Climate Memo Mondays, #55, December 27, 2021

Climate Memo Mondays, #55, December 27, 2021: Planetary Catastrophe, Resistance in Boston
Contents
Alfred McCoy, Global Warming, and Twenty-First Century Catastrophe.
Militaries are huge contributors to climate collapse.But Boston’s Green New Deal: mitigation, adaptation, resilience.

Fifty CCMs Link
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-memo-mondays-first-50.html

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/12/twenty-first-century-catastrophe-or.html

Alfred McCoy.  To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.  Haymarket, 2021.  Comment by Dick Bennett, 12-26-21.

      This is probably the first geopolitical history of the world oriented beginning and ending by the climate catastrophe, written to answer the question, where is the US now in this history of conquest and ruin?

     The history begins with a Chronology of World Orders, 1300 to 2300 (xiii).  The first entry is: “1300 Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in atmosphere is stable at 275 parts per million.”  The last projects: “2300 Temperature of 9.O degrees C above preindustrial levels raises sea level by eighteen feet.” 

     The first chapter opens with a projection of midnight of New Year’s Eve 2050.  For the “comfortably affluent” the usual festivities, but for “most of humanity” living in deltas around the world from Alexandria to Shanghai adversity and misery from rising seas and storms or from deadly heat and drought, displacing millions.

      In the final paragraph of the final chapter the author personally apologizes “ for leaving today’s youth a climate crisis whose costs will be painfully evident by 2050” (319).

     The opening section of the book (1-8) imagines the future and summarizes the present calamity.  In tropical latitudes, by 2050  summer temperatures soar above 100F, farmland lost to drought.  oceans warming , fish declining.  “As 140 million climate change refugees in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia filled leaky boats or marched overland in their desperate search for food and shelter, affluent nations worldwide were shutting and walling their borders…and pushing crowds back from those borders with tear gas and gunfire.”  Even in the US, “there was insufferable heat, uncontrollable wildfires, unpredictable weather, and unending hunger. , . .hurricanes pummeled the East and Gulf Coasts, forcing insurance companies to cancel coverage for millions of homeowners.  New York, Boston, and San Francisco built massive seawalls to survive the storm surges, but the federal government had abandoned Miami and New Orleans to the relentless rise of the tide.”  “With seas warming, permafrost receding, and moist rain forests in Africa and the Amazon drying into savannah, the closing decades of the twenty-first century will bring even more adverse conditions.”

     Three nations in particular are blamed for creating this bleak future:  Australia, Brazil, and the US, which opposed CO2 emissions limits at the UN climate conference in Madrid in 2019 and the Paris accords in 2020 (3-4).  The chief individual international criminal is Donald Trump, who in 2016 called global warming a hoax and in 2020 denounced the scientific “alarmists” (5).

     Now climate change (magnified by wars and pandemics) is shaking not only nations and empires, but the world order “for over five hundred years” (8).

      The remainder of the book (chapters 1-6) traces the history of rise and fall of empires since the 15^th century, until in chapter 7, “Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century,” McCoy analyzes the catastrophe we are experiencing that the UN IPCC has been predicting for thirty years, and that will worsen, unless, although apparently too late, we end the fossil fuels regime and build back far better than President Biden’s plan, now shattered,  provides.

January Online Course: WAR vs. ENVIRONMENT

A book over a decade old but not to be missed:  Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (AKP, 2009).

Michelle Wu: “Cities Must Lead for the Green New Deal”
[This is the title of the original article, which was available online.  Following is  the condensation in The Nation (12-27/1-3-21). https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/qa-michelle-wu/ ]
An interview with the newly elected mayor of Boston about building on the accomplishments of progressive pioneers and shaping a new politics at the municipal level.  By John Nichols.  The Nation, DECEMBER 14, 2021.
On November 2, an election night when Democrats suffered setbacks and pundits said voters were rejecting bold progressive ideas, mayoral candidate Michelle Wu won big in Boston as an ardent champion of economic, social, and racial justice and a municipal Green New Deal. Running with support from the Working Families Party, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Ayanna Pressley, the 36-year-old city council member secured 64 percent of the vote and a mandate to go big. We spoke after her swearing-in about how she won and what her victory means for progressive politics. —John Nichols

JOHN NICHOLS: Your election drew national attention because of what it said about the changing character of politics in Boston. But you’ve reminded us that the change has been in the making for some time.

MICHELLE WU: I am standing on the shoulders of so many. First and foremost, my immediate predecessor in the office, Mayor Kim Janey, who served as the first Black and first woman mayor for the city, stepping in at a time of tremendous challenge. We’ve also seen, in very recent elections, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, District Attorney Rachael Rollins, and state legislators and city councilors who reflect not only the diversity of our communities but also the urgency of action as well.

When I first ran for the city council in 2013, everyone told me I had no chance for reasons that were entirely out of my control—that Boston didn’t elect basically any facet of my identity: women, Asian Americans, young people, people not born in the city.

It made perfect sense why the wisest political advisers would say that: At that time, out of a 13-member city council, there was only one woman serving. It was Ayanna Pressley. When she had been elected, in 2009, Ayanna was the first-ever woman of color to join the Boston City Council. In 2013, when I was elected, we doubled that number from one to two.

Since then, we’ve seen not only more candidates of color and progressive candidates, young people, women, women of color, raising their hands to run, but a shift in the entire political ecosystem. When I ran that first time, the questions were very much based on where I fit in in the traditional groupings and tribes of Boston. Where did I grow up? Where did my mom live? What school did I go to?

By the 2019 election cycle, when the city elected our first-ever majority women and majority people of color city council, the questions on the campaign trail had been very different: Voters were asking about what change we would bring, what we would do, and whose voices we would amplify.

So, it’s been a combination of showing that candidates who reflect our communities not only can win but can deliver the changes that our communities need.

JN: There’s been striking progress in recent years. You mentioned that people have stepped up and people are getting engaged. Is the city itself changing?

MW: You know, I think what’s happened is the energy on the ground is always ahead of what the conventional political wisdom says.

We are certainly here in this moment in Boston because of how many barriers Mel King and Chuck Turner and Bruce Bolling and Byron Rushing and Tito Jackson and so many others broke down over the last few decades.

In my time in City Hall, it has been less about shifting the odds of who can win and more about shifting the sense of what was possible. It had been possible all along. The numbers were there. The excitement was there. The voter base and the appetite for progressive policy was there. But we didn’t quite believe it was possible until we saw it in examples in different races in different corners of the city, and now more and more across the board.

JN: Your victory on November 2 was something of an outlier on a night that, for a lot of progressives around the country, was disappointing. How do you see your victory from the perspective of the broader signals that were sent in the 2021 off-year elections and all the instant analyses that suggested voters were rejecting progressive ideas?

MW: In Boston, from the very beginning of our campaign, my team and I decided we would run on big ideas and deep organizing, and focus more on building community anywhere we went rather than trying to corral the numbers for a specific day and leave it there.

In some ways, it’s much easier to run focused on Election Day, because you have a sense of what any room wants you to say and how to placate or appease this or that fear that things might change too quickly. But I had been on the ballot four times in Boston citywide, and for me, the goal each time was not to escape unscathed through the election cycle but to put big ideas on the table and earn a mandate through the campaign to deliver on it in office.

I think, across the country, we’re in a moment of undeniable urgency. The interlocking crises of the pandemic, climate change, and our day-to-day economic situation and racial injustices mean that if you’re truly meeting people where they are, you have to move at the speed of families rather than the speed of government.

So we ran a campaign that put our resources toward distributed [grassroots] organizing and multilingual outreach, and pretty shortly we started to see some amazing things happen that were very different from the usual mold in Boston politics.

JN: Is that the answer to the threat posed by politicians who simplify issues to such an extent that they stoke fears? To go deeper, to build long-term relationships through grassroots organizing?

MW: Absolutely it is. I think, at the end of the day, especially for municipal elections, we see relatively low voter turnout. So the goal is to expand who sees themselves reflected in government, who’s empowered to take the lead in politics. . . .

JN: When you won, you said Boston was “ready to become a Green New Deal city” and suggested that it could serve as a North Star for other cities. That’s a big goal, not merely to govern effectively but to show other cities how to do things.

MW: We have no other choice. Action at the city level is what will make national momentum possible on our most urgent issues, and this is the level of government where we are closest to people, where we can innovate and move quickly. Most importantly, this is the level of government where we uniquely are in the position to earn the trust of our communities. Even though the situation is different city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood, we are all interconnected in this closing window of time to act, and we’re all interconnected in being able to build on the [proof points] and progress that each city is making.

Our Green New Deal—our Boston Green New Deal—took 18 months to put together based on many, many local conversations, as well as learning from national leaders like Bill McKibben, some of the authors of the federal Green New Deal, and other cities that have been putting forward municipal steps.

We can each be a proof point for how big change can happen day by day. And we can create the momentum for state and federal government to really show that we can put forward big changes that deliver immediate impact and draw more people into government.

If there’s anything that we’ve learned from the pandemic, it is how interconnected we are to each other, and how we can do big things when we choose to in times of crisis.

JN: The Green New Deal is an issue political leaders are struggling with at the federal level, and even at the state level, as they try to figure out how to build momentum to enact legislation and make this leap. Are there ways that Boston can provide a model for other cities, and for state and federal officials?

MW: Climate change is the issue that will shape the next 100 years, and the decisions that we make in the next three to five years will determine the lives and livelihoods of the next three to five generations.    https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/qa-michelle-wu/

[Wu is leading a retreat by recommending this incremental approach of small steps, when the catastrophe is large, global, catastrophic.  But if her Boston model catches fire and all cities makes the Leap……..!    –D]

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