Hurricane Katrina

By Joe Uehlein - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 6, 2024

Good afternoon Chair Stauber, Ranking Member Ocasio-Cortez, and Members of the Committee.

My name is Joseph Uehlein. I’m the founder and Board President of the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS). We are dedicated to making a living on a living planet. We believe that sustainability starts at the kitchen table, where working people every day worry about how they will secure health care, send their children to college, save for a family vacation, and maybe save for a pension. Advanced industrial societies around the world provide many of these things to their people. We do not.

I worked building the Texas-Eastern Pipeline as it wound its way through the rolling hills of Central Pennsylvania. I worked on the construction of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility near Harrisburg. I worked in an aluminum mill in Mechanicsburg, PA. As secretary Treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Division, and Secretary to the North American Coordinating Committee of the International Chemical, Energy, and Mine Workers Federation, I have represented fossil fuel and manufacturing workers throughout my career.

In 1988 I began attending meetings of the United Nations first global warming commission. At that time 2c of warming was a level we never wanted to reach. Now it’s a goal, and we are ushering in a world of hurt for a lot of people. This has to stop, and be reversed. I have spent my life working on labor and environmental issues, with climate change at the core of my endeavors.

My experience tells me that climate change is the real job killer, not the answers to climate change. Climate is as much an economic issue as it is an environmental issue. The impacts of unchecked global warming and climate change will decimate our economy and ecology. Whether you work on the ports, or in the agricultural fields, or in a warehouse, or in transportation, manufacturing, health care ~ even nurses and public employees will all suffer job loss due to unchecked global warming and climate change.

Before 2010 we would have one, maybe two, one-billion dollar weather events a year. Then we had a dozen such events in one year. The earth was waging its own public relations campaign. The costs of dealing with forest fires has increased dramatically over the past decade, and that’s just fire. Hurricane Katrina destroyed 40% of the New Orleans economy. Over time, much of that has come back, but not all of it. Massive storms, massive fires, melting polar ice caps, melting glaciers, famine, water shortages, and more are ravaging the planet and the people on it are suffering and fleeing to find a more stable places to live. You think we have an immigration problem now? You ain’t seen nothing yet. We will see mass migration of starving angry people. What do we do then? Wage war on humanity?

Climate change is a budget-killer, and is also a dagger pointed at our jobs. The fossil fuel industry and its allies love to spin the jobs v environment frame. We not only can, but we must, provide good jobs for our people, and protect the only planet we know of that can support life. The costs of fighting wild fires in the west has grown astronomically in the past 20 years. And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

With all due respect to the UN Paris accords, 1.5c of warming is a mirage fading in the rearview mirror. We have no time to lose and we need all of the renewable energy options. It’s not about a 2c goal, beause that’s a horrible level of warming. We need to roll warming back, not adjust to higher levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

By Eric Fretz - Marx 21, September 3, 2021

Again and Again under capitalism, we have seen poorer people disproportionately hit by the deadly effects of events like cyclones and earthquakes, as natural disasters highlight existing unnatural inequalities. It is now obvious that not just the effects, but the causes of extreme weather are stemming from capitalism.

The recent IPCC report proved that higher air and sea temperatures caused by global warming have already led to more hurricanes, and will continue to do so. “In the past seventy years,” Bill McKibben noted, “the United States has averaged three land-falling storms a year; Ida is the seventeenth in the past two years.” 

But warming also leads to a “rapid intensification” of storms. Ida turned into a hurricane in just six hours.

When Ida hit the Louisiana coast Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 150 mph, it was the second most powerful storm to hit the state in its recorded history.

Devastation 

Over 1 million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi are without power, including the entire city of New Orleans, parts of which may remain without electricity for weeks. 

Sewage pumping stations in New Orleans, which have no backup power, stopped working, leaving 441,000 people in 17 parishes with no clean drinking water, and no water to flush toilets. Another 329,000 people were under boil water advisories. However, it may be hard for many to boil water without electricity.

Added to this misery was a heat advisory which combined with humidity to reach real feel temperatures of over a hundred degrees

Tens of thousands of residents were left to themselves in figuring out how to evacuate, and even those with cars were at a standstill on choked highways. 

In a chilling reminder of the horrors of Katrina, the New Orleans Police Department announced that “anti-looting patrols” would be set up. The mayor then used the resulting arrests to justify a curfew and calling in the National Guard—not to rescue people or rebuild, but to patrol the streets. 

As in Katrina, it is poor and black people who are most at risk of losing their homes—and their lives.

Ida came one year after Hurricane Laura, which brought widespread destruction to the mostly Black industrial area around Mossville, causing chemical fires and turning Lake Charles into a toxic soup. The displacement and continued housing shortage caused by Laura worsened the spread of Covid in the area. 

The displacement caused by Ida in New Orleans could be even worse. Hospitals in Louisiana are already filled with over 2,400 patients with coronavirus. There were not enough empty beds in the state to evacuate patients from New Orleans hospitals. Staff in one hospital reported having to manually pump air into the lungs of intubated Covid patients as they moved them to a floor with a working generator.

By Movement For Black Lives - YouTube Video, May 11, 2021

M4BL's Red, Black & Green New Deal Initiative hosts the first ever National Black Climate Summit to discuss our plans to combat Climate and Environmental Injustice! Hear from leaders in the Black climate justice movement and from our team on what’s coming up for our Black Climate Agenda!

By Juanita Constible, Bora Chang, Clare Morganelli, and Nikole Blandon - Natural Resources Defense Council, June 2020

By Deja Thomas, Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, and Saba Waheed - Center for the Advancement of Racial Equity (CARE) at Work - June 2020

This report highlights the validity of public sector work as a solution in the response and recovery to the Covid-19 pandemic on Black people across communities in Los Angeles County. Covid-19 disproportionately impacts Black workers and communities. History shows that even once a disaster is over, Black workers and Black people across communities continue to disproportionately feel its impact far longer than other communities.

Through the most recent government data and relevant literature, this report demonstrates why and how public sector jobs should be a tool used to address the Black jobs crisis and the recovery from Covid-19, particularly in Los Angeles County.

Download (PDF).

By Todd E. Vachon, Gerry Hudson, Judith LeBlanc, and Saket Soni - American Prospect, September 2, 2019

As Greenland experiences a record melt, Europe recovers from record-breaking heat, California braces for another fire season, and Puerto Rico still struggles to rebuild nearly two years after Hurricane Maria, it is becoming ever clearer how profoundly the climate crisis is changing everything, and how imperative it is that we act now if we hope to avert an existential disaster.

The latest report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels by 2040. This will submerge coastlines, intensify droughts and wildfires, increase the frequency and strength of extreme storms, and worsen food shortages and poverty. The report also states that these dire consequences will come to pass well within the lifetime of most readers of this article.

We no longer have time to continue the “jobs versus environment” debate that has distracted us from acting with the boldness this moment requires. Saving our deteriorating environment is the job of our time. The Green New Deal resolution introduced to Congress by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey has spurred a wave of activism. And while it is important to channel that energy into electing a president and Senate that will treat the crisis as a crisis, it’s equally important that we fight climate change locally, from below.

Workers, people of color, Native peoples, and the poor have borne and will continue to bear the brunt of this crisis if we don't find the means to avert it. We must forge alliances that can fight for climate justice and a sustainable and resilient future. That will require working together across movements and organizations toward a common purpose.

Fortunately, we have a tool at hand that can help us build those alliances and organize those fights locally. It is called Bargaining for the Common Good.

By various - Sharable, 2019

When disasters occur, the majority of news coverage teeters on the edge of “disaster porn” at best, emphasizing the sheer mass of destruction in the affected area while celebrating a few token “heroes.” At its worst, the media perpetuates harmful stereotypes, casting survivors as looters and justifying the extrajudicial murder of people of color by the police and mostly white vigilantes, like what occurred during Hurricane Katrina.

But in both scenarios, news reporting routinely underplays how local communities come together to recover from the immediate devastation and collectively rebuild the community, often on a new foundation of sustainability and justice. It’s a good thing that people collaborate instead of competing during a crisis because all signs point towards an increase in climate change-fueled disasters in the coming years.

This kind of collective response is worth celebrating, but there’s no better way to respond to disasters than to anticipate them happening and prepare before they strike. And there’s no better time than right now to build resilience together. While a little preparation today can save a lot of trouble tomorrow, it can also create immediate benefits like stronger community ties, increased civic capacity, and the joy that comes from accomplishing things together.

Read the report (PDF).

Hilton Kelley interviewed by Amy Goodman - Democracy Now, September 26, 2017

By Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky - Socialist Worker, September 12, 2017

MANY IMAGES coming out of Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey conjure up images of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans--in particular, the rooftop rescues of people stranded in floodwaters and a Convention Center turned into a shelter packed with thousands of people displaced from their homes.

But in fact, the similarities between Houston in 2017 and New Orleans in 2005 run far deeper than mere images--though thankfully it appears that the death toll from Harvey will be far lower than the 1833 people who died during and after Katrina.

One critical parallel between Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina is that, at their root, both were human-made disasters. Of course, each calamity was triggered by weather event, but human actions and societal decisions are the reason for everything from climate change to infrastructure deficiencies that made people were more likely to be left behind to face their possible deaths.

In this sense, both Katrina and Harvey can be called "unnatural disasters." As Tulane history professor Andy Horowitz reminds us, "There is no such thing as a "natural" disaster, because who is in harm's way and the kind of harm they face is a product of human choices."

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

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

• For-Profit Pipeline Company Claims "Public Benefit" in Seizing Private Lands in Pennsylvania - By Larry Buhl, DeSmog Blog, August 31, 2016
• If the U.S. is talking about abandoning NAFTA, then maybe we should too - By Gordon Laxer, Rabble.Ca, August 31, 2016
• Study assesses climate change vulnerability in urban America - By Milken Institute School of Public Health, Eureka Alert!, August 31, 2016
• The Billion Dollar Ultimatum - By Chris Hamby, BuzzFeed, August 30, 2016
• Major Insurers to G20 Nations: Stop Wasting Time, Phase-Out Fossil Fuel Subsidies by 2020 - By Kyla Mandel, DeSmog UK, August 30, 2016; [related]: Major Insurers With $1.2 Trillion In Assets Urge G20 Leaders To Phase Out Fossil Fuel Subsidies - By Joshua S Hill, Clean Technica, August 30, 2016 | Insurance funds worth $1.2tn tell G20 to stop funding fossil fuels by 2020 - By Karl Mathiesen, Climate Change News, August 28, 2016
• Here’s Why Americans Are Mad as Hell at Wall Street and Washington - By Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall Street on Parade, August 12, 2016

The Man Behind the Curtain:

• Fossil fuel subsidies are “the world’s dumbest policy” – so why won’t G20 leaders end them? - By Alex Doukas, Oil Change International, September 5, 2016
• The Dense web of financial interests - By Mike Spille, The Cost of the Pipeline, September 3, 2016
• Public Relations Firm Claims to Have Ghost Written Thousands of Op-Eds in Major U.S. Newspapers - By David Swanson, CounterPunch, September 2, 2016
• Climate Change Authority cops out – just when we need it most - By Christine Milne, REnew Economy, September 1, 2016
• Network Map of the Koch-Funded Fueling U.S. Forward Campaign - By Brendan DeMelle, Koch vs Clean, September 1, 2016
• Railroad Commission needs transformation, not reform - By Priscilla Villa, Houston Chronicle, September 1, 2016
• When Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts Thanked 9/11 Truthers and New World Order Conspiracists For Their Science Guidance - By Graham Readfearn, DeSmog Blog, September 1, 2016
• Americans Now More Politically Polarized On Climate Change Than Ever Before, Analysis Finds - By Graham Readfearn, DeSmog Blog, August 31, 2016
• Canadian Taxpayers Fork Out $3.3 Billion Every Year to Super Profitable Oil Companies - By Kevin Grandia, DeSmog Blog, August 31, 2016
• Dutch Wind Power Proponents Face Opposition -  By John J. Berger, Renewable Energy World, August 31, 2016
• Lamar Smith to hold hearing over Exxon climate fight - By James Osborne, FuelFix, August 31, 2016
• Using Trump Playbook, Chamber Of Commerce Invents Absurd Fossil Fuel Claims - By Mary Ellen Kustin, Think Progress, August 31, 2016
• Colorado Senator Says Candidates Who Oppose Fossil Fuels ‘Unfit’ For Office - By Natasha Geiling, Think Progress, August 29, 2016

Green is the New Red:

• "We shall not rest until we’ve freed all our political prisoners", affirms Via Campesina - By Iris Pacheco, La Via Campesina, August 30, 2016
• Texas Ranch Owner Battles TransCanada to Restore Her Pipeline-Scarred Land - By Julie Dermansky, DeSmog Blog, August 28, 2016

Greenwashers:

• Landscapes of Dispossession: the National Park Service at 100 Years - By Nick Alexandrov, CounterPunch, September 3, 2016
• National Energy Board hearings into Energy East pipeline suspended - By Brent Patterson, Rabble.Ca, August 31, 2016
• [Video]: Trailer for COP21 Documentary ‘Not Without Us’ - By staff, Global Justice Ecology Project, August 31, 2016
• Conservation Efforts Are Still Violating Indigenous Rights - By Andrew E. Miller, Amazon Watch, August 30, 2016
• Governor Ayade’s contradictions on REDD in Cross River State, Nigeria - By Chris Lang, REDD Monitor, August 30, 2016
• India: The Parliament violates forest people’s rights and promotes further plantations - By staff, World Rainforest Movement, August 30, 2016
• Wildlife conservationists need to break out of their Stockholm syndrome - By Margi Prideaux, Open Democracy, August 29, 2016
• Delta tunnels fail financially - By Alex Breitler, Stockton Record, August 24, 2016

Disaster Capitalism:

• Gulf Oil Leases Spark Outcry But Little Revenue - Anne Rolfes interviewed by Helen Palmer, Living on Earth, September 2, 2016
• Hurricane Katrina, Brought to You by Big Oil - By Anne Rolfes, Bridge the Gulf, September 2, 2016
• Public Cost of Fukushima Cleanup Tops $40 Billion and Is Expected to Climb - By Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams, August 29, 2016