The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: More “Good Trouble” to Protest Against Climate Change
Dear Diary. Welcome to May everyone. As most of my readers know, I come from and live in the U.S. South where racial strife and division led to the figure of Dr. Martin Luther King with his civil disobedience protests. One of his followers, John Lewis, came up with the phrase “Good Trouble,” meaning that people should be assertive enough on issues to protest and get arrested in order to change society for the better. We should protest against bad laws and badly behaving corporations in order to change them just so long as our actions are nonviolent and don’t cause property destruction.
On this blog in my news section, I will often highlight climate protests led by Greta Thunberg and others. Today I’m reporting on “Good Trouble” in response to President Joe Biden’s misbehavior when it comes to kowtowing to oil companies. At this point, if we are going to save our climate and in turn our civilization, our leaders should not allow any more oil to be drilled. We must starve the beast, or at the very least train that beast to eat green energy projects by investing in them.
Here is more on one such protest outside of Sunday’s Press Correspondence Dinner as reported by Common Dreams:
Climate Campaigners Stage Blockade at White House Correspondents Dinner (commondreams.org)
Climate protestors begin to march up Connecticut Avenue towards the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton on April 29, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Climate Campaigners Stage Blockade at White House Correspondents Dinner
“We disrupted the rich and powerful because Joe Biden’s approval of deadly new oil and gas projects is killing the planet,” said the campaign group Climate Defiance. “We will continue to disrupt until we end fossil fuels.”
By JULIA CONLEY
Apr 30, 2023
Members of the corporate media were greeted by hundreds of climate action organizers Saturday night as they arrived at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.
Youth-led direct action group Climate Defiance staged a blockade of the event to demand that President Joe Biden fulfill his campaign promise to end fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
The protest came weeks after the Biden administration approved Willow, the massive oil drilling project on federal lands in Alaska, and a month after an oil and gas lease sale of 1.6 million acres of offshore waters in the Gulf of Mexico went forward.
“The president promised us an end to new leasing on federal lands but failed to deliver. Now, he needs to hear from the voting bloc that delivered him the 2022 midterm elections,” said Climate Defiance ahead of the protest, referring to research showing that voters between the ages of 18 and 29 were crucial to Biden’s victory in 2020.
According to Pew Research, 62% of young voters support a complete phaseout of fossil fuels.
Climate Defiance is backed by the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit run by climate psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon. The group was joined by organizers from the Sunrise Movement, which has helped push more than 100 Democratic lawmakers to co-sponsor Green New Deal legislation.
Documentarian Ford Fischer posted a video of a government vehicle attempting to drive through the protesters before retreating.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Green New Deal co-sponsor, thanked the demonstrators for the action as he walked past them, and climate scientist Peter Kalmus joined the group at one point, telling them, “You guys are on the right side of history… President Biden is on the wrong side of history [for] expanding the fossil fuels during a climate emergency.”
Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones (D-52) and Justin Pearson (D-86), who were recently expelled from the state House for participating in a gun control protest before being reinstated, also joined the campaigners to say that the interconnected fights “for democracy, climate justice, and an end to mass shootings require a coordinated emergency response.”
“We’re fighting a system that is trying to put the profits of the gun industry, the profits of the fossil fuel industry, the profits of the for-profit healthcare over the lives of our people,” he said. “So we must stand together. We must let them know that if you come for one of us, you come for all of us.”
“We disrupted the rich and powerful because Joe Biden’s approval of deadly new oil and gas projects is killing the planet,” said Climate Defiance after the blockade. “We will continue to disrupt until we end fossil fuels.”
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
More:
Here are some “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is some brand new April 2023 climatology:
Here is more climate and weather news from Monday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
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Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy”