Hello There, GreenNewDealmaker!
It’s been a crazy week (month, year..) BUT we’ve got a new podcast episode and a new GOTV video (our first ever!) that we’re thrilled to share! First, an exciting quick update & celebration:
This week Apple selected #GenGND as a “New & Noteworthy” podcast!
AND—we’re now ranked #2 in Apple’s “Government” category!!
…Move over Plouffe and Schmidt—we’re coming for ya! Also, shout-out to our pals @ A Matter of Degrees—pretty cool to see two-climate pods in the top-5 of the Government rankings, here’s hoping it stays that way for a long time.
This week on the pod we take a deep dive into this question: why has it taken so long to act on climate change? Why did it fall to young people like AOC, the Sunrise Movement and the Climate Strikers to push older politicians, when we’ve known about the impending climate crisis for decades?
To help break this down, we invited our executive producer/mentor & “Podmother” Amy Westervelt to co-host the episode. (Drilled, one of Amy’s amazing podcasts on our home network Critical Frequency, takes a deep look into how the fossil fuel industry managed to stop climate action in its tracks through years of deceit and denial—if you haven’t yet listened, Amy’s got 5 seasons worth of fossil foolery ready for your earbuds!)
In this week’s GenGND, we talk about three big reasons why we failed to act on climate for so long:
Reason #1: Deceit and Denial… brought to you by Exxon
One of the main voices featured in the episode is renowned climate writer and activist Bill McKibben. Here’s a pretty striking line from Bill, reflecting on his work in the early days of climate writing and activism:
My mistake, and the mistake of a lot of people maybe was assuming that this debate was going to be carried on in good faith.
The theory being that we would win the argument. And then the powers that be would act. At a certain point, though, it became clear that we'd won the argument, we'd won the argument, but as it turned out, we were losing the fight because the fight wasn't about data and reason, the fight was what fights are always about: money and power.
The fossil fuel industry had a lot of both, and they managed to stymie early attempts like the Kyoto Protocol.
At this point it’s quite well documented (but always worth repeating) that oil companies had access to some of the best research in the world on climate change in the 80s, and they chose to cover it up, while making sure to build their deep sea oil rigs high enough to account for sea level rise…
Something that Amy filled us in on: in addition to straight-up denial, the fossil fuel industry used the ideas of “green consumerism” and personal responsibility to deflect the problem back at regular people… “no it’s not our fault it’s your fault!”
BP even made a handy Carbon Footprint Calculator to help you feel bad about yourself:
Mary Heglar has an evergreen piece about why personal choice is a terrible way to think about climate action “I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.”
Reason #2: Neo-liberalism, baby!
To break this wonky term down we spoke to legendary writer and activist, Naomi Klein:
What has been so tragic about the timing of the climate crisis is it hit us collectively at the worst possible moment in human history. So the biggest problem that we've had in, in rising to the challenge of climate change is the political and economic ideology that has dominated in the period that we have been talking about doing something and failing to do so.
This ideology can be summed up by Reagan’s line “the most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”… Or more succinctly by Gordon Gecko’s “Greed is good”… or perhaps most perfectly by this tweet we came across this week:
This obsession with the free market and aversion to Big Government meant that before the Green New Deal came along all the solutions put on the table to deal with the climate crisis were market based, involving carbon taxes or a special pollution trading market (‘cap and trade’). And, how many voters are motivated by the idea of a special tax or a “stock market for pollution”? It’s not exactly exciting stuff.
Reason #3: Bad Messaging
When climate emerged as a political issue, it became the purview of the environmental movement… which was not ideal. “Big Green” groups had become pretty corporate friendly and played an inside game in Washington while more radical environmentalists had been typecast as tree-hugging hippie ecoterrorists. Both of these groups tended to be VERY white and were supported largely by people from the “coastal elite” bubble.
So when environmentalists took to climate activism, they tended to talk about what Amy calls “charismatic megafauna” like polar bears and whales. Also lots of data and numbers, lots of rhetoric about “believing scientists” and “future generations.” This kind of communication may have worked for smaller-scale issues like the ozone layer and saving specific endangered species, but winning large-scale, societal transformation? Not gonna cut it!
FOR MUCH MORE DETAIL ON ALL THIS, GO LISTEN TO EPISODE 4 NOW!
We loving hearing about how you’re enjoying #GenGND—and this week our pal Jamie Henn, one of the founders of 350.org—who just started an amazing and important organization called Fossil Free Media—gave us a great idea for how to consume the pod AND max out on our exercise…
Nice going, Jamie!! And thanks for tuning in!
BTW, Fossil Free Media was generous enough to support & co-produce our new GOTV video—Which has been creating quite a bit of buzz…
Please watch and share the story of the 48217 neighborhood of SW Detroit, as told by environmental justice activist and community organizer Theresa Landrum (we’ll hear A LOT more from Theresa—and other local activists in next week’s podcast episode…So, please make sure you’re subscribed for that!)
Look out for more #GenGND GOTV videos over these final few weeks before the election!
So, what’s YOUR voting plan?
Finally, here’s our Green New Reading (& listening) List for this week…
Indigenous People’s Day was Monday—and we want to spotlight a few pieces of writing that we learned from, while also recognizing that we have a long way to go in acknowledging, understanding, and elevating the thousands of years of collective global Indigenous wisdom which has persevered through genocide, slavery, colonialism, and the destructive forces of capitalism. These invaluable indigenous traditions, of land and forest management for example, hold many of the keys to solving and adapting to our climate crisis.
THE LANDBACK MANIFESTO, by NDN Collective
ACKNOWLEDGING INDIGENOUS LAND IS THE FIRST STEP IN TAKING BETTER CARE OF IT, by Nikoosh Carlo in GRIST
HOW INDIGENOUS FILMMAKERS ARE SHAPING THE FUTURE OF CINEMA, by Julian Brave Noisecat in Aperture
If you missed Rebecca Nagle (host of the must-listen THIS LAND podcast…seriously—you MUST listen to it..) on Amy and Mary’s HOT TAKE pod a few weeks ago, now would be a good time to go back and give that episode a listen…
THERE’S NO CLIMATE JUSTICE WITHOUT INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY, Hot Take with Amy Westervelt and Mary Heglar, featuring Rebecca Nagle
This #GenGND newsletter was written by Sam Eilertsen, with editing by Nate Birnbaum.