Posts Tagged ‘environmental justice’
The Nation: The Wrong Kind of Green
March 5th, 2010
Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?
At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.
I have spent the past few years reporting on how global warming is remaking the map of the world. I have stood in half-dead villages on the coast of Bangladesh while families point to a distant place in the rising ocean and say, “Do you see that chimney sticking up? That’s where my house was… I had to [abandon it] six months ago.” I have stood on the edges of the Arctic and watched glaciers that have existed for millenniums crash into the sea. I have stood on the borders of dried-out Darfur and heard refugees explain, “The water dried up, and so we started to kill each other for what was left.”
While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on these people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path–one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.
Environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair–president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995–was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: big business, big greens, cap-and-trade, coal, congress, COP15, Copenhagen, denial, disaster, environmental justice, EPA, greenwash, media, politics | 
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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
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 »
Judge Withdraws Peabody’s Coal-Mining Permit
January 26th, 2010
Black Mesa, AZ – A Department of Interior Administrative Law Judge withdrew Peabody Coal Company’s Life of Mine permit for operations (Black Mesa Complex) on Black Mesa, AZ, handing a major victory to tribal and environmental organizations who appealed the permit decision in January. The permit had been granted on December 22nd 2008 by the Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM) in one of several fossil-fuel friendly 11th hour decisions by the Bush Administration.
According Judge Robert G. Holt, “OSM violated NEPA [National Environmental Protection Act] by not preparing a supplemental draft EIS [Environmental Impact Statement] when Peabody changed the proposed action. As a result, the Final EIS did not consider a reasonable range of alternatives to the new proposed action, described the wrong environmental baseline, and did not achieve the informed decision-making and meaningful public comment required by NEPA. Because of the defective Final EIS, OSM’s decision to issue a revised permit to Peabody must be vacated and remanded to OSM for further action.”
Wahleah Johns, co-director of Black Mesa Water Coalition, one of the petitioners in the appeal, issued the following statement: “As a community member of Black Mesa I am grateful for Judge Holt’s decision. For 40 years our sacred homelands and people have borne the brunt of coal mining impacts, from relocation to depletion of our only drinking water source. This ruling is an important step towards restorative justice for Indigenous communities who have suffered at the hands of multinational companies like Peabody Energy. This decision is also precedent-setting for all other communities who struggle with the complexities of NEPA laws and OSM procedures in regards to environmental protection. However, we also cannot ignore that irreversible damage of coal mining industries continues on the land, water, air, people and all living things.”
http://www.blackmesawatercoalition.org/
Press Release – 1/13/2010:
“Indigenous Peoples are being forced to sign over their territories for REDD to the Gangsters of the Century, carbon traders, who are invading the world’s remaining forests that exist thanks to the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples,” denounced Marlon Santi, President of the CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, one of the most powerful native organizations in the world. “Our forests are spaces for life not carbon markets.”
Indigenous leader kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to surrender carbon rights for REDD in Papua New Guinea
New York, USA — As carbon traders hawk permits to pollute at the Second Annual Carbon Trading Summit, Indigenous Peoples denounced that selling the sky not only corrupts the sacred but also destroys the climate, violates human rights and threatens cultural survival.
“Carbon trading and carbon offsets are a crime against humanity and Creation,” said Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network. “The sky is sacred. This carbon market insanity privatizes the air and sells it to climate criminals like Shell so they can continue to pollute and destroy the climate and our future, rather than reducing their emissions at source.”
“This Carbon Traitors’ Summit comes on the heels of the failed UN Copenhagen climate conference which put forests in carbon markets by creating a mechanism called REDD or REDD-plus (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).” According to Goldtooth, “Most of the forests of the world are found in Indigenous Peoples’ land. REDD-type projects have already caused land grabs, killings, violent evictions and forced displacement, violations of human rights, threats to cultural survival, militarization and servitude.” 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 »
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 »
Climate Justice Now! Statement on Copenhagen
December 30th, 2009
www.climate-justice-now.org
Press conference
The following statement was released by the Climate Justice Now! network on Wednesday, December 23, 2009. It represents the view of a broad coalition of environmental justice and social justice groups from the Global South and Global North, working in partnership for climate justice.
Call for “system change not climate change” unites global movement
Corrupt Copenhagen ‘accord’ exposes gulf between peoples demands and elite interests
The highly anticipated UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen ended with a fraudulent agreement, engineered by the United States and dropped into the conference at the last moment. The “agreement” was not adopted. Instead, it was “noted” in an absurd parliamentary invention designed to accommodate the United States and permit Ban Ki-moon to utter the ridiculous pronouncement “We have a deal.”
The UN conference was unable to deliver solutions to the climate crisis, or even minimal progress toward them. Instead, the talks were a complete betrayal of impoverished nations and island states, producing embarrassment for the United Nations and the Danish government. In a conference designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions there was very little talk of emission reductions. Rich, developed countries continued to delay any talk of deep and binding cuts, instead shifting the burden to less developed countries and showing no willingness to make reparations for the damage they have caused.
Curing Post-Copenhagen Hangover
December 24th, 2009
video directed by Sara Taigher. Medley of songs from DJ Rupture & Matt Shadetek
December, 23 2009
By Bond, Patrick
In Copenhagen, the world’s richest leaders continued their fiery fossil fuel party last Friday night, ignoring requests of global village neighbors to please chill out.
Instead of halting the hedonism, Barack Obama and the Euro elites cracked open the mansion door to add a few nouveau riche guests: South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, China’s Jiabao Wen (reportedly the most obnoxious of the lot), Brazil’s Lula Inacio da Silva and India’s Manmohan Singh. By Saturday morning, still punch-drunk with power over the planet, these wild and crazy party animals had stumbled back onto their jets and headed home.
The rest of us now have a killer hangover, because on behalf mainly of white capitalists (who are having the most fun of all), the world’s rulers stuck the poor and future generations with vast clean-up charges – and worse: certain death for millions.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 770 ppm, accord, action, Barack Obama, carbon markets, climate debt, Climate Ground Zero, climate justice, COP15, Copenhagen, direct action, disaster, environmental justice, fossil fuel, government, green capitalism, greenwash, hang over, Jacob Zuma, loopholes, Lula de Silva, media, mtr, party, protest, sea level, tar sands, UN, UNFCCC, Video, Wen Jiabao |
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AN INVITATION: FROM COPENHAGEN TO TORONTO
December 24th, 2009
The Group of 8 Leaders and the Group of 20 Leaders are meeting in Ontario,
from the 25th to the 27th of June, 2010.
Following the collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, they will be
discussing the global economy, development and climate change.
These gatherings are about trying to fix capitalism, a system that cannot
be fixed; about creating unsustainable market responses to ecological
catastrophe that reinforce systems of oppressions; about ensuring the
continued exploitation of people of color and the South and about
celebrating war as a means to create puppet allies to maintain imperialist
power. The so-called leaders at these gatherings do not represent us.
In opposition and with a will to transform, people across Turtle Island
are organizing community-based days of action in Toronto, Canada. The
days of action will be led by Toronto-based organizations of people of
color, indigenous peoples, women, the poor, the working class, queer and
trans people and disabled people.
Read the rest of this entry »
What was really decided in Copenhagen? or, “50,000 people went to Denmark and all they got was a lousy 3-page political agreement”
December 24th, 2009
http://counterpunch.org/tokar12232009.html
– Brian Tokar
Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still coming in, but a few things are already quite clear, even as countries step up the blame game in response to the summit’s disappointing conclusion.
First, the 2 1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to “take note” of are completely self-contradictory, and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn’t even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to “take note” of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: analysis, BASIC, climate justice, climate summit, COP15, Copenhagen, environmental justice, europe, farce, glaciers, government, greenwash, politics, protest, sham, Toker, UN, UNFCCC |
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Call for “system change not climate change” unites global movement
December 24th, 2009
Statement of Climate Justice Now! on the outcomes of the COP15
Call for “system change not climate change” unites global movement
Corrupt Copenhagen ‘accord’ exposes gulf between peoples demands and elite interests
The highly anticipated UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen ended with a fraudulent agreement, engineered by the United States and dropped into the conference at the last moment. The “agreement” was not adopted. Instead, it was “noted” in an absurd parliamentary invention designed to accommodate the United States and permit Ban Ki-moon to utter the ridiculous pronouncement “We have a deal.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Bolivia Calls World Conference of Social Movements
December 24th, 2009
December 21, 2009
April 22, 2010: International Day of Mother Earth
CHUQUISACA, Bolivia, December 20 — Bolivian President Evo Morales announced today that a world conference of social movements is to take place in Bolivia, as a response to the failure of the 15th Summit on Climate Change, recently held in Copenhagen.
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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