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Canada needs a Green New Deal
EnvironmentWith every new decision to support fossil fuel infrastructure and corporate restructuring in the name of profit, the scale of the alternative plan to counter these actions needs to become more ambitious and far-reaching. A Green New Deal can put workers and the environment at the centre of economic policy and ensure that the necessary transformation reaches all areas of people’s lives.
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An Ecosocialist Green New Deal: Guiding Principles
EnvironmentWe must solve the climate crisis and the inequality crisis together. Climate remedies in the context of austerity will produce a popular backlash, as we see in the yellow vest protests against a fuel tax. Corporations profiting from fossil extraction have long worked to turn workers against environmentalists, claiming that clean energy would be a job killer.
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Rethinking some dominant approaches to climate change
EnvironmentAlso, we need to center the working class in a just transition: Decommodify survival by guaranteeing living wages, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, water, energy, public transit etc. Demilitarize, decolonize and strive for a future of international solidarity and cooperation. Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition.
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A Future Without Fossil Fuels?
EnvironmentImagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren’t magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands. And imagine a world in which the greatest driver of climate change—the unrelenting political power of the fossil-fuel industry—had begun to shrink. The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time.
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It’s the Green New Deal or Else
EnvironmentDo environmental calamity and the real risk of extinction count as “extravagantly high costs”? When might we be willing to achieve the not-so-fringe benefit of continued existence by confronting the totalitarian “command and control” imposed on all of us by big carbon capital’s social and economic preference for short-term private accumulation and profit over the longer-term common good.
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Students in 40 countries will go on strike this Friday to demand climate change action
EnvironmentIn schools across at least 40 countries, students are expected to walk out of their classrooms this Friday (March 15) to participate in what have become known as the “school strikes” against climate change inaction, according to Reuters. The climate advocacy group 350.org claims the count of countries joining the strike on Friday is even higher, with children from 72 countries committed to participating. The school strike movement was inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who has been striking from school every Friday since last August.
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Outside Jasper National Park, a coal mine threatens an Indigenous community’s water supply
EnvironmentTeck Resources Ltd., a B.C.-based mining corporation, plans to expand its Cheviot Mine over the Cardinal Divide — a wide alpine ridge separating two major watersheds — to Redcap Mountain, just east of Jasper National Park, Alta. Expanding across this divide extends the risks of selenium and nitrate contamination to the headwaters of the Cardinal River.
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How Can We Prevent Climate Catastrophe?
EnvironmentThere are other demands that could and should be raised, including a huge expansion of mass transit and a state-of-the art high-speed-train network across the country. Demands like these begin to challenge the logic of the capitalist market and give the opportunity to build campaigns and movements that can go on to fight for more. The role of socialists is to participate in whatever struggles like this emerge while making an argument about why we need to go much further with the goal of building an ecosocialist alternative to capitalism.
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A Green New Deal of the North
EnvironmentBased on this blueprint above, we call for a coalition of allies and supporters to join a democratic and participatory roundtable — that we may create a common GND platform to give united momentum to our struggles, our organizing and our advocacy. From there we aim to coordinate our efforts as we take the message to all levels of government, the media sphere, the private sector, our civil society peers and the broader public. We can collectively overcome this crisis. And in the process, build each corner of that other world we all know is within reach.
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Extinction Rebellion
EnvironmentThere is one desperate chance left to thwart the impending ecocide and extinction of the human species. We must carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measures to halt carbon emissions and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our binge on fossil fuels. If we do not do this, we will face mass death.
