I recently wrote a post about an action we carried out that targeted a Kimberly-Clark (KC) Kleenex manufacturing facility. A few people wrote in the comments that they would like to know more about the company’s practices and why we’re targeting them. Tons of relevant information can be found in our report, Cut & Run, which we had on-hand at the action to pass out to KC employees and anyone else who wanted to know why we were there. The report documents KC’s complicity in the destruction of the Kenogami Forest, a Boreal forest in northern Ontario, Canada that was once directly managed by KC and still serves as a primary source of tree pulp for the company today.

Clearcuts currently stretch across nearly 27,000 acres of the Kenogami Forest thanks to KC’s logging practices. Worse, the company’s plans for the next few years include the logging of forests that are as much as two centuries old – to make products that are generally used once and then thrown away.

The commenters were specifically wondering about the company’s recycling practices. I pulled some salient info out of the report:

Amount of virgin tree pulp used annually: 3.1 million metric tonnes (3.4 million tons)

Percent of total fibre used in Kimberly-Clark products sold in North America that comes from recycled sources: 18

Percent of total fibre used in Kimberly-Clark consumer brands sold in North America that comes from recycled sources: Less than 1

You read right: less than 1% of all the Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle people buy from the store every day is made from recycled content. That’s inconscionable, especially considering that the company isn’t sourcing its virgin fiber responsibly, to boot. Obviously, if the company had a high standard for using recycled content in its products, they wouldn’t have to cut down so much old-growth Boreal forest. But even when it’s necessary for them to use virgin pulp, they could be sourcing it much more susatinably. As the report states:

If the company increased its use of recycled fibre across its entire range of products, it could dramatically reduce its reliance on virgin tree pulp. And if it adopted a more rigorous and credible policy, one that prohibited the use of fibre from Endangered Forests (including intact forests and threatened species habitat) and made a meaningful commitment to wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, Kimberly-Clark could ensure that virgin fibre it did use in its products came from well-managed forests.

Inexplicably, the company has resisted implementing these simple and seemingly commonsense standards. Plus, I haven't even mentioned the social justice issues this raises: the First Nations peoples who have lived in and off of the Kenogami Forest for generation after generation who weren't consulted whatsoever about KC's plans to destroy their homeland, for instance. Needless to say, KC can do better, and we aren’t letting them off the hook until they do.

Representative John Barrow, a Democrat representing Georgia's 12th Congressional district, has created a 2-question survey on his web page to find out how people think we should be dealing with high gas prices.

Click here to tell Rep. Barrow the obvious: Renewable energy is the future!

Update: Greenpeace and  Kimberly-Clark have announced the successful resolution of the Kleercut campaign as the maker of Kleenex has established a new sustainability policy focused on protecting Endangered Forests. Go to www.greenpeace.org/kleercut to find out more!

In our latest effort to call attention to Kimberly-Clark’s unsustainable business practices, several Greenpeace activists locked down the Kleenex facility at Fullerton, CA yesterday (check out the slideshow). I was lucky enough to ride along.

It was quite a thrill to watch as the activists leapt from their vans and proceeded to lock down the main entrance of the facility by chaining themselves to toilets with fake trees in them. Around the corner, on a busy boulevard bordering the facility, another group of activists were unfurling a 40 foot banner that read “Stop flushing forests.”

Local Fullertonians (Fullertonites?) were receptive to the message, too. People honked wildly as they passed the banner and the activists in “Forest Crimes Unit” t-shirts – there were so many honks, in fact, that surely the big-wigs in the administrative office could hear them. Nearly all of the teamsters who passed by tooted their horns. Even one of the policemen on the scene gave our activists a thumbs-up.

It was just a quiet Thursday morning for most of the people commuting to work, but as they drove by and saw our activists their heads turned, their eyes lit up, curiosity got the better of them. And that was the point. The people who live and work there drive by the KC facility every day, but many are (or were) probably unaware of the degradation KC’s products have wrought on Canada’s ancient forests. Our ancient forests. But they know now.

Most people, when they learn of what goes into KC’s disposable paper products, are immediately ready to swear off of Kleenex, Scott, and Cottonelle altogether. We brought thousands of petitions and postcards from people pledging to do just that until KC starts using as much recycled content in their products as they can, and agrees to only source what virgin fiber it still needs from sustainably managed forests instead of vitally important ancient growth Boreal forests. Think they read them? Think they paid any mind to the honking outside their office?

We’ll see. In the meantime, we’ll keep the pressure on. And we won’t be buying any Kleenex.

Now that's more like it:

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. “The future of human civilization is at stake.”

Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal. He said the goal of producing all of the nation’s electricity from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” within 10 years is not some farfetched vision, although he said it would require fundamental changes in political thinking and personal expectations.

“This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative,” Mr. Gore said in his remarks at the conference. “It represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life — to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

This Alternet article delivers the goods:
As Facts Emerge, the False Promise of Offshore Drilling Becomes Clear

From a Bush Admin spokesperson admitting offshore drilling won’t make a short-term impact on energy prices to an informed citizen challenging McCain’s shortsighted new policy proposal at a campaign stop, it’s all there.

The article also exposes the inadequacies of the last refuge of offshore drilling proponents. As the facts of this terrible proposal become common knowledge, Bush, McCain, and Gingrich have been ducking for cover behind a recent Rasmussen poll that found that “two-thirds of Americans want to see the offshore ban rescinded.” Problem is that the poll is completely bogus:

But the Rasmussen poll asked (emphasis added) "In order to reduce the price of gas, should drilling be allowed in offshore oil wells off the coasts of California, Florida, and other states?"

After being misinformed that drilling would lower the price of gas, it's not surprising that voters would express support.

But what do you think the results would be if an accurate question was offered, such as: should drilling be allowed off the coasts of California, Florida and other states, even though it would NOT lower the price of gas in the next several years?

The mistake that politicians in support of the gas tax holiday made was taking comfort in polls that did not factor in what would happen after all the facts were laid out.

The facts on coastal drilling are coming out. Poll-driven politicians, beware.

President Bush gave a highly-partisan speech today in which he announced that he was lifting the presidential moratorium on drilling the outer continental shelf for oil. There are a whole slew of reasons why this is a terrible idea that would not work whatsoever. Maybe that's why the speech is more about taking pot-shots at the Democratic Congress than any real, substantive explanation of why he thinks this is the right solution to high gas prices. Put simply, it's not a solution to rising energy costs, period. It's a way for Bush to throw his pals in the oil industry one last giant bone before he leaves office -- or I guess I should say another bone, in addition to his decision not to deal with global warming.

The Natural Resources Defense Council put together a video on Omnisio that details all of the distortions and mistruths contained in Bush's speech. Check it out: The Truth about drilling, gas prices and OCS.

Please oh PLEASE let the Democratic Congress have the guts and the savvy to effectively neutralize this ridiculously partisan election year stunt. Bush has been screwing up this great country of ours for almost 8 years, we can't let him continue to lie to and manipulate the public so that his chosen successor can extend his policies. Bush's disastrous tenure must end at precisely 12:00 noon, January 20th, 2009.

A day after President Bush flippantly excused himself from a G8 summit that failed miserably to establish new policies for addressing global warming by saying "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter," this should surprise no one:

EPA Won't Act on Emissions This Year
Instead of New Rules, More Comment Sought

The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare -- a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.

The entire article by the Washington Post is well worth the read, as it details the games the administration has been playing in order to avoid dealing with the looming global climate crisis. A Supreme Court ruling last year ordered the EPA to determine whether or not global warming is a threat to human health and welfare, but the inevitable results -- there is really only one concolusion they can reach, after all -- would have required the EPA to set federal standards to remedy the problem. Rather than provide real leadership on this dire issue, the administration has shamefully pulled every trick they could think of to delay and stall, including censoring their own scientists, suppressing official reports they themselves commissioned, and deliberately fudging data provided to them by their own experts.

Nontheless, I think there are two positives we can take away from this: 1) Even the Bush Administration can't outright deny global warming any more (as much as they'd probably like to), and the call for solutions has grown so loud that they can't ignore it, either; and 2) We're so close to the end of the disastrous Bush Administration that they can choose to run out the clock rather than deal with global warming.

This is very, very cool (h/t Idealog):

On July 7, 2008, the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly – composed of one hundred and thirty (130) delegates elected countrywide to rewrite the country’s Constitution – voted to approve articles for the new constitution recognizing rights for nature and ecosystems. “If adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. (Read the entire Rights of Nature Language Approved by the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly doc on CELDF’s website.)

The environmental movement in the US has always been a voice for the voiceless – the wildlife, the ecosystems, all of the inhabitants of the Earth that have a right to life every bit as much as humans do but that can’t speak up for themselves. Rarely do enviros organize around the idea that those rights should be made law. And yet look at all of the great movements in American history: abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights – all rights-based movements. Perhaps it is time to rethink our strategies if we are to effect lasting protections for the natural world. All too often we’ve discovered that it’s not enough to get a species listed as endangered or to stop a dam project from going forward. Our opponents will simply regroup and redeploy with new tactics and new ways to spin the facts. If we codify the rights of the natural world to exist, not only do we have lasting protections for the environment but powerful new tools to stop the polluters and robber-barons who are befouling and plundering the Earth for their own gain.

Recently, our own Carroll Muffett wrote some excellent blogs about his experience attending a coal industry conference and how many of the people working in the industry feel that it is the corporation that is damaging the world, not them. This idea is fostered by the legal rights we’ve afforded to corporations as entities in and of themselves, as if they are people who should enjoy equal rights under the law. This is a misguided notion, to be sure, and the laws that established corporate personhood are “illegitimately” based on Constitutional law, according to Richard Grossman, co-founder of Programs on Corporations, Law and Democracy (read more). Given that corporations are responsible not just for a huge amount of the pollution dumped on our planet but also for obstructing most progressive, environmental causes like global warming legislation, emissions standards, etc., opposing legal corporate personhood should probably be a part of any rights-based environmental movement. We need to assert the rights of the Earth over the rights of the corporations that have been pillaging the Earth.

The world “leaders” attending the G8 summit in Japan issued a statement on global warming today committing their nations to doing pretty much nothing. They boldly declared they would half emissions by 2050 but set no binding targets, no interim targets of any kind, and didn’t even set a base year off of which the 50% reduction would be measured.

World leaders embraced for the first time on Tuesday an ambitious but nonbinding goal of slashing greenhouse-gas emissions in half by midcentury to stave off global warming. Unimpressed environmentalists called the effort too slow and too uncertain.

Leaders of some of the world's richest nations praised the agreement, which endorsed President Bush's insistence that fast-developing countries like China and India join in the effort. But one environmental critic suggested that by 2050 those leaders would be forgotten and "the world will be cooked."

Details were scant in the statement issued by the Group of Eight. Some could become clearer Wednesday when China, India and six other fast-developing nations sit down with the Group of Eight industrial nations — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy and Canada — to discuss climate change strategies.

The G-8 did not specify a base year for its proposed 50 percent cut, and the actual emissions reductions and the effect on the environment could vary hugely depending on what is eventually decided. Reductions from 2005 levels, for instance, would be far less than from 1990 levels, as in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

It would appear the rest of the 8 “leaders” are prepared to follow Bush into hell and high water, whining about India and China all the way and paying no mind to the moral responsibility of the developed world – which created the problem in the first place – to lead on this global issue. They could perhaps amend this statement after Wednesday’s meeting when they meet with China and India and other developing nations, but developing nations are far more worried about providing basic necessities to their people than global warming. If “the world’s richest nations” won’t commit to really addressing this crisis, why should they? It’s disappointing that the European leaders at the summit, most of whose countries have been far more aggressive about global warming than the US, caved to Bush’s obstructionist tactics. The growing global climate crisis will almost surely be looked upon as yet another massive failure by the Bush administration.