Then Naomi Klein, of "The Shock Doctrine". The fire of motivation of mass movements vs. a variety of calamities. The necessity of getting off of fossil fuels. She also worked on AOC's and MC's "A Message from the Future". She mentioned the breaking of levees in New Orleans as a sign of the neglect of public infrastructure. She criticizes the neoliberal "no such thing as society" ideology for failing to provide a good response to climate disasters and the collective action that will be necessary for them.
Then the rise of belligerent nationalists and authoritarians like Trump and Bolsonaro and Duterte and Modi - connected with neoliberal austerity and the drop of living standards of much of the working class. Also their divisive demagogic appeals to "Real Americans" and the like, a convenient cover for corporate looting.
She mentioned divestment from fossil-fuel companies and activism like the sit-in in Rep. Nancy Pelosi's office a year ago. Then she mentioned having to clear away the debris of the climate-change deniers and the distractors. Also the doomers and the dividers.
Then Stacey Walker introduced AOC. She showed what a great speaker she is. She recalled a Republican colleague who claimed that concern about the environment is elitist. As if billionaires aren't buying hideout estates. Fact-checking AOC's assertions can be interesting -- there are several very rich people who have bought such estates in places like New Zealand. She then talked about the Green New Deal and how Exxon officials knew about global warming around 1980. Instead of changing their business, the oil companies launched a campaign of doubt. The oil companies could have gotten into synfuels, for instance. But I digress.
About the climate crisis, it is not an accident, she says. "It is not a coincidence; it is a consequence." She says that oil and gas are very profitable, and that's what keeps the oil and gas companies going and doing climate-change denial. She recalled her campaign: "We've got people, they've got money" and "Big money is very lonely". Trump's presidency is a symptom of deeper problems. We could beat him, but we need to keep another Trump from getting into power again, and the answer to late-stage hypercapitalism is with a labor movement. We will need to address race and poverty issues as well as do things like put solar panels on our roofs. Also white supremacy and recognizing terrorism elsewhere in the world but not close to home.
Then she talked about how we used to have easily affordable colleges. But when racial integration came, then economic discrimination started, with tuitions going up, up, up. Then how we are going to pay for her GND stuff - she said that we are already doing so with hurricanes and floods and droughts and wildfires. She then introduced Bernie Sanders.
I think that racial and ethnic equity issues are a potential problem with renewable-energy development. Consider the
California water wars, where Los Angeles got the rights to Owens Valley water with what one author called "chicanery, subterfuge ... and a strategy of lies". Solar-panel farms are a potential problem here, like letting them be close to the ground instead of high up on posts to allow local people to grow crops and graze animals.
