Life's a beach.

This morning, CCAN staff, volunteers and concerned Americans nationwide staged series of beach-themed rallies in around fifty cities across the country. Held in partnership with 1Sky, the festive gathering sought to urge our Senators to enact climate legislation that ensures a real cap on CO2, dictated by the EPA, as well as creating strong provisions for domestic renewable and clean energy development here at home.

We arrived in force at Senator Jim Webb’s office (VA) at around noon, sporting swim trunks, floral leis, and signs reading, “Don’t send clean energy out with the tide!” and “Clean energy jobs NOW!” as Richmonders downtown looked on during the lunchtime break. While volunteers passed the time, playing a makeshift game of beach volleyball, spirits were high and good times were certainly had. Glen, the inflatable dolphin, also made an appearance.

This is not to say, however, that today’s participants were ignorant of the severe implications of a world climate crisis. Despite the relaxed attire and positive attitudes, all involved exuded deep concern and real frustration at the marginal progress that Congress has made so far in taking a strong approach to fixing the potentially fatal issue of global climate change.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), in its current form, sucks. We have charged the United States Senate with rectifying the mistakes of its counterpart, the House of Representatives, in transforming this confusing and weak legislation into something that us as climate activists may be proud of. A weak renewable energy standard, coupled with an abysmal form of cap-and-trade that allows for the largest polluters to incur the smallest costs, has shown that politics as usual continues to dilute the debate over how we must transition as a nation into a cleaner, more efficient economy.

Virginia, as always, finds itself in an election year, spearheaded by two candidates whose environmental stances still leave a lot to be desired. Without significant action by our representatives in Washington, the Commonwealth will see little incentive to transform the way that we currently generate and consume our energy in Virginia. If the Senate falters on this legislation, our hopes for rapid progress will become quickly diminished.

We have not yet a reason, however, to lose hope. Senator Webb has repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with the current state of ACESA, and as its Senatorial counterpart, ACELA, progresses through its infancy in committee, we can hope that he and Senator Warner will encourage significant improvements, including restoring the full oversight of the EPA in regulating carbon emissions, increasing requirements for the renewable portfolio standard, and placing a real cap on dirty fossil fuel and coal industries, who hold too great a sway in national and Virginia politics.

Webb, a veteran and military buff, understands the real dangers to national security posed by climate change, with sea-level rise playing a major role in Virginia’s potential future. With the world’s largest naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, the threat of rising tides will play a major role in Mr. Webb’s future decisions regarding climate change and its impacts.

So, the beach theme found itself to be eerily appropriate. There may be, after all, a day when any average Richmond citizen will need only to walk a few short blocks before breaking out the surfboard. Let’s hope not.

New Marching Orders from Senator Cardin: Get More Letters!

To paraphrase a great speechifier: If there is anyone out there who still doubts whether a little teamwork makes all things possible; who still wonders if our collective democratic actions truly influence our elected officials; who still questions the power of grassroots climate activism, today’s letter drop to Ben Cardin was your answer.

Today we dropped by Capitol Hill for our second big delivery of letters to Senator Cardin. Our first delivery of 250 handwritten letters a few weeks back clearly earned us the Senator’s respect, because today the Senator dispatched none other than his top legislative adviser, Michael Burke to receive our latest batch of 260 letters. Letter team leaders Ellen McGovern (Silver Spring), Susan Stewart (Greenbelt) and Sunita Pathik (Burtonsville) headed up the delivery ceremony as immortalized in the picture below.

Mission accomplished; a job well done. But the best moment was yet to come. Continue reading

How to Get a Strong Senate Climate Bill, Part 4: Party!

The passage of the Waxman-Markey bill in June may not be reason to celebrate but it is certainly reason to party. That’s because we’re going to have to fight hard to get a strong bill from the Senate in the coming months and partying is actually one of the best ways to prepare ourselves for that fight.

With everything we’re up against including a coal lobby that forges letters to our congressional leaders, we need to do everything we can this August to strengthen our movement for the fight ahead. That means taking actions like our campaign to collect 1000 handwritten letters to Cardin, but it also means building our community, connecting with one another, having fun.

In other words, we need to have some parties. Climate community mixers are just as critical to growing our movement as the actions we take, and as with our actions, the success of our parties depends upon you.

Please volunteer today to host a climate house party this month. Hosting is really simple; all you need to contribute is a space for a few dozen local climate activists to meet, mingle and have fun. CCAN will help you work out the details, spread the word, and turn out the crowd.

Contact me (keith@chesapeakeclimate.org) today to register to host an house party. You won’t find a funner way to help our movement this summer. Once you’ve registered, I’ll give you a ring to help get the party started. Sign up now and help us make this an eventful August.

James Lovelock and the End Times

Future Hope column, August 3, 2009

British scientist and author James Lovelock has just had published a follow-up book to his 2006 book, “The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.” This 2009 one is entitled, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning.” Throughout both books he presents scientific evidence to support his view that humankind has caused so much damage already to the Earth, burnt so much coal, oil and natural gas, cut down so many forests, and unthinkingly overdeveloped so many cities and towns in an environmentally destructive way that the chances are not good that we can avoid a worldwide climate catastrophe.

Lovelock believes that the likely result of our historic, short-sighted disregard for what he calls Gaia, “a self-regulating Earth with the community of living organisms in control,” (1) is the mass die-off of 85% or more of the human population over the course of this century. Despite this severely depressing belief, he has used his considerable intellect in these two books to try to think through how we can make the best of a very bad situation.

While generally supporting their work, he is critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-supported organization of 2,000 scientists who have been studying climate change since 1989. He is critical of them for underestimating the severity of climate change. Continue reading

What a Strong Bill Looks Like, Part 1: Consumer Protection

Solving global warming is not going to happen over night. The lawmakers dealing with climate legislation now are probably not going to be in office in 2050, when we need to have cut our global warming pollution 80%. So a key part of any climate bill is whether it’s built to last – through Congressional terms, Presidents, and generations.

We need public support for a carbon cap for at least the next 40 years as we work our way toward 80% cuts. The best way to do that is to make sure that the Senate climate bill is fair — it has to put people before polluters.

President Obama last February laid out a framework to fight global warming that was simple, fair, and built to last. All polluters would pay for greenhouse gas emissions, the President said. No exceptions. The money gathered from polluters would then be rebated to middle- and lower-income Americans while leaving $15 billion per year for investments in clean energy and green jobs.

This framework — where 100 percent of the carbon credits are auctioned and revenues used for direct consumer relief — protects consumers and ensures that polluters aren’t given a free ride.

Unfortunately, the House-passed clean energy bill was heavy on the corporate giveaways and light on the protections for energy consumers. The House version would give away 85 percent of the carbon credits for free to utilities, oil refiners and manufacturers. While consumers are offered no protection from price volatility or rate hikes in this version, industrial energy users secured protections to guarantee their bottom lines.

That’s why a coalition of heavy-hitting groups including AARP, Public Citizen, the Consumer Federation of America, and the National Consumer Law Center have teamed up with CCAN to call on the Senate to establish a stronger system of consumer protection. Continue reading

How to Get a Strong Senate Climate Bill, Part 2.5: Write (another) Letter to the Editor

Right now Senator Cardin is helping draft the Senate version of a clean energy bill!

The draft is expected to be released early September when the Senate returns from their August recess. This is OUR CHANCE as Marylanders to ensure that OUR VOICE and values are written into the bill.

Cardin will only fight for a strong bill in the Senate if he is hearing from the grassroots. Sen. Cardin has personally told us that he has recently heard more public feedback against clean energy policy than for it. We must be heard at this critical moment!

Here is just a small example of what we are up against. Check out this Letter to the Editor (LTE) in the Fredrick News Post:

“The world is laughing at us. Why would we ball-and-chain our economic future when it’s scraping bottom now? Oh! I almost forgot, global warming, with the emphasis on global.”

Letters like this are being printed across the state and its time for us to respond! Please, take a moment to respond and write your own letter. JOIN CCAN’s Truth Squad and get the latest updates.

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Last weeks truth squad was focused on the broad benefits of a clean energy economy so this week we will focus on consumers specifically. Here are some talking points:

Consumer Pocketbook Protection

1. Thank our Senator’s for their leadership: I am encouraged by Senator Cardin and Mikulski’s past leadership on clean energy issues and are urging them to champion a strong clean energy bill in the US Senate.

2. Make Polluters Pay: The best way to protect the American consumer from rising energy costs is to make the policy fair by making polluters – not taxpayers -pay for cleaning up pollution. Make sure the Senate bill requires polluters to pay for the right to pollute.

3. Auction the Permits: The EPA says that a bill that gives permits to polluters for free will be more expensive. Protect my pocketbook by auctioning permits to polluters.

4. Rebate the Revenues to the Public: To protect my pocketbook, Senator’s Cardin and Senator Mikulski should push to auction all the pollution permits and return revenues to the public through direct rebates.

Check out Anne’s CCAN blog post to learn more about on consumer protection.

Please, let me know when you submit a letter and again when you get it published: ethan[at]chesapeakeclimate.org

Join the Truth Squad today!

Also, for more info check out our 10 ways to make your Senator a Clean Energy Champ toolkit

The flattening of Wise, Va.

wise_county_sealCoal is in the blood of the people of Wise County, Virginia. With a population of around 41,000, the coal industry has provided steady income for an otherwise remote part of Appalachia. Situated in the southwest corner of the Commonwealth, the county boasts several small, tight-knit communities, a functional public school system, two colleges, and a thriving sense of mountainous spirit that hallmarks Appalachian living.

It is not far fetched to argue that the socioeconomic landscape of Wise County would be drastically different without the coal industry’s presence there. The bituminous rock has served as the stovepipe economic model of Southwest Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia since the industrial revolution, and has brought intense development and employment to the region. Nowhere else on earth has coal played such a crucial role in the evolution of a region, and nowhere else do people’s very blood ooze the stuff. It is a cultural icon.

But coal is destroying Southwest Virginia, the Appalachian Mountains, and threatening the planet itself. At the epicenter of this environmental catastrophe lies Wise, a county that is crumbling under the heavy hand of King Coal. While Dominion works to construct a brand-new power plant in the region, fueled by dirty, antiquated coal, mining corporations have worked to systemically level the region through the practice of mountaintop removal mining.

The result is not a pretty one. Several mountains have already been leveled in Virginia, some of which are in Wise, while millions of tons of rock, dirt, and toxic material are shoved into neighboring valleys, preventing streams from flowing and contaminating valuable, fresh water. Sludge ponds, a result of the extremely water-intense washing process, contain billions of gallons of useless, dangerous slurry, filled with heavy metals such as nickel, cadmium, lead, and arsenic. The fragile walls that hold back these industrial cesspools are typically made of fill material, and are prone to failure (as they have several times in recent decades). Mountaintop removal represents a triple threat to Appalachia, as mountains are destroyed, streams are interred beneath tons of rock and filth, and toxic contamination threatens the health of every community in the region.
Wise County has become a battlefield for the fight against mountaintop removal, and even as federal regulators crack down on the practice, the coal industry continues to push for continued, and expanded MTR operations in Wise.

Ison Rock Ridge extends into the town of Appalachia and is dotted with several communities on either side of the elongated mountain. Most recently, big coal has tapped Ison Rock as the next notch on its long line of broken mountains that now significantly mar the landscape of Southwest Virginia. Nearby communities have been hesitant, at best, to embrace the new project, as the mountain looms over several towns and villages, and threatens to create a shower of rock and dust, a byproduct of the blasting process used to get at the coal, that is unwelcome by any standard. Already, large stones and increased logging activity have spurred a public outcry, so much that the developer has been forced to revise the permit several times and the coal-friendly government has worked to suppress any public concern over the project.

“This permit application is currently in its 9th revision- and this round the permit has changed dramatically. Federal and State law require that public comment be accepted for all permits, but the state agency in charge has denied our request to have a public hearing on this latest revision that creates an essentially new mine plan.”

Climate Carrots for China and India

Amidst high theatrics, the Senate wrapped up its climate policy hearings last week, shifting the issue to the back-burner until after the August recess. Meanwhile the climate action spotlight followed US Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton overseas as they brought the Obama climate lobby to China and India respectively. carrot

By now, the story of China and India is a familiar one: both countries are quickly growing into carbon spewing behemoths. Both claim climate action could hurt their economies. Neither is enthusiastic about committing to legally binding emissions cuts. Either could emerge as a spoiler in climate treaty talks in Copenhagen this December.

To its credit the Obama administration has been making some efforts to change all that recently. Hence we’ve seen the high level Chu and Clinton missions and Obama’s joint resolution with other G8 leaders on endeavoring to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, and cut emissions 80% by 2050. Trying to set a good example, the US is finally starting to talk the talk on global climate action.

But so far all this has really amounted to is a lot of talk, with no legally binding action to back it up, and promises are clearly not the kind of climate carrots that China and India will respond to. Despite diplomatic overtures by the US, neither country has signed onto the emissions reductions goals set at the G8 summit, and neither Clinton or Chu ended their climate missions with very much to show except more Chinese and Indian refusals to talk about legally binding emissions targets.

Even the Waxman-Markey bill didn’t do much to impress either country. In fact, their only real reaction to the passage of the bill was outrage at the last minute amendment imposing “carbon tariffs” on goods imported from countries without climate laws in place.

The upshot here is essentially what we in the climate movement have been saying about US leadership and the international picture all along. If we want the Chinas and Indias of the world to come on board, we have to lead by example and pass a strong climate bill that codifies our commitment to seriously addressing our own contribution to the crisis.

And this is not just a matter of inspiration. Many of the provisions that climate advocates have been calling for to make the bill effective domestically, are also exactly the kind of carrots that may enhance the international impact of the bill and produce results if dangled before countries like China and India. A bill which strictly limits allowance giveaways to polluters, for example, will produce more revenue for domestic investments in energy efficiency, green jobs and consumer protection programs, as well as international investments in the types of clean energy technology transfer programs China and India have been calling for.

All the more reason for the Senate to deliver on a strong bill this fall, and for President Obama to invest just as much high profile lobbying time on swing Senators at home as swing States abroad. For if the best approach to climate leadership abroad is through climate leadership at home, then Obama’s best international lobby strategy must rest on a strong Senate lobby strategy.