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Books, Climate Solutions, Earth Day

These Books take a Hard look how Climate Change & Capitalism Clash

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Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Simon & Schuster

Naomi Klein’s new book is third in a venerated series on problems we face as a species

As the disasters mount and more and more are definitively linked to man-made climate change and global warming, millions around the globe recognize the need for solutions. More and more the solutions arise, only to be blocked or derailed by the same phenomena: corrupt governments beholden to status quo power and short-sighted corporate greed.

This dynamic; available solutions being actively opposed by business and governments that answer to those powerful corporate entities, even as they mount massive multi-million dollar ad campaigns to “green-wash” their image and try to appear aligned with the very solutions they violently oppose is nearly all pervasive.

Meanwhile, as the problems continue to grow, it has become clear that we, that is to say humanity and its future survivors, are not just fighting a battle against the problem itself, the rapidly deteriorating climate caused by Carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary greenhouse gas emitted through human activities, but even more so a political battle is underway which pits an entire entrenched, unequal and corrupt system (regardless of ideology) against the very issue that needs to be tackled in order for our species to survive.

Without solving the problem of Capitalism’s built-in bias toward profit at any cost, any solution to the climate crisis will be stopped or hindered before it can take root and make enough impact to give us a chance against the looming disasters.

Recently Greta Thunberg posted a statement that governments were literally doing nothing, while at the same time preaching and advertising their “commitment” to solving the problem.

Naomi Klein represents a voice, a top selling author, that has stayed focused on this specific aspect of the challenge for decades. The documentary based on her best-selling book “This Changes Everything” (trailer below) is now a classic and zeros in on the monumental importance of this problem, and how the political and economic systems of the world will require massive and immediate change if we are to survive.

This is not about the tired tropes of Socialism vs Capitalism vs Communism and so on, but rather about the specific corruption and suicidal deception that threatens us all, as fake dedication to solving the problem is paraded simultaneously with efforts that double-down on protecting the homicidal status quo of greed and destruction.

Now, with the Biden administration touting its green status and the green new deal, there must be accountability and more than just words and slogans. The new book shown below is an in-depth look at just what needs to happen to confront the political gridlock and the tendency for real solutions to be blocked or destroyed in the crib.

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

Click photo for more on “On Fire“.

Naomi has been at the forefront reporting on the many ways the economy has waged war one planet and people for over 20 years.

An instant bestseller, On Fire shows Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism,” this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.

Within this text, you will find her essays, written whilst in the midst of natural disasters, dire warnings of the future that is waiting for us if we do nothing to change. The long-forms essays display both the prophetic and philosophical while also challenging the spiritual and imaginative.

Her writings span events ranging from the smoky skies of the Pacific Northwest, the barren Great Barrier Reef to the post-hurricane Puerto Rico and many other climate crises.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Click photo for more on “This Changes Everything“.

Author Naomi Klein wants readers to embrace the radical, that there is no longer the option to remain at the status quo. Climate Change isn’t just something to be “fixed” it is a crisis that requires immediate action. Also now a feature documentary.

In her book she exposes climate change deniers, delusions of geoengineers, why mainstream green initiatives have failed thus far and how capitalism will only make things worst.

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Click photo for more on “The Shock Doctrine“.

Klein introduces us to a new term, disaster capitalism, how those who experience catastrophic events (i.e. war/extreme violence or tsunami/ natural, ect) not only had to suffer from the disaster but also were being taken advantage by “rapid-fire corporate makeovers”.

“The Shock Doctrine” shows how economic policies have capitalized on crises, how at the core of disaster capitalism is to use a cataclysmic event to radicalize privatization.

In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term disaster capitalism. Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic shock treatment, losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. 

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman’s free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement’s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

Watch Trailer for Documentary: ‘This Changes Everything’

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Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Climate Crisis Has Made Western US Megadrought Worst in 1,200 Years

Above: Photo / Lynxotic / Adobe Stock

“Climate change is here and now,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “If a 1,200 year mega-drought isn’t enough to make people realize that, I don’t know what is.”

The megadrought which has gripped western U.S. states including California and Arizona over the past two decades has been made substantially worse by the human-caused climate crisis, new research shows, resulting in the region’s driest period in about 1,200 years.

Scientists at University of California-Los Angeles, NASA, and Columbia University found that extreme heat and dryness in the West over the past two years have pushed the drought that began in 2000 past the conditions seen during a megadrought in the late 1500s.

“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years.”

The authors of the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, followed up on research they had conducted in 2020, when they found the current drought was the second-worst on record in the region after the one that lasted for several years in the 16th century.

Since that study was published, the American West has seen a heatwave so extreme it sparked dozens of wildfires and killed hundreds of people and droughtconditions which affected more than 90% of the area as of last summer, pushing the region’s conditions past “that extreme mark,” according to the Los Angeles Times.   

The scientists examined wood cores extracted from thousands of trees at about 1,600 sites across the West, using the data from growth rings in ancient trees to determine soil moisture levels going back to the 800s.

They then compared current conditions to seven other megadroughts—which are defined as droughts that are both severe and generally last a number of decades—that happened between the 800s and 1500s.

The researchers estimated that the extreme dry conditions facing tens of millions of people across the western U.S. have been made about 42% more severe by the climate crisis being driven by fossil fuel extraction and emissions.

“The results are really concerning, because it’s showing that the drought conditions we are facing now are substantially worse because of climate change,” Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA and the study’s lead author, told the Los Angeles Times.

In the region Williams and his colleagues examined, the average temperature since the drought began in 2000 was 1.6° Fahrenheit warmer than the average in the previous 50 years. Without the climate crisis driving global temperatures up, the West would still have faced drought conditions, but based on climate models studied by the researchers, there would have been a reprieve from the drought in 2005 and 2006.

“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s, or 1100s.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said the new research must push the U.S. Congress to take far-reaching action to mitigate the climate crisis, as legislation containing measures to shift away from fossil fuel extraction and toward renewable energy is stalled largely due to objections from Republicans and right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“It’s time for Congress to act by making meaningful investments into climate action—before it’s too late,” she said.

The drought has had a variety of effects on the West, including declining water supplies in the largest reservoirs of the Colorado River—Lake Mead and Lake Powell— as well as reservoirs across California and the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 96% of the Western U.S. is now “abnormally dry” and 88% of the region is in a drought.

“We’re experiencing this variability now within this long-term aridification due to anthropogenic climate change, which is going to make the events more severe,” Isla Simpson, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the study released Monday, told the Los Angeles Times.

The researchers also created simulations of other droughts they examined between 800 and 1500, superimposing the same amount of drying driven by climate change. In 94% of the simulations, the drought persisted for at least 23 years, and in 75% of the simulations, it lasted for at least three decades—suggesting that the current drought will continue for a number of years.

Williams said it is “extremely unlikely that this drought can be ended in one wet year.”

“We’re sort of shifting into basically unprecedented times relative to anything we’ve seen in the last several hundred years,” Samantha Stevenson, a climate modeler at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times.

Originally published on Common Dreams by JULIA CONLEY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license

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Business, Climate Solutions

Young PR and Ad Professionals Demand Industry Ditch Fossil Fuel Clients

Photo Credit/ Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona / Unsplash

“You had a future, and so should we.”

That’s the first line of an open letter released Tuesday by 71 young professionals and students in the advertising and public relations industry calling for an end to contracts with fossil fuel companies, given their significant contributions to the climate emergency.

“The biggest threat to our future is climate change,” they write. “The world’s 20 biggest polluters are fossil fuel companies, with the entire energy sector responsible for creating 75% of carbon emissions. They are blocking necessary and urgently needed climate action.”

“And our industry is helping them do it,” the young professionals continue. “We’re angry. We’re afraid. And we refuse to sit back and watch it happen.”

The letter is clear in its demand:

“We, tomorrow’s leaders, call on all agencies, from the holding companies to the independent shops, to stop working with fossil fuel clients. This means oil giants as well as the alphabet soup of trade associations and front groups.”

– 71 Young Professionals

“No more marketing climate denial and disinformation” or “setting up fake front groups,” the letter adds, further calling for an end to “amplifying lies about how action will hurt the economy” and “greenwashing oil, gas, and coal companies, aiding them in their attempts to dodge pollution safeguards and block meaningful change.”

The signatories urge everyone in the industry—especially agency heads, founders, and leadership teams—to take a stand against continuing to work with polluters, emphasizing that the climate emergency is already taking a toll.

“We won’t be able to reduce, reuse, recycle our way out of tomorrow’s catastrophe—because it is already happening today,” says the letter, which is open for new signatories through the end of the week. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen the devastating impacts of climate-related disasters, like record-breaking wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes. Bold action is needed, at all levels and segments of society. The time has come for our industry to do its part.”

Fires are devouring swaths of the Western United States, forcing evacuations and shutting down every national forest in California. On Sunday, Hurricane Ida, a “poster child for a climate change-driven disaster,” slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 storm, killing at least four people, leaving more than a million without power amid widespread destruction, and sparking calls for President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.

“At some point in the recent past, climate change was something that was happening in some distant future, and maybe of little concern to most people. Well, that distant future is now today—everyone will experience climate change as a series of horrific front-page photos and videos until they themselves are taking those photos and videos. It’s no longer some abstract threat,” letter leader Joe Cole toldCommon Dreams.

Cole is strategist working with Clean Creatives, a campaign supported by Fossil Free Media that pressures ad and PR agencies to drop fossil fuel accounts.

The letter comes as the New York Times is under fire for allowing fossil fuel industry advertising, thanks to a new campaign and reporting by climate journalist Emily Atkin in her newsletter HEATED.

As Atkin reported Monday:

[A] new activist campaign to pressure the Times to stop creating and running fossil fuel ads is launching today. Called Ads Not Fit to Print, the campaign argues that fossil fuel advertisements endanger Times readers’ health in the same way now-banned cigarette ads did—and likely, even more.

“What the Times is doing right now is shameful,” said Genevieve Guenther, whose group End Climate Silence is spearheading the campaign. “On one hand, they’re trying to seem like part of the reality-based community who acknowledges the climate crisis and wants to solve it. On the other, they’re doing everything they can to keep the fossil fuel economy going because it is one of the sources of their own power and they believe in it.”

Activists aren’t the only ones taking issue with this practice, either. In conversations with HEATED over the last week, several current and former Times newsroom employees expressed concerns about the paper’s practice of creating and running fossil fuel ads. Their concerns ranged from undermining the Times‘ own climate reporting, to harming Times readers’ health, to aiding industry attempts to mislead the public about the deadly effects of fossil fuels.

Cole highlighted energy giants’ contributions to planet-heating pollution and told Common Dreams that “these clients are represented by some of the most storied ad agencies in the world like BBDO, Edelman, Ogilvy, and WundermanThompson.”

“These ads go on to be featured in some of the most prominent real estate around the world, from billboards to the NYT,” he said. “Although the tobacco industry was and is responsible for a personal health crisis, the fossil fuel industry is killing the entire planet.”

Praising Times journalists’ work on the climate emergency, Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn tweeted that “the paper should stop doing them—and all of us—a disservice by continuing to make and run ads for fossil fuel corporations.”

In a statement about the letter Tuesday, Cole said that “any time our industry starts to change for the better, it is through a combination of outside and internal pressure. I believe in the power of young professionals in our industry—the leaders of tomorrow—to hasten the necessary transition away from fossil fuel clients.”

The strategist pointed to recent findings that July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded and asserted that “it’s no longer acceptable for agency executives to ignore the damage their work with fossil fuel clients is doing to the planet.”

He argued that “even a single contract with a client like BP, Shell, or Exxon can wipe out the impact of an agency’s sustainability pledge. If agencies are serious about not only protecting the future of their young staff, but recruiting them in the first place they need to begin by transitioning away from fossil fuel work and rejecting new contracts.”

“The people signing this letter truly are the leaders of tomorrow,” Cole added, “and if agencies want to remain relevant, and attractive places to work for top young talent, they need to end their work for the worst polluters on the planet.”

Originally published by JESSICA CORBETT on Common Dreams via Creative Commons

This post has been updated with additional comment from Joe Cole.

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