NY Renews Coalition Comments on Governor Signing Ambitious Climate Bill into Law

NY Renews, a coalition of over 180 environmental, justice, faith, labor, and community groups released the following statement on the Climate Leadership and  Community Protection Act:

“Today, the Governor signed the nation’s most ambitious climate bill into law. This would not have been possible without years of work from community, environmental, labor, and justice organizations throughout the state.

For four years, NY Renews has done the meaningful work of uniting New Yorkers under the banner of climate, jobs, and justice. Our coalition put forth nation-leading policy to address the climate crisis while investing in the communities most impacted by the effects of climate change.

The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act makes New York the nation’s leader in legally-mandated emissions cuts. For the future of humanity and our planet, we need to move off fossil fuels towards a renewable economy, and we hope we can inspire other states to follow our lead on bold climate action.

In addition, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act includes a climate and equity screen, to make sure climate policies do not disproportionately burden environmental justice communities. It also includes a commitment to allocate 35% of the benefits of state climate funding to communities on the frontlines of the crisis. Given the Governor’s dismissal of environmental justice priorities throughout the legislative session, it is clear that these provisions were included in the final bill due to overwhelming public pressure from New Yorkers across the state.

Community Mayoral Debate: Social Justice Advocates will pose Questions to Buffalo Mayoral Candidates

The event is non-partisan and will not endorse any candidate. The organizers encourage everyone's involvement and education in the process.

 

Indigenous peoples are one of the populations in the city that can be invisible and marginalized in the overall debate surrounding the city. This event will be to shift the conversation. 

There will also be groups addressing issues of racial justice, environmental justice, fair economics and other issues. 

Nationwide Protests 'Inspiring' and must keep 'Moving Forward' to Protect Our Democracy, says Author

Democracy & Government                 

A Great and Joyful March, But It’s Not Enough

Saturday's protests were inspiring but just the first step in fighting back against those who would end democracy.

By Michael Winship | January 24, 2017  |  Moyers & company

 Thousands of people take part in the Women's March on Jan. 21, 2017 in New York City. The midtown Manhattan event was one of many anti-Trump protests nationwide that came a day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

“Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don’t always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.”

On Sunday morning, that came flying out from the Twitter account of @realDonaldTrump, raising the question, “What have you done with the real, @realDonaldTrump?”

It sure didn’t sound like the troll we’ve come to know. A couple of days in, maybe the awesomeness of becoming the leader of the free world had penetrated his roiling psyche and settled him down.

Nah. Clearly, he hadn’t written it. Because just two hours before, in a tone far more like the narcissistic whinge we’re used to, the Trump account tweeted, “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

Not voting? Celebs? That sound you heard was my cognitive dissonance alarm hitting DEFCON 1.

In both instances, the bad and not-quite-as-bad Trump personas were writing about Saturday’s worldwide protests, women’s marches in more than 500 cities in the United States — at least 3.7 million Americans — and more than another hundred demonstrations internationally, from London and Paris to that handful of hearty souls who displayed their protest signs in Antarctica.

There were half a million people in Washington, DC, just the day after the less-than-superb turnout for Donald Trump’s inauguration and some 400,000 here in New York City, if not more. According to Sarah Frostenson at Vox, “… Political scientists say they think we may have witnessed the largest day of demonstrations in American history.”

I have been at many, many protest marches in my life, going back to the big anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the late ’60s and ’70s, and I have never experienced anything like what happened this weekend. We arrived at our designated stepping off point on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., right on time, but the block was so packed it already had been penned off. A marshal suggested we move up to the next street above and work our way back down to where we were supposed to be but it was impossible and in the process I managed to get separated from my friends — too much of a crowd between us to get back to one another; a situation complicated by a dying cellphone.

A scene from the crowd in the march in New York on Saturday, 
Jan. 21, 2017. (Photo by Michael Winship)

And so there I stood, alone in the crowd, waiting for something to happen, soaking in the excitement and anticipation everyone shared at being there, enjoying the collegiality, reading the hundreds of signs, from the woman carrying a 5×7 card with the words, “A tiny sign for a tiny man” to the guy not far from me whose placard read, “A woman made this sign for me.”

Apparently, our numbers were so unexpected it took a while for the organizers and police to figure out what to do with us all, so it was 2:30 p.m. or so before we finally began to move, slowly swinging south onto Second Avenue on the east side of Manhattan. This wasn’t so much a march as a slow group shuffle; there were so many people crowded onto the street we could only move a little bit at a time, like an escaped chain gang bound at the ankles.

We worked our way down to 42^nd Street and then west. I was tempted to peel off at Grand Central Station and head home — the hour already was late — but I was determined to make it all the way to the end, to reach Fifth Avenue and 56^th Street and summit at Trump Tower.

By the time we made our way onto Fifth Avenue the sun was going down but we kept moving, singing, chanting, cheering. A 6-year-old girl, perched on a grown-up’s shoulders, urged us on: “We are the popular vote! This is what democracy looks like!” she shouted and we echoed everything she said. This was her personal favorite: “Donald Duck for president!”

Saturday was a stunning affirmation of defiance, a rebuke and warning that resistance has just begun, yet only if we have the patience and grit to keep it moving forward.

We got to a block from Trump’s gilded pleasure dome and then were turned away by parade marshals
and police. We could get no closer; barriers blockaded the way. Amicably, the protesters broke up, walking east and west on the cross streets, many filling the bars and restaurants, others crowding into the subway stations, headed home.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer tried to shrug off the significance of what happened on our streets Saturday. Referring to the Washington march, he said, “There were people who came to the Mall, as they do all the time, sometimes in smaller numbers.” Ho-hum, he seemed to say.

“A lot of these people were there to protest an issue of concern to them and not against anything,” Spicer said, personifying the self-deception that believes the lie.

Sorry, Sean — Saturday was a stunning affirmation of defiance, a rebuke and warning that resistance has just begun, yet only if we have the patience and grit to keep it moving forward.

I’ve told this story here before, but the lesson remains: In the wake of the murder of protesting students at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970, the big antiwar demonstrations that followed and the nationwide student strike that shut down hundreds of colleges and universities, the idea was not just to demonstrate but to mobilize and continue to work toward an end to the Vietnam War. Once the dramatic marches had come to an end, all too many simply took advantage of an early end to the semester and headed for the beach. Little was accomplished and the war continued for another five years. Those of us who wanted to keep the peace work going — the stated intention of the strike — were met with diffidence at best and at worst, outright apathy and resentment.

“Thank you for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our beliefs are,” Gloria Steinem said at Saturday’s rally in Washington. “Pressing ‘send’ is not enough.” She’s right, but marching won’t be enough either as we go up against a committed band of zealots determined to end all remaining vestiges of the New Deal and the Great Society and to further enrich the wealth of the 1 percent — especially, of course, themselves.

“This is the upside of the downside,” Steinem said on Saturday. “This is an outpouring of energy, and true democracy like I have never seen in my very long life. It is wide in age, it is deep in diversity, and remember, the Constitution does not begin with ‘I the president,’ it begins with ‘we the people.’”

The work must take place at every level, from local on up: organizing, keeping yourself informed,
sending letters and emails, making phone calls, attending town meetings, running for office or working for the candidates who best represent your interests.

And this, perhaps above all: confront your member of Congress. Don’t let him or her off the hook. Make sure your representative doesn’t sell you out to the Big Interests, or deceive you with empty rhetoric. If they do – throw the rascals out.

There is no time to lose. With each day, a cornice of our republic crumbles and the body of democracy struggles to keep itself from stumbling and falling into the abyss. No joke.

NY Renews: Statewide Action is Proving the Best Route to Effective Climate Policy

Can This New York State Campaign Finish What the Paris Climate Talks Started?

The COP21 agreement is filled with holes—this diverse, statewide coalition aims to fill them.

By Rebecca Nathanson  | January 11, 2016 |  The Nation

Several weeks ago, as climate-justice activists dispersed from Paris after the United Nations climate-change summit, a couple hundred people sat cheering in a Harlem church, its walls adorned with posters reading, “There can be no environmental justice without social justice.” Community leaders, directors of national environmental organizations, union members, a Hurricane Sandy survivor, the church’s pastor, the state attorney general—one at a time, each took the mic to rally the audience and attest to the urgent need for the evening’s gathering. Down in the pews, the crowd responded in agreement, applause interspersed with chants of “Sí se puede!”

Just days earlier, in Paris, 195 countries had reached a climate deal that was at once historic in its broad, multinational scope and modest in its purely voluntary aspirations. In its wake, Hans Schellnhuber, one of the world’s most renowned climate scientists and a top adviser to Pope Francis, had declared, “It will be the job of civil society…to finish the job that national governments have begun here in Paris.”

Now, part of civil society had gathered together to meet that challenge. Its vehicle of choice was NY Renews, a new statewide campaign that will attempt to make tangible what Paris made aspirational. Standing on the church stage, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman received the loudest ovation of the night when he pledged his support for the initiative, exclaiming, “I’ve never seen an event like this.”

While NY Renews has been in the works for months, the timing of its launch placed the campaign’s demands in direct comparison to the agreement reached at the Paris summit on December 12. What could be the agreement’s best parts, such as naming 1.5 degrees Celsius as a goal for the eventual maximum temperature rise, amount to loose aims with no enforcement—and still fall short of what science demands. If every country kept its promises, the earth would still warm by 3.5 degrees Celsius, putting the temperature far above preindustrial levels.

“Think of it as a starting gun in a race,” said Aaron Mair, president of the Sierra Club, at the NY Renews launch event.

NY Renews aims to build off the Paris agreement and fill in its gaps. The campaign comes from a coalition of at least 45 organizations throughout New York State that helped organize last fall’s People’s Climate March. It targets the state legislature in Albany with numerous demands: to create clean-energy jobs, make the state’s climate commitments legally enforceable, ensure accountability for meeting those commitments, and establish a just energy policy. More specifically, the campaign calls for the state to use 100 percent clean energy by 2050, with benchmark goals in the interim and every state agency oriented to helping meet those goals.                 

As Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a member of the NY Renews coalition, explained before the event, “This will be an exciting and unprecedented moment for us to grapple with the policy at the state level, seeing as how we know how the Paris agreement is not going to protect the most vulnerable communities in the world.” In the wake of the agreement, he continued, “it becomes even more important for local action to drive how policy and how resiliency and adaptation get advanced.”

Governor Cuomo has already announced a goal of using 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 and committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by that same year. By 2050, he aims for emissions to be 80 percent below their 1990 level. The campaign hopes not only to push Cuomo further but also to codify the existing initiatives into laws, ensuring that future governors adhere to their mandates. “While there have been some good initiatives under this governor, we believe that our campaign pushes the state more broadly and more aggressively and more transparently in a direction where we need to go in terms of reducing our carbon footprint,” Bautista told The Nation.

With climate change a non-starter in Congress, statewide action is proving the best route to effective policy. “A lot of the reason why the US was even able to go to Paris and negotiate anything was because states have started to adopt more aggressive climate policy, and that’s no accident. That’s because people really built impressive political power in states,” explained May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org, which has a New York City affiliate that is active in the coalition.

Still, what’s most interesting about NY Renews may be the way it’s using this newfound political power. Whereas the Paris agreement failed to include a legally binding commitment from rich countries to appropriate sufficient funds to help developing nations mitigate the impact of climate change, NY Renews is making the inclusion of the most vulnerable central to its mission. In focusing on the needs of low-income communities, communities of color, and the communities that were most ravaged by Hurricane Sandy three years ago, it adds social, racial, and economic-justice components to its organizing—an acknowledgement that, although climate change affects everyone, it does not affect everyone equally.

“This is increasingly the direction the movement is moving,” Boeve observed. “We’re seeing across different movements and sectors the need for transformational change in the way decisions are made about the climate and the environment, about workers, about immigration, about healthcare, and increasingly recognizing that we need each other in order to be successful.”       

Beyond taking the Paris agreement as a jumping-off point, NY Renews is harnessing the momentum of the September 2014 People’s Climate March, where more than 300,000 people marched through Manhattan. Like this campaign, that event brought together people from a diversity of movements and organizations, highlighting the front-line communities that are already combating the impact of climate change. Now that coalition hopes to channel the march’s explosive energy into concrete policy change.

The reality of NY Renews remains to be seen—its own aims are still aspirational, after all. How it will channel the discussions and mobilizations around Paris into concrete support, how it will balance the needs of the variety of groups and movements it incorporates, and how it will transform its ideas into tangible political power—these are questions to which the answers can only be guessed right now. But these challenges are also what lend it the potential for success.

As Schneiderman said to the cheering crowd in that Harlem church on December 16, “NY Renews is how you keep the Climate March marching.”

~   ~   ~

State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli helped launch the NY Renews campaign in Buffalo:

He told the crowd of more than 100 activists and leaders from a variety of local church, environmental, labor and community organizations about the creation of a $2 billion Low Emissions Index for the state’s pension fund that will reduce or eliminate investments in polluting companies and encourage others to reduce their carbon footprints.

An additional $1.5 billion in promote green investments, he said, will bring the fund’s total environmentally friendly commitment to $5 billion. Echoing an earlier speaker, Jim Anderson of Citizen Action, he added, “We all have skin in the game. We all need to contribute.”

The NY Renews campaign will contribute by pushing for laws that will enforce the state’s climate goals, create jobs in clean energy and set up a fair energy policy that includes people at all economic levels.

See the full report: State comptroller’s Buffalo visit after Paris climate summit encourages push for environmental legislation at BuffaloNews.com