Russ Vernon-Jones

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

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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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Stop New Methane Gas Exports Now – CP2 and 20 others

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Eight years ago in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the nations of the world set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. They agreed that every nation, and especially the wealthiest ones, would contribute to reducing climate damaging emissions.

Since then many people, businesses, climate organizations, and governments around the world have worked to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, reduce the use of fossil fuels, preserve forests, and generally reduce our collective carbon footprint. In the United States we’ve had some modest success. Since 2005 our polluting emissions have fallen 20%. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is accelerating our progress with significant incentives for transitioning to renewable energy.

However, while we’ve been making progress on domestic emissions, something horrible has been happening in the U.S. that is having a huge global impact–worsening the climate crisis with deadly effects on people all over the world. Since 2015 the U.S. has gone from exporting no oil and virtually no LNG (liquefied “natural” methane gas) to becoming the largest driller and exporter of gas and oil in the world! The increased emissions from the gas and oil we export are so great that they exceed all the reductions we’ve achieved in our domestic greenhouse gas emissions since 2005.

One effect has been to ….

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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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What Climate “Doomers” Get Wrong

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Before I mention anything else, I want to acknowledge the horrors of the war in Israel and Gaza. I believe that every human life is precious. I’m deeply grieved by what is happening there, as well as in other wars around the world. Regardless of your political views, I want to invite you to join me in seeking to keep our hearts open toward both Palestinians and Israeli Jews and the suffering and loss they are experiencing. Each of us can contribute to reaching for greater human unity– an essential part of humanity successfully addressing both warfare and climate change.

Turning to climate change, 10 years ago climate denial was still common and a major obstacle to widespread public engagement with the issue. Outright climate denial is now relatively rare. I would say that climate discouragement is a bigger obstacle today. I’ve run into quite a few folks who admit that they are too discouraged to get involved in climate action. It’s natural for any of us to feel discouraged at times, but to let your discouragement keep you from engaging in climate action is to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Some folks believe that it’s simply too late and we are all doomed. A survey of 10,000 young people from 10 different countries found that more than half of them said that humanity is doomed. So when I encountered an interview with distinguished climate scientist Michael Mann with “what ‘doomers’ get wrong” in the title, I was eager for his answer.

He describes doomism as the view that we lack agency– that “It’s too late to prevent catastrophic, runaway warming and the extinction of all life.” He says, “There are a lot of people who think the science supports this view, but it doesn’t.”

He insists that we can and must have both agency and urgency. “The impacts of climate change, no doubt, constitute an existential threat if we fail to act,” Mann concludes.” But we can act. Our fragile moment can still be preserved.”

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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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March to End Fossil Fuels

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This past Sunday I participated in the “March to End Fossil Fuels” in New York City. What an exhilarating experience! Thousands of people jammed the streets of New York to demand an end to fossil fuels. People of different races and ages came together to show how much they care about what climate change is doing to our world and its inhabitants. There was chanting, singing, drumming and dancing. Voices were united in “What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!”

It’s estimated that over 75,000 people marched in New York. New York’s grassroots organizations and people from frontline communities headed up the march. Black, Indigenous, Latinex, Asian and Pacific Islander groups led the procession, followed by youth, elders, workers, people of faith, and people of all backgrounds. According to Oil Change International, this was only one of more than 700 end-fossil-fuel actions in 65 countries, with more than 600,000 people participating just in the past week.

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What’s Wrong with Carbon Capture

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After lying to us for decades and continuing to expand the extraction, use, and export of fossil fuels when we need to be eliminating them altogether, the oil and gas industry has come up with yet another way to confuse the public and persist in their climate destroying practices–“carbon capture.” It would be great, of course, if we could pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, but current proposals to rely on the feeble, inefficient, expensive, existing technology for carbon removal as a key climate strategy, are disastrous and intentionally deceptive.

Forests do an excellent job of removing carbon from the atmosphere and we should preserve and expand them everywhere. On the other hand, current industrial carbon capture methods are “wildly expensive,” use a great deal of energy, and remove only “pathetically small” amounts of carbon. They are no where near to being a meaningful strategy for addressing the climate crisis.

The most rapid way to deal with climate change, and we do need to act rapidly, is to cut emissions by abandoning fossil fuels, increasing renewable energy generation, increasing energy efficiency, and reducing overall energy use. The problem is that the fossil fuel industry is using the idea of industrial carbon capture as an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, in increasing amounts.

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Now Arriving: More Solar and Wind Power

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Only a few years ago, one of the biggest obstacles to climate action was denial. Now, I think, one of the biggest obstacles to individuals engaging in climate action is discouragement. Some, perhaps many, people who never would have engaged in climate denial, are allowing discouragement to stop them from taking meaningful action to address the climate crisis. Discouragement can slow any of us down.

I don’t know a lot of Spanish, but I learned that the Spanish word for discouraged is “desanimado”–literally “not animated.” In the middle of an emergency such as the climate emergency, we need to be animated (“lively, energized, full of life”).

We don’t know how things will turn out with the climate crisis. We can be sure that climate change is going to get worse. There is already a lot of suffering and damage and there will be more. But we human beings are a remarkably resilient, inventive, determined species. Large number of us around the world are taking action in myriad ways to enable humans and other species to survive and thrive on this planet. We may yet pull it off.

The New York Times recently published an article titled “The Clean Energy Future is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” In Tulsa, Oklahoma, once known as the “Oil Capital of the World,” their reporter found workers on assembly ….

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5 Ideas to Hold Firmly in Your Mind

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My blog posts are mostly about racial and climate justice. This one features some ideas that are not specifically on those topics, but which can, in my experience, lead us to be more effective, see reality more clearly, and be happier in general, including in our social justice work.

We humans have a remarkable ability to choose the perspectives that we hold in our minds. Sometimes we can succeed in holding the view that we are smart, loved, and capable. However, left to their own devices, too often our minds tend to turn toward self-criticism that undermines our confidence and reduces our happiness and effectiveness. These negative ideas often come from hurtful interactions we’ve experienced and from the oppressive society in which we live. These negative notions about ourselves sap our energy and reduce our effectiveness in our anti-racism and climate work.

We tend to think that ….

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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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I Don’t Like Bad News

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I don’t like bad news. I don’t like reading that July 3, 4, and 6 each set a new record for the hottest average global temperature on Earth, for as long as records have been kept and, according to scientists’ best estimates, the hottest day in the last 125,000 years.

I don’t like reading that parts of China are suffering under a prolonged heat wave with temperatures up to 110° F; that 1.8 million Muslims on the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia encountered 118°F temperatures; or that scientists are alarmed at the “totally unprecedented” heat wave in the waters of the North Atlantic–melting sea ice and disrupting important currents.

I don’t like reading that wealthy nations and corporations blocked significant progress at the June UN climate session in Bonn, Germany that was designed to prepare proposals for the next big UN climate conference, COP 28, this coming December. “The Bonn Climate Conference laid bare the glaring hypocrisy of wealthy nations, showcasing a remarkable indifference to the struggles of developing countries,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network, which includes more than 1,500 civil society groups.

So, what do we do with bad climate news? I think it is important that we all develop workable approaches to this situation. We are certainly going to encounter plenty more bad news about the climate crisis in the months and years ahead. We don’t want ….

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Smoke and Solidarity

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A little more than two weeks ago, my adult daughter called me and asked what I was doing. I told her I was working on a project in my yard. She said, “Have you seen the Air Quality Index (AQI)?” When I said I hadn’t, she said it was over 100 in my area in New England and suggested I stop working outside. When I looked up the AQI online, I learned that over 100 is considered “unhealthy for sensitive groups.” The next day it hit 163 near me, which is in the “unhealthy” range for everyone. The average for this area is under 40.

As many of us are now aware, the elevated air pollution was from wildfires in Quebec and Nova Scotia, Canada. Climate change has led to abnormally dry, hot weather in much of Canada for months and turned normally lush forests into tinder boxes of fire danger. Over 160 wildfires were burning in Quebec with 114 of them “out of control.” Winds carried the smoke to much of northeastern United States, blanketed New York City, and reached as far south as North Carolina.

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Changing the Language of Climate Change

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It’s getting easier and easier to have conversations about the climate crisis. More people than ever are concerned about it; the media are covering it more; and the U.S. government has approved billions of dollars to fund solutions. Having these conversations is more important than ever. There are still widespread misconceptions that are slowing down efforts to solve the crisis. The public demand for action does not yet match the magnitude of the crisis we are in. The fossil fuel industry and its political lackeys are still trying to slow the transition to renewable energy.

Writing in Scientific American, Susan Joy Hassol, says “The words we use and the stories we tell matter. Transforming the way we talk about climate change can engage people and build the political will needed to implement policies strong enough to confront the crisis with the urgency required.”

Let’s start with the word “natural.” The fossil fuel industry likes to refer to one of its major products as “natural gas.” This makes it sound healthy and good. It’s actually “methane gas,” a poisonous substance that ….

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