Lisa Friedman: a More Diverse Environmental Movement and the Critical Year Ahead for Climate Talks

Summary: “If you care about climate change and international response to climate change, the first two weeks of December in Paris, France, will be your Super Bowl,” says Lisa Friedman, editor of ClimateWire, in this week’s podcast. Friedman predicts the next UN climate summit will be the first to bring together all countries with voluntary but binding pledges to address climate change. Previous negotiations separated countries into two categories – wealthier nations bearing the bulk of emission reduction goals and everyone else. Much of the onus sits with the world’s largest carbon emitters, like China, the United States, and India. But there are also questions about what sort of responsibility countries with growing economies and emissions should bear, such as Brazil, Turkey, and Indonesia. Friedman says this question is at the heart of the Paris debate: how much responsibility should countries take? “Is it a formula?” Friedman says. “Is there a formula out there that all countries can agree to [that is] some mixture of emissions per capita, historic emissions, future emissions, GDP?” Friedman says the Obama administration is hoping for equal legal responsibility for cutting emissions among all countries, though it recognizes that level of wealth and development will impact a country’s capacity to respond. A Broader Cross-Section? While the climate talks may dominate international environmental coverage in 2015, Friedman says there’s an additional story worth watching. As the historic marches last year in New York and around the world demonstrated, the climate movement is moving away from just environmental activists to a broader spectrum of players who add more nuance and depth to the mitigation debate. “You saw…a movement of not just young people, not just activists, but religious people and older people and families and people coming at this from a business perspective,” she says. Pope Francis weighed in on the need to address environmental change in recent remarks, and activists are also courting immigrant communities. “Huge pockets of immigrant communities all over the U.S. have not been motivated to be active and politically active on issues of climate change,” Friedman says, but from Filipinos in Texas whose families were affected by Hurricane Haiyan to Vietnamese communities in California, that is starting to change. These new voices could not only make environmental movements more diverse, they could make climate change a bigger issue for Democrats and Republicans in 2015. Lisa Friedman spoke at the Wilson Center on January 23. Watch the full event on the year ahead in environment and energy news here. Friday Podcasts are also available for download on iTunes.