It’s Getting Hot In Here

This morning a group of youth climate activists attending the UNFCCC negotiations in Barcelona stood in solitary with actions in over 18 developing countries including Bangladesh, Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mexico, India, Nepal, and Nigeria to name just a few. Community groups from these regions converged on local Saudi Arabian embassy’s delivering letters and holding protests to call for Saudi Arabia to stop obstructing progress and support the position of developing nations in the negotiations, rather than stymie them.

In just the last few days in Barcelona, Saudi Arabia has managed to undermine and block consensus several key issues that are important for developing countries. They tried to remove language that would specifically support poor and vulnerable countries; they delayed progress on adaptation discussions; they were the only country to block consensus on having an additional negotiations session; and they even were the only country that said that there is no need to agree on a numerical global goal for emission reduction.

Continue reading ‘Saudi Arabia, Don’t Trade Climate for Oil.’

Cross posted from Grist

By Nell Greenberg, Rainforest Action Network

Last week, blasting began on Coal River Mountain in West Virginia. This is a part of the country where dynamite routinely goes off—turning the region’s historic mountain ranges into dust for the tiny coal seams that lie beneath their surface.

But Coal River Mountain is special, or, rather, you can decide whether it becomes special. Right now, Coal River Mountain represents the best and worst our country has to offer. It is one of the most dangerous examples of blasting for dirty coal and one of the most profound examples of hope that exist in our country. It is a crossroads.

Coal River Mountain can be a wind farm that provides 85,000 households with electricity, creates 700 long-term green jobs, gives back $1.7 million in annual county taxes and stands as a model for clean energy across coal country. Or, it can be a 6,000-acre dirty energy wasteland.

Stretching across thousands of acres of diverse and pristine hardwood forests, Coal River Mountain is one of the last intact mountains in the vicinity. It is also home to some of the few remaining headwater streams that have not been polluted with heavy metal-laden mine waste. To local residents, the mountain is a last stand.

When blasting began on Coal River Mountain this week, explosives began going off less than 100 yards from the largest coal sludge impoundment in the country. To put this in perspective, we are talking about more than eight billion gallons of coal slurry held back by an earthen dam. Were the dam to fail, and it has happened in the past, hundreds of people would have less than five minutes to save their lives.

Continue reading ‘Blowing up our clean energy future’

If you are a youth climate activist, if you have been to a Powershift conference, and/or if you read this blog, you have seen some of these amazing images that are on display, right now, in front of delegates at the Barcelona intercessional meetings –only one month before Copenhagen. (click “read more” to see them up!)

I wanted to take a moment and share this work, and also a message from my amazing co-worker, Robert van Waarden:

“Youth have been documenting the movement on the front lines of the global climate crisis and now, we are bringing our message to negotiators at Barcelona.

For years now, the global youth climate movement has been organizing, building momentum and strength, and influencing the debate through our actions, documentation, and networking from the front lines of the climate crisis. Actions by individuals have inspired groups and movements across Earth to fight for a dependable, stable climate. It is the issue that defines our generation.

Continue reading ‘Youth Climate Photographer Shows at Barcelona Negotiations’

So reads the Diamondback article in today’s paper. I’m also told we got covered by another local paper and by NPR (scroll down to middle of the page). In the past College Park elections student turnout had not broken 50 voters total, but I counted 80 students in our march alone, and there were many students in class during the march, but that voted with assistance from our group’s candidate interviews that we gathered over a two month period, as well as our endorsements. I am very confident in saying we turned out over 100 students for the day voting in a bloc for candidates that were the strongest based on our Green Platform. All in all, we endorsed 7 out of the 9 available seats if you include the Mayor, and 5 out of 7 were victorious(see results). This includes the rare election of a graduate student candidate who was very strong on our issues.

Continue reading ‘UMD for Clean Energy Proves the Skeptics Wrong with March to the Polls’

Written by Will Fischer, student leader at Washington University in St. Louis.

Something loud is afoot on our sleepy campus in St. Louis. Washington University students are beginning to re-discover what connects them. Students that have never worked together before have just executed the largest direct action on our campus. The target: big coal’s influence on our institution.

At the end of this summer, Washington University appointed two new members to its board of trustees, Gregory Boyce, CEO of Peabody Energy, and Steven F. Leer, CEO of Arch Coal. As you most likely know, they are the one-two of coal mining who together preside over 13 billion tons of proven coal reserves.  They are both deeply involved in mountaintop coal mining, destroying communities and ecosystems across Appalachia. For years they have lobbied against positive protective legislation, including the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Now, they check our chancellor’s every action and shape the future of our institution. This comes in the wake of the formation of the Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization (CCCU) last December. This research group, funded by (guess) Peabody, Arch Coal, and the local utility Ameren, plans to build a 1 megawatt demonstration carbon capture & sequestration plant on our campus.

And this last Monday, our administration organized “America’s Energy Future,” a symposium to which Steven F. Leer of Arch Coal and Fred Palmer of Peabody Energy, among others, were invited to discuss our energy “future.” It was a five-hour-long symposium culminating in a reception in the new student center (to see a program description, see here). We saw presentations on “Green Coal” where earth movers the size of houses were depicted moseying through fields. There were a couple champions of reality, but the overarching theme was deceit. There was nearly zero representation from renewable energy companies. What is the “future” according to our administration? Well, it looks a lot like our present: coal, oil, and nuclear. This is not OUR Energy Future.

To coincide with the conference, we held a rally, a press conference, an alternate symposium titled “OUR Energy Future,” and executed a silent flash mob and banner-drop to challenge Big Coal on campus!

Continue reading ‘VIDEO: WashU flashmob confronts Coal Executives’

Some scary prospects of where people are turning – geoengineering, the false solution that once seemed like science fiction, is actually being taken seriously. Seriously?

Diana Bronson, ETC Group

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. – Albert Einstein

As global climate negotiations in Barcelona enter into the last week of talks before December’s Copenhagen summit, there continues to be more aggravation than agreement amongst negotiators. Despite the litany of warnings about the devastation a failure in Copenhagen will cause – mass migrations, floods, worsening hunger and elimination of entire small island states – the most powerful countries in the world have failed to significantly reduce emissions, let alone commit to new targets or adequate funds to pay for adaptation. Unwilling to muster collective political will to dramatically reduce consumption, wealthy countries are looking for ways to continue business as usual.

The surprising announcement that the US Congressional Committee on Science and Technology will be holding hearings on geoengineering in Washington later this week has some participants in Barcelona wondering if the lack of collective political will on the part of industrialized countries has something to do with Plan B moving a whole lot faster than we thought.  Plan B is geoengineering: the intentional, large-scale plans to modify the climate and related systems.

Geoengineering technologies include, for example, schemes to simulate a volcanic eruption by shooting sulphur particles into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back to outer space. Other technologies whiten clouds to make them more reflective. Some geoengineers propose dumping iron particles in the oceans to feed algae that might soak up CO₂. Others want to change hurricane paths and rainfall patterns.
Continue reading ‘Geoengineering: Plan B for when Copenhagen fails? eek!’

Last week 12 international climate activists converged on Barcelona to kick off two months of climate actions leading up to the unprecedented climate change agreement slated to be achieved in Copenhagen mid-December. The “Action Factory” is comprised of young climate activists from Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Senegal, United States, and Australia who, like millions of others, are fed up with the rhetoric that surrounds the climate negotiations we’re setting out to bring action to directly to the delegates, negotiators, and heads of state that hold the fate of our climate in their hands.

The Factory hit the ground running today on Obama’s 1 year anniversary. One year ago today over 65 million US voters pinned their hopes on Barak Obama, a leader that promised to lead on curbing climate change. Now I’m not going to get into analyzing the pros and cons of the last year, but 365 days after hope broke the ballot box it’s safe to say we haven’t seen the international action needed to avert a climate crisis. On a Wednesday full of actions at the UNFCCC meetings in Barcelona negotiators were greeted by a jovial Obama who was celebrating his one year anniversary by giving speeches and passing out pieces of the earth shaped cake (the imagery was lost on no one that in fact Obama was carving up the Earth). However, activists and delegates alike were less than enthusiastic to celebrate Obama’s “let them eat cake” attitude”  and lack of commitment to achieve a fair, ambitious, and binding agreement in Copenhagen. Chants of “Less Speeches, More Action” and “Bold Climate Action Now” drowned out Obama’s climate rhetoric, as it was clear that Barcelona was ready for action. We’ve waited a year and the climate cannot wait any longer!

This was the first of a series of actions in Barcelona from the Avaaz Action Factory, as we gear up for the final stretch to Copenhagen, and they won’t stop until we get a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty!

Note: Actually this was our second action. Last week we stripped down and went green to encourage Brazil to become a climate leader in Copenhagen. Hope they listen because nobody wants to see those boys go Rio style again.

Cross posted from Grist

African negotiators at the U.N. climate talks in Barcelona just refused to continue formal discussions about all other issues until wealthy countries live up to their legal and moral responsibility to commit to deep emissions reductions. Rich countries (also called “Annex 1 countries”) have ground negotiations to a halt by failing to agree their new targets under the Kyoto Protocol (KP), driving developing countries to put their feet down. This walkout is significant and opens up political space – it means many of the countries in Africa just stopped one half of the UN climate negotiation process until rich countries say how much they will reduce their carbon.

We’re down to the wire: just four negotiating days left before the big agreement in Copenhagen is supposed to go down.  Its day one, and we saw just a taste of the breakdowns to come. While rich countries continue to undermine commitments for the Kyoto Protocol (one of two negotiating tracks for Copenhagen which is supposed to be renewed for a second commitment period of Annex 1 targets), the spin has already taken hold: they’re blaming Africa for their own delay-mongering. Oy vey.

In response, movement and civil society organizations held a demonstration at the U.N. building in support of African delegates’ insistence that developed countries commit to new, strong binding targets. Delegates and observers were invited to join a human shield against the killing of Kyoto targets (complete with an Annex 1 grim reaper) and instead urged to promote at least 40% emission reductions with no offsets by 2020.

Kamese Geoffrey of NAPE/ Friends of the Earth Uganda warned, “Rich countries are attempting to dodge their legal and moral responsibilities to reduce emissions. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they will be the first to face the devastating impacts of climate change.”

Many of us have longstanding criticisms of the Kyoto Protocol, particularly its market mechanisms. But here’s why Kyoto is important:

Continue reading ‘Rich countries halt Barcelona climate talks with inaction – Africa walks out’

Today is our local College Park city council elections. There’s been a lot of good press for UMD for Clean Energy, the student group I’m a part of that’s actively involved in this election. The Diamondback has already given our endorsements and Green March to City Hall attention. On election day, our march is plugged in regards to the logistics for the day, and our endorsements have been stirring up trouble in College Park. Overall, I think the coverage worked out favorably for us. Below are the excerpts from the article that discuss our group’s approach to endorsing candidates, and the disagreement a member of the community has with one of them. Continue reading ‘UMD for Clean Energy Endorsements Stir Things Up’

My first year in the midwest, my first month really, I participated in a Bike rally with pinwheels taped to our helmets (I guess to symbolize wind power but looking back at pictures we looked a bit strange) to attend a hearing on the fate of Big Stone II, a coal plant that was to be built just over the Minnesota border in SOUTH Dakota. The past three years have been quite a journey for us Twin Cities organizers. We’ve seen Minnesota pass leading climate legislation, moratoriums on coal and nuclear (sorta… lots of loopholes, of course), and embrace community wind projects. But for some reason, legislators and state official struggled to make the connection between badass legislation and policy and the COAL PLANT that would be built across the border, but would provide energy to the Twin Cities. After several false alarms, seeming deaths and unbelievable rebounds, funding pullouts, permitting issues, the Big Stone II coal plant seems to have seen its last days. Today, MDU Resources Group, Inc. announced that the coal plant proposal was officially off the table. AND The best part???? The company annoucned that they’re going to be investing in wind power instead. Bomb?? hell yeah. And yes, we’ve had our hopes dashed and out hearts broken before, but sometimes celebration is called for. Much love to TEAM Minnesota, our college coalition, Youth Environmental Activists of Minnesota, and all the rest of the wonderful Midwest activists. Check out the story here!