Russ Vernon-Jones

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

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Solving Humanity’s Shared Climate Crisis

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A great many of us care about the climate crisis. Many of us have taken steps to reduce our carbon footprints. Many of us have advocated for good climate policy at the local, state, and national levels. We have voted for candidates who seemed most likely to promote effective climate action. Collectively we’ve made quite a difference. Public opinion polls now show almost three-quarters of U.S. adults want more government action on climate. U.S. emissions are slowly coming down, not fast enough, but coming down.

Emissions from the wealthiest nations have been the primary cause of the climate crisis. Ending these emissions is essential to solving the climate crisis. Other wealthy nations are also reducing their emissions, although also too slowly.

Now I want to invite you to take an even more global perspective. We know that climate change does not respect national borders. Greenhouse gas emissions anywhere, cause climate change everywhere. This means that if we care about the livability of the planet for humans, we need to care about what’s happening with emissions everywhere.

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Using Bad News and Good News

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Reading or hearing news about the climate can pose an ongoing challenge for us. Sometimes the bad news seems overwhelming. Often it’s hard to remember the good news. I actually think that both bad news and good news can be useful to us. The bad news can help keep us focused and it affirms every decision we’ve made to put our energy into climate action. The good news reminds us that literally millions of people around the world are with us in taking on this existential crisis.

Let’s start with a bad news update and then move to some good news. The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a “red alert” about global warming late last month. They noted that in 2023 humanity experienced record-breaking heat, ice melt, and greenhouse gas emissions. The average global temperature rise reached 1.45°C, nearly surpassing the 1.5° target set in Paris in 2015.
…Keep reading for details and 6 items of good news.

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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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COP28 and the Climate Bomb on Biden’s Desk

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It’s been very interesting to read various commentators’ reactions to COP28, the UN climate conference of all the nations that met in Dubai for two weeks in December. Some are describing it as a dismal failure, while others see it as a positive turning point in human history. Paradoxically, I think both views are correct.

COP28 utterly failed to do what humanity needs in order to deal with the climate emergency. What we needed was ambitious, enforceable commitments to begin immediately to phase out fossil fuel use and extraction in every nation, and for the nations that got wealthy burning fossil fuels to provide financial assistance to the developing nations so they can deal with climate change.

Of course, we got none of this from the COP. It’s not surprising that the COP didn’t take these actions. Over 2,400 ….

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Climate Activists and Small Nations Making a Difference in Their Nations and at COP28

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I’ve been excited to learn recently about three different powerful climate activist campaigns, two of which have led to actions at COP28. As I write this it’s too early to know what the COP itself will produce, but so far much of the news seems to indicate that we have not yet built a sufficiently powerful climate movement, either in the U.S. or globally, to derail the power of the fossil fuel industry and its accomplices.

Here’s some good news. A month ago I wrote to you about a vital campaign to stop the climate-destroying expansion of LNG export terminals along the Gulf Coast in the U.S. This campaign is growing. In late November activists delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the Department of Energy calling for the Biden Administration to halt any permit approvals for new LNG terminals. At the behest of Third Act, elders are writing thousands of hand-written letters. Young influencers are using TikTok and Instagram to spread the word.

The Biden Administration has made no announcements about any change in policy, but they’ve indicated privately that they are seriously studying their response to this uproar. If you haven’t signed the petition yet, please join in on what has become an international protest and sign the petition. It’s at www.bit.ly/NoNewLNG. Organizers are now seeking a million signatures. (Note: The count you will see on the signing website includes only a fraction of the signatures so far.)

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Can we handle the harsh climate truth?

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When I was in Manhattan for New York Climate Week in late September I met climate author and activist Margaret Klein Salamon for the first time. Margaret played a key role some years ago in getting activists, and then much of the press and many political leaders to use the term “climate emergency.” In 2016 she wrote an influential paper titled “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement.” That paper had a big impact on my own thinking and I’ve long admired her work, so I felt especially honored to get to meet her and talk with her.

She gave me a copy of her new book “Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth.” Reading it has been quite an experience for me. On the one hand, I find it deeply reassuring that someone else understands how serious the climate situation is and knows that we are going to have to feel a lot of feelings in order to engage fully with it. At the same time, I’m asking myself, “Am I living my life as though we are in an emergency? Or am I still trying to have a business-as-usual lifestyle that’s inappropriate to our times?”

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A  Climate Justice Exhortation from Pope Francis

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In early October, Pope Francis, issued a new papal “exhortation” to the world on climate change. Back in 2015 the Pope wrote a major encyclical subtitled “On Care For Our Common Home,” providing an important voice of support for increased, broad climate action. It was widely applauded and had some good effect. The Pope’s new letter is even more direct, more urgent, and is, as one commentator noted, “an altogether different sort of papal rhetoric — equal parts exasperated, accusatory and prescriptive.”

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Climate News From 4 Continents

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There have been so many interesting items in the climate news recently that I decided to use this post to share a few of them with you. Some have cheered me; some have infuriated me; others leave me feeling deeply sad. Here are ones that I found especially interesting.

Twenty of the world’s largest economies (the G20 nations) combined to provide government subsidies for fossil fuels of more than $1 trillion in 2022. This is the largest amount ever. This analysis came from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The Institute said that “This support perpetuates the world’s reliance on fossil fuels …. It also severely limits the possibilities of achieving climate objectives set by the Paris Agreement by incentivizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while undermining the cost-competitiveness of clean energy.”

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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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Stories From COP27

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The nations of the world just met in Egypt at the UN climate conference, COP27, for over two weeks to try to come to agreements on addressing the global climate crisis. It was a particularly contentious conference, with agreements hard to come by, and negotiations continuing past the planned end date.

Coming into the conference the delegates found encouragement in the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, who has pledged to eliminate the deforestation of the Amazon, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, the largest climate bill ever, with billions of dollars for renewable energy. On the other hand, the urgency of the crisis has been brought into sharp focus by the flooding of one-third of Pakistan (the 5th most populous country in the world); recent flooding in Nigeria which displaced 1.4 million people; and lethal drought, famine and heat waves in many parts of the world.

At the opening session of the COP UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted that global greenhouse gas emissions keep growing and that global temperatures keep rising. He said,
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

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Can Compassion Help Us Personally and Globally?

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Climate change is causing a lot of human pain and suffering in many parts of the world. In order to be healthy and effective I think we need to limit our consumption of the news, but also stay sufficiently informed to make good decisions about how to be engaged in helping to create more just and sustainable societies. We need not follow every detail of each climate catastrophe, but I do think it’s healthy to face the extent of the crisis we humans face as a result of climate change. Trying to turn away from the reality of it seems to leave us ungrounded, alienated, and anxious.

Facing the disastrous effects of climate change may cause us to feel fear, grief, or other painful emotions, but it keeps us grounded in reality. Facing our feelings and sharing them with others can be healing and lead us to be more open-hearted, appropriately vulnerable, and connected with others.

I recently listened to an audio book titled, Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman. One of the things I found helpful in his book is the recommendation to “train your compassion.” He advises that in the face of other people’s suffering, rather than trying to share in their pain, we strive to call up our compassion — our feelings of “warmth, concern, and care.” These are much more likely to energize us and help us feel more connected.

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Where the Money Is – Solving a Global Problem

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Let’s imagine our Earth without any national boundaries for a few moments. Our species, homo sapiens, lives throughout the world–with different cultures and skin colors, but one species. We are all siblings. We share one atmosphere. We all face a huge global crisis – the climate emergency.

People everywhere are being affected by climate change–some much more severely than others. But we are all affected and will be even more affected in the near future–by heat waves, droughts, forest fires, floods, catastrophic storms, disruptions in agriculture and food systems, climate refugees, and more.

The biggest cause of this crisis is greenhouse gas emissions from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, exacerbated by deforestation and unhealthy agricultural practices. Emissions anywhere, cause climate change everywhere. This means that humanity is going to need to work together to stop emissions everywhere. Stopping emissions in our own geographic region (or country) will not be sufficient to stop climate change. We must move rapidly to stop emissions everywhere.

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