Heroes and Villains: climate change

I had a fall during the taping of Episode 4 of The Erickson Report, delaying production for a week. So I thought I would post a couple of things intended for that show but which will not be used now.

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Heroes and Villains: climate change

Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish activist who, in August 2018 at age 15, began an on-going solitary protest outside the Swedish parliament about the need for immediate action to combat climate change and has since become an outspoken climate activist.

She initiated the school strike for climate movement in November 2018. On March 15 of this year, an estimated 1.4 million students in 112 countries around the world staged strikes and protests. Another event involving students from 125 countries took place on May 24.

She is of course not alone but she is a symbol of a movement becoming more assertive about the need for immediate action on climate, a movement that is coming to embrace nonviolent direct action, as mass protests over the weekend of June 22-23 showed.

For just one example, on June 22 in Germany, hundreds of activists under the slogan "We are unstoppable - another world is possible!" stormed an open-pit coal mine in Germany while thousands of others maintained separate blockades of the nation's coal infrastructure.

Greta Thunberg

Meanwhile, in New York City police arrested 70 environmental protesters outside the New York Times headquarters who laid down in the street and climbed onto the building to demand the newspaper start referring to climate change as a climate emergency.

The same day in Bath, Maine at General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works, where some of the Navy's most advanced warships are built, 22 people were arrested for civil disobedience calling for Congress to "Fund Climate Solutions, Not Endless War"

And on July 2, the day this is being recorded, a UK group called Extinction Rebellion is staging a die-in, putting an independent edge to the opening of the London's city-organized, officially-sanctioned Climate Action Week.

Again, Greta Thunberg is not alone, but she still is a symbol of a movement that is no longer content to wait until the corporations and the politicians decide action is in their own interest. And for that she is a Hero.

The villain here may come as something of a surprise. It is Phil Goldberg, director of the Center for Civil Justice at the Progressive Policy Institute, an allegedly progressive organization - I mean, it's right in the name and all - connected to the Dimocratic Party.

Phil Goldberg

Various mayors around the country have been filing lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations for their pollution and contribution to global warming, arguing that "we did what the law required" is inadequate as a defense when they knew for a fact that those standards were inadequate. They failed to exercise due diligence, the argument goes, to exercise appropriate care, and thus can be held liable.

Phil Goldberg, who apparently needs to look up just what "justice" means, has been, precisely because of his association with PPI, an industry-useful leading point person denouncing such lawsuits. You know the game: He becomes "proof" that "even the lefties are against this."

In fact, this "lefty" is a former lobbyist for coal giant Peabody Energy and serves as special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers in its fight against climate litigation besides having recently worked for Grow America’s Infrastructure Now, a front group funded by several oil and gas trade associations, helping prepare a report on how tort law can be used to go after what the authors call “anti-pipeline activism.”
  
That's why he's the guy writing that the cities' "copycat lawsuits" are "ineffective political stunts" that "strike at the heart of our way of life" because they don't "balance" environmental concerns with the climate destroying fossil fuel production on which his bosses' profits depend.

That's why he's the guy doing it. That he's doing it under the cover of supposedly being progressive and supposedly concerned with civil justice, that's why he's our villain.