August 21 2019,
10:46 a.m.
DEAR MEMBERS OF THE DNC:
Your meeting in San Francisco
this weekend takes place against a backdrop that is literally on fire. You are
gathering one month after the hottest month ever recorded in
human history. You are meeting on the same week that smoke from a record number
of wildfires in the Amazon rainforest turned day
into night in the Brazilian megapolis of São Paulo. And you are
meeting just days after Iceland’s prime minister led her country in its
first funeral
service for a major glacier lost to climate change.
This is the terrifying context
in which you will vote on a series of
resolutions to determine whether the presidential primaries will include a
dedicated debate about the climate emergency. Not the already scheduled climate
“forum” or climate “town hall,” which will surely be fascinating for those who
seek them out — but a formal televised debate among the top candidates vying to
lead your party and the country.
I am writing to add my voice
to the hundreds of thousands of others who
have called on you to use your power to turn that debate into a reality.
Many of
you are already on board, including the chairs of several state parties, but
you are up against some powerful opponents. Let’s take on their two main
counterarguments in turn.
First, you will hear that the
rules on debates are already set. And, as DNC Chair Tom Perez has declared,
the party “will not be holding entire debates on a single issue area.” But
here’s the thing: Having a habitable Earth is not a “single issue”; it is the
single precondition for every other issue’s existence. Humbling as it may be,
our shared climate is the frame inside which all of our lives, causes, and
struggles unfold.
More immediately, climate
breakdown is already pouring fuel on every evil that humans are capable of
conjuring, from deadly wars to femicide
to unmasked white supremacy and colonialism. Indeed, President Donald Trump is
currently throwing a tantrum because
he is being denied what he perceives as the United States’s manifest destiny to
purchase the Indigenous-governed territory of Greenland, which has become
increasingly valuable because of the wealth made accessible by melting ice. In
short, there is nothing singular about planetary breakdown — it encompasses,
quite literally, everything.
Other members of the DNC will
argue that the climate debate must be shut down because if you give in to
this wave of
pressure, spearheaded by the Sunrise Movement, it will open up the floodgates
for every progressive constituency demanding a dedicated debate of their own.
In truth, that will
probably happen. And in retrospect, it probably would have served the country
better to have a series of issue-based debates, rather than the incoherent
free-for-alls we’ve been treated to so far. But the political and bureaucratic
hassles you will face should you greenlight a climate debate need to be weighed
against something far more important: the fact that, by breaking your own
rules, you have a critical chance to model what it means to treat
climate breakdown like a true emergency, which is precisely what the
next administration needs to do if our species is going to have a fighting
chance. And when you think about it (and I hope you do), that is a pretty
fearsome responsibility.
Here is why setting an
emergency tone at this crossroads is so important. Imagine that the party does
absolutely everything right between now and November 2020. It elects a beloved
candidate to lead the party with a bold and positive platform; that candidate goes
on to defeat Trump in the general election; other galvanizing candidates
succeed in taking the Senate and keeping the House for your party. Even in that
long-shot, best-case scenario, a new administration would come to power with
the climate clock so close to midnight that it will need to have earned an
overwhelming democratic mandate to leap into transformative action on day one.
The timeline we face is
nonnegotiable. According to the fateful report
issued by the International Panel on Climate Change last October, if humanity
is to stand a fighting chance of keeping warming below catastrophic levels,
global emissions need to be slashed in half in the decade that follows a new
U.S. administration taking office. Not 10 years to agree on a plan or 10 years
to get started on the plan. It will have 10 years to get the job done.
According to the IPCC report,
there is no historical precedent for change of that speed and scale, though it
is technically possible. Some pathways are much more democratic than others.
Some are much fairer than others — to workers, migrants, and the front-line
communities that have already been forced to bear the toxic burden of our
collective addiction to fossil fuels. There are big choices to be made about
what path to take, and they must to be explained and debated before millions of
Americans.
But let’s be clear about one
thing: There is no pathway that stands a chance of cutting emissions in time
that does not begin with treating the climate crisis like a true emergency.
That has little to do with the words we use — all kinds of governments, from
local to national, are declaring “climate emergencies” and then continuing on
pretty much as before. Several of the candidates running for president have
talked about the “climate emergency” — but it barely earns more than a passing
mention in their stump speeches.
What matters is that we act like we’re
in an emergency. Because it is only during true emergencies that we discover
what we are capable of. During emergencies, we stop all procrastination and
delay. We no longer do things just because that’s the way they have always been
done — instead, we suspend business as usual and do whatever it takes to get
the job done.
Which brings us to your
deliberations this week: A very good place to show the country what
this actually looks like is to vote to have a climate debate, precedents and
procedures be damned.
There will be objections and
they will be legitimate. The climate crisis is not the only emergency we face,
and many Americans are in the grips of multiple existential emergencies at
once. The Trump administration’s brutality against migrants is a full-blown
emergency. Mass incarceration and police violence against African Americans is
a five-alarm fire. Attacks on women’s rights and bodies are an emergency.
Economic inequality is an emergency. Trump himself is a rolling emergency. All
of that is true and more.
It does not help the case for
this debate that much of the mainstream climate movement has done a poor job of
making clear links between the ways that the wealthiest and most powerful
interests in our economy are assaulting the earth, assaulting democracy, and
assaulting the most vulnerable among us all at the same time and to serve the
same profitable goals.
The reasons behind these
failures to connect are many. There’s the blinding whiteness of too much of the
climate movement. There’s the fact that dependence on philanthropic dollars has
fostered an atmosphere of scarcity and competition between movements that
should, by all rights, be working in common cause. There’s the long historical
tail of the Red Scare, which has made a great many “progressives” unwilling to
align themselves with a coherent left-wing worldview that would make these
connections legible. All of these forces have succeeded in divided interlocking
struggles into safe, “single-issue” silos, built to contain and restrain us.
Thanks to the climate justice
movement and the momentum
for a Green New Deal, awareness is growing about the ways that our crises
overlap and intersect, which is why the calls for a climate debate have been
endorse by diverse groups including the NAACP, United We Dream, Fight for $15,
and more. But we have a long way to go before we can honestly say that we have
built a truly intersectional climate movement.
None of this, however,
absolves you of the historic responsibility you carry as you meet to set key
rules for the Democratic Party this week. If anything, it heightens your
responsibility because you have the power not only to approve a defining
climate debate, but to challenge the candidates and moderators to craft the
discussion so that it spans the full spectrum of issues involved in both
climate breakdown and potential climate solutions. As 17-year-old climate
justice organizer Xiye Bastida tweeted to
your chair recently: The climate crisis “encompasses economic, health,
ecological, racial, labor, energy, GENERATIONAL, and many more issues.” It’s
only “single issue” if you allow it to be.
As you search your consciences
to decide how to vote, it is worth remembering that 16-year-old Greta Thunberg
is currently on a harrowingly small sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic,
making her way to New York’s harbor. This week marks exactly one year since she
began her “school strike for climate,” an example that has inspired a movement
of young people that now spans the globe. In March, an estimated 1.6
million students joined the climate strike (and on the week of September
20, adults worldwide have been asked to
join).
I am betting that most of you
have appreciated Greta’s speeches over the last few months; many of you
probably shared them on social media. But Greta has been very clear that she
knows her actions — whether refusing to go to school or refusing to fly — are
not going to lower emissions at anything like the speed or scale required.
Rather, she is trying to show you what emergency action looks like. And that
begins with refusing to behave like everything is normal when the house is on
fire.
For Greta, that has meant
breaking the rules of what it means to be a child and going on strike from
school. For you, this weekend, it should mean setting aside the rulebook and
endorsing a climate debate, one thoughtfully designed to hold within it the many
intersecting emergencies roiling our world. Making that choice would not solve
the climate crisis. But it would send a powerful signal to the country and the
world that we are in extraordinary times calling for truly extraordinary
measures.
And that’s a very big deal.
Because as Greta says,
“We cannot solve an emergency without treating it like an emergency.”
Sincerely,
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein’s book “On
Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal” will be published in
September by Simon & Schuster. On September 9, she will appear with Greta
Thunberg at an event hosted
by The Intercept.
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