Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Say
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- Published on Sunday, 07 February 2016 22:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1218 .... February 8, 2016
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Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Say:
How the broad climate movement has failed us
James Jordan
It has been two months since the UN climate summit in Paris, aka COP 21. One might expect the kind of ebb and flow we often see in popular movements. Interest in climate issues, the cause of the day during the summit, might be expected to wane and move to the back burner of public discourse until another development pushes it forward again.
However, climate change is fundamentally different. It is going to get worse -- we will be getting slapped in the face with this one for a long, long time, even under the best scenarios. Only a few weeks after COP 21, the... world experienced a wave of floods and extreme weather exacerbated by global warming. In the U.S., there were record-setting floods along the Mississippi River. In South America, floods caused the evacuation of 180,000 persons. In Scotland, floods cut across class lines to threaten a historic castle neighboring the Queen's Balmoral residence, the swollen Dee river eating away at its foundation. Meanwhile, oil wars and drought continue to drive an immigration crisis in Syria and throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. The issue of climate is not the "struggle du jour"; it is going to be the main course for quite a while.
Shamefully, the broad, "mainstream" climate movement in the so-called "developed" world is woefully inadequate to address this concern. Current conditions call for the kind of real life strategies, analysis and resistance that the movement is not producing. Right now, the dominant character of the movement is actually holding us back, not pushing us forward. It trumpets ambiguous desires for sustainability, but is all too silent when it comes to meaningful demands.