Greenpeace

Given that global warming pollution has officially fallen from the agenda of the Senate, legislative proposals on the table to reduce the political, economic, and environmental impact of the oil industry provide an opportunity for Congress to slightly vindicate itself. On Friday the House passed legislation that finally removes special protections that oil companies have received for decades, such as limitation on liability for the damage caused by oil spills, exemptions from environmental review, and the ability to avoid US safety standards altogether. In light of the BP oil disaster, passage of these policies should be a forgone conclusion.

The Senate is expected to vote soon, maybe tomorrow, on it’s own package of policies in response to the Gulf disaster. The House passed the bill 209 to 193. With an astounding 30 Reps not voting, including 21 GOP, it is possibly a good sign for the Senate vote this week, as it may mean many conservative Representatives felt it politically impossible to vote no.

At the same time, it was not a disappointment, but a relief, that the Senate Majority Leader concluded the Senate should take a break from proposals to cap global warming pollution. It is shocking that this announcement to end the effort to solve the world's most dire and pressing problem comes with five months left in 2010. However, the Senate level of ambition to pass effective climate policy has waned from weak to damaging. With the gluts of industry giveaways, the latest bill drafts proposing a carbon cap exemplify that the legislative effort is carjacked by polluting industry lobbyists. If they have truly stopped trying for now, Congress must not think that they can simply pick up where they left off, because they are nowhere near producing legislation to overhaul America's economy to become modern, competitive, and sustainable.

This election season, members of Congress owe it to their children's future to use their campaigns to build momentum for energy policy that keeps the planet livable. What this Congress will have failed to produce is a set of policies that contains three broad elements that dissipated from legislative proposals in the Senate.

First, Congress must campaign for slashing global warming pollution in a manner that is fast and furious. We need to do whatever it takes. This is not about balancing the required efforts and bail outs of polluting industry. It is about taking deadly serious the pollution that made 2010 the hottest year on record. It is about stopping perverse subsidies that provide seven times more public funding for coal, oil, and gas than for renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal.

Second, Congress must campaign for significant financial assistance to help poor countries adapt to the devastating climate changes occurring already, and to develop cleanly, so that our efforts at home to protect the planet are not in vain. International climate financing is part of a fair and reasonable commitment from the United States, a wealthy country with the greatest historical share of global warming pollution, and is vitally necessary for achieving an effective global climate change agreement.

Third, Congress must campaign to protect and encourage the use of all existing tools for reducing global warming pollution, which includes laws they passed decades ago like the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is the reason why the administration can now require long-overdue pollution abatement technologies for the nation's dirtiest smokestacks, and why efficiency standards for America's cars will not be pitifully behind requirements in China. Members of Congress who are serious about stopping climate catastrophe will provide encouragement and support for other public officials, such as in state legislatures, the EPA, and the White House, to act quickly on this global emergency.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just issued a report declaring 2000 to 2009 to be the hottest decade on record and the evidence of man-made global warming to be "undeniable." Around 300 scientists from nearly 50 countries contributed to the NOAA report, which tracked 11 different indicators of climate change and found that seven of them – including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, sea level, and humidity – are indeed rising.

Moreover, according to Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK's Met Office, one of the agencies participating in the NOAA study, “The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”

Yet within this context, a flak from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Myron Ebell, still has the gall to say, "It's clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is."

This is what the climate deniers’ tactics basically amount to: Covering their ears and singing. “La la la I can’t hear you everything is fine we need oil and coal lalala.”

The worst part is, it works. That’s why we have to push back.

The science is settled: Global warming is happening and human activities are causing it. But the reporter who wrote this article on CNN's website didn’t bother factchecking Ebell whatsoever, meaning Ebell got away with repeating the Dirty Lie. We need you to help set the record straight.

Why would Ebell be willing to go on record ignoring hard scientific data with blatantly false talking points? Hm, let’s see… His employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has taken buckets of money from oil companies like Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and Texaco. CEI has also hosted events sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and Arch Coal. Think that maybe has something to do with Mr. Ebell’s skepticism? At the very least, these egregious conflicts of interest should be pointeded out to readers, as they should invalidate any “impartial” or “expert” opinion Ebell may have been able to provide.

Here are a few links you can drop in the comments of the article on CNN to make sure future readers know the full story about Myron Ebell and the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Competitive Enterprise Institute – Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
ExxonSecrets.org Factsheet: Competitive Enterprise Institute, CEI
Competitive Enterprise Institute on SourceWatch.org

Check out today's New York Magazine article on the second richest man in New York, and richest climate denier on the planet, David Koch:

The Billionaire's Party: David Koch is New York's second-richest man, a celebrated patron of the arts, and the tea party's wallet.

The best pull quote is this:

Global warming could be good for the planet, Koch says. "A far greater land area will be available to produce food."

...from this paragraph, which shows Greenpeace got his billionaire attention this spring:

David Koch is deeply antagonistic to the Obama administration. He fought the health-care bill, and the financial-regulation measure that was passed last week ("Everyone I know in the financial world is terrified by the powers it gives the federal government"). He also opposes the president's climate-change proposals. In his office, Koch showed me a photocopied flyer Greenpeace had produced with sketches of him and Charles below the words wanted for climate crimes and shook it in the air. Koch Industries' emissions, Koch told me, are far less than legally required. "And yet they're attacking us as environmental criminals," he said. "Wanting to put me and Charles in jail." Koch says he's not sure if global warming is caused by human activities, and at any rate, he sees the heating up of the planet as good news. Lengthened growing seasons in the northern hemisphere, he says, will make up for any trauma caused by the slow migration of people away from disappearing coastlines. "The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food," he says.

Wow. What a load of... And it goes uncontested by the NY Mag author, Andrew Goldman, who seems to write mostly "people" pieces for the magazine — on Bette Midler, Martha Stewart's daugher, Annie Leibovitz — so he can't be expected to know a big ol' global warming lie when he hears it. But we know it's a Dirty Lie — and if you want to do something about it, please go to the article right now and call Mr. Koch out for his attempts to downplay the seriousness of global warming just so he can keep raking money in hand over fist.

Here's a video about the Greenpeace campaign Mr. Koch was referring to:

Greenpeace issued a report on the Koch Brothers in March 2010 (Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine) and another report last week on Bill Koch, David's twin brother who is waging a campaign to kill Cape Wind, which will be the first offshore wind farm in the nation, just because he doesn't want to look at it from his mansion.

By the way, Greenpeace has relaunched our PolluterWatch website with profiles of all of the Kochs.

New York Magazine got trusted inside access to David Koch (who rarely gives interviews), and provides a detailed biography of the three twisted billionaire Koch brothers. Allowing the magazine such access may have been a PR attempt to do some damage control and fend off the increasing attention the Kochs are receiving for their association with Americans for Prosperity and the radical Tea Party movement. Rachel Maddow has driven this story hard for months. Koch fought back with preemptive press releases that they have nothing to do with the Tea Baggers, but it just got them more bad press on Maddow.

Its great. The Koch legacy of shrouded political action, global warming denial and free-market, anti-government, anti-regulatory radicalism is finally, slowly being dragged out into the sunlight... Accountability is a wonderful thing, especially when it involves the filthy rich.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

We’ve all heard the arguments from Big Oil and King Coal: “Without coal and oil, energy and gas prices would go through the roof;” or “We have to use domestic coal and oil reserves to ensure our energy security;” and “Renewables can’t do the job, so we have to keep using fossil fuels.”

That’s the Dirty Lie: The idea, heavily promoted by coal and oil industry lobbyists and their friends in Congress, that there is no remedy for our addiction to fossil fuels. But the truth is that with today’s technology, we can continue to grow our economy while phasing out fossil fuels altogether.


Our Energy [R]evolution report lays out a roadmap for achieving a clean energy economy. It also shows that we could create over a million American jobs in the renewable energy sector alone by 2030.

So if we have the means for kicking our dirty energy habit and moving to clean, green energy, and most Americans are more than supportive, why isn’t it happening? The reason is simple: Big industry has an incredible amount of influence over our energy policy, thanks to decades of campaign contributions to the politicians who make the rules. These companies and politicians defend their planet-killing actions by saying that we need coal and oil. It’s time to call out the Dirty Lie, and break their stranglehold.

That’s where you come in. We need help watchdogging the politicians and talking heads who take money from the fossil fuels industry and then push the Dirty Lie on the American public. Whenever you catch the Dirty Lie being promoted without challenge, or find a case where someone is regurgitating fossil fuels lobbyist talking points as if they were fact, let us know. In turn, we’ll let you know when and where to help set the record straight.

There are a variety of ways you can plug in to our work to call out the Dirty Lie:

3 Ways to expose the Dirty Lie

Facebook

If you have a Facebook account you can immediately mobilize your friends to expose the dirty lie. When you find an article that repeats the lie, post it to your Facebook with a status message that says something like:

“This article claims that we can’t live without fossil fuels. That is a dirty lie! Please go to the article and leave a comment saying so.”

Twitter

If you spot the Dirty Lie in the media and want to report it via Twitter, just use the hashtag #dirtylie and make sure you link to the news piece in question. We’ll be searching for this hashtag regularly, so we’ll be sure to find it. You can regularly search for tweets with this hashtag as well, we'll use it to let you know how you can help call out the worst offenders.

Delicious

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service that allows you to bookmark and save web pages online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It's perfect for the work before us of calling out the Dirty Lie!

Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with a keyword. That makes it a great tool for collaboration because we can easily look up all web pages tagged with the key word “DirtyLie.”

Here’s how to help:

1) If you’re new to Delicious, the first thing you need to do is create an account. Go to https://secure.delicious.com/login and follow the instructions. If you have a yahoo account you can use that to quickly create one. If not you’ll need to create one of those too.

2) Add a bookmarklet button to your browser’s bookmark bar. This way you’ll be able to bookmark and tag articles anywhere on the web with just a click. Go to http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets and follow the instructions for your web browser.

3) Now it’s time to start exposing the Dirty Lie by bookmarking and tagging articles. When you read articles that repeat junk science like “We’ll never have enough renewable energy to replace oil,” click your “Bookmark on Delicious” bookmarklet button you added to your browser. A pop-up window will appear. Add the tag “dirtylie” (important: keep “dirtylie” as one word) and any other tags or info you think is appropriate and click save.

4) Find other articles tagged with “dirtylie” at http://delicious.com/tag/dirtylie. You can read and comment on these articles and find other Delicious users that are exposing the Dirty Lie.

Greenpeace staff and volunteers will be keeping an eye on all of these social networks for the instances of the Dirty Lie you report. We’ll prioritize the worst offenders and let you know how you can help set the record straight.

Of course, you can also stay tuned right here on this blog to find out when and where you can help push back on the Dirty Lie. Stay tuned.

We released a report back in March that exposed Charles and David Koch, the billionaire oilmen who control Koch Industries, as a chief source of funding for the climate denial machine. Well, turns out doing everything possible to delay the clean energy revolution actually runs in the family. Today we’ve released a report on Bill Koch, David’s twin brother and the principal funder of opposition to Cape Wind, the project to build the nation’s largest wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

A Greenpeace boat in front of the Offshore Windpark Egmond aan Zee off the Dutch coast. America is falling behind in the race to develop renewable energy technologies and utilize renewable resources. Cape Wind would be the first major offshore wind facility in the US.

Bill Koch made his fortune through his privately-held, carbon-intensive company, Oxbow (or, I should probably say, he founded Oxbow with the fortune he received from suing his brothers in 1983 after they ousted him from the family business). Oxbow Corporation, with $3.7 billion in yearly sales and over 1200 employees, sells 10 million metric tons of petroleum coke and 8 million metric tons of steam coal annually.

After making a killing peddling dirty energy, Bill Koch turns around and uses his immense personal wealth to fund the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the primary group that finds every possible way to undermine and delay Cape Wind. Even worse, he pays lobbyists through his Oxbow corporation to try and quietly kill the wind farm project altogether.

We compiled the full story behind Bill Koch into a brief dossier which you can read below or righ-click this link and choose "Save Link As" to download the PDF: Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition.

Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition

Since the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded and sank in April, BP has devoted inadequate resources to the oil spill response, withheld information from the American public, and denied access to spill sites to journalists. So our ship the Arctic Sunrise is heading to the Gulf to do an independent assessment of the impacts. We believe it’s way past time the full, unabridged truth about the extent and nature of this oil catastrophe was told to America and the world.


The Greenpeace ship MY Arctic Sunrise was in the Mediterranean Sea in June to help protect endangered bluefin tuna. © Gavin Parsons / Greenpeace

The reports coming out of Louisiana about cleanup workers and even local police helping BP enforce a media blockade have been nearly as frustrating as watching the oil spew into the Gulf without cease for almost three months (a hat tip is most definitely deserved here to Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland, who has been chasing this story all along and doing a great job of reporting what’s happening on the ground).

It’s in BP’s best interest to limit media access to oiled beaches and wildlife, as the more they can contain the truth about just how much damage has been done, the more they can limit their liability to pay for that damage later on. We released our ScamWow video last week to highlight this very sad and galling state of affairs.

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve also had a team on the ground since the start of the disaster, tirelessly investigating local beaches and coastal ecosystems to take measure of the extent of the damage. Our team has taken copious photos and posted numerous oil spill updates on our blogs to make sure folks can see for themselves just what BP has done to the Gulf.

But BP is cracking down on public access more than ever, so we’re stepping up our efforts. The Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise is on its way to the Gulf for a three-month expedition to document the true impacts of the BP Deepwater Disaster on the Gulf’s marine life and unique ecosystems. This tour is especially crucial now because even if BP has finally capped the leaking well, the crisis will continue for some time, endangering wildlife and ecosystems, destroying the region’s fisheries, and affecting the ocean for decades to come. It’s important that we not let the focus shift away from the truly extensive catastrophe that is still unfolding in the Gulf, whether more oil is spewing out of BP’s well or not.

The Sunrise will leave Tampa, Florida during the week of August 9th and visit the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas before approaching the wellhead during the first month of the expedition. The crew aboard the Sunrise will be examining everything from the plankton on the surface to the subsurface plumes and the deep-sea corals on the floor of the Gulf.

The Arctic Sunrise is a 50-meter long, icebreaker ship that was purchased by Greenpeace in 1995. Since then, it has peacefully protested whaling in the Southern Ocean, documented climate change and glacier melts in the Arctic, and was the first ship to circumnavigate James Ross Island in the Antarctic, which was  an impossible journey until a 200m thick ice shelf connecting the island to the Antarctic continent collapsed.
 
Throughout the expedition, the Arctic Sunrise will host independent scientists and researchers who will be looking for oiled marine mammals, turtles, fish, and sea birds. Charles Messing and Jose Lopez from Nova Southeastern University will be on board looking at sponges, which filter large quantities of water and are therefore useful for looking at sub-lethal impacts of oil and dispersants. We’ll announce other on-board scientists in the coming weeks.

So keep checking back on our blog for live interviews with our onboard campaigners and scientists, video and still photography from the Gulf, and an interactive, web-based Virtual Ship Tour that lets supporters come along for the journey. You can grab an RSS feed of our blog posts dedicated to the tour by going here: Greenpeace Gulf Oil Disaster Expedition blogs.

We’ll also be posting lots of ways you can help call for a moratorium on new offshore drilling and for Congress and the White House to come clean, get rid of campaign contributions from dirty energy, and stop subsidizing big oil and coal.

In the meantime, help us promote our Energy [R]evolution report, which shows how it’s possible to phase out fossil fuels and reach 96% renewables in our energy mix by 2050. The US consumes 25% of the oil produced globally but has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. We will never drill our way out of being dependent on foreign oil. The only way for the US to achieve energy security and stop oil spills before they happen is to invest in its huge renewable energy potential.

Almost 3 months after BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster began it’s devastation to the Gulf of Mexico, we are finally seeing movement by President Obama to investigate what exactly went wrong after the explosion, what can be done to help the communities affected by this unnecessary disaster and how to make sure it never happens again.

A panel put together by President Obama that is co-chaired by Senator Bob Graham (former two–term governor of Florida) and William K. Reilly (head of the EPA under President Bush), and includes the likes of NRDC’s presidents and the Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), will come together over the next few months to try and figure out what went wrong and how to move forward. They are set to make a recommendation to the President in 6 months, and one can only hope that they will endorse a plan that includes the only thing that makes sense to make sure this never happens again: an end to offshore drilling.

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve been in the Gulf region for the last two weeks helping to document the devastation that the communities are feeling and bearing witness to the impact of the disaster on wildlife. The impacts are worse than the pictures can convey, the scope of the disaster feels wider than any map can show, and the stories are more saddening than any news program can capture.

Yesterday, the first day the commission met, I struggled through a presentation from Kent Wells, Senior Vice President of BP North America, explaining how sorry they were and how hard they were trying to make it better. I listened as Rear Admiral Peter Neffenger, Deputy Incident Commander for the Coast Guard, described the efforts to contain and clean up BP’s disaster and the struggles they are facing.

I also listened to firsthand accounts from the people that are living the reality of this disaster. Sal Sunseri, the owner of P&J Oyster Company, and Jeff Angers, President of the Center for Coastal Conservation, spoke of the impact of the disaster, the unknowns of dispersants being used during the attempt to clean up the Gulf, and how the Gulf will be changed for generations to come. These communities can not measure the impact this disaster will have on them. They can not tell how their cultures will be impacted or when life will return to what can be considered normal.

I was back this morning as the commission heard from federal government officials on the status of the cleanup efforts, from local elected officials on their communities, and from local leaders about ecological impacts. All this was followed by a 2 hour period for public comment. Stay tuned, I’ll have more updates.

There’s no way to clean up an oil spill. We’ve seen this time and again — in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, for instance, where oil from the Exxon Valdez spill is still having an impact on local ecosystems. Corporations like Exxon or BP that find themselves responsible for an oil spill — or, as was the case for Exxon and now is the case for BP, an oil disaster — are really left with only one option to handle the problem: public relations, damage control and fierce lobbying.

It’s clear BP knows this all too well, and is determined to spare no expense on the cleanup… of its image. We put together this "ScamWow" video to highlight this sad state of affairs:


We decided to spoof the original late night infomercials for the ShamWow miracle clean-up towel, which is touted as a quick fix for any cleaning problem (it's made in Germany and "You know the Germans always make good stuff"), because BP is attempting to use PR damage control as a miracle cure for its sullied image. Except, unfortunately, PR has no miraculous cleaning powers. The company's image may be less soiled as a result of the millions BP is spending on PR, but the Gulf of Mexico will be reeling from the impacts of the company's negligence for decades.

Consider the estimated $50 million BP has spent on an all-out media blitz, complete with a TV ad featuring an earnest Tony “I’d like my life back” Hayward looking into the camera and assuring us “We will make this right.” What he means is, "We will do anything to make you think we will make this right" — anything short of, you know, actually reporting the true size of the spill, allowing journalists unfettered access to spill sites and oiled beaches to provide independent coverage of cleanup operations, stopping the damn leak in a timely manner, or god-forbid taking worker and environmental safety concerns seriously in the first place so that this spill never even happened.

“The Gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened,” Tony “The size of the spill is small in relation to the size of the ocean” Hayward tells us in his TV ad. We can agree on that, at least, Tony!

BP has engaged multiple PR and lobby firms to help wage its PR assault, which spans all conceivable media. According to our calculations, BP spent almost $6 million through the end of June on ads in newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, while also purchasing Google and Yahoo ads that will display whenever people search for “oil spill” — surely an extremely pricey keyword at the moment that is generating a lot of clicks.

Considering the spill cleanup costs (estimated at $16 million a day), why would BP do this? Because public relations and lobbying is one way BP can turn public opinion in their favor and soften the blow from lawsuits, regulators, and Congress.  If the public could somehow be made to feel sympathetic toward BP, or to feel that BP is really going “to make this right,” the ultimate financial pain to BP might be lessened. So from where BP’s sitting — a place where the bottom line is the ultimate concern, not Gulf Coast residents’ livelihoods, not Gulf Coast ecosystems — the decision to give their image the vigorous scrubbing they can’t give the Gulf Coast ecosystems befouled by their oil is a no-brainer.

BP made $66 million a day in profits in the first quarter of 2010. If they want to keep raking it in hand over fist like that, they gotta do some damage control. It’s just that simple.

Oil spills are an inevitability of the supremely dirty oil drilling business, especially as companies are forced to dig deeper and take more outrageous risks to reach what’s left of the world’s oil reserves. Heard about BP’s plans to drill 2 miles deep and as much as eight miles horizontally from a gravel island the company built in the middle of the Beaufort Sea up in the Arctic? No, that’s not just a sick joke.

The Exxon Valdez spill is not our only example of how impossible it is to clean up spilled oil: Ask the villagers down in Ecuador who are still battling with Chevron to try and get their traditional lands cleaned up, or the people over in Nigeria who suffer from companies like Shell spilling the equivalent of a Valdez-sized spill every year. Oil is wreaking havoc on communities across the globe, and the companies responsible always seem to treat these disasters as little more than the cost of doing business. The Ecuadorian Amazon, the Niger Delta, the Gulf of Mexico — these are collateral damage in Big Oil’s relentless pursuit for reckless profits.

The real way forward is of course to stop drilling and invest in clean energy, but oil companies cannot be depended on to drive society toward clean energy. They are OIL companies after all.

The only way to stop oil spills once and for all is to leave it in the ground where it belongs. President Obama and Congress need to ensure we kickstart the clean energy revolution and stop drilling for oil. Check out our blueprint for how America can achieve 96% renewable energy by 2050 and create over a million jobs by 2030: Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook. Help promote our vision for the sustainable future! Then take action to tell Congress No New Drilling, Period.

On July 6th, the Brazilian Forest Code, the law which regulates the use of the Amazon rainforest, has suffered the most serious setback in recent history. For years NGOs like Greenpeace, scientists and civil society have been fighting to protect the legislation from being hijacked by corporate interests. Those efforts were threatened when a major revision of the laws was proposed earlier this year.
With the final vote by the Special Commission set up for this purpose being 13 to 5 in favor of the changes, the bill is now set to be discussed in the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives later this year. However, the fact that this will delay the process until after the Presidential elections in October is hardly a reason to celebrate. In fact, the upcoming Presidential elections could have disastrous consequences for the passage of the bill. Several politicians are expected to trade approval to the proposed legislation for votes and political support from the powerful agricultural sector during the upcoming campaign.

Those political realities put the Forest Code in immediate danger. Under the existing law, landowners are required to set aside 80% of their lands as Legal Reserves in the Amazon. This protection is now at stake. If the proposed bill becomes law, that area would be reduced to a mere 50% which would legalize the clearing of enormous amounts of forest. For more on the history and importance of the Brazilian Forest Code, check out our recent blog post and watch Greenpeace's Amazon Campaign Director Paulo Adario speaking on the issue:

Agribusiness, the energy sector and producers of biofuels have been pushing for more deforestation in the future. But it is not their future business prospects alone that these interest groups are worried about. They also are concerned about their past crimes. One of the most outrageous changes is related to the prosecution of those who have broken the existing Forest Code. The new bill includes a clause granting amnesty to environmental crimes like illegal deforestation committed in areas of permanent preservation before July 22nd, 2008. This means that fines and other penalties imposed before this date will be suspended if the proposed legislation passes.

Although pressure and actions by Greenpeace and others have lead to some last-minute changes, the bill remains more than just flawed. While it does not leave the regulation of deforestation completely in the hands of the states anymore, it still contains several loopholes. State governments, which have always been more receptive to pressure groups, will be able to allow deforestation when they believe public interests to be at stake or when they think that the environmental impact is considerably small.

The overall impact of the proposed changes, however, is anything but small. This is why Greenpeace is urging politicians to repeal the proposed changes and not pass the new Forest Code.

Next Tuesday is the fourth annual Hansen Day – or HD4 – how do you plan
to commemorate it?

What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day — is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” The entire article is worth reading, or re–reading.

Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms — the bands in which given temperatures dominate — are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article — isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.

The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.

(I’m typing this at 6:30 a.m. It’s 82 degrees in northwest Vermont, the only time of day when I can be in my office without dissolving into a pool of sweat. It was 99 at 10 p.m. last night. It’s been above 90 for the last five days in this, the land of no air conditioning.)

None of this is inevitable. We have the technology in hand to substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels and their creation of greenhouse gas. We had those technologies four years ago when Jim Hansen wrote his article. We have not mobilized the political will to use them.

We need to tax carbon. Now. What’s happening so graphically in the Gulf of Mexico is exactly what we’re doing to our atmosphere each and every day, except it doesn’t look the same. The consequences, however, will be worse.

In his article, Dr. Hansen writes about Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina discovering, in the 1970s, the damage done to the Earth’s ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon chemicals (CFCs) and how the global community reacted, via the Montreal Protocol, to phase out CFCs and reduce the damage and eventually, the threat posed by these chemicals. He calls for a similar effort on fossil fuels. 

Second, the fossil fuel industry learned from the ozone crisis. It did not learn how to be a good global citizen and save humankind from the worst effects of our excesses. It learned how to undermine scientists and environmental organizations. It learned how to protect its short-term profits and executive compensation, even at the cost of our civilization. We see that playing out in Congress today as the “representatives” of those most damaged by the latest oil atrocity scream loudest for renewed deep water oil drilling.

This year marks the fourth Hansen Day — there are only six left. Hansen Day should be recognized as a day to take stock of where we have come since July 2006 (the wrong way, really) and think about how far we’ll have to go to avoid the hazards Dr. Hansen outlined in his article.

Maybe the global recession has bought us some time, maybe not. Certainly not enough for us to make up for four years of doing the wrong thing. Since Dr. Hansen’s article was published, China has become a world leader in renewable energy technology, but it has also become the world’s number one greenhouse gas emitter. Not good news at the end of the day — or century.

How many more Hansen Days with pass with no action taken? How many can we afford? As he wrote, we have ten years, not to decide, but to fundamentally alter our trajectory.Hansen Day is not for celebrating, but it should be noted.