Fossil Fuel Free, Democracy & Our Hyper-Guilded Age
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Fossil Free Rising in Santa Marta
https://fossilfreerising.org/declaration
This April, governments met in Santa Marta, Colombia for a historic conference addressing the phase out of fossil fuels. Find out more.
Santa Marta, a historically coal-fuelled town at the heart of a coal- and oil-fuelled country, may eventually be regarded as ground zero for the demise of fossil fuels. Fernanda Carvalho, the head of policy for climate and energy at WWF International, said: “It is here that the seeds of a new, implementation-focused initiative have been planted. In times of an exhaustion of multilateral processes and a gap in delivering the system change we need, what is emerging offers a different approach. This could be a real bottom-up process that centres the voices of communities most affected by fossil fuel extraction and consumption.” But despite the “contagious” hope felt by many involved in the Santa Marta talks, there remains a long road ahead.
And while the event in Santa Marta resulted in some strongly worded statements, there were no enforceable outcomes. Instead, the group said it would work on regional plans to phase out fossil fuels, and it plans to meet in the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu next year.
Big Oil has lied about its harmful products for decades. Now, communities nationwide are seeking accountability, and we're here to help.
Our Democracy Crisis Is A Design Problem
https://jeremylent.substack.com/p/democracy-was-never-designed-to-work
Democracy’s legitimacy crisis cannot be solved by tinkering at the margins. Campaign finance reform, ethics rules, and better candidates all matter, but they do not address the structural design of a system built, from its foundations, to protect the wealthy and powerful.
The deeper task is to recover an older, more radical promise of genuine self-governance: not choosing one group of elites over another every few years, but taking on the shared responsibility of governing together.
The tools already exist. The experiments are already underway. Ordinary people, given sufficient time, good information, skilled facilitation, and the knowledge that their conclusions will matter, are demonstrating that they can arrive at thoughtful, nuanced, and widely supported decisions on society’s most difficult questions.
If democracy is to survive the 21st century, it may need to become, for the first time, actually democratic.
https://www.ecociv.org/ is Jeremy Lent’s website. Look for his new acclaimed book, soon to be released: Ecocivilization.
Our Hyper-Gilded Age
What politicians and pundits need to understand is that while the ultrawealthy would like us to believe that concern about their excessive power and privileges is a radical, left-wing, anti-centrist position, it isn’t. It is, in fact, a view shared by a large majority of Americans. And in any case, as G. Elliott Morris has shown, few voters, even those who describe themselves as moderate, really support what pundits call “centrism.”
It’s true that any politician who proposes a pushback against modern American oligarchy will face a tidal wave of lavishly funded venom. But given the realities of who today’s plutocrats are and what they do, there are big opportunities for leaders willing to pull an FDR and declare, “I welcome their hatred.”
