Climate Change Activism

Thursday, January 22, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

In our last meeting, McKenzie Funk provided several disturbing examples of businesses that will profit from the misery of climate change, but he avoided making any conclusions. In our next meeting, we will hear from Naomi Klein, who concludes that capitalism is fundamentally incapable of solving climate change. She recasts climate change as yet another example of social inequality. Here is a quote from her book, This Changes Everything:

For a long time, environmentalist spoke of climate change as a great equalizer, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. It was supposed to bring us together. Yet all signs are that it is doing precisely the opposite, stratifying us further into a society of haves and have-nots, divided between those whose wealth offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather, at least for now, and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states.

Klein not only attacks capitalism, but also the billionaires and scientists who are proposing technical alternatives to stalled efforts to reduced carbon emissions. She rails against these "self-appoint saviors" in this 2014 pep-talk to other climate change activist.

As a bonus, here is a Naomi Klein 2010 TED Talk which places climate change in the broader context of risky behavior. The women in our discussion group will be please to discover who she blames.

-------------------------------- Update 1/22/15 ----------------------

Here are the links to the websites and videos shown during the meeting:

1) Virgin Earth Challenge, Richard Branson's $25M prize for a technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

2) Video on why Naomi Klein disagrees with James Hansen on nuclear power.

3) Video on Naomi Klein being interviewed by Bill Moyers