If humanity is to survive the rapidly warming climate,
serious change has to start now
By Kevin Hall
January 29, 2020 10:51 AM
Oil refineries in California, such as this one in Richmond,
come under criticism for their role in hastening climate change. Paul Sakuma
Associated Press file
Judging from the latest climate news — that the decade just
ended was the warmest in recorded history — we’re doing it wrong. All of us.
From nonprofit foundations and labor unions to politicians
and government regulators to farmers and Wall Street, we have our horns locked
in a decades-old, institutional struggle for dominance, the politics of which
have carried us to the edge of the climate precipice.
Fresno Bee file
Yet as the ground crumbles beneath our feet, we persist in
strategies that mostly serve to ensure a hardening of the status quo and our
ultimate demise.
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This Clovis home is
so beautiful, couples regularly got married here. It’s for sale
It’s a rapidly diminishing status of “normal” marked by
increasingly worse weather, ecosystem collapse, and resultant food instability;
greater physical risk from flood, drought, wildfire, and war; and millions of
victims seeking a safe refuge far from home.
However, the January announcement of the decade just ended
as record-setting carried more than the usual cautionary statements. What’s
different, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration agree, is the pace of the heating. It’s accelerating.
Nineteen of this century’s first 20 years were among the 20
hottest ever recorded, and the last five years are the warmest on record.
Coincidentally, last year marked my 20th year as a climate
activist. I’ve taken deep dives into electoral politics, government
bureaucracy, health care, organized labor, public education and the nonprofit
sector.
Most people’s shared goals have been to build political
power and enact the public policies necessary to end poverty, racism, and
militarism, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “triple evils.” More than one
organization’s protest T-shirts bore the civil rights icon’s warning, “The
hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of
great moral conflict.”
Well, welcome to the 21st century, where people’s neutrality
has led to a hell on Earth for many, and everyone alive faces the greatest
moral conflict in the existence of our species. The triple evils are at the
heart of humanity’s crisis, and to turn away from the science of climate change
now and its urgent call for action is to turn away from a burning house and the
sleeping family within.
The coming decade is undeniably the most important in human
history. To give today’s children a two-thirds chance of avoiding runaway
global warming, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half by 2028. By 2030
the odds drop to dead even.
Nothing short of “steep structural changes in the world
economy” will do, according to the July 2019 report Climate Change and Poverty
from the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights.
Our poverty-inducing, fossil fuel-based economy won’t shift
without a serious re-evaluation of our politics. Given that greenhouse gas
emissions continue to skyrocket — 2019 set a record for carbon dioxide and
methane pollution — it’s fair to conclude that the practices of the past won’t
save the future.
Consider the stakes here in the San Joaquin Valley. Farm and
oilfield workers hold the most vulnerable jobs. Too much water and oil have
been extracted from beneath our rich soils, and the responsible industries are
now subject to long overdue regulation. Hundreds of thousands of farm acres are
to be idled, oil and methane extraction eventually ended.
What does the future hold for these workers and their
families? Their neighborhoods and communities? Many already live in poverty and
are highly vulnerable to economic disruption.
For this entire valley to avoid the dismal fate of failed coal
mining regions, we’ll need a green jobs program capable of absorbing tens of
thousands of farm and oilfield workers annually into public sector jobs focused
on installing clean energy systems, constructing affordable housing, building
groundwater recharge systems, fire protection, and more.
Nationally, this crisis will cost trillions of dollars to
address. It can only be funded through steep taxes on the accumulated wealth
and annual incomes of the billionaire class, accompanied by deep cuts in
military spending, closure of corporate tax loopholes, and re-regulation of the
financial sector.
It’s going to take a return to Dr. King’s movement, the
peaceful, political revolution currently being led by Green New Deal advocate
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the climate warriors of the youth-led Sunrise
Movement, and support for the one presidential candidate both have endorsed:
Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Kevin Hall is a Fresno resident and graduate of Fresno
State. He formerly reported on farm issues for trade publications and is an air
quality and climate activist.
