This Changes Everything

X.16

“A threat to the Fraser and its headwaters is a threat to all who depend on its health. We will not allow our fish, animals, plants, people, and ways of life to be placed at risk…. We will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, or similar Tar Sands projects, to cross our lands, territories and watersheds, or the ocean migration routes of Fraser River salmon.” –Save the Fraser declaration, signed by more than 130 First Nations

V.42

“We were a party that had the environment and climate change in the center of our interest,” said Greece’s then-opposition leader Alexis Tsipras in an interview with Naomi Klein. “But after these years of depression in Greece, we forgot climate change.”

Image: Piazza Del Popolo/Flickr

VI.3-15

In 1965, The Nature Conservancy opened a Texas chapter that would seek to preserve the habitat of the endangered Attwater Prairie Chicken.

In 1999, they commissioned an oil and gas company to drill a well on a recently acquired preserve to increase revenues to TNC — directly adjacent to the bird’s range. Today, the gas drilling continues on the land; no Attawater Prairie Chickens remain there.

IV.11

Bill McKibben famously explained “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” in a 2012 issue of Rolling Stone: the internationally agreed-upon target of 2 degrees Celsius comes with a “carbon budget,” which scientists say is the maximum amount of carbon we can burn and still hope to prevent catastrophic climate change. But as reflected in the “proven reserves” already on their books, fossil fuel companies are currently planning to burn five times that amount.

II.39

When the rise of neoliberalism allowed corporations to outsource dirty industry and manufacturing to China and other low-wage countries, the result was a spike in global carbon emissions. There is “a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions,” says Swedish researcher Andreas Malm.

Photo: Global Panorama

II.25

In 1988, Time Magazine chose planet Earth as its “Man of the Year”. From Thomas Sancton’s cover story: “In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature—the soil, forest, sea—was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. …The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience.”

I.31

According to a 2012 study by sociologist Robert Brulle, right-wing organizations espousing climate change denial are now collectively raising $900 million per year. Most of that is untraceable “dark money” from conservative foundations.

Photo: Scanrail/Dreamstime.com

II.33

Since the fast-growing carbon pollution from shipping goods around the world is not attributed to individual countries, it is not covered by the UN climate negotiations. Yet shipping emissions are set to double or even triple by 2050, and shipping container traffic has grown by nearly 400% over the last two decades.

VII.21

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made vast investments in the fossil fuel industry, with holdings worth $1.2 billion in BP and ExxonMobil alone as of December 2013.

Photo: Sebastian Derungs/World Economic Forum

II.20

“Should you let a group of foolish lawyers, who put together something before they understood these issues, interfere with saving the planet?” –Economist Joseph Stiglitz, on international trade rules that can prevent governments from building local green energy industries

Photo: Abhisit Vejjajiva/Flickr

IV.11

“By placing the interests of workers and the poor at the forefront of strategies to combat climate change we can simultaneously halt climate change and address our jobs bloodbath,” says the One Million Climate Jobs coalition in South Africa.

III.5-7

Under Germany’s famous “energiewende” (energy transition), the renewable share of the country’s electricity has skyrocketed from 6% in 2000 to nearly 30% today. Far less well-known is the key role that public ownership has played in the process: to help accelerate the transition, hundreds of local communities have decided to take back control of once-privatized energy grids.

Photo: Andreas Didion/Flickr

VII.30

In 2006, Richard Branson made a global splash by pledging to invest $3 billion in green energy technologies over the next decade. Seven years later, he had managed to spend only a few hundred million. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions from Virgin Airlines’ expanding plane fleets had ballooned by about 40%.

Photo: Hardo Müller/Flickr

IX.22

This now-iconic image, depicting a Mi’kmaq mother and fracking protester in New Brunswick, captures the spirit of what has become known as “Blockadia” — a “roving transnational conflict zone” of nonviolent resistance to fossil fuels, one that “is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attepting to dig and drill,” writes Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything.

Photo: Ossie Michelin/APTN

II.12

In an effort to grow its wind and solar industries, Ontario attached “buy local” provisions to subsidies offered under its innovative, world-renowned renewable energy program. Although they had been crucial in attracting new green investments to the province, the requirements were promptly scrapped after the World Trade Organization ruled them illegal in 2013.

Intr.2

“I love that smell of the emissions.” – Sarah Palin in “Sarah Palin Rolls Out at Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Ride,” Fox News, May 29, 2011.

Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

V.54

Author Christian Parenti writes of the lasting influence of the 1970’s bestseller ‘The Limits to Growth’: On “the limits of natural ‘sinks,’ or the Earth’s ability to absorb pollution, the catastrophically bleak vision of Limits is playing out as totally correct. We may find new inputs—more oil or chromium—or invent substitutes, but we have not produced or discovered more natural sinks.The Earth’s capacity to absorb the filthy byproducts of global capitalism’s voracious metabolism is maxing out. That warning has always been the most powerful part of The Limits to Growth.”

Con.19

“The abolition of New World slavery depended in large measure on … the emergence of writers, speakers, and reformers … who were willing to condemn an institution that had been sanctioned for thousands of years and who also strove to make human society something more than an endless contest of greed and power.” – Historian David Brion Davis

Image: François-Auguste Biard/Assemlée Nationale

Intr.16

With increasing alarm, climate scientists and analysts with organizations such as the World Bank and the International Energy Agency have warned that the world is on track for a calamitous global temperature rise of 4-6 degrees Celsius. According to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 4 degrees of warming is “incompatible with any reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global community.”

Photo: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers