A GOOD WAR?
Though I bought "A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency" the moment it came out, back in 2020, only now did I finish reading it. (You should go buy five copies.) Obviously, as the title suggests, it's a book about transforming our society with a reorientation toward a concern for climate and addressing the problems we face.
In spelling out just how all this will work, the author starts by quoting Gramsci.* And, well, it goes downhill fast from there. Among many critical problems, the book is careful to offer only a selection of accurate or otherwise sufficiently vague quotes from leaders in the climate movement. Doing so, the author manages to leave out all the figures and authoritative assertions used to justify the most extreme headlines over the past thirty years. The book presents as founts of knowledge and trustworthy oracles those same persons and publications who have been, in hindsight, so consistently sensationalist, unable to make accurate predictions, and just wildly wrong over the years. As such, the book largely highlights elite opinion rather than facts or good evidence and it requires readers to be unaware that if those same sources had been correct in their predictions then things like drought and famine (or a new ice age or ozone depletion or acid rain) would have already taken out our species and nearly every other ten times over.
If you can get over those omissions and quotations, you'll find the book is effectively a re-submission of the "Green New Deal", the Leap Manifesto, and older CCPA policy proposals. And all of it lands on me the same way the "Green New Deal" did the first time around: no different than "Make America Great Again." It still comes across as astonishing that all the same folks who saw all manner of error in the Trumpist slogan and agenda, and loudly proclaiming all of that in excruciating detail on social media and in op-eds and across kitchen tables and in marches and riots in most of the cities of America, immediately turned around the moment they caught their breath and did the exact same thing. "We need an unimaginably massive nationwide public works program to rival that of Roosevelt's New Deal!" Amazing.
