Climate Justice Alliance Calls on the White House and Congress To Follow the Lead of Frontline Communities by Keeping Fossil Fuels in the Ground, Making the Necessary Investments to Combat the Climate Crisis, and Rejecting False Solutions
August 9, 2021 – Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released its most comprehensive assessment on the state of the climate crisis since 2013. In the report, the IPCC states that the impacts of climate change are already severe and widespread, and that those impacts will get worse if global heating exceeds 2° degree.
The new IPCC report is yet another wake-up call in a long list of dire warnings that current efforts to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis are falling short. Climate Justice Alliance member groups, who are leading the charge for a Just Transition away from extractive energy models to renewable and regenerative ones that leave no one behind, are calling on policymakers to meet the urgency of the moment:
“The latest IPCC report confirms what communities on the frontlines of fighting big polluters already know. We need bold, community-led solutions that meet the scale of the climate crisis, not failed market-based schemes that allow big polluters to pump more poison into our communities and further destabilize our climate.”
– Miya Yoshitani, Executive Director of Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), Climate Justice Alliance Board Member, member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (WHEJAC)
“Scientists in the latest IPCC physical science report provide undeniable proof of faster rates of global warming than earlier predictions indicated. The gravity of the climate emergency has been tirelessly called out by Indigenous and frontline communities for decades. We must pressure the IPCC before the mitigation report comes out early next year to listen to the voices of the traditional knowledge holders of Indigenous peoples and end carbon pricing, carbon capture and solar radiation management mitigation strategies that keep fossil fuels coming out of the ground.”
– Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Climate Justice Alliance Board member
“Report after report, disaster after disaster- climate change is here! We have been warned time and time again to act before we’re at a point of no return. This is about individual choices and collective action. We will continue to call upon our Congressional leaders to make the investments necessary to act on climate change.”
– Cassia Herron, Vice-Chair of CJA member group Kentuckians for The Commonwealth
“The frontlines are already way ahead of the politicians. We are leading with solutions – from community-owned solar energy systems that create safe, good paying jobs to just recovery efforts that ensure those communities most impacted by the crisis are built back in sustainable and safe ways based on community needs. To truly address the climate crisis, we need policymakers to enact bold and transformative policies like the THRIVE Act, which were crafted in deep consultation and partnership with Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, poor, and marginalized communities.”
– Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director of UPROSE, Co-Chair, Climate Justice Alliance Board of Directors
Climate Justice Alliance is a member-led organization of 74 urban and rural frontline communities, organizations and support networks in the climate justice movement. We work to build real solutions to the climate crisis through building local, living, regenerative economies while pushing back against false promises from corporate controlled interests.
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