by Charles Fredricks
This year 20,000,000 people were displaced by climate events; more than by war (that’s from the UN). In a few years, without prompt action, that number will increase tenfold, and from there the news will only get worse. This needs to remain a top-priority focus, educating the public and discussing steps that must be taken now to avert greater damage.
To me Arun Gupta’s article fails in this respect. It is rife with political targets, and short on solutions. There are carbon pricing schemes that could work (CCL-Citizens Climate Lobby, carbon fee and dividend approach), depending on the amount of the fee and how quickly it accelerates, for example. Gupta’s article seems like leftist self-flagellation, only the holy need apply. That’s a lousy organizing approach. We need Flood Wall Street, but we also need the People’s Climate March, and to snipe at one or the other or play them off against each other serves no one.
I videoed the Building Blocks Against Climate Change action here in LA and just uploaded it here:
http://youtu.be/-yx2ap1lvEM
Especially check out Councilman Koretz, Kwazi Nkrumah and Lisa Lubow (at 5:29, 16:50, & 21:20)
Most of the global unrest which serves as a distraction from the climate issue is caused by our corporate oiligopoly and their servile puppets in government, so call it two birds with one stone. All the problems mentioned in the other articles this issue were with us a decade and more ago, and may be with us a decade from now. But if nothing happens with climate change in the next decade, humanity could be toast, due to our inability to rein it in after it reaches a tipping point, and no one can say where exactly that tipping point is.
By toast I mean extinct. You don’t have to worry about injustice when you are an extinct species. It will take a couple hundred years for that to happen of course, but our time to prevent it-unlike other issues-is exceedingly short. Humans do not rule our roost, for better or ill, as it turns out; natural law does. We don’t have time to be fighting insider battles about this. The leftist ideal of revolution will come as (or after) we save the planet, not before, or it will be entirely meaningless, as in, “let’s all agree to equally divide this last remaining ear of corn.”
These two links inform on the issue:
Wake Up, Freak Out, then Get a Grip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T_3WJPYY9g
Climate change is simple: David Roberts at TEDx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90