It’s Getting Hot In Here

In Grand County, Utah, people are thirsty. Utah is a desert state; it’s a thirsty place. What we love about Utah is its unique, gorgeous, otherworldly geography, which keeps us coming back or sticking around. So explain this logic to me: a horrifying and unprecedented project could put Utah’s Canyonlands National Park and Glen Canyon Recreation Area at serious risk, while at the same time thrusting a new source of water-depleting, CO2-billowing, filthy, and geographically destructive (but pseudoprofitable!) business into the equation.

I’m talking about the first ever bona fide tar sands extraction project in the United States of America–right here, in my own backyard!

You might have heard about the tar sands extraction happening in Canada. This nightmarish debacle has transformed countless acres of priceless Canadian biodiversity into a sticky black cesspool, for primarily America consumption. Don’t take my word for it; do a simple Google image search for “Canadian Tar Sands.” After you’ve done that, imagine the effect these proposed tar pits would have on the land immediately adjacent to the sites. Now picture that land as Canyonlands National Park. I’m not making this up. Continue reading ‘First US Tar Sands to Break Ground in Utah’

Through an event arranged by the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, college students from Alaska and across the United States had the opportunity to speak with McKie Campbell, Republican Staff Director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, about environmental issues in Alaska – and what Senator Murkowski is doing in Washington DC to address climate change, the opening of the Northwest Passage, and ocean acidification.

Naturally, one of the hot topics of conversation was Senator Murkowski’s bill to block the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide as a criteria air pollutant.  Senator Murkowski has drawn fire for these views, since this is seen to be the last hope for achieving meaningful GHG reductions if no bill passes this year.  The chances of a bill passing this year are looking smaller and smaller – the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill has failed to materialize, despite their op-ed pledging a bipartisan bill.  According to Campbell, while Kerry this morning seemed optimistic about the state of the legislation, Senate Majority Leader Reid today stated that if a climate bill is not brought before the Senate within the two weeks, climate change is not going to be addressed this year.  This puts huge pressure on Kerry – it is increasingly clear that another year without action will have huge economic and environmental consequences.

Mr. Campbell defended Senator Murkowski’s anti-regulatory actions.  Her action against EPA regulation of carbon dioxide is not because she feels it is not contributing to global warming–rather, that the language of the Clean Air Act is not sufficient to regulate GHGs as it is now written.  Continue reading ‘Let’s Talk: Alaska’

To continue recent IGHIH discussions on language and framing, as well as responding to a surprisingly long debate on ‘whether renewables can solve it’ in the comments of my last blog, I wanted to share this extract from ‘Beyond Yes We Can’ – a piece that I wrote this time last  year,  in a period of post-Poznan reflection.

Post-Copenhagen, much of what I wrote then still applies.

“The Language of Certainty”

The choice on whether or not to speak with certainty and faith about ‘winning’ and ’success’ on climate change is similar to our choices of language around the effects of climate change. Consider, for example, the difference between the two sentences:
Continue reading ‘Framing: “We’re going to solve it”‘’

[The following was co-written by Naomi Klein, author of #1 international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, Terry Tempest Williams, world renowned wildlife author, Bill Mckibben, founder of 350.org and author of The End Of Nature, and Dr. James Hansen, author of Storms of my Grandchildren, and who is regarded as the world's leading climatologist. All recognize the trial of Tim DeChristopher to be a turning point in the climate movement. Please visit our resource page for more information]

Dear Friends,

The epic fight to ward off global warming and transform the energy system that is at the core of our planet’s economy takes many forms: huge global days of action, giant international conferences like the one that just failed in Copenhagen, small gestures in the homes of countless people.

But there are a few signal moments, and one comes next month, when the federal government puts Tim DeChristopher on trial in Salt Lake City. Tim—“Bidder 70”– pulled off one of the most creative protests against our runaway energy policy in years: he bid for the oil and gas leases on several parcels of federal land even though he had no money to pay for them, thus upending the auction. The government calls that “violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act” and thinks he should spend ten years in jail for the crime; we call it a noble act, a profound gesture made on behalf of all of us and of the future. Continue reading ‘Call to action by Naomi Klein, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Dr. James Hansen and Peaceful Uprising’

Today the Yale Project on Climate Change is releasing the second wave of results from their recent national survey. This report finds that, despite the recent drops in public beliefs and concern about global warming, a large majority of Americans—regardless of political affiliation—support the passage of federal climate and energy policies. These include support for:

• Funding more research on renewable energy, such as solar and wind power (85 percent)
• Tax rebates for people buying fuel-efficient vehicles or solar panels (82 percent)
• Establishing programs to teach Americans how to save energy (72 percent)
• Regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant (71 percent)
• School curricula to teach children about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming (70 percent)
• Signing an international treaty that requires the U.S. to cut emissions of carbon dioxide 90% by the year 2050 (61 percent)
• Establishing programs to teach Americans about global warming (60 percent).

Surprisingly, majorities of Republicans and Democrats support many of these policies, including renewable energy research, tax rebates, regulating carbon dioxide, and expanding offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. Further, majorities in both parties support returning revenues from a cap-and-trade system to American households to offset higher energy costs, perhaps opening a pathway for Congressional action.

Sixty percent of Americans, however, said that they have heard “nothing at all” about the cap and trade legislation currently being considered by Congress. Only twelve percent had heard “a lot.” Continue reading ‘Americans Support Strong Climate & Energy Policies’

Cross-posted from the 1Sky Skywriter blog

Have you ever heard that the best way to reach someone is through their personal network? This is the principle behind sharing blog posts and videos via email, Facebook, and other social networks. Clicking a button is an easy way to share with your friends, but a more effective way is directly face-to-face; of course, face-to-face doesn’t have to mean “in their face.”

On Tuesday night, I joined much of America in watching the final season premiere of Lost. Thankfully I chose my roommates well last year, as evidenced by them wanting to watch with me. As we sat together in the living room, we were distracted during each commercial break by the steady snowfall outside our window.

A discussion began about how Washington, D.C. has been getting an unusual amount of snow this winter. Without really thinking, I uttered emphatically, “global warming.” Continue reading ‘Finding little moments for climate ed’

These mountains in the depths of district of Chamba in the state of Himachal Pradesh (India) used to have a lot more snow.

In recent times I’ve been reading a lot about climate change not being real. First the climate gate scandal followed by the many articles attacking the IPCC for incorrectly publishing information on the glaciers melting in the Himalayas by 2035. Climate scientists, economics, politicians and business persons are being interviewed left, right and centre.

The question on the lips of the public is – what is the truth? The truth is such an interesting thing – where more often than not, it is a human tendency for a person to believe what they want to hear.

I pose a question to all people who are jumping on the bandwagon of denying the Himalayan glacier melt due to an error made by the IPCC, and denying the existence of climate change. How many of you have been to the Himalayas? How many of you have spoken to the citizens in the mountains of India and Nepal who have spent their whole lives there?

Very few of you – if any. Continue reading ‘Are the Himalayan Glaciers melting? Why not see for yourself?’

It’s the day after MLK Day, and the eve of Obama’s inauguration.

In light of insufficient progress on national climate and energy policy, and a disappointing outcome in Copenhagen, it’s clear as a movement that we need to stop and reflect on our path forward.  It’s been great to see this discussion on IGHIH with a number of really thoughtful posts.  We got an idea of where we came from, learned about the importance of ambition and going big, and reflected on what we can learn from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. I’d like to continue the conversation, and have us reflect on what it means to be entering a new decade.

In this decade, the Millennial generation will come to power, becoming the largest voting constituency and entering the workforce.  How do we want to define our decade?

We need a movement wide discussion, and a movement wide vision. A vision built from the ground-up with the numbers to stand behind it to make it powerful. Continue reading ‘How Will We Define This Decade?’

I spent eight weeks traveling Europe with a group of 13 AVAAZ climate activists from five different continents, organizing for a better Copenhagen.  For the past three days I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened in the final moments of that journey.

The story of Copenhagen began in Bali, Indonesia two years ago. After an intensive two weeks of negotiations, 192 countries, including the Bush Administration, signed on to the Bali Roadmap, a plan to complete a binding global climate treaty in Copenhagen. The Bali Roadmap was a political agreement acknowledging that the evidence for the planet warming is “unequivocal”, and that further delays in reducing emissions would further increase the risks of “severe climate change impacts.”

Deepa Gupta speaks to a crowd of onlookers during a global hunger strike for climate justice event in Copenhagen

Fast forward to 2009 – after two years of high level negotiations and new peer-reviewed scientific findings warning that climate change is accelerating faster than previously anticipated, the stakes had been raised for Copenhagen. In the first week and a half of the negotiations, leaders from small island states like the Maldives and Tuvalu and from African countries already being thrust into water-related conflicts from extreme drought resisted threats and bribes from developed countries as they insisted on an ambitious and fair legal treaty committed to containing warming below 1.5 degrees C. Tensions ran high and the talks were deadlocked as rich nations and emerging economies blamed each other and the most vulnerable.

After nine hours of direct negotiations from world leaders on the final day, a weak agreement was reached by a diverse group of interests. The three-page Copenhagen Accord is by all accounts far short of the ambitious and fair legal treaty promised in Bali. While it does finally tie emerging economies like China and India in with the United States under the same climate agreement, it also punts most of the hard decisions down the road another year.

At most the Copenhagen Accord can be called another baby step forward, when the world needed a bold leap. The reason for this colossal failure of leadership was a No Ambition Coalition of the United States and China. Held hostage by fossil fuel lobbyists and an addiction to a 20th century growth paradigm, China held out against a legally-binding outcome and international verification of emission targets while the United States refused to budge from their weak emission targets.

Continue reading ‘Understanding Copenhagen’