103.
CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #103 NOVEMBER 28, 2022
Resisting
and Adapting to Climate Calamity
Tom
Athanasiou. Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal.
Peter Friederici. Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of
Radical Hope.
Robert Gottlieb. Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet.
Green New Deal
I am reviewing writings I had marked to return to. One is “Bernie’s Secret Weapon: Only a Global Green New Deal Can Succeed” by Tom
Athanasiou (The Nation, September 30,
2019). The article is three years old, but
even more relevant today, for crisis has become emergency, and the public
remains apathetic.
The “10-year, $16.3 trillion price tag” reflects the “hard
scientific truth that steep emissions cuts are essential” and rich nations must
support “emissions reductions in poorer countries,” if “humanity is to
stabilize the global climate system.”
“Sanders is the first major [North] American political figure to face
the reality and scale of this
necessity.” The reality is that “we
must weigh the cost of action against the cost of inaction, which would be very
great—far, far higher than $16.3 trillion” (26).
A parallel essay in the same number of the magazine
examines how much it will cost if we do not create such a global GND: Joshua Holland. “Think the Green
New Deal is Pricey?” Again, the
cost is going up.
This is hopeful in the sense of Thomas Hardy’s line in “In
Tenebris II”: “If way to the Better there be/It exacts a full look at the
Worst.” Informed by science (IPCC), Bernie understands the magnitude of the
emergency and the inadequacy of partial or magic bullet incremental “solutions”
to the global consequences of the climate catastrophe. Dick
Peter Friederici. Beyond Climate Breakdown: Envisioning New Stories of
Radical Hope. Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore. MIT, 2022.
200 pp.
The
importance of telling new climate stories—stories that center the persistence
of life itself, that embrace comedy and radical hope.
“How dare you?” asked
teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations in 2019. How dare
the world's leaders fiddle around the edges when the world is on fire? Why is
society unable to grasp the enormity of climate change? In Beyond
Climate Breakdown, Peter Friederici writes that the answer must come in the
form of a story, and that our miscomprehension of the climate crisis comes
about because we have been telling the
wrong stories. These stories are pervasive; they come from long narrative
traditions, sanctioned by capitalism, Hollywood, and social media, and they
revolve around a myth: that the nation exists primarily as a setting for a
certain kind of economic activity.
Stories are how we make
sense of the world and our place in it. The story that “the economy” takes
priority over everything else may seem foreordained, but, Friederici explains,
actually reflect choices made by specific people out of self-interest. So we need new stories—stories that center the
persistence of life, rather than of capitalism, stories that embrace
contradiction and complexity. We can create new stories based on comedy and
radical hope. Comedy never says no; hope sprouts like a flower in cracked
concrete. These attitudes require a new way of thinking—an adaptive attitude
toward life that slips the narrow yoke of definition.
Robert Gottlieb. Care-Centered
Politics: From
the Home to the Planet. MIT, 2022.
Why
a care economy and care-centered politics can influence and reorient such
issues as health, the environment, climate, race, inequality, gender, and
immigration.
This agenda-setting book
presents a framework for creating a more just and equitable care-centered
world. Climate change, pandemic events, systemic racism, and deep inequalities
have all underscored the centrality of care in our lives. Yet care work is, for
the most part, undervalued and exploited. In this book, Robert Gottlieb
examines how a care economy and care politics can influence and remake health,
climate, and environmental policy, as well as the institutions and practices of
daily life. He shows how, through this care-centered politics, we can build an
ethics of care and a society of cooperation, sharing, and solidarity.
Arguing that care is a form
of labor, Gottlieb expands the ways we think about home care, child care, elder
care, and other care relationships. He links them to the Green New Deal, Medicare for All,
immigration, and the militarization of daily life. He also provides perspective
on the events of 2020 and 2021 (including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate
change, and movements calling attention to racism and inequality) as they
relate to a care politics. Care, says Gottlieb, must be universal—whether
healthcare for all, care for the earth, care at work, or care for the
household, shared equally by men and women. Care-centered politics is about
strategic and structural reforms that imply radical and revolutionary change.
Gottlieb offers a practical, mindful, yet also utopian, politics of daily life.
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