On this day 98 years ago, June 13, 1926, Labour and environmental giant Tony Mazzocchi was born.
You can read his wikipedia entry here.
Here’s what Noam Chomsky had to say, once.
It’s not easy, but if you say, “Well, we haven’t gotten where we wanted; I’m going to quit,” you just guarantee that the worst is going to happen. It’s a constant struggle. Take, say, Tony Mazzocchi — one of the heroes of modern labor, head of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers [International] Union, one of the first serious environmentalists in the country. His constituents at the front line were being murdered by pollution, destruction of the environment, and so on. This is in the early seventies, way before the environmental movement took off. His union was working toward dealing with the environmental crisis, and it moved on to try to establish a labor party in the nineties. It could have worked, but it didn’t make it.
Jacobin – https://jacobin.com/2021/06/noam-chomsky-class-war-universal-health-care-climate-justice-denuclearization
And there’s this, too.
https://laborhistoryin2.podbean.com/e/june-13-tony-mazzocchi-is-born
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 327.5ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
Also on this day.
June 13 1963 – Revelle, Von Braun and Teller talk futures
June 13, 1988 – “‘Greenhouse Effect’ Could Trigger Flooding, Crop Losses, Scientists Say”
June 13, 2008 – activists stop coal train, throw coal off. Convictions eventually quashed…