It's Always the Top Story

It was supposed to be the Obama story of the day, but something else came up. PE Obama and VPE Joe Biden met with Al Gore, before Gore travels to the climate talks in Poland, and before Obama announces his Cabinet appointments to Energy and Environmental Protection.

In the brief press meet afterwards, Obama reinterated his support for making the Climate Crisis an urgent priority. “"All three of us are in agreement that the time for delay is over, the time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way,” Mr. Obama said. “That is what I intend my administration to do.”

But nobody paid much attention to this, because something else came up. And something else always does. That's a major problem for confronting this crisis with the breadth and depth and intensity it requires. Speaking of Mr. Obama, pre-eminent U.S. Climate Crisis scientist (and second only to Gore as the chief target of the Climate Crisis deniers) James Hansen wrote recently, "The challenge he faces is unprecedented. I refer not to the inherited economic morass, as threatening as it is. The human toll due to past failures and excesses may prove to be great, yet economic recessions, even depressions, come and go. Now our planet itself is in peril. Not simply the Earth, but the fate of all its species, including humanity. The situation calls not for hand-wringing, but rather informed action."

That puts it in perspective, but it is this perspective that is most difficult to attain and hold. It's too big, too outside everyday life, everyday issues, and the kinds of things we're used to chattering with our media enablers. So there's always something else.

Perhaps the good news is that there are other reasons for doing many of the things we need to do to address the Climate Crisis--reasons and actions perhaps easier to grasp and build support for. Like building a green economy, including fuel-efficient and alternative fuel vehicles, a more efficient and greener electrical grid. Or smaller scale changes that add up--weatherizing, redesigning, replacing wasteful technologies. All of these are already proposed are parts of the Obama economic recovery.

Al Gore endorsed this approach in an oped last month: "Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis. "

These efforts will change more than the economy. They may begin the kind of changes we need to make to respond to what's here as well as what's coming. Our communities as well as our nation will change. That's inevitable. But now we have a chance to change constructively instead of reacting with fear.

Part of the economic change we need--addressing the needs of the poor and middle class as well as the desires of the rich--must also be part of how we address the Climate Crisis and related environmental issues.

One of those calling for change on this basis is Oakland, CA activist and lawyer Van Jones. I've been meaning to blog on this interview in Sentient Times since it came out in August, but...there was always something else. In this interview--worth reading in its entirety--Jones identifies the social and racial aspect of the problem, as what he calls "eco-apartheid":

“Eco-apartheid” is a situation in which you have ecological haves and have-nots. In other words, if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you visit Marin County, you’ll find hybrid vehicles, solar panels, organic food, organic everything. If you then get in your car and drive twenty minutes, you’ll be in west Oakland, where people are literally choking on the fumes of the last century’s pollution-based technologies. That’s eco-apartheid, and it’s morally wrong, because we should deliver clean jobs and health benefits not just to the wealthy, but also to the people who need them most. Eco-apartheid doesn’t work on a practical level either, because you can’t have a sustainable economy when only 20 percent of the people can afford to pay for hybrids, solar panels, and organic cuisine, while the other 80 percent are still driving pollution-based vehicles to the same pollution-based jobs and struggling to make purchases at Wal-Mart."

Other activists--particularly Native American activists, pointing to the preponderance of toxic waste dumps and other dangerous sites on tribal lands--have long raised the issues of environmental justice. But Jones is adding a very practical addenda, another spin to Obama's contention that we need a society where the wealth is more evenly distributed: without that, we won't get to a greener country, or to adequately addressing the Climate Crisis:

"For the sustainable economy to be successful, it has to be a full-participation economy. Right now it is a niche economy, a lifestyle economy... It is easy for the eco-elites in Massachusetts or northern California to wrap themselves in the trappings of sustainability and think that the problem has been solved, but the people who clean their houses are going back to neighborhoods that may be fifty years in the past in terms of their ecological sustainability. As we move toward a sustainable economy, if we do not take care to minimize the pain and maximize the gain for the poor, they will join forces with the polluters to derail the green revolution..."

All this is only part of what needs to be done. Bill McKibben outlines some other general areas, such as some kind of carbon tax, and American support--American leadership-- for international Climate Crisis measures. (McKibben argues elsewhere that the solution Tom Friedman suggests in his latest best seller won't work--that America leads by the example of its own green economy which other nations will emulate-- because there just isn't time for it to work. Everybody has to get at this now or it will be too late.)

We can make progress addressing the Climate Crisis incrementally by a kind of "plus" philosophy: i.e. the green economy is good for the economy, for the middle class, for energy independence, plus it helps save the planet. Or as Obama said Tuesday: “We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country, to re-power America, to redesign how we use energy, to think about how we are increasing efficiency, to make our economy stronger, make us more safe, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and make us competitive for decades to come, even as we are saving the planet.”

We can make progress saving the planet by doing something else. But we're also going to have to take actions because they address the Climate Crisis that confronts the world, and that inevitably means taking actions with the world.

All of us will be forced to confront Climate Crisis realities sooner or later. And when that time comes, we will be talking about nothing else. Way before then we'd best understand that local CC problems have global causes. The planet: it's always the top story.