Rising Up For Justice: Ending Our Reliance on Oil

Upgrade your subscription now to access the EXTENDED CUT of this interview, not available to anyone except Rising Up paid subscribers.

Subscribe for as little as $4 a month (5-day free trial)

FEATURING COLLIN REES - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, my guest is Collin Rees, the U.S. Program Manager at Oil Change International. Oil Change is working to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, support grassroots resistance against dirty infrastructure, end public support for oil, gas, and coal, and wind down fossil fuel production with a just and equitable transition.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, let's first talk about the main goal of ending fossil fuels and our reliance on it. This is a huge, huge goal, right? It's as huge as, or perhaps huger than most things that we're talking about, you know, on the scale of fixing democracy, et cetera. And it's also one on which we have so much at stake, the existence of our species. So how do you go about achieving this goal? Give us a sense of your approaches to ending our reliance on oil. 

Collin Rees: Yeah. it is not a small goal, and I think we're aware of that but we think it's a really critical one. And I think the flip side, I think we'll talk more about that, the fact that this is so much work needed to make a transition happen, that the way that energy and oil and gas in particular touch our lives happens in so many ways. It's such a sprawling problem to confront, means that we have so many allies and that we can work alongside other movements for justice alongside so many people working to build a better world. 

Because at the core, that's what we're working to do. We are working to stop this existential threat to communities and to humanity. But we are doing that in order to build a world where everyone can thrive. And so I think about the work that we do in a couple different spheres. 

Specifically, we're a nonprofit. We have some expertise, and in particular, we have a lot of research and data and analysis expertise. So, research and data is one component of what we do. 

I wanna be very clear that we do not think research and data alone can defeat the fossil fuel industry. and so we are very clear that that research and data has to be combined with people's movements, with working directly with people's movements to create change.