Cross-posted from Alaska Rising Tide
Good people in Anchorage yesterday disrupted Gov. Dunleavy’s Koch Brothers sponsored “Public Discussion” with a large banner that read “Recall Dunleavy”.
Hundreds of others protested outside with concerns around Dunleavy’s budget cuts from Medicare to environmental protection to public ferries.
The rallies are part of a state-wide movement targeting Dunleavy’s roadshows selling his budget cuts.
Photo Credit: Brooke Larsen
Cross-posted from Wasatch Rising Tide and allies in Utah
Utah Youth Rise Against Oil and Gas Leasing
Young people urge Governor Herbert to oppose the BLM’s March Oil and Gas Sale
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — On Monday, Utah youth delivered a letter with over 1,500 signatures to Governor Herbert’s office, urging him to request the deferral of all parcels in the Utah Bureau of Land Management’s March oil and gas lease sale. Over 50 community members joined young leaders as they held a sit-in, expressed fears for their future, and shared how the state’s poor air quality has impacted their health. The action comes ten days after over 500 young Utahns, and millions of teens around the world, went on strike for climate action.
Utah’s young climate organizers targeted Governor Herbert to keep him accountable to the resolution he signed last year that acknowledges the threats climate change poses to Utah.
“Governor Herbert has failed my generation,” said Mishka Banuri, a senior at West High. “By acknowledging climate change but not following through with substantive action to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, the Governor is knowingly sacrificing our future.”
photo credit: Carly Ferro
On March 25-26, the Utah BLM is auctioning 217,576 acres of public lands to the oil and gas industry — the largest lease sale since the Bush administration. The BLM has listened to governors in the past. Governor Herbert successfully requested the deferral of parcels near Dinosaur National Monument in 2017, and in more recent months, governors of New Mexico and Colorado have achieved limitations on leasing.
Three students initially met with the Governor’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Mike Mower, on March 19 to deliver the letter and express their demands. They were disappointed with Mower’s response.
“Mower told us he attended the youth climate strike, but only wanted to focus on the students who drove away in their cars, turning climate change into an individual problem,” said Eliza Van Dyk, Westminster student and organizer with Wasatch Rising Tide. “Climate change will not be solved on an individual basis, we need to change our entire energy system and we need elected officials to help, not hinder that transformation.”
During the sit-in, students spoke with Mower again and asked him to take immediate climate action. He said the state would continue their “all of the above” energy strategy.
“Science shows we must drastically reduce carbon emissions in the next 11 years to prevent climate catastrophe. The state’s all of the above energy strategy is unethical and irresponsible.” said Brooke Larsen, coordinator of Uplift Climate. “My generation needs a rapid transition to the renewable energy economy. We will continue to rise to defend our future.”
The action was organized with the support of the following organizations: Utah Youth for Environmental Solutions, Utah Chapter Sierra Club, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Uplift, and Wasatch Rising Tide.
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UPDATE: Yesterday, Utah youth led a sit-in at Governor Herbert’s office, demanding he take action to defend our future. We delivered a letter with over 1,500 signatures calling on the Governor to request the deferral of all parcels in the Bureau of Land Management’s March oil and gas lease sale. We showed that the people of Utah will keep our leaders accountable and continue to rise for a livable climate, clean air, and protection of wild and sacred lands.
On Tuesday, April 2nd at 6pm MST, Utah youth will have a webinar/conference call to discuss next steps in ongoing actions in protest of the Utah Bureau of Land Management’s mass sale of public lands to the oil and gas industry, a recent court decision that says the BLM must consider climate impacts, and the numerous ways the public can rise with us in defense of our future.
Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_g1j4rCGiTJW1H1eszCbhTg
Swarming the front of Oily Wells.
Today in San Francisco, a coalition of over 50 organizations, organized by 350 Silicon Valley, blockaded the global headquarters of Well Fargo.
The action culminated a 3-day 34-mile march at the front door of the banking giant’s global headquarters with an Indigenous grandmother’s led sit-in across the front doors and a simultaneously organized barrel blockade across San Francisco’s iconic California Street.
Below is 350 Silicon Valley’s press release and lots of reasons Wells Fargo needs to be put out of business:
PALO ALTO, CA – At a mass rally in front of Wells Fargo Bank’s global headquarters at noon (PDT) today, demonstrators will call on Big Oil’s largest lender to halt its financing of fossil fuels and invest instead in clean energy solutions to the climate crisis
The rally aims to expose another aspect of the scandal-plagued bank’s unethical practices—its central role in the ever-expanding oil and gas industry—at a time when the U.N. has called for “rapid and far reaching” action within 12 years to avert environmental, social and economic catastrophe caused by ever-rising carbon emissions.
Idle No More SF Bay blocking the front doors to Wells Fargo world HQ.
The rally caps the historic 3-day March for Fossil Fuel Freedom (34 miles from Palo Alto to SF) with hundreds of marchers from more than 50 Bay Area grassroots organizations. Marchers paused at a series of “stagecoach stops” to hear talks by former Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, Redwood City Mayor Ian Bain, and other prominent environmental and labor activists; and to sing along with The Raging Grannies and Thrive Street Choir. The march and associated events are all part of a campaign, led by 350 Silicon Valley, to rename the nation’s fourth largest bank “Oily Wells.”
“Oily Wells has a dirty-energy secret, backing the biggest new projects and profiting handsomely from climate chaos” says Stew Plock, vice president of 350 Silicon Valley, lead organizer of the rally. “If they don’t quit, then consumers and investors should quit them.”
The bank is a leading lender to the fracking industry and on pipelines carrying Canadian tar sands, one of the most environmentally damaging sources of fuel (including the proposed Line 3 in Minnesota and Keystone XL in the Midwest). [EDITOR’S NOTE: For more on Wells Fargo’s dirty-energy funding, see the 10th annual Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card, led by Rainforest Action Network, embargoed until March 20.]
Barrel blockade.
“We urge Oily Wells to become the first major U.S. bank to avoid all fossil fuel infrastructure projects, as a few big European banks have already begun to do,” says Isabella Zizi, an organizer with Idle No More SF Bay. “If you cut off the flow of money, you can cut off the flow of oil. That’s why the divestment movement is so important.”
350 Silicon Valley’s partners include SEIU 1021 and 521, Sierra Club, Diablo Rising Tide, Idle No More SF Bay, Rainforest Action Network, Sunrise Movement, California Interfaith Power & Light, Sunflower Alliance, and Extinction Rebellion. They join hundreds of other groups in calling for divestment from fossil fuels, and a prohibition on oil and gas infrastructure.
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For complete details, visit https://oilywells.com/.
As the “Scaling Resistance” tour reaches its halfway mark, here are some impressions I’ve had from 2 weeks on the road with German climate activists Ende Gelaende (EG) and Rising Tide North America.
Starting with some impressions from Ende Gelaende presentation:
1) “We say what we do and we do what we say”: Ende Gelaende is radically transparent. Hundreds of people attend plenaries and make decisions on strategy and tactics. There are tens of direct action trainings, including those attended by media. Participants get regular updates on the action progress and can choose which of the “five fingers” (i.e. tactical) groups they wish to participate in. Ende Gelaende’s approach is to put out a big public call to action on their timeline and against the target they want. By dictating the terms of their action, they can do the work to ensure thousands of people show up, enough to get to almost any mine
2) Through a combination of symbolic and nonsymbolic action, Ende Gelaende has changed the debate in Germany. By focusing on huge coal mines, EG made many Germans, who were excited about the high level of renewals and energy transition, uncomfortable. But they changed the narrative in the country around coal and made the EG mass actions the happening event. As we speak, major papers are writing about this year’s action, which will be in mid-June. The actions are powerful for their symbolic value, they feature a “David versus Goliath” scenario, with thousands of small (at least in the pictures) people standing up to giant earth moving machinery and shutting down mine sites. And thisis a real shut down extraction, as thousands of people are able to stop coal mining operations for a day or coal train shipments for a day or two.
3) A small core of people can build something really big. Ende Gelaende grew out of the climate camps, grassroots groups like ausgeCO2hlt and others in the left who knew that they had to scale up their climate resistance. They used a threefold approach. First, they built relationships throughout the climate sector, including with larger nonprofits who supported their work in various ways and academic institutions, which participated in summer climate camps, providing a base for potential participants. Second, they traveled Germany and neighboring European countries giving Direct Action trainings encouraging the building of affinity groups. Finally, as mentioned earlier, they are masters at building buzz in the press and using all media outlets to their advantage. All of this is accomplished with only volunteers.
4) Civil Disobedience means something very different in Germany. In Ende Gelaende’s case, the goal is to go around the police and stop the mine, no arrests and a mine occupation is the very definition of success. If people are arrested, they do not have their IDs on them and sometimes even put superglue on their fingers to avoid identification, in the hopes (generally successful) that they will be released without charges because they cannot be identified.
Ende Galaende “Scaling up the resistance” tour.
Reactions to the presentation from U.S. audiences:
1) There is a lot of doubt on our side. We worry about all the ways Ende Gelaende’s approach is not applicable to the United States, whether that is about geography and density, or that people will not participate, or that legislative and regulatory strategies have efficacy. There is also real doubt about our collective ability to find the time, given the economic demands on so many of our volunteers.
2) There is also incredible enthusiasm for doing some experiments. Standing Rock showed us what is possible. There are tens of local fights against power plants, pipelines and extraction sites with thousands of courageous folks. There are also other interesting targets that get at the intersection of class and climate, like private airports. Finally, the same banks that fund extraction and pipelines are also the same banks that fund private prisons, immigrant detention centers, and the military industrial complex. There are lots of places with a lot of density, like the Northeast and the Northwest, who have crews of solid veteran organizers.
3) Race matters a lot more here than in Germany. Ende Gelaende is open about the fact that they are a predominantly white movement and need to work on that.. While not everyone who has attended our presentations has been white, this is a tour, and a slice of the movement that has been predominantly white, and has also skewed much older than Ende Gelaende. For us, being cognizant of race, and our nation’s history and present of colonialism, white supremacy and anti-blackness matters a lot. It also is vital to recognize that there is a rich and vibrant climate justice movement in the US. One of the key questions for us as we move forward is whether our work as white folks in the climate justice movement means we should be providing direct support to and coordination on actions with the most affected frontline communities, or whether we should be using our privilege to be putting our bodies on the line in ever more powerful ways against the largest corporations and points of extraction.
4) There is also a theory of change conversation. Many groups we are meeting with are focused on a winning a particular struggle, generally around policy or an infrastructure project. Obviously folks understand that winning is vital and part of a larger struggle, but we do not often connect the dots. What would it mean to view mass disruption that pushes on power as an inherent good in and of itself and as a theory of change. As Naomi Klein says, we need to change everything. Capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy are the problems and climate change is a symptom. Could we be winning battles while losing the war?
Over the last three weeks we have been excited to share stories about scaling up the resistance, and our guests from Ende Gelaende have been excited to learn about the climate movements and other social movements here at home. We have done our best to make the teachings accessible to all, by offering webinars to those who are not at tour stops. Now, we ask for thoughts on what our next steps should be?
Are you thinking about mass action? Let us know! Should we be building a community of practice around scaling up? Should we have some advance webinars with Ende Galaede?
Should we be thinking about mass action, but in a much more intersectional way? Let us know what you think at: We will be in touch and follow the last three weeks of the tour on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as here on our website.
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Jeff Ordower is a long-time community and labor organizer and a member of the Rising Tide Collective, who is currently peripatetic. You can follow the exploits of the second half of the tour at @risingtidena on Twitter.