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Planet Citizens

Chief Lyons, Dennis Kucinich, Leonardo DiCaprio

Marching in 2015 for the Common Good

Chief Oren Lyons also speaks up to the Associated Press before the 2021 Earth Climate Summit

• https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-technology-environment-europe-98e55f2c64aa6d3dc76a5fc64f8d4ba2

AP / World leaders have been meeting for 29 years to try to curb global warming, and in that time Earth has become a much hotter and deadlier planet.

Trillions of tons of ice have disappeared over that period, the burning of fossil fuels has spewed billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the air, and hundreds of thousands of people have died from heat and other weather disasters stoked by climate change, statistics show.

When more than 100 world leaders descended on Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for an Earth Summit to discuss global warming and other environmental issues, there was “a huge feeling of well-being, of being able to do something. There was hope really,” said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, one of the representatives for Native Americans at the summit.

Now, the 91-year-old activist said, that hope has been smothered: “The ice is melting. ... Everything is bad. ... Thirty years of degradation.”

Scientists say this is happening because of heat-trapping gases. Carbon dioxide levels have increased 17% from 353 parts per million in September 1992 to 413 in September 2021, according to NOAA. The agency’s annual greenhouse gas index, which charts six gases and weights them according to how much heat they trap, rose almost 20% since 1992.

From 1993 to 2019, the world put more than 885 billion tons (803 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air from the burning of fossil fuels and making of cement, according to the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who track emissions.

A pessimistic Lyons, the Native American activist, said, “I would say this meeting in Glasgow is the last shot.”

Listen to Chief Lyons @GreenPolicy360

• Seventh Generation / https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Seventh_Generation

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