This is the latest weekly column written by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan. Read the full column on democracynow.org here.
“In recent weeks, a polar vortex blew across the U.S., killing at least 20 people. At the same time, U.S. government scientists reported that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year on record, with the five hottest years occurring in the past five years.
A huge hole in one of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is causing accelerated melting there, while across that continent, large lakes of meltwater are bending, buckling and threatening to collapse these vast ice sheets — all leading to rapidly increasing global sea level rise. Glaciers melting in the Himalayas threaten tens of millions of people downstream with flooding and the disruption of water supplies.
As evidence that the planet is experiencing what has been called “the sixth great extinction,” a recent review of scientific data concludes that 40 percent of the world’s insects are on the brink of extinction.
President Donald Trump’s response? During the polar vortex, he tweeted: “What the hell is going on with Global Waming? (sic) Please come back fast, we need you!” Yet there are signs of hope. Two Democrats, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, have submitted a resolution to Congress recognizing “the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” House Resolution 109 had a remarkable 67 co-sponsors in the House, all Democrats, and has been distributed to 11 different House committees for consideration.
“Today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said, announcing the effort. “Climate change and our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, not just as a nation, but as a world.”
The Green New Deal is named after the original New Deal, the massive government program launched by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help the United States recover from the Great Depression. In addition to imposing a slew of regulations to constrain the big banks that were largely responsible for the financial collapse, FDR’s New Deal empowered the federal government to directly hire millions of workers to do everything from building roads and bridges to writing poetry. The Social Security system was created to protect the elderly from the ravages of poverty. In the decades since, the New Deal has become synonymous with successful government intervention on a grand scale to solve massive, seemingly intractable problems.
The parallel Senate and House resolutions put forth by Markey and Ocasio-Cortez — known as “AOC” to her supporters — are a call to action to Congress to craft laws that implement a true Green New Deal, rapidly shifting the U.S. economy to one that is powered by renewable energy, and to do so in a fair, equitable and just manner.
When asked on “60 Minutes” by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “Are you talking about everybody having to drive an electric car?” AOC replied: “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?”
Cooper also challenged her on the cost of a Green New Deal, which, in part, AOCwould pay for with an increased marginal tax on the super wealthy — a 70 percent tax rate on income earned in excess of $10 million, for example. Several national polls suggest strong support for such a tax.
While almost every Democratic presidential hopeful has embraced the Green New Deal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi casually derided the plan, saying, in response to a reporter’s question about its legislative chances: “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
After Sen. Markey submitted his Green New Deal resolution, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “We’re going to be voting on that in the Senate to give everybody an opportunity to go on record.” He and the Republican Party are calculating that a vote in favor will politically damage incumbent Democrats come re-election time.
But McConnell is wrong. A majority of Americans believe that climate change is real, poses a threat to humankind, and that something must be done. It is time for the dinosaurs in Congress and the White House to wean themselves off fossil fuels and support the Green New Deal, or face extinction.”
Our dependence on fossil fuels is complex and it’s increasing. We need a sustainable solution. What about using the sun’s energy to power our cars? We already use the sun’s energy to create electricity but it’s difficult to store and it isn’t available on demand: so we need a liquid fuel.
Plants make liquid fuels from sunlight using a chemical reaction, but they’re not very good at it. Scientists are trying to make an improved version of this process using artificial leaves. If we could improve it to make fuel more efficiently, and pack all this fuel producing leaf power into a much smaller space, we could have a bottomless supply of sustainably produced liquid fuel.
Plants can’t solve all of the world’s problems, but in the hands of some forward thinking scientists, they could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and on the list of global problems worth addressing: that’s a big one.
Good morning to everyone who is going to troll an oil company today
The goal of bullying Big Oil companies over their climate tweets isn’t just to educate people about corporate hypocrisy. It’s to unite activists around the goal of taking away their social license to operate.
Oil majors have admitted to investors that their business would be in deep trouble without broad public support. They’ve also admitted the biggest threat to maintaining social license is public anger over climate change.
Oil companies could remedy this threat by winding down their fossil fuel operations, and investing heavily in renewable energy. But for the most part, they’ve chosen to combat public anger over climate change by investing in strategic communication.This consistent choice of empty climate words over meaningful climate action is why several Shell executives quit the company this week—and it’s why Heglar says social media call-outs are increasingly powerful.
“In 2022 you have got tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers spelling out the climate science,”
said Larch Maxey, a veteran eco-campaigner. Authorities such as David Attenborough and David King, the former government chief science officer, were in agreement.
“When your house is on fire, you stop pouring petrol on the flames,” he said. “That’s basically the demand – no new licences. We are in a crisis. Let’s stop digging out new oil and gas.”
In 2010 I wrote the first two chapters. One month in 2013 I wrote the core of the book and started revisions. In 2016 I closed the loops and wrote the final three chapters. . No way is this as interesting to you as it is to me. I get that. Hey, I’m not even asking you to read the damn thing. If you buy the eBook it’s only three dollars, you waste more money than that throwing food away. Nice…
Environmental justice activists take-over and drop banner (above) from the building where McGill University was hosting its annual fossil fuel conferance, February 7, 2014 – Photo via @LockoutPetroC
MONTREAL – On February 6 and 7, 2014, McGill University’s Institute for the Study of Canada is hosting a conference entitled “Petrocultures: Oil, Energy, and Canada’s Future,” which brings together leading members of the fossil fuel industry, consultants, supporters of oil extraction in various forms, as well as critics of fossil fuel extraction. These critics believe that the solutions to the environmental and human crises caused by petrochemicals and their extraction lie in reasoned debate.
The framework of this conference positions support for fossil fuel extraction as one valid opinion among others, reducing massive environmental destruction, widespread death and disease, and the continued advancement of Canada’s colonial project to intellectual concerns, to be balanced against the promise of cheap energy and growth in profits. No matter their personal convictions, participants in such debate legitimate the pro-tar sands, pro-fracking, colonialist position by granting its defenders a speaking platform and a considered response.
To ask whether Canada should or should not engage in fossil fuel extraction is to distract from the vital question of how we (as people living in Canada and as residents of a shared planet) will shut down fossil fuel extraction and the economy it supports as quickly as possible. Petrocultures’ choice of starting point for the conversation is a political choice with important effects.
In solidarity with blockades and lockdowns of pipelines and extractive projects across Turtle Island, we are locking out Petrocultures 2014 and the academic discourses that legitimize and facilitate the continued destruction of the atmosphere and pillaging of the planet.
The structure of the Petrocultures debate is not neutral. It presumes a position of political authority, an ability to influence policy as it relates to labour mobility, free trade, and urban design among other topics. Accordingly, a quick scan of the speakers list reveals that participation is contingent on expertise and public status. Just as the debate structure reduces to an afterthought the lived experiences of people suffering the worst effects of resource extraction, the $150 price of admission serves to exclude any participants who might diverge from the script. Any discussion on how to relate to extractive industries must revolve around the people who will be most directly affected by extreme climate change, not paid experts, policymakers, and ivory tower academics.
To whom does Petrocultures offer a stage? Beyond outright promoters of the tar sands and fracking: a co-founder of ForestEthics, which advocates for “responsible industry,” a co-founder of Équiterre, which urges “responsible consumption,” and the president of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, which campaigns to achieve “green growth.” The common thread uniting these speakers is a commitment to making moderate adjustments to life under capitalism, adjustments which serve to extend the lifespan of an inherently violent system without abolishing it. Capitalist society is predicated on indefinite growth and extreme inequality. It cannot exist without the continued refinement of techniques of social control or organized violence. Gradual reforms that leave the basic structure in tact, as pursued by environmental NGOs committed to “sustainability” and “a better future”, are not merely inadequate, they act in opposition to our struggles for lives free from domination and for a planet that will continue to sustain life. Neither do demands for a “sustainable” Canadian future, with their presumptions of an ongoing nation-state and ongoing settler presence on Native lands, address the imperative to dismantle the colonial apparatus of this country.
Let us not forget Suzanne Fortier, who would have had the honor of opening proceedings today. While the world’s largest industrial project displaces indigenous communities and raises the incidence of rare and fatal cancers among their people, Fortier has worked tirelessly to give industry in general and the extractive sector in particular greater control over academic research, as president of the granting agency NSERC then as principal of McGill. Her role in cementing the complicity of universities in ongoing colonization and destruction of the earth makes it fitting that she would address Petrocultures, which, like her vaunted corporate partnerships, sees in the catastrophe of the tar sands an opportunity to generate institutional prestige.
It is not impossible that a participant in Petrocultures would utter a challenge to the systemic roots of the building ecological catastrophe. Yet the structure of the conference would have defused that challenge’s radical potential in advance, flattening it into an academic contest of ideas, opinions to be weighed against one another, prompting ever more contemplation and reasoned dialogue. Meanwhile, the pace at which tar sands projects poison the food people eat, contaminate their water supply, and annex unceded indigenous land only accelerates.
A growing scientific consensus confirms what the brutality of a petro-economy makes apparent in a million ways everyday: time has run out. Rather than wait for a political solution that will not come, we want to spread resistance to the tar sands and to all other forms that Canadian capitalism and colonialism take in our communities and daily lives. And we want to interrupt the falsely critical dialogues that legitimize the power of the people who are destroying the earth. We know that today’s action is a small one, that much more is needed. We hope that others will see in our resistance a shared call to action.
Fossil fuels have had large societal benefits and indeed represent a great wealth in the ground. But for both people and planets, wealth without health is a losing proposition. Our view.Opposing view.
In January 2019, the Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world to divest from fossil fuels. The Irish government sold €68m worth of stock in 38 companies involved in oil, gas and other fossil fuels following a July 2018 law passed by the Irish parliament that forced the country’s €8 billon national investment fund to divest from fossil fuels as part of the country’s commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement.
the fact that we’re in the twenties. the TWENTIES! we’re back in decades that end in ‘ties.’ things are cool again. well, if we actually cut down on our fossil fuel use. in future years our style will be considered 'vintage.’ but for now it’s using too many litres of water to make. we are living in the past and the future simultaneously. we are living in the twenties, but this time instead of being 'roaring,’ they will be 'aware of consumerism,’ because wow we need to save the planet.
When you remember that only a smallish proportion of the cost of dealing with climate change will be borne by governments, it becomes clear that this is not a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on foreign aid and essential public services. It is a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on coal, oil, roads, farm subsidies, environmental destruction and unprovoked wars. We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.
George Monbiot, Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning
The world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning scores of “carbon bomb” oil and gas projects that would drive the climate past internationally agreed temperature limits with catastrophic global impacts, a Guardian investigation shows.
The exclusive data shows these firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating. Their huge investments in new fossil fuel production could pay off only if countries fail to rapidly slash carbon emissions, which scientists say is vital.
