One of the things I'm trying to tackle in the book is [how] climate change is often totally talked about as a scientific problem. Its politics is often reduced to: Do you believe the science or do you deny the science? And I think most ordinary people understand there's something wrong with the climate. There's something wrong with the planet. But, if you make it like [it's all about] your understanding of climate science, then I think a lot of people won't really understand how climate change affects their material everyday struggles to survive.
So, the Yellow Vest movement had this line that, like, politicians are just concerned about the end of the world, but we're concerned about the end of the month. This is this French working class uprising against a carbon tax that was claimed to be about climate change. And they were like, you know, we're trying to get to the end of the month. That's what we say.
So, what Gunn-Wright, in that chapter, and what the Green New Deal was trying to really say, [is that] we could we could construct a climate program that actually hits those end of month struggles; that actually, that reduces energy costs; that actually gives people housing or transit. You know, Boston elected a mayor on a kind of Green New Deal platform, and she's been experimenting with free public transit. And there was just an article the other day that said it's been incredibly popular and that working class people have found that it saved them so much money and it allows them to spend on other things. So, as Gunn-Wright says, she doesn't want climate policy to be so complicated and scientific. She just wants it to be: It's that Green New Deal thing that hired your uncle to build that new energy project down the road. Right? It's something that's just intuitively appealing.
But I wanted to speak to another thing. You were talking about how it's not just about marches, but it's about levity and building a culture of solidarity and fun in these kinds of movements. And that's actually when I talked earlier about how we really need to rebuild institutions and organizations on the left. We forget that those institutions, when the left was powerful, particularly when working class and socialist movements were powerful, they built up a whole set of things that infiltrated people's lives.
So, I was actually teaching about this the other day where I was taking a passage from a book that is explaining what it was like to be in the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 1907, where one could join a socialist glee club or take part in socialist Friends of Nature excursions. There were socialist singers and actors, folk dancers, and cooperatives where people would get their basic needs by these socialist co-ops. So, these were parties and unions that were really woven into people's everyday lives and leisure as much as work, right? So that's kind of what needs to be. [Rebuilt is this kind of life of institutions.]
And, you know, marches are great - the left's been pretty good at marches since the '60, right? We have lots of marches. But if you don't have these organizations that are actually trying to build power, 'people on the streets,' don't really lead to many results. So, I mean, people that the George Floyd protest in 2020 was the largest uprising in US history -- millions of people took to the streets. But I think if we're being serious, we might want to ask like what actually resulted from all that energy, all that protest, and all that people in the streets, in terms of actual organization, in terms of actual wins. [But] like policy wise, it's not really clear that it translated into real power. And so that's where building things like unions and parties, I think really matter.
Another thing you've been talking about is the United Nations. And I do want to point out that nothing's going to happen, the United Nations, unless we can really build power in this country so that we could have a president who is actually willing to lead in these climate negotiations. The United States has been the biggest barrier to really significant climate action on an international stage.
It's always the one that's trying to organize, and basically trying to create wedges between other countries and try to ensure that all agreements are always voluntary. There's never going to be any mandatory sanctions for not abiding by "commitments." So, if we ever had a United States government that would actually lead and not only commit to a treaty that would have teeth, that would actually sanction countries, [then] we're never going to make progress in that venue. But I think the United States not only has to lead, but it has to commit to investing in decarbonization all over the world, because the United States is the largest historical emitter, by far, of any other country in the world.
And so that historical responsibility means that they have to lead the way. [And] in terms of financing, investments for particularly poor countries so that they can develop with the new energy. Technology that we need and not have too, like many poor countries now, are just going to coal because it's cheap and they want energy, they want development and electricity. So, the United States would have to really take the lead in financing a roadmap, a sort of off-ramp from fossil fuel-based development that we've enjoyed so much.
Hawkins:
You write a lot about Bill McKibben in Climate Change as Class War. And you write about how he's been a leader now for about 15 years in the Green Movement and he keeps warning about global warming's terrifying new math, and that kind of stuff. And a lot of people are looking to him for answers, and see him as a leader. But on the other hand, you know, you look at that Michael Moore-produced film, Planet of the Humans, it sort of critiques the value of his leadership, when he's willing to make these mitigate climate change in deals with the enemy - at least, that film portrayed him. And, it reminds me of the last days of the Abbie Hoffman / Jerry Rubin thing, you know, whether it's better to attack the issues as an outsider or as Rubin did, go inside, become a Wall Street broker and supposedly make changes or strive to. Is McKibben a kind of Insider?
Huber:
I think it's more accurate that McKibben has been a leading voice for over 30 years. His The End of Nature made a huge splash in the late 1980s (I think 1989).
Hawkins:
Sometimes, you wonder if the best way to getting to where we want to be is to restart, you know, to push revolution or something. You can see how things are falling apart so quickly. You know, we might be one global economic crisis away from things starting all over again. But that's not the leadership that McKibben represents. He's more a New Yorker revolutionary, snugly bourgeois. So, you have to wonder, what's effective and what isn't. We're running out of time and we need a vastly larger response. We're getting less and less popular control of the situation through representational elections. But would you be pushing for democratic socialism? Would you see that as the long-term answer to a lot of the issues we face? And how would the capitalists respond to that?
Huber:
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