a similar suit. A lone Peruvian farmer, suing a German coal giant
for the risks to his home. A small group of Gulf Coast Mississippi homeowners,
with the help of a scrappy lawyer, who tried to sue the fossil fuel companies
after Hurricane Katrina.
These have been valiant attempts, but in
every case, the industry has relied on the relative weakness and poverty of its
accusers, sometime managing to quash suits before they were filed.
And that is why today's news is so
historic. Because bullying isn't going to work here the way it has in the past.
This lawsuit is coming from the largest city in the most powerful country on
the planet, a city which also happens to be the financial capital of world.
And now that New York City has thrown
down in such a big way—on divestment, on polluter pays—it's going to embolden
all kinds of other actors to step up as well. Other cities around the world.
Universities. Foundations. Other states. Even entire nation states.
As of today, everyone needs to up their
ambition. Be bolder. Move faster. It's what our planet requires. And it's what
justice demands. No politician on the planet is doing enough. But there can be
no doubt that the bar for what it takes to call yourself a climate leader has
just been dramatically raised.
A few years ago, an Ecuadorian court
ordered Chevron to pay $19-billion in damages for an oil disaster known as the
"Rainforest Chernobyl." A spokesperson for the company responded by
pledging that it would "fight this until hell freezes over. And then we'll
fight it on the ice."
Well, New Yorkers know how to fight. They
even know how to fight on the ice, as the New York Rangers occasionally show. I
want to thank all the fighters in this room for reminding us of that.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Fossil Free, a project
of 350.org.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"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
No comments:
Post a Comment