(video by Freddy’s Brooklyn Roundhouse)

Calling carbon traders “climate traitors,” members of the Climate Crisis Coalition, Rising Tide North America, Climate SOS gathered outside the 2nd annual NYC Carbon Trading Summit to demand an end to the market-based trading of greenhouse gas emissions credits and called for just solutions to the climate crisis. The climate justice activists risked arrest to voice their opposition to the financial trading giants at the Summit, including JP Morgan Chase & Goldman Sachs, comparing their carbon trading plans to those that caused the current financial crisis.

• Saturday, Jan 9, 10am-5pm: Nonviolent direct action workshop and strategy session
• Sunday, Jan 10, 6:30pm-8:30pm: Panel discussion “Selling the Sky: Carbon Trading and the Failure of Copenhagen”
• Monday, Jan 11

7 pm – 9:00 pm: Presentation: “From COP 15 to Climate Justice Movement” with journalist Tina Gerhardt (Houston area, Manhattan)

7 pm – 9:00 pm: Art and Banner making party (Brooklyn)

• Tuesday, Jan 12, noon: Press Event: Featuring Climate Scientist, JAMES HANSEN, and FATHER PAUL MAYER, of the Climate Crisis Coalition
• Wednesday, Jan 13, 12 noon: Rally and protest action outside of the 2nd Annual Carbon Trading Summit

Following closely on the heels of the failed UN Copenhagen climate conference, the Second Annual Carbon Trade Summit will convene in New York City, bringing together representatives of some of the most polluting industries, industry associations, carbon financiers, banks, government officials and corporate “big greens.” Participants will include executives from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Duke Energy, and many more. See the official event page for more: http://www.iglobalforum.com/conference_live.php?r=22&p=home

Here they will discuss how to take advantage of the emerging carbon markets. Under a veneer of greenwash, they will be determining ways to ensure that marketable allowances for greenhouse gases (a.k.a., “cap-and-trade” schemes) remain the centerpiece of global climate policy.

Never before in history has the need for a grassroots resistance movement been more urgently needed. Climate scientists now tell us we are on course for 4 to 7 degrees of warming in the coming century, a death sentence for much of life on this planet, including human populations starting with the most vulnerable. If the climate movement is going to have any chance for success, it must confront the true source of this emergency. Placing the future of life on the altar of market fundamentalism is a path to annihilation.

Join us and take a stand for climate justice! Read on for LOCATION/TIME info!

SATURDAY- JANUARY 9th

*Nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience workshop
WHEN: Saturday. Jan. 9 from 10am to 5pm
WHERE: The Change You Want To See Gallery: 84 Havemeyer St. (at Metropolitan Ave), Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
http://thechangeyouwanttosee.org

SUNDAY – JANUARY 10th

Panel Discussion: “Selling the Sky: Carbon Trading and the Failure of Copenhagen.” With Dr. Michael Dorsey, Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College, Cecil Corbin-Mark of West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT) and Brian Tokar of the Institute for Social Ecology. (also invited but not yet confirmed: Patrick Bond, University of South Africa and Joan Yang, Deputy Ambassador from Palau)
WHEN: Sunday Jan. 10, at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: Unity Hall, 235 W. 23rd St., between 7th and 8th Avenues (1, C, E, F, or V train to 23rd St.)

MONDAY – JANUARY 11th

Presentation and discussion: Climate Change: From COP15 to Climate Justice Movement, with Tina Gerhardt (journalist, academic, activist just returned from Copenhagen)
WHEN: Monday Jan 11 at 7 p.m.
WHERE: Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street (between Houston and Delancey)

TUESDAY – JANUARY 12th

Tuesday, Jan 12 at noon: Press Event: Featuring Climate Scientist JAMES HANSEN and FATHER PAUL MAYER, founder of the Climate Crisis Coalition and representing concerned members of the religious community.

WEDNESDAY- JANUARY 13th

Protest and Rally outside of the Carbon Trading Summit (Embassy Suites Hotel)
WHEN: Wednesday Jan. 13th, 12 noon
WHERE: Irish Hunger Memorial Park

(Nearest stop: World Trade Center (E train): walk 1 block south to Vesey St., turn right (west), cross West St., and continue west past the Embassy Suites Hotel to the Irish Hunger Memorial.

OR: From Chambers St. station (A, C, 1, 2, 3): 5 short blocks south to Vesey St., continue as above.
OR: From City Hall station (R, W) or Park Place (2, 3): 2-3 blocks south to Vesey St., continue as above.

What is carbon trading and why is it a false solution that blocks positive alternatives?
Corporations are claiming the atmosphere as a private commodity and buying and selling “rights” to pollute it. Manipulation of these “rights” – in combination with so-called “offsets” (projects that claim to reduce emissions on their behalf, but most often do not) – will allow the industry to stonewall real pollution reductions for another 15 to 20 years, with devastating consequences for all life on earth. Carbon markets in the European Union have proven extremely volatile, prone to manipulation and gaming, and they do not help reduce emissions.

Eight million people viewed Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff video since December 2007, and her new nine-minute Story of Cap and Trade (http://www.zcommunications.org/zvideo/3310) received 400,000 hits in the two weeks after its December 1 launch.

The film, produced by Free Range Studios, was developed in collaboration with the Durban Group for Climate Justice and Climate Justice Now! networks, which  joined Climate Justice Action and other networks to put tens of thousands of activists on the streets of Copenhagen, London and dozens of other cities in recent days, demanding large emissions cuts, the payment of ecological debt to climate victims, and the decommissioning of carbon markets.

But critics abound, so what trends can we discern from the sometimes venomous feedback to Story of Cap and Trade, and what do these tell us about US and global climate politics? Consider three categories:

• libertarian climate change denialists;
• Big Green groups and other carbon trading supporters; and
• self-interested green capitalists.

To start, rightwing extremists are easiest to dismiss because they deny that climate change is a product of human/economic activity – but there’s a schizophrenic double agenda. For although they’re pro-business, libertarians like Fox tv’s Glenn Beck oppose market-based cap-and-trade schemes.

The most dangerous, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, denies ‘that we’re going to pass a cap-and-trade or we’re going to do something on emissions reduction,’ as he told the rightwing NewsMax agency on Sunday.

Australian climate denialists now control the official opposition party, having overthrown its leader last month due to his cap-and-trade endorsement, in the process halting the state’s proposed emissions trading scheme (http://agmates.ning.com/forum/topics/canberra-protest-rally-live?commentId=3535428%3AComment%3A9579).

Those of us fighting carbon markets certainly *don’t* want alliances with cretins like Inhofe or intrepid videoblogger Lee Doran. After a clumsy rebuttal to The Story of Stuff, Doran offered another zany video-attack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWjGZNDEH-A), in which he first agrees with the demolition of cap-and-trade, but then replies to Annie’s charge that rich-world overconsumption victimizes those least responsible for global warming:

Annie: ‘Did you know that in the next century, because of the changing climate, whole island nations could end up underwater?’

Lee: ‘Yes, and islands will emerge from the water too, it’s part of the natural cycle of the planet.’ (minute 6)

Enough said about flat-earth libertarian ideologues.

In the second group we find both pro-market ‘green’ ideologues – i.e., ‘always find a market solution for a market problem!’ – and well-meaning environmental advocates operating under conditions not of their own choosing within Washington’s adverse balance of forces.

From at least 1997, when Al Gore shoved cap-and-trade into the Kyoto Protocol with the soon-to-be-broken promise that Washington would then endorse the climate treaty, many greens who earlier criticized market solutions concluded that the market was the only game in town, due to prevailing power relations.

But instead of trying to change those power relations, most of Washington’s Big Green groups held their noses and went to work expanding carbon trading from London to the Chicago Climate Exchange, joined by like-minded academics and green policy wonks.

Along the way some turned eco-egotistical about their chosen trade. Eric de Place of Sightline Institute takes the policy critique personally: ‘All these years that tens of thousands (sic) of folks like me have worked long hours at low pay (or no pay) to hash out a workable and effective climate policy and it turns out that our purported allies like Leonard would rather paint us as duplicitous bankers in pin-striped suits.’

Notwithstanding the long underpaid hours hustling cap-and-trade – wasted, if judged by the subsequent evidence of carbon market failures – de Place’s injured tone is misplaced. As Annie did in fact acknowledge, ‘Some of my friends who really care about our future support cap and trade. A lot of environmental groups that I respect do too. They know it’s not a perfect solution and don’t love the idea of turning our planet’s future over to these guys, but they think that it is an important first step and that it’s better than nothing.’

However, as the film demonstrates, carbon trading is not better than nothing, it’s far worse than nothing. As the US’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, insisted in the New York Times last week, a Senate bill or Copenhagen deal based on cap-and-trade are indeed worse than no bill, no deal: carbon trading ‘actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate’ (www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/opinion/07hansen.html).

Ideologically, the market environmentalists risk sliding down a dangerous slope. For instance, amongst conservationists in both Southern Africa (where I live) and Seattle (where de Place lives) this question has been posed: should markets be relied upon to preserve threatened wildlife, even endangered species?

In our case, the challenge involves rhinos and elephants whose ivory tusks attract murderous poachers seeking riches in the East Asian aphrodisiac markets. Poachers have reduced the big animals’ populations dramatically in recent decades. In the Pacific Northwest, instead of aphrodisiacs, macho trophy hunters seek coastal grizzly bears for their fireplace mantels.

Market-environmentalists react with a simple formula, which – to quote Robert Mugabe – reduces life to a commodity: ‘They must pay to stay’ (http://baraza.wildlifedirect.org/2008/03/10/illegal-wildlife-trade-is-fueling-wars-in-africa/). Mugabe and his allies seduce hunters to visit Zimbabwe in order to maintain a ’sustainable’ herd for the killing pleasure of rich tourists (not ordinary Zimbabweans’ viewing pleasure).

De Place, too, defends the trophy industry: ‘I’m not sure that hunting is bad for the species being hunted’ (http://www.grist.org/article/to-save-a-species-shoot-here – and for a rebuttal by the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, see http://www.grist.org/article/raincoast-responds-to-eric-de-place ).

David Roberts of Grist (http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-01-annie-leonard-misses-the-mark-her-new-video-story-cap-and-trade/) also suffers pro-trading panic, calling the film ‘the perfect representation of all the confusion and misplaced focus that plagues the green left right now.’ In contrast, he confesses, ‘I’m generally viewed among greens as a defender of cap-and-trade-or, in the less charitable version, a defender of the “party line,” a shill for the administration, a sell-out “insider,” whatever.’

Quite. Roberts cannot defend the US and EU cap-and-trade systems’ free pollution allowances and billions of tons of offsets, rebutting that we should criticize not carbon markets, simply prevailing legislation. But the dreadful Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer carbon-trading bills were complemented in mid-December by Senator Joe Lieberman – ‘This is the market-based system for punishing polluters previously known as “cap and trade”‘ – to now include offshore drilling for oil and natural gas, nuclear energy and ‘clean coal’ scamming.

Another new bill offered by Senators Maria Cantwell and Sue Collins last week was endorsed by de Place and his colleague Alan Durning even though it has only a 4% emissions reduction target for 2020 from 1990 levels. Go figure, the author of the great 1992 anti-consumption book How Much is Enough?, Durning, now calls this irresponsibly low target ’solid’ (http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-11-cantwells-cap-and-trade-bill-almost-genius/).

Ideally Kerry, Lieberman et al will be punished by Washington’s grid-lock, as the bills suffocate in Capitol Hill’s corporate pollution – a good thing, since their death would at least preserve the existing Clean Air Act, which all the main legislators except Cantwell-Collins threaten to gut.

Roberts grows yet more defensive on matters of principle: ‘I don’t know why the green left has decided that markets are bad, in and of themselves, but it seems both politically unwise and substantively thin.’ He *doesn’t know why*? Only a year after the world’s worst market failure in recorded history, with global trade and financial indicators far lower after eighteen months than a similar period in 1929-31?!

Aside from concern about the self-destructive tendency of financial markets which host carbon trading (witness the EU Emissions Trading Scheme collapses in April 2006 and October 2008), the green left offers many substantively thick arguments why business environmentalism is flawed, and why commodifying natural resources – like the air, in carbon trading – generates systemic market failures.

For example, Africa’s greatest political economist, Samir Amin, has just penned a damning attack on environmental markets (http://seminario10anosdepois.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/the-battlefields-chosen-by-contemporary-imperialism/#more-37), as has University of Oregon professor John Bellamy Foster (http://sociology.uoregon.edu/faculty/foster.php): The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/ecologicalrevolution.php). Either can assist Roberts to plug the gaping holes in his pro-market consciousness.

Roberts doesn’t seem to understand the severe dangers associated with an anticipated $3 trillion in carbon trades by 2020, which will become the basis for further trade in financial derivatives, for he derides the film’s warning about Wall Street speculation: ‘Leonard et al. seem instead to have decided that “market Goldman Sachs derivatives bugga bugga!” suffices.’

But Roberts, de Place and NRDC policy director David Doniger (http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ddoniger/the_rest_of_the_story_of_cap_a.html) dare not trash the film’s proposed solutions, such as stronger EPA regulatory enforcement and citizen activism (e.g. West Virginia mountaintop defense). There is greater potential to push the EPA into action – in spite of misgivings by NewEnergyNews’ Herman Trabish (http://newenergynews.blogspot.com/2009/12/oversimple-story-of-cap-and-facts.html) – than to win legislation regulating carbon within ill-functioning, untransparent financial markets, in which ‘too big to fail’ deregulatory freedom was amplified by Bush-Obama’s 2008-09 bailouts.

The third critical group includes green technocrats with financial self-interest. That may explain why at least one of them – Adam Stein from TerraPass – is so very cross, absurdly entitling his attack on the film, ‘Why does Annie Leonard hate the environment?’ (http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/why-does-annie-leonard-hate-the-environment, and another is carbon consultant Gay Harley,http://carboncommentary.blogspot.com/2009/12/no-rest-in-copenhagen.html).

Stein claims, ‘cap and trade and carbon taxes are functionally equivalent policies’ – but they’re not. As Hansen points out, carbon fees would easily withstand the scamming and price volatility so notorious in the carbon markets.

Ultimately, for Stein, ‘one criterion clearly stands above all others: which policy actually stands a chance of passage in the US Congress?’ Unmentioned, for obvious reasons (the Congress being a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business) is that a carbon trading policy only enjoys the ’strong support’ of a meager 2% of the US voting population, who ‘favor a carbon tax over cap-and-trade by nearly two-to-one,’ according to a Hart Research survey (http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/19351).

But given Washington’s adverse power relations, a genuine climate policy must avoid the corporate-ruled Congress for now, and instead focus on command/control by the EPA. (To be sure, a stronger EPA would also rule many of TerraPass’s own projects – especially those methane-electricity landfill conversions that undermine zero-waste strategies – as unworthy of green investment.)

Of all the film’s supposed errors, says Stein, ‘my favorite for sheer chutzpah, if not for actual importance, is when Leonard dings Kyoto because “energy costs jumped for consumers.”‘

But Stein may want to look at what European consumers now see: no net emissions reductions on the one hand, and on the other, massive criminality in the EU’s carbon trading scheme (Europol estimates five billion euros have been stolen in tax fraud, as just one example), alongside regressive energy price increases (the poorest suffer a much higher burden of expenses than the wealthy, and are least able to make the transition to the post-carbon economy).

So when the film refers to higher EU energy costs, this is not chutzpah, it’s critical realism. No one more than Annie is committed to raising consumption costs appropriately so as to deter waste; Story of Stuff’s viewers learned of unaccounted-for eco-social externalities that should be internalized in her $4.99 radio, for instance.

Actually, the most telling contribution to the critiques of our cap-and-trade critique comes from an unlikely source: Charles Krauthammer (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121003163.html). The despicable neocon columnist fused all three hostile narratives when he wrote, last Friday, against the EPA: ‘Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend clean-air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation. Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn’t lurking in CIA cloak. He’s knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.’

Sorry, the big brother who so frightens Krauthammer is far bigger than a beleaguered Washington environmental agency and far more dangerous to corporate profits than pro-market ‘green’ critics of The Story of Cap and Trade actually comprehend: simply, a new global movement known as Climate Justice.

(Patrick Bond, a content advisor to The Story of Cap and Trade, has written widely on the climate crisis:http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,68,3,1887.)

http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/n30-day-of-action/reportbacks-day-of-action/

Contacts:

Brian Tokar, 802-229-0087 briant@pshift.com

Rachel Smolker, 802-482-2848 rsmolker@riseup.net

A controversial article posted last week on a popular environmental website has inadvertently highlighted environmentalists’ skepticism toward the cap-and-trade provisions of climate legislation now before the US Congress. The article, posted on the environmental news site Grist.org on October 1st, was titled “‘No compromise’ faction attacks climate bill,” and attempted to dismiss the activities of Climate SOS (climatesos.org) and other groups highly critical of the legislation, as far outside the environmental mainstream. A review of comments posted in response to the article tells a very different story, according to members of the Climate SOS network.

Out of 55 original, non-duplicate comments posted to the Grist.org site by mid-day October 6th, 34 were critical of the article and of the “cap-and-trade” approach to limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Fourteen comments defended the legislation and/or supported the article’s point of view, and five others were ambiguous or uncertain in their position. While far from a scientific poll, comments on mainstream environmental websites such as Grist are seen as a useful indicator of the views of environmentally concerned readers.

“We feel tremendously vindicated by Grist readers’ response to this article,” said Brian Tokar, director of the Institute for Social Ecology, a founding member of the Climate SOS network. “People seeking real solutions to the climate crisis know that creating a carbon market in the US is not an effective way to reduce emissions. It hasn’t worked in Europe or elsewhere where it has been tried. It is no accident that many of the most polluting companies support cap-and-trade, and worked actively with corporate-friendly environmental groups such as NRDC and Environmental Defense in helping craft the current legislation.”

Since the Waxman-Markey climate bill passed the US House in June, several hundred national and regional environmental groups have signed letters and statements strongly critical of the bill. Letters were initiated by groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity, as well as the Climate SOS network. They argued that the House version of the bill falls far short of scientifically valid targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, removes the EPA’s authority to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act, and incorporates massive, unjustifiable corporate giveaways into its cap-and-trade program. Corporations would be able to defer needed emissions reductions for decades under the bill’s generous offset provisions.

Dr. Rachel Smolker, representing Biofuelwatch and Climate SOS, said, “The Senate bill released last week by Sens. Kerry and Boxer can hardly be considered an improvement. The article in Grist attempted to marginalize our ‘no-compromise’ approach, but many knowledgeable environmentalists recognize that the time for compromise is long past. We were pleased to see the support that people expressed, and hope they will join us in actively demanding real solutions to climate change. The US continues to avoid taking meaningful action and is obstructing international negotiations. If we do not demand the changes that are necessary, who will?”

“The Senate bill claims slightly stronger emission reduction targets by doctoring the numbers, but its targets are still far below what scientists agree is needed,” said Dr. Maggie Zhou of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. “The current bill would partially reinstate some of EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which many recognize would be much more effective than a carbon market at regulating emissions, but it turns out that the EPA authority is simply a bargaining chip.” Senator Kerry was quoted last week saying that EPA authority over greenhouse gases was retained largely to provide “some negotiating room as we proceed forward” with the bill.

In contrast to the current legislation, Climate SOS network members support alternative approaches such as direct, revenue-neutral carbon charges coupled with equal dividend distribution, aggressive energy efficiency and renewable energy standards, and an end to subsidies for fossil fuels, nuclear power, biomass incineration and other false climate solutions.

Jonathan Hiskes, 

GRIST; Oct 1 2009

The article is interesting sort of, but most interesting is the reaction. See comments following the article (as well as pics and link to video) at Grist website here:

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-01-climate-bill-attacked-from-the-far-left/

Briefly:

Activists handed out fake $2 trillion bills at a rally for climate legislation in New York last week, criticizing the size of the global-warming emissions market they oppose. ($2 trillion is their estimate for the size of the emissions market they oppose.) The bills depict Al Gore holding a wrench and a compact-fluorescent light bulb and the words “Corporate Giveaways! Carbon Ponzi Schemes! FALSE SOLUTIONS!”

Others hung a 14-foot banner of the same bill from the Manhattan headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“Cap’n Trade,” an actor in a pirate costume, unfurled a similar banner at a presentation by Connie Hedegaard, chairperson of the Dec. 2009 UN Climate Summit and Denmark’s minister for climate and energy.

Still others blocked a motorcade of UN delegates to drop a banner with the message “Cap + Trade is a Dead End.”

At least three groups worked together on last week’s events—Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, and “Greenwash Guerrillas,” which pied Thomas Friedman last year. They all hold a “no compromise” philosophy on climate-change action, opposing carbon markets that allow polluters to buy and sell pollution credits and arguing that larger environmental groups such as NRDC have compromised too much in working with businesses and Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s an awkward position to be environmentalists working on climate change but opposing a climate bill,” said Climate SOS organizer Rachel Smolker, a Vermont ecologist and author. “Especially with a new administration that we want to support. But we felt we need to take a really strong position because this [bill] is so inadequate.”

The campaign is awkward for “establishment” green groups too. They’ve been preparing to battle fossil-fuel interests over the energy bill introduced in the Senate this week. Now they must figure out if and how to respond to this attack from the far left.

“It’s troubling,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “No one believes that the clean energy bill that will come out of Congress will address the threat of global warming in a single step. But we have to start.”

“The real enemies are Big Oil and Big Coal and the right wing attack machine,” he said. “For them to mock [Gore] in the way they did shows that they don’t understand you need to attack your enemies and not your allies.”

Hansen’s involvement is especially troublesome. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wasn’t involved in the New York stunts, but he endorsed Climate SOS’s recent tour against a climate bill. The $2 trillion bill includes his statement that a cap-and-trade program “would be worse for the environment than doing nothing.”

The opposition by Hansen and Climate SOS is unlikely to influence Washington policymakers, in Weiss’s opinion, but it’s got the potential to make everyday Americans think the situation is hopeless.

“If they hear from such a respected scientist as James Hansen that what Congress is doing won’t matter, then why would they bother to call their senators to say ‘Act on this’?” he said.

What does that even mean?

Aside from the stunts last week, other moves by the “no-compromise” camp are downright perplexing. Last week Greenwash Guerrillas launched a website in response to Cleanenergyworks.us, a three-month-old diverse coalition supporting a comprehensive energy bill. The similar-sounding Cleanenergyworks.biz was a replica of the real Clean Energy Works site, with two notable changes: The phone number and email address for spokesperson Josh Dorner had been changed. His name was left the same. The site changed to a more innocuous version over the weekend and is currently down. (Have a screen grab? Send it in and we’ll post.)

Dorner had no interest in speaking about the site that took his name. “I don’t send too much of my day worrying about a website,” he said Thursday. “There are considerably more important tasks before us to get this bill across the Senate floor.”

NRDC spokesperson Michael Oko shared Dorner’s reluctance to give attention to the stunts. “There are a lot of different groups out there,” he said in regard to the banner hung at NRDC’s office. “Everybody has the right to express themselves.”

About the replica website Oko said, “Frankly, I was a little confused about what their intention was.”

Smolker of Climate SOS said the idea was “to provide a spoof, to reveal the emptiness of the claims Clean Energy Works provides. For them, it’s green jobs and clean energy and everything’s a smiley-face, you know? Our goal is to tell people to look deeper and take the smiley faces off.”

She said she contributed ideas for the mock site, but individuals from Greenwash Guerrillas, who did not want to be identified, created the idea.

The 51-year-old Smolker has seen firsthand how environmental groups can evolve, professionalize, and grow in wealth and influence. Her father was one of the founders of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another group targeted by Climate SOS last week. EDF met in her childhood home when it was still a “ragtag group,” as Climate SOS is now, she said. (Smolker, who works for Biofuel Watch, declined to give funding information for Climate SOS but said all members were volunteers.)

“We’ve played that compromise game for a long time,” she said. “There’s too much at stake right now.”

The old saw

The compromise question—whether to sacrifice what is ecologically necessary for what seems politically possible—has been around as long as the green movement itself. The naturalist-and-mystic John Muir and the politician-and-forester Gifford Pinchot clashed over the same tensions in the early 20th century.

As for Hansen’s “worse than nothing” remark, there has been plenty written about the failings of the House climate and energy bill—it gives away too much to dirty-energy backers, it even protects coal-plant pollution from further regulation. But there is historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala notes.

“If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist,” writes Begala. “Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start.”

Most progressives, including many major green groups, would gladly embrace an imperfect climate bill as a start.

“Those who see the House clean energy bill as somehow tainted by deals, and therefore want a carbon tax, have to understand that no tax proposal would ever emerge from Congress as we know it without similar or worse deals being made,” said Weiss. “Unfortunately the moral high ground of ‘we must act for our children’ is necessary but not sufficient for our political process.”

Smolker said Climate SOS would continue on a different tack, insisting on an acceptable bill from the get-go. She expected the group would pause to take stock of the bill released in the Senate this week, then regroup.

Climate SOS, a coalition of scientists and activists who support science- and environmental justice-based climate legislation, today characterized the draft Senate bill, called the “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act” which was introduced on Wednesday by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) as an “irresponsible non-solution.”

They maintain that any bill that embraces cap and trade, offsets, outrageously inadequate emission reduction targets, and counter-solutions such as biomass burning, nuclear power and more coal fired power plants (under the guise of partial carbon capture technology that is as yet unavailable) will fail to meet its stated goal of forestalling catastrophic climate change.

Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Citizens Climate Lobby, Center for Biological Diversity and others have also rejected the Senate bill for its lack of grounding in science and its failure to consider global environmental justice concerns.

Maggie Zhou, a Climate SOS organizer, and project coordinator with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, said “Cap and trade is the worst choice for pricing carbon. It is proven ineffective even in its best incarnations, is influence-prone, creates a huge, risky, game-able carbon market that is extremely complex, subject to manipulations, whose likely bubble-bust will overshadow the mortgage or the dot com bubble.  While cap and trade is the scheme of choice for polluters and Wall Street executives, a revenue-neutral carbon tax-and-dividend program would be much more straightforward, equitable, less prone to fraud and gaming, and would compensate people, not corporations, for the costs of pricing carbon.” She added “The US forced cap and trade into the Kyoto protocol, which we didn’t even ratify.  It’s time to correct that mistake, and lead the world in implementing a much more sensible system that could simplify global efforts on fighting climate change, that has a real chance of success.”

“It is no consolation that the Senate sets superficially more ambitious goals for emission reductions than the House,” said BiofuelWatch co-director and Climate SOS spokesperson Rachel Smolker. “While the House bill required landfill gas to be captured, the Senate bill allows those projects to be used as offsets to allow additional emissions from smokestacks.  This slight of hand allows politicians to claim ‘stronger targets’ when in fact it’s all number-smithing.  Dire predictions from climate scientists make it clear that even if all the offset provisions are stripped away, the stated targets in both the Senate and the House bills (which are at most a few percentage point cuts below 1990 emissions by 2020) are still pathetically trivial, unable to even approach a greenhouse gas stabilization at 450 parts-per-million (ppm), while it is becoming clear that the safe level is no more than 350 ppm, way below what’s already in the air today (387 ppm).  In introducing an ineffective legislation, the senators send a poor message to Copenhagen and condemn us to climate chaos.”

The Senate bill is modeled upon the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), passed by the House of Representatives late June. In the past month, members of climate SOS, lead by Duff Badgley, founder of One Earth Climate Action Group, met with senate staffers in North Dakota, Indiana, Ohio, and Arkansas in an effort to rally opposition to the false climate bill on environmental grounds.  “Voting against such a poor bill would in fact be the environmentally responsible choice”, said Badgley.  Last week, the coalition also joined forces with activists from Rising Tide North America and many climate justice groups in actions from east to west coast, exposing the polluter-protection nature of the “landmark climate legislation”. Their voices were heard inside and outside the police blockade of the UN climate summit in NYC, at the Danish environment minister’s lecture that urged US to pass this false climate bill, and outside offices of big corporate green groups such as NRDC, Environmental Defense, and Nature Conservancy.

Contacts:

-Rachel Smolker, PhD. Co-Director: Biofuel Watch biofuelwatch.org 802.482.2848(o), 802.735.7794(m), rsmolker@riseup.net,

-Maggie Zhou, PhD.  Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities securegreenfuture.org 781.316.8283 maggie@securegreenfuture.org

-Duff Badgley, Founder, One Earth Climate Action Group, 206.283.0621 duff@climatesos.org

Groups endorsing Climate SOS include the Energy Justice Network, Indigenous Environmental Network, Institute for Social Ecology, Massachusetts Powershift, Mobilization for Climate Justice network, Progressive Democrats of America, Rising Tide North America, Ruckus Society and many others. http://www.climatesos.org/about-us/members/

Climate SOS platform: http://www.climatesos.org/our-platform/platform/

The world watched last week’s U.N. climate summit in anxious anticipation, hopeful that our “yes we can” president would say something earth shattering, or at least encouraging. Instead, President Barack Obama promised nothing more than that the U.S. is “determined to take action” on climate change.

While the Maldives are sinking, and floods, droughts, hurricanes and melting Arctic ice are daily headlines, all he can say is that we are “determined”? This is disturbingly reminiscent of George W. Bush stating that the U.S. “aspires” to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

What did we want our new president to say? That the U.S. would take on strong binding emissions-reduction targets and pony up the funding required to assist the developing world in coping with the consequences of warming; that we have the laws in place, or at least shortly forthcoming, and are ready to do our part to end the stalemate and engage meaningfully with international negotiation processes!

Outside of the summit, in the bright heart of Central Park in New York City, a collaborative effort involving Avaaz and Oxfam was organized, intended to kick off a “Global Wake Up Call” on climate. People reveling in the gorgeous weather were recruited to participate in an “aerial art” project illustrating that time is running out for addressing the climate crisis and that we must act now.

Yes, but what exactly should that action look like? Are they asking for the Senate to pass a bill like the one that cleared the House in June?

The devil, as always is in the details. While many heralded the House climate bill as a great achievement, those who have peeked behind the mirrors and read between the lines, are faced with a serious quandary: while supporting the call for strong action, they find the House’s American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA) to be such an abomination that notables like NASA climate scientist James Hansen, have called it “worse for the environment than doing nothing.” Oops!

Why has Hansen said this, and why do many others agree?

For one thing, ACESA would have us adopt a cap-and-trade mechanism to bring down emissions. Many have been critical of this approach because where it has been tried, it has proved profitable to polluters and ineffective at reducing global-warming pollution.

It creates a very large, complex and inscrutable artificial market that runs the risk of being brought to its knees, just as any other market. ACESA sets absurdly meek targets, a 1 to 4 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2020. But even that would be rendered meaningless by the large offset provisions.

According to analysis by the International Rivers Network, if the 2 billion tons of allowed offsets were used, the U.S. would carry on business as usual, with rising greenhouse-gas emissions, through 2029.

ACESA would also seek to repeal EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, essentially removing the one regulatory tool that we have in place.

And, the renewable-energy provisions of ACESA is a nightmare for those concerned with the growing tendency to offer up the world’s forests, grasslands and biodiversity as “renewable energy” to be burned in power plants as “carbon neutral,” or refined into biofuels for cars.

The Peterson Amendment forced into ACESA by the House Agriculture Committee, would exempt agriculture, one of the most-polluting sectors, from the cap, and instead establish a massive agriculture and forestry offsetting program.

This would enable polluters to offset their emissions by supporting practices like “no till.” But no till generally involves industrial farming of genetically engineered soy, and without tilling, more toxic chemical weed killers are used. These practices can hardly be considered “climate friendly.” Regulation of these offsets, would be taken from the EPA and handed over to the agribusiness-friendly USDA.

The environmental integrity of such land-based offsets is suspect, one reason that the “clean development mechanism” of the Kyoto Protocol limited the use of forestry-based offsets and has thus far not delved into agricultural offsets. Measuring emissions from a smokestack is easy compared to measuring those from a farmed field or forest!

Even if one were to hold faith in the reliability of offsets, the bottom line is that actual, verifiable reductions, not offsets are essential at this point. Smoke and mirrors simply will not fool Mother Nature.

The international community has made it crystal clear that it expects developed countries like the U.S. to adopt strong emission-reduction targets, and also to help pay the ecological debt that is owed to the “developing” world. International negotiations have been stalemated over this issue now for some time, so one would hope that a U.S. climate bill would provide something substantial along these lines, but not so.

According to Friends of the Earth:

The costs of adapting to climate change in the developing world are estimated at $86 billion a year by 2015; estimates for financing a clean-energy transition and tropical forest protection in the developing world are between $65 billion and $120 billion a year. Starting at $500 million a year for adaptation, $500 million for clean technology, and $2.5 billion for tropical forest protection, the ACES Act does not come close to what the U.S. contribution would need to be for these efforts.

So, as the planet heats up, so does the political landscape: the lack of firm action on behalf of the U.S. led one E.U. minister to refer to the state of climate debate in the U.S. as “prehistoric.”

Indeed, when even in the halls of Congress the conversation frequently devolves into debates over whether climate change is real or not, one cannot help but agree.

Equally frustrating and prehistoric is the role of the most corporate-friendly environmental groups, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Nature Conservancy for example, who are all members of the U.S. “Climate Action Partnership” with Dow, Shell, Alcoa, Duke, BP and the big three automakers, among other major polluters.

With their access to Washington lawmakers, they served to lay out the major features of the climate bill, ensuring that tradeable emissions, freely allocated permits and offsets were embraced, and hence, the impacts of climate-change legislation on corporate bottom lines minimized. Now these “big greens” appeal to their members to encourage legislators to pass the bill.

For the average concerned citizen, a climate bill sounds like a good idea, and calls for strong action on climate are sincere. But not any old climate bill will do.

Without being more informed and more specific about what they are asking for, many are hoodwinked into simply throwing the doors wide open to a panoply of false solutions and misleading scams while slamming the doors on the many more effective possibilities that should be, and could be, considered. Strong climate action indeed, but best be clear what you ask for!

In an attempt to counter the progress of a climate bill that would be “worse than nothing,” a new coalition of activists, calling itselfClimate SOS also showed up in New York this past week.

Believing that the climate bill is inadequate and manipulated by special interests, members handed out faux $2 trillion bills (the future value, by some estimates, of the carbon market), featuring Al Gore brandishing a compact fluorescent bulb in one hand and a monkeywrench in the other.

An enlarged banner image of the bill was presented at Columbia University to the Danish minister of environment, who will be chairing the upcoming U.N. climate negotiations in Copenhagen and is a rock-hard advocate of cap-and-trade and carbon markets.

Offering a U.S. climate “bill” ahead of the Copenhagen schedule, activists led by “Cap’n Trade,” dressed in pirate regalia, told the assembled crowd: ” ‘Tis a bloody shame for the climate that Congress has chosen me to clean up this mess for ‘em. But I don’t mind a bit, ’cause rising seas and booty and plunder are just my thing, and soon the land, air and water will be all mine.”

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, activists with the Mobilization for Climate Justice gathered under the intimidating threat of police crackdowns. They marched outside of the G20 meeting with banners reading “Corporations out of Copenhagen” and “Our Climate is Not Your Business,” as the leading economies met inside to discuss their vision for the fate of the planet.

A week earlier, a large protest was staged at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., and a message delivered opposing the ACESA and calling for “climate justice or climate chaos.”

In the countdown to Copenhagen, a movement is growing, as people increasingly recognize not only what is at stake, but also see through the veils of deceit that have left policy makers in the stranglehold of corporate greed, offering nothing more than greenwashed versions of “business as usual.”

This new movement recognizes that the numerous crises — the climate, economy, ecology, food and human rights — are all growing from the same roots. The only path forward from here, they say, is one that places justice equity and ecology at the core, not corporate profiteering.

Summing it up eloquently was Ana Pinto, a speaker with the Global Justice Ecology Project’s “New Voices for Climate Change,” who said: “Climate justice is not abstract. It’s practical, it’s about survival. It’s about need against greed.”

In spite of police crackdowns, the demand for survival, not greed, will not be silenced.

Rachel Smolker is co-director of Biofuelwatch and is an organizer with Climate SOS. She has Ph.D. in biology from the University of Michigan. After spending many years studying ecology and zoology in natural ecosystems, she turned her attention to climate change and activism. She has written extensively on biofuels and biomass, written the report, “The Real Cost of Agrofuels: Food, Forests, People and Climate,” and is a longtime participant in the global climate justice movement. She lives in Vermont.

The West Coast Convergence for Climate Justice consisted of 3 days of plenary speeches, workshops, and strategy sessions, followed by a non-violent direct action on Monday, September 21st. Workshops and plenary sessions placed the local struggle against Chevron in the broader context of the movement for climate justice leading up to the Copenhagen climate negotiations. Speakers emphasized the role of corporations like Chevron in watering down climate policy and drew connections between the Richmond fight and other frontline community struggles, including those against tar sands in Canada and against the Dooda Desert Rock power plant in New Mexico. Other workshops focused on organizing skills and on local solutions, from urban gardening to local climate action plans. According to Carla Perez, one of the conference organizers, “the convergence was a gathering of stellar minds & hearts rooted in community organizing for social and ecological justice. It brought clarity and a deep understanding of the root causes of the climate problem and inspired Richmond leaders to connect their local work to this global struggle for a livable future.”

On Monday, September 21st, conference participants demonstrated outside of Senator Barbara Boxer’s office and outside of Chevron’s “Energy Solutions” office in downtown San Francisco demanding that corporations be kept out of climate policy. Some participants went in to deliver a letter to Senator Boxer’s office, asking her to design a climate bill that will not rely on corporate solutions to climate change like carbon offsets but rather will deliver meaningful emissions reductions while respecting the needs and role of frontline communities. “Congress should never consider adopting a climate bill (the American Clean Energy & Security Act) that was written by big oil and energy corporations in the first place”, said Ananda Lee Tan of Rising Tide North America, ” Along with massive subsidies to oil, coal, nuclear, bio-fuels and incinerator industries, cap and trade legislation will only serve to add hundreds of toxic smokestacks in our backyards.”

Participants took over the intersection in front of Chevron’s offices, where they unfurled a giant parachute banner reading, “Climate Justice or Climate Chaos?” to emphasize that false, corporate solutions will lead to dangerous climate chaos.

The West Coast Convergence for Climate Justice and Action is part of an annual series of climate convergences & climate camps all over the world.   Climate camps started in August 2006, when 600 people gathered at the UK’s biggest single source of carbon dioxide, Drax coal-fired power station in West Yorkshire for ten days of learning and sustainable living, which culminated in a day of mass action against the power station. This year, convergences are occurring in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, France, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, India, Ukraine, and the United States.

The West Coast Convergence for Climate Justice and Action was hosted by the Mobilization for Climate Justice – West Coast, a coalition of 35 environmental, social justice, and community organizations in the Bay Area.