Dear Progressive Reader,
The United Nations-sponsored COP26 conference on global climate is taking place through next Friday in Glasgow, Scotland. Ironically, Glasgow is a city that is built on the system that has created much of our contemporary climate crisis. As Vicky Allan writes today in The Herald of Scotland, “Glaswegians live in the built shell of that carbon history, amidst infrastructure fabricated along with emissions.” The city first became a powerful hub for the vast eighteenth-century tobacco trade with the Americas (interrupted in 1776 by the American Revolution). It was there, as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, that a young engineer named James Watt became interested in steam engines. His improvement on the invention literally powered the Industrial Revolution that created our modern system of mass production. It was, in fact, Watt who invented the unit of measure we call horsepower (hp). Coal fired and fueled industrial expansion around the globe, and coal emissions now threaten the future of that globe as we know it.
The fossil fuel industry continues, as it has throughout history, to create “sacrifice zones” in communities that seem too small, or too isolated, or too unimportant to have a voice. Writer Meghan Kraus tells the story this week of her home city of Superior, Wisconsin – at the confluence of two controversial oil pipelines. “At the terminus of Enbridge’s Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines,” she writes, “Superior’s residents have seen too many environmental disasters in their community.”
Cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates the difficulty that progressives face in addressing the need to curb emissions, both at home and abroad. In many ways, says Fiore, “U.S. climate leadership around the world and legislation at home is being blocked by one compromised senator from West Virginia. At this point, it looks like the fate of the globe rests in the hands of one selfish coal fiend from a town with a population of 375 people.”
But civil society won’t wait for Joe Manchin. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies point out, “As world leaders converge in Glasgow, Scotland, to address the climate crisis, activists and Indigenous groups around the world are demanding real action.” The real solutions won’t wait for compromised world leaders to agree, they will come from pressure from below by grassroots movements. As Benjamin and Davies explain, “The usually mild-mannered U.N. Secretary General [António] Guterres made it clear that ‘street heat’ will be key to saving humanity.”
For more information on all of these issues, Exact Editions, the company that hosts the digital version of The Progressive for our subscribers, is providing a online resource of 156 fully searchable books that are freely available through this link until November 22: <https://exacted.me/COP26ShowcaseGlasgow22Nov>.
This coming week will include Veteran’s Day, a federal holiday in the United States in honor of the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918 that signaled the end of World War I. That war was so horrific it was called “the war to end all wars,” but since that day we have seen hundreds of brutal conflicts, each with more and more destructive weaponry. The national organization Veterans for Peace is calling for a reclaiming of that original “Armistice Day” to truly bring an end to war and militarism. “We must,” they say, “press our government to end reckless military interventions that endanger the entire world. We must build a culture of peace.”
This year, The Progressive is working with the local chapter of Veterans for Peace to produce a virtual event to commemorate Armistice Day and highlight efforts to build a peaceful world. The event will feature presentations by historian Alfred W. McCoy (author of the forthcoming book To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change) and peace activist and Progressive contributor Kathy Kelly, plus musical performances by John McCutcheon and Si Kahn. You can watch the event live online for free at
https://www.facebook.com/theprogressivemagazine
and https://www.youtube.com/theprogressive at 7:00 p.m. Central Time on November 11. It will also be available later as an archive.
Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
P.S. – November 3 was Colin Kaepernick’s birthday. If you would like to read Dave Zirin’s excellent new book, The Kaepernick Effect, about the movement Colin Kaepernick helped to inspire, you can get your copy with a donation to The Progressive, in our online shop. While you are there, check out our 2022 Hidden History calendar, and lots of other great items.
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