NEWS

From left, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and WILPF Disarm/End Wars Co-Chairs Robin Lloyd and Ellen Thomas, who met at Ms. Norton’s office on May 21, 2018, about her nuclear weapons abolition and conversion bill.

By Robin Lloyd
Co-Chair, WILPF-US Disarm/End Wars Committee

Many WILPF members may know the epic story of Ellen Thomas and her passionate commitment to abolishing nuclear weapons. She and her husband, William Thomas, demonstrated 24/7 in front of the White House for 25 years, calling for a conversion to a peace economy. (See the two-part, feature-length Aljazeera video about this prolonged peace vigil.)

In 1993 Ellen helped to coordinate the successful Washington, DC, ballot initiative for Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion (NDEC). District of Columbia representative Eleanor Holmes Norton has introduced some version of this bill to Congress every session since then.

This year, Ellen and the Disarm Committee have hopes of gaining new traction for NDEC in the House of Representatives. Two factors give us the audacity of hope for a breakthrough: 1) the passage of the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty at the UN, signed by 122 countries, and 2) the election to Congress of a flock of progressive representatives calling for a Green New Deal. 

From our perspective, the “Norton bill,” if implemented, could be the essential underpinning of the Green New Deal. It liberates our tax dollars from the sinkhole of military spending and fosters the economic conversion necessary to create jobs and rebuild our infrastructure, both of which are essential to getting our society back on its feet.

This year, the Committee sent a letter to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton congratulating her on her reelection and asking her to make several important revisions to the "Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act.”

1. The bill should encourage the US Government to provide leadership by signing and ratifying the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. (When several members of the Disarm committee met with Norton during Alliance for Nuclear Accountability  DC Days, Ms. Norton agreed to revise this section to refer to the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and was the first U.S. Congressperson to sign the ICAN Parliamentary Pledge to support the U.N Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.)
2. The bill will clarify the conversion of “nuclear weapons industry processes, plants, and programs; and in retraining employees, to shift to a constructive, ecologically beneficial Peace Economy.”
3. The bill shall take effect on the date on which the President certifies to Congress that all countries possessing nuclear weapons have begun such elimination.

What You Can Do

Please email Eleanor Holmes Norton and say you agree with the revisions in the WILPF letter, and you hope that she will introduce the bill quickly! If you live in  Washington, DC, please stop by her office and drop by a personal letter as a constituent!

Please call, email, and write to your Representative if you don’t live in DC and ask that he or she co-sponsor the bill either before or after it is introduced!  

Please send us an email to let us know when you’ve made such contacts, and what the results have been!  

Photo credit: Rachael Warriner / Shutterstock.com

By Randa Solick
Santa Cruz Branch

This is going to be GOOD NEWS!!! Take a deep cleansing breath – and imagine we are successful. We pull the planet out of its death spiral, we create a just society for everyone, and the despair is lifted from all shoulders. Wow – gratitude and hope just in time!!!!

We’ve all been hearing about the Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and more than 15 members of Congress are calling for a select committee with a mandate to draft comprehensive legislation: a Green New Deal. Based on FDR’s concept of the New Deal that helped rescue the country from the Great Depression of the 30s, this Green New Deal could be a game-changer.  

At this winter’s San Francisco Global Climate Action Summit, progressive activists declared: Action on climate change will not be effective until it expands beyond the goal of bringing about an end to the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. It has to include plans that create jobs, that lead to economic justice for poor communities, that transfer power from corporations to us, the people. It has to include the earth, our food, our health, our values.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report tells us we have about 12 years – 12 years!!!! – to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.
 
One solution: It’s called the Green New Deal (GND), harkening back to FDR’s original New Deal in the 1930s. It proposes a massive program of investments in clean-energy jobs and infrastructure, meant to transform not just the energy sector, but the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make the economy fairer and more just.

On November 13, 2018, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) proposed to form a Select Committee on Climate Change and a GND, and presented to Speaker Pelosi this Full Resolution. Current co-sponsors include Democratic Reps. Brendan Boyle (Penn.), Joaquin Castro (Texas), Yvette Clarke (N.Y.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Ted Lieu (Calif.), Joe Neguse (Colo.), and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.).

That’s why Naomi Klein wrote of hope: “Decades from now, if we are exquisitely lucky enough to tell a thrilling story about how humanity came together in the nick of time to intercept the metaphorical meteor, … the moment will be when a group of fed-up young people from the Sunrise Movement occupied the offices of Pelosi after the midterm elections, calling on her to get behind the plan for a Green New Deal — with Ocasio-Cortez dropping by the sit-in to cheer them on…. “[we have] been waiting a very long time for there to finally be a critical mass of politicians in power who understand not only the existential urgency of the climate crisis, but also the once-in-a-century opportunity it represents.” (Read "We Can Pay for a New Green Deal" on huffingtonpost.com).

The Green Party summarizes the GND’s main tenets here. “The Green New Deal (full language version) is a four-part program for moving America quickly out of crisis into a secure, sustainable future. Inspired by the New Deal programs that helped us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Green New Deal will provide similar relief and create an economy that makes our communities sustainable, healthy and just.

The Four Pillars of the Green New Deal

I - THE ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS ensures all citizens: the right to employment; workers’ rights; single payer healthcare; free tuition for education pre-K-college; publicly owned utilities; fair taxation.

II - A GREEN TRANSITION will convert the old, gray economy into a new, sustainable economy that is environmentally sound, economically viable and socially responsible: invest in green businesses; promote green research for alternative energy; green jobs.

III - REAL FINANCIAL REFORM will:  finance the GND through public banking, progressive taxation, and reduced military spending; relieve debt burden; give the public control of money supply; break up oversized banks; restore Glass-Steagall; promote public banks.

IV - A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY will:  revoke corporate personhood; protect the right to vote; ensure public financing of all elections; strengthen media democracy; end the war on immigrants; rein in the military-industrial complex.

This is urgent, AND hopeful!  Please discuss in your branches what we in WILPF can do to support this.  

For a start, we can participate in the early February national week of action.

A February 4, 2019, article on Common Dreams says the early February national week of action will call us to:

• Halt all new fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure, and subsidies, and transition power generation to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 or sooner;
• Rapidly decarbonize the agriculture and transportation sectors, and expand access to public transportation;
• Ensure a fair and just transition, led by impacted workers and communities, including low-income and communities of color, without relying on corporate schemes or market-based mechanisms;
• Uphold indigenous rights; and
• Pass a national jobs guarantee, creating good jobs with collective bargaining and family-sustaining wages.    

In the next eNews, I’ll explain some of the background of the GND, provide details of the pillars, and share more ideas for what we can do.

Many thanks, and I hope to hear from some of you with your ideas and plans for action. Contact me at rsolick@gmail.com.

(This article contains edited and paraphrased excerpts from many websites and papers about the GND; write to me for details, URLs, and references: rsolick@gmail.com.)

Credit: Feminist Art Project, Rutgers University

There is still time to apply for this national WILPF opportunity! We are looking for WILPFers older and younger, near and far, to be one of our five delegates to a peace collaborative: The Women’s Peace Initiative (WPI)! The WPI includes a one-day conference in San Francisco, on March 22.

Please spread the word about the deadline extension to your branch and/or in your area. Because this is a new and important initiative, we extended the deadline to Wednesday, February 13, in order to encourage thoughtful applications from WILPF US activists. There are numerous criteria, but commitment to WILPF (with willingness to do follow-up from the conference) are key ones.

Please look over the requirements and considerations. To get more information about the Women’s Peace Initiative, please request the application, which includes many more details.

Both newer activists in WILPF and experienced WILPFers can qualify to be participants in this collaboration-focused initiative and WILPF delegation to the March 22 conference. The participants from WILPF US and two other groups will connect, network, and learn with each other!

We have funds to cover travel and accommodations, thanks to our fiscal sponsor, the Peace Development Fund. Qualifying WILPF activists should request the application NOW!

Apply by the February 13, 2019 deadline.

Let us rise to this occasion, preparing for building peace!

Click here for WPI Participant Requirements and Considerations for WILPF Activists.

By Odile Hugonot Haber

“Climate science demands that we must act now to stop the acceleration of climate change. To keep warming below 1.5 degrees C, we must keep the majority of fossil fuel under the ground and freeze fossil fuel projects as we develop a quick transition to 100% renewable energies.”

—from 350.org

Between December 2nd and December 15th, the 2018 Conference of Parties (COP 24), was held in Katowice, Poland, where 196 countries were able to create together “the Katowice rulebook” to begin applying the agreements made in Paris in 2015.

Unfortunately, most nations were slow in meeting the agreements made three years earlier and their efforts did not rise to meet the urgency that the time demands given climate-related catastrophes that are multiplying in the world. Environmental leaders were disappointed and dismayed that the COP24 meeting reflected a lack of ambition.

In a press release entitled COP24 Ends Without Firm Promises to Raise Climate Action and Ambition, Greenpeace International Executive Director Jennifer Morgan said:

“A year of climate disasters and a dire warning from the world’s top scientists should have led to so much more. Instead, governments let people down again as they ignored the science and the plight of the vulnerable. Recognizing the urgency of raised ambition and adopting a set of rules for climate action is not nearly enough when whole nations face extinction. Without immediate action, even the strongest rules will not get us anywhere. People expected action and that is what governments did not deliver. This is morally unacceptable and they must now carry with them the outrage of people and come to the UN Secretary General’s summit in 2019 with higher climate action targets.”

Why has progress been so sluggish? The pull from Europe, specifically Germany and France, was no longer strong, the leadership of the COP24 in Poland was weak, the US was absent, and Brazil was blocking market agreements for the exchange of CO2 for the next COP (to be held in Chile in November 2019).

There was also a failure to act with regard to poorer nations, since the reference to human rights was taken out of the text of the “rulebook.” The voice of the victims in these parts of the world was barely heard at the meeting. This is in spite of the fact that many islands still lay in ruins such as the Island of Dominica.

A report was given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which contained scientific and technological advice entitled: “Unpacking the new scientific knowledge and key finding in the IPCC Special report on global warming of 1.5 C.”

According to the IPCC at COP24,  “This report is the key scientific input into COP24, when Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will review the goals and progress of the Paris Agreement in a process  called the Talanoa Dialogue.” "Talanoa” is a traditional word used in Fiji and across the Pacific to reflect a process of inclusive, participatory, and transparent dialogue, which can serve also as a measuring device.

Despite the urgency called for in this report, unfortunately it did not elicit an adequate response in light of the growing disasters such as droughts, flood, extreme heat, and the ensuing poverty that results from these events. Millions of people are already feeling these effects, and it seems that rich nations could have moved into climate actions and help the developing world and poorer nations as they first proposed in Paris.

In a press release issued by LDC Climate Change, Gebru Jember Endalew said, “It is a question of justice and survival.” As Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group, Endalew advocated for a group of 47 countries and little islands that represent one billion human beings without the weight and power of the four  petrol-leading strong nations (the US,  Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait). These nations wanted to kill the agenda rather than promote it actively. They do not seem to comprehend that the reality of climate change is becoming more evident every year and is not slowing.

What the COP24 did accomplish is to provide a space in which the civil society and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) could gather and take power back. Even if large nations are resistant, changes are happening all over the world due to grassroots actions and in local communities where solutions are evolving to solve climate-related problems. People can and are finding their power and holding their governments accountable.

350.org tells us that diverse movements fighting for justice all over the world are growing rapidly in strength and in numbers. On New Year’s Day, 5 million women came out to form a women’s wall across Kerala in South India. On January 8, a movement for national and global solidarity with Indigenous people in Canada included 67 actions around the world. In Uganda, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium there were school strikes for climate changes. People seem to understand faster than nations the seriousness of the challenges.

Greta Thuberg, a 15 year-old activist, addressed the COP24 Assembly: “Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today,” declared the Swedish teenager.

Climate change is happening, but we in WILPF must work so the climate justice movement will gain speed. Keeping to the targets will require rapid, far reaching, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.  “Climate science is not political football” said Camilla Born from climate think tank E3G (read Matt McGrath's BBC News article which this quote comes from). Indeed, it is the sacred duty of all people who want life on earth to flourish.