Global Climate Movement: Darkest Before the Dawn
Global Climate Movement: Darkest Before the Dawn
by
Roy Morrison
Wild fires burning in the Amazon and Siberia, unrelenting heat waves,100 year floods happening yearly are signs of our times, the worst of times.
A global climate change movement is emerging as we face the real threats to life and to global civilization posed by accelerating climate change. This is a matter of survival, not a blinkered environmentalism to benefit the rich.
The sudden appearance of millions of people in the streets of Hong Kong in defense of democracy is a glimpse of the billions that will fill the streets in the coming years to demand and achieve effective and swift climate change action and climate justice for all.
The emergence, for example, of a Green New Deal advanced by AOC is followed by aggressive climate plans by Jay Inslee and Bernie Sanders, and by forthcoming candidate climate debates. This is reality. But accomplishing real action must be pushed relentlessly by a determined non-violent grassroots movement that will not countenance business and carbon pollution as usual.
This is a movement that will that will encompass groups ranging from Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, Greenpeace, China Youth Climate Action Network, Climate Group India and on and on., This will include many thousands of local groups encompassing the range of global cultural diversity like Swayam Shikshan Prayog in India that takes an ecological approach working with women entrepreneurs. It will be a movement led by working people and their unions, by students, by farmers, and foresters, by fishers, by senior citizens, by business people.
In retrospect, we will say it was darkest before the dawn of a climate movement with unprecedented numbers and Gandhian persistence in demanding and accomplishing healing change.
Cause and Effect
Climate change is the consequence of global pollution, the common practices of industrial civilization powered by fossil fuels combusted with 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere unabated each year.
A global problem must be solved by global action by all. This is focused not only on global policies, but on what happens where we live, where we work. It is action that must demand and implement prompt action on all levels–
* On slashing carbon and other green house gas emissions, on removing existing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere toward sustainable preindustrial levels of 300 parts per million. This is measured individually for your Town by carbon dioxide emissions limited to about 3 tons per person per year and similar levels of carbon sequestration per year in soil and biomass;
* On building the renewable energy infrastructure to power our civilization;
* On allowing sustainable ecological practices in agriculture, forestry, industry, aquaculture.
Climate Action from Above and Below
Climate action from above, like proposals for a Green New Deal, is both driven by and will only be achieved by determined and relentless pressure from below. A global climate movement’s global demands will only be as effective as the strength of power from below manifested through non-cooperation and non-violent action in the streets and voter action at the polls.
Under business as usual, Mitch McConnell can refuse to bring a climate change bill to a vote that he knows will pass, but it will make a considerable difference if hundreds of thousands are non-violently shutting down the Capital for weeks.
We are in a fight for our lives and for the generations to come. Locally, city-wide, state-wide, nationally, internationally we must join the fight as if our lives depends upon it,because it does. Now’s the time to join the movement for stopping global climate change and for climate justice. Raise your voice. Offer your skills. Now.
Roy Morrison builds solar farms. His next book forthcoming is EEG (Ecological Economic Growth)
Fact check:
Global Carbon dioxide emissions by humans
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-emissions-reached-an-all-time-high-in-2018/
Swayam Shikshan Prayog, an Indian NGO
Three Tons Carbon Dioxide Per Person Per Year – EcoCivilization.Info
www.ecocivilization.info › three-tons-carbon-dioxide-per-person-per-year
The good news is that there’s a practical standard we can use to measure if we’re living sustainably. It’s simple. It’s 3 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per person per year. At the average individual rate of 3 tons,yearly total global carbon dioxide emissions would be 21 gigatons.
As population rises this number must decrease. And emissions must be combined with removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into soil and biomass.
Global Climate Movement : Darkest Before Dawn by Roy Morrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Roy Morrison
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