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.]