Open Left - climate change

From Contract To Bestseller In 60 Days

jamesboyce — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:25:09 GMT

When Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council, set out to write Clean Energy Common Sense her goal was simple- To bring more people into the climate change conversation now. Now? Conversations on climate change are happening in real time across the internet, on talk radio, in nightly news casts, and beside the water cooler. With only weeks until the UN's Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a book seems like the wrong medium to insert yourself into the conversation.
It was not even 2 years ago when then NYT Book Review editor Rachel Donadio asked the question, "Why Does It Still Take So Long to Publish a Book?" What has changed? As I found out, even though Rachel was able to come to her own conclusions, her question was so 2008.

(Enter immediacy). Hello immediacy. Not exactly a friend of the publishing industry. Clean Energy Common Sense is an anomaly in a usually slow moving industry. Beinecke went from book contract to #4 on the Amazon Non-Fiction Bestsellers list in a little over 60 days. That is lighting fast even for an e-book. How did it go down? Pay attention folks at Guinness. If you don't have a category for this yet, you should.

After a summer of watching big dirty energy companies spending loads of money on a direct attempt to confuse the American people on the issue, enough was enough. A definitive book was needed to call people to action and put any confusion caused by "dirty energy" money to rest. That conviction set into motion what would be a whirlwind couple of months. The contract was signed with her publisher on September 9th, and immediately Beinecke put pen to paper (or I assume fingers to keyboard). The manuscript was researched, written, and edited by October 5th. Keep up, this moves quickly. The book was released on November 9th, exactly two months after signing on to write it. The book became an instant hit, climbing to #19 overall on Amazon that night. By the end of the week it was #4 on Amazon's non-fiction bestsellers list.

This sense of immediacy by both the author and publisher creates some real surprises in the tightly-packed 112-page volume. One of the biggest being data from October 2009 was included in the analysis - last month. Most of the time we are dealing with statistics that were relevant years back. This book demands to be read in the lead up to Copenhagen and like its inspiration, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, it looks to direct people to action - a clean energy revolution even. The author kept the book small enough to fit in your pocket and synthesized the arguments enough to read over lunch in a few days before passing it on to a co-worker. Painesan even in its physical design.

As Beinecke writes in her introduction, "This book is a call to action, one citizen's honest appeal." There is no issue that requires more of an immediate call to action than climate change. The CIA understood the immediacy when it formed a new research center in September to assess the national security risks presented by climate change. The tens of millions of people worldwide that will be forced to run from their homes due to the effects of climate change understand the immediacy. Those monitoring the shrinking Arctic ice cap understand the immediacy of an area that has lost a third of its size in the past thirty years. These are all facts from the book that are substantiated by not just credible sources, but definitive ones.

I encourage you all to get your hands on this book now. Not only is it timely, but is filled with all the authoritative facts and expert insights you need on to understand the immediacy of the climate change issue.

Weekly Mulch: No Treaty in Copenhagen?

The Media Consortium — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:06:17 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

Last weekend in Singapore, President Barack Obama acknowledged that a comprehensive international climate deal will not be reached during the climate change summit in Copenhagen. While many might view this as a letdown, lowering expectations might actually be a good thing, as Matthew Yglesias notes for the American Prospect. According to Yglesias, the conference can now be framed as a relative success whatever happens, and that will keep the momentum for climate action going after Copenhagen.
Now that the conference is no longer a shoe-in failure, it's more important than ever that the president is on hand. Obama's attendance will signify that the his administration is committed to passing climate legislation through the Senate.

In the video below, The Real News notes that Obama is simply trying to buy more time. Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, is hopeful that a legally binding treaty that focuses on the clear, main points, like how much to reduce emissions and finance the bill, are still attainable. Even though the Senate has not passed a climate bill, the United States can still play a constructive role in Copenhagen.

But will the international climate summit put any pressure on the Senate to actually pass a climate bill? Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly remains skeptical. "Republican [lawmakers] seem entirely unfazed when told, 'There's a health care crisis, and the entire country is waiting for you to be responsible and do your duty,'" writes Benen. "These same lawmakers will soon be told, 'There's a climate crisis, and the entire world is waiting for you to take your obligations seriously.' Will they find this compelling? I suppose time will tell."

In Mother Jones, Bill McKibben criticizes Obama's weak leadership on climate change. Rather than applying the necessary political pressure to reach a climate deal, Obama has made climate change a second priority to health care reform. Even worse, the Obama administration conceded a sturdy treaty because it was unrealistic that Senate would pass it. McKibben notes that the "White House is starting to use the Senate in the same way that the Bush administration used China - as a scapegoat for doing too little. You don't get to blame the Senate if you haven't pushed the Senate as hard as you possibly can."

Grist's David Roberts argues that the real culprit is not Obama, but the recalcitrant Senate. Calling Obama's leadership a failure is premature because he still has a chance to push reform and make a difference. Roberts also contends that McKibben's analogy of Obama using the Senate like Bush used China is unsound:

"The analogy is apt insofar as China was out of Bush's control and the Senate is out of Obama's. But it's inapt in that there's plenty Bush could have done without China and he didn't; there's plenty Obama can do outside the Senate and he's doing it. When it comes to matters under executive branch control, the progress over the last 10 months have been amazing - new fuel-economy rules, new enforcement of efficiency standards, EPA moving forward on CO2 regulations, energy standards and goals for all federal departments, tons of green stimulus money, national retrofit programs, delay of mining and drilling permits, sustained bi- and multi- lateral international climate diplomacy... the list goes on. Obama is doing what a president can do - more than any president has ever done."

Where do the American people stand on climate action? According to a recent poll featured on Yes! Magazine, 75% of Americans "favor government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, cars, and factories" and 59% of Americans "favor the U.S. taking action on global warming, even if other countries like China and India do less."

To channel this national consensus for urgent climate action, Peter Rothberg of The Nation compiled a guide that outlines how activists can get involved before Copenhagen. The guide recommends tactics that average citizens can use to pressure the key actors at Copenhagen.

Progress at Copenhagen is still possible, but there's no guaranteed outcome. If the U.S. wants to play a valuable role at Copenhagen, it should rise above the fray in Congress and focus on producing a viable pact with international support in the upcoming year. Copenhagen needs to serve as a wake up call that climate change is a collective global problem that needs a collective global solution.

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.

Tell Obama: We need a strong climate bill

daveschwab — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:14:48 GMT

Recently, world leaders announced some deeply disturbing news: they gave up on reaching a binding climate deal at the upcoming Copenhagen conference. [1]

A major impediment was the refusal of President Obama and Congress to enact tough cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

We've got to turn that around. Immediately.

Tell Obama and Congress to commit to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases below 1990 levels by 2020.

Right now, the most ambitious target that Obama has endorsed is a 3.5% reduction in emissions by 2020. [2]

That's pathetic, compared to the 25-40% reduction that we need to have a 50:50 chance of avoiding disastrous runaway global heating, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. [3]

The United States ought to lead by example. We can do it with strong emission reductions.

Tell Obama and your Members of Congress to commit to tough emissions reductions today.

Climate Change Deniers' Smear Campaigns Exposed

jamesboyce — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:32:11 GMT

With all due respect to Don Draper sometimes the best way to sell a message isn't a clever campaign but the truth. A recently exposed whopper conjured up by climate change deniers highlights exactly what is behind the fight against climate change solutions: lies. The site Fight Clean Energy Smears has been tracking the attempts by a very small minority of deniers out there who are using, quite simply, lies to protect their interest in the status quo
In this vain attempt, a small group of Heartland Institute enthusiasts petitioned the American Physical Society's stance on acknowledging global warming and the causal links of human activity. The 206 signatures on the petition challenged the 47,000 member strong stance on the merits of scientific fact. Now the funny part... Not only did the APS reject this lame attempt at spreading propaganda, but it issued a 128-page report debunking the science, exposing the petitioners qualifications, diagramming the how the "gaggle is not a consensus" group try to distort the truth of science.

When is enough going to be enough with this type of public distraction. This is not a trial of public opinion. And if it were Mother Nature would have all the expert witnesses on her side saying, "Global warming exists and it is caused by human activity". End of story.

Truth in advertising is usually the domain of the Better Business Bureau, but one of the Smears of the Week comes straight from the Edward Bernays playbook on manipulating public opinion. A Washington Post ad taken out by the oil funded Citizensenergy.org group claimed that the Kerry-Boxer Bill on climate change will cause the loss of 2-million jobs. Fear monger! The source of their research - studies by the climate change denier National Association of Manufactures and the Exxon funded American Council for Capital Formation. Fortunately, a group with more legitimate research credentials known as The University of California, Berkley produced a study showing conclusive data that adopting clean energy and climate legislation could produce 1.9-million jobs.

It is so concerning that in an age where infinite information lays at our finger tips, there are still such a tolerance for purveyors of lies and deceit. These are not even the elaborate concoctions from Lost writers. They are just plain ole' "tell the opposite of the truth and hope nobody fact checks" lies. Climate change is real and without action it will continue to have serious consequences on humanity. Yes - our very existence is riding on the truth that science has unequivocally provided. There is no need for doomsday fear mongering. Facts are facts. The good news is there is hope. There is hope the climate bill will pass. There is hope that the economy will recover on the back of new jobs provided in the clean energy sector. And there is hope that smear campaigns will be abandoned.

If you come across smears denying climate change exists or its connection with human activity expose it. Post it to Fight Clean Energy Smears and we can end the nonsense and get to the real work of solutions.

EPA censors emplyoyees youtube video criticizing cap & trade--PEER keeps it on the web

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last weekend, I ran a two-part interview I did with Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). (Part 1 / Part 2) This week, PEER announced that the Obama EPA had ordered two EPA attorneys to take down a youtube video they had posted--"The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009"--criticizing the Obama-supported cap & trade approach to climate change as fatally flawed. PEER has reposted it for them. The two attorneys, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, are married to each other, and each has worked at EPA for over 20 years. In the video, Zabel, speaking for both of them, refers to their experience as EPA attorneys, but immediately states that they are not represeenting the EPA:

ALLAN ZABEL: Our opinions are based on more than twenty years each working as attorneys at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco regional office. However, nothing in this video is intended to represent the views of EPA or the Obama administration.

According to PEER:

The couple had received clearance for posting the video but EPA took issue with its content following publication of an op-ed piece by the two in The Washington Post on October 31
.... On November 5, 2009, EPA ethics officials ordered the two veteran employees to -

"Remove your climate change video from You Tube by the close of business on Friday, November 6, 2009";

"Edit your You Tube video...by:

(i) Removing the language starting at 1:06 min - 'Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the San Francisco Regional Office.'

(ii) Removing the images of EPA's building starting at 1:06 min...

(v) Remove [sic] the language starting at 6:30 min - 'In my work at EPA, I've been overseeing California's cap-and-trade and offset programs for more than 20 years.'"

"All future requests for approval of an outside writing activity must be accompanied by a draft of the document that is the subject of the approval request..."

"EPA is abusing ethics rules to gag two conscientious employees who have every right to speak out as citizens," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who has re-posted the original video and its script. "EPA reversed itself because someone in headquarters had a tantrum about their Washington Post essay."

Here's the video, so you can judge for yourself (more about the incident, as well as the couple's argument, on the flip):

The argument presented in the video is clear, straightforward, and from my experience following the issues involved, completely sound. I had a front-row seat to see the failure of one program they refer to, RECLAIM, which they also described in testimony to Congress earlier this year:

RECLAIM and Over-allocation: In contrast to Acid Rain, the Los Angeles cap-and-trade program known as RECLAIM (the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market) failed spectacularly. The program was aimed at reducing ground level ozone. In RECLAIM, despite the presence of accurate monitors and sophisticated regulators, the initial cap was inflated (set too high, also called "over-allocation"), which delayed most emission reductions for approximately seven years. At the end of that time, companies were accustomed to artificially low credit prices and almost no one had invested in emission control. As a result, the market collapsed when prices soared because the gradually declining number of permits no longer exceeded actual emissions. Following market collapse, the necessary control technology was required by regulation. http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/cite.php?9+Duke+Envtl.+L.+&+Pol'y+F.+231

They also appeared on Democray Now! this week. First, here's a passage where they explain what's wrong with cap-and-trade:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, could you talk some about your objections to the cap-and-trade approach to handling climate change?
ALLAN ZABEL: Yes. Basically, as stated in the video, we think that cap and trade is-with offsets, especially-is fundamentally flawed. And the reason for that is that we think offsets-offsets are reductions in greenhouse gases which happen outside the capped sources, and offsets, especially in a world market, cannot be adequately enforced or policed, and you're not sure whether the reductions are real, whether they go beyond what would have happened anyway.
And since the cap-and-trade bills before Congress include so many offsets, these programs could be run for approximately twenty years while relying on reductions only from these offsets. And so, we think that the-this fatal flaw locks in climate degradation for approximately twenty years.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I think one of the big problems is that people don't even understand what's being talked about, like when you talk about cap and trade, when you talk about offsets. Laurie Williams, give us a basic lesson, just a thumbnail kind of primer. What are offsets? What's cap and trade?
LAURIE WILLIAMS: OK. Cap and trade means that facilities need to, year by year, reduce their emissions until a certain level is met. That's supposed to be a declining cap. Trading means that if some facilities have more trouble than others reducing their emissions, they can buy pollution permits from other facilities that are having an easier time reducing.
However, in this climate bill, facilities can meet their obligation to reduce, not only by buying permits from other facilities, but by buying carbon offsets. And the bill specifically authorizes more than two billion tons a year of offsets, which would be enough to cover all required reductions for almost twenty years. In addition, you know, there are other problems with that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And an offset? Could you explain what an offset is?
LAURIE WILLIAMS: Right. So, a carbon offset means some reduction that happens outside the capped sources. And specifically, we give a couple examples in our video.
Sorry, I need a little water.
But one good example that a lot of people are able to understand is forestry. So-sorry-so let's say you have a forest, and I pay you to reduce or stop logging in your forest. That allows me to burn coal above the cap at my coal-fired power plant. But the question is-perhaps you were never planning to cut your forest, and now you've just received a bonus for what you were going to do anyway. Or maybe you were planning to cut your forest, and now you don't. But demand for wood doesn't go away. So what happens is, that economic activity merely shifts to somewhere else. So there's not truly an additional reduction. All you have is extra coal burned above the cap. That's a simple example of a carbon offset.

And here they explain the alternative:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Laurie Williams, you advocate instead a carbon tax with rebates. Could you explain how that would work?
LAURIE WILLIAMS: Yeah. So, we are calling this a carbon fee, because it's a very targeted amount that you pay when you use uncontrolled fossil fuels. Basically, as we said earlier, the problem is that uncontrolled fossil fuels remain a lot cheaper than clean energy. What we would be proposing, and many economists agree would be effective, is that those three or four thousand points around the US where fossil fuels enter the economy, a fee, gradually increasing fee, would be applied, such that over ten to fifteen years the price of uncontrolled fossil fuels would rise above the price of the clean energy alternatives we have today.
To keep this affordable for the average consumer, the vast majority of the fees, and potentially all of them, could be returned to consumers, to individuals, in monthly per person rebates. And what this would mean is that if you only use the average amount of fossil fuels, you would not be in an economically worse position. But if you use more, you would be paying at a much higher rate. So people would have a huge incentive to cut back.
But even more important, perhaps, there would be a huge shift in the incentive for investment in clean energy. Since investors would know that clean energy would become profitable within a known time frame, they would have an incentive to move away from investing in coal, in shale oil, in tar sands, and they would have an incentive to invest in all different clean energy possibilities.

The real problem, of course, is that--just like with health care reform--there's way too much money being made and to be made by those who are causing the problem in the first place. So actual solutions are not really wanted--so much so that they are simply dismissed as "not politically feasible."

Weekly Mulch: Progress for Baucus, Setbacks for Graham

The Media Consortium — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:56:57 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

For weeks, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) has opposed climate change legislation. In the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, he openly voiced his doubts and was the only Democrat to refrain from voting for the bill's passage. Now that the bill is in the Finance Committee, which Baucus chairs, many worry that the bill is doomed. However, it looks like Baucus might have outwitted us all.
Aaron Wiener of the Washington Independent reports that Baucus's opening statement at the Finance Hearing on Tuesday was surprisingly favorable. Baucus pledged his commitment to "passing meaningful, balanced climate change legislation" and even preempted economic attacks on the bill.

Jeff McMahon of AlterNet argues that this was the strategy all along: "By appearing to oppose the climate bill, Baucus may be staging its passage." House Democrats implemented a similar strategy for health care reform when they appeared to give up the public option to stifle the opposition's absurd antics. Much like the Senate's climate bill, the public option was prematurely declared dead. Nevertheless, the House still successfully passed a health care bill with a public option-and the climate bill was still able to move past the EPW committee.

"Max Baucus' no vote in the [EPW] Committee establishes Baucus as the bill's credible opposition, the representative of money and industry, especially with Republicans excusing themselves from the process through either the certainty of their opposition or, in the case of a boycott, their literal absence," McMahan writes.

Baucus' strategy helps him effectively gain traction within the Senate and in his home state, where the outdoors and hunting are valued. As the chairman of the Finance Committee, he advocates for economic concerns and a strong climate bill that is likely to pass the Senate.

Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) can't seem to catch a break, as Kate Sheppard notes for Mother Jones. The Republican Party of Charleston County, S.C. unanimously voted to censure Graham for working with Democrats on a climate bill. Charleston Country Chairwoman Lin Bennett argues that Graham has "weakened the Republican brand" and that "his work on climate legislation is the last straw." In addition, the American Energy Alliance, a shady industry group that benefits from blocking clean energy, has reportedly spent $300,000 on advertisements to rebuke Graham for his support on climate legislation.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly argues that Graham's censure is particularly ridiculous because Graham has one of the most conservative voting records. According to VoteView analysis, Graham is currently the 18^th most conservative member of Congress. Evidently, that is still not enough for South Carolina Republicans.

"One of the other angles I find interesting is that, for the better part of the year, the small and discredited Republican minority has insisted that they'd like to see "bipartisan" lawmaking," writes Benen. "And yet, when Lindsey Graham tries to work with Dems on one issue, and gets much of what he wants in concessions, he's immediately slammed -- formally -- by Republicans in his own state."

It is clear that South Carolina Republicans have no tolerance for politicians that stray from the hard party line of "freedom, rule of law and fiscal conservatism." But Salon's Andrew Leonard notes that Graham's censure is hardly surprising, considering the state's history of succession: "South Carolina Republicans are sui generis: Whether it's Sen. Jim "healthcare will be Obama's Waterloo" DeMint or Rep. Joe "You Lie!" Wilson or Gov. Mark "no stimulus for me" Sanford, they rarely disappoint. One would expect no less from the first state to secede from the United States after Lincoln's election and the first state where shots were fired in the Civil War."

Finally, the Applied Research Center (ARC) is working to ensure that women and people of color will also reap the benefits of a green economy. Michelle Chen notes for Air America that ARC has created a Green Equity Toolkit to help marginalized communities hold employers accountable for just working conditions and equal access to green jobs.

"Considering how difficult it's been to get big business on board for meaningful carbon-emissions regulation, Congress might want to bank on some of the enthusiasm springing up from communities that are starting to see the link between their economic and environmental futures," Chen writes.

In Barcelona, UN climate talks reach danger zone

Kate Horner — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:22:09 GMT

Hi – I’m writing from Barcelona, where the final round of negotiations prior to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen came to a close on Friday. It’s been a tense five days here, with time running out for world leaders to get their act together. I want to share some of my reactions to what’s going on here—and in Congress back in the U.S.

This week, two very different types of stand-offs marked political negotiations over solutions to global warming, one cowardly and one courageous.

U.S. Senators Back Away from Real Action

In the U.S. Senate, Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted the scheduled mark-up of the climate and energy bill, complaining that Chairwoman Boxer (D-CA) was not giving them enough time to assess the economic impacts of the legislation. This came after Sen. Boxer had already given tardy Republican committee members an extension to offer amendments to the bill. The Republican ploy was childish, and almost certainly was an attempt to further weaken a bill that, as passed out of the committee Thursday, is already too weak to protect our climate.

African Delegates Stand Up for Real Action

Across the Atlantic in Barcelona, negotiators from African countries initiated a different sort of boycott — one with a much more constructive aim and a very urgent plea.

Monday, the first of five days of talks in Barcelona, African negotiators announced that they would not continue with formal discussions on other topics until rich countries made some real progress with their own emissions reduction targets. (These targets refer to the reductions in greenhouse gas pollution that rich (Annex I) countries commit to make by 2020.) Millions of people in developing countries are already being affected by climate change impacts such as floods and droughts. Developing countries and communities have historically had practically no fault in the creation of climate change, yet they already face devastating impacts.

The African delegation’s action was a strategic and brave move, designed to pressure rich countries to finally step up and commit to new, deep emissions reductions targets under an internationally binding agreement. With so few formal negotiating days left before Copenhagen, time is running out for rich countries to start cooperating. Rich countries’ continued shirking of their legal and moral responsibility to set new, strong and binding targets drove developing countries to this dramatic action.

More on how it all played out in Barcelona in the extended version.

Makase Nyaphisi, an ambassador from Lesotho, explained African countries’ frustrations:

We know the scientific evidence. We know the impacts on agriculture, health and so on. We know what action needs to take place. And we are expecting that there have to be ambitious targets taken on by Annex-1 countries -- and at the moment they are not coming up with that. … We must have an equitable, transparent and fair deal.

Alfred Wills, South Africa’s lead climate negotiator echoed in an interview with Bloomberg:

We’re going around and around in circles on side technical issues rather than the core issue. … The countries which have put pledges on the table which are within the range required by science are Norway and Japan. That’s it. Everyone else is below.

International Activists Show Solidarity with African Demands

On Monday, I participated in an action sponsored by Friends of the Earth International to show solidarity with African delegates' demands. We invited delegates and observers at the negotiations to join a human shield against the killing of strong targets for emissions reductions by rich countries under the Kyoto Protocol. As these pictures illustrate, we urged Annex I, or rich countries, to avoid being “grim reapers” of climate destruction and to commit to at least 40 percent emission reductions within their countries by 2020.

Having spent more than seven weeks in negotiations sessions this year, the African action is the boldest and bravest move I have seen and the political backlash has been severe. We can only anticipate that, as stakes rise, developed countries will resort to coercive tactics to exert pressure on developing country delegates. It’s important that activists in the U.S. show solidarity with the demands of delegates from African and other developing countries. After all, it’s our U.S. negotiating team, even with our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president at the helm, which continues to do the most to obstruct serious action and is leading rich countries in a race away from their responsibilities.

U.S. Proposals Threaten to Undermine Progress

As Friends of the Earth reported here on OpenLeft at the end of the Bangkok talks in October, the United States is pushing for the abandonment of the strongest elements of the Kyoto Protocol. These critical elements are (1) binding emissions reduction targets on a global level and (2) an international compliance mechanism to ensure that individual countries meet their targets. The last two years of negotiations were supposed to be used to update the Protocol for a second commitment period, with stronger emissions reduction targets, and find some meaningful way to bring the United States into a global agreement – not to scrap the whole thing!

Instead of joining the global consensus, the U.S. has decided to throw its weight behind what policy junkies like me call a “pledge and review” scheme, whereby countries would simply commit to do whatever they happen to decide to do domestically, regardless of whether that adds up to enough emissions cuts globally to avoid catastrophic climate change. (And forget about considering countries’ historical responsibilities for what they have done to cause global warming.)

Under the U.S. scheme, a peer review process would take the place of an international compliance provision. Having a climate agreement with no compliance mechanism is like telling your kids they can’t eat any more chocolate—and then turning a blind eye as they down four Snickers, two Heath Bars and a box of Oreos. A strong compliance provision is the one thing that has made all international environmental agreements work. It simply is unacceptable for the U.S. to undermine this vital component of an agreement.

As Brendan Demelle summarized in his Grist post on the African delegates’ action:

In other words, while representatives from the developing world are calling for a strong, science-based treaty to combat climate change and save the poorest and most vulnerable nations from climate catastrophe, wealthy industrialized nations want to substitute lofty politic rhetoric for a commitment to action in Copenhagen.

Africa Forces Focus Back on the Core Issue

The African negotiators' bold move reaped some short-term progress. On Tuesday, a compromise was struck to continue discussions under the Kyoto Protocol negotiating track, with a more concerted focus on emissions reduction targets from rich countries. John Ashe, chair of the Ad hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol, announced that of ten continued negotiating sessions, six would focus on emissions reductions and four on other matters, such as land use, land use change and forestry and flexible mechanisms for the implementation of emissions reduction projects.

Developing countries expressed appreciation for this new agenda. But, developing countries continued to express their frustration at the overall lack of progress on targets -- after all, their future is at stake!

Raising the issue of rich country targets in such a bold, public fashion was severely criticized by—guess who?—rich countries. On Wednesday I heard reports that leaders in European Union capitals are calling their counterparts in the capitals of their former colonial states to demand that they rein in their negotiators.

Unfortunately, such political pressure tactics could happen in Copenhagen if developing countries choose to exercise their muscle in the hopes of provoking real action from rich countries. For now, though, this protest has helped to focus the negotiations on the core issue at hand: emissions reductions.

Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan, the lead climate negotiator for the Group of 77 developing countries, struck a dire tone in regards to the so far paltry commitments made by rich countries on this core issue:

We try to be optimistic [but] we cannot accept total destruction of our countries as a choice for developing countries. Anything south of [an emission cut of] 40 percent means Africa is destroyed.

If you take the EU position of a 20 or 30 percent cut the result is to condemn developing countries to total destruction, loss of livelihoods, and economies, land forests will be destroyed. You can't solve the climate change problem by tinkering around the edges.

As the Barcelona talks wrapped up on Friday, Lumumba continued to criticize the lack of progress on this front:

Nonperformance, nondeliverance and noncommitment by the developed countries is acting as a break for any meaningful progress. … We need a real change of heart and mind by the developed countries, [which seek to] relieve themselves of the commitment by asking the poorest of the world and the most vulnerable and the most underdeveloped to subsidize their high standard of living.

Will President Obama Earn His Nobel?

I’ve watched negotiations leading to Copenhagen over the last two years. With this week’s session in Barcelona coming to a close, we now have zero negotiating days left before leaders convene in Copenhagen and, sadly, we are nowhere near agreement on the key issue of emissions reductions targets. We are also far from agreement on financial support to help developing countries deploy clean technology and deal with the climate change impacts that rich countries like the U.S. have primarily caused. We have strayed into a serious danger zone.

A big question for the few weeks left before Copenhagen is: Will the United States continue to try to drag the rest of the world down with it towards climate chaos or will the world—and will we—be brave enough to ask President Obama to earn his Nobel and commit to the action that’s necessary to save our planet for ourselves and for our children?

Weekly Mulch: The Grown Ups are Back in Charge

The Media Consortium — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:51:50 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

Senate Democrats in the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) finally squelched Republican boycotts and passed a version of the climate bill yesterday morning. Last week, Republican Senators refused to show up to committee hearings in an attempt to stall the bill. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that EPW has now set "the stage for other panels to amend the legislation."
To no one's surprise, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) immediately complained about the legislation on Fox News. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) was the lone Democrat that did not vote, which Inhofe interpreted as a sign that the bill is "dead."

Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was much more upbeat and argued that the Republican boycott actually marred their credibility. "The absence of the Republicans during the Environmental Protection Agency's presentation was a clear message that their criticism of the EPA analysis was not a substantive one," Boxer said. "We are pleased that despite the Republican boycott, we have been able to move the bill."

Inhofe also condemned Boxer for passing the bill through the committee unconventionally. Aaron Wiener writes for The Washington Independent that "Without a quorum that included at least two Republicans, the committee was unable to open formal debate on amendments to the bill. But passage requires just a simple majority, and Chairman Boxer and the Democratic leadership chose to forgo amendments in order to move the legislation quickly, given that the end of the GOP boycott was nowhere in sight." Luckily, now that the bill is moving on to other committees, Inhofe and his Republican EPW colleagues will no longer have much of a say on the bill's final outcome.

With Copenhagen just a month away, Kate Sheppard argues for Mother Jones that the odds of passing a viable climate bill before the climate summit are very grim. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will run a series of studies after each committee's climate and energy bills are combined into a single piece of legislation. Even though the bill passed through the EPW committee, other committees, such as the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Finance Committee, and Agriculture Committee, need to weigh in before the bill is reviewed by the EPA and sent for a vote in the full Senate. How will this affect climate talks in Copenhagen? Sheppard writes that, "Without the urgency imposed by the Copenhagen deadline, any little momentum that the climate bill had could disappear very fast."

While this news is discouraging, Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly points out that, "It's worth remembering that it wasn't too terribly long ago that reports said the same thing about health care reform. Legislative battles can often take some unpredictable twists and turns." This is certainly true, but in order for the legislation to pass, more Republicans will have to get on board. Democrats are trying to gain Republican support for a bipartisan bill by pledging to meet them halfway.

"For several GOP lawmakers, the key on energy policy is building new nuclear power plants. So, Dems are willing to make a deal -- they'll back approval for expedited construction of U.S. nuclear reactors in exchange for support for the rest of the bill," Benen writes.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC.) showed that some Republicans are capable of exerting leadership. In a press conference with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Graham criticized Republicans' childish behavior toward climate change legislation. He asked, "If you can't participate in solving the problem, then why are you up here?"

David Roberts writes for Grist that the three senators pledged to work with the White House to rescue the climate bill. The senators' plan is not meant to undermine Sen. Boxer's efforts but to strengthen the bill overall through a "dual track."

"By stepping in, Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are letting the political establishment know that the Very Serious grown-ups are back in charge. (It's pretty telling that Kerry feels the need to craft another bill alongside the one with his name on it.) They will go to the White House, close the door, and hash out what kind of bill can really pass," writes Roberts.

The road ahead won't be easy. Congress' inability to pass climate change legislation could ruin any chance of success in Copenhagen. In weeks to come, the bill will move on to other Senate committees and the world will be watching. Stay tuned.

Weekly Mulch: Throwing Tantrums Over Kerry-Boxer

The Media Consortium — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:30:27 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

This week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held three hearings on the Kerry-Boxer clean energy bill and, as David Roberts reports for Grist, Republican Senators had an "adolescent tantrum" about the cost of emission reductions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Energy Information Administration (EIA) and other organizations have extensively debunked this line of debate.
Aaron Wiener agrees that the committee's hearing was a "fairly one-sided debate" in The Washington Independent. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has already threatened a Republican boycott of the Committee's markup of the Kerry-Boxer bill, which would prevent the quorum needed to do business. And on Tuesday, every Republican cut out early while Democrats discussed energy policy details with members of the Obama administration. Considering that the bill isn't even at the markup stage, we can expect more disruptive antics from the right in weeks to come.

Republicans won't be the only problem. Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) voiced his reservations about the bill on Tuesday. That makes his vote unlikely, as Kate Sheppard notes for Mother Jones. Baucus doesn't want the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, and he thinks that the bill's plan to curb emissions by 20% by 2020 is too ambitious.

Does his opinion really matter? Unfortunately, yes. Baucus is a member of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works committee, which must approve the bill before it is brought before the wider Senate. He is also the chair of the Finance Committee, meaning that he has jurisdiction over how the bill will allocate emissions permits. With a 12-7 democratic majority in the Environment and Public Works committee, legislation could move forward without Baucus, but he could still stall the bill in the Finance Committee.

"In the health care debate, Baucus delayed the bill in the Finance Committee for months, watering it down in an effort to win the support of the panel's Republicans. In the end only one (Olympia Snowe) voted for it. Now, he's apparently proposing a similar process for the climate bill...[and] questions whether the bill as written 'will lead us closer to or further away' from that goal."

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has finally taken an aggressive stance on climate change. In a video featured by The Uptake, President Obama called for a bipartisan effort to pass legislation and a clean energy economy. He also publicly announced that "the naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue...are being marginalized." The speech on Friday marked Obama's second address on climate change (the first was at the UN last month) and the first aimed at a domestic audience.

While Obama's speech was definitely important, Nancy Scola of The American Prospect argues that Energy Secretary Steven Chu's trip to Google's headquarters on Monday was even more significant. Chu announced the first round of $150 million in funding under the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) - or the "Department of Energy's experimental program for high risk, high payoff concepts for transformative energy technologies ... which just might help America find innovative solutions to our energy challenges." The ARPA-E was actually created under the Bush administration, but no funds were appropriated to get it up and running. Obama allocated $400 million from the stimulus for the program in hopes of sparking creative solutions to energy problems.

And on Wednesday, Obama unleashed the largest award of stimulus money in a single day-3.4 billion dollars in grants-to improve the national power grid. At a solar energy installation in Florida, Obama explained his hopes to replace our current infrastructure that is expensive and susceptible to outages and blackouts with a more resilient and efficient "smart grid."

Andrew Dunn of Air America notes that "It looks like a win-win for Americans-a better, more efficient power infrastructure along with jobs created to construct and maintain that system." Dunn also featured a clip from the Rachel Maddow Show describing recent efforts to promote alternative energy. Maddow reports that Vice President Biden spoke at an auto plant in Delaware that will now produce electric cars. The new auto plant is expected to create 2,000 factory jobs and over 3,000 vendor and supplier jobs by 2014, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Congress and the Obama administration are finally stepping up on climate efforts. It's about time. The US is ready to catch up with the rest of the world and address climate change seriously. There will be many obstacles ahead, but by sharpening domestic energy policies that promote a greater reliance on clean energy, we can re-create the nation's economy and show the international community that we are committed to arresting climate change.

A Manufacturing Industry To Be Proud Of

Natasha Chart — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:00:00 GMT

The American manufacturing industry and its employees are constantly told that they need to be better competitors in the global market, that they must increase the value they add. How are they doing on that?

Something that jumps out from data about the share of global manufacturing had by the United States, China and five other industrialized nations, is that the US is about even with China. As of 2008 and according to UN figures, China's manufacturing accounts for 17.3 percent of world output in dollars (though this number is slightly inflated), while the US' share is 17.7 percent. All else is rarely equal, so this is about as close as you'll get in the real world.

From a Bureau of Labor Statistics report described here, "By the end of 2006, China's manufacturing employment had increased once again to 112.63 million, nearly eight times the level of manufacturing employment in the United States (14.16 million)." The numbers have surely changed since then, but probably not by an order of magnitude.

Those figures could imply many things, but what they seem immediately to suggest is that American workers are extremely productive. They can produce both a high volume and high value of goods, and they have done so without getting a real raise since 1974.

Yet US manufacturing workers face higher unemployment rates than the national average, and often have to accept lower paying work when their plants close down, which should be no surprise. At the advice of the finance industry, wages and benefits have been driven down, policy makers were encouraged not to worry about the decline of the industrial base, and the whole thing was papered over with a massive consumer credit bubble.
Though it seems to me that any 14 million people who can give any 112 million other people a run for their money are valuable and they should have good jobs. They've proven their worth. Preserving the capacity to usefully employ them is just good sense and a worthwhile hedge against supply chain interruptions.

In any war or serious national security emergency, our extended supply chain might become a bigger deal than it's comfortable to think about. For example, as John Markoff wrote this week in the New York Times, the "Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear." (Alternate link.) He says there's concern in the military and intelligence communities about Trojan horses being placed in the circuits, raising the possibility of failures in times of crisis.

That could sound paranoid, but the US itself has used such Trojan horses against other countries, either to tamper with military hardware or steal information. In other words, it's been thought of, done and printed in the paper for everyone to read about a long time since.

There are things that a country should ideally make for itself.

Next are the pollution issues. Many of the developing nations whose lower labor casts initially attract US companies have very low pollution standards.

Links to this photograph series entitled, "Pollution in China", has been making their horrifying rounds lately. The 40 images document not only the signs on the landscape, but the damage to China's people; the adults and children with cancer, the birth defects, disabilities, festering sores, faces and bodies permanently caked with coal dust.

Pollution controls may be so poor even on newly constructed or expanded facilities that they pose blatant and immediate threats to local residents. The region of Sichuan still recovering from last year's deadly quake is now being poisoned by an expanded aluminum production facility, its permanent rain of white dust is killing crops and irritating the skin of its workers. In central China's Henan province, more lead smelters have been found releasing so much pollution that nearby children had excessive blood levels of lead, 178 of them requiring hospitalization. Steel manufacturing in China comprises a third of world steel production, but half of all steel industry CO2 pollution.

At least part of China's environmental destruction is due to poor enforcement, with multinational and Chinese firms openly flouting pollution disclosure requirements instituted in 2008.

So as China's global share of pollution increases and shipping pollution becomes a bigger issues, both the House and Senate support for border tariffs is the sensible thing to do if your concern is either cutting emissions or protecting US jobs. Even if it may irritate trading partners.

American workers are capable and productive. They're an asset to their country and to a world that's looking to the United States to take responsibility for our share of global pollution.

Congressional leaders who told us all it was an imperative to save the banking industry, which caused our current recession, should remember the US workers struggling to survive it when they craft a solution to our climate challenges.

Cross-posted from OurFuture.org. Chris and I are headed to DC today to make the Building The New Economy conference this Thursday, hosted by The Institute for America's Future and the Alliance for American Manufacturing. Free registration is available if you RSVP online, so stop by if you're in the area!

Weekly Mulch: Autumn Fools

The Media Consortium — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:12:39 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

After several prominent members left the Chamber of Commerce over its prehistoric climate change policies, the organization appeared to do an about-face on its climate stance during a press conference on Monday. Sound too good to be true? It was. Members of the Yes Men, a group of satirical, anti-corporate activists, posed as Chamber of Commerce officials and held a fake press conference claiming that "There is only one sound way to do business: That's to support a strong climate-change bill quickly, so that this December in Copenhagen, President Obama can lead the entire business world in ensuring our long-term prosperity." In reality, the Chamber has not changed their climate stance and continues to oppose climate change legislation. The Yes Men's stunt is just one more in a chain of hoaxes this Autumn, including a boy in a balloon, death panels on health care reform, and recent allegations that radical Islamists are using interns to infiltrate Capitol Hill.
In an interview with Dave Gilson of Mother Jones, Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum explains that the Chamber's absurd stance inspired them to take action. By staging a fake change of heart, Bichlbaum hoped to reveal that the Chamber's real climate policy is "A big hoax on the American public." Bichlbaum stresses that the U.S. has a major stake in the outcome of Copenhagen. "The chamber is opposing climate change legislation and the whole rest of the world is saying we need to do something...The chamber, representing the biggest and stodgiest and most powerful corporations in America is just saying, 'Nah, let's let the whole planet go to rot.'"

The Yes Men are notorious for their stunts, as Amy Goodman notes for Truthdig. "The Yes Men stage elaborate hoaxes on global-trade organizations, multinational corporations and politicians. They satirically skewer corporate, free trade, pro-business positions by acting as genuine, sincere spokespeople for these institutions, often offering apologies for past corporate crimes or promoting absurd products with remarkably straight faces at industry conferences." During the press conference, an actual employee of the Chamber interrupted to declare that the event was fake, but this only prompted more questions about the Chamber's stance on climate change. The Yes Men prank successfully drew more attention to the Chamber and publicly humiliated them.

Corporations aren't the only ones quitting the Chamber: The White House has decided to marginalize the Chamber by dealing with major U.S. corporations directly. Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly notes that historically, the Chamber served as gatekeepers. "If powerful policymakers wanted to make headway with business leaders, they had to go through the Chamber to get to them." However, in light of the Chamber's stance on important issues like climate change and health care reform, the White House has opted to create their own gateways.

Was the prank effective? In a video called "Save the Planet with Pranks, Tutus and Civil Disobedience," Grist encourages people to take the Yes Men's lead and cause their own ruckus in the name of climate change. Umbra Fisk says that "thanks to those who have come before us, we know that civil disobedience works." She highlights past examples of climate activism, and ways to show leaders that we're serious about climate change policy. The video below also features upcoming events that promote climate action before Copenhagen climate negotiations in December. Tomorrow, over 170 countries are expected to participate in the International Day of Climate Action. And on November 30^th, thousands of people will engage in acts of non-violent civil disobedience for the Mobilization for Climate Justice Day of Action.

In a piece for The Nation, Leslie Savan attributes Autumns surge of hoaxes to a lull in news coverage and a return to yellow journalism. The hoaxes have not only attacked serious issues, but the credibility of news outlets, who reported these pranks as facts. "This gaggle of hoaxes merely points up the bubbling stew of hoaxes that the 24-hour news cycle is, day in, day out, feeding to us. It's common knowledge that a lot of the stuff on cable, as the White House has said specifically of Fox News, isn't news. Instead it's composed largely of stunts, shticks, and switcheroos, adding up to a grand political punking of the People," Savan writes.

The recent hoaxes raise important questions about our political system. Do hoaxes block reform or facilitate progress? In any case, it seems that any means are justifiable if we achieve the ultimate end goal: Curbing the disastrous effects of climate change and saving the planet.

How Feminism Can Also Save The Planet

Natasha Chart — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:00:00 GMT

It's true, Rush Limbaugh is a racist idiot and vicious propagandist. One of his recent exercises in inhumanity included telling New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin that he should "just go kill [himself]", as noted at Media Matters, after Revkin said that "probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."

There is a wealth of material indicating that wingnut heads spontaneously explode when someone suggests that white Americans shouldn't have as many babies as possible in service to the noble goal of crowding out the lazy brown hordes coming to take our jobs. It's creepy, but not breaking news. When Revkin suggested, as a thought experiment, directing carbon credits towards discouraging people in America (and elsewhere, but we'll get to that) having children, Limbaugh's cranial pressure differential reached critical levels.

In the ensuing October 20th rant, the same one where he suggested Revkin off himself, we get to the meat of Limbaugh's damage:

We don't even have to talk about getting married. We don't even have to talk about being a couple. I mean men have no say now, really, in whether a child is born or not, legally I mean. So would a man have any way of benefiting from the carbon credit?

If men don't have control over something, and especially if they can't benefit from it, Limbaugh is opposed. If you needed an object lesson today on why feminism remains relevant, well, there you are.

However, the fact-on-the-ground that many men do insist on control and the greater share of direct benefits from everything within their purview, gets at the underlying problem with Revkin's thought experiment. Just because Rush Limbaugh doesn't like you, it doesn't make you right in all particulars.

Revkin closed his original blog post describing condoms as the ultimate green technology this way:

If anything, the population-climate question is more pressing in the United States than in developing countries, given the high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions here and the rate of population growth. If giving women a way to limit family size is such a cheap win for emissions, why isn't it in the mix?

Well, here's why. Because if you were really serious about reducing the birth rate, you'd be campaigning first and foremost for women's rights. If you aren't campaigning first and foremost for women's rights, then your push for greater contraception access will never get you where you think you want to go. Also, it can come off badly.
Maximal Returns

Developed nations have mostly reduced their birth rates to at or below replacement levels. Which is to say that population growth has already been cut close to the bone. Further, the rate of pollution produced by the most developed nations is entirely disproportionate to their population share.

As an example, Germany's per capita CO2 emissions are half those of the US, even though they have the highest manufacturing output per capita in the world. This year, Germany announced that they'd met their Kyoto targets three years in advance and are on track to reduce emissions to 1990 levels. They also had a positive balance of trade in 2008, according to UN economic figures, with an export:import ratio of 1.15.

Germans are not living in mud huts, suffering blackouts, or being otherwise miserable for economic reasons as compared to countries with equivalent standards of living. This would suggest that it's at least technically possible for the US to make drastic cuts in CO2 emissions equivalent to halving our total current population while both remaining prosperous and keeping our noses out of people's bedrooms.

Revkin has also been looking at UN data, from which he gathered "that meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion."

There are approximately 300 million people in the United States. Our total population is only around 3/5 of these projected reductions.

There are unmet needs for family planning in the United States, but when you're talking about the sort of needs gap resulting in that level of population growth rate reduction, the conversation automatically shifts away from the US and the rest of the developed world.

I know. He said we have much higher per capita emissions, he didn't explicitly try to shift blame to poorer nations. But. The math of the situation is such that when population growth becomes the focus, that spotlight always shines brightest on the population segments growing the fastest. Yet if you were to make a chart that compared world population to per capita emissions, which you can see below, a person could be forgiven for thinking that population and emissions have little direct correlation. Not 'no correlation', but it's very obvious that other factors weigh more heavily.

Further, when contraception becomes the focus, that spotlight always shines brightest on women. Why? I don't know, I didn't do it, ats.

Women are held uniquely accountable for population increase and contraception use. You can see the pregnant belly, not so much the erect penis that was also involved. Indeed, women have long been the focus of most reproductive education campaigns, which is funny, ha ha, because they tend to have the smallest share of leverage over sexual encounters.

It's perhaps hard to convey to people likely raised in secular humanist surroundings, but a person needs to have a certain amount of overall leverage in a relationship in order to insist on condom use when the other partner doesn't want to use one. A woman who is a despised economic burden whose sexuality is perceived as the rightful property of her partner is unlikely to be able to insist on condom use. If her society is willing to let her die needlessly in childbirth, how much power can she possibly have?

We didn't lower the birthrate in the US by handing out condoms on every corner, but by improving basic health, expanding education and economic opportunities for women, expanding their rights and status, and then, later, contraceptives proved very effective in curbing the birth rate. It's also worth pointing out that still to this day there are women in the US are in relationships where their partners respect and consider their desires in this regard, or where they're encouraged to believe that their desires matter. Condoms could, in fact, be free on every corner and wouldn't lower the birth rate in a society where men had all the socioeconomic power and saw no reason to use them.

In terms of the global mean, it's inarguable that women have less economic leverage. They are most responsible for doing the universally unpaid work of caring for any resulting children, as well as other sick or elderly adults. In many countries, just keeping the bare necessities together for a family requires hours spent gathering fuel and water, which is yet more unpaid work. They work hard but the only thing it earns them is more poverty and abuse.

Women, mostly mothers, also make up the majority of the world's farm labor force. The cumulative effect of colonial-era inheritance policies and modern development incentives likely mean that our typical farmer doesn't own the land she works on and will be lucky to get even a small share of any profits from her work. And even so, they're probably better off than women completely excluded from the productive economy.

In sum, the people who would inevitably end up being the focus of well-meaning environmentalist population crusading are in fact among the poorest, most powerless people on the planet. No one who lives in the developed world has the moral standing to shift responsibility for our climate obligations in their direction, and yet if you're going to talk about population growth, that's where you're always going to wind up if you're chasing maximal returns.

They're Busy Dying, Thanks

The book Half The Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, more fully catalogs the situation of the women who were, are, and probably will be the mothers of most of the world's children. From a review in The American Prospect, emphasis mine:

"It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century," Kristof and WuDunn write. They estimate that 3 million people, the vast majority of them female, are trapped in sexual slavery. More than half a million women die of pregnancy-related causes every year, a figure than hasn't improved in decades.

Addressing a United Nations meeting on September 23rd of this year, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pointed out that of the eight Millenium Development Goals, maternal mortality was the only one on which no progress at all has been made since 1990. None. And though progress has been made on child mortality, 230 of their infants die every hour from childbirth complications.

You could almost forget, living in the modern US, just how dangerous childbirth can be. That forgetting isn't possible elsewhere.

In sub-Saharan Africa, birth injuries known as fistulas are relatively common in regions where there may only be one health clinic for each of several dozen, or several hundred, villages. A fistula leaves a woman uncontrollably leaking waste, and perhaps partially paralyzed. While simple to either prevent or repair with proper medical treatment, many women suffering from fistulas are simply left to die. Either their governments don't care enough to make basic health services available, their families can't or won't spend the money to get treatment, or IMF/World Bank structural adjustments have priced basic care beyond the reach of the poor.

It's all about the money, you know.

Because women's labor is often unpaid or paid much less, they're routinely considered an economic drag on their families. In countries where there are school fees, daughters may only get to go to school if there's money left over after sending their brothers, and they're more likely to be taken out of schooling to marry early, help earn money to school their brothers, or help their mothers with unpaid household chores.

In countries where dowries are customary, a baby girl is a major liability, and that disdain carries throughout her life. I'm looking at you, Indian subcontinent. It's routine in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to hear of women dying from 'exploding stoves,' which is code for a woman's in-laws killing her because her dowry wasn't big enough and they want to free their son to marry again. And plenty of ink has been spilled in the last few years over honor killings, which nauseate me and I'm not going to go into it now.

So again, because "more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century," I think a case could be made that anything translating into greater responsibility or unpaid effort on the part of the world's most impoverished and oppressed persons is ethically wicked.

Feminism To The Rescue

This is not to say, again, that population isn't an issue. While problematic in some ways, this Scientific American article outlines the very real problems of deforestation and agricultural pollution that are only going to increase with world population and also won't be much affected by slight changes in wealthy nations' birth rates.

Yet if you're very serious about slowing the global birth rate what you would do instead of adding up contraceptive costs would be to increase women's access to education and employment. If that seems like too big a leap, you would increase their access to basic healthcare through affordable, nearby clinics that can waive fees for the impoverished. If that's too big a commitment, you start training women as basic health extension agents who can advise their neighbors on day-to-day issues and know when to go for a doctor.

And if all that sounds like a daunting task, then start showing men that they need to take responsibility for their effects on the health and welfare of women and children. Start telling politicians that they need to act as though it matters to them that more women die needlessly of malice or neglect than men die in war.

It's always been the feminist stance that these blatant disparities were shameful, and that glorifying motherhood while neglecting actual mothers is the most perverse tenet of patriarchal belief systems. Now it turns out not only to be an embarassment, but a threat to human survival.

If you're worried about the planet, fight for women's equality. Fight for their dignity. Do that, and a lot of the little things will sort themselves out along the way.

By The Numbers

While I know these things to be true, it's better to show than tell.

After reading about the Revkin incident, I was curious to know how maternal mortality matched up with national, per capita CO2 emissions. I wasn't sure the data would even be publicly available, but it turns out to be easier to get some statistics from the UN than it is to navigate the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' freakishly obtuse website.

Using UN demographic data, and UN climate data made public via a Wikipedia compilation, I was able to pull together a chart that compares per capita emissions and the global share of emissions to maternal mortality and child mortality for under-fives.

There's also a column in the middle derived from taking US per capita emissions and dividing them by other countries' per capita emissions to determine how many people in those other countries it takes to emit the same amount of CO2 as one US resident. So for example it takes 4.5 Chinese, 15.52 Indians, 241.09 Ugandans, or 698.21 Afghans, respectively, to emit the same amount of CO2 as one US citizen.

The table is first sorted by share of global CO2 emissions. Only 23 countries emit fully one percent or more of anthropogenic CO2, the values for the rest were left blank because, literally, I don't have all day.

The 23 countries with a one percent or greater contribution to CO2 emissions account for 83.7 percent of emissions as of 2006. They also accounted for 60.6 percent of world population as of 2009, and 83.1 percent of global GDP in 2005.

If you take out the three countries with a maternal death rate of greater than or equal to 400 per 100,000 births, (India, Indonesia and South Africa), the remaining 20 countries produce 75.7 percent of global CO2 emissions. They also account for 40.6 percent of world population and 80.1 percent of world GDP.

See that? See how the GDP share hardly budges if you take out countries where women are so neglected by their societies that their risk of dying in childbirth is around 100 times greater than the risk in the nations that take the best care of pregnant women? Twenty percent of world population, three percent of global GDP.

The lowest it seems technically possible to get maternal mortality is 3-5 per 100,000 births. The US has an embarassingly high rate of 11 per 100,000, likely reflecting the breakdowns of our health care delivery system, but certainly rates in excess of that are obviously preventable.

The rest of the countries are sorted by per capita CO2 emissions. I found it very amusing to note the high rankings of what are essentially vacation paradises for the wealthy whose own native residents can't possibly be polluting that much.

Countries for whom very little data was available have been excluded from the table, somewhere around a dozen or so. If their 2005 GDP data was in the UN database I referenced, it was included in the global GDP table. Overall, I doubt the picture would change much with a perfectly accurate and complete data set.

Without further ado, the numbers ...

	% Total CO2	Per Capita Tons CO2	US Person Equiv	Maternal X per 100k live births	Children <5 X per 1,000 live births
Country	2006	2005	2005	2005	2005
China	21.5	4.28	4.55	45	25
United States	20.2	19.48	1	11	8
Russian Federation	5.5	10.53	1.85	28	17
India	5.3	1.26	15.52	450	77
Japan	4.6	10.17	1.92	6	4
Germany	2.8	9.72	2	4	5
United Kingdom	2	9.19	2.12	8	6
Canada	1.9	17.35	1.12	7	6
Korea, Republic of	1.7	9.91	1.97	14	5
Italy	1.7	8.01	2.43	3	4
Iran (Islamic Republic of)	1.6	6.28	3.1	140	36
Mexico	1.6	4.12	4.73	60	23
South Africa	1.5	8.53	2.28	400	65
France	1.4	6.47	3.01	8	5
Australia	1.3	18.01	1.08	4	6
Saudi Arabia	1.3	15.54	1.25	18	26
Spain	1.2	8.21	2.37	4	5
Brazil	1.2	1.87	10.4	110	24
Indonesia	1.2	1.46	13.31	420	36
Poland	1.1	7.95	2.45	8	7
Ukraine	1.1	6.97	2.79	18	17
Thailand	1	4.3	4.53	110	8
Turkey	1	3.41	5.72	44	29
Qatar	-	58.67	0.33	12	16
Kuwait	-	33.29	0.59	4	12
United Arab Emirates	-	33.06	0.59	37	9
Bahrain	-	27.16	0.72	32	11
Luxembourg	-	24.81	0.79	12	4
Trinidad and Tobago	-	23.38	0.83	45	35
Aruba	-	22.45	0.87	-	-
Netherlands Antilles	-	20.14	0.97	-	-
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)	-	17.25	1.13	-	-
Brunei Darussalam	-	15.8	1.23	13	9
Nauru	-	14.14	1.38	-	30
Singapore	-	13.76	1.42	14	3
Estonia	-	13.55	1.44	25	7
Norway	-	13.12	1.48	7	4
Oman	-	12.55	1.55	64	13
Kazakhstan	-	11.65	1.67	140	35
Czech Republic	-	11.26	1.73	4	4
Cayman Islands	-	11.02	1.77	-	-
Netherlands	-	10.72	1.82	6	6
Ireland	-	10.63	1.83	1	5
Belgium	-	10.52	1.85	8	5
Finland	-	10.45	1.87	7	4
Greenland	-	9.7	2.01	-	-
Israel	-	9.51	2.05	4	6
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya	-	9.28	2.1	97	19
Cyprus	-	8.97	2.17	10	5
Equatorial Guinea	-	8.97	2.17	680	155
Greece	-	8.91	2.19	3	5
Bermuda	-	8.8	2.21	-	-
Austria	-	8.78	2.22	4	5
Denmark	-	8.64	2.25	3	5
Turkmenistan	-	8.64	2.25	130	55
Seychelles	-	8.15	2.39	-	13
Slovenia	-	7.47	2.61	6	4
Iceland	-	7.39	2.64	4	3
New Zealand	-	7.35	2.65	9	6
Malaysia	-	7.15	2.73	62	12
Slovakia	-	7	2.78	6	8
Belarus	-	6.57	2.97	18	15
Bosnia and Herzegovina	-	6.54	2.98	3	15
Bahamas	-	6.52	2.99	16	15
Malta	-	6.43	3.03	8	6
Portugal	-	6.22	3.13	11	5
Bulgaria	-	6.07	3.21	11	13
Hungary	-	5.83	3.34	6	8
Palau	-	5.83	3.34	-	11
China, Hong Kong	-	5.82	3.35	-	-
Venezuela	-	5.71	3.41	57	21
Sweden	-	5.7	3.42	3	4
Switzerland	-	5.57	3.5	5	5
Fmr Yugoslav Rep. of Macedonia	-	5.53	3.53	10	17
Suriname	-	5.26	3.7	72	31
Croatia	-	5.19	3.75	7	7
Antigua and Barbuda	-	4.95	3.94	-	12
China, Macao	-	4.88	3.99	-	-
Guadeloupe	-	4.83	4.03	-	-
Serbia and Montenegro	-	4.77	4.08	14	9
Martinique	-	4.53	4.3	-	-
Barbados	-	4.51	4.32	16	12
Cook Islands	-	4.46	4.37	-	20
French Guiana	-	4.43	4.4	-	-
Lebanon	-	4.36	4.47	150	30
Romania	-	4.25	4.59	24	17
Uzbekistan	-	4.23	4.6	24	46
Azerbaijan	-	4.22	4.61	82	46
Algeria	-	4.21	4.63	180	39
Anguilla	-	4.19	4.65	-	-
Argentina	-	4.1	4.75	77	18
Lithuania	-	4.09	4.77	11	9
British Virgin Islands	-	4	4.87	-	-
Jordan	-	3.85	5.06	62	26
Jamaica	-	3.79	5.14	170	31
Chile	-	3.65	5.34	16	10
Korea, DPR	-	3.53	5.51	370	55
Syrian Arab Rep.	-	3.52	5.53	130	18
Mongolia	-	3.41	5.71	46	48
French Polynesia	-	3.34	5.83	-	-
Iraq	-	3.17	6.15	300	45
Latvia	-	3.07	6.35	10	10
Belize	-	2.97	6.56	52	26
Saint Kitts, Nevis	-	2.76	7.06	-	20
Mauritius	-	2.75	7.09	15	15
Botswana	-	2.46	7.9	380	44
Egypt	-	2.38	8.18	130	40
Ecuador	-	2.35	8.3	210	25
Saint Lucia	-	2.32	8.4	-	18
Maldives	-	2.3	8.48	120	36
Tunisia	-	2.26	8.63	100	24
Grenada	-	2.23	8.74	-	21
Cuba	-	2.21	8.82	45	7
Republic of Moldova	-	2.1	9.27	22	20
Dominican Republic	-	2.1	9.27	150	37
Guyana	-	2.02	9.65	470	63
Fiji	-	2.01	9.69	210	18
Panama	-	1.85	10.53	130	24
Uruguay	-	1.8	10.81	20	15
Saint Helena	-	1.72	11.33	-	-
Costa Rica	-	1.68	11.58	30	12
Dominica	-	1.68	11.62	-	13
Saint Vincent, Grenadines	-	1.63	11.94	-	19
Morocco	-	1.56	12.5	240	40
Marshall Islands	-	1.49	13.1	-	58
Gabon	-	1.45	13.45	520	91
Armenia	-	1.44	13.52	76	27
Albania	-	1.44	13.54	92	17
Peru	-	1.36	14.3	240	24
Namibia	-	1.35	14.44	210	78
Tonga	-	1.33	14.66	-	24
Colombia	-	1.32	14.8	130	22
Viet Nam	-	1.2	16.26	150	18
Honduras	-	1.14	17.1	280	28
Georgia	-	1.07	18.16	66	32
Kyrgyzstan	-	1.07	18.2	150	42
Bolivia	-	1.04	18.7	290	65
Yemen	-	0.96	20.37	430	79
El Salvador	-	0.94	20.64	170	27
Guatemala	-	0.93	20.86	290	43
Swaziland	-	0.91	21.49	390	98
Philippines	-	0.9	21.56	230	30
Tajikistan	-	0.89	21.98	170	74
Zimbabwe	-	0.88	22.13	880	101
Samoa	-	0.86	22.71	-	29
Pakistan	-	0.85	22.97	320	95
Nigeria	-	0.81	24.18	1100	194
Nicaragua	-	0.76	25.61	170	37
Papua New Guinea	-	0.76	25.63	470	68
Occupied Palestinian Terr.	-	0.73	26.61	-	28
Sao Tome and Principe	-	0.67	28.96	-	99
Paraguay	-	0.65	30.02	150	30
Bhutan	-	0.62	31.63	440	90
Angola	-	0.61	31.81	1400	158
Sri Lanka	-	0.61	32.13	58	21
Djibouti	-	0.59	33.12	650	133
Cape Verde	-	0.59	33.24	210	35
Mauritania	-	0.56	34.99	820	120
Western Sahara	-	0.54	36	-	-
Senegal	-	0.47	41.11	980	119
Congo	-	0.44	43.79	740	123
Cote d'Ivoire	-	0.44	44.33	810	129
Vanuatu	-	0.41	47.67	-	38
Solomon Islands	-	0.38	51.22	220	75
Ghana	-	0.33	58.75	560	114
Kenya	-	0.31	63.31	560	120
Benin	-	0.3	64.44	840	129
Sudan	-	0.3	65.35	450	110
Kiribati	-	0.28	69.82	-	65
Cambodia	-	0.27	73.04	540	95
Bangladesh	-	0.26	74.44	570	68
Lao PDR	-	0.25	78.36	660	79
Myanmar	-	0.22	89.23	380	105
Togo	-	0.21	90.82	510	106
Liberia	-	0.21	90.99	1200	140
Cameroon	-	0.21	93.25	1000	149
Zambia	-	0.21	94.56	830	174
Gambia	-	0.2	98.73	690	115
Haiti	-	0.19	102.47	670	84
Sierra Leone	-	0.18	108.34	2100	265
Guinea-Bissau	-	0.17	114.66	1100	204
Eritrea	-	0.17	117.28	450	78
Timor-Leste	-	0.16	118.13	380	105
Guinea	-	0.15	128.92	910	160
Madagascar	-	0.15	129.78	510	119
United Rep. of Tanzania	-	0.13	147.35	950	124
Nepal	-	0.12	166.64	830	62
Comoros	-	0.11	176.61	400	71
Mozambique	-	0.09	215.49	520	174
Rwanda	-	0.08	234.7	1300	137
Uganda	-	0.08	241.09	550	136
Malawi	-	0.08	245.65	1100	127
Niger	-	0.07	278.68	1800	190
Ethiopia	-	0.07	280.29	720	127
Burkina Faso	-	0.06	344.17	700	191
Central African Republic	-	0.06	347.86	980	176
Mali	-	0.05	398.36	970	202
Chad	-	0.04	503.36	1500	209
DR Congo	-	0.04	533.7	1100	166
Somalia	-	0.03	630.42	1400	148
Afghanistan	-	0.03	698.21	1800	257
Burundi	-	0.02	906.05	1100	181
Tuvalu	-	-	-	-	38
Liechtenstein	-	-	-	-	4
Lesotho	-	-	-	960	96
Micronesia	-	-	-	-	42
Monaco	-	-	-	-	5
Montenegro	-	-	-	-	11

Resources and Notes:

- United Nations Millenium Development Goal (MDG) statistics
- Carbon dioxide emissions, total, per capita and per $1 GDP (PPP), 2005; UN MDG
- Maternal mortality ratio per 100,000 live births, 2005; UN MDG, only year of useful data
- Children under five mortality rate per 1,000 live births, 2005; UN MDG
- List of countries by 2006 emissions, percentage of total; Wikipedia, compiled from UN sources, most complete accessible data set
- List of countries by population, 2009; CIA World Factbook, most accessible source
- GDP for 2005; UNStats database.

All figures are given for 2005 where possible, as this was the only year for which there was a relatively complete, country by country estimation for maternal mortality in the UN database. Emissions statistics for 2006 and population statistics for 2009 were used because getting at 2005 data would have required either access to paid data sources or retrieving the information a country or two at a time.

I arrived at my estimate for global GDP by putting the economic source data in a spreadsheet, sorting it by the GDP indicator, transferring that data to a separate sheet and adding it up. If there's a better way to have gotten it, I don't know what that would be.

Also, some of the UN data for certain countries is based on estimates. The notes on how those estimates were made is freely available in the source database.

Take Action Next Weekend--Climate Change & The Economy

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Make no mistake, whatever else it takes, mass action is needed to make real change happen, and we're one week away from two important opportunities to do that. Go to these sits to learn more about them.

October 24th is an internal day of climate action, sponsoed by 350.org, with over 3500 events scheduled around the world, in 161 countries. 350 parts per million is the CO2 threshold we need to get below in order to avoid the worst of global warming. Find an action near you on the map here.

October 25-27 is the Showdown in Chicago, pitting the people against the plutocracy at the American Bankers Association annual meeting in Chicago.

Schedule of Events
Note: all times are approximate and subject to change
If you wish to join us at the Showdown, please fill out a Showdown Inquiry Form
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2009
3:00pm - Welcoming & Kick Off to the Showdown
Americans from all walks of life come together to roll up our sleeves and start working together on how we ensure we have a financial system that benefits people.
7:00pm - Community Dinner
Break bread with people from across the country.
8:00pm - Workshops: Financial Reform that Protects People and Creates a Recovery on Main Street
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2009
DAY OF ACTION
The American People take our grievances and proposals for change directly to the worst actors in the financial crisis - the banks and lobbyists who caused the crisis and even now continue to block reforms the that will help American families recover.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2009
MARCH TO THE BANKER'S CONVENTION
10:00am - Prayer vigil on Wacker, east of Michicagan Avenue
10:30am - March: starting at Stetson and Wacker
11:00am - Rally at the Sheraton Hotel (301 East North Water Street, Chicago)

Blog Action Day: Climate Change

The Opportunity Agenda — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:51:16 GMT

Today is blog Action Day. In the organizers' own words:

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

Although The Opportunity Agenda does not directly work on climate change, the problem is so pervasive that it impacts the issues we do work on. Climate change is not an abstract phenomenon when it comes the lives of everyday people in America. There is mounting evidence that greenhouse gases are increasing the potency of hurricanes, whose impact disproportionately affects those most vulnerable in our society. And as the climate does change, it will be the poorest among us that suffer in increased fuel costs. Finally, the polluting elements that cause climate change are also most common in low-income communities of color. As a result, the health of residents in these areas is worse than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

For these reasons, climate change isn't an issue simply to be addressed by environmental groups. Social activists, too, must see the connections and address this universal concern—a step in realizing the promise of opportunity for all.

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda website.

Weekly Mulch: Obama's Nobel Prize

The Media Consortium — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:53:41 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his accomplishments in international diplomacy, climate change and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The Nobel Committee praised Obama for his "constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," but, Richard Kim of The Nation wonders if the award comes too soon, as Obama has not yet committed to attending the international climate summit at Copenhagen.
Kim notes that if we want to significantly reduce carbon emissions to advert climate change, "the U.S. will have to bring a lot more to the table than it is currently offering." And in terms of nuclear weapons, a nuclear-free-world is currently a far off goal with many obstacles before it can become a reality. With this award, we hope that Obama will not be complacent in his efforts but take this honor with a sense of accountability to follow through with his initiatives.

"Some of the work confronting us will not be completed during my presidency. Some, like the elimination of nuclear weapons, may not be completed in my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met, so long as it's recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone" said Obama in response to winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

On the home front, Americans are struggling to balance a healthy economy and a healthy environment. Rinku Sen and Billy Parish of In These Times report that both issues have a "disproportionate impact on communities of color." The Labor Department reported last week that youth unemployment has reached a whopping 18.2%, with large racial gaps. People of color often live in neighborhoods with unfavorable environmental conditions and work in hazardous industries, like agriculture and food production. There are prominent racial hierarchies and unfair working conditions. "White flight" trend from inner cities to suburbia creates the need for more highways, driving and carbon emissions. To face this problem, groups like California's Green Media Youth Center and the national organization, Green For All, are working towards an inclusive green economy:

"These policies are a good start, but if they're to survive and lead up to the additional billions and effective implementation that we need to get control of unemployment, we have to be prepared to fight on the race front, as well as the green. All signs indicate that opponents will bait American racism with brutal inventiveness. If the right's attack on Van Jones isn't enough of a warning, then we should take our lessons from the health care debate. We can expect conservative pundits to call equity guidelines reverse racism, or to put up immigrants rather than corporate pollution as the true cause of environmental collapse," Parish and Senn write.

Although emission goals have become more stringent, many argue that getting there will stimulate the economy, not stifle it. The planet is warming at an accelerating rate. In order to avert catastrophic climate change, climate scientists have adjusted their original target of 450-ppm (parts per million) carbon emissions by the year 2050 to 350-ppm. This would mean that instead of aiming for 80% carbon emission reductions by 2050, we would need to cut carbon by 97% by 2050 in order to avert catastrophy.

Seem impossible to accomplish in a budget-neutral world? In a report (PDF) for Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3), Eban Goodstein, Frank Ackerman and Kristen Sheeran explain for Grist how we can afford to achieve 350. They estimate that with just 1-3% of the world's total output, we could create jobs, rebuild global forests to reduce carbon emissions and globally shift to clean energy. In fact, they believe that these investments might even save consumers money, given the high price of oil.

They also argue that it is more expensive to do nothing: "The bad news on the climate front is NOT that the costs of preventing climate change are becoming too expensive. Estimates of the costs have remained relatively stable, while estimates of the likely costs of inaction are becoming unbearable. Whether the final number is 450 or 350, we face no insoluble technical or economic challenges. This is still a problem we can afford to solve. Stopping global warming remains fundamentally a problem of political will."

The E3 authors also note that there are no reasonable studies that claim that a 350-concentration target would destroy the economy. If we act now, we can afford the economics of 350. However, inaction will pose a dangerous threat and grave economic costs on future generations.

And while we don't wish a global recession on anyone, Andrew Leonard writes in an article for Salon that these hard times have helped reduce carbon emissions. According to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report carbon emissions have experienced the largest drop in over 40 years, including the 1981 recession following the oil crisis.

Leonard urges us to take advantage of this opportunity: "If we take aggressive action now to promote renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation, in combination with tough new regulations, we might be able to turn a temporary decline into something more permanent."

Finally, efforts to tie local economies with environmental programs are underway to promote growth. Chelsea Green featured the Slow Money Alliance campaign this past week, a week-long pledge drive that aims to "empower individual investors to reconnect with their local economies and build an entirely new financial sector." With just five dollars, we can help change the world and solve a lot of complex, interconnected world problems, including the environment and the economy. The campaign hopes to seed a new economy and promote sustainability. "The only way we will ever solve fundamental problems is if we re-envision the way we look at the world and value things. We can value things differently through Capitalism in a way that builds a constructive economy, an economy that is based on preservation and conservation rather than merely extraction," writes Anthony Nicalo, founding member of the Slow Money Alliance.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care 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, environment 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.

Acid Test the Movie: Burning It Up

jamesboyce — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:57:11 GMT

One week ago today, Sigourney Weaver and Frances Beinecke went to Washington to show the ground-breaking movie, Acid Test: The Global Challenge Of Ocean Acidification. It's a great short film, well worth watching, with really incredibly scary conclusions about what will happen to the ocean, not in the distant future but in the next few decades.

Now, let's be honest -- ocean acidification? Really? Even with Sigourney Weaver's voice, not the sexiest topic on the planet.

But a funny thing has happened this past week, and I think it's a great credit not just to NRDC and the creators of this film, but to everyone who has been working so hard to raise the profile of the environmental problems we are facing.

The film, and its message, have been getting a lot of attention. Great, positive attention.

In Maine, lobstermen and commercial mussel growers are facing the facts of what greater acidification would do to their worlds.

In New Jersey, thanks to the leadership of Senator Lautenberg, everyone is realizing what is going to actually happen to that famous Jersey Shore.

But the best media hit of the week goes to Sigourney Weaver, who was a hero on Fox News - teaching a lesson to all Democrats and progressives about how to stand the hell up.

Weekly Mulch: Companies Ditch Chamber for Climate Bill

The Media Consortium — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:49:46 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

Major utility corporations, like Exelon, California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) and New Mexico's PNM have announced that they are leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the organization's controversial stance toward climate change and opposition to a clean energy bill. The Chamber represents business interests, and according to a New York Times editorial, "no organization has done more to undermine [climate change] legislation."
Air America's Beau Friedlander explains that the three utility companies stand to win a lot from climate change legislation, as they produce electricity at nuclear power plants that release minimal carbon emissions. Yet their departure from the Chamber is still significant because Exelon is the nation's largest utility, and PG&E is the second largest utility in California.

Moreover, Jonathan Hiskes of Grist notes that PG&E's environmental values clash with the 97-year-old business advocacy group. PG&E is a leader in solar energy, and both PG&E and Exelon are members of the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), an alliance of environmental groups and businesses that advocate for climate change legislation. Other companies like Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft decided to continue their membership, but have expressed that they do not agree with the Chamber's position on climate change.

Chamber leaders tried to defend themselves on Tuesday, arguing that they have "mainstream, commonsense views" towards climate change. Thomas Donahue, the Chamber's president and CEO, explained that just because the organization opposes Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations of greenhouse gas emissions and the Waxman-Markey bill, it doesn't mean that they oppose climate change action altogether. Yeah, right. Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones points out that the Chamber's recent claims are inconsistent with their track record:

"...The Chamber spent more than $17 million dollars in the first half of 2009 lobbying Congress, much of that in opposition to cap-and-trade policy. They've also threatened to sue the Environmental Protection Agency if they move forward on regulating carbon dioxide, and formally filed suit against the EPA for granting California the right to set higher automobile emissions standards."

Andrew Leonard also calls out the Chamber's contradictions in a piece for Salon titled "How to lie about climate change." In another statement for the Chamber, Eric Wohlschlegel said that the Chamber "never questioned the science behind global warming...[but] the science behind the EPA's recent finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and welfare." Leonard calls Wohlschlegel's assertion a blatant lie, recalling that the Chamber asked the EPA in August to defend their findings in court. The case is strikingly similar to the Scopes Monkey trial. Much like pitting evolution against creationism in a court of law, it's pretty ridiculous that the science behind climate change is still in question.

Finally, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) revealed a draft of the new climate bill on Wednesday. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo notes that the new bill, called the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, is still a work in progress and is expected to change dramatically as it moves through the Senate.

"When that's all done, and the whole thing's stitched back together, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can bring it to the floor. He's suggested that this may not happen until next year, but whenever it happens; expect a punishing debate and votes on amendments, which will culminate in a filibuster. If it can muster 60 votes to overcome that, then it may be in the clear. Bloodied and battered, but alive. But that's hardly a safe bet."

AlterNet's Brian Merchant outlines the pros and cons of the new draft and touches on how it differs from the House's climate bill. Key changes include steeper emission reduction targets, added incentives for nuclear power and more affordable carbon offsets. The new bill also gives the EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and introduces a price collar on carbon, which limits how cheap or expensive carbon prices can be. The price collar will prevent prices from falling too low and stabilize costs.

"So while the bill appears far from ideal, I'm actually encouraged-this looks like a bill that has a real shot at passing, and it would at least set us solidly on the long-overdue course to start seriously reducing emissions," Merchant writes.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment and is free to reprint. Visit Sustain.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the environment and sustainability, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health, and immigration issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net, Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.newsladder.net.

This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.

What's Spanish For Total And Complete BS?

jamesboyce — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:03:20 GMT

Sometimes it's hard to explain how the far-right and corporate lobbyists operate or how they view reality. It's much easier to understand their actions if you accept that first, they know the facts, but just choose, on the basis of business reasons, to completely ignore them and second, that they understand if they present, backed up with millions of dollars, absolute crap as fact, somewhere someone will believe them.
Recent estimates are that large energy companies, big oil companies and other interested groups are spending $1,000,000 every single day working to distort, deny and come up with reasons why we all shouldn't support clean energy.

I don't often disagree with Paul Krugman but when he recently wrote:

In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn't. Why not?
Part of the answer is that it's hard to keep peoples' attention focused. Weather fluctuates -- New Yorkers may recall the heat wave that pushed the thermometer above 90 in April -- and even at a global level, this is enough to cause substantial year-to-year wobbles in average temperature. As a result, any year with record heat is normally followed by a number of cooler years: According to Britain's Met Office, 1998 was the hottest year so far, although NASA -- which arguably has better data -- says it was 2005. And it's all too easy to reach the false conclusion that the danger is past.
But the larger reason we're ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don't.
Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It's also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.

He missed a fundamental point.

The money spent presenting fiction as fact over the past decade has had a real impact on the average American. Still, to this day, you will hear that there is debate about global warming, about whether it's happening at all.

All around us, there is massive evidence of global warming, and there is scientific consensus, but the money spent denying it gives an out to many people and many politicians.

So when something like the following happens, the tragedy isn't just that it is the effort of a few highly profitable companies who are putting profit before planet (their profit; our planet) but also that it is essentially a successful strategy.

The Institute For Energy Research, a group funded by oil companies, has paid for the author of a completely debunked study to come to the US and talk about the debunked study. What's in the study that is so wrong?

Essentially the study claims that spending money on clean-energy jobs costs an economy jobs.

Now, most of us would stop right there and say, hmm, doesn't make any sense. Of course, smarter people than me have debunked the study. Like the US Government, the Spanish Government, even the Wall Street Journal, not exactly the land of the far-left environmentalists, says, ah, no.

And yet, here is the author in the United States doing media interviews and getting press coverage on the basis of a study that is false. Unfortunately time and time again, the media takes something like this and creates a story when there is none.

That, Mr. Krugman, is also part of the problem.

Societal Challenges for Eco-Conscious Living

Adam Bink — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There is a good piece in this month's edition of Atlantic Magazine in which Witold Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at UPenn, argues the case for "returning to cities" if we really want to fight climate change. In it, he argues that our response to climate change has been too oriented towards "accessorizing" green features and less towards behavioral, systemic change. He also argues what we know- that living in cities creates a far smaller carbon footprint, and that a skyscraper with zero green features beats a suburban office park with solar panels, because of the people working in it and how they get to the office.

I think it's a very good point. The attitude towards "green", in my experience, has become more an attempt to impress your peers through accessorizing than actual change. Telling your neighbors you drive a hybrid, bragging about slapping a solar panel on your suburban roof, etc. are common things I hear among my friends and back home. But what I've never heard is anyone saying that in the name of battling climate change, they're going to move from their free-standing suburban house that consumes an immense amount of energy, complete with water and chemical-guzzling lawn, and give up the other trappings of suburban life. That is Rybczynski's central argument- if we're really going to take a bite out of climate change, we need (a) more buildings like multi-family walkups that can be dense enough to support public transit nearby (b) people willing to change their already set-in lifestyles.

Two points I want to make. The first is that (a) can always be done- more zoning for multi-family walkups, etc. Incentivizing it is another story. My boyfriend got a tax credit for purchasing his Prius- why shouldn't there be something similar for those who live in environments in which it is more likely to exert a low-carbon footprint (walking to the convenience store, using public transit to get to work, etc.)? It will take a whole new style of thinking for legislators and the general public. The popular approach to climate change is to accessorize, not to completely change where you live and how to get from points A to points B. And making an argument for rewarding people for living in cities via tax credits could raise a fair amount of opposition.

I also think there's a challenge of the audience for this, which brings me to (b). My parents have lived in the same Buffalo suburban 3-bedroom home with a gorgeous veggie garden for over 25 years, like living there, like driving their own cars, etc. Asking them, at their age, to sell their home and move to a hi-rise in the city of Buffalo (which has had negative population growth since 1960 for a reason), give up the backyard garden, take the bus to work when they've always driven, etc. just isn't happening. Nor should every suburbanite be asked to. I doubt my parents are the only ones who feel this way.

I think people just out of college and deciding where to live are one market. For instance, I have two friends (a couple) from college who are now finishing med school. They both are getting jobs in DC proper, but contemplating buying a house out in Virginia, not near a Metrorail stop. I'm trying to convince them to buy one of the many unsold condos here in DC instead, and be able to walk to most of the places they need to go. This kind of audience is one target to commit to a low-carbon lifestyle.

In other words, incentivize and target an audience from the very start instead of having to ask them to give up their lifestyle 40 years later. I think older families are the ones you can get to buy more locally-grown produce and switch off lights more- useful, but small, steps. Recent graduates and similar audiences are the ones to go after to make the big changes Rybczynski is arguing are critical.

Weekly Mulch: Climate Week Gets Lukewarm Response

The Media Consortium — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:19:33 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

Seventy days before the international climate summit in Copenhagen, hundreds of government officials and business leaders met in New York City on Monday to kick off Climate Week. On Tuesday, President Obama affirmed his commitment to action when he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly at the UN Climate Summit. Despite delays in passing a cap-and-trade bill, Obama highlighted U.S. efforts to curb climate change over the past year, including stimulus investments in renewable energy and efficiency, extension of tax credits for renewable energy, new automobile emissions standards and partnerships with other major emitters like China and India. Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones reports that Obama pledged to also address climate change with other leaders at G20 meetings later in the week.

Michelle Chen of Air America was frustrated with Obama's speech, and felt that it did little to motivate Congress or leaders of other countries to take responsibility and act. "Despite Obama's speech-and a pledge from Chinese President Hu Jintao on moving China toward a more sustainable energy system-overall, the planetary meltdown has drawn a lukewarm response from the biggest polluters," writes Chen.

Since U.S. commitment is considered key to success in Copenhagen, many are concerned how climate change negotiations will proceed. The "first steps" that Obama outlined will not suffice, and the leading emitters must be accountable for their emissions. Climate change has already begun to rear its ugly head. Dangerously high sea levels are threatening Pacific Island nations.

Activists from all over the world participated in Climate Week through demonstrations, rallies and flash mobs. Yes! Magazine features a photo essay illustrating over 2,600 demonstrations in 134 countries that "urge their politicians to 'wake up' to the threat of climate change and to create a fair, aggressive, and binding treaty during the final set of international negotiations in Copenhagen this December."

In hopes of strengthening international negotiations and raising public awareness, a new film, The Age of Stupid, premiered in 63 countries on Monday and Tuesday, marking one of the largest simultaneous screenings in history. Jeffrey Allen of OneWorld US writes that the film stresses the grave consequences of unchecked climate change. The U.K. Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, said that the documentary is "an incredibly powerful account of the effects of climate change, the urgency of climate change, and the reasons we must act as quickly as possible."

In an interview with Grist's Ashely Braun, the film's director, Franny Armstrong, says she hopes the film will rouse people to action. By setting the film in the future, The Age of Stupid shows the ramifications of inaction today. Armstrong hopes that the film reaches 250 million viewers before Copenhagen, who in turn could pressure their politicians to create strong treaties and plans of action at the global conference.

Another recent eco-doc, The Garden, tells the compelling story of the country's largest urban farm in South Central Los Angeles. As Sara Barz notes for Grist, the farmers continue to fight for their right to grow food in the community garden despite two eviction notices, numerous court proceedings, allegations of corruption, an assault charge and having to raise $16 million. "There simply isn't a better case study for budding community-garden activists," Barz writes.

But a film approach to environmental activism is nothing new. Following Al Gore's 2006 eye-opener, An Inconvenient Truth, a surge of eco-documentaries have flooded the media. Andrew O'Hehir of Salon explains that the eco-documentaries "all represent the tip of an extremely large iceberg, and reflect the fact that environmentalism has become a mass-scale, grass-roots-based movement that can't be controlled by politicians, policy wonks or talking heads."

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