>>9532002

As Divestment Movement Collapses, Activists Shift To Campaign Trail

A new anti-fossil fuel group with plans to sway the 2018 vote in Western states like Nevada and Colorado, has formally launched a campaign to deploy an “army of young people” to push climate change and renewables issues in an effort to assume the mantle of the fading campus divestment movement.

Through social media posts, emails, and a newly released video, the “Sunrise Movement” outlines its multi-state campaign of trainings and offers of full-time activism for the 2018 election, targeting politicians for an anti-fossil fuel campaign and paying special attention to one oil and gas company in particular: Exxon.

Sunrise itself has direct ties to the divestment movement. Prakash led her campus’s UMass Fossil Fuel Divestment campaign for two years and later worked for the Divestment Student Network (DSN) coordinating various divestment campaigns throughout the country. DSN is a project of the Alliance for Global Justice, which has received grants from 350.org and the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, and also has ties to Occupy Wall Street.

Several other staffers are alums of their own campus’s divestment movements, while others have volunteered for organizations like 350.org and Climate Truth.

https://westernwire.net/as-divestment-movement-collapses-activists-shift-to-campaign-trail/

>>9532002

Global Warming

The Well-Funded Environmental Extremists Of The Sunrise Movement Are Gaining Within The Left

Photos recently popped up on Twitter of young activists supergluing themselves across passageways within the U.S. Capitol in the hopes of prompting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other House Democrats to declare a “climate emergency.” These fresh-faced, khaki-wearing rapscallions belong to a group called Extinction Rebellion, or XR, one of several organizations the Momentum Community and its parent, the Boston-based Ayni Institute, “incubated.”

Founded in the United Kingdom, Extinction Rebellion now has more than 50 chapters across the United States and hundreds more around the world. Like XR, the Sunrise Movement is dedicated to advancing climate change legislation worldwide, including declaring climate emergencies.

In fact, its use of terms such as “climate emergency,” “climate justice,” and similar inventions has been underway since at least the mid-2000s. It has shifted the discussion on climate change policy from practical environmental policy to a moral imperative by linking it to issues such as equality of the sexes, migration, and racial divisions.

The theatrics of the XR and Sunrise activists are just that: rehearsed, premeditated, and anything but spontaneous. Climate change guru Bill McKibben of the older group 350.org and his colleague Margaret Klein Salamon, author of a manifesto titled “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode,” already wrote the script for this play.

In her polemic, Salamon attempts to reframe the discussion entirely: “Climate justice” is no longer just a moral cause but an Armageddon-like struggle for survival against survival. Like wasteful civilians during World War II, the greedy carbon-emitting industries are contributing to the “enemy” threat of extinction.

Salamon promotes this analogy in the manifesto, and now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is echoing it. Salamon’s document opens with the following rhetorical question: “Imagine there is a fire in your house. What do you do? What do you think about?” Fifteen-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg uses the same analogy in many of her opening remarks.

McKibben and his ilk already had the ear of powerful corporate sponsors such as Avaaz (which took donations from BP, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to the tune of $200,000 to $25o,000 per year since 2013, to his nongovernmental organization 350.org. Their global Divest-Invest campaign has attracted the support of the far-left mega-donor Wallace Global Fund (WGF), an organization founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s socialist Vice President Henry A. Wallace (other accounts claim his son Robert founded it).

It is easy to forget that McKibben was a senior backer of the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign and was even on the senator’s five-member delegation to the Democratic National Committee’s platform-drafting meetings that year and fumed about the DNC’s refusal to adopt his proposals in Politico. Like Sanders, McKibben has settled in Vermont and is an environmental science professor (through an endowment) at Middlebury College. The position was created through the Schumann Foundation Center for Media and Democracy, which receives funding from the Open Society Foundation (George Soros) and the Tides Foundation.

The Activism Academy and Its Bankrollers

What is the connection between young activists with XR and Sunrise, and the celebrity environmentalist academic McKibben? One would be naive to think the relationship is merely one of inspiration. That is what McKibben would have the public believe. He even claimed earlier this year that it was Sunrise that was hatching the Green New Deal, although it was adopted from previous proposals by the U.N. Environmental Programme and New Economics Foundation.

In fact, several of Sunrise’s founding activists are alumni of 350.org, including its most visible spokesperson Varshini Prakash and founding president. Its initial officers Evan Weber, Matt Lichtash, and Michael Dorsey had all been affiliated with either Occupy Wall Street or the Sierra Club. Wallace Global Fund also awarded its Henry A. Wallace Award to the Sunrise Movement this year.

Through the Ayni Institute, activists from these and other “grassroots” movements are trained in digital age adaptations of the same organizing tactics Saul Alinsky taught. The institute’s director, Carlos Saavedra, admits this. He proudly touts his training through Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/09/well-funded-environmental-extremists-sunrise-movement-gaining-within-left/