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Trillions of dollars of investments are being taken out of carbon-intensive companies. Governments must now take notice

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This campaign was years in the making, but Donald Trump's election and the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord spurred the local activism that led to this important victory.

Petro-states are different from other countries because the fates of their governing institutions are so deeply woven into the boom-and-bust cycles of the international petroleum economy. Now, one thing is finally clear: the business model for these corporatized states is busted. The most basic assumption behind their operation -- that global oil demand will continue to outpace world petroleum supplies and ensure high prices into the foreseeable future -- no longer holds

The call to Break Free from Fossil Fuels envisioned "tens of thousands of people around the world rising up" to take back control of their own destiny; "sitting down" to "block the business of government and industry that threaten our future"; conducting "peaceful defense of our right to clean energy." That's just what happened.

Americans have often been told that meeting climate targets is impossible without threatening jobs and costing a fortune. But the Climate, Jobs, and Justice Project shows that the opposite is true. The Clean Energy Future represents a pathway away from climate destruction that is far better for workers and consumers than our current economy based on fossil fuels.

What if we defined ourselves – to the movement, the public, and the courts – not as criminals but as law-enforcers trying to halt governments and corporations from committing the greatest crime in human history?

Last year was the second-warmest on record in the continental United States. December was a U.S. record-breaker for heat and also precipitation. 2015 will prove to be the hottest year on record globally. Give Earth a few million years and it'll do fine. If climate change does its worst, life, in some fashion, will undoubtedly survive and someday once again flourish, but the environment will cease to exist in any time span that is meaningful to us.

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“We’ve now got tangible figures of the quantities and locations of fossil fuels that should remain unused in trying to keep within the 2C temperature limit,” said Christophe McGlade, at University College London (UCL), and who led the new research published in the journal Nature.