Climate action needed now
If future worlds only know that we had the means to address climate change but failed to do so, that would be a terrible epitaph to write for our time, cautioned Bill McKibben, founder of Third Act, at an Ethnic Media Services (EMS) briefing focused on the consequences of climate change and its relevance in the election.
Panelists at the briefing on Nov. 1 provided a broad perspective on what’s at stake, discussing the impact on communities and how they mobilize to combat climate change and environmental degradation while highlighting personal experiences and activism.
McKibben, an environmentalist, author, and journalist, who organizes people over 60 for action on climate and justice, underscored the urgency of climate action against the backdrop of the U.S. election. Scientific and environmental predictions from three to four decades ago are now regular worldwide occurrences he warned.
A warming planet
The Earth’s average surface temperature in 2023 was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880. But, instead of the steady rise seen for decades, said McKibben, the planet has experienced a dramatic spike in the earth and oceanic temperatures in the last 18 months that has caused extraordinary events like the heatwave in Delhi and Phoenix and the rain events like the ones that accompanied Helene.
He stressed the importance of halving emission reductions by 2030 — a recommendation proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for staying on the Paris Agreement path. “2030,” McKibben said, “is five years and now two months away.”
“The next president of the states will take office in January of 2029 after this election. So in many ways, this is the last election that deeply and powerfully counts for what you know how hot the planet ends up being.”
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Voter priorities did not include climate change
“Climate change has largely slipped off the radar for both voters and candidates in this election cycle,” noted Sunita Sorabji, health editor at EMS who moderated the panel.
A Pew Research Center survey in Sept. 2024 found that climate change was “very important” to only 11% of Trump supporters. 81% of registered voters felt the economy was “very important” to their vote. Climate change was rated second to last in a recent Gallup poll with just 21% of voters calling it “extremely important.”
“Bread and butter issues” weighed heavily on voters in this election, reported Inside Climate News.
“When you talk about climate change, it feels very far away, not just physically, but also just kind of psychologically, if you’re like, skipping meals regularly to meet rent,” said Sissy Trinh, Executive Director at Southeast Asian Community Alliance at the briefing.
Trinh works in Chinatown, Los Angeles, one of the poorest neighborhoods in L.A. County, where climate change as an existential crisis is far from the immediate needs of neighborhoods where people could be one rent increase away from becoming homeless.
“However…we often talk about how these threats immediately impact their daily lives and also where the opportunities are,” she said.
As part of the L.A. River master plan, Trinh mobilized the community to get the county to incorporate a housing stabilization chapter, identify strategies to mitigate speculative impact, and stabilize communities. The work included identifying high-risk neighborhoods and strategic partnerships between the housing and the climate sectors.
“I see climate change as an opportunity to address these other issues that feel separate,” Trinh said, “but really aren’t.”
Economy over climate action
Rupa Basu, a research scientist and epidemiologist told India Currents that climate change took a backseat in the Indian American community.
“Even though they had a candidate who was more representative of them, it was interesting to me, how many are actually voting for the other guy,” she said. “So I think that climate is also not important. And when people talk about what was important, at least, among the Indian American community that I know, they said, “Oh, the main thing was the economy.”
She acknowledged a shift among people experiencing the effects of climate change in their daily lives and who view it as a problem. Although it wasn’t the first thing people thought about for the election, it’s coming to the forefront because of what people have experienced in recent years.
“I think just by having those types of experiences, people are actually prioritizing it more than they used to,” she said.
Community mobilization
Sharon Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James described mobilizing her community to fight against a petrochemical factory being built in her neighborhood, known as Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.
“Our community literally is dying,” said Lavigne, a resident of Welcome in St. James Parish in the heart of Cancer Alley, where people live on the front lines of some 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations — reportedly the largest concentration of such plants in the Western Hemisphere.
Lavigne, a 2021 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize who is also on Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people this year, stressed the importance of communities organizing themselves. Rise St. James is currently fighting against DG Fuels and Formosa Plastics, which is scheduled to build a multi-billion factory on the graves of Lavigne’s ancestors.
“If Formosa would come, it would be a death sentence for us,” Lavigne said. “All we need is help.”
Basu also emphasized the representation of communities in climate action and research, and ensuring accessibility to resources in the right places. She pointed out that scientists can get technical, making it difficult for people to understand the impacts so tailoring messages around climate and health education was imperative. In immigrant communities, language barriers caused by colloquialisms could make it harder for people to understand messaging, added Basu.
She suggested that communities check in on their neighbors and educate them on what to do before weather events like heat waves and wildfires.
Grassroots activism
Erik Bendix, a resident of Asheville, North Carolina who battled tornados that accompanied hurricane Helene, said the experience lost them a forest but gained them a community.
“The community just whipped itself together really fast,” he said. “It was just so disciplined and organized and we split up into different committees. There was a medical team, a team that cooked hot lunches for everybody. We had daily meetings. There was a communications team that involved sending teenagers out on dirt bikes to fan out through the neighborhood to make sure everybody was okay.”
According to Bendix, over 800,000 acres of forest were destroyed and his community is still reeling. Now that the forest canopy has been ripped open, there’s an opportunity, Bendix said, to steer things in a healthier direction.
“It depends on very focused action in the next couple of years.”
The role of the U.S. in global action
McKibben shared British think tank Carbon Brief estimates that the next four years of the Trump presidency would produce an extra 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
“For comparison purposes, that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of the EU and Japan combined,” he said. “That’s what we’d be adding with a Trump presidency.”
Experts are concerned that Trump will set back climate action again. Basu noted the likelihood of a U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, which “internationally is a big, big issue,” adding “but I think a lot of this work just will not get done. So not just the research that we do, but also policies, taking action, creating interventions that will work; these types of things are not going to get funded.”
McKibben urged U.S. representation at global talks to encourage global civil society to pressure America to do more. “We have to be engaged dramatically in the effort to find the financing for the global south to make this transition,” he said.
Closer to tipping point
As a dominant player at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the U.S. government should figure out how to reduce risks associated with investing in developing countries, said McKibben, to allow large investors, like pension funds, to direct their financial resources towards needs in these less developed parts of the world. Transitioning to clean energy in The Global South with its great advantages in sunlight and wind would be a huge boon, added McKibben.
We’re very close to the biggest of the tipping points that will make these changes deeper and permanent which is very scary.
“Climate change is the biggest thing that humans have ever done by far, and if we don’t get it under control very soon, biologists say we will be kicking off, among other things, the sixth great extinction in the history of this planet,” warned McKibben.
“If we’re going to change that outcome, we need to move very, very fast as movements and as governments to make big change happen quickly.”
