International Action
Making a Global Climate Wake-up Call on Sept. 21
Published September 17, 2009 @ 05:40PM PT
Activists are not letting next week's UN Climate Summit get by without a demonstration of support for action on global warming...350 demonstrations and counting, actually, in 52 countries all around the world, on September 21, between 12:18 and 12:30 PM.
They're all part of a remarkably de-centralized climate action called the Global Wake-up Call, telling world leaders to stop "sleepwalking into a crisis of epic and historical proportions."
The coalition pulling this together is called TckTckTck. Why the tick tock? The campaign is counting down the time to December's international climate talks in Copenhagen.
The array of online materials is well-thought-out: Folks wanting to join or create a rally, flash mob, or other event or can use this interactive map to find one or set one up for others to find. There's also an online toolkit with a lot of good resources, including ample information, event ideas, printouts, media materials, and a twitter-like forum for sharing ideas with other organizers (that be read in English, Français, Español, or Deutsch), and more.
TckTckTck's concise message is that world leaders must negotiate a "FABulous" global treaty to avert catastrophic climate change:
We want our political leaders to be in Copenhagen and to show historic leadership in achieving a treaty which is: FABulous.
FAIR: for the poorest countries that did not cause climate change but are suffering most from it.
AMBITIOUS: enough to leave a planet safe for us all.
BINDING: with real targets that can be legally monitored and enforced.
What Cost Delaying Climate Bill Until 2010?
Published September 16, 2009 @ 03:21PM PT
Yes, there is a certain logic behind including this image. Read on.
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday floated the potential that the Senate might put off climate policy reform to 2010.
As I blogged last night, Mr. Reid suggested to reporters (including one for E&ENews, which broke the story) that the Senate is looking at a "busy, busy time" for the rest of this year, with the fights for health care reform and banking regulatory reform apparently sucking up all available legislative brain matter.
"And, of course, nothing terminates at the end of this year," said Mr. Reid. "We still have next year to complete things [climate and energy policy reform] if we have to."
The mop-up operation commenced promptly, with an aide to the senator backing his boss off the edge of the procrastination cliff: "Mr. Reid's spokesman, Jim Manley, says the senator is 'a long way from making a decision' on when to hold a vote on climate legislation and 'still intends to take health care reform, [financial] regulatory reform and cap-and-trade to the Senate floor by the end of the year,'" Stephen Power reported on The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog last night,
What's at stake here?
Fatalistic Friday: 'We're waiting for our climate speech, Mr. President', major Arctic melt, more
Published September 11, 2009 @ 02:37PM PT
Above: Pacific walrus swimming to shore at an Alaskan beach. The Obama administration may give the species special protections under the Endangered Species Act, because it is losing critical habitat to global warming. Source: US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Presented for your amusement: our semi-regular horse pill of bad news about climate change. Look out -- there's a signpost up ahead that reads...Fatalistic Friday.
Climate Activists Wait for an Obama Speech to Call Their Own: As President Obama delivered his health care speech this week, climate change activists said they were waiting patiently for a similar rhetorical moment. While there is broad acceptance about the president's decision to push global warming to the back burner for now, Obama needs to grant climate change equal attention on prime-time television in coming months, they say.
With less than 100 days until the Copenhagen talks begin, time is running out. "I don't have a problem with him keeping the climate powder dry for now," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, which is pushing to strengthen global warming legislation that passed the House in June. "But, ultimately, it may take a big goosing from the White House to achieve some resolution in the Congress." (ClimateWire)
Arctic ice meltdown greater than average again in 2009: The Arctic sea ice has retreated to the third-lowest level in recorded history -- the fourth time in the past five years that the annual summer meltdown has been far greater than average. The ice has already diminished this year to less than 5.3 million square kilometres, with a week or two of melting left to go. The all-time biggest retreat was recorded in 2007 at 4.13 million square kilometres, and the 2008 retreat fell just short of that record. (CanWest News Service)
Effects of Arctic warming seen as widespread: The Arctic Circle has been warming faster than other latitudes. And the impacts are showing on the region's plants, birds, animals and insects. "The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," Eric Post, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University, said in a statement. (Associated Press)
Japan Promises Big Greenhouse Gas Cuts
Published September 08, 2009 @ 06:59PM PT
Japan's Prime Minister-elect has announced that by 2020, his nation will slash greenhouse gas pollution by 25% of 1990 levels.
It's a significantly higher target than the one set by outgoing Prime Minister Taro Aso, whose administration had said it would try to cut emissions by around 8% by 2020. , The nation has not yet met its targeted cuts under the current international climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol.
Prime Minister-elect Yukio Hatoyama could be positioning the world's fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter as an important force in December's international climate treaty talks. Japan has the world's second-largest economy.
He may also be underlining the enormity of the political transition underway in Japan after his Democratic Party's recent landslide victory.
China Vows Action on Climate Change. Where's the US?
Published August 28, 2009 @ 02:38PM PT
Above: Traffic in Shanghai. Via flickr/smokingpermitted
The Chinese parliament passed a significant climate resolution on Thursday, vowing that the world's largest emitter of human-created greenhouse gas pollution will "strive to control" its emissions, as well as promote energy efficiency, expand of clean energy generation, and lower energy demand.
It's a tad embarrassing that China's beaten the US to the punch here, since we have yet to enact any kind of federal law addressing global warming.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves: This resolution laid out no concrete steps for just how this "control" will happen, or even whether it will include carbon caps and reductions -- the cornerstones of the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty signed by most of the world's industrialized nations.
(As a developing nation, China is exempt from Kyoto's carbon caps.) And it made much of warning other nations off using global warming as an excuse to raise international trade protections or barriers that would hurt China's continuing ability to modernize.
Instead, the nation will "draft laws and regulations based on practical circumstances to provide more vigorous legal backing for fighting climate change," according to an environmental official.
Still, enviros are looking on the bright side. "It's very significant. For the first time, they have put climate change at the core of economic and social planning at all levels of government," Yang Ailun, climate and energy campaign manager for Greenpeace China, told the UK's Guardian newspaper.
What might this resolution mean to both international and US climate action?
Activist Victory: UN's top climate scientist endorses 350 ppm goal
Published August 25, 2009 @ 05:36PM PT
The United Nations' top climate scientist has stated that to have a shot at stabilizing the climate, the world's nations must embrace the goal of getting below 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
"As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations," said Rajendra Pachauri in an interview published today by Agency France-Presse. "But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target."
The IPCC's 2007 report was widely interpreted as endorsing a goal of flattening out at 450 ppm. But subsequent climate developments -- including record lows of summer Arctic ice, which plays a significant role in regulating the climate in the Northern Hemisphere -- have suggested that such a concentration would in fact be much too high to sustain a stable climate. (We're currently at around 390 ppm.)
It's a major victory for the global climate movement 350.org, as founder Bill McKibben explains:
Many national governments (and even some environmental groups) have stuck to a 450 ppm target—it seems politically “realistic.” But Pachauri has taken away that gray area, and laid down the real bottom line. Physics and chemistry say 350, and that’s that.
Pachauri cited the decision of the small island nations and less developed countries to endorse the 350 target...
This news makes it much easier for all of us to push hard leading up to the Oct. 24 “Day of Action” [http://www.350.org/actions] and the December Copenhagen climate talks. It’s clear now that science is powerfully on the side of 350. Now we need the political world to follow suit.
350.org has created a simple and effective message, and made internet tools central to magnifying its efforts. With projects like the October 24 Day of Climate Action, the group encourages people to organize within their own communities, civic and religious groups, to create change from the bottom up instead of trying to bring it from the outside in.
It's one of the most truly grassroots and creative efforts in environmental activism today, which is why we've often turned our attention to 350.org on this blog:
Bill McKibben: 'There finally is climate change activism' and anyone can join
Astroturf Fail? Join the real grassroots climate action movement
Nonprofit Profile: 350.org meshes social networking, community ...
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.
