The Dakota Access pipeline is set and oil will flow. But this is not the only fight about water, and Standing Rock is only one chapter somewhere in the middle of a long story.
For years, local Ohioans have been told by courts and elected officials that they have no control over fracking—”it is a matter of state law.”
However, groups of determined residents are refusing to accept this argument, taking steps to establish local democratic control over what they see as vital societal questions of health, safety and planetary survival. But not without resistance from their own governments.
A new study has found that without action on climate change, the millennial generation as a whole will lose nearly $8.8 trillion in lifetime income dealing with the economic, health and environmental impacts of climate change. The study, “The Price Tag of Being Young: Climate Change and Millennials’ Economic Future,” was produced by NextGen Climate and Demos. We speak to Heather McGhee, president of Demos and Demos Action.
As international climate negotiations got underway in Paris, panelists at a conference at the U.N. Foundation’s headquarters Tuesday were optimistic — provided delegates from developing nations, women and communities of color aren’t locked out of the conversation this time around.
Climate change: the challenge for social democracy The challenge for social democracy Politically, the climate change agenda has so far been presented as a major opportunity for progressive policymakers. However, […]
Attention is urgently needed: the solution to the intractable ‘wicked problem’ of global warming is to enhance democracy, not jettison it.
Water is the medium of all life on Earth. It makes up most our bodies and most our world. And that medium is in bad trouble. Since 1970, freshwater biodiversity has declined by 55% and by 33% in the oceans. Writing for the journal Science in 2006, an international research team reported that by 2050, the oceans will be depleted of fish. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July, 2014 world ocean temperatures were the hottest ever measured. Over all, 2014 was the hottest year on record and one year later, that record is about to fall to the heat of 2015.
Climate change, or rather, climate injustice is drying up our rivers and lakes and leading to the acidification of the oceans beyond the ability to sustain life. Pollution is killing our streams and groundwaters. This is a direct result of the unbridled rapaciousness of a political and economic system that thrives on war and plunder as preferable to integrated systems that put the health of land, water and people over the enrichment of the few.
It is more necessary than ever that socialists develop an overtly ecological consciousness, that our theories and practices be rooted every bit as firmly in our consciousnesses as children of the earth as it is in our identifications as workers and farmers and students. I hope that whatever brand of socialism we may use to describe ourselves, that it will be ecologically oriented.
Australia’s first trade union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) pledged to divest fossil fuel companies from its investment portfolio and shift them towards renewable energy.
Outside groups help revitalize a six-year workers’ strike against copper giant Grupo México.
In Peru, Miners are joining with indigenous, environmentalists and community activists for a national strike on July 9th against Southern Copper Corporation’s plans to develop the Tia Maria copper mine, a mega-project pit mine planned for the Arequipa region of Southern Peru. Attacks by Peruvian armed forces, in league with Southern, have already resulted in the deaths of 3 protesters, with hundreds wounded and detained.
In the state of Sonora, Mexico, Southern Copper is using scab labor to bust a labor strike at the Cananea copper mine. Meanwhile, ignoring warnings by the workers that the seals on company wells were defective, Southern allowed the bad seals to leak 10.5 million gallons of sulfuric acid into the headwaters of the Rio Sonora—the worst environmental disaster in Mexico’s history.
If you are a friends of the Earth and working families, please call Southern’s US office in Phoenix with phone calls in support of the popular movement demands in Peru and Mexico. We hope to flood the office with calls!
Southern Copper Corporation: (602) 264-1375 ext. 2 (commercial interests division)