Tate Williams at Inside Philanthropy writes—An Unusual Grant Fuels a Push to Start Treating Climate Change as a Real Emergency:
A major challenge to organizing and advocacy around climate change is how even to approach a problem so large, complex, and gradually advancing (although it feels less gradual with every year, to be honest).
An advocacy group that launched in 2014 has one answer—we respond like we’re at war.
For the Climate Mobilization Project, the climate crisis demands not incremental changes or gradual reductions in emissions, but an emergency response led by government that is on the scale of the response to World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The group just picked up a grant from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Shelter Rock of $100,000, an amount they say is the “country’s single largest philanthropic investment in emergency climate action.”
This modest grant from a local funder to a little-known climate outfit is worth a closer look, with an eye to takeaways for other players in this space. We've been saying for a while now that if climate change is really the time-urgent, existential threat that so many, including top funders, say it is, then civil society and philanthropy needs to start acting on that belief. Nonprofits need to hit harder and foundations need to give more—a lot more—while there's still time.
But what would that look like, exactly?
The Climate Mobilization Project was started by a group of friends from varying backgrounds—psychology, journalism, neuroscience—and now boasts an advisory board that includes former executive director of Greenpeace International, Paul Gilding, and leading climatologist Michael E. Mann. [...]
The war-footing for climate change concept is more than just a rallying cry. It's an operational approach that's gotten increasing attention in recent years. For example, a 2016 NBER paper by Hugh Rockoff explored the rapid transformation of the U.S. economy in World War II to see whether this mobilization model "provides lessons about how the economy could be transformed to meet scarcities produced by climate change or other environmental challenges." Bill McKibben also fleshed out the World War II analog in a long 2016 article in the New Republic, noting that Pearl Harbor made "individual Americans willing to do hard things: pay more in taxes, buy billions upon billions in war bonds, endure the shortages and disruptions that came when the country’s entire economy converted to wartime production." [...]
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“Dr. King was called a troublemaker and even a race-baiter 45 years ago as he led the call for a civil rights and economic justice Movement. He called for a Poor People’s Movement to address the glaring realities of poverty even as he loved America enough to say: Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.”
~~William J. Barber II, Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation (2014)
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—SCOTUS Upholds Voting Rights Act -- For Now, Anyway:
It's one of the neat things about the Reconstruction Amendments that's sometimes overlooked -- not only do the 13th through 15th Amendments outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude, guarantee the privileges or immunities of all citizens of the United States as well as their right to due process and equal protection -- but the Amendments also expressly authorize Congress to enact further legislation enforcing these provisions.
Among this legislation is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally outlawed various discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. Moreover, the Act in its Section 5 created federal oversight of local elections administration, requiring that those states which had a history of discriminatory voting practices ("covered jurisdictions") couldn't make any changes that affected voting -- couldn't even move the location of a polling place -- without getting "preclearance" from the United States Department of Justice.
The idea was, basically, "we're not going to let you have one bad law struck down only to see you try again the next day with some new scheme to screw minority voters -- so before you change anything, see us." That list of covered jurisdictions is here, and not only includes many Southern states but also most of New York City, isolated parts of Michigan and South Dakota, and even some California counties (among other locations).
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, The Trumps, seeking to defuse the border situation, can't help making things worse. But still claim the opposite. Paula Writer has observations on that. The collusion story moves on to the Nat’l Enquirer. A few guesses on where the weekend might take us.
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