CURWOOD: So, looking forward to what could solve the climate crisis some say it comes down to who has power.

WILKINSON: I think in so many ways, money and power are really the crux of the of the issue, right?

CURWOOD: That’s Katharine Wilkinson, co-founder of the All We Can Save project and editor of the breakthrough book on climate solutions, Drawdown.
WILKINSON: Money and power is so much of what has kept us stuck in the status quo. It’s so much what has caused denial delay, blockading by standing.

CURWOOD: According to Katharine Wilkinson, money determines who has the power to either maintain the status quo or transform the system, so to make the changes needed to save ourselves from climate catastrophe we have to think beyond dollars and cents, beyond national indicators like GDP.

Katharine Wilkinson is co-founder of the All We Can Save project and editor of the breakthrough book on climate solutions, Drawdown.

WILKINSON: We’ve somehow seem to have landed on GDP, it is like the one big needle that we’re all hearing about, you know, you tune into the news. And that’s the key performance indicator that you’re going to hear about, about how we’re doing as a society. And, of course, sort of when we think about things that were laid bare by the pandemic, while it was the gap between how the markets seemed to think we were doing last year and how average people were doing last year, we’re wildly divergent. And if that sort of doesn’t reveal some insanity to us, I don’t know. I don’t know what will.

CURWOOD: Katharine’s done a lot of thinking about how to build a green economy, and to her a lot of it requires reframing the issue.

WILKINSON: I think a lot of times, our mind goes to oh, so that means, you know, installing wind and solar power. And that means retrofitting, building and building alternative transit. And I think all of that is true. But I think it also means recognizing, where we already have a quote unquote, green economy, but we’ve never seen it as such. So, for example, most CARE jobs right, the CARE economy is largely a green economy. It’s largely a low carbon set of industries. Interestingly, predominantly held by women, and women of color.


CURWOOD: She foresees a green economy that is built upon unity, and says we’re moving in the right direction:
WILKINSON: Even as wealth inequality widens, even as concentrations of money and power in some way are growing larger and larger, in a smaller and smaller set of hands. We’re seeing the collective right rise up in various ways, as the corrective, the collective as the corrective to that situation and the collective as the means to shift the deployment of money and power towards a just and livable future.