The day Terry Christenson jumped the Trans Mountain work site security fence he wore a camera on his head. As the camera scanned the leaves on the ground, Christenson announced in a crisp voice, “This is Tango Charlie for the Coast Salish People.”
To build the power to take on climate change, we can’t simply validate individual movements or assume single-issue struggles will add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. We need class politics to connect the dots of our many struggles — and to save the planet.
A reduction of economic activity is necessary and just – and can lead to human flourishing.
To sustain the natural basis of our life, we must slow down. We have to reduce the amount of extraction, pollution, and waste throughout our economy. This implies less production, less consumption, and probably also less work.
In the United States, coal, that supervillain of fossil-fuels, is in a death spiral. But on a global scale, there’s no spiral, just an arrow pointing to Asia. Turns out coal isn’t dying; it’s moving.
The LNG Canada export plant, under construction on the northern coast of British Columbia, opens in 2025. At full capacity, the plant will produce about four-million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year, a large increase in provincial emissions.
The United Nations climate talks went into record overtime and then ended in failure on Sunday. The countries gathered in Madrid for COP25 were unable to agree on the main objectives of the negotiations and kicked the most important decisions down the road to next year’s meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
![The Khadia open pit mine is 27 km long. Workers loading coal into trucks work in hazardous conditions wear no protective equipment and accidents are frequent. Photo by: international accountability project. Flickr [CC BY 2.0]](https://ecosocialistsvancouver.org/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/article-image/12227000925_f2549129a2_c.jpg?itok=ZQWYdfQK)
