Russ Vernon-Jones

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

International

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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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Opening Our Hearts, Racism, and Climate Change

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In June 2021 I wrote about “A Conversation With Isioma.” A year later, I find that conversation is still impacting me. So it’s featured again in this post with new thoughts and reflections about it.

A year ago, I attended an international webinar on Zoom about the effects of climate change around the world. At one point I found myself paired with a friendly, but upset, woman in Nigeria. In order to protect her confidentiality I’ll call her Isioma. Isioma told me that the once consistent, dependable seasonal rains in her part of Nigeria have become so irregular as a result of climate change that farmers’ crops are often failing. The cost of food has soared, increasing numbers of people don’t have enough to eat, and thousands are displaced from their homes every year by the effects of climate change.

I’d read about these things in news reports, but it was a new experience for me to be sitting in the comfort of my home in Amherst connecting with this woman, while she was in Nigeria experiencing climate disaster firsthand. It was painful to hear her experiences. Even though I had only known her for a few minutes I found myself caring about her and my heart opening to her and her fellow Nigerians.

I began to think about the fact that my country, the United States, has played a big role in causing the suffering being experienced around her. Cumulatively the U.S. has emitted more climate-change-causing greenhouse gases than any other nation. Just as I was pondering the responsibility of the U.S., she said to me, “I don’t think we can stop climate change without doing something about racism. The wealthy white nations don’t care what happens to us. It’s racism that makes them not care.”

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“Dangerous Radicals”

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If earlier reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wake-up calls to take climate action, the one released in early April is a blaring emergency horn that the world dare not ignore. In a statement accompanying the report, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the failure of governments and corporations to keep pledges and take effective climate action has “put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world.”

The report indicates that in order to keep global warming within the 1.5°C target, greenhouse gas emissions can continue to rise for only 3 more years. They must fall 43% by 2030. The scientists report that this is still possible, but that unless transformative climate action is taken in the next 8 years, the 1.5°C target will be out of reach forever. Unless countries step up their reductions in emissions, we are on course for a global temperature rise of 2.4°C to 3.5°C. This would bring unimaginable devastation to populations everywhere.

I have not plowed through the entire 3,675 pages of this latest report, but in the summaries and articles about it there are items of good news. The first is ….

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Climate Change and the War in Ukraine

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The IPCC (the climate change scientific body of the UN) recently released another report verifying that climate change is having disastrous effects in many parts of the world—even worse than previously understood. This is not the news we want to hear, of course. However, it does remind us that the climate crisis is shared by all of humanity. If we can remember more often that we are each part of a global community, connected to people everywhere by our shared humanity, we are more likely to be able to handle bad news about the climate. We will be more likely to let bad news spur us to take increasing action to make whatever difference we can in the climate crisis.

The new climate report was released 4 days after Russia invaded Ukraine. A Ukrainian botanist on the IPCC had to make his last text checks on the report from a bomb shelter in Kyiv. Meteorologist Svitlana Krakovska, the head of the Ukrainian IPCC delegation said, “We will not surrender in Ukraine, and we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate resilient future. Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them.”

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Problems with “Net-Zero by 2050”

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Many nations, corporations, municipalities, and other entities are setting goals to be “net-zero by 2050,” that is, to have zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. While this may seem like an admirable goal, there are significant and dangerous problems with this whole approach.

In 2018 the IPCC issued a report in which it emphasized that in order for humanity to keep global warming below 1.5°C it was necessary for the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030 and to “net-zero” by 2050. The “net-zero” in this statement was an acknowledgement that no matter how vigorously we cut emissions, there will likely still be small amounts of emissions (mostly in some industrial processes) that we can’t totally eliminate and these will have to be balanced by equivalent increases in carbon sequestration. This IPCC statement was accurate, but has been distorted and misused in multiple ways.

Problem #1 – Ignoring the 2030 goal
First the 2030 goal and the 2050 goal in the IPCC report are paired with each other and must be implemented together. Many of the current adoptions of the 2050 goal are ignoring, or failing to even come close, to the 2030 target. “Net-zero by 2050” is a recipe for disaster if we don’t first reduce emissions by 45% by 2030. Here’s why:

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Reflections on COP26 – How Bad, or Good, Was It?

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COP26, this year’s UN climate conference, has ended. There has been and will continue to be a lot of analysis and opinion published about what happened and didn’t happen. The almost 200 countries represented there failed to agree to sufficient emission cuts to enable global warming to stay below 1.5° C. The developed nations also failed to commit sufficient financing to enable developing nations to adequately limit their emissions and respond to the climate crisis.

At the same time, some good commitments were made and some good steps taken. (See below for some examples.) Despite having limited access to the official proceedings, the voices of frontline nations and peoples were powerful and clear inside the conference halls and beyond. Young people and other climate activists rallied in the streets, led workshops and meetings, and expressed a clear moral urgency. Unfortunately, the delegates, especially those of the wealthy and fossil fuel producing nations, didn’t show the same level of moral clarity.

It is not surprising that what is required to address the crisis didn’t happen in Glasgow these last two weeks. What’s required is transforming the global economy from one based on energy from fossil fuels to one relying entirely on emission-free energy; upending profit and greed as the dominant organizing principles of our economies; and moving significant power and wealth from the predominantly white nations to the more than 80% of the world’s people who are black and brown.

That’s a tall order, to say the least!

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News Items – Troubling and Encouraging

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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.

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.

Also in May, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a landmark report. The IEA has traditionally ….

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We’re Aiming for the Wrong Climate Targets — Let’s Talk About Improving Our Aim

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Let’s forget about national boundaries and governments for a minute and face the fact that the whole world needs to reduce its collective greenhouse gas emissions. We — meaning all of humanity — need to emit close to 50% less by 2030 (and get to net-zero emissions by 2050). So far global emissions are still rising, so we need to make a dramatic turn in the next few years if we are to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. It’s a global problem — greenhouse gases emitted anywhere, cause problems everywhere.

Responsibility
How are we going to pull this off? Some would argue that each nation should reduce its emissions by roughly 50%. Despite the apparent even-handedness of that approach, it would be incredibly unfair and inequitable. Some nations have emitted far more greenhouse gases than others and played a much larger role in creating the climate problem.

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Only a Global Green New Deal Will Work

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It will cost the nations of the world roughly $73 trillion to transition to completely renewable energy by 2050, according to a report from Stanford University. The expense will pay for itself in under 7 years. The shift to a zero-carbon global economy will also create 28.6 million more full-time jobs than if nations continued their use of fossil fuels at current levels. After the payback period trillions of dollars will be saved annually.

Only about 10% of the $73 trillion will be required to transition the United States. So that leaves a lot of money that needs to be spent outside the U.S., much of it in poor, developing nations. These nations don’t have the resources to make those investments themselves, but they are critical to stopping global warming.

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