Portside

Keep marching

A district court judge ruled state agencies were violating plaintiffs’ constitutionally guaranteed right to a clean healthy environment. It is the first of its kind to successfully use a state constitution to ensure intergenerational climate justice

Older climate activists gathered in on hundred cities around the country for a day of action targeting banks that finance fossil fuel projects. New organization, Third Act, already has 50,000 members.

"Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers are not worth setting the planet on fire for," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "No climate, no deal," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted Wednesday.

In her recent address honoring the distinguished Palestinian intellectual and activist Edward Said, noted Canadian author and environmentalist Naomi Klein speaks to the urgent need for the environmental movement to understand Said and other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers; or what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. Klein says without that knowledge there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous place or how we can get out of it.

I respond that I am not here to broker a merger between the secular climate movement and the Vatican. However, if Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.

Upon initial analysis, noted journalist Naomi Klein sees the US-China climate deal as a badly need piece of good news. For the first time, China is committing to capping its emissions, robbing U.S. obstructionists of their most effective argument for inaction. This is an important pledge by the Presidents of the U.S. and China and pledges matter because movement can "harness them to win even more."

“With our future on the line and the whole world watching, we’ll take a stand to bend the course of history. We’ll take to the streets to demand the world we know is within our reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet; a world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world with good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities. To change everything, we need everyone on board.”