Alternative Visions – US Climate Crisis Intensifies—What’s To Be Done’? – 05/17/14

Dr. Jack Rasmus welcomes guest, Jill Stein, Presidential candidate of the Green Party USA, to discuss President Obama’s just released, ‘US National Climate Assessment Report’, this past week. While the Obama report provides overwhelming evidence of accelerating climate crisis in the USA in all regions of the country, both Jill and Jack explain it falls way short of proposals to address the growing environmental crisis—from thawing permafrost in Alaska, to drought and destruction of forests in the west, to disappearing maple trees in new England, to the melting of the Antarctic ice shelf that threatens to raise sea levels by up to 10 ft. in coming decades that will devastate coastal US cities. Jill provides a critique of the President’s report and offers an alternative set of proposals. Stein and Rasmus together then take note of the growing convergence between the environmental movement and other grass roots USA protest movements today, in the recent ‘Earth Day to May Day’ actions, the upcoming ‘Alternative Climate Summit’ this coming September, and growing discussions at the grass roots how to form joint community-labor organizations locally to fight for change. Ms. Stein calls for ‘unifying solutions’, a ‘Green New Deal’ to resolve environment and decent jobs creation, and the need for various movements to come together in a national organizing conference of some kind—a US version perhaps of the Latin American ‘Justice Movement’ in recent years that has proved successful. For more on the grass roots convergence, listeners are encouraged to go to www.globalclimateconvergence.org for more information how to do something about the intensifying joint economic-environmental problems in the USA instead of just complaining about it.