Climate Emergency Now! |
Getting Biden to declare a climate emergency while building our communities with IRA funding and getting banks to divest from fossil fuels.
This will mean large-scale societal changes to transition off of fossil fuels, adapt to extreme weather caused by climate crisis centering on the welfare of Black, Latiné, and working class communities. Follow us online at marylandcu Us the #ClimateJustice to share your thoughts on this campaign |
Climate Emergency
A Campaign to Win Housing, Jobs, and Justice
The climate crisis is rapidly intensifying and Black, Indigenous, Latiné, and working class people are the hardest hit. Every year, our people suffer through far more intense droughts, wildfires, heat, cold, hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, and flooding. The climate crisis pushes us from our homelands, poisons the air in our homes, devastates our communities with extreme weather, and forces us to labor in intense heat. Our people are at extreme risk. This is an emergency.
Over the next year and a half, we will build the power needed to transform the climate crisis, winning housing, jobs, health, schools, transportation, and more in the process. In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, we will demand that President Biden exercise his full authority on climate, delivering for Black, Latiné, and working class communities by:
Goals
Targets
Tactics
Key terms
The climate crisis is rapidly intensifying and Black, Indigenous, Latiné, and working class people are the hardest hit. Every year, our people suffer through far more intense droughts, wildfires, heat, cold, hurricanes, tornadoes, rain, and flooding. The climate crisis pushes us from our homelands, poisons the air in our homes, devastates our communities with extreme weather, and forces us to labor in intense heat. Our people are at extreme risk. This is an emergency.
Over the next year and a half, we will build the power needed to transform the climate crisis, winning housing, jobs, health, schools, transportation, and more in the process. In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, we will demand that President Biden exercise his full authority on climate, delivering for Black, Latiné, and working class communities by:
- Ensuring that billions in available federal climate funds reach our people.
- Declaring a national climate emergency and taking further executive actions on climate.
Goals
- We will grow our collective base of Black, Latiné, and working class climate activists by at least 50,000 people by the end of 2024. We will then aggressively mobilize this base for 2024 electoral efforts.
- This campaign will build the power necessary to win an even larger-scale victory over the long-term–the Green New Deal.
- We will win an implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that is highly accountable to our communities. A federal law that passed in 2022, the IRA is the largest federal investment in climate change ever and will lead to an estimated $800 billion in spending–billions in funding for our communities. We will win by pressuring President Biden and local and state elected officials to ensure that IRA implementation is transparent, engages our organizations meaningfully, and prioritizes our communities.
- Examples of wins: jobs to electrify buildings, getting gas out of our homes, shutting down polluting power plants and incinerators, installing solar for our schools, and more.
- We will win the declaration of a national climate emergency by President Biden and other executive actions on climate.
- Examples of wins: President Biden can halt hundreds of billions of corporate dollars that fund coal, oil, and gas projects abroad, direct funds toward the frontline communities hit hardest by climate disasters, fast-track renewable transportation and clean power generation, and create millions of high-quality union jobs in the process.
Targets
- Primary: President Biden
- Secondary: Local, state, federal elected officials; government agencies that will determine the rules around how the IRA money is spent and deliver the funding; key political donors and opposition, including banking and hedge fund fossil fuel financiers.
Tactics
- Base-building: We are building a climate organizing program to recruit, mobilize, and develop leadership at scale among Black, Latiné, and working class people on climate. We will base-build through IRA benefits for local communities, climate disasters, scaled digital ads and canvass programs, deep organizer support, a climate member leader academy (Climate Defenders), and more.
- Campaign actions: The campaign will escalate over 2023-2024 with strong and large coordinated direct action, including civil disobedience. We will organize a series of climate actions that escalate during the 2024 election cycle.
- Examples: coordinated national days of action against fossil fuel financiers, regional mobilizations to pressure federal agencies, high-profile actions in federal offices and DC, and more.
- Elections: We will thoroughly engage our base of 50,000 new climate activists in civic engagement, building and supporting a nationwide group of trained leaders who are able to activate local networks of climate activists and voters to engage both candidates and voters, and fully mobilizing our base and their networks for November 2024 get-out-the-vote efforts.
Key terms
- Green New Deal: a $10 trillion federal law that, when passed, will rapidly transition the US from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy, adapt our communities for the impacts of climate change, create millions of good jobs, and center Black, Latiné, and working class people in these large-scale societal changes.
- Fossil fuels: Oil, natural gas, and coal. Substances that produce carbon dioxide–the pollution primarily responsible for climate change–when burned. 81% of the total energy used in the US comes from oil, natural gas, and coal.
- Executive action: A directive from the President that is intended to manage how the federal government is operated. The President uses this broad authority at their discretion to determine how resources (funding and staff) are used. Historically executive orders have been issued in the case of natural disasters and other emergencies.
- Fossil fuel financiers: Banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and other corporations that provide the funding that allows fossil fuel companies to operate.
- Clean and renewable energy: Natural resources that produce energy–such as wind and solar–which do not pollute the environment like coal, oil, natural gas, and other dirty fossil fuels.