Russ Vernon-Jones

love, justice, and climate change … I know you can make a difference.

Economic system

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Is this the “better story” we need?

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The actions Donald Trump has taken to increase the burning of fossil fuels, eliminate the transition to renewable energy, and increase the wealth of fossil fuel CEO’s have been mind-boggling. Each of these will worsen the climate crisis, and all its disastrous effects, both in the U.S. and throughout the world. They are guaranteed to increase global death and disease — from catastrophic weather events, famine causing droughts, wildfires, and deadly air pollution.

Trump and his henchmen have shifted from climate denial (“It’s a hoax.”) to outright dismissal of the issue. For instance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tweeted, “The Department of Defense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rolllins said, “We’re not doing climate change crud anymore.” Climate change denial has become even harder to justify as the scientific evidence and weather disasters have increased. “Dismissal, on the other hand, is a way of saying, ‘It’s beneath our contempt. We don’t even have to debate this—we’ll just call it crap,’” Texas A&M communications professor Jennifer Mercieca says.

All of this comes as a poll of nearly 130,000 people across 125 countries finds that 89% of people want their governments to do more to address the climate crisis.

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We Must Resist Trump AND Advocate for Transformative Change

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Donald Trump and his minions are deliberately destroying our federal government and the economy, giving control to billionaires and far-right extremists, enriching themselves, waging war on workers, immigrants, and marginalized populations, worsening the climate crisis, stealing our private data, and eliminating government services that have protected our health, safety, and security.

This is not just an extreme version of our two-party politics. This is something we have never seen before in the U.S. It is a full-out fascist coup by MAGA forces that seek to end democracy and the rule of law in the U.S.

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Tax Justice – a necessary component of climate justice

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Trillions of dollars are now needed every year to meet humanity’s global needs for climate action and for a basic standard of living for all. Fortunately, there is enough money to meet all these needs. The problem is that a vast amount of the world’s wealth is currently held by a tiny number of ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations, and they are not spending it to meet humanity’s needs.

Tax justice is the answer. Tax justice will make the world’s wealth available to meet the world’s problems. Without tax justice (and debt cancellation) climate justice will be unattainable and humanity will not be able to successfully address the climate crisis. Action is needed in many nations and by the global community as a whole.

Tax justice includes: …

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Stop the Billionaire Heist

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There are many ways to describe and to analyze what is happening in the federal government since Donald Trump was inaugurated. But the clearest and most consistent pattern is that the billionaires have taken over and have started to destroy anything that interferes with them becoming richer and richer. Their greed appears to know no bounds. I find this truly frightening.

Two of the biggest casualties are 1.) the idea that we work together for the common good and 2.) the idea that we take care of each other. The federal government’s role, at least since the 1930’s, has included taxes, health care, education, human rights, democracy, health and safety regulations, and protection from the excesses of big business. The ultra-rich see each of these as limiting their pursuit of unlimited wealth. They are out to eliminate or disable all of them.

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No Tax Cuts for Billionaires

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The U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world. Our economy has been tremendously productive and our total wealth has grown dramatically. Yet millions of people in the U.S. don’t have enough to eat; millions lack adequate homes; and millions still lack health insurance. We seem unable to adequately fund our schools or to find the funds to address the climate crisis.

The problem is that the tremendous wealth our nation has accumulated is distributed in a grossly unfair manner.
• The top 1% holds 30% of the wealth of the nation.
• The top 10% holds 66%.
• While the bottom 50% holds only 2.5%.
At the very top, the wealth of the nation’s 801 billionaires is greater than all the wealth of the bottom 50% (66.5 million households) of the nation combined.

This is simply the way our current political-economic system works. It funnels wealth to the already wealthy. According to Time magazine, since the time of Ronald Reagan, the economy has moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%. It doesn’t have to work this way.

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Winning Hearts and Minds in the Battle Against Authoritarianism

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Many of us are wondering how we can be most effective in blocking authoritarianism from completely taking over the United States now that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are about to assume political power. This is not an easy question, but it’s an important one. I’m sure that we will need to join with others and keep thinking about it and trying things throughout the coming months and years.

First, I want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who supported the Kamala Harris campaign. We didn’t win the election, but we did enough that we prevented Trump from winning a landslide and limited him to less than 50% of the vote. This will make a significant difference in our efforts to prevent the rise of fascism over the next four years. Whether you made a donation, wrote postcards or letters, called voters in other states, went door to door, or helped in some other way, thank you!

The MAGA Republicans will have great political power, will do unconscionable harm to our collective health and safety, and will undermine equity and justice at every turn. Despite our best efforts they will frequently succeed in eliminating regulations, enacting policies, and passing legislation that benefit their wealthy supporters at the expense of the rest of us.

However, full-blown authoritarianism also requires capturing the minds of a majority of the population. They have not yet done this and this is where we can struggle and win.

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Worst Debt Crisis in History

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One of the major obstacles to solving the global climate crisis is the extreme debt crisis in much of the Global South. Just when the whole world needs nations in the Global South to participate in addressing the climate crisis, many of these nations are hobbled by impossibly high levels of debt.

The Pope’s message to a recent debt crisis meeting was reportedly, “The world’s poorest countries are being crushed by unmanageable debt and richer nations need to do more to help.”

This is more than a debt and climate crisis, of course. This is a crisis in health, education, and basic living standards, too. Across 144 developing countries, debt service is absorbing an average of 41.5% of government revenues. In the first quarter of this year in Nigeria, servicing the national debt consumed 74% of all federal government revenue. How can any nation function under such circumstances?

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Canceling the Debts of Global South Nations: A Necessary Part of the Worldwide Climate Effort – Part 2

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Actually, it is the Global North (GN) that should be repaying the Global South (GS). The countries of the GN have been stealing resources from the GS, or taking them while only paying a fraction of their cost, for centuries. The global systems of trade and finance are set up to extract profits from the Global South. Social scientists have found that the flow of resources and labor from the GS to the GN now equals $2.2 trillion per year. Furthermore, the damage to the agriculture, health, housing, infrastructure, etc. of the nations of the GS from climate change so far Is in the trillions of dollars and can be seen as part of the debt the GN owes the GS.

Debt cancellation is not rare. ,,,

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Canceling the Debts of Global South Nations: A Necessary Part of the Worldwide Climate Effort  – Part 1

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We finally have a fairly widespread understanding that we must stop burning fossil fuels to solve the climate crisis. It is just as true that we must cancel the debts of Global South nations to solve the climate crisis. There is no other way. I recognize that statement will strike some of you as radical or unreasonable. It’s taken me some time to reach this conclusion. In this post I’ll try to show how I, and others, have arrived at this position.

We know that emissions anywhere cause climate change everywhere. That means that humanity must stop emissions everywhere.

We must stop emissions in the wealthy, developed nations (the Global North) that have been the primary cause of the climate crisis. But that will not be sufficient. By 2030, 50% of all global emissions will come from the poorer nations that we collectively term the “Global South” (not including China). Eliminating emissions from the Global South is key to solving the climate crisis and will improve public health and prosperity in those nations.

Nearly 60 countries of the Global South are in debt distress or at risk of it and are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

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Living Lightly on the Earth

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[Note: In order to give myself a little break over the summer, this week I’m republishing a post from back in March 2021. It’s one that was popular and drew many comments from readers. I’ve edited it lightly to bring some of the numbers up to date. It’s still relevant to our situation today. Again, I welcome your comments.]

I like the creature comforts of my middle class lifestyle. At the same time I believe in global equity. I’m sure that I’m using more than my fair share of the world’s resources and that the planet could not accommodate 8 billion people consuming as much as my neighbors and I do.

I’ve written about many climate action steps we can take — many of which won’t require much change in our lifestyles. Today I want to invite you (and me) to consider the almost certain reality that solving the climate crisis will require reduced consumption and reduced energy use by most of us in the so-called “developed” nations.

So many of us have been conditioned to believe that more is better, that it can be challenging for us to think in this area. I’m hardly an expert. Rather than trying to provide answers, I’d like to share three experiences….

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Good News and Perspectives on 1.5°C

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Two weeks ago I shared the deeply troubling news that many scientists now think that we are definitely going to see global warming increase by more than 1.5°C. The effects of this warming will be devastating around the world, and especially in frontline nations. We do still have the possibility of overshooting that target and then, in time, with great effort, bringing warming back down below it.

This post recaps some key ideas from two weeks ago, reflects on reasons we are where we are, and offers many reasons to be encouraged about the possibilities for now accelerating our progress on solving the climate crisis.

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Climate Action: Move Your Money & Switch Your Credit Card

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One Friday night in the fall of 2012 I found myself in a room at Amherst College with Bill McKibben, a good number of college students, and some local residents, many of them in their later years. I was only just beginning to really pay attention to the issue of climate change and thought of myself as a visitor or observer in this gathering. McKibben looked like a very ordinary guy, but once he started to speak, the power of his vision and persuasion transformed the room. At that point, no college or other institution had committed to divest from fossil fuels, but McKibben announced his intention to start a nation-wide divestment movement.

It seemed unlikely that such a movement could have much impact on an industry as wealthy as the fossil fuel industry. McKibben explained that he didn’t expect to bankrupt the industry, but rather to cause them to be seen as moral pariahs for their climate-destroying business model and to delegitimize the power they wield through political donations. He thought college students and alumni could effectively pressure colleges and universities to divest, and he announced a cross-country tour to enlist them. This made sense to me and I soon wrote to my alma maters encouraging them to divest from fossil fuels.

Fast forwarding to the present … the divestment movement that Bill McKibben announced in Amherst that night has grown. More than 1500 institutions–colleges, pension funds, faith-based organization, etc.– whose investments total more than $40 trillion, have ….

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Mia Mottley and Her Proposed Overhaul of Global Climate Finance

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Mia Mottley was born in Barbados, a small island nation in the Caribbean. She completed college in Barbados and then went to the London School of Economics at age 18. One of her classmates at the time remembers meeting her– she was on a couch in a student apartment in London talking with everyone. He was “slightly enthralled by this person because she was like a queen, even at age 18. And people would come and pay homage. It was like a court visit.”

After graduating, Mottley went back to Barbados. She’s from a political family there and in 1994 became the youngest Barbadian ever elected to Parliament. In 2018 she became Prime Minister. She won a second term in 2022 with her party sweeping all of the seats in the legislature with 73% of the popular vote.

I first became aware of her when I saw an 8-minute video of a powerful speech she gave at the opening session of COP26 in Glasgow. It’s worth watching if you want some inspiring and engaging straight talk from a powerful leader who is a person of the global majority*.

Now Mottley has made a proposal that could lead to billions of dollars becoming available to finance climate action in frontline nations. These climate-vulnerable nations need funds to recover from climate disasters, prepare for the next disaster, and to transition away from fossil fuels.

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