NYC Carbon Trading Protest – Financial District, 1-13-2010

(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.

‘No Compromise’ Faction Attacks Climate Bill

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.

By Rachel Smolker, Alternet. Sept 30 2009
A new movement is demanding more from the president, Congress and even most major environmental groups in order to pass truly meaningful climate legislation.

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.

For Immediate Release:

Climate Activists Drop Banner Over UN Motorcade, Raise Warning of Ineffective “False Solutions” to Climate Change

New York, NY – Early Friday morning, at the end of the first week of the High Level meetings during Climate Week in New York, a caravan of police-escorted limousines and SUVs carrying UN delegates was delayed as they approached the 42nd street bridge.A 25 foot banner reading “UN: Cap + Trade is a Dead End” was deployed as the motorcade drew near.

A group referring to itself as the “Greenwash Guerrillas” claimed credit for the banner, and prior to a hasty departure threw leaflets down onto the stalled traffic articulating their demands:

(TEXT:)

We know a highly-developed campaign has been launched in the United States by the worst transnational corporate polluters, Wall Street financiers, and well-funded professional enviros along with their lesser-funded camp-followers to pass a bill, any bill, possessing the namesake of ‘the climate’;

We hold that polluting corporations have never advocated for anything that would harm their bottom line, their short-term profits or their shareholders;

We recognize that Wall Street financiers, responsible for a world-wide economic recession due to a speculative bubble collapse, have set their sites on a $14 trillion carbon trading system as a means of reviving their fortunes;

We know that corporate polluters have effectively defanged the mainstream US environmental movement.  Many organizations that appear to publicly support environmental defense are welcoming disastrous policy within the US and the leadup to the December COP15 Climate Talks in Copenhagen.  The mainstream environmental movement has become little more than a sounding board for corporate sponsors of profit-generating climate change legislation.

As a people, we cannot define the systematic destruction of our environment, the unprecedented exctinction crisis, and oncoming impacts of climate catastrophe as a  money-making opportunity. We will not forget or forgive those who mindlessly, selfishly advocate a cap-and-trade system. The False Solutions agenda of the corrupt circles  of government at home and abroad will meet resistance.

Signed,

Agent Simple Green

The Greenwash Guerrillas

FROM THE  MOBILIZATION FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE

For Immediate Release            22 September 2009

Actions Spreading Across the U.S. Against Corporate-Driven Climate Policy

Climate SOS spokesperson Rachel Smolker (BioFuelWatch) chimes in at Keith Farnish’s The Unsuitablog.

“Lots of mainstream enviros, especially those involved in the US Climate Action Partnership, are promoting the recent house climate bill as a great step forward. Then there are a bunch more who think it is “better than nothing”…or “the best we can get under the circumstances…”

“This would seem a bit too compromised given the near daily reports about how climate change is the greatest threat of all to national security, that methane is spewing from the seafloor beds a million times faster than expected, the Arctic sea ice is melting 80 years ahead of IPCC’s worse case scenario predictions, and may be altogether gone in just a few years, setting in place the runaway warming associated with reduced albedo….and the island nations are sinking.

Read Rachel Smolker’s post
here.

Alex Kaplun, E&E Reporter, September 8

About 60 advocacy groups — including environmentalists, organized labor, hunters and fishers, and military veterans — announced the formation of a coalition today aimed at pushing a climate bill across the finish line in the Senate.

Clean Energy Works’ campaign will feature grass-roots activities in 28 states, as well as paid media advertising. Among its members are the Sierra Club, Service Employees International Union, the American Values Network, VoteVets and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (more…)

(Tuesday, September 8, 2009) Darren Samuelsohn, E&E senior reporter

The Senate climate bill may be in limbo, but that has not stopped an onslaught of opinions about what the legislation should look like.

Letters, ad campaigns and even a few threats are piled up for lawmakers on the global warming issue as they return to Washington from their monthlong summer break. Read E&E’s coverage of Climate SOS…
(more…)

Press Release

posted on AfterDowningStreet.org –  http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/45728

A grassroots network of environmentalists, scientists, human rights and social justice activists and faith-based organizations concerned about climate change (more…)