Noam Chomsky spoke at the 20th anniversary of Democracy Now!, the independent global radio news show, at a celebratory meeting on December 6 in Riverside, Manhattan, recalling memories of the spread of fascism under Hitler and Mussolini across Europe in the 1930s.
After 25 minutes the video changes from a lecture to a talk with Noam Chomsky and Harry Belafonte. Harry Belafonte marched with Martin Luther King on Selma.
“The leading climate change scientist in Bangladesh has reacted by saying that these migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gasses are coming. Millions should be able to go the United States and indeed the other rich countries”
Since the republicans have proved to work against the Paris agreement the hopes were placed with China since the leader fo the free world was acting in such ways to doom the hopes to total disaster. In this 54 minute lecture, Noam Chomsky speaks about the Paris agreement and Trump’s take on climate change . And Chomsky predicts that we will soon see the dangerous horrifying consequences of this failure right here in the USA. He makes an example of the country of Bangladesh and that within a few years tens of millions of people will be fleeing from the low-lying coastal plains simply because of the rise of sea level since the melting of the huge Antartic glaciers is happening much more quickly than was anticipated. That and the severe weather associated with global warming. Chomsky predicts a refugee crisis that will make this current crisis seem like a footnote to a tragedy. He says that today’s crisis is more of a moral crisis of the west than an actual refugee crisis. The leading climate change scientist in Bangladesh has reacted by saying that these migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gasses are coming. Millions should be able to go the United States and indeed the other rich countries!
He speaks about the Marrakech Morrocco conference, the so-called cop 22, the goal of this conference was to implement the rather vague promises and commitments of the preceding international conference on global warming. The Paris conference had the goal of establishing verifiable commitments to do something about the worst problem that humans have every faced, the likely destruction of organized human life. They couldn’t do that they could only reach a non-verifiable commitment not fixed by treaty. And the reason was that the republican congress in the United States would not accept binding commitments. So they were left with something much weaker. Discussing what to do in this geological epoch that is marked by radical human modification destruction of the environment that sustains life stopped after November 9th. And the only question that was left was whether it would be possible to carry forward this global effort to deal with the highly critical problem, a true environmental catastrophe. This will not be possible if the leader of the free world, the richest and most powerful country in history pulls out completely, as appeared to be the case.
Because that is the stated goal of the president-elect, who regards climate changes as a hoax and whose policy is to maximize the use of fossil fuels.