More than 650 People Arrested During This Week’s “People Vs. Fossil Fuels” Mobilization Demanding Urgent Action to Stop New Fossil Fuel Projects.
Led by Indigenous youth, demonstrators will march to the Capitol tomorrow with a banner that reads “Biden: We Didn’t Vote for Fossil Fuels”
Today’s protests pushed back on the fossil fuel industry’s “false solutions,” like natural gas, blue hydrogen, and carbon capture and sequestration
Tom Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, who was arrested at the White House, was among those who called out ideas like carbon credits and carbon trading as schemes that allowed the fossil fuel industry to continue to pollute communities and the climate.
“In 1854, the great visionary Chief Seattle asked the U.S. Government how it thought it could buy the land or sky. Now 167 years later, the sky is being bought and sold on carbon stock markets in the United States and all over the world,” said Goldtooth. “These carbon markets are targeted schemes that consist of cap and trade, carbon offsets, and carbon taxes that are the primary false solution to climate change. We cannot allow polluters to profit from global warming. Selling the sky is a scam and a coverup that corrupts the sacred.”
Bill McKibben writes in a piece for The Guardian that It’s easy to feel pessimistic about the climate. But we’ve got two big things on our side:
One is the continuing astonishing fall in the cost of renewable energy and the batteries with which to store it. This trend was evident by the time of Paris, but still new enough that it was hard to trust it: we still thought of wind and sun as expensive, a sacrifice. We now understand that they are miracles, both of engineering and economics: last month an Oxford team released an (undercovered) analysis that concluded: “Compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will probably result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars – even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy.” That is, the faster we move towards true renewable energy, the more money we save, and the savings are measured in “many trillions of dollars”.
And the second lucky break is the continuing astonishing growth in the size of citizens’ movements demanding action. Again, this was already evident in Paris: 400,000 people had marched on the UN the year before demanding action, and as Barack Obama said at the time, “we cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call.” He’d been able to slink back from Copenhagen in 2009 with no agreement and pay no political price; by Paris that had changed. But it’s changed even more in the six years since, particularly since August 2018 when Greta Thunberg began her first climate strike. There are thousands of Thunbergs now scattered across the planet, with millions of followers: this may be the biggest international movement in human history.