Russ Vernon-Jones

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

International

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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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Protecting What We Love

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In my previous post, “You Are Not Alone”, I mentioned two studies that recently found that most of the world’s population clearly wants governments to take action to address the climate crisis. This is significant and worth remembering.

In this post I’m going to share some of the very interesting details from one of those reports, “Later is Too Late.” from Potential Energy. These marketing and communications experts surveyed nearly 60,000 people across 23 different countries (which contain 70% of the world’s population). They report four principal findings, each of which I’ll outline below.

ONE: The world is united in wanting climate action
They found that “On average across the 23 countries in the study, 78% of people agree with the statement, ‘It is essential that our government does whatever it takes to limit the effects of climate change,’ and just over 10% disagree.” The statement was supported by a majority in every country surveyed, with support ranging from 56% in Norway to 93% in China.

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You are not alone

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It is easy to feel overwhelmed and alone in the face of the climate crisis. I know I struggle with those feelings all too often. However, I’m sure we are less alone with this crisis than we think. Reality is different from what our feelings often tell us. There are huge numbers of people with us in this struggle. Below I will share with you some newly reported information about how widespread support for climate action is throughout the world.

However, in order to let this information deeply inform our perspective, I think there are two other essential issues to consider. The first is that we live in a society that emphasizes individualism. Being self-reliant and able to handle things on our own is highly valued. But knowing that we need other people and prioritizing being part of a group tends to be less admired.

Capitalism is built on our being individualistic and having weak group orientations. Wealthy elites and right wingers find ….

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Who is benefiting: Neo-colonialism and climate finance

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It has recently been reported that in 2022 the wealthy nations finally met their commitment to provide $100 billion per year in climate finance to the nations of the Global South. This might appear to be cause for celebration, but there is a not-so-pretty side to this story as well.

In 2009 the wealthy countries agreed that by 2020 they would provide the less wealthy nations with $100 billion per year to support climate action. That goal was reaffirmed in the Paris agreement in 2015. There are two major reasons for this aid to go from the wealthy Global North nations to the lower-income Global South nations.
1. The climate crisis has primarily been caused by the emissions of the wealthy nations while the major burden of its effects have been borne by the lower-income nations. This aid is essentially payment for having harmed the Global South nations. It is a debt owed by the Global North nations. (The wealthy nations have never agreed to put this rationale in writing, but the moral obligation is clear.)
2. Humanity will not be able to solve the climate crisis unless….

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“Startlement” by Ada Limón

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Just as I was preparing to write my blog post for this week, something I was reading mentioned that the Fifth National Climate Assessment from the United States government, which was published in December 2023, was introduced by a poem. Although I don’t read poetry regularly, I was intrigued and looked it up. The poem, titled “Startlement” was written by the Poet Laureate of the U.S., Ada Limón.

I found the poem quite moving. I long for us all to be fully alive, fully human, and fully connected to the earth and to each other. When we can manage it, I think this is also the surest foundation for meaningful climate action. So instead of writing a new post this week, I offer you “Startlement,” by Ada Limón.

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Extreme Heat, Possibilities, and a Recent Action

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At the beginning of April, I wrote about record-breaking heat in Rio de Janeiro and in Africa. This week the news is about an intense heat wave in south and east Asia. The temperature in Bangkok, Thailand was over 104°F. Bangladesh has had 23 “heat-wave days” in April, with temperatures surpassing 108°F (42°C0 in some areas. The heat forced schools for 33 million children to close. Schools in India and the Philippines have also been closed because of extreme heat. In Myanmar the temperature reached 113°F.

I find these temperatures mind-boggling. It’s hard to imagine people carrying on their lives.

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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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