A Statement on the Climate Crisis by Green Party Elders – May 26, 2020

We remember when the world had twice as many animals and half as many people as it does in 2020. When we were young there was 50% more forest, the Arctic Sea Ice was bigger and made of older ice, and much of the winter rains we see today came as snow in our northern communities. We remember the post–WWII prosperity and how widely it was shared, when democracy seemed ascendant, when the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Wilderness, Clean Air and Clean Water acts all passed within a few years.  We remember the corporate and right-wing blowback that, since 1973, has tried to return us to a robber-baron-like patriarchy and oligarchy, to a racist and violent past where the rich could pollute for profit with impudence and America was all about corporate empires.

We remember a time before “global warming” was a catchphrase, but we also understand that the climate crisis didn’t happen overnight.  It’s been exacerbated by greed and corruption in high places, but the roots go far deeper. When we look for those roots we realize that climate change is only one symptom of our culture’s ecocidal disruption of natural systems.  That disruption owes its power to our unquestioned faith in “growth-as-progress,” to our anthropocentric belief that Nature is simply “resources” for our use, to our patriarchal attitudes of dominance and control, and to the hyper-industrialism and population overshoot we’re experiencing as a result.

We Green Elders have not only seen the climate crisis developing over time but we see it a bit differently.  We realize that the solution to our energy crisis involves much more than substituting alternative technologies such as wind and solar for fossil fuels and nuclear. From the Green perspective, an understanding of the connections among ecology, equality, democracy, and peace means that to address the climate crisis and mitigate the results we are too late to stop we must not only halt carbon emissions, plant trees (and stop the insanity of over-logging and of burning millions of trees annually in biomass energy plants), we must also fix our broken political system, end militarism and wars, and embrace a community-based, socially just model of economic transformation.

Our GP-US Platform advocates for “ decentralized bio-regional electricity generation and distribution” to restore community control and to “ prevent the massive ecological and social destruction that accompanies production of electricity in mega-scale projects”. (GP-US Platform). It also calls for reducing our energy consumption, and cites the moral responsibility we have to All Our Relations, and the need to halt “ the destruction of habitats which are being sacrificed to unqualified economic expansion” (GP-US Platform).

 As Elders, we remember the early days of the alternative energy movement and the importance attached to keeping such energies appropriately scaled and community controlled. Today we see neo-environmentalists lauding as “green” any mega-scale corporate project involving solar panels or wind turbines, no matter how ecologically destructive the project may be. We oppose the colonial attitudes toward rural and wilderness areas such developments often represent. We see these mega – projects as a transition to renewables according to the rules of the current centralized, corporate-controlled system that is fixated on growth and profits. It plays into corporate agendas that enable our wasteful energy appetites, when what’s needed is to rein them in. 

The hard reality is that the scale at which modern industrial civilizations operate is a big part of the problem. Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute warns us that we can only have a post-carbon future if we in the heavily industrialized nations reduce our energy use “significantly.” James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, questions the viability of large-scale solar and wind projects when we run out of fossil fuels. In the long run, he concludes, there is no energy resource that will allow us to continue using energy at our current rates.  Thus, in a world of human overshoot, it’s imperative that we downscale our hyper-industrialism and our wasteful over-consumption.  We believe that Negative Population Growth through the encouragement of smaller families is also critical as detailed in our GP-US Platform.

During our lifetimes, we’ve witnessed an unfolding tragedy as one species after another flickers and dies out. We are experiencing what many are calling the Sixth Great Extinction, and these alarming die-offs are a direct result of the sense of human entitlement upon which industrial cultures are based.  As Chickasaw author, Linda Hogan, reminds us in her essay The First People, “We are losing everything of true worth in this world. In all the four directions, the animals are leaving. Through our failed humanity they are vanishing, and along with them we are losing something of utmost importance: the human traits of love, empathy, and compassion.” 

These extinctions also represent a great weakening of our life-support system.  Industrialized societies have been slow to recognize our absolute inter-connectedness with and inter-dependence on the other creatures we’ve evolved with on Earth.  Having appointed our species as somehow separate and superior, we’ve sought to manage, control, and exploit all others to our own advantage.  The upshot is that we’ve compromised not only the opportunity for future humans to have a good quality of life but even our chances of surviving as a species!  Greens believe it’s critical that we recognize how destructive our culture’s human-centeredness is as we try to move to more Earth-gentle, sustainable lifestyles.

The Climate Crisis is not merely at the door now, it is ransacking the house with fires, floods, and famines, driving millions of people from their homes, and fostering wars. We have seen politicians dither, corporations lie, good science bashed, and democracy squelched to protect the power and the money of the polluters and the politicians they pay.  Every time the scientists come out with a new report, it is more dire than the previous one, forecasting faster and more disastrous results, while still lagging behind the ever more dangerous reality.

Green Party candidates were calling for a Green New Deal several years before anyone else picked up the cry.  We welcome all the Green New Dealers and everyone who has been developing pragmatic approaches to community-based economics, such as Michael Shuman’s suggestions for a community’s economic resilience: local ownership, local investment, economic diversity, regeneration/sustainability, innovation, social equity, connectivity, and social performance of business. Yet preparation for meeting the coming escalation of climate disasters was considered a boring topic by most people – until our country faced the gargantuan disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic with almost no governmental preparation.  Now it’s clear that preparation at local, state, and national levels is essential for survival.

 Vulnerable populations such as people who are elderly, poor, sick or disabled have to be given thoughtful attention in planning for emergencies brought on by our damage to the Earth’s biosphere. For example, people who are older or disabled often need assistance very quickly when orders go out to evacuate from fires or hurricanes.  Therefore, in addition to developing CERTs (Community Emergency Response Teams) throughout our towns and cities, we need to develop communication networks that are embedded in neighborhoods. People are needed within neighborhoods who will volunteer, before any disaster, to check on elderly or disabled neighbors and develop plans for evacuating them along with everyone else.  It’s also important to have a system of check-in visits and support groups after a disaster.

In the matter of rising sea levels, a massive relocation effort is going to be necessary.  This will displace millions of people and move them to new locations inland.  Since nearly everyone who is relocated will have lost their jobs as well as their homes, it will be necessary to create a huge financial assistance program.  Medicare for All and a Universal Basic Income (UBI) can assure that no person is left unable to afford life’s necessities.  (The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly underscored the need for both Medicare for All and a UBI!)  Although the elderly already have monthly income through their Social Security payments, what is necessary to support them safely through disruption, relocation, and beyond is that benefits be raised significantly for lower-income seniors.  This can easily be done by simply eliminating the cap on Social Security-taxable income (the “payroll tax”).  Currently, high earners stop paying any SS tax on any of their income above $137,000.  We believe that is undemocratic, and that the SS flat tax of 6.2% for employees and 6.2% for employers should apply to ALL income (earned and unearned) of all people.  Scrap the cap!

It will take great resources to fund the necessary social/economic transformations and the climate crisis preparedness and recovery programs needed, but the resources are available. It has been proven time and again that governments can fund public infrastructure without enriching the bankers. This can be done without causing inflation by using publicly created money.  First, after 40 years of moving money upward to the wealthy, the income tax structure must be corrected.  Second, we could transfer a significant portion of the military budget to support community and bio-regional economic restructuring —  without reducing our national security one whit. (Why do we need 800 military bases around the world?)  We know that wars are a major factor in habitat destruction and a major driver of climate change through use of fossil fuels. The climate crisis cannot be countered unless we end war.

We know that we can rebuild soils and forests and clean up the waters, and that such healing will provide more jobs than currently exist in those fields. Supporting farmers and helping them stay on the land increases community food security and provides healthier food.  We know it will require effective local democracy and governance with close attention to real data and open discussions.

Local communities must be empowered to set their own green courses and transition dangerous, polluting industries into those that support the health of the community.  They must have democratically structured rights to stop inappropriate economic scams in the name of growth that makes inequality worse and degrades their land base.  They must have the resources and the capability to move intelligently and together into a local, regional and national economy that is working for everyone, not just the few.                                                                                                                  

We must make sure that clean energy, properly sited by the people who live in the community, replaces all fossil fuels, that forests, soils, waters, and wildlife as well as humans and human communities are healed and restored.  That living wages and maximum wages shape an economy that provides life affirming work for all.  That healthy environments for children are the norm.  And that democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

We need to put the health of the ecosystems and the health of people at the center of our thinking about developing resilient communities. This is much harder to do than the technical stuff, but unless we get the human relations and our relations with other living things right our efforts will be for naught. Unless justice is at its heart it will only lead to the next disaster. Unless everyone is welcome to participate in creating the new world it will recreate the disaster of the current era.   Unless we repair the social fabric of our towns and cities, revitalize rural America, and end racial and social injustices, we will fail.  Unless the healing of nature and deep respect for all life is a core value, we will continue to see unprecedented destruction in the panicked embrace of the next new thing.  

As Elders, we know that it is unlikely that we will see the worst of the heat waves and storms that are being baked into the climate today.  That is the unfortunate legacy for the youth.  We may see the end of the coral reefs, the tipping point pushing the Amazon from forest to scrubland, a world in which only billionaires have a say in the halls of government, continents on fire, and the catastrophic die-off of the oceans’ phytoplankton.  It is these disastrous possibilities, more probable by the day, that compel us to speak out as clearly and forcefully as we can. 

Make no mistake.  Unless we get right with all of our relations, human and non–human, that inhabit this little planet in the vastness of space, it will be very hard sledding for those who follow in what could become the time of no snows.

(Edited June 13, 2020)