freelansing in Seattle

COP15: Of course, the biggest climate news is currently coming from Copenhagen, & some of the best reporting from Copenhagen is coming from Democracy Now!, the only independent news show reporting daily from Copenhagen.

As might be expected, some of the biggest rifts so far in Copenhagen have been around issues of climate justice. Developing nations expressed outrage at leaked documents exposing backroom deals by rich countries that favor perpetrators of the climate crisis far into the future. Island nations, for whom the climate crisis is a matter of life-and-death, have been making it clear they will not sink quietly into the ocean.

The climate crisis is a complex and fascinating challenge to humanity. First of all, it is inescapably global–it requires a higher level of international cooperation than any challenge humanity has ever faced. That adds all kinds of complications that are not easy to negotiate. It’s easy to get cynical about the slow pace of progress, but we should not underestimate the difficulty of the challenge. The international community is required to come to grips with historical international injustices at the same time as it navigates a transition away from fossil fuels into clean energy sources. Not simple stuff.

Just as the international community faces these challenges, the progressive community of activists and advocacy organizations faces similar challenges. The climate crisis presents an issue where environmental protection and social justice are inextricably linked. Too often progressive advocacy operates in specialized silos — environmentalists over here, social justice advocates over there — with even those broad categories compartmentalized into a variety of single-issue focuses. This format has led to successes on many fronts, but will require lots of “cross-pollination” to meet the 21st century challenge of the climate crisis.

One of the more difficult pieces of the puzzle is the issue of “climate debt.” When looked at from the standpoint of the developing countries of the world (a perspective the American public rarely considers), climate debt makes perfect sense — not just as some “moral obligation” of charity, but as real mitigation costs for harm done. The “categorical rejection” of such costs by Todd Stern, the lead U.S. negotiator in Copenhagen, does not bode well, but should not be surprising. American public opinion has a long way to go before understanding and supporting this matter of international climate justice.

And of course, as soon as the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine gets ahold of this notion that hard-working, hard-pressed American taxpayers should be expected to give some of OUR money to poor people in other countries … look out.

I’ll offer more reflection on Copenhagen at a later date. But in the meantime…

Speaking of climate denialists and the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine: Unfortunately, I feel compelled to comment on the subject of “Climategate” (a.k.a. “SwiftHack”), a topic no one should need to discuss because it is so trivial, but which has been blown all out of proportion by the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine (because, well, that’s what they do). I don’t need to waste any words debunking the whole thing, because that’s been done quite well by real experts (e.g., Union of Concerned Scientists, Nature magazine, as well as an entire site created just to respond to the nonsense). A timeline & analysis here.

How weak does your evidence have to be before mainstream media decides “this is not a newsworthy story”? We’re discovering that if there’s enough heat, the amount of light matters little.

Maybe I’m naive, but I continue to be amazed at how mainstream media continue fall for the same trick over and over again: It’s like watching Charlie Brown make his run to kick the football one more time…

The formula is simple: Take some small and trivial transgression cherry-picked from amidst a very large and serious issue, blow it out of proportion, then have many voices parrot the same “outrage” till it becomes a “controversy.” It doesn’t matter how little merit the actual claims have — the key is to generate outrage and controversy. That’s all it takes to hijack a serious public discussion and drive it right into the ditch. Whether it’s Swiftboat, Bill Ayers, Van Jones, ACORN, whatever… The mystery is that this deception seems to work, over and over again.

The reality of this large and well-funded effort to deny crisis in the midst of crisis presents an ethical challenge to those of us working to address the crisis.

It’s often said that free speech does not include the right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater; but if the theater is actually on fire, neither should free speech include the right to deny it: “Ignore all warnings of fire! Nothing to worry about here. Please remain seated & enjoy the show.” If you were in a theater on fire and witnessed someone putting people’s lives at risk like that, what would you do? That’s a question we all need to face right now.

Final thought on climate justice: I dearly hope that someday — when it’s clear to all the extent of the problem, who created it, and who perpetuated it — we will hold those responsible accountable. In this case, it is not just Crimes Against Humanity, but Crimes Against Humanity and the Entire Planet. I hope to see — in my lifetime — trials of the global-warming denialists for the mass death and destruction they are creating. Perhaps as punishment we can ship them all off to their own island in the Maldives…

That’s all for now. I’ll be writing about the controversy over carbon cap-and-trade proposals sometime soon.