Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While capitalism has taught us to identify the first with money-making and the second with life-making – a necessary but nevertheless subordinated, dependent and qualitatively inferior activity – climate justice movements are claiming the progressive, i.e. egalitarian, emancipatory, and wealth-producing agency of reproductive forces.
The state’s recently passed Climate and Equitable Jobs Act offers a model for other states to build coalitions to help communities and the planet.
And so I leave Glasgow not optimistic or pessimistic, but infinitely more determined. And feeling like the power, the flow, the surge of Friday and Saturday’s tsunamis will carry us forward. I feel it at my back, I feel it in my stomach, and I will feel it forever.
We must make the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment a universal, legally binding human right, starting with the UN codifying this new declaration into existing treaties, then making it legally binding on the national and international level.
The Formosa Sunshine Project in St. James Parish, Louisiana, will undergo a full formal environmental review, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced in a memorandum issued today and posted on Twitter.
In order to overcome social and environmental injustices, we have no choice but to abandon the naturalized and structuralized notions that equate GDP growth with social progress and sincerely aim to conceive of alternatives.
By accelerating the deployment of battery storage – especially in neglected communities – the administration can bring the benefits of clean energy to those who need it most.
Notwithstanding the progress already made, the whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. That day will not come until all forms of injustice and inequity—including those that are climate-related—are removed.
In the case of integrative climate-related policies that seek to redress injustices, as well as to address Earth’s warming, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the terms environmental, energy, and climate justice. Although sharing some core characteristics, e.g., limiting access to the policymaking process, the terms are not interchangeable.
Today’s extractive industries such as gas, oil, and mining have an egregious reputation of violating human and environmental rights and supporting highly controversial political and economic reforms in poor countries.
A film produced by white people for other well-meaning white people, which does not include voices from the most vulnerable, who bear the major brunt of climate change and ecological collapse, entirely misses the mark around why ecological concerns are a matter of humiliating injustice for many people rather than merely a lifestyle choice.
Is there a way to imagine a different GND, a global Green New Deal? I think so. But it might have to start by recognizing the ecological laws of limits and a social ethic of redistribution of wealth and resources, and equality. It would argue for developmental convergence, including in energy use, between wealth and poor, within and between countries.
