Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Promises Are Not Enough

Promises.

I want to be optimistic about what happened in Glasgow in early November, but I keep coming back to this one word: promise.

The nations who assembled at the United Nations climate change summit — known as the COP26 — promised to curb emission of methane and end deforestation by 2030. They promised money for poor nations.

These are laudable agreements that, if they result in action, will make a huge impact. President Joe Biden deserves a lot of credit for getting the United States back into the mix, and the new US efforts on methane that he announced should help, even if they are a drop in the bucket of what we actually need. Still, that word — promise — is hanging there, calling everything into question.

That’s because we’ve seen this before. We’ve witnessed presidents negotiate what appear to be game-changing international environmental agreements, only to see those efforts undone when they leave office, or fail to be enacted in the United States because of Congressional opposition.

And it’s not just here. Politics matters, and as long as there are conservative and business-centered governments across Europe — not to mention nations like China and Russia that refuse to even participate — the lofty promises offered by world leaders in November will be nothing more than that. Promises.

Yet, while I am not optimistic, I also am not a pessimist or a defeatist. I am skeptical that our political leaders can escape the standard narrative that proclaims we cannot do anything big. It is a narrative that sets the parameters of debate and then uses the parameters it has set as proof that it is correct. As I write this, Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, is doing everything he can to scuttle alternative energy provisions that were to be a major component of what the press is now calling Biden’s social agenda. Manchin and his chief ally, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), had already forced Biden to slash his original proposal in half, to jettison free community college and other needed programs, because of their fealty to the standard narrative that spending money is politically suicidal.

I’m skeptical that Biden’s broader climate promises can be enacted here also, because Republican gerrymandering and archaic Senate rules give too much power to the minority, make it too easy to stop legislation from progressing, no matter how popular it might be (and the polling on this is mixed).

But I’m also hopeful. I’m hopeful because younger generations are less likely to buy into this standard narrative. I’m hopeful because many have made it their mission to fight to stem the ongoing damage my generation has done to the planet and the atmosphere.

The Pew Research Center found that younger Americans — those born after 1981— “are more open than older Americans to some of the farther-reaching policy proposals related to climate change.” The survey, conducted in March, showed that Gen Z and Millennials were more likely to list the climate as their chief policy concern. More significantly, in terms of actually making change, these younger Americans “are especially likely to express an interest in addressing climate change – and to say they have personally taken some kind of action to do so.”

This offers us a different kind of promise, one in which change might just filter up from the grassroots, as it has with so many social, economic, and environmental shifts in our history.

Grassroots action by Black Americans forced government to act on civil rights, ultimately ending legal segregation and opening the voting franchise, schools, and public accommodations to citizens who had previously been denied these rights. There has been pushback — we are witnessing a wholesale effort to restrict voting by Black and brown Americans — but the grassroots already is rising up.

The labor grassroots — organizers, striking workers, socialists — forced questions of workplace democracy, wages, and work hours into the light and led to better pay and working conditions.

And the ecology movement that created Earth Day and moved the Nixon administration to enact some of the most important environmental laws on the books has continued its fight, even as corporate America has coopted much of the agenda.

These summits are important because they set goals. But their impact will be limited unless more of us join with the younger generations, and create the kind of tension the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said was necessary to force defenders of the status quo to deviate from the standard narrative and be aggressive in ways we have not been in the past.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook, facebook.com/ Hank.Kalet; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2021

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