Dear Progressive Reader,
Discussions have moved into overtime in the United Nations-sponsored COP26 conference on global climate that has been taking place in Glasgow, Scotland. The meetings were scheduled to end on Friday. “How many COPs [does it take] to arrest climate chaos?” read one protest banner outside of the meetings. The answer almost certainly appears to be “more than 26.” In December 2019, at the conclusion of the last climate meetings held before the pandemic put global gatherings on hiatus, UN Secretary General António Guterres said that he was disappointed with the outcome, declaring that leaders had missed an opportunity to be more ambitious on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and financing for poorer countries.
This year’s meetings seem on track to fall short as well. As the closing plenary kicks off, environmental writer Tina Gerhardt describes today as “huddle day” when the delegates gather in small groups to try desperately to come up with compromises that will allow them, at least in public, to say they accomplished something over the past two weeks. As the reality of the climate crisis looms ever larger around the globe (from rising seas to raging fires to powerful storms), the stakes are too high to simply accomplish nothing in this “sudden death overtime” of transnational bargaining.
For more information on all of the issues being covered in these meetings, 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>.
In legal news, Britney Spears is out from under her thirteen years of conservatorship, and Steve Bannon is going in—scheduled to turn himself in to authorities next week after being indicted for contempt of Congress. And in Minneapolis, where a referendum to create a Department of Public Safety lost at the ballot box, Sarah Lahm reports, “Hope, deferred, may indeed rise again,” with seven new members elected to the city council.
Meanwhile, in the “culture wars” against so-called Critical Race Theory, cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates that “For the Party of Insurrection, critical race theory is a catch-all for anything they don’t like.” And education writer Rann Miller notes, “Anti-racist work—ridding our schools of anti-Blackness, for example—will require that all children are taught historical truths to understand how racism impacts our society, while being empowered with the tools to eradicate it. Liberation for our society means liberating all peoples.”
Also Annie Levin looks at the new attempts by the Teamsters Union to organize Amazon workers, and Jennifer Dorning of the AFL-CIO pens an op-ed on the rising tide of worker power. Eleanor Bader chronicles the many groups working to resettle Afghan refugees after the abrupt exit of U.S. troops from that country. And Christy Olesezki describes how Texas governor Greg Abbott and other lawmakers are depriving LGBTQ+ youth of access to a state website that provides resources, including a link to a suicide prevention hotline. “Having lawmakers decide what identities are worthy of representation, what services are available to youth and what medical care should be prescribed,” she writes, “is misguided and dangerous.”
Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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