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[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to Talking Open for Climate Justice. A limited run podcast series created by Western Michigan University Libraries. I'm your host, Sara Volmering and this week we're shining a light on open access and how it helps foster solutions for some of the greatest challenges facing our planet. Before I welcome today's guest, I want us start from a place of mutual understanding, what is open access? Open access is free, immediate access to research online.
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When research is published as open access, anyone anywhere in the world can access it for free and use it to fuel their own research. You might be wondering what open access has to do with climate justice and that's exactly what we're exploring in this series. Today's guest is Dr. Ron Kramer. Dr. Kramer's latest book, Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes, analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective.
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His previous books focus on crimes at the government and corporate levels and the intersection between the two. Dr. Kramer is a professor of sociology at Western Michigan University and is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the Larry T Reynolds Award for outstanding teaching of sociology. And the Charles Horton Cooley Award for distinguished scholarship in sociology. He's currently working on a book about nuclear weapons and international law and
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he hosts the award winning cable television program, Critical Issues, Alternative Views on the public media network in Kalamazoo. Today, he'll share his perspective as a sociologist on climate justice and open access. Dr. Kramer, welcome to the podcast. >> Thank you for having me. >> This week we're talking about open access and climate justice, so we thought we'd start with, what does climate justice mean to you? >> Climate justice has two major components.
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If you talk to anyone who works on climate policy, they will generally talk about mitigation efforts and adaptation efforts. Mitigation refers to keeping greenhouse gasses in the ground, right? Or reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses that are put into the atmosphere. So that's a very, very important component. The primary thing that we probably need to be doing, but people also realize that climate disruption is already here, right?
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It's already happening and there's more of it built into the system, no matter if we eliminated all greenhouse gas emissions today. And so, we also have to think about how do we adapt to the climate disruptions that are occurring? So both of these things have an element of justice to them. On the one hand, not everyone is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, in my book I talk about the carbon majors, there are about 90 organizations, they're mostly fossil-fuel corporations.
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As you can imagine some are government agencies, government run oil companies, but these 90 organizations are responsible for about 70% of all the emissions dating back to 1751. So that's why they're the majors, the carbon majors, they're the ones that are mostly responsible and yet they've not been held accountable in legal and political circles. They have been able to evade government regulation for the most part, they've been able to evade legal accountability.
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And there's an element of justice to that, the people that have caused the problem ought to be held to account. There ought to be some legal accountability. They should be paying reparations in some form or other for the damages that they've caused and they need to be held accountable for the wrongdoing that they've engaged in. I'm a criminologist and we always talk about punishing offenders or holding them accountable and in this case these climate criminals need to be held to account.
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So that's one element of justice that I think is involved, most of the time when people talk about climate justice however, they're thinking about those that are most affected by climate disruptions. >> Climate disruption might be a new term for many Americans. Even those who are familiar with climate change. According to NASA, the evidence for rapid climate change is compelling from rising global temperatures, shrinking glaciers and snow covers to increased frequency of extreme weather events.
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Changes in our climate can lead to changes in other areas of our lives too. Climate disruption refers to what has been or will happen as a result of climate change. How we grow our food, the weather we experience and even where we can safely live are all examples of potential climate disruption. >> Those in the Global South in particularly who are experiencing first and foremost the effects of these climate disruptions and of course these
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are people that have had no responsibility whatsoever for creating the problem. They didn't throw any of these greenhouse gasses up into the atmosphere and yet there being dramatically affected by storms and by drought conditions and agricultural failures. And these are the people that we see becoming climate refugees who are forced because of climatic conditions and the economic problems that it creates to flee. And so, these are folks that have been victimized by climate change and yet
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they have no responsibility for creating the problem. And so the issue of justice is how do we deal with them fairly, right? Climate change is not fair [LAUGH] It's not fair, it's affecting people who have no responsibility. And yet Global North, the wealthy, industrialized nations who have created most of the problems are slow let's, say to react to the problems they've created. And have been slow to develop the financial resources and other kinds of policies and procedures that
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need to be put into place to help people survive first and foremost. But adapt to the climate disruptions that are already occurring and will continue to affect these people. >> What do you think influenced your understanding of climate justice? You mentioned you're a criminologist, you're a sociologist, how did that influence your understanding of climate justice? >> Well at first, I just wanted to be a good citizen and inform myself about the climate issue.
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I had been collecting books on climate change for some time and thinking, well this is something I need to pay attention to. I was busy on other projects, but at one point around 15 years ago I had some time and I devoted it to studying the climate issue. But the more I read, the more the concept of crime kept popping up. People who were talking about global warming and climate change kept using the terminology of crime and
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it's a crime what the government did here by not addressing the climate issue. It's a crime the way fossil fuel companies continue to extract and market and cause to be burned fossil fuels. It's a crime the way they're socially organized denial of the climate issue in order for fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual. And so, I was so struck by the use of the term crime I thought well, I'm a criminologist, maybe I should look into this from a criminological perspective.
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>> You have a different perspective than many of us might have when thinking about climate change. I'm interested in the concept of carbon criminals or carbon majors and where that originated from. >> The concept of carbon majors is not mine, I'm using it. It's been identified by a number of other scholars who have done research and most of their work I find in open access sources as we going to talk about here. So the concept of carbon majors was identified by others, but
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I came across that and I realized how quickly that fit into. The theoretical approach that I was taking, focusing on corporations and government agencies. >> What do you think are the biggest challenges in the climate justice movement? >> The biggest challenge is how do we create the political will to do what we know we need to do. I mean, the answers are pretty obvious. There's no mystery there at all. We know exactly what's going on, right? It's the extraction and marketing and
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burning the fossil fuels which throw the greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. That's the issue. That's the problem. We know how to fix that. Stop burning fossil fuels, right? >> Right. >> Keep them in the ground and yet developing the political will to do that is the most difficult thing. And one of the things that I've been encouraged by most recently, of course, is the fact that the United States Government under President Biden has made working on climate issues a top priority.
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And of course, the recently passed inflation reduction act, which is how is that related to climate change. But if you really look carefully at that bill, you'll see that it's mostly a climate change bill. Most of the provisions in there are related to dealing with the climate crisis. >> The Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden on August 16, 2022. The act includes a number of measures aimed at addressing inflation, including prescription drug and tax reform, but also credits and
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incentives for clean energy jobs and other initiatives. >> And so finally, we've had some political action but in my book, I trace out decades of political inaction. The political emission has been a major problem. Finally, we're beginning to see some action and even at the international level, we've had what are called Conference of Party meetings based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We've had those conference of Party meetings every year and it wasn't until
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2015 at the Paris conference of parties that we finally had some action. We finally had a treaty, not a treaty but an agreement. But that was really the first time we had a major breakthrough in terms of the world coming together and saying, yes, we are gonna do something. Each of us are voluntarily going to contribute to this process. We're all going to pledge to reduce our carbon emissions. Now, again, Paris was a great first step after all those years of inaction,
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but something much stronger is still necessary. We really do need an ironclad treaty. Again, developing the political will both within the United States to take climate action, and also at the international level, that's the biggest problem. We know what to do, we just need to have the political power to make it happen to do it. >> On the consumer level, I guess on the individual level, I think it's clear that climate change, climate justice, these words are used more in everyday life.
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But what have you observed in terms of the individual impact? >> One thing is that people again have a higher level of consciousness of the problem and therefore look to ways in which they can help with their own individual practices as consumers, right? And so we see people who pledge not to fly or who buy electric vehicles or hybrid vehicles, who try to adjust their diet. Who try to turn out the lights and turn down the air conditioning and
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take all kinds of individual steps to lower their own carbon footprint. But there's a larger problem here. And that is the concept of individual carbon footprint was actually created by the fossil fuel industry. And the reason again is what they wanna do is deflect responsibility, right? Remember the carbon majors are responsible for 70% of all the carbon emissions going back centuries. They wanna deflect responsibility. Well, if you would just change your own lifestyle and travel less and
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turn off the lights more and don't eat meat, we could deal with this problem. I mean, those individual things are important. And I'm glad people are taking individual responsibility and making those kinds of changes in their personal life as consumers. Even if everyone tried to do that, it wouldn't be enough. We need to have other kinds of political structural changes to take place if we're gonna deal with this problem. And we're gonna hold global warming below
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the 1.5%Celsius that we agreed to at Paris. And again, whatever individuals do on their own with their own lifestyles is good and important for symbolic reasons and proud regions, but it's not enough. And in fact, the fossil fuel companies want us to feel guilty about that. So we don't blame them, we don't turn our attention to their most important role. And so it's a form of deflection. It's another form of climate denial. >> What are you finding in terms of information on climate change that's
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freely available to researchers or even just concerned citizens who are interested in learning more about what's happening? >> Well, there's a ton available out there and I do heavily on it in writing my book. >> Was there an area in your research where open-access information was especially helpful? >> So I'm not a climate scientist, I'm a sociologist, I'm a criminologist, I'm not a climate scientist. But I knew that I had to have a chapter that outlined the science, right?
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Here's what scientists have known for over 100 years. Here's what they've been saying. Here the latest findings, here are the issues, here are the ecological consequences. And so I had to really make sure I was covering that and what I found was that there's just a tremendous wealth of material available out there. All kinds of different science journals and environmental journals, journals that are directly related to climate change. So it was a tremendous resource to draw on.
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And I couldn't have written the book without access to that information. >> What do you see as the value of open-access publishing, particularly around climate research or other maybe scientific research? >> Well, just discovering things that you need to know, but probably if you're not a climate scientist you wouldn't know right off the bat. So if I'm thinking about, what's going on with regard to storms or drought conditions or climate refugees.
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And I had to go looking for that information that wasn't gonna be as readily available in all books that I was looking at. And so I would go online and try to find these things, all right? And so that was just a great resource for me as I was working on the book. Particularly in that chapter where I'm looking at the ecological effects and the science behind climate change. >> One of the things that we see in open-access in general, one of the reasons
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I think libraries find it important, it's kinda that democratizing of information. It makes it available globally, especially as you talked about people that are impacted by climate change that aren't really responsible for it. Having more available open-access gives them the opportunity to learn about what's happening in their areas and potentially look for solutions as well. >> I think that's a great point, the democratization of information,
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but it's also in a larger sense of political democracy as well. Because what we see is in my book I have a chapter on socially organized denial. So this is not just your uncle Ed denying climate change at the thanksgiving dinner. This is an organized effort by the fossil fuel companies who make contributions to conservative think tanks and who fund bogus research. Or propaganda, denying the effects of climate change or trying to deflect responsibility for it. And that's a very powerful effort.
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And so if that can be countered by people's access to other information, right? You read some of this propaganda that's being put out by the fossil fuel companies or by some of these conservative think tanks. And you can go and check on it, right? And you have available to you, these sources online to really check into that reputable sources, right? We're talking now about scientific journals that have a peer review process and are based on evidence and logic,
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not just somebody's opinion on a website, right? It's invaluable to have those resources to check on the propaganda efforts that are being made by the socially organized denial movement. So, I think it's played a really critical role in helping to counter that denial. >> So when you think about the movement towards climate justice, is there anything that gives you hope? >> Well, there's a lot of discussion right now about something called climate grief.
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>> Again, dealing with this can be very depressing. And, when I teach my course on climate change and society, I put a sort of a statement on my syllabus to tell students, hey, some of the stuff that we're gonna be reading and talking about is pretty heavy and might cause you to feel some anxiety, some climate anxiety, some climate depression. But one of the things I think that helps us deal with our climate anxiety is getting engaged in the issue, right?
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Joining an organization, coming part of the larger climate movement. And so the fact that we have these organizations, 350.org is a tremendous organizations started by Bill McKibben, who's one of the most important climate activist around. And there are others. Sunrise is an organization, mostly of young people. Who have been become very involved, and Greta Thumburg, the young Swedish schoolgirl who went on strike and has become an important figure,
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and has kind of created a movement of climate kids. As one journalist put it, the climate kids are coming. And so, that's what gives me hope, that the young people seem to be energized and mobilized. It's their future that's on the line. They see the issue clearly. They're willing to get in there and get involved and do some of the heavy political lifting that needs to be done. And that there are organizations that they can join, and can assist them, provide them resources.
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To have a social movement be effective, you have to be able to draw on certain kinds of resources, and you have to have organizing skills. And you will be getting to see a lot of that fall into place with the larger climate movement. So that's what gives me hope. The young people that are getting involved in the fact that organized climate movement has really developed, and this has some clout now. And remember, we've got to counter the lobbying and the resources of the fossil fuel industry.
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There's a lot of political activity out there that's try to keep things the way they are, to protect the fossil fuel industry, keep things as normal as possible in terms of the extraction of fossil fuels. And so we've got to have an organized movement on the other side that can counter that, and put pressure on government agencies and politicians to do the right thing. >> You mentioned teaching a course on climate change in society. What's that experience been like for you and your students?
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>> There are tons of courses all across the campus that deal with this issue. Mine is just one of them. Mine is in sociology, but there are tons of courses in geography and political science, and biology, and go across the across the curriculum. And we have a body here called the WMU Climate Change Working Group. And one of the good things that we do is to create courses for our students to take, to become informed about this issue.
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But we also hopefully are providing them with opportunities to engage in research or get active politically on the issue through different connections that we have in the community. >> Your approach to climate change or climate justice is from a criminal logical perspective, but it sounds like there's so many different ways climate change is affecting our world. How important is it to have an interdisciplinary or holistic approach to climate justice? >> I think it's critical.
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And when we started the working group that was our intent to create an interdisciplinary group of scholars here at the university to who could work on the issue. And it's just been invaluable. As a sociologist, I have a particular perspective on climate change, but I've learned so much from my colleagues in biology and geography, and other of the hard sciences about the climate change issue. And I hope they've learned something from me in terms of the sociological aspects of it.
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And we have the political scientists and they've been best important, obviously with regard to the politics of the issue. So, yes, having that interdisciplinary approach has just been critical, and I think we've all helped each other and we reinforce each other's efforts because of the interdisciplinary nature of our working group. >> Kinda goes back to that idea of sharing information, making your information open. >> Exactly, fits in exactly with what open access is all about.
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And here we're doing it at the university level, and that provides us with access to resources in the outside world, that we need to do our work. >> We're coming to the end of our conversation, Dr. Kramer, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners about climate justice and open access? >> Just that I I would hope people get involved in the issue, it's the most urgent issue of our time. It's so easy to get distracted by all the other important issues that are out
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there and there are many. But this is the the most important issue that we face. And so, I would hope that people would educate themselves about the issue, join in the movement if they feel that's a path for them to take. And to spread the word about the climate crisis and the fact that we do need to take some actions to deal with the climate disruptions that are already occurring, and are gonna come even harder and faster in the future. >> Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you.
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>> Thank you for listening to Talking Open for Climate Justice. A podcast created by Western Michigan University Libraries, for international open access week. For more information about open access, visit our website, wmich.edu/library/open-access. [MUSIC]
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