Big Green

By Jim Driscoll - CounterPunch, September 12, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

On Sunday, September 21, in NYC, I hope to attend my last big demonstration to save the climate.

Like many long-time social-change activists, I believe that real change depends not on big demonstrations, but on building lasting, personal relationships with individual human beings.

Indeed, more and more of us have come to believe that permanently-staffed, hierarchical organizations, like those calling for this demonstration, actually prevent social change. The pressure to raise funds and follow the direction of wealthy families and their foundations inevitably forces the leaders of such organizations to compromise the movement’s mission. Lower-level staff makes similar compromises to keep their jobs.

Indeed, some of us believe that the permanently-staffed, hierarchical “progressive movement,” whether intentionally or not,  serves as a front for the Democratic Party and diverts our activism into the bottomless pit of elections-for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder. Unfortunately, this demonstration looks like more of the same, timed to excite activists for the upcoming elections.

At a more micro level, demonstrations  dis-empower their participants. That same in-group of funders and their chosen friends who initiate or encourage these demonstrations will decide, at least in general terms, on the official demands and acceptable speakers. In this case, the March initiators decided NOT to make any specific demands, thus allowing corporate groups to participate and politicians to interpret the turnout as they choose. Much like their prototypes in the Nazi era, such demonstrations will ask participants to listen (rather than talk and listen to each other) or in this case, just march. There are few participatory surprises in one of these hierarchically-initiated demonstrations.

By contrast, we do know how to build  grassroots social movements.  The general outlines of a one-on-one, relational, horizontal approach to organizing have already been developed and successfully applied. Many direct-action campaigns currently use variations, including in the climate justice movement. Some peer-based social movements have independently used some of these tools to grow into the millions, as in 12 Step recovery movement, and hundreds of thousands in peer co-counseling (“RC’)  and Quaker meetings. Based on my three decades in those three just-named movements, in direct-action campaigns and on my academic work,  I’ve distilled some specific suggestions on how to build a climate movement of “equals,” not “elites” (www.NIPSPeerSupport.org.)  We’ve had some success already.

By Scott Parkin - Counterpunch, August 20, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.”

― Malcolm X

Somewhere between the Bay Area’s environmental non-profit bubble and multi-million climate march planning in New York City, 21 people in the Utah desert took action to shut down the first tar sands mine in the United States.

They’d been part of a larger encampment on the eastern plateau, where local organizers educated over 80 student climate activists about the Utah tar sands as well as trainings on organizing, direct action and anti-oppression. Utah tar sands fighters have spent the summer living in the area as a constant protest against Canadian-based company U.S. Oil Sands’ extraction efforts on the plateau. Every night, black bears raided the camp looking for food and every day local and state police agencies harassed the camp with veiled threats and innuendo derived through Facebook stalking. Despite the harassment and surveillance by the state, actions happen. This particular arrest action gained lots of national media attention and a number of larger environmental organizations put out statements of support of the activists. It also included a number of escalated felony charges on some of the activists.

Utah tar sands fighters living on the ground on the plateau, in Moab and in Salt Lake City live and breathe the campaign against the Utah Tar Sands. They strategize and organize it the same way that Appalachian mountain defenders organize the struggle against mountaintop removal coal mining. They live it the same way that the Tar Sands Blockade lived the campaign against the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline in east Texas and Oklahoma. In all of these campaigns, it’s been an alliance of unpaid radical organizers working with local landowners and community members fighting to save homes, forests, water supplies and more. Furthermore, these campaigns have defined risk and sacrifice.

In Appalachia, after numerous actions on strip mine sites, coal companies filed lawsuits against those participating in civil disobedience actions. West Virginia law enforcement imposed huge bails to further deter actions on mine sites. In Texas, TransCanada sued numerous individuals and three grassroots organizations for over $20 million after the same sort of action. The Canadian oil giant also compiled dossiers on noted organizers and briefed local and federal law enforcement agencies with possible crimes and charges for stopping work on its work sites. Texas law enforcement obliged TransCanada’s hard work with felony charges and violent brutalization of peaceful protestors.

In each of these campaigns, bold and effective organizing against oil, gas and coal companies has created moments to stop egregious practices and projects at the points of destruction only to be abandoned or ignored by the larger environmental establishment. In the wake of that abandonment, hundreds of Appalachian Mountains have been leveled while oil flows through the Keystone XL pipeline from Cushing, OK to the Gulf Coast, and ground is now broken on the first tar sands mine in the United States.

The liberal reform agenda of the environmental establishment continues to dominate the climate movement. Organizations sitting on millions of dollars in resources and thousands of staff are now engaged in a massive “Get Out The Vote” style operation to turn out tens of thousands to marches before the September 23rd United Nations’ Climate Summit in New York. Their hope is to impact the summit framed as U.N. Secretary General Bai-Ki Moon’s dialogue with global politicians on climate change in the lead up to the 2015 climate talks. Civil society’s demands include passing meaningful climate legislation and signing binding agreements on carbon regulation.

History continues to repeat itself as the environmental establishment had similar demands in Copenhagen at the 2009 climate talks. After spending millions of their donors’ dollars and thousands of hours of staff time, successes included an email campaign that got President Obama to travel to Denmark and personally witness the failure of those climate talks. Almost simultaneously, legislation to regulate carbon emissions failed in the U.S. Congress as well. After outspending the climate liberals 10 to 1, the political will of Big Oil and Big Coal remained unbreakable. Meanwhile, these same companies continue to drill, mine, frack, pollute, poison, build pipelines and burn coal in neighborhoods and communities from coast to coast.

By Nick Mullins - The Thoughtful Coal Miner, August 21, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Several people have asked me whether or not I will be attending the upcoming climate action march in New York. The answer is no. In light of my intended absence, I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts on the subject.

While I am unaware of a detailed history on environmentalism, I do know that modern environmentalism was born from naturalists and the conservation movement most often attributed to men such as John Muir, the “Father of the National Parks.” His activism preserved some of the most spectacular natural places in North America, yet, we must admit that on the whole, the creation of the national parks and all subsequent environmental protections have been miniscule wins in a full out war on the ecological systems of our planet. The results are plain to see throughout the world from global deforestation to dead zones in the oceans, rivers that change colors or catch on fire to toxic waste water ponds that are visible from space. 

Some have sought to address the underlying problems feeding the immensity of our present day version of a world war. Of those, Wendell Barry, David Orr, and Wes Jackson come to mind, each speaking volumes to the ways in which present day education, culture, and economy combine to destroy the future health and happiness of most species on this earth. As such, and I am not stating anything new here, it should come as no surprise that until we are able to bring ecological understanding into every classroom, altruistic ideals back into every community, and moderation into the economic principles of the world, we will have no chance of saving future generations from such peril. These are truths that each of us must face, a knowledge that Aldo Leopold began sharing with us long ago.  Anyone who has been within the environmental movement long enough can attest to having found themselves in an emotional dilemma:  spend time fighting inevitability or search out the best place to lead a peaceful life.

In February of 2013, I marched alongside an estimated 40,000 people through the streets of Washington DC at the Forward on Climate Rally organized by 350.org. As we marched down Constitution Ave, I recollected images and stories of a rally my father attended in Washington DC on Labor Day in 1991. The National Park Service estimated that 250,000 laborers were in attendance: coal miners, nurses, auto workers, steel workers, migrant workers, and a variety of social activists. A quarter of a million people had descended upon DC, receiving extended national news coverage (compared to the climate rally), all of them people that millions of Americans could identify with. They were trying desperately to keep labor alive, to reverse the anti-union trends that were crippling the middle class of this nation. My father was among those marching with the United Mine Workers, still unsure of what life had to offer after his recent lay off at Beth-Elkhorn's Deep Mine 26 after 16 years there.

Despite the 3,500 tour buses that brought the cries of those hundreds of thousands of people to Washington on a hot summer day, the demise of the labor movement has continued. Today more and more states are incorporating right to work laws, more people are forced to work mandatory overtime for wages that have barely increased over 20 years. As I marched along side people wielding their homemade wind turbines on that bitter February day, I kept thinking to myself,  "What makes a group of environmentalists, already ostracized by a nation as unemployed hippies, believe a march will actually garner the support needed to save the world from greed driven over consumption?"

By Burkeley Herrman - August 17, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Recently, the Washington Post covered a 192-page study that struck to the heart of the big environmental organizations. As summarized by reporter Darryl Fears of the Post, who covers wildlife and the Chesapeake Bay, the study showed that the US's biggest environmental groups have “failed to keep pace with the nation's expanding minority populations—and remain overwhelmingly white.” Rather than going into the specifics of certain numbers in the article and the study, this article will be a reaction to what the Post wrote and my thoughts on the current state of the environmental movement.

As the article notes, the study, which was one of the first investigations “of diversity within green groups in years,” was supported financially by the Sierra Club, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and Green 2.0. Through some further research I found that Green 2.0. is clearly a mainstream environmental organization since it has a working group composed of people from top environmental groups, academics, nine individuals from a lobbying and consulting group with clients including big foundations, big corporations and nonprofits (The Raben Group), governmental officials and other green activists. What about the study itself? The article talks not only about the lack of diversity in the environmental organizations, but why people of color don't join such organizations. This was part of the article I found most interesting since it noted that people of color who are employed at such organizations feel “alienated” and not welcome, while “recruitment for staff frequently occurs through word-of-mouth and informal networks...[which] makes it difficult for ethnic minorities, the working class” or anyone outside “traditional environmental networks” to know about job openings and then apply for such jobs.

This was only the first part of the article that made me realize the divide in the environmental movement. This divide is a racial one. As the article notes, during the civil rights movement, people of color joined big environmental organizations in an effort to “battle the power plants, petrochemical refineries, railroads, sewers, and other polluters operating in their communities,” but they were “unwelcome” in these organizations. Eventually, there was a summit of environmentalists who were people of color which condemned the big environmental organizations for not having diversity among their members and taking in a “lion's share of funding.” Recruiters from some of the groups responded, saying, in an almost a racist way, that “they tried to be more inclusive, but minorities lacked the education and skills needed to be effective advocates,” which implied that white advocates had the skills and education. While it is true that some people of color don't have such skills, others do. Additionally, the social environment certain people of color grow up in, especially in ghettos or slums in the inner-city areas, could result in not having these skills. As I wrote in a paper about the conditions inside prisons and the reasons for the rise of mass incarceration, that not only is the mass arrest of people within the US, the war on drugs, and the education system bias against people of color, but the hope for “a better world is to be in the 'next generation'” is greatly diminished when “when many of these people [of color] are these people are in jail or in prison.” Even so, it is still unacceptable that people would be excluded since all the environmental groups would have to do is teach someone skills if they did not know them already. It's not that hard. As a result of such opinions and the treatment of people of color inside such organizations, it is not a surprise that it's hard to retain people of color.

By Naomi Oreskes - EcoWatch, July 28 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that one cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that led to it. Yet this is precisely what we are now trying to do with climate change policy. The Obama administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), many environmental groups, and the oil and gas industry all tell us that the way to solve the problem created by fossil fuels is with more fossils fuels. We can do this, they claim, by using more natural gas, which is touted as a “clean” fuel—even a “green” fuel.

Like most misleading arguments, this one starts from a kernel of truth. That truth is basic chemistry: when you burn natural gas, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced is, other things being equal, much less than when you burn an equivalent amount of coal or oil. It can be as much as 50 percent less compared with coal, and 20 percent to 30 percent less compared with diesel fuel, gasoline, or home heating oil. When it comes to a greenhouse gas (GHG) heading for the atmosphere, that’s a substantial difference. It means that if you replace oil or coal with gas without otherwise increasing your energy usage, you can significantly reduce your short-term carbon footprint.

Replacing coal gives you other benefits as well, such as reducing the sulfate pollution that causes acid rain, particulate emissions that cause lung disease, and mercury that causes brain damage. And if less coal is mined, then occupational death and disease can be reduced in coal miners and the destruction caused by damaging forms of mining, including the removal, in some parts of the country, of entire mountains can be reduced or halted.

Those are significant benefits. In part for these reasons, the Obama administration has made natural gas development a centerpiece of its energy policy, and environmental groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, have supported the increased use of gas. President Obama has gone as far as to endorse fracking—the controversial method of extracting natural gas from low permeability shales—on the grounds that the gas extracted can provide “a bridge” to a low carbon future and help fight climate change.

So if someone asks: “Is gas better than oil or coal?” the short answer seems to be yes. And when it comes to complicated issues that have science at their core, often the short answer is the (basically) correct one.

As a historian of science who studies global warming, I’ve often stressed that anthropogenic climate change is a matter of basic physics: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which means it traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. So if you put additional CO2 into that atmosphere, above and beyond what’s naturally there, you have to expect the planet to warm. Basic physics.

And guess what? We’ve added a substantial amount of CO2 to the atmosphere, and the planet has become hotter. We can fuss about the details of natural variability, cloud feedbacks, ocean heat and CO2 uptake, El Niño cycles and the like, but the answer that you get from college-level physics—more CO2 means a hotter planet—has turned out to be correct. The details may affect the timing and mode of climate warming, but they won’t stop it.

In the case of gas, however, the short answer may not be the correct one.