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“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.” - George Carlin

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Atlanta needs a Green New Deal that addresses urban design

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Green New Deal for addressing climate change, but there’s also something very concerning: it addresses the symptoms but not the true sickness. 

When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, there’s nothing wrong with tackling the direct sources of fuel consumption. But it’s essential that we *also* address the root problem: un-walkable, inefficient urban design that demands high use of energy, both for buildings and for transportation.

In the Atlanta region, which has been called the “King of Sprawl,” this issue is particularly serious, and it’s something we can never fully solve lat the local level as long as the federal government is actively providing incentives for bad development and car dependency. 

The federal government stacks the deck in favor of sprawl and driving.

As this good post from T4 America points out, the deck is majorly stacked in favor of car-centric sprawl at the national level, and that needs to be changed. Consider these points raised in the post:

1.) Congress distributes transportation funding to states based on how much fuel is burned. The more gas burned in a state, the more money that state gets. Which means we give money to promote driving where it’s going to do the most damage to the climate – that’s insane. 

2.) That transportation-funding program dedicates 80 percent of funds to highways and only 20 percent to transit—and the highway funding is guaranteed over multiple years while transit funds are on the chopping block every year. No wonder we’ve built out our urban areas at a scale for driving, where highways become our main routes for weekly trips. We’re essentially demanding sprawl and growth in car trips through federal funding. 

3.) If you build a new highway, a transportation agency has to come up with a 20 percent local match. But if you want to build new transit, you have to come up with at least 50 percent at the local level. And yet we know that highways exacerbate greenhouse-gas pollution while transit reduces it. 

Atlanta and other sprawling areas need a Green New Deal that addresses urban design.

We’re providing billions of federal dollars as incentives for driving, and giving comparative scraps to the transit, which can barely compete given the funding slant. The damage is clear in the Atlanta region, which has a pitifully small amount of transit use compared to driving – only 3 percent of trips are by transit here, according to data from 2016. 

And Atlanta needs all the help it can get with overcoming the problems that have been created by this funding model that favors driving and sprawl. As Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times:

“Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities. This would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.”

Sprawling, car-dependent regions need a Green New Deal that addresses the urban design that lies at the source of so much of our national greenhouse-gas emissions misery. 

Top image: McMansion sprawl in Cumming, GA from Bing Maps

Lower image: Interstate 75/85 in Atlanta, photo by Darin Givens

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Instead of permitting the very actors that fuelled the climate crisis to advance their own agenda, it is time governments embody true climate championship by embracing the meaningful solutions communities on the front lines of climate change already have.

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Guerrilla Gardening

Guerrilla Gardening is the act of illegally gardening in spaces that are not technically yours to garden, to make subversive statements, protests, or as a form of direct action. The idea goes all the way back to 1973!

In other words, guerrilla gardeners take unloved or neglected land and assign it a new purpose – to make things pretty or useful. Cities are full of waste land and unused public spaces which people walk past every day without noticing. Spaces which would look a lot better if they were green!

Some guerrilla gardeners prefer to work at night when they can be more discreet. Others are activists who’ll do so in broad daylight, when everyone can see what they’re doing. Some choose to grow flowers to make places brighter. Others choose to grow fruit or vegetables (though care should be taken not to grow anything edible in places where plants might absorb toxins).

I don’t know why I haven’t posted any guerrilla gardening things on this blog yet, and I think I should change that. 

In the meantime, here are some links!

GuerrillaGardening.org

Guerrilla gardening: a report from the frontline

How to Start Guerrilla Gardening

Ron Finley: The Gangsta Gardener

What is guerrilla gardening?

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Time Lapse of the sun rising over Mount Hood, taken at Pittock Mansion in Portland, Oregon

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old dig for victory poster

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Chief Judy Wilson of the Neskonlith First Nation, east of Kamloops, is secretary treasurer of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, a community leader, strong opponent of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and an advocate for clean energy.

The Tyee reached out to Wilson to talk about RCMP action against pipeline protesters in the Wet’suwet’en nation in northwest B.C. because of her extensive involvement with government and industries and her long history of environmental advocacy. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What are your thoughts on how governments are responding to the RCMP action in the Wet’suwet’en territory?

I was just reading Premier [John] Horgan’s response to the Unist’ot’en, and I think he was trying to stay on the middle ground. He mentioned the bands who signed these agreements [to allow the pipeline], but to me, the issue is clearly about the hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs. They are the proper titleholders to their unceded territory, and they already made a decision. They said no pipelines in their territory.

As for Trudeau, I don’t think he’s really responded. It’s concerning that on one hand he talks about truth and reconciliation, he talks about implementing UNDRIP [the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People] and has supported Bill C-262, which is about implementation — and then he’s using forceful, militarized RCMP to remove people and arrest them at Unist’ot’en and Wet’suwet’en territory. He’s speaking contradictorily, and he’s actually in violation of some of the conventions that he signed at the United Nations.

You called for Canadians to ‘stand with land defenders.’ How can they do that?

Canadians, I think what they need to realize is that the land defenders are doing this for everybody. They’re doing it to protect the water, they’re doing it to protect the land, because with dirty oil and gas, we have to change, and it has to be immediate.

Dr. David Suzuki has said numerous times that there is no transitional economy to this problem with climate change and global warming. We have to all change now. We have to change to ensure that our young people have a future. That’s what the Indigenous land defenders are talking about when they say we need to protect the land and the water. That water is sacred, water is life. It’s critical and crucial to every Canadian. Not only in B.C. and Canada, but globally there has to be an awakening now.

Continue Reading.

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Black Socialists of America and DSA-LSC Present: A Panel on COINTELPRO

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Photo from @nicholas_steven_ - Mt Hood National Forest - Image selected by @stretchchristian - Join us in exploring #Oregon, wherever you are, and tag your finds to #Oregonexplored - part of the @exploredco family, online at exploredco.com via Instagram https://ift.tt/2RJCYwU

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With a New Fund, Evergreen Cooperatives Looks to Spread the ‘Cleveland Model’

Since their inception ten years ago, the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio have served as a promising model of economic development in a post-industrial city. The three worker cooperatives—an industrial laundry company, a green energy services contractor, and a hydroponic greenhouse (pictured above)—collectively employ over 200 individuals, many of whom have become worker-owners. In a city where median household income hovers around $18,500, these companies pay their workers a living wage and share with them the profits they produce.

Now, the Evergreen Cooperatives network is taking matters into its own hands with a new fund that will acquire existing companies from retiring business owners and sell them back to the employees. The Fund for Employee Ownership, as the Evergreen fund is called, is the latest and perhaps most potent initiative aimed at expanding employee ownership and the principles of democratic governance.

Read more…

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As the mythical caravan threat magically disappeared two weeks after the election, with the announcement that troops deployed would start to come home, a genuine existential threat has increasingly come into focus—the threat of climate change, heralded by a wave of wildfires in California, most notably the Camp Fire, the most deadly U.S. wildfire in almost a century.

Since a Nov. 13 protest at Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill first drew attention to it, organizing to push Democrats to commit to a New Green Deal has continued to mount. “We need a Green New Deal and we need to get to 100 percent renewables because our lives depend on it,” Rep.-elect Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez told reporters, as 51 protesters with the Sunrise Movement were arrested (and later released). Since then 13 members of Congress have signed on to support her proposal to establish a select committee tasked with developing a plan to transition to a carbon-neutral economy and beyond, with the ultimate goal of “economic and environmental justice and equality.”

But the political world still seems disastrously disconnected from the real world around it, even as smoke from California’s wildfires reached all the way to the East Coast:

The Camp Fire has an official death toll of 77, with 15,850 structures destroyed, but it’s hardly alone. According a Nov. 19 Cal Fire factsheet, five of the 10 most destructive wildfires in California history occurred in the last two years, with a sixth in 2015. All but one have happened since 2003.

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This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly-elected socialist congresswoman for New York, joined the Justice Democrats and the Sunrise movement at a sit-in at the office of Nancy Pelosi. The 29-year-old - the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives - did so to demand that the Democrats immediately develop a Green New Deal for the US economy. This programme – a huge, co-ordinated programme of public investment aimed at decarbonising growth – would be the most radical and transformative economic proposal put forward by any US party since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.

The rationale for targeting Pelosi – the incumbent House Minority Leader and aspirant Speaker - was clear. As soon as the Democrats reclaimed the lower chamber, Pelosi used her platform to suggest that the party “work together” with Donald Trump to promote a bipartisan agenda in the interests of all Americans.

As with Barack Obama’s emphasis on bipartisanship, this sounds appealing. But it neglects the conflict that exists at the heart of US society: the division between those who live off work and those who live off wealth.

Trump seeks to mask this economic divide by scapegoating alternative adversaries – the US’s immigrant and Muslim populations - while pursuing policies that serve the interests of his true constituency: the wealthy elite. Tax cuts, deregulation and the erosion of the social safety net have all served to redistribute the wealth produced by the working people of America to corrupt and unaccountable elites.

That Pelosi would even consider compromising with such a man - and such a programme - is revealing of the priorities of the Democratic establishment. Because the old Democrats, who receive billions of dollars from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, have as little interest in exposing the wealth/work divide that shapes the US economy as Trump himself.

But the new Democrats - representatives like Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar and Rashida Tlaib – are unafraid to recognise this fundamental conflict. They campaigned on reducing the profound inequalities of power and wealth that distort American democracy and are now fighting to translate their successful campaigns into concrete policies.

The Green New Deal is perhaps the most developed agenda being promoted by this insurgent movement. Spearheaded by Ocasio-Cortez, it draws on crucial research by economists such as Ann Pettifor and Mariana Mazzucato, as well as international organisations such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Like the New Deal of the 1930s, the Green New Deal would be a coordinated public investment programme aimed at expanding economic demand by increasing employment and wages, whilst also raising long-term productivity. The philosophy behind the GND is therefore classically Keynesian: investment in physical, social and technological infrastructure will pay for itself in the long-run by expanding demand today and increasing productive capacity tomorrow. The unprecedented stimulus programme introduced by the Chinese state following the 2008 financial crisis demonstrates how valuable even a more modest programme can be.

But the GND has more far-reaching aims. As the IPCC’s recent report warned, and as the ferocious fires in California have demonstrated, the world is edging towards climate apocalypse. If we fail to fundamentally change the basis of production, there won’t be an economy by the end of this century.  

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What we should do is recognize that Cuba confronted in 1991 precisely the kind of Apocalypse that looms before us today — the sudden loss of external inputs to the economy — things such as oil, heavy equipment, cars, and did we mention oil? — and handled it. We have more to learn from them than there is likely time to learn before we are in the soup, but we should do the best we can, because there is no better example in the world for meeting and besting such a crisis.

The World Wildlife Fund in its 2006 Sustainability Index Report cited Cuba as the only sustainable country in the world. To comprehend the magnitude of that achievement, and its significance for our world today, we need to go back to 1990. Cuba then was the very model of industrial agriculture, turning most of its land over to vast monocultures of sugar cane, applying oceans of imported oil to till it, spray it (Cuba at the time used more pesticides than the United States), harvest it and ship it to the Soviet Union in return for oil and food. Most of what was grown in Cuba was exported; most of what was eaten in Cuba was imported. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba, under embargo by the United States, had no market for its agricultural products and no way to pay for imported oil or food.

An industrial country wakes up one morning to no more oil. Just like that.

Motivated now by survival, not by profit, Cubans did what smart people have been telling us all to do for decades now. They stopped wresting cash from their punished land and started to heal it in order to have enough food to live. It was tough, starting from scratch, with the crisis already upon them. In the decade that followed the average Cuban adult lost 20 pounds.

They brought in experts in Permaculture from Australia and launched a national drive toward diversified, organic, polycultural, restorative agriculture. They did not do this because they wanted to save “the environment,” they did it because they wanted to save themselves. And that is why they succeeded. By the end of that first decade the average Cuban was getting 2600 calories and more than 68 grams of protein, an amount considered “sufficient” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. By 2006 average caloric intake was up to 3356 calories.

A lot of this food was produced not in the countryside (requiring transport to the cities) but in urban gardens, where food was grown and consumed in the same neighborhood. By 2002, 35,000 acres of urban gardens produced 3.4 million tons of food. In Havana, 90% of the city’s fresh produce came from local urban farms and gardens, all organic. In 2003, more than 200,000 Cubans were employed in urban agriculture. In 2003, Cuba had reduced its use of Diesel fuel by more than 50%, synthetic fertilizers by 90%, and chemical insecticides by 83%

Cuba’s achievements, in the face of exactly the kind of test we will soon face, are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Our obvious course, now that we are resuming a normal relationship, would be to commend them on what they have done and to invite teachers and consultants to come here to America and show our farmers how to stop destroying the earth and start feeding our people sustainably.

So that’s what we’re going to do, right?

Right?

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we’ll have to beat capitalism many times in many forms. in small ways and in large ways. it’s not a single struggle which we win or lose, it’s the long process of human history. don’t despair just focus on the fight at hand. 

I just watched Contrapoints’ new video on climate change and it got me thinking that we have 20 years to overthrow capitalism. 20 years to overturn centuries of conditioned slavery, inequality, fascism, and this DEMENTED world we live in, or we will die. We have only two decades, 240 months to do all of that, and we have no power...have we lost? Are we going to die? I’m not even an adult yet and the thought makes me want to cry

Well, it isnt quite that dire, although overthrowing capitalism would be a nice way to solve the problem. As Natalie says, and the IPCC report says, what we actually have to do is reduce carbon emissions down by at least 50% by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. You dont have to immediately overthrow capitalism to do that, although we do need an immense public investment in green energy. Capitalism certainly isnt going to do anything to help.

Basically, the “pragmatic” plan at this point is the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal. That plan actually gets the US to 100% renewable by 2030. And Dems will hold the House come next year. And the House starts literally all budget plans.So badger the hell out of your representatives to support that plan.

And take direct action with EarthStrike next year!