Quakers, social justice and revolution

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways

“Time to Panic” is the title of a recent opinion piece in the New York Times. One could argue it is way past time to panic, but the point is climate catastrophe is finally being discussed in the press, in legislative bodies and in public. Much of this new discussion revolves around the ideas of a Green New Deal.

The following is from: Time to Panic. The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us. By David Wallace-Wells. Mr. Wallace-Wells is the author of the forthcoming “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.”, New York Times, Feb. 16, 2019

The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island.
We are living today in a world that has warmed by just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, when records began on a global scale. We are adding planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate faster than at any point in human history since the beginning of industrialization.
In October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released what has become known as its “Doomsday” report — “a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” as one United Nations official described it — detailing climate effects at 1.5 and two degrees Celsius of warming (2.7 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). At the opening of a major United Nations conference two months later, David Attenborough, the mellifluous voice of the BBC’s “Planet Earth” and now an environmental conscience for the English-speaking world, put it even more bleakly: “If we don’t take action,” he said, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
Scientists have felt this way for a while. But they have not often talked like it. For decades, there were few things with a worse reputation than “alarmism” among those studying climate change.

Time to Panic. The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us. By David Wallace-Wells”, New York Times, Feb. 16, 2019

Discussions of climate change often talk about the consequences of a certain increase in atmospheric temperature. The article cited above includes the following graphic that makes it easier to visualize the consequences of rises in air temperatures. Note the x-axis (horizontal) begins at an increase of 1.5 degrees Centigrade (C) and ends at 3 C above pre-industrial baseline temperature.

The article continues:

Panic might seem counterproductive, but we’re at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable, for several reasons.

• The first is that climate change is a crisis precisely because it is a looming catastrophe that demands an aggressive global response, now. In other words, it is right to be alarmed. 
• By defining the boundaries of conceivability more accurately, catastrophic thinking makes it easier to see the threat of climate change clearly. 
• While concern about climate change is growing — fortunately — complacency remains a much bigger political problem than fatalism.
• The fact is, further delay will only make the problem worse. If we started a broad decarbonization effort today — a gargantuan undertaking to overhaul our energy systems, building and transportation infrastructure and how we produce our food — the necessary rate of emissions reduction would be about 5 percent per year. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by some 9 percent each year. This is why the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, believes we have only until 2020 to change course and get started.

It is because more and more people are beginning to panic that the Green New Deal is getting so much attention, both for and against it.

Now is a unique opportunity to influence public debate and policies. It will require vast numbers of us to speak up for the Green New Deal. I know it often feels futile, but it is crucial for our Congressional representatives to hear from us.

The following, from Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI). That web page includes a tool to help you create an email message to send to you Congressional representatives. In the Midwest we can talk to our governmental representatives about the opportunities the Green New Deal offers for expanding our leadership in wind energy, as one example.

Republicans – and even some Democrats – are spreading misinformation to derail one of the most incredible organizing opportunities we’ve seen to push for climate solutions we need – for us, our kids and our grandkids.
The Green New Deal can:
Create millions of living wage, non-polluting jobs. The proposal is calling for a federal jobs guarantee for all who want one.
Transition our energy, transportation, and agricultural systems to be environmentally sustainable and good for local economies.
Provide guaranteed benefits for all, such as Medicare for All, real gender pay equity, paid sick and family leave, and more.
End all new fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel infrastructure.
But the Green New Deal resolution that was introduced in Congress last week was only a resolution. It was not a full bill with detailed policies.
That’s the beautiful part. This resolution is a starting point.
This is our chance – the people’s chance – to fight for the climate solutions we need to save the planet and save our communities.
We’ve got to start organizing. Today we’re asking you to join the growing call – from the youth to the grandparents – demanding our elected officials support the Green New Deal resolution.

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/sign-on-to-the-green-new-deal?source=2.19email

Now that a joint Resolution for a Green New Deal (GND) has been introduced in the House and Senate, political strategies are emerging. Republicans seem delighted to portray the GND as an example of extreme ideas related to climate change, and governmental overreach.

As said in the Rolling Stone article below, “We sit at the nexus of protest organizing and electoral politics.“

That is why this is a critical time for you Congressional representatives to hear what you think about the GND. This link takes you to a website that will help you write a letter to your Senators asking them to support the Green New Deal.

Many Democrats are saying they support the GND, while others, mostly from states with fossil fuel industries, find themselves in a difficult position. That is why I think these divisions within the Democratic party might eventually force conservative Democrats to form their own group, or join Republicans.

Earlier this week Senator Mitch McConnell said he would bring the Resolution for a Green New Deal to the floor of the Senate for a vote. His intention is to make it uncomfortable for some Senators to vote for the Resolution (e.g. those from coal producing, fracking or oil drilling states) and, he hopes, show how little support there actually is for a Green New Deal.

Following is from an article in POLITICO about Senator Schumer’s response.

Schumer said the “amazing irony” of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell bringing up a resolution Republicans intend to vote against is a sign of why the American people hate Congress. He demanded the Kentucky Republican acknowledge the scientific consensus around climate change and commit the chamber to tackling the problem.
“I challenge Leader McConnell to say that our climate change crisis is real, that it’s caused by humans, and that Congress needs to act,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “This is what two-thirds of the American people agree with.”
Schumer’s clap back comes on the heels of McConnell saying his chamber would vote on the ambitious Green New Deal resolution floated by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). That move is expected to show internal divisions within the Democratic caucus about how to tackle climate change with some lawmakers recoiling at the resolution’s aim of decarbonizing the U.S. economy within a decade.

Schumer slams ‘stunt’ Green New Deal vote as moderates fret, By ANTHONY ADRAGNA, POLITICO, 2/14/2019

In an interview with Varshini Prakash, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, Rolling Stone asks, “how did you go from an upstart group to suddenly putting ‘the Green New Deal’ on everyone’s lips?”

At Sunrise, our tagline is: building an army of young people to stop the climate crisis and create millions of new jobs for our generation. And we largely do this by exposing the urgency of the crisis, and relentlessly demanding the solutions we actually need to solve the crisis. We sit at the nexus of protest organizing and electoral politics. An example of protest organizing would be the action that we did at Nancy Pelosi’s office. And an example of the electoral organizing: This past summer we ran a massive youth program, 75 people full-time, from June through November, to get climate champions elected to office and to create a pro-climate-action majority in Congress and in statehouses across the country. We contacted a quarter of a million voters. And we got 19 out of our 30 endorsed candidates elected. We’ve been working to kick fossil-fuel funded politicians out of office, and working really hard to elect climate champions into the halls of power like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A lot of people ask us, “How are you going to get a massive program like this passed in the next two years? That’s impossible!” Yes, we agree. That’s completely impossible. We’re not trying to push any type of legislation through in this Congress.
But we need to start laying the groundwork. We need to start building the governing coalition that will actually come together and agree on the types of policies for what an actual plan around the Green New Deal could look like. Simultaneously, we need to think about how we’re going to put people into political office who will champion such a thing, and take out the people who will be major obstructionists to it.
We cannot afford to do only one of those things. This plan cannot work if we don’t both build the governing power and also develop the plan far in advance. Both of those things need to be done simultaneously.

Getting to the Bottom of the Green New Deal: A new activist group, the Sunrise Movement, has partnered with rising Democratic stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push the ambitious policy into the national conversation, by TIM DICKINSON, Rolling Stone, 1/7/2019

This link takes you to a website that will help you write a letter to your Senators asking them to support the Green New Deal.

As I wrote yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the Senate will be voting on the resolution for a Green New Deal (GND).

“I’ve noted with great interest the Green New Deal, and we’re going to be voting on that in the Senate to give everybody an opportunity to go on record,” McConnell told reporters.

Mitch McConnell is going to force the Senate to vote on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, Tucker Higgins, CNBC, 2/12/2019

Having a vote on what may be a polarizing issue among voters may force lawmakers to choose between appeasing moderates and their liberal base — among them, many progressive activists who supported the concept of a Green New Deal long before the bill was released.
The resolution has amassed significant but by no means widespread support on Capitol Hill — there are 67 co-sponsors in the House and 11 in the Senate, including several current or potential presidential contenders: Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar.
Republicans showed on Tuesday that they are ready to use the resolution as a political weapon against those Democrats.

McConnell Plans To Bring Green New Deal To Senate Vote by Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR, 2/12/2019

As I also wrote yesterday, he played into the hands of the Sunrise Movement, the youth led organization behind the Green New Deal, that I am a member of. One of the main purposes of having Resolutions to create a Green New Deal ready for votes is to see who really supports the GND. Although most of us didn’t expect this opportunity to come up so soon, the Sunrise Movement embraces this as a chance to advance the ideas of the GND.

You get a sense of how well organized the Sunrise Movement is from our response to McConnell’s announcement Tuesday. A response was created, and a national call about the response was held last night. More than 900 were on the call to hear about #SenateSprint:

There were over 900 of us on the conference call last night. The plan, as you might expect, is to flood Senate offices with calls and visitors asking for support for the Green New Deal Resolution.

This vote is simply to call for the creation of a committee to work on legislation needed to make the Green New Deal a reality. It is not a vote on any specific implementation of the Green New Deal.

A groundswell of public support right now is really important.