Prioritizing Survival: Why Climate Change Is Our Most Urgent Concern
On June 25th, the 2021 National YDSA Convention was called to order. I wasn’t a delegate, but rather an excited observer, impatiently waiting to see what progress would be made. This convention was an opportunity for YDSA to coordinate our actions on a national scale, consolidate our messaging, and most importantly, set our priorities as an organization.
As YDSA delegates introduced and debated a long list of resolutions, our country was experiencing horrific and deadly climate catastrophes:
In the Northwest, never-before-seen heatwaves were causing mass crop failures as well as widespread dehydration and heatstroke, claiming the lives of nearly a thousand vulnerable people. People who suffered from chronic medical conditions like heart disease, people who couldn’t afford air conditioning, people whose only mistake was being old in a society unwilling to protect them.
In California, raging wildfires were tearing through our national forests, destroying 142,477 acres and 119 homes. This month, the hottest reliably recorded temperature in the history of humanity was recorded in the state: 130ºF, which incidentally is the internal temperature of a medium-rare steak. Our country is being grilled alive.
And in our own backyard, in Southeastern Michigan, we saw apocalyptic images of cars abandoned in flooded streets, entire houses inundated up to their chimneys; the livelihoods of the poorest, hungriest, and most needy Michiganders drowned in one of the worst man-made disasters in our state’s history. In Michigan, one of the results of the climate crisis has been a stunning 44.2% increase in annual precipitation since the year 1951. And as the frenzied fossil fuel corporations continue to flood our skies with deadly greenhouse gases, our government at every level has failed to pass significant emissions regulations and neglected to prepare for the impending climate onslaught.
Our state government, for example, has completely abdicated its responsibility to maintain critical drainage infrastructure, earning a failing D- grade on stormwater management in a recent infrastructure report card. Nowhere was this chronic lack of preparation more evident than in our low-income communities of color like Dearborn and Hamtramck, where the sluggish relief effort left thousands of residents deep in debt as a result of extensive property damage.
Across our country, while working-class Americans were suffering from the disastrous effects of our myopic and uncompassionate capitalist economy, our young delegates met to discuss what YDSA’s priorities were going to be. Among the items of discussion was Resolution 9, an ecosocialist resolution sponsored by Emerson Bannon of Miami University of Ohio. The resolution fundamentally aimed to establish climate action as one of our main organizing priorities. Importantly, it was the only resolution that discussed climate change, and its goals were ambitious and consequential. The resolution outlined a new national Ecosocialism Campaign that would comprise a centralized national climate-propaganda strategy as well as localized, region-specific action. Some of the proposed local actions include climate strikes, disaster relief efforts, pipeline resistance, and strategic pushes for clean energy expansion. For our YDSA chapter on campus, this would mean working with Detroit DSA to provide aid to flood victims, collaborating with local groups like the People’s Food Co-op to encourage students to buy local produce, and leading issue-oriented campaigns to achieve a carbon-neutral university and city.
It was the perfect moment to declare that we care about working-class people in our country who’ve lost so much, to say that we are in this fight together and that an injury to any working person in our country is an injury to us all. With no limit on the number of resolutions that could be passed at the convention, we should have been poised to come together and overwhelmingly pass this resolution on climate action.
Yet, at this critical moment, a majority of our national delegates rejected Resolution 9, deciding instead to prioritize other political issues. While YDSA must focus on a wide range of political struggles, the climate crisis stands apart as a uniquely important fight that intersects with food justice, racial justice, and economic justice. Long-standing wrongs can be righted and bad policy can one day be repealed, but a failure to halt climate change would render every other political fight futile. What good is it to fight for civil rights if we don’t have a civilization to live in? That’s what the struggle against climate change is about: fighting to maintain some form of organized human life on our planet. And as we are seeing now, working people are and will continue to be disproportionately the victims of climate catastrophe. As the climate crisis progresses, we will see more heatwaves, more wildfires, more flooding, more “once-in-a-lifetime” storms, more destruction, more death. These changes will further entrench income inequality as the rich use their wealth to insulate themselves while the poor are abandoned to fend for survival.
Ask yourself: When Texas was slammed by a “freak” ice storm, who was left to freeze to death while the “Ted Cruzes” of the state fled to vacation resorts in Cancun? More than 700 Texans lost their lives during that man-made crisis, most of them average, working-class people who just weren’t prioritized in the disaster response effort. That is sadly the norm in this country and many others. The rich, who are the advocates and profiteers of the fossil fuel industry, are protected and prioritized while the poor are ignored and left for dead. If we are to claim the title of Democratic Socialists, friends of all working people, it is absolutely vital that we prioritize climate action.
While the ecosocialist resolution failed, its vision doesn’t have to. The core of the proposal is localized action and while it would have been nice to have support from a nationally coordinated campaign, we at YDSA at UMich have no shortage of allies to call on for support in undertaking our own ecosocialist campaign. In fact, we’ll be joining our friends at the Huron Valley DSA (HVDSA) Ecosocialist Committee who have already launched a transformational campaign called Ann Arbor for Public Power. It’s a project to completely rid our city of the corporate monopoly DTE by acquiring and democratizing all of DTE’s energy infrastructure in Ann Arbor. The pathway to doing this is entirely legal and the result would be the creation of a public power utility that we, the people of Ann Arbor, control completely. That means that we will no longer be beholden to the rich DTE executives who have been polluting our air and poisoning our water with one of the dirtiest fuel mixes in the country while they consistently overcharge us to do so.
Although this campaign’s focus is Ann Arbor, its implications are enormous. If successful, Ann Arbor for Public Power will serve as a blueprint for how other DSA and YDSA chapters can run grassroots campaigns strong enough to overcome powerful corporate interests. It will be a huge win for our community, for YDSA, and for every young person of our generation because DTE’s stranglehold on our state will finally be challenged.
I joined YDSA to organize for transformational causes like this. Like all of you, I want to do my part in making our world a better place. I remember when I first read the YDSA slogan: “A Better World is Possible.” It’s a powerful statement that evokes action and optimism. What I’ve come to realize, however, is that its optimism is not blind. The phrase doesn’t read “A Better World is Coming.” It’s not a promise that regardless of what we do and what our priorities as a movement are, a better world will magically materialize. Rather, it is an incomplete statement, one that we must finish ourselves. A better world is possible, but only if we fight for it.
