It’s Getting Hot In Here

By Teryn Norris
Originally published by AlterNet
July 8, 2009

The recent passage of the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACES) through the U.S. House of Representatives drew different reactions from climate and environmental advocates. But one key perspective shared by most advocates is that, despite its weaknesses, the bill is a good first step. ACES builds a solid foundation for future progress on U.S. climate mitigation, the argument goes, and climate advocates will be well-positioned to strengthen the legislation in years ahead.

But what are the prospects for strengthening ACES in future years? This question is subject to many uncertainties, depending on the vagaries of the political climate. But a closer examination reveals that ACES could create a “super-lobby” of interest groups that will significantly diminish the possibility of achieving future reforms.

The newest climate lobby — and potentially one of the most powerful in years to come — is the financial industry. If ACES is signed into law, the global carbon market could become the largest commodity market in the world. According to Bart Chilton, Commissioner of the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), “The potential size and scope of a structured carbon emissions market in the US is unequivocally vast. It is certainly possible that the emissions markets could overtake all other commodity markets.”

A growing number of analysts are expressing concerns about the emergence of a new financial climate lobby and the potential for gaming in a new U.S. carbon market. A recent report by Friends of Earth (FOE), “Subprime Carbon,” argued that cap and trade proposals like ACES could create a system with similar financial and political interests to the housing market bubble. Just as financial practices during the housing bubble caused deteriorating standards in mortgages, cap and trade could create “subprime” carbon offsets — offsets that do not represent actual emission reductions and carbon derivatives based on future carbon reductions with high risk of not being fulfilled.

Continue reading ‘New Climate Bill Could Create “Super Lobby” Against U.S. Emissions Reductions’

Perplexed by the inter-related problems India faces as it develops at the cost of 2/3 rd of its population living outside the economy, two young activists from Switch ON, rode their cycles 1800 kilometers across India through the coal belt – to question India’s growth based on fossil fuel, and to seek and highlight alternatives for a sustainable and equitable development.

Why New Coal gives a new perspective to Coal in India – addressing India’s growing energy needs, problems of energy security and Climate Change Vulnerabilities – by interviewing experts across the nation, while also documenting Vinay and Hoob’s epic journey across the nation.

Continue reading ‘Why New Coal?’

This April, the roots of leadership were laid in the Climate movement.  From Powershift to the FTN Town Hall Campaign, young people across the country moved into positions of leadership, and engaged their community and policy makers on our vital clean energy future.  A sea change in the quality and quantity of leadership occurred, and on the eve of the first ever US climate legislation it continues to breed success and momentum.

Since April, certain needs have arisen that must be addressed. First, we must continue pressure on policy makers and institutions to accelerate our transition to clean energy sources, and to strengthen ACES and our local legislation. At the same time, we must fulfill the less noticed need of developing and empowering our new climate leaders.

Continue reading ‘From Coal to Copenhagen: An Opportunity for Leadership’

On Wednesday, June 10th, Representative Nikki Tsongas (D-MA) officially congratulated both houses of the Massachusetts State Legislature for passing a resolution written by Mass Power Shift student leaders in partnership with State Senator Marc Pacheco and Representative Frank Smizik in a statement in the congressional record.  

In her statement, Representative Tsongas highlighted the efforts of Mass Power Shift in helping secure the passage of the resolution that called on congress to RePower America with 100% Clean Electricity in the next 10 years.  MAPS Campaign Co-Coordinator Nick Dahlberg, a rising senior at Boston University, expressed his gratitude to Representative Tsongas: “We really appreciate the Congresswoman’s recognition of our hard work and persistence.  It’s good to know that congress has officially received word about our efforts here in Massachusetts.”  His fellow Campaign Coordinator, Meredith Annex, a rising junior at Williams College, adds: “But we could not have succeeded without strong leadership in the State House.  We are really grateful for the partnership our network has established with Senator Pacheco and Representative Smizik, and look forward to continuing our work with them in the years ahead.”

Massachusetts Power Shift is continuing forward with its campaign towards 100% Clean Electricity within the next 10 years, seeing it as a serious solution to a serious crisis.  This summer, the network has twenty students bicycling around the state, spreading awareness about the climate emergency, and the 100% Goal.  They are also proud to partner with students at Clark University, who are hosting Summer of Solutions – Worcester.  Stay tuned to itsgettinghotinhere for updates!

For more stories on the RePower America Resolution and other Mass Power Shift successes, please visit www.masspowershift.org/media

Released yesterday, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a report titled “The Clean Energy Economy: Repowering Jobs, Businesses and Investments Across America” defines and quantifies all the jobs in the every state in country and the District of Columbia that are involved in developing the clean energy economy.

To do this, they defined what a clean energy economy is and created criteria to determine which jobs can actually be included in that definition. This report provides a baseline of existing jobs, rates of job growth and analysis of the state and federal policies that encouraged this job development from 1998-2007. Finally, someone is defining criteria for measuring the development of a clean energy economy!

The report states,

A clean energy economy generates jobs, businesses and investments while expanding clean energy production, increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waste and pollution, and conserving water and other natural resources.

and defines and provides examples of the types of jobs involved in a clean energy economy:

• Clean Energy – Building sustainable energy for the future
• Energy Efficiency – Reducing and managing our energy demand
• Environmentally Friendly Production – Improving our products and processes
• Conservation and Pollution Mitigation – Recycling and remediating waste
• Training and Support – helping develop our clean energy economy Continue reading ‘Pew Report Counts Clean Energy Jobs’

Micah Melnyk and Doug Forsythe of the Canadian Delegation in the main Plenary session.

Canada’s lead negotiator for the UN climate talks answers your questions again. You can ask Michael Martin your question by commenting here.

1. What is the length of commitment period that Canada is looking at for the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol?
2. What research initiatives do you think Canada should be focusing on in light of these negotiations?
3. And beyond Copenhagen, how are we going to kick-start the technology revolution that we are going to need?
4. Is Canada looking at the gender perspective in climate adaptation discussions and policies?
5. I heard a rumor that you joined Twitter in the last 24 hours… is this true?

Read his answers here.

There is ample reason for disappointment over the current climate bill’s public investment priorities which in Rep. Markey’s own words has “huge subsidies for clean coal—huge—much more than we have in for renewables.” However, the amount of investment and the sectors of the economy into which it goes are only part of the bigger problems regarding popular democratic control over investment  decisions and their outcomes. When the goal of technology development is economic monopoly power and profit maximization rather than maximum social benefit, certain results tend to follow be it in the field of medicine or energy.

In a recent article Mark Weisbrot spotlights some of the increasingly obvious contradictions of accumulation and imperialism surrounding investment in the private sector for the development  technologies aimed at mediating climate change:

“According to Inside U.S. Trade, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is gearing up for a fight to limit the access of developing countries to Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs).  They fear that international climate change negotiations, taking place under the auspices of the United Nations, will erode the position of corporations holding patents on existing and future technologies.  Developing countries such as Brazil, India, and China have indicated that if — as expected in the next few years — they are going to have to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, they should be able to license some of the most efficient available technologies for doing so.

Continue reading ‘US Capitalists Organize Energy Tech Patents for Extortion of World’s Most Vulnerable’

Originally posted at the Breakthrough Institute

Advocates of the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454, or “ACES” for short) argue that the bill is far more than just a climate bill. It’s a comprehensive piece of clean energy, efficiency and climate legislation, and taken as a whole, they argue, it should be considered transformational — even if the cap and trade portion of the bill may have been significantly weakened (see Breakthrough’s detailed analysis of the ACES cap and trade program here).

The ACES bill does indeed include many provisions to set a new course for our nation’s energy policy, including efficiency standards and regulations, authorization for new programs aimed at modernizing the nation’s electricity infrastructure and paving the way for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles, and a national renewable electricity standard. Many of these will move America in the right direction.

But the question remains: will ACES really be transformational? And will it propel American quickly away from business as usual and towards the prosperous clean energy economy and dramatic emissions reductions we need?

Breakthrough’s team has taken a close look at the bill’s cap and trade provision, and discovered that the combination of offset provisions and a little-known provision called the “strategic reserve pool” could allow U.S. emissions to greatly exceed the supposed emissions “cap” set by the legislation.

Here we examine one of the other major provisions of the ACES bill, the national renewable electricity standard (RES) established by Title I of the bill. Unfortunately, our analysis concludes that the RES has been severely weakened since initially proposed in the discussion draft version of the ACES bill; as it now stands, the RES may barely increase U.S. renewable electricity generation compared to business as usual projections.
Continue reading ‘Climate Bill’s Renewable Electricity Standard Severely Weakened; May Have Little to No Impact’

For many of us who have been in the climate activism loop for several years, the time of our entry into serious activism was marked by a growing public awareness over the link between oil and the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the hand Big Oil played in writing the Bush/Cheney energy policy.  In the last years of the Bush Administration, the focus of many environmentalists shifted subtly from oil to coal, which contributes even more than oil to global warming.  Now, at the dawn of the Obama Administration, coal maintains its well-deserved reputation as Climate Enemy #1; but tar sands development, oil shale mining, and other newly-emerged branches of the oil industry give even King Coal a run for his money.

The struggles of communities confronting the oil and coal industries are fitting banners for our movement; they show just how far the abuses of the fossil fuel giants will go.  However, in this new political atmosphere in which serious proposals for climate protection are at least being considered in Congress (though always watered down by industry), and in which Big Oil (though still hugely influential) is no longer directly advising the Executive Branch on global warming science, the time has come to ask ourselves: just what are we willing to settle for?  The most polluting and environmentally destructive of industry practices must go—even a few individuals in the Halls of Power are beginning to see that.  But if we are really going to achieve, in the words of the Cascade Climate Declaration, a “Sustainable, just, and prosperous future for all,” then we need to go much further.  And this means focusing our attention on a fossil fuel that, for most of us, hasn’t traditionally drawn the spotlight: natural gas.

Even environmental groups have traditionally regarded natural gas as a lesser evil when compared to oil or, especially, coal.  When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the Capitol Power Plant in DC would move quickly off coal and substitute natural gas as the fuel of choice, it was hailed by many as a victory for the climate.  But, as the Center for Biological Diversity points out, “the Capitol Power Plant’s switch won’t get our planet far on the road to reducing our atmospheric carbon levels below the necessary 350 parts per million.”  Ordinary natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal; but that takes us only halfway to where we need to be.

In contrast to much of the rest of the country, where concerns about natural gas have taken a backseat to Big Oil and King Coal, the topic is much hotter in my own Pacific Northwest.  It’s here that the third fossil fuel is attempting perhaps its most serious new inroads on the US energy economy.  And it’s materialized in natural gas’ dirtiest, most environmentally destructive form: Liquefied Natural Gas, or LNG. Continue reading ‘The Third Fossil Fuel: Or, What are We Willing to Settle For?’

As I rolled into Wilmington, OH this Wednesday, a small farming community in southwest Ohio and the site of the largest economic collapse I’ve ever known in this country, I daydreamed of slowly dilapidating buildings and for sale signs lining the streets. This is the story that 60 minutes and other big media have covered, but it’s not the one I went to find and it’s not the one I saw.

Wilmington hosted shipping company DHL’s national hub of operations, which began to close down last year after the economic downturn and is preparing to fully close its U.S. operations this summer. This makes for a total of 8,000 jobs lost from a 12,000 person town.

That’s where the story of Mark Rembert, Taylor Stuckert, and Energize Clinton County begins. Mark and Taylor postponed Peace Corps duties to save their hometown through community organizing and grassroots economic development. I entered their donated downtown office into a meeting with the only Clinton County energy auditor, amongst buy local banners and Green For All posters.

In the shadow of a mono-industry way of life, ECC is pioneering a new way. Mark spoke excitedly about Wilmington’s potential, saying “we’re only capitalizing on 10% of our potential, we have so much room to grow!”. However, having submitted the largest weatherization program in US history to mostly deaf ears, during a glut of money for such programs, it’s clear that their work is cut out for them.

Time shall tell whether ECC can pull Wilmington out of this crisis. The federal response is helping, but ultimately the solutions must be local. Taylor said the stimulus package is like “trying to fit a square peg through a round hole, or drinking out of a firehose”, that our organic community networks have eroded and it takes a lot of work to rebuild them. Things are about to get very interesting in Wilmington. To learn from ECC, you can check out their Energize Your Community toolkit, Energize Your Garden toolkit, and more at http://EnergizeCC.com.