Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
September 22, 2019
Hello All – Yesterday's worldwide Global Strike for Climate was one of the largest protests ever. Led by students and young people demanding a future, some 2,500 protests were held in 117 countries. Estimates are that four million people demonstrated around the world, and that 250,000 people joined the NYC march and rally. Here are some good pictures from Erik McGregor and good pictures and some video from CFOW's Susan Rutman. What's next for this student-led movement, and how can those of us from an older generation support this movement?
Why a Climate Strike?
While scientists and political leaders have known for 40 years that human activity is making our planet warmer, and that global warming is changing our climate, governments have failed to act effectively. And the planet has gotten warmer and our climate has changed – mostly for the worse. In general, wet parts of the world have become wetter and dry parts have become dryer. Storms have become more intense, because warmer air holds more water. Glaciers are melting, seas are warming, and spring comes earlier. Plants and birds are confused.
The UN climate-change scientists say that we have to reduce the causes of global warming – carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" – by half by 2030. Otherwise, it will be nearly impossible to stop global temperatures from rising beyond a dangerous and perhaps unstoppable point. It's a timed test. The point is to recognize that there is an emergency and to act on this understanding. But governments have failed to do anything effective to stop or even slow climate chaos. And so young people have decided that only they can save themselves, and that there is no time for "moderation."
What's Next for the Climate Movement?
Tomorrow there will be a special session at the UN to review and consider how the nations of the world are doing with the climate-related promises they made at the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. This will not be a pretty picture, as the Trump team has said it will withdraw from the Agreement, and only a few nations have taken effective steps towards the goal of reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2030. Paying close attention, we will see if the US mainstream media has absorbed the urgency about our climate crisis that was on display during Friday's demonstrations, and whether the mainstream media reflects this urgency in its reporting of the UN meetings, or whether it returns to business as usual, with "climate change" being but one of it many agenda items, usually at the bottom of a long list.
We will also see if the energy generated by the Climate Strike influences political leaders. At the protest in NYC there was strong support for a Green New Deal that would launch federal funding for programs to move the USA away from fossil fuels. This idea has been opposed by the Democratic Party leadership and of course rejected by the Republicans. In the streets of New York many young (but old enough to vote) people vowed to turn up at the polls to do what they can to save the planet; and as the primary elections approach, candidates may feel the pressure to support effective climate programs. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party leadership will predictably push hard to channel the climate momentum into electing a Democrat in 2020, downplaying the importance of mass movement momentum on the climate issues themselves.
So – between now and November 2020 - what else can young people do besides voting? The major climate group 350.org will hold an open conference call on Sunday (this) evening at 8:30 PM, where climate action leaders will talk about Next Steps. In addition to educating and a focus on critical primary elections, I think we can look forward to a season of imaginative exercises in direct action – sit-ins, school campaigns and protests, demonstrations at media outlets and corporate headquarters, etc. Some of this action will be led by the young peoples' Sunrise Movement, and also by the Extinction Rebellion. At CFOW we will do our best to circulate info about these actions in our Newsletter and our Facebook page. At this stage in the fight, I think we want to give as much support as we can to the youth-led climate justice movement.
Some Useful/Illuminating Reading on the Global Climate Strike
How the youth-led climate strikes became a global mass movement
September 16, 2019]
---- It began as a call to action from a group of youth activists scattered across the globe, and soon became what is shaping up to be the largest planet-wide protest for the climate the world has ever seen. The Global Climate Strike, which kicks off on Sept. 20, will not be the first time people all over the world have taken action for the climate on a single day. But if things play out the way organizers hope, it could mark a turning point for the grassroots resistance to fossil fuels. "Strikes are happening almost everywhere you can think of," said Jamie Margolin, a high school student from Seattle who played a role in initiating this global movement. "People are participating in literally every place in the world." "Suddenly there's this entire new generation of activists calling out everyone no matter who they are for not doing enough, and that's woken people up." [Read More]
Climate Protesters and World Leaders: Same Planet, Different Worlds
By
---- This is the world we live in: Punishing heat waves, catastrophic floods, huge fires and climate conditions so uncertain that children took to the streets en masse in global protests to demand action. But this is also the world we live in: A pantheon of world leaders who have deep ties to the industries that are the biggest sources of planet-warming emissions, are hostile to protests, or use climate science denial to score political points. … At the current pace, global temperatures are set to rise beyond 3 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels by the end of the century even if every country on Earth meets its goals under the 2015 Paris pact, which calls on nearly 200 nations to set voluntarily targets to reduce their emissions. Many big countries, including the United States, are not on track to meet their commitments. [Read More]
Why Next Monday's UN Climate Action Summit Matters
By Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation [September 16, 2019]
---- As world leaders converge on New York City for the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23, they enter what may be the most consequential week in climate politics since Donald Trump's surprise election as president of the United States in 2016. Trump, of course, announced soon after taking office that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, the landmark treaty signed at the last big UN climate summit in 2015. …The events of the coming days—including a global climate strike on September 20 by the activists whose protests in the past year have pushed the term "climate emergency" into news reports around the world—may help answer a question that has loomed over humanity since Trump's election: Can the rest of the world save itself from climate breakdown if the richest, most powerful nation on earth is pulling in the opposite direction? [Read More]
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. We meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) Our leaflet and posters for our rallies are usually about war or the climate crisis, but issues such as racial justice or Trump's immigration policies are often targeted, depending on current events. We (usually) meet on the first Sunday of each month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dobbs Ferry Historical Society. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
That's it for this week.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
GOOD READING/FEATURED ESSAYS
The Green New Deal: A Fight for Our Lives
By Naomi Klein, New York Review of Books [September 17, 2019]
[FB – This essay is excerpted from Naomi Kleins new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. I'm about half-way through and recommend it highly. It sells for $27 and is available from Book Culture (NYC) and many other stores.]
---- One month before the young Sunrise Movement activists first occupied the office of then-soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in November 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report that had a greater impact than any publication in the thirty-one-year history of the organization. The report examined the implications of keeping the increase in planetary warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7°F). Given the worsening disasters we are already seeing with about 1°C of warming, it found that keeping temperatures below the 1.5°C threshold is humanity's best chance of avoiding truly catastrophic unraveling…. Pulling off this high-speed pollution phaseout, the report establishes, is not possible with singular technocratic approaches like carbon taxes, though those tools must play a part. Rather, it requires deliberately and immediately changing how our societies produce energy, how we grow our food, how we move around, and how our buildings are constructed. What is needed, the report's summary states in its first sentence, is "rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." It was against this backdrop that 2019's cascade of large and militant climate mobilizations unfolded. [Read More]
The War On Yemen Has Failed; Time For Peace, Not More War
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies, Popular Resistance.[September 17, 2019]
---- On Saturday, September 14th, two oil refineries and other oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia were hit and set ablaze by 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles, dramatically slashing Saudi Arabia's oil production by half, from about ten million to five million barrels per day. On September 18, the Trump administration, blaming Iran, announced it was imposing more sanctions on Iran and voices close to Donald Trump are calling for military action. But this attack should lead to just the opposite response: urgent calls for an immediate end to the war in Yemen and an end to US economic warfare against Iran. … The Houthis' newfound ability to strike back at the heart of Saudi Arabia could be a catalyst for peace, if the world can seize this opportunity to convince the Saudis and the Trump administration that their horrific, failed war is not worth the price they will have to pay to keep fighting it. But if we fail to seize this moment, it could instead be the prelude to a much wider war. So, for the sake of the starving and dying people of Yemen and the people of Iran suffering under the "maximum pressure" of U.S. economic sanctions, as well as the future of our own country and the world, this is a pivotal moment. [Read More]
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: Building on the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty
By Joseph Gerson, Common Dreams [September 17, 2019]
---- On September 20, in a formal U.N. ceremony, the Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty will be opened for signatures. The Treaty further stigmatizes nuclear weapons and seeks to outlaw their use, threatened the use, development, testing, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession or stockpiling nuclear weapons, transfer and deployment. ... This is important. But it will be law for only those states that sign and ratify it. All the nuclear powers boycotted the Ban Treaty negotiations. … Thus, we could be entering an era of nuclear weapons proliferation not abolition. Our future depends on how people and governments respond, and it dictates a global division of labor among nuclear weapons abolitionists. Nations that negotiated the Ban Treaty must sign and ratify it as quickly as possible. This will reinforce the momentum created by its negotiation. But, winning nuclear weapons abolition still requires building mass movements, in alliance with other social movements, within the nuclear weapons and "umbrella" states: NATO nations, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. These nations and their disarmament movements lie at the center of the struggle. If just one or two of these governments are led by their people to take advantage of the opening provided by the Treaty and reject the strictures of their nuclear and potentially omnicidal alliances, the world's nuclear architecture will be weakened. That in turn could lead to a global disarmament dynamic. And, for those of us in the world's nuclear weapons states, the imperative of resistance remains. [Read More]
The Liberatory Potential of Local Action
By Brian Tokar, Roar Magazine [September 19, 2019]
---- Today we are seeing an inspiring resurgence of progressive action at the local level, even as reactionary nationalist movements in Europe and beyond seek to position themselves as the true voices of a renewed localism. What are the prospects for such locally centered political engagement in a time of rising political polarization and conflict? How can local action help advance personal liberation and social justice? More broadly, how can it further our goals for global transformation? … At their best, local solutions to social and environmental problems may be more amenable to an open and accessible democratic process, and their implementation can remain more accountable to those most affected by the outcomes. Local measures can help build closer relationships among neighbors and strengthen the capacity for self-reliance in a time of increasingly extreme climate-related disruptions. Local actions enable us to see that the ruling institutions that often dominate our lives may be far less essential than people tend to believe, and that we can effectively challenge regressive policies at the national and supranational levels that favor powerful outside interests. At the same time, local initiatives often raise the question of how to spark a broader social transformation that can offer a systemic change greater than the sum of its dispersed local expressions. Read More]
Our History
Silent Spring
By Rachel Carson, The New Yorker [June 16, 1962 issue]
[FB – In support of the worldwide climate mobilization, The New Yorker made available some excellent articles from its archives. Linked here is the first of a three-part essay by Rachel Carson that became her path-breaking book, Silent Spring. Written more than a half century ago, it is still relevant to our climate-chaos world.]
---- There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wild flowers delighted the traveller's eye through much of the year. Even in winter, the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall, people came from great distances to observe them. Other people came to fish streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days, many years ago, when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death. The farmers told of much illness among their families. In the town, the doctors were becoming more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness that had appeared among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among the adults but also among the children, who would be stricken while they were at play, and would die within a few hours. And there was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? [Read More]
