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New: Curbing Corporate Power: The Next Step for the Movement to Slow Climate Change
Following up on the White House demonstrations to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org , is already hard at work on the next stage of the movement to rein in reliance on fossil fuels.
On a three-state speaking tour, he is calling for a constitutional amendment to undo the damage the Supreme Court did when it declared corporations as persons and campaign contributions as speech. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent more money last election cycle than the Democratic and Republican national committees combined—and 97 per cent of that went to climate deniers, he told an audience in Asheville, N.C., on Nov. 30. The climate change movement has to figure out how to break “the corporate power dominating our political lives.”
Energy companies with huge reserves in fossil fuels have a long-term financial incentive to keep the current system in place. “Exxon made more money last quarter than any company in the history of money.” That, he said, is because Exxon and the other fossil fuel companies don’t have to account for the waste they pour into the atmosphere. What we have to do is curb the “power of the fossil fuel industry to prevent change.”
Taking a page from Occupy Wall Street’s strategy book, proponents of an amendment to strip corporations of personhood will occupy federal courts across the country on January 20, 2012. Courts in San Francisco and San Jose are on the list.
The idea of pushing through a constitutional amendment in time to make difference is daunting. Time is running out on the effort to slow climate change. People across the globe are already suffering devastating floods, storms, fire, and drought.
The world’s people know the urgency of action, as is spelled out by a new digest of polling data featured in a Council of Foreign Relations blog on the same day McKibben spoke in Asheville.
In his rundown of what the numbers mean, Stewart M. Patrick, senior fellow and director of the Council’s Program on International Institutions and Global Governance, said, “Publics around the world—including in the United States—believe that global warming is an urgent problem and want their governments to make it a higher priority, by taking vigorous national and multilateral actions to confront it.”
The problem now, worldwide, is how to make governments responsive to the will of the people.
Carol Polsgrove is author of Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement and professor emerita, Indiana University School of Journalism.
