Tag: climate change

To address the climate emergency, foundations must spend big on movements

MARGARET KLEIN SALAMON – Philanthropy has a unique and critical role to play in addressing the climate emergency. By acknowledging the calamity we face and adjusting their operations, philanthropies can lead society into the “emergency mode” necessary to avert disaster. The time for half-measures, white papers and panel discussions is over. Philanthropy must act now, boldly and decisively, to help save our planet for future generations.

Eastern Europe’s purchase of US nuclear reactors is primarily about military ties, not climate change

MAHA SIDDIQUI and M.V. RAMANA – Investments in nuclear power in Eastern Europe hide geopolitical and military motivations behind a smoke screen of fighting climate change. When these motivations result in the massive acquisition of military equipment, manufacturing and operating them will increase carbon dioxide emissions. Worse, military buildups will also increase the risk of conflict, potentially leading to a catastrophic war that could involve nuclear weapons.

Air Pollution Is Killing Millions and Rising Exponentially—A Shift in Agriculture Can Solve It

JIMMY VIDELE – Today’s biggest epidemic is the exponential rise of CO2-equivalent atmospheric emissions. With COVID-19, the world changed protocols within weeks of the outbreak. This shows that we can change today to stop the harm inflicted on the planet, the more than 8 billion humans, and countless other Earthlings. We need to realize that there is no bigger threat facing us currently.

Climate movement elders revive monkey wrench tactics to save an old forest

NICK ENGELFRIED – Earlier this year, seven activists entered the site of a proposed timber sale in Washington State, intent on halting — or at least delaying — the destruction of trees with immense carbon storage potential. Over the course of several hours, they hiked off-trail through the dense understory, removing signs and flagging tape marking the boundaries of the controversial Carrot timber sale. The creative nonviolent direct action seemed to pay off, as a couple days later Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, announced it was cancelling the Carrot sale for the time being. The timing seems striking, even though the announcement did not acknowledge the protest. Now, the nonviolent saboteurs hope their actions have bought enough precious time to permanently protect the area.

How to Make Recyclable Plastics Out of CO2 to Slow Climate Change

ANN LESLIE DAVIS – Chemists are manipulating carbon dioxide to make clothing, mattresses, shoes, and more. These products are already on the market around the world. And others are in the process of being developed. They’re part of a growing effort by academia and industry to reduce the damage caused by centuries of human activity that has sent CO2 and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Over 5,000 actions were organized for Campaign Nonviolence Action Days 2023

RIVERA SUN – During the 10th annual Campaign Nonviolence Action Days from Sept. 21 to Oct. 2, hundreds of local, national and international groups organized actions and events to build a culture of peace and active nonviolence, free from war, poverty, racism and environmental destruction. In 2023, a staggering 5,057 actions were planned across the United States and 20 countries. Over 60,000 people took part in these actions and events.

A major win against factory farming points to a powerful new direction for the climate movement

NICK ENGELFRIED – Small farmers in Oregon, backed by a coalition of animal rights and climate activists, secured a big legislative victory over industrial factory farms, providing inspiration for wider action. “Part of our philosophy is you cannot only oppose or restrict the bad actors, although that is important,” Alice Morrison said. “You also have to lift up folks doing things that align with good stewardship of the land. Any solution to factory farming will be more viable if it puts forward that kind of positive vision.”

Wildfires Aren’t Just a Threat to People-They’re Killing Off Earth’s Biodiversity

REYNARD LOKI – In September 2022, climate journalist and native Oregonian Emma Pattee wrote in the New York Times that “[c]limate scientists estimate that the frequency of large wildfires could increase by over 30 percent in the next 30 years and over 50 percent in the next 80 years, thanks in large part to drought and extreme heat caused by climate change.” That is a frightening prospect not just for humans but for the countless nonhuman animals with whom we share this planet.

How Workers in the South Are Defying History

TOM CONWAY – Workers at Blue Bird Corporation in Fort Valley, Georgia, launched a union drive to secure better wages, work-life balance, and a voice on the job. The company resisted them. History defied them. Geography worked against them. But they stood together, believed in themselves, and achieved a historic victory that’s reverberating throughout the South.

Nature Corrects Itself … Through Us

RIVERA SUN – Nature’s way of correcting itself right now is embodied by the students walking out of school on Fridays, pleading with older generations to take action to ensure their future. Nature is correcting itself through climate scientists publishing well-documented facts about this crisis. Or through activists blocking pipelines or pushing universities and retirement funds to divest from fossil fuels. Earth is speaking through city councils declaring climate emergencies, churches switching to solar and wind, businesses cleaning up their act, and much more.

The Renewable Energy Transition Is Failing

RICHARD HEINBERG – We need a realistic plan for energy descent, instead of foolish dreams of eternal consumer abundance by means other than fossil fuels. Currently, politically rooted insistence on continued economic growth is discouraging truth-telling and serious planning for how to live well with less.

Climate Change: If you want to know who changed Manchin’s mind–you did

BILL MCKIBBEN – For decades now, when asked about the point of one climate protest or another, I’ve usually said something to the effect of: we fight to change the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what is normal and natural and obvious. Yes, we fight to block this pipeline or divest that pension fund, and each of those is important: but they add up to something more, a slowly moving weight that eventually shifts from one side to the other. That’s what happened last night when Joe Manchin caved. Now the Senate finally—for the first time in more than three decades—seems set to pass actual serious climate legislation.

Digging for Peace – Resisting Nuclear Weapons

BRIAN TERRELL – NATO boasts of “Steadfast Noon,” betraying the arrogant conviction of the Allied Heads of State and Government that despite a “deteriorating security environment,” through annual displays of brute force and profligate waste of fossil fuel, the darkness can be held at bay forever and the exploiters of the earth and its people will bask in the everlasting light of noon. The scholars at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who have kept a “Doomsday Clock” since 1947, propose instead that the planet is actually closer to midnight, the hypothetical global catastrophe. The Bulletin’s Clock is now at 100 seconds before midnight and humanity is closer to its destruction than ever before, because “the dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder… Climate change just compounds the crisis.”

Climate Activists Mount Utility Strike to Urge the Shutdown of New England Coal Plant

BARBARA PETERSON – The Strike Down Coal campaign provides a COVID-safe form of disobedience, building on more than a year of direct actions to shut down Merrimack Station. Activists protest the continued burning of coal in New England by refusing to pay utility bills, and mailing coal to the utility company instead. (Facebook/No Coal No Gas)

The Established Order Has Never Been Weaker – Movements Need to get to Work

CAM FENTON – All around the globe, governments are starting to move forward with reopening plans that lift some degree of COVID-19 social distancing. With that comes talk of recovery and rebuilding. While some of the attention is on green stimulus and a range of progressive demands for just and equitable recoveries, the only way we can win any such advances is through movements that are prepared to take on the fight.

How the Youth-led Climate Strikes Became a Global Mass Movement

NICK ENGELFRIED – It began as a call to action from a group of youth activists scattered across the globe, and soon became what is shaping up to be the largest planet-wide protest for the climate the world has ever seen. The Global Climate Strike is the result of a whole new generation taking bold action and could be the turning point for grassroots resistance to fossil fuels.

Sanders Spells Out a Progressive Prescription

NORMAN SOLOMON – Bernie Sanders wrapped up a weekend campaign swing through California with a Sunday afternoon speech to 16,000 of us a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. News coverage seemed unlikely to convey much about the event. The multiracial crowd reflected the latest polling that shows great diversity of support for Bernie, contrary to corporate media spin. High energy for basic social change was in the air.

How to Fight Fascism from a Position of Strength

GEORGE LAKEY – The growth of white supremacy and fascism has been noticeable in a number of countries lately, prompting the question: What can we learn from each other? Each country might find “best practices” elsewhere that could be applied at home, in addition to learning from its own past successes.

What the Bernie Sanders 2020 Campaign Means for Progressives

NORMAN SOLOMON – In the obvious contrasts with Kamala Harris and in the less obvious yet significant contrasts with Elizabeth Warren on matters of economic justice as well as on foreign policy, Bernie Sanders represents a different approach to the root causes of — and possible solutions to — extreme economic inequality, systemic injustice and a dire shortage of democracy.

A Mandate for Left Leadership

KATE ARONOFF – Democratic socialism will be defined by what its most public adherents—people like Sanders, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez—are able to accomplish once they have the opportunity. At least in the short term, turning their ambitious bills into law will mean prying open the Overton window in policy debates to accommodate what might elsewhere be considered fairly basic social-democratic demands. But with just 12 years left to prevent a total climate catastrophe, time is a luxury that progressives simply don’t have.

Russia Madness on the Eve of Destruction: Hegemony Trumps Survival

PAUL STREET – Given the current state and rate of environmental destruction, the continuing advance in the destructive power of nuclear weapons systems, and the likelihood of pandemics in a warmer and more globalized world, there are good reasons to wonder if a human civilization with historians will exist a century from today. We may well be standing near the “end of history,” and not the glorious bourgeois-democratic one that Francis Fukuyama imagined with the end of the Cold War.

The Darkness and the Needle

EMILY JOHNSTON – It’s such an astonishing honor to live in this moment, knowing that we probably still have the power to set the world back onto a stable path, and thereby make life better, or at least possible, for countless people and other beings. I cannot imagine anything more meaningful. Uncertainty is possibility. In the uncertainty before us, in the sacrifices and joy of our connections with each other and every living thing, we have been given overwhelming abundance. In this darkness, we have begun our real journey.