It’s Getting Hot In Here

By Teryn Norris & Daniel Goldfarb
Published by Americans for Energy Leadership

President Obama’s exclusion of “climate change” from the State of the Union, combined with Carol Browner’s exit as the administration’s top climate advisor, has sparked wide debate across the climate movement. On one hand, many climate advocates are backing the president’s strategy. As Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) put it, “He’s trying to unify… I think it was very smart of him.”

On the other hand, climate advocates like Joe Romm of Climate Progress and David Roberts of Grist are criticizing the president for not using climate change as a central justification for his clean energy proposals.  Unfortunately, even after the collapse of cap and trade legislation, Roberts and other critics continue to follow a type of policy literalism that has undermined environmentalists and climate advocates for years.

The argument goes something like this.  First, Roberts claims that without climate change as the central justification, the case for federal investment in the clean energy industry “is no stronger than the argument for supporting pharmaceuticals, or telecom, or any other industry that’s likely to be big in the 21st century.” (Roberts wrote partly in response to Norris’ article on the rise of “innovation hawks.”)

However, as the American Energy Innovation Council and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recently explained in their reports, other industries like pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and computer electronics spend far more on research and development than the energy industry, due to a variety of market and non-market barriers.  The underinvestment is dramatic: whereas pharmaceuticals invest about 18.7% of sales in R&D, the U.S. energy industry only invests 0.3%.  The federal government already invests over $30 billion annually in health research, and $80 billion on military R&D, but only $3-5 billion in energy R&D.

Continue reading ‘Obama’s Climate Omission: Can We Disagree on Climate and Win on Clean Energy?’

Cross-posted from Peaceful Uprising

The earth and democracy aren’t dying. They’re being killed—and the people killing them are next door to this hotel.

Know what’s funny? “Koch” is pronounced “Coke.” Know what isn’t funny?  Today, in Palm Springs, California, the Koch brothers are meeting in secret to plot the final stages of their wildly successful campaign to destroy representative democracy.

Oh, and the planet too.

I’m here with some other people and we are going to try to stop them. But we’ll need your help.

First you’ll need to know who the Kochs are, what their motives have been, and how they’ve gotten away with this for so long.

Then you need to tell everyone you know.

These men are highly effective sociopaths who have been on an unchecked spree for years. A description of their trail of carnage contains all the major elements of todays public discourse. Climate change has been made politically unaddressable by their meticulous misinformation campaign; they’ve divided (and effectively conquered) the American people through by creating the so-called Tea Party; and to secure their long-term profits they’ve even succeeded in legalizing unlimited corporate spending in elections.

There’s nothing unusual about billionaires messing around with politics. It’s been going since before billionaire became the new millionaire. But the Kochs are special. Professional nonpartisan watchdog Charles Lewis from the Center for Public Integrity, puts it this way: “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money…They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.” (Read the amazing New Yorker expose.)

Why has the public been slow to embrace the reality of the Koch stranglehold? How did Charles and David pull this off?

That’s where the climate comes in. Continue reading ‘Koch brothers hide as movements unite’

via news.nationalpost.com

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” -Judy Bonds

Pay attention. A critical learning moment for the climate and environmental movements is unfolding before us in cities across Egypt.

Egyptians are taking their country back. Hundreds of thousands are sick of the strong-armed 30 year bullshit rule of faux pharaoh Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian ruling class. Sparked by the Tunisian revolt which ended a 23 year old US backed authoritarian regime weeks ago, the youth-led protests have taken over the streets of Egypt and are close to toppling Mubarak.

The majority of the secular pro-democracy demos have been mostly peaceful with relatively low numbers of casualties after less than a week of revolt. (Note: It appears that Egyptian government forces are beginning to use deadly force more often.) They have not taken offensive action against police and military forces that are mostly comprised of poor conscripts. Most of the clashes have happened when police attempted to disperse the crowds or force them from bridges and spaces they are determined to hold. But the crowds only have grown larger and more defiant. In fact, in some cases, the opposite is happening, in scenes reminiscent of the film V for Vendetta, police officers have been seen laying down their batons, stripping off their uniforms and joining the protesters. Soldiers are joining hands with protesters saying “The army and the people will purify the country.”

The rising tide of a people’s movement, like in Egypt, seeking justice and democracy is not an uncommon global phenomenon in the past 20-plus years, but the question for those of us seeking climate justice and climate action: How do we build North American People Power to dismantle the fossil fuel economy like the Egyptians are dismantling Mubarak’s dictatorship? How do we organize a hundred Capitol Climate Actions democratically, from the bottom up, with effective mass direct action and sustained momentum like Egyptian comrades are doing today? Continue reading ‘Could We Please Have the Next Capitol Climate Action in Cairo?’

Explaining what happens at the UNFCCC Conference of Parties is difficult at the best of times. Journalists, Civil Society organisations and governments struggle to translate the technical language of international climate policy into understandable public information. Young people can help distill the essence of the negotiations – and sometimes into video form.

In this example, the UK Youth Climate Coalition have summarised the COP16 Cancun talks in this short clip. Surprisingly and depressingly accurate.

Post by Janina Klimas, Coordinator for Ohio Student Environmental Coalition. Cross posted from Energy Action Coalition’s blog.

In Tuesday’s State of the Union President Obama promised to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail in the next 25 years. This is huge! And a far cry from the struggle we are facing with the Governor of Ohio to get rail in the Rustbelt.

Ohio students have wasted no time in registering their disenchantment and disapproval of our recently-inaugurated Governor, matching the speed with which John Kasich began undermining Ohio’s recovery, environmental progress and industrial sector-development with a slew of austerity measures, anti-environmental policies, and conservative attacks on public services, upper education, and organized labor. Even before being formally inaugurated as one of the least popular starting governors in our state’s history, Gov. Kasich was overseeing the wreckage of our infrastructural aspirations through the unabashedly-nonsensical and lopsidedly-partisan initiative to kill the ’3C rail corridor;’ a project designed to not only provide alternative transit to one of the most densely traveled corridors in the U.S. currently not served by high-speed rail, but also to provide jobs for Ohio’s families and beleaguered construction sector, and mobility and access both to Ohio’s young talent and elder residents.

The wash out from his success in killing 3C before even taking office? 16,000 jobs lost, $400 million federal stimulus dollars shipped to other states, and Ohio students joining the rest of the state in their lack of interest in any kind of honeymoon. Continue reading ‘Ohio’s Callin; It Wants It’s Rail Funds Back!’

I’ve been doing a lot of reflection over the weekend on our movement, our democracy, and our country one year after the Citizens United ruling and how we move forward.

Join us in Palm Springs to expose the Koch Brothers and other corporate billionaires planning a takeover of our democracy. RSVP and Reserve your spot on one of the buses.

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President Obama gave his State of the Union last night and set out a clear vision for our country. I agree that we need to win the future – and we can begin by investing locally in clean energy technology, reinvigorating our manufacturing sector, and leading the world to a sustainable 21st century economy. We need to invest in our young people and expand educational opportunities across the country.

Unfortunately, the President was not completely honest with the American people on the true state of our union. Families are in crisis – people are losing their homes and cannot find work. Their health is being threatened every day by our addiction to dirty and dangerous fossil fuels. Halliburton (among others) continue to undermine water supplies for millions of Americans through hydraulic fracturing – a dangerous method of extracting natural gas. We continue to spend $6 billion per month on the War in Afghanistan. And our country spends 59% of its budget on the military – while states and cities are being forced to cut education funding, enlarge class sizes, eliminate mental health programs, and squeeze budgets across the board.

The President did not acknowledge that hundreds of millions of dollars poured into campaign coffers from undisclosed sources and large corporations. He did not highlight that the Supreme Court in its’ Citizens United ruling – gave corporations the rights of people under our constitution – allowing unrestricted corporate spending in our elections.

Continue reading ‘Let’s replace We the Corporations with We the People’

(Cross-posted from PeacefulUprising.org)

It is generally acknowledged that we won’t get a carbon tax until 2013 and that we should focus our efforts until then on building the movement. It is also a given that the new Congress will try to prevent the EPA from doing their job and we will have to put substantial effort into defending a law passed by Richard Nixon. Trying to end subsidies for fossil fuels is also a worthwhile goal in this Congress; one that will at least expose the hypocrisy of the free market cultists.

I agree with all of that completely, but I’d like to suggest another modest legislative goal for the 112^th Congress: Get young people banned from observing sessions of Congress. 

Wait, wait, wait: please keep reading.

I was recently talking with a student at Wesleyan University who agreed with me about the need for civil disobedience in the climate movement, but lamented that our task is harder than that of the civil rights movement because our target isn’t as clear. With the civil rights movement, she argued, it was easy to see how to take direct action against the problem of segregated lunch counters or bus stations. Go to the place where you’re not supposed to sit, and sit. With the climate crisis, on the other hand, where is the opportunity for resistance?

Perhaps our solutions are limited by our perspective on the problem. If the problem is that there are too many parts carbon dioxide per million particles in the atmosphere, then the target for action is indeed elusive and enigmatic. But if the real problem is that those whose future is being sacrificed (young people) don’t have a voice where the decisions about that future are being made (Congress), then the appropriate response becomes a little more obvious. Go to the place where you’re not supposed to have a voice, and make your voice heard.

Now, let’s be reasonable about this goal. If a young person stands up in the balcony of a congressional session and says, “It’s my future you’re sacrificing by turning your backs on the moral imperative of defending a livable climate,” it will be a minor distraction that will be quickly forgotten after the Capitol Police drag the young truth-teller out. When someone stands up after him to say, “History will remember that you sold our survival for campaign contributions,” she will likely earn a condescending and trivial mention in the media to go along with her citation. If a dozen young people make their voices heard that day before taking “free public transportation” to the nearest police station, there might even be a headline that collects hateful comments about naive, spoiled, elitist blah blah blahs.

As with most actions, what happens the next day will determine everything. If twice as many folks rise up the next day to speak truth to power, things will start getting interesting. After more and more young people each day raise their voices to proclaim their right to the same planet their parents had, people around the country will finally start to believe in the existence of a climate movement. When those first trendsetting students go back a second, third or fourth time to throw themselves into the gears of the machine, the “naive and spoiled” criticisms will fall from their backs like blackbirds from the Arkansas sky.

Most importantly, when those uninvited voices prove so persistent and multiplicative that they seriously hinder the 112^th Congress’s God-given right to sell the country to the highest bidder, Congress will have to act. If they truly are as simple-minded and reactionary as they pretend to be, they might even give us exactly what we want and ban people under age 30 (plus Ashley Anderson) from observing sessions of Congress.

Why is that exactly what we want? Because it forces Congress to admit reality. The reality of climate change is that it is a war against the young. But it doesn’t look or feel like a war to most people. It doesn’t fit the picture of what we think of as war. When Congress admits that they can only continue doing what they’re doing by preventing young people from watching, it is a clear statement that the status quo is only possible by waging war against the young. Thus, these waves of action force Congress to either end the war against the young, or start waging it openly.

Of course, it is not only young people with the motivation or the ability to raise their voices in defense of a livable future. So once Congress is forced to wage that war more openly, perhaps our parents will start raising their voices as well. At some point our leaders will have to admit that the status quo is a war against the living.

It’s hard to imagine that there are enough engaged, courageous people in this country to make any of this a reality. The vast majority of available media provides plenty of evidence of the superficiality and selfishness that dominates our culture. It almost seems silly to hold on to a genuine faith in each other. But I suspect we’re approaching a time when the only reason to keep moving forward will be an unreasonable faith in the greatness of humanity.

Even now, the reasonable and pragmatic thing is probably to join up with a big corporation and protect you and yours. Holding on to our humanity may require an unreasonable morality. Or perhaps that’s how it’s always been. Perhaps all bold acts of sacrifice have required an unreasonable faith in each other.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

–Howard Beale

What the hell is going on here?

Rogue actors known as corporations have hijacked our democracy.  They regularly pollute and poison our communities. They own our elected officials and use police and military forces as their own private armies. They control much of the major media outlets. They’ve even convinced our legal system that they exist as actual “persons.”

If it were on television, it would a conspiracy worthy of Fox Mulder.  But you know what?  This Truth Isn’t Out There. It’s Right Here in Our Faces.

But despite all their power and influence, opinion polls STILL tell us that Americans are skeptical about capitalism and big business.

Yet, environmental and climate movements seem to have their heads buried in a compromising rear extremity and are unable to build power, mobilize their masses or tell a narrative with an anti-corporate (let alone anti-capitalist) theme.

The case made against Corporate America destroying the environment, the climate and our democracy is made every hour of every day. Continue reading ‘Why Aren’t Greens Kicking the Sh*t Out of Corporate America?’

Andrew Revkin, who runs New York Times Dot Earth and formerly served as the lead NYT environment/energy reporter, has a new post, “America’s Energy Challenge, and Opportunity,” asking what people would say to President Obama about energy if he were to launch a national energy listening tour with his State of the Union tomorrow:

“As I asked on Sunday, if he does this, and the Obama Energy Road Show came to your town, what would you say? Below, you can read “Obama moment” statements on energy from industry representatives to climate campaigners, scientists to investors… When President John F. Kennedy announced plans to send men to the Moon, it was not because people were marching with signs demanding a space race. There were a host of reasons – strategic, economic, military, visionary and more. Kennedy wove them into a comprehensive, challenging and extraordinarily productive technological journey.”

He invited several scientists, advocates, and pundits to kick off the discussion with a few sentences, including Bill McKibben, Nathan Lewis, Andrew Karsner, Roger Pielke, Marty Hoffert, Paul Hawken, and others, and it’s worth reading their thoughts. He posted my contribution here alongside theirs, where I spoke to the “new Sputnik moment” the president is declaring:

Continue reading ‘Speaking to President Obama on Energy: What’s Your Elevator Pitch?’

“At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoroeau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.”

-Edward Abbey

In Dec. 2008, college student Tim DeChristopher (aka “Bidder 70″) entered into a Bureau of Land Management auction and bid on millions of dollars in oil and gas leases. Tim’s action monkey-wrenched the plans of oilmen and the Bush Administration to develop those leases for profit in the last days of their regime.

Subsequently, Tim was charged with two felonies and after a long legal process finally has a court date on Feb. 28. The federal government (yeah, that’s Obama) has made it clear that they are using Tim’s case to intimidate any activists effectively fight back against the destruction of the climate, the earth and the people living on it.

While Tim is inside facing down the federal government, many others will be outside in solidarity. If you’re able to make it to Salt Lake City, the last weekend of February, please join Peaceful Uprising (the group Tim co-founded) as we call out the wanton destruction of the planet at the hands of corporations and the system that puts us on trial for resisting it.

Tim has put much on the line with his action, how many of us are willing to risk our freedom with such an action to save the planet?

Continue reading ‘The Trial of Bidder 70′