Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The Single Most Important Thing President Biden Can Do for the Climate Is Enforce an Immediate Cease-Fire in Gaza https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/climate-gaza-ceasefire-earth-day/Jeff Jones,Eleanor SteinMar 25, 2024

War and warming: US support for Israel’s war in Gaza is deepening the climate crisis—and making it impossible to solve.

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Activism / March 25, 2024

The Single Most Important Thing President Biden Can Do for the Climate Is Enforce an Immediate Cease-Fire in Gaza

War and warming: US support for Israel’s war in Gaza is deepening the climate crisis—and making it impossible to solve.

Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein
Smoke rises over the Gaza Strip from Israeli bombardment, as seen from southern Israel. (Amir Levy / Getty Images)

The first Earth Day blossomed in Central Park nearly 54 years ago—on April 22, 1970. At the time, it seemed to those of us in the anti-war movement like a diversion from the most urgent tasks of the day: ending the Vietnam war and fighting racism. We were further alienated by President Richard Nixon’s embrace of an environmental legislative agenda coinciding with, and distracting from, his expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia.

Only decades later, when we joined the environmental movement, did we recognize the deep connection between war and warming, racism and environmental injustice. Today, Earth Day is an opportunity for advocacy. And now must be the climate change moment, with 2023 global temperatures rising to record levels and exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase above preindustrial levels long identified as the catastrophic tipping point by the world’s scientists and nations. Addressing the gathering climate crisis should be a priority that unites people, movements, and governments. Instead, war, genocide, and settler-colonial occupation have intervened and are pushing countries further apart, with the present specter of a widening Mideast war.

And that is why it is clear to us that the single most important thing President Biden could do to for the climate today is to enforce an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza and end the war against the Palestinian people.

The Israeli campaign against Gaza, with US political complicity and military support, and both governments’ contravention of the order by the International Court of Justice to prevent the killing, stop the destruction of the means of life and the interference with humanitarian aid, has ripped the fragile fabric of international cooperation.

Yet that is exactly the fabric on which any hope for mitigating the climate catastrophe rests.

The fossil fuel industry has taken full advantage of the current global disarray: Oil and gas majors, reaping windfall profits from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are already shifting away from even their modest investments in renewable energy, and banks are reneging on their fossil fuel disinvestment pledges. The influential Global Turning Points report released by 200 scientists at COP28—the November 2023 Dubai climate summit last November—warns that rapid changes to nature are reaching the long-feared scale to overwhelm entire societies. The study calls on UN Secretary General António Guterres to convene a global summit on the governance agenda for managing Earth-system risks and maximizing global coordination to speed up mitigation and resilience.

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Yet right now there is no possibility of such a convocation. Instead, the United States has become a rogue state, in violation of the International Court of Justice order. Its active complicity with Israel’s war in Gaza places the US among a diminishing group of European nations and in opposition to the sentiment of millions of its own citizens, as well as countless more around the world.

The United States, one of the world’s biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and Europe, a consistent force for emission reduction, both played important roles in global climate negotiations. But meaningful joint global action on the climate emergency is out of the question now—at the very moment when it is the only thing that holds out the hope of real solutions. The world’s largest emitters are now staring at one another across battle lines.

Strengthening the ties between the anti-war/anti-imperialist/peace and environmental/climate/justice movements has long been a priority for both of us. We call this effort “war and warming.” The globe’s two most immediate crises—climate change and genocide—are dimensions of the same system with different facets: Call it racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, environmental racism, or extractivism. Let’s examine this intersection.

According to a report from Brown University’s Watson Institute, the US Department of Defense is “the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases.” In other words, military emissions significantly drive the total of US emissions. And this is a peacetime analysis.

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The Guardian reports that planet-warming emissions over the first two months of the war exceeded the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. According to an analysis by researchers in the UK and the US, 99 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted in the first 60 days after the October 7 Hamas attack is attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, while almost half the war’s total CO2 bootprint is from US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.

“From the river to the sea” might be the touchstone slogan on both sides of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, but the Jordan River is currently reported as running at just 10 percent of its historic average flow, while the rise of the Mediterranean Sea is predicted to be impactful by the end of the century—if not long before. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that temperatures in the Mediterranean region are rising extraordinarily fast: about 20 percent faster than the global average. And climate change itself has long been recognized as a conflict multiplier.

These realities should influence our response to the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, as well as the US role in widening the regional war. War is simultaneously deepening the climate crisis—and making it impossible to solve. The linkage is clear. It is imperative for us to reflect this in our organizing, our advocacy, in the streets and classrooms, and in our thinking in ways we have not yet done. As we near Earth Day 2024, let’s make an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza a point of global unity.



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Our Friend Kathy Boudin: A Great Life and a Great Losshttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/kathy-boudin-memoriam/Jeff Jones,Eleanor Stein,Jeff Jones,Eleanor SteinMay 3, 2022

For most of her 78 years, Kathy Boudin, who died on May 1, was a frontline activist and creative political thinker. Confronting white racism and supporting the Black freedom struggle defined her life, with some serious consequences along the way. Coverage of her passing has been defined by her presence in, and survival of, the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in March 1970 and her support role in the October 1981 Brinks robbery. Three Weather Underground comrades died in the former, and a Brinks guard and two Nyack, N.Y., police officers were killed in the latter. Kathy regretted both—and served 22 years in New York State prison for her support role in the robbery.

For those of us who shared so much of her life experience, as well as the many activists—young and old—who admired her and the close family who cherished her presence, Kathy’s passing is the loss of a friend, uncompromising radical, parent, and guide on the path to responsibility and redemption. The two of us will always remember her startlingly beautiful blue eyes, swirling scarves, and iconic turquoise Thunderbird ring acquired on the Navajo Reservation during a cross-country drive we made together in 1971.

A high point of her last few months was the release from prison last November of her life partner, and former husband, David Gilbert. David served 40 years in prison for the Brinks robbery. He was granted clemency by former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the final hours of his administration and was paroled several weeks later. David went from a prison cell to becoming Kathy’s constant companion and caregiver in her final months. David, and their son, Chesa Boudin, were with Kathy when she died.

Chesa is the San Francisco district attorney, a national criminal justice reform leader who is using his experience growing up with parents in prison as a guide to systemic changes in a flawed criminal justice system. Chesa and his wife, Valerie Block, are the parents of Aiden Block Boudin. Kathy was able to meet Aiden, who brought her joy and wonder in her final days.

In prison, Kathy became a leader in the fight against AIDS, and a pioneer in developing parent and child relationship opportunities for women in prison. Among her many post-prison accomplishments is her role in the creation of the Center for Justice at Columbia University. She dedicated her years of freedom to supporting others leaving the carceral system and helping develop programs to aid jailed parents in understanding and addressing the damage to children and families wrought by mass incarceration. She was a driving force behind Beyond the Bars, an annual conference that brought hundreds of activists together to hear from prison reform and abolition leaders like her life-long friend and fellow Little Red Schoolhouse graduate Angela Davis.

“More than just an academic conference, Beyond the Bars is led by formerly incarcerated people and has built a global community at the forefront of justice reform,” said Cheryl Wilkins, cofounder of the Center for Justice. “Kathy was instrumental in developing Release Aging People from Prison (RAPP), uplifting the voices of women through work with the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and so much more.”

After his parents’ arrest, Chesa was integrated into the family of Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and his new brothers Zayd and Malik Dohrn. Throughout her life, her years of separation from Chesa led Kathy to pursue and keep close friendships with the children of her many friends—and their own children too. An avid reader and inspired storyteller, poet, and gift-giver, she was a beloved adopted aunt and grandmother to dozens of young people.

Also not known as widely was her passion for the natural world. An inherited joy from her parents, civil liberties attorney Leonard and poet Jean Boudin, were many Cape Cod sunrises and sunsets. After 22 years in prison, she could not wait to be outdoors again. She and close friend Nancy Gear could be found every summer canoe camping on remote islands deep in the Adirondack wilderness or along the shores of Lake Champlain. She rode her bike or walked often in Central Park, and many of us will always remember Zoom calls with Kathy sitting on the grass under a tree.

Donations in memory of Kathy Boudin should be made to: Columbia’s Center for Justice, or Release Aging People in Prison, or The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.



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