From November 11th to 22nd, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for the Climate, John Podesta, will be traveling to the Conference of the Parties, better known as COP for its 29th year. COP is supposedly an event for international leaders to come together and tackle the existential threat of the climate crisis. But when U.S. leaders refuse to acknowledge the U.S. military as the #1 institutional polluter in the world, conferences like these become meaningless. Tell John Podesta that he is killing us all by trying to bury a principal cause of the climate crisis that must not stay buried.
We, the undersigned, are writing with great concern for all living things on the planet. While you are empowered to represent us, the people of the world, you come to COP with blood on your hands.
Your former lobbying organization, the Podesta Group, has represented Lockheed Martin, a weapons company that manufactured rockets for the state of Israel as it bombs Gaza to rubble and burns hospital patients alive.
Meanwhile, the weapons created by Lockheed Martin have been used by the U.S. military to continue unleashing millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. U.S. military bases around the world continue to leak toxic PFAS chemicals into the soil. The first two months of the genocide in Gaza alone produced more emissions than 20 countries combined.
The administration you represent is responsible for one of the largest Pentagon budgets in history…you represent one of the largest funders of ecocide in history.
How can you parade the U.S.’s “diplomacy” around the world and to COP, urging other countries to do more while you refuse to even acknowledge the role of the Pentagon as the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world?
You cannot continue pretending to care about the climate crisis if you don’t urge your own administration to:
- Implement an arms embargo to stop the U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza.
- End the war in Ukraine through diplomacy instead of blowing up pipelines.
- End sanctions on Venezuela that create a reliance on fossil fuels for economic survival.
- End the sanctions on Cuba that prevent their access to renewable energy and resilient seeds to combat the flooding that we cause.
- Stop the escalation on China that restricts their green energy plans.
- Close military bases unleashing dangerous chemicals into the soil and occupying stolen land.
- Have the U.S. pay its fair share to countries in the Global South that have borne the brunt of the climate crisis.