A year ago, it seemed possible-likely, even-that President Barack Obama would sweep into the international negotiations on climate change at Copenhagen and make serious progress on the tangle of issues at stake. The reality was quite different. This year, the expectations for the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun are less wild.
The conference will be held from Nov 29 to Dec 10 and the same issues from 2009 are up for debate. Countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany are still contributing an outsize share of carbon to the atmosphere. Countries like India and China are still rapidly increasing their own carbon output. And countries like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, and Bolivia are still bearing an unfair share of the environmental impacts brought on by climate change.
A very different set of expectations are building in the climate movement this year. If last year was about moving forward as fast as possible, this year, climate activists seem resigned to the idea that politicians just aren't getting it. Change, when it comes, will have to be be built on a popular movement, not a political negotiation.
Climate change from the bottom up
Last year, climate activists put their faith in international leaders to make progress. This year, they believe that it's up to them, as outside actors, to marshal a grassroots movement and pressure their leaders towards decreased carbon emissions.
"There's a recognition that the insider strategy to push from inside the Beltway to impact what will happen in DC, or what will happen in Cancun has really not succeeded," Rose Braz, climate campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Making Contact's Andrew Stelzer. "What we're doing in conjunction with a number of groups across the country and across the world is really build the type of movement that will change what happens in Cancun, what changes what happens in DC from the bottom up." (This entire episode of Making Contact is dedicated to new approaches to climate change, at Cancun and beyond, and is worth a listen.)
Fighting the indolence of capitalists
Here's one example of this new strategy. As Zachary Shahan writes at Change.org, La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement, is coordinating a march that will begin in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, then converge on Cancun. The march will include "thousands of farmers, indigenous people, rural villagers, urbanites, and more," Shahan reports.
After they arrive in Cancun, the organizers are planning an "Alternative Global Forum for Life and Environmental and Social Justice" for the final days of the negotiations, which they say will be a mass mobilisation of peasants, indigenous and social movements. The action extends far beyond Cancun, though. Actually, they are organizing thousands of Cancuns around the world on this day to denounce what they see as false climate solutions.
These actions echo the strategy that environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and other climate leaders are promoting to push for climate change policies in the U.S. All this talk about building momentum from the bottom up, from populations, means that anyone looking for change is now looking years into the future.
The U.S. is not leading the way
Of course, ultimately, politicians will need to agree on a couple of standards. In particular, how much carbon each country should be emitting and how fast each country should power down its current emission levels. The U.S. is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to agreement on these questions, especially due to the recent mid-term elections. As Claudia Salerno, Venezuela's lead climate change negotiator wrote at AlterNet:
Unlike what many suggest, China is not the problem. China, along with India and others, have made considerable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are already working to realize them. Other developing countries have done the same, although we only generate a virtual drop in the bucket of global carbon emissions. The key player missing here is the U.S.
China, the U.S. and Clean Coal
The most interesting collaborations on clean energy, however, aren't happening around the negotiating table. This week, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a long piece about the work that the U.S. and China are doing together on clean coal technology, the magic cure-all to the world's energy ills.
In the piece, Fallows recognizes what environmentalists have long argued: coal is bad for the environment and for coal-mining communities. But, unlike clean energy advocates who want to phase coal out of the energy equation, Fallows argues that coal must play a part in the world's energy future. Therefore, we must find a way to burn it without releasing clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. That's where clean coal technology comes in. So far, however, researchers have had little luck minimizing coal's carbon output.
A few progressive writers weighed in on Fallows' piece: Grist's David Roberts thought Fallows was too hard on the anti-coal camp, while Campus Progress' Sara Rubin argued that the piece did a good job of grappling with the reality of clean energy economics. And Mother Jones' Kevin Drum had one very clear criticism-that the piece skated over the question of progress on carbon capture, the one real way to dramatically reduce carbon pollution from coal. He wrote:
All the collaboration sounds wonderful, and even a 20% or 30% improvement in coal technology would be welcome. But that said, sequestration is the holy grail and I still don't know if the Chinese are doing anything more on that front than the rest of us.
On every front, then, the view on climate change is now a long one.
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If America actually had a punditalkcracy instead of a punditalkcrazy, James Fallows would be as well-known as George Will. If you had to read just one book about our media and what's wrong with it, his 1996 book, Breaking The News, could arguably be that one book. Which is why I take it seriously when he writes something about Obama, as he did earlier this week in "Belatedly, on the Cairo speech & Obama rhetoric in general". Just as I hoped, it provides an excellent opportunity for clarifying where I stand with respect to Obama.
The thesis is about Obama's "big" speeches, by which Fallows means his Philadelphia speech on race during the campaign plus five more recent ones: the
June 4 Cairo speech on relations with Islam, the May 21 on anti-terrorism strategy, the >May 17 Notre Dame speech on religion and politics, the April 14 speech at Georgetown on economic strategy, and the April 5 Prague speech on reducing nuclear weapons. Here's what Fallows says:
here is a way to think about why Barack Obama's "big" speeches of the past 15 months seem different from normal political rhetoric. It's because they are...
These six -- including an astonishing five of them in an eight-week burst -- were different from normal rhetoric in the following basic way:
Most of the time, "effective" speeches boil down to finding a better, clearer, cleverer, more vivid, or more memorable way to express what people already think.
In contrast, pointing to his Philadelphia speech on race, Fallows says:
What Obama did in that speech is what he has done, or attempted to do, in those subsequent five big speeches as president. Rather than simply reaffirming or reinforcing what much of the public already thinks; and rather than attempting the relatively common political feat of explaining small changes or compromises in policy; he has tried to change the basic way in which we think about large issues. You can look back on his 2004 Democratic convention speech, given before he'd even been elected to the Senate, as a preview of this approach. By 2008, "not Red states or Blue states..." had become a mere catch phrase. In 2004, during the embittered Bush-Kerry campaign, it was something like a new idea. That's what got him such a response in the convention hall (I was there; it was electrifying), and extensions of that approach are what make his big speeches these days seem different from what we generally hear.
I think Fallows is absolutely right about this, and he goes on to describe what he means even more specifically, in a passage I'll quote on the flip. But at the same time, this helps us focus attention on just what's lacking in Obama, and that can been quite clearly in the current fiasco of his GLBT policy (if, indeed, he can be said to have a GLBT policy.)
The problem, as I see it, is two-fold: (1) a lack of genuine, substantive follow-through, from rhetoric to action, and (2) a lack of real depth in the change he articulates. It may well be a "change [in] the basic way in which we think about large issues", but it's a change that's been just beneath the surface for a long time, a change that people have been hungry for. It's a change in key from major to minor, or the reverse, or maybe even up a half-step--all key-changes that are part of the musician's standard repertoire, if not the politician's.
But it's not as Monty Python would have it, "something completely different." It's not Frank Zappa changing key and time signature at the same time. And it's certainly not Charles Ives, playing in two different keys at once, or Harry Partch, playing in just intonation, with 1743 notes to the octave. So if Obama hasn't given a major speech on GLBT issues-as some of you are surely already protesting--it's precisely because there is no such latent change on GLBT issues overall, even though there certainly is such a change with regard to their service in the military.
Friday, on Bill Moyers Journal there were a couple of remarkable segments (transcript here). I doubt I'll have time to discuss the segment with Eric Foner, one of America's top historians, but it was really excellent, a sharp contrast to the almost endless mindless blather one routinely hears about Abraham Lincoln. Foner comes at Lincoln as an historian who's written extensively about much more ordinary people of that time, and so he carries a perspective that much more in tune with how the blogosphere sees power today. But I want to focus on the other segment, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen.
What was so good about the segment was not the content per se, which most of us are generally familiar with, but they way they were able to convey it in the tv medium, in a very distilled, but not dumbed-down manner. And I'd like to use that distilled presentation to link what they were saying to a couple of excellent books from the 1990s that can further illuminate the historical background of what we're living through and fighting against.
They began with a discussion of the Daschle affair....
Why are predictions and speculation even part of the job of a political reporter at all?
And "Chris Matthews is right", in which he quotes from exchange between Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw, and observes (1):
The endless attempts to predict the future and thus determine the outcome of the elections -- to the exclusion of anything meaningful -- is a completely inappropriate role for journalists to play, independent of the fact that they are chronically wrong, ill-informed, and humiliated when they do it....
The very idea of discussing issues, examining the candidates' positions, or even analyzing voter preferences does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews.
and (2):
Brokaw's sudden, embarrassment-driven request for the media to act differently (where has his sermon been for the last 20 years?) will not have the slightest effect on what they do.
This diary-and the one following-represents a brief attempt to explain just why and how this state of affairs came about. This diary takes a short-term focus on the historical why and how of recent times, not in a comprehensive fashion, but with reference to a few significant signposts. The next takes a longer-term focus on the philosophical/normative underpinings, and is more analytical. The two are related by the broad thesis that we live in a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy, and the subthesis that the nature of masquerade changed significantly from around 1980 onwards.
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