Scaling Up the Movement to Force Immediate Action on Global Warming

from Jacobin:

. . . . This movement is organizing and growing quickly after years of stagnation.

Influenced by the climate movement in Europe — as well as by the recent dire warnings, from science and lived experience alike — the US climate movement is moving quickly beyond the nonprofit industrial complex, which produces a lot more direct mail than direct action. We’re now hearing the early rumblings of the movement that’s actually needed, with constant action at every level, from legislative bodies to the streets — and a sense that the subject of climate action has become inescapable. In the mid-nineteenth century, black and white abolitionists alike created a culture in which the evils of slavery were  constantly discussed and debated. In London, Extinction Rebellion has done this with climate change. We may get there, too.

This new movement distinguishes itself by a willingness to tell the truth — that we could be facing disaster, even human extinction — and to confront the horror of that truth. Extinction Rebellion, as its name suggests, is honest about that. On Truth-Telling Thursdays, activists set up tables and tell people, without sugarcoating, how bad the climate crisis is, signing them up for the movement.

For many people, though, denial remains the most popular option. (Not ideological Fox News–style climate denial, but rather the form that many of us deploy as often as possible: thinking about anything other than climate change.) For most of us, it hasn’t been worth exiting that comfortable fog just to participate in the occasional ineffectual protest. That’s changed for two reasons: it’s becoming impossible to hide from the problem, and the movement is growing so fast that change looks possible. Now that it actually might matter, leaving that safe haven of denial seems worth it.

Another reason this movement is growing so fast, and might eventually win, is its understanding that climate change requires a massive economic change that is at least comparable to the ending of slavery. That’s why it is so intertwined with — and at least in part made possible by — the recent resurgence of socialism. This movement understands that the problem, and all its major solutions, are economic in nature and also massive. . . .

Best Climate Plan So Far is by Jay Inslee

Beto's inadequate energy plan released earlier this week is blown out of the water by Inslee's most serious outline yet for dealing with the climate emergency.  From HuffPo:

Jay Inslee unveiled a sweeping plan Friday to all but eliminate planet-warming emissions from power plants, automobiles and new buildings, becoming the second contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to release a climate policy this week.

The Washington governor, who is making climate change the primary focus of his inaugural White House run, said his nearly 2,900-word “100% Clean Energy for America Plan” is the first of a series of policies he intends to roll out before the first Democratic primary debate in June. 

The plan calls for shuttering all coal plants and setting a national clean electricity standard that requires 100% carbon-neutral power by 2030, leaving room for gas plants equipped with technology to capture and store heat-trapping pollution. It proposes rapidly building out electric vehicle infrastructure and mandating that all buses and new light- and medium-duty vehicles produce zero emissions within a decade. The platform lays out nine separate policies to eliminate emissions from heating, cooling and appliances in new buildings by the end of the next decade.. . .

Scotland Declares Climate Emergency

Read this and then tell me activism doesn't make a difference:

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has declared a "climate emergency" in her speech to the SNP conference.

The SNP leader told delegates in Edinburgh she was inspired after meeting young climate campaigners who had gone on strike from school.

Ms Sturgeon said "they are right", and pledged to "live up to our responsibility" to halt climate change.

She also announced what she described as the SNP's "biggest campaign on the economics of independence".

Labour is expected to press the UK government to declare a national climate emergency on Wednesday.

The party will call for a dramatic cut in the UK's carbon emissions, with leader Jeremy Corbyn also calling for a UK-wide ban on fracking. . . .

National Climate Emergency, Anyone? Anyone?

Britain's Labour Party is on the verge of declaring a National Climate Emergency.

Today's homework: Is there a Democrat now running for President who would do the same?  

Schools That Matter!

A clip from Jacobin on the New York City Schools' involvement in the student climate strike:

. . . .Like the Urban Assembly students, Meremetoh and her schoolmates credit their school with their engagement on this issue. Melanie Mueses, eighteen, said, “The school really pushed me to understand how the environment is crumbling and how we are affecting it,” she says. “I wasn’t like that before.” Meremetoh tells me about an art project she did, showing the sun going from cold to warm to hot. “A lot of people don’t pay attention, and don’t realize the world could be ending in a couple years.”

Mueses suspects policymakers don’t care since they think they’ll be dead when problems caused by climate change get more serious. “I feel people in power don’t feel as deeply about this as us because they’re not going to be here,” she explains. “Us, as ‘the future,’ we are the ones who are going to be most affected.”

Emmanuel Pimentel, eighteen, also a student at High School for Environmental Studies agreed: “We need the world.”

Said Meremetoh, “We have to stand up to everything Trump is saying because he’s crazy. We have to continue to fight. We can’t stop.” Asked what she hopes comes out of these actions, she says, “I hope the future president listens. We have to start taking care of the environment. I really hope the government listens to us, the young people.”

Climate strikers at City Hall were mostly high school kids, but there were younger children, too. A growing movement, #Fridays4Future will continue the Friday strikes that Greta Thunberg began.

There Will Be Plenty of Time for Fear If We Fail

In the meantime, let's get to work:

. . . . Amid all the carnage, the leading global authority on warming, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, detailed the horrors in store if average temperatures pass 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. (We’re already over 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, and worldwide carbon emissions hit a new high in 2018.)

Scientists are now sounding the alarm. Young activists are skipping school and taking to the streets. And in the U.S., a bold proposal to remake the American economy is sending shockwaves through climate legislation discussions that had been stalled for a decade.

Into that now-bubbling climate cauldron comes the book The Uninhabitable Earth, a distressing review of climate science designed to jolt us out of complacency. David Wallace-Wells, who characterizes himself as a concerned liberal who “wasn’t really focused on this issue until a few years ago,” channels the panic he felt at reading reams of scientific reports into a vision of a dystopian future that we’re not doing enough to avoid.

The question is whether fear is the right emotion to play on to get people to sit up, listen, and take action. According to Grist’s own Eric Holthaus, who’s been writing about climate change for more than a decade, it’s not. To him, it’s best to accept the scientific consensus and inspire our fellow humans to roll up their sleeves and ensure we do whatever it takes to decarbonize the global economy rapidly. . . .

Photos from Student Strike Against Global Warming

Today students around the world walked out to protest their parents' attempted murder of the Earth. 

More photos here at the NYTimes.

Join National Student Strike March 15

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. 

It’s going to take bold action to bring about bold solutions to this crisis, and we’re not afraid to show our elected officials that we mean business. On March 15th, youth in the US will join thousands of youth across the globe striking from school for climate action. And we need your support. 

Join the US Youth Climate Strike on March 15th to call for radical legislative action to combat climate change. Join the movement today.

Decades of climate inaction has left the most marginalized communities exposed to the threats of the climate crisis. As this crisis gets exponentially worse, my generation will face extreme impacts like worsening storms, and will be left to clean up the mess we’ve created.

Youth across America will strike in pursuit of a bold set of demands that include a Green New Deal, a fair and just transition to 100% renewable energy, and no new fossil fuel infrastructure. 

Mobilize with US youth on March 15th to fight for an equitable and just world for our climate and our communities. 

Youth across the world are taking power into their own hands. Are you with us?

Onward, 
Isra Hirsi, US Youth Climate Strike

P.S. Not only do we need thousands on the streets on March 15th, we also need tons of volunteers to pull this off. Interested in volunteering to support the US Youth Climate Strike? Sign up today and let us know how you can help.

10 Years To Educate, Mobilize, and Change--Or Die

We have made the ultimate existential choice now immediate: choose life or choose death:

The Green New Deal (GND) is now part of the national conversation. But for decades, social movements have been doing the on-the-ground work to resist fossil capitalism and envision a different future. Such grassroots social mobilization — but at a massive scale — is vital to ensuring the GND catalyzes transformative social change.

Cooperation Jackson is at the forefront of eco-socialist organizing to create a new society and economy from the bottom up. Cooperation Jackson encompasses a network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions fighting to build a solidarity economy in Mississippi and beyond. Jacobin’s Green New Deal editorial team spoke with Kali Akuno, the cofounder and executive director of Cooperation Jackson, and coeditor of Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS.

In this wide-ranging interview, we discussed the links between local eco-socialist action, national movement-building, and an internationalist orientation; tactics and strategies for interacting with electoral politics to radicalize the GND — and much more. Throughout, Akuno draws on a long history of environmental justice activism in the United States and around the world, providing key lessons about how to move forward — and quickly — to generate a militant, mass movement for a just planet.

Read on.

Killing Terrorists to Avoid Another 9-11?

Following the terrorist plots in 2001 that brought down the World Trade Center, left the Pentagon smoldering, and killed thousands of people, the U. S. government acted swiftly to put in place measures to target and take out the terrorists who masterminded and enabled the mass destruction.  

Now if we had prior knowledge of an even more devastating plan to wreak havoc worldwide, this time a plan to kill millions while making large parts the planet uninhabitable, would we be justified in locating and neutralizing those who are planning and enabling such horrendous acts?

The fact is that we do have prior knowledge of such a plan, and it is being directed by both national and international groups to destroy large swaths of life on Earth, while carrying out a well-funded political and media campaign to deny, derail, and to discredit any effort to undermine the flagrant and massive operation of capitalist terrorism.  This campaign is being directed by fossil fuel interests in corporate boardrooms and secure corporate/political retreat locations around the globe.

The question remains how to mobilize forces and to effect operations that are required for our children and grandchildren to have lives, and for the planet to remain like Earth rather than Venus.

. . . .The IPCC report makes it clear that the time for talking is over — this is literally a matter of life and death. To give just one example, Yale scientists predict that the difference between a 1.5 degree and 2 degree rise in global temperatures could cut corn yields in parts of Africa by half. . . .

Clinton and Trump Entirely Irresponsible on Global Warming

via GIPHY

Approaching the Point of No Return

No, it's not a science fiction piece--it is real science.  Real science that is being ignored by both the RNC and the DNC, as they swap the status quo back and forth among the 1 percenters who control both political parties.

Only Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein seem to be attuned to what the science is telling us.  I hope you will take 15 minutes to listen.

Published March 21.

Paris Climate Conference DOA As Capital Proves More Important than Life

Multi-national capitalists have banned together to protect their obscene wealth and to doom the planet at the same time.  This comes even before the vaunted Paris Conference gets underway.

Given the choice of a dead world or the neutralization of a few hundred oligarchs, we must wonder now which options humanity will choose.  I know--it's a tough choice.

From the NYTimes:

They [negotiators] have pointedly declined to take up a recommendation from scientists, made several years ago, that they set a cap on total greenhouse gases as a way to achieve that goal, and then figure out how to allocate the emissions fairly. The pledges countries are making are voluntary, and were established in most nations as a compromise between the desire to be ambitious and the perceived cost and political difficulty of emissions cutbacks.

In effect, the countries are vowing to make changes that collectively still fall far short of the necessary goal, much like a patient who, upon hearing from his doctor that he must lose 50 pounds to avoid life-threatening health risks, takes pride in cutting out fries but not cake and ice cream.

The scientists argue that there is only so much carbon — in the form of exhaust from coal-burning power plants, automobile tailpipes, forest fires and the like — that the atmosphere can absorb before the planet suffers profound damage, with swaths of it potentially becoming uninhabitable.

Comments on Naomi Klein's New Book

A clip from comments on Naomi Klein's new book at Nation of Change:

Klein starts with a blunt statement of the problem: “[O]ur economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.” (21) Human survival requires a new economics, which explains why climate-change denial is strongest among conservatives. Klein points out that while deniers are wrong about science, “the right is right” when it says that climate change demands a full frontal assault on free-market ideology. The minimizers—often liberals, usually self-professed environmentalists—dream of technological fixes and peddle policy changes that don’t upset the status quo, such as the carbon-market shell game of cap-and-trade. Klein’s reproach: Trying to protect existing lifestyles through existing economics “is either dishonest or delusional because a way of life based on the promise of infinite growth cannot be protected, least of all exported to every corner of the globe.” (58)

So That Schools May Matter a Hundred Years from Now

Stand with Corey Husic in Demanding an End to Climate Miseducation by Heartland Institute

Go to Climate Reality and support these high school students in calling out the propagandists at the Heartland Institite.

How Global Warming Is Not Like Any Political Problem

As the propagandists and ecological terrorists work overtime to deny the facts on global warming, a recent poll shows some effects on public opinion. Last year, for instance, 71% of Americans polled believed the earth is warming. This year that number is down to 57%. Does our U. S. Department of Education have a curricular initiative to make sure children learn the facts on global warming? Sorry--it's not on the test.

From Bill McKibben at Huffington Post, as Copenhagen enters Day 2:

. . . climate change is not like any other issue we’ve ever dealt with. Because the adversary here is not Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face -- adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. The adversary here is physics.

Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible "with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.

And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble -- because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.

Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already. We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.

So here’s the thing: When Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen, he will treat global warming as another political problem, offering a promise of something like a 17% cut in our greenhouse gas emissions from their 2005 levels by 2020. This works out to a 4% cut from 1990 levels, the standard baseline for measurement, and yet scientists have calculated that the major industrialized nations need to cut their emissions by 40% to have any hope of getting us on a path back towards safety.

And even that 17% cut may turn out to be far too high a figure for the Senate. Here’s what Senator Jim Webb (a coal-country Democrat) wrote to the president last week: "I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed in Copenhagen… The phrase 'politically binding' has been used. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."

In any case, the Senate has decided that it will not debate any climate-change bill until “the spring,” after health care is settled, and maybe entitlement reform, and perhaps even financial regulation. And awfully close to the next election.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are apparently prepared to offer a 40% reduction in the “energy intensity” of their economy by 2020. In other words, they claim they’ll then be using 40% less energy to make each yuan worth of stuff they ship off to WalMart. Which is better than not doing it, but more or less what the experts think would happen anyway as China’s economy naturally becomes more high-tech and efficient. It’s at best a minor stretch from “business as usual.”

Meanwhile, the Indians almost sacked their environment minister after the newspapers decided he was compromising the national interest by engaging in real negotiations about global warming.

Meanwhile, the Australian opposition last week did sack their leader for being willing to compromise on an already-compromised Emissions Trading Scheme that would have capped carbon -- meaning nothing will pass.

Meanwhile…

A Challenge Unique in History

A new analysis released Thursday by a consortium of European think-tanks shows that the various offers on the table add up to a world in which the atmosphere contains 650 parts per million and the temperature rises an ungodly five degrees Fahrenheit.

What I’m saying is: even the best politicians are treating the problem of climate change as a normal political one, where you halve the distance between various competing interests and do your best to reach some kind of consensus that doesn’t demand too much of anyone, yet reduces the political pressure for a few years -- at which time, of course, you (or possibly someone entirely different) will have to deal with it again.

Obama is doing the same thing with climate change that he did with health care. He’s acting with complete political realism, refusing to make the perfect the enemy of the good (or, really, the better-than-Bush). He’s doing what might make sense in almost any other situation.

Here, unfortunately, the foe is implacable. Implacable foes emerge rarely. The best human analog to the role physics is playing here may be fascism in the middle of the last century. There was no appeasing it, no making a normal political issue out of it. You had to decide to go all in, to transform the industrial base of the country to fight it, to put other things on hold, to demand sacrifice.

Yet it’s all too obvious that we’re not dealing with it that way. The president hasn’t, for instance, been on a nonstop campaign to make everyone realize the danger. When he went to China, he certainly reached some interesting agreements about cooperation on automobile technology, but that’s not the same as seeking a wartime partnership.

Nor is the senate meeting late into the night figuring out how to mobilize our country’s resources and people in the struggle to save our planet. Here’s how Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill summed up the mood: “I don’t think anyone’s excited about doing another really, really big thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad.”

Some of us have been trying hard to open some political space for world leaders to step up to this challenge. We built a worldwide movement at 350.org that managed to pull off the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” (at least according to CNN). In some places, it even sparked the desired result. Ninety-two nations, all poor and vulnerable to the early effects of climate change, have endorsed that radical 350 target.

Some of their leaders, like Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a nation made up of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, have emerged as tigers, ready to fight. No one would be surprised to see him lead some kind of walkout from the Copenhagen negotiations, since he’s declared over and over that he won’t be party to a “suicide pact” for his low-lying nation; he is, in other words, unwilling to treat global warming as a normal political issue.

We, however, couldn’t get even the most minor player in the Obama administration to come to one of the 2,000 rallies we staged across this country. None of them were interested in jumping into the space we were trying to open. If the U.S. is this willing to treat climate change as politics-as-usual, most of the other major players will simply follow suit.

They'll sign some kind of paper in Denmark -- that became all but certain on Friday night when Obama announced he'd jet in for the meeting's close. European leaders and some environmental groups may then call it a “qualified success,” and on we will go through more years of negotiation. In the meantime, physics will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread.

It’s like nothing we’ve ever faced before -- and we’re facing it as if it’s just like everything else. That’s the problem.

Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. His The End of Nature, published in 1989, is regarded as the first book for a general audience on global warming. He is a founder of 350.org, a campaign to spread the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million worldwide. He is, most recently, the editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (Library of America). His next book will be Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, which will be published in April. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with McKibben on President Obama and climate change politics in the U.S., click here.

Copyright 2009 Bill McKibben

Sign the Petition at 350.org

Here!

Global Warming Matters Most

If we do not address the climate emergency in ways that halt global warming, our grandchildren will inherit a world unfit for living. We have about a decade to choose a different course. If human civilization is to continue, there is no other choice. October 24, then, will be a very important day to commit, or recommit, to become knowledgeable about what can be done to save humanity. From Bill McKibben:

Dear friends,

For 20 years the world has managed to do very little about the greatest problem it's ever faced. In three days time, you can help change that--and if you step up you're going to have a lot of company!

It looks like the International Day of Climate Action this Saturday October 24th will be the single most widespread day of political action the planet has ever seen--we're closing in on 170 nations, and more than 4,000 rallies and events. There's something happening near you--if you're not sure what, this link will let you find out quickly and easily: wwww.350.org/map

People in all those cities and towns all around the world will be saying the same thing: science tells us that we can't have more than 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere if we want a planet like the one we were born onto. That sounds complicated, but it isn't--350 is the bottom line for the earth.

And since we can use our email tools to separate out our lists geographically, here's a message just for those of you in the U.S. It looks like this weekend is going to be even more important here: President Obama is scheduled to give a major climate speech on Friday, and the Senate is set to hold hearings on its global warming bill on Tuesday1. This will be one of the last best chances to make the support for much stronger efforts unmistakably loud and clear. Your efforts this weekend will be doing double duty--helping with the fight in Copenhagen and also on Capitol Hill.

Please take a moment to forward this along to everyone you know in your community and around the world, and ask them to find an event near them to take part in this important day: www.350.org/map.

Thanks for everything you do,

Bill McKibben for the 350.org Crew

1 Samuelsohn, Darren, "Obama to Give Senate Climate Bill Push with MIT Speech" http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/10/21/21climatewire-obama-to-give-senate-climate-bill-a-push-wit-53858.html

Apple Becomes the Latest to Leave the Chamber of Doom and Dollar Worshippers

Shrinkage of membership continues for the official corporate coven of the global warming deniers. From the NYTimes:

Apple has become the latest company to resign from the United States Chamber of Commerce over climate policy.

“We strongly object to the chamber’s recent comments opposing the E.P.A.’s effort to limit greenhouse gases,” wrote Catherine A. Novelli, the vice-president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, in a letter dated today and addressed to Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber. Click here to read the letter.

“Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the chamber at odds with us in this effort,” Ms. Novelli continued.

Apple’s resignation was effective immediately, the letter said. The move comes a few weeks after Apple expanded the environmental disclosures on its products.

The chamber has threatened litigation if the Environmental Protection Agency moves forward with regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. In a statement last week clarifying the chamber’s stance, Mr. Donohue said: “We believe that Congress should set climate change policy through legislation, rather than having the E.P.A. apply existing environmental statutes that were not created to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”

Over the past several weeks, three large utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon — have resigned from the chamber over climate policy differences. Last week, also citing climate, Nike withdrew from the chamber board, though retained its membership.