Opinion: Love, Justice, And Climate Change. News Items – Troubling and Encouraging

Some recent climate news items seem particularly noteworthy. I’ll start with some bad news, but I promise some encouraging items in the remainder of this post.

50 Percent Higher Is Not A Good Thing
For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, the atmosphere held about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. (From studying air bubbles in ancient ice scientists have determined that for most of the last 800,000 years carbon dioxide levels were even lower than that.) Once humans started burning fossil fuels at the beginning of the industrial age, the carbon dioxide level started rising. The news item is that in May the global level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a new dangerous high–50% higher than the pre-industrial level.

This undesirable benchmark is particularly problematic because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 1,000 years or more. Worse yet, the average rate of increase is faster than ever. Carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere are the primary cause of climate change and all its harmful effects.

A New Roadmap–No New Gas Or Oil Wells, No New Coal Mines
Also in May, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a landmark report. The IEA has traditionally been conservative and sympathetic to the fossil fuel industry, but this report, driven by its scientific findings, is different. It found, “The world has a viable pathway to building a global energy sector with net-zero emissions in 2050, but it is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how energy is produced, transported, and used globally.”

The IEA studied how the world could achieve a net zero energy system by 2050 while still having “stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth.” It developed a detailed roadmap with more than 400 milestones to guide the global transition. These include–starting immediately–no new fossil fuel supply projects, no new investment decisions for unabated coal power plants (“unabated” means that emissions are not captured and sequestered, which is a very costly process), no sales of internal combustion passenger vehicles after 2035, and a net zero emissions global electricity system by 2040.

Climate activists have been calling for these objectives for years; but here is a major, respected, international research and policy agency stating that these steps are necessary and also possible. This is all the more significant because the IEA is not a climate agency; its focus is energy. Not only is it saying that we must not open any new fossil fuel wells or mines, but also that we don’t need to open any new wells or mines in order to have adequate energy supplies and robust economic development.

Equity And Public Health Considerations
The IEA roadmap includes providing electricity to 785 million people who currently have none and clean cooking solutions for 2.6 billion people who lack them currently. It estimates the implementation of the roadmap will cut the number of premature deaths from air pollution by 2.5 million per year. While the plan will require significant financial investments, according to a joint analysis with the International Monetary Fund those investments will increase jobs and global GDP.

It is problematic that as it approaches 2050 this roadmap relies too much on technologies that don’t yet exist. Nonetheless, its statements about what needs to happen in the next decade are certainly a place to begin immediately. A powerful people’s movement to insist that governments and other institutions take the necessary actions and to build bridges across divisions, especially those of race and nationality, is needed more than ever.

A Good Day
May 26, 2021, was quite a day for climate news. Bill McKibben called it “Big Oil’s Bad, Bad Day.” ExxonMobil shareholders, over the strenuous objections of management, elected three dissident directors to its board, all committed to climate action. At Chevron that same day, 61% of shareholders voted to require the company to cut emissions from the use of its products. A court in the Netherlands ruled that Shell Oil, an international oil company headquartered in the Netherlands, must cut oil and gas carbon emissions from use of its products by 45% by 2030. These three companies are in the top six of those with the greatest cumulative carbon emissions.

The new ExxonMobil board members were put forth by a small activist investment firm, but were elected with support from some major financial investors. Reuters reported that the Chevron vote “shows growing investor frustration with companies, which, they believe, are not doing enough to tackle climate change.” The case against Shell was brought by Friends of the Earth, some other environmental groups, and 17,000 Dutch citizens who signed on as co-plaintiffs. The ruling will be appealed, but is expected to reverberate in legal actions throughout the world. For the first time in history a judge required a major corporation to comply with the Paris Climate Accords. The court decided the case partly on human rights grounds. In the words of the Center for International Environmental Law, “… the Court recognized that the corporate responsibility to respect human rights is a global standard of conduct with real consequences in the context of the climate crisis.”

All of these positive developments show the influence of the growing movement of people insisting on meaningful climate action. Joining that movement, speaking out, and encouraging others to join and speak out are important ways each of us can make a difference.

Russ Vernon-Jones was the Principal of Fort River Elementary School from 1990 to 2008. He is a co-facilitator of the Coming Together Anti-Racism Project in the Amherst area. He chairs the Racism, White Supremacy, and Climate Justice working group of Climate Action Now of Western Mass., and blogs regularly on climate justice at www.RussVernonJones.org.