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Saturday, January 4
Sunday, January 5
Diane Shisk

 

Draft Program on Climate Change
for the RC Community1

draft September 2, 2021
Short Version

Introduction

A vast accumulation of data clearly indicates that, to avoid catastrophic consequences, we must act quickly to stop global temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C by 2030. A temperature rise greater than that would damage and destabilize the world’s natural systems and cause devastating irreversible impacts on the environment, agriculture, all humans, and all of life. To prevent it we must swiftly and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increase carbon capture and storage.

Our economic systems, with their embedded drives for profit regardless of the damage done, have shown themselves to be incompatible with an ecologically sustainable society. To preserve the environment and ensure the survival of our species (and many others), we must fundamentally change these systems and end the oppression and exploitation they are built on.

To do this, we will need a coordinated global effort to reduce inequities and create a rational economy—one that allows everyone to have a good life while living lightly on the Earth. This will require an inclusive mass movement with leadership that includes frontline populations2, workers, and youth. The populations most impacted by climate extremes in the present are those that have been targeted with genocide, oppression, exploitation, and war. Solutions to the climate emergency must include the thinking and perspectives of these people.

In order to effectively confront the climate crisis, we must transition our priorities from global systems of production and consumption that are energy intensive and fossil fuel dependent to more localized systems that are resilient, publicly-owned, energy efficient, and regenerative.

What we do in the next decade will have big impacts on all future generations and all species. We can all play a significant role. All climate solutions must work for all populations and shift the landscape so that subsequent goals become more attainable.

Below are the actions we need to take.

OVERALL PROGRAM: Implement policies that will halt climate change quickly enough to avoid catastrophic consequences that are devastating to human life and the environment.  This means reducing emissions to stabilize global temperature rise at no more than 1.5°C as quickly as possible and by no later than 2030 as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, Global Warming of 1.5C (2018, 2022 IPCC Reports).  (Summary)

RESILIENT COMMUNITIES

  • Protect the use of the Earth’s limited fresh water supply and prioritize its use for the purpose of sustaining all life.
  • End patterns of exploitation and replace our current profit- and growth-based economies with economies that meet the real needs of humans and other life forms and that protect, restore, and sustain our global environment.
  • Make communities climate resilient—provide everyone, especially frontline and vulnerable populations3, the resources needed to adapt to and reduce the impacts of climate change.  This includes affordable housing, health care, education, jobs and job training, food, and clean water.
  • Support the leadership and sovereignty of indigenous nations and tribal peoples who have tens of thousands of years of experience effectively sustaining their lands and adapting to change. Support the preservation, revitalization, and widespread adoption of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK, also known as indigenous science) practices. Protect those practices from exploitation.  Honor the treaties, the leadership and experience of Native people, and their sovereign rights (recognized or not).4
  • Create the conditions where women can control their own bodies and reproduction without compromise, including through voluntary family planning, human rights for women, and education and opportunity for girls and young women.5 Birth rates decrease under these conditions.
  • All national, tribal, state, provincial, and local governments enact and enforce policies that are in accordance with this draft program. Require all industries and businesses to make ending climate change a priority over being profitable, in line with the Paris Agreement. All national governments immediately strengthen and meet their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to reduce GHG emissions under the Paris Agreement6 and subsequent IPCC Reports.

ENERGY

  • Engage in every way to meet a 1.5°C (or lower) climate stabilization goal as recommended in the IPCC Reports.
  • Rapidly and drastically reduce fossil fuel7 use, production (including fracking), exploration, and infrastructure. Remove subsidies that continue to encourage the use of fossil fuels. Support divestment from fossil fuels.
  • Refocus tribal, national, and local economies on a fossil-free future, budgeting the necessary resources to meet these goals.
  • Reduce energy consumption to the level of rational need through conservation and energy efficiency. Improve energy efficiency at all levels of use.
  • Institute a publicly-owned energy sector that can respond to the public need instead of investor desire for profits, and plan for its impacts on transport, industry, and building sectors.
  • Prioritizing community-based/community-led solutions, make a planned and coordinated transition to renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, small scale and micro-hydro8, as well as storage and delivery systems, and convert to all-electric power usage.
  • Only decommission existing nuclear reactors where they can be replaced with renewable energy, not fossil fuels.9 No new current generation nuclear reactors should be built.  
  • Ensure equitable access to publicly-owned renewable energy (make electricity a common good), electrification, transportation systems, and improved infrastructure,  sharing technical energy knowledge and expertise globally.
  • Engage local, municipal and state level input on decisions about the optimal energy mix based on human and ecological needs for the unique conditions of a particular region/country
  • Expose the fallacies with emissions trading and carbon tax systems.
  • Expose the risks of geoengineering.

AGRICULTURE, LAND USE, AND FOOD

  • Support the wide adoption of climate-friendly farming techniques (e.g. regenerative agriculture)  that reduce emissions from producing crops and livestock and/or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in soil and perennial plants like trees. Ensure that frontline populations are educated in these techniques.
  • Support methods that make farm and grazing land more productive with agroecological10  techniques, which can also reduce pressure on forests.
  • Reduce emissions from deforestation and industrial agriculture by greatly reducing consumption of livestock protein in wealthy nations and putting strong limits on biofuel.11 End deforestation while backing the leadership of, and protecting the sovereignty and stewardship of, Indigenous peoples.
  • End agricultural subsidies that support inefficient and polluting practices.
  • Promote, where possible, local food production and consumption.  Support food sovereignty12 for frontline communities. Plan for a sustainable food future; feeding a growing population without increasing emissions.
  • Reduce and compost food waste.13

  • Protect and restore natural carbon sinks (such as oceans, forests, peatlands, and wetlands), with full engagement of, inclusion of, and leadership by the people who inhabit those places.14
  • Prioritize natural solutions to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and store it. As necessary, support the development of safe, affordable, and effective practices and technologies to capture and store CO2. Share these technologies widely.
  • Protect prime farmland for food and crop production.

JUST TRANSITION

  • Create jobs with good wages and benefits, training, pension protections, high safety standards, and strong unions for the workers currently employed in the energy sector, workers in related fields, and workers in frontline communities.
  • Invest in communities bordering extractive and polluting industries, as well as communities most vulnerable to climate impacts, and communities experiencing under- and unemployment.
  • All economic, health & safety, labor, and environmental policies must be guided by the priorities of frontline communities, workers, and people in vulnerable populations.
  • Fund these investments through substantially increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy, financial transaction taxes, elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, money redirected from the military, and by eliminating tax dodges and tax havens.

MILITARY

  • End war and support universal demilitarization.
  • Use military budgets to fund the transition to a sustainable, clean, renewable energy, future.

TRANSPORTATION

  • Reorganize our societies so people live and work in local communities and reduce reliance on travel and shipping.
  • Provide widespread and affordable access to public transportation powered by renewable energy.
  • Provide lowest emissions commercial shipping and air travel, while reducing air travel.
  • Transition to all-electric vehicles.

MANUFACTURING, BUILDINGS, AND CONSUMPTION

  • Adopt low and zero emissions construction materials and techniques.  Change our industrial economy to one with more efficient use and re-use of materials.
  • Design and construct new buildings and rehabilitate existing buildings to be energy efficient and environmentally friendly, primarily in wealthy nations, with priority to low-income communities.
  • Reduce consumption, primarily in wealthy nations, through lifestyle change and zero-waste15 strategies. Rethink whole industries that generate GHG emissions with limited human value, such as armaments, fashion, advertising, psychopharmacology, and beautification.

GLOBAL COORDINATION

  • Ensure that wealthy nations provide the necessary technological and financial assistance to other nations and frontline populations so they may create and/or implement locally-appropriate initiatives that enable them to adapt to climate change, mitigate its effects on their populations, stay on their own land, and rapidly gain access to renewable energy16 and climate-friendly farming techniques.17
  • End policies that limit the rights of climate migrants, refugees, and displaced people seeking the right to a safe and dignified life in a new land.  Support safeguarding sovereign native lands while helping climate migrants, refugees, and displaced peoples find new homes.

ORGANIZE INTERNATIONALLY AND LOCALLY

  • Communicate to people everywhere about the climate emergency: the causes (including human distress recordings), results, disparate impact, and solutions in a way that will move them to take individual and collective actions in support of this draft program.
  • Build an international movement committed to ending climate change as part of transforming society to one that ends the exploitation of humans, all forms of oppression, irrational and destructive use of resources, and creates a sustainable, equitable future for all humans, all life on earth, and the planet.
  • Join organizations focused on climate change and work with these organizations to: (a) back the leadership of Indigenous people, people of the global majority, poor and working class people, women, and youth, (b) assist people to understand and address the connections between climate change, racism, genocide, and other oppressions, and the economic systems that both drives and benefits from them; (c) educate people about and implement elements of the above program as part of the work of the organizations, and (d) support the work of the organization by building relationships, supporting good leadership, helping with its work, and introducing the tools and practices of RC.
  • Join organizations focused on social/racial justice and ending oppression and work with them to (a) understand and address the connections between their issues and climate change, (b) educate people about and implement elements of the above program as part of the work of the organization, and (c) support the work of the organization by building relationships, supporting good leadership, helping with its work and improving policies, and introducing the tools and practices of RC.
  • Encourage these groups to build alliances to end climate change, environmental degradation, capitalism, oppression, war, and poverty and create an equitable, sustainable future.
  • Advocate and agitate for good policy and action wherever you are, through whatever means you have.  Where possible, seek to end patterns of exploitation and advocate for transformative change (ending class society) rather than simply reform.  When working for reforms, use the opportunity to create the conditions for people to understand the need for transformative change and move toward it. Include nonviolent strategies of protest, resistance, and direct action in support of this program.

FOCUS ON "REVOLUTIONARY" RATHER THAN "REFORMIST" REFORMS:

We can frame the issues we care about in a way that helps move toward systemic change—revolutionary reform—rather than just making things more bearable within the current system—reformist reform. How can our work be a wedge for opening up larger change? Here are some revolutionary reforms:

  • Development of a publicly owned (rather than private/corporate) energy system, where control of the energy system is in the hands of the people.
  • Fossil fuel divestment. Building pressure on wealth-holding institutions to remove their investments from the fossil fuel industry does not remove their power. But the public is claiming a right to have a say in how wealth is deployed. This can grow to challenge the system.
  • Community wealth building. This is a city/local effort that doesn’t change national or international systems. But it invites people to think about and practice the ownership of wealth in ways that challenge the system.
  • Public banking. This doesn’t transform the money system. But it provides a campaign that local people can be mobilized around that invites them to open their minds to new possibilities around who controls wealth, and puts them on a path to challenge that system.
  • Creating jobs, lot of jobs, in clean energy, and targeting lower income populations for recruitment and training.

OTHER THINGS WE CAN DO IN OUR PERSONAL LIVES:

Develop our personal program to reduce GHG: 

While the massive changes that are needed will require action by every level of government, industry, and all institutions; personal changes are also required, and especially by those of us in the Global North.

One way to start would be to develop a personal program for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in your household. Set a goal to reduce your emissions by 10% (and another 10% when the first goal is achieved, and so on) and research how you can accomplish that, addressing each point above that is relevant in your family. Develop a plan that all family members can participate in. Try your plan for a week and see if it reduced emissions. How was it for you and your family? Have a session about it and see if you need to revise your plan. Can you then involve another family in your neighborhood in trying it for a week with you? Could it become a neighborhood project?  A town project?

Develop your personal program to support drawdown of GHG:

Learn about how you can help preserve carbon sinks in your geographical region and implement practices that support these efforts, for example: gardening that restores soil carbon and planting trees. Is anyone near you involved in these efforts? Would they welcome you and others in their efforts?

FROM THE DRAFT POLICY FOR CARE OF THE ENVIRONMENT:

We can work on climate change in our Co-Counseling sessions:

  • We can identify and discharge the early distresses that keep us from facing the present situation and working with others toward a solution.
  • We can take the RC care of the environment goal* and initiative** into sessions and make it a personal goal.
  • We can stay connected to others and the environment as we do this work.
  • We can reclaim our connection with and love for the earth.
  • We can discharge on the connection between climate change and racism, classism, genocide, sexism, and other oppressions.
  • We can discharge regularly on feelings of discouragement, fear, powerlessness, and helplessness.
  • We can reduce consumption and our carbon footprint, especially those of us in the countries contributing the most greenhouse gas emissions.
  • We can discharge any worries and fears that could interfere with our thinking and acting rationally, with integrity and courage, in the widespread social upheavals that are likely as climate change progresses. 

We can address climate change in our RC Communities:

  • We can work on the climate emergency in our classes and workshops.
  • We can hold support groups, classes, and workshops on climate change and the connection between climate change and oppression.
  • We can support RCers—especially People of the Global Majority, Indigenous people, working-class people, and young people—who are taking leadership on climate change.
  • We can go public (with the necessary approval) with workshops, forums, listening circles and listening projects, along with other efforts to offer RC tools to the world.
  • We can bring together groups of RCers who are thinking and acting toward solutions and strategize about next steps and a long-term plan.
  • We can talk to, listen to, and counsel RCers who are not yet looking at climate change.
  • We can support the projects of Sustaining All Life.
  • We can unite across all constituencies in support of the work on the climate emergency.
  • We can build the RC Community.

We can also take action out in the world. Here are some actions with a short-term effect:

  • We can ensure that People of the Global Majority, Indigenous people, young people, working-class people, disabled people, and women are listened to and respected and that members of these groups are supported as leaders.
  • We can support excellent leadership on climate change.
  • We can join climate organizations and assist them to be effective in their actions and policies.
  • We can model diversity and unity in our activism.
  • We can act locally.
  • We can donate funds.
  • We can voice our thoughts on climate change to our political leaders.
  • We can take work on the climate into all the organizations we are part of.
  • We can build a broad-based coalition of groups, across race and class lines, that will make ending climate change one of its platforms.

Here are some actions with a long-term effect:

  • We can change educational systems to prepare all young people to actively participate in building a sustainable, just society.
  • We can work to end war.
  • We can work to end all oppression.
  • We can build unity.
  • We can replace capitalism with a rational system that is in everyone’s interest.

___________________________________________________

1 More detailed information on all of these issues can be found in the article Why We Prioritize Addressing Climate Change in RC.

2 Indigenous and tribal peoples, People of the Global Majority, poor and working-class people, and women

3 We define vulnerable populations as people with disabilities, children, older people, homeless and displaced people, and people in institutions—populations often not considered in developing climate change policy.

4 Upholding treaty obligations between sovereign nations would be a big step toward resolving climate change.

5 This could include ending sexism, sexual exploitation, and forced marriage; educating girls and boys about sexual coercion and family planning; and providing free and universal access to rational and safe birth control.

6 The wealthy nations must reduce emissions in line with principles of equity (the idea that countries with more responsibility for causing the problem, and more capacity to act, should do more than those who lack capacity and contributed few emissions).

7 Oil, coal, natural gas, and liquified gas

8 Mega-dams should not be supported because they destroy local ecosystems and take land, often from poor and indigenous people.

9 Nuclear reactors are unsafe, expensive, and harmful to life and the environment. But we would not decommission them before they age out if it requires they be replaced with fossil fuel power sources, which would result in emissions that are more dangerous at this time than the reactors.

10 Agricultural practices that don’t sacrifice people or ecosystems, such as growing different types of crops together.

11 Agriculture and land use (mostly deforestation) are responsible for about a quarter of human emissions. Rising demand for meat and biofuel is the main cause of deforestation, which causes tremendous emissions of carbon dioxide.  Livestock production produces less food per hectare or acre than food plants. Acknowledge that there are climates that do not sustain enough plant food year-round and tribal peoples who rely on meat to survive. (In some areas like dry grasslands, livestock production can be the most productive form of food production available.)

12 Food sovereignty is the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and communities’ right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

13 Food waste in landfills is also a major source of methane, which can be reduced by composting and other techniques.

14 When indigenous and tribal people have sovereign rights to their forest land, emissions from deforestation and degradation are greatly reduced.

15 Adopting Zero Waste plans and practices will result in significant reductions in consumption and trash disposal in the short-term and eventual complete elimination of waste. This includes increased recycling, reuse and composting as well as reduction in consumption of materials.

16 This is to avoid the destructive path taken by the wealthy nations. It is in everyone’s interest that developing nations not pursue a fossil fuel-based economy and instead be provided needed resources to build their economies as they determine using renewable energy sources.

17 This includes ensuring that wealthy nations fulfill their commitment to mobilize US$100 billion per year in climate finance from public and private sources for developing countries by 2020.

Last modified: 2024-10-12 14:30:08+00