I think I would say that there is absolutely no way to reconcile an austerity agenda with climate action. Our political class needs to understand that the fight against austerity and the fight for climate action are the same fight.
The reason why nothing sticks to Trump – or very little sticks to Trump – is that he created this brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it.
If you look at the polling around climate change in this country before ‘Sandy’, that was kind of the low point in terms of Americans believing that climate change was real and that humans were causing it.
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don’t change course, if we don’t change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.
I can tell you Donald Trump’s products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America.
The growth in emissions is coming from the developing world. So if we are going to get out of this, it’s going to come out of a process of cooperation and collaboration. That’s why it really requires a paradigm shift.
Governments started negotiating towards emission reduction in 1990. That’s when the official negotiations started.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I’m Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties.
I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying, ‘This is the issue that beats all other issues,’ or, ‘Your issue doesn’t matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.’
There is a triple layer of jargon when writing about climate change. You have the scientists, who are very cautious now because of the amount of climate denial. Then you have the U.N. jargon – I had to carry around a glossary of terms. It was like an alphabet soup.
You’ve got the Trump water and Trump Steaks and Trump’s very so-called dodgy university. And so many of the towers, the Trump towers around the world, the Trump resorts around the world, those are not owned by the Trump Organization.
As I explored Trump’s inextricable relationship with his commercial brand, and its implications for the future of politics, I began to see why so many of the attacks on him have failed to stick – and how we can identify ways of resisting him that will be more effective.
Look at the structure of the Gates Foundation and this idea that, rather than trying to solve these huge global problems through institutions with some kind of democracy and transparency baked into them, we’re just going to outsource it to benevolent billionaires.
Maybe Trump himself will be voted out through impeachment, right?
Pages: 1 2
