Together with other organisations we are currently blocking the Rogier metro station in Brussels as part of the ongoing #StopFossilSubsidies action.

€400 billion in subsidies was given to the fossil industry in the EU last year, which is about €1000 per EU citizen. (1/3)

#ClimateJustice #UnitedForClimateJustice

We know — and our rulers certainly know — that if we are to have any hope of preserving even a limited version of today’s complex modern society, greenhouse gas emissions MUST go down, swiftly and urgently.

But instead, emissions continue going up and up and up. It is literally suicidal.

So, WHY haven't we stopped burning fossil fuels?

Because there are profits to be made. Huge, massive, irresistibly tempting profits.

In a sane world, these actions would be seen as criminal.

Perpetrators like fossil fuel executives, their financiers, and the politicians who enable them, would be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted, with assets forfeited to pay for mitigation and reparations.

But we do not live in a sane world.

#Politics #Economics #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateJustice #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #Degrowth

Roger Hallam is one of the founders of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, and a leader in the fight against global climate change. I would like you to read this statement he posted yesterday… 🧵1/4
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I've just been sentenced to 5 years in prison.

The longest ever for nonviolent action.

The 'crime'?

Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction.

I have given hundreds of similar speeches encouraging nonviolent action and have never been arrested for it. This time I was an advisor to the M25 motorway disruption, recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse.

I was not part of the planning or action itself.

In the trial, I swore before God to tell the truth. The truth is the science. The science is clear. We're heading for billions of deaths and ecological collapse. To prove this, I presented the jury with a 250-page dossier of leading scientists' research as evidence in my defence. This was denied by the judge as an invalid - climate science is now illegal in the British courtroom.

I then began to speak about the apocalyptic conditions humanity faces - floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths - and was silenced by the judge. He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn't stop. Instead, I stayed in the dock and argued that until I was given the right to complete my defence – I would not move. Even the prosecution tried to argue in my defence and the judge let me continue.

When the jury had shuffled in again, I spoke about the legal concept of “equality of arms” – that as the prosecution had had a right to lay facts over a whole week, I also wanted an equal opportunity. I spoke of various cases where juries had acquitted defendants when they had heard the facts, such as the Extinction Rebellion cracking of Shell's windows in 2018 as a reasonable action against criminal destruction. The Dutch Supreme Court has even said that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emission of greenhouse gases. Whilst the prosecution accepted that emissions pose an existential threat, for the first time in British history no less, they still tried to convict us for public nuisance rather than praise us for trying to stop those emissions. Given the objectivity of existential threat, there were overwhelming grounds to be involved in a plan to cause some disruption to the M25.

In the British law on public nuisance, there is a ‘reasonable excuse’ clause. Science says there is an overwhelming threat to my life, my children, you and your children. To argue there is not a reasonable excuse directly defies the wish of this legislation. Things are happening that cause harm – people are engaged in physical acts to stop that harm – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a protest or not.

As I began to offer up some case law, the judge kept intervening telling me I was “wasting my time” and ordering the jury to disregard me. To illustrate that I was not talking about my motivations but speaking about real necessity, I referred to a famous case over a decision to operate on conjoined twins with the likelihood that one would die. In this dilemma, I quoted the 19th Century principle that the action was necessary if the threat faced was inevitable and irrevocable, that no more should be done than essential, and that it must be proportionate. I argued that there was a “duress of circumstances” including the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food, and the global significance of “food insecurity” – a euphemism for famine and starvation.

There has never been a moment in history where ‘necessity’ has been more supported by objective facts – more than 10,000 scientific and peer-reviewed papers, indicating an outcome of mass starvation and death from man-made climate collapse.

In response, Judge Hehir called for an early lunch and dismissed the jury. He turned to me and warned that I wasn't a lawyer and that “this is not the Roger Hallam show”.

He then gave me just 15 more minutes to put forward my “beliefs” - a totally fucking incoherent statement. This isn’t belief - it’s the objective threat of destruction of property and livelihoods of billions of people and the secondary effects of famine i.e. war, rape, and torture.
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That's Part 1 of 4. Read the next below...

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

For those who haven’t seen it before, here is my review of The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg…
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I've read dozens of books about climate change, and this one is easily the best. It's packed with information, written to be accessible for anyone from high school (or a bright middle school student) on up, and most importantly it does NOT shy away from the true severity of our situation and the imperative need not only for individual action but for system change.

It's stunning to me that a young woman who just turned twenty years old was able to pull together such a massive project — coordinating the submissions of more than a hundred scientists, activists, and educators — while also writing a large part of the content herself. A truly amazing accomplishment.

This essential work should be in every school library and in every home. It will remain relevant for years to come, I believe, because although there certainly is plenty of data, mostly it's about *ideas* which will never age.
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bookwyrm.social/user/BreadAndC…

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #CO2 #Emissions #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

A message from Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg)...
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School strike, week 251.

Today, I graduate from school, which means I’ll no longer be able to school strike for the climate. This is then the last school strike for me, so I guess I have to write something on this day.

When I started striking in 2018 I could never have expected that it would lead to anything. After striking every day for three weeks, we were a small group of children who decided to continue doing this every Friday. And we did, which is how Fridays For Future was formed.

Some more people joined, and quite suddenly this was a global movement growing every day. During 2019, millions of youth striked from school for the climate, flooding the streets in over 180 countries. When the pandemic started, we had to find new ways to protest.

With time, we started to get back on the streets again. We’re still here, and we aren’t planning on going anywhere. Much has changed since we started, and yet we have much further to go.

We are still moving in the wrong direction, where those in power are allowed to sacrifice marginalised and affected people and the planet in the name of greed, profit and economic growth. They continue to destabilise the biosphere and our life supporting systems. We’re rapidly approaching potential nonlinear ecological and climatic tipping points beyond our control.

And in so many parts of the world, we are even speeding up the process. There are probably many of us who graduate who now wonder what kind of future it is that we are stepping into, even though we did not cause this crisis.

We who can speak up have a duty to do so. In order to change everything, we need everyone. I’ll continue to protest on Fridays, even though it’s not technically “school striking”. We simply have no other option than to do everything we possibly can. The fight has only just begun.
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🤗 💚

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

We can have one of two things — but not both.

We can either have a society that tolerates millionaires and billionaires polluting the planet and destroying the biosphere. Or we can have a planet with a healthy biosphere but with fewer millionaires and no billionaires at all.

This is from a recently published peer-reviewed scientific paper titled “Millionaire Spending Incompatible with 1.5 C Ambitions”...
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Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change. Here we study the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Our findings suggest that the share of millionaires in the world population will grow from 0.7% today to 3.3% in 2050, and cause accumulated emissions equivalent to 72% of the remaining carbon budget. This significantly reduces the chance of stabilizing climate change at 1.5°C.

The concentration of wealth at the top means that a significant share of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5°C is depleted by a very small share of humanity. This comparably small group is also likely to invest its wealth in ways that further increase emissions.

Continued growth in emissions at the top makes a low-carbon transition less likely, as the acceleration of energy consumption by the wealthiest is likely beyond the system's capacity to decarbonize. To this end, we question whether policy designs such as progressive taxes targeting the high emitters will be sufficient.
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Like I said, we can have one thing or the other — but not both.

READ THE PAPER --sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

#Politics #Capitalism #Inequality #CO2 #Emissions #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateJustice

There's an interesting new paper in the journal Ecological Economics. The title is:

"Assessing US consumers' carbon footprints reveals outsized impact of top 1%"
sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

This is from the abstract --

Unsustainable environmental degradation and extreme economic inequality are two of humanity's most pressing challenges. They are intimately linked. Climate-altering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are disproportionately driven by consumption among wealthy and socially privileged groups, yet poorer and socially marginalized peoples face disproportionate climate harms.
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What really grabbed me, however, was the chart below, created by Andrew Fanning using data contained in the paper. It clearly illustrates the massive scale of carbon inequality in our modern society.

#Inequality #GreenhouseGases #Emissions #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice

Nature Sustainability published 2 consistent papers recently on carbon emissions.

They show the wealthiest 10% are responsible for about 47% of emissions, where the poorest 50% of only 11%, and the top 1% of 16%.

To blame "humanity" is a gross injustice.

#ClimateJustice

Redo of post (now complete):

More and more #ClimateJustice groups and activists are joining the #Fediverse and they have more instances available than ever before:

forfuture.social
climatejustice.global
funk.climatejustice.global
climatejustice.rocks
climatejustice.social
climatejustice.video/
social.rebellion.global
tube.rebellion.global
mobilizon.rebellion.global

Here is a long list of accounts:

joinfediverse.wiki/The_Climate…

Currently we're trying to get Greta Thunberg here as well. #JoinTheFediverseGreta.

Climate Justice Global

This is an official mastodon instance for activist groups of the global climate justice movement. If you're an individual please sign-up at climatejustice.rocks instead.

^{Mastodon hosted on climatejustice.global}

Hello new followers! I've been bad at hashtags, which are crucial here for discoverability, so here's some of them.

I try to toot interesting things related to #activism about #ClimateChange / #ClimateCrisis / #EarthBreakdown, from the perspective of #degrowth / #ClimateJustice / #sustainability. I'm one tiny part of #ExtinctionRebellion.

I build #FOSS / #OpenSource / #commons and #SmallTech using #rust and will write more about that soon.

Third, occasionally #philosophy, #anticapitalism.