A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

ways forward 339hold little appeal for the biggest polluting businesses. If it is carried outas it is today, then its environmentalist proponents have lost their battle.Either way, environmentalists are deceiving themselves if they thinkthat carbon trading is going to ‘jiu-jitsu’ ruling elites into serious actionon climate change. There are no detours around political organising.No Detours around PoliticsQ. At the talks you give to American audiences,you are often asked the question,‘What should I do?’A. Only by American audiences. I’m neverasked this in the Third World. When yougo to Turkey or Colombia or Brazil, theydon’t ask you ‘What should I do?’ Theytell you what they’re doing… These arepoor, oppressed people, living under horrendousconditions, and they would neverdream of asking you what they should do.It’s only in highly privileged cultures likeours that people ask this question. We haveevery option open to us, and have none ofthe problems that are faced by intellectualsin Turkey, or campesinos in Brazil… Butpeople [in the US] are trained to believethat there are easy answers, and it doesn’twork that way… You want a magic key,so you can go back to watching televisiontomorrow? It does not exist. Somehow thefact of enormous privilege and freedomcarries with it a sense of impotence, whichis a strange but striking phenomenon…There is no difficulty in finding and joininggroups that are working hard on issuesthat concern you. But that’s not the answerthat people want. The real questionpeople have, I think, is, ‘What can I do tobring about an end to these problems thatwill be quick and easy?’… But that’s notthe way things work. If you want to makechanges in the world, you’re going to haveto be there day after day doing the boring,straightforward work of getting a coupleof people interested in an issue, buildinga slightly better organisation, carrying outthe next move, experiencing frustration,and finally getting somewhere… That’show you get rid of slavery, that’s how youget women’s rights, that’s how you get thevote, that’s how you get protection forworking people. Every gain you can pointto came from that kind of effort. 44Noam Chomsky, 2005Indeed, no aspect of the discussion on global warming can be disentangledfrom debates about colonialism, racism, gender, exploitationand the democratic control of technology. What, for example, is tobe done about the fact that the world – and mainly the rich minority– uses the energy equivalent of 400 years of plant growth every yearthanks to being able to burn the ‘buried sunshine’ of fossil fuels? 45 Toswitch enough of the world’s energy production from fossil fuels tobiomass so as to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxidewithout cutting energy use would require more land than iscurrently used for all of the world’s crops. To switch enough energy