climate justice

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 2022

Protecting the climate requires rapidly reducing the extraction of fossil fuels. That’s a crucial part of the Green New Deal. While the federal government has done little so far to reduce fossil fuel production, people and governments all over the country are taking steps on their own to cut down the extraction of coal, oil, and gas.

Introduction

The U.S. needs to cut around 60% of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030 to reach zero net emissions by 2050.[1] The world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6% per year between 2022 and 2030 to reach the Paris goal of 1.5°C. Countries are instead planning and projecting an average annual increase of 2%, which by 2030 will result in more than double the production consistent with the 1.5°C limit.[2]

In the previous two commentaries in this series we have shown how initiatives from cities, states, and civil society organizations are expanding climate-safe energy production and reducing energy use through energy efficiency and conservation. These are essential aspects of reducing climate-destroying greenhouse gas emissions, but in themselves they will not halt the burning of fossil fuels. That requires action on the “supply side” – freezing new fossil fuel infrastructure and accelerating the closing of existing production facilities. That is often referred to as a “phaseout” or “managed decline” of fossil fuels.

Such a phaseout of fossil fuel production is necessary to meet the goals of the Green New Deal and President Joe Biden’s climate proposals. The original 2018 Green New Deal resolution submitted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a national 10-year mobilization to achieve 100% of national power generation from renewable sources. Biden’s Build Back Better plan sought 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 and net zero GHG emissions by 2050. These goals cannot be met without reducing the amount of fossil fuel that is actually extracted from the earth.[3]

While the US government and corporations are failing to effectively reduce the mining and drilling of fossil fuels, hundreds of efforts at a sub-national level are already cutting their extraction. 50 US cities are already powered entirely by clean and renewable sources of energy. 180 US cities are committed to 100% clean energy.[4] According to a report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International, Indigenous resistance has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.[5] Such reductions are an essential part of a widespread but little-recognized movement we have dubbed the “Green New Deal from Below.”[6]

By staff - Climate Justice Alliance, March 1, 2022

Climate Justice Alliance Calls on White House, Congress, UN to Center Frontline Wisdom/Solutions & Reject False Techno Fixes Accelerating Climate Change

We must keep fossil fuels in the ground; If we take anything away from Part 2 of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment, that should be it. Like so many times before, once again we find ourselves calling on the White House and Congress, and all world leaders to act boldly and courageously to reduce and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions at their source.

As Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) Co-Executive Director, Ozawa Bineshi Albert pointed out after participating in the most recent UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), “we must act with an urgency that is not happening now and we need community leaders experiencing harm to lead with solutions.”

Hans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of the working group that issued the report explains, “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet… Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

However, we cannot rely on unproven fossil fuel industry backed, techno-fixes and market schemes that are really just band-aid approaches to solving the climate crisis: practices that do not guarantee a reduction or elimination of emissions at their source, such as geoengineering approaches like carbon capture and storage, solar radiation management, carbon removal and the like. We must safeguard Earth and all her creatures for generations to come. That means stopping the harm that continues to pollute her for future generations. We must center frontline solutions that are grounded in a Just Transition as we move away from the dig, burn, and dump economy to local, community-controlled renewable and regenerative models that reduce emissions while building community wealth and justice at every turn. 

Together with 1,140 organizations and as a part of the Build Back Fossil Free Coalition in a letter issued last week, we called on President Biden to use his Executive powers to immediately 1) ban all new oil and gas contracts on federal areas, 2) stop approving fossil fuel projects, and 3) declare a climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act that will unlock special powers to fast track renewable projects that will benefit us all.

Additionally, as this report rightly points out, the United States must pay its fair share as the major culprit of climate change and heed the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples as we craft real solutions and reject false ones that will only serve to accelerate climate chaos in Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and other low-income and vulnerable communities. We must invest in mitigation and adaptation resources for all frontline communities, in the Global South, and all other nations immediately. 

At the same time that the United Nations was preparing to craft this damning report on the fossil fuel industry, the largest delegation of badged participants at the COP26 were fossil fuel lobbyists. Only a few from vulnerable and most impacted communities were allowed in. This is unacceptable – the UN must end rules that restrict and keep out those most impacted by climate change from fully participating in future climate change conferences. Finally, we call on the UN to end its long practice of bowing to pressure from fossil corporations and member nations aligned with them, and reject false solutions that enable polluters to continue business as usual while doing nothing to stop emissions at their source.

This most recent IPCC Assessment focuses on impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation. An upcoming section in April will focus on ways to reduce emissions, and the final part will present lessons to member states during the next Climate Change Conference (COP27) to be held in Egypt. If the nations of the world truly want to solve the climate crisis they will heed the calls of those most impacted and look to them to lead rather than those who created the crisis in the first place; here in the United States that looks like addressing this issue as the emergency that it already is.

By Sydney Ghazarian - Labor Network for Sustainability - March 2022

Labor Network for Sustainability is proud to be among 45 climate and environmental justice groups calling on the green building community to stop partnering with Kingspan, an international building materials company that’s so-called ‘green’ manufacturing processes are polluting the indoor air and local watershed (learn more here).

“We call on those who deal with Kingspan to reconsider rewarding it for behavior that weakens the credibility of the green building community, and that goes against the values of safe and sustainable buildings and communities.” Read the full statement and list of signatory organizations here.

This effort is part of Clean up Kingspan, an inspirational campaign led by Kingspan factory workers in Santa Ana, CA who are holding the global manufacturing company accountable for health, safety, and pollution issues in their community and demanding a fair process to decide whether to unionize. In collaboration with UC Irvine pollution scientist Dr. Shahir Masri, these workers measured unhealthy levels of PM2.5 pollution inside their workplace.They also blew the whistle on Kingspan for misrepresenting its daily operations and water pollution clean-up efforts to the CalEPA.

What this campaign makes clear is that the struggle we face isn’t ‘jobs vs. the environment;’ it’s corporate greed vs. everyone else. LNS is proud to stand with workers, community activists, faith leaders, & environmentalists in this campaign for true economic and environmental justice. It’s time for the green building community to stand with us too.

Join us in calling on the green building community to stop partnering with Kingspan: https://cleanupkingspan.org/take-action/

By Hannah Wilton and Davida Sotelo Escobedo - California Climate Agriculture Network, June 24, 2022

TIC’s work always comes back to strengthening relationships with members of the local community — giving everyone the means to stay in a place, liberated from the pains of poverty.

“I’m from here and hope to live here for the rest of my life,” Chester remarks. “Being committed to place allows you to go deep where you live and not be worried about moving on to the next professional step or location. We’re here and we want our community to be a better place — for our children and grandchildren and everyone else’s children and grandchildren.”

Why We Can’t Build a Fire-Resilient Future Without Worker Justice

Navigating the threat of wildfire is an ongoing reality of life in Sonoma County. From 2017 to 2020, fires burned more than 300,000 acres across the county, resulting in devastating losses to ecosystems, homes, communities, and human lives.¹ Recent years of extreme wildfire events have not only transformed the land itself, but also shifted the priorities of the public, management agencies, and local governing bodies around the essential need for fire adaptation and mitigation.

This work looks different everywhere, but in Sonoma County (SC) where over half the land area is forest and woodlands, there has been a strong focus on “vegetation management” – a set of practices that alter vegetation to reduce wildfire risk, promote public safety, and support healthy ecosystems.² Often, the goal is to reduce high “fuel load” or flammable vegetation that cause fires to build heat and intensity, through strategies like understory thinning, grazing, clearing along evacuation routes, and prescribed fire. Vegetation management is important in light of extractive land use patterns and decades of fire suppression that have disrupted or altogether eliminated natural disturbance regimes, leading to dense vegetation overgrowth. The removal of fire as a keystone process from California’s landscapes is also inextricably tied to colonization and the criminalization of traditional fire stewardship practiced by Native communities for thousands of years.

To reduce immediate wildfire risk, hazardous fuels reduction is needed at every scale – first, vegetation must be managed around homes to create “defensible space” delineated by a 100-foot perimeter around a structure³, and second beyond 100 feet into adjacent vegetation or wildland. Homeowners are on the hook for defensible space with California law and insurance companies, yet more and more attention is going toward the forest and wild areas beyond in order to create wildfire resiliency at a landscape-scale. Through such targeted vegetation management strategies, humans can take an active stewardship role in healing ecosystems and building fire adaptability for animal and plant life, forest health, and communities.

By various - Central Florida Jobs With Justice - February 16, 2022

By staff - Global Climate Jobs, February 15, 2022

The 2022 Lisbon Declaration on Climate Jobs and Just Transition was written as part of the training that took place in January 2022, in Lisbon, and was attended by 20 participants from 11 different nationalities. The declaration was later presented at the final plenary of the V International Ecosocialist Encounters, which took place in the same month, in Lisbon. At that time it was signed by more participants of the Encounter.

The text calls for environmental, climate justice, trade unions, labour and other civil society organizations to come together to support existing campaigns and create new Climate Jobs Campaigns, which seek to create decent jobs that contribute to reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, stoping climate collapse and building an economy with life at its center.

The climate is changing. Increases in average temperatures and disruptions to local climates are resulting in extreme weather events and ecological catastrophes. As a consequence, the livelihoods, identities, and cultures of people are threatened and are already being destroyed. These impacts are inherently unjust as the regions and communities with the least historical responsibility for GHG emissions are the ones most affected and often the ones least listened to.

Science has told us that we need to drastically reduce emissions within a relatively short timeframe if we wish to avoid climate collapse. In order to do this, we need to create millions of new jobs that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. This will facilitate a fast transition away from ecologically destructive industries while also being fair to those who contribute to, or would be affected, by this transition.

Within this challenge are the opportunities of creating new emission-cutting jobs that are dignified, with fair wages, while respecting environmental, health, hygiene and safety rules. We refer to these as Climate Jobs. These must be in renewable energies, public transportation systems, building and infrastructure energy efficiency, forest protection, waste management, professional training and re-qualification, and agriculture that respects the natural cycles of our global and local ecosystems. Large amounts of funding will have to be mobilized, carrying out actions without the need to maximize profits, but rather guaranteeing direct and immediate jobs to workers that will lose their old jobs due to the transition. These have to be public jobs, created in the optic of public service, to ensure they are stable to the workers and beneficial to all of society.

Governments, international institutions and the “invisible hand of the market” have failed in their responses to the climate crisis. Nevertheless, we know that historically the biggest developments in democracy, social rights, and access to public services, such as healthcare and education, have been gained due to the organized struggles of the working class. This was so because the workers if organized and united through their different oppressions of class, race, gender expression and sexuality, have massive power.

Similarly, stopping climate change can’t be done without a massive popular movement. Indigenous people have been fighting against the destruction brought upon by multinational corporations that have been ensuring climate and ecological catastrophe. Recently we have seen the strengthening and internationalization of a climate movement that has been demanding climate justice all around the world. This movement is seeking to unite workers everywhere to ensure a just transition.

Such a transition will have to also involve sectors of work that capital considers non-productive. Any kind of organizing for Climate Jobs campaigns will have to involve, organize, and mobilize workers doing care work, which are mainly women and racialized persons. Reproductive labour is very often made invisible and left out of the labour movement, even though these workers – that ensure the pillars of the capitalist system – are the most marginalized and thus the most fragile of the working class. This transition has to change the path of our economy from a profit-extracting march of death to an economy with life at its centre. In the process, this builds a new system that cares for both people and planet, that values indigenous and peasant knowledge, and respects nature and its cycles.

Workers have been left out of the discussions on how to carry this transformation. Attempts to transition so far have occurred without considering workers interests, rights and demands, while at the same time has not resulted in an actual decrease in global greenhouse gas emissions or in an improvement of local ecological conditions. On the contrary, any plan that aims to solve the climate crisis should not be dictated by the needs of companies but instead by the needs of both workers and life on Earth. A Just Transition plan needs to specially include workers and communities affected by the climate crisis and/or by the transition, so it can result in the improvement of living conditions everywhere. It should never result in an increase of exploitation or extractivism, but on the contrary, should be built upon international solidarity, with the goals of peace and democracy at its core.

The points of convergence between the workers and the climate justice movements are immense. As so, we call for environmental and climate justice organizations, workers’ movements and unions, as well as other civil society groups, to come together to create and raise support for Climate Jobs campaigns. Multiple international campaigns would shift the global conversation about Just Transition, rescuing it from the hands of profit, and would mobilize workers and the climate justice movement everywhere – and in this process creates a future for all.

By Tom BK Goldtooth, Kali Akuno, Elizabeth Yeampierre, Inkza Angeles, and Keenan Rhodes - Climate Justice Alliance, February 11, 2022

By Anne Marshall-Chalmers and Dan Gearino - Inside Climate News, February 8, 2022

Over 70 member organizations in the coalition received charitable contributions in 2020 worth $1.67 million from big California utilities that see solar as the competition.

In the fight over California’s rooftop solar policy, a coalition that claims to represent low-income, senior and environmental leaders is running ads warning about a cost shift that forces consumers to subsidize solar for people who live in mansions.

This message, by Affordable Clean Energy for All, is trying to influence the debate as California regulators consider rules that would sharply reduce the financial benefits of owning rooftop systems.

But Affordable Clean Energy for All is not a grassroots movement. It is a public relations campaign sponsored by big utility companies that stand to benefit from policies that hurt rooftop solar. Many of the 100-plus groups that make up the coalition have received charitable donations or other financial support from the utilities. Few of them wanted to talk about the campaign when contacted by Inside Climate News.

The utilities’ campaign is using what watchdog groups say is a familiar playbook from across the country, with community groups providing a relatable face for advocacy messages that align with those of the utilities. If the result is a policy that hurts rooftop solar, that could be a big setback for California’s push to get to net-zero emissions, an effort that is counting on a continued expansion of solar and other customer-owned energy systems.

By various - War on Want, February 4, 2022

By various - War on Want, February 4, 2022