OMNI
CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS #218, February 17, 2025. Compiled by Dick Bennett
Green New Deal. Kate Aronoff. Overheated.
Greenpeace
Inside
Climate News
GREEN
NEW DEAL
Kate
Aronoff. Overheated: How Capitalism
Broke the Planet—and How We Fight Back.
Bold Type Books, 2021.
[Aronoff reflects
the long tradition of Utopian thought and practice. For utopianism means the ability to imagine
a better world, without which we can’t get started,--such as with the New
Deal of the 1930s. –D]
“Decarbonizing the
global economy and adapting to the climate changed century ahead will be the
single hardest and most important thing our species has ever done.* It’s
impossible without a big, democratic government and massive state investment,
as well as the dismantling of the most powerful industry that has ever
existed. That, in turn, seems dangerously
far off unless some critical mass of people see the Green New Deal as
their path to a better life and manage to overcome the rank [class] and racist
divide-and-conquer politics that have been so successful at stopping efforts to
turn these United States into a more perfect union, and this planet into a
fairer place. . . .
A Green
New Deal isn’t just about subbing out one form
or energy for another as all else states equal.
It means rooting out the deep power imbalances that have made the fossil
fuel economy possible and will keep toxic and deadly extraction humming along
if they remain in place. It means writing
a new social contract in its place that ensures people are as free as money to
move around the places where they were born and be welcomed with open arms
where they weren’t. It’s about building
a genuinely sustainable United States….Should all that succeed, the resulting
society will also be a happier one,” where “people can dream about abundant,
joyful futures and have the tools to turn those dreams into reality” (358-59). [Aronoff
discusses the UN World Happiness Report 2019 on p. 350.] [*As you know, I add
nuclear weapons and war for the two hardest and most important things
for our species to do. –D]
|
Inside
Climate News (ICN) is increasingly an
excellent source of current climate information, as it increasingly
foregrounds the climate origin of the increasingly extreme weather. I count 17 directly or indirectly climate
stories reported in the ICN Weekly of 12-15-24. <newsletters@insideclimatenews.org> The ICN Weekly of 1-11-25 is
similar. The intro. focuses on the
present LA fires: Trump blaming governor
Newsom, Trump’s failure to mention the
impact of climate change, and “the information ecosystem… expected to be
further tested during climate-fueled disasters as social media platforms like
Facebook roll back fact-checking programs.”
Then it gives 11 abstracts with five reports of events
traceable directly to climate change, ending with “Climate Trauma Is a Thing. Here’s What the Research Reveals.” Climate is “its own beast that we now want to study on
its own and deserves its own recognition, awareness and characterization.”