Occupy Climate Change

Democracy Now recently published transcribed portions of "Occupy Everywhere," a panel hosted by The Nation magazine, "On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power" (here).  Naomi Klein was quoted as drawing a connection between the movement and the climate change debate, saying the following:

[T]here has been an ecological consciousness woven into these occupations from the start…. So, what I find exciting is the idea that the solutions to the ecological crisis can be the solutions to the economic crisis, and that we stop seeing these as two problems to be pitted against each other by savvy politicians, but that we see them as a ... single crisis, born of a single root, which is unrestrained corporate greed that can never have enough, and that ... trashes people and that trashes the planet, and that would shatter the bedrock of the continent to get out .. the last drops of fuel and natural gas. It’s the same mentality that would shatter the bedrock of societies to maximize profits. And that’s what’s being protested.... [T]he reason why the right is denying climate change now in record numbers— … 80 percent….. [is] because they have looked at what science demands, they’ve looked at the level of emissions cuts that science demands, 80 percent or more by 2050, and they have said, "You can’t do that within our current economic model. This is a socialist plot." [T]heir entire ideology, which is laissez-faire government, attacks on the public sphere, privatization, cuts to social spending, all of that, none of it can survive actually reckoning with the climate science, because once your reckon with the climate science, you obviously have to do something. You have to intervene strongly in the economy.

For more on this you can read her article "Capitalism vs. the Climate."

SJP