International – Page 2 – Russ Vernon-Jones

A Climate Justice Exhortation from Pope Francis

October 31, 2023October 31, 2023 russvj 1 Comment International

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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Climate News From 4 Continents

October 3, 2023October 3, 2023 russvj 6 Comments Feelings, International

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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Mia Mottley and Her Proposed Overhaul of Global Climate Finance

January 17, 2023May 26, 2023 russvj 4 Comments Economic system, International

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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Stories From COP27

November 22, 2022December 13, 2022 russvj 3 Comments International, Talking climate

The nations of the world just met in Egypt at the UN climate conference, COP27, for over two weeks to try to come to agreements on addressing the global climate crisis. It was a particularly contentious conference, with agreements hard to come by, and negotiations continuing past the planned end date.

Coming into the conference the delegates found encouragement in the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, who has pledged to eliminate the deforestation of the Amazon, and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, the largest climate bill ever, with billions of dollars for renewable energy. On the other hand, the urgency of the crisis has been brought into sharp focus by the flooding of one-third of Pakistan (the 5th most populous country in the world); recent flooding in Nigeria which displaced 1.4 million people; and lethal drought, famine and heat waves in many parts of the world.

At the opening session of the COP UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted that global greenhouse gas emissions keep growing and that global temperatures keep rising. He said,
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

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Can Compassion Help Us Personally and Globally?

September 27, 2022October 11, 2022 russvj 0 Comments Feelings, International

Climate change is causing a lot of human pain and suffering in many parts of the world. In order to be healthy and effective I think we need to limit our consumption of the news, but also stay sufficiently informed to make good decisions about how to be engaged in helping to create more just and sustainable societies. We need not follow every detail of each climate catastrophe, but I do think it’s healthy to face the extent of the crisis we humans face as a result of climate change. Trying to turn away from the reality of it seems to leave us ungrounded, alienated, and anxious.

Facing the disastrous effects of climate change may cause us to feel fear, grief, or other painful emotions, but it keeps us grounded in reality. Facing our feelings and sharing them with others can be healing and lead us to be more open-hearted, appropriately vulnerable, and connected with others.

I recently listened to an audio book titled, Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman. One of the things I found helpful in his book is the recommendation to “train your compassion.” He advises that in the face of other people’s suffering, rather than trying to share in their pain, we strive to call up our compassion — our feelings of “warmth, concern, and care.” These are much more likely to energize us and help us feel more connected.

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Opening Our Hearts, Racism, and Climate Change

July 12, 2022July 2, 2022 russvj 3 Comments International, Race and racism

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”

April 19, 2022April 19, 2022 russvj 0 Comments Collective action, Individual action, International, Movement building

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

March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 russvj 4 Comments International

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”

November 30, 2021December 6, 2021 russvj 1 Comment International, Science

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?

November 16, 2021November 18, 2021 russvj 3 Comments Economic system, International

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

June 15, 2021June 15, 2021 russvj 3 Comments Hope, International

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 ….