From my friend Christina Polcari:
There was a collective cringe in the room last night as activists and journalists listened to Obama’s closing press conference. There was no video, only audio, so you had to do something with your eyes. You could pretend to take notes on your laptop, but there was nothing to note. The speech was empty. As was the “deal.” You could do a slow pan across the room, but that would require making eye contact with people from other countries and there was an unsettling familiarity about being American with a leader failing the rest of the world…again. It would also require making eye contact with the kinds of Americans most responsible for our President’s world-changing election in the first place. So instead, I looked down.
Although I may dream it, I didn’t come to Copenhagen expecting some bold and valiant legally binding treaty. I try to be more of a realist. So maybe I’m naive because I did expect something more than what we got.
The “deal” is a failure. It has no real targets and no real timetables–that’s policy failure. But more importantly, it was reached without the participation of most of the countries that will suffer most and have contributed least to the problem–that’s system failure.
Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein gave our group a much needed therapy session after the speech. McKibben said: “Movements at their best work as people figure out how to exploit the zeitgeist of the moment - what the openings are. We don’t know what the openings are right now. Where there are wedges to be exploited. We’ll find them. This issue isn’t going away; it becomes more important with every passing minute. We’re gonna have to find them. That’s what human beings do. We’ll figure out how to build a movement that influences what it has to influence. But if the terrain shifts, strategy will shift and it will take a little while to figure that out.”
Our movement is strong, but we’re growing. We have learned so much this week especially about how we need to grow differently as a movement. It’s an interesting parallel to the change for which we strive and it brings me hope, drive, ambition, and focus. Here’s to the months that lie ahead.
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Brutal. That image of not knowing what to do with your eyes while listening to Obama is so vivid. I like the quote from McKibbon about needing to find where the openings are that we can wedge further open. With Obama either unable or unwilling to get Senate’s ass in gear, it seems like it’s up to us shove a big fat wedge into the Senate to get them to pass a meaningful climate bill. Here in California, we need to put pressure on Diane Feinstein. It’s inexcusable for a California Senate to suck so bad on climate change.