Russ Vernon-Jones

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

Economic system

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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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Do We Understand the Problem?

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How do you feel when you find out someone has lied to you? How do you feel when you find out someone claiming to be doing something good is actually doing something else–something truly harmful?

While the election lies in the U.S. have been getting a lot of attention (as they should), the lies and deceit of the big oil and gas companies are much less well-known and remembered, but are every bit as disastrous for the health of our society.

A new report last week from the House of Representatives Oversight Committee details what they learned in their investigation into the big oil and gas companies. Their key finding was that while these fossil fuel corporations are falsely portraying themselves to the public as committed to going green, they are continuing to seek to expand drilling and sales of climate-destroying fossil fuels. The Committee actually got the big oil CEOs to appear (from ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron and Shell), put them on the spot, and got lots of previously hidden documents released.

The Committee report says, “Big Oil has doubled down on long-term reliance on fossil fuels with no intention of taking concrete actions to transition to clean energy.” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the Chair of the Committee said, “Even though Big Oil CEOs admitted to my Committee that their products are causing a climate emergency, today’s documents reveal that the industry has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come.”

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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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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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Doughnut Economics

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In my previous post I raised the issue of “living lightly on the earth” — inviting us to think about our levels of consumption and what lifestyles are sustainable on a planet with 7.8 billion other humans. We will each need to make our own decisions about what a sensible and workable lifestyle is for us. As a society, we also need to think about a more sustainable and equitable economic system — what should be its goals and how can we bring it into being?

As I wrote last time, I’m intrigued by what I’ve learned so far about “Doughnut Economics.” First, there are no glazed or cream-filled pastries here — just an intriguing doughnut-shaped diagram that summarizes some important ideas. I believe we can all think about the most important issues facing our society. The “doughnut” approach provides us with an accessible entry point to some interesting and relevant perspectives on economic systems.

Kate Raworth, the creator of this way of thinking about things, says that “a healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow. …

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