Calendar

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Feb
5
Sun
Film Clips and Discussion: A Rising Tide @ New Parkway Theater
Feb 5 @ 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Be the first to see clips of our new film, “A Rising Tide” with Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife and film director, Cheryl Fabio’s fireside chat.

“A Rising Tide” is SWFCenter’s new documentary about Alameda County unhoused children and families.

 

“It is in your hands, to make a better world

for all who live in it.”

-Nelson Mandela

*Proceeds from this event help fund film completion

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Discussion: Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth! @ Omni Commons
Feb 5 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

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Feb
6
Mon
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 6 all-day

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Press Conference: Support Black Women @ Oscar Grant Plaza
Feb 6 @ 9:00 am – 10:00 am

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Tyre Nichols Block Party Vigil @ Oakland Tech
Feb 6 @ 11:15 am – 2:00 pm

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SF Public Bank Forum @ Online
Feb 6 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Register at bit.ly/sfpbc-forum

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Feb
7
Tue
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 7 all-day

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Feb
8
Wed
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 8 all-day

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Feb
9
Thu
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 9 all-day

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What is the Role for Hydrogen in the Energy Transition? @ Online
Feb 9 @ 10:00 am – 11:30 am

To register:  https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEof-isqzsvHtIz_YFVwpOvckDgM_0W_J1f

This 90 minute workshop will equally emphasize factual evidence on hydrogen from Professor David Cebon, and strategic communications advice from a global communications group’s hydrogen specialist, to help provide the wider climate community with an understanding of hydrogen, topline key messages, and tools to navigate this complex topic.

As natural gas has increasingly become a politically divisive topic on the global stage, many of the world’s economies are desperately looking for ways to speed up the energy transition.  Oil and gas companies have reciprocated by latching on to the “hydrogen economy” as an exit route for their business in an environment where they are under pressure to evolve.

Through intensive political lobbying, hydrogen has shot to the forefront of the climate debate in the past few years.  Politicians are now touting hydrogen as a central piece needed to unlock the energy transition, allowing oil and gas companies a seat at decision-making tables and a silver bullet tactic to buffer out their net-zero plans.

But while hydrogen as a silver bullet solution to natural gas sounds alluring, what does the evidence actually tell us about its role in the energy transition? And how can we best organize as a global climate community to strategically communicate about this complicated subject?

AGENDA:

  • Introductions and objectives of the session
  • What is hydrogen?
  • What role can (and should) hydrogen play in the energy transition?
  • Why is hydrogen strategically important in the global energy transition, and what is the current media narrative?
  • How can we, as climate activists, communicate about hydrogen?
  • Opportunities, threats, and things to watch
  • Breakout questions and group discussion

SPEAKERS:

  • Professor David Cebon, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Cambridge, England
  • Kaliana French, Senior Strategic Communications Associate, Hydrogen, the Global Strategic Communications Council.
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EFF Talk: Fog Data Science – data broker to law enforcement @ Online
Feb 9 @ 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm

https://eff.org/EFA-2nd-Thu
Join us for a talk from EFF staff technologist Will Greenberg on Fog Data Science� a data broker which has been selling raw location data about individual people to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.
You can get a head start on the topic by checking out our blog series on the topic here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/inside-fog-data-science-secretive-company-selling-mass-surveillance-local-police

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Justice 4 Willie McCoy @ Starbucks
Feb 9 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

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Feb
10
Fri
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 10 all-day

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International Peace Activist: A Lifetime of Peace Work: Medea Benjamin @ Online
Feb 10 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

moderated by Dr. Maya Soetoro

Join us to learn from Medea Benjamin who will describe her work to stop wars and activism in the United States, Palestine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. She will also share how college students can participate in these issues.

About Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin is an internationally recognized peace and human rights activist. She is the co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women For Peace. Both organizations have trained dozens of interns in challenging the US government’s war propensity and have enabled young activists to work in conflict areas to gain a better understanding of the effects of U.S. government policies including economic war through the use of sanctions. Medea is the author of 10 books including books on Drones, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Her latest book is “War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless War.”

About Dr. Maya Soetoro

Dr. Maya Soetoro is the Graduate Chair at the Matsunaga Institute for Peace at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was previously the Director of the Matsunaga Institute where, in addition to leading outreach and development initiatives, she also taught Leadership for Social Change, History of Peace Movements, Peace Education, and Conflict Management for Educators. Maya also serves as a consultant to the Obama Foundation, working closely with their international team to develop programming in the Pacific-Asia region.

Sponsor: Matsunaga Institute for Peace, Veterans For Peace-Hawaii Chapter, and Hawaii Peace and Justice

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/international-peace-activist-a-lifetime-of-peace-work-tickets-528391171217?aff=ebdsoporgprofile#search

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Feb
11
Sat
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 11 all-day

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South Berkeley Walking Tour for Black History Month
Feb 11 @ 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

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Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: Cannibal Capitalism @ Online
Feb 11 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.

For our February meeting we are reading Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It (Verso, Amazon) by Nancy Fraser.

A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite—and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world.

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital—and starve it to death.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Previous readings have included Doughnut EconomicsLimitsBanking on the PeopleCapital and Its Discontents, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, The Deficit Myth,  Revenge Capitalism, the Edge of Chaos blog symposium , Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, The Optimist’s TelescopeMission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Exploring Degrowth, The Origin of Wealth, Mine!, The Dawn of Everything  A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Beyond Money, and Less is More.

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Feb
12
Sun
Sf Independent Film Festival
Feb 12 all-day

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Sunday Morning at the Marxist Library: Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. @ Online
Feb 12 @ 10:30 am – 12:30 pm


Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.

Our speaker is Yusuf Gürsey who is originally from Istanbul, Turkey and currently lives in New Haven, CT. He is a member of the CPUSA, as well as a member of the US Peace Council in Connecticut and a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Marxist Education centered in Cambridge, MA. After retiring from being an associate professor of physics in Turkey, he studied graduate level linguistics online at the Virtual Linguistics Campus broadcast from the University of Marburg in Germany. He is an independent researcher, translator and interpreter. His fields of interest in linguistics are historical linguistics (specializing in Turkic and Semitic languages), phonology and socio-linguistics. He is also currently engaged in research in the study of calendars and the history of Middle Eastern peoples, the medieval period and the history of modern Leftist movements.

The current talk will concentrate Joseph Stalin’s “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics” and the language policies of socialist states and some other leftist movements.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81133350622?pwd=dUUyUWppbWt6djVTaElISUhocXpSUT09

Meeting ID: 811 3335 0622
Passcode: ICSS2717rs
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CA Biomass Plan Threatens Climate and Environmental Justice @ Online
Feb 12 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Register here

Learn about a plan to destroy California forest land and increase pollution—here and overseas—by producing “biomass,” a false climate solution that does more harm than good.

The plan is to produce wood pellets to burn in for energy that’s supposedly “renewable,” because trees absorb carbon dioxide when they grow back—disregarding the fact that the CO2 from burning wood is all released immediately, while it takes many decades for a new tree to absorb that much. We don’t have that time!

Golden State Natural Resources is proposing to build two of the country’s largest wood pellet production facilities in California’s Lassen and Tuolumne counties, using wood obtained by cutting and removing “trees and other forest materials, of any type and size . . .within a 100-mile radius of each pellet facility.”

The wood pellets would then be transported by rail to ports in Stockton and Richmond, where they would emit methane, dust, and fine particulate matter. From there they would be shipped overseas to burn in power plants converted from coal, releasing CO2 and co-pollutants.

At this webinar, speakers including Gary Hughes of Biofuel Watch will explain the dangers of this plan and the efforts to stop it.

In a comment letter on the scoping plan for the environmental impact report on this project, the Center for Biological Diversity and other organizations, including Sunflower Alliance, wrote: “Wood pellets are a highly polluting, expensive, and inefficient energy source that have no place in a clean energy future. Burning wood for electricity releases more carbon emissions at the smokestack than fossil fuels, including coal, per unit of energy produced.

“Numerous studies show that it takes many decades—to a century or more (if ever)—for cut forests to re-sequester the amount of carbon that is emitted from logging and burning woody biomass for energy, even when forest “residues” (i.e. “waste”) are burned. Producing wood pellets is extremely carbon-intensive because the wood must be debarked, chipped, dried, pulverized, and compressed into pellets. . . Wood pellet production facilities also emit toxic air pollution that harms public health. These facilities are often concentrated in communities of color and low-income communities, worsening environmental injustice.”

For deeper dive on the proposed California project and the perils of biomass, check out this recent episode of Terra Verde on KPFA.

Take a look at how biomass projects contribute to old-growth forest destruction in Canada here.

Find an inspiring story about how North Carolina communities defeated a proposed biomass plant here.

Take action:

If you’re interested in joining a work group to organize opposition, please email action@sunflower-alliance.org

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