By SUSAN ROGERS “To Change Everything, It Takes Everyone!” Under this mantra of the new climate justice movement, 400 Connecticut activists joined a “March for Jobs, Justice, and a Livable Earth” on Dec. 3. Picket signs carried the slogans voted up by the planning committee and included: Emergency Transition to 100% Renewable Energy Grid! Mass…
By MARTY GOODMAN More than bitter winter weather lies ahead for hundreds of Native American nations and their supporters battling hazardous fossil-fuel pipelines on sacred Sioux land at the Standing Rock camp near Cannonball, North Dakota. A far more bitter struggle looms for Native American rights and climate justice with the incoming Trump administration. Former…
By CHRIS MATO NUNPA Ho Mitakuyapi, Owasin cantewasteya nape ciyuzapi do! In the Dakota Language, this is a greeting that means, “Hello, my relatives. With a good heart I greet all of you with a handshake!” On Sunday, Dec. 4, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not issue a permit for the…
By CHRIS MATO NUNPA For most of this year, since April 2016, the Great Sioux Nation has gathered, along with its allies and supporters, to protect its treaty lands, with the sacred waters, the animal relatives, sacred sites, and burial sites, from the “Black Snake” (the Dakota Access Pipe Line, DAPL). In the past…
By BRUCE LESNICK On Nov. 18, the Obama administration banned oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans for the next five years, while allowing drilling projects to go forward in the Cook Inlet (southwest of Anchorage, Alaska) and in the Gulf of Mexico. The media have noted the strong possibility that when…
By CARL SACK When I decided to become a cartographer, I didn’t just want to make pretty and useful maps. I became a cartographer to make maps that change the world for the better. Right now, no situation needs this kind of map more than the current drama unfolding around the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline’s…
By KAREN SCHRAUFNAGEL and JOHN SCHRAUFNAGEL — MINNEAPOLIS — Close to 1500 people protested on Friday, Oct. 28, outside Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek’s office. The protesters were angered by the use of Hennepin County deputies and equipment brutalizing Indigenous people and their allies at Standing Rock. Sheriff’s departments from across the Midwest have been…
By BRUCE LESNICK This is the second part of an expanded debate in which socialist “Sydney Solidarity” squares off against the candidates of the ruling rich, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Part I of the debate, which appeared earlier on this website, dealt with economic matters. In this segment, the moderator, Lester Holt, asks the…
By CHRISTINE FRANK As a last-ditch effort to curb runaway global warming, while avoiding a definitive halt to fossil-fuel combustion, scientists, governments, entrepreneurs, and even right-wing think tanks are advocating various highly dangerous technologies to block solar radiation or draw down atmospheric carbon to cool the planet. Touted as Plan B, these risky methods come…
By BILL ONASCH Socialist Action’s vice-presidential candidate Karen Schraufnagel has filed extensive reports to this paper about the confrontations last month in remote Standing Rock, North Dakota. Efforts aiming to halt construction of a pipeline from the Bakken fracking fields to refineries in Illinois drew world attention to several important issues concerning Indigenous People’s rights,…
By CHRISTINE MARIE “People gonna rise like the water,” the most poignant of the new songs of the climate justice movement, makes a strong prediction. And the potential breadth and power of that people was on display in a new way on July 24, as close to 10,000 marchers took to the streets on a…
By CARL SACK Humanity is faced with a worsening climate catastrophe. In June, levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere topped 400 parts per million at the South Pole, a concentration not seen on this planet in the last four million years. Scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which is registering…
By BILL ONASCH This year’s Earth Day, hosted by the UN, was staged to be all about climate change. The chosen venue came attached with some historical irony. The land for the New York City complex housing the United Nations Headquarters was donated by John D. Rockefeller. His father started him off as a director of…
By MARTY GOODMAN The Algonquin is a “natural” gas pipeline under construction about 45 miles north of New York City and a mere 1500 feet from the accident prone Indian Point nuclear-power plant in Buchanan, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. Construction may be put on hold temporarily, pending a federal and state safety study urged…
By MICHAEL SCHREIBER Despite protests by residents and environmental groups, clear cutting of trees has begun in northeastern Pennsylvania for the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline, designed to carry Marcellus Shale fracked gas to New York and New England. Megan Holleran says that the loggers are destroying about 90 percent of her family’s sugar maple trees, devastating…
By CHRISTINE MARIE At the Paris climate talks in December 2015, the world’s governments—dominated by those who contribute most egregiously to global warming—acknowledged the need to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels but refused to commit in a meaningful way to the necessary reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases. Major…
By BRUCE LESNICK It [is] too much the way of [mainstream politicians] to talk of this terrible [crisis] as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it—as if observers of the…
By CARL SACK After 10 days of talks at the COP 21 climate conference in Paris, negotiators from 195 countries celebrated the adoption of an agreement that calls for a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5o Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. On one hand, the agreement goes farther than any previous accord to acknowledge the…
By CHRISTINE MARIE A Dec. 12 rally and march for Jobs, Justice, Climate in Boston constituted the first coordinated effort by New England 350.org chapters to build concrete relationships with economic justice and social justice organizations. New England 350 developed a partnership with several key Boston-based unions and immigrant rights organizations, gathered the endorsements of…
By RENA LAU Just in the last month there have been two cases of environmental protests occurring in China. Around one thousand people protested on the streets of Yangjiang city, in Guangdong province, against the construction of an incinerator. And ten thousand people protested against a chemical factory in Shangrao city, Jianxi province. The protesters…
BY JEFF MACKLER OAKLAND, Calif.—Organized by a broad coalition of environmental, social justice, labor, antiwar, anti-racist, and faith-based groups across Northern California, some 3000 mobilized on Saturday, Nov. 21, to demand immediate action to stop and reverse global warming and associated climate-change-influenced catastrophes. The mobilization was part of the worldwide effort to protest the Nov.…
By BILL ONASCH The world market for cars and trucks is booming. So are profits in most of the industry. Unionized auto workers in the U.S. have been properly focused the past few months on contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler that determine their wages, benefits, and working conditions for the next…
By CHRISTINE FRANK On the eve of the UN Climate Summit in Paris, some 785,000 people marched and rallied in 2300 locations around the world to demand concrete action to phase out fossil fuels and implement clean, renewable energy to prevent catastrophic warming of Earth’s atmosphere with a binding agreement to achieve that. Despite the…
BY JEFF MACKLER — OAKLAND, Calif. — As the 21st United Nations Conference of Parties (COP21) approaches, climate-crisis activists in the U.S. and around the world are gearing up for massive protests both before and after the Nov. 30–Dec. 12 UN meeting set for Paris. Some 40,000 government, corporate, and “civil society” representatives are expected to…
By CARL SACK On Nov. 6, U.S. President Barack Obama formally denied TransCanada’s application for approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The 1200-mile-long pipeline would have carried heavy crude oil (called bitumen) from tar-sands mines in northern Alberta, Canada, across the U.S. Great Plains states to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. Tar-sands oil…
