Funding from CREDO Mobile powers Green America’s fight for our climate

The climate news keeps getting worse. Recently, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization reported that global temperatures will surge past the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels within 5 years. Not 50 years, not 15 years, not the year 2100. We’ve got 5 years.

And then what? Beyond 1.5 degrees lies “uncharted territory,” the UN warned, with “far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment.”

Our condition is dire and it is urgent that all possible solutions be applied. One of them is capitalism: supply and demand. It’s the system that got us into this mess and it can help us get out. We, as consumers, must demand that corporations pursue long-term sustainability, not short-term, climate-killing profit and growth.

This is why we at CREDO Mobile support Green America, which harnesses economic power—the strength of consumers, investors, businesses and the marketplace—to create a socially just and environmentally sustainable society.

In April, CREDO mobile customers and community members voted to support Green America’s mission to take economic action for the planet and achieve a world where all people have enough, where all communities are healthy and safe, and where the abundance of the Earth is preserved for all the generations to come.

Backed by our donation, Green America has recently made real progress toward cooling our climate. Here’s a brief report from our friends at Green America describing the ways that our donation is making a difference.

Recent victories

Green America has scored a number of wins recently. They’re important in and of themselves and, in the big picture, they’re vital to demonstrating that economic action by consumers can achieve real results for our planet.

Green America’s Cool It campaign urges major supermarket chains to transition away from refrigeration systems powered by super-polluting, super-warming hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and better manage leaking systems. In September, Kroger, the latest target of the Cool It campaign, publicly committed to rolling out infrared leak-detection in all its stores by 2024. Although there is more to be done to get Kroger to move away from HFCs altogether, this announcement shows that the Cool It campaign is helping Kroger begin to understand the importance of refrigerant management as a part of its overall sustainability goals.

In addition to this victory, Green America has made progress on a number of other fronts since the CREDO Mobile grant award.

• The group secured over 20,000 signatures on its #CleanUpWireless petition, which urges the major telecommunications companies to accelerate their transitions to renewable energy. That’s twice the number of signatures hoped for when the campaign was launched.
• Promoted the proxy voting season and taught Green America audiences how to participate in investor activism through the shareholder resolution process.
• Registered thousands more regenerative gardens through the Climate Victory Gardens campaign, which now stands at over 21,000 gardens.
• Hosted four free webinars, which educated over 4,000 people about gardening using soil-regeneration practices.
• Developed, published and sent two editions of Green American magazine and the annual issue of Your Green Life to Green America members.

New initiatives

Since receiving its donation from CREDO Mobile, Green America has launched a campaign to tell the truth about biomass energy as part of its Climate Action & Clean Energy Program. Biomass energy, also known as bioenergy, is the burning of wood pellets to produce electricity. Though wood pellet production requires cutting down millions of trees and wood pellets release more carbon than coal when burned, biomass production is often marketed as “clean” or “green” energy. To make matters worse, polluting wood pellet plants are most often located near environmental justice communities in the Southeast, so countering the rise of biomass is a climate justice priority.

Green America has teamed with Dogwood Alliance and local community activists throughout the Southeast to challenge the greenwashing perpetuated by the biomass industry and bring national attention to the harm caused by wood pellet production. Already, it has engaged 7,000 of its members in the campaign through a petition urging Enviva, the world’s largest producer of biomass wood pellets, to preserve forests and protect environmental justice communities from the harm caused by its processes. The petition is scheduled for submission to Enviva by the end of October, when it should have 15,000 total signatures.

If you’d like to learn more or get involved with Green America, please visit GreenAmerica.org. And follow Green America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.