Part I: To Strike, or Not to Strike, Will County Workers go for Broke?
Part II: Are Climate Activists Frustrated after the Glasgow Climate Summit?
Will 1400 county workers represented by the Service Employees International Union 521 be going on strike? A list of demands was presented to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors at their meeting this morning. One unusual demand was that the county lower their overall carbon footprint and have a plan to go carbon neutral. Veronica Velazquez is president of SEIU, local 521 and works for the county. She will be joining host Chris Krohn for an update on this breaking news story today…is a strike imminent?
On the second half, Santa Cruz resident Becca Richey has just returned from the Cop26 Climate Summit in Glasgow Scotland. She’s a member of the group, “Climate Clock,” which seeks to ramp up the pressure on world leaders to respond to the climate crisis. Find out what she learned in Scotland and if climate activists are making any headway on the ultimate goal of trying to limit future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ronnie D. Lipschutz is Emeritus Professor of Politics at University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught from 1990 to 2020, and Co-director of the Sustainable Systems Research Foundation in Santa Cruz (https://sustainablesystemsfoundation.org/). He received his Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC-Berkeley in 1987 and an SM in Physics from MIT in 1978. He teaches and writes about energy, resources and social sustainability, foreign policy, global politics and sociology, politics and popular culture, and surveillance society. He is the author/co-author and editor/co-editor of numerous books and articles. His most recent book, with Dr. Doreen Stabinsky, is Environmental Politics for Changing World—Power, Perspectives and Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).