We Stand in Opposition to Line 3!

Speech giving by Andrew Josefchak, member of the Anti-War Committee,  at the Army Corp of Engineers protest organized by the Climate Justice Committee on 5/18/22

My name is Andrew, I’m with the Anti-War Committee, and I was asked to speak a little bit about the connections between the struggle against US imperialism and the fight for environmental justice. These issues are inseparable. Actions taken by governments and corporations in the pursuit of profits are the direct, immediate cause of the rising temperatures, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, mass extinction and ocean acidification that we’re facing today. And it’s US corporations and the US military, which enforces corporate interests, that cause the majority of carbon emissions and pollution in order to make an exceedingly small group of people unfathomably rich. And that comes at the expense of the global working class.

I think it’s common knowledge by now that the United States regularly wages wars for the express purpose of sating the military-industrial complex’s thirst for oil. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Iran — these are just a few countries that the US has either invaded or subjected to regime-change operations in our quest to open up new sources of oil, in order to keep it flowing and keep it cheap for the benefit of big business.

But it isn’t just that US industry needs oil to keep the wheels greased and the money flowing in. The US also wants to ensure its own dominance of the world’s energy supplies. This is one of the real reasons that the US has been engaging in a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine joining NATO. We’ve levied massive sanctions on Russian oil and pressured other NATO countries into doing the same, what has of course spiked oil prices. But this doesn’t mean the US is going to start moving away from oil, no, this has led the Biden administration to double down on oil by pursuing a policy of “energy security.” This means more oil drilling, the repeal of environmental regulations, more fracking, more destruction of our planet, so that we can simultaneously keep guzzling down oil and destroy the Russian economy at the same time, all while making countries around the globe even more dependent on US oil exports.

The consequence of this will be further entrenchment of the US economy in oil production and consumption, at exactly the time that we most desperately need to be ridding ourselves of the stuff. More than that, our government is now dumping almost $50 billion dollars into its proxy war with Russia, $50 billion that needs to be spent on sustainable infrastructure, green energy, green jobs. Biden is killing all hope of any kind of a Green New Deal before our very eyes.

And it’s not just countries thousands of miles away that the US is destroying in order to keep the oil flowing. In the case of Line 3, the US may not be invading to seize oil supplies directly, but it is invading the territory of a sovereign people — what the US itself recognizes as a sovereign people with its own borders! — in order to ensure the cheap and easy transport of that oil, despoiling land in the process and destroying natural resources that indigenous people rely on for their livelihoods. Do you see a meaningful difference here? I don’t! Anti-imperialists and environmental justice activists have to recognize that our struggles are one and the same, and stand together in opposition to Line 3.

No war for oil! Keep it in the soil!