Why the South Is Organizing Its Own Green New Deal

LAKE CHARLES, LA.—After Hur­ri­cane Lau­ra hit in late August, a local chem­i­cal plant erupt­ed in flames. The fire, one of 31 post-Lau­ra oil and chem­i­cal leaks report­ed, sent up plumes of smoke and chlo­rine gas. Louisiana offi­cials told res­i­dents (many of whom had lost pow­er or their homes) to shel­ter in place and turn off their air con­di­tion­ing in the sum­mer heat to avoid the fumes.

“How do you shel­ter in place with no shel­ter?” KD Minor, a com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er from Lake Charles, asked dur­ing a vir­tu­al con­fer­ence in August. Minor began coor­di­nat­ing relief before Lau­ra hit, pro­vid­ing res­i­dents with gas mon­ey to evac­u­ate. Oth­ers matched her con­tri­bu­tions, and “$5 turned into $1,000,” which Minor dis­trib­uted through For­ev­er Cal­casieu, a mutu­al aid net­work. Minor is still help­ing peo­ple get assis­tance as hur­ri­canes bat­ter the region.

Lau­ra wasn’t the first storm to expose over­lap­ping vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in the Gulf South—where thou­sands of oil and gas wells, refiner­ies and petro­chem­i­cal plants sit in a storm path super­charged by the emis­sions of the fos­sil fuel indus­try—nor will it be the last. While res­i­dents of Texas, Louisiana, Mis­sis­sip­pi, Alaba­ma, and Flori­da are build­ing mutu­al aid net­works, they’re also mak­ing longer-term plans, like the Gulf South for a Green New Deal.

Like the nation­al Green New Deal (GND) res­o­lu­tion, the Gulf South GND pro­pos­es slash­ing plan­et-warm­ing emis­sions through an ener­gy tran­si­tion with well-pay­ing union jobs, hous­ing, trans­porta­tion and health­care for all. But the Gulf South plat­form goes fur­ther, call­ing for an end to pipeline con­struc­tion, divest­ment from region­al mil­i­tary instal­la­tions and repur­pos­ing fos­sil fuel infra­struc­ture for renew­able ener­gy. It also demands food sov­er­eign­ty, repa­ra­tions for Black, Brown and Indige­nous peo­ple, and the redis­tri­b­u­tion of unpol­lut­ed lands to mar­gin­al­ized groups.

The plat­form ​“out­lines what the Green New Deal would need to suc­ceed in the South and, there­fore, nation­al­ly,” says Emma Collin, direc­tor of pro­grams for the not-for-prof­it Gulf Coast Cen­ter for Law & Pol­i­cy (GCCLP), which coor­di­nates the ini­tia­tive. No cli­mate plan can win mate­r­i­al gains with­out lead­er­ship from ​“peo­ple who work in the ener­gy indus­try, who have lived through cli­mate dis­as­ters, and who have been on the front lines of a lot of America’s dark­est his­to­ries,” she says.

Local farm­work­ers, fish­er­folk, labor groups and Indige­nous nations cre­at­ed the plat­form, meet­ing over six months in 2019 to decide what they liked about the nation­al GND and what was miss­ing from it. The result lays out a long-term vision that the platform’s more than 150 sig­na­to­ries, includ­ing Sun­rise Move­ment, are orga­niz­ing around.

The GCCLP sub­mit­ted the plat­form to the House Select Com­mit­tee on the Cli­mate Cri­sis and oth­er pol­i­cy-mak­ing bod­ies, but sig­na­to­ries are plan­ning state and region­al cam­paigns. Nurs­es, teach­ers and oth­er front­line work­ers—many non-union—have led much of the orga­niz­ing, while indus­tri­al unions have been more reluctant.

“How do you sell the refin­ery hole watch­er” on the Green New Deal, Minor asks. ​“They hear ​‘change’ and what that real­ly says to them is ​‘cut.’”

But change is inevitable. With near­ly 4,300 orphaned oil and gas wells in Louisiana (and more infra­struc­ture to be aban­doned as Covid-19 slash­es oil rev­enues), the Green New Deal’s wager is that a planned, demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly man­aged tran­si­tion will be bet­ter for work­ing peo­ple than a chaot­ic, cor­po­rate retreat.

“I use that old union phrase, ​‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,’ ” says Ryan Pol­lock, an elec­tri­cian and orga­niz­er with IBEW 520 in Austin, Texas. In 2019, Pol­lock per­suad­ed the Texas AFL-CIO to pass a Green New Deal-style res­o­lu­tion. While indus­tri­al work­ers are warm­ing to GND pro­pos­als, he says, they need to get much more mil­i­tant. ​“We’ve let our­selves be on the menu far too often.”

Cli­mate dis­as­ter rais­es the stakes. After Hur­ri­cane Ivan struck a Louisiana drilling plat­form in 2004, oil poured into the Gulf for 16 years. Kat­ri­na spilled 8 mil­lion gal­lons of oil. When Har­vey hit Texas in 2017, mil­lions of gal­lons of chem­i­cals entered water­ways. In Port Arthur, Texas, refin­ery oper­a­tors burned what was left in their pipes to pre­vent clog­ging, send­ing tox­ic gas over the city, accord­ing to local com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er Hilton Kel­ley. Weeks lat­er, a near­by Valero refin­ery caught fire.

“We have to get real about chang­ing the dynam­ics around how we get ener­gy,” Kel­ley says. ​“Because the old way is killing people.”

Gulf states sup­ply 75% of the country’s liq­uid fuel and 125,000 miles of pipeline snake across Louisiana alone, but far few­er peo­ple work in fos­sil fuel than the indus­try claims. ​“It’s sort of this mythol­o­gy … that the petro­chem­i­cal indus­try is what makes Louisiana work,” says Dar­ryl Malek-Wiley, an orga­niz­er with Sier­ra Club’s Envi­ron­men­tal Jus­tice and Com­mu­ni­ty Part­ner­ships Pro­gram. In real­i­ty, pol­lut­ing indus­tries have ​“tak­en most of the wealth and shipped it some­place else.”

In Lake Charles, peo­ple are ​“slow­ly but steadi­ly” con­nect­ing the dots between extrac­tive indus­try and cli­mate dis­as­ter, Minor says. Collin hopes the Gulf South GND can make those con­nec­tions clear­er, adding that the GND brand­ing is less impor­tant than what it hopes to do.

“The win,” Collin says, ​“is mate­r­i­al change.”

This arti­cle is reprint­ed with per­mis­sion from In These Times mag­a­zine, © 2020, and is avail­able at inthe​se​times​.com.

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