The 1975, Jaden Smith, Billie Eilish & More Artists Fiercely Fighting Climate Change

Billboard - Kirsten Spruch

The 1975
Mara Palena

 Climate change isn’t an easy thing to write a song about, unless you’re into really depressing lyrics... And who needs those bad vibes? But there are some artists who are accepting the cold hard truth and stepping up to make a difference, whether it’s through music, donations or organizations. The most important thing is that they’re using their platform to raise awareness among their many followers.
The 1975 recently did this with their newest self-titled song from their upcoming 2020 album Notes On a Conditional Form, for which they enlisted teen activist Greta Thunberg, who gives a speech urging the world to “wake up” over the band's instrumentation. Jaden Smith has made it his goal to help with the Flint water crisis and even founded his own sustainable water company, Just Water. Additionally, Lil Dicky enlisted every A-lister there is to be featured on his track and animated music video for “Earth,” in hopes of garnering attention of fans everywhere.
Billboard rounded up the artists who are fighting to raise awareness.

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The 1975

“We are right now in the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis,” Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg says over a landscape of twinkling synths. “We need to call it what it is: an emergency.” The cut, released last month, comes from the band’s forthcoming 2020 album Notes on a Conditional Form and follows the pattern of all their previously released self-titled opening tracks. Thunberg’s speech is so clear and straight-forward and has such a deep sense of urgency, it’s hard to listen to it and not feel the need to take action.

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Jaden Smith


Smith is the founder of Just Water. The water company began in 2015, but Smith had been stuck on the idea since the young age of 11, after seeing plastic floating in the ocean while surfing. It’s not purified tap water, which actually takes more energy; it’s spring water that is pumped from Upstate New York, a reliably plentiful source. Eighty-two percent of every bottle is plant-derived, resulting in a 74% reduction in carbon emissions compared to a standard water bottle.
Additionally, Smith made a huge contribution to the serious Flint water crisis in Michigan, by donating a mobile water filtration system in Ellen DeGeneres’ name. “This actual box is gonna be in Flint providing clean water for people on pretty much a weekly basis,” he explained when he appeared on the show.

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Billie Eilish


In a recent interview with Netherlands radio station 3FM, around the 4:54 mark, Eilish revealed that the line, “Man is such a fool, why are we saving him?” from her song “All the Good Girls Go to Hell” is actually about mankind and global warming. “Why are we working so hard to save mankind when we should really be out here saving the planet, saving the world, saving animals?” Eilish explained. “We are literally the flu and the fucking world is this beautiful place that we’re ruining. Obviously that song is however you want it to be, but a lot of it is about global warming and the world being ruined by us.”
She went on to explain that while she’s guilty of using some products that aren’t good for the environment, she has always used metal straws and has never eaten meat her whole life.

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Lil Dicky


Talk about using your fame for good. The rapper/environmentalist decided to round up almost every celebrity on Earth and then write a song about it. Actually called “Earth,” the song features Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Halsey, Zac Brown, Brendon Urie, Hailee Steinfeld, Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, Adam Levine, Shawn Mendes, Charlie Puth, Sia, Miley Cyrus, Lil Jon, Rita Ora, Miguel, Katy Perry, Lil Yachty, Ed Sheeran, Meghan Trainor, Joel Embiid, Tory Lanez, John Legend, Backstreet Boys, Bad Bunny, Psy and Kris Wu... phew! It also came with an enchanting animated video that has already reached more than 180 million views on YouTube alone, so needless to say, he succeeded in reaching a large group of people.

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Grimes

Grimes has been teasing her highly anticipated follow-up to 2015’s Art Angels for quite some time and here’s what we know so far: It’s called Miss_Anthropocene which, according to the artist via an Instagram post, “is a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on the Earth’s Geology and ecosystems including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.”
She continued to explain: “Climate change is something I’m only ever confronted with in a sad/ guilty way…. Reading news and what not… so my goal is to make climate change fun (lol..??)…. uhhh… (I mean, everybody loves a good villain... re: the joker, Queen Beryl).. so maybe it’ll be a bit easier to look at if it can exist as a character and not just abstract doom.”

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Beyoncé

Watch: Beyoncé's heartfelt message on natural disasters & climate change. #HandInHand pic.twitter.com/B0McFh21Dt

— BEYONCÉ LEGION (@BeyLegion) September 13, 2017

Beyoncé advocated for the environment back in 2017, when she filmed a heartfelt message in the wake of natural disasters in India, Mexico, the Caribbean Islands and the U.S. for the Hand in Hand Telethon. “Natural disasters take precious life, do massive damage, and forever change lives,” she said. “The effects of climate change are playing out around the world every day.”

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Jack Johnson

Happy #WorldOceansDay! In honor of the non-profits, agencies & volunteers working for healthy oceans, Jack is sharing this @marinesanctuary video highlighting #Papahānaumokuākea. #TogetherWeCan🌊 work to reduce plastic pollution. https://t.co/eFf4NIDglm

— Jack Johnson (@jackjohnson) June 8, 2019

Johnson does way more than just make surf music and ride waves -- he’s been a strong activist on more than one occasion. Here are just a few of the things he’s supported in the past: Bring Your Own Bottle for plastic-free July, World Oceans Day and World Environment Day, among many other movements.

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Sean Paul, Sir Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow & more


Back in 2015, several artists came together to record the song and video “Love Song to the Earth.” Other artists who were included are Jon Bon Jovi, Fergie, Colbie Caillat, Natasha Bedingfield, Leona Lewis, Johnny Rzeznik, Krewella, Angelique Kidjo (a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador), Kelsea Ballerini, Nicole Scherzinger, the late Christina Grimmie, Victoria Justice and Q’Orianka Kilcher. “Looking down from up on the moon/ It's a tiny blue marble/ Who'd have thought the ground we stand on/ Could be so fragile,” they sing.

Links

• How Rising Sea Levels Erase Culture
• Why Science Needs The Humanities To Solve Climate Change
• Political Change Is The First Step To Stopping The Climate Crisis
• How Climate Anxiety Is Changing The Face Of Australian Fiction
• Pink Floyd's David Gilmour Auctions Guitars For A$31 Million To Fight Climate Change
• 'Cartoons For Future': Artists React To The Climate Crisis
• Here There Be Monsters (Made Of Coal, Plastic And Pesticides)
• It Looks Like Banksy Just Created An Extinction Rebellion Mural

Brazil's Climate Change Sceptic Government Says Warnings About The Fires Consuming The Amazon Are 'Sensationalist,' 'Hysterical,' And 'Misleading'

Business Insider - Sinéad Baker

A composite image showing fires in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state in August and Brazilian President Jail Bolsonaro in January 2019. AP/EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images/Business Insider

Key Points Brazil’s government is calling warnings about the record fires in the Amazon “sensationalist,” and claiming the fires are not an international problem. Brazil’s government has ministers that reject climate change, and its president, Jair Bolsonaro, has advocated using the rainforest for industrial activity. The equivalent of three football pitches worth of the Amazon is currently burning every minute, spurring international leaders to call for actions to save the rainforest. But Bolsonaro called the fires an “internal matter for Brazil and other Amazonian countries,” and rebuked calls from French President Emmanuel Macron for the issue to be discussed at this weekend’s G7 summit. Other Brazilian officials are also dismissing concerns about the Amazon, but experts and activists say the government has allowed the destruction of large chunks of the rainforest for activities like logging and farming.

Brazil’s government is downplaying the record number of fires that have ripped through the Amazon this year, calling international warnings about the damage to the rainforest “sensationalist,” and “hysterical and misleading.”
The government is painting itself as the subject of an international smear campaign as activists and political leaders around the world urge action and decry state policies that have allowed increased clearing of the forest for farming and logging, which has likely been the source of many of the fires.
Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, accused French President Emmanuel Macron of trying to “make personal political gains in an internal matter” after the French leader called the fires an “international crisis.”
Macron called on Thursday for the fires to be discussed at the G7 summit of world leaders, which begins on Saturday.
“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days! #ActForTheAmazon,” he tweeted.
“I regret that Macron seeks to make personal political gains in an internal matter for Brazil and other Amazonian countries. The sensationalist tone he used does nothing to solve the problem,” Bolsonaro tweeted in reply.
Macron received support from Canada’s Justin Trudeau. But he may not ultimately get support from US President Donald Trump or other leaders like the UK’s Boris Johnson at the G7.
Bolsonaro also accused Macron of having a “colonialist mentality” for suggesting that the issue be discussed at the G7. Neither Brazil, nor other Amazonian nations like Colombia and Peru are members of the group.

Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Humaita, Amazonas State, Brazil on August 17. Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Humaita, Amazonas State, Brazil on August 14. Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Bolsonaro expressed frustration with other countries’ concern about the fires during a Facebook live on Thursday.
“These countries that send money here, they don’t send it out of charity … They send it with the aim of interfering with our sovereignty,” he said, Reuters reported.
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations has also called for action to save the Amazon, while Ireland’s prime minister said he will try and block a trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur, a South American trade bloc, if Brazil does not take action to save the Amazon.
Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo said: “Instead of spreading outrageous lies or denying the scale of deforestation taking place, we urge the President to take immediate action to halt the progress of these fires.”
INPE, Brazil’s space research centre, has detected more than 74,000 fires so far in 2019 – almost double the number recorded in all of 2018.

An aerial view shows a deforested plot of the Amazon near Porto Velho. Reuters

Bolsonaro’s response, and his insistence that the fires raging across the source of 20% of the world’s oxygen is a matter for only Brazil and other Amazonian countries, has been mirrored by other Brazilian officials.

Filipe Martins, one of Bolsonaro’s advisors, said the Amazon would be saved by Brazil and not “the empty, hysterical and misleading rhetoric of the mainstream media, transnational bureaucrats and NGOs,” Sky News reported.
Onyx Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, accused European countries of exaggerating the issue to harm Brazil’s commercial interests.
“There is deforestation in Brazil, yes, but not at the rate and level that they say,” he said, according to The Associated Press, which cited Brazilian news website globo.com.
In May, Bolsonaro fired the head of INPE, Ricardo Galvao, saying that the institution had exaggerated the extent of deforestation in the Amazon, and calling one of its reports a “lie.”
“We cannot accept sensationalism, or the disclosure of inaccurate numbers that cause great damage to Brazil’s image,” Bolsonaro said at the time.

Members of Suriname indigenous tribes pray for the protection of the Amazon and Brazilian indigenous tribes on August 9, 2019. REUTERS/Ranu Abhelakh

Despite his protestations, Bolsonaro said that Brazil does not have the resources to fight the fires itself.
“The Amazon is bigger than Europe, how will you fight criminal fires in such an area,” he told reporters on Thursday, according to Reuters. “We do not have the resources for that.”
Some European countries had decided to withhold money meant to help protect the Brazilian rainforests as Brazil’s leadership appeared uncommitted to the project, according to the AP.
The fires have put a new spotlight on Bolsonaro’s policies after he pushed the opening of the rainforest for industrial activities like logging and farming.

A tract of Amazon jungle burns as it is being cleared by loggers and farmers in Novo Airao, Amazonas state, Brazil August 21, 2019. Bruno Kelly/Reuters

Alberto Setzer, a senior scientist at Brazil’s INPEtold CNN that about 99% of fires in the Amazon start by humans actions, “either on purpose or by accident,” and that the fires are often used to clear the land for industry.
Bolsonaro has also repeatedly pushed an evidence-free theory that NGOs have started the fires in order to make Brazil look bad.
On Thursday, he acknowledged that farmers may be starting fires.

Links

• The blazes in the Amazon are so big they can be seen from space. One map shows the alarming scale of the fires.
  
• The ‘lungs of the planet’ are burning at a record rate. If too much of the Amazon disappears, that ‘dieback’ could turn the land into a savannah.
  
• Amazon fires created a smoke eclipse in the skies above Brazil’s largest city, 2,000 miles away
  
• Brazil’s president is blaming farmers clearing land for the fires raging through the Amazon. Here’s how big Brazil’s farming industry really is.
  
• Brazil’s president baselessly claimed that NGOs set the Amazon on fire on purpose to make him look bad
  
• 99% of the fires in the Amazon rainforest were started by humans, one expert says – here’s why they have gotten so out of control
• Fires in the Amazon could be part of a doomsday scenario that sees the rainforest spewing carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more
• Here’s what you can do to help the burning, ravaged Amazon rainforest
• The Amazon is losing about 3 football fields’ worth of rainforest per minute

Scientists And Economists Are Warning The World's Governments That Climate Change Will Destroy Capitalism As We Know It

Business Insider - Ruqayyah Moynihan | Alberto R. Aguiar

A protester attends a demonstration under the banner "Protect the climate - stop coal" two days before the start of the COP 23 UN Climate Change Conference hosted by Fiji but held in Bonn, Germany November 4, 2017. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

According to a recent report by scientists at BIOS — an independent, multidisciplinary research unit launched in Helsinki in 2015 — there isn't much time left before we see the fall of capitalism as we know it today.
One economist at the Finnish unit, Paavo Järvensivu, told the BBC that "capitalism as we know it has, until now, depended on cheap energy".
Now, however, things may have to change.
According to Järvensivu, cheap energy has been the driver behind most of the growth we've seen in the past 200 years.
According to the expert, however, the era of cheap energy is coming to an end.
If we no longer have cheap energy, we can no longer sustain the sort of capitalism we've enjoyed thus far.

Markets are unable to find a solution to the problem
According to Järvensivu, the incidence of climate change is indisputable.
Due to the occurrence of climate change, many markets and states are turning their sights to energies that — for the time being — require more effort to produce and, yet, are less efficient.
Considerable effort will be needed to entirely cut out relationship and dependence on fossil fuels.
The BIOS Report indicates that global markets aren't able to provide solutions to the problem — those already put forward haven't been adequate to effectively tackle the issue.
For this reason, the report has called on nations to play a more prominent role in the battle against climate change, rather than just market - and this report isn't the first to endorse the notion that a number of those economic models currently dominating the geopolitical scene were put forward at points during which energy was in abundance.
They're currently not applicable the current upheaval we're experiencing.

We live in a scenario similar to that of the end of World War II
Järvensivu has detailed in the BBC report that we live in a period similar to that of Europe at the end of the Second World War.
"In the post-World War II period, societies rebuilt their infrastructures and practices; now we need something similar so that our economies and practices can operate without fossil fuels.

Capitalism as we know it has depended on cheap energy, according to economist Paavo Järvensivu. Shutterstock

The scientist considers that we have a margin of up to 30 years for this, although in any case it can be understood as an optimistic period that can only be reduced to 15 years."We have to start to see what the concrete tasks are: for example, how we are going to rebuild our energy systems and transport systems. Governments must find out how to do it and how to organize the economy," says the BIOS spokesman.

As a result of climate change, many markets are having to turn their sights to other less efficient energies. Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

"The result must be production and consumption that provide decent opportunities for a good life, while drastically reducing the burden on natural ecosystems.
In early August, the UN warned that we will eventually need to alter our dietary habits and rate of meat consumption in order to reduce climate change.
BIOS' report also suggested that "dairy products and meat should largely give way to plant-based diets".
The report also explained that states and governments are the only legitimate agencies with the power and legitimacy to effectively put these changes into motion.

Järvensivu and the BIOS Report also suggested that "dairy products and meat should largely give way to plant-based diets". @fujifab12 / Instagram

When discussing the fact that a number of deniers of climate change have risen to power — including many members of the Trump administration — Järvensivu was quite clear on his stance.
"There has been increased airtime for populist movements offering 'easy' solutions," he explained, "which, in reality, are not easy solutions at all."
According to the economist, the rising prominence of governments denying climate change is, in part, down to the fact that "progressive parties haven't really been able to provide adequate answers on how to solve issues related to inequality as well as climate change."

Links

• These are the 17 countries that have done the most to limit global warming since 2017
• The UN has warned that we only have 12 years to curb climate change
• Harvard scientists want to limit how much sunlight reaches the Earth's surface in order to curb global warming
• Stanford researchers say we could curb the effects of climate change by turning methane into carbon dioxide
• This Spanish company found a way to produce fuel without emitting CO2 — and it's made of sewage