Commentary: It’s becoming a routine occurrence. Protesters flowed down Water Street last Saturday, waving signs and chanting as they marched through downtown. And those in Las Cruces weren’t alone. Similar demonstrations sprang up in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, as well as Washington, D.C. and over 300 cities nationwide. All told, over 300,000 people marched on six continents, not-so-coincidentally timed for the 100th day of the new administration. We marched to demand action on climate change, as part of the People’s Climate March for climate, jobs, and justice.
Right now, Earth is in the midst of a major extinction event – the sixth in the planet’s history. Species are dying off and disappearing 1,000 times faster than normal, faster than at any point in the last 65 million years.
One of the major drivers of this mass dying is climate change, which we are causing by burning fossil fuels and releasing CO2 and other planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The carbon in the atmosphere is also rising faster than at any point in the last 65 million years.
We can’t emit forever, and we are on track to significantly overshoot our budget. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that to avoid “irreversible and catastrophic” impacts to ecosystems worldwide, we must keep global warming under 2-degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But after decades of international negotiating, we remain on track to warm the globe anywhere from 2.7 to 4 degrees by 2100.
The “irreversible and catastrophic” consequences of climate change are not limited to species loss, and they will not be distributed equitably. In fact, those who have contributed least to the problem will suffer the worst effects. From Bangladesh to Brazil, rising seas, drought, food shortages, new diseases, and extreme weather will most impact those with the least resources and support – the poor, women, people of color, the elderly, and the disabled.
In the Americas, drought, heat waves, and agricultural disruption will drive immigration, increase conflict at the border, and threaten human and civil rights, a process we are already seeing play out in the Middle East. Syria may be a sign of what is to come.
New technologies alone won’t save us. At its core, climate change is a problem of environmental racism. We have created great wealth and luxury in the predominantly White, Western world, at the expense of sacrificing natural systems and human lives on distant parts of the globe. To solve our problem, people need not only a new relationship to nature, but to each other.
Scientists have run the numbers, and it’s beyond dispute: if we extract and burn all currently-known reserves of fossil fuels, we will emit five times too much carbon and warm the globe by several degrees. Governments at all levels should commit to enacting policies that will limit emissions and warming to safe levels. Corporations must look beyond narrow economic incentives and quarterly reports – or everyday people must make them. We all have a stake in a healthy, sustainable, planet. We have to find the political and economic will to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Peter Sloan is a field organizer at the Southwest Environmental Center.