Organized labor must join the battle for climate justice
2015Bill Onasch 2015-08Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
The words are the paper's own, from its digital file; the division into articles was made by machine, so a box or caption can end up inside the article next to it.
Scan page 4
Marlowe Hood opened a July 18 AFP story, “For eign and environment ministers and other high-level officials from 45 countries are set to gather in Paris Monday seeking to re-energize climate talks mired in technical details and political squabbling.
“Just four months ahead of a UN conference in the French capital tasked with producing a historic cli mate pact, US scientists this week said 2014 was a re cord year for sea level rise, land temperatures, and the greenhouse gases that drive dangerous global warm ing. But overwhelming consensus on the urgency of the problem has not translated into significant prog ress on united action to prevent the planet from over heating.”
The referenced findings are based on contributions from 413 scientists in 58 countries and include de tailed data updates on numerous global climate indi cators—virtually all bad news.
Suzanne Goldenberg wrote in the Guardian, “Global sea-level also reached a record high, with the expan sion of those warming waters, keeping pace with the 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year trend in sea level growth over the past two decades, the report said. Scientists said B mentary, “3½ Minutes 10 Bullets,” ritish filmmaker Marc Silver’s docu mainly consists of the trial of Michael Dunn, the killer of Jordan Davis, a Black teen. It plays out like television’s “20/20” or “Dateline” production, with no com mercials. Despite the current inflamed debate on racial injustice, director Silver offers us a cool-headed portrayal of an egregious white on Black murder.
Question: When does a person unload a clip from an automatic handgun on a four teenagers sitting in a car in a gas station, killing one of them?
Answer: When a middle-aged white man objects to the loud music the teens are playing in their car, even after they agree to turn it down, but then increase the volume.
Circumstances: The killer is a known racist and arrogant misogynist; the teens are Black, and the location is Jacksonville, Fla., where Stand Your Ground is law.
In the early evening of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in 2012, Mi chael Dunn and his fiancée were return ing home to a neighboring state after his son’s wedding reception. Dunn admit ted during his trial that they’d had a lot to drink. Still, Dunn sent his fiancée into the store at the gas station to “buy more wine.”
Meanwhile, the teens were on their way to a mall to meet friends after shooting hoops. When they also stopped at the gas station to buy gum and snacks, Michael Dunn pumped 10 bullets into their SUV, killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis.
In his film, Silver used footage from security cameras in the gas station and convenience store to show the actions as they happened. He included both Davis’s the consequences of those warmer ocean tempera tures would be felt for centuries to come—even if there were immediate efforts to cut the carbon emis sions fuelling changes in the oceans.
“‘I think of it more like a fly wheel or a freight train. It takes a big push to get it going but it is moving now and will continue to move long after we continue to pushing it,’ Greg Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, told a con ference call with reporters. ‘Even if we were to freeze greenhouse gases at current levels, the sea would ac tually continue to warm for centuries and millennia, and as they continue to warm and expand the sea lev els will continue to rise,’ Johnson said.”
Recent reports from tracking surface temperatures show 2015 to be hotter yet. June was the hottest month ever in recorded history.
Certainly some of the impacts of these trends— droughts, wildfires, flash floods—are headline news, but the science explaining their cause contained in these reports not so much. The mainstream media in the USA was instead focused on hanging on every word of GOP presidential front runner Donald Trump; a video slandering Planned Parenthood made by “Right-to-Life” crooks fraudulently posing as repre tion united not by consensus of the climate wreckers but through the assertion of the worker and farmer majority of humanity.
Unions and working-class parties throughout Eu rope will play a major role in mass demonstrations in Paris before, during, and after the COP21 climate summit Nov. 30-Dec. 11. There is some union partici pation in preliminary discussions about national and regional mass actions in North America as well.
The Northern California Climate Mobilization states in an e-mail blast: “Please join us for this third plan ning meeting aimed to coordinate a mass march and rally in the East Bay on Nov. 21 as a lead up to the Paris UN COP21 climate meeting (Nov. 30–Dec. 11).
“We are activists from various groups who orga nized the Northern California People’s Climate Rally in Oakland on September 21, 2014, in solidarity with the People’s Climate March in New York on the same date. Based on discussions at our first two meetings we have drafted points of unity for our coalition…”
Among their unifying demands are Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground and 100 Percent Clean, Safe, Renewable Energy. The venue for their planning meeting is the SEIU Local 1021 Hall in Oakland. This 54,000-mem ber local has a Climate Justice page on their website.
SEIU is among the few unions, along with AFSCME, ATU, and National Nurses United, who have mobilized for past climate actions. They could do more, howev er, and it’s high time the rest of the labor movement heeds the warnings from science. We will not win the battle for climate justice without the heavy battalions of organized labor. n