For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Politics and Democracy page, Environment and Climate Resource page, and our Organic Transitions page.

If you listen to right wing commentators, you might think
American progressives are leading the charge to protect our planet from
climate change. Would that it were so!   

All around the country progressives are fighting to make our world a
better place to live. In the midst of an ascended right wing and the
dominance of corporations over our daily lives, progressives continue to
fight for affordable housing, better wages and working conditions,
social justice, clean water and many other solutions to the ills that
have long plagued their communities. And yes, most of us progressives
also support policies to cut greenhouse gasses and thereby reduce
climate change.

But climate change is not just another “issue.” The earth is in the
midst of a radical shift that will affect our country and society more
severely than other great upheavals such as the Civil War, the Great
Depression, or World War II. It represents an existential threat to
every human and every community on the planet. It threatens every job,
every economy in the world. It threatens the health of our children. It
threatens our food and water supply.

The disruption of the earth’s climate appears in many forms. Often they
seem contradictory – heat waves and snowstorms, floods and droughts.
 But there can be no reasonable doubt that greenhouse gasses are raising
the earth’s temperature and thereby making its climate more unstable
and extreme.  At this very moment, the effects of climate change are all
around us: Texas is withering under the driest seven months on record;
flooding from the Mississippi river has devastated a huge swath of the
South; food prices are sky-rocketing due to dueling droughts and
flooding worldwide.