Transform, Heal, and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy (THRIVE)

TO: Friends & Interested Citizens, FROM: Center for Coalfield Justice, February 1, 2021

Amidst a confluence of devastating crises — the pandemic, racial injustice, economic devastation, and of course climate change — we have a historic opportunity to set our country on a different course in the next few months. But it will take all of us working together to make our voices heard and demand change.

This Tuesday, February 2, at 7 p.m. Eastern / 4 p.m. Pacific, the Green New Deal Network will host a grassroots livestream: “100 Days for Climate, Jobs, and Justice: Winning the THRIVE Agenda.” We hope you can join.

You can …. RSVP HERE!

The THRIVE Agenda includes building a groundswell of support to Transform, Heal, and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy (THRIVE) Agenda— a bold economic recovery plan to address the intersecting crises facing our nation.

Sincerely, Kristen Locy, CCJ Outreach Coordinator

SOME LEADING GROUPS — The Green New Deal Network is a 50-state campaign with a national table of 15 organizations: Center for Popular Democracy, Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Greenpeace, Indigenous Environmental Network, Indivisible, Movement for Black Lives, MoveOn, People’s Action, Right To The City Alliance, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement, US Climate Action Network, and the Working Families Party.

Fossil fuels are major contributors to climate change problems

From an Article by Corbin Hiar, E&E News, June 18, 2020

The public relations firm CRC Advisors criticized environmental groups for promoting climate policies that it said would hurt communities of color in an email that accidentally included the name of a client: Chevron Corp.

It was an audacious messaging campaign: White environmentalists are hurting black communities by pushing radical climate policies that would strip them of fossil fuel jobs.

The email to journalists, sent by a public affairs firm at the height of national protests over systemic racism earlier this month, accidentally contained the name of a high-profile client.

It was Chevron Corp. It was Chevron Corp. It was Chevron Corp.

The Virginia-based communications firm, named CRC Advisors, urged journalists to look at how green groups were “claiming solidarity” with black protesters while “backing policies which would hurt minority communities.”

“Despite this claimed solidarity, environmental organizations, composed of predominantly white members, are backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring particular harm to minority communities,” wrote John Gage of CRC in an email sent to media outlets including E&E News.

The story pitch included an offer to connect journalists with black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal, a sweeping government jobs program advanced by progressive lawmakers who champion environmental justice issues for communities of color.

The email ended with a revealing tagline: “If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”

Chevron denied involvement in the messaging campaign, but the email’s accidental nod to the oil giant is renewing suspicions among activists and academics that Chevron’s public statements about climate change fail to match its lobbying activities. While Chevron has promised to do more to slow rising temperatures, observers view the email as a shadowy continuation of the fossil fuel industry’s past efforts to undercut legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Chevron’s fingerprints appear to be on this,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University history professor and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a 2010 book about how scientists with ties to Big Oil worked to obscure the truth about global warming.

Oreskes described previous instances of oil and gas companies working with communications firms to advance industry talking points. But the CRC effort is remarkable, she said, for trying to leverage national unrest about systemic racism and police violence to promote an expansion of oil and gas drilling.

“There’s no socially acceptable language to describe how despicable this is,” she said. “It’s hard for me to contain my fury.”

Chevron, a longtime CRC client whose shareholders recently called on the oil major to detail its lobbying on climate change, says it had nothing to do with the message.

“Thanks for the opportunity to clarify the situation,” Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said in an email.

‘A clerical error’ — (Are you kidding me? ADMIN)

The email received by an E&E News journalist on June 3 included quotes from two black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal.

They were Ken Blackwell, a Republican who served as Ohio’s secretary of state in the late 1990s and has gone on to stump for a wide variety of conservative causes, and Derrick Hollie, a former advertising executive.

The email portrayed CRC as playing a helpful role in distributing Blackwell’s and Hollie’s concerns with the climate plan and its effect on black communities.

Instead, the firm appears to have organized the campaign. Hollie, who said he doesn’t personally know Blackwell, revealed that CRC approached him with the idea.

“This was like, ‘Derrick, would you mind being a part of something that we’re working on?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And they asked me to put together a quote,” Hollie said in a phone interview.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” he added. “I figured they were going to put it in an op-ed or something like that.”

Gage, the account executive at CRC, said in an email to E&E News that he had contacted journalists “on behalf of Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Hollie regarding this issue and inadvertently attached a disclaimer from another client’s media list onto that email.”

“This was, in effect, a clerical error,” Gage said.

The Green New Deal is a conceptual resolution that calls for a sweeping public jobs program and asserts that the government should “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” in a decade’s time.

That would require overhauling the nation’s oil-dependent transportation system “to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” and invest in “zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail,” the proposal says.

Chevron hasn’t directly lobbied on the Green New Deal, but it has pressed members of Congress and the Trump administration about “Energy Transitions, technology, and climate change,” lobbying disclosures show.

Energy prices — another major focus of the CRC pitch — are also an issue Chevron has lobbied on.

“Radical policies like the green new deal that raise the cost of driving to work and heating our homes would target the African-American community and … would make us even more vulnerable and marginalized than we already are,” Blackwell said in the email sent by CRC. He is currently an adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign and senior fellow at the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group.

Blackwell’s quote was partially featured in the headline of a June 4 story on the website of the conservative Daily Wire.

This story is to be continued tomorrow!

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See also: Chevron’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Tweet Prompts a Debate About Big Oil and Environmental Justice, Ilana Cohen, InsideClimate News, June 20 2020

Order your own copy now of “A Planet to Win”

From the Reviews of Eric Klinenberg, New York Review of Books, March 26, 2020

The Great Green Hope, Review of Books on the Green New Deal

A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal is a collective endeavor, written by four young intellectuals (a journalist, a sociologist, and two political scientists) who are part of the climate movement they’re studying, and the tone of this short book is urgent and pragmatic.

It’s also refreshingly optimistic and future-oriented, filled with specific ideas for how to decarbonize the energy system, build affordable housing and public transportation, expand parks and public recreation facilities, and renegotiate global trade regimes so that human rights and public health are properly valued.

“Fighting for a new world starts with imagining it viscerally,” the authors write. Their portrait of a planet transformed by a GND is designed to spark that effort.

Aronoff, Battistoni, Cohen, and Riofrancos are motivated by the troublesome fact that we have very little time — roughly the ten years spanning the 2020s — to decarbonize the economy, lest we pump so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that catastrophic warming becomes irreversible.

Following Bill McKibben, they note that the only way to do this is by burying fossil fuels, including those that are already primed for distribution. Taxing carbon to increase its price may help a little, but “a carbon price low enough to be politically viable won’t be high enough to transform global energy markets.”

What do we need in order to transform the energy system?

First, the authors say, we need to pressure market analysts to factor the runaway costs of climate collapse into their valuations of fossil fuel companies. (This is already beginning to happen, thanks to the warnings of climate scientists and the fossil fuel divestment movement.)

Second, we need the government to buy up majority shares of (devalued) energy company shares and quickly cut gas, oil, and coal production. (This seems far-fetched, given American political culture.)

Third, we need a managed transition to renewable energy, so that current workers in the industry, and the communities that depend on them, gain security instead of losing ground.

All of this, they concede, conflicts with the current direction of US energy policy. But they believe most Americans are eager for a radical break from our dirty sources of power, provided that the transition does not compromise reliable service or significantly increase prices.

“We need to directly take on the fossil fuel companies and private utilities whose business models rest on making the planet uninhabitable,” they write. “We can’t avoid a confrontation.”

Industrial policy, not energy policy, is the key to making a politically appealing GND, and the most exciting parts of A Planet to Win describe what we can build in the name of sustainability, not what we need to bury. The authors worry about the fate of those who labor in the coal, oil, and gas sectors, and about the potent Republican political strategy of pitting workers against environmentalists.

Their response is a rousing call for public works projects that would employ millions of people while also remaking more sustainable systems for electricity and transit. They propose building “10 million beautiful, public, no-carbon homes over the next 10 years, in cities, suburbs, reservations, and towns, in the most transit-rich and walkable areas.” Ambitious, yes. Realistic? Only if progressive states like California and New York change their retrograde zoning policies and eliminate the “Not in My Backyard” building restrictions that limit density in desirable areas.

During the New Deal, the authors recall, “workers hired under the Works Progress Administration constructed 651,000 miles of highway and 124,000 bridges…. They built 125,000 public buildings, including 41,300 schools, and 469 airports. They built 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields.” Most Americans still rely on these aging resources.

Like Klein and Purdy, the authors of A Planet to Win champion a guaranteed jobs program. They also advocate restoring workers’ right to unionize. They see enormous needs for work in construction, maintenance, education, recreation, health care, child care, and ecological care. “The economic question is whether this work can be done profitably,” they proclaim. “Much of it, we submit, cannot.” As they see it, though, the current mode of production, based on extraction, exclusion, and exploitation, is even more ruinous.

“For better and for worse,” they argue, “our choice now is between eco-socialism or eco-apartheid.” If we only have one decade to fix things, it’s time to chart a course. “We need to pose a simple question,” they conclude. “Which side are you on?”

These are expensive proposals, and it’s not clear how much support they will get in a post-pandemic political climate. But already, social policies in all domains are up for grabs, and big investments in long-term public health and ecological sustainability may soon become very popular.

Now, at least, we can more easily see the cost of inaction. We are fighting to survive one preventable emergency (COVID-19), and no matter what happens, the climate crisis awaits.

—March 26, 2020

Katharine Hayhoe has examined these issues in great detail

From an Article by Olivia Goldhill, Quartz Newsletter, September 18, 2019

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe says her evangelical religion influences her approach to climate change. She is very concerned.

When evangelical environmentalists talk about climate change, they don’t stick to sea level rise projections and the carbon emissions associated with red meat. Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, national organizer and spokesperson at Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA), also points to the psalms, and the Old and New Testaments.

These texts emphasize how God created and loves the Earth, and wants humans to love it too. So for Meyaard-Schaap, choosing to care for the planet—and fight climate change—is simply following his God’s wishes.

In the United States, evangelical Christians are not known for their environmental engagement. The group is “synonymous with resistance, if we’re honest,” says Meyaard-Schaap. Evangelicals are the religious group least likely to believe the Earth is warming due to human activity: 28%, compared to 50% of all US adults, according to a 2015 survey from Pew Research Center.

But in recent years, a few leaders have started connecting environmentalism with religion. They’re starting to find a receptive audience among evangelicals.

Katharine Hayhoe, a prominent climate change scientist and evangelical Christian, says her religion motivates her interest in climate change. She finds the concept of protecting God’s planet to be an effective framing when talking to religious groups. “As Christians, we believe that we have been given responsibility over every little thing on this planet,” she says, “and we believe we’re to care for people who are less fortunate than ourselves.”

Hayhoe first started talking about the importance of combating climate change from a religious perspective in 2008. That’s when she realized that audiences thought she cared about the environment simply because she was a scientist—and disengaged as a result. Since she shifted her approach, she says, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “I can count on the fingers of my hands and maybe just a few extra toes the letters and emails and even nasty tweets I’ve gotten from atheists over the last decade,” she says. “On the other hand, I can count on my fingers and toes how many I get from people who call themselves Christians every week.”

Of course, not every evangelical Christian applies the loving-protection maxim to climate change. There are two types of evangelicals in the United States, says Hayhoe: political and theological. “For political evangelicals,” she says, “their statement of faith is written first by their political ideology and only a distant second by what the Bible says.” Evangelicals are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, and their religious beliefs can be interpreted to support conservative views on climate change. “As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Republican congressman Tim Walberg said in 2017. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

But there are ways to communicate the importance of addressing climate change across the political spectrum, says Meyaard-Schaap. He says that, when talking to conservatives, YECA emphasizes the economic freedom that comes from not accessing energy through a regulated monopoly. Also a plus: the national security benefits of not being dependent on hostile foreign powers for oil. YECA members also highlight how climate action is a pro life issue, as burning fossil fuels contributes to low birth weight and preterm babies, and heavy metals emitted through the burning of coal cross the placenta and impede fetal development.

Amidst these messages, there are signs that evangelical engagement on climate change is shifting: A recent poll found that 40% of evangelical Christians support the Green New Deal. In July, YECA released a statement highlighting the “biblical principles” in the proposed legislation. “The Green New Deal shows clear concern for making sure that we have tangible ways of protecting the natural environment, caring for God’s creation,” says Meyaard-Schaap.

Hayhoe would like to see even more support from the evangelical community, though she doesn’t expect evangelicals to embrace environmental action en masse, as long as “political ideology continues to drive the belief system of those who identify as Christian.”

Meyaard-Schaap, meanwhile, sees a distinct generational divide. Millennials and Generation Z often already care about climate change, he says, and YECA focuses on training these young leaders to talk with their parents and pastors.

Although politics is a strong indication of belief in climate change, Meyaard-Schaap says YECA activists are motivated by religion rather than politics. “We come at this work not because we’re environmentalist, even though some of us identify that way, and not because we’re Democrats or Republican,” he says. “We come at this because we’re Christians and we believe that acting on climate change and calling the church to action and it’s just part of what it means to follow Jesus in the 21st century.”

>>> This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

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Denominational Religious Statements on Climate Change

>>> Inter-Faith Power & Light Campaign Compilation

Most religious communities have released statements on “climate change” and the need to care for the earth and living things. The compiled list (organized alphabetically first by religion, then by denomination) demonstrates the unity within the religious community on these important issues.

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VIDEO: Burke Lecture: An Ecological Inquiry – Jesus and the Cosmos with Elizabeth Johnson – UCSD-TV – University of California Television, July 6, 2010

Prof. Elizabeth A. Johnson, a former president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the ecumenical American Theological Society, argues that interfaith dialogue has made clear that each religious tradition has its own distinctive contribution to make. In this Burke lecture, she explores one line of thinking peculiar to the Christian tradition, namely, the meaning of Jesus Christ. Her question is whether the central, organizing figure in Christian faith also has anything intrinsic to do with the natural world.

https://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=18746

The “Extinction Rebellion” is wide-spread demanding action to prevent climate change

Essay by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, May 21, 2019

VIDEO: ‘We don’t have any choice’: Protesters participate in Earth Day demonstrations (Extinction Rebellion, the group behind the ongoing demonstrations in London, has mobilized thousands across the globe to protest climate change)

Amid the daily infamies of Donald Trump’s presidency, his greatest dereliction of duty is his decision not to confront but to accelerate the greatest threat facing this country: the clear, present and growing danger of catastrophic climate change.

Trump is called a climate denier. He is actually a warrior for climate calamity. In many ways, Trump is the first president of the climate catastrophe era. We’ve already witnessed the undeniable first terrors: the fires that erased Paradise, Calif., in a day, the storms that savaged Houston and Puerto Rico, floods in the Midwest, droughts that forced millions to migrate from what used to be called the Fertile Crescent. In the face of this and more, Trump has chosen to go all in on the side of this direct security threat to our people, our country and our world.

Last week in Hackberry, La., Trump celebrated his collusion with the furies that threaten us, hailing the United States as the “energy superpower of the world.” Trump’s speech consisted of his stale stew of lies, exaggerations, boasts and insults, claiming credit for transformations that began long before his presidency, and scorning alternative views and opponents. Yet in the midst, he made it clear: He is proud to contribute to the horrors that now threaten us.

The reality is no longer in dispute by anyone willing to be honest about the science. We are on a path that has already begun to take casualties and rack up staggering costs. A recent U.N. report warns of the extinction of a million species — and the imperiling of humanity itself — in the next few decades.

The conservative scientific consensus is that we have about 12 years to transform how we produce energy to avoid unimaginable destruction. Continuing the current course will cost trillions over the next decades (more than the Green New Deal) and, more importantly, displace hundreds of millions in forced migrations, and spread disease, starvation and death at levels far beyond any war yet witnessed. No wall Trump succeeds in building would be able to deal with the 140 million climate refugees that the World Bank predicts by mid-century.

In Louisiana, Trump bragged that “American energy independence” would make our nation “wealthier” and “safer.” “We have an America First energy policy,” he brayed. “We don’t need anybody. And we don’t need to be ripped off by the rest of the world, either, because those days are over.” He boasted about getting out of the Paris climate accord, “replacing the EPA,” torpedoing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, “unlocking” the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, and more.

And, of course, Trump repeated his mockery of the Green New Deal, calling it a “hoax, like the hoax I just went through.” He continued, “We will never let radical activists, special interests, and out-of-control bureaucrats wreck our economy, eliminate our jobs, or destroy your future.” In fact, that is exactly what Trump is doing. Lining up with the radical fossil-fuel activists and special interests, installing energy lobbyists and lawyers into government, and empowering them to make decisions that will — if not reversed rapidly in the next years — “wreck our economy, eliminate our jobs, [and] destroy your future,” to say nothing of your children’s lives and possibilities.

The stakes could not be higher. As Bill McKibben, the climate expert who first warned of the climate change threat 30 years ago, noted, “The problem with climate change is that it’s a timed test. If you don’t solve it fast, then you don’t solve it. No one’s got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it’s melted. … We’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing — maybe — for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible.” And we are facing an opposition led by a president throwing in with powerful fossil-fuel interests and corporations that have pumped millions into disinformation and deception, and corrupted politics and politicians to preserve their profits while posing a direct threat to our lives.

The betrayal of Trump and the Republican Party is self-evident. Sadly, the leadership of the Democratic Party has also been AWOL, as have too many voices in media, particularly television. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), former vice president Joe Biden and too many other Democrats mistakenly seem to think that the best response to extremism is moderation. Rather than seeking a mandate for the change we need immediately, they choose to woo a mythic center with modest reforms.

Biden promises only to return to the Paris accord, a policy that might have been promising in the late 1980s, but simply represents inadequate moral signaling now.

In the end, as McKibben writes, the fossil fuel interests and their collaborators like Trump will lose this battle. Already insurance companies are refusing to guarantee against losses that are coming to coastal properties and elsewhere. The only question — and it is fundamental — is how long it takes for the climate destroyers to lose and how much damage is done in the interim. This is why Trump’s collusion is his greatest dereliction of duty.

The change we need will come — as it usually does — from independent citizen movements calling our compromised and corrupted leaders to account.

It’s the Extinction Rebellion that brought traffic to a crawl in London last month. It’s millions of children walking out of school. It’s the young activists of the Sunrise Movement vowing to force Democratic presidential contenders to take a position on the Green New Deal — and demanding that this debate be at the center of the next presidential election. These efforts would be amplified if the media stepped up with heightened urgency to report on the climate crisis and on the growing movements to address it. Toward that end, the Nation magazine, which I edit, and the Columbia Journalism Review are launching a new project — Covering Climate Now — to bring journalists together to try to find ways to dramatically improve media coverage of the climate crisis and its solutions.

Fifty years from now, McKibben says, we are going to run the world on sun and wind. The only question is whether the world will be completely broken, or whether we will have acted in time to avoid the worst. Trump has committed his administration to buttress the immensely rich and powerful fossil-fuel interests in accelerating the worst. Now we will see who has the courage and the conviction to stop them.

June 20, 2018 Webinar was on Fracking, Pipelines, Plastics and Climate Change

Dear Friends and Concerned Citizens,

Breaking news: We just learned that the new Republican governor in Florida has initiated the process to ban fracking in the state and oppose drilling off Florida’s coasts. (See reference 1 below.)

This is huge — it comes after more than 5 years of work by Food & Water Watch activists, staff, and allies in Florida, and it follows momentous fracking bans in Maryland and New York.

That’s not even all that happened today! Food & Water Watch and over 600 of our ally organizations publicly called on members of Congress to stand with us to fight for our communities and planet. (See reference 2 below).

A new Congress was sworn in last week and they have helped build incredible energy for a Green New Deal — climate policy that builds upon the strong ideals we have been pushing forward for years.

Urge your representative to support a strong Green New Deal.

We’ve spent years pushing the envelope and redefining what is possible for climate policy. From being the first national organization to call for a ban on fracking, to moving forward the Off Fossil Fuels Act — we’ve always been focused on bold solutions for protecting our food, water, and climate.

Together, we have shown the climate movement what’s possible. We’ve built unprecedented momentum for the OFF Act, the strongest piece of climate legislation to date. The hallmark policy points of halting fossil fuel extraction and moving to renewable energy on an urgent timeline are now part of the Green New Deal conversation — something that would have been unheard of just a few short years ago. Send a message today to continue to move strong climate policy forward.

All of this context makes the news out of Florida even more exciting. Our team of dedicated activists, staff, and allies managed to move landmark statewide fracking policy with uncompromising commitment to a full ban.

We know climate change is impacting food supplies, the availability of clean water, and too many urban cities and rural areas — but we also have a solution, and we know how to win.

It’s time we all fight like we live here. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, and the chance of our lives — for our lives. Our home, this planet, and our families, can’t wait another year.

Take action with Food & Water Action and tell Congress to support a strong Green New Deal now.

Onward,
Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

1. Governor Ron DeSantis Moves to Ban Fracking in Florida, Food & Water Watch, January 10, 2019.

2. 600 Groups Present ‘Green New Deal’ Demands, E&E News, January 10, 2019.

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SEE ALSO: The Green New Deal’s Sudden Popularity Is A Reason For Climate Change Optimism | Huffington Post, January 11, 2019

We are not ready for these climate impacts ...

From an Article by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, November 23, 2018

In a move environmentalists and journalists denounced as a blatant effort to bury facts that conflict with the president’s denialism and pro-fossil fuel agenda, the Trump administration used the Friday after Thanksgiving to quietly release Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), which warned “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization” and concluded that “greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account” for planet-threatening warming.

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels.”
……………. —Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

“The decision to release this damning report when families are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a brazen attempt to bury the truth from the public that we must act now to move off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

“Releasing this report when no one is looking, tweeting his annual nonsense about global warming and cold weather, and announcing that he’ll use the upcoming U.N. climate meetings as a fossil fuel tradeshow, Trump is doubling down on his climate denial for the holidays—as many families are still reeling from unnatural climate disasters across the country,” Hauter continued. “The science is way past in on climate change… We must prepare for our climate future in spite of Trump.”

From deadly wildfires to catastrophic hurricanes and other extreme weather events, the “impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future,” notes the congressionally mandated report—the first of its kind released since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Authored by officials from over a dozen federal agencies, the report warns that in the absence of aggressive action to quickly slash carbon emissions, the climate crisis will continue to have increasingly devastating effects on the environment, wildlife, and human health.

“It is very likely that some impacts, such as the effects of ice sheet disintegration on sea level rise and coastal development, will be irreversible for many thousands of years, and others, such as species extinction, will be permanent,” the report warns.

Using the hashtag #ClimateFriday, environmentalists worked to overcome the Trump administration’s attempt to hide the NCA4 amid the chaos of the holidays by highlighting the report’s findings and stressing its dire implications if ambitious and global climate action is not taken.

“This report makes it clear that climate change is not some problem in the distant future,” Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a statement. “It’s happening right now in every part of the country.”

The Washington Post summarized the report’s key findings with regard to major regions of the U.S.:

Already, western mountain ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year, threatening water supplies below them. Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida, and the U.S.’s Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires are devouring ever larger areas during longer fire seasons. And the country’s sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has utterly upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly thawing permafrost tundras.

The federal report comes as climate activists and progressives like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing for the Democratic Party to combat the Trump administration’s fossil fuel agenda with ambitious climate action centered around a Green New Deal.

“It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, and why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent clean renewable energy,” concluded Hauter of Food & Water Watch. “This transition is not only possible, but necessary for the health and prosperity of people and the planet.”