What You Can Do To Make Us Win The Climate Battle

We need to take paradigm-shifting collective action, and we need to take it now. All of the distractions that keep us from carrying out a successful climate movement need to be ignored right now, or at least put into perspective up against the threat of environmental apocalypse.

I’m rallying people towards climate action not because I think that all the damage can somehow be reversed, but because there’s at least still hope for the survival of humanity. As Chris Hedges has assessed about the compromise that we have to make with the climate future we’ve created:

Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Our technology and science will not save us. The future of humanity is now in peril. At best, we can mitigate the crisis. We cannot avert it. We are fighting for our lives. If we do not rapidly build militant movements of sustained revolt, movements willing to break the law and attack the structures of the corporate state, we will join the 99.9 percent of species that have vanished since life first appeared on earth.

Here are some things that people can to do accomplish this.

Demand that city governments make the moves towards switching to renewable energy

The dramatic rise of renewable energy use in recent years show us that the climate fight isn’t hopeless. Particularly on the local and city level, we’re seeing a transformation; one hundred cities worldwide are now powered primarily by renewable energy, and many of them are estimated to run 100% on renewables within the next twenty years.

We all need to work towards making our local governments force this change to wind, water and solar. This can be done not just by contacting city officials or holding protests, but by organizing to build the climate movement; there are dozensof nationwide or local climate change organizations that can be gotten involved with, and there are many more small-scale progressive organizing groups in cities and towns around the country. If these institutions grow, corporate power won’t be able to hold back the city-level revolution towards green energy.

This is also the case for the struggle against corporate power worldwide: when the people are organized, the corrupt can’t carry through their plans.

Carry on Standing Rock

Not only is the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline still going on, but its publicity from 2016 has created a nationwide series of anti-pipeline efforts. Activists are now blocking pipelines on a much bigger scale than they would have if the earlier fighters hadn’t went up against police violence to mount a resistance.

We can help in this ongoing effort by looking for pipeline plans that can be obstructed-for instance, the Mountain Valley pipeline in Virginia will likely need to be protested against in the coming years-and by creating a version of Standing Rock that applies to all of the climate battles. To defy corporate and governmental fossil fuel use, there needs to be millions of people participating in strikes, sit-ins, occupations, and other direct actions that follow in the example of protests like the ones at Standing Rock.

If you’re wondering which entities to focus these efforts on, here’s a link to a list of the 100 companies that have been behind 71% of the world’s carbon emissions. We need to defend our planet from these companies in the same ways the Sioux Tribe is defending its land.

Work to build new economic and energy systems on the local level

The resistance efforts I’ve mentioned are the most important part of the climate battle, and they also need to be directed towards pollution facilitators like the U.S. military and the Trump administration. But while we tear down the old systems, we need to create new ones.

Through public banking, the creation of worker-owned businesses, the forceful shifting of business into local areas, and other strategies, many communities are moving towards a pluralist commonwealth-where the economy is democratized and therefore safe from corporate control. If climate activists focus on these goals as well, human beings will become much better at coexisting with the planet.

And if we can exist as a species without doing more harm to the earth, I think it will make for the best possible outcome within the ecological disaster that we’ve already made inevitable. Humanity would be living in a very changed world, but it would still manage to thrive.