President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao touched on energy issues in the bilateral summit between the two countries this week.
"I believe that as the two largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouses gases, the United States and China have a responsibility to combat climate change by building on the progress at Copenhagen and Cancun, and showing the way to a clean energy future. And President Hu indicated that he agrees with me on this issue," President Obama said during a Wednesday press conference.
But can the United States step up as a leader on clean energy? The proliferation of politicians whom The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard calls "climate cranks" suggests otherwise.
The biggest consumers
In international climate negotiations, the United State and China are the two key players, and if the world as a whole is to move forward on combating climate change, agreement between Presidents Obama and Hu would be a huge breakthrough. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard notes that Hu also said the United States and China would work together on climate changes, but, she writes, "I can imagine, though, that the conversation on this subject wasn't entirely as chummy as the remarks would imply, however. The US last month lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization about China's subsidies for clean energy, arguing that the country is unfairly stacking the deck in favor of their products."
At AlterNet, Tina Gerhardt and Lucia Green-Weiskel explain the background to those tensions and to the U.S.'s protectionist bent on clean energy projects. They write, "Energy Secretary Chu recently framed the new relationship between the U.S. and China as a 'Sputnik Moment.' Referencing the first satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, which demonstrated its technological advantage and led to the Cold War-era space race, Chu warned that the U.S. risks falling behind China in the clean technology race."
Stumbling blocks
China's motivations for growing its clean energy sector may not be leafy green; new energy sources feed the country's rapidly growing economy. But at least the country is committed to green energy sources, unlike our climate change-denying Congress. As Mark Hertsgaard argues at The Nation, this brand of American has become so pernicious, it's time to stop adhering to the protocol that dubs them "climate deniers" and start calling them "climate cranks." He explains:
True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.
Climate cranks attack
Unfortunately, climate cranks continue to interfere with both climate scientists and forward-thinking energy policy. At Change.org, Nikki Gloudeman writes about the ongoing saga of climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the climatologists embroiled in the Climategate brouhaha, who is still being attacked by climate-denying groups for his work. Gloudeman reports that although Mann has been investigated and found innocent of any misdeeds several times over, a group with a bias against climate change, the American Tradition Institute, is trying to obtain access to his work.
And in New Mexico, the state's new conservative governor, Susana Martinez, "has attempted to subvert her own state constitution in order to stop [a] plan to begin reducing her state's carbon emissions," reports Dahr Jamail for Truthout. The plan, executed through state rules, would have reduced the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 3%, from 2010 levels, each year. The rules should have been made public, but Gov. Martinez kept them from being published, according to Truthout's report. A local group, New Energy Economy, is fighting to implement them.
Bright spots
In some states, however, the clean energy economy is moving forward. As Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, Clean Edge, a clean-tech advisory group, has identified the top ten states for clean energy leadership. They include California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
"Rankings were derived from over 80 metrics including total electricity produced by clean-energy sources, hybrid vehicles on the road, and clean-energy venture and patent activity," Buczynski reports.
And, as David Roberts writes at Grist, there is important work to be done at the local and regional level to both prepare for and prevent climate change. His preferred term for this challenge is "ruggedizing"-strengthening a community's ability to respond to challenges brought on by climate change, such as flooding, droughts, or food shortages. The solutions to these problem, Roberts writes, often have the welcome side effect of decreasing carbon emissions, as well:
For instance, the residents of Brisbane are discovering that when disaster strikes, it's not very handy to have everyone spread out all over the place and utterly dependent on cars to get anywhere. It's more resilient to have people closer together, more able to walk or take shared transportation. It just so happens that also reduces vehicle emissions.
The advantage of this type of work-building the clean energy economy, ruggedizing communities-is that leaders don't necessarily have to agree on the reality of climate change to move forward. But these are only partial solutions, and to address climate change on an international scale, the cranks will need to be quieted.
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.
A year ago, it seemed possible-likely, even-that President Barack Obama would sweep into the international negotiations on climate change at Copenhagen and make serious progress on the tangle of issues at stake. The reality was quite different. This year, the expectations for the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun are less wild.
The conference will be held from Nov 29 to Dec 10 and the same issues from 2009 are up for debate. Countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany are still contributing an outsize share of carbon to the atmosphere. Countries like India and China are still rapidly increasing their own carbon output. And countries like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, and Bolivia are still bearing an unfair share of the environmental impacts brought on by climate change.
A very different set of expectations are building in the climate movement this year. If last year was about moving forward as fast as possible, this year, climate activists seem resigned to the idea that politicians just aren't getting it. Change, when it comes, will have to be be built on a popular movement, not a political negotiation.
Climate change from the bottom up
Last year, climate activists put their faith in international leaders to make progress. This year, they believe that it's up to them, as outside actors, to marshal a grassroots movement and pressure their leaders towards decreased carbon emissions.
"There's a recognition that the insider strategy to push from inside the Beltway to impact what will happen in DC, or what will happen in Cancun has really not succeeded," Rose Braz, climate campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Making Contact's Andrew Stelzer. "What we're doing in conjunction with a number of groups across the country and across the world is really build the type of movement that will change what happens in Cancun, what changes what happens in DC from the bottom up." (This entire episode of Making Contact is dedicated to new approaches to climate change, at Cancun and beyond, and is worth a listen.)
Fighting the indolence of capitalists
Here's one example of this new strategy. As Zachary Shahan writes at Change.org, La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement, is coordinating a march that will begin in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, then converge on Cancun. The march will include "thousands of farmers, indigenous people, rural villagers, urbanites, and more," Shahan reports.
After they arrive in Cancun, the organizers are planning an "Alternative Global Forum for Life and Environmental and Social Justice" for the final days of the negotiations, which they say will be a mass mobilisation of peasants, indigenous and social movements. The action extends far beyond Cancun, though. Actually, they are organizing thousands of Cancuns around the world on this day to denounce what they see as false climate solutions.
These actions echo the strategy that environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and other climate leaders are promoting to push for climate change policies in the U.S. All this talk about building momentum from the bottom up, from populations, means that anyone looking for change is now looking years into the future.
The U.S. is not leading the way
Of course, ultimately, politicians will need to agree on a couple of standards. In particular, how much carbon each country should be emitting and how fast each country should power down its current emission levels. The U.S. is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to agreement on these questions, especially due to the recent mid-term elections. As Claudia Salerno, Venezuela's lead climate change negotiator wrote at AlterNet:
Unlike what many suggest, China is not the problem. China, along with India and others, have made considerable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are already working to realize them. Other developing countries have done the same, although we only generate a virtual drop in the bucket of global carbon emissions. The key player missing here is the U.S.
China, the U.S. and Clean Coal
The most interesting collaborations on clean energy, however, aren't happening around the negotiating table. This week, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a long piece about the work that the U.S. and China are doing together on clean coal technology, the magic cure-all to the world's energy ills.
In the piece, Fallows recognizes what environmentalists have long argued: coal is bad for the environment and for coal-mining communities. But, unlike clean energy advocates who want to phase coal out of the energy equation, Fallows argues that coal must play a part in the world's energy future. Therefore, we must find a way to burn it without releasing clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. That's where clean coal technology comes in. So far, however, researchers have had little luck minimizing coal's carbon output.
A few progressive writers weighed in on Fallows' piece: Grist's David Roberts thought Fallows was too hard on the anti-coal camp, while Campus Progress' Sara Rubin argued that the piece did a good job of grappling with the reality of clean energy economics. And Mother Jones' Kevin Drum had one very clear criticism-that the piece skated over the question of progress on carbon capture, the one real way to dramatically reduce carbon pollution from coal. He wrote:
All the collaboration sounds wonderful, and even a 20% or 30% improvement in coal technology would be welcome. But that said, sequestration is the holy grail and I still don't know if the Chinese are doing anything more on that front than the rest of us.
On every front, then, the view on climate change is now a long one.
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.
Congress couldn't get it together to vote even on the smallest of possible energy bills-the renewable energy standard-before the October recess. That doesn't change the reality that our energy dependent society needs to find alternatives quickly. Changing up our approach to transportation, one of the biggest sources of energy consumption, is a good place to start.
If more Americans used bicycles as a primary mode of transportation, the country would be closer to getting its energy use under control. So how can we make biking safer, easier, more mainstream? Infrastructure, safety, and education are key. It also helps to replicate model behaviors.
"Last spring, public officials from Madison, Wisconsin, returned home from a tour of the Netherlands, and within three weeks were implementing what they learned there about promoting bicycling on the streets of their own city," reports Jay Walljasper for Yes! Magazine.
Cities like Portland, Madison, and San Francisco are trying to make cycling a way of life. But for the best answers, American leaders must look abroad, to cities like Copenhagen in Denmark, Utrecht and The Hague in the Netherlands, and Malmo in Sweden.
Safe riding
Improving safety is the first order of business to encouraging cycling, and that means investing in infrastructure specifically for bike use. As Change.org's Jess Leber writes, "Every time there is a senseless death, there are going to be a group of residents who decide biking is too risky for their tastes."
Many regular bikers admit that it's frightening to ride down a street with a gigantic, roaring beast of car quickly approaching. "When I lived in New York City, I myself was too frightened to use my bike in many parts of the city," Leber admits.
What kind of infrastructure do we need? Designated bike lanes indicate what sort of space bikes need on the road. But bike lanes should also be physically separated from cars. In Copenhagen, for instance, "the busy roadways are lined with cycle tracks (elevated bike paths painted bright blue for distinction)," writes Campus Progress' Jessica Newman.
In the Hague, bike paths are separate from cars and trucks, Some streets are designated as "bike boulevards," where bikes take precedence over cars, reports Walljasper in Yes! Magazine.
Ease of use
But safe infrastructure is a waste of money if no one uses it. While cities are out building better bike lanes, they should consider adding other features that will make it as convenient to bike as it is to drive or walk. In Malmo, bike riders stopped at red lights can grab onto railings to keep their balance-"a surprisingly popular feature," reports Grist's Sarah Goodyear.
Another Dutch project is to improve the process of parking. "Access to safe, convenient bike storage has a big impact on whether people bike," as Walljasper reports in Yes! Magazine.
"The car is parked right out in front of the house on the street, while the bike is stuffed away out back in a shed or has to be carried up and down the stairs in their buildings. So people choose the car because it is easier," one Dutch policy officer told Walljasper.
More mainstream
In both Utrecht and Copenhagen, one strategy for integrating cycling into its citizens' behavior is to teach the young. In Copenhagen, "Instead of driver's education classes, children attend biker's ed in the third and ninths grades, where they learn traffic laws, proper bike etiquette and general agility," according to Campus Progress' Newman.
A municipal program sends special teachers into schools to conduct bike classes, and students go to Trafficgarden, a miniature city complete with roads, sidewalks, and busy intersections where students hone their pedestrian, biking, and driving skills (in non-motorized pedal cars). At age 11, most kids in town are tested on their cycling skills on a course through the city, winning a certificate of accomplishment that ends up framed on many bedroom walls.
"To make safer roads, we focus on the children," [city planner Ronald] Tamse explained. "It not only helps them bike and walk more safely, but it helps them to become safer drivers who will look out for pedestrians and bicyclists in the future."
Envisioning the future
What does a city with these sorts of programs in place look like? In Copenhagen, you see "streets crowded with bikes, with riders ranging from wealthy, middle-aged businessmen to mothers in tow of three or more kids to poor college students," Newman reports. Thirty-three percent of Copenhagen's citizens commute by bike; in Portland, by contrast, it's just 5.81%.
Yes! Magazine points to another way to understand the difference between biking in an American city, unfriendly to bikers, and in a European city that embraces them. In Riding Bikes with the Dutch, Michal W. Bauch compares transportation culture in Los Angeles and Amsterdam:
Increasing reliance on cycling is not impossible. The tools are already there. American cities just need to use them, and quickly.
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.
"There's a dead dolphin on this beach," Mother Jones' Mac McClelland, wrote yesterday in Louisiana. It's one snapshot of the harm visited on the Gulf Coast by the BP oil spill. Back in Washington, the Senate climate bill, which would put the country on a path to cleaner energy consumption, is on its last legs.
You'd think that after a seemingly unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (official estimates are up to 50,000 barrels a day, as of yesterday) and the hottest spring on record (hello, climate change!), U.S. citizens and elected representatives would recognize that our country's thirst for resources has consequences.
It's not just that oil is spilling into the Gulf, even after BP hit on a fix. Besides the blow-out that has dominated headlines, another, more routine spill showed up near the Louisiana coast. The Deepwater Horizon spill is now the larger of two spills in the Gulf Coast, according to Care2. A week ago in Pennsylvania, a natural gas well owned by EOG Resources (formerly Enron) shot a geyser of chemical-laced water 75 feet into the air; and on Monday, in West Virginia, another natural gas well, this one owned by Chief Oil and Natural Gas, also exploded, as AlterNet reports.
Yet BP is still supplying the Pentagon with oil and gas, as Jeremy Scahill writes at The Nation. Senators are still supporting natural gas exploration and off-shore oil drilling. The White House has also abandoned any intention of pushing for strong legislation that would push for better, cleaner energy.
Lifestyle vs. lives
Americans aren't willing to give up their lifestyle, so wild animals are giving up their lives. One casualty of the BP spill in the Gulf might be bluefin tuna. Their population is 20% of what it was 40 years ago, Inter Press Service reports. Although the effects of the oil spill won't be entirely clear for a few years, scientists are worried.
"Biologically, bluefin are already unlucky," IPS writes. "The fish - which can be as long as and faster than a sports car - only spawn once a year and only in certain locations."
Schools of the tuna, IPS reports, are headed now towards the Gulf of Mexico.
"The spill has been going on during their peak spawning period in the only place the western population spawns, so in timing and location it's probably the worst place you could have it and during the worst time," Lee Crocket, director of federal fisheries policy at Pew Environment, told IPS.
"There were dead Portuguese man o'war jellies-one of the few species that weather the travails of the dead zone that afflicts these waters each summer. The dead zone is an area around the outflow of the Mississippi River made hypoxic by too many nutrients flowing downstream, mostly from farms and ranches. If you're a jellyfish, a dead zone is survivable. Apparently an oiled zone is not."
BP's shroud of secrecy
BP has been remarkably cagey with the public about what's going on in the Gulf. In addition to keeping reporters away from soiled area, the company hasn't shown much interest in understanding exactly how much oil it's spilling into the ocean. Initial estimates of 1,000 barrels per day have blossomed into estimates, on the low end, of 25,000 barrels. On Democracy Now!, scientist Ira Leifer said that the company is being more forthcoming with information now than it was originally. But he'd like a fuller picture:
"What there really should be at these kind of sites is some acoustic methods, whether it's sonar or passive listening devices, or other approaches that continuously are monitoring and waiting for something to happen and then would provide a nonstop, steady data stream, so we could actually learn from what happens....These things, they're not steady states. They belch. They have large eruptions."
What that means, Leifer said, is that it's not necessarily accurate to talk about a definitive rate at which the oil is pouring out. In his words, "the flow today is not necessarily the flow tomorrow." What's more, the attempts to stop the spill can make it worse. One concern is that the rock surrounding the pipe could "give out," Leifer says. In that scenario, the oil would not just come from the pipe but from many sites in the surrounding sea bed.
"This reservoir is massive, and it could easily flow that kind of oil for the next twenty or thirty years, if it was left to go unattended," Leifer said. "So the amount of oil that could end up in the environment if measures are not successful is at what I would call unimaginable."
Spin, BP, spin
Given that sort of doomsday scenario, it's not surprising that BP has plans to promise as little as possible to the spill's victims. As Justin Elliott reports at TPMMuckraker, the company's plan for oil spills instructs its spokespeople not to promise anything.
BP's June 2009 Gulf of Mexico Regional Oil Spill Response Plan reads: "No statement shall be made containing ... Promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal," Elliott writes.
Solutions
How to move beyond these horror stories? This week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) completely disowned the climate legislation he was working on before, and both Mother Jones' Kevin Drum and The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen bemoaned the climate bill's fate.
Yesterday, the Senate narrowly defeated an amendment offered by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) that would have stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate carbon. Although the amendment failed, support from Democrats like Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln signals that the support isn't there for even unambitious climate legislation. And at this juncture, it seems like the U.S. has done more harm than good in the international arena.
Coping with Copenhagen
International leaders are at Bonn this week, trying to pick up the pieces from last November's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.
"Copenhagen was a pretty horrible conference," conceded Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as IPS reports. "This year it's about restoring trust."
For the U.S., passing climate legislation would help.
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.
Environmental advocates from around the world gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week and resolved that, a year from now, they would hold a world's people referendum on climate change to marshal support for the rights of the planet.
"Although it is hoped that some states will cooperate, the participation of governments will not be essential to the referendum, as civil society organizations are to plan it according to their own lights and the traditions and customs of each local area," reports Franz Chavez for Inter Press Service.
The conference's democratic, citizen-oriented format starkly contrasted with March's United Nations-led summit in Copenhagen. The conference at Cochabamba emphasized inclusion and a diversity of voices, providing an antidote to processes like the U.N. climate negotiations, where smaller countries were excluded from key discussions.
No official United States delegation attended the conference, but this week, the country held its own celebration of the environment: the 40th annual Earth Day. On Thursday, arguments over climate change were put on pause, as environmental leaders recognized both accomplishments and the unfinished business of cleaning up the air, land, and water.
"Environmentalism isn't such a mysterious thing anymore. People are looking more at environmental values as being things that are tangible and relate to how we live our lives," Pete Carrels of the South Dakota Sierra Club told Public News Service.
The mystery, now, lies in finding a way to shore up defenses against old environmental hazards-dirty water, dirty air, diminishing resources-and to agree on a path towards a low-carbon future that avoids the worst calamities of climate change.
At Cochabamba
"Bolivian music, indigenous ceremonies and the Bolivian army's honor guard were on hand to greet the first indigenous president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales," Democracy Now! reported from Tiquipaya, the town just outside Cochabamba where the actual conference is being held.
In a stadium crowded with fifteen thousand people, President Morales opened the event Tuesday morning with exhortations to choose life for the planet. Franz Chavez of Inter Press Service reports:
"The stadium, ablaze with the multi-coloured traditional garments of different Andean and Amazonian native communities and the flags of people from different countries around the world that contrasted with the cold formality of presidential summits, served as the stage for Morales, of Aymara descent, to call for an "inter-continental movement" in defence of Mother Earth."
One of the main goals of the summit was to draft a "universal declaration of rights of Mother Earth," envisioned as a complement to the United Nations declaration on human rights. There were also 17 working groups that dealt with issues like climate migrants, the Kyoto protocol, and technology transfer. Any conference participant could participate in up to five working groups.
The open format was, at times, chaotic. Cormac Cullinan, an environmental lawyer from South Africa who provide the baseline text for the declaration of rights, told Democracy Now! that on one day of the conference four hundred people were contributing revisions to the text. Another day, that number jumped to one thousand.
"The challenge is to make sure we integrated all the different comments and point of view," he said. "We're essentially expressing an entirely new world view from an indigenous perspective in legal language."
Many voices, but what are the solutions?
Elizabeth Cooper affirms this emphasis on a diversity of voices in a report for Yes! Magazine. "This issue of valuing the knowledge and abilities of indigenous peoples and those from the South was an undercurrent to the rest of the afternoon as it is to the Summit as a whole," she writes.
But this scale of participation also meant that conversations could veer from essential topics. Also at Yes! Magazine, Jim Shultz asks, "If forcing rich countries to pay a climate debt is a dead end, what is the plan to move "climate debt" from a catchy idea to a real proposal with a chance of delivering some results?"
"At a workshop today on that topic, there was an abundance of declarations about why climate debt is important, but few ideas of how to make it real," he reports.
The need
There's a need, though, for people to participate in these discussions, even if the conversations don't take a smooth and tidy course. At The Nation, Naomi Klein writes that "Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness."
At a conference like Copenhagen, the worries and priorities of smaller countries were ultimately excluded from the debate. In Bolivia, Klein explains, glaciers-the water source for two major cities-are melting. Yet that problem did not earn the country a place in the Copenhagen discussions that could determine its fate. Cochabamba's goals were, in part, to reestablish a more democratic system for decision-making about climate reform.
As Regina Cornwell documents at the Women's Media Center, left to its own devices, international bodies like the United Nations easily exclude interested groups from the conversation.
"In early March, just as the entire area of Manhattan around the UN was crawling with women wearing their blue Conference for the Status of Women tags, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced a "High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing" composed exclusively of men," she writes.
Earth Day 2010
The conferees at Cochabamba traveled to Bolivia because they saw a gap in leadership after UN climate talks at Copenhagen crumbled. The ideas developed this week could prompt the world's leaders towards brave action on climate change. Strong leadership can make the difference between real change and status quo.
At The Nation, John Nichols reflects on the leadership of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who helped create Earth Day. Nelson, was "a bold progressive who recognized the need to make the health and welfare of human beings, in the United States and abroad, a priority over the profits of multinational corporations," he writes. Nelson's vision for Earth Day was to produce an outpouring of empathy for the environment "so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy."
It worked. The first Earth Day is credited with driving action on the environmental institutions that still protect Americans today: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency.
For more inspiration, check out the climate rally on Sunday, April 25 on the Mall in Washington, DC; organizers are promising the largest climate rally ever, along with an awesome line-up of speakers and performers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
On Monday, climate activists, nonprofit leaders, and governmental officials will gather in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to look for new ideas to address climate change. The conference, organized by leading social organizations like 350.0rg, "will advocate the right to "live well," as opposed to the economic principle of uninterrupted growth," as Inter Press Service explains. In the absence of real leadership from the world's governments, the conferees at Cochabamba are looking for solutions "committed to the rights of people and environment."
The United States certainly isn't stepping up. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), were supposed to release their climate legislation next week, just in time for Earth Day. But yesterday the word came down that the release was being pushed back by another week, to April 26.
No matter when it finally arrives, like other recent environmental initiatives, this round of climate legislation falls short. Even if Congress manages to pass a bill-and there's no guarantee-it will likely leave plenty of room for the coal, oil, and gas industries to continue pouring carbon into the atmosphere. And a wimpy effort from Congress will hinder international work to limit carbon emissions: As a prime polluter, the United States needs to put forward a real plan for change.
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman
Although the text of the bill is not public yet, it is likely that this attempt at Senate climate legislation will limit carbon emissions only among utilities and gradually phase in other sectors of the economy. On Democracy Now!, environmentalist Bill McKibben called the bill "an incredible accumulation of gifts to all the energy industries, in the hopes that they won't provide too much opposition to what's a very weak greenhouse gas pact."
Climate reform began with a leaner idea, a cap-and-trade system that limited carbon emissions while encouraging innovation. The Nation's editors document the transformation of climate reform from the Obama administration's original cap-and-trade proposal to the behemoth tangle it has become. Both the House and the Senate fattened their versions of climate legislation with treats for the energy industry. The Senate's new idea to gradually expand emissions reduction through a bundle of energy bills only opens up more opportunities for influence.
"Some of these pieces of legislation may pass; others may fail; all are ripe for gaming by corporate lobbies," the editors write. "Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also skew subsidies in the wrong direction, throwing billions at "clean coal" technologies, nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, a questionable gambit favored by the Obama administration to garner support from Republicans and representatives from oil-, gas- and coal-producing states."
Even with these goodies, the climate bill may not pass. The Washington Independent rounds up the D.C. players to watch as the next fight unfolds, including the Chamber of Commerce's William Kovacs and the Environmental Protection Agency's Lisa Jackson.
Green leftovers
In theory, the climate bill should not be America's only ride to a greener future. But the other vehicles for green change choked during start-up. The EPA was going to regulate carbon emissions, but Congress has reared against that effort. The climate bill could snatch away that power from the executive branch.
If companies won't limit their carbon emissions, individuals still have the option for action. But as Heather Rogers explains in The Nation, carbon offsets, one of the most popular mechanisms for minimizing carbon use "are a dubious enterprise."
"To begin with, they don't cut greenhouse gases immediately but only over the life of a project, and that can take years--some tree-planting efforts need a century to do the work. And a project is effective only if it's successfully followed through; trees can die or get cut down, unforeseen ecological destruction might be triggered or the projects may simply go unbuilt."
The pull of carbon offsets should diminish as energy use in buildings, cars, food, and flights gains in efficiency and uses less carbon. But if the green jobs sector is any indication, that revolution has been slow in coming. ColorLines reports that "there are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills-in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago-and who nonetheless can't find jobs."
Cochabamba's unique approach
These failures and setbacks don't just affect Americans; they keep our leaders from negotiating with their international peers. The United Nations led a conference last winter in Copenhagen that promised to hash out carbon limits, yet produced no binding agreement. This coming winter, the UN will try again in Mexico, but if the United States shows up with the scant plan put forward by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman, those negotiations have little promise.
In Cochabamba, leaders from inside and outside the government will attend a summit to discuss the future of climate change action. In The Progressive, Teo Ballve writes that,
"One of the bolder ideas is the creation of a global climate justice tribunal that could serve as an enforcement mechanism. And conference participants are already working on a "Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights" meant to parallel the U.N.'s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948."
With U.S. government action paling, it might take outside ideas like these to revitalize the push towards a green future. By the end of next week, we'll see if the Cochabamba group made any more progress than the bigwigs at Copenhagen.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Americans don't know what to think about climate change anymore. A few years ago, the public more or less trusted the science that said human activity was raising global temperatures, but now that Congress and the Obama administration have hemmed and hawed about climate issues, we're not longer so sure.
Forty-eight percent of Americans-more of us than ever before-believe that reports of global warming are "generally exaggerated," according to a new Gallup poll. Climate science hasn't changed, so it's not crazy to look at these numbers and think that conservatives' incessant critiques of climate change may be working.
A perfect political storm
These shifts in opinion started around 2008. Aaron Wiener at the Washington Independent argues that the politics of climate change are driving American opinions about the reality of global warming. The percentage of Americans willing to put the blame for climate change on humans is about equal to the percentage of Americans still behind President Barack Obama's agenda, he notes.
"What was once a broad moral and scientific issue is now a centerpiece of the Democrats' legislative agenda," he writes.
Republicans have taken a political stand on climate change, too, one that reinforces the message that we can afford to ignore global warming. At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum links the Gallup numbers to confusion about Copenhagen and to negative "Climategate" stories about a few climate scientists' unprofessional emails.
But taking a wider view, Drum points out another big problem: "The Republican Party has largely decided that climate change simply doesn't exist. It's a hoax," he says.
Green xenophobia
It's also politically convenient for a party that throws a tantrum every time the president produces a policy idea. But in another corner of the right's world, conservatives are eager to defend the country's environment against the burden of immigration.
Jamilah King reports for ColorLines that Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), which is linked to a conservative anti-immigrant group, is warning that immigration "is pushing our country deeper into ecological deficit."
King refutes this notion, citing reports that population and pollution are not directly linked. "In fact, newly arrived immigrants are probably among the most ecologically friendly folks around," she writes. "They're more likely to use public transportation and less likely to waste food."
Impacts of climate change
Conservatives who'd prefer that immigrants stay on the other side of the border would do better to worry about Republicans' studied blindness to climate change. Without action, global warming could send waves of people north, as places like Mexico grow warmer and can no longer support the same amount of agriculture.
Inter Press Service lays out some of the detrimental effects of climate change on poorer countries, particularly on the female half of the population. Women are more vulnerable to the natural disasters that accompany global warming, and the tasks that they take on, like collecting water and firewood, will grow harder as water becomes more scarce.
Overall, Thalif Deen reports, "The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men."
Slow Senate progress
The Senate is trying to move forward on climate change legislation. A key group of Senators met this week at the White House with President Obama, but coming out, the legislators had only "vague observations" to share about progress, according to Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard.
Part of the problem with the Senate's process is that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) have already said that they'll likely discard the sort of cap-and-trade provisions that the House bill used to regulate carbon emissions. From an environmental point of view, the Senate is getting close to doing nothing at all.
"It's really clear that whatever attains 60 votes in the US Senate at this stage in the game is at best an extremely incremental step forward," Gillian Caldwell, campaign director at the environmental group 1Sky, told Sheppard.
The new progressive energy
The Senate seems more eager, along with President Obama, to embrace nuclear energy as a climate solution.
"I happen to be one of the Senators who's concerned about waste," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said at a recent summit, reports TPMDC. "But most progressives in the Senate believe nuclear power is part of the solution at this time."
"If we don't expand nuclear power, there are going to be more coal plants and more oil plants," Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) added. "Nuclear power has been accepted as part of the solution [to climate change] among progressives."
Considering the political will the Senate has been able to muster behind climate legislation, one might as well believe that reports of global warming are "greatly exaggerated." After all, you'd think that if there was a potentially catastrophic threat looming in the future, our elective representatives might want to, you know, do something about that.
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.
In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.
The Obama administration's attitude towards climate change still represents a remarkable shift from the Bush years, when global warming was treated as little more than a fairy tale. But in the past year, Congressional squabbling has stalled climate legislation, and international negotiators nearly gridlocked in talks over carbon admissions at the multinational Copenhagen conference. Without strong leadership from the president, work to prevent this looming environmental crisis will stall.
Obama did address global warming skeptics, saying that they should support investment in clean energy, "because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy."
Despite his combative language, the president did not challenge Congress to push for real solutions to ballooning carbon emissions and energy consumption. As Forrest Wilder of The Texas Observer notes, Obama "uttered the phrase 'climate change' precisely once."
The Senate has already wait-listed the climate bill: Health care came first. With health care reform now in line behind work on jobs and bank regulation, climate legislation has little chance of passing the Senate in the coming months, let alone making it to the president's desk.
If Congress lets this work wait until after the midterm elections, the United States will show up at international negotiations in December 2010 as a leader in carbon emissions yet again, but with little in hand to show a way forward.
Clean energy, not renewable energy
When the president did bring up climate issues, he focused on their connection between climate reform and potential job creation. Obama highlighted areas for growth, not in renewable energy fields like wind or solar power, but in nuclear power, natural gas, and clean coal.
Yes, these fuel sources could decrease the country's carbon emissions. But they are not solutions that will revolutionize energy production. Grist's David Roberts was floored that the speech omitted renewable energy entirely and kowtowed to a more conservative litany of energy projects. "I suppose it was done to flatter conservative Senators that will have to vote for the bill Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham are working on," he writes. (The three Senators are working on a version of the climate bill designed to appeal to Republicans.)
"But the SOTU is not a policy negotiation," Roberts says. "It's a bully pulpit, a chance to shape rather than respond to existing narratives."
Roberts argues that progressive supporters would benefit from a stronger message. If activists knew that the White House stands behind a real shift in America's energy policy, they could use that prompt to drive action on climate change.
What was missing
While touting the virtues of off-shore drilling, Obama overlooked other policies that could broker real change. Although he admonished Congress to pass a climate bill, he did not pressure the legislature on what he'd like that bill to include. He did not mention cap-and-trade, the mechanism the House bill relies on to tamp down emissions and dirty energy use.
President Obama did touch on transportation reforms that could decrease the country's use of fossil fuels.
"There's no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains," Obama said. He cited a high-speed rail project that broke ground on Tuesday in Tampa, FL, as evidence that America could best the rest of the world in creating new energy-efficient technology.
But one or two high-profile projects won't be enough to challenge Europe's network of high-speed trains or China's investments in solar power. The White House could put the country at the forefront of sustainable technologies, but it'll take more money than the president has committed. In AlterNet's ideal state of the union, projects like the railway would merit sustained attention and funding. Funding for the high-speed train came from this year's stimulus bill, and there's no guarantee that similar projects will find federal funding in the future.
"Continued support is still needed" for green jobs and clean energy, Alternet's editorial staff argues. "It's unclear yet how Obama's new proposal for a three-year spending freeze will apply to this sector, but a boost is what is needed, not cuts."
Green jobs
Michelle Chen argues for In These Times that the president is right to subordinate climate issues to economic policy. "The jobs angle is more than sugar-coating," she says. A recent Pew Research Center poll put climate change at the end of Americans' long list of cares, and a Brookings Institution study found that they're no longer willing to pay as much for greener products.
Jobless workers need green in their pockets most of all, and so far politicians' promises haven't made up for the slack economy.
"No matter how slick the marketing, confidence in green jobs may wilt even further absent real investments in the beleaguered blue-collar workforce," Chen writes.
Copenhagen accord losing momentum
The small role that climate change played in the state of the union address only emphasized the downward momentum of the issue since the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen. Grist's Jonathan Hiskes talked to six leaders in climate change activism, and none of them offered a different strategy than they had last year.
That same stasis is showing up in Europe, as well. Spain, which currently leads the European Union, proposed that the European Union's negotiating position should remain the same as its position before the Copenhagen conference, according to Inter Press Service.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), who's working on climate change legislation in the Senate, offered advice to climate activists at a clean energy forum in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports that Sen. Kerry encouraged his audience to get angrier, louder, and more active, in the mode of the conservative Tea Partiers, who have earned plenty of attention. After his speech, he also recalled the tactics that pushed landmark legislation like the Clean Air Act through Congress.
If climate change is going to play a larger role in the next state of the union, the citizens and groups concerned about this issue need to do something to put it on the agenda. Otherwise, next year, the president may find it just as easy to skim over it again.
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.
The next United Nations climate change conference is almost a year away, and health care is still dominating the legislative agenda in Washington. That means climate reform opponents, from the coal industry to the global warming skeptics, have plenty of time to work, out of the spotlight, to derail progress. Here's a glimpse of the enemies of reform-and the companies and individuals that are still fighting for change in 2010.
Digby, Amanda Marcotte and Krugman traded thoughts recently on what exactly it is about climate science that so sets off the right in opposition.
It's an important question. The right, while opposed to environmentalism in most regards, could in past at least see what side of the bread is buttered. The Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, after all, was negotiated and ratified in the era of Reagan, Thatcher and even in Canada, Mulroney. Thatcher herself was an early believer in the need for concerted action to address Climate Change. Why (aside from her education in chemistry) is she basically alone on this? I like Krugman's answer the best of the three, but even so I think he comes up short, particularly on the anti-intellectualism angle.
What's really happening is that anthropogenic climate change is a fundamental assault on right wing ideology and the solution requires a worldwide implementation of liberal policies that will undercut right wing ideas at every level well into the future. Right wingers maybe do not grasp this fear consciously, but intuitively everything about this issue stinks for them. Denial is the only way to save their worldview.
Fifth in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an LVC translator. Also, even if farming isn't your usual interest, I encourage you to read this, on account of how we in the US might soon need to learn a thing or two from the world's peasant farmer and landless peasant movements.
Renaldo Chingore João works a 5-7 acre farm with his family. There, they grow maize, beans and vegetables, keeping 15 cows for meat and milk, as well as draft labor. Though it's a small farm, João and his family don't face the world alone.
They're part of a community that's organized itself for advocacy and mutual support, both within Mozambique and the larger global community of peasant farmers.
As the climate conference in Copenhagen hobbled towards a close Friday night, the United States, in a strong-arm move, slammed through the “Copenhagen Accord" – a weak, loose, and potentially backstepping agreement negotiated by a small subset of nations involved in negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The process for striking this accord was so undemocratic and peripheral to the official UN process that in the end, the parties to the UNFCCC didn’t even know what to do with it, and finally decided to “take note” of the accord. The implications of “taking note” will be discussed and hashed out by lawyers for days, if not months, to come.
OBAMA'S GAME OF BRINKSMANSHIP
The way this agreement came into being is a study in political brinksmanship. Around 9 p.m. Friday, President Obama announced to an exclusive group of reporters that an agreement had been reached. After the story that the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa had struck a deal circulated in a number of online news stories, the United States called a press conference and President Obama announced publicly that a deal had been reached, and that “most of the text has been completely worked out.” He then left to go back to Washington in advance of the imminent snow storm that hit on Saturday. It turned out that President Obama had called it a done deal before any agreement was actually reached. All these announcements seem to have happened before some countries had even had a chance to see the text under discussion.
When the text was finally presented, a number of countries spoke out strongly against it – and particularly against the manner in which it was determined by a few countries behind closed doors and then thrust upon the 192 countries participating in the official plenary session. Into the morning on Saturday, the plenary adjourned and reconvened, attempting to determine what had happened and what the implications were.
Now that the conference is offically over, those implications are still not entirely clear. It looks like a number of countries will flat out refuse to sign the Accord. The UN operates by consensus -- and there's certainly no consensus that this weak accord is the best way forward.
WHAT'S IN THE COPENHAGEN ACCORD?
While the Accord endorses the two existing tracks of negotiations that are the focus of the UN process, it appears to set its own course when it comes to how countries would actually move forward on the key issues on which those tracks are supposed to yield agreement, including pledges for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and pledges to provide financial support to developing countries so they have the capacity to deal with the impacts of climate change.
If we continue business as usual, we will not be able to see our grandchildren.
--Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed
A decade ago, the coalition of "Teamsters and turtles" that disrupted the WTO talks created some space for developing nations to more effectively oppose the agenda being pushed by US and other advanced industrial nations. But many of those nations were not that prepared for opposition. Ten years later, in Copenhagen, the what had been a fairly adventitious and partial convergence had matured to the point where the official representatives of the underdeveloped nations have become some of the most eloquent and advanced advocates for a fundamental transformation in how the world works. Here are a few examples.
Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed addressed the UN climate summit on Wednesday. Here is what he said, as broadcast on Democracy Now!:
PRESIDENT MOHAMED NASHEED: Developed countries created the climate crisis. Developing countries must not turn into a calamity. Therefore, I invite the leaders of big developing countries to recognize their responsibilities. I urge them to come forward at Copenhagen with quantifiable and verifiable actions to reduce emissions 30 percent below business as usual by 2020.
Let me be plain. We urgently need to move forward. Giving us intensity targets that are close to business as usual is not acceptable at this stage.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that you should not ask others to do something you are not prepared to do yourself. The Maldives has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2020.
And I have been hugely encouraged by the steps already taken by least developed countries and small island states to begin getting their economies green. At the recent Climate Vulnerable Forum in Male, eleven states pledged to raise their ambitions in leading the world towards carbon neutrality. This is an enormous opportunity to reduce future emissions before fossil fuel infrastructure is built. But it cannot be done without the financial support from rich countries. I say to the industrialized world, you have the finances and much of the technology; please help us go green.
When we say this, please bear in mind that climate change negotiations have nothing, nothing at all, to do with money. Maldives is a very small state. We have never received aid from European Union countries. Whatever we have been able to do, we have been able to do with our friends and neighbors, and we have been able to fend for ourselves. Climate change negotiations have, for me and for our country, everything to do with our grandchildren. I have two daughters. I want to see grandchildren. If we continue business as usual, we will not be able to see our grandchildren. To assume that climate change has anything to do with money, in my mind, is the height of arrogance.
I am also encouraged by regional climate initiatives in places like California and Quebec, where true leadership is being shown. Outside the rim of the nation state, their standards, their ambitions are much, much higher than the center. Climate change, I do understand, is an issue that transcends nationality, that trandscends the nation state. And what we have on offer from the centers, from heads of states, falls far shorter than what we are seeing from sub-regions or from provinces and from states.
Ladies and gentlemen, Kyoto divided the world. It divided us between rich and poor, developed and developing, Annex I and Annex II. Our task now is to unite the world behind the shared vision of low carbon growth. The Maldives is trying to lead the way. I call upon every country in this room to join us, not just for the sake of the Maldives, but for the sake of the entire planet. If we are not able to seize this opportunity, and if we are not able to come to an understanding during the course of next forty-eight hours, I'm afraid we might very well be doomed. I hope that that is not what we are contemplating. Thank you very much.
In his reaction to Obama's speech in Copenhagen announcing the postponement of any legally binding treaties, climate campaigner Bill McKibben said that Obama "chose the Senate over the UN tonight."
Obama told the world tonight that the US had come to the table "with an ambitious plan to reduce our emissions" but that the US also couldn't "turn on a dime" and so refused to make any commitments that it might not be able to keep. Yet as Naomi Klein said tonight, he could easily have used the stimulus money to jumpstart a clean economy in a way that would have given the US "inspiring emissions cuts" to show the world and chose not to.
Though Obama made comments about wanting to act based on the science and leave a better world for our children and grandchildren, his refusal to commit to a firm target kept the rest of the world from doing so. Now, the agreement will include only voluntary goals from each country that will be added in an appendix to the document.
Klein said that while the Obama administration was trying to make much of his having brought China, India, Brazil and South Africa along on an agreement, it had been their position from the beginning that they didn't want to be spoilers and would agree to binding cuts if the US was willing to do so.
Klein pointed out that in spite of Obama's claim not to want to move things backwards, the world went from having a legally binding agreement signed by most countries to a non-binding agreement signed by four countries. Obama may not have wanted to create "frustration and cynicism", but McKibben added that there wasn't even a numerical target in the new document and that he doubted George Bush could have gotten away with so forcefully brushing aside the UN.
While complaining about logjams and looking backwards, Obama said that the world needed more time to build trust and that the "US was coming to this with ... a clean slate." And at that point, there was a shocking sense for me of campaign deja vu, where women and the LGBT community and social justice advocates were told to look forward and forget old divisions. Then once he got into office, all that talk of hope was replaced with using fine words to smooth over the continuing sell out of the poor to the powerful. wash, rinse, repeat. At least he's consistent.
Phil Bloomer of Oxfam commented earlier today that rich countries' governments were captured entirely by "massive, vested interests" and that wealthy countries "care more about their banks than ... our shared destiny." Rarely has this been more on display than in this president, tonight, who acted, as Avaaz' Ben Wikler said today that the US often did, to lower our national ambitions based on the power of the coal and oil industries.
Obama said tonight that, "climate change threatens us all." Yet he seemed frankly more afraid of letting anyone in the US think he'd signed up to an international treaty, closing by very awkwardly noting that there was a question of whether there even could be a signature on a document that wasn't legally binding.
Fourth in a series of interviews with farmers affiliated with La Via Campesina, an alliance of international peasant farmer organizations. This interview was conducted with the assistance of an LVC translator.
Baramee Chaiyarat is responsible for organizing the seven networks that make up Thailand's Assembly of the Poor and his background as the son of a subsistence farmer and a teacher made him well-suited to this work.
The Assembly of the Poor represents villagers affected by either dam construction or forestry policy, the landless, alternative agriculturalists, small scale fisher folk, slum dwellers and injured workers. They're a non-partisan organization that's deeply suspicious of all the country's political parties. At one point, they were all separate, and Chaiyarat said they all "felt tired and out of energy" after many years of unsuccessful work. He doesn't even know who first thought of bringing them all together, and that it took several years of face to face forums before everyone trusted each other enough to establish the AoP, which organizes mass mobilizations in the capital and community-backed lending circles.
Chaiyarat said he and his colleagues "came to let the world know that the solutions being proposed at Bella Center are false solutions. We feel the real way to solve the problem is through the principle of food security," he said, and supporting small scale farmers who work in harmony with nature.
One proposal that particularly concerns Chaiyarat is the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)standard, which is said to be close to a final deal. He said that without adequate protections for indigenous peoples, "it will be one of the most vicious sorts of programs around," allowing the government an additional pretext to drive villagers out of their ancestral lands.
STATE BLOGS
