Young people, whose whole future is ahead of them, must tell their universities, all of whom have a huge endowment that includes holdings in fossil fuel companies. They must say to those who are charged with their education, "Explain to me how you can prepare me for a future that with your investments you're demonstrating you don't believe in." How can you prepare me for a future at the same time as you bet against my future?

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(Article changed on November 26, 2012 at 14:58)

 

What follows here is a synopsis and interpretation of a discussion Bill Moyers recently had with Naomi Klein.

The fossil fuel industry business model is based on them selling, and us burning, five times more coal and oil-based fuels than is compatible with the continuance of healthy human life on earth.   This means their business model is at war with human life on this planet.  

We're up against the very, very powerful fossil fuel lobby whose paymasters have every reason in the world to do whatever they can to prevent this from ever becoming the most urgent issue on our agenda.   This includes spending billions on a very corrupt corporate media, and on academic and intellectual whores whose "professional opinions" are essentially for sale to the highest bidder, and who will testify on their behalf.

Climate change requires collective action  

It requires that we somehow manage, in spite of what was just stated, to regulate extremely powerful corporations including oil and coal companies.   It requires that we plan collectively and effectively, as a society.   Problem is, at the historical moment that climate change hit the mainstream, all "collectivist"/regulatory ideas fell into disrepute.   All solutions had to be "free-market' solutions.   Governments were supposed to "get out of the way (of corporations)."   Among right-wingers, "collectively' remains a dirty word -- "that's what communists did."   Anything "collective' was tainted and suspect.   Libertarians like Margaret Thatcher even went so far as to claim that "There's no such thing as society."

Now if you believe that, of course you can't do anything about climate change, because climate change is inherently a collective and societal problem -- there's no denying that this is our collective atmosphere.   We can only respond to its gradual poisoning and alteration collectively.   Otherwise we cannot respond in any effective way.   Yet some parts of the environmental movement foolishly respond to this dilemma by personalizing the problem and cheerfully saying, "Okay, let's recycle.   Let's all buy a hybrid car."   In an effort to get along with the powers that be, they treat this problem like it could have business-friendly solutions -- things like cap-and-trade and carbon offsetting.   But those "solutions' aren't nearly enough.  

For this reason and others we ended up with a movement that every once in a while would rear up, and people would get all excited and say, "this time we're really going to do something about this."   And whether it was the Rio Summit or the Copenhagen Summit, or that moment when Al Gore came out with Inconvenient Truth, the movement would then, after a brief period of mild public optimism, just recede into the background of most peoples' consciousness.   Why so?   Because it (the movement) didn't yet have the collective social support and political-economic support it needed.

On top of that, we've had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby (with the help of their academic/scientific & journalistic whores) to both buy off the environmental movement, to defame it, to infiltrate it, and to spread lies within the larger culture about it.   And, quite sadly, the entire climate-denial movement has been doing all this very effectively.

Where, why, and how the climate-change denial movement is most entrenched

Environmental writer Glenn Scherer has pointed out that over the last two years, the lion's share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunder storms, wind storms, heat waves, wildfires, has occurred in Republican-leaning red states.   And yet, quite paradoxically, those states have sent a whole new crop of climate-change deniers to Congress.  

Explanation:   If you are deeply invested in free-market ideology, if you really believe with your heart and soul that everything public and anything the government does is evil, and that our liberation must and will come from liberating corporations, . . then climate change fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because the truth is that the big corporations (which have the biggest hand in creating the problem) must be regulated!

Climate change is the greatest single free-market failure.  

It is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.   So it isn't just "Okay, the fossil fuel companies want to protect their profits."   It's that climate-change science threatens the free-market worldview.   And when you drill deeper into the drop-off in belief in climate change, what you see is that the large majority of Democrats still believe in climate change -- in fact their rate of belief in it is up in the 70th percentile.   This means that the whole drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political spectrum.   So it turns out that the most reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is real is what their views are on a range of other political subjects -- things like abortion and taxes.   What you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs simply cannot face the science behind climate change.   Why not?   Because it threatens the ideological structure within which everything else they believe is anchored.

Yes the market can play a role.  

There are things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job.   Could that ever be a replacement for preventing the fossil fuel industry from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet?   No, of course not.   But it could help our efforts to stop carbon-induced (CO ₂ -induced) climate change.

So yes, we need these market incentives on the one hand, to encourage renewable energy.   But we also need a government that's willing and able to say no to big corporations:   "No, you can't mine the Alberta tar sands and thereby promote the burning of enough carbon that you will destroy the human future of the planet!"

If there was a fantastic public transit system that really made it easy for you to get where you wanted to go, would you drive less?  

If it was easy to recharge an electric vehicle at any filling station, and if that electricity came from solar and wind, would you stamp your foot and say "No, I want to fill my car with dirty energy"?   No, I don't think you would.   Because this is what ordinary folks have expressed over and over again:   We are willing to make changes.   We recycle and we compost.   Increasingly we ride bicycles or take public transit to get where we want to go.   There's actually been a tremendous amount of willingness for people to change their behavior.    But people get demoralized when they know they're making these changes in their habits and practices, yet CO ₂ emissions are still going up, because the corporations aren't changing how they do business.   They're not holding up their end of the bargain, so to speak.   In fact, most of them are not even willing to admit that they have any obligations in this regard.

Some activists are saying the environmental movement has been getting a little too close to Obama.  

For instance, a meeting took place shortly after Obama was elected wherein the message that all these big green groups got from Obama was, "We don't want to talk about climate change.   We want to talk about green jobs and energy security."   And a lot of these big green environmental groups played along.   Why did these groups go along with this messaging, talking about energy security instead of talking about climate change?   Because they were told that climate change avoidance wasn't a "winnable message.'  

Yet polling absolutely supports the claim that Hurricane Sandy helped Obama get reelected!   One of the reasons why people voted for Obama over Romney was that they were concerned about climate change and they felt that he was a better candidate to deal with it.

Asking big educational institutions to disinvest in, and take their money out of, big fossil fuel companies

This is what happened during the fight against apartheid in South Africa that was ultimately victorious.   So now a group in Britain has come up with something called "The Carbon Tracker Initiative" and is using it to directly address the financial community.   What their research shows is that if we are going to ward off truly catastrophic climate change, we need to keep the increase in average global temperature below 2 degrees centigrade.

The problem with this is that they also measured how much the fossil fuel companies (and countries who own their own national oil reserves) have now currently in their reserves (i.e. oil to which they have already laid claim).   In other words, they already own the oil, they can drill for it any time, it's already boosting their stock price, and they will be refining it and selling the fuel that is derived from it.     So how much oil and fuel is that?   It is, once again, five times more than what the viability of human life on this planet can afford to be burned.   So what we're saying is, "Your business model is at war with life on this planet.   It's at war with us.   And we're going to fight back."

These are rogue companies.   So young people, whose whole future lies ahead of them, must send a message to their universities, especially if the university has a huge endowment -- for there isn't an endowment out there that doesn't have holdings in these fossil fuel companies.   Young people must say to the people who are charged with their education, charged with preparing them for the outside world, for their future jobs:   "Explain to me how you can prepare me for a future that with your investments you're demonstrating you don't believe in.   How can you prepare me for a future at the same time as you bet against my future with these fossil fuel holdings?"  

These are rogue corporations whose business model involves externalizing the costs of their waste, passing it onto the rest of us.  

Their business model is based on not having to pay for what they call an externality, which includes the carbon dioxide that's spewed into the atmosphere that is, by way of the greenhouse effect, warming the planet.   And that cost (of their externalized waste), that ultimately we have to pay, is enormous.   How so?   Because we absolutely know that the future is going to be filled with many more super storms, like Sandy and worse, each of them costing us anywhere from $50 billion to $150 billion, or more.   Last year there were more multi-billion-dollar disasters than any year previously.   So climate change is already costing us plenty.   And the cost will continue to increase as the total amount of greenhouse-causing CO ₂ in the upper atmosphere continues to pile up -- which it will surely do, for just as long as coal and oil companies sell as much of their product as they can possible sell, within our max-growth, hyperproduction-hyperconsumption society.  

When you try to get wind farms set up, really big wind farms, there's usually a lot of community resistance that happens in the United States.   It also happens in Britain.   Where it hasn't happened is in Germany and Denmark.   And the reason for this is that in those places you have movements that have demanded that the renewable energy be community controlled -- not centrally planned, but community controlled -- so that there's a sense of ownership, not by some big, faceless state, but by the people who actually live in the community that is impacted.

Therefore, climate change is tied to the state of capitalism and the necessary transformation that must happen to the American political-economic system.   And now there's an opening that's been provided by Sandy following close on the heels of Katrina.

The Shock Doctrine

Whenever you have this kind of destruction, there has to be a reconstruction.   And what Naomi Klein documented in "The Shock Doctrine" is that these right-wing think tanks (like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation) have historically gotten very, very good at is seizing these moments of opportunity and using them to push through their wish list of policies.

Problem is, their wish list of policies actually digs us deeper into crisis.   After Hurricane Katrina, there was a meeting at the Heritage Foundation, just two weeks after the storm hit.   Parts of the city were still underwater.   And there was a meeting on which the "Wall Street Journal" reported, the minutes of which were obtained by Naomi Klein.   The title of the central report presented at the meeting was "31 free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina."    Here's a sampling from the list of "solutions":

* Don't reopen the public schools,

* Replace the public schools with vouchers.  

* Drill for oil in ANWAR, in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve,

* More oil refineries.  

So here you have a crisis that was created by a collision between destructive weather (linked to climate change) colliding with weak infrastructure, weakened because of years and years of neglect.   And the free market solutions to this crisis are, "Let's just get rid of the public infrastructure altogether and drill for more oil" -- which is of course the root cause of climate change!  

So now it's time for an appropriate response from the people and their government, which actually we've had before.     That response first followed from the events of 1929 and the 1930s.   People then wanted to get at the root of the problem.   They wanted to get away from speculative finance and that's how we got some very good legislation passed in this country.    Legislation like Glass-Steagall, and much of our existing social safety net, was born at that time -- not by exploiting a crisis to horde power for the few and ram through policies that people don't want, but to build popular movements and to really deepen our democracy.  

The main thesis of "Shock Doctrine" came out five years ago, before the great crash.   It was that disaster capitalism exploits crises in order to move greater wealth into the hands of ever fewer people.   You don't expect those people to change their appetites or their ways, do you, just because we face a climate crisis?   That would be extremely naïve.

At the time most of us didn't understand this tactic of our overlords.   We didn't understand that during times of crisis, certain sectors of the business world and its interlinked political class take advantage of our disorientation in order to ram through these policies that favor the few.   Their whole tactic is about taking advantage of our disorientation in those moments of crisis.   And the fact is that many of us become childlike and look towards a supposed expert class, and leaders, to take care of us.   And so we become very trusting during disasters.   But that's exactly when and how they take advantage of us with this very clever racket of theirs.

The rich won't suffer from these disasters nearly as much as the rest of us will.

There's a privatization of response to disaster, wherein wealthy people do understand that, yes, we are going to see more and more storms, which are going to be ever more turbulent and destructive.   But the rich are capable of planning for it, and do.   So you have, for instance, private insurance companies now offering what they call a concierge service.   The first company that was doing this was AIG.   And in the midst of the California wildfires about six years ago, for the first time, you saw private firefighters showing up at people's homes, covering them with fire retardant, so that when the flames came, this house would stay.   This mansion, usually, would be standing while the houses nearby would burn to the ground.   So firefighting is no longer something that people get equally.   We now have a kind of two-tiering of protection from wildfires.

After Hurricane Katrina a company in Florida saw a market opportunity.   And they decided to offer a charter airline that would turn your hurricane into a luxury vacation.   That was actually the slogan.   They would let you know when a hurricane was headed for your area.   They would pick you up in a limousine, drive you to the airport, and whisk you up into the air.   They would have made you five star hotel reservations at the destination of your choice.   So, if you've got the money to pay the price, why does a hurricane have to be bad news after all?

This is of course what Naomi Klein wrote about in her book, "Shock Doctrine," that the monopolization of resources by the rich, in times of crisis, further divide us as a society.

Deregulated capitalism is a kind of crisis creation machine.    

To the extent you take away the rules and regulations, you are going to have serial crises.   They may be economic crises, booms and busts.   Or there will be ecological crises.   Or you're going to have both.   You're just going to have shock after shock after shock.   And the longer this goes on, the more shocks you're going to have over any period of time, and the more devastating they are going to be.

The way we're currently responding to all this, unfortunately, is that with each shock, we become more divided.   And the more we understand that this is what the future looks like, the more those who can afford it protect themselves and buy their way out of having to depend on the public sector -- and thereby become ever less invested in, or interested in, collective responses.   And that's why there has to be a whole other way of responding to this crisis -- some way that protects all of us.

Climate change can be a historic moment to usher in the next great wave of progressive change.  

It can be and it must be.   It's our only chance.   It's actually the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.   And we've been kidding ourselves about what it's going to take to get our emissions down to the extent that they need to go down.   We're talking about an 80% lowering of emissions if human life and society is to remain sustainable and viable as we know it!   But that's going to require a huge shift in our consciousness, our laws, regulations, habits and business practices.

We shouldn't beat up on the big environmental groups, because they do fantastic work, yet part of the reason why public opinion on this issue has been so shaky is that it's not really enough to say to the public, "This is a huge problem.   It's Armageddon."   Watch Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" and be afraid, be very afraid.   But then you say, "Well, the solution is very simple:   You can change the kind of light bulbs you use.   Plus, we'll have this complicated piece of legislation called cap and trade that you don't really understand, but that basically means that companies here can keep on polluting, and they're going to trade their rights to carbon emissions.   And then somebody else is going to plant trees on the other side of the planet and they'll get credits."

And people look at this and say to themselves, "Okay, if this really was a crisis of the magnitude that is alleged, wouldn't be we be responding way more aggressively?   Wouldn't we be responding in a way that we've responded in the past during wartime, where there's been a kind of a collective sense of shared responsibility?"  

When we really do feel that sense of urgency about an issue -- and I believe we should feel it about climate change -- we are willing to sacrifice.   We have shown that in the past.   But when you talk about a supposed emergency and actually don't ask anything major of people, they think you might be lying, that it might not really be an emergency after all.   So if this is an emergency, we have to act like it.   And yeah, this is an emergency.

Naomi Klein is the author of "The Shock Doctrine:   The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." Readers of two influential magazines to put Naomi Klein high on the list of the 100 leading public thinkers in the world.   She is now working on a new book and documentary on how climate change can spur political and economic transformation.   She also has joined with the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben in a campaign launched this week called "Do the Math."

Authors Bio:

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.