When Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, set out to write Clean Energy Common Sense her goal was simple- To bring more people into the climate change conversation now. Now? Conversations on climate change are happening in real time across the internet, on talk radio, in nightly news casts, and beside the water cooler. With only weeks until the UN's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a book seems like the wrong medium to insert yourself into the conversation.
Last weekend in Singapore, President Barack Obama acknowledged that a comprehensive international climate deal will not be reached during the climate change summit in Copenhagen. While many might view this as a letdown, lowering expectations might actually be a good thing, as Matthew Yglesias notes for the American Prospect. According to Yglesias, the conference can now be framed as a relative success whatever happens, and that will keep the momentum for climate action going after Copenhagen.
Recently, world leaders announced some deeply disturbing news: they gave up on reaching a binding climate deal at the upcoming Copenhagen conference. [1]
A major impediment was the refusal of President Obama and Congress to enact tough cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Right now, the most ambitious target that Obama has endorsed is a 3.5% reduction in emissions by 2020. [2]
That's pathetic, compared to the 25-40% reduction that we need to have a 50:50 chance of avoiding disastrous runaway global heating, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. [3]
The United States ought to lead by example. We can do it with strong emission reductions.
With all due respect to Don Draper sometimes the best way to sell a message isn't a clever campaign but the truth. A recently exposed whopper conjured up by climate change deniers highlights exactly what is behind the fight against climate change solutions: lies. The site Fight Clean Energy Smears has been tracking the attempts by a very small minority of deniers out there who are using, quite simply, lies to protect their interest in the status quo
Last weekend, I ran a two-part interview I did with Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). (Part 1 / Part 2) This week, PEER announced that the Obama EPA had ordered two EPA attorneys to take down a youtube video they had posted--"The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009"--criticizing the Obama-supported cap & trade approach to climate change as fatally flawed. PEER has reposted it for them. The two attorneys, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, are married to each other, and each has worked at EPA for over 20 years. In the video, Zabel, speaking for both of them, refers to their experience as EPA attorneys, but immediately states that they are not represeenting the EPA:
ALLAN ZABEL: Our opinions are based on more than twenty years each working as attorneys at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.
According to PEER:
The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31 .... On November 5, 2009, EPA ethics officials ordered the two veteran employees to -
"Remove your climate change video from You Tube by the close of business on Friday, November 6, 2009";
"Edit your You Tube video...by:
(i) Removing the language starting at 1:06 min - 'Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco Regional Office.'
(ii) Removing the images of EPA's building starting at 1:06 min...
(v) Remove [sic] the language starting at 6:30 min - 'In my work at EPA, I've been overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years.'"
"All future requests for approval of an outside writing activity must be accompanied by a draft of the document that is the subject of the approval request..."
"EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who has re-posted the original video and its script. "EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay."
Here's the video, so you can judge for yourself (more about the incident, as well as the couple's argument, on the flip):
For weeks, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has opposed climate change legislation. In the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, he openly voiced his doubts and was the only Democrat to refrain from voting for the bill's passage. Now that the bill is in the Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, many worry that the bill is doomed. However, it looks like Baucus might have outwitted us all.
(This post is part of Friend's of the Earth sponsoring Open Left. Please check out the Friend's of the Earth website here--promoted by Chris Bowers - promoted by Chris Bowers)
Hi – I’m writing from Barcelona, where the final round of negotiations prior to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen came to a close on Friday. It’s been a tense five days here, with time running out for world leaders to get their act together. I want to share some of my reactions to what’s going on here—and in Congress back in the U.S.
This week, two very different types of stand-offs marked political negotiations over solutions to global warming, one cowardly and one courageous.
U.S. Senators Back Away from Real Action
In the U.S. Senate, Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted the scheduled mark-up of the climate and energy bill, complaining that Chairwoman Boxer (D-CA) was not giving them enough time to assess the economic impacts of the legislation. This came after Sen. Boxer had already given tardy Republican committee members an extension to offer amendments to the bill. The Republican ploy was childish, and almost certainly was an attempt to further weaken a bill that, as passed out of the committee Thursday, is already too weak to protect our climate.
African Delegates Stand Up for Real Action
Across the Atlantic in Barcelona, negotiators from African countries initiated a different sort of boycott — one with a much more constructive aim and a very urgent plea.
Monday, the first of five days of talks in Barcelona, African negotiators announced that they would not continue with formal discussions on other topics until rich countries made some real progress with their own emissions reduction targets. (These targets refer to the reductions in greenhouse gas pollution that rich (Annex I) countries commit to make by 2020.) Millions of people in developing countries are already being affected by climate change impacts such as floods and droughts. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they already face devastating impacts.
The African delegation’s action was a strategic and brave move, designed to pressure rich countries to finally step up and commit to new, deep emissions reductions targets under an internationally binding agreement. With so few formal negotiating days left before Copenhagen, time is running out for rich countries to start cooperating. Rich countries’ continued shirking of their legal and moral responsibility to set new, strong and binding targets drove developing countries to this dramatic action.
More on how it all played out in Barcelona in the extended version.
Senate Democrats in the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) finally squelched Republican boycotts and passed a version of the climate bill yesterday morning. Last week, Republican Senators refused to show up to committee hearings in an attempt to stall the bill. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that EPW has now set "the stage for other panels to amend the legislation."
This week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held three hearings on the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill and, as David Roberts reports for Grist, Republican Senators had an "adolescent tantrum" about the cost of emission reductions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other organizations have extensively debunked this line of debate.
The American manufacturing industry and its employees are constantly told that they need to be better competitors in the global market, that they must increase the value they add. How are they doing on that?
Something that jumps out from data about the share of global manufacturing had by the United States, China and five other industrialized nations, is that the US is about even with China. As of 2008 and according to UN figures, China's manufacturing accounts for 17.3 percent of world output in dollars (though this number is slightly inflated), while the US' share is 17.7 percent. All else is rarely equal, so this is about as close as you'll get in the real world.
From a Bureau of Labor Statistics report described here, "By the end of 2006, China's manufacturing employment had increased once again to 112.63 million, nearly eight times the level of manufacturing employment in the United States (14.16 million)." The numbers have surely changed since then, but probably not by an order of magnitude.
Those figures could imply many things, but what they seem immediately to suggest is that American workers are extremely productive. They can produce both a high volume and high value of goods, and they have done so without getting a real raise since 1974.
Yet US manufacturing workers face higher unemployment rates than the national average, and often have to accept lower paying work when their plants close down, which should be no surprise. At the advice of the finance industry, wages and benefits have been driven down, policy makers were encouraged not to worry about the decline of the industrial base, and the whole thing was papered over with a massive consumer credit bubble.
After several prominent members left the Chamber of Commerce over its prehistoric climate change policies, the organization appeared to do an about-face on its climate stance during a press conference on Monday. Sound too good to be true? It was. Members of the Yes Men, a group of satirical, anti-corporate activists, posed as Chamber of Commerce officials and held a fake press conference claiming that "There is only one sound way to do business: That's to support a strong climate-change bill quickly, so that this December in Copenhagen, President Obama can lead the entire business world in ensuring our long-term prosperity." In reality, the Chamber has not changed their climate stance and continues to oppose climate change legislation. The Yes Men's stunt is just one more in a chain of hoaxes this Autumn, including a boy in a balloon, death panels on health care reform, and recent allegations that radical Islamists are using interns to infiltrate Capitol Hill.
It's true, Rush Limbaugh is a racist idiot and vicious propagandist. One of his recent exercises in inhumanity included telling New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin that he should "just go kill [himself]", as noted at Media Matters, after Revkin said that "probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."
There is a wealth of material indicating that wingnut heads spontaneously explode when someone suggests that white Americans shouldn't have as many babies as possible in service to the noble goal of crowding out the lazy brown hordes coming to take our jobs. It's creepy, but not breaking news. When Revkin suggested, as a thought experiment, directing carbon credits towards discouraging people in America (and elsewhere, but we'll get to that) having children, Limbaugh's cranial pressure differential reached critical levels.
In the ensuing October 20th rant, the same one where he suggested Revkin off himself, we get to the meat of Limbaugh's damage:
We don't even have to talk about getting married. We don't even have to talk about being a couple. I mean men have no say now, really, in whether a child is born or not, legally I mean. So would a man have any way of benefiting from the carbon credit?
If men don't have control over something, and especially if they can't benefit from it, Limbaugh is opposed. If you needed an object lesson today on why feminism remains relevant, well, there you are.
However, the fact-on-the-ground that many men do insist on control and the greater share of direct benefits from everything within their purview, gets at the underlying problem with Revkin's thought experiment. Just because Rush Limbaugh doesn't like you, it doesn't make you right in all particulars.
If anything, the population-climate question is more pressing in the United States than in developing countries, given the high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions here and the rate of population growth. If giving women a way to limit family size is such a cheap win for emissions, why isn't it in the mix?
Well, here's why. Because if you were really serious about reducing the birth rate, you'd be campaigning first and foremost for women's rights. If you aren't campaigning first and foremost for women's rights, then your push for greater contraception access will never get you where you think you want to go. Also, it can come off badly.
Make no mistake, whatever else it takes, mass action is needed to make real change happen, and we're one week away from two important opportunities to do that. Go to these sits to learn more about them.
October 24th is an internal day of climate action, sponsoed by 350.org, with over 3500 events scheduled around the world, in 161 countries. 350 parts per million is the CO2 threshold we need to get below in order to avoid the worst of global warming. Find an action near you on the map here.
October 25-27 is the Showdown in Chicago, pitting the people against the plutocracy at the American Bankers Association annual meeting in Chicago.
Schedule of Events
Note: all times are approximate and subject to change If you wish to join us at the Showdown, please fill out a Showdown Inquiry Form
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2009 3:00pm - Welcoming & Kick Off to the Showdown Americans from all walks of life come together to roll up our sleeves and start working together on how we ensure we have a financial system that benefits people.
7:00pm - Community Dinner
Break bread with people from across the country.
8:00pm - Workshops: Financial Reform that Protects People and Creates a Recovery on Main Street
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2009 DAY OF ACTION
The American People take our grievances and proposals for change directly to the worst actors in the financial crisis - the banks and lobbyists who caused the crisis and even now continue to block reforms the that will help American families recover.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2009 MARCH TO THE BANKER'S CONVENTION 10:00am - Prayer vigil on Wacker, east of Michicagan Avenue
10:30am - March: starting at Stetson and Wacker
11:00am - Rally at the Sheraton Hotel (301 East North Water Street, Chicago)
Today is blog Action Day. In the organizers' own words:
Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.
Although The Opportunity Agenda does not directly work on climate change, the problem is so pervasive that it impacts the issues we do work on. Climate change is not an abstract phenomenon when it comes the lives of everyday people in America. There is mounting evidence that greenhouse gases are increasing the potency of hurricanes, whose impact disproportionately affects those most vulnerable in our society. And as the climate does change, it will be the poorest among us that suffer in increased fuel costs. Finally, the polluting elements that cause climate change are also most common in low-income communities of color. As a result, the health of residents in these areas is worse than those in more affluent neighborhoods.
For these reasons, climate change isn't an issue simply to be addressed by environmental groups. Social activists, too, must see the connections and address this universal concern—a step in realizing the promise of opportunity for all.
President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his accomplishments in international diplomacy, climate change and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The Nobel Committee praised Obama for his "constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," but, Richard Kim of The Nation wonders if the award comes too soon, as Obama has not yet committed to attending the international climate summit at Copenhagen.
One week ago today, Sigourney Weaver and Frances Beinecke went to Washington to show the ground-breaking movie, Acid Test: The Global Challenge Of Ocean Acidification. It's a great short film, well worth watching, with really incredibly scary conclusions about what will happen to the ocean, not in the distant future but in the next few decades.
Major utility corporations, like Exelon, California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) and New Mexico's PNM have announced that they are leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the organization's controversial stance toward climate change and opposition to a clean energy bill. The Chamber represents business interests, and according to a New York Times editorial, "no organization has done more to undermine [climate change] legislation."
Sometimes it's hard to explain how the far-right and corporate lobbyists operate or how they view reality. It's much easier to understand their actions if you accept that first, they know the facts, but just choose, on the basis of business reasons, to completely ignore them and second, that they understand if they present, backed up with millions of dollars, absolute crap as fact, somewhere someone will believe them.
There is a good piece in this month's edition of Atlantic Magazine in which Witold Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at UPenn, argues the case for "returning to cities" if we really want to fight climate change. In it, he argues that our response to climate change has been too oriented towards "accessorizing" green features and less towards behavioral, systemic change. He also argues what we know- that living in cities creates a far smaller carbon footprint, and that a skyscraper with zero green features beats a suburban office park with solar panels, because of the people working in it and how they get to the office.
I think it's a very good point. The attitude towards "green", in my experience, has become more an attempt to impress your peers through accessorizing than actual change. Telling your neighbors you drive a hybrid, bragging about slapping a solar panel on your suburban roof, etc. are common things I hear among my friends and back home. But what I've never heard is anyone saying that in the name of battling climate change, they're going to move from their free-standing suburban house that consumes an immense amount of energy, complete with water and chemical-guzzling lawn, and give up the other trappings of suburban life. That is Rybczynski's central argument- if we're really going to take a bite out of climate change, we need (a) more buildings like multi-family walkups that can be dense enough to support public transit nearby (b) people willing to change their already set-in lifestyles.
Two points I want to make. The first is that (a) can always be done- more zoning for multi-family walkups, etc. Incentivizing it is another story. My boyfriend got a tax credit for purchasing his Prius- why shouldn't there be something similar for those who live in environments in which it is more likely to exert a low-carbon footprint (walking to the convenience store, using public transit to get to work, etc.)? It will take a whole new style of thinking for legislators and the general public. The popular approach to climate change is to accessorize, not to completely change where you live and how to get from points A to points B. And making an argument for rewarding people for living in cities via tax credits could raise a fair amount of opposition.
I also think there's a challenge of the audience for this, which brings me to (b). My parents have lived in the same Buffalo suburban 3-bedroom home with a gorgeous veggie garden for over 25 years, like living there, like driving their own cars, etc. Asking them, at their age, to sell their home and move to a hi-rise in the city of Buffalo (which has had negative population growth since 1960 for a reason), give up the backyard garden, take the bus to work when they've always driven, etc. just isn't happening. Nor should every suburbanite be asked to. I doubt my parents are the only ones who feel this way.
I think people just out of college and deciding where to live are one market. For instance, I have two friends (a couple) from college who are now finishing med school. They both are getting jobs in DC proper, but contemplating buying a house out in Virginia, not near a Metrorail stop. I'm trying to convince them to buy one of the many unsold condos here in DC instead, and be able to walk to most of the places they need to go. This kind of audience is one target to commit to a low-carbon lifestyle.
In other words, incentivize and target an audience from the very start instead of having to ask them to give up their lifestyle 40 years later. I think older families are the ones you can get to buy more locally-grown produce and switch off lights more- useful, but small, steps. Recent graduates and similar audiences are the ones to go after to make the big changes Rybczynski is arguing are critical.
Seventy days before the international climate summit in Copenhagen, hundreds of government officials and business leaders met in New York City on Monday to kick off Climate Week. On Tuesday, President Obama affirmed his commitment to action when he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly at the UN Climate Summit. Despite delays in passing a cap-and-trade bill, Obama highlighted U.S. efforts to curb climate change over the past year, including stimulus investments in renewable energy and efficiency, extension of tax credits for renewable energy, new automobile emissions standards and partnerships with other major emitters like China and India. Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones reports that Obama pledged to also address climate change with other leaders at G20 meetings later in the week.
October 24th is an internal day of climate action, sponsoed by 