The Climate Mobilization Begins!
September 2017 was historic for the climate mobilization cause in Los Angeles: we joined Naomi Klein, City Councilmember Paul Koretz, Republican Mayor of Lancaster, CA, and a coalition of leading Angeleno community organizers to announce the formation of a Climate Justice Mobilization 2025 working group.
Its mission: to achieve a carbon-neutral Los Angeles by 2025, through a WWII-scale climate mobilization rooted in environmental justice and the principles of the Leap Manifesto!
The Climate Mobilization team has been working with Councilmember Koretz’s office and the Leap team on this effort behind the scenes for months, and we are very excited to see L.A. citizens taking on the concept of climate emergency mobilization and adapting it to the needs of their own communities. I am thrilled that Angeleños are taking on the imperative of WWII-scale mobilization and aiming enthusiastically for carbon-neutrality by 2025 plus drawdown. This is easily the most excited and hopeful I’ve felt since Nov. 8.
This is the most ambitious advocacy of a rapid transition to zero emissions, plus a major carbon drawdown effort, of any major metropolitan area in the United States. And I am thrilled that the 2016 Democratic platform language calling for a WWII-scale emergency climate mobilization played a key role in motivating this effort.
I am also cautiously optimistic that, if we succeed in this daunting effort, the L.A. mobilization effort could catalyze emergency climate mobilization on a massive scale, far beyond the confines of Southern California. To learn more about the L.A. climate mobilization and to stay in the loop, click here and sign up:
The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, while discouraging to many, may be the best thing that’s happened to climate politics in a long time. The illusion of meaningful global climate action has been shattered. As the world community stares into the abyss, an opening has emerged for heroic mobilization aimed at restoring a safe climate.
Last Wednesday, the courage of Paul Koretz allowed us to seize that opportunity. I spoke with the councilmember after the press conference and came away convinced that he understands we have a 10-year window at most left to transform our entire economy. He assured me that failure is not an option. We discussed how his father Erich escaped Nazi Germany in 1939; the councilmember grasps the consequences of abrupt civilizational breakdown.
The press conference gave me hope that the level of threat we face is becoming more widely understood. Rex Parris, a one-man climate mobilization who is leading his city of 160,000 rapidly toward net-zero energy, warned that runaway global warming poses 10 times as great a risk to Americans as the Axis Powers of the ’40s.
And Naomi Klein, who has a new book out called No Is Not Enough, embraced the call for a WWII-scale climate mobilization, describing how we can confront our many social emergencies as we overcome the climate emergency by organizing with an intersectional perspective in mind. This is the goal of the L.A. Leap Manifesto, a forthcoming platform document that will help guide the L.A. Climate Mobilization effort.
Check out Naomi Klein’s address here:
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