An Oil Change International analysis shows that developing existing fossil fuel reserves would make it impossible to avoid global warming over 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that we must keep nearly 40% of reserves in the ground to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
Yesterday indigenous climate activists in DC bravely put their bodies on the line to shut down the roads around the Department of the Interior and inked "Climate Emergency" in front of the building, releasing a statement reading:
We refuse to be complicit in the demise of our communities through co2colonialism. We know violence to the land results in violence to Indigenous bodies. Our people are dying from climate chaos already and with them our culture, our plant knowledge, our language, our sacred ways.
We are not victims of the United States when we fight for our sovereignty and self-determination. We will not sit by silently as we have our lives devalued by white supremacy, while we are stripped of our sovereignty.
Our struggle to abolish white supremacy and it's systems that are killing us recognizes the political importance of accountability and refuses to embrace the rhetoric of victimhood, even as we vigilantly keep fighting to bring attention to the continued genocide and oppression of our people.
We are inseparable from nature. We are older than the United States, older than western imperialism, older than colonization.
And still the United States, this extractive and exploitative system, does everything it can to sever our connection to Mother Earth, lying to steal our sovereignty and strip us of our self-determination.
Politicians don’t care about us, presidents don’t take care of us, these systems were created to destroy us.
But we will fight until the natural balance is restored.
For generations, they’ve arrested us, tear gassed us, poisoned us…
But they cannot stop us.
We will continue to fight so that our young will thrive.
Protecting the sacred is our Indigenous responsibility, passed down generation after generation. We are the prayers of our ancestors…
We are the actions of those who walked before us…
Another world is possible.
Expect us.