The Next Election Is About the Next 10,000 Years

By Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine

02 August 20

Dramatic climate action is critical because we’re about to cross tipping points that are not reversible.

he upcoming election looks to be an apocalyptic turning point for our democracy—and our planet. In Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency, political visionaries and movement leaders such as Bill McKibben define the urgency of this moment and provide a manual for turning out voters in an age of extreme inequality, climate change, and pandemic.

It is a cliché at this point to describe an election as “the most important of our lifetimes.” Every election is key—they’re how we take stock of where we are as a nation. They’re part of a chain stretching into the past and into the future.

But if you wanted to make the argument—and I do—that this year actually is special, the climate crisis might be as good a place as any to start. And that’s because it comes with a feature that most political issues don’t: a deadline. In October 2018, the world’s climate scientists issued a special report, assessing our chances of meeting the targets set at the global climate talks in Paris a few years before. Those targets were modest—they called for attempting to hold the planet’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since we’ve already raised the temperature 1 degree, and that’s been enough to melt half the summer sea ice in the Arctic, kill off vast swaths of coral reef, and set big patches of the Earth on fire, it’s not like the Paris targets are desirable. (Desirable was the world many of us were born onto.) They’re crucial. And if we hope to meet them, the scientists were quite explicit: We have to fundamentally transform our energy systems by 2030. They helpfully defined that fundamental transformation: We need to cut our carbon emissions in half. In 10 years.

Anyone who has ever spent time around governments knows that speed is not one of their hallmarks. If we have any hope of meeting that target set for a decade out, we need to be hard at work just about … now. If another four years of inaction passes, the chance is over, and with it the planet as we’ve known it.

The past four years, of course, have been more than a time of annoying stasis—it’s been a period of active regression. The Trump administration has tried, with a good deal of success, to undercut every environmental law on the books, paying particular attention to climate change. A rogue’s gallery of coal lobbyists and oil executives have taken the top jobs in the environmental and energy bureaucracies and used the posts to give their industries free rein across the landscape. Where the Obama administration had scored modest successes—ratcheting up the gas mileage for cars, for instance—they’ve sprinted in the opposite direction.

Above all, of course, they’ve removed America from those Paris climate accords, in an act of breathtaking vandalism. It took decades for the international community to reach those agreements, and now the country that has poured the most carbon into the atmosphere is also the only country not engaged in the only global effort to do something about it.

Our vote is our chance to have a say.

It’s not that the Paris accords were so amazing—even the people negotiating them acknowledged at their signing in 2015 that they fell short of the task. Even if all the countries on Earth kept their pledges, the mercury would still rise nearly 3 degrees Celsius. But the calculation was that perhaps once countries began implementing renewable energy on a large scale, they’d find it cheaper and easier than they reckoned, and a virtuous spiral would ensue, allowing much faster progress. At first, it seemed to be working—throughout the past decade the world’s engineers kept dropping the price of sun and wind, and the pace of installations started to quicken. But then appeared Trump, who labeled global warming a hoax manufactured by the Chinese and who believed that wind turbines caused cancer. It was as if the road along which we were supposed to be accelerating was suddenly filled with potholes; momentum slowed, not just here but in much of the rest of the world. (The appearance of Trump-like figures in other countries didn’t help—Brazil’s Bolsonaro, for instance, started opening up the Amazon to intense exploitation, an act as reckless as opening a new fleet of gas-fired power plants.) Having lost three decades to the oil industry’s campaign of disinformation, we were now losing time again.

And time, as I have indicated, is the most precious asset here. Most of our problems linger—my entire adult life we’ve been engaged in the fight to try to provide medical care to Americans. It’s infuriating that we haven’t done it yet; Trump’s efforts to cut back access will, of course, kill many and bankrupt more. But at least they won’t make it harder to solve the problem once we finally decide to—the day will come when some president is able to make our country match every other industrialized nation, and the preceding decades will not have made it harder. The climate crisis isn’t like that—as a team of scientists reported in November, we’re about to cross a whole series of tipping points, ranging from destabilizing Antarctic ice sheets to slowing down vast ocean currents. These are not reversible; no one has a plan for refreezing the poles.

Every election that passes, we lose leverage—this time around our last chance at limiting the temperature rise to anything like 1.5 degrees would slip through our fingers. Which is why we need to register and vote as never before. It’s also, of course, why we need to do more than that: many of us are also hard at work this year taking on the big banks that fund the fossil fuel industry, trying to pull the financial lever as well as the political one. And even within the world of politics, we need to do much more than vote: no matter who wins, Nov. 4 and 5 and 6 are as important as Nov. 3; we have to push, and prod, and open up space for the people we work to install in office.

But in the autumn of an even-numbered year, we have a superpower that will wither as soon as Election Day passes. Our vote is our chance to have a say. In the case of the climate, that is not just about what will happen for the next four years. It’s about what will happen for the next 10,000 years.

This excerpt by Bill McKibben from Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (Routledge, 2020) edited by Matt Nelson, Suren Moodliar, and Charles Derber, appears by permission of the publisher. 

Removing Monuments Is the Easy Part. We Must Make America a Real Democracy

By Reverend William Barber and Bernice King, Guardian UK

02 August 20

Flags and statues may fall, but the real struggle is for genuine voting rights, equal healthcare and truly integrated schools

ne hundred and fifty-five years after Confederate troops surrendered at Appomattox and Bennett Place, their battle flag has finally come down in Mississippi and their statues are retreating from courthouse squares and university quads. As the children of generations of Black southerners who fought against the lies of the Lost Cause, we celebrate this most recent surrender and look forward to walking down streets that are not shadowed by monuments to men who claimed to own our ancestors. But we cannot understand why these monuments lasted so long without challenging the inequities they were erected to justify. In fact, many who support flags and statues coming down today also advocate voter suppression, attack healthcare and re-segregate our schools. We must attend to both the systems of injustice and the monuments that have justified them if we are to realize “liberty and justice for all”.

If you examine the bases of statues that are being hauled away, most bear a date between the 1890s and 1920s. These monuments did not rise in defiance of the federal troops who were sent by Congress and Ulysses S Grant to enforce Reconstruction and guarantee political power to the new Black citizens of the south in the 1860s and 1870s. If a statue of Robert E Lee or Jefferson Davis had been proposed during Reconstruction, the very suggestion would have sparked a riot. But after the compromise of 1876, when Rutherford B Hayes agreed to remove federal troops from the south, newly established Black and white political alliances were subjected to the violence of white terrorist organizations and the propaganda of white supremacy campaigns.

As Martin Luther King Jr taught on the steps of the Alabama state house in 1965: “To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society.” Black people were driven from public life and blamed for the troubles of a society that had invested its resources in treasonous rebellion against the United States. Jim Crow laws went on the books to offer a legal structure for the caste system that had built plantation wealth with enslaved labor. “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” King said. “And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man.”

George White, the last Black congressman from the south during Reconstruction, finished his term representing North Carolina’s second congressional district in 1902. Five years later, the United Daughters of the Confederacy petitioned the University of North Carolina to erect a memorial to alumni who had fought for the Confederacy. With Jim Crow established, their cause was no longer lost. In the Jim Crow south, these veterans and their descendants celebrated the sacrifices their fathers and grandfathers had made to defend white supremacy. Before a cheering crowd of more than 1,000 people who gathered to dedicate their new Confederate Monument, Julian Carr recalled how “100 yards from where we stand, less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 federal soldiers”. Like Confederate monuments in almost every southern community, this one was erected to celebrate that no federal authority was willing to challenge white supremacy.

After the Brown v Board of Education decision rendered Jim Crow unconstitutional in 1954, Black and white people in the civil rights movement worked tirelessly to demand federal enforcement of Reconstruction-era promises: Black citizenship, equal protection under the law and the right to vote. As in the moral struggle of the civil war, our parents and their colleagues risked their lives in non-violent struggle to make the promise of America real for all of her citizens. As Coretta Scott King said: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.”

While the gains of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act transformed the horizon of possibility for millions of Americans, the Second Reconstruction’s work of establishing a genuine multiethnic democracy was not completed before calls for “law and order”, “traditional values” and a tax revolt rallied a Confederate resistance once again. By uniting white voters in the suburbs, the sun belt, and the south, the Southern Strategy promised white people political power in an increasingly diverse America for the next 50 years.

While the divisive politics of Trumpism may be the last gasp of the Southern Strategy, the question of whether America can do the work of becoming a genuine democracy still remains. Removing monuments to the lie of white supremacy is an important step, but a shared future depends on redistributing power and resources so that every American, no matter their race, income, geography or immigration status, has access to healthcare, public education, affordable housing, a living wage, clean water and a livable planet.

In this moment when millions of Americans are suffering from a triple crisis of poverty, Covid-19 and police brutality, we need more than a conversation about monuments. We need concrete action to address the incredible disparities in death rates among Black, brown and poor people. This pivotal moment for our nation and our world is beckoning us to dismantle injustice and rebuild with love as the foundation. We can build a more just, humane, equitable and peaceful world. But, as King so prophetically admonished us: “The hour is late. And the clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now before it is too late.” We must act now, America.