01 November 21
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The climate crisis, the economy, Biden’s struggle to enact his spending agenda. The list goes on. The lesson? Be strong
The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience: how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back.
This is a hard lesson for high-achievers used to jumping over every hoop put in front of them. It’s also a hard lesson for people who haven’t had all the support and love they might have needed when growing up. In fact, it’s a hard lesson for almost everyone in a culture such as ours, that worships success and is embarrassed by failure and is inherently impatient.
Why am I telling you this now? Because we have gone through a few very difficult years: Donald Trump’s racist nationalism and his attacks on our democracy, a painful reckoning with systemic racism, angry political divisions, a deadly pandemic accompanied by a recession, and climate hazards such as floods and wildfires.
We assumed everything would be fine again once these were behind us. But we now find ourselves in a disorienting limbo. There is no clearly demarcated “behind us”. The pandemic still lurks. The economy is still worrisome. Americans continue to be deeply angry with each other. The climate crisis still poses an existential threat. Trump and other insurrectionists have not yet been brought to justice. Democracy is still threatened.
And Biden and the Democrats have been unable to achieve the scale of change many of us wanted and expected.
If you’re not at least a bit disappointed, you’re not human. To some, it feels like America is failing.
But bear with me. I’ve learned a few things in my half-century in and around politics, and my many years teaching young people. One is that things often look worse than they really are. The media (including social media) sells subscriptions and advertising with stories that generate anger and disappointment. The same goes for the views of pundits and commentators. Pessimists always appear wiser than optimists.
Another thing I’ve learned is that expectations for a new president and administration are always much higher than they can possibly deliver. Our political system was designed to make it difficult to get much done, at least in the short run. So the elation that comes with the election of someone we admire almost inevitably gives way to disappointment.
A third thing: in addition to normal political constraints, positive social change comes painfully slowly. It can take years, decades, sometimes a century or longer for a society to become more inclusive, more just, more democratic, more aware of its shortcomings and more determined to remedy them. And such positive changes are often punctuated by lurches backward. I believe in progress because I’ve seen so much of it in my lifetime, but I’m also aware of the regressive forces that constantly threaten it. The lesson here is tenacity – playing the long game.
Which brings me back to resilience. We have been through a difficult time. We wanted and expected it to be over: challenges overcome, perpetrators brought to justice, pandemic ended, nation healed, climate saved, politics transformed. But none of it is over. The larger goals we are fighting for continue to elude us.
Yet we must continue the fight. If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game. The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed.
January 6, 2021. (photo: Nate Gowdy/Rolling Stone)
The FBI and other key law enforcement agencies failed to act on a host of tips and other information ahead of 6 January that signaled a potentially violent event might unfold that day at the US Capitol, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The tip included details showing those planning violence believed they had orders from the president, used code words such as “pickaxe” to describe guns, and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session.
On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, as a target, the Post said.
Romney was later one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump on one charge of inciting an insurrection, leveled by the House of Representatives during a second impeachment of the former president.
An FBI official who assessed the tip noted that its criminal division received a “significant number” of alerts about threats to Congress and other government officials. The FBI passed the information to law enforcement agencies in Washington but did not pursue the matter, the Post said.
“The individual or group identified during the assessment does not warrant further FBI investigation at this time,” the internal report concluded, according to the Post.
That detail was among dozens included in the report, which the newspaper said was based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.
A special congressional committee is investigating events which exploded into violence after a rally Trump held near the White House to rail against the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Four people died on 6 January, one shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, one dying the next day. Four officers have since taken their own lives.
More than 600 people have been charged with taking part in the violence.
Kyle Rittenhouse pictured during a motion hearing at the Kenosha County Courthouse on Monday. (photo: Sean Krajacic/AP)
But is it that clear cut? The prosecution thinks it's so clearly not self-defense that it charged one of the three shootings as first-degree intentional homicide.
In Wisconsin, self-defense works like this: If a jury is convinced Rittenhouse reasonably feared he would be killed or seriously hurt by Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz, he would be found not guilty of most of the shootings.
Rittenhouse need only make "some showing" of self-defense before the burden shifts to prosecutors to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, Rittenhouse's belief only deadly force would save him was either dishonest or unreasonable.
Before deliberating, the jury would hear instructions about how the privilege of self-defense applies.
"The keys are whether the defendant actually believed (shooting the men) was necessary to save himself from imminent death or great bodily harm," said Michael O'Hear, professor of criminal law at Marquette Law School.
"And second, and probably the real battle at trial, was it reasonable to believe that?" O'Hear said. "It's a very open-ended determination and the jury is invited to use its own values, experience and common sense."
So-called perfect self-defense results in complete acquittal.
In the death of Huber, Rittenhouse is charged with first-degree intentional homicide, which raises the potential of imperfect self-defense, when a defendant proves an honest — but unreasonable — belief he had to resort to deadly force.
In such instances, the defense can mitigate the charge to second-degree intentional homicide, which does not carry the same mandatory sentence of life in prison.
What the law says about retreat in Wisconsin and how it will play out in the Rittenhouse trial
While Wisconsin law does not contain a specific duty to retreat from attack, the presence or absence of opportunity to retreat can factor into the analysis of whether deadly force was reasonable under the circumstances.
"The jury instruction kind of speaks out of both sides of its mouth on retreat," O'Hear said. "On the one hand, there's no duty, but the jury could find you don't qualify for self-defense because you didn't retreat. The law is a little messy on retreat in Wisconsin."
Rittenhouse's first victim, Joseph Rosenbaum, was unarmed when he began running at Rittenhouse, who chose to run in between some parked cars.
Rittenhouse's lawyers have advanced the theory Rosenbaum, who, because he was a felon and could not legally possess a gun, was trying to take Rittenhouse's rifle from him, and could have then killed Rittenhouse.
The general scenario plays out frequently in police shootings where officers say they feared a person was reaching for their or another officer's weapon. The argument is that by carrying a gun you're then entitled to use it against someone you think might take it and shoot you.
O'Hear said that approach often makes him uncomfortable in police shooting cases.
"They're almost always armed on duty," he said. "If you really push that argument, it's like carte blanche to use their weapons."
Rittenhouse had already fallen to the street when an unknown man ran up on him and unleashed a flying jump kick. Rittenhouse fired two shots that missed. For that, he's charged with first-degree recklessly endangering safety.
Prosecutors could argue Rittenhouse had the entire open area to retreat, but the defense would say he was surrounded by an angry crowd and could not escape the threats of violence.
Huber then hit Rittenhouse with a skateboard, and tried to take his rifle. Rittenhouse killed him with a single shot to the stomach. A defense expert said the skateboard could be considered a deadly weapon.
His family and other witnesses say Huber, believing Rittenhouse had already killed someone, was trying to disarm him. Rittenhouse is charged with first-degree intentional homicide in Huber's death.
Just as Rittenhouse shot Huber, Grosskreutz was walking up to Rittenhouse. He briefly stopped and raised his hands after Huber was shot, holding a handgun in his right hand. Rittenhouse, still seated on the pavement, looked up and shot Grosskreutz in the right bicep. Prosecutors charged attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
A defense expert testified at a pretrial hearing that Rittenhouse fired all four shots at Rosenbaum in less than a second, and that seven seconds elapsed between his shot at the attempted kicker, and when he shot Grosskreutz. The expert is expected to testify about that, and human reactions to sudden stimuli, but will not be allowed to offer an opinion or whether or not Rittenhouse's reactions were reasonable — the ultimate question the jury must decide.
Experts on the use of force typically appear on behalf of police officers accused of using excessive force of one kind or another. O'Hear sees some comparison with such cases, but with the difference that Rittenhouse, who lacks professional training about how and when to legally use a gun for protection, might have an easier time proving that, to him, it was a reasonable response.
"On the other hand," O'Hear said, "the fact that he's not a law enforcement officer, but trying in some ways to act like one — protecting property, order and safety, as an untrained but armed civilian, doesn't necessarily put him in a sympathetic light."
Provocation is 'complicated part of the law' that could play into self-defense
There's yet another potential wrinkle to Rittenhouse invoking the privilege of self-defense. As the Wisconsin jury instruction reads: "A person who engages in unlawful conduct of a type likely to provoke others to attack, and who does provoke an attack, is not allowed to use or threaten force in self-defense against that attack."
Except if the provocateur thinks he's in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm — and then slightly different rules apply.
O'Hear called provocation "an interesting and complicated part of the law," of self-defense.
Though his lawyers dispute it, for now, it was unlawful for Rittenhouse, at 17, to be carrying around an assault-style rifle. Could that alone, given the context, provoked Rosenbaum to chase him?
Once he shot Rosenbaum, which appeared to observers at the time to be a crime, did that provoke Huber and Grosskreutz to attack Rittenhouse, either in anger or to try to stop further violence?
"I think there's something to that," O'Hear said, "and I've been wondering if the state might raise that."
But he said while Rittenhouse's behavior was likely inappropriate, or threatening to some, it might be difficult to argue that it would provoke an attack against him, given he was armed with a rifle.
If Rittenhouse's actions are seen as a provocation, he can still assert lawful use of deadly force if he reasonably believed his own death or great harm was imminent, and he believed he had "exhausted every other reasonable means to escape from or otherwise avoid" those possible consequences.
Nicholas Bowser, outside of his home in Oklahoma City, Okla. on Wednesday, July 14, 2021. (photo: Nick Oxford/NYT)
“You pulled me over for that? Come on, man,” said Brown, a security guard headed home from work at 1:30 a.m. Expressing his annoyance was all it took. The officer yelled at Brown, ordered him out of the car and threw him to the pavement.
After a trip to jail that night in 2018, hands cuffed and blood running down his face, Brown eventually arrived at the crux of the matter: Valley Brook wanted $800 in fines and fees. It was a fraction of the roughly $1 million that the town of about 870 people collects each year from traffic cases.
A hidden scaffolding of financial incentives underpins the policing of motorists in the United States, encouraging some communities to essentially repurpose armed officers as revenue agents searching for infractions largely unrelated to public safety. As a result, driving is one of the most common daily routines during which people have been shot, shocked with a stun gun, beaten or arrested after minor offenses.
Some of those encounters — like those with Sandra Bland, Walter Scott and Philando Castile — are now notorious and contributed to a national upheaval over race and policing. The New York Times has identified more than 400 others from the past five years in which officers killed unarmed civilians who had not been under pursuit for violent crimes.
Fueling the culture of traffic stops is the federal government, which issues more than $600 million a year in highway safety grants that subsidize ticket writing. Although federal officials say they do not impose quotas, at least 20 states have evaluated police performance on the number of traffic stops per hour, which critics say contributes to overpolicing and erosion of public trust, particularly among members of certain racial groups.
Many municipalities across the country rely heavily on ticket revenue and court fees to pay for government services, and some maintain outsize police departments to help generate that money, according to a review of hundreds of municipal audit reports, town budgets, court files and state highway records.
This is, for the most part, not a big-city phenomenon. While Chicago stands out as a large city with a history of collecting millions from motorists, the towns that depend most on such revenue have fewer than 30,000 people. More than 730 municipalities rely on fines and fees for at least 10% of their revenue, enough to pay for an entire police force in some small communities, an analysis of census data shows.
To show how a dependence on ticket revenue can shape traffic enforcement, the Times examined the practices of three states — Ohio, Oklahoma and Virginia — where police traffic stops have set off controversy. What emerges is a tangle of conflicts and contradictions that are often unacknowledged or explained away.
The Money Machine
Newburgh Heights, a frayed industrial village of about a half-square-mile with 2,000 residents just south of Cleveland, doggedly monitors traffic on the short stretch of Interstate 77 that passes through.
Its 21 police officers cruise around looking for vehicles to pull over, and aim speed cameras from the Harvard Avenue overpass or from a folding chair beside the highway.
All told, revenue from traffic citations, which typically accounts for more than half the town’s budget, totaled $3 million in 2019. Some of that money is processed through the Newburgh Heights Mayor’s Court, one of 286 anachronistic judicial offices that survive, mostly in small towns, across Ohio.
A 2019 report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio found that 1 in 6 traffic tickets in the state were issued in towns with mayor’s courts, which the ACLU called a “shadowy and unaccountable quasi-judicial system that wrings revenue from drivers.”
The fixation on revenue has made mayor’s courts an enduring source of controversy. Years of complaints about tiny Linndale, population 160, raking in as much as $1 million annually from speed traps led to a ban on mayor’s courts in towns of under 200 residents.
Trevor Elkins, the mayor of Newburgh Heights, said his town’s increasing use of cameras has reduced the need for traffic stops, though the latter remain disproportionately high, according to state data.
Publicly, mayors insist their courts are not used to generate money, yet privately that is often the focus of their concerns. The mayor’s court in Bratenahl, a wealthy suburb on Lake Erie, typically has more than twice as many traffic cases each year as there are residents in town, according to state records.
Bratenahl, with a population of 1,300 that is 83% white, uses its roughly 18 officers to patrol a strip of Interstate 90 that skirts the town's border with Cleveland, where half the residents are Black. As a result, many days, the crowd in Bratenahl mayor’s court is mostly Black.
Mayor John Licastro said officers were simply following the law.
“We don’t choose who drives the Shoreway,” he said.
Elkins offered a similar defense of Newburgh Heights, where Black residents account for about 22% of the population yet often make up a majority at his mayor’s court. A Times analysis of more than 4,000 traffic citations there found that 76% of license and insurance violations, and 63% of speeding cases involved Black motorists.
Public Safety and Profiteering
On April 19, 1995, Oklahoma State Trooper Charles J. Hanger made one of the most famous of roadway stops.
Heading north on I-35, Hanger spotted a 1977 Mercury Grand Marquis with no license plate. Its driver was Timothy McVeigh who, about 90 minutes earlier, had detonated a truck full of explosives outside the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people in what then was the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil.
The McVeigh case holds mythic status among police officers, for whom it is a go-to rejoinder to concerns that many traffic stops are pretexts for raising revenue or searching, without cause, for evidence of other crimes. But researchers and some former police chiefs say that for every occasional lucky break, hundreds of innocent motorists are subjected to needless scrutiny, expense and potential danger.
In the 2019 fiscal year, Valley Brook, Oklahoma, collected more than $100,000 from tickets for “defective equipment” like Brown’s burned-out tag light, with citations issued, on average, nearly every day.
A majority of stops in this town of less than a half-square-mile occur along a four-lane road. Valley Brook collects 72% of its revenues from fines, the highest in the state.
Chief Michael A. Stamp defended the police department’s practices. Because their jurisdiction covers only one block along the main roadway, he said, officers look for broken taillights or “wide turns” to catch more serious infractions.
“I put officers out on the street every single night for the sole purpose of drug and alcohol enforcement, because it’s such a big problem that we have here,” Stamp said. He conceded the town’s dependence on traffic tickets, but added, “I will stand by the fact that what we are doing out here also saves lives.”
By some measures, Nicholas Bowser, 38, is exactly the kind of driver the chief says he wants to take off the road. Rather than pulling over around midnight July 2, he led officers on a chase from Valley Brook to his home about a mile away. Upon his surrender, the police found a handgun at his feet and discovered his blood alcohol content exceeded the legal limit.
That might have been enough to keep Bowser from driving for a while, or have a court-ordered breathalyzer installed in his truck. But the next day, he retrieved his truck from the impound. All he had to do was pay $2,185.11 in estimated fines and fees to Valley Brook.
Local police had charged him with “negligent driving” and “public intoxication” — lesser crimes than driving drunk, which must be transferred to district court. Some lawyers say that a 2016 law designed to prevent repeat offenders’ drunken-driving records from staying hidden in local court systems has incentivized towns to downgrade offenses, keeping the ticket — and the revenue.
In an interview, Bowser said, “I should have gotten a DUI.” This summer, after he requested a jury trial, Valley Brook dropped the charges against him and refunded about $2,000.
After details emerged of the case involving Brown, those charges too were dismissed, the officer was disciplined and Stamp called to apologize. Still, Brown sued the town, which he asserts has turned traffic enforcement into a ruthless profit-making enterprise.
“They are lawless,” he said.
A Culture of Quotas
When Windsor, Virginia, police threatened and pepper-sprayed a Black and Latino Army lieutenant, Caron Nazario, last December over a license plate infraction, the mistreatment by police made national headlines in April. Officials fired one of the officers involved and called the case an aberration. But in many ways, the traffic stop was routine.
Windsor is one of nearly 100 Virginia communities to receive federal grants encouraging tickets. The annual grants, awarded by state authorities, ranged last year from $900 to the village of Exmore for nabbing seat belt scofflaws to $1 million to Fairfax County for drunken-driving enforcement. Windsor got $15,750 to target speeders.
There is little doubt that these grants affect the economics, and frequency, of traffic stops.
Jessica Cowardin, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, said the number of citations “is just one of many things we look at to evaluate how effective a grant is.” She added, “We do not require nor encourage grant-funded police departments to issue a prescribed number of traffic citations.”
But a review of state grant applications found that the number of traffic stops is a common performance measure.
For all the billions spent to promote ticket-writing by police, there is little evidence that it has helped achieve the grants’ primary goal: reducing fatal car crashes.
In 2019, there were 33,244 fatal crashes nationwide, up from 30,296 in 2010. Traffic safety experts say targeted enforcement works, but improvements in automobile technology and highway engineering account for much of the progress since the 1970s and ’80s, when annual fatal crashes routinely exceeded 40,000.
In the wake of the George Floyd protests, some municipalities and states are rethinking their approach to traffic stops. Berkeley, California, has proposed shifting away from police enforcement, in favor of an unarmed civilian corps. Virginia lawmakers prohibited stops initiated because of defective taillights, tinted windows and loud exhaust.
Fallout from the Nazario case moved Windsor to pursue ways to slow traffic “while reducing police and citizen contacts,” including electronic signs and rumble strips. The Windsor police also ended grant-funded patrols, saying it was “in the best interest of our agency and our community.”
When the town council presented a new budget for the upcoming fiscal year, it projected revenue increases from all major sources except one: traffic fines.
It is expected that the climate summit will be accompanied by massive protests. (photo: Andrew Milligan/dpa)
And now, just a few days before the beginning of the World Climate Conference in Glasgow, British Prime Minister Boris Johnston is clearing the way for the oil in the Cambo field to be extracted.
The timing could hardly be worse. The British government hopes to be a successful host of the 26th UN climate summit, at which 30,000 participants from around the world will search for ways to decrease global greenhouse emissions as rapidly as possible. And phasing out oil, coal and natural gas is certain to be a key part of any solution.
Indeed, Johnson and his diplomats have been announcing one big climate-protection scheme after another in recent months: They submitted ambitious climate goals to the UN, suggested a coalition for phasing out the combustion engine and positioned themselves to end subsidies for oil and gas.
But the Johnson-Cambo dilemma shows the contradictory nature of climate conferences. For the host country, they are above all else an opportunity to shine on the world stage Рideally as brightly as France did in 2015. In Paris, the world community signed the first truly global climate agreement. After years of unsuccessful climate summits, the French government, under the leadership of then-President Fran̤ois Hollande, achieved a breakthrough: Fully 195 countries signed a deal to reduce greenhouse gases and thus limit global warming to significantly below 2 degrees Celsius Рideally to just 1.5 degrees Рrelative to pre-industrial times. Hollande went down in history as the president of the Paris Agreement.
It is expected that the climate summit will be accompanied by massive protests.
Foto: Andrew Milligan / dpa
Boris Johnson has similar plans in Glasgow – oilfield or not. And, indeed, the 26th Climate Conference offers at least the potential for a showdown: Climate activists see Glasgow as the last chance to make the changes necessary to slow global warming. For the International Energy Agency, a UN organization, the conference is a test for whether countries are prepared to truly act and present ambitious goals. Endangered island nations, meanwhile, are warning that the 1.5-degree goal will not be achievable if the world doesn’t get its act together in Scotland.
To achieve a breakthrough, Johnson needs to overcome several obstacles as negotiator:
- Industrialized countries have pledged to make at least $100 billion per year available to poorer countries to help them adapt to the climate crisis and transition to clean energy. But according to the OECD, the countries fell around $20 billion short of that goal in 2019. If industrialized countries don’t live up to their obligations, others could lose their trust in the Paris process.
- Economic damage caused by severe weather phenomena like hurricanes or droughts is overwhelming many African and Asian countries. They are calling for the wealthiest countries to pay for these losses, since they are historically responsible for climate change. Wealthy countries, though, don’t want to be made legally liable. Because climate change is likely to become far more expensive in the future, an initial compromise will have to be presented in Glasgow – and the primary question it must address is where the money should come from.
- The Paris Agreement’s controversial Article Six is meant to enable international compensation for CO2 and other greenhouse gases. It would allow countries to buy CO2 credits from one another, generated, for example, through wind farms or the reforestation of woodlands. But even at the last UN Climate Conference in Madrid in 2019, countries were unable to agree on binding rules. The hope is that a solution will be found in Glasgow.
- Participating countries also need to agree on rules for evaluating progress in fighting climate change and in addition to standards that can be used to appraise the climate goals set by individual countries.
At the same time, Boris Johnson and his team would need to motivate countries to set higher targets – at least on the long term. After all, none of the largest countries have made appreciable improvements to their climate plans.Dabei schließt sich das Fenster für die Begrenzung auf 1,5-Grad-Erwärmung schneller als gedacht.
The sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was published in August, shows that the window for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is closing faster than expected. It’s very likely that the 1.5-degree limit will already be passed in the early 2030s, according to the IPCC report. This means we only have about 10 years left. And the report makes it clear that beyond that limit, extreme weather such as droughts and heavy rainfall will become more frequent.
But the starting point ahead of this summit is grim. COVID has made the negotiations more difficult, and the last UN climate summit in Madrid two years ago was a disaster. According to one observer, "we could have done without it.” In late 2020, several countries – including the European Union and, a few weeks later, the U.S – announced plans to curb emissions further. But things have gone quiet since then.
The reason for the dark mood can be found in the numbers: For the world to limit warming to no more than 1.5 degrees, global greenhouse-gas emissions would need to be cut by 30 billion tons per year by 2030. According to the UN Environment Program, countries currently emit over 50 billion tons per year.
“It is now very late for reaching the 1.5-degree goal, and it will definitely be missed if everyone doesn’t switch to emergency mode.”
Niklas Höhne, New Climate Institute
According to a current UN report, however, the climate plans that have thus far been submitted to the UN only amount to global reductions of 5 billion tons. The gap is gigantic. Even limiting warming to 2 degrees, which would have incalculable consequences for the global climate, greenhouse gas emissions would have to be cut by 11 billion tons by 2030, more than twice the 5 billion tons in reductions already announced.
"We can only hope that the G-20 countries will boost their pledges,” says Jennifer Tollmann of E3G, a European think tank. "It is likely that India and China will pledge more, but that still won’t close the gap to the 1.5-degree goal.” To do so, China alone would need to cut emissions by at least 3.5 billion tons, she says. To save the summit, she says, vanguards like the EU would need to try to create new "momentum” – by motivating laggards to improve their emissions reduction goals by 2023 at the latest. "Either way, we can’t wait until the next Paris cycle in 2025. By then it will be far too late to redirect investments in fossil fuel projects so that we can achieve a halving of emissions in this decade,” says Tollmann.
Climate activists began protesting in Glasgow well ahead of the start of the summit.
German climate expert Niklas Höhne is also frustrated. He oversees the Climate Action Tracker platform, which regularly ranks the climate plans submitted by countries around the world. "We have here a giant gap between aspiration and reality,” Höhne says. Many countries have pledged only minimal improvements, and some have even lowered their targets. Seventy of 200 countries have not submitted any updates at all yet. The consequence: "It is now very late for reaching the 1.5-degree goal, and it will definitely be missed if everyone doesn’t switch to emergency mode.”
But the world’s capitals aren’t currently radiating ambition. According to the International Monetary Fund, about $6 trillion in state funds flowed into subsidies for fossil-fuel energy production in 2020 alone. It was oil, rather than coal, that got most of the money from the governments.
Severe flooding in Germany this summer clearly demonstrated the dangers associated with our warming planet.
Foto: RHEIN-ERFT-KREIS / EPA
In 2018 and 2019, China, Japan and South Korea pumped the most money into climate-damaging projects. Only 2 percent of the money G-20 states injected into their economies to combat the COVID downturn was invested in renewable energy or climate-protection projects.
This political approach will not prove sufficient to combat the climate crisis. After the COVID dip in 2020, the International Energy Agency is expecting the second-largest rise in human-caused CO2 emissions in history. With the current plans for reducing emissions, the organization’s new annual report finds, the world would only decrease its output by 40 percent by 2050. Many countries have pledged to become emissions neutral by the middle of the century – meaning they will emit zero net emissions into the atmosphere. But in a recent report, the IEA noted that many of those countries have failed to present "near-term policies and measures” to reach that target.
Many diplomats are pessimistic and have already begun looking to the climate conference in 2025. All countries are required to have submitted more ambitious goals by then. That, though, means four more years of waiting – and four more years of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions. For countries already affected by climate change, especially small island nations, such an outcome would be unthinkable. For them, climate change has already become existential.
A Last Chance for Merkel's Climate Legacy
Whether there will be movement or even a new start depends currently on the three big players at the climate summit: the U.S., the EU and China. Chinese climate activist Li Shuo of Greenpeace currently describes the situation as follows: "The truth is that in the 'climate tricycle,’ Europe was always the strong front wheel – but both of the two rear wheels are flat – what’s worse, they are constantly getting in each other’s way.” He argues that climate diplomats don’t have a solution for how this constellation can move forward.
Both "flat tires” – China and the U.S. – have a mountain of problems in advance of Glasgow: U.S. President Joe Biden is struggling to get a majority for his trillion-dollar infrastructure package, which is also linked to his climate promises. Meanwhile, China is struggling with power outages and high energy prices – and the country is eager to maintain its unhindered growth. At least until 2030, at which point it could reach the apex of its emissions.
It is an historic stalemate: If the U.S. doesn’t move, neither will China. Despite the big announcements, Chinese President Xi Jinping does not trust Biden. But experts agree that without China, many emerging and developing countries won’t do anything either.
The only hope in this muddled situation is a chancellor on the verge of retirement: Angela Merkel. She has been in office long enough and has the respect of China and the U.S. and she discussed climate protection in a video meeting with Xi Jinping in October. Glasgow is Merkel’s last chance to go down in the history books as the "climate chancellor.”
Sunday's rally was one of the biggest in recent months. (photo: Andrew Nachemson/Al Jazeera)
Thai protesters demand changes, including the repeal of a draconian law that criminalises any criticism of the king.
With thousands in attendance, Sunday’s rally was one of the biggest protests in recent months, despite being temporarily disrupted by rain.
Small-scale demonstrations have been a constant fixture, particularly in Bangkok’s Din Daeng neighbourhood, some of which have led to clashes with police.
It was at one of these protests that a teenage boy was shot in the head in August, leaving him in a coma for two months before he eventually died last week.
One of the main themes of Sunday’s demonstration was to call for the repeal of Section 112, a draconian piece of legislation that criminalises criticism of the king.
While it was once taboo to call for reforms to the monarchy, young protesters are becoming increasingly bold in their demands.
At the protest, a man in a Squid Game costume stalked the street holding a sign that read: “Abolish 112. Abolish fear. Abolish indifference. Abolish hopelessness.”
Amnesty International, a global rights watchdog, was on the ground collecting signatures for a petition, demanding the release of prominent activists who have been arrested and charged under the law.
A trio of female drummers pounded a war beat with stickers on their instruments showing “112” in a circle with a line through it.
The group first began playing at protests about one year ago, with no prior experience.
“At first we were drumming just buckets but it was a waste because we kept destroying them,” said one member, a 20-year-old, who added that somebody generously donated the drums they use today.
When asked why she decided to become involved in political activism, she laughed and gave a one-word answer: “Anger.”
“We have to do something against what the government has done to the Thai people,” said one of her companions. “We can have a bright future.”
This was a common sentiment on display at the protest among young people, who made up the bulk of the participants.
“We can’t see our future if we stay under the regime of dictatorship and monarchy,” said another 20-year-old protester, who identified herself as Jib.
“We want to have a voice, we want the government to work for us, not the king … We want humans to be equal.”
One of her friends, a 19-year-old, said protesters have been reinvigorated by the government’s recent decision to reopen the country to tourists.
As of November 1, visitors from more than 60 countries can enter Thailand without quarantining, if they are fully vaccinated.
“We want the tourists to see what’s happening in Thailand. Thailand is never the land of smiles, it’s just the land of lies,” he said, referring to a common tourism slogan.
Uniting protest groups
Before the demonstration, a protest coordinator for a group called the People’s Revolutionary Alliance (PRA) told Al Jazeera activists are making increasing efforts to bring various protest groups together, including those from Din Daeng.
Identifying himself by the nom de guerre “Stray Cat”, he said the protest this weekend was meant to call for the repeal of the lese-majeste law, demand more equitable vaccine distribution, and try to unite different protest groups.
He said organising demonstrations has been challenging, both because different protest groups have different objectives and tactics, and because of legal pressure.
“The PRA has decided to form a group of people who want to rise up to determine their own lives. This is a self-determination process, but it is difficult at first and appears to be unsuccessful,” he said, attributing the slow progress to lack of familiarity in the wider public with “network collaboration”.
“Each group has its own mark and objectives,” he said.
Stray Cat also said some people who agree with the protesters’ objectives may be afraid to turn out because of increasingly harsh rhetoric and legal threats from the government.
This includes declaring protesters “terrorists” and threatening to charge them under Section 113 for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government – a government Stray Cat calls a “monarchist dictatorship”.
But this did not seem to be too much of a problem on Sunday, as many protesters turned out from different activist groups and generations.
The older generation was also strongly represented, many wearing tell-tale red shirts, originally a sign of allegiance to overthrown Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was removed from power in a military coup in 2006.
Prominent Red Shirt activist Anurak Janetawanich, 53, told Al Jazeera he is encouraged by the growing signs of cooperation between student protesters and older activists.
“This year we see the students and the Red Shirts can get closer and fight together … The power of democracy will grow bigger and bigger.”
‘No sign of change’
He said he supports the young people’s calls for monarchy reform, saying it is the best way to bring democracy to Thailand.
“As long as the monarchy does not change, the problem will happen again and again and again. My children, my grandchildren will face the same thing,” he said.
“At the moment, there is no sign of change. But I support the right to fight. Maybe tomorrow there will be change, maybe next year we will be successful, but we need to fight.”
Stray Cat took a similarly long-term view of the situation, using Myanmar as an inspiration.
He pointed to the failed uprising against the military there in 1988, and the far more successful resistance that has emerged since the Myanmar military’s latest coup in February.
“This may be the first year of the uprising [in Thailand]. But definitely not the last year. And it will go to the breaking point between the state and its citizens,” he said.
First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. (photo: United Church of Christ/Grist)
Thirty years later, organizers reflect on the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.
There was excitement, remembers sociologist Robert Bullard, an environmental justice advocate who served on the summit’s planning committee, but also anxiety. Conversations got heated. “We had to unpack, and throw off that baggage of mistrust that’s kept African Americans from knowing that much about Latinos, Latinos from Asian and Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people,” said Bullard. “Those first few days were very intense.”
“That was the moment that we came together — not knowing much about each other — but we learned during those first few days,” he added.
Thirty years later, the 17 principles of environmental justice laid out during the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit are as relevant as ever. The intersection between race and environmental injustices has been recognized by the federal and state governments, and a growing number of people understand certain groups are more vulnerable to the devastating effects of environmental degradation and climate change due to historical injustices. On the 30th anniversary of the summit, we talked to four of its key figures to understand the legacies of the watershed moment, and what challenges still lie ahead for environmental justice.
Q. How did this event change the environmental movement in the United States?
A. Robert Bullard: The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was groundbreaking in that people of color basically decided we wouldn’t wait for white environmental groups to ride in on a white horse and save us. Our communities were being poisoned, but many of the environmental groups did not see our issues as part of their agenda. So we pushed back. A couple of them showed up at our summit, and we said that people of color will no longer take a backseat when it comes to advancing our policies. When we see environmental racism, we will call it what it is, and we will fight to dismantle structural and systemic racism in this country. That was 1991. It has taken almost 30 years for that lens to become the dominant lens. For me that was a power shift. Our EJ lens was a footnote. Today, it’s the headline.
Donna Chavis: The event’s legacy is not just symbolic, it is concrete. The executive order they used for the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, which came out of the Clinton administration, grew out of the summit and the organizing work that happened post-summit. If you look at the structure of the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] now, and trace back to when its focus began to include environmental justice, it was post-1991 summit.
Q. How has the EJ movement changed and evolved since the summit?
A. Charles Lee: The call to action from the summit was to go back to our communities and to organize, and all the people that showed up took that to heart. Particularly the people from community organizations. They went back to all parts of the country and organized over several decades to build power at home, to really deepen the roots in terms of those struggles. In that process, it began to really impact local dynamics, and then regional, and now national over this period of time.
Gail Small: There was steady progress for the environmental justice movement going back 30 years, using administrative and legal methods to get our voices heard. All of that was wiped out when Trump came into office. He eroded all of the administrative protocols for what we called the Administrative Procedure Act — how agencies operate and how they’re required to participate in a public notice to those affected. That in and of itself was a wake up call to the environmental justice movement that the progress we’ve made is fleeting. The momentum is still there. That’s important to say. But a lot depends on who gets into political office, who has the power to unilaterally throw out decades of precedent and decades of rulemaking.
Q. How are today’s challenges different or similar from the ones you had in 1991?
A. Robert Bullard: The underlying condition that creates environmental health, housing, energy, climate, and food and water insecurity challenges in communities of color, disproportionately, is racism. Systemic racism is still a major challenge, a barrier that we have yet to dismantle. And it was the same challenge in 1991. Our communities are still getting poisoned, and our institutions and organizations are still not getting the funding they need. The fact that racism is so ingrained in American DNA, that means that when we come up with solutions, they need to include a whole-system approach.
Donna Chavis: They’re not different challenges, I just think they’ve been magnified. For me, you can’t have anti-racism without anti-environmental racism. You can’t have racial justice without environmental justice. And yet, so often, I find in the environmental justice arena, fear and timidity, sometimes, of being too vocal, because you don’t want to seem like you’re trying to overshadow other issues. We’re all in the same boat when it comes to dealing with unjust systems.
Q. What gives you hope after 30 years of working on EJ issues?
A. Robert Bullard: In 1991, when we say we are fighting environmental racism, they would run from us, it was almost like we were carrying a match and gasoline. But today, there are some folks and organizations, institutions or politicians standing with us trying to really cut out this cancer that’s holding back our nation.
Charles Lee: Environmental justice issues were originally not heard at all, even at the time of the summit. It wasn’t until events like Hurricane Katrina that raised this issue in the mainstream American consciousness. And then certainly Flint, Michigan, made environmental injustice real to people. Now, it’s totally different — it’s expanding in terms of getting attention in the federal and state government. That creates all kinds of new opportunities to leverage resources. The idea that 40 percent of the benefits over a set of federal programs should go to disadvantaged, overburdened, or environmental justice communities — that’s a huge sea change in terms of how we do our work.
We have the opportunity to really make environmental justice part of the regulatory process. In the past we have not been able to fully analyze disproportionate impacts, particularly cumulative impacts. That’s a challenge that has been there, but I think it’s the first time people are directly looking at it.
Gail Small: The environmental justice movement, the tribal sovereignty movement, that momentum continues. And it continues with us mentoring and teaching younger generations our knowledge and our experiences. What gives me a lot of hope is that younger people are very open minded. They’re very aware of the environmental movement. They’re very aware of the climate crisis, and they don’t see it as something that is separate from their daily lives.
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