Versailles Narrative: Obama's governed his first two years as an activist liberal, and now he's steering back more toward the middle.
Reality: Not so much. Obama just got a C- overall on his environmental report card from the Center for Biological Diversity, a leading out-side-the-Beltway environmental organization whose scientists and advocacy experts have provided valuable insight for Open Left throughout Obama's first two years.
Environmental Report Card: Obama Gets "C-" for First Half of Term
TUCSON, Ariz.- In a report card released today, the Center for Biological Diversity gave President Obama a grade of C- for his two-year environmental record. The report card chronicles positive and negative policies on endangered species, climate, energy, public lands and oceans.
"Barak Obama is no George Bush, but he's no Theodore Roosevelt either," said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center. "His environment record is pretty dismal, considering all the promised hope and change."
Among Obama's bright spots were a declaration under the Clean Air Act that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the designation of 120 million acres of protected "critical habitat" for polar bears and the reinstatement of protection for millions of acres of roadless lands. Negatives include a continuation of damaging Bush-era policies on polar bears and offshore oil drilling, stripping of federal protection for and killing of endangered wolves, and his failure to lead either Congress or other nations toward strong global warming policies.
"Obama's record on endangered species is particularly bad, and entirely predictable, given his appointment of Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior," said Suckling. Obama has protected just eight species under the Endangered Species Act in the conterminous United States, while relegating 254 - including the wolverine - to the unprotected "candidate" list. His protection rate is slightly better than that of George W. Bush and much worse than those of Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr.
The administration also failed to follow the lead of Canada and several northeastern states in banning lead ammunition and fishing tackle. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of lead needlessly enter the environment every year from these sources, poisoning and killing millions of birds and mammals.
Here's the "Climate" section of the report card (other sections are on the flip):
Also participating, in keeping with the project's emphasis on 'voices from the field,' are two on-the-ground innovators from sub-Saharan Africa: Edward Mukiibi, co-founder and Project Coordinator of Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) in Uganda and Sithembile Ndema with the Food and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) in South Africa. The DISC project instills greater environmental awareness and understanding of nutrition, indigenous vegetables, and food culture in Uganda's youth by establishing vegetable gardens at pre-school, day, and boarding schools. FANRPAN's Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) project recently launched a series of Theatre for Policy Advocacy (TPA) campaigns in rural Malawi, using an interactive model to strengthen the ability of women farmers to advocate for appropriate agricultural policies and programs.
State of the World 2011 is full of similar stories of success and hope in sustainable agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. The report draws from hundreds of case studies and first-person examples to offer solutions to reducing hunger and poverty. It's nearly a half-century since the Green Revolution, and yet a large share of the human family is still chronically hungry. Since the mid 1980s when agricultural funding was at its height, the share of global development aid has fallen from over 16 percent to just 4 percent today. Drawing from the world's leading agricultural experts and from hundreds of innovations that are already working on the ground, State of the World 2011 aims to help the funding and development community reverse this trend.
In Kibera, Nairobi, the largest slum in Kenya, for example, more than 1,000 women farmers are growing "vertical" gardens in sacks full of dirt poked with holes, feeding their families and communities. These sacks have the potential to feed thousands of city dwellers while also providing a sustainable and easy-to-maintain source of income for urban farmers. With more than 60 percent of Africa's population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, such methods may be crucial to creating future food security. Currently, some 33 percent of Africans live in cities, and 14 million more migrate to urban areas each year. Worldwide, some 800 million people engage in urban agriculture, producing 15-20 percent of all food.
In 2007, some 6,000 women in The Gambia organized into the TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting producer association, creating a sustainable co-management plan for the local oyster fishery to prevent overharvesting and exploitation. Oysters and fish are an important, low-cost source of protein for the population, but current production levels have led to environmental degradation and to harmful land use changes over the last 30 years. The government is working with groups like TRY to promote less destructive methods and to expand credit facilities to low-income producers to stimulate investment in more-sustainable production.
State of the World 2011 provides new insight into the often overlooked innovations that are working right now on the ground to alleviate hunger and deserve more funding and attention. Its findings will be shared in over 20 languages with a wide range of global agricultural stakeholders, including government ministries, policymakers, farmer and community networks, and the increasingly influential nongovernmental environmental and development communities.
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Editor's Note: We're posting the Weekly Mulch on Thursday this week because of the holidays. It'll return to its regular Friday morning posting next week. Until then, Happy New Year!
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
2010 was a disappointing year for environmentalists.
This was the year Congress was supposed to pass climate change legislation, but each and every time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed on the verge of pushing the bill forward, the effort fell short. In April, off the coast of Louisiana, the Deepwater Horizon explosion led to one of the worst environmental disasters in the country's history, and in the aftermath, neither President Barack Obama nor Congress has pushed for the sort of strong regulations that would rein in the oil industry and the risk it poses to coastal ecosystems.
Meanwhile, a newly invigorated natural gas industry has been plowing forward with a controversial drilling technique called hydrofracking. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has committed to studying the environmental impacts of the practice, it's unclear at this point how much leeway the industry will be given to use techniques that have contaminated water and air across the country. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben had trouble convincing the president to take the small symbolic act of reinstalling a solar panel on the White House roof. And in November, the country elected a group of lawmakers who are skeptical that climate change even exists.
Hope springs eternal
But the news was not all bad, as Change.org's Jess Leber reports. In California, green-minded voters defeated a proposition that would have rolled back the state's ambitious climate law. Coal-fired power plants are closing in states like Oregon and Colorado, and mountaintop removal coal mining is losing its funding. And cities like New York, Washington D.C., Denver and Minneapolis made it easier for their inhabitants to use bikes as a primary mode of transportation.
"All over the world, activists are fighting in their states, towns and cities to do right by the environment," Leber writes. "They are also moving to pressure the corporate world. So while, given the results of Election Day in the U.S., progress in Congress will be an uphill battle, I'm confident there will be even more victories to report this time next year."
A year can be a long time. Consider, for instance, Steph Larsen's reflections on her farm's first year. "I feel like I've lived a decade in the last 12 months," Larsen writes in Grist. Last year, her pasture did not exist, and the farm buildings on her land had sat unused for years. But in the past 12 months, she's grown cherries and tomatoes and squash, kept chickens and hunted for their eggs, and raised livestock that later became her dinner.
Larsen's goals for her farm are modest: "to grow food for her household and community." It can be hard sometimes to see how individual choices like hers can make a difference while global leaders cannot agree on how to reduce carbon emissions and industry continues to exploit and pollute the environment. But as Winslow Myers, the author of Living Beyond War, writes at Truthout, "the cause-and-effect relationship between what I do personally in my daily life and those planet-wide challenges has become infinitely clearer" over the past 50 years:
Now we can see how the two are connected - between my diet and the effect of industrial agriculture on the land, between my energy consumption and global climate change, between the chemicals in my laundry detergent and the health of the oceans - and between my political commitments and the world-destroying weapons built with my tax dollars....the reality is that I am so deeply connected to the whole entity that I am responsible for it, answerable to it.
Local leaders step into the breach
It's true that individual decisions to turn down the heat, or eat local food, or bike instead of drive cannot turn back global warming. But in aggregate, they do make an impact. And although nationally and internationally, politicians are finding it difficult to create strong policies on climate change, that would reduce emissions, not all lawmakers are avoiding the issues. Franke James' visual essay on climate change at Yes! Magazine puts it like this: "Don't be fooled by the global leaders loafing. Local leaders and cities are making plans to adapt to climate change (because it's affecting them NOW!) "
And ultimately, these sorts of decisions on local and individual levels do send a signal to leaders that their constituents care about keeping the planet healthy, care about preserving our environmental resources. To that end, check out these ideas for individual action from the staff and readers of Mother Jones.
And next year? Leaders like Bill McKibben are working to create a global movement around climate change, a people-driven movement that will convince legislators and negotiators that it is incumbent upon them to act. Look for them to start making lots of noise in 2011.
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 Progressive Platform we are building will be a sort of blueprint that we believe all progressives, especially candidates, should follow. It will be our beliefs as progressives, where we stand on various issues, and in many cases, what we believe needs to be done on those issues.
In the first post, the idea of creating a Progressive Platform was introduced. I had posted links to various political platforms, so everyone could get an idea of what we are trying to accomplish. Then you were asked to vote on what planks we should include in our platform.
This week we will briefly discuss planks for our platform.
In this week's episode, Nourishing the Planet research intern, Elena Davert, introduces a counter-intuitive method of cleaning water. In 2004 Peter Njodzeka founded the Life and Water Development Group Cameroon (LWDGC) with a rather simple goal. " I wanted to see the people in my area have clean water," he said. "And we kept expanding. That's how it started." Now, LWDGC, with support from Engineers without Borders (EWB) and Thirst Relief International, is teaching households how to use dirt and bacteria to clean their water, greatly improving the quality of drinking water and all but eliminating diseases caused by contaminated water.
It is about a week before early voting begins for a bunch of us around the country, and that means this may be one of the last times I have to convince you that, frustrated progressive or not, you better get your butt to a ballot box or a mail-in envelope this November, because it really does matter.
Now I could give you a bunch of "what ifs" to make my point, or I could remind you how we spent all summer watching oil gush into the Gulf, and how that came to be...but, instead, it's "Even More Current Event Day", and we're going to visit Hungary for a extremely real-world reminder of what can go wrong when the environmental cops are considered just too much of a burden by the environmental robbers-and if today's story doesn't scare you to death, I don't know what will.
It ain't Texas, but we will surely visit a Red River Valley...and you surely won't like what you're gonna see.
On July 14th, Green Change announced the campaign for a Green New Deal, a 10-point program to create economic prosperity together with ecological sustainability.
Since then over 100 candidates for elected office at all levels have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.
The Green New Deal Coalition will cut military spending, create millions of green jobs, and revive the economy by protecting the planet we depend on.
Green Change is inviting all candidates, individuals and organizations that support a prosperous, sustainable future for America to endorse the Green New Deal.
To date, 11 candidates for governor, 11 candidates for US Senate, and 33 candidates for US House of Representatives have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.
All agree on the need to cut military spending, fund green public works, ban corporate personhood, pass single-payer health care, restore progressive taxation, ban usury, enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax, legalize marijuana, institute tuition-free public higher education, change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental and safety standards, and pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.
These candidates represent a clean break with the failed policies of the past that have led America down the road to economic and ecological disaster.
The Green New Deal promises a brighter tomorrow for America – one that combines the New Deal’s promise of freedom from economic hardship with decisive action to protect our planet.
This is the second in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country. Today, we examine Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional district -- Bucks County, Montgomery County, and northeast Philadelphia. Currently, the 8th CD is represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by Patrick J. Murphy (D). Murphy is being challenged by Republican Mike Fitzpatrick.
Where does Rep. Murphy stand on clean energy and environmental issues? In 2009, Murphy received a 93% rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Murphy also voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), about which he correctly says, it "will create millions of new American jobs, limit the pollution that causes climate change, and reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil by investing in American-made clean energy." In addition, Murphy co-sponsored H.R. 890, the American Renewable Energy Act, as well as H.R. 2222, the Green Communities Act and H.R. 1778, the Retrofit for Energy and Environmental Performance (REEP) Program, among other excellent environmental legislation. Finally, Rep. Murphy touts the fact that "Bucks County is home to the fourth largest solar field in the United States – the largest east of the Mississippi River" and that "Nearly 1,000 people have been put to work building components for wind turbines and solar panels at the old U.S. Steel site in Fairless Hills in Bucks County."
In contrast, Mike Fitzpatrick says he "oppose[s] legislation currently being considered by [C]ongress that would implement a carbon 'cap and trade' system." Fitzpatrick also says he supports "a balanced national energy policy that includes safe, nuclear power, clean coal, responsible offshore drilling and economical, renewable energy." When he served in Congress, Fitzpatrick received a 61% League of Conservation Voters rating in 2005 and a 73% League of Conservation Voters rating in 2006. Fitzpatrick also was a co-cosponsor with Rep. Henry Waxman on the Safe Climate Act of 2006 – which would have cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 - but now says he is against "Cap and Trade."
We believe that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
Take action today for a cleaner, stronger, and more sustainable future. Join NRDC Action Fund on Facebook and Twitter and stay up-to-date on the latest environmental issues and actions you can take to help protect our planet.
This is the first in what will be a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country. Today, we examine Virginia’s 5th Congressional district, a district - stretching south from Charlottesville to the North Carolina border. Currently, the 5th CD is represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by Tom Perriello (D).
Where does Rep. Perriello stand on clean energy and environmental issues? In 2009, Perriello received a 71% rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Perriello also voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) and has"touted development of a clean energy economy as a way of creating jobs; improving energy efficiency; increasing this country’s energy supplies and sources and reducing reliance on foreign energy, which also would benefit this country’s national security; and other benefits." With regard to his ACES vote, Perriello says that he "believes there are ‘huge upsides’ in manufacturing and agriculture in a clean energy economy." As the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, Perriello is exactly right about the agricultural sector, as "Wind, solar, and biomass energy can be harvested forever, providing farmers with a long-term source of income." And, as California’s experience has shown, Perriello is right about the manufacturing sector as well.
Perriello does, however, favor some things that many environmentalists disagree with. For instance, Perriello says he supports an "’everything and the kitchen sink’ national energy strategy that includes an expansion of oil drilling." On the other hand, it should be noted that Perriello’s support for oil drilling comes in the context of his overall support for "using market-based solutions to create a carbon-limited economy."
The Republican candidate, Virginia State Sen. Robert Hurt, has views on energy and the environment contrast sharply with Perriello’s. In this video, for instance, Hurt incorrectly claims that cap and trade legislation would "absolutely raise the cost of energy in this country and it will hurt individuals and it will hurt businesses." In fact, as studies like this one show, "the Waxman-Markey climate bill makes economic sense, offering benefits worth at least twice as much as it costs, if not more." And, as this study concludes, the climate legislation already passed by the U.S. House of Representatives "would produce an average net energy spending reduction of $354 per household and an increase of nearly 425,000 jobs" by 2030. Finally, a recent study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration finds that the comprehensive climate and clean energy "American Power Act" being considered in the U.S. Senate would produce increases in income "almost 60 times greater than the estimated $185 annual investment** cost, exceeding $11,000 per year on average" while reducing U.S. oil imports "1.9 to 2.4 million barrels per day by 2035."
For whatever reason, Robert Hurt has ignored or discounted these studies, not to mention the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding the urgent need to act on climate change. Thus, instead of advocating for a transformation from the dirty fuels of the past, to a prosperous economy based on energy efficiency and clean energy that will never run out, Hurt’s solution is essentially the same-old, same-old: "opening up drilling in off the coast of Virginia, something I have supported year after year." Hurt adds, "We have to include drilling all over this country in order to meet the demands for our society, the demands for our businesses."
In reality, of course, the United States contains only 3% of the world’s oil reserves and is considered by geologists to be a "mature oil province." In common language, the meaning is simple: our oil production has long since "peaked," which means we can’t "drill our way out of it." Fortunately, we can open up tremendous opportunities for our nation through policies and investments that encourage energy efficiency – also known as "Invisible Energy" – and clean, renewable energy. For whatever reason, Robert Hurt disagrees and instead is pushing to move us backwards in this area.
In general, Sen. Hurt’s environmental record is unimpressive, with a 20% Virginia League of Conservation Voters rating in 2009 and a 38% rating in 2010. During the 2010 Virginia General Assembly session, Hurt voted the "wrong" way - in the view of the LCV - on HB 787, which states that "it shall be the policy of the Commonwealth to support oil and natural gas exploration, development, and production 50 miles or more off Virginia’s coast." Hurt also voted for HB 1300, which "[p]rohibits the Air Pollution Control Board from requiring that electric generating facilities located in a nonattainment area meet NOx and SO2 compliance obligations without the purchase of allowances from in-state or out-of-state facilities." Obviously, Robert Hurt is no friend of clean energy or the environment.
That concludes our environmental profile of the Democratic and Republican candidates running in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District this year. We believe that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
Take action today for a cleaner, stronger, and more sustainable future. Join NRDC Action Fund on Facebook and Twitter and stay up-to-date on the latest environmental issues and actions you can take to help protect our planet.
We oppose the shopping culture, and so we must deal with the unseeable part of the sale.
With Consumerism the system, there are always levels of secrecy behind the flash. When Steve Jobs gets up on the stage he is our modern magician, but he conceals a vast sweatshop empire that is kept out of sight - until last month when the 12th suicide this year at one Chinese facility finally stopped his iPad cold. He was forced to insist that the iPad is not made in sweatshops, and began to define the term absurdly, comparing his factories with California high schools. OUR FACTORIES ARE NOT SWEATSHOPS, he said, and as weird as his explanation was - his "sweatshop" seemed an objectively defined entity with a panel of experts to absolve him.
"Facts" are Consumerism's best cover-up. A really misleading ad campaign always has, somewhere nearby, its logical apologist: the Expert. It's the magician's razzle-dazzle that hides the rabbit under the table. The facts as processed by corporations have night-vision for our intuition, our common sense, our love of chance and mystery - these old-fashioned practices that leave us purchasing products too slowly, maybe even thoughtfully, maybe not at all.
It is "facts" that tilt and spin and somersault all the way to climate change denial. We say No! But we are defenseless if scientific studies are our only defense. Lobbyists and experts working for CO-2 emitting energy, like Big Coal, insist that the facts are incomplete, more facts are needed. What? Something in our indigenous past stirs in us - can this be the time to sit on our hands? Isn't the Earth speaking directly to us in a language more alive than "facts?"
America has enjoyed for so long what it saw as an obedient Earth. That is, the Earth was made unseeable behind a wall of facts which we manipulate like Steve Jobs' suicide math. Our "western frontier," our "American freedom" - are spaces curved by facts for our gullible consumption. Now we are watching the tsunamis and tornadoes and ash clouds and oil spills and rising seas - escaping through the wall of facts. The Earth is surfacing, the sky and soil touching again. The Earth is breaking through and taking a deep breath.
Some of us are waiting for a signal that there will be a post-consumption future. We would like to cooperate with this greater force, the life of the Earth. We are hearing such a signal from the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest mountains in this hemisphere, some 280 million years old. About 500 of these mountains have been blown up in the coal-mining process called Mountaintop Removal, or "MTR."
The biggest financier of MTR is currently the Swiss bank UBS, which is a famous practitioner of secrecy and spinning facts. UBS is the perfect final magician of Consumerism, in a showdown with the oldest mountains. The bank plans to blow up the mountains invisibly. We won't notice. The marketers will make MTR a war movie for American's freedom from Arab oil, with experts firing "facts" at the activists. The Earth, however, has seen Mountaintop Removal. The Earth sees the whole thing.
It's been a while since we had to have a real heart-to-heart, the Obama Administration and I, and last time it was because Rahm Emanuel had been a bit snippy toward those of us who are carrying the water for this Administration.
We need to have another one of those conversations today; this time the circumstances are a lot more positive-in fact, if the Administration follows my suggestions here, we have a real chance to put the Democrats on the road to victory, not just this November, but also in 2012.
What I'm proposing will create hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs, and it will stimulate millions more as we create a national source of discount electrical power that can be used by business and consumers alike.
Here's the best part: it's no "pie in the sky" promotion I'm offering here; we've already done the same thing before, it's been working out well for almost three quarters of a century...and even better than all that...my idea first pays for itself, and then...it actually makes the Federal Government a profit, forever after.
At present, oil saturates the Gulf Stream. An official six-month cessation of permits for new drilling did not actually affect the industry or government decisions. Despite Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead. To explain such an authorization and waiver, the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Services Division which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar. He did not intend to forbid all first cuts in the Earth's crust. Absolutely not. The Federal Government approved wells off the coast of Louisiana in June. Regardless of the day, or realities that are anathema to our citizenry, little has truly changed. Today, just as in yesteryear, we, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect Union, polishpolicies to appear as though our civilization would wish to protect and defend all beings, equally.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting four public information meetings on the proposed study of the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and its potential impacts on drinking water...The meetings will provide public information about the proposed study scope and design. EPA will solicit public comments on the draft study plan.
The public meetings will be held on:
* July 8 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. CDT at the Hilton Fort Worth in Fort Worth, Texas * July 13 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. MDT at the Marriot Tech Center's Rocky Mountain Events Center in Denver, Colo. * July 22 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT at the Hilton Garden Inn in Canonsburg, Pa. * August 12 at the Anderson Performing Arts Center at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y. for 3 sessions - 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT
Brighton, Colorado (FNS)-Attorneys from the Republican Study Group (RSG) descended upon the 17th Judicial District courtroom of Judge John T Bryan today to present an amicus brief and associated oral arguments in order to prevent a settlement in a lawsuit related to an automobile accident in this Colorado city.
The intervening attorneys claim the settlement reached between the two parties to the accident is a "shakedown" because the plaintiff had not yet exhausted all possible legal remedies when the agreement was finalized, and because the agreement was executed in the presence of the plaintiff's brother, a well-known local attorney.
They hope Judge Bryan will decline to approve the settlement in today's hearing, and that he will order the parties to move forward to trial.
"What we have is government transferring property from one party, an admittedly unattractive one, to others, not based on preexisting laws but on decisions by one man, a car czar", said Crush Mimbaugh, attorney for the RSG, "and we are here today to protect all Americans from this legally sanctioned rape of an innocent driver."
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