Everyday Justice magazine

December 2024

Articles from Mercy:

• Gender and climate justice (Marianne Comfort; Institute Justice Team)
• Critical Considerations: Is the United States becoming a plutocracy? (Karen Donahue, RSM)
• Making nuclear weapons taboo (Sue Gallagher, RSM; Institute Justice Team)

Local Justice News & Upcoming Mercy Events:

• Washington, D.C.

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Gender and climate justice

Marianne Comfort; Institute Justice Team

News out of the international climate talks (COP 29) in Azerbaijan last month focused on disappointing levels of financial commitments from wealthy nations to assist countries struggling with the worst harms from a warming planet. But advocates for women also expressed frustration with a lack of progress on addressing gendered impacts of climate change.

The Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO), for instance, went into COP 29 prioritizing a gender-just transition away from fossil fuels that includes attention to care and demilitarization; feminist climate finance that includes alternative forms of funding; collection of data on how women are particularly harmed by climate change and its impacts; and a shift in power and representation toward women and other non-traditional voices in these negotiating spaces to achieve true climate justice.

Countries did adopt a ten-year work program on gender, encourage mainstreaming of gender- and age-disaggregated data, and provide a clear roadmap for a gender action plan by next year’s COP. However, negotiations were marred by hours of pushback on language addressing human rights and equality, according to the Women & Gender Constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organizes the annual COPs. This constituency consists of 54 civil society organizations, including WEDO.

Advocates also had been pressing governments for at least $1.3 trillion annually in direct public grants to assist the most climate-vulnerable nations. But in the end, the negotiations resulted in $300 billion, mostly made up of loans and private sector funding.

Civil society organizations and the United Nations itself recognize the particular threats that climate change poses to women’s livelihoods, health and safety.

Women are responsible for securing food and water in many cultures and thus disproportionately experience the stress of erratic rainfall and drought. This, in turn, can put more pressure on girls to leave school and help with these essential tasks. As climate change drives conflict across the world, women and girls also become more vulnerable to human trafficking, child marriage and other forms of violence.

Contributors to a book of essays and poems written entirely by women detail some of these particular gender harms while also claiming that more female leadership would result in better outcomes for climate policy, reducing emissions and protecting land. They name actress Jane Fonda, activist Greta Thunberg, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former UNFCCC head Christiana Figueres as among those who have had great influence. Authors in the anthology cited four characteristics these leaders share: prioritizing change over being in charge, a deep commitment to justice and equality, emotional intelligence, and recognizing that building community is critical to building a better world.

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Critical Considerations

Is the United States becoming a plutocracy?

Karen Donahue, RSM

The appointment of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the incoming Trump administration’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has highlighted the influence that extremely wealthy individuals are exerting over government operations and policy even though they lack relevant expertise and experience. Donald Trump has also nominated billionaires to serve as Secretaries of the Treasury, Education, and Commerce and multi-millionaires to serve as Secretaries of Energy, Health and Human Services, and the Interior as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Wealth concentration continues to accelerate in the United States. A recent report from inequality.org (a project of the Institute for Policy Studies) notes that the combined worth of the twelve richest people in the U.S. has reached $2 trillion (a trillion is 1,000 billion), and just four of these individuals hold half of this wealth ($1 trillion). By comparison, the median U.S. household has a net worth of about $192,000. However, since this figure is the median, half of U.S. households have a net worth less than this sum.

This extreme wealth concentration is not limited to the United States. According to the Swiss wealth manager UBS, the wealth of the world’s billionaires more than doubled over the past decade, going from $6.3 trillion to $14 trillion. Global GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is about $104.5 trillion. With a global population of about eight billion, this means that the world’s 2,682 billionaires (0.000000335 percent of the world’s population) control about 13 percent of the world’s wealth.

This asymmetry has serious implications for humanity and the planet, especially as extremely wealthy individuals and groups exert ever greater political influence and push governments to support their priorities. For example, here in the U.S., one of the first orders of business in the next administration will be extending or even making permanent the 2017 tax cuts, cuts which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest people.

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Making nuclear weapons taboo

Sue Gallagher, RSM; Institute Justice Team

Each year when the Nobel Prizes are awarded, I listen for the area I can relate to the most: the Peace Prize. Usually, I have never heard of the person or organization; my study of the winner always engenders much inspiration and admiration.

In October of this year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo. This is a grassroots movement comprised of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha. A reason this organization received the Peace Prize was for efforts to “achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”

Since 1945 many people have set about spreading the news that nuclear weapons must never be used again, thus creating a kind of “nuclear taboo.” Yet, as we have all heard in the news, the threat of using nuclear weapons is very real and threatening. The call to action against this very real danger is coming from several areas.

In 1963’s Pacem in Terris, John XXIII called for a cessation of the arms race, a reduction of stockpiles, and agreement on the banning of nuclear weapons. This seems to be the stance of the popes until Pope Francis, condemning the use of the bomb; Francis proclaims the very possession of the bomb immoral. Francis also denies the morality of possessing the atom bomb for deterrence purposes. This is a new development by his papacy.

Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, NM, says in his pastoral letter Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament,

Pax Christi USA, unsurprisingly, has taken up the call of Wester: we can no longer deny or ignore the extremely dangerous predicament of our human family. They list a terrific number of resources to assist us in our study and action. These materials include information on the grassroots group Back from the Brink. What can each of us do to work on making the world free of nuclear weapons? There are suggestions of what folks can do in supporting House Resolution 77; while the 118th Congress has concluded its work, it’s likely that a similar bill could be introduced in the 119th. This resolution calls on the president to embrace the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and make nuclear disarmament the centerpiece of U.S. national security policy. It also calls on the United States to lead a global effort to move the world back from the nuclear brink and to prevent nuclear war.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it is estimated that “plans for U.S. nuclear forces, as described in the fiscal year 2023 budget and supporting documents, would cost $756 billion over the 2023–32 period, $122 billion more than CBO’s 2021 estimate for the 2021–30 period.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists states that nuclear weapons are “the most dangerous invention the world has ever seen. Can we prevent them from being used again?” Spend some time on their website if you’ve forgotten the chills that the Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer stirred in you! There are multiple issues that demand our attention. Please make a resolution that you will turn your attention to the existential threat of nuclear weapons. The Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight!

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