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​There it is in black and white, in the text of the debt ceiling agreement between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy: a whole section [p. 95] on pushing the Mountain Valley pipeline to completion, overriding the well-reasoned decisions of government regulatory agencies and courts, not to mention the dogged, passionate opposition of residents along the 302-mile route of this fracked gas pipeline. If completed, it would bring up to two billion cubic feet per day of fracked gas from northern West Virginia through that state and Virginia, making a mockery of Biden's claim to be the Climate President.

Natalie Cox, a spokesperson for the Mountain Valley project, said Monday that developers are “grateful for the full support of the White House, as well as the strong leadership of Democratic and Republican legislators for recognizing the Mountain Valley Pipeline as a critical energy infrastructure project.” She's got that right.

I’m devoting the rest of my post to my friend and MVP fighter from VA, Deborah Kushner, who sent out this post after the debt ceiling deal was released. See the action items at the end so you can help turn back this travesty:

“Some of you have had the good fortune to have visited Southwest VA and WV [I have! MT], to meet and stand with the amazing scrappy and stoic people who live there. Some of you have witnessed the cruel devastation wrought on that stunning landscape by the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which for 9 years has laid waste to the region. Land has been seized through eminent domain, ancient aquifers have been fouled, sole water sources for communities have dried up or been polluted, public roads have been buried under 9” of mud because of inadequate ‘erosion control devices,’ construction has caused landslides that have threatened more than one home, pipe sections have floated downstream after heavy rains. Many sections of pipe still sit above ground, exposed to the elements for years, consistently corroding, years past the pipe manufacturer’s recommended time limit for exposure to UV rays. Unique perched aquifers have been damaged. Endangered species’ habitat has been compromised. The list of harms goes on and on…

"For years, this unneeded, unwanted, dangerous project has been stalled with court challenges and revoked permits, but now it’s being fast-tracked – leaping over judicial lawsuits, environmental reviews, and permitting processes in a desperate attempt to complete the project so that it can yearly add the equivalent of 19 million passenger cars and lock us into decades more fossil fuel consumption. And so greedy petro barons like WV Sen. Joe Manchin can profit from this archaic industry that is killing the planet and all life.

"On June 8 at 2pm, your friends and neighbors will gather at the White House to demand an alteration to our government’s crash course towards planetary annihilation.
The fight for a livable present and future is here and now. Stands are being taken across the globe to sever the oil and gas/ government/ financial industry connections. This particular fight is at our doorstep. These are our neighbors who we must protect. This is our planet that we are fighting for. [I'll be there. Contact me for more info if you can join me. MT]

"These wrongs won’t be corrected overnight, and the powers that be are well dug in. They won’t give up easily, so we must be unrelenting in our demands. Numbers count. This is the work we’re here for. See you there. We’ll be in excellent company in this most worthy of fights.

The important thing is to continue to show up and speak out. Don’t agonize, organize! It will take all of us – see you out there!”

Other Actions to Take (Thanks to POWHR, Appalachian Voices, and others):

• Make a call to House members before Wednesday - MAY 31 - to tell them to reject the Dirty Debt Ceiling Deal – we need a clean debt ceiling bill! 
• VA Sen. Tim Kaine is proposing an amendment that will strip out MVP approval from the bill. Send an email to your senators to ask them to demand a clean debt ceiling bill!
• Post on Social Media – hold elected officials accountable 

Plan to be in SWVA should MVP construction start

• Train to be a Legal Observer by signing up here: appalachianjustice@nlg.org. Virtual training will be held over 2 days, June 1 & June 4 at 6:30 pm. Please email if you want to sign up and welcome others. In-person training will take place in Montgomery County and Bent Mountain /Floyd in July and August. Actual dates /times for in-person training is still tbd. 

 

• Volunteer with Mountain Valley Watch to monitor construction for violations here (can be done virtually or in person):  Sign up to learn more here! 

You could say the biggest global banks are guilty of mass murder. Their investments in fossil fuel development continue and their profits have soared beyond belief since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, fossil-fueled climate chaos and attendant human and ecosystem destruction is ramping up at a terrifying pace.

The newest report from Rainforest Action Network and other groups, Banking on Climate Chaos 2023, just came out with a lot of discouraging data. (Click here for a link to the report and an interview with the lead researcher.)  But it also provides fodder for the resistance.

On March 21 I was with hundreds of elders and others at the flagship Rocking Chair Rebellion in DC, which focused on the four biggest U.S. banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America – with a 24-hour rocking chair sit-in, followed by a rally, followed by a march past branches of all four banks, followed by a massive protest outside two of the banks, which ended before anyone was arrested. Click here and here for three brief but fiery speeches from the rally. 

Actions took place in more than a hundred cities around the U.S., all initiated by a one-year-old organization for those over 60, called Th!rd Act, in alliance with faith communities, labor, environmental groups and more.

The next day, 10 of us from Th!rd Act and Beyond Extreme Energy went back to the Chase bank, sat in a circle on the comfortable rug in the lobby, and read an indictment of Chase as the worst offender in funding fossil fuels. (It was taken over just this year by a Canadian bank, but historically Chase is by far the biggest investor in dirty energy.) We sang classic songs with new lyrics, read the Washington Post story in that day’s paper about the latest and scariest report from the IPCC (the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and when the staff asked us to leave, we said we’d leave when Chase stops its dirty investments. (10-minute video here). The cops came and arrested us, and we spent 10 hours in a D.C. lockup before being charged with unlawful entry (a silly charge since the bank was open when we entered) and given a court date a few weeks hence.

Before that day arrived, charges were dropped, leaving us free to pursue other criminal banksters, like Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, which all had their annual shareholder meetings in late April, in New York, San Francisco and Charlotte, NC, respectively. There were lively, creative nonviolent direct actions at all of them, perhaps the most impressive being at the Wells Fargo headquarters, where activists unfurled a huge banner from atop the building and shut the whole thing down. I was at Citi Plaza in NYC, where we held a fun rally the day before the shareholders’ meeting, and several small groups spray-chalked “No new oil” and “Climate Criminal” on the banks’ windows. (It looks like paint but washes right off.)

It was disappointing to hear that support for decarbonizing the banks’ investments actually went down from last year. I don’t understand how these people think. When we were flyering the thousands of Citi employees leaving their fancy high-rise, about 1 in every 8 took a flyer; almost all of them were polite even as they declined; a few of them “wished us luck,” whatever that means; one responded, “I’m Canadian” – sorry, see bank reference above; and one yelled at me, “You effing people don’t have a clue!” I asked him what his clue was, but he didn’t answer. 

Luckily, people are taking bold, creative actions all over the world, especially young people, and now elders in an organized way.  Things look very bad, but it's worth it to keep fighting if it saves just one person from dying from climate disaster.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.                      Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

I was part of the Rocking Chair Rebellion, a group of 10 elders (and one young supporter) who traveled to Atlanta during the Week of Action Against Cop City, when the local opposition to a militarized police training facility called for support against an increasingly violent police response and increasingly heavy-handed legal ramifications. Forest defender Tortuguita was killed by police on Jan. 18 (see my previous post here), and 19 protesters had already been charged with domestic terrorism – a felony calling for up to 35 years in prison – when the specific “crimes” they’d been charged with were no more than trespassing or sitting in trees.

When we gathered Sunday evening at our AirBnB to finalize our plans, we didn’t know that police at that very hour had again raided the forest while a music festival was going on with hundreds of attendees, including children. The raid was apparently in response to a smaller group of camouflaged protesters who destroyed some equipment and threw projectiles at the police at another site in the forest; 23 more people were charged with domestic terrorism, most of whom had nothing to do with that action. Since almost all the arrestees are from out of state, they were denied bail because they have “no local ties,” even though local organizers had invited people to come down to be in solidarity.

The next day, Monday, we visited the Atlanta headquarters of Brasfield & Gorrie, the general contractor for Cop City, and five of its other construction sites around Atlanta. We held banners, passed out flyers and otherwise let the company know that we want to  Stop Cop City and Let Atlanta Breathe. (That's me in  photo below, holding the left banner, wearing a hard hat.) Our main purpose was to show that it’s not just young people who are opposed to this project, whose official name is the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Plans include shooting ranges, roads for high-speed chases, a mock town to practice urban warfare, and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad, all to be built on 85 acres in the middle of the South Atlanta Forest, that was the former site of a prison farm and was land the Muscogee Creek indigenous residents called Weelaunee before they were expelled almost 200 years ago on the Trail of Tears. A group of Muscogee arrived from Oklahoma on Wednesday to deliver an expulsion order to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and demand that the land be returned to them.

Our flyers said Cop City would increase the use of militarized policing of the already overpoliced Black and brown neighborhoods adjacent to the site; destroy acres of trees, which are badly needed to reduce the flooding that already occurs in local communities, to clean the air where residents already suffer from high asthma rates, and to reduce the urban heat island effect; exacerbate climate change, and greatly increase noise and particulate pollution. We added that Nature has its own right to exist, and provides beauty and tranquility for humans and other living things; and that the City of Atlanta could find much better uses for the $30 million it has promised toward building this $90 million facility, like funding non-police responses to improve security and improving health care for its most at-risk residents.

Our efforts reached thousands of motorists, pedestrians and construction workers with information about the project, and we were only threatened with arrest once. We felt like it was a small but useful contribution.

The majority of our group departed on Tuesday, but I stuck around with a few others to participate in two actions in downtown Atlanta. One was a march to various corporate supporters of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), which is the private entity behind Cop City, investing $60 million into the project.

There were fewer than a hundred marchers, and it seemed like more cops than protesters. They were decked out in riot gear, many carrying long guns, some of which were loaded with pepper balls. They had an honest-to-god tank parked nearby. They seemed to be on all sides of us and were very intimidating; we were afraid of getting kettled and arrested (and who knows what else). I couldn’t afford to get arrested just then due to an important upcoming commitment, so I peeled off and kept a little distance, when I ran into some young people who had done the same. Then I had some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about being in the movement. They asked me how I decided what level of risk to take, and I found myself telling them that elders – who are retired, have no kids or parents to care for, and don’t have to worry about a criminal record getting them fired from a job or unable to get a job – have the least to lose but often are more conservative than the young ones who have everything to lose. They are leading with their anger and their love and we must support them!

Later that day we finally got to see the forest. We got a tour from someone staying there, and walked among dozens of tents where young people had re-occupied the forest after everyone had been cleared out on Sunday. There were cooking and washing stations and lots of literature available at the welcome table in the parking lot. It was a beautiful day and the forest was lovely and serene.

Although 70 percent of the people who testified at a 17-hour public hearing two years ago were against Cop City, it’s unclear to me how that translates to the general population; most of the people we encountered said they knew nothing about the actual plan, and a few were in support.

In addition to Cop City, there is a plan to consume many more acres of forest to build a film production studio. All this construction would be in direct contradiction to a plan adopted about six years ago to conserve the forest – called the fourth lung of Atlanta – as passive recreational space, where the trees would not only clean the air for a mostly Black neighborhood adjacent to it where families already suffer high rates of asthma, but reduce flooding and help mitigate climate change. By the way, the weather was unseasonably warm while we were there, with highs in early March around 80 on Monday and Tuesday.

Stop Cop Stop is a leaderless – or leader-full – movement promoting independent action and diversity of tactics. The mantra is, Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and don’t criticize what others do. That was crystalized for me when I met a young woman who’d been at the music festival Sunday night. “We weren’t expecting” the police response, she said. I said something like, “I guess only the people destroying the equipment expected it,” and she responded, completely non-judgmentally, “We may have different approaches, but we all have the same goal.”

Opponents of Cop City posit that this type of militant action likely caused the first general contractor (before Brasfield & Gorrie) to quit, and has kept the project from moving forward so far in any significant way. They may very well be right.

I met a lot of brave young people and local, especially African American, residents who are defending the forest and calling for the end of Cop City as if their lives depend on it. In some ways, they do -- it's the campaigns against environmental racism, police abuse and climate change all in one package. We can learn a lot from what feels like a watershed struggle for environmental, climate and racial justice.

Click here, here, and here  for past interviews and background about Stop Cop City, including one from the Week of Action, and here for an update on Tortuguita's killing after an independent autopsy showed he was likely in a cross-legged sitting position with his hands raised when he was shot. The press conference featuring their parents, brother and the family's attorneys starts around 6:30 in the video. Visit here to learn more and take action: donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, email or call local politicians and the corporations funding the Atlanta Police Foundation.

Here I am ready for a bike ride in my t-shirt and shorts on February 16, when we broke not just the daily record, but the monthly record, for the high temperature. It was 68 degrees.

But it wasn’t just one day. Since December there have been just a handful of what we used to call “normal” weather days, which included cold, some snow, some ice. This year the overnight temps rarely dropped below 30 degrees, and daytime temps were almost always in the 40s, and 50s, sometimes 60s.

Twenty years ago, a climate change study in Connecticut predicted we’d have a climate like North Carolina’s by 2050 if we didn’t take action to reduce global heating. It’s here now, folks.

As a Buffalo native, I think snow is normal in winter and I actually love snow, as long as it’s fluffy. It’s great for cross-country skiing and nothing could be prettier to look out on while cozily ensconced in a warm home.

I am aware that many people don’t have a warm home – or any home – and I would say this non-winter winter has been a blessing for them. And I see many advantages myself. As an elder, I haven’t had to be super-careful about slipping on the ice, since there hasn’t been any. It sure makes winter biking easy and enjoyable, since the bane of my winter cycling has always been a nose that won’t stop running and is hard to address while wearing a balaclava. And really – what’s not to like about a beautiful warm day?

I try to appreciate the lovely weather as it comes and not think too much about what it portends for the summer. Last summer was hideous – with at least a six-week-long heat wave from mid-July through August (and maybe September, it’s hard to remember). I can only guess that the steady warming of our Connecticut climate will bring the same or worse this year.

I find it infuriating and depressing that none of the meteorologists on TV and even the local NPR station ever breathe the words “climate change” or “global heating.” They’ll laugh and say it’s another above normal day, but never an explanation of this very clear trend.

I interviewed a Congressional candidate last year who had worked as a TV meteorologist for an Illinois station for 20 years – and talked about climate change. He made the connections to people’s lives, like how the hotter, drier weather – punctuated by heavier rainstorms – affected farming in the region. He said he was in the first class of TV meteorologists who was trained by Climate Matters in the Newsroom, now called Climate Central. Here’s a link to the audio and transcription on Between the Lines. I sent a note to my local TV station encouraging them to get with the program. I’ll let you know if anything happens.
 
 

What can you say about a young activist killed by police while trying to stop the destruction of an urban forest for the construction of a militarized police training facility to practice urban warfare? It marks an escalation of repression against the environmental justice/climate movement in the U.S. of the kind more commonly associated with Brazil or Mexico. It has prompted rallies and vigils around the country, including in Connecticut.

On January 18, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, 26, who took the forest name Tortuguita (“Little Turtle”) or Tort, was shot by police who were raiding various camps and tree sits in the forest that comprised the movement to Stop Cop City. The official police story – amplified by the mass media, the mayor and Governor Brian Kemp – is that someone shot first at the officers, injuring one, and the police returned fire. They said no camera footage is available, and they didn’t produce a gun for several days that they now say was bought legally by Paez Terán. They have also told conflicting versions of what happened. In one version police say they surrounded the tent while Tort was inside, leading to speculation that the officer was injured by friendly fire.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, a private entity, got permission from the city to build an actual town on 100 acres of forest, the better to practice urban policing. Not just activists, but local residents from the neighboring part of the city, which is majority people of color and lower income, oppose the project. Part of the forest is a public park, used by people on a daily basis.

From mid-December until mid-January, a total of 19 people have been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism,” but the putative actions by the protesters that prompted the charges have not been specified. For most, their only crime was trespassing, a misdemeanor. The raids on the forest defenders have been carried out by an almost unprecedented collaboration of local, county, state and federal authorities, including the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The opposition to Cop City – focused on racial and environmental injustice and climate concerns – has been militant and decentralized, with some people carrying out sabotage of heavy machinery and focusing their ire on the CEOs of companies participating in or funding the project. Some consider destruction of property violence, while others don’t, but it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of killing another human being. Tortuguita (who used they/them pronouns) declared on several occasions to reporter David Peisner their commitment to non-violence, if not as a belief system at least as a strategy: “The right kind of resistance is peaceful, because that’s where we win. We’re not going to beat them at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not. We win through nonviolence. That’s really the only way we can win. We don’t want more people to die. We don’t want Atlanta to turn into a war zone.” I urge everyone to check out the full story by Peisner in The Bitter Southerner. 

Peisner even speculated that Tort might have been telling him what he wanted to hear about nonviolence, but concluded they were most likely sincere, based on how they lived their life. They were a trained medic and volunteered with Food Not Bombs. I have met countless young people engaged in frontline fights around the country who remind me of Tort: smart, extremely brave, loving, mostly anarchists and committed to nonviolence.

A week before Tortuguita was killed, I interviewed a local resident who has been active in the fight to Stop Cop City. I spoke to her again after their death, and she said, “Folks who live here are incredibly grateful for all the support we’ve gotten – vigils, donations to a memorial fund, notes of condolence; donations to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, and some people have traveled to Atlanta to stand in solidarity. We are continuing to push because police and politicians are out of control. We’re calling for an independent investigation that does not include law enforcement.” Click here to help.  

Tortuguita’s mother hopes to travel to the U.S. from her home in Panama to pursue justice for her son.

Anyone in Connecticut who wants to work on this issue can sign up for a zoom meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 31. 
 

Remember the Keystone XL pipeline fight? After more than 10 years of struggle that involved thousands of people and all kinds of tactics,  including a lot of non-violent direct actions at critical points directed at critical targets; the creation of the CIA – the Cowboys and Indians Alliance fighting together on the Great Plains to stop the Black Snake; and the involvement of a myriad of climate orgs, it finally died when President Joe Biden made cancellation of the State Department approval for it to cross the Canada-US border one of his very first actions in office, back in January, 2021.

But there was already an existing Keystone pipeline, running from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Cushing, Oklahoma. It has leaked more than a dozen times since becoming operational in 2010, and on Dec. 7 the biggest leak to date occurred, spilling 588,000 gallons – almost enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool – onto the Kansas soil.

We fought the Line 3 pipeline in more recent years – another Black Snake, this one running from the Alberta tar sands to Wisconsin, across the entire state of Minnesota and its indigenous wild rice lakes. It became operational in October 2021, just five months after our affinity group, the Mayflies, blocked two entrances to the Enbridge man camp for pipeline workers for part of one day. The pipeline immediately started spilling drilling fluids into the pristine waters of northern Minnesota. And I just learned while researching this post that the original Line 3 leaked 1.7 million gallons of crude oil on March 3, 1991. There have also been leaks along the infamous Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), which has been operating illegally for the past two years in violation of a court order requiring the company to do a full Environmental Impact Statement. Which, of course, should have been done BEFORE construction.

Those of us fighting fossil pipelines always say it’s a matter of when, not if, a pipeline will leak, or in the case of gas, maybe explode.

On the brighter side, I want to mention some of the successes we’ve had in the past several years, and the amazing people who made success possible.

In 2016, six members of Beyond Extreme Energy from as far away as North Carolina arrived in cold, snowy western Massachusetts for the Martin Luther King Day weekend walk against the Northeast Energy Direct (NED) gas pipeline proposed by Kinder Morgan. Boy was it cold! With the wind chill on the third day the temperature was 6 degrees. But our hearts were warmed by the amazing people we met, including several “raging Grannies” who helped power the walk by singing old tunes with fresh lyrics. We were fed and housed along the walk, and you can imagine how delicious a hot meal was when we came in from the cold. We made a few good friends on that walk that we’ve continued to work with. Oh, and the pipeline was cancelled!
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Some of us did another walk in March 2017 across eastern North Carolina to oppose the 600-mile Atlantic Coast fracked gas pipeline (ACP) that was planned to cross West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina, possibly extending to an LNG (liquefied “natural” gas) export terminal in South Carolina. While not as cold as Massachusetts, it was still chilly for camping, so we camped inside many of the days. It was organized by APPPL, the NC Alliance to Protect the People and the Places We Live, and included my friends from western NC as well as powerful African American and indigenous leaders from the poorer eastern part of the state, which is where the pipeline was scheduled to be built, after the whiter, wealthier residents of the central part of the state objected to the original path through their communities. Nothing new there.

There was also very effective organizing against the ACP by a coalition in WV and VA called ABRA, the Allegheny-Blue Ridge Alliance. All that organizing paid off when the company trying to build the pipeline pulled the plug in July 2020.

And we have stopped Sen. Joe Manchin's dirty deal three times in Congress, and we will stop the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP)!

So we end the year with some wins and some losses (coal use reached an all-time high this year), keeping in mind and heart the long view – that we do as much as we can while we’re here to preserve the quality of life on earth for all. And if we fail on any given day to do so, we try not to waste energy beating ourselves up about it. 

This blog post was published first in the CT Mirror:

For years I’ve thought that the annual COP (Conference of Parties) meetings to discuss the climate crisis were a contradiction, as they have a giant carbon footprint, including emissions from private jet-setting fossil fuel CEOs.

Emissions are still going up, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has warned we are “on a highway to climate hell.” Now, with COP 27 happening in the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt — a police state — I have even more reasons to be disgusted. Read on for my proposal for a low-carbon, environmental justice-focused COP.

A recent analysis shows that taking a long-haul flight generates more carbon emissions than the average person in dozens of countries around the world produces in a whole year. There are 35,000 COP 27 “delegates,” whatever that means, the vast majority of whom flew there. What can 35,000 people discuss and decide on? Very little, as past COPS have shown.

The group Global Witness found that 636 fossil-fuel lobbyists are among those attending COP 27. That’s more than the combined number of delegates from the 10 countries most impacted by the climate crisis and more than even in past years.
And Egypt being a police state, there are many fewer activists attending than in previous years. Many couldn’t get visas, and the dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has banned many Egyptians from attending.

Why is Egypt even hosting this thing? The COP rotates among the continents and it’s Africa’s turn. Africans contribute a few percent total to the greenhouse gases that have been released into the atmosphere, but already suffer some of the worst impacts, like the severe flooding that occurred last month in Nigeria. Things will only get much worse for them.

Egypt says it wants to use its high profile to push for loss and damage for the most impacted countries, including in Africa, but Egypt itself is aiming to become a regional gas exporting hub. That certainly qualifies it to host a climate summit? Not that other countries haven’t also been ramping up fossil production while claiming to be hip to the climate crisis.

Egypt is holding thousands of political prisoners, probably the most famous being Alaa Abd el-Fattah, a British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist. He’s been imprisoned for nine years and on hunger strike for more than 200 days. He announced he would renounce even water once COP 27 started, and his family finally received word that he has had “medical intervention” (force-feeding).

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist, announced that she wouldn’t attend the conference in part out of concern for human rights abuses in Egypt. 

The New York Times notes that the conference will feature “biodegradable drinking straws and recycling bins, beach strolls and electric shuttles.” That’s good because activists will need those shuttles to get from their hotels to the official “protest area” in the desert, miles from the site of the COP meetings and they can only protest if they register in advance. But but but – this protest area in the desert will be “very chic,” according to one Egyptian official, complete with cafes and restaurants. You can’t make this stuff up.

So, how could world leaders and advocates for a safe climate — and NOT representatives of the companies causing the crisis — have meaningful discussions and make real, impactful decisions to reverse the trajectory we are on?

Civil society groups that go to the COPs to demonstrate for real action can do so effectively on their own continents. (Organizers in New Haven just held a Climathon to discuss problems and solutions on a local level — nitty, gritty work that’s not as glamorous as jet-setting to an international venue, but critical just the same.) Since Covid, other groups have held conferences, including global conferences with thousands of people, online. There are emissions connected to this kind of endeavor, but they pale in comparison to in-person gatherings. Virtual conferences would also allow more people at the forefront of the crisis — who tend to be poorer — to contribute their valuable perspectives and experience to the discussions.
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For those who don’t have internet access, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to provide that than to send them to Egypt or any other far-flung place where they can enjoy a “chic” environment while the planet burns.

News flash! An amazing coalition of frontline and BIPOC groups, supported by more mainstream enviro orgs, managed to throw a wrench into Sen. Joe Manchin's and Sen. Chuck Schumer's plan to incorporate Manchin's "dirty deal" into the Continuing Resolution to fund the government. Instead, a clean CR passed without his deal, which would have greatly reduced both agencies' oversight and grassroots opportunities to object to infrastructure projects that would affect them. See my previous few posts for background, and click here to listen to or read a short interview explaining what happened and what might be next.
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I just watched a 2014 movie I don’t know how I missed, based on a true story. The film is Pride, and it chronicles the efforts of Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners, a group in London that supported the national coal miners’ strike of 1984-85 – a strike to stop the mine closures that were promoted by the Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to reduce the power of the unions. The group was the brainchild of Mark Ashton, an activist with the gay rights movement in Britain (and, though the film never mentions this, he was a member of the Communist Party and General Secretary of the Young Communist League). His pitch to his comrades was that they should support the miners – despite some of the  gay men having been bashed by anti-gay violence in those very communities – because the powers that be treated both groups so terribly.

The group raised and sent a ton of money to three mining communities in Wales, and then began visiting the miners and their families. There was the usual anti-gay bias on the part of some, but others welcomed them from the beginning – especially most of the women. Some of the miners’ wives visited their gay allies in London and spent a wild night going to London’s gay bars. People on both sides came to respect and care about each other.

Then a leak to the sensational press (such as it was in the pre-internet age) highlighting the gays’ support led the miners to vote to end their relationship with the group. The union eventually lost the strike.

It’s notable that this occurred as AIDS was ravaging the world, and a scene in the movie shows one gay man criticizing the group for raising funds for [anti-gay?] miners and not for the gay community.

The film ends as the gay community in the UK is putting on its annual Gay Pride march in London. Remarkably, busload after busload of miners and their families arrive to join the parade. This really happened, and I have goose bumps as I’m writing it.

As the credits roll, there are updates to the lives of the real people depicted in the film: a member of Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners, who was the first man in the UK diagnosed with HIV, was still thriving; a miner’s wife, who became a leader of the miner-gay and lesbian alliance and then went back to school was elected to Parliament from Wales; and Mark Ashton, the leader of Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners, died of AIDS at 26, just two years after the events depicted. That broke my heart.

This story offers food for thought for our current situation:

• The intersectionality (what we used to call Solidarity) is off-the-charts inspiring.
• The LGBTQ+ movement, after making many strides, is facing some of the worst backlash in decades, at least in the U.S.
• Don’t get me started on the devolution of the media.
• And coal mines across the U.S. are closing, at first due to cheaper fracked gas but now also due to cleaner and cheaper renewables. I can’t be against that, because coal is deadly not only for the climate but for the communities where it is mined, whether underground or through blowing the tops off the mountains. But the miners are not the villains, and I’ve seen their anger and fear at the prospect of losing their livelihoods. In fact, they could be heroes in their own film. It’s encouraging that among the positive measures in the Inflation Reduction Act is the extra points proposed projects get when they pay union wages for the workers hired.

I heard about this film from my friend George Lakey’s book, How We Win – one of the best books on organizing I’ve ever read. George will be speaking in Hamden at the Unitarian Society at 7 p.m. on November 30 about his just-released memoir, Dancing with History, and he’ll be signing copies of both books.
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And even though I gave away the plot, I highly encourage you all to watch the film for yourselves.

Four of us (including Rachel on the left and me second from right) drove down from New Haven in my electric Chevy Bolt for the day of lobbying and a rally on September 8 dubbed No Sacrifice Zones: MVP Resistance Comes to DC. That made the drive an hour slower but also cheaper than driving a gas-powered car, and boy, did we feel righteous! We also came to oppose Sen. Joe Manchin’s dirty side deal that would force through not only the Mountain Valley pipeline, but would weaken bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and make it easier to push through any infrastructure project with little or no public input.
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I only go to DC for actions of one kind or another, and when I stay with friends, I barely get to see them, which was the case again this time. Someday I’ll go down just to see my pals.

The organizing that went into both the lobbying and the rally was phenomenal. We did lobby training either online ahead of time or when folks arrived at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation that morning, which served as our headquarters. Once we signed up to lobby, organizers coordinated with Congressional staffers to set up appointments, and each team included a lobby liaison and a frontline fighter. Our very savvy liaison was Dahlia with the newish Jewish climate org, Dayenu (which means “Enough” in Hebrew). Our frontliner was Nancy, a retiree who lives in Monroe County, West Virginia, the place I most fell in love with of all the gorgeous places we passed through on our Walk/Drive for Appalachia’s Future last spring. She’s been fighting it for 8 of the 12 years since she retired.

Eluned and I were the Connecticut team, and the four of us met with staffers for both our senators, Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, and our Congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro. Nancy explained the situation on the ground (see my past few blogs for more on that), including how the consortium of companies building the Mountain Valley pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia and maybe into North Carolina has lost permits from three federal agencies due to their egregious violations. It was on life support before Manchin and Chuck Schumer made their “side deal.” The silver lining is that it thrust the MVP into the limelight, and now folks down there are fielding almost more interview requests than they can handle, explaining to a much broader audience (including readers of The New York Times and the Washington Post) why the pipeline is a bad idea.

All the staffers listened but of course were non-committal when we made our asks that their bosses 1) make a public statement in favor of separating the side deal from any must-pass legislation, like the Continuing Resolution to fund the government or the National Defense Authorization Act; and 2) oppose the side deal. Since Blumenthal is on the Judiciary Committee, I emphasized to his aide that the side deal would remove jurisdiction over any appeals regarding the MVP from the Fourth Circuit, where judges have often ruled against the developers (with good reason) to the DC Circuit, where they hope to get more pro-business rulings. That idea – that moneyed interests can pick their courtroom – is so anathema to the way our government is supposed to operate that members of Congress should vote against the deal on that basis alone.

I like to share some Manchin quotes from his home-state media outlet to demonstrate the man’s hubris:
 
Manchin said the language will be in a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. “This is something the Republican Party has wanted for the last five to seven years I’ve been with them,” he said. “It either keeps the country open, or we shut down the government. That’ll happen Sept. 30, so let’s see how that politics plays out.”

We were thrilled that while we were lobbying, Sen. Bernie Sanders made a very strong statement against the side deal, going so far as to say he’d vote against any must-pass bill that included it. We were also happy that at least 72 House members signed onto a letter from Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) calling for the side deal to be a stand-alone bill.

The rally later that day was held in a cozy, tree-lined spot on Capitol Hill, just big enough for the 500 people who came, including front-line fighters from struggles against mining and drilling from all over the country, from Alaska to California to the Gulf Coast to the Upper Midwest, in addition to Appalachia. Contingents from each of those areas took the stage together, each person speaking for about two minutes about their particular fight and all of them pledging solidarity with each other, and showing up for each other, as No Sacrifice Zones implies. The music, if anything, was even more powerful than the speakers. Four of us seven “Mayflies” who locked down last year to protest the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota reunited and took a selfie (above).

I tend to talk with folks and walk around at rallies, and I know I missed a lot even though I was there the whole time. So, after I got home, I listened to the whole thing again, and I really had missed a lot! You can watch the whole 2 hours and 11 minutes here, or just skip through it. At 2:06, you can catch the final song, Idle No More, sung by two indigenous women from North Carolina, which harkens back to the nonviolent indigenous uprising in Canada begun a decade ago and seemed an appropriate way to end. Whatever happens with the MVP and the side deal, we have work to do for the rest of our lives.  

In my post last month, I blasted Joe Manchin for refusing to vote with Democrats to pass even a greatly scaled back version of President Biden’s Build Back Better initiative. Maybe Manchin read my blog, because just a day or two later he came back to the table and agreed to what became the Inflation Reduction Act. (Seriously, reporting indicates that not just my condemnation, but that of thousands of others convinced him that he didn’t want to be responsible for destroying the liveability of the planet.)

But what I wrote in July seems on the mark: “Some folks I respect say we should be more positive and talk about solutions and not be such Debbie and Donny Downers. My only problem with that approach is, we can build out all the solar panels and wind turbines and battery storage we want, and we can promote energy efficiency and conservation (not using the energy in the first place) 24/7, but if we don’t turn off the gas and oil spigots (coal is dying on its own, but we definitely should encourage its retirement), we are not going to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in.”

Because the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has some good things (promoting electric vehicles and incentivizing more renewables) and some bad things (requiring offering millions of acres for on-shore and off-shore oil and gas drilling as a prerequisite for building renewable energy projects).

In other words, digging the hole deeper. It’s all carrots and no sticks – no enforceable requirements for reducing climate pollution in the law – which was probably the only way it was going to pass, but which makes achieving the advertised 40% reduction over 2005 levels pretty squishy. Many frontline groups fighting fossil projects, like indigenous folks in the Midwest and Black folks on the Gulf Coast who are already overburdened, point out that they’ve been thrown under the bus – again.

As if that’s not bad enough, the side deal to the IRA that Manchin and Schumer agreed to is really despicable. In legislation not yet finalized and to be voted on in September, it would require the completion of the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline (MVP) through West Virginia and southwestern Virginia, much-delayed because of all the violations the consortium building it has committed. It also calls for “streamlining” the permitting process, which would reduce a lot of government oversight and public participation. See my June and July blog posts for more on the MVP.

It will likely be tacked onto “must pass” legislation such as the budget bill. While the proposals to “streamline” the permitting process would also apply to renewable energy projects, the side deal takes an “all of the above” approach to energy, with fracked gas projects and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) getting billions in subsidies through the IRA that even former CCS project developers now say is a total waste of money and will only help entrench rather than phase out fossil fuels.

 We can’t afford that at this late stage in the climate crisis. We must stop it.
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Folks from the frontlines of the MVP fight are gathering to lobby their elected officials in DC on Thursday, Sept. 8, to vote NO on the bill, and then attend a rally at 5 p.m. I am going and would love to bring you with me. Not only is this a critical fight for all of us, but meeting the people along the path of the MVP was a highlight of my life as I’m sure it would be for you. Check out the link below or send me a message. https://tinyurl.com/nodirtydeal

And PLEASE call your reps and senators in Congress and tell them (probably just leaving a message will take you about 30 seconds) you are opposed to this side deal. We need all the voices we can get. Go here to find them: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Also attaching link to my two op-eds that just came out that pretty much blanketed the state, thanks to running in all the Hearst papers as well as the CT Mirror:

https://ctmirror.org/2022/08/30/mountain-valley-pipeline-killingly-ct/
https://www.nhregister.com/opinion/article/Opinion-Stop-side-deal-that-undermines-climate-17397503.php