Earth Day Special: The Fossil Fuel Resistance is Fertile.

Posted inClimate, Direct Action, Peoples' History
The first Earth Day was in 1970 after decades of conservation and environmental advocacy from Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” to real life monkey wrenchers in the deserts of the American West. Since then, like so many other things, it has become by co-opted by corporations, politicians and non-profits looking to do well with environmentally minded consumers, voters and donors. In reality, change always comes from below. 
Listen in here: https://apple.co/3k4qDTT
Or watch is on YouTube
In our Earth Day special episode, Bob interviews Scott about four moments in environmental history where communities led struggles against fossil fuel companies and governments. They dive into struggles against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and the community and grassroots led disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. 

Climate and Punishment w/ journalist Alleen Brown

Posted inClimate

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It’s about 25% of the world’s incarcerated population with over 2 million people held in federal, state and local jails. We’re also seeing unprecedented extreme climate disasters in the form of wildfires, heatwaves, drought, super-storms and more.

Listen in: https://apple.co/3M2uhJN

The aging infrastructure and failing logistics systems of many prisons are unprepared for the emerging climate crisis. The intersection of these two crises have created a pattern of human rights abuses across the country, and elected officials and their “regimes of cruelty” from California to Texas to Florida are only making matters worse. 

The Myth of California’s Climate Exceptionalism ft. Gary Graham Hughes w/ Biofuelwatch

Posted inClimate
pic via Dan Bacher

California prides itself on being more progressive than most on solving the issue of the climate crisis. Whether it’s phasing out the internal combustion engine or promises to take on the state’s many oil extraction sites. There is a notion of “climate exceptionalism” in California’s liberal ruling elite.

Listen in: https://apple.co/3uZ6ci4

But the California state government is captured by oil interests like many others. The pro-industry legislation and political action just comes in different forms.

Col. Andrew Bacevich on the Deepening Crisis in Ukraine

Posted inForeign Policy

Rising tensions in eastern Europe between the U.S. and Russia over the Ukraine have dominated the news.  We discuss the situation with scholar and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich.   We discussed why the U.S. is so concerned, and hawkish, about Russia and Ukraine–Russophobia?   We talked about the role of NATO in this current crisis.  We talked about the many more pressing issues the U.S. should focus on–like inflation, COVID, the surveillance state, and especially Climate Change!

Listen in: https://apple.co/35CTESB

It’s a great conversation with one of America’s leading intellectuals and critics of foreign policy.

Full Audio Episode: Climate, Forests and Corporate Power at COP26

Posted inanti-capitalism, Climate, Uncategorized

New audio version of our recent coverage from Glasgow.

The UN Climate Summit in Glasgow (COP26) is in its second week. It’s been marked by large street protests, a “greenwash trade show” inside the meetings and empty promises by world leaders in the face of climate disaster. Green and Red focuses on movements and what’s happening in the streets, so we’ll be talking more with organizers and “outside voices” in Glasgow than you’ll hear from mainstream media channels.

Listen in: https://bit.ly/Glasgow4GandR

“It’s a greenwash trade show”: Climate, Forests and Corporate Power at COP26 w/ Emma Rae Lierley

Posted inanti-capitalism, Climate, Uncategorized

The United Nations climate summit goes into a second week in Glasgow, Scotland. Over the weekend, over 100,000 (led by youth, Indigenous and frontline delegations) marched demanding a just and stable climate as world leaders, corporate lobbyists, the non-profit industrial complex and others continued to meet and negotiate on critical climate issues.

Scott gets an update from Glasgow from Emma Rae Lierley (@EmmaRaeLierley) with Rainforest Action Network (@RAN). They discussed Saturday’s march and the invisibilization of Indigenous leadership and delegations by the media. They also discussed the (empty) pledge by world leaders to stop deforestation by 2030, the role of reactionary countries such as Brazil and Indonesia and the importance of Indigenous land and forest defenders in stopping deforestation and climate crises. Finally, they talked about corporations at COP26, public relations strategies, greenwashing and “Net Zero by 2050.”

Climate protests go hard in Glasgow at COP26 with Matt Leonard from Oil and Gas Action

Posted inClimate, Direct Action, Uncategorized

This week, the United Nations climate talks (or COP26) commenced in Glasgow, Scotland.

We’re going to be talking to a variety of folks who are there. We get an update with Matt Leonard (@MattOakland) from the Oil and Gas Action Network (@oil_action). Matt’s been in Scotland for a couple of weeks supporting street actions targeting world leaders like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, and Wall Street bankers wining and dining their way through the climate talks.

Mother Earth Doesn’t Negotiate. On the Rights of Nature w/ Pennie Opal Plant & Shannon Biggs

Posted inClimate, Direct Action, Uncategorized

In Cochabamba Bolivia in 2011, tens of thousands were present on Mother  Earth Day as the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth was  declared in response to the “privatization” of nature by the corporate  state. This was in alignment with Indigenous worldviews that have  accelerated the development of rights of nature law.  Both Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as numerous local jurisdictions, have amended their  constitutions to include a “rights of nature.”

Listen in: https://bit.ly/NatureGandR

In this episode, we talk with Pennie Opal Plant (@PennieOpal) and  Shannon Biggs (@ShannonKBiggs), co-founders of Movement Rights  (@movementrights), about the growing movement around the rights of  nature. We discuss the legal, political and cultural aspects of the growing rights of nature movement. We also discuss the recent news that oil has begun to flow through  Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline after 8 years of resistance, the Indigenous  rights movement and the climate movements in the U.S. and globally.

Cascadia Forest Defense and the Climate Crisis

Posted inClimate, Direct Action, Uncategorized
pic via Cascadia Forest Defenders

“There is new crop of forest defense climate activists feeling a new sense of urgency that the traditional environmental advocacy isn’t doing it…”

— Daniel with Cascadia Forest Defenders

The Pacific Northwest has a long history of organizing and direct action around logging and timber industries. From the Wobblies trying to organize the logging sector in the early twentieth century to Earth First!’s campaigns to stop old growth logging to the new generation of forest defenders linking the struggle for wild places and communities to the climate crisis, direct action has always tried to get the goods.