By Ben Jealous | Trice Edney Wire

On Juneteenth, I traveled to the Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s plantation outside Nashville, to celebrate Black music. Neither Juneteenth nor Black music had ever been celebrated there before.

Lela Harris flew in from Maryland. She descends from Alfred, born enslaved on that land. When freedom came, he chose the name Jackson for himself. He asked to be buried beside the president, and he was.

She stood on that same ground and spoke. Other descendants of the enslaved came too. Hundreds of Black folks. Hundreds of White folks. Likely the largest gathering of Black people there since slavery ended.

Lela grew up with a tradition. Her family believes they descend from Andrew Jackson himself. Others say that cannot be, that Jackson fathered no children. The family carries the story. The records carry a silence.

My cousins are the Hemingses of Monticello. For centuries they said they descend from Thomas Jefferson, through Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his wife. They were told it was impossible. Then the science proved them right.

I told the crowd to call each other cousin, and I meant it plainly. If your family has been in Tennessee or Virginia a long time, the odds are good that — Black, White, or Native — you are kin to people who do not look like you. All afternoon you could hear it across that lawn. “Hey, Cousin!”

Cris Corley is an eighth-generation Tennessee farmer. His family included soldiers who fought alongside Andrew Jackson, and he grew up proud of that. Cris has fought for racial justice in Tennessee. He teared up that day.

Cris remembers when his elementary school in Alexandria, Tennessee, was desegregated.

A White father stormed in, using a slur for the Black children and swearing his kids would never sit beside them. The principal knocked him down where he stood. He decided that was better than letting a man block the schoolhouse door. Young Cris agreed.

The good people won that day.

Cris has a friend, Charlie High, who fights beside him today. Charlie remembers his own father coming home from the courthouse one day, excited. He had watched Diane Nash and the students from Fisk stand their ground. His dad then marched his young White children around the living room, the way Nash had marched, and praised them.

I am proud of the Hermitage team for not flinching, for digging into the hard questions instead of hiding from them. It is why I tell people we must step into the gray. We have always been more connected, and more human, than the history books let us believe.

Juneteenth was the right day to remember all of it. In a single instant, the government stopped calling human beings property and started calling them the political equals of the men who had owned them. There may be no other holiday that marks a turn so complete and so sudden.

So we stood on sacred and stained ground, and we sang, and we called each other cousin. We cannot control what was done to us, or for us. We control only what we build now.

Ghosts cannot heal us. Only we can do that.

The oldest truth my grandmother, Mamie Bland Todd, ever taught me was this: our people were always free. Strange, from a woman with three grandparents born into slavery. But it is both a basic Christian principle and a law of nature.

Her third great-grandfather carried that same fire. His name was Richard Bland. In 1766, he published a pamphlet asserting that very point against the British crown: under English government, all men are born free, regardless of what the King said.

Richard owned people even as he wrote it. His blood runs on both sides of the line. Two of his grandsons were half-brothers. They shared a father. One was born free. The other, Frederick, was born enslaved, six years the elder. Two brothers. One father. One owned the other.

That is my family. That is the country.

Our cousin, President Thomas Jefferson, had a word for that freedom. He wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among them: liberty.

Unalienable. It cannot be sold, surrendered, taken away, or even granted. And like the Blands, his family owned their own kin. His words outran him too.

From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to the civil rights movement, the fight was never to “win” our freedom. It was to make a nation finally recognize what was already true: freedom is a right of all humanity. Period. Full stop.

As we mark 250 years as a nation, that is still the work. To finally defend the freedom of every last one of our cousins. Because that is what we all are.

Hey, Cousin!

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

Based on reporting by Seattle Medium.

By Ben Jealous | The AFRO

Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania. This week he discusses America’s ability to lead the clean energy revolution.

The Biden-Harris administration is making bold moves to ensure America leads the global clean energy economy of the 21st century.

We are at the crossroads of our country’s next major shift in trade policy and domestic manufacturing that will define our economy for decades. The last time we were here was more than 30 years ago. I was helping to organize the movement to stop the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The framework being put forward this time, by the current administration, is the anti-NAFTA moment American workers have been waiting for. I am organizing in support of it.

The tariffs announced this month on electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, batteries, semiconductors and materials like aluminum and steel are part of a broader regime of policies and investments creating the foundation for America’s leadership in the next economy.

These tariffs are part of a smart, targeted approach that stands at odds with the flailing, nonstrategic approach of his predecessor. They show the president understands the threats posed by China and has the courage to take them on in a real and impactful way.

And the administration gets that tariffs are just one piece of the puzzle. In his remarks at the signing ceremony for the tariffs, Biden highlighted his bipartisan infrastructure law’s investment in building 500,000 EV charging stations nationwide and the “thousands and thousands of jobs” it would create. The tariffs will help ensure the aluminum, steel, solar panels, and other components and materials for these charging stations are American-made. And that means even more good American jobs.

NAFTA cost our country hundreds of thousands of jobs and devastated America’s manufacturing sector. By contrast, Biden’s trade policies, coupled with other policies and investments, have the power to create a green jobs boom and birth a new manufacturing renaissance. Companies have already announced over $825 billion in private sector investments in US manufacturing and clean energy since Biden took office. All of this is key not only to long-term job creation, but to stopping China’s domination of the next economy.

A future in which China holds all the economic cards is one in which climate change is allowed to run rampant. Even though manufacturing in the United States is 3.2 times more carbon efficient than manufacturing in China, China has a grip on more than 80 percent of the world’s solar manufacturing. China produces 58 percent of all new electric vehicles sold worldwide. In 2022, China accounted for about 59 percent of global primary aluminum production and 54 percent of the world’s crude steel production.

All that manufacturing is energy intensive, especially for steel and aluminum. And in China that energy comes primarily from coal – the dirtiest energy source there is.

China is the world’s largest consumer of coal – with 56 percent of global consumption in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. That coal reliance makes carbon emissions from Chinese steel production as much as double that from American steel. It adds to the urgency of seizing market share from China and using our own domestic manufacturing to help expand the market. And it is why the president paired his tariffs on Chinese solar with tariffs on aluminum and a $500 million investment in the first aluminum smelter in the US in 45 years. Imagine that new aluminum plant being built with modern protections against pollution and powered by American-produced solar panels made with the plant’s own aluminum. That is what President Biden imagined. And he is making it happen.

The Chinese government has not played fair. It overproduces in order to flood global markets. It has leaned on exports of “bifacial” (basically, two-sided) solar panels, which were foolishly exempt under the Trump-era solar tariffs – with 98 percent of Chinese solar panel imports to our country now being bifacial. And the Commerce Department is now investigating how China has allegedly used countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Thailand as pass-throughs to route solar products to the US and evade tariffs.

The Biden administration’s trade policy in this area can help make China more of an honest broker. But even that is no substitute for owning the manufacturing and supply chains of the staple goods that will power our next economy. And let us not forget the national pride Americans once felt in the products invented and built by American hands.

The US automobile industry is a great example. The future of automobiles is electric. If we do not invest heavily in US EV production, we cede important ground to our primary global competitor. And we leave behind the current and future auto workers who will benefit from robust domestic EV production. But President Biden’s policies once again show he has the whole picture in mind. He is not simply putting a tariff on EV’s and expecting us to dominate. He is investing in the supply chain and protecting it – with tariffs on the aluminum, steel, semiconductors, and chips that are all vital to EV manufacturing (EVs use twice as many chips as gas-powered cars).

At the end of the day, we must invest in domestic growth of the industries at the center of the emerging global economy. If we fail, we allow China to dominate that economy and risk taking steps backwards in our efforts to curb climate change and save our planet. The Biden administration is showing its keen understanding of what is needed to tackle that challenge and build a strong future for American workers at the same time.

By Ben Jealous

Thanks to 20th century aquariums and marine theme parks, orcas – also known as killer whales – are the most iconic whales in America. 

When the public learned their captivity involved torture, orca shows disappeared from those parks, as they should have. Now there are signs that certain groups of orcas could disappear entirely. 

Significantly, many of the orcas captured – including the famed Shamu – came from a small population of orcas whose trusting nature made them easy to catch. Southern Resident orcas, which historically spent the summer and fall months in Washington’s Puget Sound, are down to only 75 left in existence. Designated as “endangered” as of 2005, the Southern Residents remain one of the most critically endangered marine mammals in the United States. 

But it’s a different human activity that is now making it hard for these creatures to survive.

Dams that were constructed decades ago along the Columbia and Snake Rivers have greatly disrupted the populations of sockeye salmon – also now listed as an endangered species – that the Southern Residents depend on as a primary food source. 

The impact of the loss of salmon has been devastating not only to the orcas, but to the Indigenous peoples of the Columbia River Basin whose culture and livelihoods were closely tied to the fish, and to ecosystems from Idaho to the Pacific Ocean. 

Four of the dams on the Lower Snake River are among the most harmful to the salmon. The removal – or breaching – of the Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite dams could bring back the fish and, in turn, give the Southern Resident orcas their best shot at a thriving future and growing numbers. 

One of the fiercest leaders on Capitol Hill in the fight to get rid of these dams is Republican Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho. For nearly three years, Simpson has been pushing his Columbia Basin Initiative as a framework for salmon recovery and the restoration of the Lower Snake River to a natural, free-flowing river. 

In today’s hyper-partisan political environment, people might be surprised that a Republican is leading the charge to protect endangered wildlife. But 50 years ago this month, it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA). 

Both Rep. Simpson’s tenacity and the ESA’s 50th anniversary serve as reminders that environmental stewardship and conservation wasn’t always assumed to be a partisan issue. In 1973, the US Senate passed the ESA unanimously; the House passed it by a vote of 355-4. Can you imagine any piece of legislation getting near-universal bipartisan support in Congress today?

When he signed the bill into law, President Nixon said the law would preserve an “irreplaceable part of our national heritage – threatened wildlife.” Those words have proven prescient.

 It’s estimated that, in its first 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has saved 99 percent of all the species listed as endangered under the Act from permanent extinction. These include the bald eagle – our national symbol – as well as the humpback whale, the grizzly bear, and the American alligator.

And it’s likely a testament to the effectiveness of the ESA that the Southern Resident orcas are still with us too. But it’s going to take both the strength of the ESA and shutting down the dams to save these whales.

Many of us might recall that in 2018 a female member of the Southern Resident clan made national news after her newborn calf died. The orca, known as J35, spent 17 days pushing the body of her baby through the water along a 1,000-mile stretch off the coast of British Columbia. It was a clear act of mourning – known behavior of orcas. But the length of time the mother pushed her calf and the dramatic nature of the display almost seemed intentionally aimed at getting the attention of humans – which it did.   

It’s no wonder that people – myself included – feel an intense connection to these animals. The Lummi Nation, who has lived and fished alongside Southern Residents since time immemorial, call them “qwe lhol mechen”, which roughly translates to “our relations beneath the waves.” And a fish, that people love to eat but might not recognize as important to the survival of other lifeforms, is the key to saving this community of orcas, among the most majestic and intelligent creatures in all of God’s creation. 

The story of the orcas and the salmon shows the interconnectivity of species in our natural ecosystems. It further illustrates the dire need to combat the extinction crisis and protect endangered species. And it shows the importance of protecting laws like the Endangered Species Act and passing more of them – as well as shutting down the damn dams. 

Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

The post The Story of the Orcas and the Salmon, on the Endangered Species Act’s 50th Birthday appeared first on Chicago Defender.

By Ben Jealous | Chicago Defender

If you live in Detroit or another part of Michigan where there’s a looming threat of bodily harm from fossil fuel pollution, it just got a little easier to breathe a sigh of relief … and to maintain your ability to breathe in general.

The historic Clean Energy Future Package and Clean Energy and Jobs Act, just recently signed into law by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, will greatly accelerate the state’s transition to the exclusive use of clean power sources like wind and solar.

That’s a victory for Michiganders and for the country’s goals of slashing the pollution that fuels climate change and harms our health. It’s also a major win for environmental justice, hard-hit communities in a state, and workers.

Michigan’s codified commitment to fighting the pollution driving climate change is inherently good news for the communities of color that bear a disproportionate burden of the effects of the crisis, and the benefits go even further. New incentives in the bills to make buildings energy efficient will have an outsized positive impact for these communities, where a higher number of the homes are old, drafty, and not energy efficient.

Finally, air pollution from many of the power and industrial plants, which are also disproportionately located in these communities, will be reduced by the state’s mandates for clean energy. This is huge for all Michiganders, and especially for those communities where public health is suffering from pollution.

The Detroit tri-cities area – encompassing Detroit, River Rouge, and Ecorse – and other parts of Michigan experiencing the worst air pollution are predominantly Black or Black and Latino. The Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review has pointed out that within the two zip codes that make up Southwest Detroit alone, “there are more than 150 facilities that emit toxic fumes, gasses, chemicals, and particulate matter.”

Black residents make up 80% of one of those zip codes, 48217, a statistic noted at an October gathering of activists, near the Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s refinery in Southwest Detroit, by Ember McCoy, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, in discussing the disproportionate impact of air pollution on the city’s residents.

According to 2019 figures from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, adult residents of Detroit were 46% more likely to have asthma than the statewide average. And within Detroit, Black residents were hospitalized for asthma three times as often as white residents. And that’s just asthma.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says this type of pollution is also known to increase rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurological and immune disorders, and other health concerns. And, as McCoy also noted at that Detroit panel discussion, “certain pollutants, when combined, as they are in the air, are worse together than they are alone individually … but we still measure them and regulate them as if they’re acting separately.”

So, yes, a lot still needs to be done. Especially in terms of how these chemical and particulate pollutants are regulated at the federal level. Still, we shouldn’t lose sight of the positive action that states like Michigan are taking right now and the example it sets for other states.

There’s a lot to be hopeful about in the clean energy bills’ impact on public health. The bills also set a powerful example for how to help ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels with strong protections for labor. Part of the clean energy package is the creation of the Community and Worker Economic Transition Office.

The office will develop a plan and coordinate efforts to address the impact on workers in the shift from fossil fuels to renewables, helping to ensure that no worker is left behind. By delivering historic federal action in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has already given states a powerful way to capitalize on massive federal investments in their economies and a green future for us all.

That’s exactly what Michigan is doing, and doing it right. In addition to the billions that Michigan has already secured in federal investment dollars, a recent report by the Michigan-based 5 Lakes Energy shows that passing the 100% clean energy legislation could mean over 160,000 additional quality jobs over the next decade and $7.8 billion more in investments by 2050, which is more than twice what Michigan would expect to receive without enacting these policies.

Thanks to the IRA, states now have an unprecedented opportunity to address the harm done by climate change while also jumpstarting economic development, creating jobs, moving towards energy independence, improving the health and lives of their residents, and leading on environmental justice.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free.”

The post How the Clean Energy Win in Michigan Provides a Roadmap for Other States appeared first on Chicago Defender.

By Ben Jealous

Forever home. That’s how folks from Aurora I met last week describe the houses they bought outside Denver. 

Now those dream homes are caught in what may be America’s most dire urban fracking nightmare.

Over the last year, residents have discovered, and began a grassroots challenge against, a plan to erect 174 10-story-high oil wells that stretch horizontally underground for thousands of feet. 

The project is to be built next to a pristine, vital reservoir that hugs ON the city’s edge and shares its name. Nearby communities without reservoirs buy their water from Aurora. The snowmelt-fed water is so clean you can drink it while you swim in it. 

That all could change fast. Civitas, an oil company whose biggest investor is the Canadian equivalent of the Social Security Administration, wants to frack — inject water, sand, and toxic chemicals underground to free oil — under the reservoir, neighborhoods, and close to a Superfund toxic waste site. The entire area in the proposal is more than 33,000 acres with one drilling pad within 3,000 feet of a neighborhood. 

What started as a Facebook page grew into a full-fledged campaign involving residents and allied environmental groups pushing city, county, and state officials to stop the fracking proposal from moving forward. Residents only learned of the plan when Civitas started trying to acquire the mineral rights under their houses and common areas controlled by homeowners’ associations. 

When they go to a hearing, “it’s the suits versus the t-shirts” says Marsha Goldsmith Kamin, referring to the blue shirts she and other opponents wear. Kamin and her husband learned about the fracking proposal after they moved in November to be closer to their three grandchildren. Opposing the wells amounts to a full-time job for the retiree now. 

In Colorado, like most Western, states access to water remains a contentious issue. As its name suggests, the leading opposition group Save the Aurora Reservoir leads with the threat to drinking water for much of metro Denver.

Beyond the direct threat of fracking under and around the reservoir, the proposed wells will demand billions of gallons of water that end up so polluted they’re lost to other uses. So Aurora, which has experienced recent droughts, would see precious water used to produce fossil fuels that are accelerating climate change that can make water even more scarce. 

The fracking would worsen Denver’s poor air quality as well. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised its concern about ozone levels in the Rockies’ Front Range from serious to severe last year. The proposed wells would emit thousands of tons of “volatile organic compounds” and nitrogen oxide that make up ozone. 

The Superfund site, created by a now-closed Air Force base and city and county dumping, could be an unlikely hero in the story. The EPA won’t allow fracking under the unlined landfill, and more recently has raised questions about the impact of fracking close by on the already leaking site’s structural integrity. Opponents hope that federal concern will help sway regulators in Colorado.

Opponents have made progress. Civitas agreed to move five well sites. The county commission, which narrowly defeated a drilling halt this week, is considering closing loopholes to its oil and gas ordinances to ensure no development within a mile of the reservoir. U.S. Representative Jason Crow wrote to commissioners reiterating residents’ concerns. 

But Save the Aurora Reservoirs activists are learning how far powerful interests can tilt the playing field. Civitas needs mineral rights from fewer than half of the property owners to force fracking on the rest. While the city has a one-mile setback preventing drilling near the reservoir, opponents must fight for the same from the county. 

“We think it’s so obvious that the downside is so much greater than the upside. But it feels like so much of the structure – the laws and regulations and approval process – are really working against us,” says Julie Huygen, an Air Force veteran who moved to Aurora two years ago.

Kamin said she’s fighting for the grandchildren she relocated for. She’s energized by her eight-year-old granddaughter’s desire to take part. “She asked me, if they do that to the ground, where are the prairie dogs going to go?”

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

The post Protecting Their Dream Homes from a Fracking Nightmare appeared first on Chicago Defender.

By Ben Jealous

As someone who’s been organizing since I was a teenager, I can tell you that it’s hard to get people to focus on two things at once. Pick a real need and work on it in real time – that’s the way to win people over.

We saw this play out when President Biden announced he would seek re-election. Considering the record, Biden’s presidency has been a consequential one. Employment is as high as before COVID. While inflation is higher than in recent memory, it’s basically a third of what it was last June.

He’s made mistakes around supporting fossil fuels drilling, but President Biden has attacked the three things driving the climate crisis – vehicles, methane and power plants. And he has time to finish the job as he said in the last State of the Union Address by curbing further fossil fuel expansion.

So why was a common response to his announcement handwringing about an “enthusiasm gap” among key voting groups – Blacks, Hispanics, and young people? The White House can’t seem to cut through the clutter to convince people it has solved a real need in real time, even when it has.

The real need for many continues to be economic stability. I’ve talked to people in every region of the country in the last five months. Many continue to feel the only economic mobility slopes downward. It’s something that President Biden and Congress actually have done something about.

They’ve made unprecedented commitments to spend hundreds of billions to take a giant step toward keeping the Earth cool enough to stay livable. It’s our generation’s equivalent of the Apollo moon missions. The changes will happen over a decade, their benefits may take even longer to see.

But there will be immediate impacts, and that’s what is giving people the solution they need. Incentives for school systems to buy electric school buses and families to buy electric SUVs? Jobs. Home energy efficiency programs? Jobs. Tax credits for private sector investment in clean energy? Jobs.

The one thing we need to bring attention to and to protect are the jobs that come from reshaping the economy from destruction to renewal. They are good-paying jobs that in many cases don’t require a college education, the kind of jobs that have made the American middle class flourish. They employ mechanics, construction workers, electricians, technicians, and people to support their work. And whether it’s the most dollars invested, or most jobs created, the states benefitting are among the reddest politically.

It makes sense that flipping the economy in this way would be a growth engine. The biggest subsidy our country ever gave private industry was allowing it to designate certain places and certain people disposable. Poverty is what has always driven people to trade the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the land they love for a paycheck that feeds and house them and their families. Turning that past on its head will create a lasting prosperity, one that doesn’t count on fuels extracted from under another country.

Opinion research makes clear that Americans care about the environment and will vote to protect it. They care about jobs more. For those of us fighting to reverse the climate crisis and leave a healthier, safer planet to our children, from the White House to a local rally, we must show people that a cleaner economy tomorrow brings jobs they want today.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

The post Addressing the Real Need in Real Time appeared first on Chicago Defender.