Supporting documents for Dana Fisher’s CACOR Live Presentation
There is no slide deck available (copyright)
Dr. Dana Fisher | Saving Ourselves in Times of Crisis. | Sep 03, 2025 at 13:30 EDT | CACOR Live
Posted by Art Hunter
Canadian Association for the Club of Rome
Become active - It's your duty!
Some comments with respect to some of the questions in the ‘chat record’.
Q: Why is it that consuming much less, especially with respect to fossil fuels, is not a method of saving ourselves? That is something in which everyone can participate.
Comment: This is true, in the aggregate. But it’s not an option for someone on a low income who is possibly not consuming enough to live a decent life and actively participate in society. Most people need to consume less, but the most deprived people need to consume more. That can be done whilst consuming less in the aggregate. Distribution matters!
Q: I’d posit that the lower participation rates in climate protests for lower incomes and blue collar demographics is due to the fact that the cost of climate mitigation programs will be high, and these demographics are least able to afford climate action. They may well be the first to suffer but they are barely getting by now and simply do not want to/are unable to bear any additional cost. Could this explain any of the climate protest participation rates?
Comment: I’d say, yes, for the reasons I’ve given in my first comment. People badly affected by the current system are not being catered for by the current system. However, they are concerned that a change in the system (e.g., less consumption) will make them even worse off. To take as many people as possible along with you in a call for a change in the system, you need to guarantee that the most deprived people will be adequately catered for by a ‘new’ system – indeed, that we will all be adequately catered for. Why would the ‘deprived’ believe this when the current system fails them? That’s been the problem of the Left for decades. The Left has failed the underprivileged by embracing neoliberal reforms and failing to understand the fiscal capacities of currency-issuing central governments, which can be used to guarantee full employment paid at a minimum, living income, and to provide everyone with access to high-quality public goods – the latter as important, as a distributional mechanism, as the distribution of income. In a nutshell, the Left has failed Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’. It’s no wonder they don’t participate in marches.
C: I have come to suspect that until 2,000,000 Americans die in a huge heatwave, fire, or storm, climate change denial will continue.
Comment: Why? A single weather event or weather-related event cannot be attributed to climate change. The denialists will claim that such an event is ‘normal’ and that a single event that kills 2 million people has always been a possibility. If 2 million people start dying on a regular basis from weather-related events, it may be different. By then, it will be too late to prevent catastrophic CC.
Overall comment: ‘Create community’ and ‘cultivate resilience’ is about explicating an alternative system that caters for everybody – a system that does not let people fall through the cracks, including the people and the communities currently having food on the dinner table paid for by income generated from activities like coal mining. These people need to be shielded from the cost of transition by being retrained and often resettled to seamlessly shift to new, low-emissions and renewable energy-based industries. I don’t hear anything like this from the environmental movement. It must also be a system that overcomes the institutional deprivation that is a feature of the current system. The term ‘just’ in ‘just transition’ is the key to any possible transition to a sustainable society. The very rich and powerful won’t like this, but they would be overwhelmed by a groundswell of support for a new system. That groundswell doesn’t exist at present. If anything, the rich and powerful have been successful at pitting the rest of us against each other, with the USA the best example of this.
I submit that the death rate from deteriorating climate will not be a step function from zero to 2 million. It will happen far more gradually over many months but there will be many analytics to demonstrate the advancing death rate correlates with deteriorating climate that correlates with fossil fuel use. It will be well debated and very clear. deniers will always deny but facts become harder to deny.