As weather wreaks climate change-fueled havoc around the world – most recently Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas – more individuals, organizations and governments are recognizing that the earth is, in fact, experiencing a true climate emergency. The destruction wrought by the hurricane came just weeks before the Sept. 20 Global Climate Strike, with worldwide protests demanding action to address climate change.
The Climate Mobilization was founded at the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City by Margaret Klein Saloman, a self-described climate psychologist, and Ezra Silk, with the mission of telling the truth about the climate emergency and the existential risk it poses to humanity and the natural world. The group has called for a World War II-level mobilization to convert the world economy off dependency on fossil fuels. There are now 18 nations and just under 1,000 cities worldwide (992) that have declared a climate emergency, including 29 in the U.S., representing 5 percent of the U.S. population.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Laura Berry, research and publications director with The Climate Mobilization. Here she talks about the changing landscape of climate awareness and activism and explains what, in her organization’s view, must be done immediately, to prevent climate catastrophe.
LAURA BERRY: We’ve been focusing on spreading this concept of climate emergency to get people on board with understanding that this is an emergency situation, that climate change is not another political problem or environmental problem that we can deal with through some incremental regulations, but is actually something that is going to fundamentally change how we go about our lives and so we have to take it head-on and mobilize and put an immense amount of resources into tackling the problem. What The Climate Mobilization is trying to do is shift away from the incrementalism that a lot of climate organizations and a lot of politicians who really do care about climate change, but don’t know what to do about it, shift away from that incrementalism and make people confront the problem that we can’t solve climate change with the same tools that we have, with the same sorts of approaches to policy that we’ve been using.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Where do you see TCM fitting into the current climate geography, with the Sunrise Movement and its Green New Deal, Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager’s effort called Fridays for Future?
LAURA BERRY: Absolutely. I mean, I think she said that she doesn’t want people to have hope; she wants them to be afraid, and that actually is something that TCM – the psychology of climate reality, of climate truth, is what we base a lot of our organizing and our policy work on, because we believe that it does actually take acknowledging that climate change is a fundamental threat to the way that all of our lives are, to really have a reason to take the kind of scale and scope of action that we need.
We talk a lot about the concept of shifting into emergency mode, which Margaret describes as the point at which an individual or an organization or a government realizes this is an emergency situation and we have to do all that it takes in that moment to deal with the problem that’s presenting itself, rather than say, “Oh, it’s not that bad” or “We can deal with it in 2050 rather than right now.”
So what TCM is trying to do, I think, alongside groups like Extinction Rebellion and like Sunrise Movement, is say climate policy and climate politics, globally and especially in the U.S. has been the same sort of business as usual and trying to be politically reasonable, I suppose, about climate change, when in reality this is the most unreasonable situation that humanity has faced, ever, and that we really have to start talking about what’s necessary instead of what’s considered politically feasible.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Laura Berry, how does TCM propose to do that? New Haven, Connecticut, where I live, just declared a climate emergency and the board of alders mandated a task force to figure out next steps. So what does TCM suggest that cities do after they’ve declared an emergency, so it doesn’t just sit on a shelf somewhere?
LAURA BERRY: I mean, that’s really what the power of the climate emergency declaration is. It’s a way for a local government to tell the truth about the climate emergency, acknowledge that what’s been done hasn’t been enough, and to help residents acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, to help them shift into emergency mode. It’s saying that we have to throw all the resources we have at our disposal to deal with the climate emergency that we face. It’s drawing a line in the sand where before, governments would recognize that climate change was an issue and use climate action plans or emissions targets to say we’re doing something. But a climate emergency declaration says, “No, this is serious. We’re going to start acting like this is the emergency that it is.”
What’s happening with New Haven with the convening of a task force to actually try to figure out, okay, how are we actually going to get to zero emissions by 2030? That is leaps and bounds beyond the vast majority of climate commitment or planning in the U.S., especially at the local level. And so I think you’re exactly right.
We recognize at TCM that the climate emergency declaration itself is incredibly valuable, but we had to also provide a framework for local organizers to start thinking about, okay, what comes after a climate emergency declaration? And we started doing some research and working with local organizers who had been campaigning and realizing that in a lot of places – even in the absence of federal or state climate action – local governments could utilize a lot of different legal and regulatory tools to start building what we call the mobilization, which really is the national World War II-scale mobilization of resources. What we’ve developed right now is we’re rolling out this new organizer tool kit to bring climate emergency campaigns to the next level.
We’ve come up with this post-declaration framework, which is called Ban, Plan and Expand. And actually what you’ve named is something that New Haven is doing is convene a centralized body, a government body, a new structure to actually run this climate mobilization program, to determine what sorts of things locally need to happen to get to the 2030 decarbonization deadline. That’s a key part of this Ban, Plan and Expand framework.
Learn more about The Climate Mobilization and its campaigns at theclimatemobilization.org.
