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3 things to know ahead of this year’s U.N. climate talks in Poland.

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on December 2, 2018

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Thousands of the world’s top officials have gathered in Katowice, Poland to negotiate over the nuts and bolts of global climate solutions. The 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (otherwise known for its jazzier name, COP24) kicks off on December 3, and will continue over the following two weeks.

A lot is riding on the summit. This year marks the deadline set by the Paris climate agreement during COP21 to hammer out a rulebook for critical commitments made by nearly every country in the world to slow down climate change and avoid hugely damaging natural, economic, and human costs.

According to the Nature Conservancy, “This COP is just as important as the one in Paris, but without the fanfare.”

We’ll always have Paris … but a lot has changed since that climate accord was signed in April 2016. The United States has turned away from its Paris agreement pledge. The United Kingdom is preoccupied by Brexit, making it less likely to be able to focus on environmental goals. And Brazil, which recently backtracked on its offer to host next year’s U.N. climate talks, is about to inaugurate a leader who wants to open up the Amazon rainforest to deforestation, and could eff up the planet for all of us.

So what are we to make of COP24 against all this ruckus? Here are three signs that already hint to what we might expect from this year’s global climate talks.

Most U.S. politicians are sitting this one out.

Look, given his recent comments on his administration’s own climate report, no one expected President “I don’t believe it” Trump to high-tail it to COP24. But few if any top Democrats, who recently said they plan to use their House majority to prioritize the issue of climate change, seem to be schlepping it to Poland this year. According to Axios, no Democratic senators will be attending COP24. Even the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, will be sending staff in his place.

Last year, several big-name politicians, including California Governor Jerry Brown and Oregon Governor Katie Brown, attended COP23 in Bonn, Germany — but they won’t be attending this year. What gives? According to congressional aids, it’s about timing: COP24 is a being held nearly a month later in the year compared to 2017’s talks, and Congress is still in session.

Coal is going to be creeping on the conference.

COP24 will be held in Katowice, a coal mining city that is among the most polluted in Europe. Poland’s coal habit is becoming more expensive and damaging to the environment, but the country is still struggling to part ways with it. Poland currently uses coal to meet a whopping 80 percent of its energy needs. One of Poland’s leading coal companies, Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa (JSW), was the first official sponsor of the climate talks. Several other coal companies have followed suit.

The Trump administration has not been shy about its own love affair with coal. This year, it’s planning to have its own coal convention as a side event to COP24 touting the “long-term potential” for so-called “clean coal.” Pffft.

The recent flurry of climate reports might add real urgency to negotiations.

There has been a spate of major scientific reports in the run-up to COP24, including this one and this one and this one. The most comprehensive of these is arguably the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which underscores just how far governments still have to go if they’re to reach the goal agreed upon in Paris — namely to try to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But the IPCC report found that even in a 1.5-degree scenario, there will likely be an increase in extreme weather conditions, resulting in a major uptick in hunger, poverty, mass migration, and resource-driven conflicts.

The reports just might be the scary kick-in-the-ass world leaders need to up their commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

Stay tuned for Grist’s on the ground coverage of the goings-on at COP24.

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3 things to know ahead of this year’s U.N. climate talks in Poland.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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Ringling Bros. Announces It’s Finally Ending Elephant Acts

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey said it will end the use of elephant acts by 2018—a move that follows decades of mounting criticism and public concern over the show’s abusive treatment of the animals. Ringling’s parent company, Feld Entertainment, cited a “mood shift” experienced by circus-goers who have grown “uncomfortable with us touring with elephants” for the decision.

President Kenneth Feld also said local legislation barring certain circus practices, such as the use of bullhooks, made it increasingly difficult for the company to continue including elephants in its performances. “This decision was not easy, but it is in the best interest of our company, our elephants and our customers,” he said in a statement.

In 2011, Mother Jones published an explosive, yearlong investigation looking into Ringling’s treatment of elephants, including the regular employment of electric shocks and whippings to control them:

Several of the beatings targeted Nicole, a twentysomething elephant named after Kenneth Feld’s eldest daughter. Sweet-natured but clumsy, Nicole would frequently miss her cues to climb atop a tub and place her feet on the elephant next to her, Stechcon said in his videotaped statement. “I always rooted for her, ‘Come on, Nicole, get up,'” he said. “But we left the show, brought the animals back to their area, and…we took the headpieces off, and as I was hanging them up, I heard the most horrible noise, just whack, whack, whack. I mean, really hard. It’s hard to describe the noise. Like a baseball bat or something striking something not—not soft, and not hard…I turned around to look, and this guy was hitting her so fast and so hard with the ankus, and sometimes he would take both hands and just really knock her, and he was just doing that. And I was, like, I couldn’t believe it.”

The investigation also exposed that Feld Entertainment had spent millions of dollars on PR campaigns to hide such abuse from the public and fend off lawsuits:

It was part of a multimillion-dollar spy operation run out of Feld headquarters to thwart and besmirch animal rights groups and others on the company’s enemies list, according to a stunning Salon piece by Jeff Stein. Feld had even hired Clair George—the CIA’s head of covert operations under President Reagan until his conviction for perjury in the Iran-Contra scandal. (George, who died in August, received a pardon from President George H.W. Bush.)

Thursday’s announcement to phase out the elephants, which have been a staple for the Ringling brand for more than a century, has been met with praise from animal rights activists. Feld Entertainment said the elephants will be transitioned to the company’s elephant conservation center in Florida.

For more, read our in-depth investigation here.

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Ringling Bros. Announces It’s Finally Ending Elephant Acts

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