On Friday, November 4, the Paris Agreement on climate change is set to formally go into effect. It aims to stop climate change in its tracks by significantly reducing the emissions that cause global warming while increasing the amount of energy we get from clean solar and wind power.

Whether those goals are achieved depends  on who the people of the United States elect to be their next president four days later.

Hillary Clinton favors the Paris Agreement and will help America lead the effort to replace climate changing coal and oil with clean, healthy, jobs-producing renewable fuels.

Donald Trump wants to reopen coal mines and actually increase America’s use of the fossil fuels that pollute our air, make us and our kids sick, and perpetuate the natural disasters climate change has been fueling since Hurricane Katrina.

There is no doubt in my mind that all the progress we’ve made on climate change over the last eight years will come to a screeching halt if Trump prevails.

But he won’t – not if we all get out and vote, and get our friends, family and neighbors to do the same.

Facts to Keep In Mind

√ We just wrapped up the hottest summer since global record-keeping began in 1880.

√ Arctic sea ice, a key indicator of long-term climate change, fell to 28 percent below the 40-year average in September, tying 2007 figures for the lowest levels in the 47-year satellite record, reports the Natural Resources Defense Council.

√ Last year was the hottest year ever recorded. The first nine months of this year have been even hotter, a record 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th Century average.

√ Nineteen of the hottest years on record have all occurred in the past 20 years.

How does that actually affect us?

⇒  Sea level is rising, swamping our homes and neighborhoods and threatening hundreds of billions of dollars worth of property, roads and favorite vacation spots, from New Orleans to Boston, from Florida to Texas, and even along the Great Lakes

⇒ Storms are drenching us. Flooded communities in North and South Carolina are still trying to recover from Hurricane Mathew, even while neighborhoods in Louisiana still struggle from the effects of Hurricane Katrina

⇒ Drought is stretching our drinking water supplies to the limit and creating so much parched land that some of our most beautiful heritage forests are catching fire and going up in smoke.

⇒ Poison ivy is getting worse as it thrives in the hothouse conditions that global warming is causing.

⇒ Mosquitoes are posting a bigger threat, too, as they spread farther north, live longer as the seasons extend, and spread diseases that used to be restricted to a narrow band in the tropics.

The threat is clear. So is our choice on Election Day.

Vote to Stop Climate Change

Hillary Clinton has been a strong proponent of stopping climate change since the first day of her campaign.

She has vowed to clean up dirty power plants and switch to solar and wind.

She supports building the next generation of energy-efficient cars, homes and workplaces.

And she knows that we can create millions of good-paying American jobs by becoming the clean energy superpower of the 21st Century.

Donald Trump is one of those people who has been discredited by over 99% of the scientific community: a climate “denier.”

He’s called climate change a “hoax” and is eager to roll back decades’ worth of climate progress.

He would squash President Obama’s signature climate change program, the 2015 Clean Power Plan. The Plan will reduce the carbon pollution from the dirty power plants that account for 40 percent of our nation’s carbon footprint.

He wants to “cancel” the Paris climate accord, which would not only be a set back for our own country, but would seriously tarnish our standing on the world stage, too.

He would actually try to accelerate how much coal and oil we burn. It would be HUUUUUGE.

You can stop climate change – by stopping Trump.

If you can still vote early, do it (here I am about 5 minutes after I voted!)

If you can volunteer, sign up here. You can help by canvassing, phone banking, and otherwise working to get people to the polls.

If you plan to vote on election day, know where your polling place is. You can plug in your zip code here to find the right location.

If you have friends, neighbors or family who need help getting to the polls, offer to drive them or get them a ride.

If you’re a lawyer, get trained in voter protection and staff a polling place to prevent voter intimidation.

If you’re active on Facebook and Twitter, encourage your communities to vote.

In other words, whatever you can do, do it.

But first and foremost, vote.

The post On Nov. 8, Vote to Stop Climate Change appeared first on Big Green Purse.

Why? Because ensuring that women have full reproductive rights creates one of the most desirable “two-fers” on the planet. Complete access to voluntary family planning is among the quickest, simplest, and most affordable ways to improve women’s quality of life. It is also one of the most direct, immediate and cost-effective ways to reduce climate change. In fact, studies show that slowing population growth by giving women access to the contraception they already want could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between 8 and 15 percent [PDF] — roughly equivalent to ending all tropical deforestation.

Women took these issues to Rio because more than 200 million women in the U.S. and around the world cannot choose whether or when to have a baby, simply because they don’t have access to voluntary family planning. Groups like the Global Fund for Women and International Planned Parenthood Federation spent several days last week making their case, button-holing delegates, meeting with celebrities, blogging and Tweeting, and protesting in the streets.

In the end, as Grist reported, the Rio+20 outcome document – though 49 pages long and consisting of 23,917 words – mentions women in less than 0.01 percent of the entire text. And only two of the 283 sections addressed women’s needs for family planning. Of the seven priority areas of discussion at the summit, none included language endorsing the idea that access to contraception is a basic human right. In fact, language to that effect was specifically removed from earlier drafts of Earth Summit recommendations, primarily at the insistence of the Vatican, which interprets endorsement of reproductive “rights” as endorsement of abortion.

This did not sit well with Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State who led America’s official summit delegation. “Women must be empowered to make decisions on whether and when to have children” if the world is to attain agreed-upon sustainable development goals,”  she said.

Peggy Clark, the executive vice president for policy programs at the Aspen Institute, concurred. “Removing references to reproductive health from the outcome document was “an unacceptable step backward that erases decades of global commitments,” she said. “The ability to choose the number, spacing and timing of children is not a luxury. It is a basic human right, one that has already been affirmed by the world community at the Cairo and Beijing conferences.”

Dr. Carmen Barroso, Regional Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Division, pointed out that there is “no recognition [in the outcome document] of the intersection between population dynamics, reproductive health and rights and sustainable development.”

“Overall, it was disheartening to say the least to see the lack of recognition of women’s sexual and reproductive rights and the critical role women’s equality plays in ensuring sustainable development,” she said. “It bears repeating time and time again that as long as women don’t have sustainable lives, there will not be, and cannot be, global sustainability.”

Nevertheless, activists who left Rio seem more determined than ever to secure reproductive rights for all women and to draw a bright line between voluntary contraception and sustainability.

“We will keep organizing well beyond the confines of this conference. There are tens of thousands of us! Collectively we can make a lot of noise, change minds and policy. It’s kind of like our version of “occupy.” We’re going to occupy Rio beyond 20,” declared Musimbi Kanyoro, CEO and President of the Global Fund for Women.

RELATED POSTS:

Earth Summit Delegates Refuse to Recognize Women’s Reproductive Rights

At Rio+20, Women Focus on Reproductive Rights and Sustainability

Why Climate Change Matters to Women

The post Women Leave Rio+20 Motivated to Galvanize Sustainability Around Family Planning and Reproductive Rights appeared first on Big Green Purse.

  As news reports noted this morning, “The New York senator went from narrowly losing the women’s vote in Iowa to Barack Obama to swamping him in New Hampshire among females, 46 percent to 34 percent. Women had been the anchor of her support in national and regional polling for most of the past year, and she had seemed in danger of springing a leak in her major constituency. This was crucial, since females usually comprise more than half those who vote for Democrats across the country.”

I say, why stop at the voting booth? Harnessing their clout in the marketplace, women could become the most influential voice for environmental change in 2008 and beyond.

Women already spend $.85 of every dollar at the check-out counter. Just as they focused their votes in New Hampshire to send Hillary over the top, women who “vote with their dollars” to buy products and services that benefit the environment can create a groundswell of support for manufacturing that goes easy on the earth.

The New Hampshire primary has breathed new life not only into Hillary’s presidential bid. It has also cast a big bright spotlight on the power women have to create the world they want. From the ballot box to the cash register, from the presidency to the planet, women can be “the deciders” in more ways than one.

The post Women Are “The Deciders” appeared first on Big Green Purse.