activism

Over 100 ‘Clean Air Ambassadors’ Call On Congress To Clean Up Its Act

A coalition of over 100 “clean air ambassadors” — including nurses, physicians, clergy members, labor leaders, tribal leaders, and social justice activists — descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to call on Congress to protect children, the elderly, the poor, and other vulnerable Americans from the health threats of air pollution, smog, and rising carbon emissions.

They represented a range of groups from all fifty states, as well as Puerto Rico, all organized under the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign. They spoke this week with elected officials to call for several needed changes:

1) Finalize new carbon limits for new power plants, and establish limits for existing power plants. The regulations for new plants are in the works, driven by a Supreme Court ruling that the executive branch has the power and legal obligation to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration hasn’t decided yet what to do about emissions from already existing plants, but the National Resources Defense Council recently came up with an impressive proposal. And this can all be done without the need for legislative approval from Congress.

As the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign notes, the rising temperatures driven by climate change intensify the damaging health effects of smog and other pollutants. On top of that, climate change can alter the spread of diseases and increase deaths due to heat waves, and all these effects fall harder on poorer and more vulnerable populations.

2) Finalize federally enforceable coal ash rules. Coal ash is created whenever coal is burned, and generators often then dump the toxic residue in landfills — which have given way on more than one occasion, leading to spills that are hazardous to both the environment and human health. Meanwhile, the EPA’s regulations of coal ash have been stuck in limbo for years.

3) Strengthen standards limiting air pollution and smog. Along with carbon dioxide, the burning of fossil fuels emits all sorts of other pollution into the air we breath, driving up rates of asthma, heart and lung disease, hospital visits and premature deaths. Again, these harms fall hardest on children, the old, the poor, and minorities.

Estimates of new EPA rules to crack down on these pollutants suggest the limits could prevent 21,600 premature deaths, 12,540 hospitalizations, 199,000 asthma cases each year. The rules include standards for power plants and industrial emitters, as well as the still-being -developed “Tier 3″ standards for motor vehicles. But again, the rules are still awaiting finalization.

“50 States United For Healthy Air” includes representatives from the American Nurses Association, Earthjustice, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Council of Churches, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

‘Enlightened,’ Aaron Swartz And The Consequences Of Activism

At the end of the second season of Enlightened, HBO’s strange, precise show about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a former corporate drone who has an awakening and decides she has to bring her employer, Abaddon Industries to justice, Amy finds herself in shock after she is caught stealing corporate documents and turning them over to Jeff (Dermot Mulroney), a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. “They just fired me,” she tells him on the phone, clearly frightened despite her show of bravado to the company’s president. “They said they were going to sue me.” “Well,” said Jeff, who had been putting up some pretense of dating her to enhance their emotional bond while she continued to feed him documents, “we knew that was going to happen.” “We did?” Amy asked him. “Amy, this story is going to shift the paradigm, man,” Jeff tried to reassure her, appealing to her rather grandiose ego and desire to be an “agent of change” on a massive scale. “They can’t stop it, okay? It’s all worth it.” When Amy told him “We’ll see,” she sounded more sobered, and more realistic, than she has at any other point at the show, even at the moment of her biggest triumph.

Enlightened is a beautiful, wonderful, extraordinarily difficult show on any number of levels—I find it so hard to watch even though I think it’s remarkable that I marathoned the entire second season yesterday so I could enjoy and get it over with at once. And Mike White’s long and quietly been doing critically important work about how hard it is to live out your principals in America, whether he was writing about Dewey Finn (Jack Black) finding another way to make a career out of his love of music in School of Rock or showing Amy crumple in the first season as she learned that the salary for her dream job at a non-profit would leave her bobbing around the poverty line. But even though Enlightened had a semi-triumphant finale, it made one of the most painful points White’s ever gotten across: that you can be right on the merits, you can even win a major political or social battle, and still be treated like a pariah, fired, sued, or jailed. Winning doesn’t save you from consequences—in fact, your continued suffering may be the price of your victory.

This is a point that—with the exception of martyr stories like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—is often significantly absent from our popular understanding of history and our mass culture. We remember Harriet Tubman’s heroic work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and never bother to learn that she had her arm broken by a train conductor while white passengers called for her to be thrown off the train, that she didn’t receive a pension for her Civil War service until 1899, and that she was the victim of a kind of prototypical 419 confidence fraud. After Frank Kameny was fired from the U.S. Army Map Service after his arrest in Lafayette Park for cruising, he was never employed again, friends and family supported him as he pursued activism, and it wasn’t until 2009 that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry apologized to Kameny on behalf of the government and gave him the Theodore Roosevelt Award.

Seeing the gap between the public impact of activism and the private consequences for activists unfold in Enlightened hit me in a particularly painful way because I watched the show’s second season on the same day that the New Yorker put Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Aaron Swartz, the activist and programmer who committed suicide in January, online, and the day after The Atlantic published Swartz’s former partner Quinn Norton’s account of her involvement in the federal case against him for downloading documents from JSTOR. I would never compare Swartz to Amy Jellicoe as activists on the whole, because Amy’s talents and understanding of political systems are so nascent, and because she fundamentally lacks the talent for making friends that Swartz, in my and many others’ experiences, possessed. But in that lack of full cognizance of the consequences of their actions, they seemed to have something in common. MacFarquhar writes:

Two years ago, he was indicted on multiple felony counts for downloading several million articles from the academic database jstor. It is not clear why he did this. He may have wanted to analyze the articles, or he may have intended to upload them onto the Web, so they could be accessed by anyone. It is clear that he did not anticipate the astonishing severity of the legal response. He did not consider his JSTOR action an act of civil disobedience for which he was prepared to sacrifice a portion of his life in prison. It was not a project that was particularly important to him. There had been a time when he cared deeply about copyright issues, but he had moved on.

In the wake of Swartz’s suicide, there’s been a lot of discussion about overprosecution, and about the prospect of an Aaron’s Law that might whittle down the penalties in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But watching Enlightened and reading the so many profiles of Swartz that have been published since his death, I wonder if, just as Swartz had broadened his interests far beyond computers and copyright to questions of politics, governance, small-but-effective regulations, and the influence of corporate money on our political system, our discussions of his life and death might honor him more if expanded to the larger political context.

It’s not just hackers who face severe punishments for their activism, and who may not be prepared for the consequences they face. Labor activists face risks of retaliation and firing if they push for more humane work environments and better pay. The Occupy activists who were netted, arrested en masse, and pepper-sprayed were a powerful illustration of what a militarized police force can, and will do to people protesting for change, even if they’re doing so without breaking the law. Whistleblowers who are less spacey and self-deluded than Amy Jellicoe get fired. These sorts of consequences are extremely powerful tools of the corporations and governments who have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, raising the consequences of protest and organizing so high that many, many people can’t afford the entry fee. Whether Aaron Swartz killed himself because of the pressures of the prosecution brought to bear against him, his life in the two years before his death are a dramatic illustration of the tab activists can be presented with: millions of dollars in legal fees, the circumscription of their ability to speak and act, and profound disruption of their social and private lives, and overwhelming fear. Maybe Swartz should have been prepared to pay it, and understood the price before he took action so he’d know what was likely to come due to him. But maybe the bill for him, and for many other activists, even ones like Amy Jellicoe, should come in at a lower cost.

Beef Production and Greenhouse Gases

Story by Noah Botwinick, contributing author for the PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com.

                                                                                    Beef Production and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Background of Beef Production in the US

Beef cattle production represents the largest individual single portion of US agriculture today. In fact, roughly 35% of all farms in the US are beef-producing farms. The U.S. beef industry is made up of more than 1 million businesses, farms and ranches, and there are more than 800,000 ranchers and cattle producers in the United States. The retail equivalent value of the U.S. beef industry in 2011 was $79 billion and total U.S. beef consumption in the same year was 25.6 billion pounds. The value of US cattle and calf production in 2011 was $45.2 billion, and total US beef production measured in commercial carcass weight in 2011 was 26.29 billion pounds. In 2012, 90.8 million cows were produced.

Negative Impacts of Beef Production

Producing all this beef leaves a large carbon footprint on the environment. According to the National Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the meat industry is responsible for approximately 18 percent of the 36 billion tons of “CO2-equivelant” greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere on a yearly basis. To put this figure in perspective, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, electricity generation is responsible for 33% of total greenhouse gas emissions; transportation is responsible for 26%, industrial use accounts for roughly 11%, and residential and commercial uses are responsible for about 8%. According to the FAO, the amount of greenhouse gases that are produced in order to make half a pound of hamburger meat is equivalent to the amount of gases that are released when driving a 3,000 pound car for 10 miles.

Some of the adverse environmental effects of the beef production industry include:

-          Deforestation: Producing large amounts of beef requires large amount of cattle, and large amounts of cattle requires large amounts of land. Additionally, asides for just the land required for grazing, the beef industry also takes up huge amounts of land to grow the crops used to make feed for the cattle. As a result, the land used for beef production purposes takes up almost a third of the earth’s total land surface. Making all this land usable for beef production requires clearing away large areas of land, lots of which was previously occupied by forests.

• In Brazil, for instance, an average of 19,368 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest was cut down every year between 2000 and 2007 to produce land to for cattle to graze on.
• This has serious negative effects on biodiversity and introduces new, deadly diseases into the human population through zoonosis.

-          Desertification and Soil Erosion: Each animal that is allowed to graze consumes roughly 10,800 pounds of vegetation a year, in addition to the vegetation and soil that is trampled and ruined by the 24 pounds of force per square inch from the animals’ hooves. As a result of these effects, cattle production is quickly transforming usable land into desert in America and elsewhere around the globe.

• According to a UN report from 1991, 685 million acres of usable land in the western US is becoming ruined by overgrazing and other problems. Approximately a third of the topsoil in the US has been lost as a result of overgrazing and raising crops to feed livestock, and about seven billion tons of soil in the US has already become eroded, mostly as a result of overgrazing and planting crops to feed cattle and other animals. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 35 pounds of American topsoil becomes eroded just to produce one pound of feedlot steak.

-          Water Scarcity: In the US, an estimated 50% of the total used water goes to provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock and for growing feed for cattle. As a result, US freshwater reserves have become significantly reduced, and water shortages have become severe, particularly in the Western US.

• It takes hundreds of gallons of water to produce just one pound of grain-fed steak.

-          Water and Air Pollution: The main non-point source of water pollution in the US is organic waste that comes from cattle and other livestock, pesticides, agricultural salts, chemical fertilizers and sediments.

• Cattle can produce an estimated 1 billion tons of organic waste per year, and the average feedlot steer make more than 47 pounds of manure every day. There are approximately 42,000 feedlots in the US, and the average 10,000 animal feedlot can create 500,000 pounds of manure in 24 hours.
• Large amounts of this manure is stored in manure lagoons, the runoff and leaching from which can end up surface and groundwater and pollute nearby drinking water. The runoff of manure contains nitrogen and phosphorus and can cause eutrophication and dead zones from increased algae production in water. Additionally, the manure emits ammonia into the air, which can cause respiratory diseases when inhaled.

-          Global Warming: As mentioned, cattle and beef production is a major producer of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane, all of which contribute significantly to global warming. This comes from burning forests to create grazing land for cattle and from burning large quantities of agricultural waste from feed crops.

• For every 55 square feet of rain forest that is cleared for grazing, roughly 500 pounds of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.
• Carbon dioxide is also generated by the fuel that is used in the mechanized agricultural production of feed crops for cattle and other livestock; considering that about 70 percent of the grain produced in the US is used for animal feed, this is a lot of carbon dioxide emissions.
• Petrochemical fertilizers are used to produce feed crops for grain-fed cattle, and this generates nitrous oxide, which accounts for 6 percent of the earth’s greenhouse gases.
• Another major contributor to the earth’s greenhouse gases is methane, much of which is produced from cattle belches and flatulation. One methane molecule traps almost 25 times as much solar heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide, and roughly 60 million tons of methane are produced each year just from cattle alone.

-          Antibiotic Resistance: Many cattle are confined to small living spaces and are fed a diet of corn, which is not their natural food. They are often treated with antibiotics to keep them healthy and to promote growth. Roughly 70% of all antibiotics in the US are given to livestock for these purposes. The issue is that widespread use of antibiotic results in the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is increasingly becoming a health problem both in the US and abroad.

Efforts to Decrease Negative Impacts

As the human population continues to increase, so does the need for meat. As a result, the US and other countries are constantly raising more cattle and clearing more land. If beef producers continue their current practices, negative impacts on the earth will be devastating. According to a report by the FAO, the environmental damage that comes from livestock may double by the year 2050. Fortunately, there have been several measures taken to reduce these adverse effects from the beef industry.

-          The government of Brazil is undertaking efforts to reduce its rate of deforestation by 80% in the next 7 years by making laws that require landowners, branches of government and business to maintain up to 80% of native vegetation on private lands in the Amazon region. Brazil is also working to create management plans for the land that is better for the environment.

-          If managed properly, manure can be used as an important source of nutrients and organic matter when used as a fertilizer.

-          Another reform that would be beneficial for the environment is the intensification of the cattle industry. This would lead to less land being used to produce the same amount of beef. This would produce less greenhouse gases, use less fossil fuels, waste less land and use up less water. Intensification is implemented through Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.

-          If cattle grazing is properly managed, it can actually have positive environmental effects on native herbs and forbs. By properly managing grazing lands through managed intensive rotational grazing and grazing at low intensities, it can lead to increased recapture of carbon dioxide, fewer ammonia emissions into the atmosphere, reduced soil erosion, better air quality as well as less water pollution.

-          To reduce methane emissions, management methods include genetic selection, immunization, changing the livestock’s diet and grazing management. Although cattle that eat forage emit more methane than cattle that are fed grain, methane emissions from forage-fed cattle are offset by the increased carbon recapture of grazing pastures.

About Noah Botwinick

Currently attending Yeshiva University in New York. Majoring in political science. I’m passionate about protecting the environment and the world we live in. I believe that sustainable, clean and efficient energy practices hold the key to reversing the damaging effects we’ve had on the earth. In addition, I played on my college basketball team for 2 years and I’m the editor in chief of the YU yearbook. 

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Welcome to the Revolution … I Think

by Auden Schendler

There’s a taboo and terrifying thing people do in the mountains called “trundling.” It means pushing an often frighteningly big rock off the side of a mountain, then watching it roll down, bounce, explode, crush trees, and smoke off into the valley below. It is not sanctioned; it is dangerous to the trundler and to others; people who do it don’t talk about it. But it happens.

If you have ever “trundled” a big rock (and I’m not saying I have, at least not intentionally) you know that the moment it tips from massive geologic inertia to kinetic energy is both terrifying and thrilling.

That is the uncomfortable point we may have reached in the climate movement. I saw this at a rally in Denver last week, which I attended with my wife and two young children:

The first characters we ran into wore black bandannas as facemasks and backpacks. And there were a lot of them. My response was a gut feeling of panic. What, exactly, did these guys think was going to happen here? They seemed ready for the Seattle world trade protests, or something gnarly out of Eastern Europe.

I had thought this protest was about stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as a way for Obama to draw a line in the sand on climate. But there were people railing against just about everything connected to the environment, including social justice, indigenous people’s rights, and fracking. “What the Frack!” was one chant. There was a guy carrying a book on Marx, there were some homeless guys with the agenda of not being bored. Later, at the rally, a child activist (who emceed the event) talked about suing Boulder for violating the public trust by polluting the air.

Suing Boulder, one of the greenest cities in the world, seems like an odd tactic: it’s like suing Jesus for not being loving enough. (Turns out, on further research, they were suing Colorado, not Boulder.) Whatever—there were many different viewpoints, from the hobo who blessed me, to the 12 year old radical, and many of them I did not agree with. It was both a rainbow coalition and a Babel of agendas.

Despite the facemasks, the event was civil: I never saw a cop, and I heard grumbling from some of the several hundred marchers that “when we have half a million, that’s when we’ll take over the street…” and “this is the only protest march that stayed on the sidewalk…” Point being, it might have even been too civil. See “At climate rally, some signs of fraying in a movement’s big tent.”

Only at one point did the event tip slightly to the radical.

Almost at the park where the rally was to be held, the crowd surged across a heavily trafficked four-lane road in defiance of the stoplight. In the streets the Marxists and the anarchists were exhorting people to ignore the lights. The traffic was honking now out of outrage, not support. A woman fell down and several people hauled her back up. “Now,” I thought, not particularly happily, “maybe something is happening.” I held my children well back on the curb and waited for the light.

I have become skeptical of the idea of working within the system for change, because I think the system itself is corrupted—by money in politics, by crackpot governance (the filibuster, gerrymandering) and by apathy. But when things start to get even a little bit crazy, the system starts looking pretty damn good. That’s why I was on the sidewalk, an unintentional gesture in support of the status quo. I had an urge to envelop my kids in my arms.

And yet, waiting awkwardly at a stoplight in the middle of a revolution, we were no better off. My children would be no safer in a world warmed by 4 degrees C than out on the most dangerous streets. This corner was a place of false refuge. On my wife’s urging, we surged into the road, with the crowd, in defiance of the light.

Barry Lopez calls the uncomfortable balance point between fear and accomplishment “the cusp on which human life finds its richest expression.” Perhaps only at these scary points in our lives, or in history—when neither forward nor backwards nor stasis is ideal—does the object you have been pushing on begin to move.

– Auden Schendler is Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and author of the book Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.

Bill McKibben: Climate Change Won’t Wait For The President To Act

by Bill McKibben, via TomDispatch

Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents.  Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published “A Nation at Risk,” insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and… we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.

Even facing undeniably real problems — say, discrimination against gay people — one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe.  There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.

Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.

And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change — the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.

We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn’t care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets.  Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.

We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible — all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

Unless you understand these distinctions you don’t understand climate change — and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.

That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.

It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people — and politicians — like. We should have adopted it long ago (and would have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here’s the terrible thing: it’s no longer a measure that impresses physics.  After all, physics isn’t kidding around or negotiating.  While we were discussing whether climate change was even a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5% a year to make a real difference.

It’s not Obama’s fault that that’s not happening. He can’t force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we’re going to get, in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to get off the couch and fight.

There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America.  Indeed, some of them were the same institutions.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed Lend-Lease.

So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority, and then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for instance, telling the car companies that they were out of the car business for a while and instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.

For Obama, faced with a Congress bought off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic approach would be to do absolutely everything he could on his own authority — new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, for example; and of course, he should refuse to grant the permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, something that requires no permission from John Boehner or the rest of Congress.

So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures.  The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal miners. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations.  (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.)  And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth.  Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save.

If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy.  He’d also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment. God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the federal government’s premier climate scientist declared it a “planetary emergency.”

In fact, he didn’t even appear to notice those phenomena, campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble, even as people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, where apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and wind.

Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it — his people letting reporters know on background that climate change would now be one of his top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a second term. That’s a start, I suppose, but it’s a long way from telling the car companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.

And anyway, he took it back at the first opportunity. At his post-election press conference, he announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,” he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:

“I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

It’s as if World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had declared, “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it.”

The president must be pressed to do all he can — and more.  That’s why thousands of us will descend on Washington D.C. on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to have to do it for him, as best we can.

If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.

If he won’t use our position as a superpower to drive international climate-change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try.  That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to scientists — like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the Keystone pipeline was a mistake — then top scientists are increasingly clear that they’ll need to get arrested to make their point.

Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We can’t.

This piece was originally published at TomDispatch and was reprinted with permission. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Activating The Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon For Reproductive Rights

I love pretty much everything about the Draw The Line campaign, a project of the Center For Reproductive Rights, which is attempting to get people to sign up and register their support for a Reproductive Bill of Rights:

I’m generally opposed to contempt as a political emotion, but I think here it’s effective because it reinforces what’s compelling and fun about the ad, the idea that you can be part of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The ad sells the idea not merely that you can end up part of a social network that has a particular cultural cachet, but that you have an affinity with the people in it, that we share disgust and frustration with people who seem impossibly distant from our own lives.

Deal Reached To End Palestinian Prisoner Hunger Strikes

Palestinian youths protesting last month in support of hunger-strikers

Earlier today, before the prisoners accepted the deal, the New York Times reported on the concessions made by Israel to the hunger-striking prisoners:

Israel had accepted three of the prisoners’ main demands: to restrict the military courts’ ability to extend the terms of some 300 inmates being held without charge or trial under what is known as administrative detention; to end the solitary confinement of 17 prisoners who have been kept in isolation; and to permit family visits for prisoners in the West Bank who come from Gaza.

Prisoner Khader Adnan sparked the mass protest of around 1,600 prisoners after he refused food and was released 66 days later. Last week, the Israeli HIgh Court rejected appeals from two prisoners who went even longer and are reportedly in danger of death.

The hunger strikes stoked fear in Israel because of protests in their support; prisoner deaths could inflame this movement. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour covered the hunger strikes and other non-violent pro-Palestinian activism on her CNN show last week:

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch called on Israel to end detentions without charges, a practice some Israeli figures have admitted is often unnecessary.

State Department Disputes Latest Chinese Activist Account On Family Threats

Discrepancies between the accounts of the U.S. government and blind activist lawyer Chen Guangcheng as to the latter’s departure from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing grew wider when the State Department contradicted Chen’s account that threats against his family were relayed by U.S. officials. Foreign Policy reported that State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland disputed Chen’s account, reported by the AP, that the U.S. told him about threats made against his family by the Chinese government. Nuland said:

At no time did any US official speak to Chen about physical or legal threats to his wife and children. Nor did Chinese officials make any such threats to us. U.S. interlocutors did make clear that if Chen elected to stay in the Embassy, Chinese officials had indicated to us that his family would be returned to [their home in] Shandong, and they would lose their opportunity to negotiate for reunification.

AP: Chinese Dissident Says He Left Embassy Because Of Threats Against Family

The tale of Chinese dissident and legal activist Chen Guangcheng’s stay at the U.S. embassy in Beijing seemed to be moving toward a tentative close just this morning. The blind activist left for medical care at a hospital with what the State Department said were U.S.-brokered guarantees for his safety in a deal that honored his desire to stay in China. But now Chen tells the AP he only left the embassy because of threats against his wife and family (relayed by U.S. officials), and that he wants to leave China — contradicting a statement from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Here are the AP’s breaking tweets:

10,000 Americans Criticize Discovery Channel’s ‘Frozen Planet’ CO2 Censorship

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

by Brad Johnson

When the Discovery Channel aired “On Thin Ice,” its Frozen Planet episode documenting changes in the Arctic, it conveniently left out human causes. The show’s producer told the New York Times she didn’t want people saying “don’t watch this show because it has a slant on climate change” – illustrating everything wrong with the conversation around climate change in America. This afternoon, I and other members of Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Discovery offices with 10,000 signatures demanding the organization correct this unscientific self-censorship:

We are deeply disappointed by your decision not to explain the science, and human causes, of global warming in the “On Thin Ice” episode of the Frozen Planet series. As the world’s leader in environmental programming, your decision sends a dangerous message to media companies around the world — that it is better to censor yourself than risk criticism by global warming deniers. We call on you to immediately acknowledge this error and to conduct a review of all Discovery programming decisions to ensure no such self-censorship happens again.

As I and other members of Forecast the Facts, scientists Steve Scolnick and Clarence Maloney, entered the Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, we were greeted by a security officer in the vestibule. Corporate Security Manager David Sterner told us that no-one in communications, production, or viewer relations was or would be available to accept the petition, nor were we welcome even into the main lobby. However, he did personally guarantee that the 10,000 signatures and the letter addressed to Discovery chairman John Hendricks would be delivered on our behalf.

It is an essential fact that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the melting poles. As Bill McKibben noted, “On Thin Ice” is no different than a documentary on the ravages of lung cancer that censored mention of cigarettes. The pursuit of profit is not a valid excuse for the censorship of science. Neither is the fear of reprisal from well funded polluters.

Faced with a gross failure of leadership on climate pollution by those in power, average citizens are mobilizing to demand honesty and action. But they’re not the only ones. Today also marks the start of the inaugural science policy conference of the American Geophysical Union, a response by the leading organization of earth scientists to the increasing disconnect between the facts of science and the decisions made by politicians and corporations. The central topic of today’s sessions? The rapidly changing Arctic.

Brad Johnson is campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

Meet Mr. Coal Guy: ‘Coal-De-Lay-Ee-Hoo!’

As long-delayed rules to enforce the Clean Air Act against coal pollution go into force, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has launched Mr. Coal Guy, a new social-media campaign with satirical videos that parody the coal industry’s multi-million dollar advertising campaigns. These videos feature Mr. Coal Guy, played by Mr. Show’s John Ennis, using iconic TV shows from the 1980′s to portray coal as fun, hip, and totally safe. In one video, Mr. Coal Guy provides the voiceover to a clip of Bob Ross’s timeless landscape painting to promote mountaintop removal coal mining (“scrapey scrapey goodbye lakey!”):

Another video portrays a coal-executive beach party celebrating “the fact that coal pollution never causes any health problems”:

The $300,000 campaign is “a funny send up of just how desperate dirty fossil fuel execs are to keep our country chained to the dirty, outdated 19th-century energy source,” says Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign. The campaign is on Facebook and Twitter at @mrcoalguy.

Caged In Cushing: Native Americans Protesting Obama’s Keystone XL Support Will Be Put In A Cage

“Native Americans gathering in Cushing, OK for a planned Thursday protest of President Obama’s anticipated words of praise for the Keystone XL pipeline will be forced by local authorities to hold their event in a cage erected in Memorial Park,” Climate Connections reports. “President Obama is an adopted member of the Crow Tribe, so his fast-tracking a project that will desecrate known sacred sites and artifacts is a real betrayal and disappointment for his Native relatives everywhere,” said Marty Cobenais of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Tar sands is devastating First Nations communities in Canada already and now they want to bring that environmental, health, and social devastation to US tribes.” Rosemary Crawford, Project Manager of the Center for Energy Matters, added: “We can’t stop global warming with more fossil fuel pipelines.”

More Than 10,000 GM Owners Demand Company Pull Its Support From Heartland Institute

More than 10,000 current and former owners of General Motors vehicles are calling on the company to pull its financial support from the Heartland Institute, which is working on classroom curriculum to deny climate change. The GM Foundation gave $30,000 to Heartland since 2010. In a statement to the Guardian, Greg Martin, GM’s director of policy and Washington communications, heaped praise on Heartland, saying it gives “careful and considerate thought to complex policy issues.” The campaign is coordinated by Forecast the Facts.

One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

More Than 10,000 GM Owners Demand Company Pull Its Support From Heartland Institute

More than 10,000 current and former owners of General Motors vehicles are calling on the company to pull its financial support from the Heartland Institute, which is working on classroom curriculum to deny climate change. The GM Foundation gave $30,000 to Heartland since 2010. In a statement to the Guardian, Greg Martin, GM’s director of policy and Washington communications, heaped praise on Heartland, saying it gives “careful and considerate thought to complex policy issues.” The campaign is coordinated by Forecast the Facts.

One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

800,000 Signatures Against Keystone XL Delivered To Senate Today

In 24 hours, the 99 percent flooded the U.S. Senate with more than 800,000 messages opposing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. This afternoon, 781,000 of the signatures to the Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline emergency petition were hand-delivered to the U.S. Capitol in boxes of 20,000 names each by members of 350.org, Green For All, and other climate hawks. “In Kentucky, over 2,000 people gathered at a rally opposing mountaintop removal mining picked up their cell phones and called Sen. McConnell to tell him to stop pushing Keystone XL. In New York City, dozens of people visited Sen. Schumer’s office and got him on the record opposing the pipeline. Petition deliveries also took place in Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, New Mexico, and elsewhere.”

In Less Than 7 Hours, Over 500,000 People Sign Up To Keep Keystone XL Killed

Less than seven hours after progressives launched a campaign to mobilize opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, the 24-hour goal of 500,000 signatures has been reached. “Um, I don’t quite believe it,” tweeted 350.org founder Bill McKibben, who is appearing on tonight’s Colbert Report show to discuss the climate crisis. “Whaddya say we just keep going?“

OccupyKXL: The 99 Percent Takes A Stand With 24 Hours Against Keystone

A broad coalition of the grassroots progressive movement is launching a 24-hour effort to mobilize 500,000 people opposing Republican efforts to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. GOP senators “plan to file an amendment mandating the project to the Senate transportation package Monday,” the Hill reports. In a Daily Kos diary, 350.org founder Bill McKibben — who led thousands of Americans who got arrested last summer in front of the White House in opposition to the pipeline — explains the “powerful, unified fight” to “keep this pipeline dead“:

We’re going to war at noon eastern today–non-violent war, but a powerful, unified fight against the heart of right-wing power, the fossil fuel industry. We’re out to collect half a million emails in 24 hours telling the Senate: back up the president and keep this pipeline dead. It’s going to be the most concentrated burst of environmental activism this millennium–and it needs you.

This effort includes a diverse coalition of the national environmental movement — including the Environmental Defense Fund, Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation and Green For All. As McKibben said, it’s “everyone else who’s ever tried to save a whale, clean a lake, build a park, find a solar job.”

The 24-hour push isn’t just a “green” cause, but one of the American progressive movement. Other organizations participating in the petition drive include MoveOn, Credo, Democracy for America, Public Citizen, Change.org, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and businesses like Patagonia.

Bill McKibben will be on the Colbert Report tonight to discuss the effort to prevent the destruction of our climate for the profit of foreign oil companies.

Josh Fox Decries His Fracking Hearing Arrest: ‘This Is Not Government, This Is Thuggery’

On “The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur,” Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of “GasLand,” described his arrest on Capitol Hill at a public House Science Committee hearing on hydraulic fracturing. Fox had hired a video crew that was credentialed to cover Congress, but that crew was rejected access by the committee chair Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX). When Fox came to the hearing and set up his camera to shoot, he was swarmed by security and eventually led out in handcuffs:

This access used to be granted quite regularly when the Democrats ran the House. . . . The video you see was shot by Congressional staffers — they’re all recording. The only person who’s being threatened with arrest is me. This is not government, this is thuggery. That is what happened. They threw out John Boehner’s promise for transparency in Congress in handcuffs with me yesterday. And they threw out the First Amendment. They threw out the Constitution.

Watch it:

Fox’s arrest has spurred outrage and increased attention about the apparent poisoning of Pavillion, WY by the natural gas industry.

Sierra Club Admits Secretly Taking $26 Million From Chesapeake Natural Gas

Michael Brune ended Sierra Club's relationship with Chesapeake when he became executive director in 2010.

Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past. It’s also sure to anger ordinary members who’ve been uneasy about the Club’s relationship with corporations.

In a Sierra Club blog post, Brune explained his response when he became the executive director in 2010: “We cannot accept money from an industry we need to change. Very quickly, the board of directors, with my strong encouragement, cut off these donations and rewrote our gift acceptance policy.”

Gasland Director Josh Fox’s Statement On His Fracking Hearing Arrest

Josh Fox, the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, has issued the following statement about his arrest in the U.S. Capitol today.

I was arrested today for exercising my First Amendment rights to freedom of the press on Capitol Hill. I was not expecting to be arrested for practicing journalism. Today’s hearing in the House Energy and Environment subcommittee was called to examine EPAs findings that hydraulic fracturing fluids had contaminated groundwater in the town of Pavillion, Wyoming. I have a long history with the town of Pavillion and its residents who have maintained since 2008 that fracking has contaminated their water supply. I featured the stories of residents John Fenton, Louis Meeks and Jeff Locker in GASLAND and I have continued to document the catastrophic water contamination in Pavillion for the upcoming sequel GASLAND 2. It would seem that the Republican leadership was using this hearing to attack the three year Region 8 EPA investigation involving hundreds of samples and extensive water testing which ruled that Pavillion’s groundwater was a health hazard, contaminated by benzene at 50x the safe level and numerous other contaminants associated with gas drilling. Most importantly, EPA stated in this case that fracking was the likely cause.

As a filmmaker and journalist I have covered hundreds of public hearings, including Congressional hearings. It is my understanding that public speech is allowed to be filmed. Congress should be no exception. No one on Capitol Hill should regard themselves exempt from the Constitution. The First Amendment to the Constitution states explicitly “Congress shall make no law…that infringes on the Freedom of the Press”. Which means that no subcommittee rule or regulation should prohibit a respectful journalist or citizen from recording a public hearing.

This was an act of civil disobedience, yes done in an impromptu fashion, but at the moment when they told me to turn off the cameras, I could not. I know my rights and I felt it was imperative to exercise them.

When I was led out of the hearing room in handcuffs, John Boehner’s pledge of transparency in congress was taken out with me.

The people of Pavillion deserve better. The thousands across the US who have documented cases of water contamination in fracking areas deserve their own hearing on Capitol Hill. They deserve the chance to testify in before Congress. The truth that fracking contaminates groundwater is out, and no amount of intimidation tactics –either outright challenges to science or the arrest of journalists –will put the genie back in the bottle. Such a brazen attempt to discredit and silence the EPA, the citizens of Pavillion and documentary filmmaking will ultimately fail and it is an affront to the health and integrity of Americans.

Lastly, in defense of my profession, I will state that many many Americans get their news from independent documentaries. The Hill should immediately move to make hearings and meetings accessible to independent journalists and not further obstruct the truth from being reported in the vivid and in-depth manner that is only achievable through long-form documentary filmmaking.

I will be thinking on this event further and will post further thoughts and developments.

I have been charged with “unlawful entry” and my court date is February 15.