Mayor Menino’s announcement comes after Massachusetts finalized a three-year plan to triple utility investments in energy efficiency. Boston and the State of Massachusetts are moving toward a clean energy future. But will it be enough?

An emerging coalition of faith, business, environmental, and workforce development groups are joining The Leadership Campaign in challenging the Massachusetts State Legislature to double-down on recent clean energy and energy efficiency investments by creating a task force to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2020. The campaign – The Commonwealth Challenge, launched on March 4th – is not your typical political initiative.

The motto of the Commonwealth Challenge is “When the people lead, leaders will follow.” 40 years after the first Earth Day, the people of Massachusetts are putting down their phones, pens, and signs and picking up caulk guns and home retrofit contracts. Residents of the Commonwealth are demonstrating a real solution – hire local workers, including workers with barriers to employment, to make homes more energy efficient and pay them family supporting wages and benefits. Following in the footsteps of Van Jones, Green For All, and the Green Justice Coalition of Massachusetts, the Commonwealth Challenge is creating a green collar economy that works for people and the planet. And along the way, people are measuring the results and holding themselves and their leaders accountable.

The Commonwealth Challenge aims to engage 3,000 residents by Earth Day, April 22nd, in saving 100,000 KWh of electricity. If each person saves 5% of their electricity the goal will be reached. 100,000 KWh is enough to power the homes of Beacon Hill, home of the State Legislature, for a full day. It’s also enough to create 2200 job hours for local workers, save residents $20,000 on their energy bills, and remove more than 370 tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

By retrofitting their homes to make them more efficient, residents are taking the first step toward clean energy revolution. But more has to be done if the planet is to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid dangerous climate change tipping points. On April 22nd, residents will present the results of their actions as a challenge to the State Legislature to lead the nation toward the next American Revolution – an energy revolution for good jobs and climate security. The way to get there – pass An Act to Create a Repower Massachusetts Emergency Task Force, a bill introduced on December 7th that would create a task force to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2020. At the same time, residents are challenging Massachusetts Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry to lead Congress toward finally putting a national price on carbon pollution.

It is not enough to simply promote home energy retrofits. Without a signal from customers or government that they should act differently, many companies will continue to weed out job applicants with barriers to employment such as the disabled, women, people of color, people from marginalized communities, and people who have ever been convicted of a crime. Contractors serving the Commonwealth Challenge must sign on to, the Green Collar Hiring Pledge, a promise by employers to pay fair wages and benefits, hire people with barriers to employment, and choose environmentally preferred products and practices. So far, three companies have signed on and are serving homes through the Challenge.

Before April 22nd, Neighborhood Captains across Massachusetts will organize “Energy Retrofit Parties”, phonebanks, canvass their neighborhoods, and show up at community events to sign people up to retrofit their homes. Thanks to significant subsidies and a group discount from Commonwealth Challenge Service Partners, a home retrofit is an easy sell for anybody in Massachusetts whether they own or rent their home. In fact, the initial energy audit and air sealing work is free. This flier explains what I am talking about.

After Copenhagen many people lost faith in the willingness of political leaders to step up to the plate to address the climate crisis. The question now becomes – what are we going to do about it? With coastlines eroding in the Maldives, fires and droughts raging in Africa, and desperate farmers turning to suicide in India, I believe that it is incumbent on all of us to take this challenge into our own hands. If governments won’t adopt a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty, we the people, have to use whatever power we have to decarbonize our economy and demonstrate the way forward.

Actions speak louder than words, but they also often begin with words. I have one question for people reading this.

Who do you know in Massachusetts? If you are inspired by what we are doing, I urge you to tell your friends and family in Massachusetts about the Commonwealth Challenge and encourage them to retrofit their home. 3,000 people might not seem like a large number; but the difference between 3,000 people signing a petition and 3,000 people signing up to schedule someone to come work on their home is significant.

Use the tools on this website to spread the word and become a fan of the Commonwealth Challenge on Facebook.

It is time to lead.

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.”

Now THIS seems like something worth watching on Oscar night, help us spread word on Facebook and Twitter (where it’s already gaining) by retweeting and posting “I want Avatar director James Cameron to mention real-life Ecuador struggle against #Chevron at #Oscars: bit.ly/9Rvut8 #realavatar RT Please”.

My personal two cents is that, after taking his narrative from the all-to-familiar struggles of indigenous communities and their fights against resource extraction, colonialism, and the corporations that perpetuate the destruction of these communities, James Cameron has a responsibility to use the global venue of the Oscars to highlight communities that are more real than any 3d glasses.

Last month Josh Schrei wrote a great piece on how Avatar’s dialog mimics the rhetoric of so many corporate hacks and unfortunately there are all too many real-life Avatar plots, from India to Peru. However the case against Chevron resonates with me for two reasons. One is has the potential to share some commonalities with the films ending in the very near future. Chevron and CEO John Watson are facing a potential guilty verdict in the next 6 months for their dump and run in the Ecuadorean Rainforest. Granted this battle will not be won with majestic trees, or flying dragons; it will be won with a communities unending will for survival, and a global rally for justice. While the means may be different, the result will be the same in that one of the world’s most powerful corporations (Chevron) will be held accountable to their crimes. Which leads to my second reason to why the Chevron/Avatar connection resonates with me.

The Chevron case is already sending ripples through the oil industry on how they are operating in communities, don’t get me wrong they are still destroying communities for the black gold but they have taken notice. Now we need these corporations to move beyond “taking notice”. As the Chevron case builds to a crescendo, and if Chevron is found guilty of the over $27 billion in damages, oil corporations worldwide will be forced to take measures to rethink their operations and their consequences, and communities will have an unprecedented momentum to fight back against the likes of John Watson who enable some of the most atrocious operations and crimes in the world.

This trial is a legal catalyst and Avatar has the potential to be the pop-culture catalyst. Something as simple a mentioning the ongoing fight in the Ecuadorian Amazon would be an enormous act of solidarity with communities that inspire his narrative, and bring the real-life stories of corporate corruption and colonization to an entirely new audience waiting to take action after being inspired by Avatar.

Help ask James Cameron:
Repost this blog, the SF Chronicle, or better yet write your own blog and post on Facebook.
Help spread the word about this group
Retweet “Avatar director James Cameron should mention real struggle of Amazonians against #Chevron at #Oscars http://tinyurl.com/ybd6d72 #realavatar” on Twitter.

Additionally, Public Radio International traveled with indigenous communities in Ecuador as they bused to Quito to see Avatar. Here is there reaction to James Cameron’s film.
You can find the full PRI article here.

Among the panelists were leaders and experts of the global justice movement like Martin Khor from the South Centre, Maude Barlow from the Council of Canadians, Victor Menotti of the International Forum on Globalization, Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, and Gopal Dayaneni from Movement Generation. You can view the full event online here, or by clicking the image below. I’ll discuss some highlights and possible movement-building lessons.

Movement-Melding in Copenhagen

The experts left very little doubt that the fight to avert climate catastrophe is the fight for the direction of the global economy.

Climate justice + development justice + trade justice = true global justice.

If, as panelists noted, the climate negotiations will eventually lead to the rewriting of the global economy then global institutions like the WTO and other unfair institutions of trade and development will have to change dramatically. For decades, social movements have resisted the globalization agenda of the international corporate elite. With the threat of climate change, the world has been forced to pursue fundamental economic transformation. That transformation presents tremendous opportunity, and so comprises the silver lining on the dark, looming clouds of possible climate catastrophe.

Problem is that too few of us in the global north are connecting the dots between the struggles of the global justice movement with the current fight for a fair climate deal.

Before I say more, here are some highlights from a few leaders and thinkers who are:

- Early on Maude Barlow makes the explicit connection between the unfair and anti-democratic process that played out in Copenhagen as parallel to what we see at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva. Rich countries ganging up and bullying poorer countries, divide and conquer tactics, and ‘green room’ -esque VIP meetings where the ‘real’ decision are made, without voices of poorer countries or marginalized peoples (min 7:00).

- Martin Khor makes clear that by proposing to cap emissions, that leaders are “negotiating not only the future of humanity and the earth, we are also negotiating the distribution of the future GNP of the world” [emphasis mine]. Because the five major issues areas in the working groups “are no longer about climate science” only, shifting the global economic and development paradigm is explicitly required to avert catastrophic climate change. He then criticizes the exclusive and anti-democratic process, reminiscent of the WTO process, that produced the controversial Copenhagen Accord (beginning around min 11:30).

- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz points out the importance of the historic first inclusion of language regarding human rights and land rights of indigenous and local peoples in the climate negotiation document. Also, like the movement for global economic justice at the WTO, she emphasized the wisdom of using an inside-outside strategy to influence the negotiations inside AND support the social movement mobilizations outside the convention center (min 31:00).

- Victor Menotti notes how the each of the food, finance and climate crises has been caused by neoliberal economic orthodoxy that privileges corporate power over democratic governments, and by capture of global institutions like the WTO by corporate interests (min 38:00).

A spirited discussion followed, delving into a wide array of issues:

- Gopal Dayaneni insisting that a real solution will require indigenous and local peoples winning back rights over their land, ecologies and development paths (min 44:00).

- Maude Barlow pointing out the hypocrisy of countries negotiating new trade deals that further enshrine corporate economic development paradigm that relies on over-consumption and over-extraction, while purporting to green themselves in the climate negotiations (min 51:00).

- Victoria Tauli-Corpuz takes on the question of climate debt, and how indigenous peoples have led the fight to solve the problem by opposing fighting corporate extraction projects and with them the “dominant economic development paradigm” that facilitate it (min 1:06).

- Victor Menotti relates how lessons from fighting the WTO teach that we need to call out corporate power and spotlight who wins and who loses under proposed climate solutions and their corollary economic underpinnings. If we recognize that its not a poor country vs. rich country dynamic, but a fight of corporate elites vs. the rest of us (min 1:13).

The overall upshot of the panel was that the proper venue for solving the climate crisis is the U.N. Indubitably. Just solutions will not emerge from a more exclusive and corporate-captured venues like the G-20 or WTO.

Global Justice Movement at the Millennium

The lesson here for movement builders and campaigners is another. These experts, all steeped in peoples’ movements for a more just and sustainable world, call us to act now for justice beyond Copenhagen, and beyond the next climate summit in Mexico. To answer their call we must fundamentally challenge what Victoria Tauli-Corpuz calls the “dominant economic development paradigm” – one that not only causes global warming emissions but one that sews the very injustices and inequities that Gopal Dayaneni points out are what enable over-consumption and over-extraction.

Thus a good climate agreement is not, as Martin Khor mentions, just a matter of climate science or emissions targets. It never really was. There are those within the alter-globalization movement that highlight the need to turnaround failed trade policy in order to actually stave off climate change, and the youth climate movement does as good a job as anyone linking the struggles of people in the global south with those in the global north.

But to create sufficient pressure behind real solutions we’ve still got a long way to go. We need to find common strategies for building a revitalized movement for global justice – a progressively more holistic and vibrant one that bridges all the gaps that have divided us. That means organizing to confront every single global institution that promotes the “dominant economic development paradigm” like the WTO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (and other development banks), and fight back against corporate control of our governments, especially the G-20 governments key to governance of each of these institutions.

The global justice and climate movements, then, are inextricably linked. In fact they are one in the same. and we must seize the moment and unite. Tuesday night’s visionary voices from the global south, and others representing marginalized people in the global north, proclaimed the need for just this sort of solidarity. We must continue to push the climate fight beyond the science and into the realm of global social, economic, and ecological justice for regular working people across the globe.

We in the global north need to step it up while the planet still hangs in the balance. You can almost feel the forces aligning, and hear the ranks forming. If we continue to grow together, an unprecedentedly vibrant movement awaits us.

(Originally posted at EyesOnTrade.Org)

In response, we launched the Organize to be Heard Challenge, and thousands of young people have stepped up, generating thousands of phone calls, handwritten letters and petitions demanding action on climate and clean energy.

Unfortunately, despite the overwhelming call for action, there is one roadblock where all progress stops: our broken U.S. Senate. The Senate needs to know we’re sick of leaders who fail to lead and tired of government which fails to govern. They need to know that we’re not idealistic, we’re angry.

Call your Senator and tell them to stop standing in the way of our clean energy future!

We aren’t the only ones. At last week’s Clean Energy Forum, Senator Kerry embraced our outrage:

I want you to go out there and start knocking on doors and telling people this has to happen. You know if the Tea Party folks can go out there and get angry because they think their taxes are too high, for God’s sake, a lot of citizens ought to get angry about the fact that they’re being killed and our planet is being injured by what’s happening on a daily basis by the way we provide our power and our fuel and the old practices we have. That’s something worth getting angry about.

Some Senators are hopelessly bought and paid for by Big Oil and Big Coal. Others want action but cower in fear of the rabid, denial-fueled fringe that gets marching orders straight from big business and big polluters.

These Senators need to know they have more than teabaggers to worry about; they have an obligation to secure our country’s clean energy future. If they abdicate this responsibility to our generation, there will be consequences.

Call now: get the message to your Senators that inaction is inexcusable.

This year we learned that hope only gets you so far. It’s time to get angry.

On Monday President Obama will be answering questions about his State of the Union address, how would you like for that question to be one submitted by young climate activists?

Right now, the most voted question is from someone promoting alternative fuels. Not clean energy. Not just energy. Not renewable energy. But alternative energy, and you know what that means right? If this question is still #1 by tomorrow, President Obama will have an open window to reiterate his support for dirty coal, nuclear, and offshore oil drilling and ignore the true solutions to our energy, national security, and climate crises.

Go to CitizenTube and upvote this question from Energy Action. We are only 120 votes away from the top, so every vote counts. Please spread the word and RT this:

RT @energyaction: Vote up youth leader question to #Obama! Why dirty energy when clean is smarter & creates more jobs? http://bit.ly/bGNR8R

Sometimes it’s hard to describe an experience. Sometimes words, film, or photos fail to capture the overwhelming feeling that we are witnessing something truly extraordinary. We say, “You just had to be there.”

Enter the media. No one can be everywhere at once, so there are people whose job it is to go collect stories, verify them by checking a second source, and then paint a picture for the folks back home. People rely on the media to keep them informed about what’s going on in the world. And while the media can’t capture every detail, while there will unavoidably be some omissions and differences in emphasis, as reporters, it is part of our job to tell the whole story, and to pick out the wheat from the chaff.

This is why the coverage so far of the December 12 march in Copenhagen, Denmark is so disappointing to me. During the event, I was working in downtown Copenhagen alongside TckTckTck, 350.org, and Avaaz staff, collecting photos and videos coming in from actions all over the world. Behind me, a huge 2 by 5 foot screen showed local TV coverage of the march.

I was inside a media hub, surrounded by information, and the positive messages that kept flooding in. But until I heard verbal accounts from marchers and observers, and saw the footage that Ekta Kothari, Project Survival Media videographer, had shot during the day, I assumed that this particular action, the march in Copenhagen, had been pretty scary. Most of it wasn’t.

Upon her arrival in from the cold, Ms. Kothari, put it this way, “Honestly, since I was much ahead of the arrests, for me it was just a very powerful moment, like one of those which usually make history. It’s a real shame that despite such a magnanimous effort, the media can only focus on the downside of events!”

So, let’s take a moment and focus on the event itself. In order to motivate between nearly 100,000 people to walk for over three hours in the frigid streets of Copenhagen, Parliament Square to the Bella Center, (the location of the climate talks), the message must have been pretty powerful. It was: Marchers were calling for an agreement on climate change that recognizes what the science is telling us: We need to get back down to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to avoid critical warming feedbacks, and to ensure a livable planet. Marchers were also calling on our political leaders to fulfill their duty and pen a climate treaty that reflects scientific targets, and takes the aggressive action that we know we need.

The march was one of over 3,000 events around the world, from marches to candlelight vigils to the pealing of church bells.

At various stops along the way and at the Bella Center, marchers got to hear from an awesome succession of environmental and climate leaders, including: Marina Silva, former Brazil Environment Minister who, along with rubber tapper leader Chico Mendes, formed the independent trade union in the state of Acre; Vandana Shiva, physicist, philosopher, environmentalist, and one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalization; and youth climate organizer Deepa Gupta, who helped lead the effort to bring 160 youth from the global south to the climate talks.

The positive energy around the march and the speeches was overwhelming, and those who where there came away with a sense that they had just been part of a great moment in this movement, and in our planet’s history.

Yes, arrests happened. Yes, it’s important to mention that. Arrests are sexy, and it’s okay to maybe even give them a bit more attention than they deserve. But the main story was that hundreds of thousands of peaceful walkers showed united support for a solution to climate change. That this message is quickly being drowned out is worrisome.

As a young person, I am determined to share the positive side of this day’s events. My generation cannot afford the continuation of a polarizing conversation around climate change, based on selective and sensationalist media coverage.

Youth need the world to hear the core message: There were millions of people this weekend who stood up and declared their support for a ‘real deal’ that adheres to scientific targets, to come out of these talks. And, encouragingly, they are ready to take positive action, and demanding the same from our world leaders.

With that, I am so appreciative of this video by Ms. Kothari, which shows us sitting at home what the march was like to tens of thousands of people.

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.

In true It’s Getting Hot In Here fashion, the international youth performed a flash dance during the first day of the UN climate treaty negotiations. We made our presence felt outside the the first open plenary session of the conference.

Over 100 youth gathered for the action and we were literally surrounded by press. The message was clear: these negotiations will determine whether we will inherit a world with clean, safe energy and we must not delay action.

The “it’s hot in here” chant used for this flash dance has become the un-official chant of this movement. And if I’m not mistaken, this blog takes it’s name from that chant.