Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, NY; April 22, 2016
As 171 nations gathered Friday morning to sign the Paris Agreement, and most environmental organizations hailed this as an “historic” achievement, The Climate Mobilization staged a die-in, collapse scenario outside the United Nations to demonstrate the truth of this agreement: it puts us on a path to a 3.5°C temperature rise and the collapse of global civilization.
Instead of the “carbon gradualism” of the Paris agreement, protesters demanded a WWII-scale climate mobilization to rapidly eliminate emissions and draw excess greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
This is a panel from Session 2 of the 2015 Left Forum, held May 29 -31 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The conference theme was "No Justice, No Peace: Confronting the Crises of Capitalism & Democracy."
From the Organizers:
Without a decisive break from business-as-usual politics, scientists warn that accelerating global warming threatens both economic and ecological collapse in a matter of decades. To secure a climate that supports organized human societies for the rest of the 21st century, it will now take nothing less than a rapid, wartime-level economic effort to transition the world's nations to 100% clean energy, adapt to unavoidable disruptions, and begin the long process of withdrawing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Whatever we call this response to our unprecedented crisis — a Green New Deal, a Marshall Plan for the Earth, a WWII-scale Climate Mobilization — how can we build the critical mass of public will that makes a just post-carbon transition possible in the United States? Is it possible to mobilize an intense bloc of citizens behind such an ambitious platform by 2016? Panelists will discuss The Climate Mobilization, a growing national campaign to accelerate the American climate movement toward the mobilization we need.
Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD, is co-founder and director of Climate Mobilization. Klein earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Adelphi University and also holds a BA in social anthropology from Harvard. Though she loved being a therapist, Margaret felt called to apply her psychological and anthropological knowledge to solving climate change. Her writing can be viewed at The Climate Psychologist
