In the Netherlands, Workers and People of Color Are Raising the Alarm Over the Climate Crisis

It’s important that this action is taking place in the Netherlands – a country with a disproportionate role in accelerating climate change. It is home to Europe’s largest oil and coal harbors – Rotterdam and Amsterdam, respectively – while the gas field based in the northern province of Groningen is also the biggest on the continent. The Netherlands is also the birthplace of oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell, which has been responsible for 1.8 percent of all the CO2 ever produced by human civilization. Today, it produces 1 percent of all CO2 emissions worldwide annually. In fact, the fossil giant’s role in greenhouse emissions has long been at the center of climate justice campaigns. A few years ago, for example, the Shell Must Fall campaign was launched, echoing the decolonizing Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa. As campaigners pointed out, the parallel was especially fitting, given Shell’s history as a union of British and Dutch colonial interests in the Middle East and beyond (…) In Leiden, supermarket union activists have taken a leading role in the local coalition. Despite considerable logistical limitations, organizers have formed an alliance of various local political groups and community members. This has provided an opportunity to form links not only between climate justice activists involved in XR and FFF, but also those fighting for an increase of the minimum wage (the Voor14 campaign), those fighting racism in the area – including the long-standing tradition of blackface – as well as LGBT and feminist campaigners. Teaching staff and students from the University of Leiden have joined. They are currently taking their managers to task over the university’s fossil fuel investments with the Never Mind Warm Sweaters campaign – a name mocking the university’s former dean, Carel Stolker, who encouraged staff and students to turn down the heating and wear a warm sweater instead in order to fight climate change. Stolker, however, remained silent on his institution’s investments, and on the fact that when students staged a die-in against Shell on his campus, the police were called in.

Malia Bouattia in In the Netherlands, Workers and People of Color Are Raising the Alarm Over the Climate Crisis (Jacobin)