Fighting Doom: The New Politics of Climate Change

I am not an environmentalist. But all I think about these days is the climate crisis.


I admit I have arrived late to the party. Only recently have I begun
to realize what others have known for decades: The climate crisis is
not, at its core, an environmental issue. In fact it is not an "issue"
at all; it is an existential threat to every human and community on the
planet. It threatens every job, every economy in the world. It threatens
the health of our children. It threatens our food and water supply.
Climate change will continue to alter the world our species has known
for the past three thousand years.


As an oyster farmer and longtime political activist, the effects of
climate change on my life will be neither distant nor impersonal. Rising
greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures may well force me to abandon my
60-acre farm within the next forty years. From France to Washington
state, oystermen are already seeing massive die-offs of seed oysters and
the thinning shells science has long predicted. I can see the storm
clouds and they are foretelling doom.


But my political alter ego is oddly less pessimistic. Rather than
triggering gloom, the climate crisis has surprisingly stirred up more
hope than I have felt in twenty years as a progressive activist. After
decades of progressive retreat it is a strange feeling. But I am haunted
by the suspicion that this coming crisis may be the first opportunity
we have had in generations to radically re-shape the political landscape
and build a more just and sustainable society.


The Power of Doom

The modern progressive movement in
the U.S. has traditionally grounded its organizing in the politics of
identity and altruism. Organize an affected group -- minorities, gays,
janitors or women -- and then ask the public at large to support the
cause -- prison reform, gay marriage, labor rights, or abortion -- based
on some cocktail of good will, liberal guilt, and moral persuasion.
This strategy has been effective at times. But we have failed to bring
these mini-movements together into a force powerful enough to enact
broad-based social reform. It takes a lot of people to change society
and our current strategy has left us small in numbers and weak in power.


The highlights of my political life -- as opposed to oystering --
have been marked by winning narrow, often temporary, battles, but
perennially losing the larger war. I see the results in every direction I
look: growing poverty and unemployment, two wars, the rise of the
right, declining unionization, the failure of the Senate's climate
legislation and of Copenhagen, the wholesale domination of corporate
interests. The list goes on and on. We have lost; it's time to admit our
strategy has been too tepid and begin charting anew.


This time can be different. What is so promising about the climate
crisis is that because it is not an "issue" experienced by one
disenfranchised segment of the population, it opens the opportunity for a
new organizing calculus for progressives. Except for nuclear
annihilation, humanity has never faced so universal a threat where all
our futures are bound inextricably together. This universality provides
the mortar of common interest required for movement building. We could
literally knock on every door on the planet and find someone -- whether
they know it or not -- who has a vital self-interest in averting the
climate crisis by joining a movement for sustainability. With all of
humanity facing doom, we can finally gather under one banner and count
our future members not in the thousands but in the millions, even
billions.


But as former White House "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones told the New
Yorker in 2009, "The challenge is making this an everybody movement, so
your main icons are Joe Six-Pack, Joe the Plumber, becoming Joe the
Solar Guy, or that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun,
picking up a caulk gun." The climate crisis is carrying us into
uncharted waters and our political strategy needs to be directed toward
making the climate movement an "everybody movement."


Let me use a personal example. As an oysterman on Long Island Sound
my way of life is threatened by rising greenhouse gases and ocean
temperatures. If the climate crisis is not averted my oysters will die
and my farm will be shuttered.


Saving my livelihood requires that I politically engage at some
level. Normally I would gather together my fellow oyster farmers to
lobby state and federal officials and hold a protest or two. Maybe I
would find a few coalitions to join. But we would remain small in
number, wield little power, and our complaints about job loss would fall
on largely unsympathetic ears in the face of so many suffering in so
many ways. And what would we even petition our government to do about
the problem? Buyouts and unemployment benefits? Re-training classes? Our
oysters will still die and we will still lose our farms.

To save our lives and livelihood we need to burrow down to the root of
the problem: halting greenhouse gas emissions. And halting emissions
requires joining a movement with the requisite power to dismantle the
fossil fuel economy while building a green economy.


To tackle such a large target requires my support for every nook and
cranny effort to halt greenhouse gases and transition to a green
economy. I need to gather up my fellow oyster farmers and link arms with
students blocking new coal-fired power plants while fighting for just
transition for coal workers; I need to join forces with other green
workers around the country to demand government funding for green energy
jobs, not more bank and corporate bailouts; I need to support labor
movement efforts in China and elsewhere to climb out of poverty by going
"green not dirty." I have a stake in these disparate battles not out of
political altruism, but because my livelihood and community depend on
stopping greenhouse gases and climate change.


In other words, the hidden jewel of the climate crisis is that I
need others and others need me. We are bound together by the same story
of crisis and struggle.

Some in the sustainability movement have
been taking advantage of the "power of doom" by weaving together novel
narratives and alliances around climate change. Groups in Kentucky are
complementing their anti-mountain top removal efforts by organizing
members of rural electrical co-ops into "New Power" campaigns to force a
transition from fossil fuels to renewable power -- and create jobs in
the process. Police unions in Canada, recognizing their members will be
first responders as climate disasters hit, have reached out to unions in
New Orleans to ensure the tragedies that followed Katrina are not
repeated. Artists, chefs, farmers, bike mechanics, designers, and others
are coalescing into a "green artisan movement" focused on building
vibrant sustainable communities. Immigrant organizers, worried about the
very real possibility of ever-worsening racial tensions triggered by
millions of environmental refugees flooding in from neighboring
countries, are educating their membership about why the climate crisis
matters.


My hope is that over the coming years we will be able to catalog
increasing numbers of these tributaries of the climate crisis. Our power
will not stem from a long list of issue concerns or sponsors at events
-- we have tried that as recently as the October 2nd Washington D.C.
"One Nation Working Together" march with little impact. Nor, with the
rise of do-it-yourself organizing, will our power spring from top-down
political parties of decades past. Instead oystermen like me, driven by
the need to save our lives and livelihood, will storm the barricades
with others facing the effects of the climate crisis. We will merge our
mini-movements under a banner of common crisis, common vision and common
struggle. We will be in this fight together and emerge as force not to
be trifled with.


This Time We Have an Alternative

I am also guardedly
optimistic because this time we have an alternative. My generation came
of age after the fall of communism, and as a result, we have been raised
in the midst of one-sided debate. We recognize that neoliberalism has
ravaged society, but besides nostalgic calls for socialism, what has
been the alternative? As globalization swept the globe, we demanded
livable wages and better housing for the poorest in our communities; we
fought sweatshops in China; we lobbied for new campaign finance and
corporate governance laws. But these are mere patchwork reforms that
fail to add up to a full-blown alternative to our current
anti-government, free-market system. Never being able to fully picture
the progressive alternative left me not fully trusting that progressive
answers were viable solutions.


But when I hear the proposed solutions to the climate crisis, the
fog lifts. I can track the logic and envision the machinery of our
alternative. And it sounds surprisingly like a common sense rebuttal to
the current free-market mayhem: We face a global emergency of
catastrophic proportions. Market fundamentalism will worsen rather than
solve the crisis. Instead we need to re-direct our institutions and
economic resources toward solving the crisis by replacing our
carbon-based economy with a green sustainable economy. And by
definition, for an economy to be sustainable it must addresses the
longstanding suffering ordinary people face in their lives, ranging from
unemployment and poverty to housing and healthcare.


For years I have tossed from campaign to campaign, but the framework
of our new progressive answer to the climate crisis now provides a
roadmap for my political strategy. It helps chart my opponents -- coal
companies and their political minions, for example -- as well as my
diverse range of allies. It lays out my policy agenda, ranging from
creating millions of new green jobs to building affordable green housing
in low-income communities. I finally feel confident enough in my
bearings to set sail.


The Era of Crisis Politics

While building a new green
economy makes sense on paper, it is hard to imagine our entrenched
political system yielding even modest progressive reform, let alone the
wholesale re-formatting of the carbon economy. But I suspect this will
change in the coming years, with our future governed by cascading
political crises, rather than political stasis.


We are likely entering an era of crisis politics whereby each
escalating environmental disaster -- ranging from water shortages and
hurricanes to wildfires and disease outbreaks -- will expose the
impotence of our existing political institutions and economic system. In
the next 40 years alone, scientists predict a state of permanent
drought throughout the Southwest US and climate-linked disease deaths to
double. As Danny Thompson, secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO,
told the Las Vegas Review Journal, the ever-worsening water crisis could
be "the end of the world" that could "turn us upside down, and I don't
know how you recover from that."


As if that is not enough, these crises will be played out in the
context of a global economy spiraling out of control. Each hurricane,
drought or recession will send opinion polls and politicians lurching
from right to left and vice versa. Think of how quickly, however
momentarily, the political debate pivoted in the wake of Katrina, the BP
disaster, and the financial crisis.


As White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said "Never let a
serious crisis go to waste...It's an opportunity to do things you
couldn't do before." While addressing the climate crisis requires
radical solutions that cannot be broached in today's political climate,
each disaster opens an opportunity to advance alternative agendas --
both for the left and right. While politicians debate modest technical
fixes, ordinary people left desperate by floods, fires, droughts and
other disasters will increasingly -- and angrily -- demand more
fundamental reforms. While our current policy choices appear limited by
polls and election results, in an era of crisis politics what appears
unrealistic and radical before a storm may well appear as common sense
reform in its wake.


My generation has been raised in the politics of eternal dusk.
Except for a passing ray of hope during the Obama campaign, our years
have been marked by the failure of every political force in society --
whether it be political elites or social movement leaders -- to address
the problems we face as a nation and world. They have left us spinning
towards disaster.


We can forge a better future. Climate-generated disasters will bring
our doomed future into focus. The failure of political elites to
adequately respond to these cascading crises will transform our
political landscape and seed the ground for social movements. And if we
prepare for the chaos and long battle ahead, our alternative vision will
become a necessity rather than an impossibility.

As a friend recently said to me, "God help us, I hope you're right."