It’s Getting Hot In Here

Ding ding ding!! It’s round 2 in the public debate between Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President of Waterkeeper Alliance and outspoken mountaintop removal critic.  The Hill, a daily

Maria Gunnoe, organizer with Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, shows coal dust she wiped off Frankie Mooney's home in Twilight, WV

congressional newspaper in Washington DC, published a set of opposing op-eds yesterday just as the 5th Annual End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington wrapped up.  See Blankenship’s here and RFK Jr.’s here.

This follows the televised debate of Blankenship and Kennedy in Charleston, WV in late January, which helped focus national attention on MTR after Science magazine published an article on its destructive effects earlier in the month.   Climate Ground Zero also launched a treesit the same day as the debate, which halted blasting on Massey’s Bee Tree site in Pettus, WV for nine days.

Blankenship is feeling the pressure (and surely realizes Congress is too!) as he alludes to in his op-ed, and he makes clear he believes everyone, including the media, is against “energy producers.” Continue reading ‘Round 2: Blankenship versus RFK Jr. on Mountaintop Removal’

I’ve been familiar with mountaintop removal (the practice of blasting the tops off mountains and dumping them in streams to get at coal seams maybe a foot thick) for years now.  But this week it became personal.

I’m here at the 5th Annual End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington, joining residents from the coalfields of Appalachia in meetings with our Congressmen, gathering support for the Clean Water Protection Act (HR 1310) and the Appalachia Restoration Act (S 696).  This may be the 5th year, but the momentum is tangible.  We have 166 co-sponsors for the CWPA, bi-partisan support in both Houses and committee chairmen who are receptive to moving this forward. To build even more momentum, today is a National Call-In Day to urge your Congresspeople to support these bills.  Their offices are hearing from us in person and need to hear from even more constituents.

Please, take the two minutes to call your Rep.  Below are some of the most powerful points I’ve heard from local residents to communicate with members of Congress. Continue reading ‘National Call-In Day to Stop Mountaintop Removal’

Post By Junior Walk, Whitesville, Coal River Valley, West Virginia

Hi, my name is Junior Walk, and my family has lived in the coal fields of southern West Virginia for generations.  It pains me to see my heritage destroyed and defamed, and to see my friends and family poisoned by unclean water.   So, I decided to take a little trip to Washington D.C. to put a stop to it.

Today, I’m in our nations capitol to stop the heinous practice of mountaintop removal coal mining.  I’m here with the Alliance for Appalachia, as an employee of Coal River Mountain Watch; I’m here as an environmental activist; I’m here as an affected coal field resident; but I’m mostly here as someone whom cares about people, and all other living things.

My meetings today were cordial, I met with the offices of three different congressmen.  The first one was on the fence about the Clean Water Protection Act, the second one will probably co-sign, and the third was already a co-signer.  I think we’re making serious progress here, we already have more than 160 co-signers, and we only need 40-50 more co-signers.

When this bill becomes a law, it will effectively end mountaintop removal by making valley fills illegal (which they were in the first place).  Continue reading ‘From Coal River Valley to Washington DC’

©Stuart Matthews

Guest post and photography essay from photographer Stuart Matthews

In November, 2009, I visited Bangladesh to document the impact of global warming on the country and its’ people. I focused on how NGO’s such as Oxfam Great Britain are collaborating with the communities to develop initiatives like the ‘Cash for Work’ program. This provides an income to the individual workers who participate in developing the climate defenses around their community.

Bangladesh has an extremely vulnerable landscape with 80% of its land made up of low-lying deltaic plains with an altitude of only 10 meters above sea level or less. This land is subject to frequent flooding during the Monsoon season, with large quantities of water flowing down the Jamuna and Padma rivers, causing catastrophic erosion along the banks of a fragile, predominantly silt, landscape.

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Continue reading ‘Changing Tides – A Photo Essay on Bangladesh’

It’s Oscar time and people are all counting the days until we can sit down, play the Oscar polls, critique the Oscar De La Renta dresses, and cringe at the hot mess that is Mariah Carey. Oddly enough I’m now eagerly waiting with them this year; not to compare my impeccable eye for style, or guess the winner of the Best Song (Weary Heart, from Crazyheart duh), but to see if James Cameron, director of that little movie that could, will put some action where his mouth is.

In recent weeks James Cameron himself has been calling Avatar a catalyst for environmental action saying he now wants to “use the spotlight that’s been put on him by Avatar’s success to bring attention to environmental causes“. This caught the eye of Rainforest Action Network’s Becky Tarbotton. On yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle website Tarbotton started a call to Mr. Cameron to help expose the “real-life Avatar” that Chevron continues to enable in Ecuador.

In the article Tarbotton asks:

“What if in his acceptance speech James Cameron mentioned the real-life Indigenous Ecuadorean heroes who are battling the real-life evil oil corporation Chevron?

She then continues:

If Director James Cameron accepts an Academy Award next month, he should let his faithful fans know that while Pandora is fictional, what is happening to communities in Ecuador because of Chevron’s actions is as real as it gets.”

Continue reading ‘James Cameron, the Oscar’s, and the Real-Life ‘Avatar’.’

Originally published by The Stanford Review

“If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years,” declared the world’s wealthiest man during last week’s TED 2010 conference, “I can pick who is president, I can pick a vaccine… or I can pick that [an energy technology] at half the cost with no CO2 emissions gets invented, this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact.”

Bill Gates is right. And he is not just talking about the impact on climate change, which does of course present a major threat. He is also talking about one of the most critical global imperatives to make poverty history: making clean energy cheap.

“If you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy,” said Gates in his introduction. Gates should know as well as any development expert, since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – the world’s largest transparent private foundation – has invested billions of dollars in extreme poverty alleviation since 1994.

Nearly 1.6 billion of our fellow human beings have no access to electricity, and around 2.4 billion people – over one third of global population – meet their basic cooking and heating needs by burning biomass, such as wood, crop waste, and dung. “Without access to modern, commercial energy, poor countries can be trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, social instability and underdevelopment,” concludes the International Energy Agency.

Continue reading ‘Make Poverty History: Make Clean Energy Cheap’

Good news for the climate in 2009 came in the form of a host of local victories and unprecedented civil society coordination at the international climate negotiations, both of which demonstrated that across the U.S. and the world, the call for real climate action is alive and growing.  But in other obvious and important ways–stalled US climate legislation, an anti-climactic Copenhagen climate summit, a resurgence of climate skepticism in the media– it was not the 2009 many of us had hoped for.  So- What now?  What next?  A national summit or series of regional climate summits in the US could help answer those all-important questions by pulling together the collective wisdom of those in-the-know: on-the-ground citizen climate leaders.
Continue reading ‘If you want to know, just ask…’

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?’

Written by Lance Brisbois, Holly Jones and Juliana Williams

While Robert Kennedy Jr. and Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, debated mountaintop removal coal mining last night, the momentum against coal is building across the country and world.  Beginning yesterday, three activists with Climate Ground Zero halted blasting on Coal River Mountain, and they are continuing their tree sit today despite Massey’s intimidation efforts which include felling trees near the activists and deafening noise machines.  Delhi, India, with a population of over 12 million residents, announced that it will shut down all five of its coal-fired power plants over the next four years.  Earlier this month, Rising Tide in Australia blocked coal trains in protest of the weak outcomes of Copenhagen.

My journey in the movement has been one of critical engagement with the status quo, my peers, and my assumptions. Strategy sessions, marches, actions,  speeches, lobby meetings, countless emails and googledocs, rallies, conversations, books, and periods of reflection have constructed the vantage point from which I write today. This is a lengthy post. In it, I will recount personal experience and observations, present the bones of a theoretical framework for redirecting our movement, offer a critique of current strategies, and begin a conversation on what would constitute an effective strategy. It’s probably a bit much for one blog post, but I hope that you will take the time to read it and offer your perspective on the topics at hand. I write out of love and respect for the many amazing people who have shaped me and my work to this point.

Introduction
In August 2007, I participated in the Sierra Student Coalition’s annual leadership gathering, Shindig. At Shindig, I connected with dozens of inspiring youth leaders from around the nation. Leaving that week I saw myself as one person in a network of groups and individuals leading the way to a carbon-free future. I knew that by organizing our fellow students and communities to demand clean energy from the powers-that-be we could secure a sustainable and prosperous future. It was with this conviction that I returned to Michigan and threw myself into my new role as student coordinator of the Michigan Student Sustainability Coalition on the eve of Power Shift 2007. Continue reading ‘Climate Generation: Reshaping the Flow of Power’