President Biden told the United Nations recently that by 2024 the U.S. will provide $11.4 billion yearly in climate financing for developing nations. This is a bold, courageous, and much needed step, and at the same time woefully insufficient. …
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Good news abounds on the climate front. More solar and wind power is being installed all over the world. The international financial industry is slowly but surely withdrawing support for fossil fuel projects. The President of the U.S. is aiming for net-zero carbon emissions from the electric grid by 2035 and is moving legislation forward to support climate action.
Yet the overall picture with our climate is still quite dire and getting worse.
Seven things you can do to make a difference.
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When Greta Thunberg addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 she mentioned “feedback loops” as something most people were not taking into account. In January of this year, she and the Dali Lama had a public conversation online with some leading scientists to promote the launch of a series of five new short videos, “Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops.” These were created by a documentary film company collaborating with top-flight scientists, and are narrated by Richard Gere.
Thunberg said, “If I could ask one thing of you, it would be to educate yourself…spread that knowledge, spread the awareness to others…. Most people I know haven’t even heard of feedback loops or tipping points, chain reactions, and so on. But they are so crucial to understanding how the world works.”
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Let’s forget about national boundaries and governments for a minute and face the fact that the whole world needs to reduce its collective greenhouse gas emissions. We — meaning all of humanity — need to emit close to 50% less by 2030 (and get to net-zero emissions by 2050). So far global emissions are still rising, so we need to make a dramatic turn in the next few years if we are to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. It’s a global problem — greenhouse gases emitted anywhere, cause problems everywhere.
Responsibility
How are we going to pull this off? Some would argue that each nation should reduce its emissions by roughly 50%. Despite the apparent even-handedness of that approach, it would be incredibly unfair and inequitable. Some nations have emitted far more greenhouse gases than others and played a much larger role in creating the climate problem.
I got a surprise the other day. I came across a reference to the Yale Climate Opinion Maps produced by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. I remembered that I had been intrigued by these maps once before, so I decided to browse a bit and see what I could find. These maps show how Americans’ climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support vary from place to place.
*Should schools teach about global warming?
*Environmental protection vs. economic growth
*All is not rosy
We need some success stories to share as we listen to people about their thoughts and feelings about climate change and express our commitment to doing whatever is necessary to stop climate change. Here are a few that have been helpful to me.
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This month, March 2020, marks the one-year anniversary of my blog, “Love, justice, and climate change … I know you can make a difference.” – 25 posts in all. Whether it’s because you have a busy life, or because you only recently started reading this blog, you likely haven’t read all of them. This post provides a retrospective of the first 12 posts (more to come later) — an annotated table of contents, if you will. This will let you see what’s there and perhaps go back and read ones that are of special interest to you.
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When I was a boy I lived in my grandparents house with my mother and brother. My grandfather was not very involved in my upbringing, but he did want things to go his way. If he told you something and you seemed not to understand or not to agree, his response was to say the same thing to you again, in an angry yell. While I often complied rather than get in more trouble, I have to say that his loudness and wrath never made me more open-minded to his point of view.
How do we change people’s minds or get them more engaged? How do we get the public as a whole, or the government, to take more action on climate change? How do we turn things around in the midst of this climate crisis?
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I sometimes find myself wondering if anything I do to try to help stop climate change makes a difference. So it got my attention when the Yale Program on Climate Communications reported recently that having more frequent conversations with friends, neighbors, and relatives about climate change really does make a difference. These conversations shift people’s perceptions to greater …
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Two things people need to join the climate justice movement. Developing the habit of having a hopeful fact to share related to climate change.
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