22 March 21
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Ken Burns on the Radical Ernest Hemingway
Ed Rampell, Jacobin
en Burns, the maestro of documentary television, is back with Hemingway, a new three-part, six-hour series for PBS, codirected with longtime collaborator Lynn Novick. Their biopic chronicles Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Hemingway’s life, work, loves, travels, and causes with archival footage and original interviews with Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as the author’s son Patrick Hemingway and, surprisingly, Senator John McCain, among others.
Burns has won four Emmys and been nominated for nine more, as well as for two Oscars, for documentaries including Huey Long (1985), The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), and The Dust Bowl (2012). Often working with producer/director Novick, these films have been imbued with social awareness and stamped by cinematic storytelling techniques.
Burns and Novick bring their talents to Hemingway, with cinematic vignettes detailing “Papa’s” famed globe-trotting exploits across Paris, Spain, Key West, Cuba, and Africa. But Hemingway also focuses on the writer’s active participation among the political left, using his renown and literary gifts as a novelist and journalist to try to “write” the wrongs of the Depression and fascism.
Jacobin contributor Ed Rampell recently spoke with Burns about Hemingway’s encounters with war, the FBI, Cuba, and how Hemingway may have been the Bay of Pigs’ most famous casualty.
ER: Perhaps the peak of Hemingway’s celebrity in the 1930s was also when he first began to delve into politics. What was his reputation among the American left at that time?
KB: There was the presumption that, at the time, in the middle of a great depression, his stories were devoid of, let’s just say, a dialectic that was very much front and center for the American left: confronting the tragedy and pain of the Depression and the underlying causes of it. So he was dismissed, and he reacted, saying, “There’s no Left and Right in literature. There’s only good writing.”
He himself seemed to be aligned in a more conservative fashion, less government. The only thing that is certain, he said, is “death and taxes.” He really despised the Roosevelt administration’s attempt [at] the Florida Keys, where he lived. When the hurricane hit, and jobless veterans who had been there, many hundreds of them lost their lives, he blamed the Roosevelt administration and wrote an article for New Masses saying that.
And so, then, almost instantaneously, you have this transition on the part of Hemingway, in which he ends up writing To Have and Have Not (1937), his bad attempt at a proletarian novel. Then him going off to follow the Spanish Civil War with definite loyalty to the leftist Loyalist government that was in the process of being overthrown by the fascist Francisco Franco and his allies, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Hemingway then made a few pacts with the devil in the fact that Joseph Stalin, who’d made himself the sort of protector of the Loyalists, had so infiltrated the cause that he was weeding out anybody who wasn’t a Stalinist. And it was something Hemingway didn’t write about in his journalism, though, strangely, it made it into his fiction. In his journalism, he looked the other way. This caused a severe rupture with novelist John Dos Passos, who thought it was so opportunistic.
It’s a very complicated pirouette within his own self. That’s what’s so endlessly fascinating about Hemingway, is that in the Whitmanesque sense, he contained multitudes.
ER: What did Hemingway do while he was in Spain? Who did he write for there?
KB: He had a very lucrative contract to give dispatches and then larger articles [for the North American Newspaper Alliance newspaper syndicate], and he was paid more than anybody else. He was writing with Martha Gellhorn, turning out dispatches — very poetic, very beautiful.
It’s interesting — his archenemy at the time, Franklin Roosevelt, invites him (through the intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend of Martha Gellhorn) into the White House to screen The Spanish Earth, by the communist filmmaker Joris Ivens, in which Hemingway is the writer and the narrator. The First Lady hosted a screening to impress the president — in his own way, he understands the much more complicated dynamics of having to remain neutral in relationship to what’s going on in Spain.
So, Hemingway’s got kind of bewildering gyrations in different political polarities.
ER: In your film, Senator John McCain says that the Loyalist-aligned hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, was his role model. But it seems to me that McCain drew a curious conclusion from the novel, spending his life either fighting or promoting imperialist wars of aggression.
KB: This is where the superficiality of small-p politics is involved. This is a literary character that Barack Obama, who ran against John McCain for president, also cited as an important influence, which I find so interesting.
As McCain says in the film, he — McCain — is a flawed man, serving a flawed cause, meaning the cause that Robert Jordan served, meaning that he often was involved in things and doing it with a certain kind of existential nobility. A lot of people who are captured, if you will, by a literary figure — obviously a made-up literary figure, but based in some reality — there’s an emotional connection. I can’t speak to the dialectic of the fraudulence of John McCain in regard to that, if it is [fraudulent]. He genuinely loved Robert Jordan.
[Novick and I] did a film on the Vietnam War, and we interviewed a woman named Le Minh Khue, who, as a young girl, volunteered to go down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and repair the damage done by American bombers — incredibly dangerous work. And she carried with her For Whom the Bell Tolls, and she thinks one of the reasons she survived is that Hemingway taught her how to think outside and survive in the war.
ER: Your documentary chronicles the fact that Hemingway was among those talents who fell under the cloud of suspicion during the McCarthy era. What contact did Hemingway actually have with Soviet officials in Spain and then, later, in China during his honeymoon with Gellhorn?
KB: In Spain, he turned a blind eye to some of the ruthless acts of Soviet commissars there, [who were] often disappearing people, executing them without trial, torturing people. He knew this was going on. He dined with them.
In China, Hemingway was ostensibly on this trip observing [the China-Japan War] on behalf of the US government. But because, I presume, of the contacts he’d made in Spain, on the eve of World War II, Moscow was also apparently asking for material, and he’d promised to send observations to them but never did. It’s a headshaker.
ER: Did Hemingway’s leftist convictions mark him for ridicule by other members of the literati? I believe Edmund Wilson took shots at his politics.
KB: At the time, his outsize personality outweighed the tiny, internecine things. He was basically beloved within the mainly left-wing literary scene after he began to “turn” with that first article in New Masses — then with To Have and Have Not and, obviously, his reporting on the Spanish Civil War. Everybody wanted to claim him — and he wished not to be claimed.
ER: How did McCarthyist America handle the fact that its beloved national author was so pro-Left?
KB: I’m not sure that they understood it. Remember, there’s not mass readership to New Masses when he writes his anti-Roosevelt thing about the hurricane and the death of the people that he’d helped fish out (some of them were drinking buddies at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West). The dominant image of Hemingway is more the macho image. So I don’t think, in any way, there’s a blip there.
He does change; he goes to Africa in the ’30s. It’s very paternalistic, colonialistic. He refers to the porters as “boys.” But Hemingway came back in the ’50s, twenty years later, and it was a different thing. He stopped shooting, started taking pictures — realizing, as he put it, that every person had a name.
By this time, he’s also being overtaken by madness — we don’t know where that’s from, whether it’s pure genetics or it comes from PTSD or addiction and abuse of alcohol and other drugs or a number of traumatic brain injuries.
ER: How did the FBI feel about Hemingway’s politics? Were they surveilling him?
KB: He thought they were. I don’t know. He was the most famous writer on Earth. He was living in Cuba. I’ve got to assume he sympathized with Fidel Castro’s revolution. He knew how corrupt Fulgencio Batista’s government was. He also understood, in a realpolitik kind of way, that the Ketchum [Idaho] house would be a hedge against the loss of his beloved Finca [Vigía, Hemingway’s home near Havana, now a museum]. In some way, you could argue that it was the loss of that that really sent him completely around the bend. He has fantasies of the FBI checking him out. Who knows what the origin of that is?
ER: Tell us about Hemingway’s longtime ties to Cuba.
KB: He started making trips there in the early 1930s. He was based in Key West, in a house that was essentially purchased by his rich wife’s uncle, who adored Hemingway. I think he felt constrained, so as he discovered the pleasures of deep sea fishing, he’d go to Bimini and sometimes travel to Cuba, and he fell in love with Cuba and eventually bought a house there. And he spent more time there than any other place that was his home — certainly longer than Key West or Paris. Maybe Oak Park [the Chicago suburb where Hemingway was born] is about the same amount of time.
ER: Where was Hemingway politically at the time of his death?
KB: How can you measure that? Somebody who was so mentally degraded? Clearly, he sympathized with the Cuban Revolution, but the Bay of Pigs ended any opportunity for him, he knew, to be able to go back to Cuba. And he was dead in six months.
ER: Hemingway has fallen out of favor in the academy. Do his leftist politics play a role here?
KB: No. Ironically, to whatever extent he’s fallen out of the academy has to do with his maleness, macho-ness, whiteness, and deadness.
A worker removes razor wire from the top of security fencing on 20 March 2021, as part of a reduction in heightened security measures taken after the 6 January attack on the US Capitol in Washington DC. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Trump Still Being Investigated Over Capitol Riot, Top Prosecutor Says
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes:
ederal investigators are still examining Donald Trump’s role in inciting the attack on the US Capitol.
Michael Sherwin, the departing acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, confirmed that the former president is still under investigation over the 6 January putsch in an interview with CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday.
“Maybe the president is culpable,” he said.
Sherwin also said there were now more than 400 cases against participants in the riot and said that if it is determined Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who died, did so because he was hit with bear spray, murder charges would likely follow.
“It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to DC on 6 January,” Sherwin said. “Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach?
“…Based upon what we see in the public record and what we see in public statements in court, we have plenty of people – we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, ‘Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.’ That moves the needle towards that direction. Maybe the president is culpable for those actions.
“But also, you see in the public record, too, militia members saying, ‘You know what? We did this because Trump just talks a big game. He’s just all talk. We did what he wouldn’t do.’”
Trump addressed a rally outside the White House on 6 January, telling supporters to “fight like hell” to stop Congress certifying his election defeat by Joe Biden, which he falsely claims was the result of voter fraud. A mob broke into the Capitol, leading to five deaths, including a Trump supporter shot by law enforcement.
Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when only seven Republican senators could be convinced to vote him guilty.
Lawsuits over the insurrection, one brought by the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, are among proliferating legal threats to Trump now he has lost the protections of office.
More than 100 police officers were allegedly assaulted during the riot. Sicknick died the next day. Cause of death has not been released. But two men have been charged with assaulting the 42-year-old officer with a spray meant to repel bears.
Asked if a determination that Sicknick’s death was a direct result of being attacked with the spray would lead to murder charges, Sherwin said: “If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death, yeah. We have causation, we have a link. Yes. In that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.”
He also said: “That day, as bad as it was, could have been a lot worse. It’s actually amazing more people weren’t killed. We found ammunition in [one] vehicle. And also, in the bed of the vehicle were found 11 Molotov cocktails. They were filled with gasoline and Styrofoam. [Lonnie Coffman, the man charged] put Styrofoam in those, according to the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], because when you throw those, when they explode, the Styrofoam will stick to you and act like napalm.”
He also said pipe bombs placed near the Capitol by an unidentified suspect were not armed properly.
“They were not hoax devices, they were real devices,” Sherwin said.
Sherwin also said sedition charges, as yet not part of cases against participants in the riot, were likely.
“We tried to move quickly to ensure that there is trust in the rule of law,” he said. “You are gonna be charged based upon your conduct and your conduct only.
“… The world looks to us for the rule of law and order and democracy. And that was shattered, I think, on that day. And we have to build ourselves up again. The only way to build ourselves up again is the equal application of the law, to show the rule of law is gonna treat these people fairly under the law.”
Graham, Lieberman, and Kerry (from left) led the 'tripartisan' effort to find votes in the Senate, but after Graham bailed it fell apart. (photo: Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images)
Democrats Get a Second Chance on Climate
Patrick Reis, Rolling Stone
Reis writes:
A decade ago, Democrats missed a golden opportunity to address the climate crisis. But if they can learn from that mistake, the next chance may not slip away
arbara Boxer was in Greenland in July 2007, watching chunks of ice slide off glaciers into the rising ocean. She had brought Republican senators there with her, hoping a first-person confrontation with climate change would persuade them to take action. And as the newly calved icebergs flowed past, the then-senator thought her colleagues might be persuaded to vote yes on legislation to transform the U.S. from one of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas polluters into a leader in addressing the crisis. “This was a moment in time,” Boxer tells Rolling Stone, “where I thought, ‘We’re going to do it. It’s going to work.’ ”
She was wrong. She’d find out for sure on July 22nd, 2010, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gathered his top lieutenants for a private meeting. Democrats had 59 Senate seats and had already passed a major climate bill through the House. But Reid had tough news: He’d conferred with the White House, and they’d decided they were moving on from climate. Environmental groups and climate-friendly Democrats protested, but the truth was that Reid wasn’t killing the Senate bill so much as euthanizing it: After a promising beginning, the climate push had been falling apart for months, and even the bill’s supporters weren’t calling for a vote because they knew they didn’t have the all-important 60 votes to pass it.
A decade later, many of the people who worked on the bill remain haunted by its failure. “If [the climate bill] had become law, we would now be talking about the final phases of what we have to do before 2030 to complete our journey toward net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions,” says Sen. Ed Markey, who was in the House in 2009 and co-authored its Waxman-Markey climate bill. “We would have created millions of new jobs. The solar and wind and all-electric-vehicle revolution would have already taken hold.”
Instead, the past decade has seen dystopian climate fiction become reality: California families driving through blackened skies as they flee a burning paradise; “once in a thousand years” floods becoming near-annual events in the Midwest; superstorms pounding the coast with alarming frequency. And while temperatures keep climbing, the United States keeps pumping climate-cooking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
After the bill collapsed, the coalition that had backed it became a circular firing squad, as congressional, White House, industry, and environmental partners blamed one another — most notably in a 2010 New Yorker story in which Senate staffers ripped Obama for not doing more. But beyond arguing that someone else was to blame, the dissecting produced little in the way of consensus as to how a popular president, bolstered by big majorities in Congress, failed to deliver on a major campaign promise. The question is newly relevant, with Democrats back in control of government for the first time in a decade and again hoping to address climate change — though this time with a far smaller margin for error.
Hoping to understand what went wrong and how this crop of Democrats could get it right, Rolling Stone interviewed more than two dozen current and former administration officials, lawmakers, staffers, and environmental leaders who were at the heart of Obama’s climate push. With a decade’s worth of distance from the failure, conversations with the officials reveal a different and more holistic picture of what went wrong in 2009-10.
There were outside hurdles (the Great Recession, Obamacare, the BP oil spill), and there were certainly bad actors (ahem, Sen. Lindsey Graham) and officials who failed to rise to the moment (Obama staffers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod were, per multiple sources, indifferent at best to the climate push). But those were all deck chairs on the Titanic: The effort was ultimately doomed by a major misreading of the changing politics of the moment, and particularly by an outdated assessment of who really held the power in the Republican Party.
Democrats spent most of their energy courting corporate CEOs, believing that if they signed on, Republicans would be sure to follow. But the GOP was rapidly mutating into a toxic golem of Tea Party extremism, Mitch McConnell-style cynicism, and megadonor money. “The ground shifted underneath, and it was no longer the case by the spring of 2010 that simply having leading business voices supporting a bill was enough to get Republicans on board,” says the Environmental Defense Fund’s Nathaniel Keohane. And amid the focus on corporate boardrooms and industry concessions, the climate effort’s architects neglected to build the grassroots support they’d desperately need when the Tea Party attacks began.
In criticizing the Obama-era effort, Markey adds the caveat that a lot of what’s obvious now wasn’t then. “You live life forwards, but you understand it backwards,” he says. Sometimes, however, you get a second chance. Democrats are now making even bigger promises on climate, but the same forces that strangled the last climate push are coming for this one, including a Republican Party that has only gotten more extreme. And with zero margin for error in Congress, Democrats need to learn from their past mistakes if they’re going to avoid a failure the planet cannot afford. “The one thing that’s clear,” says David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “is how we’re just desperately running out of time — how deep into overtime we are.”
Newt Gingrich sat on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi in the spring of 2008. Filming a commercial for Al Gore’s climate campaign, the duo looked into each other’s eyes and agreed on the urgent need for action on climate change. It’s unthinkable today — and indeed by the time he was running for president in 2011, Gingrich was claiming, implausibly, that his real purpose was to make a point that “we shouldn’t be afraid to debate the left, even on the environment.”
But his canoodling with Pelosi is a reminder that in the run-up to Obama’s election, there were some saner climate voices on the rise in the Republican Party. There was still a formidable wacko wing — Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe was claiming climate change was a new-world-order hoax — but seven Republican senators voted for a plan to cap greenhouse-gas emissions that summer, and John McCain won the GOP primary while laying out a climate-change platform that looked similar to the one touted by Obama.
The business world was experiencing a similar shift. There were companies fighting any and all attempts to unfuck the planet, but some corporate CEOs had — with varying degrees of sincerity — come to the table. That sentiment produced the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (CAP), a coalition of industry and environmental groups that, starting with secret negotiations in 2006, aimed to build a climate plan everyone could live with. They settled on a system called “cap and trade,” which would require polluters to obtain permits for their greenhouse-gas emissions and then “cap” the total number of permits available in order to reduce emissions overall. Polluters would also be allowed to sell unused permits (that’s where the “trade” comes in) to emitters that hadn’t found a way to reduce their own pollution, effectively creating a carbon market. Some environmental groups harbored doubts about cap and trade, but it was a political winner: The Obama and McCain campaigns both endorsed it, each touting it as a pragmatic, market-based solution.
After Obama trounced McCain and Democrats won huge majorities in Congress, U.S. CAP members planned to take their big ideas to Capitol Hill. The thinking was that if everyone from the CEO of BP to the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council could agree on cap and trade, Congress couldn’t possibly say no.
That theory was to be first tested in the House, where Markey and Rep. Henry Waxman introduced a cap-and-trade bill in the spring of 2009, a measure that also included a renewable-energy standard and billions in subsidies for creating “green jobs.” The White House hoped the measure would pass in a landslide. Cabinet secretaries were given lists of wavering House members to persuade, and Waxman and Markey spent months working with moderate Democrats to make the bill more amenable to the coal industry and agriculture. Environmental groups weren’t wild about the concessions — Greenpeace withdrew its support in May, saying the bill did too little to cut emissions and gave too much in subsidies for “clean coal” power plants — but most green groups lived with the changes in the hopes of winning over a large block of centrist Blue Dog Democrats.
The eve of the climate vote in the House coincided with the annual Congressional picnic. While lawmakers gathered on the White House lawn, Obama met with swing voters on the climate bill in the Oval Office, asking them what it would take to get to “yes.” It was the type of schmoozing Obama loathed, and a senior White House official says some of the meetings drifted into the absurd: Brought to the Oval Office to discuss a bill aimed at addressing a global crisis, one lawmaker spent the bulk of his time trying to get Obama to autograph various items (the representative got the autographs but voted no on the bill anyway, the official says).
In the end, the bill squeaked by, 219 to 212. Despite the business-friendly framework and the perks added for fossil fuels, Republicans voted against it 168 to 8, and 44 Democrats jumped ship as well. It should have been a red flag that perhaps the corporate-led strategy was missing its mark, but still, it was a victory, and when Democrats left for their August recess, the climate plan was still on schedule.
Then all hell broke loose. Democrats found themselves under siege at town halls from a rising Tea Party movement that raged about Obamacare and, to a lesser extent, cap and trade — calling it a “cap and tax” government takeover of the energy sector that would leave American families paying sky-high electric bills for power that only worked when the wind blew and the sun shined.
Those were nonsense arguments about a market-based bill that aimed to gradually phase out fossil fuels (too gradually, according to many climate scientists) and subsidize renewable energy, but Democrats failed to effectively counter the Tea Party messaging, says Tom Perriello, a Virginia Democrat who lost his House seat in 2010 after voting yes on cap and trade. “We didn’t tell an integrated story that connected the stimulus, the health care bill, and climate change as being about rebuilding the American dream, making the American dream real and affordable again,” Perriello says. “It seemed like just three large gigantic votes, all with big price tags, all of which the Republicans were able to suggest were going to cost people at the kitchen table.”
Meanwhile, fossil-fuel backers like the Koch brothers were feeding Tea Partiers their climate-change talking points and pouring money into an anti-cap-and-trade campaign. Exactly where that cash was coming from was difficult to track, and today, people involved in the effort suspect that some companies were participating in cap-and-trade bill negotiations while also funding efforts to sink it.
“This was when that political game was changing,” says Perriello. In an earlier era, lawmakers could survive by bringing stakeholders in their districts together and cutting a deal that everyone could live with. But dark money changed that calculus. “Rather than say, ‘You know what, this isn’t everything that we like, but this is a fair way to go forward,’ these [industry] groups got everything they wanted from the bill — a much-watered-down thing that upset the environmentalists for good reason — and then they still went out and spent unlimited amounts of money [to attack it], because they could do it initially through dark money while looking like they were playing ball.”
Another flaw in the pro-corporate strategy was that it turned off some would-be grassroots supporters. Rhetoric about “carbon markets” and “emissions trading” went over poorly with large parts of the Democratic base who’d found themselves on the wrong end of the “free market” for generations. And so legions of cap-and-trade critics overwhelmed supporters at town halls. When Perriello tried to explain his climate vote at one August town hall, he was unable to be heard over the chants of “drill, drill, drill.”
For the next six months, as the Tea Party raged, the two parties were locked in a death struggle over health care, causing a delay that was a disaster for the climate. “The chance of passing both health care and climate change really was contingent on getting health care done in the fall of 2009,” says Phil Schiliro, Obama’s director of legislative affairs.
Despite all that, in the spring of 2010, it looked like the Senate might pass a climate bill of its own. The most promising effort came from “the three amigos” — Democrat John Kerry, Independent Joe Lieberman, and Republican Lindsey Graham, a “tripartisan” trio who vowed to bring left, right, and center together on a climate bill. Graham wasn’t the climate movement’s first choice for a GOP partner. That probably would have been McCain. But the wounds from his 2008 campaign were too fresh. McCain “completely ices us out,” says Carol Browner, Obama’s climate and energy czar. “I have these very painful meetings with McCain about climate change, and he’s just so angry about what happened in the election.”
McCain was frustrated that environmentalists had attacked his record during his contest with Obama, after he’d been a leading Republican on climate change for years. Then, that spring, any chance of him joining the climate effort vanished when he was faced with a Tea Party primary challenger. So instead of McCain, the climate team got his understudy. “Graham called me literally out of the blue,” says Browner. “I answer my phone one day, and it’s Lindsey Graham: ‘I’m going to be your best friend, Carol, because I’m there on climate change.’ ”
After months of planning, negotiations, and delays, they finally set a date for the congressional equivalent of an album-release party: April 26th. The plan was for the trio to stand united on Capitol Hill and unveil their own version of a cap-and-trade bill that could get the 60 votes needed to overcome an inevitable Mitch McConnell-backed filibuster.
Except it never happened. Within two days, it all fell apart. The high-water mark of the entire congressional effort might have been April 23rd, when Kerry triumphantly announced corporate support for the bill: Three major oil companies and the nation’s leading utility lobby group were on board, and the American Petroleum Institute had generously agreed to hold off on running attack ads. Kerry had to agree to a host of pro-industry provisions — including a delay for when the emissions caps would take effect — but he finally had the corporate support Democrats were counting on for GOP votes.
Graham abandoned the climate effort the next day. His official reason was that Reid had killed the bill’s chances by promising to take up immigration reform — and he was still furious that a White House source had anonymously (and largely falsely) told Fox News that Graham was trying to get a gas tax included in the bill. But others, then and now, doubted those excuses. “We gained momentum until a major coal enterprise unleashed a major assault on Lindsey Graham in his home state,” Kerry tells Rolling Stone. “That’s when things got harder.” (Graham’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Environmentalists still fume at the time and energy spent trying to win Graham’s support. “I don’t think he was ever going to vote for a bill. I never took Senator Graham’s words to heart, and I don’t think that he actually was close to voting for the bill,” says Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. “As a result, I think some of the negotiators lost months and months and months of time and a world of momentum.”
Kerry and Lieberman continued scrambling to find the bill its 60 votes. They released a measure in May, but no Republicans signed on. Graham didn’t even support it, saying that it put too many restrictions on offshore drilling — at a moment when the Deepwater Horizon spill was gushing 200 million-plus gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Environmental groups “kept leaking word to the press that the numbers for this bill were going up when the numbers were going down,” says Jim Manley, Reid’s communications director at the time. “Privately, members were raising doubts to Reid.” By late July, Reid told lawmakers he was moving on. The bill would never get a vote. “There was official public happy talk that day” about coming back to climate soon, says Darren Goode, the longtime congressional reporter who broke the news of Reid’s climate decision. “But pretty much everyone knew that that had been [Democrats’] only real chance.”
Is there any hope now? Can Joe Biden’s Democrats do with 50 Senate votes — one of which belongs to West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who once ran an ad of himself shooting a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — what they couldn’t when they had far larger majorities under Obama?
If they again put their hopes in Republican hands, the answer is almost certainly no. “The reality is that the Obama administration desperately wanted bipartisan support for everything that they did. Unfortunately, that’s like waiting for Godot. It never shows up,” Markey says. “Today, people reflect upon what happened, and they realize that the Republicans will drag out each negotiating process for as long as they can, and then ultimately not be there with sufficient numbers in the end.”
The risk of going it alone with such a narrow majority, however, is that Democrats will eschew sweeping changes and instead aim for incremental reforms that have a better chance of succeeding. That may be easier politically, but it’s a compromise the planet cannot afford, says Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a leader in the Democratic Party’s climate push. “Nature has told us what the test is,” he says, “and if we make all the politicians and all the groups happy but don’t pass that test, then we flunk.”
Hoping to succeed this time, Democrats are revisiting their last effort and changing, well, almost everything. For starters, they’ve recognized they need to talk more about what their climate plans can do for people, rather than how they work. “I think we sort of talked ourselves into thinking, ‘Boy, we can point to this great policy mechanism,’ rather than leading with all the great things that are going to happen if we address climate change in this country,” says Keohane, the Environmental Defense Fund economist. “It was sort of like we were leading with our chin.”
This time around, lawmakers are leaving behind the Obama-era obsession with free markets and adopting climate plans that better align with a more diverse and progressive movement that sees protecting the climate as part of a broader effort toward environmental, economic, and racial justice. Markey, a 74-year-old senator who first came to Congress almost 50 years ago, has adopted the language of a new generation of activists to talk about the current climate movement, saying it’s bolstered by “intersectional activism from Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, indigenous and native organizations, and peace groups, who are going to be pushing leaders to be as ambitious as possible.”
Democrats are also not pinning all their hopes to a single, do-or-die stand-alone climate bill this time, but rather looking to infuse climate provisions across their legislative agenda. “Anybody who is serious will get their stuff ready and just look for opportunity,” says one congressional staffer. In December, Democrats managed to pass $35 billion in funding for renewable energy, including a plan for the EPA to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas. It was one of the most significant legislative windfalls for green energy in the nation’s history, and it wasn’t even the headliner of the legislation, which was principally about Covid relief. Keeping climate out of the headlines can help bills pass with a bipartisan vote, says the staffer. His dream scenario for a climate bill is that “it goes through just getting a story on page A-6 of The Washington Post on the day it’s enacted — and never before and never after.”
One of the first big opportunities for Democrats during this Congress is the infrastructure bill they plan to push later this spring. The details are still being worked out, but what’s taking shape is effectively a domestic Marshall Plan — both for workers and the climate. In the package, Democrats hope to beef up the nation’s aging power grid; mandate utilities to rapidly transition from fossil fuels to carbon-neutral sources of electricity; expand public transit and high-speed rail; fund the infrastructure needed for an all-electric vehicle fleet; and make a massive investment in green energy and green jobs.
Democrats would welcome GOP support for their agenda, but they’ve made clear that they’re going forward one way or another. In practice, that means passing legislation through reconciliation, a provision in the Senate’s byzantine procedural code that allows some measures to pass with a simple majority — rather than the typical 60 votes needed to beat a filibuster. But even with reconciliation, Democrats would still need their full caucus on board, including Manchin. Democrats can build that support by making the benefits of climate action obvious and spread them everywhere, says Faiz Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign: “One of the most powerful ways that FDR’s New Deal operated was that it thought about projects in every congressional district in America, and I think that that’s the way we should be thinking as we do green infrastructure investments and green jobs.”
They’ll also have to rebuild credibility with people who’ve suffered under past policies supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. “If you are a coal miner and you are being told, ‘Oh, there will be a nice job after five years of a just transition in the renewable sector,’ you would understandably be skeptical, because your experience over the last 20 or 30 years has been that when politicians promised that there would be jobs after outsourcing occurred in America, there weren’t jobs,” Shakir says.
Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota is preparing a “clean electricity standard” bill that would require utilities to ramp up their transition to carbon-neutral energy sources like wind and solar. Manchin has thrown cold water on renewable energy mandates, but his voting calculus might change on a clean electricity standard if it were combined with legislation he introduced in March to give tax credits to green energy companies that invest in areas that are losing coal jobs.
But even the best-constructed climate plan is going to come under assault from Republicans, most of whom continue to be in thrall to fossil-fuel interests and to Donald Trump, who spent four years doing everything he could to ensure oil-and-gas dominance and strangling any last vestiges of climate sanity from the party. To beat that, climate advocates are openly depending on what they say is the biggest change this time around: The public is demanding climate action in a way it never has before.
A decade ago, Americans as a whole were in favor of climate action, but they didn’t feel particularly strongly about it. When surveyed, the issue consistently ranked near the bottom on their list of priorities. That was part of what drove Democrats in 2010 to beg for industry support in their bid to attract moderate lawmakers. They needed cover from the middle, because they lacked a groundswell from an organized grassroots effort, which can demand action and impose political consequences on lawmakers who refuse to take it.
A decade of climate horrors, combined with a resurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party that has rallied around a Green New Deal, has changed all that. Climate consistently polls at or near the top of the list for Democrats, particularly young ones. Vocal efforts from groups like the Sunrise Movement have already yielded dividends: They pushed Biden to campaign on climate, and he launched his presidency with a slew of pro-climate executive actions.
Markey says the strength of the climate movement — and lawmakers’ willingness to listen to it — could be the critical difference from last time. “The Waxman-Markey bill was an inside-out effort, born of a congressional timeline that demanded we move quickly,” Markey says. “Now, we have an outside-in force with the movement of engaged and mobilized young people. Now, we have an army.”
NYPD. (photo: Shutterstock)
New York Makes Complaint Records of 83,000 Police Officers Available to Public
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "The New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board published a new searchable database this month that allows people to view the records of tens of thousands of police officers."
ast August, The Root reported that the New York Civil Liberties Union released data that revealed more than 323,000 misconduct complaints filed against more than 80,000 New York police officers just after police unions failed to block the records from being exposed in a federal appeals court. Well, it turns out that the Big Apple is not done exposing police records for the good of the civilian communities that police are tasked with protecting and serving. In fact, earlier this month, the disciplinary records of another 83,000-plus police officers in the state have been made available to the public.
Insider reports that the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board published a new searchable database this month that allows people to view the records of tens of thousands of police officers. The NYPD also provided a database of its own shortly after.
A professor of criminal justice law at the University of California, Berkeley, Jonathan Simon, sat down for an interview with Insider to talk about the benefits of data dumps like these saying they could “help people feel more empowered and get more accountability out of the system.”
From Insider:
Simon said one of the biggest reasons people don’t make legal claims when they feel their rights have been violated by police is because they doubt their experience. They question whether what happened may have been their fault or if they are overreacting.
But if a person who believes they’ve experienced misconduct can look online and see that an officer has done the same thing before, “it would reaffirm their own initial sense of being wronged in a way that would empower them, hopefully, to take some action,” Simon said.
The public records could also help prevent a police department from hiring someone with a history of misconduct.
When a police officer gets fired, including for serious misconduct, they are often able to get a job with another law enforcement agency in an occurrence known as the “wandering-officer phenomenon,” according to a Yale Law Journal study published last year.
Simon said in some of those cases, the new agency may not know of the officer’s history of misconduct since it is often not publicly available. With public disciplinary records, Simon said, “it’ll be easier for police forces to avoid hiring officers with a track record that hasn’t been disclosed to them.”
One can only wonder why police officers who tend to live by an “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about” creed never seem to want to apply that same logic to themselves. Allowing the public to see the records of officers in their communities shouldn’t be a thing cops would want to fight, especially if they’re serious about weeding out the bunch-spoiling “bad apples” we keep hearing so much about.
If the criminal records of civilians are made accessible to the public, why shouldn’t the disciplinary records of police officers?
Anyway, the database published by the CCRB excludes “open allegations, successfully mediated allegations,” or “allegations referred to NYPD or other investigative units,” Insider reports.
Exposing misconduct records is only a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done in the way of bringing true police reform to America—but it is a step in the right direction. Currently, there are around a dozen U.S. states that have made police disciplinary records public. It’s a policy that needs to be adopted across the nation.
Federal prison. (photo: Michael Conroy/AP)
On Federal Death Row, Inmates Talk About Biden, Executions
Michael Tarm, Associated Press
Tarm writes:
n federal death row, prisoners fling notes on a string under each other’s cell doors and converse through interconnected air ducts. A top issue these days: whether President Joe Biden will halt executions, several told The Associated Press.
Biden hasn’t spoken publicly about capital punishment since taking office four days after the Trump administration executed the last of 13 inmates at the Terre Haute, Indiana, penitentiary where all federal death row inmates are held. The six-month run of executions cut their unit from around 63 to 50. Biden's campaign website said he'd work to end federal executions, but he's never specified how.
Four inmates exchanged emails with the AP through a prison-monitored system they access during the two hours a day they are let out of their 12-by-7-foot, single-inmate cells. Biden's silence has them on edge, wondering whether political calculations will lead him to back off far-reaching action, like commuting their sentences to life in prison and endorsing legislation striking capital punishment from U.S. statutes.
“There’s not a day that goes by that we’re not scanning the news for hints of when or if the Biden administration will take meaningful action to implement his promises,” said 36-year-old Rejon Taylor, sentenced to death in 2008 for killing an Atlanta restaurant owner.
Everyone on federal death row was convicted of killing someone, their victims often suffering brutal, painful deaths. The dead included children, bank workers and prison guards. One inmate, white supremacist Dylann Roof, killed nine Black members of a South Carolina church during a Bible study in 2015. Many Americans believe death is the only salve for such crimes.
Views of capital punishment, though, are shifting. One recent report found people of color are overrepresented on death rows nationwide. Some 40% of federal death row inmates are Black, compared with about 13% of the U.S. population. With growing scrutiny of who gets sentenced to die and why, support for the death penalty has waned, and fewer executions are done overall. Virginia lawmakers recently voted to abolish it.
The prisoners expressed relief at Donald Trump's departure from the White House after he presided over more federal executions than any other president in 130 years. Gone is the ever-present fear that guards would appear at their cell door to say the warden needed to speak to them — dreaded words that meant your execution had been scheduled.
They described death row as a close-knit community where bonds are forged. All said they were still reeling from seeing friends escorted away for execution by lethal injection at a garage-size building nearby.
“When it's quiet here, which it often is, you’ll hear someone say, ‘Damn, I can’t believe they’re gone!’ We all know what they are referencing,” said Daniel Troya, sentenced in 2009 for participating in drug-related killings of a Florida man, his wife and their two children.
The federal executions during the coronavirus pandemic were likely superspreader events. In December, 70% of the death row inmates had COVID-19, some possibly infected via air ducts through which they communicate.
The AP attended all 13 federal executions.
Five of the first six inmates executed were white. Six of the last seven were Black, including Dustin Higgs, the final inmate put to death, on Jan. 16 for ordering the killing of three Maryland women.
Memories of speaking to Higgs just before his execution still pain Sherman Fields, who is on death row but has a resentencing for convictions in the killing of his girlfriend after escaping from a jail in Waco, Texas.
“He kept saying he’s innocent and he didn’t want to die,” Fields, 46, said. “He’s my friend. It was very hard.”
While there were rumors Biden would take action on the death penalty in his first days as president, there have been no announcements. As he grapples with issues like the coronavirus and the economy, capital punishment appears to be on a back burner. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are still saying they'll pursue death sentences.
The easier step politically for Biden would be to simply instruct his Justice Department not to carry out any executions during his presidency. That would spare inmates' lives for at least four years but would leave the door open for a future president to resume them.
The inmates first learned federal executions would restart after 17 years in 2019 when the first inmates were put on execution lists. More were added throughout 2020.
Through last year, inmates would flinch whenever they heard the jangle of thick key rings as a larger-than-normal contingent of guards entered their floor. That sound meant guards would soon stop at an inmate's door and that he'd soon be in the warden’s office to be handed his death warrant.
When a frantic Keith Nelson, convicted of raping and killing a Kansas girl, kept saying a year ago he was sure he'd be selected next to die, one inmate yelled at him to “shut up,” that he was unnerving everyone else, Troya recalled. Nelson was executed on Aug. 28.
Emotions ran high as execution days approached. As guards led condemned men away, other inmates shouted, “Come on! Fight ’em!” Troya said. None appeared to resist.
Inmates can't access the regular internet but could follow news of last-minute appeals on TVs in their cells. When broadcasts confirmed an execution had been carried out, Taylor said, a hush fell on death row, followed by a chorus of curses.
Inmates know that Biden, while a senator, played a key role in passing a 1994 crime bill that increased federal crimes for which someone could be put to death.
“I don’t trust Biden,” Troya said. “He set the rules to get us all here in the first place.”
Several inmates said Brandon Bernard's death was especially hard to process. They described him as introspective and kind. Bernard, convicted of participating in the Texas carjacking, robbery and killing of an Iowa couple, also organized a death-row crocheting group that shared patterns and knitting tips.
“The gentlest guy on federal death row,” Fields said.
Bernard's case drew the attention of reality TV star Kim Kardashian and other celebrities, who pleaded on Twitter for Trump to commute his sentence.
His lawyers said Bernard, 18 at the time and the lowest-ranking member of a street gang, was pressured to light a car on fire with Todd and Stacie Bagley’s bodies inside. They said he believed the Bagleys were already dead after a gang leader shot them in the head.
He and co-defendant Christopher Vialva, both of whom were Black, were convicted by a nearly all-white Texas jury in 2000.
Strapped to a cross-shaped gurney on Dec. 10, Bernard addressed the couple's relatives in an adjoining death-chamber witness room, repeatedly apologizing and telling them he hoped his death would bring them closure.
After his execution, Todd Bagley's mother called the killings an “act of unnecessary evil.” She said the executions of Bernard and of Vialva months earlier did bring closure. But she also expressed gratitude to both for apologizing. Beginning to cry, she told reporters: “I can very much say — I forgive them.”
Troya said he thinks often about Bernard, Vialva and Higgs, whom he considered close friends. All three, he said, had long since transformed themselves into better people and were mentoring other inmates.
“They killed future prison role models,” he said. “So much potential, lost for nothing.”
A photojournalist covers a protest in downtown Yangon in the early days of the anti-regime protests in February. (photo: The Irrawaddy)
Firmly on the Regime's Enemies List, Myanmar Journalists Continue to Document Its Atrocities
Naing Khit, The Irrawaddy
Khit writes:
s it confronts the sheer scale of the anti-regime movement, the military regime has identified as one of its main enemies the news media, in particular those journalists whose work daily exposes the true colors of the coup leaders—their cruel, inhumane and immoral acts against the entire population. Their work has made the media an enemy of the regime.
Since Feb. 1, when the military led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing seized power, journalists across the country have been tirelessly working to disclose the truth—which is the first and foremost obligation of their profession.
Independent publications and their journalists across the country have been meticulously covering the cruel killings, brutal crackdowns, arbitrary arrests, looting and all of the other human rights violations committed by the regime’s soldiers and police since the coup.
Hour by hour, they have kept the world informed of what’s going on in every corner of Myanmar through their websites and social media pages. As a result, the international community has come to understand the military regime’s atrocious persecution, naked lies and political repression, as well as the people’s determination to rid the country of the military dictatorship. For the citizens of Myanmar, the journalists’ work not only keeps them informed, but encourages them to join in the national spirit of this anti-regime movement.
For the first month or so after the coup, journalists freely covered the anti-coup protests, wearing helmets and vest emblazoned with the word “PRESS”, wearing their press cards around their necks and not bothering to hide their cameras. Initially, the security forces didn’t target the press while they were cracking down on protesters in the streets. But it didn’t take long for that to change.
Before long, the regime’s forces started targeting journalists on the streets as they cracked down on the protests. To date, the regime has arrested more than 40 journalists reporting on anti-coup protests and the resulting crackdowns nationwide. Some of them were later released, but 18 remain detained to date, of whom 10 have been charged under Article 505(a) of the Penal Code.
The most recent victims were Ko Aung Thu Ra and Ko Than Htike Aung of the BBC Burmese Service and the Mizzima news organization, respectively. Last Friday, the two reporters were arrested by plainclothes police in Naypyitaw while gathering news about a court hearing of detained National League for Democracy (NLD) patron U Win Htein. On the same day, another freelance reporter for Mizzima was arrested by police in Bhamo, northern Kachin State. And on Sunday, a reporter for DVB was arrested in Naypyitaw. On Monday, Ko Aung Thura was released but his fellow reporter from Mizzima was still in detention.
The regime took its crackdown on the media to another level on March 8. On that day, it went beyond detaining journalists and revoked the licenses of five media outlets: 7Day, Democratic Voice of Burma, Myanmar Now, Mizzima News and Khit Thit Media.
On that day and subsequent days, the regime’s soldiers and police raided the offices of Myanmar Now and Mizzima News in Yangon and confiscated property. Luckily, staff had stopped working in their offices, having anticipated such raids, so no one was detained. However, the chief editor and co-founder of another media outlet, Kamayut Media, were arrested during a raid on its offices. A few days later, the regime sued The Irrawaddy under Article 505(a) of the Penal Code. It was the first case of a lawsuit being opened against a media organization as a whole, as opposed to individual journalists.
The regime’s announcements, raids and lawsuit have forced almost all independent journalists into hiding, and the rest are keeping a low profile.
In fact, soon after the military staged the coup, its Ministry of Information ordered media not to use the phrase “coup d’état” to describe the military’s “takeover”, and not to refer to it as the “military regime” or “military council.” However, all independent media continue to use those terms in defiance of the regime’s warning.
Based on what my journalist friends—editors and reporters of newspapers as well as digital publications—have told me, the number of journalists who have gone into hiding appears to be in the hundreds across the country. Many others are laying low. My friends are still talking to me via phones but don’t dare to give a hint of their whereabouts. They tell me they are working from their hideouts. Their appearance in public would spell the immediate end of their freedom. Some have moved to remote areas or are even trying to flee the country.
Since the coup, all independent print newspapers have ceased publishing under the regime’s pressure and raids. The only print newspapers now available in Myanmar are one military-owned and two state-run newspapers that are entirely controlled by the regime. All media outlets’ offices are closed indefinitely for fear of raids.
After the semi-civilian government began easing the previous regime’s draconian media censorship rules a decade ago, Myanmar’s private media had an opportunity to expand their presence, though the number of outlets is still not that high. Some journalists put the number at around 2,000 across the country. Not all are truly independent, however; some of their journalists work for state-run media or media outlets that are close to the generals and those in power.
Several hundred journalists who work for mainstream media in big cities and other publications in ethnic states have industriously covered the anti-coup movement and the regime’s crackdowns since Feb. 1. In fact, it’s quite a small group to be covering such a flood of news events, which have been occurring day and night.
That small army of independent media and journalists can no longer work freely in the open; nonetheless they continue to work from their hideouts, contacting sources or even managing to sneak out to gather news clandestinely and serve as eyewitnesses to the unfolding events.
The public is well aware of this difficult situation for the media. In recent days, citizen journalists have emerged to play an important role to supplement the work done by professional reporters in the weeks since the coup. They have tried to take photos and videos of the ongoing anti-regime movement and the regime’s human rights violations. They send these news items and information to various media groups, which later publish them for people across the country and the world to see.
These days, we no longer see journalists openly covering protests on the streets. Those who do are targeted and detained right away, as in the cases of the BBC and Mizzima reporters.
The regime has seemingly added journalists to its ever-growing list of people targeted for arrest. With many reporters having gone underground, this effort has been stymied somewhat for now.
But all professional journalists are now on the list of the regime’s main enemies, together with the Generation Z protesters, civil servants who have joined the civil disobedience movement (CDM), active members of the NLD led by ousted leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and other political and rights activists.
Independent journalists are simply documenting the crimes against humanity committed by the military regime led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. But in the eyes of the coup leaders, this is a serious crime against the military regime.
It is a serious job. All who do it are in danger, as they have made themselves prime targets of the atrocious regime, simply by wielding cameras, mobile phones, recorders, pens and notebooks.
I have no doubt that the world and the people of Myanmar appreciate the professionalism with which they are carrying on with their work, which is making such a vital contribution to this Spring Revolution and demonstrates their conviction and commitment to the truth and their loyalty to the people of Myanmar. In my own view, they are both making and recording history, a crucial task in ensuring a brighter future for the county.
Installing solar panels. (photo: Sacred Earth Solar/Mongabay)
Catalyzing an Indigenous-Led Just Energy Transition
Rhett A. Butler, Mongabay
Excerpt: "A Just Transition is the idea that the shift toward low-carbon economies needs to be fair and inclusive, meaning it considers the people that will be most impacted by abandoning fossil fuels."
n the past decade, the term “Just Transition” has gained more widespread understanding among climate campaigners and environmental advocates. A Just Transition is the idea that the shift toward low-carbon economies needs to be fair and inclusive, meaning it considers the people who will be most impacted by abandoning fossil fuels.
Among the groups most likely to be affected by the green energy transition are Indigenous communities, especially those living in remote areas where they’ve often been pushed by governments. Indigenous communities may be disproportionately dependent on fossil fuels for their day-to-day energy needs and livelihoods, particularly in places where government policies and incentives mean that extractive industries account for a large share of local jobs. Curbing oil and gas drilling, mining, and other heavy industries would thus cause significant social and economic disruptions in places that currently have few other opportunities and are already struggling with the impacts of colonization, including systemic discrimination, unfulfilled treaty obligations, and legacy traumas stemming from violence, oppression, and stolen land.
Paradoxically, it is Indigenous communities that are also most likely to bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change. Rapid warming in places like Alaska and northern Canada are already triggering dramatic changes for ecosystems, with immediate consequences for Indigenous communities, including Native traditions and cultures, food security, and the very existence of their villages and settlements due to rising seas and melting permafrost.
But the green energy transition could be an opportunity for Indigenous communities, creating new livelihoods, reducing localized pollution, and freeing up income that would otherwise go toward propane and diesel. It could also help maintain the very ecosystems and climate that have sustained them since time immemorial.
Recognizing this potential as well as a need for a Just Transition for Indigenous Peoples, Melina Miyowapan Laboucan-Massimo of the Lubicon Cree First Nation in northern Alberta founded Sacred Earth Solar in 2015 to empower Indigenous communities across Canada to adopt renewable energy.
Laboucan-Massimo told Mongabay that Sacred Earth Solar was born out of her desire “to push for an end to extractivism in our traditional territories.” She had been advocating on these issues since a very early age, but it was a pipeline rupture that spilled more than 3 million liters (800,000 gallons) of oil near her family home in the village of Little Buffalo in 2011 that moved her to focus on bringing solutions to Indigenous communities.
“I realized, ‘Wow, I need to really start building: What does transition technology look like? What does a just transition look like in our communities?’”
Sacred Earth Solar’s first project was a 20.8-kilowatt system powering the health center in Little Buffalo.
But Laboucan-Massimo’s work isn’t limited to Sacred Earth Solar. She is the Just Transition director at Indigenous Climate Action, an Indigenous-led organization that advocates for Indigenous communities and Indigenous-led solutions; a renewable energy fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation; and the host of the Power to the People TV series that profiles sustainability initiatives among Indigenous communities in Canada. Laboucan-Massimo also continues to advocate for social justice, including speaking out on violence against Indigenous women, and serves on the boards of Seeding Sovereignty and NDN Collective and the executive steering committee of the Indigenous Clean Energy Social Enterprise.
Laboucan-Massimo says the obstacles Indigenous communities face in trying to secure a Just Transition are myriad and substantial.
“Indigenous communities are on the receiving end of massive extraction zones and a lot of environmental degradation,” she said. “We’re also on the receiving end of cultural and environmental genocide, where it’s really impacting people on a very fundamental level.
“Indigenous communities are operating in crisis situations in many arenas. Not only are we experiencing the brunt of colonization — there’s a lot of undoing of really detrimental government and colonial policies that were tearing apart the social fabric of communities and governance structures, and we are rebuilding all of these —but we’re also fighting being forcibly pushed from land and encroachment by very toxic developments in and around our communities.”
Laboucan-Massimo spoke about these issues and more during a March 2021 conversation with Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The original version can be found in the embedded video.
Mongabay: Where are you from and where do you live?
Melina Laboucan-Massimo: Tansi kwakiya — My name is Melina Miyowapan Laboucan-Massimo. Niya Nehiyaw. Kinaskomtinow.
I am Lubicon Cree from northern Alberta. I was born in a small Indigenous community that is called Little Buffalo and it’s in the territory of my Nation, which is the Lubicon Cree. And that is pretty far north of the Medicine Line, as we call it, in so-called Canada. If you’ve been to Calgary, it’s about eight hours north of there. So, it’s quite a long distance: it’s in the northern part of a place called Alberta, which is sometimes called a “Little Texas.”
You’re engaged in an impressive number of initiatives between founding Sacred Earth Solar, hosting a TV series, being a fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation, co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action, and more. What are you working on across these roles and activities?
I founded Sacred Earth Solar in 2015. I was very concerned as an Indigenous climate campaigner working on fossil fuel extraction and trying to push for an end to extractivism in our traditional territories, because of the immense impacts we were feeling from water contamination, air pollution, massive deforestation of the boreal forest — which is the northern lungs of Mother Earth — and the major health issues in our communities and our peoples across the north. Because the tar sands, which is what I campaigned on for a decade-plus, is one of the biggest industrial extraction zones on the planet, so we feed into the addiction of Canadian and U.S. oil.
It’s a major, major impact zone and that’s where I was born. My first protest was when I was 7, when there was a big road being built into our territory. This is work that I’ve inherited.
When we had a major oil spill back home, I realized, “Wow, I need to really start building: What does transition technology look like? What does a just transition look like in our communities?” That’s why I founded Sacred Earth Solar, which began with my master’s thesis, on implementing the 20.8-kilowatt system which powers the health center in the community of Little Buffalo where I was born.
Since then, I have also done research with the David Suzuki Foundation, on Indigenous knowledge, climate change, and renewable energy.
I also just finished filming a TV show, and it’s now airing here in so-called Canada. It’s called Power to the People, and it’s about renewable energy, eco-housing and food security across Turtle Island in Indigenous communities.
And then, also, as I said in the beginning, I am a co-founder of Indigenous Climate Action, where I currently serve as the Just Transition director. With the experience from all of these projects that I just named, I’m working on a Just Transition Guide, which talks communities through how to implement renewable energy projects: the pros and cons of renewable energy, and how communities can get off diesel and use this as a transition technology. When I first applied for my master’s in 2012, I was like, “There’s not a lot of guides out there to show communities how to transition.” My current work is the culmination of many years of research.
What is the significance of a just energy transition for Indigenous communities?
Indigenous communities are on the receiving end of massive extraction zones and a lot of environmental degradation. We’re living the consequences of what is a lot of the time unseen by other communities, urban centers and people that don’t live near extraction sites. We receive the impact and the burden of toxicity and sometimes unclean air and unclean water. We’re also on the receiving end of cultural and environmental genocide, where it’s really impacting people on a very fundamental level.
We have the impacts of extraction and the impacts of climate change, but a lot of times we are not receiving the benefits of a just transition, or utilizing transition technologies to allow our communities to get off of fossil fuels, propane, and diesel. These are expensive fuels that are very toxic for people’s inhalation and linked to dementia. There’s a lot of impact that communities are burdening for oil and gas addiction. A just transition looks at transitioning communities as well; not just receiving the impacts, but also receiving some of the benefits of trying to transition and move our communities away from dependency on fossil fuel extraction.
What has been the biggest obstacle for Indigenous communities to transition and get access to clean energy?
Indigenous communities are operating in crisis situations in many arenas. Not only are we experiencing the brunt of colonization — there’s a lot of undoing of really detrimental government and colonial policies that were tearing apart the social fabric of communities and governance structures, and we are rebuilding all of these —but we’re also fighting being forcibly pushed from land and encroachment by very toxic developments in and around our communities. We’re dealing with a slew of crisis situations on top of poverty and high rates of suicide, because of colonial policies that have detrimentally affected our communities. Because of the impacts of the trauma of colonization.
We’re battling things on multiple layers.
When you try to add in a just transition on top of dealing with a community in crisis, it can be very challenging to implement climate solutions. Communities may think: “We’ll just keep this diesel or propane and pay exorbitant amounts of money to keep the lights on, because we’re dealing with so many other things, like youth suicide rates, foreign governments trying encroach on more land — basically more land theft.” There are a lot of issues that communities are dealing with. Sometimes you don’t necessarily see people coming from communities wanting to implement climate solutions, because we are already dealing with so much. That’s one major issue.
This is why I decided to do my master’s degree in renewable energy and Indigenous governance. I wanted to figure out, “How can I actually implement this? How can I teach myself? How can I teach my community? How can I learn to do this implementation?” No one else is going to do it for us, because a lot of the times, we don’t have external governments coming in and saying, “Let me do a really great project for you.” And many times when that has happened, the projects have actually been detrimental, not beneficial, for communities. People from communities know what the problems are, and therefore, communities know what the solutions are.
That’s why it’s been a slow transition, but as more resources, funding, knowledge, and Indigenous experts have come out of the woodwork, and the renewable energy sector grows, the situation is changing. We’re all building up at the same time so that we can abate climate change, ideally. What we see north of the Medicine Line in Canada is that Indigenous communities are now leading the way. We have up to 2,500 different renewable energy projects across the country, of which up to 200 are medium- to large-scale revenue-generating projects like major wind farms or solar farms which communities are either owning outright or have ownership stakes in. And 2,300 small- to medium-scale projects where, for example, communities like mine have implemented solar to run one or multiple buildings or housing. It’s happening, but there are definitely challenges.
You’ve been operating in this space for about 20 years. What would you say the biggest difference is between when you got your start and now?
I think there is now more recognition of Indigenous rights and title. In North American collective minds, the history books have no Indigenous history or the actual history of America or Canada. There’s Indigenous invisibility. Because Indigenous people were pushed out into small reserve areas and had to have land passes to leave, there was not a lot of interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous settler communities. And there’s the history of residential schools that’s been hidden from American and Canadian textbooks. In America, and in Canada, to a lesser extent, there is more of a discussion that is happening now. We have certain policies and documents and commissioned reports like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that happened here in Canada, and the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls that just wrapped up last year.
As I grew up, from a young age, I felt very invisible as an Indigenous person, especially when we moved to the city. Most of the time, I was the only Indigenous person in the classroom, in university settings, in high school. The history wasn’t taught, even around settler colonial and Indigenous relations, which is the very foundation of Canada. People do not know their own history: if they’re Treaty beneficiaries, or whatever kind of agreements, or lack thereof, or unceded or stolen land.
That was the basis of what I was coming into in my early 20s and I was having to do a lot of awareness raising around Indigenous issues in any space I went into. That added a lot of emotional labor and toll.
Fast forward to 20 years later, people do now understand that they’re a part of this relearning of Indigenous/American/Canadian history. That this past is a part of the foundation of these countries. Every single person that lives in Indigenous territories — which is North America — needs to understand the history that they are building their lives upon. I think that’s one big change that is now coming into people’s consciousness.
About a decade-plus ago, when I would be going to a conference or going to speak in front of an investors’ group, or doing toxic tours in the tar sands, or sitting next to someone on the airplane, someone would ask, “What do you do? What do you work on?” And I’d be like, “Well, I’m a climate and energy campaigner.” And they would say, “Climate change? Oh, that’s interesting. That’s nice.” I felt like I was kind of speaking out to this void.
There were a handful of us that had dedicated our lives to bringing climate change awareness and ringing the alarm bell that scientists, Indigenous Elders and people through our prophecies and our deep connection to the land, were saying: “This is going to be a problem and we need to address it.”
We had a little bit of that in the ’80s and ’90s, but then it wasn’t a part of the national dialogues that we’re having now. That feels really different. Today, most people don’t dispute climate change. A decade ago, many people either didn’t care, or they disputed it.
Historically there have been tensions when the conservation sector has not respected — or even undermined — Indigenous peoples’ rights and traditional practices when establishing protected areas. Is this an issue you’re involved with?
Yeah. As somebody that’s worked in environmental and climate justice campaigns to get a certain outcome in the work that we’re doing, to either raise awareness or get governments or banks or institutions to divest, it’s definitely something that you come across. Especially since the history of the environmental movement is not one that I would say took into consideration Indigenous rights and titles in the past. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Indigenous peoples were many times left out of any of the campaigns or any of the strategies or any of the policies that literally affected Indigenous peoples on their homelands. That is definitely a part of the history of the conservation movement as well.
That’s why there is criticism of the conservation movement as well as the environmental movement. I think these movements are even more responsive now to those criticisms and will say, “From the get-go we have to include Indigenous people as more than just stakeholders. We have to ensure that they are helping us write the policy, helping us write the strategies, helping us implement these things.” Not just as an afterthought, not, “We’re going to devise all of these strategies and plans, and then get Indigenous ‘consent’ after the fact.” That’s not a respectful way of knowing that Indigenous people actually understand the problems and understand the solutions. We understand how to implement and what is necessary on the land.
When you have outsiders in the conservation movement and the environmental movement bringing strategies and implementing these policies without including Indigenous peoples’ input from the beginning, they get lackluster results or do not succeed in the way that they need to. That is definitely an issue that I’ve come across for many years and continue to deal with sometimes. But I feel like people have heard that and are starting to understand that they need to stop doing that type of behavior, which is definitely a colonial behavior and a patronizing behavior. There needs to be deeper levels of respect and understanding of how we work together.
What would you say is a way to address this?
It is really understanding. There needs to be work on the part of conservationists, white settler conservationists, or white settler environmentalists, who have really good intentions of wanting to work with communities or wanting to make change in the world, but not necessarily understanding their location of where they are coming into this work. We are existing under a white colonial and white body supremacist society which definitely prioritizes the voices of people that are not marginalized.
When you’re starting to work with communities that have been traditionally oppressed, I think it’s important to understand your location. It’s important to understand the history of the society that you’re living in. It’s really about people doing their homework, and truly understanding where they live and what history took place. That helps inform people: What history actually took place in the land you currently live on?
What land do you live on right now?
Ohlone land.
So, you’re based in California?
Yeah. Redwood City, it’s near San Francisco.
There are a lot of people that work on environment or conservation who don’t even know the history of the land where they’re making their living. The land where they work, play, love, and all of these things. They’re unaware of the history and the genocide, or the forced removal, or the biological warfare. If you can ground yourself in the land where you actually live and work and make your life, that will help inform you to understand the microcosm of the macrocosm of how North America was colonized.
I think that’s a basic foundational premise to help your heart and body understand what’s happened across North America and how these ways of being continue to be perpetuated in our workspaces even now.
I think an easy solution that someone can feel empowered by is reading a book, or watching a documentary, or speaking to a local Indigenous Elder — if they have time to speak to you — but also realizing that that’s your homework and that’s your work to do. You can’t put it on somebody else and expect someone to educate you. You have to do that work as somebody that has these roots in the country that you live in.
I want to pick up on a point made earlier, which was about violence. This past year has been notable for rising violence against environmental defenders, including Indigenous peoples in many countries. And I know you’ve done work on this issue, so I’d be interested in your take on what sort of actions can be taken to improve the situation.
That’s a really heavy one, because there are Indigenous land defenders across the world. In South America, where there’s a really high rate of murder for Indigenous land defenders, it feels sometimes hard to know how to stand in solidarity with people that are so far away, even though we feel the heartbreak of people’s very lives being taken just because they’re speaking out for the protection of the land, the climate, and the benefit for all of us. Some of the things that I’ve done in the past are solidarity actions; figuring out what is supportive of those communities that are experiencing that crisis, so, if it’s down South, doing solidarity actions to raise awareness in North America, or being a part of documentaries, or writing articles that can document these cases.
Also, looking at what the audiences and the choke points are that can help put pressure on those local or national governments to let them know that people are watching. I think when you get international pressure, that can help alleviate some of the local pressure. It doesn’t take it all away, but it helps. I think that’s one of the benefits of social media: nowadays we don’t have to depend on traditional mainstream sources of media. We can share and reshare, sign petitions, and send letters to local governments and to our governments.
I’ll give a specific example: one of the issues when I was down in Ecuador was that there were Indigenous peoples that sued the Ecuadoran government and won, and then sued Chevron, formerly Texaco, and won. They won, but were not able to hold those corporations accountable in those countries, because the corporations left the country. The Indigenous people then brought a legal case in Canada, because Chevron has assets here in the country. We then did a cross awareness raising around that via actions at Chevron refineries and different sites in North America that put pressure on Chevron. That’s been a big battle that I know a lot of people are more aware of, but it’s really challenging to figure out how to support communities.
I think it’s really about taking note from the communities of how they want support: what they think is strategic and effective and following the direction of those communities is number one. And then telling friends, families, governments, posting, reposting, resharing. The more that people have eyes on it, the better, I think, and the safer people ultimately are. It’s a very challenging one, because obviously we’re not physically there with our brothers and sisters that are getting murdered when it’s actually happening. Raising awareness is a huge one.
The pandemic has been especially difficult for many Indigenous communities around the world. How has COVID affected you, your community, and your work?
Well, it has definitely forced the organizations that I work with, at Indigenous Climate Action and Sacred Earth Solar, to work with all of our staff online. I think that’s par for the course for most people during COVID: not being able to work directly with communities other than through an online platform and online ways of webinars, Zoom, and all of the things that I think we’re all becoming very familiar with.
In terms of COVID impacts, it’s a scary thing for remote Indigenous communities, because once the virus is in the communities it can become an outbreak, which has very detrimental impacts on Elders and people that are of higher ages.
Our Elders are seen as a vital source of knowledge and history and oral tradition and language and culture. When an Elder dies, for us, it’s a huge loss for the community, for the family, for the Nation. That’s a major issue with the pandemic and why Indigenous peoples, in my opinion, have taken it so seriously.
I can speak specifically to my family. We’ve had pandemics already within our life: where the pandemics and the biological warfare that’s been waged against Indigenous peoples here in North America has reduced our population by 95% already. That trauma is very much in our minds and in our bodies. It’s very real and present.
This is reflected in the ways in which I act toward the virus: I’ve seen family members die in front of my eyes from communicable diseases like tuberculosis. It’s a very real thing, whereas, I think some people in our society, in Canadian and North American society, don’t take it as seriously, because they don’t really know what it’s like to experience a pandemic in their recent memory: the last one we can think of was in 1918. But our people have very recent stories of the detrimental impact of pandemics.
I’d say it affects us a little differently and I think our response is a bit different. When it gets out of control and the outbreaks happen, like it did in Navajo country, because they have such a large population, the impacts are utterly heartbreaking. I have a close friend that has lost 15 family members. It’s a very real thing. I have family members back home on my reserve that have gotten very sick. Thank God, knock on wood, we haven’t lost any Elders, but it’s definitely kept me up at night thinking about my aunties and uncles and how much it would be crushing if that were to be the case.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to be an ally in supporting Indigenous people’s rights and general welfare?
The one step that I already covered was really learning the history and grounding yourself in the land where you are, where you make your life and living, and in your home. Knowing that history. There are so many books, studies, and resources out there. If people look for it, they’ll find it. There are a lot of amazing books written by Indigenous scholars.
If they can, going through anti-oppression workshops and anti-oppression training.
And understanding a little bit more deeply the work I think we all need to do on our identity, of who we are and our location in the world and how we bring that into our communities and our families.
I think that’s really important, because I know there are a lot of people that want to do a lot of good and that’s a really amazing, altruistic need. We need that and people like that in the world, but we also need people to understand deeply the impacts of colonization and also their location within that: how they’ve benefited from white body supremacy and how they’ve benefited from land theft. Having that framework helps you become a better ally when you locate yourself within the struggle.
Some of the materials used in renewable energy are sourced from areas where there is conflict with Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Is this an issue you’re engaging on?
I think it’s important that we talk about how there’s impact. When we promote just transition technologies, it’s just that. We see it as a transition technology, because ultimately there’s impact when we take from the land, if we’re taking too much. We can’t say renewable energy is the end all, be all. We can’t say that it’s the silver bullet, like people say carbon capture storage is the silver bullet. These technologies can actually also be harmful. Mega dams are harmful.
Having a critical analysis of solar and wind is important. I’m not saying to throw the baby out with the bath water, because I think that can also be really harmful, but understanding that these technologies, that really should have been implemented in the ’80s and ’90s, that existed, that we are finally implementing now, are just what they’re called — transition technologies — to get us hopefully off of fossil fuel extraction. With the mining and lithium batteries, I think we need to look more into where the rare earth metals are coming from and need to understand that deeper.
We need to continue to analyze the impact regardless of what the technology is, and be honest with it, because I think what we’ve seen in mainstream media, unfortunately, is a glossing over of the impact.
We need to talk about the impact on the land. We also need to figure out how we can recycle, because there’s so much upcycling or recycling that we could do, but we haven’t learned how to do that with a lot of the old dinosaur technology and fossil fuel technology that we’re now decommissioning. How can we use all of those heavy metals and rare earth metals and all the things that we’ve already taken from the land? How can we recycle them and put them into clean tech? I think that’s not necessarily being done, and that’s something that I would hope to see in the future to reduce the amount of mining that’s happening.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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