Environmental Justice
Drowning Nations: Tuvulu vows to kick fossil energy by 2020
Published July 23, 2009 @ 08:16PM PT
Above: The first major solar system in Tuvalu, atop the stadium roof in the capital, Funafuti, is the first step towards a national goal of being powered entirely by renewable energy sources by 2020. Credit: e8
Tiny archipelago nation Tuvalu, the fourth smallest nation in the world, sits in the middle of the South Pacific. Composed of four coral reef islands and five atolls, most of Tuvalu is less than one meter (three feet) above sea level. Periodic high tides (called king tides) have gotten notably worse in the past decade, causing increasingly destructive flooding. It's confronting the government and its 12,000 citizens with the reality of global warming.
Tuvalu was settled around 3,000 years ago. If global business as usual continues, Tuvaluans might have to abandon their 10 square miles of home well before the end of this century.
So as China, India, the United States and other major emitters of greenhouse gas pollution jockey for position on the road to Copenhagen, Tuvalu has vowed to totally break with fossil energy by 2020.
Well okay: with no heavy industry and almost no natural resources, Tuvalu's carbon footprint is extremely small, both per capita and in absolute terms. But the point is to make a point. "We look forward to the day when our nation offers an example to all," Public Utilities Minister Kausea Natano told the BBC this week, "powered entirely by natural resources such as the sun and the wind."
The government believes it will take around $20 million to convert the entire archipelago to renewable energy.
So far, with the logistical assistance of e8 (a non-profit consortium of utilities from G8 nations) and funding from two Japanese utilities, it's installed a $410,000, 40 kilowatt solar power system on the roof of the country's largest soccer stadium in the capital, Funafuti. In operation for around 14 months, the array is estimated to have cut Tuvalu's consumption of fuel oil (which is shipped in from New Zealand) by about 17,000 litres, and its CO2 emissions by about 50 tons.
The government now aims to bring solar power to Tuvalu's outer islands. Later this year, it's planning to erect an $800,000, 46 kilowatt solar power system for a secondary school on Vaitupu.
"There may be other larger solar power installations in the world, but none could be more meaningful to customers than this one," Takao Shiraishi, general manager of Japan's Kansai Electric Power Company, told reporters.
Said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Programme: "In a sense, they are paving the way for medium and larger economies which have to move if we are going combat climate change."
Related articles:
Tuvalu plots world's first zero carbon output by 2020 (The Telegraph)
At risk from rising seas, Tuvalu seeks clean power (Reuters)
Tuvalu vows to go carbon neutral (BBC News)
Drowning island pins hopes on clean energy (CNN)
Tiny Tuvalu: If we can do it, so can you (Carbon News)
Violence Escalating Against Anti-Coal Activists
Published July 23, 2009 @ 08:28AM PT
Above: The devastated landscape of a mountaintop coal removal site. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Coal is the dirtiest fuel around, which is why movements are springing up across the country to end our reliance on this supremely destructive fossil fuel. The epicenter of this movement is Appalachia, which once produced two-thirds of America's coal.
These activists are often being met with hostility and even violence by the coal miners and their families, tens of thousands of whom still rely on King Coal to put bread on the table.
The frontline in the fight is no doubt West Virginia, the heart of Appalachian coal country, where a constellation of small, citizen-led groups have been working to stop environmentally devastating mountaintop removal mining. Among them are some of the environmental movement’s biggest heroes: Maria Gunnoe, of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, received a 2009 Goldman Prize (sometimes called the "green Nobel") for her work to stop mountaintop removal in her native West Virginia. She's pursued this work despite harrassment and threats of violence from coal miners.
Another West Virgininan woman honored with a 2003 Goldman Prize is Judy Bonds, founder of Coal River Mountain Watch.
Violence and intimidation against these and other activists in West Virginia's moutaintop removal country are escalating. In late June, Ms. Bonds was violently attacked by the wife of a coal miner. She was participating in a nonviolent march to support an elementary school that sits downslope from 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge and a coal prep site operated by Massey Energy, a company with mountaintop removal mining operations in the area The woman hit Bonds around her head, ear and jaw, and also attempted to attack another protestor, Lorelei Scarbro, a coal miner’s widow and local community organizer.
Green Economy Rising: Navajo Nation Votes 'Yes' for Green Jobs
Published July 21, 2009 @ 03:32PM PT
Above: Green jobs advocates walk to today's summer meeting of the Navajo Nation Council.
The Navajo Nation Council voted 62 to 1 to establish the "Navajo Green Economy Commission" at its meeting today in Winslow Rock, Arizona. "According to Enei Begaye, who spearheaded a coalition to create the legislation, it is the first tribal government initiative to create green jobs policy and structure. Undoubtedly ambitious -- combining traditional culture, web-based marketing and cutting-edge green technologies -- the plan could transform the Navajo Nation and serve as a model for other tribes," reports Marty Durlin of High Country News.
The legislation will establish a commission to implement projects in seven areas: renewable energy (large-scale and small), green manufacturing (focused on traditional crafts such as rug-weaving, combined with sophisticated marketing and PR campaigns), sustainable agriculture, weatherizing and making energy-efficient traditional and nontraditional homes, green workforce training, management training, and a small business initiative.
A series of 10 pilot projects will launch the program, along with research on current job opportunities and a needs assessment. The legislation will also create “green teams” which will support community initiatives and help with business plans.
The fund will pursue federal grants that have been earmarked for green collar job development, and channel them into small-scale, community development projects within the Navajo Nation.
Wahleah Johns, who helped organize the Navajo Green Economy Coalition, told the Farmington, New Mexico Daily Times that green jobs can help Navajo preserve traditional ways of life, while also bringing much needed revitalization to the reservation economy. "This will help small-scale green projects revitalize sustainable life," Johns told reporter Alysa Landry. "For example, there are a lot of sheep on the reservation, and there are ways to use sheep in a green fashion. We need to make that more marketable." The group expects that the new fund will create hundreds of jobs on the 27,000-square-mile reservation.
Native communities are often on the front lines of the nation's unsettled energy policy -- in part because the federal Department of the Interior represents both Indian tribes and resource extraction agencies like the Office of Surface Mining. OSM exists pretty much to assist energy companies in mining on public lands.
Per the Black Mesa Water Coalition (which also supports the green jobs measure), the Bush administration executed a midnight maneuver in January, giving coal giant Peabody Energy a lease to reopen a controversial, enormous coal mine on Black Mesa, in Arizona, and consolidate it with the nearby Kayenta coal mine. Peabody's operations on Black Mesa use the same groundwater supply that Hopi and Navajo communities in the area rely on for drinking water.
Across the Change-i-verse
Published July 12, 2009 @ 06:24PM PT
14-year-old Alec Loorz, founder of Kids vs Global Warming
Highlights of the past week's blogging by the smart, talented, and good looking editors at Change.org:
Youth Taking Action: Kids vs. Global Warming: The Social Entrepreneurship blog chats with Ashoka Youth Venturer Alec Loorz, 14, founder of Kids vs. Global Warming. On positive ways to make change, Alec says, "Even though the actions we need to take might seem small in comparison to the enormity of the problem, every thing we do brings us one step closer to making the shift that we, as a whole society, need to make," says this remarkable peer organier. "It's also true that we can recycle and ride bikes all day long and we still won't be making a huge dent in the problem. Our whole world needs to get serious and make big changes. We need to be involved in the changes that governments and businesses need to make too."
Is Oil Ever NOT Connected to War? On the occasion of Sudan joining the African Petroleum Producers Association (APPA), Stop Genocide editor Michelle notes that the membership is composed of nations with striking histories of civil war and human rights abuses. "And to Energy Gluttons elsewhere in the world: How often do you stop to think about the human cost of your weekly fill-up?"
Climate Change, People and Poverty: Humanitarian Relief editor Michael Kleinman has put together a good resource page on the Humanitarian Impact of Climate Change.
The Slave Behind Your Bargain: Another example of just how interlinked human rights abuses and environmental pollution have become: "[H]ave you ever wondered why that bookshelf or tennis ball or t-shirt is so cheap? Have you ever wondered if a slave is paying the cost of your bargain?", writes End Human Trafficking editor Amanda Kloer. "The Human Trafficking Project writes about the prevalence of slave-made consumer goods on the market...They also share some hopeful ideas, like whole towns committing to selling only fair trade goods. However, the fact is that slave-made goods are in every part of our lives, and in many cases they are bringing us the bargains we so love."
Amada frequently highlights Fair Trade products on the HT blog in her "Red Light Specials." This week it was Cocoa Minty Lip Balm.
A caricature-buster, via Dave Bennion at the Immigrat Rights blog: GOP Voters Support Path to Citizenship for Undocumented Immigrants
Immigration Restrictionists Make Bad Environmentalists: Dave also makes a great catch on the real motivations of immigration reform opponents who make an environmental case for their arguments: "[T]he members of Congress that NumbersUSA, [an anti-immigration John Tanton-organized] outfit, rates most highly on immigration policy voted against the recent Waxman-Markey climate change bill by a margin of more than 5 to 1."
Dave's Open Letter to John Tanton on Global Warming asks, "Will you ask Congress to support ACES and other environmentally-friendly legislation? Or will you continue to assert that policies that limit immigration, rather than those that limit carbon emissions, are the key to slowing climate change?
Obama's Nominee for FWS: No Friend to Endangered Species: According to Animal Rights editor Stephanie Ernst, "Obama has nominated, to enforce the Endangered Species Act as head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Sam Hamilton: the FWS official with 'by far the weakest record on Endangered Species Act enforcement of any comparable official in the country'...Obama is no animal rights advocate, but surely he can do better--and the animals deserve better--than Sam Hamilton."
Suggest a story to Stop Global Warming
Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:01AM PT
Use this form to submit a news tip, story, video, or link for editorial review.
To improve your chances that it will be reviewed:
- Please include a permalink, not the top level URL/general link to an entire site
- Tell us a little about the item and why it's a good one for Stop Global Warming
Please don't use this form for any kind of personal or professional note to the editors and writers of SGW or Change.org. We're all pretty easy to find via email, which is the better medium for such messages.
#G8 Global Warming Fail? Sands shift under feet of climate treaty talkers
Published July 08, 2009 @ 09:11AM PT
Word is emerging that the "Group of 8" world's major industrial nations has failed to create a consensus on slashing human-propelled greenhouse gas pollution (GHGs) by 2050.
G8 climate change negotiators, meeting this week in L'Aquila, Italy, have given up on a proposal that would have comitted most nations to cutting GHGs by 50% by 2050, and industrialized nations to 80% cuts by 2050. They're putting off the hard talk until December's international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen.
(Others are framing this as keeping the overall global temperature change by 2100 to no more than +2 deg. Celsius, or 3.6 deg. Fahrenheit.)
A proposal to establish a $400 million fund to help developing nations adapt to the impacts of climate change, including expansion of their own low- and no-carbon energy sources, seem to have been tabled as well, for now.
Is the failure "unraveling an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks," as Peter Baker in The New York Times reports?
Probably not quite so dire. Not yet.
Just as the US previously held back global efforts to stop global warming, we're now a heavy presence in negotiations on how to make progress, and that's shaking up delicate international alliances formed (in essence under fire) during the atmospherically dark days of the Bush-Cheney years.
Now that the Obama administration is on the move on climate action, there's a growing fear that the US and China are forming an action axis. The world's two greatest emitters of GHGs could effectively set the terms for carbon caps worldwide, possibly outside the established international treaty and carbon market system, and possibly at a level that's too weak to do enough good.
Again at The Times,reporter James Kanter blogs some useful context:
Europeans [fear they] could be forced to downgrade the importance of their flagship policies – including their system for capping greenhouse gases and trading emissions permits – if they lose control of the negotiating agenda over the coming months.
To bolster their Emissions Trading System, which has suffered bouts of volatility and has been criticized for ineffectiveness since its creation four years ago, the Europeans want all rich-world nations like the United States join a global carbon market by 2015, and for fast-emerging economies like China to join by 2020.
But the Chinese are fiercely averse to capping their emissions for the foreseeable future, and that has stoked fears among Europeans that the Americans and Chinese would reach a lowest-common-denominator agreement with widely divergent goals for reducing greenhouse gases even among wealthy nations.
That, in turn, could jeopardize European efforts to link its carbon trading system with other cap-and-trade systems under development in countries like the United States and Australia.
As downbeat as the news out of L'Aquila seems to be, there are still reasons to be optimistic:
- It's inevitable that powerful polluters like the US, China, and India are going to play out the time and the situation as long as possible, in order to get the greatest advantages (as they see it) in the end.
- This gives climate negotiators and activists room to maneuver as well.
- The final act of US climate policy has yet to be written in Congress; that will send a huge signal to the rest of the world on whether the US is a strong actor and ally in stopping global warming, or still an mpediment to contend with. And to the Obama administration on just what its parameters for action will be, realistically.
- There's still time for the public and climate action advocates in this country time -- nonprofit and in business and industry -- to influence that outcome. Not that it won't be difficult.
Related news:
What is Obama's international climate strategy? (Grist)
Can Obama Keep Pledge to Lead on Climate? (DotEarth blog - The New York Times)
E&E's Geman, Samuelsohn preview Senate action on climate and energy (E&E -- hat tip to 1Sky for the pointer)
Across the Change-i-verse
Published July 06, 2009 @ 03:56PM PT
Just got home from my holiday weekend away, and easing back into the blogging routine. While I catch up with the news, here's a selection of what some of my fellow Change.org editors have blogged in the past several days:
Climate Change, People and Poverty: Oxfam's new report on climate change and poverty documents how "26 million people have already been displaced because of climate change." -By 2050, Oxfam estimates as many as "200 million people may be on the move each year...because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land." Humanitarian relief editor Michael Kleinman has used the sobering findings to create a good resource page on the humanitarian impacts of global warming. I'll have more to say about this report soon, too.
Goldman Sachs Owns You:: US Poverty editor Leigh Graham links Matt Tabbibi's "frightening" article on the investment bank's massive footprint in our economic system to some of the latest commentary on whether we're on the road to a recovery.
The Growing Threat of Malaria: Global Health editor Alanna Shaikh does a great job covering one of the big risks of global warming: the spread of tropical diseases into formerly temperate regions. "Right now, malaria is a tropical illness. It needs a climate friendly to mosquitoes and the malaria parasite that lives in them. Those parasites cannot survive in temperatures under 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius). That limits where malaria can spread, but global warming is going to bring a lot more of the world into the temperature range where malaria can survive."
Risk, Talent, and Why Some Become Entrepreneurs and Others Don't: Entrepreneurialism is a huge component of the growing clean energy market as well as other forward-thinking overlaps of sustainability, society and environment. So it's always interesting to see what Social Entreneurship editor Nathaniel Whittemore is covering -- here, considering "just how much opportunity there is to invest in the capacity of individuals and communities who, for whatever combination of reasons, have tended not to have access to the ingredients to let those capacities fully flourish."
Buffy vs Edward Cullen: Just like Women's Rights editor Jen N., I'm happy to see the Slayer take on a vampire (and the retrograde gender roles) of the sudsy "Twilight" teen horror-fantasy series.
Natasha Chart posts this amazing-sounding, vegetarian (and so, low on climate impact) recipe for Persian Eggplant Stew on the Sustainable Food blog.
-----
Image: First photograph made by a human being of the Earth rising over the Moon's horizon, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Dec. 24, 1969. Source: NASA. More about this image on a NASA history page commemorating the 40th anniversary of the image, late last year.
