This is a fine week to start working on ways to dismantle the systems of those who wish to be Masters of the Universe.
Over this past year, they have caused much pain, much struggle, much hardship…….
……and the year also gave us much hope, much love, much gratitude and much bold, creative imagination of pathways to face the fear, the fires, the prisons, the floods, the droughts and storms coming our way…
From Chile to Hong Kong, from the frontlines of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs stopping oil and gas pipelines on their un-ceded lands to mass mobilizations against fascism and religious fundamentalism in South Asia, we are witnessing some of the most powerful uprisings the world has seen since we last fought to evict colonial extractive empires from our lands.
Our humanity seems to have recovered from shock and stupor in the year 2019. Just in time to take a stand against the growing, unified forces of climate destruction, fascism, militarism and financial power.
And as we align our struggles in solidarity to fight this common enemy around the world, we need to build grassroots movements that are principled and powerful enough to shape change in the direction of a universal liberation, justice and peace.
Here are some reflections I’d offer – to help guide emergent strategy for this purpose:
Flip the Script: Indigenize Leadership
Start by acknowledging the leadership of those whose wisdom, culture and actions illustrate longest local, living knowledge of the earth, as communities of practice in defense and care of our common mother and all her children. Wherever you happen to be across Mother Earth’s beautiful global tapestry, stand with local Indigenous communities taking direct action to protect her lands and waters.
Turn Solidarity into Action
Just as the Rainbow Coalition of Revolutionary Solidarity served to align the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, AIM, Brown Berets, Red Guard and many others in collaboration and direct action in the 60s and 70s, we need to start building our collective muscle in practice and service to the elderly, the poor, the ill and traumatized, those whose families and kids are under direct attack, those whose lands and waters are being destroyed.
Embody Action with Collective Self-determination When we take mass, direct action in our streets, our communities, our worksites – we learn to practice democratic principles; and embodied knowledge of how justice, mutuality, solidarity, and service guide our practice in all forms of collective self-governance. For in mutual struggle, our hearts learn to seek universal emancipation, and our muscle memory finds ways to weave our mutuality – trans-locally across a global landscape, with threads of relational trust.
Self-determine Strategies to Sustain our Strongest Struggles
As movements are built at the pace of trust, we need to train our organizing muscle to be resilient in cultivating, growing, healing and caring for our beloved movement families. For short-term tactics to embody long-term strategies, we need to be rigorous in principled practice. This will mean navigating much internal conflict and contradiction, but where we find pathways to free us from false binaries and allow us to cultivate layers of complexity in our capacity for compassion and shared understanding, we can effectively decolonize our pedagogy.
Decolonizing popular education returns us to the first commitment – seeking local, Indigenous leadership, which means supporting the struggles of the poorest, most historically harmed among us. This requires learning local culture, song, art and ancient stories that deepen our ability to appreciate the creative beauty and purpose of the ecological tapestry around us.
Simply lean into this creative process of cultivating skills for future generations to continue building power with hope and love.
Washington, D.C., August 28 – Youth leaders from around the world have called for a Global Climate Strike and week of action from September 20-27. Youth have led the way so far, but now they are calling on everyone to take action alongside them. In Washington, D.C. we are answering that call in a major way: on September 23, we are going to Shut Down D.C.
While countries deliberate the fate of the world at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City, a coalition of climate groups and allies will bring traffic and business as usual to a standstill in the nation’s capital. Parents, workers, students and everyone who is concerned about global heating will skip work and school and put off their other responsibilities to take action on the climate crisis.
The multi-site blockade will shut down key intersections all across the city and demand sweeping action from the U.S. Government to address the climate emergency. The event is a response to youth calls for a Global Climate Strike and will follow a student-led march to Congress on September 20. The Shut Down D.C. kickoff meeting is taking place today at 7 PM at the Friends Meeting House in Washington, D.C. near Dupont Circle. The next meeting will be on September 4 at 6:30 PM at the same place.
“[Politicians] ignore our will as voters, our rallies, our calls to action and even our pleas, so I am no longer interested in asking,” said Kathleen Brophy, who is an organizer with 350 DC. In the past, Brophy has worked with communities affected by oil extraction and witnessed the devastation it had locally. “The severity of the issue and the complete lack of response from elected officials necessitates mass civil disobedience,” she said.
The blockades are being organized by a coalition of activists from different climate and social justice organizations including Extinction Rebellion DC, 350 DC, Zero Hour, Rising Tide North America, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, the Movement for a People’s Party, Backbone Campaign, Code Pink and the Friends Meeting in Washington Social Concerns Committee.
This spring, more than 1.4 million young people in 123 countries went on strike to demand that governments reverse the climate crisis. This fall, Shut Down D.C. marks the start of an international wave of citywide climate shutdowns on October 7 in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York City.
The Earth’s life support systems are failing as global heating spawns innumerable crises. Millions are facing hunger and migration as their homes sink beneath the waves and farm land turns to desert. Biodiversity is plummeting and ecosystems are breaking down as a sixth mass extinction grips the planet. The oceans are acidifying and disease vectors are expanding. The Amazon Rainforest, which produces 20 percent of the world’s oxygen, is ablaze and nearing a tipping point of cascading collapse. Humanity has never faced a crisis of this magnitude and only immediate and transformative change can ensure our survival.
“Our children are calling to us. We must respond,” said Fletcher Harper, Executive Director of GreenFaith, in regards to the climate strikes. Across the world, frontline communities, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and the poor are bearing the brunt of a crisis caused by fossil fuel corporations and politicians. In recognition that decades of petitions, protests and phone calls have been all but ignored by our leaders, the action will use nonviolent civil disobedience to elevate the demands to a level of urgency that matches the crisis.
This September there are over 600 events taking place worldwide in support of the Global Climate Strike, and more than 130 across the United States.
They Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives, Then They Lost Their Jobs
This isn’t what a just transition looks like
by Patrick Young
At around 4 am on Friday, June 21, a massive fire and explosion rocked Alkylation unit at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in South Philadelphia. The explosion was so powerful that it shook houses and apartment buildings around West Philadelphia. The ball of fire could be seen for miles, turning the predawn sky orange. As the fire raged, while every human instinct must have screamed to run away from the fire, members of the PES Emergency Response Team (ERT) dropped everything to run toward the fire. They battled the blaze for hours and by 10 am the fire was contained but still burning.
Like anyone who is familiar with refinery operations, Jim Savage, an operator at PES and a union activist immediately turned his thoughts to the ERT writing, “Huge props to our refinery Emergency Response Team. I’ve always questioned their sanity, but their courage and professionalism has never been in doubt. Those explosions were terrifying and I have no idea how we didn’t have injuries or even worse. It’s going to be a long and dangerous day for them, so keep them in your thoughts.”
It took a full day to fully extinguish the fire. The explosion was bad, but it could have been much, much worse. Unit 433, the Alkylation unit where the explosion occurred used hydrofluoric acid (HF) as part of the refining process. HF is by far the most dangerous chemical in the facility and PES’s most recent emergency response plan reported that there were as many as 71 tons of the chemical at the facility. Just after the explosion, the operator on the board at the refinery’s central control room transferred the HF that was in process to another container, preventing a mass release of the chemical.
Hydrofluoric acid is an incredibly dangerous chemical used as a catalyst in some oil refineries (there are inherently safer technologies in use in many refineries but owners of many older refineries, including the PES facility in South Philadelphia have refused to invest in safer systems). HF quickly penetrates human tissue, but it interferes with nerve function so burns may initially not feel painful, giving people a false sense of safety. Once it is absorbed into the blood through the skin it reacts with calcium and can cause cardiac arrest. It volatilizes at a relatively low temperature and travels as a dense vapor cloud — PES reports that the supply of HF stored at the South Philadelphia refinery could travel as far as 7 miles putting as many as a million people at risk.
Seven mile potential vulnerable zone around PES refinery. Source: Google Maps
On June 21, the members of United Steelworkers Local 10–1 on the PES Emergency Response Team and in the refinery’s control room prevented the dozens of tons of HF at the refinery from being released saving tens of thousands of lives.
Then on June 26th, those workers learned that they were losing their jobs. Philadelphia Energy Solutions announced that it was shutting down refinery operations and laying off nearly all of the workers at the refinery within weeks.
Declaring Victory
Philly Thrive, a local environmental group that had been organizing against the refinery for years immediately declared victory, changing the cover photo on its Facebook page to an image with the words “Victory: The largest polluter in Philly is closing” and, in much smaller letters, the words “time for a just transition! #GreenNewDeal.”
To their credit, Philly Thrive did issue a longer written statement on the closure laying out a more detailed set of demands for remediating the site and ensuring that workers’ pensions and healthcare were paid for. But that statement seemed to fall flat with the 1,000 workers — many of whom had just risked their lives to prevent a catastrophe and save tens of thousands of lives — who saw Philly Thrive proudly declaring victory right after they learned that they were losing their jobs.
Tonight, there are a thousand families that are wondering what their futures will look like after the refinery closes. At PES, because of years of union struggle in the oil refining sector, those workers pulled in good, family-sustaining wages. They could own homes, send their kids to college, and plan for a comfortable retirement. But many of their skills are not immediately transferrable to other jobs, and the jobs that are available are largely non-union and pay half of what workers at PES were earning.
This isn’t what a just transition looks like
While the shutdown of the South Philadelphia refinery is unlikely to have any impact on fossil fuel consumption in the eastern United States in the short term — imports of refined gasoline and home heating oil will make up for the lost production — there is a scientific consensus that if we are to have any chance at averting the catastrophic changes in our climate that we are experiencing, we need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases.
Any sort of transition away from the fossil fuel economy will almost certainly be painful for the hundreds of thousands of workers currently employed in the sector. And there probably is no scenario where the majority of workers would in the fossil fuel industry would enthusiastically embrace such a dramatic change. But abruptly laying off the workers who just ran towards — not away from — danger and saved tens of thousands of lives is probably one of the most unjust transitions those workers could expect to face. Philadelphia Energy Solutions management apparently went as far as violating the federal WARN act by failing to give many of the workers 60-days-notice before unceremoniously escorting them out of the refinery carrying cardboard boxes containing their personal belongings.
Steelworker kids rally to save the South Philly and Marcus Hook refineries in 2012. Source: United Steelworkers Local 10–1
When talking about plant closures and job loss, the climate movement often talks about a just transition. Interestingly, the idea of a ‘just transition’ isn’t an idea to come out of the environmental or climate movement. The term was coined by Tony Mazzocchi, a leader in the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers (a predecessor of USW Local 10–1). In the early 1990s as the evidence that carbon in the atmosphere was contributing to climate change, Mazzocchi recognized that although it would be painful for workers, we would soon need to transition our economy away from fossil fuels. He said, “there is a Superfund for dirt. There ought to be one for workers,” proposing significant public investment to support fossil fuel workers who were transitioning out of the fossil fuel industry. When environmental partners suggested that the Superfund for Workers had too many negative connotations, Mazzocchi changed the name of his proposal to a Just Transition.
Since 1993 the term “just transition” has gained traction in much of the climate movement and in parts of the labor movement. While many are comfortable with using it as a vague catch-phrase, workers who are facing job loss have found some urgency in becoming much more specific about exactly what a just transition will look like. In the lead up to the 2015 UNFCCC talks in Paris, the International Trade Union Confederation published a five-point framework for what a just transition means:
1. Sound investments in low?emission and job-rich sectors and technologies. These investments must be undertaken through due consultation with all those affected, respecting human and labour rights, and Decent Work principles.
2. Social dialogue and democratic consultation of social partners (trade unions and employers) and other stakeholders (i.e. communities).
3. Research and early assessment of the social and employment impacts of climate policies. Training and skills development, which are key to support the deployment of new technologies and foster industrial change.
4. Social protection, along with active labour markets policies.
5. Local economic diversification plans that support decent work and provide community stability in the transition. Communities should not be left on their own to manage the impacts of the transition as this will not lead to a fair distribution of costs and benefits
The shutdown of the South Philadelphia refinery was not preceded by investment in clean energy jobs (Principle 1) or early warning, training and skills development (Principle 2). Social protections have failed workers in Philadelphia as many were not even given the federally-required 60-day WARN notices and payments (Principle 4) and this shutdown comes at a time when the Philadelphia government is pushing expansion in an east-coast energy hub, not supporting local economic diversification (Principle 5). While environmental activists from organizations like Philly Thrive have issued sweeping demands for comprehensive transition programming there does not appear to be any indication that workers at the refinery were meaningfully involved in the crafting of that platform (Principle 2).
The shutdown of the South Philadelphia refinery failed badly on all five of the ITUC’s Just Transition Principles.
Where to go from here
The situation in South Philadelphia is bad and there isn’t anything that is going to make things okay for the 1,000 workers and their families who are struggling to imagine what their futures might look like. There are, however, some things that could help keep the situation from getting worse.
Everyone in the environmental community who celebrated the closure of the facility should be ready to campaign just as hard to demand that the Carlyle group, Energy Transfer Partners and PES’s other investors aren’t able to make off with the $1.25 billion insurance payments the company is poised to collect in the aftermath of the explosion just to leave workers and the community holding the bag. Workers and the community need to be first in line to collect whatever is left over to provide severance, healthcare, and to clean up the site that has been badly contaminated by over 150 years of oil refining.
Right now there is no superfund for workers, but there is a transition program that can be adopted for these workers. Because the lost production at the South Philadelphia refinery will be replaced with refined gasoline and home heating fuel imports, workers at the facility should be eligible for TAA benefits, which could provide urgently needed funds to support job retraining and extended unemployment. Supporting workers’ TAA petition should be a top priority of anybody who is concerned about a just transition at this facility.
Going forward, bold proposals like the Green New Deal start the ball rolling on an incredibly important discussion about building the clean energy infrastructure that we need to have a just transition away from fossil fuels. But we need to make sure that the workers and communities who are at the front lines of this transition are not left behind and have an opportunity to be a core part of the process. The workers at the South Philadelphia refinery risked their lives and saved thousands of lives on June 21. They didn’t cause that disaster and they deserve a much more just transition.
Nationally, the climate movement is organizing and growing quickly after years of treading water. The combination of the Green New Deal, the youth-led climate strikes, and radical demands for climate action from Extinction Rebellion to frontline communities across the world, has energized the movement to begin to meet the problem at the scale of what is needed.
And in the midst of it New York City’s climate movement is rising!
This week has been big. The long term campaign led by a robust local coalition, against the billion dollar Williams Pipeline scored a major victory as the State of New York rejected the company’s permit application (albeit temporarily). The project “fails to meet New York State’s rigorous water quality standards,” the department said.
The pipeline was planned to run 37 miles, connecting natural gas fields in Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York. Its operator, the Oklahoma-based Williams Companies, pitched it as a crucial addition to the region’s energy infrastructure, one that would deliver enough fuel to satisfy New York’s booming energy needs and stave off a looming shortage.
And the battle is not over as the pipeline is still awaiting permits from the state of New Jersey.
Image via Erik McGregor.
Another NYC centered campaign slowly building steam has been targeting the largest funder of fossil fuels…. JPMorgan Chase (JPMC). For almost two years, campaigners with Rainforest Action Network, 350 Seattle, a host of Indigenous groups and others have been making life hell for Chase CEO Jaime Dimon, other top execs, board members and various Chase branches around the country.
In New York, organizers have focused on the company’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan with action after action. This week, climate activists erected and scaled a 24-ft tall steel tripod directly in front JPMorgan Chase bank’s headquarters, protesting their egregious funding of fossil fuels.
As one organizer said:
“we’re here to tell them we won’t put up with business as usual. While more species are going extinct, wildfires ravage the west, cities are lost to sea level rise and more water is polluted from spilled pipelines, we call on CEO Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank, the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuels, to stand on the right side of history.”
Currently, the global political establishment is being woken up to the climate crisis. New York is often seen as a center for media, finance, corporate power, national and global politics, etc, and as campaigns, local and globally heat up than New York becomes an increasingly natural place for climate uprisings.
by Ananda Lee Tan
