Three Months, Three Years

July 20th will be the three month anniversary of the BP oil blowout disaster.

To call attention to this fact–to demand strong climate legislation that reduces carbon emissions and promotes clean energy–to call for getting dirty energy money out of politics, a broad coalition of 19 national, regional and state organizations (see list below) issued a call a couple of days ago for local “Congress: You’ve Got Oil on Your Hands” events around the country on July 20th. The coalition urges that actions be held in front of the offices of members of the Senate or the House who have taken a large amount of money from Big Oil or who have refused to support strong action on climate. More info on Big Oil campaign contributions can be found at http://www.followtheoilmoney.org. MoveOn.org is setting up a website operation where local organizers can register their events and get more information.

Given the continuing ecological and economic disaster unfolding in the gulf, and because the U.S. Senate will be debating and voting on offshore drilling/energy/climate legislation this month or early in August, it is right-on-time that these actions are happening. This is the time to really step up grassroots pressure on the U.S. Senate!! Continue reading

Will the BP Oil Spill Be the Spark?

“The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it’s important. . . This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.”
-Bob Herbert, “More Than Just An Oil Spill,” NY Times, May 22, 2010

Just about a week ago I was on a conference call with leaders of about a dozen national and regional groups which have made the climate crisis a top priority of their work. The two main things we talked about were the prospects for decent climate legislation in the Senate and how we should be responding to the catastrophic BP oil spill.

Most of us were not very hopeful about the prospects in the Senate, absent the kind of leadership on this issue Barack Obama gave to achieve passage of a not-so-good health care reform bill. Indeed, there is legitimate reason to be concerned that if he did so, he could advance a bill strongly supportive of nukes, coal and offshore drilling, based on things he has said and done as President, and based on the Kerry-Lieberman “American Power Act” released on May 12th.

As far as the BP spill, there was discussion on this call about the idea of local actions around the country on the one-month anniversary of the spill, May 20th. One important national organization, the Energy Action Coalition, took the initiative and organized 45 local actions around the country beginning on that day, to their credit.

Could the BP spill be the spark that generates an on-going, in-the-streets movement for a rapid shift away from dirty fossil fuels to a justice-based, green jobs, clean energy economy? It sure seems to have a number of the elements that make that a possibility. Continue reading

Climate Legislation, Science and Activism

It is a very unfortunate fact that what the U.S. Senate does about the climate crisis, and when, is decisive when it comes to the possibility of an eventual solution to that absolutely critical issue. If the Senate does nothing, or very little, this year or for the next few years, the odds of staying this side of climate tipping points and avoiding climate catastrophe are definitely worsened, and they’re not so good right now.

The conventional wisdom among the inside-the-beltway, established environmental groups is that the hope for action lies with the legislation-writing process currently taking place under the leadership of Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. But two of the most significant political developments last week as far as Senate climate legislation took place elsewhere.

One was the public announcement via an email from Bill McKibben sent to 350.org’s far-flung network that “we’re joining a group of our best allies in backing the proposed Cap-and-Dividend approach that would stop letting big polluters pour carbon into the sky for free.”

The other was the public letter from AARP, the 39-million member organization of seniors, to Senators Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins, authors of the CLEAR Act cap-and-dividend legislation. In their letter [pdf] they commend Cantwell and Collins for their “continuing leadership” and for offering “a thoughtful, bipartisan approach to reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions while also mitigating potential energy cost increases to consumers.”

Strengths and Weaknesses

There’s a lot that is good about the CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal), especially in comparison with the Waxman-Markey ACES bill passed by the House of Representatives last June. It would make fossil fuel polluters pay for their poisoning of our atmosphere, with no free pollution permits. In the first year, 2012, that the legislation would take effect, they would need to pay, cumulatively, as much as $126 billion dollars via a 100% auction of pollution permits. Putting a price on carbon in this way, all by itself, is an important step forward.

A steadily-declining cap on carbon pollution would be enacted so that, over time, prices for carbon-based fuels would go up and co2 emissions would go down as a steady national shift takes place to energy conservation, efficiency and renewable energy. There are provisions for a tightening of this cap relatively easily by way of a simple majority (no filibuster allowed) of both houses of Congress in support of a Presidential proposal. There are no problematic “carbon offsets.” Wall Street and speculators are prevented from buying or selling permits. 75% of the money raised from the auction each year will be returned in equal monthly payments to every legal US resident. A family of four will receive approximately $1,000 a year to help with the higher energy prices the oil, coal and natural gas companies will pass along. Analyses have shown that about 3/4 of all U.S. Americans will actually gain additional money to spend via this program. The remaining 25% of the auction revenue will be put into a “Clean Energy Reinvestment Trust (or CERT) Fund” for various programs to reduce U.S. and international greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, for clean energy, energy efficiency, transition assistance and similar purposes.

A key feature of the CLEAR Act is its understandable, transparent architecture. It is 39 pages long, compared to 1,428 for the House-passed ACES bill.

There’s a lot to like about this proposal. Continue reading

Copenhagen: Turning Point or More of the Same Old Same Old?

This coming week, in New York City and Pittsburgh, there will be important United Nations and G20 meetings that could advance the process of coming up with a new international treaty to address the climate crisis. This coming week will also see the opening salvo of “civil society” groups in the streets taking action to press their demands for not just any treaty but one that is strong and fair, one that reflects the deepening of the crisis.

From December 7-18, in Copenhagen, Denmark, 190 or so nations will come together in for the annual U.N. Climate Conference, but this one is particularly important. One reason is that it will be the first one in eight years where the U.S. delegation will be led by people who believe that climate change is real, serious and that action is needed to address it. But much more significant is that this is the U.N. conference that was planned, two years ago at a UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, as the place and the time that the world had to come up with a much stronger international climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol became operative on February 16, 2005, and as of sometime in 2012 it will no longer be in effect. The countries which signed it and agreed to reduce their emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels have until then to do so. At that point, if there is no international treaty that has been negotiated, ratified by enough countries and gone into effect, there will be nothing that replaces the expired Kyoto treaty.

Since it is expected that it will take at least two years for enough countries to ratify a treaty, the Copenhagen conference has been seen as critical so that there’s no gap in between Kyoto and a new treaty. However, as we’re less than three months out from Copenhagen, with 15 actual negotiating days between now and the end of Copenhagen (including five days in Barcelona, Spain Nov. 2-6), and with a significant number of major issues unresolved and points of conflict, especially between the countries of the Global South (developing countries) and the Global North (developed), it is not looking hopeful for any kind of treaty, much less a good one, to be adopted and signed at Copenhagen. Continue reading