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Local Efforts Noble, But Study Shows Scale of Climate Threat Demands 'Heavy Lifting' of National Governments
"The actions of cities, companies, and states aren't insignificant but they can't do it by themselves."
Aug 30, 2018
Since President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, a number of local governments have taken it upon themselves to meet the deal's requirements to the extent that they can--but a new study finds that while those efforts are admirable and significant for individual states and communities, they are no match for the climate crisis fast accelerating by increased carbon emissions around the world.
Local leaders should continue doing what they can to combat the climate crisis, researchers at Data-Driven Yale found in their study. But until the United States--the world's largest driver of greenhouse gas emissions--is led by a government that prioritize a sharp reduction of carbon emissions and a shift to renewable energy, individual cities' and states' ability to slow the climate crisis will be minimal.
Examining the efforts of nearly 6,000 cities and states and 2,000 businesses--like California's advancement on Tuesday of a 100 percent renewable energy bill--found that those initiatives will only reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 1.5 billion to 2.2 billion metric tons by 2030.
In contrast, the United States' carbon output last just last year was 5.14 billion metric tons.
"When we look at the individual pledges the impact isn't that large, so we absolutely need national governments to pull through and do a lot of the heavy lifting," Dr. Angel Hsu, director of Data-Driven Yale, told The Guardian. "The actions of cities, companies, and states aren't insignificant but they can't do it by themselves. This shows everyone can be doing more. The current reductions are woefully inadequate and hopefully the actions of other entities will give national governments the confidence to be more ambitious."
The individual actions of forward-thinking governors and mayors, the study suggests, is no match for an administration which refuses to even acknowledge the consensus of 97 percent of climate scientists that human activity is contributing to the climate crisis, and which announced last week a plan under which states would be able to regulate their emissions from coal plants.
"The idea we just tighten our belt a bit isn't going to solve the problem. We need to stop using the atmosphere as a dumping ground, abandon fossil fuels, find other sources of energy and deal with the carbon debt we already have," Klaus Lackner, the director of Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, told The Guardian.
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What Standing Rock Gave the World
Americans saw the Indigenous struggle—the violence, stolen resources, colluding corporations and governments—that goes hand in hand with protecting the Earth.
Mar 18, 2018
At the height of the movement at Standing Rock, Indigenous teens half a world away in Norway were tattooing their young bodies with an image of a black snake. Derived from Lakota prophecy, the creature had come to represent the controversial Dakota Access pipeline for the thousands of water protectors determined to try to stop it.
"This Indigenous-led disruption, the awakening resolve that was cultivated at Standing Rock, did not dissolve after February. Rather, it spread in so many different directions that we may never fully realize its reach."
It was a show of international solidarity between the Indigenous Sami and the Lakota. "They got tattoos because of the Norwegian money invested in the pipeline," said Jan Rune Maso, editor of the Sami news division of Norway's largest media company, NRK.
Rune Maso said the story about the tattoos was just one of about a hundred that his team of journalists covered over the course of the months-long pipeline battle in North Dakota. One of them, "The War on the Black Snake," was awarded top honors at a journalism conference held in Tromso in November. That story revealed large investments Norwegian banks had made to advance the $3.8 billion energy project, spurring a divestment campaign by the Sami Parliament.
The backstory can be told simply. As early as April 2016, Indigenous activists protested the pipeline's threat to the Standing Rock Sioux's primary water supply, the Missouri River. While battles were fought in federal courts, representatives of hundreds of Indigenous groups from around the world--the Maori, the Sami, and the Sarayaku, to name a few--arrived. Temporary communities of thousands were created on the reservation borderlands in nonviolent resistance against the crude oil project. Police arrested more than 800 people, and many water protectors faced attack dogs, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, and, once, a water cannon on a freezing night in November. Last February, armored vehicles and police in riot gear cleared the last of the encampments. Recently, investigative journalism by The Intercept has documented that the paramilitary security firm TigerSwan was hired by DAPL parent Energy Transfer Partners to guide North Dakota law enforcement in treating the movement as a "national security threat."
Oil now flows through the pipeline under the Missouri.
But this Indigenous-led disruption, the awakening resolve that was cultivated at Standing Rock, did not dissolve after February. Rather, it spread in so many different directions that we may never fully realize its reach. The spirit of resistance can easily be found in the half-dozen or so other pipeline battles across the United States. Beyond that, the movement amplified the greater struggle worldwide: treaty rights, sacred sites, and the overall stand to protect Indigenous land and life.
To be sure, post-colonization has always demanded acknowledgment of Indigenous autonomy. It's what spurred months of international advocacy when Haudenosaunee Chief Deskaheh attempted to speak before the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1923. He wanted to remind the world that European colonizers had honored Iroquois Confederacy nationhood upon entering treaty agreements under the two row wampum.
The stand at Standing Rock, then, was not anything new--just more modern.
Google the words "the next Standing Rock" and you get a smattering of circumstances, mostly posed in the form of a question: Bears Ears, Line 3, Yucca Mountain. "The Next Standing Rock?" the headlines ask.
The story of White Clay, Nebraska, is indicative. When the last tipis came down at Standing Rock, Clarence Matthew III, a middle-aged Sicangu Lakota man better known by his camp nickname, Curly, spared little time migrating to the South Dakota-Nebraska border. There, another fight for justice was mounting, for families living on the neighboring Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This one focused on a decades-long dispute over beer sales targeted at Native American customers mostly prone to alcohol addiction.
Demands turned to broader issues: investigation of dozens of unsolved crimes in White Clay against Native Americans. "Once we got down there, they started telling us about the problems they've had, more than just alcohol, the murders, the rapes, and everything that was on the bad side of that alcohol problem," Matthew said. "It just broke my heart to hear all that."
Matthew had been caretaker of one of the main communities at Standing Rock, and he settled right in at Camp Justice at the edge of Pine Ridge. He was there with his "water protector family," others who have adopted camping as an active form of protest.
For all the momentum that the resistance at Standing Rock brought, the Indigenous rights movement in the 21st century faces increasing challenges. Tribal nations tread cautiously under the administration of Donald Trump. Internationally, the militarized protection of extractive energy projects and theft of land persist, despite glaring media attention paid to the rising number of Indigenous peoples killed or jailed for their activism in the face of it.
In a final push for re-election last fall, Standing Rock's Dave Archambault II gave what would be his last interview as chairman to tribal radio station KLND. Archambault used the airtime to speak matter-of-factly about how the movement had shifted the tribe's potent public image away from the reservation. "It used to be cool to be Indian; now it's cool to be from Standing Rock.
"This movement was significant, not just for Standing Rock, but for all of Indian Country and around the world. We made some noise and now we're starting to see other Indigenous communities rise up and say, Let us all speak now, and it's pretty powerful and moving," he said.
Less than a week later and on the same day that the state of North Dakota accepted a $15 million gift from Energy Transfer Partners, Archambault was unseated by former council member Mike Faith, who has said publicly that he believes the overall movement hurt Standing Rock's economy and neglected daily life for tribal members.
The difference of opinion between the two leaders is a conflict that often lies at the heart of tribal community: protecting the Earth or protecting the Indigenous peoples.
On the eve of Thanksgiving 2017, when the Keystone pipeline ruptured and spilled 210,000 gallons of oil in neighboring South Dakota, the newly elected Faith remained notably silent while water protectors responded with outrage, most loudly, closest to home.
"Ironically, this week most Americans will be sitting down and giving thanks when last year at this time my people were being shot, gassed, and beaten for trying to keep this very thing from happening," Chairman Harold Frazier from the neighboring Cheyenne River Sioux tribe said in a statement. Like Archambault and other tribal leaders, Frazier was arrested for participating in the Standing Rock occupation.
Leadership in the Indigenous world is not only a difficult balance, but also dangerous.
In Honduras, activist Bertha Zuniga Caceres is fighting for Indigenous rights in one of the most militarized regions in the world. She is the daughter of Berta Caceres, the Indigenous Lenca woman who was assassinated after leading a successful campaign to halt construction of the Agua Zarca Dam. Now she is seeking justice for her mother's death.
The 26-year-old Caceres is also campaigning to suspend all U.S. military aid to Honduras. In July, she survived an attack by a group of assailants wielding machetes. Just weeks earlier she had been named the new leader of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, the nonprofit organization formerly led by her mother.
"Many organizations, many NGOs, many Indigenous groups are struggling in how to sustain the work that they are doing in the face of these attacks," said Katharina Rall, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Last year, after the military-style assaults on the camps at Standing Rock, Human Rights Watch expanded its agenda to include a program focused on the environment as a human right. "The fact that we now have an environment and human rights program at our organization is a reflection of this reality that a lot of people face," Rall said.
Meantime, the organization Global Witness reports that it has never been deadlier to take a stand against companies that steal land and destroy the Earth. In 2016, the watchdog group found that nearly four activists a week are murdered fighting against mining, logging, and other extractive resource development.
As disturbing as this reality is, it is unsurprising then to recall the military-style violence at Standing Rock: the rows of riot police pointing their guns at unarmed activists standing in the river; tanks shooting water in freezing temperatures at a crowd of people gathered on a bridge. In this one regard, Standing Rock was not unique in the world. It had become crucially important. Americans saw the global struggle faced by the estimated 370 million Indigenous people--the violence, stolen resources, colluding corporations and governments that go hand in hand with protecting the Earth.
Sustaining this awakening is the next great task.
Climate change poses one of the most serious reminders of why the sacred fires ignited at Standing Rock must continue to burn: Indigenous peoples and their knowledge and value systems matter.
"Climate change poses one of the most serious reminders of why the sacred fires ignited at Standing Rock must continue to burn: Indigenous peoples and their knowledge and value systems matter."
At November's COP23 climate conference in Bonn, Germany, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim was dressed in traditional Mbororo regalia when she stood in a conference hall demanding that Indigenous knowledge systems be properly acknowledged in Paris Agreement negotiations. The girl who once tended cattle in the region of Chad bordering northeastern Nigeria has now become a bridge for her people and government officials making decisions impacting the fragile ecosystem of Lake Chad, the lifeline for the Mbororo.
"Traditional knowledge has kept us from century to century to be in harmony with Mother Earth," Ibrahim said. "These knowledges will make for all the difference, but we cannot wait years and years, because climate is changing, and it's impacting the Earth."
Other members of the Indigenous Caucus at Bonn say inserting traditional knowledge into the climate talks doesn't go far enough. Jannie Staffansson, a representative of the Saami Council, wants what Chief Deskaheh had petitioned to the League of Nations nearly a century earlier: sovereign recognition for Indigenous Peoples on an international scale. It would allow equity at the negotiating table--a level playing field to fairly deal with the consequences of a warming planet in the face of land grabs and natural resource extraction.
"Why is it always that Indigenous peoples need to pay for other people's wealth?" said Staffansson. She paused to check the Snapchat account she had been using to engage with a young Sami audience while at COP, a demographic similar to the teens who got tattoos of the black snake.
"I had friends that went to Standing Rock," said the 27-year-old. "I was envious of their trip to support self-determination. Self-determination and a just transition is what we have to take into account."
"We need climate justice in everything we do."
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A Year of Resistance--and Why I'm Hopeful for 2018
Through a chaotic year, it’s been inspiring to see a resistance movement gather strength and show its muscle.
Dec 25, 2017
What a year it's been. The destructive antics of the Trump administration and Congress and a political discourse increasingly polluted by 'alternative facts' have frequently made many of us angry, sad, and sometimes just plain crazy.
Through it all, it's been inspiring to see a resistance movement gather strength and show its muscle. I've been awed by the work of racial justice activists, scientists, grassroots groups, immigrant rights groups, youth groups and many many others. Here's a snapshot of what a year in the resistance looked like for me.
January
The Women's March (one of the largest protest marches ever, coordinated across the nation and globally), held a day after President's Trump's inauguration (with its less-than-record attendance), showed where the true power of the people lies.
Like many of you, I joined the march with my family. Watching my kids (in their pink hats, of course) experience the crowds, point out their favorite signs, raise their voices in call-and-response chants--all of it gave me a thrill to think that a new generation was beginning to understand the power of peaceful protest in a democracy.
And we called out a dangerous new form of climate denial taking hold in the administration, especially with the nomination of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator.
February
In courts across the nation, including in Hawaii, Washington, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Maryland, there were immediate challenges filed to President Trump's terrible 'Muslim Ban' executive order issued at the end of January.
As an immigrant myself, it was especially moving to join a large and diverse crowd of people marching in protest in Boston, and to see similar protests nationwide. At many major airports teams of lawyers also flocked in to offer pro bono assistance to travelers affected by the ban. (The Supreme Court has since allowed a modified version of the ban to go ahead but this is by no means the last word since it is still being litigated.)
March
We called out Scott Pruitt's lies on climate change, held the administration accountable on its rollback of protective health standards including an all-out attack on climate policies, and we urged Congress to resist harmful cuts to the EPA budget (and succeeded in fending off some of the most damaging cuts).
April
The March for Science March and the Peoples Climate March were the highlights of April. It was magnificent to join the throngs of people marching for climate, jobs and justice on that sweltering hot day in Washington DC. More importantly, we are building a movement that is about more than just that one day.
May
President Trump's destructive first budget proposal was shown up to be all bark and no bite since Congress actually controls the purse strings. We campaigned against the many awful elements of the Trump budget proposal, including cuts that would harm our nation's ability to prepare for climate and extreme weather disasters and cuts that would gut the EPA. (Harmful budget cuts are an ongoing threat. It's critical for constituents to continue to urge their policymakers to resist deep cuts to agency budgets that jeopardize the health and well-being of Americans.)
June
'We are still in!' declared states, cities, counties, tribes, businesses, investors, faith groups, colleges and universities, in prompt response to President Trump's shameful announcement that he intended to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.
Unfortunately, June also brought terrible heatwaves and wildfires, further evidence that the impacts of climate change are here and now, despite the climate denialism rampant in this administration.
July
One of the most satisfying ways to resist the madness wrought by this administration is to just carry on doing good science. In July, my colleagues and I released a new report, When Rising Seas Hit Home: Hard Choices Ahead for Hundreds of US Coastal Communities. The report highlights the threat of chronic coastal inundation exacerbated by sea level rise, and is accompanied by a fantastic online mapping tool.
Its findings challenge us to work toward solutions at the national, state and local level. Frontline communities facing these risks need help--and this should not be a partisan issue.
August-September
The nightmare hurricane season of 2017 unfolded in August and September, bringing Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Houston, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands suffered particularly devastating impacts. Groups like Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.), an Environmental Justice organization in Houston, rallied to call attention to urgent needs.
My colleagues and I wrote about the flood threats in Houston, especially the risks from toxic pollution and the need to keep environmental justice front and center in the recovery process. We also laid out the science of hurricanes and climate change, and called on Congress to take action to help devastated communities.
And, yes, we also pointed out the irony of the Trump administration's rollback of the federal flood risk management standard just a week before Harvey hit. And the how damaging the administration's proposed budget cuts to FEMA and HUD, key agencies for our nation's disaster response, would be.
October
Market trends, state policies, and federal tax incentives continued to drive a historic transition away from coal to cleaner forms of energy, despite the EPA's announcement that it would repeal the Clean Power Plan, the nation's first-ever limits on power plant carbon emissions. We called out Administrator Pruitt's cynical move to pander to fossil fuel interests while blatantly ignoring the EPA's mission to protect human health and the environment.
Terrible wildfires raged across Northern California, killing 44 people and causing billions of dollars of damage. Sadly, another example of how climate change is exacerbating risks to people and property.
November
I was in Bonn, Germany for COP23, the annual UN climate talks, where the Trump administration was rendered largely irrelevant and isolated in its stance on the Paris Agreement. Every other nation is steadfastly committed to the agreement, and the 'We Are Still In' coalition of US sub-national actors was there in full force to reiterate that the nation's clean energy and carbon-cutting progress will continue despite the retrograde actions of the Trump administration.
December
As we close out the year with the passage of a deeply unjust and harmful tax reform bill and a sober reckoning of this year's record-breaking disasters, including wildfires and hurricanes, there are lots of reasons to be very concerned.
Yet, there are some bits of good news too. The terribly destructive Thomas Fire in California is finally under control, for one. I also see signs all around that the resistance is alive and well-and gathering steam.
Just a few examples of positive developments:
We've seen a number of unqualified nominees proposed by the administration forced to withdraw recently because of public pressure;
Our nation's transition away from coal to cleaner power sources continues unabated, lowering power sector carbon emissions;
Many states continue to enhance the ambition of their clean energy policies;
Many people stood up to defend science (here's UCS' list of 2017 Science Defenders, example);
Congress roundly rejected many of the extreme budget cuts proposed by the administration;
The Alabama election demonstrated the power of African American voters (women especially), a historically disenfranchised segment of the population;
The National Defense Authorization Act recently signed by President Trump explicitly acknowledges that climate change is a direct threat to US national security. (Of course we had to then call him out for flip-flopping a week later when the administration released a National Security Strategy that doesn't even mention climate change!)
Hope for 2018
What gives me hope for 2018 is that Americans from all walks of life are now awake to the threats this administration poses to our democracy, our health, our climate, and basic human rights--and we're fighting back! Our movement is strongest when we work together, connecting our work to people's daily lives and concerns, and specifically aiming for solutions that are just.
The wins may not come easily and there's a lot of work ahead. This administration's attacks on science and our core values will very likely continue. But they are helping to forge our resistance and build its power. (Not to mention inspiring reams of incredibly biting, funny, incisive political satire-humor is sometimes the only way to handle the farcical extremes we've experienced this year!)
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