Photos – Penny U, March 2015

On March 3, 2015 about 30 people came together to discuss how we can raise awareness that the crises of climate change and economic inequality are heating up together. We tried to imagine catalytic images. With many thanks to Jean Sherrard, who also participated actively in the conversation, we have photos!

Catalytic Images, notes

At Penny U on March 3, 2015, participants were charged with this question:

How can we raise awareness that the crises of climate change and economic inequality are heating up? What image would be catalytic? Is there an icon for climate change?

"Image" was not meant to be just visual. It could be expressed as metaphor, story, or symbol. We seem to have international symbols for many things, like fragile or recycle, but not, apparently, for climate change.

The images & stories that emerged from 30 participants around six tables follow. More background on the conversation and other ideas that came up are in another post, "Notes March 3: Climate Change & Economic Inequality" [here].

•     There's a gigantic opportunity here. The green economy is coming, and it's coming fast! Drawn from her hand gestures, a chart in Rachel's mind is something like this:

    

      The green economy is growing, but the negative impact of climate change is increasing at a faster rate. The goal is to ramp up the trend line for green energy.

•     Technology offers one of the happier images.

•     The Bullitt Center is an example of the positive use of technology. (Several tables mentioned it.) It's inspiring in its aims to meet the goals of the "Living Building Challenge." <http://www.bullittcenter.org/vision/living-building-challenge/>  Its commitment to zero waste shows the possibilities, even though it plays into a market mentality. It's flawed, but a good example. The building feels austere; it is a scientific image not an artistic one, and that's OK. Can the ideas it embodies be expanded to more situations?

     

•     Van Jones used powerful images of solar panels, gleaming in the sun.

•     350.org has become an image. In its own words, it "is building a global climate movement"…"To preserve a livable planet, scientists tell us we must reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from its current level of 400 parts per million to below 350 ppm.

•     What always sticks in my mind is the group effort, training for the art of action.

•     James Balog's documentary, Chasing Ice, asks, "What are you going to tell your kids (or future generations) about what you did back then to make their lives possible?" This is often said, but in this film it was put in a way that can relate to many people.

•     Termite mounds are a demonstration of balanced communities.

•     A cool green stream.

•     Earth image  –>  Earth Day  The Whole Earth Catalog, with the earth even farther out. Apollo image with earth in the background. Several tables mentioned this image, though one person whose family is from China added, "This picture of the earth wouldn't make sense to my family."

•     Mountain peak and snow.

•     Radical inconvenience = radical change.

•     Green is beautiful, green is $. "Green is cool." Focus on lifestyle, on a way of life that's cool.

•     Create an interactive icon that allows an audience to create what they care about in it. That will reflect who your market is.

•     The peace symbol as an example. Several tables mentioned it. "Everyone knows what it means."

•     Provide an image that shows we have made some positive changes, have become more efficient.

•     Stories:  When Morgan Stanley says, "Get out of coal," I'm really inspired. There's also a story going around that the reason the Saudis dropped the price of oil is that they see the end of the game and want to be the ones who sell the last drop.

•     Thailand is HOT, it's HOT in the American West. "We live in hotter places." (Thailand)

•     Though not an image as much as an action, maybe payment systems should be put in place. That is, make people pay a personal penalty. 

•     "Intimidation into ethics."  Can we use intimidation to move people toward ethical behavior? Can an image create shame and guilt?

•     Ideas that resonated at one table: "pricelessness," "sacrifice," and "scarcity." Some environmental assets are priceless. The earth is more important than any economic activity.

•     Concept artwork, proof of concept, and speculative fiction can all contribute to this.

•     An anti-image

•     Predictive texts might be catalytic:   1) Storm impact

                                                                        Katrina  –>  New Orleans

                                                                        Sandy  –>  DC

                                                                 2) Drought

                                                                 3) Super cold weather

•     Image/story of climate change as a tipping point for war, especially in terms of the scarcity of resources. For example, the 1783-1784 Laki volcanic eruption in Iceland led to food scarcity in Europe and was a tipping point for the French Revolution. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/15/iceland-volcano-weather-french-revolution>

•     Or, an image/story of the connection between global climate patterns and the political economy, as presented by Mike Davis in his book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. What happens when a well-off country is afflicted by food shortages?

•     Another story: the future will be more fulfilling through work that builds community. "Let's have fun doing this!"  The Transition Initiative movement was given as an example. <www.transitionnetwork.org/support/what-transition-initiative>

•     Water scarcity is the pivot point for everything now. State policies have to change and encourage conservation instead of utilization.

•     Is disaster good, or even necessary? What will pull society off the edge? Will it take population reduction? Will it take sacrifice? And, how do you sell that in the world? Sacrifice is tied up with scarcity, but it's part of the process and the $ is there.

•     Small steps from the ground up. We have to believe we can make a difference. It has to be easy to understand. Preparing to go to the moon took many little steps over a long time.

•     "Imagine a desert landscape and you're in a car packed full of your belongings, and you come upon a hobo and a dog," Miles said. "You have room for only one of them. Which would you take along?" Or would you get rid of some stuff?  Or would you get out and walk with them?

•     "The 'blue planet' image is positive for all."

E-postcard to Penny U

A Penny U participant, Gwen Demombynes, wrote us this week, reflecting on travel in Vietnam and other parts of southeast Asia that kept her from joining us on March 3. It felt as though she were part of our conversation! She adds a valuable international perspective to the discussion we had, which tended to focus on what we each can do in our own communities.

"It was funny to be thinking about what concepts, visual or otherwise, might inspire people to greater consciousness while I was travelling in countries that were no where near where the US is terms of thinking about these issues. It's not that the issues aren't important to the people of these developing nations, it's that the infrastructure is not there for even the most basic of services.  

"My stepson Gabe, who is a senior economist for the World Bank, pointed out that the developing nations are the most vulnerable when it comes to the effects of climate change, and are suffering the most from its effects. He believes that the United States MUST enact policies that will bring all the other countries along, that this cannot be addressed at the grassroots level. At the same time, drinking water comes in plastic bottles, way more trash is generated everywhere than can be collected by the numerous garbage collectors, charcoal is how everything is cooked and run, rivers are used for everything, from fishing, to washing to dumping, etc, etc, etc. 

"It's overwhelming. Gabe also pointed out that the biggest polluters are the richest countries (well documented), with the US being the richest and worst. 

"Anyway, I just wanted you to know I was thinking about the issue, even though I wasn't there!"

Notes: March 3 – Climate Change & Inequality

Penny U poses questions as springboards for conversation. Its principal content comes from all who attend.

Edward Wolcher and Anne Focke introduced the overall topic and context, and then artists Buster Simpson and Laura Sindell posed a question for discussion.

The question: A catalytic image?

Today we face two major crises at the same time: climate change and economic inequality. The roots of both are deep, and we are very slow to actually do anything about them. How can we raise awareness that these crises are heating up? What image would be catalytic? Is there an icon for climate change?

"Image" is not meant just to be visual. It could be expressed as metaphor, story, or symbol. We seem to have international symbols for many things, like recycle, but Buster and Laura searched without success for a symbol for climate change.

After everyone introduced themselves and the topic and question were posed, about 30 people sat around six tables to imagine a catalytic symbol or story and to consider what traits it should have. At each table one person agreed to take notes, and many ideas were captured. The images that emerged are collected in a separate post (see "Catalytic Images" [link?]). What follows are notes on the rest of the discussion.

What kind of image do we want?

•     Beware "gloom and doom!"  It doesn't get us anywhere. We have to shift to a positive approach. Provide a challenge more than a threat. Don't start an argument; ask for active participation. Draw on positive rather than negative impulses. The image should be aspirational and for all, not just for progressives. We have to look farther out than the next day. What is a doable challenge?

•     We need a call to action. We need to change belief systems that seem to be entrenched. How do we change a belief or culture? Especially among people who are determined not to accept it? Louise has found that when she issues a call to action, she doesn't try to change the deniers, she asks them to help her with something specific, like with the financial records. Amy Snover, a research scientist with the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington, says climate deniers can hear "flood prevention," but they can't hear "climate change."

•     What is our polestar? What is our guiding principle, our collective success?

      We need a tool to communicate, we need to create an instrument of social change. We need to remember that symbols can be corrupted.

•     What keeps us motivated? How do we want to feel? How can an image interact with life style choices – a range of life-style choices? What affects you directly can change your behavior.

•     The values embodied in the image need to be grounded in community.

•     We should hold on to aesthetics as an issue for dealing with climate change.

•     A cinematic image might be better and more compelling than just one static image.

General discussion

•     Summarizing is hard. Issues around climate change are hard to summarize because there are so many, and things are changing so fast. Everybody is behind where we need to be.

•     We need a green plan, not just a visual image, says Mark Jacobson at Stanford. How can changes actually be made? He and his colleagues have created a 50-state roadmap for replacing coal, oil, and natural gas with wind, water, and solar energy. <http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/fifty-states-renewables-022414.html> This will cost us jobs, but the green economy provides job growth. By very conservative measures, millions of new jobs are possible. Oil money could be invested in wind farms.

•     Capitalist system needed. We will need a scale of intervention that can only be possible with resources from the capitalist system. Indeed, capitalism is what feeds us now, especially given how many of us are there are. If we're looking for alternatives, government is a static creature; it can't move quickly. Thomas Piketty advances the idea of a global tax on capital, saying it's what will overcome inequality.

•     Many ways to be involved, and from many fields.  <Riskybusiness.org> takes stock of "the economic risks of climate change in the U.S." Another example is the Northwest Ecobuilding Guild, an association of building professionals and homeowners interested in ecologically sustainable building.

•     Too late? Should we worry whether it's too late to make a difference? We shouldn't, one table argued. Americans always look for excuses not to get off the couch.

•     The consequences of climate change won't be equally distributed.

•     Two participants whose home is Thailand believe the consumer is the problem.

•     People are distracted by modern life. Social discipline has diminished. Corruption is on the rise. Does utopia mean the planet survives?

•     Terraforming was also mentioned, which means, literally, "earth-shaping." From an online definition: It is the theoretical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography, or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the biosphere of earth to make it habitable by earth-like life.

•     "Maybe Picard (Jean-Luc) had the right idea." 

Two Crises at Once, for March 3

Inequality and climate change: perhaps it's good we face them at the same time

Penny U's question: A catalytic image?

We face two major crises in our times: climate change and economic inequality. The roots of each are deep. In terms of actually doing anything about them, though, we are very slow to respond. One challenge facing both is that they seem to have come on gradually, we keep muddling through. The situation might be captured in the well-worn tale (useful, even though apparently untrue) of a frog in a pot. The story goes that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will quickly leap out. But if you put it in a pot of cool water and very gradually increase the heat, you'll end up with a well-cooked frog.

So how can we raise awareness that these two crises are heating up? Artists Buster Simpson and Laura Sindell will ask Penny U participants: "What image could be catalytic?" The "image" needn't be visual, but could also be expressed as metaphor, story, or symbol. "Is there an international symbol for climate change?" What images can you imagine that could raise the visibility and understanding of the urgency of these crises, suggest the connections between them, and perhaps provoke people to action in their own ways? Can one help address the other?

Buster offers an example, "The Smell of Money" – an art installation that compares the smell of paper currency from economies that rely on extractive labor, especially carbon-based energy industries, with the smell of money from low-carbon economies, such as wood workers, rice farms, salmon canneries, and jasmine fields.

On March 3, in small groups of four or five, we'll see what images we can construct.

Brief background information about both economic inequality and climate change follow:

* * * 

About inequality, after Thomas Piketty

Anne Focke

What follows is a cursory summary of what Thomas Piketty seems to say about inequality in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It's offered not by an expert, but in a spirit of curiosity and a desire to understand what's going on around me. It's wide open to corrections and revisions.

Based on lots of data and analysis, both current and historical, Piketty shows that the "natural" or "normal" economic state is that inequality will grow and reach great extremes with a few on the top and most at the bottom. One concept that I've grasped and that, in part, helps me understand why this happens is that capital increases in value faster than the overall economy grows. Capital (investments in stock, real estate, etc.) has historically increased at, more or less, a rate of about 5%. The economy, on the other hand, grows at, more or less, a rate of about 2%. That means that capital will always be ahead of the economy, or that a person who lives on earnings from capital investments will always earn at a faster rate than a person who lives on earnings from work in the economy of producing goods and providing services. That is, a person with wealth is apt to keep getting more wealth, while a person working in the production/service economy is apt to have a hard time keeping up, especially as wealth gets more and more concentrated, and the few get farther and farther ahead.

There's lots more to it than that, of course, but for me, this sets a stage.

The anomaly of the economy in my lifetime

We had an extraordinary period of nearly 50 years in the last century, from the end of World War II until about 1980, during which the gap between the wealthy and the rest was much smaller and the well-being of both grew at the same time. Their chart lines rose in parallel rather than diverging. This period also more or less paralleled my own life. It's what I ­– and many others like me – knew. It was a productive time for many more people than would have been the case in more "normal" economic times. So why did that happen?

What happened was World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression. The wealthy lost much of their capital and the rest lived in desperate conditions. The results were riots and strikes, Hoovervilles and an economy driven by the wars. Partly to quell civil unrest, all this led, in the U.S., to a new social safety net with the New Deal and Social Security, new financial regulations, and changes in tax rules that increased tax rates especially on corporate earnings and upper incomes. The top income bracket in 1945 was 94% for income over a certain amount.

With President Reagan in 1981, all this began to change. Tax rates, especially on capital, corporations, and upper incomes have declined; the top income bracket today is 35%. Financial regulations have been loosened and the social safety net weakened. As a consequence, income equality has grown dramatically. As Paul Krugman said in a review of Piketty's book in the New York Review of Books, "we are living in a second Gilded Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque."

What's to be done?

It's not enough to just understand, even in such a shorthand way, what the story of inequality is and how it happened. But what's to be done about it?

What I've picked up is that we need to generate new revenue from new taxes, put new social policies in place, and establish new financial regulations. And that's all fine and good to know, but how in the world can those changes happen? Will it take more bloody wars? Another desperate depression? Maybe another good crisis would do, and we certainly have that. 

The second crisis: This Changes Everything, climate change & capitalism

Edward Wolcher

Climate change activism has often been mired in the traditional divisions of the environmental movement: environmentalists who argue for reduced consumption or increased regulations pitted against working class concerns that see environmental protections as luxuries. In the past decade, however, a growing movement has framed climate change (along with most of the energy use and consumption issues tied to it) in the context of its intersections with economic and political movements. This “climate justice” activism argues that social and economic justice are fundamentally tied to climate change in the 21st century, that the overwhelming weight of the suffering caused by climate change is and will be felt by the world’s poor, and that grassroots community economics represent hope for a carbon neutral world.

This climate justice framework inspired journalist Naomi Klein to research and write her monumental This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which brought her to Town Hall in September 2014. Ms. Klein argues in this book that the global climate crisis has reached a point where modest regulatory fixes like cap-and-trade can no longer mitigate the ecological catastrophes from our warming planet. This failure results from twenty years of policy inaction after scientific consensus was reached in the late 1980s that global warming is anthropogenic. Only “radical” outcomes are possible now: the radical transformation and suffering that would come from a 2+ degree Celsius rise in global temperatures, the radical application of so-called geo-engineering technologies, (that is, technologically altering earth's atmosphere) that would have unknown effects on the fragile planet, or finally the radical reorganization of the global economy around the principles of climate justice.

A real green economy

The third radical option would strive for a “green” economy in a much more profound sense than the currently watered-down language of green energy. Though her analysis tends to avoid the word, much of the necessary change would essentially be increased socialism at a national level: massive reinvestment and management of the energy economy, transportation infrastructure, and manufacturing. While this could seem far away from our life today, much of what this economics would look like is already happening in self-organized ways among communities concerned with climate change: affordable, dense urban development; small-scale and local agriculture; divestment from fossil fuels and investment in renewable energy; and respect for indigenous land rights and sovereignty. The problem, as Naomi Klein discusses, is that the situation is so dire that these communities of activists and conscious communities are not even close to enough. These economic principles need to become the basis of a major global political realignment. 

Activists on all levels from street marchers to think tankers are beginning to achieve consensus on this. Climate change is not simply another fight in the environmental movement; it requires a cross-class, cross-race, transnational alliance whose ultimate goal is not merely regulation but a profound reorganization of the global economy. How to make that happen is the big question. 

A big tent

During her talk at Town Hall, Klein said, "We're allowing sea levels to rise in the name of protecting an economic system that is failing the vast majority of people on this planet, with or without climate change. By responding robustly to climate change in line with what scientists are telling us, we have a once in a century opportunity to solve some of our biggest and most intractable social and economic problems." She went on to say that she believes "climate change can provide the big tent that we need to build a new coalition, put us on a science-based deadline, and tell us that we cannot afford to lose."