Posts Tagged ‘biomass’

by Takver – Climate Indymedia

Greenpeace and Indigenous Climate activists in Indonesia have
unfurled a 20 metre by 30 metre banner protesting Deforestation
which said, “Obama you can stop this,” calling on President Obama to take
a leadership role in climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December
and at APEC in Singapore this weekend.
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article from grist:
by TOM PHILPOTT
What do industrially produced meat and corn-based ethanol have in common?

Well, they both thrive on the assumption that it’s good idea to devote vast swaths of land to an incredibly resource-intensive crop—corn—and then run that crop through an energy-sucking process to create a product of dubious value.

And .. they both got tagged as major drivers of climate change this past week.

Ethanol took the harder blow of the two, I think. It came wrapped in the Oct. 23 issue of Science. In a concise and devastating “policy forum” piece, a team of authors led by University of Minnesota researcher Tim Searchinger fingered a gaping defect in existing European and pending U.S. climate policy: biofuel gets treated as carbon-neutral, ignoring carbon emissions from land-use change. According to the paper ($ub req’d),  the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union’s cap-and-trade law, and the final version of Waxman-Markey (the House climate bill that passed over the summer) all contain the a “far-reaching but fixable flaw”:

[They] does not count CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

Or, as Searchinger put it to a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Literally, in theory, if you chopped up the Amazon, turned it into a parking lot, and burned the wood in a power plant, that would be treated as a carbon-emissions reduction strategy.”
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In ancient times some places we now know as vast arid deserts, or desert-like plains, were deeply forested and thrived with abundant wildlife. What happened? Human populations pushed the envelope too far. The human race has a distressing penchant for clear-cutting great stretches of forest to feed fires, build cities, sail fleets, graze herds, or do whatever. Making matters worse, we seem to have had little interest in replanting, or better yet, intelligently managing such forests. Some gruesome examples include the once “Fertile Crescent” in the Mideast; the ancient Mediterranean;Haiti in the Caribbean, but also in the more recent past, giant swaths of the Amazon.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Scientists, Activists Protest Corporate Control Over Climate Policy

Bryant Park –  Climate SOS, New York Climate Action Group, and members of Rising Tide North America protested what they called “a greenwashed U.S. climate agenda” at the opening of NYC Climate Week.  Activists distributed their version of the ACESA (American Clean Energy and Security Act) bill to event attendees and media in the form of fake $2 trillion bills which subtly depict a collusion of prominent Green NGOs (NRDC, the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund among others) with corporate backers of the bill (BP, Shell, Dow, and others).  Climate SOS organizers Dr. Rachel Smolker and Dr. Maggie Zhou engaged ceremony patrons with a pointed critique of the bill’s corporate-friendly implications.

Citing the overwhelming embrace of business CEOs at the upcoming climate summit, largely closed to the public, Smolker states:

“At the national and international level, special interest corporate lobbyists have held a stranglehold on climate policymaking. “Solutions” being offered are those most profitable and convenient to corporate polluters and their acquiescent faux ‘Green’ NGO allies.  The panoply of cap-and-trade, emissions offsets, genetically engineered organisms, and carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS) form a pipe-dream constellation of false solutions.  That these proposals are not met with the critique or rejection offered by scientists and grassroots movements illustrates the privileged access of corporations to the halls of the US Congress and the UN.”

“This focus on corporate-friendly solutions is leading us to certain annihilation,” states Dr. Maggie Zhou of the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities. The recently passed House climate bill HR 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), has been described by eminent world climatologist James Hansen “worse for the environment than doing nothing.” So many concessions were offered as it went through the House of Representatives that the bill was rendered entirely inadequate, setting weak targets that rely on risky market based cap-and-trade which has already proven itself failed in Europe.   So many offsets are proposed that no real reductions would occur for nearly 25 years.  Meanwhile, the US claims to be providing international leadership! We are in a crisis that threatens all of life on this planet, and yet the priority seems to be supporting corporate welfare and creating new markets rather than saving ourselves.”

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, activists make a similar statement on the occasion of the international coal conference and the G20. Three rivers climate convergence organizer Kim Teplitzky stated “The Coal Conference and the G-20 are a series of closed door meetings designed to further the same destructive systems that caused our current economic and climate crises, we want an end to these failed polices and institutions and instead solutions that value the health and safety of the 6 billion people of the world, not just the wallets of the few profiting from polluting our land, air and water.”

The same sentiment was echoed at a climate camp in Richmond, California organized by the Mobilization for Climate Justice west, which is planning an action at the Chevron refinery there today. The statement from the MCJ west stated, “OUR CLIMATE IS NOT THEIR BUSINESS!  Corporations have no place in domestic or international climate policy development.  We need just and science-based climate policy, not the bill currently in Congress.”

“Yes”, adds Dr. Smolker, “it is time that the interests of indigenous peoples, the poor, those living on melting ice and sinking islands, people coping with imminent hunger, and the public at large be granted full participation in policy decisions, while corporate CEO’s protest outside these events.”

Organizational Links & Info:
Climate SOS.org – http://www.climatesos.org
Mass. Coalition for Healthy Communities http://www.securegreenfuture.org

Rising Tide North America.org – http://www.risingtidenorthamerica.org

For information on activist responses to International Coal Conference
and G20 upcoming in Pittsburgh:

http://3riversconvergence.org/press

For a sense of the corporate lobbying on climate policy:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/1609/

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Rachel Smolker, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Biofuel Watch
Organizer, Climate S.O.S
Cell – 802.735.7794
rsmolker@climatesos.org

Maggie Zhou, Ph.D.
Program Coordinator, Massachusetts
Coalition for Healthy Communities
Cell – 339.368.0461
maggie@securegreenfuture.org

Climate SOS – www.climatesos.org
Rising Tide North America – www.risingtidenorthamerica.org
Mobilization for Climate Justice – www.actforclimatejustice.org
(north american resistance to the corporate COP15 climate agenda)
Climate Pledge of Resistance – www.beyondtalk.net

BioTech company Novozymes offers promises of greener futures through the re-engineering of our world without reductions or changes in behavior are another unfortunate mark of how the Corporations-Will-Save-Us mentality is putting us into one hell of a handbasket…  With biofuels/biomass – the math is bad, the solutions short-term, and the long-term impacts are abominable.

Below is the press release:

Novozymes to Share Insights at United Nations Summit on Climate Change

Biotech to play a leading role in achieving a low-carbon economy.

Franklinton, NC, USA – Heads of state, United Nations agency heads, and CEOs of the world’s top businesses will gather in New York on Tuesday, September 22, at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change to explore the role business and society can play in advancing global efforts to fight climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

CLIMATE SOS

TELL YOUR SENATORS A CLIMATE BILL THAT IS “WORSE THAN NOTHING” IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

This past June, the House passed the American Clean Energy & Security Act (ACESA). Soon, this bill will be voted on by the Senate. If passed, this climate bill would:

a. Prevent the U.S. from making anything remotely close to its fair share of greenhouse gas emissions reductions – necessary for averting catastrophic consequences and forging an effective global strategy on climate stabilization.

b. Lock us into an extremely complex cap-and-trade scheme that benefits fossil fuel, utilities, the Wall Street, and big agribusinesses, prone to Enron style market manipulations, while doing nothing to save the climate.

c. Use public money to subsidize the most polluting industries like coal and nuclear, drawing much needed financing away from real climate solutions like renewable energy production;

d. Add more toxic and climate polluting smokestacks, especially in backyards of the poor, people of color, and indigenous communities across the U.S., by grandfathering dirty old coal plants, permitting numerous new ones, and subsidizing incinerators as a form of renewable energy.

In the words of leading climate scientist James Hansen:

[ACESA would] “do more harm to the environment than doing nothing at all.”

Please contact your Senators and let them know that as a person deeply concerned about climate change, you want to see climate legislation passed, but ONLY IF IT IS REAL AND EFFECTIVE legislation, not like ACESA.

Click to join ClimateSOS

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Burning Forests for Electricity

By MICHAEL DONNELLY

“All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.”

—David Brower

Like one might expect from a Dr. Seuss character, the Once-ler of old has morphed into the Renew-ler in these “Sustainable” times. The modern day Thneed is electrical power. His allies are a mix of industrialists, politicians and co-opted “greens.” The end result: a forest vacuumed of all life; remains the same.

Coming Soon to a Forest Near You

On a daily basis of late, plans are unveiled for new biomass “renewable energy” electricity plants nationwide, complete with State and Federal “Renewable Energy Tax Credits.” Over 100 are already up and running or approved and under construction. Another 200 are in the approval process. Ten in Michigan; six in Arkansas; three in Massachusetts; two in Georgia; three in Maine; three in Florida; …even one in swanky Vail, Colorado. If a state has trees, it has a burner(s) on the drawing board. Of all the proposals working their way through state governments, only those in Oregon have been (so far) thwarted. There, Governor Ted Kulongoski has vetoed legislation giving the renewable tax credit designation to existing Timber Industry wood-to-electricity and existing garbage burner electricity plants that sailed through Oregon’s Democrat-dominated Legislature with GOP support. On the other hand, Kulongoski and Oregon have given their renewable energy tax imprimatur to giant wind farms. For some 3550 megawatts of peak production, Oregon is handing these private wind power producers a projected $144 million in tax subsidies this biennium alone. But, that’s a different part of the story.

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LISTEN TO THIS COMMENTARY

Here’s a great idea: Let’s bring into our country a genetically-engineered, non-native tree that is known to be wildly invasive, explosively flammable, and insatiably thirsty for ground water. Then let’s clone thousands of these living firecrackers and plant them in forested regions across seven Southern states, allowing them to grow, flower, produce seeds, and spread into native environments.

Yes, this would be irresponsible, dangerous, and stupid – but apparently “Irresponsible, Dangerous, and Stupid” is the unofficial slogan of the U.S. Department Agriculture. In May, with little consideration of the devastating consequences for our native environment, USDA cavalierly rubberstamped a proposal by a profiteering corporation named ArborGen to do all of the above.

Substantially owned by International Paper, ArborGen shipped tissue from Brazilian eucalyptus trees to its New Zealand laboratories, where it was genetically altered to have more cellulose. New Zealand, however, outlaws plantings of genetically-engineered crops, so ArborGen sought out a more corporate-compliant country: Ours. The engineered eucalyptus was waved right into the good ol’ USA to be cloned, and it’s now awaiting final approval for outdoor release in our land. Read the rest of this entry »