dany robles is the illinois green new deal coalition coordinator. in this q&a, he will talk in depth about the coalition’s goals such as a “just transition” to renewable energy in illinois, engaging black and brown working class communities, and the creation of an environmental youth council.

interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

q: what need did you guys see for the green new deal coalition?

a: we felt that there wasn’t a group talking to working class families or people about climate change and their opportunities to impact their own lives through upcoming legislation. we really wanted to contextualize the conversations that needed to be happening. post-trump presidency, there was also a gap of who’s pitching and advocating for a green new deal at the national level to bring the funding that is necessary. so that’s how our coalition got built up.

there’s young organizers out there who are very much dedicated and looking to make those changes. but they’re very spread out throughout the state. it just feels like there’s an opportunity for us to coalesce all the advocates throughout the state to make sure that they have a space to have conversations amongst each other, but also build that network to be ready for the long haul project. our coalition landed on the structural reform being a 20 to 30 year project. we need to be creating the spaces and areas where we can continue having the development, the analysis, and the campaign goals that are going to get us to win these changes.

q: as an organizer based in chicago, what are some environmental issues you see specific to the city?

a: what we see especially here in chicago is a lack of access to green spaces for black and brown communities, food apartheids that are preventing people from getting good, healthy food, and the city keeps making these plans to decarbonize within a certain timeframe. but the city is not making sure black and brown community members have access to green jobs, the technical training involved in these jobs and the creation of resources such as green space that the city will be investing in.

there are a lot of community members who are concerned about what changing our way of energy and transportation means for them if they work in those industries. so there’s a big conversation on what a “just transition” to renewable energy looks like. for us it’s a question of how we ensure that we’re getting buy-in from those community members, and helping them be leaders so that the just transition conversation is uplifted. 

q:  could you talk a bit more about a “just transition”? how do you think it can be done in a way that is mindful of who a transition to renewable energy might be affecting?

a: there’s the climate and equitable jobs act that puts some funding towards technical training, but also assistance for any housing or financial issues that some workers might have during the process. we think that we’ll need to see more of that.

a just transition also creates a timeline that’s not going to cause abrupt change. we’re not going to close everything down in the next two years. it’s gonna actually take almost 20 years before the full coal plants close down. what we’re hoping to do in the next decade or so is make that timeline decrease because we can’t continue exerting greenhouse emissions at the rate that we’re going, and even though illinois is at the forefront of closing down fossil fuel plants as a source of energy, there are still so many states that are far behind. we’re not moving fast enough to impact the amount of greenhouse emissions that we have to reduce. 

i think one of the things that we, as organizers, have to lean on is, radical change sometimes takes some time, unless there’s an inflection point that causes massive changes. it’s going to take some time for us to make the movement and mobilization towards the changes that we need. and part of that is grounding ourselves that it’s not a challenge of a day or a month. it’s a challenge of a lifetime.

i look at civil rights leaders or chicano leaders who did a lot of this work before us, and for them to make the changes that they needed, it sometimes took 20 years before the conversation really shifted. and for us as climate organizers that can feel alarming, because we do feel there’s that needle continuing to tick behind us. but i also think that needle can help us make the conversation to be quite transformational, when we start feeling the effects really hit us hard.

otherwise we are gonna see increasingly extreme climate patterns. we’re already seeing them, like forest fires and increased storms that are more severe in nature, droughts. i think sometimes we just have to feel it to really understand what’s happening. in chicago, we’re sensing it every once in a while, whether it’s longer summers, or wild winters.

q: you guys are also concerned with legislation, right? how do you try to bridge that gap between policymakers, and communities most impacted by environmental injustice, do you try to reconcile that?

a: i don’t. there’s a lot of people in those elected seats that are no longer paying attention to our communities — that they’re more closely tied to special interests — whatever it’s gonna take for them to win their offices. we’re looking to target those leaders to get them out. at the local level, we want to see impact on local races, and really have those conversations among the community members and the local leaders to be driving some of that impact.

it’s a bit of a challenge within our coalition because all of our organizations can’t technically be doing electoral political work. but what we can be doing is shaping the conversations that we have with our community members. some of the questions that we’re asking are, ‘what is your current elected official or representative doing for you? and how is that changing your current life?’ 

q: yourself and other environmental organizers are also trying to build up an environmental youth council in illinois. could you tell me any upcoming plans for that council?

a: the youth council will be part of our coalition. the coalition itself tends to be older folks. what we’re trying to do is bring those organizers in the coalition to the youth council, and then the youth council to the coalition to help give insight and keep conversations flowing between the both of them. we’re trying to build a campaign around equitable redevelopment of schools. with the youth council, i think more of our goals are closely tied to public schools, knowing that public schools also have to decarbonize in the next five to 10 years to be ready for renewable energy electrification.

as we are shifting those schools, we also want to be cognizant that water quality, and air quality isn’t the best in schools across illinois. we also want to move toward a curriculum in illinois that really focuses on climate justice and environmental justice to both give students a historical context of why environmental justice is important to our lives, but also a technical preparedness program to prepare young students for some other jobs that are coming up in the future.
 
q: as far as the demographics of the youth council, who is it that you guys want to be targeting?

a: for our youth council, we’re looking for college level students to take on mentorship roles. and then high school students would be those on the ground, helping bring some of the climate justice concepts to their peers. i mean high school students basically live at school for most of the school year. they can best explain why they need those changes, and why they are requiring their school administrators and school teachers to make those changes with them, for them.

on top of that, there’s a lot of teachers who want the schools to stop being closed down and be fully funded so they can get the mental health resources that they need, the nurses that they need, and better quality infrastructure, so their schools don’t feel like they’re always falling apart. so we hope to also liaise with students and teachers to be in conversation with each other.

q: how did environmental organizing become important for you? and what sustains you in the work?

a: after the 2016 election, it really clicked in my head that i wasn’t happy with the career path i was in. i was working in corporate investigations, and it just didn’t feel like i was feeling fulfilled at the end of the day. and what was the true catalyst for me to move into the organizing world was seeing aoc (u.s. congresswoman, alexandria ocasio-cortez) and members of the sunrise movement take over nancy pelosi’s office. i remember reading an article about it on one of my days at work, and i just saw their energy and determination. seeing aoc, who is a year younger than me, be the voice of our generation in the halls of power; it really motivated me to think about what else i could be doing. 

my first instinct was, i wanted to help elect better leaders like aoc and through that process, i ended up finding an organizing home with sunrise movement and organizations like justice democrats. in those organizations, my analysis of the structural issues that were happening started to refine themselves to really see the world in an intersectional lens, and also realize that one of the biggest issues that is upcoming for our generation is climate change. it’s a piece that’s gonna affect all of us across the world. as an immigrant, i just started realizing the conversation on immigration reform isn’t just about citizenship for the people who are here, but also thinking about how we absorb the climate refugees that are coming down the pipeline. 

climate refugees are going to be losing their homes and losing their ways of life because of the global climate change that we’ve caused as a western world. like the deeper we dive into it, the us, europe and all the western countries have a lot more culpability creating greenhouse gas increases. we should be thinking about how we are going to be adapting our immigration system to make sure that we are protecting the people that we’ve harmed.

one of the struggles now is that i think imperialism has taken a new life in how it’s being developed. now it’s very much tied to new liberal corporations, and i think having those targets — identifying that these are the people that we need to be advocating against — is a long-term trajectory, because i think we’ve gotten very closely tied and reliant on major corporations.

the big goal that we are trying to move towards is, ‘how do we create a sustainable way of community building so we don’t have to rely on these massive corporations to keep us going?’ we want to use the information that we are gathering, the stories that we experience, and use that to shape the conversation to make the changes that we need in the future.

to learn more about the illinois green new deal coalition, visit their twitter and instagram pages.

we know we’re dumping carbon in the atmosphere,
it’s warming the earth, messin’ with the oceans, climate change is here.
we know what we’ve got to do, leave it in the ground;
look to the sun, feel the wind, listen to the sound.

                                                                                                             -joe uehlein

long sung from the throats of ralph chaplin, pete seager, and workers around the world, “solidarity forever / for the union makes us strong!” is the authentic fighting song for organized labor, centering solidarity as their greatest strength against exploitative capital. yet for joe uehlein, it is hard not to see this as a “hollow slogan” after more than four decades at the intersection of labor organizing and environmental activism. to him, the climate crisis has pulled organized labor’s priorities—its “two hearts beating within a single breast”—in opposite directions, giving into a false duality of “jobs vs. environment” as though we can’t have one without the other.

as one heart fights for the health, safety, and future of its members, the other must protect their jobs, as “the smoke coming out of the steel mill smokestacks… [means] bread on the table” for america’s working class. through his tireless work as a union organizer, environmentalist, and musician, uehlein picks out a new tune that “speaks to something other than the intellect,” helping those beating hearts “recognize each other” and coalesce environmentalism with organized labor, taking down the barriers that keep these movements in separate “silos” to fight for a just, sustainable future.

though they normally occupy two separate political spheres, organized labor and environmental activism could not be more relevant, more interlinked, or more personal for uehlein. the social life of his ohio hometown revolved around the united steelworkers local 1104 union hall, and both of his parents made ends meet thanks to their union work. but when the nearby cuyahoga river caught fire, uehlein and his community were forced to question what they were doing to “[their] paradise, lake erie.” signs reading “don’t swim in the lake” and “don’t eat the perch” were visceral reminders that the steel mill’s smokestacks represented more than just their daily bread.

uehlein brought this environmental consideration to the forefront of his work. after his early career in several union jobs—both as a manufacturing and construction worker, and as a union rep—and election to secretary-treasurer for the industrial division of the afl-cio—the nation’s largest federation of unions—he joined the un intergovernmental panel on climate change in 1988. “i’d never heard of global warming,” uehlein said, “but i read about the [congressional] testimony…and i thought, i’m representing the energy unions, mine workers, steelworkers, refinery workers. i better learn about this.” seeing both the available science and the presence of foreign labor unions, uehlein judged that america’s labor movement was dangerously unconcerned with the looming danger of climate change. however, pushed by the energy unions under their banner, the afl-cio opposed uehlein’s work on the 1997 kyoto protocol, undercutting their own representation on the panel and causing uehlein to resign in frustration.

why is the afl-cio so reticent in its attitude on climate, despite the danger to its roughly 12.5 million members and to working people around the globe? of its 57 affiliated unions, many have no stated environmental policy, while a handful advocate for some climate action as a peripheral issue. that leaves a bloc of about a dozen unions—the building trades, steel, utility, and mine workers whose jobs depend on the fossil fuel industry or other climate-unsustainable sectors. far from being outright malicious, these unions have a legal duty to advocate for their members, especially in a time of increasing wealth inequality and corporate power. thus, these powerful and highly motivated energy unions direct the entire afl-cio into an “all of the above” energy policy, accepting “green jobs” and infrastructure projects while vehemently opposing any attempts to curtail extractive industries. in the early 1980s, pressure from the united mine workers dissolved the afl-cio’s action on community health issues like air pollution and acid rain, and toxic rhetoric about “jobs vs. environment” has continued to poison labor’s political action. following protests against the keystone xl pipeline, special interests like the american petroleum institute have learned to inflame these tensions and now wield huge influence through energy unions.

according to uehlein, correcting this is a matter of advocacy. yet, in his experience as a strategic advisor for the blue-green alliance, a founding member of the coalition for environmentally responsible economies, a member of the union of concerned scientists, the chief organizer of the afl-cio’s 50,000-strong presence at the 1999 wto protests, and leading countless workshops on cross-issue activism, uehlein observes that the prominent environmental groups who ought to be leading this charge are mired in shortcomings of their own. because of their general unwillingness to utilize direct action or mass mobilization tactics, these major environmental organizations—national wildlife federation, environmental defense fund, audubon society, league of conservation voters, sierra club—appear to deal more in respectability politics than the massive popular demonstrations needed to motivate sustained action. ossified by beltway politics and the need to remain respectable amidst the mainstream democratic party, these “big greens” hold intransigently to their traditional organizing patterns and lose support because of it.

for uehlein, the bottom line is that “both movements are losing.” traditional environmentalism fails to elicit the nation-stopping turnout of 1970’s first earth day, and traditional unionism has been greatly weakened in many sectors by multinational corporations and weak labor-rights enforcement. both movements, in their most institutionalized forms, are dominated by white male voices which fail to represent the women, people of color, and working poor who are most threatened by corporate greed and climate catastrophe. when operating in separate “silos,” labor and environmentalism fight each other instead of their common enemy.

yet despite the failings of big green and big labor, these movements have so much to gain from cooperation. the federal jobs guarantee, a cornerstone of the green new deal and other major climate legislation, would benefit organized labor more than any legislation in the past several decades. according to uehlein, such a program would “drive wages and benefits up and allow unions to do what they do best: negotiate good contracts.” the infrastructure necessary to transition the u.s. to a sustainable power grid would employ millions of americans across the country, and vigilant oversight could ensure fair workplace conditions that new unions to grow and flourish. and these new unions could bolster the waning power of american workers. history shows us that labor’s greatest victories follow minority inclusion, like women in the “9to5” movement or black workers in the congress of industrial organizations [the “cio” in afl-cio]. recent victories at starbucks and amazon rejected the parenting of established unions, garnering more widespread support by organizing themselves. with the prominence of black lives matter, youth climate activism, environmental justice, and indigenous movements, uehlein maintains that labor must platform and learn from these activists who are actually doing something.

how do we achieve this cooperation and dispel the toxic, false dichotomy of “jobs vs. environment”? uehlein now heads the labor network for sustainability, a research and advocacy group working out the nuts and bolts of a just transition. he was arrested for civil disobedience protesting keystone xl, arm-in-arm with bill mckibben. and he’s in a rock band. the u-liners have performed with pete seager, tom morello, and at both the rock & roll hall of fame and afl-cio headquarters. whether singing his originals or covering jerry garcia, bruce springsteen, and willie nelson, uehlein’s performances are a testament to his beliefs. he changes billy edd wheeler’s lyrics to give the unions due credit and prefaces each set with words of love, empathy, innocence, or revolution. as opposed to capitalism’s propensity for division and addiction, “art and music… arrest life and invite contemplation,” uehlein muses, and “help [labor’s two beating hearts] recognize each other and come together.” in tributing labor’s rich history of art and music, he marvels at how songs can tell coal miners to “leave it in the ground” with empathy and nuance that prose could never achieve. “living life is art,” he says, and when business-as-usual fails us, it is the unexpected gracenotes in our music—and our marching—that keep us fighting.

***

this article was originally published here: https://cawei.georgetown.domains/stia396_spr22/uncategorized/music-mobilizing-and-making-a-living-on-a-living-planet/

last week, a video of children pleading with sen. dianne feinstein, d-cal., to back the green new deal resolution went viral on twitter. the video, which now has about 10 million views, was posted by the sunrise movement, an environmental activist organization consisting mostly of young people. 

while feinstein made it clear that she thought the group’s goals were unrealistic, she released a statement saying she had her own climate change resolution she was going to release soon, but acknowledged their “spirited discussion.” others have criticized sunrise for only posting an edited version of the video on twitter at first, which some considered misleading.

it’s not the first time the group has made headlines. at the end of 2018, they staged a sit-in in house democrat’s offices to demand action on climate change and many attribute this action as part of the reason rep. alexandria ocasio-cortez, d-n.y., introduced a green new deal proposal in february.      

fifty-five percent of sunrise’s funding comes from institutions like the wallace global fund and the rockefeller family fund, but most of the rest comes from individual donations. they raised over a million dollars in 2018. 

sunrise isn’t finished yet. the group has plans to disrupt the 2020 democratic primary debates this summer.

washington — in his second state of the union address, president donald trump focused heavily on foreign policy, immigration, and the need for a border wall while completely ignoring the environment and climate change, reflecting the issues important to his supporters.

the only time trump mentioned natural resources was when he said, “the united states is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.”

sen. edward markey, d-mass., brought environmental activist varshini prakash to the state of the union as his guest. prakash is a co-founder of the movement sunrise, which gained national attention when hundreds of activists protested outside house speaker nancy pelosi’s office after the midterm elections demanding that congress support their green new deal. incoming freshman rep. alexandria ocasio-cortez, d-n.y., upped their visibility when she joined the protesters.

the three core principles of the green new deal are creating a carbon-free economy, investing in green jobs and promoting environmental justice, especially in poor communities. markey and ocasio-cortez are expected to introduce green new deal legislation as early as this week.

“on the most important issue facing our country and its people – climate change – president trump’s state of the union was as empty as his schedules,” markey wrote in a press release after the speech. “while temperatures rise and wages fall, president trump continues his climate denial, letting big oil, king coal, and the koch brothers dictate an energy agenda that endangers public health, national security, and economic prosperity. instead of trump’s climate raw deal, america needs a green new deal that transforms our economy, delivers justice, and unleashes the greatest blue-collar job creation program in a generation.

“so, when donald trump talks about compromise, what he really means is capitulation,” markey wrote.

the trump administration has pursued a policy of rolling back environmental regulations in order to spur economic growth. “my administration has cut more regulations in a short time than any other administration during its entire tenure,” trump proudly told congress tuesday night.

national geographic has tracked over 80 changes to science and environmental policy throughout the first two years of the trump administration. 

the environmental protection agency has eased sulfur dioxide regulations on coal plant emissions. the interior department has eased restrictions on oil and gas drilling on protected habitat in western states. the bureau of ocean energy management issued the first permit to begin drilling in the arctic’s beaufort sea. and a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is in the same class of chemicals as sarin gas, was quashed by the scandal-plagued former head of the epa, scott pruitt, in one of his first acts as director of the agency. 

one day before the government shutdown in december, trump issued an executive order to the interior and agriculture departments to ramp up logging on federal lands to 4 billion board feet, an increase of 31%. trump has repeatedly stated on twitter and in interviews that poor forest management is responsible for wildfires, though experts disagree.

like markey and ocasio-cortez, the military and intelligence communities have consistently been more concerned about climate change and the environment than the president.

last week, director of national intelligence dan coats testified before the senate select committee on intelligence about the 2019 worldwide threat assessment. coats oversees the office of the director of national intelligence, which integrates the work of 17 organizations including the cia and departments of state, defense, justice, energy, homeland security, and treasury as well as the coast guard and drug enforcement agency.

for the third year in a row, the odni report highlighted global threats posed by climate change alongside threats posed by china, russia, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism.

“climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security,” the report stated.

the threat assessment also cited the dangers to military installations posed by rising sea levels.

“damage to communication, energy, and transportation infrastructure could affect low-lying military bases, inflict economic costs, and cause human displacement and loss of life,” odni found.

this already happened when hurricane florence caused $3.6 billion damage to the marine corps’ camp lejeune in north carolina in september 2018, followed one month later by $5 billion in damage to tyndall air force base in florida after hurricane michael, according to the union of concerned scientists.

a january 2019 report on climate change risk by the department of defense reviewed 79 military installations and found 53 at risk of recurrent flooding, 43 vulnerable to droughts, and 36 at risk of wildfires, with many installations threatened by more than one risk factor. desertification and thawing permafrost were other risk factors.

“congress needs to use the power of the purse to ensure that our federal spending prioritizes clean energy, climate change, and science, and restricts the ability of the trump administration to take actions that would move us further away from our climate goals,” markey wrote in a dec. 7 op-ed in the boston globe. “in the 116th congress, we will have that chance to make history. now is the time for a green new deal.”