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Activists Lock Down and Blockade West Bound Coal Train in Missoula, Montana

from Northern Rockies Rising Tide and Blue Skies Campaign On Thursday, September 17th, members of Northern Rockies Rising Tide and Blue Skies Campaign staged a peaceful blockade in order to prevent a coal train from entering the Missoula rail yard in an act of peaceful protest against Montana coal export projects that threaten the health of rail line communities and the global climate. This…

These are some notes for a talk i was supposed to give about climate and racism - another dimension of #ICantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter

https://www.facebook.com/events/643082579157710/permalink/709480205851280/

My own experience include growing up within blocks of the City of Vernon, which was the one zip code with the highest TRI in the entire state of CA while canvassing for PIRGs and Greenpeace in W. LA on issues that white middle and upper class people cared about. A toxic waste incinerator was opposed by the Mothers of East LA. Huntington Park also had toxic lead waste that was so bad it actually posed a serious cancer risk.

We are already starting to face devastating climate change - from extreme weather and disastrous storms, record breaking heat, floods, droughts, lost crops, rising food prices, water shortages, return of malaria, etc. We are also seeing the climate change exacerbates existing injustices and oppression, e.g. Katrina and shock doctrine “development.”

How can #BlackLivesMatter when capitalism relies on price rationing for the highest bidder and poor lives don’t matter in their supply and demand curves? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-parenti/reading-the-world-in-a-lo_b_903634.html http://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-08-24/could-rationing-be-made-palatable

We face intensified gentrification and displacement in a greenwashed Whitetlandia – PNW will be a climate refuge for those with money that provides electric charging for cars but arrests the houseless who need to charge their phones. http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/08/in_portland_theres_free_electr.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/call-it-what-it-is-a-glob_b_8056186.html

https://www.facebook.com/metaltoad/photos/a.217941291402.142502.14453206402/10152894707961403/?type=1&theater

#TropicOfChaos (excerpt at the end) – will mean that the police and military are planning to react to refugees and migration with higher border walls and militarized responses. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown

Naomi Klein [What does #BlackLivesMatter, and the unshakable moral principle that it represents, have to do with climate change? Everything. Because we can be quite sure that if wealthy white Americans had been the ones left without food and water for days in a giant sports stadium after Hurricane Katrina, even George W. Bush would have gotten serious about climate change. Similarly, if Australia were at risk of disappearing, and not large parts of Bangladesh, Prime Minister Tony Abbott would be a lot less likely to publicly celebrate the burning of coal as “good for humanity,” as he did on the occasion of the opening of a vast new coal mine… The grossly unequal distribution of climate impacts is not some little-understood consequence of the failure to control carbon emissions. It is the result of a series of policy decisions the governments of wealthy countries have made—and continue to make—with full knowledge of the facts and in the face of strenuous objections. When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City two years earlier, a similar combination of forces showed its brutal face, but on a much larger scale. Housing projects suffering from decades of official neglect were devastated by the storm, with water and electrical systems completely knocked out for weeks. No lights. No heat. No power for lights or elevators. But the worst part was how fear of those darkened buildings clearly played a role in keeping government officials and relief agencies from checking in on elderly and sick residents, leaving them stranded in high-rise buildings without basic provisions for far too long. And Sandy was by no means the only example of this toxic combination of heavy weather and highly segregated neglect. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” Kanye West famously said, going way off script during a 2005 telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina. As that storm showed so nakedly, the worst impacts of extreme weather follow racial lines with the same devastating precision as the decision about whether to employ lethal police force. During Katrina, it was overwhelmingly New Orleans’s black residents who were abandoned on their rooftops and in the Superdome; who did not receive emergency aid in the earliest days; who were called “looters” when they took matters into their own hands; who were labeled “refugees” in their own country; and who were shot by both vigilantes and cops on the streets of their city. Race also continues to play no small role in determining whose homes and schools are rebuilt (or torn down, or privatized) in the name of “building back better.”] http://www.thenation.com/article/what-does-blacklivesmatter-have-do-climate-change/

POC are more concerned about climate change and pollution than average. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-racial-gap-on-global-warming/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/race-and-the-politics-of-climate-change-in-two-charts/ http://mic.com/articles/105120/new-poll-finds-something-surprising-about-race-and-climate-change

Health disparities – #ICantBreathe POC and the poor suffer more and have less access the healthy living and health care [Communities of color have been suffering the health effects of climate-altering pollution for far too long. Sixty-eight percent of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal plant -- one of the biggest sources of carbon pollution in America. That might help explain why African-American kids have a much higher rate of asthma: 1 in 6, compared with 1 in 10 nationwide. African Americans living in Los Angeles are more than twice as likely to die during a heat wave as other residents of the city. That's because cities develop "heat islands," which are created by an abundance of concrete and asphalt. People of color more densely populate urban areas that are prone to the heat-island effect. And folks living in these areas also tend to have limited access to cars and air conditioning.] http://www.theroot.com/how-climate-change-affects-people-of-color-1790895451

Supreme Court Rules Against EPA Mercury And Air Toxics Standards For US Coal Plants http://www.ibtimes.com/supreme-court-rules-against-epa-mercury-air-toxics-standards-us-coal-plants-1985841   [The federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2011 issued new guidelines, called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), for the first time ever limiting the toxic air pollution that coal- and oil-fueled power plants were allowed to emit. It required these plants to reduce emissions by upgrading their facilities to more public health-friendly systems. While few plants run on oil, coal plants provide the U.S. with nearly half of its electricity. … Why is this of such import to the Black community? Because these coal-powered plants spew extremely poisonous toxins of pollutants into the air every day that cause diseases and conditions like cancer, chronic heart conditions, ADD/ADHD, and respiratory diseases ranging from asthma to lung cancer in the surrounding communities. Not only that, 68 percent of the 42 million African-Americans in this country live within 30 miles of one of these coal-fire plants… It is not a coincidence. For a long list of reasons that mostly come back to racism and exploitation, these dangerous plants are far more likely to be built in poor areas mostly populated by Black and Hispanic people. Black children are the most likely to be exposed to mercury, in particular, which is a neurotoxin that after long-term exposure can cause fetal birth defects, brain damage or delayed development, emotional disturbances and psychotic reactions, and more. Jacqui Patterson, director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, which is backing the EPA in the case before the Supreme Court, said that African-American children are two to three times as likely to miss school, be hospitalized, or die from asthma attacks than White children. “For us, it’s very much a civil rights issue if certain communities are being disproportionately impacted by the pollutants that come from these coal plants,” she said, according to a story by Jazelle Hunt, Washington Correspondent for the NNPA, the Black press organization. To make its case, the NAACP referred to a report it issued called “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People.” The organization assigned a grade and rank to nearly 400 coal plants around the nation, in addition to listing the worst plants, the worst companies and the toll these plants take on the surrounding communities. According to the report, four million people live within three miles of the 75 worst plants, and nearly 53 percent of them are Black and brown... In addition, the Black community is in for a double whammy—after the pollutants do their damage and alter the climate, then Black communities bear the worst effects of climate change. “Indeed, Hurricane Katrina and the tornadoes in Pratt City, AL have already vividly demonstrated that the shifts in weather patterns caused by climate change disproportionately affect African Americans and other communities of color in the United States—which is a particularly bitter irony, given that the average African American household emits 20 percent less [carbon dioxide] per year than the average white American household,” the report states. “The six states with the largest proportion of African-Americans are all in the Atlantic hurricane zone, and all are expected to experience more severe storms as a consequence of global warming.”] http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/04/10/supreme-court-to-decide-on-environmental-justice-case-that-will-have-enormous-effect-on-future-health-of-black-community/

Native American lands and mining https://books.google.com/books?id=H7FMDztgSfkC&lpg=PA163&ots=ZB0FIJqECh&dq=when%20indian%20nations%20were%20confined%20to%20reservations%20they%20were%20typically%20assigned%20to&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=true

Principles of Environmental Justice Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, in Washington DC, drafted and adopted 17 principles of Environmental Justice… PREAMBLE WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice… 11) Environmental Justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination. 12) Environmental Justice affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and provided fair access for all to the full range of resources. 13) Environmental Justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent, and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color. .... 15) Environmental Justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms. 16) Environmental Justice calls for the education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives. http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html

Why this is our final chance for justice- The Unfinished Business of Liberation (Excerpt From: Klein, Naomi. “This Changes Everything.”) On one level, the inability of many great social movements to fully realize those parts of their visions that carried the highest price tags can be seen as a cause for inertia or even despair. If they failed in their plans to usher in a more equitable economic system, how can the climate movement hope to succeed? There is, however, another way of looking at this track record: these economic demands—for basic public services that work, for decent housing, for land redistribution—represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. The massive global investments required to respond to the climate threat—to adapt humanely and equitably to the heavy weather we have already locked in, and to avert the truly catastrophic warming we can still avoid—is a chance to change all that; and to get it right this time. It could deliver the equitable redistribution of agricultural lands that was supposed to following dependence from colonial rule and dictatorship; it could bring the jobs and homes that Martin Luther King dreamed of; it could bring jobs and clean water to Native communities; it could at last turn on the lights and running water in every South African township. Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth. The fact that our most heroic social justice movements won on the legal front but suffered big losses on the economic front is precisely why our world is as fundamentally unequal and unfair as it remains. Those losses have left a legacy of continued discrimination, double standards, and entrenched poverty—poverty that deepens with each new crisis. But, at the same time, the economic battles the movements did win are the reason we still have a few institutions left—from libraries to mass transit to public hospitals—based on the wild idea that real equality means equal access to the basic services that create a dignified life. Most critically, all these past movements, in one form or another, are still fighting today—for full human rights and equality regardless of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation; for real decolonization and reparation; for food security and farmers’ rights; against oligarchic rule; and to defend and expand the public sphere. So climate change does not need some shiny new movement that will magically succeed where others failed. Rather, as the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractivist worldview, and one that puts humanity on a firm and unyielding deadline, climate change can be the force—the grand push—that will bring together all of these still living movements. A rushing river fed by countless streams, gathering collective force to finally reach the sea. “The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance,” Frantz Fanon wrote in his 1961 master work, The Wretched of the Earth. “What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”14 Climate change is our chance to right those festering wrongs at last—the unfinished business of liberation. Winning will certainly take the convergence of diverse constituencies on a scale previously unknown. Because, although there is no perfect historical analogy for the challenge of climate change, there are certainly lessons to learn from the transformative movements of the past. One such lesson is that when major shifts in the economic balance of power take place, they are invariably the result of extraordinary levels of social mobilization. At those junctures, activism becomes something that is not performed by a small tribe within a culture, whether a vanguard of radicals or a subcategory of slick professionals (though each play their part), but becomes an entirely normal activity throughout society—it’s rent payers associations, women’s auxiliaries, gardening clubs, neighborhood assemblies, trade unions, professional groups, sports teams, youth leagues, and on and on. During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing “activists” and “regular people” became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone. Which brings us back to where we started: climate change and bad timing. It must always be remembered that the greatest barrier to humanity rising to meet the climate crisis is not that it is too late or that we don’t know what to do. There is just enough time, and we are swamped with green tech and green plans. And yet the reason so many of us are inclined to answer Brad Werner’s provocative question in the affirmative is that we are afraid—with good reason—that our political class is wholly incapable of seizing those tools and implementing those plans, since doing so involves unlearning the core tenets of the stifling free-market ideology that governed every stage of their rise to power. And it’s not just the people we vote into office and then complain about—it’s us. For most of us living in postindustrial societies, when we see the crackling black-and-white footage of general strikes in the 1930s, victory gardens in the 1940s, and Freedom Rides in the 1960s, we simply cannot imagine being part of any mobilization of that depth and scale. That kind of thing was fine for them but surely not us—with our eyes glued to smart phones, attention spans scattered by clickbait, loyalties split by the burdens of debt and insecurities of contract work. Where would we organize? Who would we trust enough to lead us? Who, moreover, is “we”? In other words, we are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage, while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are capable of solving problems big and small. This project also has led our governments to stand by helplessly for more than two decades as the climate crisis morphed from a “grandchildren” problem to a banging-down-the-door problem. All of this is why any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect. Because what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once—rules written into national laws and trade agreements, as well as powerful unwritten rules that tell us that no government can increase taxes and stay in power, or say no to major investments no matter how damaging, or plan to gradually contract those parts of our economies that endanger us all. And yet each of those rules emerged out of the same, coherent worldview. If that worldview is delegitimized, then all of the rules within it become much weaker and more vulnerable. This is another lesson from social movement history across the political spectrum: when fundamental change does come, it’s generally not in legislative dribs and drabs spread out evenly over decades. Rather it comes in spasms of rapid-fire lawmaking, with one breakthrough after another. The right calls this “shock therapy”; the left calls it “populism” because it requires so much popular support and mobilization to occur. (Think of the regulatory architecture that emerged in the New Deal period, or, for that matter, the environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s.)]

Christian Parenti-  Tropic of Chaos [THE PENTAGON IS planning for a world remade by climate change. You could even say that the Pentagon is planning for Armageddon. In the summer of 2008, Dr. Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, gave the US Congress a classified briefing on the military implications of climate change: “Food insecurity, for reasons both of shortages and affordability, will be a growing concern in Africa as well as other parts of the world. Without food aid, the region will likely face higher levels of instability—particularly violent ethnic clashes over land ownership.” “Closer to home,” continued Fingar, “the United States will need to anticipate and plan for growing immigration pressures. . . . Extreme weather events and growing evidence of inundation will motivate many to move sooner rather than later. . . . As climate changes spur more humanitarian emergencies, the international community’s capacity to respond will be increasingly strained.”1 Military planning, conceived of as a response to events, also shapes them. Planning too diligently for war can preclude peace. America’s overdeveloped military capacity, its military-industrial complex, has created powerful interests that depend on, therefore promote, war. Now the old military-industrial complex—companies like General Electric, Lockheed, and Raytheon, with their fabulously expensive weapons systems—has been joined by a swarm of smaller security firms offering hybrid services. Blackwater, DynCorp, and Global come to mind, but private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation, and The Geo Group are also involved. This new security-industrial complex offers an array of services at home and abroad: surveillance; intelligence; border security; detention; facility and base construction; antiterrorism consulting; military and police logistics, analysis, planning, and training; and, of course, personal security. Their operations are found wherever the United States projects power: in Afghanistan, running supply convoys, serving food, and providing translators; in Columbia, spraying coca fields and training the military; in the Philippines, training the police; in Mexico guarding businessmen; and all along the US-Mexico border, processing immigrant detainees. This new economy of repression helps promulgate a xenophobic and bellicose ideology. For example, private prison companies lobbied hard for passage of Arizona’s tough anti-immigration law in 2010.2 As a politics of climate change begins to develop, this matrix of parasitic interests has begun to shape adaptation as the militarized management of civilization’s violent disintegration. The Apocalypse on Paper A slew of government reports has discussed the social and military problems posed by climate change. In 2008, Congress mandated that the upcoming 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review—the policy document laying out the guiding principles of US military strategy and doctrine—consider the national-security impacts of climate change. The first of these investigations to make news, a 2004 Pentagon-commissioned study called “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” was authored by Peter Schwartz, a CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network… Schwartz and Randall’s report correctly treats global warming as a potentially nonlinear process.6 And they forecast a new Dark Ages:Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. . . . As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance. . . . Europe will be struggling internally, large numbers of refugees washing up on its shores and Asia in serious crisis over food and water. Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life.7 In 2007 there came more reports on climate and security… That report envisioned permanent counterinsurgency on a global scale. Here is one salient excerpt: Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world. Many governments in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are already on edge in terms of their ability to provide basic needs: food, water, shelter and stability. Projected climate change will exacerbate the problems in these regions and add to the problems of effective governance. Unlike most conventional security threats that involve a single entity acting in specific ways at different points in time, climate change has the potential to result in multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame. Economic and environmental conditions in these already fragile areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and populations migrate in search of resources. Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflict, extremism, and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies. The U.S. maybe drawn more frequently into these situations to help to provide relief, rescue, and logistics, or to stabilize conditions before conflicts arise.8 Another section notes: Many developing countries do not have the government and social infrastructures in place to cope with the types of stressors that could be brought on by global climate change. When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order, and protect the nation’s borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum . . . the greatest concern will be movement of asylum seekers and refugees who due to ecological devastation become settlers.9 In closing the report notes, “Abrupt climate changes could make future adaptation extremely difficult, even for the most developed countries.]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/27/naomi-klein-on-climate-change-i-thought-it-best-to-write-about-my-own-raw-terror

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/new-age-water-wars-portends-bleak-future-804130903