Posts Tagged ‘civil disobedience’
The Climate Movement is Dead… Long Live the Climate Movement!
March 2nd, 2010
Rising Tide North America is pleased to announce the release of our latest publication:
The Climate Movement is Dead… Long Live the Climate Movement!
In the aftermath of the COP15 talks in Copenhagen, the inability of the Big Greens, governments, and market approaches to find genuine and sustainable solutions to climate change is undeniable. As author Naomi Klein so aptly observed at the end of COP15 talks, “A particular model of dealing with climate change is dying.”
DOWNLOAD HERE [PDF]
In the same uncompromising spirit as Rising Tide publications such as Deal or No Deal, and Hoodwinked in the Hothouse, CMID:LLCM delivers a timely critique of the failures of this “particular model” as exemplified by the mainstream NGOs who have grown all too cozy with corporations and the political establishment. It explores the ways in which “green” capitalism,electoral politics, and market mechanisms, far from solving the climate crisis, are some of the climate movement’s biggest obstacles.
Not content with mere polemic, CMID:LLCM charts a course that diverges from the dominant discourse of the mainstream climate movement. The essay lays out a strategy of supporting and escalating frontline struggles againstdirty energy while building a new global climate movement from the ground up, based around core principles of climate justice, grassroots power, solidarity, and direct action.
The Climate Movement Is Dead: Long Live the Climate Movement is a must-read for anyone left disenchanted by the mainstream climate movement, and all who are ready to step it up and fight for climate justice.
You can download a digital copy to view online or print yourself.
Or send us an email to contact (at) risingtidenorthamerica (dot) org with your name, address, and how many copies you would like to receive. We are happy to provide this publication for free but as an all volunteer collective we greatly appreciate donations. Also consider joining in our print run collaboration:
Rising Tide North America is excited to announce a “Print-Run Collaboration” project for CMID:LLCM. Local groups and allies can help us raise the funds necessary for an initial print-run of several thousand copies, and in return, receive a big stack “hot-off-the-presses” at approximately the cost of printing (cheaper than photocopies!).
Click HERE to join in
Local Citizens ‘Die-in’ at Xcel HQ in Coal Protest (Colorado)
February 27th, 2010
Group calls on Xcel to Keep Comanche 3 Closed and Produce 100% Renewable Electricity by 2020
Denver, CO – At 11:45am on Friday, February 26th, local citizens demonstrated at the Denver headquarters of Xcel Energy – located at the corner of 17th St. and Lawrence St. – in protest of the utility’s impending plan to bring a new coal-fired power plant online in Pueblo, CO. The lunch hour protest called on Xcel executives to move Colorado in the right direction by keeping the Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant closed. Protestors demonstrated in a ‘die-in’ in front of the building’s main entrance to highlight the grim consequences that coal has on our lives and those of future generations. Simultaneously, two activists clad in hazmat suits dropped a banner off an adjoining bridge on Lawrence St. Police arrived on scene but no arrests were made.
The 750-megawatt Comanche Unit 3 would be the largest coal-fired power plant in the state, surpassing even the mammoth Cherokee coal plant in North Denver. “At a time when the costs of coal are becoming increasingly clear and the benefits of clean energy are ever more apparent, building the largest coal-fired power plant in the state is taking us 180 degrees in the wrong direction,” said Amy Guinan, an activist with Power Past Coal. Read the rest of this entry »
What are you going to do to raise the stakes this Fossil Fools Day?
February 23rd, 2010
Matt Wilkerson on It’s Getting Hot in Here
2 years ago I and several friends shut down construction at the site of the Cliffside Coal Plant in North Carolina. It was April 1st, Fossil Fools Day. After public hearings, petitions, legislative efforts, and protest failed, we knew we had to do something to up the ante in the fight against coal plants in this country. So it was that we found ourselves locked to Duke Energy’s bulldozers on that dark, drizzly morning.
Did we permanently stop the Cliffside construction site? No. However this action, along with the countless other actions like it by groups around the country, have greatly increased the cost, both politically and economically, of building coal plants in this country. While the construction at Cliffside continues, I feel confident that our direct actions, and those of others, is in part responsible for the wave of coal plants that have been canceled in the US (100 and counting).
No doubt utility companies and state governments pursuing new coal plants took note of the fight against Cliffside and decided that the constant controversy and harassment was not worth it (of course the recession and prospects of CO2 being regulated has helped as well). Well its 2010 and Fossil Fools Day is once again rounding the corner. We’ve witnessed the spectacular failure of Copenhagen, the Obama administration time and again capitulating to big business, and corporations doing there best to stall our efforts.
Yet we’ve seen inspiring resistance around the country, from Climate Ground Zero’s relentless direct action campaign against mountaintop removal to citizens shutting down Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, CA. The question is: What are you going to do to raise the stakes on April 1st?
JP Morgan Chase Social Media Day of Action to End Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining, Thursday Feb. 18
February 18th, 2010
Join Rainforest Action Network and thousands of friends on the internet as we send a message to JP Morgan Chase to stop financing mountaintop removal! JP Morgan Chase is the largest US financier of mountaintop removal coal mining, investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a real American tragedy.
Please join us for a social media day of action. On Feb. 18, we’ll use our Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and blogs to hold JP Morgan Chase accountable for financing this despicable practice.
Click any button for instructions on how to participate
For Internet Explorerer users scroll below for directions
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Internet to Chase: Stop Destroying the Mountains
February 18th, 2010
JP Morgan Chase is the biggest U.S. financier of mountaintop removal.
They have financial relationships with the poster child of mountaintop removal, Massey Energy. That means their money is funds sludge impoundments like Brushy Fork which is currently holding 7 billion gallons of coal waste above the Coal River Valley. Their money funds the dragline that 14 of my friends shut down in Twilight last June that scrapes away house size chunks of earth after the mountain has been blasted. Their money funds the security guards and noise machines that harassed and abused 3 tree-sitters last month defending Coal River Mountain with non-violent direct action. Their money funds Don Blankenship’s helicopters, mansion and corrupt junkets to Spain with WV Supreme Court Justices .
Chase has hired PR firms to re-brand themselves on the internet as “charitable” and “benevolent” through their “Chase Community Giving sites and Facebook Fan Pages (even though they disallowed “political” groups from participating in any fundraising). Chase touts themselves as a green environmentally friendly bank. Their greenwashing, social media branding and high powered PR firms can’t hide the truth about what Chase really does. They are complicit in destroying Appalachia’s mountains, poisoning it’s communities with dirty water and ruining it’s economy by creating conditions that lead to the worst poverty in the country.
Today, we’re exposing that truth using tools on the internet that will concentrate tens of thousands of people on Chase brand they’ve spent so much money perfecting. It’s time we amp up the pressure on Chase and take their money out of the coal industry. Read the rest of this entry »
Arrests, Actions: Blowing Off Thumbs of Soldiers, Blowing Off Mountaintops, Does JP Morgan Chase Fund Crime?
February 18th, 2010
Racketeering: The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) (18 USC §§ 1961-1968) prohibits (1) acquiring, establishing, or operating an enterprise with illegally derived income, (2) acquiring or maintaining an interest in or control of an enterprise through illegal activity, and (3) using an enterprise to commit illegal acts (Extortion, Blackmail, Etc. , 31A Am Jur 2d).
As fearless nonviolent protestors occupy the corporate office of a life-threatening and violation-ridden mountaintop removal operation in the Coal River Valley, West Virginia this morning, hundreds of thousands of American citizens are jamming the social media networks today, calling on JP Morgan Chase to end their financing of arguably criminal mountaintop removal coal mining operations in Appalachia.
Al Gore may have called mountaintop removal “a crime and ought to be treated as a crime,” but God bless veteran activists Mike Roselle, Joseph Hamsher, and Tom Smyth and the footslogging Climate Ground Zero nonviolent campaigners who are willing to put their lives on the line to stop mountaintop removal mining. Read the rest of this entry »
Call for Legal Defense Funds: Support the Fight Against Carbon Trading and for Climate Justice!
February 5th, 2010
On November 30, 2009, twelve activists locked themselves together in the middle of an intersection outside the Chicago Climate Exchange, in the heart of the financial district in downtown Chicago. The Chicago Climate Exchange is the first and largest carbon trading institution in North America.
A network of groups in Chicago planned this action as part of an international day of action for climate justice, a week before the start of the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen and on the 10th anniversary of the successful shut-down of the WTO talks in Seattle in 1999. 
The network chose to target the climate exchange, among other local climate criminals, because the current approach to climate change in the UN, as well as in the US Congress, is based on the creation of a new market in carbon emissions.
This market would privatize the very air we breathe, and hand the world’s biggest polluters property rights over the atmosphere and the Earth’s carbon cycling capacity. Carbon trading (aka “cap and trade”) and carbon offsets do not address the root causes of global warming, nor do they effectively reduce emissions. Carbon trading does, however, succeed in inflating corporate profits, and creating the illusion that action is being taken to combat global warming, thus acting as a dangerous distraction from the real, systemic changes that are so urgently needed.
This was the biggest action against carbon trading yet to take place in North America, a much-needed wake-up call urging people to more closely examine the so-called climate solutions that are being proposed by the government, Wall Street, and cozy alliances between corporate America and some of the big green environmental groups.
The activists who put their bodies on the line to get a message out about false solutions to climate change will be facing charges in court this February. As we all continue our work to promote real, effective, and just climate solutions in 2010, we’d like to request your support in contributing to their legal fund. Anything you can give helps – please consider making a donation, from $5 to $500.
Donations can be made online via the button below using a credit card or Paypal…
…or checks / money orders can be sent to:
Rising Tide North America
Chicago N30 Legal Fund
P.O. Box 3928
Oakland CA 94609
*** If you send a check, be sure to write “Chicago N30 Legal” in the memo line!***
Thanks in advance for your support!
Nine-Day Tree Sit Ends, Sitters Vow Not Over Until Blasting Stops
January 31st, 2010
Friday, January 29th, 2010
UPDATE – legal support needed! click here
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: 304-854-7372, news@climategroundzero.org
Note: For more info, see : www.climategroundzero.org, www.mountainjustice.org
PETTUS, WVa—After blocking Massey Energy’s operations on the Bee Tree Permit for nine days, Amber Nitchman, 19, and Eric Blevins, 28 descended from their respective trees. They had occupied the two oak trees—originally accompanied by a third tree sitter, David Aaron Smith, 23—to protest mountaintop removal and the blasting of Coal River Mountain. Upon descent, they were immediately arrested by West Virginia State Troopers. The sitters’ decision to leave the trees was made in light of the recent drop in temperature.
After a week of Massey security harassing the sitters with deafening sirens and air horns, a call-in pressure campaign was launched by Climate Ground Zero, Mountain Justice and other anti-mountaintop removal groups. The receipt of hundreds of calls from around the country led to an emergency meeting with Climate Ground Zero volunteers, the Raleigh County prosecutor and Governor Manchin. The meeting resulted in the moratorium and a call for an investigation of the abuse.
The tree sit represents Climate Ground Zero’s most sustained intervention in mountaintop removal mining operations since its campaign of nonviolent direct action began last February. Read the rest of this entry »
Tree Sit Halts the Blasting in southern West Virginia
January 21st, 2010
“Coal River Mountain was the last mountain around here that hasn’t been touched and they could’ve been using it for windmills…But Massey wants to get that coal. It seems like they just don’t care about the populace. Just the land and their checkbook.” – Richard Bradford MARFORK, W.Va. – Protestors associated with Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice halted blasting on Coal River Mountain today with a three-person tree-sit. David Aaron Smith, 23, Amber Nitchman, 19 and Eric Blevins, 28 are on platforms approximately 60 feet up two tulip poplar trees and one oak tree. They are located next to where Massey Energy is blasting to build an access road to the Brushy Fork Impoundment on its Bee Tree Strip Mine. Their banners state: “Save Coal River Mtn.,” “EPA Stop the Blasting” and “Windmills Not Toxic Spills.” Read the rest of this entry »
Video from NYC Carbon Market Crash Event
January 20th, 2010
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.
Green is the New Spectacle
January 17th, 2010
From The Nor’easter – by Jason Slade
The Spectacle —- Environmental issues can oftentimes be very complex. Some issues directly relate to climate change, and some do not. However, it is very important to connect the dots between issues because almost all environmental problems are caused, at their base, by capitalist expansion, commodification and privatization. Corporations have used the climate crisis and growing public concern about environmental issues to their advantage. They have learned to use the rhetoric of environmentalism to justify extremely oppressive projects whose sole purpose is to increase their power and to continue the cycle of production and consumption. Incredibly destructive projects, such as hydrofracture natural gas extraction in Upstate New York, are marketed as clean. This absurd spectacle must be stopped.
In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, he writes, “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification … The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production.
It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life … It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.” And now the light of that sun is green. The green spectacle is confronting the climate crisis with hollow solutions presented to us in a pleasant, prefabricated package that can be bought if we can afford them and allow us to pollute in good conscience. In an absurd twist, these corporate false solutions cause the poor, and those who resist these schemes, to be blamed for destroying the planet. Read the rest of this entry »
Climate Justice Activists confront Carbon Trade Summit with demonstration, direct action
January 13th, 2010
1/13/2009 – New York, NY – In the wake of a controversial outcome at the Copenhagen climate talks, a diverse crowd of scientists, Faith congregations, activists, students, and concerned citizens converged in confrontation and protest at the 2nd Annual IGlobalForum Carbon Trading Summit today. The summit is the largest annual meeting place of corporations, banks, and lobby groups to further the agenda of a carbon trading scheme to address climate change. Activists rallied to oppose market-based trading of greenhouse gas emissions credits and call for real solutions to the climate crisis. Dr. Maggie Zhou, from Secure Green Future and Climate SOS, was among the demonstrators who engaged in a nonviolent direct action and risked arrest in an attempt to blockade the venue’s revolving doors, and display a banner decrying carbon trading as a false solution.
Other outraged environmentalists and faith-community activists entered the hotel and disrupted the Carbon Summit luncheon, challenging attendees to consider the future of the planet above their own short-term financial interests and denouncing them as climate profiteers. The private gathering, separated from the central hotel atrium by a tall curtain, was suddenly exposed to activists and other members of the general public when the curtain was torn down.
“The same Wall Street bankers who gave us the global climate crisis are trying to own the sky,” stated Brian Tokar, director of the Institute for Social Ecology and an organizer of this week’s protest events. “Carbon trading is unjust, it will not work, and it is a false solution. It is a dangerous distraction from the urgent measures needed to prevent an ever-worsening destabilization of the climate.”
Speakers at the rally included Dea Goblirsch, organizer with Climate Ground Zero in southern W. VA., Reverend Billy of the Church of Life After Shopping, who delivered a critique with the fire and brimstone of a televangelist; Chaia Heller, Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, and Father Paul Mayer, co-founder of the Climate Crisis Coalition and religious community leader.
Participants inside the Carbon Trading Summit included executives from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Duke Energy and more, as well as polluter-friendly environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and World Wildlife Fund.
“I don’t trust these people to make decisions about the future of humanity,” said one young participant, who wished not to give her name because she will be risking arrest today. “If we follow through with market-based solutions like carbon trading, everyone will regret it. We need to stop believing the corporations’ false solutions and put all our collective energy into getting this conversation onto a track that’s useful.”
Dr. James Hansen, renowned climate scientist, was present outside the Carbon Trading Summit on Tuesday to voice his opposition to carbon trading schemes.
“Cap-and-trade is not a smart approach,” wrote Hansen his book Storms of My Grandchildren. Hansen has stated that current US climate legislation is “worse than nothing” because it relies on risky and ineffective cap-and-trade. He also declared that the failure to reach an agreement in Copenhagen was a better outcome than adopting the carbon-trade-based approach that was being negotiated.
“Carbon trade, which includes cap and trade and offsets, are a dangerous distraction, economically risky, and prone to gaming and speculation,” stated Maggie Zhou. “Offsets allow polluters to simply pay someone else somewhere else to reduce their emissions on your behalf, which in the end does nothing to actually reduce emissions. The climate crisis simply can’t wait!
“Carbon trade is an insidious threat to human rights,” stated Dr. Rachel Smolker from Biofuelwatch and Climate SOS. “It turns rights to pollute the atmosphere, as well as forests, soils and agriculture practices that store carbon into commodities to be bought and sold as excuses for polluters. This is the greatest corporate grab on the “global commons” ever! It is disastrous for most of humanity.
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Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, Beyond Talk (Climate Pledge of Resistance), Rainforest Action Network, Institute for Social Ecology, The Change You Want to See Gallery and others are behind this effort. To learn more and take a stand for climate justice, for real solutions, and for the future of our planet, please visit above websites, or visit us on Facebook. contact@climatesos.org
Counter Carbon Trading! NYC – January 9-13
January 7th, 2010
CALL TO ACTION!
NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE TO CARBON TRADING
NEW YORK CITY, JAN. 9-13
CONFRONTING THE SOURCE OF COPENHAGEN’S “FAILURE” Read the rest of this entry »
Statement from those still imprisoned in Denmark
January 1st, 2010
Something is rotten (but not just) in Denmark. As a matter of fact, thousands of people have been considered, without any evidence, a threat to the society. Hundreds have been arrested and some are still under detention, waiting for judgement or under investigation. Among them, us, the undersigned. We want to tell the story from the peculiar viewpoint of those that still see the sky from behind the bars. Read the rest of this entry »
Rising Tide Mops up the COP – Copenhagen Climate Summit Archive Project
December 24th, 2009
Rising Tide North America is pleased to announce www.WhatIsCop15.net – an instant archive project compiling some of the incredible work of the global climate movement at and in the lead up to the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen (the 15th Conference of the Parties or COP15).
Much has been said about the failure and collapse of the climate of COP15 last weekend to reach a binding agreement, and you’ll find lots of analysis at www.WhatIsCop15.net.
But the real story from the climate summit — which at best was expected expand the carbon market and entrench corporate control of climate policy — is a happy one.
It’s the massive organizing success and coming of age of the climate justice movement. 100,000 in the streets, tens of thousands in attendance at the climate justice oriented Klimaforum, and countless actions against the root causes of climate change.
Moreover, the sham of polluter-dominated climate policy political sausage making – which expelled groups like Friends of the Earth and Via Campesina from its proceedings – was revealed to millions of onlookers, as was Obama’s complicity in the whole affair.
Depressing as the state of things is, the understanding that there will be no just climate solutions without massive social change has crystallized for score of people in the past weeks: the movement of people demanding a radical shift in the existing order is growing by leaps and bounds, and we must celebrate this awakening!
www.WhatIsCop15.net compiles images, reports, videos, reflections and education resources from COP 15, to thank those who organized for climate justice in Copenhagen and to inspire those of us who weren’t there to equally monumental actions.
Whether you’ve been struggling to keep up with the news or were there in Copenhagen, we invite you to learn, enjoy, and spread the word about the online archive! We’d love it if you contributed content as well!
Tags: big business, biofuels, Canada, cap-and-trade, civil disobedience, climate justice, COP15, Copenhagen, direct action, documentation, environmental justice, government, images, indigenous issues, media, protest, REDD, Rising Tide, south america, trees and forests, UN, UNFCCC, what is cop15? | 
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