Climate & Social Justice
EMERGENCY Film Series
with socioeconomic context
by Tim Martin
updated September, 2024
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice
3 Global-boundaries:
Climate, Ocean, Ozone
4 Bio-boundaries:
Biosphere, Land, Water, Biogeochemical
2 Pollutant-boundaries:
Aerosol & Novel Entities
At the end of the Netflix film Breaking Boundaries: The Science Of Our Planet (2021) co-host Johan Rockstrom outlined four imperatives for returning humanity to safe operating space:
Film 1 - A Life On Our Planet
2020 | 1h 23m | watch trailer
Film 2 - Breaking Boundaries: The Science Of Our Planet
2021 | 1h 15m | watch trailer
Film 3 - Eating Our Way To Extinction
2021 | 1h 21m | watch trailer
Film 4 - The Divided Brain
2018 | 1h 18m | watch trailer
Film 5 - Don’t Look Up
2021 | 2h 18m | watch trailer
"Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator."
António Guterres, November 2022 at COP27
United Nations Secretary-General, formerly head of the UN Refugee Agency, formerly Prime Minister of Portugal.
New Report: Dire Sea Level Rise up to 20 meters (66 ft) Locked-In Even if Climate Goals Met
Review of recent paper by Canadian climatologist Paul Beckwith
In 2023 Global Mean Surface Temperature reached 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, faster than anyone expected.
Whoops!
What a record of Atmospheric CO2 Levels over Last 66 million years tells us about our Future
Review of recent paper by Canadian climatologist Paul Beckwith
@ current CO2e,
“The problem of humanity is we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technologies.”
E.O. Wilson (1929-2021)
American biologist, naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist known for developing the field of sociobiology and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
John Adams (1735-1826)
Global North
Global South
Australia
and New Zealand
are also
in the
“Global
North”
“Global North”
“Global South”
“If you net out all the financial transactions between rich (North) and poor (South) countries, including imports, exports, debt collection, interest payments, charitable aid, direct investment - all the global transactions - you find that the global North takes $2Trillion a year from the global South.”
“You can’t meet the aspirations of your people and their needs in terms of food, housing or quality of life if your economy paralyzes and prevents you from serving those needs, and instead requires of you to serve the needs of the global supply chains in manufacturing or energy.”
Fadhel Kaboub, February 2023
Secretary-General of the Organisation of Educational Cooperation
Interview with Fadhel Kaboub on the Planet Critical Podcast
The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets p.27 by Jason Hickel
For every $1 of aid from Global North to South, there are $63 from Global South to North. This is known as “racial capital enslavement”.
+128 Aid from North to South
-60 TRIPS
-138 Tax holidays
-211 Interest payments
-480 Structural Adjustments
-486 Repatriated Profits
-571 Climate Change
-700 WTO Uruguay Round
-973 Capital flight: BoP leakages
-1,750 Trade Misinvoicing + a.t. pricing
-2,660 Unequal Exchange
= - 8,029 Total flow South to North
8,029/128 = 63
“The phrase ‘Climate Change’ was created by corporate public relations people in the 90’s as part of a subtle campaign to make people believe it was a technical problem... But it’s really a social project by the global elites to have billions of people die to maintain their power. It’s a subset of class struggle and part of a narrative that’s been going on since the Industrial Revolution.”
Former organic farmer, Social movement scholar, Co-founder of Extinction Rebellion & Just Stop Oil
Roger Hallam: Can Rolling Climate Dice End The Carbon Regime?
Maximum safe limit of material footprint has been exceeded every year since roughly 2000, and accelerating…
In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. So green growth without degrowth is actually greenwashing.
The Global North’s mostly rich people’s GDP economic growth is coupled with material footprint, which is coupled with energy use and associated carbon pollution in the atmosphere, which causes global heating, which murders mostly poor people in the Global South. These relationships are accelerating with climate system feedbacks and tipping points.
And yet, a healthier economic plan has been designed and confirmed and is waiting to be implemented.
8 tons per person is the sustainable and fair level of material footprint Globally.
US averages 35 tons per person
“If warming reaches or exceeds 2°C (global mean surface temperature above pre-industrial levels) this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming, which is comparable with involuntary or negligent manslaughter.” Quantifying Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Human Deaths to Guide Energy Policy, by Joshua M. Pearce and Richard Parncutt. 19 August 2023
We can expect to reach 2°C in the 2030’s, according to a recent bulletin from James Hansen, et. al
“What we do in the next 3-4 years, I believe, will determine the future of humanity.”
Sir David King, February 2021
Head of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government
…what we do will depend on our unique situations.
Our primitive lizard brain has three normal responses to the stress of doom-and-gloom news about the climate (and biodiversity and cost of living) emergency, and of the abhorrent behavior of governments inadvertently allowing or indirectly causing social and ecological breakdown with unhealthy pro-growth economic policies of both Republicans and Democrats:
“Fight” = blaming others and other constructive or destructive conflict,
“Freeze” = giving up or shutting down, and
“Flight” = being distracted or in denial with wishful thinking (hopium).
While none of these responses are helpful in actually solving our systemic problems collectively, we do have our better stories and strategies for truly overcoming them…
”As people of faith and as people of conscience, we have a responsibility to care for Creation and ensure a habitable planet for future generations and all life on Earth.” - Lucinda MacKethan, October 2022, with the
Interfaith Creation Care of the Triangle’s 2nd Annual “Prayer Chain for the Earth”. However, standing on the side of the road with picket signs is an example of “not-being-violent” because it’s passive and ineffective.
“Like the strings of a lute
not-being-violent is too loose,
and violence is too tight, but nonviolence is just right (in tune).”
Rowan Tilly
By prioritizing endless economic growth on a finite planet the U.S. Government and powerful corporations have caused emissions to go up for 35 years despite our writing letters, signing petitions, marching, voting, and signing of international climate treaties. Nobody voted for social and ecological breakdown. We’ve a moral spiritual duty to rise up.
The Declare Emergency campaign is emerging the people to create a more livable and democratic world using nonviolent civil disobedience to pressure President Biden to tell the truth and declare a climate emergency, and then use all his powers to turn around the carbon death project in ways that are just and fair.
Find out how you can help at the next Introduction to Declare Emergency meeting. Register from this Events page.
Thank you!