It’s On! Battle To Save The Earth Joined By Climate Defiance And KlimaSeniorinnen

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2024 is an important election year in nations around the world.  The results of those elections may well determine whether progress toward a greener, cleaner world continues are gets shoved to the curb by hyper-partisan voters who are more worried about immigration and gender issue than whether their grandchildren have a place to live. Individuals who wish to advocate for the planet are under increasing pressure from laws passed at the behest of fossil fuel companies that make civil protest not a right but rather a crime. Two new groups are refusing to let those laws deter them, however. Climate Defiance in the US and KlimaSoniorinnen in Switzerland are making their voices heard, both in their own way.

Climate Defiance

On December 26, 2023, Bloomberg said in its Evening Briefing newsletter,

“This was a year when the world experienced its hottest 12 months on record, when China connected more new coal plants than ever before, US oil production hit the highest level of any country in history and shipment volumes for liquified natural gas reached an all-time high. Moreover, David Fickling writes in Bloomberg Opinion, the annual United Nations climate meeting in Dubai left fossil fuel producers grinning and climate campaigners fuming. In other words, there’s been no shortage of bad climate news in 2023.”

Climate Defiance is an organization that is committed to making global heating a major campaign issue in the United States in the coming year. In an interview with The Guardian, co-founder Michael Greenberg said the organization is preparing to take action against “cowards” and “criminals” of all political stripes as the 2024 election approaches. It will also focus “more and more” on state level demonstrations designed to deter policymakers from approving fossil fuel projects. Here’s what the group has to say on its website:

We do not do petitions. We do direct action. If people in power will not save us, we will save ourselves. There is not other choice. Conventional tactics will not suffice. We need consistent, mass-turnout, nonviolent disruption to stop business as usual and compel politicians to act.

When we engage in direct action — whether through a strike, a blockade, or a mass occupation –we break through. People see us. People tune in. People engage. Our movement grows. Direct action puts the state in a double-bind — allow the action (and the disruption) to continue or crack down, further driving up public support for the cause.

We are young. We are livid. We are no longer willing to be disposable. We have been sold out by our politicians. We have been betrayed. But we refuse to lose hope. We come from many walks of life but are united in fighting for a thriving and just world.

We came of age in a time of great tumult. A global pandemic. A deadly assault on democracy. Mass shootings with our morning coffee. And hovering above it all, an existential crisis that threatens every fiber of every being in every corner of the world.

Our leaders have failed to save us. So we will save ourselves. We aim not to work within the current political reality. We aim to change it. We can do it. We have leverage.

The laws of nature do not care what’s “realistically feasible.” And neither do we. We will use mass-turnout, peaceful direct action to force our politicians to take action at the scope and speed necessary to avert the worst impacts of this crisis. Join us.

Climate Defiance is funded in part by The Climate Emergency Fund, which has backed disruptive climate groups including Extinction Rebellion. The fund’s directors include the film makers Rory Kennedy, daughter of former US attorney general and senator Bobby Kennedy, and Adam McKay, director of The Big Short, Vice, and Don’t Look Up. Jeremy Strong, the Succession actor, joined the board in December.

Climate Defiance is targeting Democrats because “They are the administration in power,” says Greenberg. So far, that strategy is working. Ali Zaidi, the national climate adviser, has been on the phone. David Turk, the deputy energy secretary, has invited Greenberg to a meeting.

“The reason they’re willing to meet with us is they know we are really intense and really strident,” said Greenberg, who said the fundamental goal of Climate Defiance is to build the climate crisis into a top US political issue, “along with racial justice and kitchen table economic issues.” A Department of Energy spokesperson said, “To solve the climate crisis, we must engage with a diverse variety of stakeholders. Candid, substantive and constructive discussions among states, local leaders and climate organizations can create paths to work together to address this existential crisis threatening humanity, create economic opportunity for our nations, and save our planet.”

Climate Defiance is confident the willingness of Biden Administration officials to engage with its members can be traced all the way to the Oval Office. “Congressman Ro Khanna said that the president is talking about us,” Greenberg said.

The group has been targeting Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell because it wants the central bank to crack down on the lenders financing fossil fuel projects. So far the Fed has insisted such moves would be “inappropriate.” Greenberg told The Guardian, “The banks are getting a free pass to torch the planet, and the Fed is doing nothing about it.” Powell, in his view, is “either asleep at the wheel or in bed with the fossil fuel CEOs.”

KlimaSeniorinnen

A group of older Swiss women — the youngest is 64 — have filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights claiming that warming global temperatures are having a disproportionate effect on them and other women their age. The latest scientific research indicates that older women in Switzerland died at the highest rates from heat in the summer 2022. The group says that 60% of the deaths would have been avoided in a world not affected by the higher temperatures brought on by the climate crisis. One member, Pia Hollenstein, says,

“Our generation has done so much to destroy the climate. We have a responsibility. It serves everyone if we can successfully make Switzerland do more.”

There is a reason why this group is bringing legal action. Legal scholars say that suits based on the notion that global heating is harming all people won’t succeed, but a suit filed by a small group of people who can show they have been adversely affected more than others in the general population might be successful — emphasis on “might.”

According to The Guardian, the women are suing the Swiss government in Europe’s top court for violating their human rights with policies that do too little to stop the planet from baking. Their case, which could send shock waves through courts across the continent, rests on two simple facts. Heatwaves are getting hotter as people burn fossil fuels. And women, particularly older ones, are more likely to die when temperatures soar.

Heat is far more dangerous than people realize. Doctors say during periods of hot weather, some victims drop dead when working or living outdoors. Many more die in retirement homes and hospitals because their bodies have been weakened from the weather and are unable to fight off diseases that harm the heart, lungs, and kidneys. Heat killed an extra 70,000 people across Europe last year, according to the latest analysis of mortality and temperature data, and the death toll this year, the hottest on record, may prove higher still.

“Based on current evidence from epidemiological studies, older women are particularly vulnerable to heat,” Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, who leads the climate and health team at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Berne, told the court. The reasons why are unclear, she said, but “changes in the cardiovascular system due to menopause or the fact that older women tend to be more active than men have been proposed as potential reasons.”

Charlotte Blattner, a researcher at the University of Berne who specializes in climate law, said experts were hopeful that the process would enshrine milestones that nudged governments into more stringent climate policy through human rights guarantees. Still, she said, “the chances that the KlimaSeniorinnen will win this case on all grounds is very unlikely.”

The “Don’t Blame Me” Merry Go Round

In a filing with the Court of Human Rights, the Swiss government said it was “perfectly legitimate” for members of the public to call on states to do more to combat global heating, but that the system around the European convention on human rights had not been intended to become the place where national policies to combat global heating were decided. “Defining and choosing the measures to be taken is indeed a matter for the government, parliament and people of Switzerland.”

In other words, it’s a problem but it is not your problem. Just go back to your hiking and your knitting and let us deal with these things. It’s the same runaround people all over the world get when they try to induce their governments to take effective action against a constantly warming planet. We all know what the problem is — carbon and methane emissions from extracting and burning fossil fuels.

But extracting and burning fossil fuels provides the energy the world needs to make air conditioners, cars, airplanes, elevators, and factories operate. Shutting down fossil fuel production would crash the global economy, and we can’t have that, now can we?

The problem is always someone else’s department. The courts can’t act because it’s not a legal question. Governments and legislatures can’t act because they have to answer to voters — or their corporate sponsors. Fossil fuels are a matter of national security, which implies anyone who doesn’t support their continued use is a traitor, a communist, or a terrorist who deserves to be locked up.

And so around and around and around we go while carbon dioxide and methane continue to make the Earth hotter and then hotter still. It may be that groups like Climate Defiance and KlimSenioriinnen are our last best hope of getting our governments to take the action they know they should but are too afraid to actually initiate. And yet members of both groups risk serious sanctions if they persist.

It’s a difficult choice — speak up and risk jail or keep quiet and be complicit in the destruction of the only home humans have ever known or ever will know. Which begs this question — what should any of us do? Give that some thought and let us know your answer in the Comments. Thank you.