It’s Getting Hot In Here

On the surface, broad-based solutions to global warming appear to be emerging in Congress. But with even a meager scrubbing of the surface, Senators Lieberman and Warner’s “Climate Security Act” (S. 2191) - which is scheduled to be debated on the Senate floor in June - turns out to be perhaps the greatest greenwash of our generation.

Everyone who cares about the climate and a just energy future would do well to take a good, hard look at the Lieberman-Warner (L-W) bill. It will frame the climate debate in the US for our generation.

If we don’t stop L-W in it’s tracks and go back to the drawing board for real solutions, we risk our bold local efforts for climate protection being trumped and even overturned by deeply misguided and corrupt federal policies. Sadly, most of the national environmental groups are taking a pass on L-W, not publicly taking a strong stand against the bill despite misgivings. At the moment only Friends of the Earth and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service are taking strong stands against the bill. [some weak-willed environmental groups are even supporting this insane bill!]

Lest we be the victim of our success, the youth climate movement cannot afford to remain neutral and silent on this rapidly moving train. The time for demanding “action” on climate is over, we must define and demand “real action” and speak out against these deadly dangerous distractions.

A few highlights from the bill:

• Besides the inherent problems of carbon trading, the bill gives tradeable carbon permits valued at one trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry for free.
• The revenue from the portion of carbon permits that are auction is directed straight back to back to polluters through hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to the coal, oil and automobile industries, and nuclear power.
• According to an aide to Senator Lieberman, the bill “would be the most historic incentive for nuclear in the history of the US“. It is estimated that throughout various incentives in the bill $500 billion could go to nuclear power.
• Carbon permits are given first - before all other auctions - to NEW coal facilities, giving incentive to new coal construction before other forms of energy.
• The bills targets are well below what the UN recommends, especially the short term goals: virtually no national reductions in emissions would occur before 2020.

Continue reading ‘Lieberman-Warner Bill: Dirty energy in the name of climate protection’

I wanted to quickly share a few Earth Day articles with folks…some interesting food for thought here:

1. “This Earth Day, Let’s Scrape Off the Greenwash” by Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy

2. “Stop Waiting for ‘Leaders’ to Act on Global Warming, Greener energy in your community depends on strong grass roots” by Peter Asmus published in the Christian Science Monitor

3 “Is Earth Day Still Relevant 18 Years On? As Corporate Sponsors Mount, Some Activists Believe the Charity Strayed from Its Purpose” by Moira Welsh in the Toronto Star

4. “Quit recycling” by Ashley Braun at Grist (a funny one)

Did you see or hear about anything interesting this Earth Day? Continue reading ‘Some Earth Day readings…’

[photo is Walden Bello]

It’s all too easy for us living in the insular United States to ignore or make a lot of assumptions on where our climate change allies from the less developed nations (aka the “Global South”) are at. There’s also a lot of claiming of ideas as “new” that have actually been simmering for a long time outside of the narrow confines of our experience.

I’ve seen more than a few posts here speaking of the “needs” or “demands” of the developing world as if there is an established consensus. Meanwhile, outside of a few elites from the South, voices of people actually living in the developing world remain largely unheard here. Is this not a sort of “new colonialism“, where ideas are alternately robbed or impressed upon marginalized people’s in much the same way resources and customs have been in the past?

And of course colonialism, new and old, continues today. Case in point, many of us living from North America may not be aware that The World Bank, an organization controlled by the Global North that is charged with spearheading many of the energy industry developments in the Global South — “sustainable” or otherwise — held it’s critical spring meetings this week in Washington, DC.

It’s noteworthy that the United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer was in attendance, a fact that speaks to the growing role of the World Bank in climate policy and politics.

But enough chatter from YAWGB (Yet Another White Guy Blogger) from the world’s only superpower! Read on for some links to recent analysis from Focus on the Global South, an organization with staff in Thailand, the Philippines and India that focuses on issues of global inequality, and increasingly the relationship between inequality, climate change, and energy policy. Continue reading ‘Some views from the Global South’

In 2004, the Durban Group for Climate Justice convened in Durban, South Africa to question the central role of carbon trading and carbon offsets in governments’ responses to the climate crisis. Members of the Durban Group are traveling in various cities throughout the US and Canada in January, February, and March 2008 to share experiences of the failures of carbon trading in Europe, India, Brazil, Uganda and elsewhere, and to learn more about U.S. carbon trading plans and climate politics.

Five internationally recognized experts, fresh from the climate meetings in Bali, Indonesia, will be visiting campuses and communities throughout Canada and the US. With over fifty groups in over forty cities, they’ll speak on carbon trading, carbon offsets, the effects of climate change and current international campaigns to keep the fossil fuels in the ground and affect meaningful change.

Check out the complete list of tour dates.

UPDATED: There are still a handful of dates open if you want the speaking tour to come to your town. We’re still booking the east coast and the midwest for late February and early March! Contact falsesolutions AT risingtidenorthamerica DOT org to host a talk.

Continue reading ‘Members of Durban Group For Climate Justice on Carbon Trading Speaking Tour this Winter’

I’ve been meaning to write a post about New Orleans for weeks now. This month - in the midst of the bad news from Bali and congress - a new climate-provoked crisis, one in the works since just after Hurricane Katrina has hit New Orleans hard. It’s been called “Hurricane H.U.D.” [HUD is the government office of Housing and Urban Development].

What’s at stake is the bulldozing of 5000 homes, or what politicians and reporters euphemistically call “units”, of public housing. These units, some moderately damaged, some unimpacted by Katrina, have been neglected by government for decades, but nonetheless were homes for some of New Orleans neediest and most disenfranchised people before the storm. Since the storm, rent prices are up by 50% and the homeless population is far larger than pre-storm levels. After nearly 2 and half years of all types of neglect and abuse toward survivors of a global warming related disaster, this has become a hugely symbolic battle against the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans.

And it has been the last straw for many of New Orleans’s most oppressed people.

While I’ve been following the housing struggle as its gone from grave to worse for two years, I reached a breaking point of despair these last 2 days when it got personal.

At least 2 people I know in New Orleans, including one close friend, were TASERed by police while loudly, but peacefully, demanding entry into their city council meeting where the approval of the demolitions of these homes. Despite (police initiated) physical strife both inside and outside the chambers, the council approved the demolitions. Dozens more people, public housing residents and supporters alike, were pepper sprayed and beaten by police. 15 people were arrested. 4 people, including my friend, were hospitalized. Continue reading ‘For New Orleans, for the survivors of Katrina, for climate justice’

Far from Bali, home in the United States, it appears the US environmental movement is so desperate that we can do little but focus on getting something, anything from our country’s negotiators at the UN Climate meetings, who appear to be bent on utter inaction.

Yet the appearance of unmovable obstructionism hides a deeper truth. Behind the scenes, through extensive lobbying by US industries, allies within European governments, corrupt yet powerful US environmental groups, and influential international monetary institutions, the US is very actively engaged in climate policy, exporting models of addressing climate change to the world, with made-in-the-USA technologies, research, and economic theory.

Our narrow, US-centric focus on the obstinate evil Bush distracts us from major conflicts in climate policy at Bali. The reality is that the movement for climate justice in the majority world — for climate justice activists from the Global South (also known, derisively, as the “third world”) — Bush’s is but one side of the climate injustice coin. What we here in the US are missing is that this struggle is an old one: it’s the struggle of the powerful against the disempowered, against the hegemony of the United States and it’s allies, their dominance of everything and anything, including “saving the planet”.

The battlegrounds in this struggle today are over colonialist “green” carbon offset projects (CDMs, or Clean Development Mechanisms in UN speak) and agrofuel planatations, couched in climate saving rhetoric, financed and controlled by polluting energy companies and the World Bank. The conflict is also about the defacto “Rights to the Atmosphere” gained by Northern Countries industries under Carbon Trading. Worst of all, despite taking center stage in climate policy, carbon offsets, carbon trading, and agrofuels have at best an uneven record of doing anything to protect the climate.

Moving from Carbonacracy (dominance by the carbon industry and their allies in the rich governments) to Climate Justice is about more than addressing inequity in pollution. Climate Justice is about addressing inequity of POWER, which starts with addressing inequity in crafting environmental policy. That to me means shifting leadership on climate policy from the US / EU environmental mainstream, toward environmental visionaries from the Global South and indigenous people’s voices that are often marginalized, and directly impacted communities here in the United States.

So where to start?

Continue reading ‘Climate Justice or Carbonacracy?’

Although things have been starting to heat up here in the past year or so, anyone watching climate and fossil fuel activism over the past few years in the UK knows we’ve still got a wee bit of catching up to do on the action front.

On Monday across the UK, from Edinburgh to Cornwall, from blockades to “invisible theatre”, the “Oil” (ahem, Royal) Bank of Scotland felt the sting - 25 actions took place against a company that publicly promotes itself as “The Oil & Gas Bank”.

The Royal Bank of Scotland provides the loans to oil and gas corporations that make climate change possible. In 2006, the bank provided over $10 billion to fossil fuels development.

RBS provide oil corporations with loans to build new, massively ecologically detrimental drilling rigs, pipelines and oil tankers.

So maybe we should start targeting banks in the US?

Keep reading for a run down of the actions from across the UK. There’s lots of photos at Rising Tide UK and UK Indymedia.

Continue reading ‘Inspiring direct action across the UK against the “Oil” Bank of Scotland’

It’s one thing for a campus to claim its gone carbon “neutral” solely by buying carbon offsets, but no one would even suggest that it would make sense for all of the emissions “reductions” of the entire industrialized world to actually just be projects like CO2 sucking tree plantations located in the developing world.

Anyone with a solid grasp of climate science and international politics knows that we need to make major real reductions in fossil fuel use here at home; the rich shouldn’t just be able to pay the poor to reduce carbon use. Right?!?

Well apparently Yvo de Boer, leader of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the entity responsible for the Kyoto Protocol feels otherwise. In a recent interview with the BBC Boer stated flatly that rich nations should not have to cut emissions if they finance poor countries doing so on their behalf.

Although he clarified that the view was his own and not the UN’s he went so far as to say that he had no problem with the United States buying its way out of 100% of its Kyoto reductions and “letting the market take its course” by way of Carbon Trading.

Indeed Carbon Trading is already the current modus operandi for the Kyoto Protocol, albeit with some constraints which proponents like Boer have suggested removing. Proponents of Carbon Trading believe that it is effective to reduce greenhouse gases by using a market in which polluters can “trade” carbon pollution rights amongst each other. Carbon Trading, as well as most of the “Carbon Neutral” campaigns which have sprung up around campuses around the US and Canada, include the use of “Carbon Offsets” as part of their overall strategy. Continue reading ‘World Betting the Farm on Carbon Trading?’

COME CREATE AN ALTERNATIVE TO AN DIRTY ENERGY-DEPENDENT WORLD!

In less than one month, from August 8-14^th, regional North American Convergences for Climate Action will bring hundreds of social justice and environmental activists together to fight the fossil fuel empire and create truly sustainable, bio-regionally appropriate and community-based responses to climate change. The events on the West Coast and in the Southeast are modeled after the inspiring 2006 Climate Camp in the UK, which will reemerge this year at Heathrow Airport from August 14^th-21^st.

Part networking and activist skills training, part community sustainability demonstration site, the Convergences aim to invigorate the Climate Movement by pulling together communities of resistance. We aim to inject an anti-oppression, justice-focused agenda, and to demonstrate examples of truly sustainable, less energy-intensive lives that don’t depend on the oppression, thievery, and destruction attached to fossil fuel extraction. Continue reading ‘3 Weeks Until the Convergences for Climate Action!’

From the Portland Area Students for Energy Justice: Last weekend — the weekend before Step it Up — students representing all the major colleges in the Portland, OR were hard at work (and play…) on Mt. Hood to create a documentary about the loss of Mt. Hood’s glaciers for Step it Up. We (the Portland Area Students for Energy Justice) spent Saturday night in a cabin near Government Camp, reading old cabin logs and learning about the history of the place. The next morning we ventured out we Timberline, the northernmost area on the mountain and year-round ski facility (you might recognize the lodge from exterior shots in The Shining). We hiked around the ski boundary, filming scenic shots, interviews, a few snowball fights, and our rally against Global Warming. We found that our cardboard signs, with the message “Step It Up: Reduce Emissions 80% by 2050″ were helpful for sliding down the mountain for those of us without the foresight to bring a snowboard, as a few of us did.

Continue reading ‘Portland, OR students make documentary film on Mt. Hood for Step it Up’