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.