Friday, April 22, 2022 was Earth Day. As the impending climate catastrophe draws closer, Earth Day has gone mainstream and become a feel-good holiday stripped of serious messages. The White House issued a Presidential proclamation declaring “For the future of our planet, for our health, and for our children and grandchildren, we must act now. Let us stand united in this effort to save our planet and, in the process, strengthen our economy and grow more connected to each other and the world we share.” The U.S. Commerce Department Office of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Programs posted Happy Earth Day greetings on its website and its newsletter included photographs from its 2022 Earth Day Photo Challenge. Climate activists biking from New York City to Albany to demand state action on climate change were briefly joined by Senate Majority leader Charles Schumer (Dem-NY) who is at least partly responsible for the Democratic Party’s empowering anti-climate change Senators Manchin (WV) and Sinema (AZ) who blocked the Biden climate repair agenda.
Corporate America has jumped on the Earth Day bandwagon in embarrassingly small ways. Schick introduced a new sustainable razor for people experiencing “Greentimidation.” SodaStream started a campaign to save a million baby sea turtles. Uber riders in Miami, Los Angeles and Washington can win free, nature-inspired rides. The Wrangler Westward 626 Earth Day jeans are made from organic cotton and feature eco-friendly finishes. BMW North America ran an ad featuring an all-electric car. Samsonite recycled used luggage as coasters.
And from the banal to outrageous, in 2019 the petrochemical company Koch Industries posted a video for Earth Day on its Facebook page celebrating the fossil fuel company’s “pollution prevention practices” with the line “You love the Earth. So do we.” In 2021, ExxonMobil, one of the all-time leading polluters and a spreader of climate denial misinformation for decades, released a video celebrating its eco-friendliness with claims that its employees are “work[ing] tirelessly to reduce emissions and move towards a low-carbon future.”
Climate news is bad. The most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, written by over 250 scientists from almost seventy countries, spells out how bad the approaching climate catastrophe will be. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres calls it “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” According to the report, climate change is happening more rapidly than expected with increasingly devastating results. The average global temperature has increased by 2° F since the start of the 19th century Industrial Revolution and the mass burning of fossil fuels.
The bill proposed by President Biden to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030 was blocked in the Senate by Republicans joined by Democrat Joe Manchin (W.Va.) whose family business invests in the use of coal by power plants. The rise in gas prices because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to calls for greater fossil fuel production, further jeopardizing the environment.
Meanwhile major American companies continue to be guilty of practices that will decimate the human environment. Microsoft claims to be committed to a “carbon negative” future, but between June 2020 and June 2021, its carbon emissions rose by over 20% because of the construction and operation of new data centers and the manufacture and use of its electronic devices.
This term the Supreme Court, with a 6-3 rightwing majority including three Trump appointees, will rule on an anti-climate regulation case brought by 18 Republican state attorneys generals and the largest coal companies in the United States. The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is supported by 91 Republican members of Congress and powerful conservative groups including a group affiliated with the petro-chemical Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation. They want the court to rule that federal efforts to limit greenhouse gas pollution actually violate the 1970 Clean Air Act. They argue that enforcement of clean air regulations can only target individual power plants and cannot regulate the entire power industry. Coal-fueled power plants used to generate electricity are the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, trailing only truck, bus, airplane, and car pollution.
There are groups that are taking the impending climate catastrophe seriously. Scientist Rebellion is calling for a “Climate Revolution.” According to the group’s website, “As scientists, we have tried writing reports and giving presentations about the climate and ecological crisis to those in power. We must now have the humility to accept these attempts have not worked. Now is the time for us to take action, so that we show how seriously we take our warnings.” On April 6th, over 1,000 Scientist Rebellion activists in more than 25 countries including Italy, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Portugal, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Ecuador and the United States engaged in non-violent civil disobedience targeting governmental, scientific, and corporate institutions to highlight the urgency and injustice of the climate and ecological crisis. In Los Angeles, scientists locked the entrance of Chase bank to protest their financing of fossil fuels.
An open letter on the Science Rebellion website declares: “We are scientists and academics who believe we should expose the reality and severity of the climate and ecological emergency by engaging in non-violent civil disobedience. Unless those best placed to understand behave as if this is an emergency, we cannot expect the public to do so. Some believe that appearing “alarmist” is detrimental - but we are terrified by what we see, and believe it is both vital and right to express our fears openly. . .W e call on academics, scientists and the public to join us in civil disobedience to demand emergency decarbonisation and degrowth, facilitated by wealth redistribution.”
On Earth Day 2022, thirteen members of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion were arrested for blocking the entryway to the New York Times printing plant in Queens, New York. The climate activist demanded that the Times and other newspapers operating out of the distribution facility drop advertising deals with fossil fuel companies. On April 23, New York Times deliveries were obstructed again and “Fight for Our Future’”rallies were held across the United States including dozens of demonstrators outside the White House in Washington DC.
In 1915, Joe Hill, a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World and a labor troubadour, was executed by the State of Utah. He was convicted of murder and the charges, trial, and verdict are still disputed by historians. Before he was execution, Hill sent a telegraph to “Big Bill” Haywood, a “Wobblies” leader where he wrote “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”
The message for this year’s Earth Day is that climate activists can’t waste time mourning for what is happening to our planet, what we need to do is ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, AND ORGANIZE. We need a climate revolution.
Follow Alan Singer on twitter at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1