Dear friends,

Welcome to the Rising Clyde #13, and a belated happy lunar new year! As usual, be sure to subscribe to our joint Coalition Calendar to stay up to date on our events, and check in on this edition’s soundtrack to remind yourself why we need trade unions

From The Ground Up: Take Action Now / 27-28 March 2021

From 27-28 March 2021, we will hold our second Global Gathering for Climate Justice. Join us for From the Ground Up #2: Take Action Now, to move our thinking towards how we can collectively tackle the multiple crises we are facing.

• What are our tactics and strategies for meaningful change? What are their context, history and diversity, and how do they play out for different people in different places?
• How do we build an inclusive, equitable, intersectional and radical movement for change?
• How do we mobilise a million people to take to the streets this year?

The COP26 Coalition is all of us – please lend us your capacity and time to work together. Whether you’re a tech wizard, a facilitator, or can help us spread the word, we need all hands on deck. Join our crew here.

Get involved!

• Are you an activist in Scotland, looking to get back into the game? Come to our climate justice gathering on Sunday at 6pm, to meet other Scottish activists and climate groups from across the nation. With the elections looming, the independence movement growing, and COP26 (probably) coming to Glasgow, we need all voices in the room to discuss what our next steps are. Join us here!
• MORE – Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment are holding their next workshop on Climate Justice and Migrant Justice this Monday at 6pm! This time, Kirtana Chandrasekaran from Friends of the Earth International will guide the discussion on what COP exactly is – if you are a migrant, refugee or asylum seeker with experience of the immigration system, please come along! 
• Do you run a Glasgow-based venue, community cafe, art gallery or events space? We’re looking for a wide variety of venues to help us hold events, provide accommodation for activists, and offer convergence spaces for people travelling to Glasgow to take part in COP26 Coalition mobilisations and other activities. If you are a venue holder and are interested in helping us, please fill out this initial survey and we’ll get back to you with more specific asks in the next few months. You can find more information about our requests for helphere, or contact [email protected] if you have specific questions.

As ever, there’s plenty of ways to lend a hand! For those of you who love messaging, framing and social media, the Comms WG are meeting on Wednesday 25th at 3pm.

Next week we’re having another policy discussion, this one on the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE) Bill, on Tuesday 2nd March at 6:30pm! With the Bill soon being returned to Parliament, we will have the CEE Bill Alliance presenting to us the newest draft, as well as Biofuelwatch outlining some concerns around the bill – join us to learn and discuss!

Also next week, the Mobilisations WG will be meeting on Wednesday, 3rd March, 6:30pm to plan actions in Glasgow on 6th December.

News and Resources 

• If you think that Fracking at least created a lot of jobs, we’ve got news for you: The Fracking Boom was in fact busting jobs, as “ it costs a lot of money to drill, but it doesn’t employ a lot of people, and much of the income is siphoned off to shareholders.” So, “despite the huge increase in shale gas production over the past decade, the vast majority of the 22 counties experiencing the drilling boom also experienced “economic stagnation or outright decline and depopulation.” 

• We’ve often spoken about “net-zero” pollution targets and the offsetting mechanisms and “nature-based solutions” companies and governments will rely on to deliver them but nothing tells the story as starkly as the news that Shell’s 2050 net-zero target actually involved them expanding their production of fossil gas by 20%, exposing the potential or indeed inevitability of this sort of thing happening. It was a bad few weeks for Shell, who prior to their much-ridiculed announcement had been ordered by a Dutch court to pay damagesto Nigerian farmers for oil spills between 2004-2007. 

• The fact is that fossil fuels have got to stay in the ground. From a climate perspective, it’s crystal clear. But it is also clear from a very immediate global health perspective: a new study has linked 1 in 5 deaths worldwide to fossil fuel air pollution.

• Unfortunately, a lot of states around the world have invested their funds into National Oil Companies (NOC), and are continuing to do so, even though the oil majors are lowering their price estimates. With the energy transition speeding up, these state oil firms risk losing 400 billion dollars that could have been spent on healthcare, education or other things that aren’t silly and actually help their citizens. The result could be the worsening of global inequality, as most of the NOCs are located in nations with 280 million people live below the poverty line.  

• Rather than transitioning away from deadly fossil fuels, we’re seeing a renewed push for dangerous false solutions. The latest nonsense is from the Swedish State-owned Space Company that is involved in the development of solar geoengineering technology that would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth. Our governments would rather fight the sun rather than changing our economic system!  

• Greenland possesses some of the world’s largest oil and gas and mineral reserves.Currently, there are about 70 active large-scale exploration and exploitation licenses in Greenland – which could turn into active extraction projects very soon. 141 NGOs have come together urging the Danish government and European Union to issue a moratorium for mining and oil and gas extraction projects. 

• Our friends at 350 have written a really important brief on how the climate movement have gotten it wrong in how to speak on climate migration. Even if it was well-meaning,  climate groups using “crisis language like ‘mass migration’, ‘unprecedented migration’, ‘waves of migration’ feed into this perceived  ‘fear factor’ or ‘threat narrative’ and will be used to justify treating those that have been forcibly displaced by a rapidly warming world with walls, bullets, drones, cops, and cages.” Here is how to fix it.

• If you want more detail on how to talk about climate migration (for example, because you’re interested in joining our comms group), feel free to read thisbriefing.

• In case that you haven’t read it yet, check out Framing Climate Justice, an amazing project on how our movement can better frame climate change as a human and a justice issue. Read it and join our comms working group straight after!

Also, our friends in the Asian movements have sounded the alarm this lunar new year – if you’d be interested in helping them out from a UK perspective, click here.