It’s Getting Hot In Here

Leadership is contagious. President Nasheed of the Maldives delivered a powerful speech yesterday at the opening of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, which included leaders from Bangladesh, Barbados, Bhutan, Ghana, Kenya, Kiribati, Maldives, Nepal, Rwanda, Tanzania and Vietnam and other countries. The focus of his speech was to bring attention to the dire consequences of coming out of the Copenhagen Climate Talks this December with a weak or non-binding agreement. His words speak for themselves:

Members of the G8 rich countries have pledged to halt temperature rises to two degrees Celsius.
Yet they have refused to commit to the carbon targets, which would deliver even this modest goal.
At two degrees we would lose the coral reefs.
At two degrees we would melt Greenland.
At two degrees my country would not survive.
As a president I cannot accept this.
As a person I cannot accept this.
I refuse to believe that it is too late, and that we cannot do any about it.
Copenhagen is our date with destiny.
Let us go there with a better plan.

Nasheed called on all nations to push for carbon neutrality in order to ensure the survival of his country and all the most vulnerable people around the world:

After all, it is not carbon we want, but development.
It is not coal we want, but electricity.
It is not oil we want, but transport.
Low-carbon technologies now exist, to deliver all the goods and services we need.
Let us make the goal of using them.

Finally, he made the distinction between what might be considered a good deal in Copenhagen, and one that would ensure the end of his people:

At the moment every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible.
They never make commitments, unless someone else does first.
This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide.
We don’t want a global suicide pact.
And we will not sign a global suicide pact, in Copenhagen or anywhere.
So today, I invite some of the most vulnerable nations in the world, to join a global survival pact instead.

Today, President Nasheed and leaders from vulnerable countries around the world signed a declaration calling on developing countries to up the ante and develop using clean energy and sustainable technology, and for rich nations to commit to fast and deep carbon reduction paired with significant assistance to poor nations.

Let’s join with heads of state from the most vulnerable countries in calling on our leaders to go to Copenhagen and sign a fair, ambitious, and binding deal that gets us back to 350ppm. Anything less would be a suicide pact. Leadership is contagious, and we can be the virus.

The world including the sea level, climate, and landscape has been shaped by the power of ice for billions of years.  And now, as we’ve pushed co2 concentrations well beyond historical ranges (at least the range of the last 800,000 years), ice is becoming harder to find.  There’s even the potential that earth may become ice free in the near future.  I never really thought much about ice and it’s importance in my life and the lives of others, and most of my interactions with ice involve ice cubes and freezer burn. And, although some people may never even interact directly with ice, “one quarter of Earth’s population will within another decade be affected significantly by lesser snowfall and glacial ice loss.  That number translates to two billion people–and most of them live in Asia.”

“A World Without Ice” is a new book by Henry Pollack that examines geological, biological, and human history and how it has directly and indirectly been shaped by ice.  This historical context (from billions of years ago and even into 2009) creates a foundation that prepares the reader for not only to understand the importance of ice in our earth’s system but also the huge and immediate threat posed by the current climate crisis to humans and all species on earth.  Pollack is a scientist, has been a professor for more than forty years at the University of Michigan and was a member of the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.   read on for more on the book, the opportunity to send in questions for the author and the chance to win a copy of the book!

Continue reading ‘A World Without Ice’

from Bill McKibben:

Were thinking of our friends in El Salvador today, like these these girls scouts at a 350 rally.

because a truly nasty hurricane, Ida, just blew through the tiny country, leaving more than a hundred dead, and many still missing in mudslides triggered by massive rains, in some places measuring more than 15 inches. The country’s president said today:  “the damage sustained by our country is incalculable.” Ida is now in the Gulf of Mexico, and may make landfall in the United States later this week.

Student organizers working with Cascade Climate Network (CCN), Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG), Sierra Student Coalition (SSC), and student groups at the University of Oregon hosted Power Shift West ’09, which began Friday, November 6 and went through Sunday, November 8. The three-day event featured educational workshops; special guests including Rep. Jefferson Smith, Rikki Ott, and Pete Sorenson; opportunities for participants to learn more about organizing local groups to advocate sustainable living practices; and a capstone march through the streets of Eugene.

Backbone Campaign brought props from “Procession for the Future” and built model wind turbines with participants at the conference. Participants raised a banner measuring 15′ x 30′ foot giant banner with helium powered weather balloons as the grand finale.

Over 500 students and youth from Oregon and 13 western states attended to promote four primary goals:

• Pass a strong climate bill and negotiate a strong International Climate Treaty in Copenhagen
• Generate support for a high-speed rail corridor from Eugene to Vancouver, B.C.
• Mobilize local community groups to address sustainable living practices
• Unite regional campuses to advocate plans to move beyond coal usage

“There’s never been a better time to become more educated and involved in promoting clean, renewable energy in our communities,” said Jeremy Blanchard, a core organizer and a UO student Senator. “The national success of Power Shift depends on the action we take locally, and we’re encouraging students and young peole to actively communicate with their local and state representatives so that our generation’s voices are heard in the halls of Congress.”

Student activists from thirteen states across the West coast converged to learn skills and netowrk with peers around clean energy solutions and climate change. Some traveled from as far away as Alaska to build a grassroots movement for sustainability and global warming solutions.

Continue reading ‘Power Shift West sends ripples across 13 states’

As politicians and diplomats try to crush expectations from the Copenhagen negotiations next month, young people across the world are stepping up their efforts to preserve the hope of a legally binding, science-based, equitable agreement to secure the survival of all nations and peoples.

Since rising to the task of co-leading the UK Youth Climate Coalition last year, I’ve learnt that when our generation understands what is at stake, and what is necessary to build a safer, better future – we are capable of truly great things. Being more connected, more informed and more savvy than ever before, youth all over the world have unprecedented power to make this a reality. And the bonus of having a good time while doing it? That’s just part of the package!

Amongst those young people making their lives count are 23 individuals from the UK who will be travelling overland to the Copenhagen talks. They will be bringing energy, optimism and a fighting spirit to a process that will surely be remembered with shame in years to come. Their story is being told in parts on youtube, here is the first chapter. 

Yesterday, the fight against new fossil fuel infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest rose to a new level.  For years, a remarkable coalition of activists – ranging from wilderness advocates, to small farmers and timber growers, to college students and climate organizers – has been fighting proposals by giant energy companies to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) into our region.  LNG is a foreign fossil fuel extracted from through basically the same processes as oil, with all or most of the attendant social and environmental costs.  Thanks to the energy-intensive process of supercooling the gas into liquid form so it can be shipped across the ocean and then re-gassified once it reaches its destination, LNG also has a carbon footprint much larger than North American natural gas.  Finally, the pipelines associated with LNG terminals would cut through salmon-bearing streams and Mount Hood wilderness areas, while decimating small farms and tree plantations across Oregon, all in order to deliver gas to the mammoth California market.

In response to this travesty against the climate, natural ecosystems, and the property rights of Oregon landowners, activists on Thursday launched a major campaign targeting Northwest Natural Gas – the one company that may stand to benefit more than any other from opening Northwest markets to LNG.  The new Hey! Northwest Natural campaign is now pressuring the monopoly gas company to pull its support for the Palomar Pipeline, which would connect the proposed Bradwood LNG Terminal to an existing gas pipeline pumping gas to California. Continue reading ‘Hey, Northwest Natural – LNG’s a Climate Crime!’

Posted on behalf of Jay O’Hara of the Leadership Campaign

Copenhagen looms like Russia over Sarah Palin’s horizon, and it is easy to get discouraged that negotiations aren’t going to accomplish what needs to be done: our federal government will not pass laws that will meet the demands of physics and chemistry, our President is making speeches full of rhetoric and bereft of policy, and the tops of new mountains are being blown off.

Now is the time for serious actions and strategies that advance our goals.

In Massachusetts, students and community leaders have joined together to lead us out of the wilderness and off the road paved with good intentions. The Leadership Campaign is demanding their state show the nation and the world that it is possible to implement sound policies based on the science of 350. And, they are putting their bodies on the line to do it, working to Repower Massachusetts with 100% Clean Electricity in the next decade. They hope to move legislation forward before international talks begin in Copenhagen December 7.

Continue reading ‘Hope and Action in Massachusetts’

It was a really powerful experience to sit up on stage at the 350.org press conference in Barcelona this afternoon with Ambassador Dessima Williams from Grenada and Dr. Victor Fodeke, the head of the Nigerian delegation, and talk to the media about the growing 350 movement. I started getting into climate activism when I was a college student in Vermont, mostly working with other students from the US. To be here in Barcelona, just a few years later, talking with the international press side-by-side with ambassadors from Nigeria and Grenada is honestly a bit hard to comprehend.

Or at least until I exited the press room and caught another glance of all of our 350 photos lining the walls of the convention center (I put one of my favorite pictures from Barbados in the Caribbean below).

You’ve built an incredible, vibrant, and uplifting movement in mere months and opened up the doors to all sorts of new possibilities. At the press conference, both Ambassador Williams and Dr. Fodeke spoke passionately about how inspired by October 24. And the reminded all of us that it’s back at home where the real work gets done. That’s where we set the agenda and build the public pressure that will make a deal possible. The most important place this year isn’t Copenhagen — it’s your home town.

There’s still plenty of work to be done, that’s for sure, but we’ve created powerful new alliances this week. Let’s keep this movement moving!

Aliens at UN. Credit: Robert vanWaarden - vanwaardenphoto.com

On the final day of the UNFCCC negotiations in Barcelona, the last meetings before the world turns it’s eyes to Copenhagen, the Avaaz Action Factory formed a coalition with the aliens from Planet B (you read that right). The aliens were on a dire mission to find climate leaders who are willing to do what it takes to achieve a fair, ambitious and legally binding climate treaty in Copenhagen. Unfortunately it looked like there were very few climate leaders at the Barcelona negotiations. The 10 aliens searched high and low outside the conference center, greeting negotiators as they arrived. To the aliens dismay most negotiators identified themselves as NOT being climate leaders. In fact, ONLY negotiators from Bangladesh told the aliens they were here in fact  because they were climate leaders.

As the talks in Copenhagen wrap up, nations like the US, Australia, most of the EU refuse to take the steps science deems necessary to avert a climate crisis. The main strategy coming from negotiators seems to now be to dramatically downplay any possibility of achieving a just treaty in Copenhagen. Now that’s ambitious leadership. Golf clap.

Confused as ever by the lack of evidence of any ambitious leadership the two aliens decided to sneak up to the delegation offices and ask the inert negotiators why no ambition, why no binding treaty, why just no no no. It was time for an intergalactic intervention! The aliens swung by the EU offices, they weren’t interested in ambition. Next they swung by the UK negotiation offices (video), no ambition there either. However, the UK sound like big fans of they new idea of “politically binding” (oxymoron, um hmm) instead of legally binding, a concept the aliens, or I, care to entertain. Finally the aliens spotted the US offices , surely the ambitious nation that brought us the Mars rover and shooting a missile at the moon would be willing to lead the world in achieving a treaty to curb climate change. Oh, funny naive aliens. They were dealt a strong dose of US reality when the delegate didn’t even want to talk to the extraterrestrials .

Continue reading ‘Looking for Climate Leaders? None here…yet’

This is a guest post by Jen Row ’11 of Williams College.

I am- as are a growing movement of over 80 people from around the world are beginning a hunger strike as a moral reaction to climate change.  The international Climate Justice Fast begins this Friday, November 6th and will continue throughout the December climate conference in Copenhagen.

The movement is inspired by leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King who took personal non-violent actions to address gross injustice present in their societies.

The US government’s inaction on climate could well go down as the greatest injustice against humanity in history, allowing the world’s most vulnerable people, and even our very own children, to suffer at the hands of an irreversible catastrophe they played no part in causing.

In fasting, we are sending not only an alarm, but expressing hope and belief in the innate sense of right and wrong within every person.  But we need your help.

Continue reading ‘Are U.S. students ready to take a moral stand on climate change?’