Climate movement broadening and building – new hope for the world

In a few short centuries, the carbon-based fuels of the industrial breakthrough have come to threaten the entirety of a civilization they made possible. In the People’s Climate March is the suggestion that civilization might rise to the challenge, perhaps in time to avert total catastrophe. After the march, the four-letter word I heard most was: hope.

Why you should be hopeful about the climate movement Grist, By Todd Gitlin Cross-posted from Tom Dispatch 3 Oct 14, Less than two weeks have passed and yet it isn’t too early to say it: The People’s Climate March changed the social map — many maps, in fact, since hundreds of smaller marches took place in 162 countries. That march in New York City, spectacular as it may have been with its 400,000 participants, joyous as it was, moving as it was (slow-moving, actually, since it filled more than a mile’s worth of wide avenues and countless side streets), was no simple spectacle for a day. It represented the upwelling of something that matters so much more: a genuine global climate movement………

There is today a climate movement as there was a civil rights movement and an anti-war movement and a women’s liberation movement and a gay rights movement — each of them much more than its component actions, moments, slogans, proposals, names, projects, issues, demands (or, as we say today, having grown more polite, “asks”); each of them a culture, or an intertwined set of cultures; each of them a political force in the broadest as well as the narrowest sense; each generating the wildest hopes and deepest disappointments. Climate change is now one of them: a burgeoning social fact.

The extraordinary range, age, and diversity exhibited in the People’s Climate March — race, class, sex, you name it, and if you were there, you saw it — changes the game. The phalanxes of unions, indigenous and religious groups, and all manner of local activists in New York formed an extraordinary mélange. There were hundreds and hundreds of grassroots groups on the move — or forced to stand still for hours on end, waiting for the immense throng, hemmed in by police barricades, to find room to walk, let alone march. At least in the area that I could survey — I was marching with the Divest Harvard group, alongside Mothers Out Front …

There is a social movement when some critical mass of people feel that it exists and act as if they belong to it. They begin to sense a shared culture, with its own heroes, villains, symbols, slogans, and chants. Their moods rise and fall with its fate. They take pleasure in each others’ company. They look forward to each rendezvous. And people on every side — the friendly, the indifferent, as well as the hostile — all take note of it as well and feel something about it; they take sides; they factor it into their calculations; they strive to bolster or obstruct or channel it. It moves into their mental space.

The climate movement is, of course, plural, a bundle of tendencies. There are those who emphasize climate justice — “fairness, equity, and ecological rootedness” in one formulation — and those who don’t. Politico’s headline-writer called 350.organd other march co-sponsors “rowdy greens,” to distinguish them from old-line Washington-based environmental groups. To my mind, they are not so much rowdy as decentralized on principle, which means that the range of approaches and styles is striking. This is a feature characteristic of all the great social movements of our time.

Unities and diversities

Degrees of militancy also vary — again, this goes with the territory of mass movements. ………

What policies and terminology will best underscore the truths that carbon-based energy is scarcely “cheap” and that it exacts a host of planet-imperiling social and economic costs remains in dispute. There’s a big push for “carbon pricing” from the World Bank, for instance. What’s meant is a mixture of taxes, cap-and-trade policies, and internal pricing proposals, all based on the principle that once the actual costs of carbon are factored into policy calculations, it will become pricier and renewable energy less so……..

But don’t forget this: The movement has arrived. It’s a fact. And as the climate-change crisis mounts and powerful institutions default, it needs to grow if we have any hope of keeping in the ground the lion’s share of the carbon reserves already known to lie there. (Eighty percent of them is the figure usually cited.)…..