Russ Vernon-Jones

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

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It’s Hot! – extreme heat, race, recommendations, and hope

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In a hospital bed in Jacobabad, Pakistan, Mohammed Musa was suffering from heat stroke. The 65-year old rice-farm worker had been brought in with a 102°F temperature, body aches, and exhaustion. Temperatures in Jacobabad reached over 100° for 51 straight days and hit 123.8° one day earlier this year. Above Musa’s bed was a banner detailing how to avoid heat strokes. “Stay indoors or under a shade during the hot hours of the day,” it advised. It’s an excellent recommendation, but not currently realistic for countless farm workers in many parts of the world. “If we stop working every time it gets too hot,” Musa said, “how will we eat?”

Musa recovered from his heat stroke, but in Portugal, Spain, Germany, and Britain, over 4,600 people, many of them elderly, died in a heat wave in June and July this year. Temperatures in Europe went over 104°F–more than 20 degrees higher than usual summer peak temperatures — impacting millions.

In the U.S. NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) categorizes a “heat index” reading of over 103°F as in the “Danger” zone. The “heat index” takes humidity as well as temperature into account in order to measure how hot it feels. Heat index readings of 90° – 103° are in the “Extreme Caution” zone. This week the heat index in 40 major cities in the U.S. is expected to reach the Danger zone, with large areas of the country in the Extreme Caution zone.

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A Battle for Your Mind

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I used to think that if people of good will had more information about climate change, they would all be moved to take action to stop the climate crisis.  I don’t think that any more.  Why are some people moved to take action as they learn about climate change and some are not?  One key variable is whether you believe you might be able to make a difference, and whether or not you see yourself as significant, or potentially significant.  If you believe you can make some difference you are much more likely to take action.

Don’t we all have this problem, to some extent? Don’t we all have days when we feel engaged, connected to others, and glad to be part of the action; and other days when it seems like nothing we do matters and the problems
are all too big for us?

Many people, perhaps including yourself, feel as though they have very little choice about how the world looks to them and how they feel about it.  They take what comes their way.  Even when you don’t want to, you may find yourself feeling discouraged, hopeless, or despairing. Your perspective may seem to be buffeted about by the latest news item, a comment by a friend, a minor failure.  I invite you to consider that we humans have the power to choose, and fight to hold, a good perspective.

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The Moment We Are In

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At the moment the Democrats in the U.S. Senate have a new proposal — a bill to curb inflation and address climate change. It’s not yet clear whether they have the votes to pass it, but Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Senator who has scuttled previous Democratic climate bills, helped to craft this one and is making the rounds of the TV talk shows advocating for it.

Climate activists don’t agree about this bill. At least one organization has forcefully rejected it as “a gift to the fossil fuel industry” (XR NYC in an email to supporters on July 31). It does have some horrible provisions. It requires that the federal government offer new fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands and waters as a prerequisite to putting any solar or wind energy projects on public lands, and is part of a deal to speed up some pipeline permitting. On the other hand, the widely respected Sunrise Movement said “the strongest version possible of this bill must pass immediately,” noting that it puts $369 billion of climate spending in play (in an email to supporters on July 28).

Analysts estimate that that the combined provisions of the bill will cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030! That’s huge. That’s enough to have me, and many other climate activists, cheering despite the concessions that were required to get it. There is nothing more important in solving the climate crisis right now than reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

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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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Women’s Rights, Guns, and Reforming the Supreme Court

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The overturning of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court is a cruel blow to women’s rights. Not only does it remove a woman’s right to end an unwanted pregnancy, it sends a deeply offensive message to all females. As a woman friend of mine wrote after the decision, “It is a direct and clear attack on all females. It is a direct statement that our bodies are not our own. It is a sexist notion that our bodies belong to everyone else, our children, our male partners, our country, but not us.”

The Supreme Court’s action is an unprecedented removal of a constitutional right that women have had for almost 50 years. While it is not surprising, given the current composition of the Supreme Court, it is an outrage, nonetheless. Women should have control over their own bodies. Women and men alike should rally to support that right, and all reproductive rights for women. Polls show that a two-thirds majority of the population did not want Roe overturned.

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People Need to Hear About Climate a Lot More Often – Let’s Talk About It

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I’ve written often about the importance of our talking with people about climate change. While polls show that more people are worried about climate change, it is not yet a major salient issue for most people. Jessica Lu and John Marshall, of the Potential Energy coalition, write that we need to talk about climate a lot more often. Their study of the data shows that “frequency of exposure strongly predicts growth in climate supporters.”

Polls show that less than 15% of the population talks about climate often and roughly 75% of people report that they hear other people talk about it less than once a month. Lu and Marshall write that people are simply not hearing about climate often enough. “Based on the data, our best guess is that the average person needs to see and hear about climate at least 80 times a month — potentially even more — to become an active supporter of significant climate action.”

What’s most effective for us to say?

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Racism and Some Good News About Public Opinion

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On May 18, a heavily armed 18-year-old white man drove more than 3 hours from his home to a black neighborhood in Buffalo and shot and killed 10 African Americans as they were grocery shopping. This was one of the more than 200 heartbreaking, heinous mass shootings this year. This young man was fueled by racial hatred and convinced of the “Great Replacement Theory.” This totally false “theory” is racist and anti-Semitic to its core. It has recently become more mainstream on the right–with the much-watched Tucker Carlson at Fox News repeatedly evoking the specter of imminent white extinction and Republican politicians mostly refusing to disavow it, even after the Buffalo shooting.

The Great Replacement Theory is a racist conspiracy theory that claims that Jews and left-wing “elites” are actively and covertly seeking to replace white people in currently white-dominated countries with “inferior” populations, especially immigrants and other people of color. The perpetrators of racial violence at the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooting and at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh were adherents of this theory. The torch-light marchers in the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

Among political leaders it’s hard to know who really believes this harmful nonsense and who is cynically using it to gain or keep political power by whipping up the base of Republican party. In the population as a whole, its adherents are a minority, but it is sad and dangerous that distress patterns of fear and hatred have grabbed hold of the minds of so many white people.

Adherence to the ideology of white supremacy has a long history in this country–from slavery and Indian removal to the present day. The Republican party today appears to be quite captured by it, or at least some variation of it.

At the core of white supremacy is ….

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Why Can’t We Move Faster on Climate?

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What is it that has stopped the United States from dealing successfully with the climate crisis? We’ve known for at least 3 decades that we needed to act, but instead we’ve allowed the problem to get much worse. Is it the climate deniers? Is it people not taking lowering their “personal carbon footprints” seriously enough? Is it politicians who just don’t get it?

No! It is none of the above. The big barrier has been the fossil fuel companies–and the way they exert political power and manipulate public opinion. Climate denial was created by a deceitful disinformation campaign funded by ExxonMobil and others. The whole idea of a “personal carbon footprint” was a ploy invented by the PR department of BP Oil to distract the public from the huge responsibility borne by the fossil fuel industry. The politicians have been paid not to “get it.” Senator Joe Manchin, who recently sank the Build Back Better bill, has his own financial stake in the coal industry, and he also has taken in more the $400,000 in donations from oil and gas companies just in the last few months. He’s also the top lifetime recipient of oil, gas, and coal money among all those in Congress.

These companies have pursued their own profit and greed with abandon, while knowing that their very business itself was creating a climate crisis that threatens the existence of civilization as we know it. They have expanded their extraction and marketing dramatically, while climate scientists have been making it clear that fossil fuels must be eliminated entirely. They have used money, lies, and high-paid public relations experts to undermine every effort to address the climate crisis.

A new report, just out, ….

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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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A Useful Idea with Practical Implications

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One of the most useful concepts I’ve encountered in working with people and organizations is the concept of “distress patterns.” While distress patterns themselves are generally harmful and can interfere with individual relationships and with organizations–including groups tackling racism and climate change–understanding them is potentially transformative. Here is an introduction.

You may have noticed that people often respond to life in repetitive ways, that is to say there are patterns in their thinking, feelings and behavior. Some people frequently feel discouraged; some are always trying to take care of other people; some tend to feel victimized; some frequently try to dominate other people or situations; and many of us feel that we are essentially on our own and no one really understands us.

There are many ways that psychologists, therapists, and people in general think about these issues. Many approaches contain ideas that people have found helpful. I find the concept of distress patterns distinctive its power to explain people’s behavior and in its potential to help people and groups move forward.

At our best, we humans are flexible, creative, and smart; we like other people; and we are glad to be alive. We think and function in ways that fit the present situation, connect us with other people, and contribute to advancing the goals we care most about. When distress patterns occupy our minds ….

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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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What’s Needed – Changes in Our Economic System

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Our current economic system in the United States and throughout most of the world is complex, but some of its prominent features are:
1. Decisions are made on the basis of what will be most profitable, not on the basis of what will serve the common good or the health of the planet
2. Tremendous amounts of wealth continue to be accumulated by a small number of people, while many people have very little. (In the U.S. today the top 10% of the population has 70% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% of the population has 2% of the wealth.)
3. The system depends on endless growth–in production, extraction, and consumption.

Such a system has many consequences. Two major consequences are:
1. This system has caused and is perpetuating the devastating global climate crisis.
2. This system makes it very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to do what needs to be done to solve the climate crisis.

This is not to say that we must create a new economic system before we can do anything about climate change. As we take action on the climate crisis, however, we will need to challenge the current economic system on many fronts. We will need to think and act outside its prevailing paradigms, especially the three identified at the top of this piece….

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