Gov. Brown: Millions Suffering Because of Climate Change

We want to live with dignity.

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Elizabeth Renzetti quotes author George Marshall as saying, “The view held by every expert I spoke to is that we still have not found a way to effectively engage our emotional brain in climate change”.

“If we project this to the future… what kind of horizon can they look towards”, he asked.

Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu of New Orleans told Catholic News Service, “There is a vivid recognition that mayors are key players in changing how policies that have before now been spoken about across nations are actually applied on the streets of the cities”.

“It was a profound experience”, she said. During the first eight months of her pregnancy, she said, she was compelled to continue acting as a prostitute.

The mayor and town council members in Madrid walk and use public transport, according to Manuela Carmena, the mayor of Spain’s capital.

With global action on climate change stalled for the past two decades, the emphasis of today’s meeting on cities made ideal sense to Nils Moe, managing director of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, a US nonprofit that helped organize a delegation of mayors to the Vatican.

A fellow Mexican, Karla Jacinto, described how she was physically and sexually abused by her family and forced into prostitution between the ages of 12 and 17.

“You’re not worth more than me just because you have money”, she told the politicians. “I thought I was just an object that was used and thrown away”. This will likely prove important come September, when Francis is scheduled to address both the United Nations and a joint session of Congress. By that point it also expects to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent over 2007 levels.

He added that thanks to federal and state credits, San Francisco’s fuel costs will actually be reduced as a result.

Mayors attending the conference come from cities in all continents, including many Olympic bidding and hosting cities.

As per the organizers of the event, many American politicians were invited, but the ones who have accepted the request are most Democrats.

“We have to respond, and if we don’t the world will suffer, we will all suffer”, Brown said.

There also were commitments on human slavery.

“We can’t say that the person is here, and the care for the environment is there”, he explained in Spanish during his brief appearance Tuesday to salute the conference attendees. Some of their families will be “pushed into the dark dungeons of slavery”, Chammany said.

Pope Francis called the Vatican summit of mayors to put global warming and human slavery at the top of their national leaders’ agendas.

Others took the opportunity to announce ambitious climate actions. And he urged the mayors sitting in front of him Tuesday to pay increasing attention to the problem of environmental destruction. “Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever”.

Hollande warned that these targets are not sufficient to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Robertson says Vancouver is also among a group of cities focused on becoming 100 per cent renewable and eliminating the use of fossil fuels.

“I have great hopes for the Paris summit in December”, he said.

“The [pope’s] encyclical is not a call to arms”, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio said in an address to the conference. California has enacted the toughest greenhouse gas emissions standards in North America.

“It’s not possible that it still exists, that we remain blind” to the issue of modern slavery, said Ana Laura Pérez Jaimes, who spent five years chained up and forced to work 20 hours a day in Mexico.

Birmingham Mayor William Bell had a very personal reason for being at the Vatican’s conference on climate change and human slavery. Pope Francis last month released an environmental encyclical that denounced what he calls a fossil fuel-based world economy that exploits the poor and destroys the Earth.

Mayors from around the world declared Tuesday that climate change is real, man-made and must be stopped as a matter of moral imperative, gathering at the Vatican to announce new measures to fight global warming and bask in Pope Francis’ ecological star power.