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Today's Top News
Fighting the Joe Millers of the World
Joe Miller, Sarah Palin's choice candidate for one of Alaska's Senate seats, does not believe in climate change. That didn't bother Alaska voters: this week, Miller bested Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the state's Republican primary.
If that weren't worrisome enough, it also emerged that the fossil fuel industry spent eight times more than environmental groups on lobbying in 2009, the year the House passed the climate change bill. It's been a bad year already for environmental causes, and as the November election edges closer, progressives might want to start working overtime to regain momentum on climate and energy issues.
Murkowski was solidly against the idea of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulating carbon. But she was willing to talk about cap-and-trade programs, and at the very least, she was willing to admit climate change was happening. Depending on how November's election shakes out, the shift towards climate-denial in Congress may only worsen. A slew of Republican candidates are convinced that, as one put it, "only God knows where our climate is going," as Care2 reports.
A tougher tomorrow
Current political trends bode badly for the planet. If Congress couldn't pass climate legislation while are in Democrats control of the House and Senate, there's little hope that lawmakers will step up when facing opponents who don't believe in climate change.
Carla Perez has a few ideas about how progressives and environmentalists can fight back - and they begin with accepting that, yes, giving up fossil fuels would mean sacrifice, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. Perez, a program coordinator at social justice group Movement Generation, appeared recently on National Radio Project's Making Contact and imagined how life would look without fossil fuels:
No iPods. No iPads. No plasma TVs. No motorized individual vehicles. No plastic bags. No pleather boots for $9.99 from Payless.... Then again, no island of plastic twice the size of Texas. No plumes of sulfuric acid over Richmond, California. No skyrocketing rates of cancer and diabetes concentrated in native and people of color communities all over the world. No spontaneous combustion of flames off of contaminated rivers.
"How bad would it be?" she asked.
Target practice
To move from iPods to environmental justice, though, people like Perez will have to keep politicians like Joe Miller out of Washington. In an interview with Yes! Magazine, Riki Ott, a marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor, makes a good point about the challenges that environmental advocates face.
"This BP disaster, like the Exxon-Valdez, is more than an environmental crisis-it's a democracy crisis," Ott says. "Right now we're playing the game: Going through regulatory arenas, tightening some laws. But that's not good enough. The real question is, how do we get control of these big corporations?"
Electing politicians that don't take corporate money or listen to industry lobbyists will help. Another way to move away from the dominance of fossil fuel companies is offering real alternatives to using their products.
Brave new NOLA
In New Orleans, in the five years since Katrina hit, the people rebuilding the city have worked to create greener alternatives, as Campus Progress reports. Here's just one example:
Go Green NOLA encourages homebuilders to think small, since smaller homes use less energy. The group also makes suggestions such as installing windows and insulation systems with special attention to local weather and climate - think: humidity, and lots of it-and using shade trees and other landscaping to help beat back the southern sun.
Change can happen without devastation preceding it. In Massachusetts, the Green Justice Coalition worked to ensure that environmental justice provisions made it into the state's $1.4 billion energy efficiency plan, The Nation reports. What's more, the coalition made certain that Massachusetts citizens would feel the impact of the new plan directly:
There will be a financing plan to make energy-saving home improvements more affordable. Many of the 23,300 jobs to be generated by the plan will go to contractors who pay decent wages and meet "high road" employment standards. Finally, four pilot programs across the state will test a radically new outreach model by going door to door and mobilizing low- and moderate-income families in building greener neighborhoods.
Women lead the way
Progress doesn't happen on its own, of course. At RH Reality Check, Kathleen Rogers suggests that female leaders make all the difference. "Women get the connections between climate change, public health and economic growth, because climate change is disproportionately affecting women," she writes. "A new generation of women entrepreneurs, leaders and civil society, have demonstrated the potential for being the solution to the climate crisis. But they must be mobilized and given an opportunity to influence government and business."
Rogers is right. Leaders are out there. Just listen to the whole of Carla Perez' comments on Making Contact. The Green Justice Coalition's Phyllis Evans also gets it. And even Sen. Murkowski was willing to work on climate change compromises, on some level.
Of course, it's not just women who can lead the country and the planet away from current environmental and democratic crises. Paths forward are emerging; anyone can follow them.
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11 Comments so far
Show AllSo let me see if I can unpack this duffel bag of green optimism/inspiration:
1. Oh no, Republicans who are moderates on environmental policy are being displaced by complete lunatics!
2. Congress is likely to get even more polluter friendly.
3. Carla Perez has some ideas that are likely to be met with complete ridicule by the mainstream because they will actually require us to change the way we live in order to avoid the catastrophic consequences of Climate Change.
4. To move from where we are now to where we need to be we have to keep politicians like Joe Wilson from replacing moderate Republicans like Murkowski.
5. Ricki Ott (who I admire) says our current efforts are not getting us far enough, we need to somehow take over the corporations (then shut them down? make them play nice?) How to bring about this revolution is anyone's guess. My guess is there will be bloodshed involved.
6. Baby steps in Mass. and New Orleans are a cause for hope.
7. Women need to lead the way in the environmental movement because women tend to suffer more (from just about any social or environmental ill you would care to name, I suppose you could lump children and the poor in there too).
You hear that women, kids and poor people? We need you to step up to the plate, help us keep people like Sen. Murkowski in office, stop using fossil fuels, take over the corporations, and build homes in a greener way. If you don't, you are the ones who are going to suffer most.
Come on. We know what needs to happen and those of us who don't subscribe to the teachings of "The Secret" know there isn't a snowballs chance in hell that anything other than half measures and baby steps will ever make it past the corrupt politicians and the ignorant, overfed citizens of this country. The pain of the natural consequences of our collective actions is the only thing that will bring real change. Of course many of us can already see and feel that pain, sometime in the next year or so I expect the rest of the country will too. Until then, articles (blogs) like this one are spitting in the wind.
I sense your frustration and I get that too at times but it is who we listen to that can influence what we do after that. The author is implying that we drop the party labels and understand how women think even when they are placed in higher level positions. It is true that even women in higher positions have sold out but the rate at which they would do so differs from the rate at which most men in their places would have done so. Society has to cooperate on all levels as well or else we will only continue to collectively fail.
Good analysis, CommonSenseParty!
I think you wrote "Joe Wilson" when you meant "Joe Miller", but that's a harmless error... Wilson, Miller, Smith, Jones. Whatever.
Hell, don't vote for either one! if we want Green we need to vote Green, not for some Corprocrat who mouths the words, then goes back to Wa. for more business as usual. Eatin the lobbiests food, sleepin with the lobbiests whores!
That's the way we got into this mess. Even if they start ok Washingon twists them until their good Demogogs and Rethugrocrats. Don't fall for it!
Vote you concience, be it Green, Labor, or American Communist. just don't vote for R / D
>^^<
Women such as ... Margaret Thatcher, Madeline Albright,Hillary Clinton, and Carly Fiorina, just to name a few? OK, so Hilary isn't the residence of evil in the universe. Still, do women get to high office by selling out, or do they only sell out when in office? These problems are indeed bigger than political parties; they also transcend gender. Women, kids, and poor people are the second, third, and fourth class passengers on this ship of State, and no steward will answer their calls for justice. It's a damn shame.
As they sat in Washington, you can either go along, or go take in a play.
>^^<
People seem to be inclined to believe what is convenient for them to believe. If living in Alaska, where evidence of changing climate is everywhere all around is not enough to elicit a non ideological response, what is? Denial in the face of the obvious begs a greater question. What is the bottom line which motivates human behavioral response? What is the nexus between common interest and self interest. Where is the self interest for the average citizen in denying climate change. Are we merely a nation of angry sheep being led by a 'pied piper' off a cliff of indifference to our fate as a civilization?
And let us somehow come up with a more compelling something, than changing lights bulbs, as sensible as that is, to our systemic economic dilemma.
"There will be a financing plan to make energy-saving home improvements more affordable. Many of the 23,300 jobs to be generated by the plan will go to contractors who pay decent wages and meet "high road" employment standards"
The author isn't considering the fact that tied to the housing bubble of the past several years was the devastating old laissez-faire capitalist racket to "grow the economy" at any/all expense. In the case of the housing bubble, the idea was to "grow the economy" by overbuilding, massively plundering the earth, and further disconnecting people from each other and connecting them further to material gluttony.
In the case of our need for energy efficient shelter, the far left advocates government programs that empower the people to take control of markets with their demand power, i.e. demanding what is in their better interests, which includes energy efficient methods but more importantly lifestyle/cultural changes to reduce consumption. It most certainly does NOT include new construction (or refurbishment) to "grow the economy".
Notice that "growing the economy" is not in the people's better interests. "Growing the economy" is the treacherous destructive elite idea that turned the USA into the world's most gluttonous consumer of energy and materials, four times greater than the world average per capita.
The pseudo-left is famous for advocating further plunder/gluttony, as long as it can serve as a way to "empower the government". Kaka on that. The people will drive the economy with thoughtful demands that serve their better interests.
Insightful comment--except for the last sentence which is unmitigated lunacy. The "people" will continue to be driven and manipulated by others and by their own outdated hardwiring. The number of people making "thoughtful demands" serving "their better interests", will become even fewer as the country spirals into the abyss. People become more feral when situations become truly dire, not more prescient or civilized.
rtdrury, good point about "growing the economy", although I think refurbishment or retrofitting should not be clubbed with new construction, as the former has the potential to greatly improve the energy efficiency of buildings, even on a life-cycle basis.
What they don't tell you about "growing the economy" is that it is a direct substitute for redistribution of wealth - the complete no-no and forbidden subject in many capitalist countries. "Growth" is pushed, so the already wealthy can hold on to their disproportionate share of wealth, while the legitimate needs of the poor will have to be met by further plundering the earth. And guess what? As the poor become less poor, the super-rich will only grow richer, under the current system. The only way this can go on is by plundering the earth more and more. Yes, plundering is the right word here.
I find it astounding that someone who seems to not want Joe Miller elected, and who still supports the farce of elections in the USA, fails to even mention the name of the Democratic Party candidate opposing said Joe Miller. On the off chance that someone might want to send money or give other support to that candidate, his or her name should be mentioned. (It's Scott Mc Adam.)
The word incompetent has been used by many who post here regarding Democratic politicians and liberals. This unfocused and pointless article is yet another example.