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Shopping Differently Won't Solve the Climate Crisis, So What Should We Do Instead?
Large companies like BP have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
Sep 26, 2025
This article has been adapted from Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (The MIT Press, September 16, 2025) by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly. It is taken from Chapter 1: “You Do You: The Misdirected Individualist History of Climate Activism,” and is provided courtesy of the publisher.
Your Footprint, Your Responsibility
The more recent notion of everyone having a “personal carbon footprint” has similar roots in the dark arts of corporate PR. The oil giant BP popularized the term and bent it to its own purposes.
BP worked from the same playbook as the Ad Council. After acknowledging that climate change exists, the company makes you feel responsible for it. And then they give you something to do that helps you feel like you're part of the solution. Meanwhile, BP continues pumping away, enjoying massive federal subsidies and outlandish profits while avoiding any new, restrictive regulations.
The strategy was popular. One analysis of decades of ExxonMobil’s public communications found that the corporation framed climate change in terms of consumer energy demand when speaking publicly. But in internal company documents, ExxonMobil recognized that it could not continue to supply fossil fuels without disastrous consequences to the environment. They knew they were causing the problem (supply) but put the blame on us (consumer demand).
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better.
ExxonMobil even conducted its own secret research on climate change in the 1970s. The results were consistent with scientific predictions. The corporation's in-house models predicted that global temperatures would rise to within 0.2°C of what they have in fact risen to since. While it publicly claimed in 1997 that “some of today’s prophets of doom from global warming were predicting the coming of a new ice age,” in the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists had privately been in agreement all along with the overwhelming majority of published science on climate forecasting.
Once you know what to look for, you start to see the message of personal responsibility everywhere. Worried about retirement? Start saving more. Have a gambling problem? Exercise some willpower and stay away from the casino. Worried about obesity? Fix your lifestyle. From 2008 to 2010, 87 percent of all alcohol ads in magazines told consumers to “drink responsibly.”
While it was becoming clearer that Americans consume too much sugar, Coca-Cola fought back by subsidizing research arguing that the problem was not calories in but calories out: “Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.” The central plank of the food industry’s lobbying has been to frame discussions about eating habits in terms of personal responsibility (e.g., “portion control”).
What these messages minimize are all the social, structural, and systemic drivers of health problems like diabetes. In one New York Times article, Dr.Dean Schillinger explained how “our entire society is perfectly designed to create Type 2 diabetes.” There is no amount of scolding about sugary foods and exercise, he explains, and “no device, no drug powerful enough to counter the effects of poverty, pollution, stress, a broken food system, cities that are hard to navigate on foot, and inequitable access to healthcare, particularly in minority communities.”
Yet these companies have devoted enormous amounts of money to teaching the public to focus on the symptoms rather than the underlying system. They have taught us to track what we buy, and take responsibility for what we do with the stuff we buy, so that they won’t have to stop making and selling the stuff we buy from them or deal with laws regulating how they do it.
A Too-Convenient Model for Facing Inconvenient Truths
Whole social movements have been built around this individualist, little-things-add-up ethos. An iconic poster from the early days of the modern environmental movement mirrors the Ad Council’s claim that personal choices are both the cause of and the solution to pollution. This individualist thinking prevailed all the way from the 1970s environmental movement to May 2006, which marks one of the biggest box office events in documentary history: the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary reached millions of people around the world. Its vivid depictions of solar rays pelting the atmosphere and glaciers melting raised public awareness of climate change to new heights and ignited collective fervor about the environment like never before. It demanded action.
Widely and deservedly lauded, An Inconvenient Truth presented the facts in a way that was hard to argue with. It also presented solutions:
Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource.
The general template should sound familiar. What causes climate change? We do. How? Driving gas guzzlers, leaving on the lights, and buying unrecyclable plastic. What’s the solution? Stop doing these things. Consume better. This is another effect of the long history of corporate-funded individualist messaging: the first thing that comes to mind for many of us when we ask “what can I do?” is a series of thoughts about stuff. What should I buy? Where should I buy it from? What should I do with it? Even leaders in the fight against climate change have perpetuated our preoccupation with consumption.
As the credits of An Inconvenient Truth roll, the film offers concrete suggestions for how to make a difference, stating, “The climate crisis can be solved. Here’s how to start.” Here are the first five items in the list:
- Buy energy-efficient appliances + lightbulbs.
- Change your thermostat . . . to reduce energy for heating + cooling.
- Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.
- Recycle.
- If you can, buy a hybrid car.
These are good things to do, though energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs are basically illegal now and hybrid cars may be on their way to being old news. But An Inconvenient Truth exemplifies a whole world of books, TV, and academic research that looks at climate change through the lens of our personal consumer choices. Even academics have gotten in on the act. One widely cited study examined and ranked nearly 150 personal lifestyle choices by their effectiveness in reducing personal carbon footprints. The four most impactful options, it found, are having one child, living car-free, flying less, and eating a plant-based diet. Eventually, further down the list of action items, An Inconvenient Truth also tells viewers to do the following:
- Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis.
- Write to congress.
- If they don’t listen, run for congress
- Speak up in your community.
- Insist that America freeze CO2 emissions + join international efforts to stop global warming.
These suggestions head in a different direction, away from what we buy. They gesture toward our political choices and our communities’ values. This is promising, and we’ll talk a lot more about why in the coming chapters. For now, notice how vague they are. “Speak up in your community” sounds empowering, but what does it really mean? Speak up to whom? Say what? “Join international efforts” sounds good too. But your average moviegoer may be forgiven for thinking, “Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Most viewers likely walked out feeling alarmed, maybe intending to buy better lightbulbs. After all, lightbulbs were first on the list!
It turns out audiences did become both more knowledgeable and more concerned about the climate crisis. But this new found knowledge and concern doesn’t appear to have amounted to much, at least in the short term. One study found that a month after seeing the film, viewers had done next to nothing to put their newfound climate knowledge into action. Not one of them had examined their carbon footprint or written a letter to their senator.
Another study found that framing solutions in terms of individual consumer choices decreases people's willingness to take other forms of action to fight climate change. Maybe people feel like they’re being blamed for a global crisis beyond their control. Maybe they resent being asked to respond with what to them looks like merely symbolic, even futile, changes to their personal behavior. The danger, then, is not just that such messages don’t help. It’s that they might be making things worse.
System Change, Not Climate Change
Some people have started to get wise to this long history of corporations laying problems at the feet of individuals. The backlash it’s helped create has produced slogans now found on fridge magnets, protest posters, and newspaper headlines. The most common ones suggest a different kind of thing to do: stop worrying about personal choices, and start focusing on changing the system. The news site Vox published an article in 2019 whose headline perfectly expresses this idea: “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle.”
The Sunrise Movement, a decentralized, youth-led group at the forefront of progressive climate politics, advocates system change: “to abolish or reimagine institutions that degrade our communities and our climate.” This marks a generational sea change in climate activism. Abolishing or reimagining institutions was most certainly not on An Inconvenient Truth’s list. Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz recounts a telling experience with a Sunrise group in Philadelphia:
The organizers were scanning the menu of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Uber Eats. Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s training director, sat at a laptop, taking orders. “Can you get me a beef kebab?” Dejah Powell, an organizer from Chicago, said. “Or, no. Beef is the worst, right? Maybe chicken. Or falafel?”
“Dejah,” an activist named John Paul Mejia said, in a mock-scolding tone. He started reciting a movement adage, using the singsong rhythm of a call-and-response: “The biggest driver of emissions is . . .” The others joined him, in unison: “. . . the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior.” In other words, if you want the beef, get the beef.
One way to think about Sunrise’s system-over-individual logic is to recall Iron Eyes Cody. We called him a fraud, but looked at another way, his personal deception obscures the bigger story. A first-generation Sicilian American was able to play some of the most iconic Native American roles in Hollywood because the movie industry excluded actual Native Americans from taking those roles. The biases woven into cultural norms and movie business practices allowed, and incentivized, Cody’s personal fraud. Too much focus on what he should or shouldn’t have done, as a single person, makes it easy to overlook the system that structured his options and made his personal choices possible in the first place. Coming to appreciate the significance of systems can be disorienting, but keeping that significance firmly in view is crucial to understanding the bigger picture. The little-things-add-up take on individual responsibility is too easily weaponized by corporations advancing their own interests. When it comes to climate change, they have long pushed a picture where “taking action” means tweaking our shopping choices. It’s this history that Sunrise and other progressive climate activists are rightly standing at war, yelling stop.
But even if we accept this change in perspective, it’s not at all obvious what we should do next. To take that step, we’ll look at another area of life where a loud chorus is rightly demanding structural change.
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As Trump Dismantles the Republic, Where Are Its Former Leaders?
Tens of millions of Americans voted for our past presidents. They are waiting for them to speak up, stand up, and mightily help lead the fight to stop Trump’s mayhem against the American people in red and blue states.
Apr 13, 2025
If there was ever a strong contemporary case for declaring that silence is complicity, consider the hush of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and even George W. Bush as they grind their teeth over the Donald Trump-Elon Musk wrecking of America. Trump is destroying freedom of speech and due process, abolishing democratic restraints, and establishing a criminal fascistic dictatorship.
Trump pounds Biden for the Trump administration’s blunders and failures an average of six times a day. These assaults go unrebutted by the Delaware recluse, nursing his political wounds.
The Clintons? Bill sticks to his private telephone wailings. While Hillary, who gave us Trump in 2016 with her smug, stupid campaign, penned a self-anthem op-ed in The New York Times on March 28, 2025. She writes: “Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries.” Trump is not belligerent enough for the war hawk Hillary Clinton who has been the pro-Iraq sociocider butcher of Libya and the ardent supporter behind provocative “force projection” of the Empire around the world.
What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?
Before turning to the excuses for essentially shutting themselves up during our country’s greatest political upheaval—unconstitutional and criminal to the core—here is what prominent former Democratic presidents and presidential candidates COULD do:
- Tens of millions of Americans voted for our past presidents. They are waiting for their leaders to speak up, stand up, and mightily help lead the fight to stop Trump’s mayhem against the American people in red and blue states. The people want former Democratic leaders to galvanize the Democratic Party, still largely in disarray about confronting Trump.
Don’t they know they have a trusteeship obligation to citizens, many of whom are voicing their demands for a comprehensive plan of offense against the GOP in town meetings and other forums?
The media, threatened daily by Trump, is eager to give former Democratic Party leaders coverage.
- They are all mega-millionaires, very capable of raising many more millions of dollars quickly with their fame and lists of followers. They know very rich people as friends. They could set up strike forces in Washington and around the country to provide needed, fighting attorneys, organizers, and other specialists to ride head-on against the proven damage to health, safety, and economic well-being of people here and abroad and counter Trump’s daily cruel and vicious assaults. They could end Trump’s unrebutted soliloquy of lies and false scenarios over mainstream and social media.
- They could push the Democrats in Congress to hold constant “unofficial” public hearings and file resolutions and legislation that provide the daily evidence of this dictator and his recidivistic criminality and push for impeachment and Trump’s removal from office. Impossible, you might say with the GOP in narrow control on Capitol Hill. Look back at Richard Nixon who for far fewer violations was told by Republican senators that his time was up. Politicians save their political skin in approaching elections before rescuing an unstable, egomaniacal, vengeful politician like the one now camped at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Trump will be soon plunging in polls and stock market drops, inflation, recession, and more Gestapo-like kidnappings and disappearances to foreign prisons of targeted individuals. These conditions are not popular with the American people.
- The former Democratic leaders could do what Bernie Sanders is doing and traverse the country supporting the fighting civic spirit of the American people who oppose the painful afflictions wrought by Tyrant Trump.
- Gore is well-credentialed to show how the actions of Hurricane Donald, Tornado Trump, Drought Donald, and Wildfire Musk’s fossil-fuel-driven greenhouse gases are leading to a climate catastrophe. The facts and trends Trump omnicidally ignores need to be front and center.
Even George W. Bush, known for causing the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis and the destruction of their country by his criminal war of aggression has a beef. His sole claim to being a “compassionate conservative”—the funding of life-saving AIDS medicines overseas—has gone down in flames with Trump’s illegal demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Bush may be mumbling about this, but he’s staying in his corner painting landscapes.
All this abhorrent quietude in the face of what they all believe is a mortal attack on the Republic has the following excuses:
First, they don’t want to get into a pissing match with a slanderous ugly viper, who unleashes his hordes of haters on the internet. That’s quite a surrender of patriotic duty at a time of unprecedented peril. What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?
Second, it wouldn’t have much impact. America doesn’t listen to “has-beens.” Then why is Obama still the most popular retired politician in America with over 130 million followers on Twitter? That attitude is just convenient escapism.
Third, plunging into the raucous political arena with the Trumpsters and Musketeers is just too disruptive of a comfortable daily routine life by politicians who believe they have been there, done that, and deserve a respite. Self-diminishment gets you nowhere with tens of millions of people in distress who seek powerful amplifiers from well-known leaders behind the demand that Trump understands: YOU’RE FIRED, ringing throughout the nation from liberals and betrayed Trump voters hurting in the same ways. That mass demand is what pushes impeachment of the most visibly impeachable president in American history.
In the final analysis, it comes down to their absence of civic self-respect and cowardliness in confronting Der Fuhrer. Aristotle was right: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
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The Painful Irony of Trump’s Plan to Build an American-Owned Gaza Riviera
Attempts to develop independent Palestinian economic growth through the Builders for Peace program 30 years ago were derailed by Israeli restrictions.
Mar 10, 2025
When I first heard President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” scheme, it brought back memories of the hopes Palestinians had three decades ago during the heyday of the Oslo Accords. Back then, I was serving as co-chair of “Builders for Peace,” a project launched by then-Vice President Al Gore to encourage American businesses to invest in the Palestinian economy to support the fledgling peace process.
We had prepared for our mission by reading the exhaustive World Bank study on the pre-Oslo Palestinian economy. The observations and conclusions were sobering, and yet hopeful. It noted obstacles that stifled the development of a Palestinian economy—problems like: Israel’s control of Palestinian land, resources, and power; its refusal to allow Palestinians to independently import and export; and the impediments Israel had created to Palestinian travel and even to conducting commerce within the occupied lands. The bank, however, concluded that if these Israeli restrictions on Palestinian entrepreneurs were removed, external investment would provide opportunities for rapid growth and prosperity.
We also read Sara Roy’s brilliant study of the cruel measures Israel had implemented to “de-develop” Gaza so as to stifle the development of an independent economy, thereby creating a cheap pool of day laborers for Israeli businesses or a network of small workshops that produced items for export by Israeli companies.
When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia.
We also made a few exploratory visits to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to meet with business and political leaders to assess the possibilities before us and the challenges we would confront. In short order, both became quite clear.
When the project was ready to launch, my fellow co-chair, Mel Levine, and I led the first of a number of delegations of American business leaders (which included both Arab Americans and American Jews) to the Palestinian lands. Our first exposure to the problems we would encounter came as we attempted to enter via the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. American Jews and others passed easily, while Arab Americans were separated from the group and forced to undergo humiliating screening.
We convened a session in Jerusalem for Palestinians to meet with the Americans interested in investment opportunities, only to discover that in order to enter the city Palestinians had to secure a pass from the occupation authority. Since the passes only permitted them a few hours in the city, the time they were able to devote to our discussions proved limited.
Entry into and exit from Gaza was equally problematic. One scene on leaving Gaza has stayed with me. Hundreds of Palestinian men filled what I can only describe as cattle chutes, waiting in the sun for permission to enter into Israel. Straddling these chutes were young Israeli soldiers shouting at the Palestinians below, ordering them to look down and hold their passes above their heads. It was deeply disturbing.
In both Gaza and the West Bank, our meetings with Palestinian business leaders were hopeful. They were eager to discuss possibilities with their American counterparts, and the Americans were impressed. A number of partnerships were discussed.
Two projects were notable. One sought to manufacture leather products and another to assemble furniture. Both sought to take advantage of Gaza’s proximity to Eastern Europe so as to export there. As both projects required that the Israelis permit import of raw material and export of finished products, both projects failed. It appeared that the Israelis might have been willing to entertain such projects but only if the Americans and Palestinians operated through an Israeli middleman, thereby reducing the profitability of the ventures.
Even opportunities that the U.S. government tried to implement failed. One day I received a call from an official in the Department of Agriculture who told me that they had provided 50,000 bulbs for Gazans to develop a flower export industry. These bulbs he told me had been sitting in an Israeli port for months and were rotting. He said that the department was able to send another 25,000 bulbs but could only do so if the Israelis ensured their entry. This too proved fruitless as Israelis wanted no competition with their flower export industry, and therefore wouldn’t allow a competing Palestinian industry to develop.
After a few frustrating years, I saw then-President Bill Clinton who asked me how the project was developing. I told him about the frustrations we were encountering due to the Israeli impediments on investment in independent Palestinian economic growth. He appeared troubled and asked that I write him a detailed memo. The letter I sent to the president both outlined the specific problems we were facing and my complaint that his peace team was not taking these challenges seriously, as they insisted that any U.S. challenge to the Israelis would impede efforts to promote negotiations for peace. I told the president that since Oslo: Palestinian unemployment had doubled, poverty had risen, and Palestinians hope for peace was evaporating. To my dismay, the response I received from the White House appeared to have been drafted by his peace team, and was no response at all. At the end of Clinton’s first term, Builders for Peace (BfP) was disbanded and with it the hopes for Palestinian independent economic growth.
Over the next decade, absent any U.S. pressure on the Israelis to change their behavior, negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians continued to falter, Palestinians became poorer, Israeli became more emboldened and oppressive, and Palestinian attitudes hardened, leading to renewed violence.
There are two other memories from that period that need to be recalled.
One of the more optimistic projects BfP endorsed was a proposal by a Virginia-based Palestinian-American company to build a Marriott resort on the Gaza beachfront. Securing initial investment, they began construction, starting with the foundation and a massive parking garage. Because of the risks involved, they sought risk insurance from OPIC, the U.S. agency created to guarantee investment against risk. The project was endorsed by then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, a champion of our BfP, and supported by PLO head, Yasser Arafat—both of whom saw the resort hotel as laying the foundation for the future economic growth of a Palestinian state.
When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia. Israel did everything it could to guarantee that Gaza would become Somalia—and they appear to have succeeded.
Against this backdrop, it was painful to hear of Trump’s insulting plan to build an American-owned Gaza Riviera. It reminded me of what might have been, but, three decades later, is being discussed without benefiting any Palestinians from its development.
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Maine Took the US One Giant Step Toward More Democratic Elections
On Wednesday, Maine’s legislature passed a bill joining a compact to commit all of their electoral votes, regardless of who won in their individual state, to whichever candidate won the national popular vote.
Apr 05, 2024
What if the person the majority of Americans voted for became president? It usually happens, but no Republican has been initially elected to the White House by a majority of Americans since 1988.
Just imagine how different America (and the world) would be today if neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump had ever set foot in the White House because both lost the federal election, the national popular vote.
This week, the State of Maine took America one giant step closer to ending the antidemocratic grip the GOP’s had on our presidential elections. Even though George W. Bush lost the 2000 election by a half-million votes nationally and Donald Trump lost in 2016 by 3 million votes, both ended up in the White House because of the Electoral College.
The Electoral College was a compromise designed to keep the president above political considerations; it was sold to the public as a way to prevent an agent (witting or unwitting) of a foreign power from becoming president. It has failed on both counts.
The problem with getting rid of the Electoral College is that it’s written into the Constitution: Amending that document takes two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-quarters of the states, and that isn’t happening any day soon.
But, because the Constitution also says that individual states can determine on their own how to assign their electoral votes, there’s a way to get around the Electoral College altogether.
Right now, all but two states give 100% of their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who won the most votes in the state (Maine and Nebraska split their states in two but assign all electoral votes to whoever won the most popular votes in each region).
But they don’t have to: A state, under the Constitution, can assign their electoral votes to any candidate they want.
When it looked like Al Gore was going to win Florida in 2000, for example, the speaker of the Florida House prepared legislation authorizing the governor, Jeb Bush, to give the state’s electoral votes—and, thus, the presidency—to his brother George W. Bush, regardless of who the recount determined won the popular vote in that state.
So, some smart political and constitutional minds got together and came up with a system whereby states representing 270 electoral votes (the amount to become president) pledge to commit all of their electoral votes, regardless of who won in their individual state, to whichever candidate won the national popular vote.
To accomplish this, they organized what they call the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), and states have been signing up for several decades. With Maine, they’re at 209 Electoral College votes, and Michigan (with 16 Electoral College votes) will be the next state to join, as the National Popular Vote legislation is working its way through their legislature now.
By about two-to-one, 65% of Americans favor this change so the person who wins the country also wins the White House. As you can imagine, Republicans hate the idea and are threatening litigation under an ancient and anachronistic law if it passes.
By this system, we would have had President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton, the Supreme Court would today have a pronounced progressive tilt, a half-million Americans would not have died of Covid-19, and the country wouldn’t have lost two decades in the fight against global warming.
All because that’s what the majority of Americans actually voted for. Democracy, after all!
On Wednesday, Maine’s legislature passed (with votes of both Democrats and Republicans) a bill joining the compact, bringing the total number of electoral votes now held by compact states to 209. With Michigan, we’ll be at 225.
Most Americans are rightly confused by the entire process, and only a small percentage could even accurately describe what the Electoral College is or why it’s in the Constitution.
The history is fascinating.
America’s founders and framers thought they could use the Electoral College to prevent somebody like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. Seriously.
Unfortunately, they were wrong, and now we’re paying the price.
It’s often said that the Electoral College was brought into being to perpetuate or protect the institution of slavery, and, indeed, during the first half-century of America, it gave the slave states several presidents who wouldn’t have been otherwise elected.
This is because there’s one elector in the college for every member of the House and Senate (and three for the District of Columbia). When the three-fifths compromise was in effect (until just after the Civil War), slave states had more members in the House of Representatives than the size of their voting public “deserved.”
(It’s now true of Red States and the Senate, where Republicans represent only 145 million Americans and Democrats represent 186 million Americans, but Republicans hold fully 50% of the vote.)
This explains, in part, why when James Madison proposed the Electoral College, the framers seized on it as a compromise and solution after weeks of drawn-out and often angry debate on how to select a president.
Most amazing, according to the framers of the Constitution themselves, the real reason for the Electoral College was to prevent a foreign power (like Russia) from placing their stooge in the White House.
Today we’re horrified by the idea that Donald Trump may actually be putting first the interests of Russia and China, and that money and other efforts from multiple foreign entities may have helped him get elected.
It’s shocking, something we never even really took seriously when, for example, the movie Manchurian Candidate came out back in the day. What a cute idea for a movie, we thought; that could never happen here.
But this was actually a big deal for the founding generation. One of the first questions about any candidate for president during that era was, “Is he beholden in any way to any other government?”
At the time of the Declaration of Independence, it’s estimated that nearly two-thirds of all citizens of the American colonies favored remaining a British colony (Jimmy Carter’s novel The Hornet’s Nest is a great resource); there were spies and British loyalists everywhere, and Spain had staked out their claim to the region around Florida while the French were colonizing what is now Canada and Louisiana. Foreign powers had us boxed in.
In 1775, the year the Revolutionary War unofficially started, virtually all of the colonists had familial, friendship, or business acquaintances with people whose loyalty was suspect or who were openly opposed to American independence.
It was even rumored that Ben Franklin was working as a spy for British intelligence (and, it turns out, evidence shows he was, only against France when he lived in Paris). Conservative Federalists, in particular, were wary of Franklin’s “internationalist” sentiments.
Thomas Jefferson was living in France when the Constitution was being written, and his political enemies were, even then (it got much louder around the election of 1800), whispering that he had, at best, mixed loyalties. In response, he felt the need to protest to Elbridge Gerry that, “The first object of my heart is my own country. In that is embarked my family, my fortune, and my own existence.”
When John Adams famously defended British soldiers who, during an anti-British riot on March 5, 1770, shot and killed Crispus Attucks and four others, he was widely condemned for being too pro-British, an issue that recurred in 1798 when, as president, Adams pushed the Alien and Sedition laws through Congress over Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s loud objections. British Spy Gilbert Barkley wrote to his spymasters in London that Quakers and many other Americans considered Adams an enemy to his country.
And after the Revolutionary War, the nation was abuzz about one of that war’s most decorated soldiers, Benedict Arnold, once considered a shoo-in for high elected office, selling out to the British in exchange for money and a title.
So, it fell to a fatherless man born in Nevins to explain to Americans that the main purpose of the Electoral College was to make sure that no agent of a foreign government would ever become president.
Back then, America was so spread out it would be difficult for most citizens and voters to get to know a presidential candidate well enough to spot a spy or traitor, Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 68. Therefore, the electors—having no other governmental duty, obligation, or responsibility—would be sure to catch one if it was tried.
“The most deadly adversaries” of America, Hamilton wrote, would probably “make their approaches [to seizing control of the USA] from more than one quarter, chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
Influencing public opinion or owning a senator was nothing compared to having their man in the White House. As Hamilton wrote:
How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy [presidency] of the Union?
But, Hamilton wrote, the framers of the Constitution “have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.”
The system they set up to protect the White House from being occupied by an agent of a foreign government was straightforward, Hamilton bragged.
The choice of president would not “depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes.”
Instead, the Electoral College would be made up of “persons [selected] for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.”
The electors would be apolitical because it would be illegal for a senator or House member to become one, Hamilton wrote:
And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the president in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors.
This, Hamilton was certain, would eliminate “any sinister bias.”
Excluding members of Congress who may be subject to bribery or foreign influences, the electors would select a man for president who was brave of heart and pure of soul:
“The process of election [by the electoral college] affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
Indeed, while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state, Hamilton believed the Electoral College would ferret out such a traitor.
He wrote:
“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence” of the men in the Electoral College who would select him as president “of the whole Union...”
Hamilton’s pride in the system that he himself had helped build was hard for him to suppress. He added in Federalist 68:
It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.
Unfortunately, as Donald Trump proves, things haven’t worked out that way.
Because the three-fifths compromise gave more electors to the slave states than their voting population would indicate, the Electoral College handed the White House to four Virginia slaveholders among our first five presidents. Since that compromise has been eliminated, the Electoral College has continued to wreak mischief in putting George W. Bush and Donald Trump into office.
Hamilton never envisioned a day when a man so entangled in financial affairs with foreign governments as is Donald Trump could even be seriously considered, because, in his mind, the electors would carefully investigate the candidate. That hasn’t happened in over a century, so, by his standards, the electors totally failed in their job in the 2000 and 2016 elections.
The Electoral College was a compromise designed to keep the president above political considerations; it was sold to the public as a way to prevent an agent (witting or unwitting) of a foreign power from becoming president. It has failed on both counts.
Through the arc of time since her founding, America has constantly—albeit in fits and starts—expanded democracy. From expanding the vote to include racial minorities and women, to amending the Constitution to allow for citizens to vote for U.S. senators rather than having them appointed by often-corrupted state legislatures, average citizens of all races and genders have been brought into the decisions around who will lead us.
But in the past two decades, the Electoral College has brought us two presidents who were rejected by a majority of Americans. This is fundamentally undemocratic.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact can fix this (if the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene in response to a GOP lawsuit). Check out your state on their website: If Democrats can flip a few more Red states Blue this November (and, with abortion on the ballot that’s a real possibility), we might be able to get this done in time for the 2028 election.
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Gore Calls Out Fossil Fuel Industry 'Shamelessness' in Lying to Public
"They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed," the former vice president said.
Mar 17, 2024
In reflecting on nearly 50 years of climate advocacy, former Vice President Al Gore said that he had "underestimated" the greed of the fossil fuel industry.
The remarks came in an interview published in USA Today on Sunday. When asked if he had any regrets, Gore responded that he had "put every ounce of energy" he had into climate advocacy, but added:
"I was pretty slow to recognize how important the massive funding of anti-climate messaging was going on. I underestimated the power of greed in the fossil fuel industry, the shamelessness in putting out the lies."
"They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed," Gore continued.
"What's at stake is so incredible."
Gore, who tried to raise awareness about the climate crisis in the U.S. House of Representatives as early as 1981 and brought the issue to national attention in 2006's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has taken a harsher tone against oil, gas, and coal companies in recent months. In August 2023, he said that the "climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis," and in September, he implored the industry to "get out of the way." In December, he lamented that the industry had "captured the COP process," referring to the appointment of the United Arab Emirates national oil company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber to preside over the United Nations' COP28 climate conference in that country.
In the USA Today interview, Gore also named the fossil fuel industry when asked about his greatest frustration.
"Well, that we haven't made more progress," Gore answered, "and that some of the fossil fuel companies have been shameless in providing, continuing to provide lavish funding for disinformation and misinformation."
"What's at stake is so incredible," he added.
However, Gore told USA Today that he tried not to focus on his anger, but instead on continuing to raise awareness about the crisis and what can be done about it. And he remained hopeful that his grandchildren would live in a world in which people had come together and acted in time.
"We've got all the solutions we need right now to cut emissions in half before the end of this decade," he said. "We've got a clear line of sight to how we can cut the other 50% of emissions by mid century."
He also encouraged more people to get involved with the climate movement.
"I would say the greatest need is for more grassroots advocates because the most persuasive advocates are those in your own community," he said.
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Al Gore Was Such a Good Sport to Give In Gracefully – Really?
When a Republican operative tells Democrats to continue being good losers, don't buy it.
Dec 20, 2023
The Washington Post, conveyor of the conventional wisdom, has just printed a telling testament to how Beltway culture functions. It is an op-ed by Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant who has purportedly seen the light and has now denounced the GOP. In the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign, we’ve seen a fair number of people like Stevens warn us about their former party (as if we needed a reminder), and they’ve gone on to form organizations like the Lincoln Project, of which Stevens is senior advisor.
An unusually large number of these converts are political consultants—and they make up the bulk of the Lincoln Project’s leadership. For those of us who have worked in government and tried to stay honest, political consultants represent the lowest form of animal life in the Beltway ecosystem; we regarded them with about as much affection as we reserve for the invasive Burmese Python. For a consultant like Stevens to have moral qualms about the behavior of politicians is as remarkable as a drug dealer cutting public service announcements about preventing substance abuse.
Stevens tells us that we should look with fond respect on Al Gore, the presidential candidate who so gracefully conceded the 2000 election despite having more popular votes and despite the fact that Florida, where the election was decided, was legitimately in play even as the Supreme Court issued its diktat that George W. Bush had won the election.
It is by no means clear that Gore lost that election. It is by no means certain that the U.S. Supreme Court, a court now widely seen as illegitimate and out of control, was acting in a nonpartisan manner even then.
Gore, says Stevens, did the decent thing by conceding the election gracefully, so unlike the crude vulgarians around Donald Trump in 2020. Gore represented the spirit of civic democracy, now under threat by MAGA. That’s easy to say for Stevens, who profited from his relationship with the Bush administration.
But might we suppose that the maintenance of a healthy democracy should require a little more controversy, a little more getting one’s hands dirty, even a little more rancor, especially if one’s cause is just? It is by no means clear that Gore lost that election. It is by no means certain that the U.S. Supreme Court, a court now widely seen as illegitimate and out of control, was acting in a nonpartisan manner even then. It is definitely not assured that George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, who happened to be governor of the state in contention, was averse to putting his thumb on the scale.
Stevens doesn’t mention any of that, or the fact that the then-chief justice, William Rehnquist, had a daughter seeking a prospective Bush administration job (she got it). And Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, author of so much recent mischief, was then employed by the Heritage Foundation to vet job seekers in the hoped-for Bush presidency.
Perhaps the Gore campaign should have been a bit more elbows-out, demanding recusal of Rehnquist and Thomas as a condition of accepting the jurisdiction of a court to decide an election rather than the normal method of a supervised recount. What might then have happened lurches, of course, into counterfactual territory, but there is no such thing as historical determinism: the flow of events is contingent on real people making actual decisions.
What would have been more important for the future well-being of the United States: Al Gore setting an example of gentlemanly civic behavior, as Stevens insists, or the Gore campaign doing whatever it took, within the bounds of honesty and legality, to transform his popular mandate into an electoral-college mandate?
It is quite possible that future historians will judge 9/11 and its extended fallout as an inflection point for the United States as significant as the Civil War, even though its consequences are less obvious. September 11, 2001 set in motion a chain of events that has still not played out, with each event a seismic shock destabilizing the country.
Any honest examination of 9/11 must begin with the fact that the Bush administration was hardly less than willfully negligent in failing to protect the country, with the August 6, 2001 president’s daily brief titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” being Exhibit A for the prosecution. Bush’s response to the briefers was “you’ve covered your ass,” after which he played golf and cut brush at his summer ranch for almost a month.
It is hardly wild speculation to think that Gore, an Armed Services Committee member in the Senate before becoming vice president for eight years, might have reacted differently and put the appropriate agencies on alert, just as the Clinton administration had done when it foiled the so-called millennial bomb plot. Gore’s qualifications were certainly deeper than Bush’s, whose only previous acquaintance with national security was going AWOL from an air national guard unit.
As it was, 9/11 with its xenophobic revenge fantasies, hubris turned to grief on the stony soil of the Middle East, financial roulette where the billionaires always win, and color-coded threat warnings made a large swath of the American people functionally mentally ill.
No 9/11 means no Global War on Terror, a two-decade exercise in grandiose futility that thoroughly ruined two countries, gave rise to ISIS, and cost an estimated $8 trillion. And no Bush tax cuts, which instantly transformed a budget surplus into the large and intractable deficits that Republicans incessantly complain about (at least when they don’t control the White House).
Further idle speculation, but would Gore have let the foxes run the chicken coup as Bush did with respect to financial regulation? The whole spectacle of liar mortgage loans, synthetic CDOs, and massive credit default swaps resulted in perhaps the most predictable financial collapse in history, resulting in three years of lost growth that can never be recouped, more deficits, blighted lives, and increased public cynicism.
Without all of that, there may have been no public clamor for a dictator, and consequently no violent attempt to overthrow the Constitution. As it was, 9/11 with its xenophobic revenge fantasies, hubris turned to grief on the stony soil of the Middle East, financial roulette where the billionaires always win, and color-coded threat warnings made a large swath of the American people functionally mentally ill. Some even gush with enthusiasm at the prospect of dictatorial rule. Trump may go, but they will latch onto some other charlatan as a substitute Jesus-figure to worship. The rest of us will likely have to deal with all of this for the rest of our lives.
Beltway culture, which has been gradually “wired” to be Republican since the 1980s, apparently thinks all the disasters of the last two decades have been worth it, because it preserved the political parties in their scripted roles: Republicans as the rule-breaking but lovable Cool Kids, and Democrats as the gentlemanly losers.
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COP28 on 'Verge of Complete Failure' as Draft Omits Fossil Fuel Phaseout
"Nations committed to climate action must reject this weakened proposal," said one campaigner.
Dec 11, 2023
The most recent draft text of the agreement world leaders are hoping to reach by the end of the United Nations Climate Change Conference on December 12 does not include any mention of a phaseout of fossil fuels.
Instead, the document released Monday calls for "reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science."
"COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure," former U.S. Vice President Al Goretweeted in response to the release. "The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared. It is 'Of the Petrostates, by the Petrostates, and for the Petrostates.'"
"How do we go home and tell our people that this is what the world has to say about our futures?"
An agreement to phase out fossil fuels at COP28 has been a major demand of civil society groups and influential delegations including the European Union and nations especially vulnerable to the climate crisis, according to Reuters. The call comes as nations' current pledges under the Paris agreement put the world on a path for 2.9°C of warming, even as 2023 is almost certain to be the hottest year on record.
Yet there were concerns leading into the U.N. talks that the influence of the fossil fuel industry would undermine an ambitious outcome. COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is also the CEO of the United Arab Emirates' national oil company, and reports emerged that he had used talks surrounding COP28 to push oil and gas deals.
The latest language on fossil fuels comes in the text of the Global Stocktake, a mechanism by which parties to the Paris agreement assess their progress and set new goals. It is one bullet in a list of actions that the draft says nations "could include" in the path to "deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."
Other actions in the list include
- Tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling efficiency by 2030;
- Quickly "phasing down unabated coal";
- Achieving a "net-zero energy system" as soon as possible;
- Curbing greenhouse gases beyond carbon dioxide such as methane; and
- Ending "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies."
"The COP28 draft text resembles a disjointed wish list, far from the stringent measures required to limit warming to 1.5°C," Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, said in a statement. "The presidency, displaying a troubling lack of leadership, has notably weakened commitments to phasing out fossil fuels and promoting renewables."
Sieber also criticized the lack of urgency in the text's overall language.
"By framing actions as 'could' instead of 'shall,' and with weak language on short-term declines and renewable targets, this draft falls short. Nations committed to climate action must reject this weakened proposal, insisting on transformative changes for a meaningful impact on global warming."
The Alliance of Small Island States, meanwhile, told the Financial Times that the "weak language on fossil fuels was completely insufficient."
Joseph Sikulu, Pacific managing director of 350.org, added, "This week we felt that the goal of phasing out fossil fuels was within reach, but the lack of climate leadership shown by the presidency and the blatant watering down of commitments to a 'wish list' is an insult to those of us that came here to fight for our survival. How do we go home and tell our people that this is what the world has to say about our futures?"
Environmental Defense associate director of national change Julia Levin called the draft text "unacceptable," while Jean Su from the Center for Biological Diversity told The Associated Press that it "moves disastrously backward from original language offering a phaseout of fossil fuels."
"If this race-to-the-bottom monstrosity gets enshrined as the final word, this crucial COP will be a failure," Su said.
Climate campaigners are also concerned that the text opens the doorway to untested technological solutions like carbon capture and storage that can be used to extend the burning of fossil fuels.
"The word 'phaseout' has been phased out."
"It's incredibly dangerous for the fossil fuel industry and its enablers in government to promote the idea that they can keep burning fossil fuels while pulling carbon out of the air or out of the smokestacks with technologies that consistently fail to deliver," Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, told New York Times opinion writer Peter Coy before the latest draft was released.
Despite these warnings, one of the suggested actions in the text is "accelerating zero and low emissions technologies, including, inter alia, renewables, nuclear, abatement, and removal technologies, including such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, and low carbon hydrogen production, so as to enhance efforts towards substitution of unabated fossil fuels in energy systems."
"Like the smog-ridden Dubai skyline, the mention of fossil fuels in the final outcome is at best murky, and at worst, dangerous," Cansin Leylim, 350.org associate director of global campaigns, said in a statement. "This outcome leaves the doors wide open to dangerous distractions and false technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which will surely blow us past the 1.5°C planetary limit, and fails to integrate the crucial finance and equitability aspects of the just transition to renewable energy that we need."
Sara Shaw with Friends of the Earth International agreed that "the fossil fuel text is alarmingly weak and opens the door to risky, dangerous CCS/CCUS, hydrogen, nuclear, and carbon removal technologies (geoengineering, or nature-based). These loopholes prolong the fossil fuel era, and delay and distract from any meaningful phaseout."
However, she added there was more going on behind the scenes.
"Countries who claim to be climate champions like the U.S. and E.U. are calling for stronger fossil fuel phaseout text, despite planning massive fossil fuel expansion," Shaw said. "And they are seeking to water down the climate finance provisions (one of the elements of the text which is better than expected) so urgently needed to enable the energy transition in the global South."
Activists are still hoping to strengthen the language before negotiations conclude Tuesday.
"The word 'phaseout' has been phased out," Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, told AP. "We need to phase in the word phaseout. I think there's still a chance for countries to do so."
Peri Dias, 350.org Latin America representative at COP28, said: "In the coming hours, we will either witness a historic decision for the good of the planet, or one for its end. Are the parties at COP28 going to agree to a rapid and fair elimination of fossil fuels or not?"
Gore concluded: "There are 24 hours left to show whose side the world is on: the side that wants to protect humanity's future by kickstarting the orderly phase out of fossil fuels or the side of the petrostates and the leaders of the oil and gas companies that are fueling the historic climate catastrophe."
"In order to prevent COP28 from being the most embarrassing and dismal failure in 28 years of international climate negotiations, the final text must include clear language on phasing out fossil fuels," he said. "Anything else is a massive step backwards from where the world needs to be to truly address the climate crisis and make sure the 1.5°C goal doesn't die in Dubai."
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Al Gore Says Fossil Fuel Industry Has 'Captured the COP Process'
The former U.S. vice president accused the United Arab Emirates of "abusing the public's trust" by naming the CEO of its national oil company as president of COP28.
Dec 04, 2023
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said Sunday that fossil fuel interests have effectively seized the reins of the United Nations climate summit process, preventing the kind of ambitious action that scientists say is necessary to prevent catastrophic warming and all of its cascading impacts.
"This industry is way more effective at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions," Gore told Reuters on the sidelines of the COP28 summit in Dubai. "And they have captured the COP process itself now and overreached, abusing the public's trust by naming the CEO of one of the largest and least responsible oil companies in the world as head of the COP. It's an abuse of the public's right to have confidence in the processes by which the decisions about humanity's future are made."
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, COP28 president and chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)—which is planning a massive expansion of oil and gas production in the coming years—has insisted that any deal reached at the critical climate summit must include fossil fuels.
A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists are believed to be in attendance at the latest round of U.N. climate talks, and little has been done to curb their influence.
Gore's interview with Reuters came after he delivered a presentation highlighting the UAE's rising greenhouse gas emissions. Citing data from Climate TRACE—an emissions tracking coalition that he co-founded—Gore said the UAE's planet-warming emissions rose 7.5% last year compared to 2021, while the rest of the world's rose 1.5%.
As AFP reported Sunday, Dubai's skyline was "obscured by a blanket of smog rated as 'unhealthy'" as COP28 delegates attended day four of the summit, which was deemed "health day."
A Human Rights Watch report published Monday notes that the UAE's "dangerously high air pollution levels" are "creating major health risks for its citizens and residents." Pointing to World Health Organization estimates, the group observed that more than 1,800 people die from air pollution every year in the UAE.
"Even as the United Arab Emirates government works to burnish its image as a global climate leader," the report notes, "the country's vast fossil fuel production and use spew toxic pollutants into the air and contribute to climate change."
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Voting for President Is Not an Exercise in Personal Expression
Whatever flaws you may see in Joe Biden, he is the only actual alternative to Trump’s reign.
Nov 26, 2023
Many Americans are unhappy about the likely 2024 choice being offered them for president—Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. However, two third-party alternatives surfaced recently: Jill Stein of the Green Party and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who appears to be seeking the “No Labels Party” nomination.
They join two other non-major-party candidates, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and left-wing intellectual and activist Cornel West.
These candidates appear to offer voters a broad menu of political ideologies and beliefs from which to choose—from Kennedy’s contention that Americans are enslaved by vaccination record-keeping to Manchin’s claimed centrism to West’s plans for abolishing poverty and Stein’s condemnation of corporate-dominated politics.
Voting for Nader, the candidate who appeared to have stronger liberal credentials, proved to have far-reaching consequences—but the opposite of what most Green Party voters would likely have desired.
One thing that is not on the third-party menu is an opportunity to vote for someone who could actually become president. There isn’t a ghost of a chance Jill Stein, Joe Manchin, Robert F. Kennedy, or Cornel West will be elected.
Nonetheless, their campaigns could have a powerful impact: helping elect Donald Trump. The Green Party achieved an equivalent disaster before.
In 2000, the Green Party fielded a candidate, Ralph Nader, against Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. In what turned out to be a remarkably close election, the result turned on Florida.
Nader received 97,488 votes in the state, votes that otherwise would have tilted strongly in favor of Gore: In his book, Crashing the Party, Nader acknowledges that 13% more of his voters would have gone for Gore than for Bush. These 12,700 votes would have given Gore an indisputable victory.
Instead, the vote was close enough for a right-wing Supreme Court to be in a position to halt the voting when Bush was only 537 votes ahead, bestowing Florida—and the presidency—on Bush.
How did voting for the Green Party work out?
Foreign Policy: The neocons around Bush had long targeted Iraq for overthrow. Following 9/11, they lied us into an invasion that led to 4,500 dead American soldiers, more than 165,000 dead Iraqi civilians, and a Middle East in the chaos that spawned ISIS.
Climate change: In Al Gore, we could have had a president in 2001 who really understood the climate threat. Instead, we had the pro-oil Bush presidency, initiating nearly two decades of political stagnation on the emerging climate crisis.
Democracy and Constitutional Rights: Bush got to appoint two right-wing Supreme Court justices, who joined three other Republican Justices to give us the 5-4 decision in the money-rules-all Citizens United case. The two Bush justices were also part of 5-4 majorities in cases that (1). invented a personal constitutional right to own firearms, and (2). eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, precipitating an avalanche of laws disenfranchising large numbers of minority, elderly, and youth voters.
Voting for Nader, the candidate who appeared to have stronger liberal credentials, proved to have far-reaching consequences—but the opposite of what most Green Party voters would likely have desired.
Third party candidates regularly tell us we’re entitled to express our own views in voting. But voting for president is not an exercise in personal expression and it is not like seeking your true love or dream candidate. Voting is what you do to effect the best outcome for your country among the real possibilities.
The GOP has ceased to be a normal party that respects majority rule and the rule of law, and Donald Trump has made clear his intentions of dismantling our democracy. Whatever flaws you may see in Joe Biden, he is the only actual alternative to Trump’s reign.
It’s as simple as this: If you vote for supposed “progressives” Jill Stein or Cornel West, you’re reducing the votes needed to stop Trump.
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It’s Time to Boycott COP-OUT 28
To keep pretending, year after year, decade after decade, that the U.N. process is working when everyone can see that it is failing, is its own kind of denial.
Oct 01, 2023
Every year, the world’s governments gather at what the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, calls a Conference of the Parties, or COP, to talk about lowering carbon emissions while they just watch emissions continue to rise. It is time to start calling these annual UNFCCC gatherings what they are: COP-OUTs.
The U.N. climate negotiations are failing so miserably I have been thinking for years these COP-OUTs should be boycotted by civil society with the UNFCCC excoriated for its failure to adhere to its stated mission to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.” Earth to U.N.: We are already experiencing dangerous human climate interference at current levels of carbon pollution. Negotiations that allow even more lethal pollution are in direct contravention of the UNFCCC’s publicly declared goal.
So I was encouraged when climate visionary Naomi Klein called for a civil society boycott of COP28 last fall. I expected to hear a groundswell of support for her oppositional approach to the COP-OUT charade. Instead, all I heard was crickets. Some outside-the-box ideas take time to catch on, I guess. If only we had the luxury of time.
When the world is on fire, you don’t invite the arsonists to the negotiating table to argue for their right to toss on more fuel.
A boycott of climate negotiations may seem counterintuitive to those wanting to affect climate policy, but civil society is largely relegated to the sidelines at COP conferences anyway. Why lend the political facade the veneer of legitimacy with our presence? Why not instead use our power to withdraw their social license to speak in our name? I don’t know about you, but my government is not representing me at these annual negotiations. Chasing after 30 years of failure is not a recipe for success. We have lost too many precious decades playing the game the U.N.’s way. To keep pretending, year after year, decade after decade, that the U.N. process is working when everyone can see that it is failing, is its own kind of denial. The UNFCCC has to recommit to its mission.
COP28 is already shaping up to be the biggest COP-OUT of them all. Taking the dressed up climate pageant to a new level of absurdity, the COP28 conference being held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from November 30 to December 12 is being chaired by—get this—an oil baron. The president of COP28 is Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Lest you think the Biden administration truly gets that we’re in a climate emergency, John Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, publicly praised Al Jaber’s appointment as “a terrific choice,” as if the idea of an oil baron presiding over international climate talks wasn’t preposterous on its face.
In a July TED Talk, former Vice President Al Gore described how the fossil fuel industry has “brazenly seized control of the COP process, especially this year’s COP in Dubai,” reminding us that fossil fuel companies had more delegates at COP27 “than the combined delegations from the 10 most climate-impacted countries.” Then Gore shared this:
And now this year’s host, which is a petrostate, has appointed the president of COP28, in spite of the fact that he has a blatant conflict of interest, he’s the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company... Their emissions are larger than those of ExxonMobil, and they have no credible plan whatsoever to reduce them. So this is the person in charge of the COP. He’s a nice guy. He’s a smart guy. But a conflict of interest is a conflict of interest.
There should be a worldwide outcry demanding that Al Jaber step down over this clear conflict of interest.
I don’t deny that vital strategic initiatives get hammered out at these U.N. conferences. The governments of the Global North, for instance, have a moral obligation to support serious climate financing for the Global South, which despite having done the least to contribute to climate breakdown is bearing the brunt of some of its most lethal impacts. So I respect the decision of those civil society leaders who feel compelled to attend and participate. But let’s not pretend that the incremental UNFCCC approach has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually saving civilization and the living world from collapse.
We need to stop thinking things will get better with the next COP-OUT, when things just keep getting worse. The hostile takeover of the international climate negotiations by fossil fuel industry arsonists is an unconscionable betrayal of our children’s trust and of all generations to come. Big Oil has not only been lying to the public for decades, it is knowingly perpetrating ecocide and crimes against humanity.
When the world is on fire, you don’t invite the arsonists to the negotiating table to argue for their right to toss on more fuel. You arrest the arsonists and mobilize firefighters to contain the worldfire. I don’t have a ready answer to what is the best alternative to the U.N. process, but when what you’re doing isn’t working, it’s time to try something else.
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