Excerpts: Climate change can’t be solved within the confines of the status quo, because it’s a product of the status quo. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war,” she writes. The only hope of avoiding catastrophic warming lies in radical economic and political change. This is a terrifying predicament to find ourselves in. Even warming of 2 degrees may result in “drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society.” Meanwhile, avoiding still-greater warming (and greater dangers) will require precisely those who’ve enjoyed the richest benefits of burning fossil fuels suddenly to forswear the practice. The situation justifies Klein’s sense of urgency and also her sense that there’s a disconnect between the soothing rhetoric of “Big Green” environmentalists and the enormity of the challenge. ... the environmental movement has itself become little more than an arm (or perhaps one should say a column) of the fossil fuel industry. Her proof here is that several major environmental groups have received sizable donations from fossil fuel companies or their affiliated foundations, and some, like the Nature Conservancy, have executives (or former executives) of utility companies on their boards. “A painful reality behind the environmental movement’s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind our soaring emissions,” she writes, is that “large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting those interests—they have merged with them.”
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 13:00:01 +0000
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