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grassroots global justice
Jerry Brown, Michael Bloomberg (and Their Agenda) Face Protests at Climate Action Summit
Diverse groups say the crisis is upon us — and market-based solutions don't work and damage vulnerable communities
Sep 14, 2018
As Governor Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg opened the Global Climate Action Summit Thursday, they were greeted by hundreds of protesters and direct action outside Moscone Center, led by the indigenous and frontline communities hit hardest by climate chaos.
For nearly three hours, protesters (two of whom were arrested) blocked summit entrances, chanted and unfurled banners stating, "Keep it in the Ground," and "Climate Capitalism is Killing Our Planet." As one speaker in front of Moscone Center put it, "we are the ones who are dying."
From the mass 30,000-strong climate justice march Saturday Sept. 8, to numerous protests and educational events, the message has been loud and clear: indigenous and frontline communities are bearing the most severe, immediate brunt of climate disasters, and market-driven approaches are exacerbating and prolonging the crisis.
Indigenous activists drew a direct connection between Brown's market-led carbon trading system and intensifying fossil fuel extraction: pollution credits in California, for instance, can be used to expand climate-wrecking emissions elsewhere.
"You can't buy and sell the earth with your carbon trading schemes," said Casey Camp-Horinek, an elected councilwoman for the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma. Jerry Brown, she said, "has entered the largest carbon trading scheme the world has ever seen." She termed this market-led approach "false economy, false solutions."
In her community in north-central Oklahoma, the toxic mix of refineries, injection wells, and fracking by Phillips 66 and other fossil-fuel extractors is producing what Camp-Horinek calls "an environmental genocide...Every single family has a member with cancer. We have averaged a funeral a week." The intense fossil fuel production in her area is contributing to more autoimmune, cardiovascular, and respiratory diseases, she says, and even "kids being born with bone cancer."
All of the 30 injection wells in her area are leaking methane into local tribal drinking water sources, she added.
In North Dakota, home to a fracking boom in recent years, fossil-fuel extraction has intensified as a direct result of carbon trading and offset programs pushed by Brown and others, said Kandi White, an organizer from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes in that state.
"Instead of keeping fossil fuels in the ground, they want to continue to making money off it, and it hurts us," she said. People in her area, she said, suffer more cancers, and more babies are born with upper respiratory illnesses. "The planet is screaming at us," she said.
White applied for credentials to the summit but wasn't allowed access. "Those of us that are suffering the worst," she said, are not being allowed in.
Asked about solutions to the crisis, White replied, "Scientific, commonsense, traditional understanding. Capitalism, which is the carbon market system, is the problem--so carbon markets and capitalism can't possibly fix the problem. We need to leave the remaining fossil fuels in the ground," where, she noted, 50-80% of what's left lies on and in native peoples' lands. "That's why our voice is so prominent and should be heard. Yet we are the ones locked out, we've always been locked out."
Inside the summit halls, protesters briefly disrupted Bloomberg's speech, chanting, "our air is not for sale," and were removed by security,NBC Bay Area reported. Bloomberg lobbed a stunning rebuke at the protesters, likening them to right-wing border wall advocates: "We've got environmentalists protesting an environmental conference. It reminds me of people who want to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep people out from a country we go to for vacations."
Bloomberg and Brown may seem like climate action heroes compared with Donald Trump, but these leaders are "patting themselves on the back for insufficient action," said David Turnbull, a spokesperson for Oil Change International. "They're not standing up to the fossil fuel industries. Governor Brown has been very resistant to our demands to keep fossil fuels in the ground."
While Brown has snared headlines for signing legislation to make California's electricity supply 100 percent renewable by 2045--and signing an executive order directing state agencies to make California carbon neutral by that same year through carbon sequestration and reduction approaches--climate activists say his policies on carbon trading and maintaining fracking and fossil fuel production are causing immense harm.
As Turnbull put it, "pushing pollution around, trading pollution around, means that the most vulnerable communities bear the brunt."
Brown's policies "have allowed fossil fuel companies to create a living hell for Californians whose health and safety are threatened by toxic drilling operations," Cesar G. Aguirre, an organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network, said. "People in California's Central Valley are forced to breathe some of the dirtiest air in the nation, and Kern County has the worst air in the United States, because of toxic oil drilling. The climate crisis isn't just happening in our atmosphere, it's also happening in our bodies when we breathe this poisoned air."
Solidarity to Solutions
As sea levels and climate chaos rise, so too are the indigenous and frontline communities. The climate justice movement, once characterized as white and middle-class, is increasingly led by communities of color and indigenous people who are suffering the most direct, severe effects of climate change.
Joining forces in the It Takes Roots Alliance, several major coalitions--The Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice, Indigenous Environmental Network and Right to the City--organized a week of Solidarity to Solutions actions and education.
The complexity and diversity of climate-related battles and local solutions was on full display at the "Sol 2 Sol" event in La Raza Park in the Mission District this past Tuesday. Perched on park's top slope, Gwich'in Indian Nation leader Bernadette Demientieff told a group of young climate activists what's at stake for her people, who have lived with the caribou in Alaska's northeastern Arctic Circle for thousands of years.
"We're fighting for our human rights, we're fighting for our food security, we're fighting for our land," said Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, which is also battling to protect traditional caribou herds in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, as new threats of oil drilling and pipelines close in around them.
In the Gwich'ins' home of northern Alaska, caribou herds have been decimated by climate change's impacts on vegetation--plummeting by 57% since 2010, according to Demientieff. "Our future generations aren't going to have land, water, and healthy animals to hunt if we don't take care of them."
Two days after an indigenous-led climate justice march roughly 30,000-people strong, and two days before the Global Climate Action Summit's more staid, officious convening, climate justice activists from around the world gathered in La Raza Park to strategize community-based solutions to the climate disasters wreaking havoc on indigenous and other frontline communities.
Bathed in an unseasonably warm sunny afternoon this Tuesday, hundreds of activists, from Native American Alaskan tribes based in the Arctic Circle to Bay Area communities of color battling gentrification and pollution, shared the public space to tell their stories from the front lines of climate change.
Alaskan Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, from the 500-person Native Village of Nuiqsut on the Arctic Ocean, said more than 75 people in her community are suffering respiratory illnesses from fast-encroaching oil industry developments by Conoco Phillips, Exxon, British Petroleum and others.
"They exempt human health protections to increase profitability," said the community health aide. She reports more cases of heart disease, thyroid illnesses, and babies being born in respiratory distress, but, "they won't connected to resource extraction."
Another health and nutrition threat from climate change: their ice cellars are melting, making it harder to freeze and store meat, and ice fishing is getting tougher as people fall through thinner ice on freezing rivers.
Down the hill, Amee Raval and Shina Robinson, organizers with the Asian-Pacific environmental network, explained that a key part of climate justice is making renewable energy accessible and affordable for low income people and communities of color. This "energy equity" requires public funding and community involvement to make these connections between low income communities and renewable energy, Raval said.
One small step in that direction: the California Public Utilities Commission now provides a 20 percent savings on solar energy to make it more accessible for lower income communities, according to Raval.
Building connections between renewable energy access and stable housing, along with community-based job creation, is key to solving this climate justice puzzle, Robinson added. "We want to make sure that the people in those buildings get to stay and enjoy these benefits" of solar access, she said. "We are mindful of every policy to make sure that job creation for communities of color is a part of it. When it comes to renewable energy jobs, she said, "is missing from those industries are folks of color and women."
Antonio Diaz, director of People Organized to Demand Economic and Environmental Rights, which hosted the Solutions event, stressed the importance of "showcasing on-the-ground climate resilience." He pointed to community-based solutions such as Hummingbird Farm in the Excelsior, and efforts to create a new public park in the Mission. "Reclaiming public lands is part of building climate resiliency, especially in a city where gentrification is such a crisis and our community fabric has been torn," he explained. "Here in San Francisco, what's being commodified and extracted is land."
Diaz noted that while San Francisco has been aggressive in reducing waste and emissions, "there's something contradictory in a city that says it's committed to sustainability and at the same time it displaces people" through evictions and gentrification--leading to more long-distance commuting, more traffic congestion, and more pollution. Linking climate and economic justice issues, Diaz said San Francisco needs to "make a commitment to be a zero-waste city and a zero-displacement city."
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Leaving Paris for All The Wrong Reasons
Jun 16, 2017
The announcement by Donald Trump that that United States intends to ignore the non-binding Paris Climate Agreement, with the intention to renegotiate it to foist his America First policy on the rest of the world, should come as no surprise to anyone. What is surprising is who opposed the US withdrawal: Big business - including fossil fuel transnationals Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and BP, industrial agribusiness and agrochemical giants Monsanto, DuPont, and General Mills, and more, as well as the current Secretary of State (and former Exxon exec). If nothing else, this assortment of big-business boosters of the Paris Agreement tells us just how weak the agreement truly is at addressing the root causes of climate change.
Since Kyoto, the US has diluted every global climate proposal to the point of ineffectiveness, including the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 and the Paris Agreement itself. It was the US that insisted on making the deal based on non-binding pledges for voluntary emissions cuts (which collectively would still lead to a global temperature increase between 3-4degC above pre-industrial levels), on preventing the operating text of the agreement from including recognition of human rights and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and on promoting many false solutions that will end up doing a great deal of harm (including so-called "carbon neutrality," which allows polluters to keep polluting by purchasing offsets).
These realities, combined with Trump's claims that the Paris Agreement would somehow be an unfair burden on the US, are particularly disturbing, embarrassing, and even enraging, given the responsibility that the US has as being the most historically responsible for the causes of climate change, and our continued role as one of the most significant contributors of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
"By abandoning the Paris Agreement, this administration will further perpetuate environmental racism and climate injustice against Indigenous Peoples experiencing the worst effects of climate change across the globe...Backing out of this agreement continues a long history of broken promises and threatens the vital and sacred life cycles of Mother Earth." - Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network
It is clear that major transnational corporations played a large role in influencing the US's role in negotiating the Paris agreement. Indeed, Bloomberg news reports that Exxon and Conoco-Phillips supported the Paris agreement based on the argument that "The U.S. is better off with a seat at the table so it can influence global efforts to curb emissions that are largely produced by the fossil fuels they profit from."
At Grassroots International, we are reflecting on four key lessons and priorities for climate justice work going forward:
- Contrary to Trump's "America First" philosophy, isolating the US from the rest of the world only hurts us more. We are not separate from each other or from the rest of the world - rather our lives and our future are in a precarious balance that is linked to one another. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words are more true today than ever: "In a real sense all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
- We must continue to push and hold our government accountable for the US' role in causing climate disruption. In a recent Grassroots Global Justice Alliance statement about Trump's withdrawal of the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, shared this perspective: "By abandoning the Paris Agreement, this administration will further perpetuate environmental racism and climate injustice against Indigenous Peoples experiencing the worst effects of climate change across the globe...Backing out of this agreement continues a long history of broken promises and threatens the vital and sacred life cycles of Mother Earth."
- Perhaps more than ever, a translocal strategy is one of our best opportunities to combat climate change. Recently, mayors across the country made a pledge to uphold the Paris agreement at the local level. While this pledge is not enough, it is an important signal to the world that the majority of the country does not agree with Trump's climate denial approach. Furthermore, it is a sign that it is possible to win more government action for climate justice at the local level, with cities, towns, states, and Tribal governments.
- As always, it is clear that what is most needed is leadership and solutions coming from those most impacted by climate disruption, including grassroots communities and social movements of small-scale farmers, Indigenous Peoples, Black and Afro-descendant communities, migrant communities, women, and young people in the US and around the world - particularly in the Global South. These are the communities on the frontlines of climate impacts, and at the forefront of struggle. These are the communities putting their bodies and lives on the line to stop fossil fuel extraction, to regulate refineries and shut down power plants, to stop the corporate takeover of agriculture, land, water, and seeds. These are the communities pushing to address the legacies of environmental injustice. These are the communities standing up against megadams, forest offsets, agro-fuels, and other false solutions to climate change. And these are the communities creating the solutions that we will need for a healthy future, based on the concept of buen vivir - living well, in harmony with one another and with Mother Earth.
In the US, communities organized through the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ), Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and others are taking leadership to articulate Just Transition agendas at the local level, and they are winning! These agendas include pushing for an end to the extractive economy, and transitioning to regenerative, local, living, loving, linked economies. These economies include community land trusts, agroecology, local seed libraries, and other strategies to achieve food sovereignty They include expansion of public transit and community controlled renewable energy, along with protection of rivers and ecosystems.
These are the struggles that have won and will continue to win real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, while building community resilience to the impacts of climate change. In fact, the same day that Trump announced pulling the US from the Paris Agreement, Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) announced an amazing victory in Richmond, California - a historic cap on pollution from oil refineries, which will prevent Bay Area refineries from bringing Tar Sands or other extreme and heavy crudes to be processed.
It is clear that we are in a unique and critical moment in the history of the planet. Through our Climate Justice Initiative and beyond, Grassroots International is committed to continuing to prioritize our work to support and accompany climate justice struggles in the US, with GGJ, CJA, and others, and with our partners leading climate justice movements in the Global South.
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Justice Protectors, Let's Take Action Inauguration Day
Dec 30, 2016
I'm not sure how many Inauguration Day protests in DC I've been to over the years. The one I distinctly remember is January 20th, 2001, George W. Bush's first inauguration. There was a similar political dynamic then as the upcoming Trump one. A reactionary Republican was taking office, and progressives were very concerned about what it would mean across a broad range of issues.
Of course, Bush had not campaigned the way Trump did. He hadn't been publicly accused by a dozen women of sexual attacks. He hadn't called Mexicans rapists or for a ban on all Muslim emigration into the USA. He wasn't a full-on, narcissistic, pathological liar. He hadn't aligned himself so overtly with white supremacists. He hadn't nominated the head of Exxon Mobil to be Secretary of State.
But there were justifiable fears, and they proved to be well-founded after the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks. The world, especially the Middle East, is still reeling from the continuing impacts of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq, in particular.
Trump has made it very clear by his Cabinet appointments that he does not intend to use his Presidency to unify the country. He and other Republican leaders have every intention of doing all they can to turn the clock back years, decades, on issues across the board, and to do it quickly once Trump takes office.
It is essential, strategic, absolutely necessary that the demonstrations in Washington, DC and in localities around the country be strong, large, vocal and nonviolently militant. The American people, a big majority of whom do not like Trump, need to see and feel the power of our people's resistance movement.
Fortunately, there is a whole week of action shaping up in Washington, DC, beginning the weekend of January 14th and 15th.
On the 14th the National Action Network is organizing a We Shall Not Be Moved March on Washington. On the 15th, the 88th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Interfaith Moral Action on Climate is organizing a spiritual assembly and walk to the White House beginning at 2 pm at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.
During that weekend a collective of long-term DC organizers and activists working under the umbrella of the DC Welcoming Committee will initiate a week-long series of actions, trainings, and events to give Trump an appropriate welcome to their city.
On January 18 and 19, The Climate Justice Alliance is teaming up with Grassroots Global Justice and Right to the City for the #ItTakesRoots Pushback! Convergence. There will be Training for Trainers Labs and Strategy Conversations. More info can be found here.
On January 18th climate activists are organizing a Climate Convergence where activists will network to help plan the work ahead. Workshops will be held on organizing, strategy, mass action, intersectionality, allyship, and more.
On the morning of January 19th Beyond Extreme Energy is organizing a "Resist Trump's FERC" action at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The monthly FERC Commissioners meeting is happening that morning, and for the 27th month in a row activists will go into it to speak out against FERC's rubber-stamping of permits for fracked gas pipelines and other infrastructure.
On January 20th, Inauguration Day, there are various activities taking place, including decentralized but nonviolent direct actions, coordinated by Build and Resist nationally and the DC Welcoming Committee.
Then on January 21st there is a massive Women's March beginning at Independence Avenue and 3rd St. SW and marching to an area near the White House. This looks to be the largest event of the week.
And this is just the beginning of our resistance campaign. It will be followed by 100 Days of Resistance leading up to a massive People's Climate March on April 29th in DC. More information on those activities can be found here.
It is encouraging to see the ways that our resistance movement is rising up in response to the threat that a Trump-led government represents. In the face of this clear and present danger, it's time to hit the streets, in DC and around the country, starting Inauguration week and just keep going. The people, organized, have the power, and we must use it now.
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