Boston College Sociology Professor Charles Derber spoke recently at a Boston event focused on getting people to New York City for the September 21 rally. His purpose was to explain the unavoidable connection between wars and climate change. Derber is author of "Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy," and several other very special books. He is introduced (in a separate MP3 file posted here) by local organizer Paul Shannon.
We are at a crossroads, faced with a climate crisis that threatens to end our world as we know it. We canât afford the greenhouse gas emissions arising from the way we live and from war and preparation for war.
The sponsors of this event went to New York with the following demands:
(1) Re-direct military spending to the creation of millions of green jobs and to research for a rapid transition from fossil fuels to non-polluting energy sources.
(2) Stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure, including the Keystone pipeline project. Rapidly end fracking projects and the awarding of any new offshore drilling contracts
(3) Move quickly toward mutual abolition of all nuclear weapons as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
(4) Stop blocking the proposals for effective international action on climate change being put forward by the Group of 77 and other developing countries.
We canât effectively address climate change without ending war and militarism and the massive carbon pollution which they directly and indirectly generate. And we canât end war without ending the fossil fuel energy system which war protects. The specter of nuclear war hangs over a world in which there are 10 current wars, 32 limited conflicts, 9 nuclear-armed nations and 17,000 existing nuclear weapons. Climate change will cause massive displacement of impoverished and desperate people leading to regional hostilities and increasing the danger of nuclear war and world wide annihilation.
[The event's web page is masspeaceaction.org/event/stop-wars-warming-derber; the above description borrows text from that site.]
Recorded and posted by Truth and Justice Radio, an award-winning public affairs program aired weekly at WZBC 90.3FM Sundays 6-10am, also available online live and archived two weeks at wzbc.org. Its primitive website: truthandjusticeradio.org
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