Why are we not talking about the Climate Crisis in West Michigan: When inaction on Climate Change is just another form of climate denial

The weather has been all over the map for some time now, but particularly this winter – if you can call it that – in West Michigan. 2023 was the warmest year in recorded history, as was the most recent months of December, January and February.  

Over the past few weeks we have had some temperatures in the 70’s, and while having sunshine and warm in the later months of winter and often welcomed, we can no longer deny that the human manufactured Climate Crisis is the culprit. Of course it would be easy to blame the climate deniers – GOP politicians, think tanks, and far right pundits, but we are facing a Climate Crisis because the political and economic systems are both failing us miserably. Here are a few examples of the lack of Climate Justice within the Biden Administration:

• As the Center for Biological Diversity noted in January, the Biden Administration is on pace to approve more oil and gas drilling permits than what former President Donald Trump did in the previous 4 years.
• The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) provides some of the best critiques of the COP28 conference that took place last year. The IEN writes, “The outcomes of the UNFCCC 28th Conference of Parties has left Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities across the world sitting in disappointment as world leaders put forward watered-down climate commitments and text that continue to compromise our future.”
• The Biden Administration approved the largest US military budget in history at $886 Billion, with over an additional $100 Billion in military aid to Ukraine, Israel and for so-called Border Security. US military spending and climate change are well documented in a recent report entitled, Climate Collateral: How military spending accelerates climate breakdown, published by the Transnational Institute.
• The Biden Administration has decided that invest billions into electric vehicles instead of a robust mass transit system in the US. Such a decision does not provide a long term solution and only perpetuates extractivist practices of removing precious metals from other countries to power electric vehicles.

Then there is the role of the commercial news media, which is also complicit in not making Climate Change a front and center issue. For example, WZZM 13 ran a story a few days ago talking about Michigan businesses can apply for federal relief funding because on the warmer winter weather, specifically businesses that rely on tourism.  While the channel 13 story talks about the warmer winter weather, nowhere in the story are the words Climate Change mentioned.

A second example of local news coverage about the warmer winter was from MLive on March 5th, with the headline, We had a 2-week winter in Grand Rapids, Muskegon, West Michigan. The MLive article had some very nice graphics showing how few days of winter temperatures we actually had over the past several months, but refused to bring up the issue of Climate Change and the causes of such a warm winter. 

Liberals and Democrats love to mock climate deniers, but many of these same people continue to vote for and defend politicians that ultimately do nothing to stop the planet from warming or burning. What we need is a Climate Justice movement that is also an anti-war movement and an anti-Capitalist movement that understand the systemic root causes of the current climate crisis. 

Lastly, it is important that we come to terms with the fact that the Climate Crisis impacts BIPOC at a higher level that white/Europeans. However, one of the most important players in the Climate Justice movement are Indigenous people.

Throughout the history of the struggle for Indigenous Sovereignty, right relationship to the land (rather than property) and its people has been central. Multiple direct actions and campaigns led by Indigenous people to fight pipelines from Standing Rock to Line 5 have been effective in reducing the impact of climate change. According to a report put out by the Indigenous Environmental Network in 2021, Indigenous-led resistance campaigns against pipelines in the US and Canada have reduced greenhouse gas pollution by at least 25% annually since these campaigns began. We need to learn from and follow the examples of concrete ways to reduce Climate Change, especially if we care about leaving behind a planet for future generations.