On Being Wrong

WAMC Audio for “On Being Wrong”

Dr Steven A. Leibo is the Sage Colleges Professor of International History & Politics.

For a professor of modern world civilization this has been quite a week watching a good chunk of the leadership of the entire planet gathering in Copenhagen to protect a significant percentage of human civilization from catastrophic man made climate change. But doing so by looking for ways to transition us away from the very fossil fuels we built much of modern human civilization with.

How dramatic can it get! And of course, as has been the case for decades, there in Copenhagen has gathered as well a nasty crowd of anti-scientific climate change deniers. Folks who have so gullibly bought the fossil fuel industries understandable efforts to protect their long term profits by orchestrating a massive disinformation campaign

But just for the moment it seems worthwhile to ask the obvious question. What are the implications of either group the deniers or the international scientific community simply being flat out wrong?-

Ok, maybe it’s a silly question but stay with me for a moment. Let’s just put aside that the world’s climatologists have more than a hundred years of solid research behind them. Forget that the academies of science of all the major nations in the world back their claims that we face a planetary catastrophe.

Just pretend we are simply dealing with two opinionated blocks fighting over some issue more opinion based then temperature measures and ask ourselves what if one group or the other is simply wrong.

I mean, so what really happens if those who so loudly insist we must move toward a carbon free energy future because humanity’s generations long burning of fossil fuels has upset the equilibrium of our fragile planetary heat balance are flat out wrong. What do we end up with?

Well, let’s see, in that case we end up well prepared to deal with the reality that the world’s sources of conventional oil, the very fuels that power the global transportation system are running out. Indeed the international energy agency just recently doubled its estimates about how quickly we are depleting global oil resources, estimating that those conventional sources will start declining by 2020, only a decade from now. All that will happen of course, during an era when Asian giants like India and China, are using more and more of the stuff.

Let’s see, what if the world’s scientific community is wrong? And we blow money building the infrastructure necessary to tap the enormous potential of the world’s wind, solar and geo-thermal energy sources. Well in that case we will have employed enormous numbers of people for decades to tap the green energy resources found within each country, jobs that in large measure can’t be outsourced. With the eventual result of having created clean and less expensive energy sources for our children. Energy that unlike fossils fuel are absolutely renewable resources

Yes, what if the climate scientists are wrong and we unnecessarily wean ourselves from our addiction to the petroleum products largely dominated by nations that so often despise us. Well then, God forbid, we end up less likely to fight wars over foreign oil fields.

But what if the anti-science crowd is wrong? What if they are wrong in their effort to block America’s transition to a clean green energy future. What if their wrong in their claims that all this climate crisis talk is poppycock.

Well, that’s an easy one. We’ll see increasingly flooded cities, millions of climate refugees fleeing the world’s coastlines from Florida to Vietnam. While the continental interiors of the world, from north central China to the American west dry out faster and faster. Less and less able to support the agriculture production we absolutely depend on while the world ends up facing massively higher prices for diminishing oil resources. And seeing America face an increasingly aggressive energy competition with the ever more oil thirsty nations like China.

While the millions employed by our petroleum based global economy find their futures destroyed even as the leaders of the anti-scientific denial crowd end their days with their grandchildren lining up to spit on their graves

Obama’s Afghan Choice

Dr. Steve A. Leibo directs the Sage Program in International & Globalization Studies

WAMC audio for Obama’s Afghan Choice

It may be not quite be a year but I think we’re justified in making at least a preliminary evaluation of President Obama’s Foreign policy. It does seem reasonable given that he has just made one of the most important short term decisions of his presidency; one that will deeply impact him and America in the immediate future.

Ok, maybe it’s not the decision that will have the longest impact on the American people. No, we will have to cede that legacy to his health care & green energy efforts. And the most obvious conclusion we can draw, is that he gets an “A” for consistency.

I mean it’s certainly obvious he has spent a great deal of time thinking through his options on dealing with Afghanistan. But it’s hard not to recognize as well that is so many ways, the eventual outcome of the president’s deliberations was in large measure pre-ordained.

After all, President Obama, more than most presidents seems to have remained much closer to his initial campaign promises. He has not, dramatically veered away from his core promises as George W. Bush did on climate change or Bill Clinton on the question of the federal budget deficit versus future investments. No here is a president who campaigned to commit his presidency to a series of promises from health care delivery reform to confronting the challenge of dangerous man made climate change. And remains committed to this day.

In foreign policy, Obama promised a more conciliatory foreign policy. Ironically a version of the “humble” foreign policy George W. campaigned on and promptly forgot once in office. But Obama has acted on that promise. With both Iran and North Korea, Obama he has been willing to offer more direct talks. He’s even started a tentative effort to dialogue with the leaders of Myanmar’s nasty junta, while trying to lower the tensions with the Islamic world.

Clearly an approach that has paralleled his campaign promises. And given that consistency can there be anyone who could possibly have imagined Obama would have chosen a different course in Afghanistan than the one he outlined Tuesday night.

I mean let’s be realistic. That choice, that strategy was after all the price of his admission to the presidential sweepstakes as then Senator Obama successfully out-campaigned Hilary Clinton by somewhat unfairly linking her to the vote to conquer Iraq which so obviously undermined Clinton with the activist anti-war wing of the Democratic Party.

But running as a pacifist does not win one the presidency of the Untied States, no, he also outmaneuvered the Republicans by undermine their post Nine Eleven war time leadership by attacking them, not for going to war but distracting themselves from the real war in Afghanistan with their reckless adventure in Iraq—that war he so often calls a war of choice.

No, despite the best hopes of some of his followers Obama campaigned not as an anti-war leader but as one who wanted to focus on the real war of necessity, the struggle in Afghanistan which of course made sense given that the horrors of nine eleven really had originated in Afghanistan.

Now, of course, President Obama has been forced by the logic of his own election to come down on the side making a real try in Afghanistan. After all Afghanistan’s former leaders once turned their nation into a haven for international terrorism. And they are capable of doing so again if not stymied. To be sure maintaining the stability of Afghanistan may not be all that important to America but a failure there will make Pakistan much more vulnerable and a stable Pakistan absolutely is in America’s best interests.

But Obama knows as well that his own democratic constituency is not going to follow him long just because he’s working so hard on health care. If you have doubts about that just conjure up the ghost of L.B.J.

Thus the very clear exit strategy he also enunciated Tuesday evening which is good politics both domestically and internationally. Especially so given how quickly so many Democrats could turn forcibly against his expanding Afghanistan commitment and how easily our very presence can arouse opposition among the very proud Afghans whether they like the Taliban or not.

Our Choice

Audio from Northeast Public Radio

For someone who has spent years studying the significance of humanities accidental and reckless thickening of the belt of greenhouse gases that have long helped regulate our planetary heat, I was disappointed that the world’s leaders just announced a much less ambitious goal for the up-coming Copenhagen talks.

In fact, I was deeply disappointed that they are not yet able to commit to binding agreements that might slow our Titanic like race towards a much more disruptive future. Sure, I never thought Copenhagen would result in the stringent emissions limitations we need to avoid a dangerous increase in climatic catastrophes.

And, the part of me that has spent not years but decades teaching international politics was not surprised at all. We are after all talking about fundamentally altering how humanity uses energy, a challenge like nothing else we have ever taken on.

No, Copenhagen always seemed more likely to be part of the
educational process than an immediate implementation of a meaningful green energy conversion. But it’s important not to go overboard with disappointment. After all, the world really is making enormous progress though perhaps more as individual countries than as a unified international community.

After all, nations from Australia and China to the United States, long unwilling to commit themselves to the challenge of energy conversion are finally deeply engaged. Indeed China and the United States, together the nations most responsible for our present predicament and the solutions to it just embraced an extraordinarily ambitious program to jointly develop cleaner and a more energy efficient designs for everything from homes to appliances, while they together explore ways to gain the advantage of coal without the climate bashing price that comes with its use.

But the fact remains; the reason we are not making enough progress yet is because we’ve not yet generated enough political will to make really meaningful change possible. Indeed the American public has been too deeply distracted by the general economic downturn to focus on the challenge At least to focus on the energy challenge until it is more correctly linked to the possibility of new jobs which remain uppermost on people’s minds.

Which is exactly why Al Gore’s new book is so timely. After all Gore has spent much of his adult life informally serving as the public spokesperson for the international scientific consensus on global warming while finally making real progress with his ground breaking documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth has now taken up the next and most immediate challenge.

What precisely are we going to do about the challenge of a destabilized climatic system? Just how exactly do we carry out this ambitious energy conversion while generating the jobs we need now and into the future.

Thus the title of his book, Our Choice a Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis which is filled with material drawn from a series of solutions conferences Gore just convened with energy experts around the country; a book which interestingly hardly talks about Copenhagen at all. But focuses on the nity gritty of actually accomplishing this extraordinary task. To put people back to work, even as we pursue energy independence and stave off the worst of dramatic climate change. A book that offers a series of extraordinarily clear yet sophisticated chapters on the various alternative energy sources we have before us
from solar, and geo-thermal to the development of a new national energy grid.

Not shying away from the more controversial questions of whether nuclear power should and can be part of our future cleaner energy mix or whether it is actually feasible to clean coal to a point when we can gain the advantage of the energy it holds without the destruction it carries with it. All the while writing perceptively on the psychological and political issues that have made it so difficult for people to accept the implications of man made dramatic climate change.

A book that can easily serve as the primer we all need to successfully and optimistically move deeper into this new energy century with the optimism so many Americans felt at the beginning of the last century

Missing the Really Obvious On Climate Change

Audio from WAMC for “On Missing the Really Obvious About Climate Change” NOV. 2009

Dr Steven A. Leibo is the Sage Colleges Professor of International History & Politics.

One of the really curious aspects of the entire discussion about humanity’s accidental forcing of a change in the global climate balance within which we have built human civilization is how many of the really important elements of this profound challenge almost never get discussed. I mean for some reason we focus on the more visually dramatic elements of the challenge from the increasingly stronger tropical storms to the rising waters that especially threaten our coastlines.

And yet we ignore the most obvious implications of the threat of dramatic climate change like the less visually dramatic but more expansive and immediate threat to global public health around the world and the especially serious international security implications of the challenge. Or least too many of the public and politicians do but not Gwyn Dyer, Canada’s most prominent writer on military and security issues, who has taken on the effort of explaining the full implications of a world where drying out land increasingly causes crop failures that put entire societies at risk; exploring the emerging realities of this growing challenge in his brilliant new book Climate Wars.

But Dyer is not alone in this undertaking, as he makes clear. The world’s military s have already begun their plans to confront the military security threat of climate change. In fact, Dyer bases much of his work on studies already produced by the world’s military establishments. Laying out a series of scenarios on what is likely to happen as the world becomes more and more stressed by the lack of available water. Writing about what might well happen in nuclear armed South Asia as a truly water parched Pakistan confronts a situation where its arch enemy India controls the headwaters of the rivers that feed its people. What may well happen as the previously well off industrialized folks of the northern hemisphere find themselves besieged by millions of their more southerly neighbors who will soon find themselves trapped in regions increasingly without the water necessary to nurture their crops.

Or when China, itself suffering from the depletion of the Tibetan glaciers starts diverting water from those that feed India and if you don’t have the stomach to reflect deeply on this series of very likely geo-political explosions Dyer offers up let me simply suggest a perusal of the document just issued last Thursday by the Military Advisory Council of the project on Climate Change and the Military within which current and retired military officers from across the globe warn of the tremendous security implications of climate change. But the most curious aspect of this unfolding drama is that other too often ignored reality of dramatic climate change; the impact on global public health that has already begun. In short, this is not about the polar bears, but humanity itself. A point driven deeply home by the authors of important new document on the Human Impact of Climate Change “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis” issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum of Geneva, chaired by Kofi Anan the former Secretary General of the United Nations. A document that reminds us that even now that every year climate change is leaving over 300,000 people dead. That it currently leaves 325 million people seriously affected and economic losses of around US$ 125 billion. A reality that is certainly the most immediate and dangerous aspect of dramatic climate change yet one that is hardly ever even discussed issues discussed. Yet are currently available in three documents that everyone should take the time to explore.

And for many of those within Northeast Public Radio’s listening audience there will be a chance to explore some of these critical aspects of climate change challenge right here in Upstate New York as Susan Scrimshaw, President of the Russell Sage College and an internationally known expert on Public Health takes her turn at the podium of the Sage Colleges’ ambitious Road to Copenhagen series this Tuesday evening Nov. 10 in Troy NY information for which can be found at www.sage.edu

350 Or Bust

audio for 350 or Bust!

You have really got to hand it to the WAMC listening audience. They really have their act together. I mean, let’s look at the situation. All around the world people are preparing even now as I speak to head off to Copenhagen’s upcoming International Climate Talks. People who are ready to make their voices heard in the world wide effort to stave off the worst of dramatic climate change caused by our prolific dumping of greenhouse gases like CO2 into the upper atmosphere.

Deeply committed people working to slow the worst of the dramatic food shortages, more violent storms and rising waters caused the burning of fossil fuels. People ready to fly off this December to join communities from all over the world to push our national leaders to undertake even more vigorously the conversion to cleaner safer green energy sources to maintain the climatic balance within which human civilization evolved.

But not everyone can go hopping off to Copenhagen. Not everyone has the money or the time. And thus entered our intrepid Northeast Public Radio listeners. And especially Bill McKibben formally of the Adirondacks and now Burlington, Vermont with his merry band of Middlebury based global climate organizers. Folks from right here in our very own WAMC listening area who came to the rescue of all those people around the planet who wanted to make their voices heard but can’t show up in Copenhagen themselves, came to their rescue by taking on the organization of the entire world.

Can’t say folks around here aren’t ambitious! And what’s great is that they have actually pulled it off! Yes, members of WAMC’s Northeast Public Radio listening audience have taken the lead – have brought the international battle to maintain the earth’s current climate balance right to the doorstep of people across the planet. Allowing people to take part in the international movement known as simply as 350, that simple block of Arab numerals, recognized around the world regardless of language barriers that represents what our best scientists tell us is the absolutely highest amount of CO2 parts per million the atmosphere can handle for any sustained period least we set off an even greater thickening of the green house gases that will soon push us into a climatic battle for survival too scary to contemplate. A number that compared to today’s 390 we are already depressingly long past. And that 350 movement — started right here in WAMC’s home turf is now all over the world from China to Japan, from South Korea to Indonesia
from Abu Dhabi to Brazil. In total almost 4 thousand events around the world in over 170 countries.

Events specifically designed to slam that critical 350 number into the world’s consciousness with rallies around the world that will focus on publicizing that critical number by having people using their own creativity to dramatically create that number.

Creating it in with chains of human groups, tree plantings, bike riders; a movement that is crossing international and culture battle lines as few had done before. As in the Middle East this week when on the 24th right there at the Dead Sea Israelis plan to gather to create a giant three as their Palestinians cousins form a five along side while their Jordanian brothers finish up with that final zero.

But WAMC folks won’t have to fly to Shanghai or Madrid. In fact, most of those in WAMC’s listening area won’t have to go far at all to find a 350 rally from Hartford Connecticut to the Massachusetts’ Berkshires, from Bennington Vermont to New Hampshire one has only to go to the 350.org website to get the details.

And right here in upstate New York, from Oneonta to Glens Falls, from Lake Placid to Plattsburg. And for the good folks of the New York’s capital region, right here in WAMC’s home base Albany, NY. This Saturday at the New York State Capital Building starting at 2:00 with local environmental heroes from Ward Stone and Barbara Warren to Congressman Paul Tonko helping to lead the rally.

To Heal The World

To Heal the World Audio from Northeast Public Radio

Dr. Steven A. Leibo is a professor of International History & Politics at the Sage Colleges

What an interesting week in the history of the world, a single week bookmarked at both ends by the Jewish Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. One holiday, Rosh Hashanah that deals with the New Year, on the Jewish calendar 5770 and the other the Day of Atonement; the day Jews confront their sins of the previous year.

Oh sure by the standards of modern scholarship the moment of creation, the big bang as they say was considerably longer ago than the approximately six thousand years of the Jewish calendar. Though the date is not terribly far off if we think of it as the date from which the earth, especially the level of the seas and oceans began to become familiar with their recognizable array of coast lines along side which we’ve built our cities and harbors.

And as for Yom Kippur: It’s the day in Jewish tradition that calls for changing one’s behavior seeking forgiveness for wrongs done against God and human beings. Sure the Jewish high holidays come every year. But this particular set should have special meaning— a more global meaning. Especially if we recall one of the most common ideas found in Judaism, the ever so familiar idea of tikkun olam. That is “To heal the world” an idea that has certainly had many applications over the years but this time it is considerably more literal than in the past. Coming at a time when through the power of humanity’s ingenuity. We have actually arrived at a point when we have the power not only to deeply damage the world but to heal it depending in large measure on the choices we make in the next few months. A moment made most graphic because only a few days after the start of the Jewish New Year the secretary general of the UN convened an unprecedented meeting of the world’s leaders. — Or as Ban Ki-moon said:

“I will have a simple message to convey to leaders: Climate change is the preeminent geopolitical issue of our time. It rewrites the global equation for development, peace and prosperity. It threatens markets, economies and development gains. It can deplete food and water supplies, provoke conflict and migration, destabilize fragile societies and even topple governments. The world needs you to actively push for a fair, effective and ambitious deal in Copenhagen. Fail to act, and we will count the cost for generations to come.”

And of course most importantly the two countries most responsible for our climate crisis were there, the United States which has historically emitted the most green houses gasses that are threatening human civilization. A reality which is profoundly important fact given the more than one hundred years that CO2 stays in the atmosphere. And China which if it is not the cumulative winner in this infamous race has emerged as the world’s current largest emitter. And not merely representatives but President Obama himself, representing an America whose leadership has finally begun to responsibly confront the climate crisis and Hu Jintao, the president of the People’s Republic of China, who in his first ever address on the climate change spoke of China’s own ambitious commitment to embracing cleaner energy sources.
Oh sure, the pundits keep telling us nothing substantial will come out of the international climate talks at Copenhagen – that Obama’s too busy with health care to move forward on this extraordinary planetary challenge to convert to cleaner energy sources. And Hu Jintao was too vague about how real China’s own commitment is to avoiding the worst of challenges of climate change. As if any nation on the eve of international negotiations would be likely to reveal its full bargaining position.

No, from the perspective of this commentator, it seems that with enough public pressure, especially on the US Senate for America to play its part in healing the world. And we do indeed still need that public pressure we may very well be on the verge of a truly international effort to pull us back from the brink of climate change disaster.

350: It’s A Nice Easy Number

WAMC Northeast Public Radio Audio for 350 It’s a Nice Number Sept 2009

For someone who has spent his entire adult life studying developments in East Asia, and of late closely monitoring Asia’s role in trying to get humanity’s carbon emissions under control before they wreak havoc on the entire climatic system we depend on for food, water and shelter.

You would think I’d be happy that Japan’s elections last week saw the Japan’s Conservative LDP fall from power, replaced by the opposition Democratic Party which has called for a much more ambitious Japanese effort to confront climate change by, let’s see if I can say this correctly, promising to reduce CO2 emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by the year 2020.

But frankly I am not. You see, and I hesitate to admit it but I have a problem with numbers. And to be frank, and all this talk about cutting such and such country’s emissions by such and such a percentage linked of course to base line years selected from some year in the past, say 1990 and dates in the future say 2020, or 2050 just leaves me glass eyed.

Now, it’s not that I don’t understand the climate change realities behind those numbers. It’s not that I don’t understand the potential impact of increasingly powerful storms of the sort that have hit the American Southeast & Asia of late. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the significance of the growing reality of drought that is currently hitting California’s Central Valley, north central China and north & eastern Africa. Not that I am not deeply worried about bigger and scarier forest fires of the sort that have devastated Los Angeles, Greece and Australia in recent months or the rise of everything from water to tropical diseases.

It’s just this little problem I have with those strings of abstract numbers. Which is why I was so pleased when climate change leaders Bill McKibben and James Hansen simplified the entire struggle against radical climate change by inspiring the movement known simply as “350”. A very clear and concise rethinking of the entire climate change challenge by simply focusing on 350 the number of parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; a very simple number even I –one of those arithmetically challenged folks can hold in my head.

Or let me be more precise, the need to get the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts per million. To make sure that that famous green house belt of gases that CO2 is so important to that atmospheric belt that has long kept us reasonably protected from the harsh cold of space does not continue to retain more and more solar heat within the earth’s atmosphere pushing us beyond the climatic global temperature balance within which we have largely built our entire global civilization

Sure some might argue we’ve got to go even lower. After all before the industrial revolution’s wholehearted commitment to the burning of fossil fuels for energy those CO2 numbers floated around 280 parts per million for hundreds of thousands of years. But that was then and this is now. And we have already pushed past 350 long ago. In fact the last time I looked it was getting closer to 390 parts per million with the likelihood of much higher numbers and the accompanying rise of global temperatures that is already melting mountain glaciers across the planet.

Which is why having a very clear and concrete number to focus on, the goal of at least getting back down to 350 is such a useful tool in this complicated challenge so different from anything humanity has ever faced in the past. And why over the next few weeks we are going to see that 350 cropping up all over the world in over a hundred countries and counting.

And why within cities across America, educational and religious leaders are signing up at 350.0rg on the web. To make sure their communities take part in this very clear call to protect ourselves from the worst of the many looming threats of climate change.

Unscientific America

Audio from WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Dr. Steven A. Leibo is a professor of International History & Politics at the Sage Colleges

I don’t know about you but I spent a lot of time this summer reading a string of international thrillers. But as the summer wound down I yearned for more substance and picked up the wonderful new book Unscientific America by Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum. A book written by some of the same folks that carried out last year’s effort to organize the Science Debate2008.

That of course was the unsuccessful attempt to have the public hear the presidential candidates dialogue on issues from stem cells and cloning to gene therapy and space exploration. But if that effort failed, its energy flowed into the production of this very important book. And happily Unscientific America is not just another discussion of about how little Americans know about science but a much more ambitious effort to trace the widening tension between a large part of the public and the scientific community.

In fact, it focuses on the antagonism that has emerged in some quarters against the entire scientific establishment—a dramatic rejection of the historic American optimism that long maintained that science would over time improve our lives. A belief now so often replaced by a suspicion that the scientific community has somehow become our enemy; not just assaulting our views on God and creation with its evolutionary based explanation of life but with its the newest challenge to America’s supposedly God given fossil fuel driven life style. With the emerging scientific consensus that that lifestyle itself is threatening human civilization. A personal assault on the American identify if there ever was one.

But if climate change denial and the anti-evolutionary creationist movement originates in the conservative movement it goes far beyond that as reflected among those who have become campaigners against vaccines – people who seem to assume that the scientific community is committed to hurting their children rather than protecting them.

It would of course be easy to assume all this could be rectified by better education. If people knew more about how devastating diseases from small pox and measles to polio were to earlier generations or even knew of the existence of the greenhouse gas belt around the planet that has long protected us from the freezing cold of space. The knowledge of which would make it easier to understand the impact of humanity’s recent thickening of that same belt by the burning of ever more fossil fuels.

But it’s not just a lack of scientific literacy our authors decry. After all they remind us that the European public is not too scientifically swift either, but has not seen the same battles over science. None of this is of course surprising. After all most of our leaders arrive in power without any scientific background, while our society is largely informed by media types who themselves rarely have any knowledge of science either. But the authors don’t just indict the scientifically illiterate.

No, they reserve some of their most vehement criticism for the scientific community itself. Which has been unwilling to nurture those scientists who have tried to communicate their conclusions and more importantly the methods of modern science to the general public; a community that most notoriously once undermined the late Carl Sagan for the sin of trying to excite the general public about the wonders of the universe. And more recently has produced scientists who have gone out of their way to antagonize the religiously minded. As if science had an official conclusion on such spiritual issues.

In short our authors blame a good part of the scientific community for the suspicions that have emerged about their work. And encourage a much more pro-active establishment effort to support and professionally advance the role of scientific popularizers – real scientists, but folks with the communication skills necessary to midwife the general public’s appreciation of how science operates. And to appreciate the scientist’s absolute necessity to find results and conclusions that other scientists can independently confirm.

Because if we don’t take on this larger American challenge to enhance the American public’s ability to successfully navigate our way through the looming scientific decisions of the 21st century. We will keep stumbling along from decision to decision re-fighting the battle anew with every new issue.

America’s Human Rights Challenge

Audio From WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Dr. Steven A. Leibo is a professor of International History & Politics
at the Sage Colleges

Like a lot of people I trotted out last Saturday to watch one of those congressional town hall meetings that have been all over the national news. Sure, I understood there would not be a real discussion of the various ways we might go about fixing our broken health care system; that there would be no thoughtful conversation addressing the increasingly common fear that our insurance companies will try to weasel out of any medical claims we might actually make on them. Something that irony of ironies happened to me even as I was writing this commentary. Let alone the millions without health insurance or the thousands who die every year simply because they lack such insurance.

No, I knew enough from the media to know that useful and substantive discussions were not taking place. Rather, that I would most likely find a bunch of people yelling about whether Obama’s goals were more like those of Stalin or Hitler. But I still felt it was important to experience one of those town halls for myself. So off I went, to one held by freshman Congressman Scott Murphy, a few miles from my home. And I should add that Murphy handled the meeting’s challenges especially well.

And happily while there was plenty of tension as the crowds occasionally confronted each other no real fights broke out but I could not help but amuse myself by reflecting on the irony that if such an altercation did break out. If a demonstrator actually attacked someone else the attacker would be guaranteed a right to lawyer but the victim would have no right to medical care. Now, it’s not that I am against the criminally accused having a right to lawyer but it does seem well – odd.

But given my profession, I reminded myself that I am supposed to take a broader perspective at such moments. So, I switched to ruminating on the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights that just celebrated its 60th year in existence. Reflecting on that profoundly important document that was signed originally on Dec. 10, 1948 by 48 nations, with eight abstentions while none opposed which stated very clearly in article 25 that health care should be a human right, a human right that that nations around the world should aspire to supply their citizens with.

And there was plenty within the right’s declaration that Americans, who had done so much to create the document, could embrace like its profound support for the democratic idea. But not surprisingly there was also much that many Americans found troubling.

Granted this was back in 1948 when much of America was still deeply committed to the Jim Crow system of racial segregation. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included racial equality clauses.
And of course, the declaration’s definition of human rights differed somewhat from what most Americans had historically embraced. After all, wealthy America has long focused on what one might call rich people’s rights putting its focus more on rights like voting and free speech rather than more core issues like food, shelter and health care.

But over the years America’s ambivalence about the document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has evolved and the U.S. did eventually embrace the values of racial equality so fundamental to the declaration. Yes, committed ourselves. But I should add with moments of emotion and outrage not all the different from that what we have seen at this week’s town hall meetings.

Though today, the issue is not America’s embrace of the Declaration of Human Right’s clauses on racial equality but the question of whether we will adopt as so many industrialized nations around the world have long done, the 60 year old declaration’s call to treat health care as a human right which every American citizen, regardless of financial status should have available.

And no one watching today’s current national debate should think it will be any easier this time to progress forward to fully embrace the idea of human rights that the world community struggled to define for itself sixty years ago.

On False Choices

Audio from Northeast Public Radio

About a week ago I found myself having a very strange conversation among a group of political activists. We were sitting in a library meeting room being asked whether we thought the group’s energies should be focused more on the current struggle for a new health care system or to push for the new green energy legislation.

What a choice! My God I thought, has it come to that, a sort of contemporary Sophie’s Choice for those that remember that great old film. Had it really come down to deciding whether we should focus on one absolutely critical issue or the other? Being forced to decide between using our limited resources on fixing the broken American health care system or working to avoid the looming planetary climate crisis. Sure, I realized that the moment did have some positive aspects to it. I mean, on one hand the fact that we could have arrived at a point when with great effort we could actually make progress on these two vital issues seemed amazing.

After all, only a short time ago most Americans did not have a clue what our dependence on fossil fuels was doing to us and on health care they were still confused by Wall Street’s professionally orchestrated marketing campaign that we had the best medical system on the planet rather than one of the worst health care delivery system in the developed world.

After all, only a few years ago I was picketed for warning of the dangers of climate change and when I spoke of the excellent universal health care systems available to people in so many other developed countries people looked at me as if I were nuts And now, here we were. On the brink of actual making progress on both critical long term issues.

But the question remained. Given the limited resources of our small group it was reasonable to suggest making a choice to concentrate on either health care or energy but not both – a question I’d been asking myself for months. But then I realized, it’s a false choice because neither challenge is a run of the mill issue of the moment.

Both literally call for revolutionary action to dramatically transition to new clean energy sources even as we transform health care from a system designed to meet Wall Street’s profits to one based on America’s need for healthy citizens

No, this time we cannot make a choice. Because the downside of the relative political stability American have long enjoyed over so many other countries is an essentially conservative democracy only very infrequently capable of making really dramatic changes . In fact such opportunities come along only a few times in a lifetime. And right now is such a moment, a very temporary moment when we can pass these two revolutionary changes; one of those rare moments when progressives have the votes in congress, and a president in the White House who understands the need for a radical overhaul of how we deliver health care and use energy.

Even as the defenders of fossil fuel and our Wall Street based health care market lovers are in retreat. Yes, right now is one of those rare moments when, as they say, the legislative stars have lined up to allow these revolutionary changes. So, there really is no choice.

We have to fight for a people not Wall Street based health care delivery system using every financial donation, e-mail and public march we can organize.

We have to fight for affordable universal health care as if the looming threat of climate change was not bearing down on us.

And take on the challenge of climate change, fighting off the rising waters, increasing drought, and growing public health threat it forces us toward, fighting with every financial donation, e-mail and public march we can organize as if the fight for an effective American national health care system did not exist.

Because only now are we in a position to fight for the real change last fall we merely voted for.