Climate Justice: Holding Governments and Business Accountable for the Climate Crisis

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 197-201
Author(s):  
Kristin Casper
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

People around the world are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, and their human rights are under threat. Greenpeace's Climate Justice and Liability Campaign is collaborating with a growing number of communities to reclaim their rights through strategic climate litigation. Three themes run throughout these efforts. First, the climate breakdown is a human rights crisis. Second, political and business leaders must take immediate action or risk being sued. Third, there is mounting evidence that the fossil fuel industry is significantly responsible for the climate crisis and will ultimately be held accountable. Before exploring these themes, it is useful to understand the origins of Greenpeace International's climate justice efforts.

scholarly journals The role of youth in the climate change debate

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P Van Den Hazel
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Young People ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Sustainable Lifestyles ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Indirect Impacts ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

Abstract The impacts of climate change are not distributed equally. Some people will experience natural disasters first hand, some will be affected more gradually over time, and some will experience only indirect impacts. There are data from the United nations that show the interest of youth on climate change. Close to half a million youth around the world have taken action on climate change through SGP [small grants programmes] projects in their homes, schools and communities. (UNDP, 2015). 84% of the surveyed young people agree that they need more information to prevent climate change. (UNEP, 2011). Furthermore, about 73% of surveyed youth say they currently feel the effects climate change. (UNEP, GlobeScan Survey, 2008). Some 89% of youth respondents say young people can make a difference on climate change. [UNEP, 2008]. But only 9% of youth are very confident the world will act quickly enough to address climate change. [UNEP, 2008]. Young people are key actors in raising awareness, running educational programmes, promoting sustainable lifestyles, conserving nature, supporting renewable energy, adopting environmentally-friendly practices and implementing adaptation and mitigation projects[UNFCCC]. Action by youth, as protest school strikes or speeches to the UN by Greta Thunberg, urge immediate action from governments, business leaders and school leaders. There are different reasons for this action by youth. The psycho-social impacts of a changing climate are generally under lighted in these reasons. Are the responses by society enough to minimize suffering and promote resilience of youth in the face of the challenging impacts of climate change? Or do governments and businesses enough while they increasingly seem to be moving toward action on climate change, as they proclaim to cut their own emissions or be active in their energy transition? It is not clear whether those actions are enough to satisfy the next generation of customers, employees and decision makers.

scholarly journals Coal, Climate Justice, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Brown ◽  
Samuel J. Spiegel
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Paris Agreement ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Phase Out ◽  
Development Agendas

In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-fired power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. However, coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the world, while fossil fuel industries continue to flourish. This article discusses these entanglements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal and energy transition. We highlight how recent struggles around phasing out coal have stimulated renewed critical debates around colonialism, empire, and capitalism more broadly, recognizing climate change as an intersectional issue encompassing racial, gender, and economic justice. With social movements locked in struggles to resist the development or expansion of coal mines, power plants, and associated infrastructure, we unpack tensions that emerge as transnational alliances connect disparate communities across the world. Our conclusion signals the need for greater critical engagement with how intersecting inequalities are coded into the cultural politics of coal, and how this shapes efforts to pursue a just transition.

scholarly journals Climate and wartalk: Metaphors, imagination, transformation

Elem Sci Anth ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rupinder Mangat ◽  
Simon Dalby
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
National Security ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Human Security ◽  
Sustainable Society ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
War Metaphor ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Change Problem

Fossil fuel divestment activists re-imagine how the war metaphor can be used in climate change action to transform thinking around what will lead to a sustainable society. Through the naming of a clear enemy and an end goal, the overused war metaphor is renewed. By casting the fossil fuel industry in the role of enemy, fossil fuel divestment activists move to a re-imagining of the climate change problem as one that is located in the here and now with known villains who must be challenged and defeated. In this scenario, climate activists move away from the climate and national security framing to a climate and human security way of thinking.

scholarly journals From Carbon Democracy to Carbon Rebellion: Countering Petro-Hegemony on the Frontlines of Climate Justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Theo LeQuesne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Grassroots Democracy ◽  
Corporate Power ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry

This essay combines salient instances of climate justice activism in key battlegrounds against the fossil fuel industry in the United States and Canada with theoretical interventions in studies of corporate power, grassroots democracy, and counter hegemony. It explores Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy and the term’s relevance to understanding the conditions in which climate justice activists must combat the entrenched interests of fossil fuel companies.  It suggests that Carbon Democracy is a helpful concept for understanding how fossil fuel dependency both shapes and distorts democratic governance. Drawing upon insights in three case studies - activism against Chevron in Richmond California, the Water Protectors and the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, and the First Nations-led fight against the Trans Mountain Pipeline in British Columbia - the essay supplements Carbon Democracy with two more terms: Petro-Hegemony and Carbon Rebellion. These reveal three power relations, namely consent, compliance, and coercion, upon which fossil fuel companies depend and in which climate justice activists must strategically intervene to move beyond conditions of Carbon Democracy. I show that dual power is a logic of strategic intervention that climate justice activists are successfully using to intervene in all three of these relations to reign in corporate power and assert their own sovereignty. 

A Climate Change Solution Does Exist

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
William John Montague ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carbon Emissions ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Plastic Pollution ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Viable Solution ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Simple Technology ◽  
Fuel Industry

If anyone cares to stop the fossil fuel industry producing countries from destroying the ability of the Earth to support human life, now is the time to demand an alternative. Inaction on eliminating carbon emissions and plastic pollution have all but sealed the fate of our planet. These efforts should have been well underway more than twenty years ago. It is not too late if we act now. I have found a simple technology which can provide a viable solution. This means it is within the means of every nation on Earth to have and implement a simple ‘public domain’ technology.

Planetary Challenges

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wright ◽  
Daniel Nyberg
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Environmental Cost ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Low Carbon Economy ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Carbon Economy

The extraction and consumption of fossil-fuel-based energy has underpinned the growth of global capitalism over the past two centuries, resulting in an industry dominated by some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. However, the centrality of fossil energy to economic growth has also come at a huge environmental cost as escalating carbon emissions have generated a climate crisis that now threatens the future of organised human civilisation. This article explores the origins of the global fossil-fuel industry and its political response to the growing recognition of climate change and moves towards the decarbonization of economies. It highlights how the industry has engaged in various forms of political activity to defend itself from critique and delay the transition to a low-carbon economy. While this has been a successful strategy for over forty years, the article notes how the growing urgency of the climate crisis and the current global pandemic now pose fundamental threats to the continuation of fossil fuel expansion.

scholarly journals Climate change and fossil fuel: An examination of risks for the energy industry and producer states

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Krane
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Gas ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Developed World

ABSTRACTThis article compiles and categorizes the various forms of climate risk facing the fossil fuel industry. The type and intensity of risk differs greatly among the three forms of fossil fuels, as well as between countries in the developing and developed world. The paper finds heightened risk for the coal industry and reduced risk for oil businesses, due to its lack of substitutes.Burning coal, oil, and natural gas is the source of two-thirds of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Sales of these fuels also represent the economic underpinning of resource-rich countries and the world’s largest firms. As such, steps taken to abate emissions undermine commercial opportunities to monetize fossil fuel reserves. Risks to the industry correlate with progress on climate goals.This article analyzes recent literature on climate action strategy and finds that a new or intensified set of risks has arisen for the fossil fuel industry. These include government policies and legislation, financial restrictions among lenders and insurers, hostile legal and shareholder actions, changes in demand and geopolitics, as well as the onset of new competitive forces among states and technologies.The exposure of carbon-based businesses to these risks and the potential for loss is neither distributed uniformly across the sector, nor adheres to a uniform time scale. Shareholder-owned firms in the developed world will be incentivized to react sooner than large state-owned resource owners in developing countries. The fates of the three fossil fuels also appear likely to play out differently. Demand for oil appears insulated by its lack of viable substitutes, while coal businesses are already undergoing climate-related action, pushed by decreasing social acceptance and constraining financial regulation. At the other end of the spectrum, climate action has improved the medium-term viability of low-carbon natural gas. What appears clear is that, as effects of climate change grow more pronounced, the industry faces a future that is less accepting of current practices.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Paris Climate Talks on Twitter: Media and Climate Stakeholder Visual Social Media During COP21

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630511878268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill E. Hopke ◽  
Luis E. Hestres
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
News Media ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Ghg Emissions ◽  
Trade Association ◽  
Visual Framing ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Domestic Support

In 2015, meeting in Paris for the Conference of the Parties (COP21), representatives of 195 nations set an ambitious goal to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mid-century. This research uses the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took place in Paris during 30 November to 11 December 2015, as a case study of Twitter coverage of the talks by mainstream and alternative media outlets and other climate stakeholders, including activists and fossil fuel industry groups. It compares the British Guardian with other media and climate stakeholders’ visual framing of climate change on Twitter during COP21, because the publication had launched an advocacy campaign in March 2015 promoting fossil fuel divestment in the lead-up to COP21. Findings show that individual activists and movement organizations functioned similarly in climate change visual framing in Twitter posts, as did individual and organizational multinational representatives and scientific experts. The news media categories varied by type of news organization. The major outliers were the fossil fuel industry and trade association accounts. Industry stakeholders largely focused on former US President Barack Obama’s climate policy, promoting the perception of a lack of domestic support for his climate policies in their visual Twitter postings.

scholarly journals The Environment, A Bipartisan Issue?: Partisanship Polarization and Climate Change Policies in the United States

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-506
Author(s):  
Valentina Dotto ◽  
Anne Richardson Oakes
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Climate Change Policies ◽  
Party Members ◽  
Democratic Parties ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry

Abstract Responding to climate change presents significant challenges on both international and domestic fronts. The current U.S. federal government disclaims a connection between climate change, and human activity, and embraces an environmental program that includes withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement at international level and retrenchment from regulation domestically. This Article comments on the rollback of Obama-era environmental regulations now taking place at federal level and locates these policies in the context of the domestic polarization and partisanship that now characterizes U.S. politics. It notes that environmental regulation divides the Republican and Democratic Parties but that the response of individual party members may be more nuanced, particularly amongst younger voters. The Article comments on state level initiatives to counteract the effects of climate change that have gathered bipartisan support but are now subject to partisan actions by the federal government designed to limit their effectiveness. The Article concludes with the observation that as the combination of an aging demographic and alignment with a declining fossil fuel industry shrinks the GOP traditional constituency, it is to be hoped that far-sighted politicians from both parties will embrace credibility on this issue as a key component of enhancing their own as well as the planet’s survival.

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