Fighting climate chaos, part 1 | Column

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 8, 2026

By Jeff Johnson

Past president of the Washington State Labor Council, co-president of the Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action and president of the SJI Farmers Market

We are in a state of climate emergency. So said Antonio Guterres following the release in March of the 2025 State of the Global Climate by the World Meteorological Organization. According to the report, a key climate indicator, the Earth Energy Imbalance, which measures the gap between the sun’s energy (heat) absorbed by the Earth and the energy released by the Earth, is the highest on record. The culprit is greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which prevent heat from escaping the Earth’s atmosphere.

The results, Guterres says, “are written into the daily lives of families struggling as droughts and storms drive up food prices, in workers pushed to the brink by extreme heat, in farmers watching crops wither, and communities and homes swept away by floods.”

Of course, we saw this with our own eyes last July in the reported deaths of 135 in the flooding in Texas; in the Eaton and Palisades fires in California resulting in losses of over $60 billion and the displacement of 260,000 people; and in Typhoon Tino in the Philippines causing a reported 235 deaths and over a half million people displaced from their homes.

What we don’t so readily see is that over 90% of the heat that is trapped heats the oceans. This is leading to profound degradation of marine ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, reduction of the ocean carbon sink, sea-level rise, groundwater salinization, food and water insecurity, and damage to coastal infrastructure and the livelihoods of many communities.

So, are we just doomed? No! But the earth’s desperate clarion-call requires us to come together as community, faith, labor, senior, youth and elected leaders to act both thoughtfully and urgently. This is no time for small changes. It is time to take extraordinary action to address this existential crisis.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that we need to figure out, and quickly, how to leave fossil fuels in the ground; we need to make systemic investments in clean renewable energy sources; we need to electrify our transportation system; we need to practice macro level regenerative organic agriculture; we need to invest in systemic energy retrofits to public and private buildings; we need to address the issues of food and water insecurity; and to recognize that we need a humane plan to address the growing climate refugee crisis.

Of course, bad pun intended, we need to “recognize the windmill in the room.” We must recognize that we face serious market forces and political challenges to making transformative change. Since the Paris Climate Accord was signed in January 2016, the financial industry has invested nearly $ 8 trillion in the fossil fuel industry (gas, oil and coal) — over $ 3 trillion in new fossil fuel infrastructure and exploration. In December 2024, one month prior to Trump’s inauguration, six major U.S. banks (JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) withdrew from the United Nations-sponsored net zero banking alliance.

The financial industry has doubled down on financing climate chaos. On the political front, President Trump hates windmills. He also continues to claim climate change is a hoax. And to effectuate his campaign slogan “drill, baby, drill,” he has withdrawn the Unitee States from the Paris Climate Accords (again), removed any mention of climate change from federal agencies, canceled all federal climate reporting and financing, repealed Biden-era environmental regulations, canceled funding for two previously approved off-shore wind projects and ordered the Department of State to run military facilities on coal power. No friend of change here.

These challenges, while daunting, are not determinative. In the near term, we need to look to community-, state- and regional-level efforts to organize around. In a follow-up article, I will look to the Washington State Investment Board’s $8 billion investments in fossil fuels (including $2.6 billion in coal) and what it would take to divest this portfolio from these assets and reinvest the money in “life”-affirming assets.