OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #204, NOVEMBER 11, 2024.

 

 

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #204, NOVEMBER 11, 2024.  Compiled by Dick Bennett

Pandemics, Population Growth, Capitalism, Green New Deal, Doppelgangers

Andreas Malm.  Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency.
Naomi Klein, A Planet to Win and Doppelganger.

ANDREAS MALM, CONVERGENCE: DON’T FORGET PANDEMICS
A decade ago, I named my blog War and Warming, but I have added crises:   and pandemics, population growth, fascism.   Andreas Malm in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020) reminds us that pandemics arise from the increasing human activities throughout the planet.   Best known, of course, is the rising temperature from humans burning fossil fuels.    Less known is the increasing spillover of climate-related pathogens from human growth and development (not Chinese labs).   Excellent book.    -D

Dick’s Summary of Naomi Klein’s Foreword to Aronoff et al., A Planet to Win, ix-xiii (2019), a radical GND vision for the future (and another outstanding book). 
I.  In 2018 Pelosi dismissed the GND as a “Green Dream.”  Green dreamers agreed, saying rapid and radical planetary climatic changes threatening catastrophic barbarism required “big dreams” in response.
II. Earlier eruptions of utopian imagination/”moments of deep progressive transformation”/dreaming big are the Paris Commune, Democrats’ New Deal, MLK’s civil rights movement.   In the US, they were times when people united against the injustice of “neoliberalism’s grip.”
III.  But the US environmental movement atrophied, prevented or unable to “tell the truth about the depth of systemic change required,” sidetracked and derailed by trivial goals.
IV.  (p. xii-xiii).  Fortunately thanks to the radical GND, that “era of pseudo change is definitely over.” “The GND has a long way to go before it constitutes an actual plan to get to zero emissions while battling rampant economic inequality and systemic racial and gender exclusions,” but the “bold dreams” described in this book have existed long before 2018; in the IPCC of the 1990s for example and among people throughout the world.  The climate crisis is an opportunity “to build an altogether fairer, more leisurely, and more democratic world.“   The GND’s dream of the future “is not just better than ecological collapse, but a whole lot better than the barbaric ways our system treats human and nonhuman life right now.”   Only the leadership has been missing. 

[I wrote the preceding note prior to starting Klein’s latest book, which is continuous from her preceding books, adding the overwhelming difficulties in advancing GND dreams, but is a radical departure in technique. Entitled Doppelganger, it’s proving to be an engrossing, original, multilayered psychological novel, autobiography, biography (of Naomi Wolf), and, continuing her earlier work, political analysis and polemic.]