http://americansforprosperity.org/120909-eco-hypocrites-fly-jets-across-atlantic-attack-afp-copenhagen

A NOTE TO AMERICANS FOR PROSPERITY

(from the ‘eco-activists’)

1. We didn’t come to Copenhagen JUST to attack you, AFP.  Don’t be so full of yourselves.

2. Great job admitting carbon pollution is bad (i.e. ‘flying across the Atlantic’)… Seems like you’re beginning to see the light.

This piece of art is perhaps one of the best videos of our movement:

Only nine campuses have installed systems producing more than 1 megawatt of electricity, and even those system are making only a tiny dent in their campus power supplies. The 1.2 MW system at the University of California San Diego, for one, generates less than 4% of campus energy use. Dozens of other campuses have smaller solar projects, but among them, only 27 top 100 kilowatts.

Compare our nation’s universities with Wal-Mart, and the numbers are pitiful. Wal-Mart has 18 large arrays in California alone, and it just announced it will double that number in the next 18 months.

So why are universities so slow to jump on solar?

Certainly they could benefit from the carbon-reduction points they’ll earn under the University and College President’s Climate Commitment, a pledge that 633 institutions are now bound to. Solar is also an outstanding educational vehicle for students, especially those eyeing 21st century green jobs. And we mustn’t forget, PV makes great fodder for glossy recruitment pamphlets.

The answer is perhaps best explained by the handful of NGOs and for-profit consulting firms that have popped up to advance the market for solar in higher ed.

They pare the issue down to this: University decision-making moves at a glacial pace, and speedy private-sector solar firms have plenty of other business they can move on with for-profit velocity. It simply hasn’t been worth the time of solar firms to work with campuses – until now.

That untapped market and the lost opportunity for universities are precisely what compelled Jacob Travis, founder of the newly launched Solar College Initiative, to get involved in the solar biz after years in academia.

“There’s a fundamental issue – after a certain point, it just doesn’t remain profitable for solar firms to work with universities because the decision-making and contracting period tends to take forever. By streamlining the evaluation and contracting phases, we hope to create a ‘solar pipeline’, where numerous firms will be jumping at the chance to offer ripe universities the best solar deal they can get. It’s a total win-win.”

This article has been cross-posted from SolveClimate.com.  To read the rest of the article, click here.

At 648 pages, the “discussion draft” of the Waxman-Markey climate bill is a behemoth – I’d personally rather walk on hot coals than have to synthesize that beast.  But the endless page-count and dry legal jargon isn’t stopping young climate advocates from reading every inch, nor promptly picking it apart. 

To get a handle on what they’re thinking, and how their congressional “asks” differ from colleagues one generation removed, I talked with a number of young climate policy experts intimately familiar with the Waxman-Markey legislation. I wanted to understand their take on the bill, the political war-zone it has to fight through, and where they see young people contributing in the policy debate.

The loudest message I got was that our nation’s savviest young climate advocates are calling for a complete reframing of the climate debate, in two major ways.

The first deals with rhetoric around the cost of the policy. When Republicans say, “It costs too much,” and Democrats respond with, “We’ll make it cost less,” they’ve already lost the argument.  The debate needs to be around “how much it can help” – how much will it stimulate the economy, how many jobs will it create, how secure will it make us, etc.  And inversely – how much will a weak bill, or inaction, cost us?

The second framing critique deals with the climate movement’s unfortunately schizophrenic disconnect between our messaging and our policy prescription.

For years, we’ve been hammering the following point: climate change = red alert global catastrophe, it threatens all life on Earth and the future habitability of our planet. Yet our policy solution is nowhere near the red alert level, it lies somewhere between Velveeta cheese and Taco Bell hot sauce in terms of punch.

By asking for slow-moving emissions reductions targets far into the future, we’re sending a completely inappropriate and ultimately disempowering message for our cause – that solving climate change isn’t urgent, we’ll deal with it sometime later, and it won’t require much change from the status quo since we’ll transition so gradually. Two percent reductions per year – easy, right?

Wrong, say young advocates, whose personal future is at stake. We’ve got to go full steam ahead and transition off carbon fuels as fast as possible, with our goal not 80% by 2050 but “maximum effort”, as Holmes Hummel likes to describe. And because this bill appears to be our only shot at climate legislation this year, youth are in no position to compromise.

Beyond framing, young folks want carbon dollars flowing into clean tech RDD&D, green jobs corps, and a portion into citizen’s hands to counter persistent Republican tantrums about increased energy costs (which GOP leaders shamefully exaggerated earlier this month).

What they don’t want is money and policy perks flowing to float the dirty energy industry – and they’re outraged that the bill is chalk full of them.

I’ll let their stories speak for themselves.

Jesse Jenkins, 25, is director of energy and climate policy at the Breakthrough Institute. He’s been shouting the weak points of the bill over public radio and on web, and fears that without a clear focus on where the carbon dollars are going, the legislation will be prone to Republican attacks.

In failing to explain where the money raised from cap and trade will be spent, he says that the bill “has allowed Republicans to quickly and easily frame the entire debate on climate change around increased energy prices and economic costs … a fight Republicans take up with relish — and one they will surely win.”

In the recession’s economic climate, justifiable concerns about job security and costs of living amplify the effects of such attacks, and Jenkins says, could spell doom for effective legislation on carbon emissions.

That concern is echoed by Craig Altemose, a former executive committee member of the Sierra Student Coalition and now a student at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government.

Altemose, 25, contends that an effective bill should rival the economic stimulus package in both size and scope.

“We should invest hundreds of billions of dollars into solving the climate crisis—now,” he says.

A politically viable and environmentally responsible bill must recognize the economic imperative for jobs and the global urgency for climate action, he says, and connect them through a transformation to a clean energy economy.

Altemose also claims the current paradigm of emissions reduction policy betrays the urgency of the problem – by focusing on far-off targets like 80% by 2050, rather than the immediate action needed.

“After 9/11, did anyone go on TV and suggest we should try to reduce the number of terrorists 20% over the next 11 years, and 80% over the next 40 years? Or did we say that we needed to hunt down and catch every single terrorist as quickly as possible?

“The same needs to be true for tackling climate change. Citizens and lawmakers aren’t convinced we need to act now, because if this was truly a big problem, we would be looking to solve it now, not slowly over the course of 40 years.”

Richard Graves, the 27-year-old director of Fired Up Media, worries that the bill’s impact on state-level efficiency standards is being overlooked.

“The preemption of stronger state standards is a Trojan horse provision that could seriously hamper future efforts to strengthen the bill to science based targets, he says. “Basically, corporations and others want a uniform standard for efficiency, but this means that progressive states can’t move ahead without control of the federal government.”

The massive gains in efficiency and renewable energy standards that California pioneered, for example, would be squelched for future progressive states under the current version of the bill.

“It’s my impression that no one thinks that this bill is going to solve global warming in one go,” Graves adds. “Environmental groups from within the process have argued that we can strengthen the bill later.”

Whether that’s a viable strategy is hard to predict – if the pendulum swings back towards the Republican side in 2010, beefing up the bill could be nearly impossible.

The deficiencies in the current legislation are even more problematic considering that the bill will be subject to a rough and tumble Senate debate, where Republicans will lob attacks regarding supposed economic harm inflicted by climate change legislation.

Jenkins asserts that compromises to the legislation are inevitable, likely resulting in lower, less effective carbon prices and emissions reductions. A bill without high enough carbon prices would be one without teeth – it will leave the U.S. without an effective emissions-reduction policy while simultaneously missing the opportunity to use the bill as a jumper cable for the clean energy economy.

Lack of clean energy technology investment is a central concern for young advocates, as Juliana Williams of the Sierra Student Coalition explains:

“Because the bill is currently structured around emissions reductions rather than investment in a clean energy economy, the reductions targets seem to be the most powerful force in the bill. However, these targets are not adequate for the level of reductions needed.

“If the bill is focused on investment in clean energy technologies rather than emissions reductions, we will likely make deeper and faster cuts in emissions because the immediate steps will be solutions we need. The long term goals are empty if we don’t take the first steps now.”

Another sore point is that the legislation is already “bloated with concessions to carbon-based industry”, including heavily use of carbon offsets, Jenkins says. With the future habitability of the planet in the balance, young people don’t feel that these questionable credits should be given out so easily.

Additionally, the $10 billion investment in carbon-capture and storage technology feels like a slap in the face to most activists, and indicative of the coal lobby’s thirst for dollars to provide life support for the dirty energy status quo.

Since dirty energy companies and special interests will assuredly petition for most auction permits to be given out for free in order to float their industry, young folks are worried that concessions to these interests will hamper the ultimate goal of the legislation – fast emissions reductions and a transition to a clean energy economy.

John Landefeld, a 24-year-old researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, believes that instead of reducing the efficacy of carbon pricing legislation by redistributing the proceeds to an already monopolistic and powerful dirty energy industry, lawmakers should instead explicitly pledge auction revenue towards tech investment to spur a clean energy renaissance.

While clean energy investment is vastly popular with the public, it is remarkably barren from the current bill. Why the authors of the bill aren’t jumping to make use of this abundant political capitol, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that both a substance and a messaging shift needs to occur for the bill to be environmentally and politically successful. Landefeld puts it this way:

“By changing the paradigm of this legislation and the broader debate on climate change from one of ‘how much will it hurt’ to ‘how much can it help’, Congressional Democrats can ensure an effective environmental bill and change the political dynamic in their favor – a vital win-win.”

 

 

This article is cross-posted at SolveClimate.com; see original article here.

Hi all!  I want to share an article I recently wrote for SolveClimate.com, reporting on students’ experiences lobbying at Powershift.  The thing I was most surprised (and disappointed) about during my research was the high prevalence of students reporting that their representatives (or staffers) didn’t even know the basics about global warming.  Huuuuhhhh?

Looks like Lobby Day was also “Education Day” for many congresspeople, who apparently have had their heads in the sand in regards to climate change over the last decade.  While my interviews were in no way comprehensive, it’s certainly an interesting look into one aspect of the tremendous impact we had at Powershift 2009.

Here’s the article:

Students Give Their Take on How Well Congress Listens

by Rachel Barge – Mar 11th, 2009

Months of planning, negotiating, strategizing and training set the stage for the best orchestrated mass-lobby day in climate and youth activism history.

After 350 meetings between student activists and congressional representatives or their aides drew to a close last week, many of us within the movement began to wonder – what exactly did we accomplish?

Did our reps “get it?” What’s going to be the fallout for national climate policy, for the road to Copenhagen, for the role of youth in national energy justice issues?

In a few Capitol Hill offices, we were disappointed to discover, lawmakers and their aides seemed to know very little about even the basic facts of climate change.

I interviewed several Powershifters to learn about their experiences behind the thick wooden doors of Congress. What they had to say, honestly wasn’t what I expected.

Tommaso Boggia is a 22-year old Italian-born, California-educated activist and blogger. He works as a climate and energy organizer for Campus Progress, the Center for American Progress’ student branch. Despite his not-yet citizen status, he had several meetings on Lobby Day, including one with a staffer of Jim Risch, a Republican senator from Idaho.

Tommaso reported that during their discussion, the staffer expressed strong support for renewable energy (yay!) and nuclear (not so yay), and opposition to coal (super!).

One unfortunate revelation Tommaso noted was that

“the staffer didn’t really understand global warming – he said that it was still uncertain whether humans had anything to do with it.”

For a congressional aide, even a conservative one, that registers as disappointing, if not pathetic.

It seems the “educate your representative” theme didn’t stop there. In a meeting with Rep. Cathy McMorris, a Republican from Washington state, sophomore Elena Gustafson from Whitman College in Walla Walla had an interesting story:

“She listened, but ultimately I don’t know how much impact it had. She hadn’t even heard of the IPCC reports, or at least that’s the impression she gave, so some of the requests we were making were several steps ahead of where she seemed to be.”

What’s up with that? You’d have to live under a rock to be a public official and have no idea about the IPCC. Isn’t ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ just about mandatory background training for congress-people by now?

McMorris wasn’t hostile, but she did express some concerns about moving “too quickly” on climate legislation, Elena said. She also had fears about Washington state getting unfairly burdened by climate legislation since they “already have a lot of hydro power.” I’m not sure I follow her logic, since coal-heavy states will be hit hardest.

John Smith, a junior from the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota, was lucky to meet with Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar from his home state, along with a whopping 80 other Minnesota students. Klobuchar has been a champion on clean energy and climate issues, and as John reported,

“She said yes to our ‘big ask’ on the four lobbying points with no hesitation. It was exciting, and we certainly got her and her staff all jazzed up too with lots of cheering and applause.”

In 2007, Klobuchar reportedly joined a group of over 100 Minnesota students at Powershift 07 as they stormed into the Hart Senate Office Building and chanted from the lobby, disrupting all the working offices and nearly getting arrested. She recalled the incident with laughter and noted the higher levels of security this year.

John’s luck shifted as his next stop was an unscheduled visit to Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann. Bachmann is the Republican who during an election-season TV interview infamously called then-candidate Barack Obama “anti-American” and then, in Joseph McCarthy-style, called for an investigation of other “anti-American elements” in the U.S. Senate.

The stunt nearly cost Bachmann her seat, but now that she’s securely in office, she apparently didn’t have time to meet with her young constituents, despite being hounded for months by the EAC. As John explains:

“We walked into her office, and no one was there that could really help us or deliver our message – we had written her several letters, which we handed to her aide. Honestly, it was kind of unimpressive, but we did the best as we could. We’re definitely planning on meeting with her when she’s back in MN later this spring.”

Aside from a few weather-related travel delays from western states’ reps like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Utah Rep. Fred Hunsaker, nearly all the students I interviewed held successful meetings as planned. They generally felt like their message got across, though they said it was hard to tell how seriously they were being taken, or even how knowledgeable their representatives really were about climate science.

“I’d call the day a success,” John concluded. “I don’t know what the exact effect of our presence was on the legislators, but Power Shift got the masses engaged and really brought the democratic process to life for me and the others I was with. You couldn’t look any direction without seeing a green hard hat and a finely dressed young crowd!”

By Tristan Fowler
December 5, 2008

Wind turbines in Wasco, Oregon (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)

All those environmental studies majors out there should consider getting a minor in accounting or financing, because the future of “Going Green” has become a numbers game. The upfront costs of energy efficient renovations, LEED-certified buildings, and renewable energy credits can be encumbering to the campus sustainability coordinators and staggering to students in the local environmental club. Late last month, Alfred State College installed a 5.1 kilowatt photovoltaic grid intertie system. It cost $45,000. The University of Saskatchewan is replacing 26,000 light fixtures with energy-efficient bulbs at a cost of $1.9 million over three years. So what can a recession-era institution with Ramen noodle-eating students do? Just follow the example of over 25 campuses that are barely raising their tuition rates, and reaping huge benefits.

Rachel Barge, a 2008 grad from University of California–Berkley, has started a consulting non-profit, Campus InPower, which provides large-scale funding strategies and resources for college students. During her undergrad at University of California Berkley, Barge helped run a successful green fee campaign, raising the tuition by $5 per student. The minor fees added up to between $170,000 and $200,000 each year for sustainable projects. A committee of students, faculty and administrators decide how to best use the funds. The funding has paid for educational programming, created a native plant nursery, and built a campus-wide resource monitoring system.

Many colleges and universities are using the money to buy their electricity from wind and solar power. At University of California–Santa Cruz, 69 percent of the student body voted to have a $3 per quarter fee increase to purchase renewable energy. The fee generates $135,000 every year. With this student money, the university is operating on 100 percent renewable energy.

In some cases, students have decided the best way to use their bucks is in a revolving loan fund. The idea is that energy and resource efficient upgrades save money. With that extra savings, students and administrators can reinvest into more efficiencies. Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota, established a $27,000 fund in early 2006 with funds from the student government and the Environmental studies program, and they have a goal of increasing the fund to $100,000. Anyone or any group can offer a proposal, which they will receive all the extra savings after the initial loan and interest are reimbursed.

Eco-minded students and administrators will continue to crunch the numbers, but here are a few more numbers to keep in mind. This week, more than 600 college and universities have pledged to make their campus carbon neutral through the American College & University Presidential Climate Commitment. And with more than 7,000 students who attended PowerShift ’07 in Washington, D.C., it certainly appears the numbers are shifting in favor of the environment.

Tristan Fowler is an Intern at Science Progress and a senior at Ithaca College.

This post from Campus Progress Magazine, at www.CampusProgress.org

It’s hard times in higher ed – with our universities’ budgets getting slashed, administrators are in hyper hunker-down mode in terms of campus spending. More and more student organizers are turning to new, innovative funding sources to implement the vital campus sustainability initiatives we need. Campus InPower is here to help!

This post is a quick shout out for two new resource pages on the www.campusinpower.org site – they’re for students working to establish Green Fees or Revolving Loan Funds. If you know campuses that are working on either of these initiatives, please send them this info. We also offer direct consulting for campaigns; email rachel@campusinpower.org to get in touch!

On the new resource pages, here’s what we got:

The Green Fees Page:

• Sample Bylaws (…save yourself the pain of writing a 7-page legal doc!)
• Campaign Timeline and Guide (post election day = party)
  
• Volunteer Training Guide (train your volunteers to answer the tough questions… and not break campaign rules)
• Sample Flyers (because making flyers is hard)

The Revolving Loan Fund Page:

• RLF Overview (…what the heck is a RLF anyways?)
• Payback Guide (kind of like Mel Gibson… for energy financing)
• Macalester’s Clean Energy Revolving Fund guide (because we <3 Timothy Denherder-Thomas, aka TDT)

That’s it for now! Thanks for spreadin the info, and the love.

Oh, and if you’re unfamiliar with Campus InPower, we’re a national training program that gives student organizers the tools to create revolving loan funds, green fee campaigns, and other funding mechanisms to pay for large-scale sustainability projects on their campuses. You can download our funding toolkit here.

Busta Rhymes laid it out when he rapped, “It’s all about the money, baby”. Whether it’s clean energy purchasing, an awesome bike-share program, comprehensive composting, water conservation, student sustainability internships and more, these projects all need seed funding to get going. That’s where Campus InPower comes in.

Campus InPower is a national training program that gives student organizers the tools to create revolving loan funds, green fee campaigns, and other funding mechanisms to pay for large-scale sustainability projects on their campuses. Check out the website at www.campusinpower.org. I’m Rachel Barge – I created the program, and here’s what Campus InPower has to offer:

1. “Raise The Funds” Action Toolkit – brand-spanking-new funding guide for student organizers, co-published with AASHE. In its glorious 54 pages, it features SEVEN funding mechanisms to pay for wide-scale sustainability projects or create large, dedicated sustainability funds on campus. It is free to download at www.campusinpower.org

2. Trainings, Workshops, Speaking – as Director of Campus InPower, I am traveling the country, speaking at sustainability conferences and visiting schools. I have a travel budget, so I can visit any interested school and offer a unique training to their environmental group, student body, staff committee, etc on how they can leverage funds on their campus.

3. Strategy Consulting – I am available as a consultant, advocate and supporter to any group of students or staff who are working to establish a sustainability fund on their campus. That includes campaigns that are already underway, or plans that are still on the drawing board. I arrange conference calls, help perform research, and make personal visits to help advise campaigns.

It’s Getting Hot In Here community: I need YOUR help! I want campuses across the country to know that this resource exists for them to tap into. Please pass this info along to your campus community, alma matter, or friends at other schools who might be interested. Send them to www.campusinpower.org or have them email me at rachel@campusinpower.org With your support, we can help make the existing awesome organizing on campuses even more financiall powerful!

A lil background to the program: As a student organizer at UC Berkeley, I realized fast that funding was the biggest obstacle to the transformative change I wanted to see happen on my campus. That’s why I worked to pass The Green Initiative Fund in 2007, a $5/student green fee that now brings in $200,000 per year for sustainability projects on the UCB campus.

I got so much interest from schools around the country who wanted to replicate the green fee model that I created Campus InPower after graduating this May. The goal is to bring together the best campus funding practices available and get those resources to as many students as possible. So far, about 50 campuses have passed such fees nationwide, but we can do better! Campus InPower is supported by AASHE, Big Ideas at Berkeley, Breakthrough Generation and Wild Gift. Thanks for your help!

“No more pollution…or ocean dumpage. FROM NOW ON WE WILL TRAVEL IN TUBES” -Jack Black

Jack Black, the modern-day musical genius, once said in response to criticism of his music, “I’m tired of all this nay-saying! Why don’t YOU create something!?” This mantra could be perfectly applied to the global energy economy.

Why aren’t we going full force to create some awesome, renewable, scalable solutions rather than blaming democrats for high gas prices, calling for more offshore oil drilling (hello!?), or whining about our ever-increasing emissions? It seems like we’re spending more time naysaying than pioneering the energy solutions we need to solve the energy/climate crisis.

Thankfully there is a growing light at the end of the oil-economy tunnel – and I needn’t look further than an article by Andrew Leonard in this week’s Salon to see it.

Leonard cites some fantastic new analysis from market intelligence firm iSuppli, which predicted on Monday that by 2010, “worldwide investments in the production of photovoltaic (PV) cells will rise to the same level as those for semiconductor manufacturing by 2010.” That means that in only a few short years, solar panels could be as normal, cheap and accessible as owning a PC. And that’s for consumers and businesses alike – you, me, everybody. Booyah!

Continued solar development is one step in the inevitable direction of “Solar Grid Parity” – the point at which PV electricity costs the same or less than power derived from the electrical grid (a grid fueled currently mainly by coal and natural gas). The question we need to be asking ourselves now is: what can WE do to help the market speed up the process to the parity party?

One word: federal investment. Okay, that was two words. But the concept still stands: without significant resources and federal leadership allocated to innovation and dispersion, private investors will take at least until 2010 to make solar technology hit the market big time.

Do we have until 2010? Not if you ask climate scientists. As it stands, we’re stuck with a 385ppm carbon concentration with a 350ppm ecological target and no concerted effort to turn our colossus oil-tanker of an energy infrastructure around.

[To be honest, this type of long-range thinking and investment should have been happening 30 years ago… Oh wait, it was – under Carter. When Reagan came in, renewable energy research was cut almost entirely from the federal budgets. But, that’s history and we’ve got to focus on the problems at hand].

The government should create a steady, incentivized renewable energy tax environment (eight year solar ITC extension for example), strong RD&D efforts, and a government procurement program, to name a few options – all could make the diffusion of solar technology happen at a much greater speed.

Don’t worry – I’m not one of those “the government’s gonna solve all our problems” types. I’m happy as a clam that private investors are running with solar production, and I want the market to mitigate climate change just as bad as the next capitalist. But I want these solutions FASTER, damn it!

And I think the best way we can help the private sector roll out solar faster than this dude smashes watermelons with his head is to pour some top dollar into the brightest minds at the best universities and energy research centers. If the federal folks who dropped the cost of a single computer chip from $10,000 to $20 in only a decade can do anything for solar, we’ll soon be swimming in renewable energy (once we make a decent investment).

So let’s quit the naysaying and get down to work CREATING (i.e. investing in) the clean energy economy we want to see. We should aim to be like Jack Black – he invented the greatest singing technology since yodeling, and we could invent the greatest energy technology since hydrocarbons.