The climate crisis is here. Arctic permafrost is melting, forests, towns, and Indigenous territories are burning. States of emergency – declared for once-in-a-century floods – are becoming commonplace, and millions around the world already face dislocation and starvation.
But that’s not the only thing keeping us up at night. Many of us are struggling to find an affordable place to live, or a decent job to support our families. Hate crimes and racism are on the rise. And promise to Indigenous peoples have yet to be implemented.
On Wednesday night a bipartisan UK Parliament passed an extraordinary measure: a national declaration of an Environment and Climate Emergency. The UK is the first national government to declare such an emergency.
Environment secretary calls for cross-party approach as Labour leader says vote can ‘set off wave of action’
MPs have endorsed a Labour motion to declare a formal climate and environment emergency, with Jeremy Corbyn hailing the move as a necessary response to school climate strikers and groups such as Extinction Rebellion.
By that, I mean: a world democratic socialist republic.
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Global warming connects the local and the global. As Canada dumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a rate of 22 tonnes per person each year, sea levels in Bangladesh rise, swallowing coastal communities.
The river “flows up the map,” they used to say, first south, then west, and then north, and through some of the most verdant and beautiful country in America. It is called the Tennessee, but it drains some forty thousand square miles of land in seven states, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Alabama, and from Mississippi to the Ohio River, an area nearly the size of England.
Humans are pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate. But climate change is a cumulative problem, a function of the total amount of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the sky. Some of the heat-trapping gases in the air right now date back to the Industrial Revolution. And since that time, some countries have pumped out vastly more carbon dioxide than others.
