Opinion: Love Justice And Climate Change: The Only Path to Climate Success?

Good news abounds on the climate front. More solar and wind power is being installed all over the world. The international financial industry is slowly but surely withdrawing support for fossil fuel projects. The President of the U.S. is aiming for net-zero carbon emissions from the electric grid by 2035 and is moving legislation forward to support climate action.

More Good News
As I mentioned in my previous post, a court in the Netherlands has ordered Shell Oil to reduce the emissions from the use of its products by 45% by 2030. A conservative international energy agency reports that humanity can still reach net zero by 2050 and can meet energy and development needs without opening any new fossil fuel wells or mines. Sales of electric vehicles are expected to accelerate as a new all-electric Ford truck demonstrates the remarkable performance and features that EV’s can provide at a reasonable cost.

Yet …
Yet the overall picture with our climate is still quite dire and getting worse. Despite all the good news, humans are still putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate; the climate is being destabilized more severely, and more people around the world are experiencing the disastrous effects. We are approaching a point somewhere in the not-too-distant future where it will no longer be possible to stop the runaway effects of permanent deadly climate change.

“Is the Earth F**ked?”
Back in 2012 Brad Werner, a geophysicist who works at the Complex Systems Laboratory at UC San Diego, gave a talk at a huge American Geophysical Union conference which he titled, “Is Earth F**ked?“. Speaking to serious Earth and atmospheric research scientists, he asked directly the question that’s on many people’s minds. His answer, succinctly stated, is “Yes,” unless “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups” can shift things more quickly than all other factors are predicted to be able to produce change.

In other words, our only hope is a powerful people’s climate movement that takes direct action. The recent years have verified Werner’s analysis–governments, businesses, markets, scientists, and experts of all kinds will fail to solve the global crisis in the absence of such a movement.

Feelings Need Not Deter Us
Facing the magnitude of the climate crisis can lead any of us to feel powerless and despairing. In the struggle to solve the climate crisis, these feelings are often our biggest enemy. Fortunately, we humans have a remarkable ability to decide to act and to do what needs to be done, regardless of our feelings. We can decide to act on the basis of hope, possibility, love, and justice. Fortunately we don’t have to do this alone. There are people everywhere who care about climate justice that we can find and work with for change.

So let me ask directly, “Are you active in the climate movement?” “Are you as active as you want to be, given the severity of the crisis that humanity faces?”

Here Are Some Things You Can Do To Make A Difference
(This is only a partial list, of course.)

1. Join a local climate organization. Attend meetings; join in one of their campaigns or actions.
2. Decide now that you will show up at direct action opportunities – rallies, protests, marches, sit-ins, etc. Be sure you are on a mailing list that will notify you of these. You can choose to participate in civil disobedience or not. There are plenty of opportunities to take action completely within the law.
3. Talk about climate regularly with people around you. A major idea behind this blog is that every two weeks you get another post that you can use as a conversation starter. Every two weeks you can say to at least a few people, “I read this blog post that said _____. How do you react to that idea? What are your thoughts about it?” Invite some people to join you at meetings or actions.
4. Get other organizations you are a part of talking about climate. Book groups, religious groups, civic organizations, racial justice groups, etc. can all add climate to the things they learn about and talk about.
5. Get climate groups thinking about racial justice and racial justice groups thinking about climate. The issues are completely intertwined.
6. Donate money to a group tackling climate justice such as the Sunrise Movement, Honor the Earth, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, 350.org, and a host of others. Join these groups and participate in their campaigns.
7. Other specific actions that you can take every week are available at Inside the Movement. Some could be done in only a few minutes per week. This is a new website to me, but it looks promising. Please try it out and then write and let me know what you think of it.

Numbers Matter
It can be hard to believe that one more person (you) doing these things will make a difference. The truth is that every movement is built one conversation at a time, one email at a time, one action at a time. Numbers matter. You can help swell the numbers and build our effectiveness as a climate justice movement. Thanks for what you’ve already done and for what you will do.

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.