Competing Environmental Discourses Ecological Activists vs. the Ecological Modernists

Ecological Activists  spiritual descendants of Foreman  direct action, nature as sacred, skeptical about technology, emphasis on local change/grassroots  grassroots organizing,

350.org   International Day of Climate Action in 2009  the Global Work Party in 2010  Moving Planet in 2011  Climate Impacts Day in  movement-90-seconds-no-words/ movement-90-seconds-no-words/

 wershift.org/ps- videos/

Stop the Keystone XL

  Oxford Alumni Occupy University Over Fossil Fuel Investments Oxford Alumni Occupy University Over Fossil Fuel Investments  Oxford, UK – Oxford alumni have occupied a university administration building to demonstrate their anger over today’s announcement that the university has deferred until May its decision on whether to divest from fossil fuels.

People’s Climate Change

  largest climate march in history.

Gustave Speth  “A specter is haunting American environmentalism – the specter of failure.”

Naomi Klein   “The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.”  “requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.”

Smart Growthers  “The price of renewable electricity from solar and wind is now equal to the grid average price in many countries around the world and that list is growing because there is a cost down curve…The more we use, the more scaling of production, the cheaper it gets. The more oil and coal we use the more expensive it gets. Within less than seven years 86% of the people in the world will live in areas where the price of renewable electricity y is cheaper than the price from other sources.”  Al Gore

Bring out your dead...

Critique of Env. Movement  Beltway centered  Bipartisan  Not kitchen table issues  The green bubble of seemingly widespread interest in climate change and green jobs was, it turns out, primarily an elite phenomenon, one which had little effect upon widespread public opinion about climate change

EcoModernist Manifesto

Wake up Enviros!  more, better, or louder climate science will not drive the transformation of the global energy economy  stop trying to scare the pants off of the American public  most successful actions will not be justified for environmental reasons.  stop treating climate change as if it were a traditional pollution problem  we will not regulate or price our way to a clean energy economy  we will not internalize the full costs of fossil fuels,

Be Realistic  we will need to make clean energy technologies much cheaper in order to decarbonize the global energy economy  we are going to have to get over our suspicion of technology, especially nuclear power. There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power.  big is beautiful. The rising economies of the developing world will continue to develop whether we want them to or not. The solution to the ecological crises wrought by modernity, technology, and progress will be more modernity, technology, and progress. The solutions to the ecological challenges faced by a planet of 6 billion going on 9 billion will not be decentralized energy technologies like solar panels, small scale organic agriculture

Need to Play Politics  CAFE requirement  Campus Divestment

 Very shallow