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Barack Obama Is Coming to a Statehouse Near You |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36874"><span class="small">Jim Newell, Slate</span></a>
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Wednesday, 19 October 2016 08:29 |
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Newell writes: "Barack Obama is focusing his post-presidency on a matter that bedeviled his two terms: gerrymandering."
President Barack Obama speaks on Feb. 27, 2009, at Goettge Memorial Field House in Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, North Carolina. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)
Barack Obama Is Coming to a Statehouse Near You
By Jim Newell, Slate
19 October 16
He’s focusing his post-presidency on a matter that bedeviled his two terms: gerrymandering.
 arack Obama is a relatively popular politician, itself quite an accomplishment in the Age of No National Politicians Being Popular. Once he retires from the Oval Office and the public firing line, history will begin to buff his halo, the way it has with other recent ex-presidents. Like him or not, he has been an iconic figure in American history since the day he won the 2008 election. He still has a long life ahead of him. One would expect him to spend his post-presidency on something commensurate with this lofty status. Ending global hunger? World peace? The elimination of death? The death of sadness?
Eh, he can get to all that jazz eventually. But first: How about working on some state legislature campaigns?
The Democratic Party, “in close consultation with the White House,” has launched a new political group “which will coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps,” Politico reported Monday. Former Attorney General Eric Holder will chair the new group, named the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. And Obama himself, as Politico writes, has “identified the group … as the main focus of his political activity once he leaves office.” The group will focus on the “gubernatorial, state legislative and House races” in 2018 and 2020 that will determine the design of the next congressional redistricting maps.
Why would Obama concern himself with such seemingly small-fry politics? One reason could be tradition: Ex-presidents like to give their successors room to breathe, so hieing off to state-level battles is one way for Obama to remain active without meddling in the day-to-day grind of national politics. The other, more important reason is that control of state legislatures is in no way small-fry politics. By throwing his name behind the effort, Obama is trying to fix the colossal infrastructural damage his party sustained under his tenure: the Republican state-level domination—and thus congressional domination—achieved first in the midterms of 2010 and iced in 2014.
What happened in the 2010 “Tea Party wave” election, anyway? President Obama has a go-to explanation. “We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year,” he told New York magazine in a recent interview, “and the [2010 Senate special election] loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president and any good elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate those ideas.”
The explanation is a self-flattering one: We were just so busy implementing perfect policies that we forgot to communicate them properly. One doubts that a more cleverly crafted party message—nipping and tucking an adjective here or there in public speeches—would have overridden the factors that led to Democrats’ catastrophic 2010 losses. The flat economy, the party-line stretch to pass the Affordable Care Act, the gravitational pull that was bound to drag Democrats down to Earth after their big successes in the 2006 and 2008 congressional elections. It was the election that finally saw conservative whites switch jerseys in states with long Democratic state-level traditions, while governorships and chambers across the Rust Belt states fell into Republican hands and haven’t been recovered since.
The 2010 elections may have tethered the Republican Party to a base-centric strategy that’s made it agonizingly difficult for them to retake the White House. But the damage it did to the prospects of the Democratic Party at the sub-presidential level is no less rotten. It was a census year, i.e. the best cycle for a party to have a “wave” election. The pickups in governorships and state legislative chambers allowed Republicans to redraw favorable maps for themselves. In 2014, the second Republican-wave election of Obama’s tenure, the Democrats’ hole only got deeper. The GOP won 52 percent of the votes cast for the House that year but won 57 percent of the seats.
Democrats might make gains across the board in 2016 with a Clinton victory—or, more aptly, a Trump loss—but they’ll be fragile. They would once again head into midterms with the presidency, and the contemporary Democratic presidential coalition just doesn’t turn out reliably in those midterms. It will be a difficult environment for Democrats to pick up the statehouses and governorships they’ll need, whether to draw their own favorable maps or at least to block unified Republican governments from keeping the crayons and drawing whatever they want. Democrats can’t expect the 2020 presidential cycle to serve as much more of a counterweight. Hillary Clinton, who probably won’t have awe-inspiring approval ratings, will be vying for a fourth consecutive Democratic term, probably against someone who isn’t such a thick cut of Westphalian ham.
If it’s at all doable, turning around the party’s state-level health will require Democrats to avert their focus solely from the bright, shiny object of presidential races. It means getting voters from the Obama coalition to recognize that state-level races aren’t afterthoughts, and that losing the “farm team” races means dooming your preferred causes for decades at a time. Even though he won’t be in office anymore, Barack Obama will be the most famous politician in the country for the foreseeable future. For both the preservation of his legacy and his party’s future, he should be the one who grabs his coalition by the shoulders and points it toward the statehouse races. He can’t change all of the structural factors that have contributed to down-ballot Democratic suffering. But at least he can communicate the ideas.
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Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo |
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Tuesday, 18 October 2016 14:08 |
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Parry writes: "Note how differently The New York Times prepares the American public for civilian casualties from the new U.S.-backed Iraqi government assault on the city of Mosul to free it from the Islamic State, compared to the unrelenting condemnation of the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on neighborhoods of east Aleppo held by Al Qaeda."
Iraqi soldiers during a training session for the battle to retake Mosul, as a shepherd led his herd in Bashiqa this month. (photo: Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters)
Good Deaths in Mosul, Bad Deaths in Aleppo
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
18 October 16
As the U.S.-backed offensive in Mosul, Iraq, begins, the mainstream U.S. media readies the American people to blame the terrorists for civilian casualties but the opposite rules apply to Syria’s Aleppo, reports Robert Parry.
 ote how differently The New York Times prepares the American public for civilian casualties from the new U.S.-backed Iraqi government assault on the city of Mosul to free it from the Islamic State, compared to the unrelenting condemnation of the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on neighborhoods of east Aleppo held by Al Qaeda.
In the case of Mosul, the million-plus residents are not portrayed as likely victims of American airstrikes and Iraqi government ground assaults, though surely many will die during the offensive. Instead, the civilians are said to be eagerly awaiting liberation from the Islamic State terrorists and their head-chopping brutality.
“Mosul’s residents are hoarding food and furtively scrawling resistance slogans on walls,” writes Times’ veteran war correspondent Rod Nordland about this week’s launch of the U.S.-backed government offensive. “Those forces will fight to enter a city where for weeks the harsh authoritarian rule of the Islamic State … has sought to crack down on a population eager to either escape or rebel, according to interviews with roughly three dozen people from Mosul. …
“Just getting out of Mosul had become difficult and dangerous: Those who were caught faced million-dinar fines, unless they were former members of the Iraqi Army or police, in which case the punishment was beheading. … Graffiti and other displays of dissidence against the Islamic State were more common in recent weeks, as were executions when the vandals were caught.”
The Times article continues: “Mosul residents chafed under social codes banning smoking and calling for splashing acid on body tattoos, summary executions of perceived opponents, whippings of those who missed prayers or trimmed their beards, and destroying ‘un-Islamic’ historical monuments.”
So, the message is clear: if the inevitable happens and the U.S.-backed offensive kills a number of Mosul’s civilians, including children, The New York Times’ readers have been hardened to accept this “collateral damage” as necessary to free the city from blood-thirsty extremists. The fight to crush these crazies is worth it, even if there are significant numbers of civilians killed in the “cross-fire.”
And we’ve seen similar mainstream media treatment of other U.S.-organized assaults on urban areas, such as the devastation of the Iraqi city, Fallujah, in 2004 when U.S. Marines routed Iraqi insurgents from the city while leveling or severely damaging most of the city’s buildings and killing hundreds of civilians. But those victims were portrayed in the Western press as “human shields,” shifting the blame for their deaths onto the Iraqi insurgents.
Despite the fact that U.S. forces invaded Iraq in defiance of international law – and thus all the thousands of civilian deaths across Iraq from the “shock and awe” U.S. firepower should be considered war crimes – there was virtually no such analysis allowed into the pages of The New York Times or the other mainstream U.S. media. Such talk was forced to the political fringes, as it continues to be today. War-crimes tribunals are only for the other guys.
Lust to Kill Children
By contrast, the Times routinely portrays the battle for east Aleppo as simply a case of barbaric Russian and Syrian leaders bombing innocent neighborhoods with no regard for the human cost, operating out of an apparent lust to kill children.
Rather than focusing on Al Qaeda’s harsh rule of east Aleppo, the Times told its readers in late September how to perceive the Russian-Syrian offensive to drive out Al Qaeda and its allies. A Sept. 25 article by Anne Barnard and Somini Sengupta, entitled “Syria and Russia Appear Ready to Scorch Aleppo,” began:
“Make life intolerable and death likely. Open an escape route, or offer a deal to those who leave or surrender. Let people trickle out. Kill whoever stays. Repeat until a deserted cityscape is yours. It is a strategy that both the Syrian government and its Russian allies have long embraced to subdue Syrian rebels, largely by crushing the civilian populations that support them.
“But in the past few days, as hopes for a revived cease-fire have disintegrated at the United Nations, the Syrians and Russians seem to be mobilizing to apply this kill-all-who-resist strategy to the most ambitious target yet: the rebel-held sections of the divided metropolis of Aleppo.”
Again, note how the “rebels” are portrayed as local heroes, rather than a collection of jihadists from both inside and outside Syria fighting under the operational command of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which recently underwent a name change to the Syria Conquest Front. But the name change and the pretense about “moderate” rebels are just more deceptions.
As journalist/historian Gareth Porter has written: “Information from a wide range of sources, including some of those the United States has been explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad organization unit in those provinces [of Idlib and Aleppo] is engaged in a military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it. …
“At least since 2014 the Obama administration has armed a number of Syrian rebel groups even though it knew the groups were coordinating closely with the Nusra Front, which was simultaneously getting arms from Turkey and Qatar. The strategy called for supplying TOW anti-tank missiles to the ‘Syrian Revolutionaries Front’ (SRF) as the core of a client Syrian army that would be independent of the Nusra Front.
“However, when a combined force of Nusra and non-jihadist brigades including the SRF captured the Syrian army base at Wadi al-Deif in December 2014, the truth began to emerge. The SRF and other groups to which the United States had supplied TOW missiles had fought under Nusra’s command to capture the base.”
Arming Al Qaeda
This reality – the fact that the U.S. government is indirectly supplying sophisticated weaponry to Al Qaeda – is rarely mentioned in the mainstream U.S. news media, though one might think it would make for a newsworthy story. But it would undercut the desired propaganda narrative of “good guy” rebels fighting “bad guy” government backed by “ultra-bad guy” Russians.
What if Americans understood that their tax money and U.S. weaponry were going to aid the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks? What if they understood the larger historical context that Washington helped midwife the modern jihadist movement – and Al Qaeda – through the U.S./Saudi support for the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1980s?
And what if Americans understood that Washington’s supposed regional “allies,” including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, have sided with Al Qaeda in Syria because of their intense hatred of Shiite-ruled Iran, an ally of Syria’s secular government?
These Al Qaeda sympathies have been known for several years but never get reported in the mainstream U.S. press. In September 2013, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored Syria’s Sunni extremists over President Bashar al-Assad.
“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al Qaeda.
And, in June 2014, speaking as a former ambassador at an Aspen Institute conference, Oren expanded on his position, saying Israel would even prefer a victory by the brutal Islamic State over continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.
But such cynical – and dangerous – realpolitik is kept from the American people. Instead, the Syrian conflict is presented as all about the children.
There is also little said about how Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and its allied jihadists keep the civilian population in east Aleppo essentially as “human shields.” When “humanitarian corridors” have been opened to allow civilians to escape, they had been fired on by the jihadists determined to keep as many people under their control as possible.
Propaganda Fodder
By forcing the civilians to stay, Al Qaeda and its allies can exploit the injuries and deaths of civilians, especially the children, for propaganda advantages.
Going along with Al Qaeda’s propaganda strategy, the Times and other mainstream U.S. news outlets have kept the focus on the children. A Times dispatch on Sept. 27 begins: “They cannot play, sleep or attend school. Increasingly, they cannot eat. Injury or illness could be fatal. Many just huddle with their parents in windowless underground shelters — which offer no protection from the powerful bombs that have turned east Aleppo into a kill zone.
“Among the roughly 250,000 people trapped in the insurgent redoubt of the divided northern Syrian city are 100,000 children, the most vulnerable victims of intensified bombings by Syrian forces and their Russian allies. Though the world is jolted periodically by the suffering of children in the Syria conflict — the photographs of Alan Kurdi’s drowned body and Omran Daqneesh’s bloodied face are prime examples — dead and traumatized children are increasingly common.”
This propagandistic narrative has bled into the U.S. presidential campaign with Martha Raddatz, a moderator of the second presidential debate, incorporating much of the evil-Russians theme into a question that went so far as to liken the human suffering in Aleppo to the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews and other minorities.
That prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to repeat her call for an expanded U.S. military intervention in Syria, including a “no-fly zone,” which U.S. military commanders say would require a massive operation that would kill many Syrians, both soldiers and civilians, to eliminate Syria’s sophisticated air-defense systems and its air force.
Based on the recent Wikileaks publication of Clinton’s speeches to investment bankers and other special interests, we also know that she recognizes the high human cost from this strategy. In one June 2013 speech, she said, “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk — you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.”
Yet, during the campaign, Clinton has spoken glibly about her own proposal to impose a “no-fly zone” over Syria, which has become even more dangerous since 2015 when the Russians agreed to directly assist the Syrian government in fighting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Also, left unsaid about such a U.S. intervention is that it could open the way for Al Qaeda and/or its spinoff Islamic State to defeat the Syrian army and gain control of Damascus, creating the potential for even a worse bloodbath against Christians, Shiites, Alawites, secular Sunnis and other “heretics.” Not to mention the fact that a U.S.-imposed “no-fly zone” would be a clear violation of international law.
Over the next few weeks, we are sure hear much about the Islamic State using the people of Mosul as “human shields” and thus excusing U.S. bombs when they strike civilians targets and kill children. It will all be the terrorists’ fault, except that an opposite set of “journalistic” rules will apply to Aleppo.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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It Has Been a Really Unprecedented Year for Global Climate Action |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35653"><span class="small">Natasha Geiling, ThinkProgress</span></a>
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Tuesday, 18 October 2016 13:49 |
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Geiling writes: "The past few months have seen a historic amount of global climate action, from the official entry into force of the Paris climate agreement to a landmark agreement to begin limiting emissions from the international aviation industry."
Secretary of State John Kerry delivers a speech to the 28th meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. (photo: AP)
It Has Been a Really Unprecedented Year for Global Climate Action
By Natasha Geiling, ThinkProgress
18 October 16
From the Paris agreement to a new deal on another kind of greenhouse gas, the world is doing a lot to slow climate change.
 he past few months have seen a historic amount of global climate action, from the official entry into force of the Paris climate agreement to a landmark agreement to begin limiting emissions from the international aviation industry.
Now, mark another win for global climate action: On Saturday, representatives from almost 200 countries agreed to a new deal to reduce emissions from the world’s fastest growing greenhouse gas?—?hydrofluorocarbons.
Hydrofluorocarbons?—?or HFCs?—?are the gases currently used in refrigeration and air conditioning. And while they help keep certain items cool, they also threaten to heat up the world, with 1,000 times the heat trapping properties of carbon dioxide. According to scientists, continued use of HFCs in air-conditioners would be enough to raise global temperatures one full degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
In an effort to curb their use, members of the Montreal Protocol met in Rwanda last week to discuss how HFCs could be phased out without disproportionately impacting developing countries, like India, where air-conditioning is crucial to public health.
The countries settled on an amendment to the original Montreal Protocol called the Kigali Amendment, which relies on a tiered system to time the phase out of HFCs throughout the world. Developed nations stop using and producing HFCs within a few years, followed by developing countries like China and some island nations in 2024, and finally countries like India, Iran, and Iraq in 2028.
“This amendment to the Montreal Protocol is the single most important measure the global community could take to limit global warming in the short-term,” Andrew Light, senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, said in a statement. “Because HFCs are thousands of times more potent as a warming agent than carbon dioxide, a successful phase down can avoid up to a half a degree Celsius of global warming by the end of this century.”
The deal, according to some scientific estimates, could prevent .5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century?—?no small amount, given the goal of staying well below 1.5 degrees of warming set out in Paris.
If the Montreal Protocol sounds familiar, that’s because this same body had great success in the late 1980s and early 1990s to force the phase-out of chlorofluorcarbons, which both destroyed the ozone and contributed to global warming. HFCs were meant as a non-ozone-depleting replacement to CFCs, but ended up acting as powerful warming agents themselves.
The Montreal Protocol is one of the great environmental success stories in recent history?—?a coalition of countries coming together to recognize a problem (in this case, the hole in the ozone) and agree upon a solution. Phasing out CFCs really did help the ozone?—?today, it is finally starting to heal.
It’s fitting that the Montreal Protocol would reach another crucial global deal at a time when the global community seems to be embracing climate action like never before. In early October, the Paris climate agreement reached the threshold of representative countries and emissions needed to enter into force, and it’s expected to take effect in early November. That’s months before anyone thought the agreement would enter into force, spurred largely by the specter of an American president who would seek to cancel the agreement. Nations understand the critical nature of the climate change problem, and are acting quickly?—?and acting together?—?to help slow the crisis. Earlier in October, nations came together to help curb greenhouse gas emissions from airlines?—?a deal the International Air Transport Association (IATA) trade group called “historic.”
So even as the United States seems locked in a contentious presidential election that treats climate change more as an aside than a critical issue, the international community appears ready to move forward with climate action.
“In less than 12 months, American leadership has brought the world together to craft two historic agreements that represent a global turning point in our fight to tackle climate change,” Michael Brune, director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “While we have much more work to do, the significance of these diplomatic achievements cannot be overstated.”
Which is not to say that these agreements represent the culmination of global climate action?—?they are much more like the floor of what is necessary than the ceiling. A recent study, published before peer-review, by former NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen, argued that even with the Paris agreement, the world has already warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. And many of the countries individual pledges to the Paris agreement do not go far enough to help slow global warming.
Still, with a wave of international accomplishments preceding this year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to be held November 7 in Morocco, there are reasons to be optimistic that the international community could continue to press for increasingly ambitious climate action.
“The Kigali Amendment, just prior to the adoption of the Paris Agreement, brings concrete global action to fight catastrophic global warming,” Clare Perry, climate campaign leader with the Environmental Investigation Agency, said in a statement. “Still, with billions of tonnes of emissions still up for grabs, the ultimate success of the Kigali amendment will depend on accelerating the removal of these industrial climate-killers in upcoming meetings.”
UPDATE: This post has been updated to reflect that other analysis has concluded that, because HFC reductions were already included in many national contributions under the Paris Agreement, it is unclear how much additional temperature control the updated Montreal Protocol will add.
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FOCUS: The Question I Get Asked the Most |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24462"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, EcoWatch</span></a>
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Tuesday, 18 October 2016 11:28 |
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McKibben writes: "The questions come after talks, on twitter, in the days' incoming tide of email - sometimes even in old-fashioned letters that arrive in envelopes. The most common one by far is also the simplest: What can I do? I bet I've been asked it 10,000 times by now and - like a climate scientist predicting the temperature - I'm pretty sure I'm erring on the low side."
Bill McKibben being arrested during a protest at Seneca Lake in March. (photo: Monica Lopossay/NYT)
The Question I Get Asked the Most
By Bill McKibben, EcoWatch
18 October 16
he questions come after talks, on twitter, in the days' incoming tide of email—sometimes even in old-fashioned letters that arrive in envelopes. The most common one by far is also the simplest: What can I do? I bet I've been asked it 10,000 times by now and—like a climate scientist predicting the temperature—I'm pretty sure I'm erring on the low side.
It's the right question or almost: It implies an eagerness to act and action is what we need. But my answer to it has changed over the years, as the science of global warming has shifted. I find, in fact, that I'm now saying almost the opposite of what I said three decades ago.
Then—when I was 27 and writing the first book on climate change—I was fairly self-obsessed (perhaps age appropriately). And it looked like we had some time: No climate scientist in the late 1980s thought that by 2016 we'd already be seeing massive Arctic ice melt. So it made sense for everyone to think about the changes they could make in their own lives that, over time, would add up to significant change. In The End of Nature, I described how my wife and I had tried to "prune and snip our desires," how instead of taking long vacation trips by car we rode our bikes in the road, how we grew more of our own food, how we "tried not to think about how much we'd like a baby."
Some of these changes we've maintained—we still ride our bikes, and I haven't been on a vacation in a very long time. Some we modified—thank God we decided to have a child, who turned out to be the joy of our life. And some I've abandoned: I've spent much of the last decade in frenetic travel, much of it on airplanes. That's because, over time, it became clear to me that there's a problem with the question "What can I do."
The problem is the word "I." By ourselves, there's not much we can do. Yes, my roof is covered with solar panels and I drive a plug-in car that draws its power from those panels, and yes our hot water is heated by the sun, and yes we eat low on the food chain and close to home. I'm glad we do all those things, and I think everyone should do them, and I no longer try to fool myself that they will solve climate change.
Because the science has changed and with it our understanding of the necessary politics and economics of survival. Climate change is coming far faster than people anticipated even a couple of decades ago. 2016 is smashing the temperature records set in 2015 which smashed the records set in 2014; some of the world's largest physical features (giant coral reefs, vast river deltas) are starting to die off or disappear. Drought does damage daily; hundred-year floods come every other spring. In the last 18 months we've seen the highest wind speeds ever recorded in many of the world's ocean basins. In Basra Iraq—not far from the Garden of Eden—the temperature hit 129 Fahrenheit this summer, the highest reliably recorded temperature ever and right at the limit of human tolerance. July and August were not just the hottest months ever recorded, they were, according to most climatologists, the hottest months in the entire history of human civilization. The most common phrase I hear from scientists is "faster than anticipated." Sometime in the last few years we left behind the Holocene, the 10,000 year period of benign climatic stability that marked the rise of human civilization. We're in something new now—something new and frightening.
Against all that, one's Prius is a gesture. A lovely gesture and one that everyone should emulate, but a gesture. Ditto riding the bike or eating vegan or whatever one's particular point of pride. North Americans are very used to thinking of themselves as individuals, but as individuals we are powerless to alter the trajectory of climate change in a meaningful manner. The five or ten percent of us who will be moved to really act (and that's all who ever act on any subject) can't cut the carbon in the atmosphere by more than five or ten percent by those actions.
No, the right question is "What can we do to make a difference?"
Because if individual action can't alter the momentum of global warming, movements may still do the trick. Movements are how people organize themselves to gain power—enough power, in this case, to perhaps overcome the financial might of the fossil fuel industry. Movements are what can put a price on carbon, force politicians to keep fossil fuel in the ground, demand subsidies so that solar panels go up on almost every roof, not just yours. Movements are what take 5 or 10 percent of people and make them decisive—because in a world where apathy rules, five or ten percent is an enormous number. Ask the Tea Party. Ask the civil rights movement.
The other side knows this, which is why it ridicules our movements at all times. When, for instance, 400,000 people march on New York City, I know that I will get a stream of ugly tweets and emails about how—saints preserve us—it takes gasoline to get to New York City. Indeed it does. If you live in a society that has dismantled its train system, then lots of people will need to drive and take the bus, and it will be the most useful gallons they burn in the course of the year. Because that's what pushes systems to change.
When brave people go to jail, cynics email me to ask how much gas the paddywagon requires. When brave people head out in kayaks to block the biggest drilling rigs on earth, I always know I'll be reading dozens of tweets from clever and deadened souls asking "don't you know the plastic for those kayaks require oil?" Yes, we know—and we've decided it's well worth it. We're not trying to be saints; we're trying to be effective.
We're not going to be forced into a monkish retreat from society—we need to engage this fight with all the tools of the moment. We're trying to change the world we live in and if we succeed then those who come after will have plenty of time to figure out other ways to inhabit it. Along the way those who have shifted their lives can provide inspiration, which is crucial. But they don't by themselves provide a solution. Naomi Klein once described visiting an "amazing" community farm in Brooklyn's Red Hook that had been flooded by Hurricane Sandy. "They were doing everything right, when it comes to climate," she said. "Growing organic, localizing their food system, sequestering carbon, not using fossil-fuel inputs—all the good stuff." Then came the storm. "They lost their entire fall harvest and they're pretty sure their soil is now contaminated, because the water that flooded them was so polluted. It's important to build local alternatives, we have to do it, but unless we are really going after the source of the problem"—namely, the fossil-fuel industry and its lock on Washington—"we are going to get inundated."
Like Klein, I find that the people who have made some of those personal changes are usually also deeply involved in movement-building. Local farmers, even after a long day pulling weeds, find the energy to make it to the demonstration, often because they know their efforts out in the field aren't enough, even to guarantee a climate that will allow them to continue their efforts. No, the people calling environmentalists hypocrites for living in the real world are people who want no change at all. Their goal is simply to shame us and hence to quiet us. So we won't make them feel bad or disrupt the powers that be.
It won't work, unless we let it. Movements take care of their own: They provide bail money and they push each other's ideas around the web. They join forces across issues: BlackLivesMatter endorsing fossil fuel divestment, climate justice activists fighting deportations. They recognize that together we might just have enough strength to get it done. So when people ask me what can I do, I know say the same thing every time: "The most important thing an individual can do is not be an individual. Join together—that's why we have movements like 350.org or Green for All, like BlackLivesMatter or Occupy. If there's not a fight where you live, find people to support, from Standing Rock to the Pacific islands. Job one is to organize and jobs two and three."
And if you have some time left over after that, then by all means make sure your lightbulbs are all LEDs and your kale comes from close to home.
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hen I was sentenced to 30 months in prison after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, friends, allies, former colleagues, and a whole lot of attorneys warned me that the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA were likely angry at the short sentence I received. Indeed, even after getting no halfway house time at all, I was released after serving only 23 months. I took those warnings seriously. I didn’t trust anybody, inside or outside prison, and I was always alert to the fact that the FBI would likely try to set me up. Again.
