OCCUPY BIDEN

FOSSIL FUEL FREE IS THE WAY TO BE!

The week after Christmas 2021, a coalition of climate activists united with the groups listed below, gathered near president Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home to propose that he assert executive privilege, declare a climate emergency and stop all new fossil fuel projects. Occupy Biden is a non-partisan, non-violent effort to demand that the Biden administration take action on climate change NOW!

• Grandparents Climate Group

• 2021 Grandparents Walk for their Grandchildren and Mother Earth

• Beyond Extreme Energy

• Build Back Fossil Fuel

• Extinction Rebellion Delaware,

  Philly, Richmond, VA and NYC

• Sunrise Movement Delaware and Baltimore

• Fridays For Future, DE

• Working Families Party

• Honeybee Kitchen and Market

• Democratic Socialists of America

• Climate Mobilization

• Philly Water Protectors

• Seeds of Peace Catering

• Marcellius Outreach Butler (PA) aka MOB

• The Green Party of Butler and Venango Counties

• Code Pink

• Peace, Justice, Sustainability Now!

• YES Youth Environmental Summit

• Third Act

• Veterans for Peace

• Gamers for Peace

• Delaware Riverkeeper

Biden has the power to change the world for the better within his grasp via constitutional executive orders which, according to lawshelf.com, enable a president to “issue an executive order to bypass Congress’ bureaucracy and advance policy objectives without having to go through the legislative process.” For example, as Lee Camp points out on scheerpost.com, Biden could make college tuition free, eliminate student debt, stop corporations from using tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes, close Guantanamo Bay, end federal prosecutions for marijuana, and give everyone in American free healthcare right now. These are just a few of the many socially transformative executive actions he could take, but as Lee Camp emphasizes, won’t.

At the beginning of last year, on February 4, 2021, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his congressional colleagues Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Representatives Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez (D-NY.), introduced a bill that would require President Biden to use his executive powers to take another significant action he has so far refused to take: declare a national climate emergency under the National Emergencies Act. The “long-shot resolution” has little chance of success in a congress deeply divided along partisan lines, but the effort does at least reveal that some denizens of the “Swamp” understand the gravity of global warming.

President Biden has power, lots of power, and as Heather Cox Richardson documents in Letters from an American, on Substack.com, he has used that power in many positive ways. Since he took office on January 20, 2021, just two weeks after the January 6 storming of the Capitol, “we have been engaged in a great struggle between those trying to restore our democracy and those determined to undermine it,” she writes. Among Biden’s many achievements in facing this challenge, Richardson also notes that the president “committed to restoring our democracy after the strains it had endured” by invoking the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of vaccines, “working with the states to establish vaccine sites and transportation to them, and established vaccine centers in pharmacies across the country.” Richardson also praised Biden’s commitment to the Afghanistan war withdrawal operation and his efforts to repair the economy shattered by the pandemic. On the economic front she cited Matthew A. Winkler’s report in Bloomberg that the nation is “outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century, and with good reason: America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years.”

These are laudable achievements, but his constitutional obligation to ensure the well being of the nation by declaring a national climate emergency and stopping all new fossil fuel projects at this juncture in the global warming dilemma, arguably the two most important issues affecting the future, not only of America, but of all mankind, remains unfulfilled. The focus of the Occupy Biden coalition is to expand citizen awareness of the crisis and demand that the U.S. government act NOW on the issue of climate change.

Declaring a climate emergency would be an act of cosmic justice, necessitated by ecological reality and aligned with the spirit of democracy, but Biden has often demonstrated during his long political career that he stands in opposition to these values and pledges allegiance instead to the agendas of the multinational corporations and the masters of war, the very forces that have driven mankind to the brink of catastrophe. As of New Year’s Eve, the final night of Occupy Biden, Green New Deal Network Campaign Manager Rachel Gregoire reported that the president “has not yet met the demands of this occupation. He has not declared a climate emergency, even as Delaware legislators echoed this demand. He has not committed to ending new fossil fuel projects.” Undaunted, the encampment mobilized one more act of solidarity for climate justice on a rainy New Year’s Day and in Gregoire’s words, “took to the streets as a unified force to stand with and for life on Earth.”

Extinction Rebellion for its part has declared “non-violent rebellion against the U.S. government for its criminal inaction on the ecological crisis,” stating the organization’s demands as a three-step process: 1. Governments must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.

2. Governments must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

3. Governments must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

For more, go to Extinction Rebellion