“Prevarication is the process whereby lies are told and truths are omitted. The vast majority of voices speaking for or about the Green New Deal have either a narrative or a funding stream to protect, sometimes it’s both.”
The post The Unannounced Death of the Green New Deal: Part 2 – An Object of Projection appeared first on Wrong Kind of Green.
***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***
October 28, 2020
Press Contact:
Robert P. Alvarez
robert@ips-dc.org
(916) 690-9896
Washington, D.C. – On October 28, 2020, the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies released a new report exposing the troubling link between new laws criminalizing protesters and the fossil fuel industry’s deep influence over elected officials.
The report, titled “Muzzling Dissent: How Corporate Influence over Politics Has Fueled Anti-Protest Laws” and authored by Basav Sen and Gabrielle Colchete, examines a new pattern of anti-protest laws that restrict or infringe upon constitutionally protected freedoms such as free speech and free assembly. These laws brazenly attempt to shield fossil fuel infrastructure projects from public scrutiny at the expense of the health of surrounding communities. Additionally, the extractive projects these anti-protest laws seek to protect disproportionately harm marginalized communities that often lack resources to oppose them.
“As Black Lives Matter and environmental protesters are met with paramilitary police repression and draconian felony charges, state legislatures are also passing ‘Critical Infrastructure Protection’ laws that conflate civil disobedience with heinous, felony acts,” writes Colchete.
Through case studies of Louisiana, Minnesota, and West Virginia — all of which have either passed or introduced ‘Critical Infrastructure Protection’ laws during the construction of new, controversial oil and gas pipelines — this critical new report unearths linkages between corporate lobbyists and elected officials, details disparate and harmful impacts of extractive fossil fuel projects on Black, Indigenous, and impoverished communities, and offers practical policy solutions.
“The nexus between the fossil fuel industry and state elected officials is a prime example of the system of legal corruption that prevails at all levels of government in the U.S., and results in laws that criminalize protest against corporate abuses,” writes Sen.
Key Findings:
Policy Recommendations:
Muzzling Dissent exposes the money trail linking corporate lobbyists, elected officials, and anti-protest laws targeting community members and advocates who oppose extractive fossil fuel projects. This case-study analysis of three pipelines in three different states illustrates the disproportionate harms these projects inflict on the health of the Black, Indigenous, and impoverished communities they are constructed in. Crucially, this report concludes with policy recommendations designed to safeguard the constitutional rights of protesters, challenge corporate hijacking of the political process, and prioritize the health of marginalized communities over fossil fuel profiteers.
Read the report: https://ips-dc.org/report-muzzling-dissent
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About the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies
The aim of the Climate Justice Project is to support the transition from a financially extractive, fossil fueled economy to equitable, democratic and local living economies. Because we understand climate disruption as a consequence of our broken economic system, and as a major factor exacerbating race, class, gender, and other forms of inequality, we look for root causes and promote solutions at the intersection of both the economic and climate crises.
The post Alarming New Report Exposes Dangerous Link Between Fossil-Fueled Politicians and Anti-Protest Laws appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.
China’s reckless mode of development has savaged its environment and ecology. Is a new revolution the only way to prevent disaster?
The post Review: ‘China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse’ first appeared on Climate & Capitalism.
Trillions of dollars of GDP depend on biodiversity, according to Swiss Re report
One-fifth of the world’s countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of the destruction of wildlife and their habitats, according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re.
Natural “services” such as food, clean water and air, and flood protection have already been damaged by human activity.
The post Mutual Aid Groups Faced Attacks from Militias and Police After Setting up a Community Hub in Wake of Oregon Wildfires appeared first on It’s Going Down.
Agency interviews members of Siskiyou Rising Tide about mutual aid efforts in the Rogue Valley following the devastating Almeda Fire. To support Agency’s work, go here. By Lilia Letsch Most people on the US West Coast are painfully aware that this summer has given rise to a really intense and tragic wildfire season. Even though… Read Full Article
Louis Dean
The rise of eco-fascism has led to some of the worst far-right lone wolf terror attacks in recent years. From the Christchurch and El Paso massacres, eco-fascist philosophy has played a key, if not the central, motivation for these attacks.
An often overlooked and unforeseen consequence of the worsening climate crisis is the further radicalising effect it is having among young people on the far-right, giving their xenophobia, racist and fascist beliefs a greater ecological impetus. Consequently, this is proving to have horrendous real world consequences for people of colour, ethnic and religious minorities who are the target of these eco-fascist terror attacks.
Thus, this article calls for governments at COP26 to realise how decades of ineffective climate change measures has led to the growth of this ideology. It is therefore imperative that governments take accountability for the consequences of previous inaction by pursuing an international effort to halt eco-fascist radicalisation.
This collective effort must take the form of targeted action against fascist networks on social media, which has become the primary facilitator of far-right radicalisation. With current social media platforms all too easily allowing eco-fascists to communicate, disseminate propaganda and radicalise others. Therefore the article calls for governments at COP26 to embrace;
This article features in the Young Fabians Environment Network’s Cop26 Report, titled ‘Climate Change Accountability’. The Young Fabians Environment Network is the environmental youth wing of the Fabian Society, a socialist think tank established in 1884, which is affiliated with the UK Labour party. The report features articles written by members concerning ways to improve transparency, responsibility and accountability at the next COP26 UN climate change conference in Glasgow, in an effort to help solve the climate crisis. A link to the article, and a full report can be found here.
The post The Rise of Eco-Fascism: The Environmental Case for Taking a Tougher Stance Against Online Hate appeared first on Institute for Social Ecology.
Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The climate catastrophe has caught fascism’s evil eye. First it spawned eco-fascism, a creed founded on lies about immigrants and population control. More people migrating to first world countries, eco-fascists say, means more people with outsized carbon footprints. Better for those immigrants to stay home, having less climate impact, than coming here to indulge in our red meat, SUVs and guns.
Eco-fascism also posits that there are too many people in the world – read black and brown people. Fewer people mean a healthier climate, so this deviously false reasoning goes. But this neo-Malthusian nonsense conveniently ignores the fact that most people on the globe, billions of them have a very small climate impact. Millions in Bangladesh, drowning in climate catastrophe-caused flooding, have tiny carbon footprints compared to, say, the U.S. military, one of the planet’s pre-eminent carbon emitters. Subsistence farmers in Central America do nowhere near the climate damage of industrial agriculture, or corporate fossil fuel capitalists, fracking companies or even just North American suburbanites. The problem is not numerous poor people. It’s rich people – and their obscenely opulent corporations and the militaries they deploy to defend their wealth.
Then last year, Australia burned. When climate change thus became undeniable, radical right-wingers tried a new diversionary tactic: blame the left. Right-wing politicians and Rupert Murdoch’s rabidly reactionary Newscorp spread the lies that left-wingers and environmentalists set Australia’s fires. Those fires, according to Vice, “burned an area larger than South Korea, killed over 30 people and resulted in the deaths of millions of animals.” Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison downplayed the role of the climate catastrophe, while climate-change denying propagandists, including Murdoch’s Newscorp, wouldn’t shut up. Trump picked up the “environmentalists did it” lie and disseminated it further.
Then this past summer, the West Coast burned. Actually, parts of it still burn. It did so because of globally warmed, extremely dry weather, which is the direct result of huge corporations abetting the burning of fossil fuels. These fires had nothing to do with raking and nothing to do with antifa. But that didn’t stop both lies from gaining wide currency. According to NBC, the falsehood that antifa set the fires metastasized in neighborhood Facebook groups and on far-right websites. It wasn’t just that the Trumpian know-nothings took over, it was worse. Actively promoted, flagrant lies, inciting violence against unspecified leftists, took over. And they were dangerous.
The Douglas County, Oregon Sheriff’s office said it was “overrun with…inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires.” QAnon also got into the act, and NBC reported that a fire-fighters union in Washington State called Facebook “an absolute cesspool of misinformation right now.” Once again, thank Facebook for polluting public discourse with so much fake news, people didn’t know what to believe.
The authorities knew this “antifa did it” line was a blatant fabrication, but idiot, radical right-wing terrorists believed it. They interfered with people evacuating, which was dangerous. Locals fleeing killer fires had to waste time while imbeciles with guns held them up at self-proclaimed check-points, to ascertain that they weren’t in fact antifa arsonists. Who didn’t exist anyway!
Just as stupid were those radical reactionary armed fanatics who refused to evacuate and insisted on staying in their homes, risking their lives and those of their families, to protect their property from antifa marauders, a threat anyone with a brain could spot as a colossal fabrication in 10 seconds. But right-wingers aren’t the brightest bulbs in the batch, as this latest activity proves. They will believe anything, no matter how preposterous, about the left.
These lies about climate change and their hysterical, uncritical, wide acceptance bode very poorly for the future. If we can’t even have a coherent national or global conversation on the subject, informed by science, how on earth can we expect to control the climate catastrophe? Fortunately, lots of other countries ignore the U.S. and Australia and their climate disaster denial. Citizens of Europe take the climate catastrophe seriously, as do their governments. So do many African and Asian countries. That’s where humanity’s future lies: with people and their governments who face, honestly, the death and destruction that rich capitalists have wrought and who move to limit the damage – because it’s too late to stop it altogether – so that some parts of earth remain habitable. The future does not lie with the U.S. and Australia, purveyors of megadeath, who deny what they’ve done as the world burns down in front of them. Liars like the world’s Murdochs, right-wing climate-change denying politicians, fossil fuel corporations and eco-fascists will usher in only one thing: planetary doom. The evidence of that is already all around us.
The post Fascism’s Twisted Take on Climate Change appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
An interview with Siskiyou Rising Tide
By Lilia Letsch
Most people on the US West Coast are painfully aware that this summer has given rise to a really intense and tragic wildfire season. Even though temperatures are starting to cool, at the time of writing this there are still at least 42 major wildfires burning in California, Oregon and Washington. A few weeks ago, during a historic wind event, the Almeda Fire started on the edge of Ashland, Southern Oregon, where I live. It was one of the smaller wildfires that have burned on the West Coast this year, but it hit a very densely populated area and ultimately burned down over 2,300 mostly low-income homes and displaced roughly 3,000 people in the Rogue Valley.
We know these fires are being exacerbated by climate change, but it also goes beyond rising temperatures, and involves interactions with the myriad of pressures on native plant communities (e.g. logging and highly flammable non-native plants), the removal of seasonal Indigenous burning practices from the landscape, and the lack of social services that could help avert some of the accidentally or intentionally-lit fires. There are so many issues at play, and so much at risk, it all feels really overwhelming and hard to digest. When one of our local climate activist groups Rogue Climate lost their office in the Almeda Fire, it was a stark and symbolic reminder for me as to how much harder this struggle will continue to get.
Witnessing and being involved with mutual aid projects in response to events like wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the few things that grounds me and keeps me feeling like there is something to fight for – and I know I’m not the only one. Mutual aid – when people take responsibility to care for one another and change political conditions by building new social relations that don’t rely on the state or the non-profit industrial complex – has been garnering increasing awareness since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Mutual aid projects and networks are popping up all over the country. Here in the Rogue Valley there has been an incredible mutual aid response to the displacement of people from the Almeda Fire. I sat down with the good folks at Siskiyou Rising Tide (SORT) to learn more about their involvement with local mutual aid efforts and the challenges that are being faced in a community fraught with some very intense social and political divisions.
Agency: Thanks for taking time to answer these questions during what I know is a very busy time for you. To start, can you share a bit about how and why Siskiyou Rising Tide (SORT) emerged as a group?
Siskiyou Rising Tide: SORT formed in 2015 to fight against the proposed Pacific Connector LNG Pipeline – which, if constructed, would run through Southern Oregon and five major watersheds, including the Klamath, Rogue, Umpqua, and Coquille rivers and the Coos estuary. We are a volunteer-run, non-hierarchical group focused on direct action and climate justice. We value direct action as well as other community organizing strategies, and we’re down to kick it with all kinds of people and organizations so long as we can be ourselves. In the No LNG Coalition we’ve been able to bring things like our knowledge around security culture, a willingness to call-out so-called progressive politicians, and our love and connection to the places that would be destroyed by the pipeline. We value decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty, and we support a climate movement that centers Indigenous voices.
Agency: Siskiyou Rising Tide has been very active in the mutual aid response to the Almeda Fire in Southern Oregon – can you share a snapshot of what that work looks like on the ground?
SORT: Disasters like the Almeda Fire unfold in stages. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, it was important to drive around the county, to get a literal understanding of what was happening on the ground – where are evacuees congregating, what do they need – things like that. Mutual aid sites emerged in multiple locations and we were involved in supply drives, gathering sleeping bags, blankets, tampons, water – whatever people needed, we would gather and redistribute. We are also one of five organizations on the steering committee for the Rogue Valley Relief Fund. The weekend after the fire, we worked with other organizations on the relief fund to help distribute nearly $5,000 in Visa gift cards to Latinx folks who had lost their homes. Being scrappy and down put us in a position to be really responsive to different logistical needs that came up.
Agency: Did you foresee that mutual aid work would be an element of Siskiyou Rising Tide’s mission when the group was founded?
SORT: We’ve always valued mutual aid but it wasn’t a major focus until last year, when someone gave us a rather large donation. We had to decide what to do with the money, and we figured it was good to give a lot back to the community. We started the Siskiyou-Klamath Community Action Fund to offer $500 grants to support social and environmental justice organizing throughout the region. We prioritize groups that don’t have access to mainstream sources of funding, and have given grants to support everything from a zero-to-low-cost herb clinic to prison abolitionists responding to COVID-19 outbreaks within Oregon prisons.
When the pandemic hit, we provided a lot of support to folks doing mutual aid within our local houseless communities. We were making our own hand sanitizer for free distribution, and we’ve supported efforts to hold the police accountable for their mistreatment of houseless folks throughout the pandemic. The pipeline is on hold, at least for now, so it’s been a good time to shift our work toward emergent community needs and organizing.
Agency: The community response to the Almeda Fire has been really inspiring in many ways, but there’s also been some tensions with police and white supremacists harassing mutual aid efforts. How has Siskiyou Rising Tide and other collaborators been tackling these issues?
SORT: It’s been intense. While our towns were still burning, rumors flooded social media that “Antifa” and “BLM” lit the fires. When it’s not Antifa or BLM, they blame houseless people. It’s hard to keep up with the rumor mill these days, there’s so much disinformation out there.
A cool thing about mutual aid right now is that a lot of the folks we’re currently working with are people we got to know over the summer, people who’ve been out in the streets protesting in defense of Black lives. Right after George Floyd was killed, there were thousands of people who took to the streets in Medford. Most of them were zoomers and millennials – teens and young adults – and we were like, holy shit! Where did they come from? Despite having organized here for many years, we had no idea our towns were filled with rowdy kids ready to throw down for love and justice.
More recently, when the militia dorks found out a bunch of people who happen to believe that Black lives matter were doing mutual aid down at Hawthorne Park in Medford, they came to threaten and intimidate us. They circled us with their trucks, took pictures of our license plates, walked through the mutual aid camp carrying guns, and said all kinds of wacky stuff on social media. There were intense moments but at the end of the day, we couldn’t stop them from coming around to check it out. Well, fine. Come see what we’re up to – we’re feeding and sheltering people in the middle of a disaster zone. There’s no hidden agenda. I mean, we think that white supremacy and capitalism are evil but we’re open about that – no secrets here!
The police, that’s a whole other issue. They’ve engaged in a war against houseless folks for many years, and that won’t stop until we have total abolition.
Agency: Southern Oregon is well known for its right wing and white supremacist militias – have you had to deal with these issues in your climate justice work before the Almeda Fire?
SORT: Yeah, definitely. But things really escalated after George Floyd was killed. Right-wingers were waving guns at people and driving their trucks into crowds! Some of the newer organizers are still getting death threats, trucks circling around their houses late at night, stuff like that.
What’s really changed though is the strength of our own networks. There’s been a fundamental shift in community power, and a new generation of organizers and activists are throwing down for the cause. There’s no going back on that, as Sam Cooke sang, a change is gonna come!
Hawthorne Park Mutual Aid
Agency: The Hawthorne Park Mutual Aid hub was a really amazing collaborative effort – what are some of the different groups that came together to make it happen, and can you share any examples of how collaborating together has been building long-term community capacity.
SORT: Since the fires displaced so many people, folks have done everything they can to survive – sleeping in their cars, in fields at the local high school, whatever it takes. Meanwhile, there have been these incredible supply drives and community efforts to share resources throughout the community – so really, Hawthorne Park was just another example of that. When the fires started, a lot of people who live along the Bear Creek Greenway got burnt out or had to evacuate. Hawthorne Park was an obvious place for people to take refuge, but anyone was welcome there. There were people who’d lost their mobile homes staying there too, along with a handful of otherwise housed folks who camped out to help keep things running smoothly.
In terms of the different groups, Hawthorne Park has always been a place where street folks hang out, and there’s been various outreach efforts there over the years. One particular group was doing daily feeds there for the past three weeks – a loose network of folks who know each other through protesting for Black lives – but there are other rad groups doing street outreach, cop watch, and sweeps response in Medford for many months. There’s also the mutual aid networks that have been going on since the pandemic, plus crews of people who know each other through environmental justice work, stuff like that. Essentially, we had an open collective working together like an ecosystem, without any centralized leadership. It was amazing!
In the past few months, there’s been a fundamental shift in how our communities hold power, which is why, at the end of the day, the police raided the park. Mutual aid is disruptive. We were running a mutual aid camp that did not rely on police to resolve our issues, and that’s scary for the city. They’re afraid of what can happen when houseless people are treated with dignity and respect. If we took seriously our most marginalized community members, we would have to understand why they were so ostracized and demonized in the first place. We would have to face hard truths about things like capitalism and white supremacy.
At the park, we lived and worked together for two weeks. It was a liberatory space, and now we know that’s possible. One of the best things to come out of this experience is a deepening of our own relationships – we learned a lot about our friends, their strengths and weaknesses, and we know how to build together going forward.
Agency: As you mention, the Hawthorne Park mutual aid camp was raided by the Medford Police Department on September 22. Can you share a bit about what led up to the raid, how it played out, and what your plans are for continuing the mutual aid work in the face of this repression?
SORT: The camp was targeted because of the perceived demographics of the people staying there. On the one hand, you had people claiming that the camp was full of people from out of town. Right wingers actually thought we enlisted the “Antifa buses” to bring in houseless folks from Eugene, San Francisco, wherever. On the other hand, you had people who thought the folks staying there were just taking advantage of the fire in order to, I don’t know, get a free sleeping bag?
The truth is, the raid was the latest example of the city’s war on poor and houseless communities. There were a hundred tents at the park, and the police got worried. In the midst of a disaster zone, this humanitarian aid camp began to model an alternative to the existing houseless shelters – which work for some people, but not everybody, and are usually full anyway.
Rather than see it as an opportunity to encourage, they came and destroyed it. They sent a couple dozen police officers to raid the camp, and arrested eleven people. They targeted houseless folks, volunteers, and even a member of the press.
It’s classic state repression, and it’s also symptomatic of the war on houselessness. Every time the police come in and demolish houseless encampments, their goal is to disrupt and destroy the communities that exist there. It makes organizing difficult – how do you build relationships and trust while people are living in a war zone? – but not impossible. Our communities hold tremendous power, and our work is rooted in justice and love. There’s no stopping that!
NOTE: Members of Hawthorne Park Mutual Aid have since filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Medford for “unconstitutional and inhumane treatment” after Medford Police raided and cleared the Hawthorne Park camp.
Agency: It’s still early days in the mutual aid response to the Almeda Fire, but I’m wondering if you have any “lessons learned” already that you think might be useful for other people dealing with climate disaster impacts in their community?
SORT: The new lessons are probably old ones. We weren’t there but a few of us know old stories from Common Ground, the collective that emerged in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and I find myself thinking about that space a lot these days. When the fundraising efforts started, our networks reached out to disaster relief friends to hear about their financial models, and that was really helpful.
The biggest lessons are about keeping your head together. When the shit hits, sometimes it’s best to chill a bit – make sure you’re thinking clearly, otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time and energy running in circles. Remember that you aren’t going to be able to support everyone, so get clear on what your skill sets and capacities are, and stay away from drama.
Don’t worry too much about whether you’re “qualified” to help or not – sometimes the best folks are just ordinary people who rise to the occasion. It’s hard to address disagreements in ad hoc, open collectives. Watch out for militias, and don’t talk to cops!