Washington has a blind spot when it comes to the environment. BP and the oil spill brought the government's failures into the spotlight, but the same problems crop up across industries: Corporations pollute water, blast through mountains, and pour carbon into the atmosphere with insufficient oversight. But no one-Congress, the environmental community, or the president-seems to have the power to address these issues.
The Senate says it will take up energy legislation soon, but staffers are saying the body won't pass a strong climate bill without more public pressure. Energy companies are ripping resources from the land and leaving destruction in their wake, while clean energy technology, though popular, has yet to form a new platform to fill the country's needs.
And where's presidential leadership on this issue? "The president had a good meeting a couple days ago with senators from both parties that have led on this issue," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told the press this week, according to Mother Jones. "We have not made any final determinations about the size and scope of the legislation except to say that the president believes, and continues to believe, that putting a price on carbon has to be part of our comprehensive energy reform."
President Barack Obama has taken his time to reveal definitive policy stances on issues like health care and the war in Afghanistan; in those cases, it was clear a decision was coming. On climate, it's less clear that the president is moving towards a decision that will push Congress to act.
The Senate
The problem is not a lack of policy ideas. The Senate has already produced two decent bills that put a price on carbon, an effort that would over time decrease the country's contributions to the world's emissions. The second of those bills-the American Power Act, also known as the Kerry-Lieberman bill-would reduce the deficit by $19 billion, as the Congressional Budget Office announced this week.
Plenty of Senators have trumpeted about the need to reduce to the deficit. But in Washington, even a $19 billion reduction won't help push forward legislation that Senators have decided to shirk. As Aaron Wiener writes for the Washington Independent:
"Will that be enough to get the bill passed? Of course not. The very same centrist senators who frequently raise deficit concerns are wary of legislation that could raise energy prices, and so the APA appears all but dead."
Clean energy technology
At Grist, Jesse Jenkins suggests that enviros needs to reframe the issue altogether. "If you look at what Americans support in poll after poll, it is clean energy technology," he says. "Put investment in clean technology front and center-and oh, by the way, we're going to pay for this with a modest fee on carbon."
Part of the problem could be that the country's waiting for big corporations to lead the energy revolution. At Chelsea Green, however, Greg Pahl argues that smaller projects should play a bigger role, too. "Given the choice between a large, corporate-owned coal-fired power plant or a large, corporate-owned wind farm, the obvious choice is the wind farm, regardless of who owns it," he writes. "But that's no reason to exclude smaller...community projects that are far more effective in promoting distributed-generation strategies."
Yes, your Majesty
It should be embarrassing for the Senate that, as a body, it's more conservative than the Queen of England. This week, Queen Elizabeth told the United Nations that climate change was a front-line issue. Care2 reports that the Queen's "brief statement was largely unremarkable but for the fact that she called out climate change, placing it on a par with terrorism in terms of today's challenges."
On environmental issues in general, though, the American government isn't living up to its potential. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), for example, could be working to minimize the impacts of oil and gas drilling on public lands, but "the agency is reluctant to wiled that power after a drilling lease is granted," Public News Service reports.
National Marine Fisheries Service
BLM is just one of a tangle of agencies that could, in theory, push back against the interests of big energy companies. They haven't done so. In the case of the BP oil spill, for instance, TPMMuckraker reports that the National Marine Fisheries Service missed an opportunity to push back against BP's lease, but, using bad information from the Minerals Management Service, rubber-stamped the operation. Rachel Slajda writes:
"In 2007, the National Marine Fisheries Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act, was asked to give its 'biological opinion' on the impact of new oil drilling leases-including the lease of the now-leaking Macondo prospect-on endangered species, including turtles, sperm whales and sturgeon. ... In the report (PDF), NMFS estimated the impact of a major spill on endangered species and concluded that the new drilling 'is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of these species.'"
New Dawn
Energy companies are not the only ones tipping the balance against the environment, either. At the American Prospect, Monica Potts delves into Dawn detergent's less than pristine environmental record. The detergent has benefited lately from a spate of good press because wildlife groups are using Dawn to clean oiled birds in the Gulf. But Potts writes that Dawn's parent company, Procter & Gamble spent more than $4 million last year on lobbying and opposed measures that would, for instance, regulate household chemicals.
"Procter & Gamble lobbied against a 2009 effort to disclose ingredients in household cleaning products, instead supporting an industry-led voluntary-disclosure effort. It also lobbied against bans in various states on dishwashing detergent containing high levels of phosphorus and fought to delay the bans' implementation," Potts explains. "The company opposed stricter household chemical regulations in the European Union in 2003 and is rated poorly by Greenpeace for the chemical content of its household products. Those chemicals, including ones banned in the EU because they can be harmful to fish and humans, end up in the environment."
The list of such offenses goes on, and touches legions of companies. However limited, a climate bill would be a good start to addressing the country's environmental woes. The Senate says it needs to hear this from more people before taking real steps to combat climate change; anyone who's concerned about the planet's future might want to start speaking up.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: Why the Senate Climate Bill is Doomed
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), though down one man, finally released their stab at climate legislation this week. One of the most crucial sections in the bill covers off-shore oil drilling, an issue that was supposed to help solve the tricky math of reaching 60 votes. But since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank in the Gulf of Mexico, drilling has become a wedge issue.
Just a few weeks ago, off-shore drilling could have been a point of compromise around which Senators could rally votes to pass the climate bill; now the bill had to strike a new balance to mollify both potential allies who oppose drilling, like Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and those who support drilling, like Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). The draft that Sen. Kerry and Sen. Lieberman released this week allows for expanded drilling but gives states veto power over new projects.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who worked on the bill, said that he had not seen the changes his two colleagues had made since he dropped out of the drafting process-but he looked forward to reviewing their work. Although Sen. Kerry says he thinks the bill can pass, without support from Sen. Graham or another Republican, chances are slim.
Next steps
Now that the two Senators have released the bill, the only work that remains is to pass it.
"There's not enough time for a bill to go through the committee process, get passed by the Senate, sent to conference, amended, and then passed by the full Congress before the midterms, and after the midterms Democrats will probably be reduced to 53 or 54 members in the Senate."
Not everyone agrees that the bill's chance are so dire, though.
"I think the chances are roughly as good as they've ever been in the Senate: low but non-trivial," says Grist's David Roberts.
Kerry's argument
But should green-minded politicos root for the bill's passage at all? Sen. Kerry and Sen. Lieberman worked closely with energy companies while drafting the bill, and the resulting legislation balances the need to reduce carbon emissions with the interests of prime polluters. The bill includes incentives for old energy industries like coal and natural gas, for instance, and exempts farmers from carbon caps.
On Wednesday, Sen. Kerry made his case to left-leaning environmentalists. "A comprehensive climate bill written purely for you and me - true believers - can't pass the Senate no matter how hard or passionate I fight on it," he wrote for Grist. The bill they have, he wrote, can pass, and that victory outweighs the compromises in the legislation.
Responses from the left
On Democracy Now!, Phil Radford, the executive director of GreenPeace USA, said that most environmental groups have given the bill little more than a "tepid endorsement." Radford squared off on the show with Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress, who supports the bill.
"This will be the first bill ever passed by the Senate, if it were to pass, that would put us on a path to get off of fossil fuels," Romm said.
The two men were also divided over issues like the impact the climate bill could have on international negotiations.
They agreed, though, there is room for improvement; the only question is whether the politics of climate change will allow for the passage of a stronger bill any times soon. As Kevin Drum wrote, "If you think this year's bills are watered down, just wait until you see what a Congress with a hair-thin Democratic majority produces."
Coal and natural gas
Tripping up environmentalists now, though, are the hand-outs to dirty energy industries. The coal and natural gas industry could both benefit from the provisions of the Senate bill, for instance.
On GritTV, Jeff Biggers, a writer and educator who covers the coal industry, explained his frustration:
"The climate bill is a nice first step and a very well meaning effort for someone like Sen. Kerry who's been working on this issue for 20 years. But at the same time, because of the massive big coal lobby that has poured millions of dollars into lobbying congress on this climate legislation...there are all sorts of little panders and loopholes and exemptions."
"What we see in this bill is that Sen. Kerry and Lieberman want to ensure coal's future," he said.
The booming natural gas industry also had a hand in shaping the bill and benefited from it. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club favor natural gas as an energy source over coal, and as Kari Lydersen reports in Working In These Times, the industry is driving job growth at a time when the economy needs a boost.
But as Alex Halperin reported last month for The American Prospect, in the places where drilling is occurring, like Ithaca, NY, activists are arguing that the environmental risks could outweigh those economic benefits.
Drill or be drilled
That devil's bargain-risking natural resources for jobs in the energy industry-went the wrong way for the Gulf Coast, and states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida are paying the price even before the oil hits shore.
As I report in AlterNet, the Gulf's economy could lose billions of dollars and is suffering already from the misconception that its beaches are tarred with oil. With this catastrophe still fresh in voters' minds, the Senate climate bill proposes pushing new drilling initiatives 75 miles offshore and giving affected states veto power over these projects.
Depending on how long the memory of the Deepwater Horizon spill lasts, politicians could have a good reason to veto drilling. Public News Service reports that 55% of Floridians now oppose off-shore drilling, "almost a complete reversal from one year ago."
Blame game
Certainly no one is stepping up to take responsibility for the explosion off the coast of Louisiana, as the Washington Independent reports. At a hearing this week, officials from British Petroleum, which was operating the well, Transocean, which owns it, and Halliburton, which was doing contract work that may have caused the problem, all denied wrongdoing and pressed the blame on each other.
It's starting to look Halliburton played a key part. "The focus is increasingly shifting to the role of Halliburton, which poured the cement for the rig, as well as for another operation that spilled oil off the coast of Australia last August," writes Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones. The company apparently did not place a cement plug that would have kept gas in the well before emptying it of the mud that was holding in the flammable gas.
Anyone living in a state that could have new drilling off their coast should keep this catastrophe in mind if their politicians are given the option of vetoing new projects.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Mulch: Slick of Oil Industry Cash Gummed up Regulatory Works
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is worse than anyone thought, and the crisis will likely go on for months. British Petroleum (BP) is tripping over itself to say it'll cover the costs of the clean-up, yet before the spill, the company spent its time and money pushing back against government regulation and safety measures.
Care2 reports, "A piece of machinery costing .004% of BP's 2009 profits might have prevented the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that is currently threatening the U.S. gulf coast. An acoustic valve designed as a final failsafe to prevent oil spills costs $500,000; the Wall Street Journal writes that the valve, while not proven effective, is required on oil rigs in Norway and Brazil, but not in the U.S."
Oil is drifting towards the southeastern coastline as clean-up crews and politicians scramble to respond. BP has not staunched the leaks that are pouring more than 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day.
Beach communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are bracing for the oil's arrival and waiting to see what the damage to their businesses and their natural resources will be. And in Washington, members of Congress, who just a couple of weeks ago were willing to compromise on off-shore drilling expansion are rallying against the practice.
As Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said this week, "accidents happen," but in this case, it's becoming clear that the oil industry and government regulators did not do all they could to minimize the risks of a spill.
The slick
Over the past week, reporters trying to describe the size of the spill have compared it to Jamaica or Puerto Rico. Public News Service talked to Steve Bousquet, Tallahassee bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times, who saw the slick in flight.
"It's really a horrifying thing to see because of the magnitude of it," Bousquet said. "They use these chemicals to break up the oil and it takes on a kind of rust-colored look to it. And we saw these long streaks, miles and miles long of oil, and just oil as far as the eye can see."
"This is Louisiana sweet crude, and it's got a lot of what's called "light ends," which evaporate very quickly into the air and also dissolve very readily into the water column. So what you see on the surface is like the tip of the iceberg...Imagine a big cumulus cloud of dissolved and dispersed oil under the slick, wherever it is. And that cloud is extremely toxic to everything in the water column - shellfish, eggs and embryos - so shrimp eggs and young life forms that are in the water column, young fish."
According to Dr. Ott, the extent of the damage won't be clear for a few years. Oyster fisherman, for instance, would usually be seeding oysters now, as the crops take two years to mature. That work needs to be done within the next few months to avoid economic losses two years in the future, but the precautionary measures shutting off access to waters east of the Mississippi are keeping that from happening.
Oiling the machine
It's no accident that oil interests work under looser rules. As Lindsay Beyerstein reported last week for Working In These Times, BP wrote to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) saying that tighter regulation of the oil industry was unnecessary. MMS doesn't have a stellar history of oversight, and if you're not familiar with its sordid past, TPM's Justin Elliott put together a tour through the agency's history with sex and drugs.
The industry hasn't just been selling snake oil to MMS, though. Oil companies have been greasing the palms of politicians with campaign donations for years. Democracy Now! spoke to Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil, about the oil industry's influence.
"The entire oil industry, will continue to use its vast wealth - unequaled by any global industry - to escape regulation, restriction, oversight and enforcement," Juhasz says. "BP, now the source of the last two great deadly US oil industry explosions, has shown us that this simply cannot be permitted."
The new politics of climate
To see the oil industry's influence in action, look no further than the ongoing work on the Senate's climate legislation. Two weeks ago, before the spill, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) announced that the oil industry would back the tri-partisan legislation that he was working on with Sen. Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Since then, Graham has stepped away from the bill, and off-shore drilling, a keystone of the negotiations over the legislation, has become much less politically palatable.
"While he acknowledged that "we can't drill and burn our way out of danger," Kerry also spoke highly of the oil companies backing the draft legislation, which was supposed to be released last week," Sheppard writes. "BP, operator of the rig currently spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, was expected to be among the supporters."
"Ironically we've been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months," Kerry said. "I took them in good faith. They have worked hard with us to find a solution that meets all of our needs."
"The legislation was predicated on something of a grand bargain -- the left would get cap-and-trade and investment in renewables; the right would get nuclear plants and offshore drilling," Benen explains. "But in the wake of the catastrophe in the Gulf, there is no deal. Key Dems now insist drilling be taken off the table, while Republicans and Democratic industry allies (Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, for example) now insist they won't even consider a bill unless it includes plenty of drilling."
While the White House is saying that the oil spill may spur interest in and support for clean energy legislation from Congress, that hasn't happened yet. Congressional leaders might have to wait for the noise from the Hill to die down before they can re-start serious discussions about how to pass a climate bill.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Two disasters flared up this week, one environmental, the other political. Off the coast of Louisiana, oil from a sunken rig is leaking as much as five times faster than scientists originally judged, and the spill reportedly reached land last night. And in Washington, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) jumped from his partnership with Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) just before the scheduled release of the draft of a new Senate climate bill.
The trio had worked for months on bipartisan legislation on climate change. After Graham's defection, his partners promised to press on, but the bill's chances of survival are dimmer.
The next Exxon Valdez?
As Grist puts it, the spill off the Louisiana coast is "worse than expected, and getting worser." The oil rig sank on April 20, and since then, oil has been pouring out of the well and into the Gulf of Mexico.
British Petroleum (BP), which operates the rig, along with the Coast Guard and now the Department of Defense, has pushed to contain and clean up the spill. The problem is deep under water and difficult to measure, but by mid-week, experts estimated that it was gushing 5,000 barrels a day from three different leaks.
Interior department officials said the spill could continue for 90 days. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum looks at a couple of estimates for how much oil could end up in the Gulf and concludes, "An Exxon Valdez size spill might only be a few days away."
The federal government has rallied to respond. Administration officials have traveled to Louisiana, and both the executive branch and the legislative branch have announced investigations into the spill. But, as Care2 writes, the White House is saying that the explosion should not derail plans for future drilling.
"In all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters, according to Care2.
New drilling, no regulations
Just a few weeks ago, President Barack Obama announced that the government would open up areas off the East Coast for offshore oil and gas drilling. The proposal already had some opponents, and the spill makes the politics of new drilling that much trickier. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports that White House energy and climate adviser Carol Browner acknowledged the issue, along with energy experts around Washington.
"This reopens the issue: Is the risk worth the reward?" Lincoln Pratson, a professor of energy and environment at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, told Sheppard.
And even though BP is relying on the Coast Guard and the Department of Defense for help managing this spill, the company is pushing back on efforts to minimize those risks, Lindsay Beyerstein reports for Working In These Times.
The company "continues to oppose a proposed rule by the Minerals Management Service (the agency that oversees oil leases on federal lands) that would require lessees and operators to develop and audit their own Safety and Emergency Management Plans (SEMP)," Beyerstein writes. "BP and other oil companies insist that voluntary compliance will suffice to keep workers and the environment safe."
Climate bill catastrophe
The country might also have to rely on companies' "voluntary compliance" with measures to combat global warming: Congress doesn't seem likely to pass a bill regulating carbon any time soon. Sen. Kerry and friends were supposed to release their version of climate legislation Monday, but over the weekend, Sen. Graham backed out. His reason? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had floated the idea of prioritizing immigration reform, which Graham argued would undermine work on energy legislation.
"It seems like the senator...has a bit of an attitude problem," wrote The American Prospect's Gabriel Arana. "He storms out of climate talks because Democrats have dared consider working on two things at once? The degree to which movement in the Senate hinges on this single, mercurial senator, seemingly the only one whose agenda includes something more than stymieing Democrats, is remarkable."
Call the clean up crew
After Graham's announcement (Arana called it a "hissy fit"), congressional democrats scrambled to prove that the climate bill was not knocked entirely off course. On Monday, Sen. Kerry and Sen. Lieberman met with their wayward colleague; by Wednesday, Sen. Reid had promised that he would "move forward on energy first;" and by Thursday, Kerry and Lieberman had asked the EPA to start evaluating the bill's environmental and economic impacts.
Although a draft of the bill was supposed to come out on Monday, no one has seen it. At Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard reports that even the EPA, which is supposed to analyze the bill, hasn't received the full draft.
"According to the EPA, the senators submitted a "description of their draft bill" for economic modeling," she writes. "The agency confirmed in a statement to Mother Jones the senators "have not sent EPA any actual legislative text." The agency is determining whether it has enough information about the bill to produce an analysis of its economic and environmental impacts."
Despite assurances from the Senate leadership, it's not clear if climate legislation will come to the floor this year or, if it does, that it will pass.
Not a disaster
There was one bright spot of news for environmentalists this week: the United States will build its first off-shore wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod. The project, called Cape Wind, has a host of opponents, but Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar decided to approve it. The scale will be smaller than originally planned-130 rather than 170 turbines, the Washington Independent reports-which could mollify critics who worried about its visual impact.
Cape Wind is a prime example of how clean energy projects can still cause harm or anger the people who live in their shadow. The Texas Observer recaps opposition to clean energy projects: A working-class neighborhood fought against efforts to build a biomass plant in their town, and won.
"Despite some activists touting these projects as solutions to global warming, and politicians promoting them as the key to economic prosperity, renewable energy projects tend to have their own sets of problems for local residents," reports Rusty Middleton.
Biomass is one thing: burning materials like waste wood might produce fewer greenhouse gasses, but a biomass plant still dirties the air around it. But if the choice is between an off-shore wind farm that could mar a pleasant vista or an off-shore drilling operation that could spill gallons of oil onto your coast, it seems clear which is the better option.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
On Monday, climate activists, nonprofit leaders, and governmental officials will gather in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to look for new ideas to address climate change. The conference, organized by leading social organizations like 350.0rg, "will advocate the right to "live well," as opposed to the economic principle of uninterrupted growth," as Inter Press Service explains. In the absence of real leadership from the world's governments, the conferees at Cochabamba are looking for solutions "committed to the rights of people and environment."
The United States certainly isn't stepping up. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), were supposed to release their climate legislation next week, just in time for Earth Day. But yesterday the word came down that the release was being pushed back by another week, to April 26.
No matter when it finally arrives, like other recent environmental initiatives, this round of climate legislation falls short. Even if Congress manages to pass a bill-and there's no guarantee-it will likely leave plenty of room for the coal, oil, and gas industries to continue pouring carbon into the atmosphere. And a wimpy effort from Congress will hinder international work to limit carbon emissions: As a prime polluter, the United States needs to put forward a real plan for change.
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman
Although the text of the bill is not public yet, it is likely that this attempt at Senate climate legislation will limit carbon emissions only among utilities and gradually phase in other sectors of the economy. On Democracy Now!, environmentalist Bill McKibben called the bill "an incredible accumulation of gifts to all the energy industries, in the hopes that they won't provide too much opposition to what's a very weak greenhouse gas pact."
Climate reform began with a leaner idea, a cap-and-trade system that limited carbon emissions while encouraging innovation. The Nation's editors document the transformation of climate reform from the Obama administration's original cap-and-trade proposal to the behemoth tangle it has become. Both the House and the Senate fattened their versions of climate legislation with treats for the energy industry. The Senate's new idea to gradually expand emissions reduction through a bundle of energy bills only opens up more opportunities for influence.
"Some of these pieces of legislation may pass; others may fail; all are ripe for gaming by corporate lobbies," the editors write. "Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also skew subsidies in the wrong direction, throwing billions at "clean coal" technologies, nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, a questionable gambit favored by the Obama administration to garner support from Republicans and representatives from oil-, gas- and coal-producing states."
Even with these goodies, the climate bill may not pass. The Washington Independent rounds up the D.C. players to watch as the next fight unfolds, including the Chamber of Commerce's William Kovacs and the Environmental Protection Agency's Lisa Jackson.
Green leftovers
In theory, the climate bill should not be America's only ride to a greener future. But the other vehicles for green change choked during start-up. The EPA was going to regulate carbon emissions, but Congress has reared against that effort. The climate bill could snatch away that power from the executive branch.
If companies won't limit their carbon emissions, individuals still have the option for action. But as Heather Rogers explains in The Nation, carbon offsets, one of the most popular mechanisms for minimizing carbon use "are a dubious enterprise."
"To begin with, they don't cut greenhouse gases immediately but only over the life of a project, and that can take years--some tree-planting efforts need a century to do the work. And a project is effective only if it's successfully followed through; trees can die or get cut down, unforeseen ecological destruction might be triggered or the projects may simply go unbuilt."
The pull of carbon offsets should diminish as energy use in buildings, cars, food, and flights gains in efficiency and uses less carbon. But if the green jobs sector is any indication, that revolution has been slow in coming. ColorLines reports that "there are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills-in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago-and who nonetheless can't find jobs."
Cochabamba's unique approach
These failures and setbacks don't just affect Americans; they keep our leaders from negotiating with their international peers. The United Nations led a conference last winter in Copenhagen that promised to hash out carbon limits, yet produced no binding agreement. This coming winter, the UN will try again in Mexico, but if the United States shows up with the scant plan put forward by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman, those negotiations have little promise.
In Cochabamba, leaders from inside and outside the government will attend a summit to discuss the future of climate change action. In The Progressive, Teo Ballve writes that,
"One of the bolder ideas is the creation of a global climate justice tribunal that could serve as an enforcement mechanism. And conference participants are already working on a "Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights" meant to parallel the U.N.'s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948."
With U.S. government action paling, it might take outside ideas like these to revitalize the push towards a green future. By the end of next week, we'll see if the Cochabamba group made any more progress than the bigwigs at Copenhagen.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Seven months out from the midterms, electoral anxieties are hampering potential climate change legislation. Election years are a time to pass easy, politically popular policies, and climate change legislation does not fit that bill. For the Senate's climate change legislation to have a chance, Congress has to sweep through the financial overhaul faster than any bill in its history. Otherwise, politicians' focus will shift to the midterms before they pass a climate bill.
The next international climate negotiations are just weeks after the November midterms, and failure to pass a bill now means that the United States could show up once again without a solid platform from which to negotiate. After working on climate legislation for over a year, leaders on the Hill and in the executive branch are getting nervous.
At this point, any climate legislation that reaches the president's desk will have far less impact than advocates once hoped, but Congress can still pass a bill that moves the country forward on this issue.
Tick tock
Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) are working on a bill. On Thursday, Sen. Graham half-promised it would come a couple of weeks after Congress' spring recess. That's not the end of the process, though, as Kate Sheppard reports for Mother Jones. The Environmental Protection Agency will also take a crack at the bill and weigh in on its cost and overall environmental benefits.
That process could take a month and a half, Sheppard says, and on Capitol Hill, Democrats are getting antsy. "If the legislation isn't ready to go to the floor by Memorial Day, it probably won't make it there at all this year," Sheppard writes.
Connie Hedegaard, the outgoing Danish Minister of Climate and Energy who hosted this year's international climate negotiations at Copenhagen, also noticed the unease in a series of meetings with environmental leaders rangingfrom Todd Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change, to Carol Browner, head of the White House Climate and Energy Office. Hedegaard told Inter Press Service (IPS) that "she got the sense that they are not sure "what will fly and what will not fly or when" with regards to U.S. climate legislation."
"I definitely get the feeling that if [the legislation] fails this time then it would not come until after the midterm elections," Hedegaard said.
That means the U.S. would go to the next round of international negotiations empty handed. As IPS notes, midterm elections "take place Nov. 2. The Cancun climate conference starts Nov. 29."
Energy reduction is key
As far as anyone can tell, the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill is not going to do a great job limiting carbon emissions. Don't expect that to change between now and May, or whenever the bill comes to a vote. In the absence of a real cap on carbon, Grist's David Roberts has some advice for the trio of senators on what they can do:
"The main goal with your bill should be to establish a framework whereby a carbon price is implemented and steadily raised. The initial price can be low -- low enough to avoid the kind of political backlash that has poisoned previous efforts -- and phase in over time so affected industries have time to prepare ... In exchange for reducing the role of carbon pricing, you should push to strengthen and expand the clean energy and efficiency provisions in your bill."
In other words, the bill can avoid the politically treacherous cap-and-trade system, as long as it pushes through strong policies for programs like energy efficient appliances, home insulation, and other actions that reduce the amount of energy we're using.
Who watches the watchmen?
Climate legislation, even in weakened form, is still on the table, so the amount of finger-pointing over its difficulties has been limited so far. But in The Nation a few weeks back, Johann Hari threw a stink bomb at big environmental groups, arguing that their increasing coziness with the corporate world had checked their political strength and led them to advocate for milquetoast environmental policies.
This week, the magazine published responses from the groups profiled, who called the story "plump with distortions of reality" and "a toxic mixture of inaccurate information and uninformed analysis."
The responses are worth a read, as is Hari's original article. In his rebuttal, Hari asks the critics to point out specific inaccuracies in his story and worries at the defensiveness of the environmental community. "Do none of these people feel any concern that the leading environmental groups in America are hoovering up cash from the worst polluters and advocating policies that fall far short of what scientists say we need to safely survive the climate crisis?" he writes.
Local action for green jobs
If big environmental groups are not as perfect as one might hope, more local environmental efforts can still make an impact, albeit on a different scale. Chris Rabb and Colorlines profile three grassroots efforts to create green jobs in three corners of the country. In Los Angeles, solar panels went up on roofs; in New York, more low income communities won access to public transportation; and in Arizona, a Navajo group formed to advocate for more green jobs in their community.
"We need all kinds of solutions--local, state, and national--and as we've seen the people need to make it happens," says Rabb.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
To the Majority leaders of the Senate, the House of Representatives, their Minority counterparts, the President of the United States, and various others (such as Senators McCain, Lieberman, and all the others who are making a mess out of our legislative system and the future of our economy and our government):
What the hell is wrong with you guys? Don't you know we are watching all of you as you behave like High School adolescents and make our lawmaking processes a joke? Don't you know you were elected by ordinary people like me and, while we don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure your campaign hotel accommodations are first rate, we believed that in voting for you... all of you...that you would not only represent us, but LISTEN to our concerns and work together to solve our collective problems?
The first rule of medicine is, "Do no harm." The post-Joe Lieberman version of the Senate healthcare bill fails that basic criterion. Unless Democratic leadership steps up to fix this misguided proposal, our only recourse will be to kill it.
The fundamental failing of the newest Senate proposal is that it requires individuals to purchase health insurance, but does nothing to rein in what insurance companies charge. There is nothing to stop spiraling health costs from eating up an ever-increasing percentage of our national productivity.
In an e-mail received Friday, Nov 13, Public Campaign says there are now 115 co-sponsors for HR 1826, the public financing for campaigns bill. Take a look at their website and re-double your efforts to build grassroots support for this needed change.
On the same date, an e-mail came in from Lawrence Lessig with news of the latest videos from Change-Congress. They are targeting Lieberman and Bayh for their links to big PhARMA and their threats to prevent significant reform with a public option. Here's hoping that Glenn Greenwald doesn't mind being "incorporated" into the Lieberman video; there have been times in the past when objections have been raised by persons whose words and likeness have been used by Change-Congress in a video ad.
In these the last weeks of debate, there is more value to the exposure of just how much the outside campaign contributions influence the positions of our Senators and Representatives.
One of the interesting facts is that not only do Democrats in the Senate defect a lot more than Republicans on crucial votes, but they are doing it more often. Thirty Democrats who were around for 2008 have Progressive Punch scores that are less liberal than their career marks while only 16 are more liberal. Overall, we are losing an average of 2.5 votes on crucual votes due to this trend.
Liberals/Progressives are essentially showing no trend. Most scores are pretty close and a similar number are going up as going down. Regionally, 8 of the 16 with a rising score come from the Northeast. With the exception of Tom Harkin, all of those with a higher score come from Democratic states in Democratic regions, although you might quibble about Ohio.
Some of those with the biggest increases were big targets of the left who may have decided to move closer to their constituencies: Joe Lieberman went from a pathetic 68.49 career score to an OK 83.33. DiFi moved from 79.06 to 87.50. Tom Carper, a particular sore spot for me, went from 70.45 to 81.25. John Kerry showed some leadership moving from 82.52 to a really good 95.83.
I read three or four serious articles about the rise of fascism yesterday, and they were helping to ground me with an understanding of the violent mobs shutting down public meetings on health care issues and threatening Congressmen with lynching and poisoning.
I thought, who I should send this to is Senators Reid, and Lieberman, and Nelson, and Feinstein, and tell them that it is their responsibility to stand up for our democracy, and take some effective action to stop this insanity.
And so I sent emails, and quotes from the pieces comparing our violent lobbyist-coached mobs and the situation in Nazi Germany, and I asked each of them to take responsibility, take action to stop this violence in our public meetings.
So I have been thinking about it for a day, and I want to suggest that we approach these so-called Democrats who do so much business with the health care industry, and we ask them to not only repudiate the violent and threatening behavior we've seen, but ask them also to acknowlege that the lobbyists they have been doing business with are financing the PR firms and lobby shops who are openly coaching and encouraging the mob actions.
Are Senators Lieberman, Feinstein, Nelson, and all the others, willing to sign onto this move into violence themselves? Or are they willing to quit supporting the corporations which are funding it?
Are they willing to condemn the corporate funding of violence and distortion and lies? Are they willing to meet with their lobbyist supporters and insist they they call off the violence and the mobs?
Are they willing to organize in the Senate and the House against violent behavior and threats?
If they are taking health care money, and the same organizations are financing mob rule, then the Senators and Representatives who take that money are responsible to stop the promotion of violence, or resign their alliance with those businesses.
Don't you think so?
What do you think?
Some info:
http://www.openleft.com/... http://qwstnevrythg.com/... http://www.alternet.org/...
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America are running a 10-day vote where progressives can decide which states to bring the WeWantThePublicOption.com "sign your name" ad to.
Ads will feature the names of local residents from across a given state and call out the local Senate Dem for taking millions from health and insurance interests while threatening to oppose the public option. (A slight variation of the ad to the right we've been running in DC the last few weeks.)
Thousands of people have voted. So far, Baucus is in first place, Kerry second, Feinstein third, Lieberman fourth, Bayh fifth, and so on.
Well me either and I'll tell you my main reason. The U.S. Senate could vote to gather up every loose saber littering that chamber's floor to lock safely in the attic and what this White House would hear are sabers being rattled while they were carted off. But I'll tell you something I don't like almost if not equally as much as Clinton's Kyle - Lieberman vote. By and large I am upset by how anti-war grassroots have seized on Clinton's vote to use as a primary season football at the expense of trying to lesson the risk of war with Iran.
Essentially the primary reaction of most anti-war grassroots activists to the passage of Kyle -Lieberman by the U. S. Senate has been to blast Clinton for her vote and use that vote to argue against her Presidential candidacy. I know I am over simplifying, but the most common line of attack seems to be that by voting for Kyle- Lieberman, Clinton gave political cover to Bush/Cheney that will make it easier for them to attack Iran while they still are in office. Let's step back and look at that for a second. Maybe several LONG seconds.
This is another in the regular series called Strategery, which is written by David Sirota and appears Wednesdays on OpenLeft (I know today is Thursday - sorry I'm off my a day...).
According to a new poll released today by the nonpartisan firm Research 2000, if Connecticut's 2006 Senate general election happened today, Ned Lamont would defeat Sen. Joe Lieberman handily. What is of particular significance in the numbers is that the shift is due precisely to the deception that Lamont supporters had been exposing during the campaign - but which reporters refused to cover both during the race and in the post-election analysis. This deception on the issue of Iraq goes straight to how the media and political Establishment will do anything to keep this war going. And the two lessons that come out of this poll after looking at its details are worth remembering.
As the poll shows, if the race were held today, Lamont would garner 48 percent of the vote, Lieberman just 40 percent and Republican Alan Schlesinger would get 10 percent. This represents roughly a 16-18 point swing from the actual results (Lieberman 49, Lamont 40, Schlesinger 10), and according to today's poll, the major shift to Lamont from Lieberman would be among Democratic and Independent voters.
You may recall that in a post-election analysis I wrote for In These Times, I noted that Lieberman's entire general election strategy was about pretending that, if reelected, he would lead the fight to end the Iraq War. The man literally portrayed himself as the leader of the antiwar movement after he lost the primary. His very first ad in the general election was him looking to camera saying "I want to help end the war in Iraq." During debates he said "No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do." It was, as this well-known YouTube video showed, a positively Nixonian enterprise by Lieberman - and it was a deliberate effort to confuse precisely the same Democratic and Independent voters who now say they would vote for Lamont. As I reported:
"Our internal polling showed that somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the population said they simultaneously opposed the war and supported Lieberman's position on the war-a signal that Lieberman's confusion campaign was working."
During the campaign, we did all that we could to point out how Lieberman was lying about his position on the war through as many venues as possible - blogs, candidate speeches, and television advertising making the point that "a vote for Lieberman means a vote for more war" (an ad that Lieberman actually held a special press conference to attack for supposedly being not true). But in the general election's stretch run, the independent validators in the race - the local and national media - refused to report on Lieberman's actual positions and votes continuing to support Bush and the war, and this key slice of Democratic and Independent voters remained confused. They voted for Lieberman because they believed that he perhaps had been pro-war before, but had changed - when in fact the only thing that had changed temporarily was his language, but not his actions.
But now this key group of Democrats and Independents isn't confused anymore because, since the election (and, as predicted) Lieberman has become even more supportive of the Iraq War, and is actually publicly pushing a war with Iran. You can't turn on a television and see a story about the political debate over war without seeing/hearing/reading about Lieberman ratcheting up the saber rattling.
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