A People's Climate Plan for New York City

A PEOPLE’S CLIMATE PLAN FOR NEW YORK CITY CLIMATE ACTION LAB 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 3 ABOUT THIS PAMPHLET 4 EXTREME CITY, JUST TRANSITION: LANDSCAPES OF CLIMATE ACTION IN NYC 12 POPULAR PLANNING: THE PLAN IS THE PROCESS 16 ARENAS OF STRUGGLE IN CLIMATE PLANNING: ENERGY, FOOD, WASTE, HOUSING 22 ARTS, CLIMATE JUSTICE, AND CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS 26 THE CITY AFTER CLIMATE CHANGE: Q & A WITH VANESSA KEITH 29 ACTIVATING CUNY AS AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR POPULAR CLIMATE PLANNING 30 SPECULATIVE DEMANDS FOR A PEOPLE'S CLIMATE PLAN, NYC 32 AN ECOSOCIALIST GREEN NEW DEAL: GUIDING PRINCIPLES 35 ORGANIZATIONS & BIBLIOGRAPHY LAND ABOUT THIS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT PAMPHLET The meetings of the Climate Action Lab (CAL) devastation. We stand in solidarity with the This is a living document. We are releasing the Devised in a spirit of militant cooperative research took place at the Graduate Center of the City Lenape people —here and in the diaspora—and all first version today, September 20, 2019, in at the juncture between the public university and University of New York, located on the island those fighting for the return of Indigenous lands, solidarity with the week of Climate Strike actions urban social movements, this pamphlet is not of so-called Manhattan. This place-name is a waters, and air in the face of settler complicity, that will be taking place in New York and across aimed at putting forward a single programmatic distorted settler-appropriation of the Lenape state repression, and corporate violence. In the world. This pamphlet emerges from the plan for the city—hence the question mark at the name Manahatta. CAL acknowledges that CUNY so-called New York and beyond, Indigenous work of the Climate Action Lab at the Graduate end of the title, intended to signal an ethos of as a “public” educational institution stands on communities—including those arriving in this city Center, CUNY. It crystallizes a year-long series of both critical interrogation and radical imagination. occupied Indigenous land, expropriated from the from beyond the colonial boundaries of the settler workshops during the Fall of 2018 and Spring Instead, it provides a snapshot of our work over Lenape by European colonizers beginning in the state—have been on the frontlines of struggle of 2019 with activists, researchers, and artists the past year and its underlying principles in the early 17th century. This protracted process of against border imperialism, gentrification and intended to reimagine climate politics through hope that it can function as a vehicle for sharing dispossession lies at the origins of New York City climate crisis. the lens of the city as both the frontline impact research, developing questions, proposing ideas, as a hub of global capitalist accumulation, and zone and the potential source of grassroots and building relationships that could in turn it coincides with the forced arrival of enslaved Any discussion of popular climate planning in alternatives informed by the principles of climate contribute to a city-wide process for generating African people on this land. Stolen land, stolen this city must begin with an acknowledgement justice. a People's Climate Plan. Any discussion of a labor, and stolen lives form the foundations of of —a nd a commitment to dismantle—the People's Climate Action Plan must confront this city. From the beginning, this foundational contemporary dynamics of settler-colonialism. Inspired in particular by Aurash Khawarzad's the following key question: who or what is the violence has been met with militant resistance In their concentrations of land, infrastructure, Upper Manhattan Project (which in turn has its People? We take up this question in more depth and practices of liberation. resources, and visibility, universities—especially roots in the 2015 WE ACT for Environmental in "Popular Planning" (p. 12-13), and, on page those animated by nominally progressive “public” Justice's Northern Manhattan Climate Action 29, we propose a future role for the CUNY system CAL acknowledges that settler-colonialism is not a missions such as CUNY—have a responsibility Plan), this pamphlet aims to promote ongoing as a potential infrastructural support for a city- one-time event sealed in the past, but an ongoing when it comes to the imperatives of climate conversation, organizing, and speculation about wide popular climate action planning process structure that underpins contemporary racial justice, reparations, and Indigenous land popular climate planning at a city-wide scale in in the coming years. We welcome feedback capitalism, white supremacy, and ecological restoration. ■ New York. on this document at climateactionlab@gmail. New York is an exemplary "extreme city" in com, and please save the date for a city-wide its globe-girdling finance sector, its outsize assembly devoted to popular climate planning contributions to climate crisis, its inequalities on Saturday, November 16th, at the People's of race and class, and the uneven distribution Forum, 320, West 37th, NYC. ■ of climate risk amongst its populations and Climate Action Lab was developed with support from the Andrew neighborhoods. But the city also reflects the W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative vibrancy of its many communities, the immense Research at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate diversity of cultural traditions that enliven these Center of the City University of New York. We are immensely communities, and the militant responses to grateful for their staff for all the help they provided. oppression born in these locations—both in the past and today. EXTREME CITY, JUST TRANSITION: THINGS ARE HEATING UP. THE city government. In 2014, hundreds of groups from around INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON the city, the country, and the world assembled in Manhattan for the People’s Climate March (PCM). Based in decades of CLIMATE CHANGE WARNED LAST environmental justice work by grassroots community groups, AUTUMN THAT THE WORLD MUST the PCM was informed by the principles of the nation-wide LANDSCAPES OF DRASTICALLY LOWER CARBON Climate Justice Alliance, and, at a local scale, the New York EMISSIONS IN THE SPAN OF JUST OVER City Environmental Justice Alliance, comprised of groups like A DECADE OR RISK CATASTROPHE. Uprose, El Puente, and Community Voices Heard. During this period, New York has been an intensive hub for As the planet nears critical environmental tipping points, the organizing, research, art, and action around climate justice. A capitalist system that is pushing us towards apocalypse is itself climate justice framework insists that any efforts to address LIMATE CTION in crisis, generating obscene wealth for the 1% and increasing C A the planetary crisis of global warming must start not with misery and discontent for the rest of us. the generic idea of the Anthropocene--which holds an empty, But opposition to this ecocidal agenda is mounting. Frontline universal idea of “humanity” responsible for the crisis--but communities around the world, including Indigenous people, rather with a political and economic analysis of the uneven urban and rural environmental justice organizations, and distribution of both carbon emissions and climate vulnerability IN EW ORK ITY progressive labor unions, have raised compelling demands along lines of race, class, gender, and geography. Climate N Y C for a Just Transition taking place at multiple scales and forms. justice sees capitalism, and the imbrication of capitalism Cities, especially in the global North, are integral to the climate with settler-colonialism, slavery, neo-imperialism, and white crisis, both in their massive amounts of carbon output, and, supremacy as the historical backdrop and driving force of in many cases, their vulnerability to extreme weather events. climate change. Therefore, it calls for climate activism to be Like responsibility for emissions, climate vulnerability in cities intertwined with struggles against these broader forces, insisting is distributed unevenly, exacerbating longstanding patterns that the de-carbonization of the economy must also involve of precarity and dispossession along lines of race, class, and the decolonization of land, water, and air following the lead gender. New York City exemplifies the logic of “extreme cities,” of Indigenous struggles, as well as an embrace of reparations which came to a head with Hurricane Sandy in 2012. as advanced by the Black liberation movement in the United States and Third World solidarity networks around the world. Since Hurricane Sandy, several trajectories of action to address climate crisis in New York City have been advanced With this horizon in mind, anti-capitalist social centers like by governmental and nongovernmental actors. In 2015, for Mayday Space, Woodbine, and the People’s Forum have joined example, the De Blasio administration released OneNYC, a the landscape of community spaces and local organizations in strategic climate plan designed to address the shortcomings recent years. Students, artists, journalists, and mediamakers of Bloomberg’s earlier PlanNYC. While asserting the need for have joined with direct action organizers in mobilizing against urban climate policy to address economic inequalities, OneNYC pipelines, standing in solidarity with Indigenous struggles failed to aggressively address the power of the real-estate at Standing Rock and elsewhere, keeping the pressure industry. It thus presented the grim prospect of a “green” city on elected officials at city, state, and national

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