Every Breathing Person Should Celebrate the Climate Bill
It includes new drill leases and coal subsidies, yet it’s a step toward a new life on Earth
--
Very Unpopular Strong Opinions Blog by Christyl Rivers
Years ago, about the time of the first People’s Climate March, a few of us observed that the big switch to clean fuel will not come until giant capitalists (and their lobbied politicians) smell the dollar signs.
It came true last week.
When the determined “let’s keep an Earth” crowd finally set down the stick, and proffered up a juicy carrot to the GOP, big oil, the Old king Coals’ (Imagine/ Manchin, that!) and to the many others blocking progress, it was as if the planet was finally revealed to be a positive thing.
Although people have known for centuries that human beings came from Nature, need nature, and ARE nature, the ethos, and values reflected by the systems we created said:
Nah, let’s exploit people and nature to make a buck.
For extreme capitalists, for supremacists, and for wealth-obsessed guys, the only way to get them to play is to show them the money. So, we can do that.
It should not be binary, any more than sex or pro-life, or any major issue should be. We shaped it in binary terms because, well, we’re idiots.
It has never been an us versus them, nature versus jobs, conflict. It has always been, rather, a how we align ourselves to thrive in abundance issue.
We need to drill, baby, drill for a new consciousness
We are a bright enough species to walk the walk and chew the planet — more gently — at the same time. We could have clean fuel, make it profitable, and have social justice and make it profitable.
Here are some more things we could make profitable: welcome some refugees, teach science and critical thinking in schools, monitor pollution, hand out free birth control, stop paying plastic profiteers to trash our place, innovate for smart, clean grids and nuclear energy, and go full force on the new CCCC (Civilian Climate Crisis Corps.)
Having gardens and wildlife stations to promote biodiversity could save some birds and insects. We could shatter our sense of being terrible, by just being gardeners. It will be nice, in fifty years, to know rather than slaving away to the dictates of big chemical and gas-guzzling lawnmowers, we find the lovely joy of attracting birds during the droughts and watching flowers and trees bloom as they hold water, carbon, and our better thoughts.
Caring and sharing the planet, creating and innovating to thrive is not a new idea, but one we could never get right while allowing/manifesting exploitation.
But belonging, together as one carbon-based set of critters on just one planet, is a newer idea we are just beginning to drill down into to pull out the carbon gems that are more diamond than coal.