Environmental Justice
Climate at the G20: White House briefs bloggers on climate discussions
Published September 26, 2009 @ 05:25PM PT
Above: G20 Voice bloggers at a briefing by Michael Froman, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor, at the end of the G20 Summit on Friday, Sept. 25. (Photo by Julie C. Roth; Courtesy G20 Voice.)
Climate activists were underwhelmed by what came out of this week's Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh in the way of formal climate change commitments.
True, the heads of state of the 20 leading developed and developing economies agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies "in the medium term." But they couldn't come to a consensus on climate finance -- aid from richer nations to poorer, directed at adapting to and mitigating the impacts of global warming.-- which is what it takes for something to make it onto the summit's final statement.
Stronger pledges on climate had been part of a leaked draft of the summit communique earlier in the week, and climate activists from Oxfam, Greenpeace, US Climate Action Network and other groups were aggravated that they vanished from the final version.
The G20 are asking their finance czars to keep digging into the issue when they meet in Scotland, in November, according Michael Froman, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor. Froman met with bloggers covering the G20 for a briefing, soon after President Obama's press conference late Friday afternoon.
The G20 "felt it is important that climate financing stays primarily in the UN context," said Froman -- the context of the UN's international climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen in December -- where all developing as well as poorer nations will also be at the table to help forge the agreement. Although the G20 nations represent about 85% of the globe's economic output, there are over 160 additional countries involved in the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty.
According to Froman, there has been no decision made on whether President Obama will attend December's international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen.
Climate at the G20: Obama to press cuts in fossil fuel subsidies
Published September 24, 2009 @ 09:10AM PT
After three days of an all-climate schedule in New York City, featuring Tuesday's all-day United Nations Climate Summit, I'm now in Pittsburgh to cover the meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies. My thanks to Grist and G20Voice for helping me to be here.
Given that the heads of state chewed over global warming at the United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday, where will climate figure into tomorrow's G20 agenda of meetings?
According to reports, it's on the list of confab issues -- "Fresh from the UN general assembly in New York, heads of government and a vast diplomatic entourage will descend on Pittsburgh today to kick off two days of talks on economic stability, financial regulation, climate change and bankers' bonuses," reports the Guardian.
President Obama is expected to put a stunner of a demand on the G20 table, as my Grist colleague Dave Roberts notes: that nations stop subsidising fossil fuels, which could cut 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since fossil energy subsidies dwarf those going to renewables, such a move would also likely transform energy prices, better reflecting the true costs of dirty energy while making clean more competitive.
There's also the not-small matter of how much aid wealthy nations will provide to poorer nations to help them mitigate and adapt to climate disruptions -- buzzworded as "climate financing." "Wealthy nations promised in 2001 to provide the 49 least developed countries $2 billion for immediate climate change adaptation, but they only funded about a 10th of that," reports Solve Climate. "Since then, the UNFCCC has estimated the cost of global adaptation to be between $40 billion and $170 billion a year through 2030, and more recent studies now suggest the costs will be far higher — with the price growing each year the world delays action on climate change."
An Open Letter From Van Jones: 'What you can do'
Published September 17, 2009 @ 06:03PM PT
Van Jones e-mailed this message to friends and supporters on Tuesday, Sept. 15. It's his first public comment since resigning from the White House on Sept. 6:
Dear Friends:
My family and I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support that we have received over the past week or so. I resigned from the White House on Sept. 6, and I have remained silent since then—in keeping with my promise not to be a distraction during a key moment in the Obama Presidency.
Over the past several days, however, many people have been asking how they can help and what they can do.
The main thing is this: please do everything you can to support both President Obama and the green jobs movement. Winning real change is ultimately the best response to these kinds of smear campaigns.
I ask everyone to:
NY Senate's Bipartisan Vote Jump-starts $5B Green Jobs/Bldg Plan
Published September 15, 2009 @ 06:23PM PT
Start spreading the news: A newly-passed law in New York State will use the proceeds from auctions of carbon emissions credits to fund a massive statewide weatherization-and-green-jobs-creation program.
And a Republican state senator bucked the party line to help pass the bill.
Last Friday, the State Senate passed Green Job/Green New York Act. The legislation will channel $112 million in proceeds from auctioning carbon emissions credits (at the market created via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) into starting up a $5 billion energy-efficiency program -- which will lower energy costs for New York households, cut the state's greenhouse gas pollution levels, and create thousands of jobs.
Republican State Sen. Thomas Morahan co-sponsored the bill with Democratic colleague Darrel Aubertine. Morahan's support led to a resoundingly bipartisan vote to pass the bill.
Ecuador v. Chevron: Oil Giant Tries Dirty Tricks to Derail $27B Trial
Published September 04, 2009 @ 07:57AM PT
With a major new documentary about Texaco's petro-pollution travesty in the Amazon on the way, Big Oil giant Chevron -- owner of Texaco -- seems increasingly desperate to evade responsibility. Evidence has emerged that Chevron has used dirty tricks to try and derail the 16-year-old lawsuit underway against it in Ecuador.
The company recently released spy camera footage of former Chevron employees trying to bait the Ecuadorian judge in the case into saying Chevron was guilty before the trial has even come to a close -- which, if true, might lead to a mistrial.
"This is a total trap on the part of Chevron," Nuñez said in an interview with Ecuadorian network Teleamazonas on Sept. 1, according to a report yesterday in Time magazine.
Chevron's attempt to derail the trial is just one more desperate move by a Big Oil titan that sees a $27 billion hammer of truth about to come down.
Senator Kennedy, Dead at 77, Was Champion for Clean Energy, Energy Efficiency
Published August 26, 2009 @ 12:11PM PT
Above: President Barack Obama and Senator Ted Kennedy walk on the grounds of the White House. White House Photo, Pete Souza, 4/28/09
Related action: Complete Kennedy's Unfinished Work -- Pass Health Reform
Senator Edward Kennedy died late last night, at age 77, after a 15-month bout with brain cancer.
The "lion of the Senate" is justly being praised today for his decades of effort to improving health care for all Americans -- not a surprise, given that his Democratic colleagues in Congress and President Obama, his chosen torch bearer for the future of Kennedy-brand American liberal reform, are locked in a battle to overhaul America's health care system.
But Senator Kennedy was also a strong, influential advocate for the environment, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and energy industry reform. Just a few of his long list of accomplishments include:
Cosponsoring the first law to establish fuel economy standards over 30 years ago, and in 2007, supporting stronger fuel economy standards, which will in turn help cut the nation's greenhouse gas pollution.
Sponsoring the "Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act of 2000," to compensate men and women who, while working on national defense, were often unknowingly exposed to radiation and other toxic substances, as well as their survivors.
In 1975, pushing to end an "oil depletion allowance," which for several decades had allowed oil producers to exclude 22 percent of their enormous revenues from any taxes. Kennedy’s initiative lowered the allowance for independent producers, and ended it for the major oil companies.
Sponsoring the “America COMPETES Act of 2007,” which established an Advanced Research Projects Authority at the Department of Energy to be the focal point of federal efforts to support breakthrough research on new clean energy technologies.
Long-time support of renewable energy funding and programs, including the weatherization assistance program and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program that helps low-income families reduce their energy bills by improving home energy efficiency.
Ted Kennedy is a singular example of someone who could have kicked back and coasted through life, but chose instead to help others. He was born into a position of social and financial privilege. The violent deaths of his brothers Jack and Robert gave them center stage in America's Kennedy mythology, and could have sucked a lesser character forever into stasis and regret.
Kennedy focused outward instead, on serving those who had less than he did, and needed help more. Publicly, he moved through his own disappointments, personal mistakes, and his family's terrible losses, to achieve a 46-year Senate career of steady liberal accomplishment and constructive leadership.
(Compare Kennedy's lifelong class act and embrace of responsibility for others, under intense public scrutiny and personal loss, to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's regular offloadings of blame onto anyone and anything for her political and personal setbacks, her extremist us-vs-them political philosophy, and her cynical political gaming with the nation's energy policy and climate future.)
Senator Kennedy took his advantages, and perhaps the tragedies as well, and turned them toward being one person who could change the lives of many for the better. Losing him is surely an incalculable grief for his family. But hopefully it will move a new generation, equally devoted to changing the world for the better, to fill the void he's left in American politics.
In DC, Activist Tent City Evokes Plight of Climate Refugees
Published August 20, 2009 @ 07:26PM PT
Above: Video about climate refugee tent city action in Washington DC, Aug. 2009
Young climate activists built a settlement of tents and tarps near the State Department on Monday, and lived in it for 24 hours. Their goal was to dramatize the plight of climate refugees: people who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods by the environmental degradation caused by global warming.
A banner propped up next to the huddle of tarps propped up on sticks urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to "recognize and protect climate refugees at COP 15," the international climate treaty meeting in December.
"Climate change is not only a great opportunity to create jobs and new prosperity. It is also an urgent crisis that is already impacting many individual human lives and perpetuating current injustices," writes activist Julie Morgan, who put herself "in the shoes of people displaced by climate change for over 24 hours" by living in the makeshift settlement. She was joined by several fellow members of DC Action Factory, the group that's been spending the summer staging creative actions in support of strong, effective climate action by the US.
Our action gave us a brief taste of what it would feel like to be Katrina refugees forced to leave their flooded homes ... Sudanese refugees who have no choice but to flee from the violent Darfur conflict, which has it’s [sic] roots in drought caused by climate change ... Alaskan villagers forced to relocate as the permafrost that used to support their houses thaws..
Morgan acknowledges that with easy access to cold water, coffee, food, and air-conditioned shops to duck into for a break, she and fellow activists weren't at anywhere near the loose ends of real refugees.
But the modest discomforts of living displaced for just 24 hours gave her a dawning perspective on the experience of those with no end in sight to their forced migration. "It was hot, exhausting, and uncomfortable. I lay on my back awake on the pavement at 4:00 am and longed for my bed at home or even a light blanket to protect me from the early morning chill," she writes.
The tent city action was also a "wake-up call," she says, shifting her perspective on climate activism out of the heady heights of Capitol Hill, federal legislation, and international diplomacy, and into the sometimes-devastating impacts the unstable climate is having on the ground.
"Putting myself in the shoes of those forced to leave their homes due to flooding, contamination, drought, melting ice and war," she writes, "was crucial in bringing my focus to the individual and community level where climate impacts are felt."
This year saw the world's first widely acknowledged climate change population movement, when the 2,000 - odd Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea evacuated their homes and farms for good.
As Change.org Immigration blogger Dave Bennion noted recently, the International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200 million people uprooted by global warming by 2050 (when population is expected to be around 9 million people).
The recent report “In Search of Shelter, ” by the United Nations University, the charity CARE and Columbia University, names the likely “hot spots” of climate-driven displacement as: the dry areas of Africa; river systems in Asia; both the interior and coast of Mexico, as well as the Caribbean; and low-laying islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. (Which we blog about here under the rubric of "Drowning Nations.")
And forced migration due to climate change is also seen as a growing threat to national security.
