sung-Wake Up No time for sleeping
You gotta wake up- open your mind
Abel: Following your career, I have been reading
you since I was a teenager, I have noticed
that your attention has turned somewhat from
focusing on trying to prevent a nuclear holocaust
to more preventing a climate catastrophe.
I wondered if you'd comment on on what led
to that shift in priorities
Noam: A change in understand. I remember very well
in the early seventies the two friends
of mine, personal friends the one who happened
to be head of Earth Sciences at Harvard the
other was head of Meteorology at MIT, around
the same time they both started talking privately
about new information that was coming out
that suggested that we're heading toward some
real problems. And over the years that's become
clearer and clearer- by now it should be evident
to a rational person that we're at the edge
of a cliff 
we're in a unique moment in the history of
the human species. We're on the edge of the
cliff in which we could, not totally destroy ourselves
but destroy the possibility of a
decent existence. And there's not a lot of
time to make that decision- that's become
more and more evident.
Abel: I try to take a systems perspective
along the veins of Barry Commoner-
an ecological perspective
like Bill McKibben espousing now or Wendell Berry, from
a more literary standpoint. Making the connection between foreign policy
or our militarism
and how we're treating the environment.
Noam: the military's one of the major polluters
Abel: It's the biggest consumer him petroleum
products for our country of course.
Do you share that perspective? Do you try to
bring in a the way in which environmental
issues connect with everything?
Noam: Yes
Abel: I often find that people separate the environment-
like we have civilization over here and we
use the environment for resources (over there).
Noam: No, can't separate- Barry Commoner was
kinda disregarded and even sometimes derided
but he was prophetic- he was right on
target. You could argue this or that but the
the basic thrust was correct.
Yes these are all interconnected, and incidentally,
this is connected to the top questions corporate
power we were discussing, so what there isn't
going to be anything serious a climate change
unless the richest and most powerful state world
namely us takes the lead on on it. And in fact
we're taking the lead backward the United
States is the only one maybe a hundred relevant
countries doesn't even have a national program
on the restriction of carbon dioxide- national
standards on sustainable energy and we're
not doing very much. The reason is that it's
a business run society.
There is a huge corporate offensive first of all to deny climate change.
Secondly if accept it's it's not anthropogenic that it is human based, to prevent any action it.
And they are powerful. 
and it's gone to the extent that ALEC-
you know the group that writes) the corporate group writes legislation for states- they that have enough clout so
they get accepted It is actually initiating
what they call an educational program for
states- k to 12- children.
Abel: uh huh
Noam: in which which is presented as critical
thinking- it means if a sixth-grader learns
something about climate change, they also
have to have a section on climate change denial!
That's critical thinking for 6th graders. 
Abel: wow
Noam: The idea is to try to drive the population
to totally irrationality so that corporations
can make more profit tomorrow even if they
doom on the planet for
the next generation. To a very
substantial extent we are a business run society
much more than, way beyond the norm and that's
effective on how policy is designed to maximize dangers.
So these things are all totally interconnected.
