Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 7, 2016

On March, 29, 2016, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and CoalSwarm released Boom and Bust 2016: Tracking The Global Coal Plant Pipeline, the second annual report examining the precarious global coal plant pipeline. New investigations detailed in the report revealed that while the coal industry continues to push for the construction of more coal-fired power plants, in reality, coal plants are increasingly sitting idle in all of the world’s four largest markets, and global coal consumption is declining drastically. This is particularly evident in China where the government recently took the first step to curb runaway coal plant investment, after the country’s coal use plunged by nearly 6.4 percent in two years.

The report’s unprecedentedly detailed mapping of new coal-fired power plants indicates the reported suspension of new permits and new construction starting in half of China’s provinces could affect 60 percent of the 460 new coal-fired units that have been permitted or are in the permitting process.

With coal use on the decline worldwide, the estimated $981 billion needed to construct the proposed coal plant pipeline represents a massive investment in potentially stranded assets — resulting in an even further downward spiral for the global coal industry. In fact, this number is more than one-and-a-half times the amount that the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates is needed to end energy poverty for the 1.2 billion people currently living without reliable energy access. On top of this staggering revelation, the report found that the additional new proposed coal capacity would result in over 130,000 more premature deaths worldwide each year from air pollution and finds that existing coal-fired power plants are responsible for a total of nearly one million premature deaths annually from coal-fired power generation.

In spite of the coal barons' continued insistence on beating a dead horse, hundreds of thousands of coal mine workers have lost their jobs anyway, (for which the capitalists have shed not a single tear--and yet the instant environmental activists oppose even the most insignificant coal facility or propose the meekest upgrade to a clean air regulation, these same capitalists screech and howl about how these "unwashed-out-of-town-jobless-hippies-on-drugs" are "threatening jobs!" (meaning profits). Meanwhile, in the wake of the continuing decline in oil prices (from a high of $114 US on the Brent index in October 2014 to as low as $27 US in the early months of 2016), more than 250,000 oil workers have also lost their jobs. Likewise, many railroad workers have been furloughed as the carriers' insistance on putting all of their eggs in the fossil fuel basket has broken far more than warranted by any omlette. Across the supply chain, steel workers, pipefitters, office workers, and just about any craft related to fossil fuel extractivism are experiencing increasingly precarious job status.

Clearly the carbon bubble has burst. It's long past time to organize a workers' led movement to seize control of the means of production and initiate a rapid and just transition to a post carbon economy that puts an end to wage slavery and brings humanity back into harmony with the Earth!

The Report

• Boom and Bust 2016: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline - By Christine Shearer, Nicole Ghio, Lauri Myllyvirta, Aiqun Yu, and Ted Nace, CoalSwarm, Greenpeace, and Sierra Club, March 2016

More Reactions

• Obama Admin About To Kneecap Own Efforts To Reform Coal Leasing - By David Roberts, Vox, April 1, 2016
• The Big Coal Bailout of 2016 - By Carl Pope, EcoWatch, March 31, 2016
• Global Coal Plant Overbuilding Could Cost $981 Billion - By Joshua S Hill, Clean Technica, March 31, 2016
• Boom & Bust: The Future of Coal-Fired Power Plants - By Climate Nexus, EcoWatch, March 30, 2016
• Nearly $1 Trillion Wasted Globally on Unnecessary New Coal Plants - By Kyla Mandel, DeSmog Blog, March 30, 2016
• New Coal Plants Rise in 2015 Despite Falling Consumption - By Sophie Yeo, Carbon Brief, March 30, 2016
• How your taxes ended up enriching coal executives who are betraying their workers - By David Roberts, Vox, March 18, 2016

Related

• Busting the Myth of the Obama Administration’s “War on Oil” - By Greg Zimmerman, Center for Western Priorities, April 1, 2016 March 31, 2016

By Anne Meador - DC Media Group, April 4, 2016

The Sheriff, District Attorney and a judge in Huntingdon County, PA may have stretched the law and infringed on individual civil rights in assisting a gas transmission company to get a wildlife sanctuary cleared for pipeline construction.

Sunoco Logistics Partners is in the midst of eminent domain proceedings in Central Pennsylvania to construct the Mariner East 2 pipeline. A court order favorable to the company, punitive bail set for activists resisting the clear-cut for the pipeline, plus allegations of endangerment and arbitrary arrests–one allegedly ordered by the District Attorney–point to local courts and law enforcement looking out for Sunoco’s interests.

A judge issued an emergency injunction on March 28 to allow Sunoco to proceed with clear-cutting three acres of the Gerhart family’s land, even though they are still pursuing litigation. Their supporters took to the trees on March 29-31 in an attempt to stop or delay the chainsaw crew. Three tree-sitters were backed up by a support team in a civil disobedience action “of last resort.”

Sheriff’s deputies arrested one of the property owners and two of the liaisons between the tree-sitters and law enforcement officers. For the activists, the judge set bail out of proportion to the misdemeanor charges. In one case, bail was set at $200,000.

The pipeline resisters say that the safety of the three tree-sitters was threatened, and law enforcement officers refused to stop crews from cutting down trees near them. With high wind speeds, there was danger of creating a wind tunnel by clearing a long path for the pipeline. “They told us the people should get down if they didn’t want to be cut down,” said Megan Holleran.

Liz Glunt was arrested when she crossed into the right-of-way to warn tree-cutters that they were getting too close. She met the $100,000 bond and was released the next day.

Property owner Ellen Gerhart says she wasn’t near the right-of-way when she was arrested, although she was alarmed that a tree had been felled so close to the one her daughter perched on that it brushed it on the way down. The deputies said she had been arrested because she was “in the danger zone.”

Alex Lotorto said he had been asked to come to the Gerharts’ and take on the role of police liaison. He assists landowners around the state who are facing pipeline easements with things such as getting attorneys to negotiate for them. He called a civil disobedience action like this one a last resort for landowners to consider only when nothing else has worked. “It’s a piece of leverage they have in these one-sided negotiations,” he said.

At the Gerharts’, he said he spent 3 1/2 hours discussing everyone’s intentions with police officers and rules and regulations pertaining to the right-of-way and wetland boundaries. His aim, he said, was to make sure that everyone remained safe. The state police, however, ran a background check on him and discovered that he had participated in protests like this one before.

Sheriff’s deputies arrested him and said they did so on the orders of the Huntingdon County District Attorney, according to Lotorto. (The District Attorney had not returned calls by press time.) Lotorto maintains that he never stood in the right-of-way, raised his voice or refused to answer a question.The official grounds for the arrest were that he was carrying a two-way radio. Lotorto says he used it only to communicate with others on the ground, and he was not involved in the tree-sit.

Press Release - Railroad Workers United, April 1, 2016

Whereas, the continued extraction and combustion of fossil fuels such as coal and oil has been scientifically proven to represent a threat to the environment and the future of the planet; and

Whereas, there is a mass movement domestically and globally to radically reduce the continued use of such fuels to power economic development; and

Whereas, other alternative energy sources – wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric–are developing rapidly and appear to be the wave of the future; and

Whereas, railroad corporations have traditionally hauled large amounts of fossil fuel–especially coal–but the future of this traffic appears uncertain or possibly even non-existent within a few decades; and

Whereas, the burden of shifting from an economy based on fossil fuels to one based upon renewal energy should not be unfairly born by workers, including railroad workers; and

Whereas, to ensure that such a transition to alternative energy does not create an economy of low paid jobs for working people-including railroad workers-whose jobs could conceivably be threatened by such a transition;

Therefore, Be it Resolved that RWU supports a “Just Transition” to an economy based upon renewal and clean energy; and

Be it further Resolved that RWU demand workers who are displaced from environmentally destructive industries be provided living wage income and benefits through public sector jobs or a universal basic income; and

Be it Further Resolved that RWU demand that workers who are displaced from environmentally destructive industries be provided with commensurate rates of pay and benefits while retraining; and

Be it Further Resolved that RWU demands that fossil fuel extraction dependent regions such as Appalachia be locations where investments of alternative energy are made to offset the economic dislocations that workers and communities would face from such a transition; and

Be it Finally Resolved that RWU call upon the rail industry and the rail unions to work together to move away from unsustainable practices - specifically the hauling of environmentally destructive commodities--and work towards expanding the railroads’ business prospects in areas such as mail, passengers, trailers and containers, renewal energy components, etc.

By Candice Bernd - Truthout, April 3, 2016, ©Truthout; reprinted with permission.

Lliam Hildebrand says he had a moment of clarity during an apprenticeship at a steel-fabricating shop in Victoria, Canada. He was learning the metal-working skills he would need to become a boilermaker, to eventually move on to work on the many steel vessels -- including furnaces, pipelines, "cokers" and "exchangers" -- that make up the oil industry's vast infrastructure in Alberta, Canada's oil sands fields.

During that apprenticeship, Hildebrand would come into the fabricating shop and see a pressure vessel on one side of the shop being made for the oil sands, and at the same time, on the other side of the shop, his own project -- a wind farm weather station. Hildebrand says he walked into the shop one morning, and the contrast between the two ventures struck him sharply. That was the moment when he realized, "We are the trade -- the building trade -- that's really going to help address [climate change]."

From then on he has felt as though he's been living two lives. Coming out of his apprenticeship, he started looking for jobs in the renewable sector, but was unable to find work. Six years ago, he reluctantly decided to apply his skills where there were plenty of jobs: the Canadian oil sands fields.

But after years of working in an industry that one top climate scientist has called "the biggest carbon bomb on the planet," Hildebrand came to realize that he was not the only oil worker in Alberta who felt "guilty about developing the infrastructure that is creating climate change."

Al Weinrub - Yes! Magazine, November 12, 2015

On September 21, Pa Dwe, a 16-year-old student at Oakland’s Street Academy, spoke out against the export of coal through the Port of Oakland to City Council members: “I’m opposed to this coal export because it will make my community in West Oakland sick. I support jobs, but not the kind of jobs that make us sick. There are clean job alternatives, like Community Choice energy, and this will be good for the health of my community. This is my generation; I want to have a healthy life.” 

Pa’s comments exemplify a growing awareness that the people of California can only successfully address climate change by breaking with fossil fuels and the state’s investor-owned utility companies.

These utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California, with the other 25 percent being supplied by public (municipal) utilities.

By creating slick, misleading ad campaigns about how green they are, the monopoly utilities have done their best to fight renewable energy programs. This often happens behind the scenes, and with the willing assistance of the scandal-ridden California Public Utilities Commission—the agency that is supposed to regulate these behemoth energy enterprises.

Back in 2002, in the wake of the Enron-induced crash of California's electricity system—which to this day has left rate-payers bailing out the utility companies— California passed AB 117, the Community Choice Aggregation law. This law allows a city, county, or any grouping of cities and counties, to “aggregate” electricity customers in their jurisdictions for the purpose of procuring electricity on their behalf. Under this arrangement, a public agency—the newly formed Community Choice program—decides where electricity will come from, while the incumbent utility delivers the electricity, maintains the electric lines, and bills customers.

The new program is a hybrid between a public agency and a private utility. The utility owns the distribution infrastructure, but the public is in the driver’s seat regarding energy decisions.

“It puts our community in control of the most important part of our electricity system,” explains Woody Hastings of the Center for Climate Protection in Sonoma County, one of the jurisdictions that has opted for a Community Choice energy program. “That means we can purchase more renewable and greenhouse-gas-free energy on the market than PG&E offered us. But more importantly, we can build renewable energy assets right here in the County. We not only get the benefits of low carbon electricity, but we get the economic benefits—the business opportunities and clean energy jobs—that come from investing in our own community.”

Sonoma County’s Community Choice customers get power that is 30 percent lower in greenhouse gases than PG&E. They also pay up to 9 percent less on average than PG&E customers. In addition, electricity net revenues go back into the community rather than into the pockets of PG&E shareholders and overpaid executives.

By Reid Frazier - The Allegheny Front, March 30, 2016

Web Editor's Note: This campaign involves members of the IWW.

As the chain saws revved nearby, Elise Gerhart was literally up a tree Tuesday protesting a pipeline slated to course through her family’s wooded property.

Gerhart, 29, of Huntingdon, and about 20 protesters coalesced around the Gerhart property as a work crew—chaperoned by local sheriff’s officers—took down trees along the property. Two protesters were arrested as the work crews cleared land for Sunoco Logistics’ Mariner East 2 pipeline, which will carry natural gas liquids from Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania to the Philadelphia area.

The company was granted a right-of-way on the Gerhart’s land by a judge through eminent domain in January. Though they are appealing that decision, the Gerharts were ordered by Huntingdon County Common Pleas Court Judge George Zanik Monday to stay clear of the chain saw crews.

Elise Gerhart said she didn’t know what else to do, so she climbed a tree early Tuesday to keep the crews away from at least one tree. 

“We’ve been forced to do this because the government isn’t protecting us,” Gerhart said, wearing a helmet and sitting on a platform wedged between branches of the tree, 40 feet in the air. “These agencies aren’t doing their job to protect the people and the environment.”

Two protesters were arrested for violating the judge’s orders. Huntingdon County District Attorney Dave Smith says the protesters were Elizabeth Glunt of Altoona and Alexander Lotorto of Milford. Bail for each was set at $100,000.

The chainsaw crew was attempting to finish the cutting by March 31, the end of tree-clearing season established by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect migratory birds and the Indiana bat.

Elise Gerhart said she would stay in the tree until the end of the week, when the tree-clearing season ends.

The Gerharts bought the property in 1982 and have participated in a state program to preserve forestland on their property.

As she watched a chainsaw crew cut down a tall tree, Ellen Gerhart, Elise’s mother, teared up.

“It’s our little part we thought we could do some good in by at least protecting three acres of Pennsylvania.” 

The Gerharts are among dozens of property owners in Pennsylvania fighting with Sunoco over Mariner East 2. The $2.5 billion pipeline travels through 2,700 properties in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Company spokesman Jeff Shields said in an e-mail that the pipeline will carry “mostly propane and butane, with some ethane.” These liquids can be used for home heating but also as the raw materials for plastics. Shields says the ethane would be exported from the Marcus Hook industrial complex in Philadelphia overseas but eventually could be “part of other petrochemical processing units” at the complex. 

“(T)oday Sunoco Pipeline proceeded under the law and continued with our tree-felling activity in Huntingdon County,” Shields said. “We will continue to work with landowners to address their individual needs and concerns, but as the court noted, protesters do not have the right to prevent Sunoco Pipeline from conducting lawful activity.”

By Hamza Hamouchene - Jadaliyya, March 23, 2016

Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco, well worth visiting. It is an important holiday destination and has been nicknamed the "door of the desert." It is also known as a famed location for international filmmaking, where films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Mummy (1999), Gladiator (2000), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) were shot, as was part of the television series Game of Thrones. That is not all what Ouarzazate has to offer as its name has recently been associated with a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”

If we were to believe the makhzen's (a term that refers to the king and the ruling elite around him) narrative, recycled without nuance or critical reflection by most media outlets in the region and in the West, the project is very good news and a big step toward reducing carbon emissions and tackling climate change. However, there is space for scepticism. One recent example of such deceptive talking points was the official celebratory announcements of a "historic" agreement at the COP21 in Paris.

My recent visit to Ouarzazate has prompted me to deconstruct the dominant narrative around this project. In particular, to scratch beneath the surface of the language of "cleanliness," "shininess," and "carbon emission cuts" in order to observe and scrutinize the materiality of solar energy. This analysis examines the project through the lens of the creation of a new commodity chain, revealing its effects as no different from the destructive mining activities taking place in southern Morocco. As Timothy Mitchell argues, analyzing this materiality of such a project can help us trace the kinds of economic and political arrangements that particular forms of energy engender or hinder (Timothy Mitchell 2011).

Last year, I wrote a critique and an assessment of the Desertec solar project, advancing arguments for why it failed and why it was misguided from the start. A similar approach is necessary to understand the political and socio-environmental implications of what is currently being dubbed the largest solar plant in the world. Actually, most of the arguments made in the Desertec piece still stand. The purpose here is not to be gratuitously harsh or cynical, but to raise a few important questions and points in order to contribute an alternative perspective to the hype surrounding existing media coverage.

What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.

By John Carico - Fifth Column, March 26, 2016

John Carico: What got you involved in social justice and labor organizing?

John Paul Wright: I got involved in social justice activism as a result of my mother going to college late in life. In my teens my mother went to the University Of Louisville and found herself. She joined an organization called The Progressive Student Leauge. I looked up to her new friends. They had organizing meetings in our home while they were fighting to have the university divest funds from companies that supported South African Apartheid. I joined a group at my high school called Youth for Peace at this time and also got involved in another group called Nuclear Free Zone of Louisville.
My union work started when I became a member of The United Transportation Union when I was hired on with the railroad. I grew up in a very union family. My father is an IBEW 369 electrical contractor and my grandmother worked at the union hall.

John Carico: What do you see as priorities in terms of securing a liberated and sustainable future?

John Paul Wright: Wow! What a question! I see as a priority a focus on human need to be at the focus of the what some are calling a just transition. Over a hundred years ago Upton Sinclair said this in his book Profits of Religion…

What I would like to say to young radicals–if there is any way to say it without seeming a prig–is that in choosing their own path through life, they will need not merely enthusiasm and radical fervor, but wisdom and judgment and hard study.

So, to move to a sustainable future, I think we as a people are going to need to study what has worked from the many movements and social shifts of the past. I think many times we as a people are looking for “new” ways to approach very complex issues, when many times there are plenty of examples of successes that can be drawn upon. Specifically, it is my experience in many a situation, basic communication skills seem to be where the problem lies when folks start to enter very difficult territory. For years language and culture has been born at the foot of a capitalist model that has taught people how to fight and take sides. Our media, that should be ours, has created a myth of who we are, our history has been re-written for profit and people make laws and decisions based on moral codes that are drawn from corporate entity myth makers. Media is owned by very large empires that have a culture package to sell… so I guess what I am trying to say is a liberated future depends on a very serious re-settling of how we see ourselves as a people. As inhabitants of a planet, members of communities, and free thinking compassionate individuals who have a real need of each other to exist. Especially in these days as the machine get closer and closer to being able to wage war by drones and computer driven models.

John Carico: What are some of your favorite labor stories?

John Paul Wright: The story of Joe Hill because of how much myth it has with it. There are so many stories about who Joe was as a person. What I like about his story is how important he really was to the process of culture and the I.W.W. Joe Hill was a journalist, organizer and songwriter. His skills at organizing are mostly myth or, one would have to do extensive research into the drives that he worked on. But his music is a very big insight to what he was thinking back in the 1910s. There were many writers that were writing the Socialist/Communist literature such as Upton Sinclair and Eugene V. Debs. We can only imagine how connected as people they really were, but their muckraking style was very similar. I also think Upton Sinclair’s EPIC (End Poverty In California) campaign is something very interesting.

As for labor issues today, without a doubt, the story about CORE (caucus of rank and file educators) and the Chicago Teachers Union rise of Karen Lewis, is one of the greatest labor stories of my lifetime. Especially as someone who has been very involved in many reform movements. What Labor Notes Magazine has done to keep a more radical element to the labor movement alive is nothing to shake a stick at either.

By Eric K. Arnold - Reimagine, March 2016

Coal, once the staple of American industrial production, may be on its last legs. With domestic production showing a long-term decline, the fossil fuel’s days appear to be numbered.

According to the most recent annual report [1] of the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2013, U.S. coal production fell below two billion short tons for the first time in two decades; coal mining capacity decreased, as did the average number of coal mine employees, the average sales price of coal, and total U.S. coal stocks. In April of 2015, the EIA projected coal would hit a 28-year low, reflecting significant drops in domestic demand and exports. In August, Goldman Sachs divested itself of its coal holdings; a month later, it issued a gloomy forecast[2] for coal’s future, stating, “the industry does not require new investment,” dashing hopes for a miraculous upturn in the coal market. A report[3] by the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) noted that 26 domestic coal companies have recently gone into bankruptcy proceedings; and coal’s value on the Dow Jones index dropped by 76 percent between 2009-14 (a period when the overall Dow index went up 69 percent).

According to CTI, domestic energy generation has remained flat for the past decade but energy sources have shifted: coal and oil are down, but natural gas and renewable energy are up. America’s largest coal producers are recording annual losses in the billions of dollars, while Chinese coal demand has slumped and new environmental regulations[4] aimed at significantly reducing air pollution and increasing wind and solar consumption are being phased in by the Chinese government. Additionally, all federal coal leasing is currently under moratorium until a comprehensive review can be completed. As the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted[5] in its online magazine, OnEarth, “it would be difficult to overstate the industry’s current distress.”

This is scary news for the coal industry, yet a welcome announcement for environmentalists who have waged national campaigns against coal for decades. These desperate times for coal producers have led to desperate measures. Their last hope, it would seem, is to increase coal’s export capacity by transporting the black gunk through West Coast ports. But even there the pro-coal forces have met with unexpected resistance, as city after city in Oregon and Washington have mounted grassroots campaigns to deliver an emphatic message: “Say no to coal.”

By Stefania Barca - Jacobin, March 18, 2016

Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution?

I am convinced this social agent could be, and indeed must be, the global working class. Yet to play this role, the working class must develop an emancipatory ecological class consciousness.

Fortunately, history is rife with examples of this kind of green-red synthesis — labor environmentalism is as old as the trade union movement.

For much of its existence, labor environmentalism focused on the workplace and the living environment of working-class communities, linking occupational health and safety with the protection of public and environmental health.

In the 1990s, labor environmentalism began embracing the concepts of “sustainable development” and the “green economy.” More recently, as climate change has intensified, “just transition” (JT) has become the idea du jour. JT is based on the notion that workers shouldn’t bear the brunt of the shift to a low-carbon economy, whether in the form of job losses or destabilized local communities.

To this end, blue-collar unions — particularly those in heavy industry, transport, and energy — have forged so-called blue-green alliances with environmental groups across the globe. These convergences demonstrate a growing consensus around the need to tackle climate change, advancing union involvement and sustainability as the means to that end.

Yet important cleavages exist within this consensus, especially when it comes to the just transition. Some groups simply push for job creation in a greened economy. Others, refusing to abide market solutions, have adopted a radical critique of capitalism.

How this schism shakes out will decide whether labor unwittingly bolsters capital — or confronts capital and climate change.