It’s Getting Hot In Here

With the end of 2010 approaching, one thing’s clearer to me than anything else: we climate activists still have our work cut out for us. Now seems like a good time to talk about something I’ve put a lot of thought into lately: namely, how those of us in the United States are going to build the type of mass movement really needed to avert a climate catastrophe.

The US youth climate movement has done amazing things these past few years. Under a government system less beholden to big corporations, I truly think our efforts would have been enough to transform the economy. But the fact is we live in a country where corporations hold more sway over politics than in probably any other major world power. As a result 2010 was in many (though certainly not all) ways a disappointing year. So what’s next for our movement?

Mainly, I think we need to grow bigger. To do that we need to think bigger. I agree with Bill McKibben that for the next couple years climate activists need to focus on movement building. We’re unlikely to see a federal climate bill until at least 2013—and then only if President Obama and a healthy number of Democrats in Congress win the 2012 election. But when we have a chance at passing such a bill, our movement needs to be much, much larger. Only then will a climate bill be able to not only make it through the US Senate, but actually do so in a form strong enough to do some good.

On that note, below the fold are a few of things I think the US movement must consider moving forward: Continue reading ‘On Building the Mass Movement We Need’

Published by Americans for Energy Leadership

On Wednesday, several of the country’s leading energy experts gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, DC for the Energy Innovation 2010 conference. Their purpose? Reframing the national energy discussion in the aftermath of cap and trade and beginning the transition to a new federal clean energy strategy.

Hosted by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation and Breakthrough Institute, and co-sponsored by a large coalition of think tanks across the political spectrum, the conference drew hundreds of attendants for a day of presentations and panels. Speakers and moderators included ARPA-E Director Dr. Arun Majumdar, DOE Under Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi, Nobel Laureate Burton Richter, Andrew Revkin of New York Times, Bryan Walsh of Time Magazine, and many others.

For forty years, the federal government has failed to implement a strategy for cutting U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. And for over a decade, cap and trade has defined the federal policy vision of the U.S. clean energy and environmental community, only to collapse in summer 2010.

Continue reading ‘Energy Innovation 2010: A New Beginning for U.S. Energy Policy’

Communities around the world are under attack from extractive industries that poison our families, kill our loved ones on the job, and destroy the ecosystems we cherish. The BP oil spill was unfortunately just one of an endless string of disasters born of an economic system that must endlessly consume the Earth’s  resources.

Extraction is the act of taking without giving anything back. Extraction takes workers lives so  corporations can make a few more bucks. Extraction takes clean water and air and gives us blackened oceans and a climate in chaos. Extraction takes the natural wealth of communities and ecosystems and leaves behind poverty and ecological wastelands.

For a stable climate, clean air and water, we must stop the extraction of fossil fuels and other “resources.”  From the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf Coast, people are fighting back against the extractiveindustries  that have declared war on our planet. Rising Tide is calling for a day of direct action against extraction on the 1 year anniversary of the BP oil spill.

On April 20th take it to the point of production.  Shut down a well site, occupy a mine, take over an office, blockade a bank. Nobody’s community should be a sacrifice  zone.

For climate justice and a livable planet,

Rising Tide North America

[click for printable poster]

JOIN THE CHAIN REACTION

www.risingtidenorthamerica.org/extraction

This year, the UN climate talks in Cancun felt markedly different than last year’s much-anticipated conference in Copenhagen. Since the last negotiations, a major shift has taken place in the youth climate movement.

Throughout 2010 our movement has experienced major growing pains and witnessed major failures on the part of our politicians. Last year’s Conference of Parties in Copenhagen ignored the cries to the millions of world citizens demanding a FAB, fair ambitious and binding treaty. Instead we got a ‘FLAB’ deal: full of loopholes and bull$**t. American youth saw their leaders dilute and ultimately dismiss the climate legislation we’d been calling for. This fall, dozens of climate deniers and Big Oil politicians were elected into office.

These experiences have produced a lot of despair and disillusionment within our generation around the current system; political obstacles feel insurmountable, the corrupt fossil fuel interests are too powerful, and any significant agreement on an international level just seems impossible.

Youth at the Conference of Parties before Cancun

But the vexing reality is that these challenges cannot be     insurmountable, too powerful, or impossible. We have no    option but to face them. We know that our survival and      the survival of entire vulnerable communities count on it.    So what are we going to do about it?

Over the past two weeks, youth in Cancun have showed    our tenacity, our innovativeness, and our  uncompromising idealism. While youth recognize the    agreement coming out of Cancun as an important step  to stabilizing and building a foundation for future    negotiations, we know there is much work to be done    and much of the foundation hinges on what happens in  the coming year.

The following are lessons and resolutions from Cancun- on the current state of our movement and directions moving forward, into the light. In 2011, we must:

1) Improve upon our models for tracking and measuring our efforts and use our findings to build and refine our strategy.

2) Further engage our communities and change public opinion by utilizing earned and social media.

3) Continue to build our technical skills, employ creative methods, and utilize technological innovations.

4) Ask ourselves everyday: how can we connect our efforts to the source of bold, credible, and real hope? How can we communicate this real hope to others?

Please read on for further explanation and reflections from Cancun.

Continue reading ‘Field Notes from Cancun and Four Resolutions for the Movement in 2011′

-Kinky Friedman

They say everything is bigger in Texas.  And in the race to drive our environment and climate off a steep cliff in my home state of Texas is speeding ahead in a big ass Mack fucking Truck.

Big Oil and King Coal have found kindred spirits in the land of rugged individualism and right wing politicians. George Dubya Bush’s political spawn just don’t think bombing Iraqis and Afghans for oil is a good idea, but polluting and killing communities for big corporate profits in their own state with filthy water, dirty air, mercury poisoning, hydro-fracking, offshore drilling, oil refineries, nuclear plants,coal mines and coal plants is seen as a God-given right under their perverse interpretation of John Locke’s natural law.

For starters with coal, Texas is like the “Land Where Time Stood Still.” Where we’ve seen frontline communities and national groups like Sierra Club successfully challenge and defeat existing and new coal fired power plants all over the country, corporations and politicians in Texas keep marching forward towards the climate apocalypse.

Currently there are at least 40 dirty coal burning boilers in Texas.

Yeah, that’s right four-zero! And they are some of the oldest dirtiest plants in the country.

Furthermore, at least another 12 more proposed coal plants are in the approval process to be built in the next few years.

In 2006-2007, Dallas based utility TXU tried to move 11 coal plants through an approval process that sparked massive resistance from all over the country (but especially inside Texas.) Now Luminant (formerly TXU, subsidiary of Energy Future Holding) owns four massive dirty plants in central and east Texas and have three others in various stages of approval and development.

Other companies are proposing coal plants throughout the state as well. It’s a dirty energy epidemic!

According to the Environmental Integrity Project, Texas leads the country in mercury emissions. In fact, five of the worst mercury emitting coal plants make their home in Texas. The Martin Lake Stream plant (owned and operated by Luminant) is the nation’s worst mercury polluter.

You’ll also be surprised to find out that according to a March 2009 report by the NRDC, Texas is facing the largest increase in the production of toxic coal ash waste by power plants than any other state. Continue reading ‘Deep in the Heart of Dirty Energy and False Solutions’

Both houses of the New York State legislature recently passed a bill for a 6 month moratorium on methane (natural) gas fracking.  Citizen concerns about pollution, trampling of land rights, and a groundbreaking new film Gasland have fueled a massive grassroots backlash against companies like Haliburton diving headfirst into the gas rush.

Image via the Working Families Party

The fracking moratorium bill was vetoed, but Governor David Patterson issued an executive order in its place that does a more limited version of the same thing.  The bill would have banned all wells, but the executive order only bans ‘horizontal wells’ – the kind where a drill rig drills sideways to get gas below other people’s property (and drinking water).

The plus : most wells are horizontal, so the order has a big impact.  The minus: polluted groundwater flows, so it doesn’t really matter where its contaminated.  And the fact that the legislature could send such a clear message on a moratorium and that Patterson still felt the need to ‘bend to industry pressure’ is worrisome.

This issue is far from going away anywhere, and New York is likely to continue to be a central piece of the Haliburton/gas industry strategy to open up every bit of gas to extraction.  The EPA is also conducting a 2 year study (2010-2012) on the safety of gas fracking.  Residents of New York hope that Lisa Jackson spends more time in impacted communities listening to stories of residents and less time listening to the oil companies.

I believe in Energy Democracy.

Energy is 10% of the entire economy, powers and makes possible everything we do in the other 90%, and is the most centralized and tightly controlled of all economic sectors – just a handful of giant oil companies and electrical and natural gas utilities control the vast majority of the wealth. Every year, the average American household puts 5% of their income into the hands of these energy companies, and reaps a return in asthma, traffic congestion, war, destruction of communities in places where energy is extracted, reduced economic security in the face of volatile energy prices, and dramatic and unpredictable changes in our climate as well as the ability to heat, light, and power their homes, schools, and workplaces, and drive between them. For families below the poverty line, this portion of their income is more like 15%, and these proportions get still higher if you count the energy costs embodied in the prices of our food and other products. Every day, our communities are pouring these dollars outside, to massive, centralized energy producers. Every day, we’re pouring these dollars towards the problems that are fracturing our communities, attacking our health, threatening or security, and devastating our climate and ultimately our economy.

What if we reversed this flow? What if we poured this vast channel of wealth – over $1 trillion across the United States alone – back into our communities and towards energy solutions that reconnect us with ecology, create bonds between neighbors, and revitalize our economy my cutting our costs and creating jobs building and servicing smart energy systems in our communities. What would this change do for our society? First, it would send a huge pulse of resources and capital back into our communities to improve the efficiency of our homes, upgrade our infrastructure to local smart grids, and help capitalize a massive wave of localized community-owned energy. Second, it would put these resources into local job creation serving local needs, and require people getting together with their friends and neighbors to learn how to make the transition and work together to do it. Finally, it would eviscerate the dirty energy industry by removing its greatest cash flow (which, let’s remember, is not investors or the government, but us, energy users). We could do all this if only we (collectively, individual consumer choice makes little difference) redirected the money we spend on dirty energy and invested in a better energy.

In 2007, I began a journey to figure out how to turn this big concept into a reality. Read on to learn the what, the how, and the why.

Continue reading ‘It’s Our Power’

This piece can also be found at: http://huff.to/gpT0Ee

Outside of the Cancun Messe at the international climate talks, runners Kevin Osborne from the U.S and Yingao Chen from China take their mark at the starting line. A sports commentator calls out: “It’s a beautiful day! The sun is shining, the wind is blowing and our two competitors are ready to begin this epic race for a brighter and more prosperous world”. At the sound of a whistle, the runners take off, racing toward the clean energy future.

What is the story behind this race? The U.S and China are major emitters and major economies with a complex relationship and huge opportunities to lead the clean energy economy…

At this moment in time, U.S is falling behind during a time that  we most need economic revitalization and a competitive new  job sector. While China has taken huge strides in building their  renewable energy sector, much of their turbines and solar  systems are exported while more new coal plants are  constructed to meet growing energy demands.

U.S leadership has come empty-handed to the negotiations and continues to accuse China of holding up progress. Relations between U.S and China remain tenuous and marked with antagonism and mistrust.

Can the two countries overcome their differences and rise to the challenge? Who will emerge victorious in the clean energy economy?

***

Continue reading ‘U.S and China Race to the Clean Energy Future PART 2: Taking Action’

Breaking news from  Coal Tattoo

Don Blankenship is going to plead the 5th in the Upper Big Branch probe. Seems that Big Don is invoking his right to avoid self-incrimination. I’m pretty shocked and awed by this bit of information.

I guess all those times I called Blankenship a “homicidal maniac,” his lawyers didn’t disagree.

And it’s good to know that the rich still have all the rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

Blankenship to take the 5th

We’ve just confirmed that retiring Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship no longer plans to appear next week to be questioned by state and federal investigators who are looking into the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.

C.A. Phillips, acting director of the state Office of Miners Health, Safety and Training, said his agency was informed just a little while ago that Blankenship would invoke his 5th Amendment rights and not answer questions from the investigation team.

UPDATED: Here’s a copy of a letter from Blankenship’s attorney to the state Office of Miners Health Safety and Training.