Changing the Social Climate (AlterNet)

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Changing the Social Climate

By Catherine Lerza, Tides Foundation. Posted April 21, 2007.



Prominent African-American environmentalist Michael Gelobter discusses how global warming affects economic justice, the future of the progressive movement and whether your child walks to school.

The pressing need to do something about dramatic climate change has reached a critical mass across the globe and across the country. And it is an issue that has also reached into every aspect of our lives.

Global warming is not simply an environmental issue. It is an economic issue, a social justice issue, a lifestyle issue. It's about race, class and democratic participation. It's about globalization and global democracy. It's about national security and global security.

Catherine Lerza, a writer, editor and a senior philanthropic advisor at the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation interviewed Michael Gelobter, the executive director of Redefining Progress, about how we can effectively enact positive change around this growing crisis. Redefining Progress is one of the nation's leading policy institutes dedicated to developing solutions that help people, protect the environment and grow the economy.

What world do we want to live in?

Lerza: Why do you think it took so long for the U.S. public and mainstream politicians to acknowledge the reality of climate change? And moving ahead, what do you suggest as effective strategies to capture the public's imagination and mobilize them to support climate stabilization initiatives?

Gelobter: Well, to speak in broad terms, we tend to be complainers within the progressive community. We are good at saying what is wrong. But there is a positive story behind addressing the problem of global warming and moving towards climate stabilization. We really have to talk about the kind of world we will be living in when we start addressing climate change.

For example, "peak oil" was a hot topic for some time -- the idea that the worldwide rate of oil production will eventually begin a terminal decline. And that is a negative story, right? "We're going to run out of oil."

But that can be a positive story. Why can't we talk about the benefits of a world where we're not using oil? About spending less of our money on oil and more of our money on education, on our children, or on recreation? About safer vehicles and shorter commute times?

The leadership act for the movement is in projecting a positive future. It is about getting out of our silos and talking about the world we want to live in.
...(snip)...

The social climate

Lerza: The impacts of global warming highlight social and racial inequalities around the world. It certainly affects poor communities differently. We saw that clearly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Could you talk about these different impacts of climate change depending on geography, race and class?

Gelobter: Communities of color and low-income communities in this country clearly feel the impact of climate change and have been feeling that impact for over 20 years.

My organization, Redefining Progress, has conducted a number of studies on Latinos and climate change and African-Americans and climate change. Different communities bear quite a different vulnerability to the risks of global warming. Six years ago, we already had figured out that the greatest victims of climate change were the lower-income communities and communities of color. You can see it in the disparity in heat deaths in St. Louis. You can see there's an impact on agricultural communities and on border communities and indigenous communities, particularly in the Arctic.

We have to address issues of justice: people have a right to health and to a secure place to live. They have this right whether they're black, or white, or whatever.

Even before Katrina hit, New Orleans was an extremely clear case of what's happening all over the country. People of color and from low-income communities are spending almost twice as much of their income than white people on energy -- both for gasoline, because they have to commute farther and because they live in substandard housing, which requires less efficient and more expensive heating.

At the same time, the primary policies being considered to control greenhouse gasses were economically regressive and could put communities of color at even greater risk. Many of these policies represent what we call "paying the pusher for the cure." That is, paying off big polluters to take actions that are actually quite cheap for them. After all, why should we pay coal companies to sell less coal? We can give them subsidies to help them and their workers transition, but at the end of the day we want to break the oil addiction. And we want to do it in a way that doesn't make our most heavily impacted communities worse off.

So there was a collision course: The greatest victims of climate change were potentially the greatest victims of climate policy. But we can change this collision course into a collaboration for justice and the environment.

Justice is central at a global level as well. Western countries have appropriated the lion's share of the atmosphere as a dumping ground for their energy waste. What are newcomers to industrialization supposed to do? If we just ratchet down fossil fuels use without offering any alternatives, then the poor of the world will have a major road to development blocked and no way out. That's a recipe for even greater economic and social disaster. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/50402/?page=1