The new "deal" to delay signing a climate agreeement until next year, which was announced at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting this past weekend, is nothing more than an attempt to lower expectations for the climate talks taking place in Copenhagen this December. It’s especially disappointing given President Obama’s key role in the announcement. What we really need is for Obama to step up and lead the world as a bold advocate of an ambitious and binding treaty.

What’s even more disturbing is that this is part of a larger trend in Obama’s handling of the climate crisis since taking office. In his inaugural address he promised to “restore science to its rightful place,” yet he has not followed through on that promise. Instead, he sat back and watched as the coal industry essentially rewrote climate legislation as it moved through the House. And now that the Senate is in no rush to pass a similar bill, Obama is letting that dictate his foreign policy and stalling an international climate agreement.

Fed up with the stalling and lowering of expectations? I know I am. Tell Obama that December is the time to sign an ambitious climate treaty, not some unspecified future date.

This brazen stall tactic is all the more unconscionable when you consider the fact that it ignores the plight of the developing world, which will be hit hardest by global warming even though they did not have nearly as large a hand in creating the problem as developed countries like the US had. There’s more on this topic and the “deal” to not make a deal in Copenhagen in this statement from Greenpeace International:

“ Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen has become complicit in a so-called ‘deal’ which would put Obama’s political difficulties ahead of the survival of the world’s most vulnerable countries,” said Kaisa Kosonen, Climate Policy Advisor for Greenpeace International, in Copenhagen ahead of tomorrow’s “Pre-COP” gathering of key environment ministers in preparation for December’s climate summit.

“I don’t think a majority of countries will buy this face-saving plan. When Obama started downplaying the Copenhagen outcomes, did he check with the world’s most vulnerable countries as to whether their survival was now negotiable? That’s certainly not the message we have heard – climate change impacts are already affecting millions across the developing world and they need action now. There is no real excuse to postpone decisions on legally binding, ambitious action,” said Kosonen.

She questioned whether any EU leaders knew about Rasmussen’s cop-out deal. They were not at APEC, which only includes some of the world’s industrialized countries – the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Japan.

“ EU leaders, including Merkel, Sarkozy and Brown, must immediately step in and publicly oppose this back down from a legally binding climate agreement in Copenhagen,” she said.

Just two weeks ago in Barcelona the 43-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) expressed outrage at attempts to steamroll the world’s most vulnerable countries into accepting a watered down political agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Their calls are supported by the African Group, which said it would accept only legally binding commitments on deep emission cuts and adequate funding from the industrialized world for climate adaptation and mitigation, including tackling deforestation.

“This is not about time but rather the absence of political will from industrialized countries, which are refusing to take their fair share of the global efforts and instead continue to postpone important decisions into eternity. Denmark should be ashamed of itself for caving in to Obama in this so-called deal,” said Kosonen.

Industrialized countries recognized two years ago that they would need to cut their emissions in the range of at least 25-40%. But right now their aggregate emissions stand at a mere 10-17%, not enough to stop climate change. The industrialized countries at the APEC meeting are largely those at the lower end of this range.

The bill passed by the House is certainly at the lower end of emissions reductions targets, aiming for a mere 4% reduction relative to 1990 levels by 2020. Half-measures like this will doom us all to runaway climate change we can believe in – because we’ll be increasingly witnessing its effects with our own eyes.

Greenpeace activists delivered over 7,000 "Stop Whaling" petitions to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C today, just hours before President Obama was scheduled to travel to Japan. As Michelle wrote yesterday, there is a very real possibility that Japan's whaling program could be ended soon. That's why we took the opportunity to send the message to Japan that they should stop whaling in the Southern Ocean international whale sanctuary, and use Obama's visit as a chance to make that announcement to the world.

Check out these pics from the delivery event today:



If you want to lend your voice to the call for Japan to stop slaughtering whales, sign our petition urging President Obama to to talk about whale conservation with the new Japanese Prime Minister.

This morning, an international team of Greenpeace activists issued an urgent call to action to President Barack Obama from the heart of Indonesia's threatened rainforests by unfurling a banner in a freshly destroyed area of forest that reads "Obama: you can stop this."


© Greenpeace/John Novis

As Rolf wrote last week during the Barcelona climate talks, the United States continues to block progress in advance of critical UN climate negotiations that will take place in Copenhagen next month. The banner hang was meant to urge Obama to join with other world leaders and help avert a climate crisis by ending global deforestation, one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to lower carbon emissions and combat global warming.


© Greenpeace/John Novis

Global deforestation is responsible for about a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. Greenpeace estimates that ending global deforestation requires industrialized countries to invest $42 billion annually in forest protection.

While the banner was being deployed this morning, several other Greenpeace activists locked themselves to four excavators owned by Asia Pacific Resources International Holding Limited (APRIL), one of Indonesia’s biggest pulp and paper producers, to stop the company from destroying more rainforest to make way for tree plantations.

Over 50 Greenpeace activists from the Climate Defenders Camp on Indonesia's Kampar Peninsula take action against APRIL, one of Indonesia's biggest pulp and paper producers, to prevent it destroying the rainforest on the Kampar Peninsula to make way for tree plantations, grown for pulp and paper. © Greenpeace/Ardiles Rante

Check out lots more great photos in this slideshow:

President Obama, who will meet two days from now with 20 other Heads of State in Singapore to discuss Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), has promised to take decisive action on climate change. Yet his administration is actively undermining and stalling global climate change negotiations while the US Congress delays its vote on an inadequate bill.

It’s time for leadership. Help us send this message by signing our petition telling President Obama that it’s Time To Sign a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty.

Today’s action took place on the Kampar Peninsula on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where Greenpeace has set up a Climate Defenders Camp. Rainforest and peatland destruction in Indonesia emits huge quantities of CO2, causing the country to become the world’s third largest climate polluter after China and the US.

Greenpeace activists are also working to reduce carbon emissions by constructing dams in the area to stop paper companies from destroying the rainforest’s carbon rich peat soil, which contains approximately 2 billion tons of carbon. They will continue to protect the rainforest peatlands in coming weeks as December’s UN climate summit approaches.

To find more info and resources on deforestation in Indonesia and climate change, click here.

Here's a great video from the Greenpeace banner hang at Barcelona's Sagrada Família last week:

As the last day of climate talks before the Copenhagen summit drew to a close, Greenpeace activists attached a banner reading "Climate chaos: Who is to blame?" to Barcelona’s Columbus Monument, which points to America. The US delegation has emerged as one of the chief obstructions to progress at the talks that took place in Barcelona this week.




Images © Greenpeace/Pedro Armestre

Today's action was the final one of a series of actions Greenpeace did this week in Barcelona. Check out pics from our banner hang at Sagrada Família and the "extreme weather event" we created to show delegates what lies in store for the planet if global warming goes unchecked.

If the political courage of the developed world’s leaders remains missing in action, then we won’t have a deal in Copenhagen. And despite their best efforts to continue floating half-measures and make them stick, consensus is not forming around a deal with weak emissions targets. Developing countries are pushing back and fighting for their survival.
 
We singled out President Obama, however, because his actions fall so far short of his promises to “restore science to its proper place” and lead the world’s response to global warming. He has stood aside while Congress let the fossil fuel industry hijack its climate legislation. And on the international scene, he has been silent while his negotiators obstruct the progress on a treaty intended to deal with the most pressing environmental crisis of our time.

Write to President Obama now and tell him that it’s time to sign a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty.

Greenpeace activists staged an extreme weather event today for delegates at the UN climate talks in Barcelona, Spain to give them a taste of what the future will look like if they don’t create the right conditions for a fair, ambitious and binding climate deal in Copenhagen next month.

Amidst a mock storm of thunder, lightning, rain and wind outside the Barcelona conference center, the Greenpeace activists deployed a banner that read “Our climate, your decision”.



© Pedro Armestre/Greenpeace


© Pedro Armestre/Greenpeace


© Pedro Armestre/Greenpeace

The really bad news is that, according to reports coming out of Barcelona, it is the US that is the biggest threat to the deal the world needs in Copenhagen. Rolf has all the dirt on the excuses the US delegation is making in his post, "Call to Action: US obstructing Barcelona talks." There's also a sample script and numbers you can use to call Secretary of State Hilary Clinton or US climate envoy Todd Stern to let them know that you expect the US to lead the world's response to climate change, not obstruct those efforts.

If you haven't made a call, please make one now. If you have made a call, consider calling again. The Obama Adminstration needs to hear from us that we expect the leadership that then-candidate Obama promised on global warming.

Yesterday I reported on a Greenpeace banner hang at the UN climate talks in Barcelona, as well as the fact that several African nations had walked out of the negotiations in protest of the weak emissions reductions targets commitments made by developed nations.

I mentioned in that post that the talks were to resume today, but also noted that I didn't know what resolution had been reached to allow talks to resume. Today, via The Associated Press, we have our answer:

BARCELONA, Spain — African countries ended a boycott of meetings at U.N. climate negotiations on Tuesday, after winning promises for more in-depth talks on how much rich nations need to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Due to the Africans' demands, most of the rest of this week's talks in Barcelona will be devoted to discussing carbon-cutting pledges rather than other issues including carbon offsets and action by developing countries, said John Ash, chairman of the negotiations on emissions.

The Africans, supported by about 70 other developing countries, said industrial nations were making weak commitments to stave off dramatic temperature rises while Africa was being devastated by droughts and floods blamed on global warming.

Scientists say industrial countries should reduce emissions by 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, but targets announced so far amount to far less.

...

"It's really good that the Africans have finally been able to stand up together," said Fiona Musana of Johannesburg-based Greenpeace Africa. "That sends a strong signal."

Of course, low emissions targets aren't the only ways the leaders of the developed world are attempting to shirk their responsibility to solve the climate crisis. Jess, blogging on Greenpeace International's Climate Rescue Weblog, reports that negotiators for developed countries are now arguing for a "politically binding" agreement as opposed to a "legally binding" agreement:

The climate negotiations have arrived at yet another war over words that might prove detrimental to a deal in Copenhagen this December. Check this one out - developing countries are demanding that negotiators stick to the commitment of a legally binding treaty while developed countries seem to be pleased with showboating their new idea of a politically binding agreement. Sound like just semantics to you? May sound like it but consider this: When was the last time you trusted a promise that a politician made to you before they took steps to make good on it?

...

“I do not know anything called a politically binding agreement. They are worth very little. Tell me of any politician that delivered on their (election) manifesto,” Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, a delegate with Sudan.

OK, so maybe it sounds like a whole lot of unwarranted distrust to you, so let’s use President Obama as an example. I campaigned and voted for President Obama based on the promises he made. As someone that cares about the environment, I was inspired by his statements about leading the world in the fight against climate change. After he was elected, he talked about returning science to its rightful place and leading the world in a solution to the climate crisis. But just 32 days out, where is the leadership and return to science that my President Obama promised? How much longer do I trust in promises without any accountability?

Where is the accountability, indeed. We now learn that, far from providing the leadership that was promised by Obama, the US is actually doing its best to undermine negotiations in Barcelona. If you're as fed up with this lack of leadership as I am, you can call Obama's Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, right now — click here for the number and a suggested script.

We’re now just over a month away from the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, which commence on Dec. 7th. World leaders are currently meeting this week in Barcelona, Spain for the last time before Copenhagen. These meetings are crucial to establishing a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty in December, yet early signs are not good. Greenpeace activists are there reminding world leaders of their moral obligation to solve the climate crisis. And we’re not the only ones protesting: Several African nations walked out of the meetings to point out that the developed world was simply pursuing business as usual.

Barcelona’s famous church, Sagrada Família, which was designed by renowned architect Antoni Gaudí, was the scene of a series of stunning banner hangs by Greenpeace activists on the first day of the talks. Check out these amazing pics:


More than twenty Greenpeace activists climbed the Sagrada Família, Gaudí's monument, in Barcelona, Spain. They deployed two banners at the cranes with the message "Save the climate" — in Spanish, "Salvad el clima." Greenpeace is asking world leaders to make the climate call and to take the responsibility for tackling climate change. © Greenpeace/Pedro Armestre


Greenpeace activists hold a banner that reads "Activist for the climate" in Spanish. © Greenpeace/Pedro Armestre


Greenpeace activists deploy a banner at Barcelona's Sagrada Familia that reads "World leaders, Make the climate call." © Greenpeace/Pedro Armestre

There’s also video of the activists deploying the clear banner at twilight:


But like I said before, Greenpeace is not alone in protesting the dithering of developed countries on climate change. The so-called African Group walked out of the meetings when it became clear that developed countries were not willing to set aggressive emissions reductions targets. Greenpeace New Zealand campaigner Geoff Keey is on the ground, and posted this report:

The first signs of trouble occurred in the morning when the African Group (the group of African countries at the negotiations who work together) warned that if there wasn’t sufficient progress in the negotiations on developed country emission reduction targets, they’d walk about and not allow further meetings to be scheduled.

The African Group’s threat reflects increasing frustration over the refusal of developed countries like New Zealand to adopt strong climate change targets.

Then in the afternoon, the chair of the meeting to discuss developed country targets told countries to not restate their targets (e.g. New Zealand’s nothing - 20% target) but to talk about how they could increase those targets. In other words, current proposed targets are well below what’s needed.

The request from the chair of the negotiations was met with complete silence from developed countries for around five minutes before South Africa finally said they were disappointed no developed country was willing to speak. From then on a walk-out was inevitable.

According to Jess Miller, another Greenpeacer on the ground in Barcelona, the walk-out has ended and talks will resume tomorrow. No word yet on what resolution was reached between the African Group and developed nations, but Jess adds that “the walk out by the African Group proved to be an effective way to get developed countries to realize that business as usual will no longer be tolerated!”

A bit of background on why the Barcelona talks are important: In December of 2007, the world's leaders agreed to spend two years crafting a global treaty to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. The talks happening right now in Barcelona are the last milestone on the road to the UN negotiations that will take place in Copenhagen at the end of the year. The aim of the Copenhagen talks is to establish a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Meetings like those going on in Barcelona have happened consistently throughout the past two years, and were intended to be used for laying the groundwork for a successor climate treaty. Alas, little to no progress has been made in the previous rounds of talks.

Hence why the African Group was absolutely right to walk out when developed nations refused to discuss ambitious emissions targets, and why Greenpeace is there on the ground to remind world leaders that it is their moral obligation to lead the world’s response to global warming. Copenhagen is our last, best chance to avert the worst impacts of global warming, and the developing nations of the world will be hit the hardest if we don’t get it right, even though they had an inordinately small role in creating the problem in the first place.

GPUSA climate campaign head Damon Moglen is in Barcelona, and said this of the walk-out by the African Group: “It is clear that for many countries, enough is enough. President Obama can no longer hide behind failed congressional legislation. He must provide ambitious, science-based emissions reductions targets.”

President Obama has the power to use this meeting as a springboard to the treaty that the world needs. If the US fails to show leadership during these crucial moments, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. Take action now and tell Obama that it's time to sign a fair, ambitious, and binding climate treaty.

I’m back in San Francisco after the Defending Our Pacific tour wrapped up in the Cook Islands on October 21st. We ended the tour by hosting an “open boat,” where a couple hundred locals and tourists got the chance to tour the Esperanza, and by holding a press conference to inform local journalists about what we accomplished out on the high seas.

We also met with some folks from the Ministery of Marine Resources in the Cook Islands. It was a pretty exciting meeting for all of us, because just the week before we had busted the Koyu Maru 3, a Japanese ship we caught fishing in Cook Islands' waters illegally, as you might recall. The Cook Islands has started a formal investigation of the vessel with their counterparts at the Fisheries Agency of Japan. I’ll be posting updates on that as well as on how all of the actions and documentation work we did plays out at the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) meeting this December, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, being that the tour was a really amazing experience for me and seeing as I’m still trying to process all of it, I thought I’d share just a few more videos about life onboard a Greenpeace ship.

We saw an abundance of amazing marine life, including dolphins, whales, flying fish, seabirds, and more. Here’s a video of a baby whale shark we encountered one day:


Our helicopter, Tweety, is an invaluable tool that we use to scout out the open water, document pirate/unlicensed fishing, etc. I went on one early morning heli flight to search for another two Japanese longliners, which we suspected might be fishing in the Cook Islands' waters with their sister ship the Koyu Maru 3. We didn't find them, but I put this video together anyway because I think it's interesting how a heli flight gives you a whole new perspective on just how small the Espy really is in relation to the deep blue sea:

 Lastly, I shot this video tour of the ship, which is pretty self-explanatory:

Like I said, there are definitely more updates coming on the political developments resulting from the actions we took and the documentation we compiled of the vessels plundering the Pacific. When the WCPFC meets this December, we’ll be pushing to have all four of the high seas pockets in the Pacific designated as marine reserves at this meeting.

There might be a few more videos coming from the tour, as well. Keep checking back!

Here we are a few days later and the reports, photos, and stories are still rolling in from the 350 day of action on October 24th. And no wonder: by the latest counts there were over 5,200 events held in over 181 countries, and Google News officially showed that 350 and the climate actions around the world were the biggest story on the planet that day.

I was on my way back to the States after being on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza for the Defending Our Pacific tour when the 24th rolled around. I happened to be in Sydney, Australia. The event there was amazing, right on the steps of the iconic Opera House. I shot some video to share:


That’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore, Sydney’s first publicly elected female Lord Mayor, you see speaking in the video.
 
The culmination of the event was a group of people spelling out “350” with blue umbrellas. I got this shot of them while they were still organizing the umbrella-holders, but you can still make out the numbers pretty well:



Here’s me doing an obligatory shot with the crowd and Opera House:



By all accounts, October 24th was a massive day of action. But the larger question is: Was it the start of, or ramping up of, an equally massive global movement — the movement we desperately need ahead of the meetings in Copenhagen? This question is already being discussed. What do you think?

Our tour is wrapping up. We steamed into port here in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, on the 19th. We spent the last few days of the tour in high seas pocket number 3 (see a map of the high seas pockets here), looking for fishing vessels that are threatening the future of the Pacific. And let me tell you, we had absolutely no problems finding them.

On Thursday, the 15th, we found a Taiwanese long-liner, Kai Jie No. 1, that had no license to fish in the waters of any Pacific island countries. This does not make it illegal for them to be fishing on the high seas, since these waters belong to no particular nation, but this is one of the main ways fishing fleets get around the regulations that Pacific island countries are introducing to better manage their tuna stocks.

We spoke with the captain of the vessel and explained that what he was doing was decimating the tuna stocks that Pacific island nations rely on and asked him to pull in his line. When he refused, we took action. We went out and, using a special contraption designed by our fitter from the first leg of the tour, Jono, to hold the line up out of the water, we went down the long-line and removed the bait from their hooks.

I shot this video of the action, in which our resident marine life expert, Gabe, explains more about the process:


This ship may not have been a pirate fisher in a legal sense — though it was operating in an area known to host a lot of the region’s illegal fishing — but it was certainly plundering the Pacific. That’s why we’re trying to shut down the four high seas pockets to all fishing.

The next day we spotted yet another unlicensed Taiwanese long-liner fishing on the high seas. It might seem unlikely for us to come across one vessel after another in an ocean as vast as the Pacific, but when you consider that these ships are part of a massive fleet of more than 1,300 long-liners — and that’s just the Taiwanese fleet — you begin to realize how big the problem is and why we keep encountering them.

Again, we went and spoke with the captain, passed him information about our campaign and the science showing that Pacific tuna stocks are in bad shape, and asked him to stop plundering the Pacific. He also refused to haul in his line, as you’ll hear our translator Tan-chi tell us in this video:



As you could see, the captain of this ship was quite an agreeable guy who seemed genuinely interested in what we had to say. He sat and read our campaign materials for several minutes. He was even very hospitable towards us: when we refused the grape sodas he offered after reading our literature, he insisted we take them so vehemently that he actually threw them onboard our boats. We are not trying to set ourselves up in opposition to this hard-working captain and his crew.

As Tan-chi translated for us, the economics of the situation make it impossible for him to stop fishing and head back to port. And that’s what we are trying to change. You can read more about this situation — the vicious cycle of fishing in the Pacific and the diminishing returns these vessels are producing as Pacific fish stocks grow more and more depleted — in this blog by Karli, our onboard campaigner.

Being that I’m in the middle of the Pacific on an Oceans campaign, I thought it would be appropriate if I celebrated Blog Action Day ’09 with a post about the effects global warming is having on the world’s oceans.

I wrote yesterday about the obligation of the developed world to help developing nations deal with the impacts of climate change on the oceans, but I didn’t really specify what those impacts might be. Here are a few of the major impacts we can expect if global warming is not put in check:

• Coral bleaching
The world’s coral reefs are some of the most amazing and diverse ecosystems on the planet, but they’re in grave danger from global warming. Corals contain microscopic algae that provide the coral with food and give them their vibrant colors. Rising ocean temperatures cause corals to expel these algae, thus turning them white or "bleaching" them. Worse, the corals die if the algae don’t return.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef, experienced its worst ever case of coral bleaching in 2002, when over 60 percent of the reef was affected. Unless projected levels of climate change are slowed, much of the reef will be dead in decades. Worse, hundreds of species relying on the reef will also die out along with their living home.

Corals the world over are facing the threat of bleaching, from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean to the Galapagos Islands and the Philipines.

•Global melting
As global temperatures rise, the world’s ice melts. It’s as simple as that. And we’re already witnessing this happening. Our recent Arctic Impacts expedition was all about documenting the meltdown of Greenland’s glaciers and trying to understand the mechanisms behind it.



The melting of the world’s sea ice and glaciers will have a number of implications, perhaps the most discussed being that as Arctic sea ice melts there will be less habitat for polar bears, further imperiling this already endangered species. But global melting will also contribute to sea level rise and change the salinity of the oceans, hurting fish stocks and disrupting ocean circulation patterns.

Most worrisome is the fact that as the ice melts, more land and ocean water is exposed. The white ice reflects the sun’s light, but the darker water and land absorbs it, thereby potentially creating a negative feedback loop in which the melting of the world’s ice and the heating of our planet is accelerated. Already the Arctic is melting much faster than anyone predicted.

•Sea level rise
Melting sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise because that ice is already floating, but melting glaciers most certainly will cause the world’s seas to rise. A very sobering report was released earlier this month by the United Nations Environmental Program that forecasted a 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit rise in global temperatures by the end of the century. This would mean as much as a six-foot rise in sea levels.

Even a sea level rise of just around three feet, meanwhile, is projected to displace millions of people who live in low-lying parts of the world. In fact, the president of the Maldives, a Pacific island nation that is only 4.9 feet above sea level on average, recently held a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the threat that the looming climate crisis and sea level rise pose to his country.

You can check out this Google Map to see what various degrees of sea level rise might look like.

•Threats to marine life
Coral and Polar bears aren’t the only species threatened by global warming. Rises in ocean temperatures will impact the entire web of marine life. For example, phytoplankton, which is the main food source of small crustaceans like krill, grow under sea ice. A reduction in sea ice implies a reduction in krill — and krill feeds many whale species, including the great whales.

Whole species of marine animals and fish are directly at risk. A recent study found that warmer waters, for instance, can lead to some species becoming more aggressive and more vulnerable to prey.

Ocean acidification is another problem threatening marine life. As more CO2 is pumped into our atmosphere, more CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, which decreases the pH level of the oceans. Unfortunately, ocean acidification is happening much faster than anyone predicted, making life harder and harder on organisms like molluscs that depend on calcium carbonate shells, which can be weakened or even dissolved by acid.

These are just some of the main impacts I wanted to talk about, but by no means all of them. I barely touched on what a change in ocean currents due to decreased salinity might mean to weather patterns, for instance. And speaking of weather patterns, you’re probably already aware that warmer ocean temperatures are widely considered to make tropical storms bigger and more frequent. There’s even some compelling evidence that climate change is causing the El Niño phenomenon to be more frequent and more persistent.

All of this, I think, makes it abundantly clear that we need to put pressure on President Obama and other world leaders to sign an ambitious climate treaty in Copenhagen this December.

When we caught the Japanese ship Koyu Maru 3 illegally fishing in Cook Islands waters, I made the point that their actions were not just illegal but immoral. I thought I'd write a little bit more on that, as well as the moral obligations of the developed world to deal with issues like overfishing and climate change — issues that developed nations are overwhelmingly responsible for creating.


September 02, 2009 - Activists from the Esperanza display banners alongside a Taiwanese fishing vessel that was illegally transferring fish to another vessel in the Western Pacific Ocean. The transfer of fish at sea is one of the methods used around the world to cover up illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU or pirate) fishing activities. © Greenpeace/Paul Hilton

Last week, The Commonwealth released a report written by 26 scientists and academics that underscores the drastic need for government action on overfishing and climate change in order to stave off a collapse of global fisheries. The report warns that the oceans could soon become as barren as deserts and goes on to say:

The study reveals that those least responsible for the state of the oceans are most likely to suffer the consequences of poor management and climate change. Small island states in particular are vulnerable to illegal and unfair fishing by foreign fleets and to migration of fish away from warming seas.

The Esperanza has been in the Pacific region since May to support Pacific Island countries on issues ranging from climate change to fisheries collapse and marine conservation (read more here and here).

But of course Greenpeace’s history in the Pacific Ocean goes back much further than that — all the way back to the early 1970s when we were protesting the French nuclear blasts at Moruroa. The fallout from these blasts also disproportionately affected those Pacific islanders living downwind from the blast sites — another instance of those not responsible for a problem suffering the most. While there was nothing technically illegal about these blasts, the total disregard for human health and welfare only highlights how egregiously immoral they were.

The industrialized commercial fishing vessels that are literally stealing fish from Pacific island nations' waters is just another example of the developed world doing as they please and disregarding the well-being of the people affected by their actions. That's why it’s very encouraging that eight Pacific island nations have come together and are standing up for their rights against the invading international commercial fishing fleets.

Pacific island states are not the only developing nations that are banding together to force the developed world to live up to their moral obligations: “Africa will demand billions of dollars in compensation from rich polluting nations at a UN climate summit for the harm caused by global warming on the continent, African officials said Sunday.”

Lest we doubt that there is any need for this stand by African nations, even the World Bank, which has not historically been known as a good friend to the developing world (Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine documents ample evidence of this assertion), is warning of the threats those nations are facing as the climate crisis looms: “The World Bank estimates that the developing world will suffer about 80 percent of the damage of climate change despite accounting for only around one third of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

So the real question we must be asking ourselves is: Will the developed world stand up and do the right thing in regard to these moral obligations?

Greenpeace released the “America’s Share of the Climate Crisis: A State-By-State Carbon Footprint” report back in May to highlight the United States’ responsibility for leading the world's efforts to stop global warming given our outsized role in creating the problem.

Sign our petition to President Obama letting him know that Americans expect world leaders to agree to a climate deal that is ambitious, fair and binding this December in Copenhagen.

Just the other day, I was having a discussion with Karli, one of our onboard Oceans campaigners, about the origin of the phrase “caught red-handed.” One website I found said that it came about as a reference to literally being caught with blood on your hands after the commission of a murder or a poaching session.
 
Whether or not that’s the true origin of the phrase, it makes an apt introduction to what we witnessed yesterday. We literally caught the Japanese ship Koyu Maru 3 red-handed, hauling in its long-line and catching tuna within Cook Islands waters, where the ship does not have a license to fish.


The Koyu Maru 3 in Cook Islands waters. Image © Paul Hilton/Greenpace

We provided the Cook Islands Ministry of Marine Resources and the Fisheries Agency of Japan with photographic evidence of the illegal activity, which you can see here, and are now calling for the arrest of the ship’s captain.


The crew of the Koyu Maru 3 hauling in their long-line. Image © Paul Hilton/Greenpace


The crew of the Koyu Maru hauling a tuna onto their ship. Image © Paul Hilton/Greenpace

Greenpeace is also demanding that the Japanese government order Koyu Maru 3, which is owned by Tokyo-based World Tuna Co Ltd., to stop its illegal fishing activities and sail to the nearest port for further investigation.

This is more than an issue of what’s legal and illegal. The Koyu Maru 3 and other pirate fishing vessels are stealing fish from these waters and using it for their own profit, depriving the people of the Cook Islands of a vital source of income. Josh, another Oceans campaigner onboard who is from the region, put it well when he said, “These pirates of the Pacific must be stopped from plundering ocean life and robbing local communities.”

With that in mind, we decided that documenting the plundering of their seas and providing that evidence to Cook Islands officials, and thereby helping empower them to police their own waters, would be more effective than taking action against the vessel ourselves.

Globally, more than $9 billion dollars is lost each year to pirate fishing fleets, who reap their profits in European, American and Asian markets while threatening Pacific fish stocks and depriving coastal communities of much-needed income. A recent report estimated that pirate fishing in the Pacific accounts for an average of 36% of the fish caught there, much higher than the global average of 19%.

Long-liners like the Koyu Maru 3 mainly target bigeye, yellowfin and albacore tuna, as these species fetch top dollar in sashimi markets in Japan and other countries where this delicacy has become popular. Scientists have warned, however, that some Pacific tuna stocks, particularly bigeye and yellowfin tuna, are being fished beyond their limits. Pirate fishing further threatens the stocks and undermines conservation and management attempts in the region. That’s why it’s important that local Pacific islands governments have the resources they need to protect their waters.

As I sat on the bridge one day doing my regular watch duty, I pulled out my trusty digital camcorder and shot this quick pan across the bridge windows. This is pretty much what I spend two hours a day doing — staring out at the open sea, looking for other vessels, FADs, long-line beacons, whales, dolphins, or anything else there might be to see.
Sadly, I have never seen anything of much interest on any of my watches (aside from the occasional flying fish or seabird, that is). But one morning I did see some sperm whales spouting way in the distance — our wake-up call went something like this: "Good morning! It's 7:30, and there are whales off the bow!"

I didn't get to go out there and swim with the whales, but our photographer did:




Images © Paul Hilton/Greenpeace

Before we left Vanuatu for the second leg of the current tour, our onboard videographer did a quick dive test to check his underwater camera. He swam under the Esperanza and filmed the whole thing. I thought the footage was pretty amazing and definitely worth sharing with you all. But to make it even more interesting, I asked the Esperanza's chief engineer, Freddy, to narrate what we were seeing. Check out the video and a note from Freddy, who has been working on Greenpeace ships for quite a while — in fact, he was even there for the very beginning of the Defending Our Pacific tour way back in 2004.

My name is Freddy, I am from Argentina and am the current chief engineer on board the Esperanza. Since 1994 I have worked as an engineer on tankers and fishing vessels in my country. In 2002 I had the opportunity to start working as electrician on board the Arctic Sunrise, and I gladly took the opportunity. I have continued working as electrician and engineer on board all three Greenpeace ships since then.

Since people think I'm not busy enough with my 12 hours of work every day (at least), they sometimes ask me to tattoo them. I had to stop, though, because high stress levels were leading me to confuse fairies with pin-up girls... dangerous if the tattooed subject is a big hairy sailor asking for a pin-up girl.

In 2004 I had the opportunity to be part of the crew helping launch the Defending Our Oceans campaign to establish marine reserves on board the Rainbow Warrior. It was there that I found out what a FAD is and the destructiveness of the purse seiner method of fishing. Last year I was here on the Espy and again witnessed the same thing, with the only difference that the quantity of fish on the nets was getting lower and lower.

I hope this time we are able to get the full reserves and then start heavily with the enforcement. I feel really proud of having done my bit these past few years.

I may be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now, but I’m very excited to take a break from campaigning for marine reserves to bring you some HUGE news about our campaign to stop deforestation in the Amazon.

Sao Paulo, Brazil – In a major step forward for climate protection, today four of the biggest players in the global cattle industry — Marfrig, Bertin, JBS-Friboi and Minerva — joined forces to ban the purchase of cattle from newly deforested areas of the Brazilian Amazon from their supply chains, backing Greenpeace’s call for zero deforestation in the rainforest.

The move follows the release of the Greenpeace report ‘Slaughtering the Amazon’ in June, which exposed the link between forest destruction and the expansion of cattle ranching in the Amazon. This prompted calls for action from key international companies, including Adidas, Nike and Timberland, which committed to cancel contracts unless their products were guaranteed to be free from Amazon destruction, encouraging today’s move.

The announcement was made at a high-level event in Sao Paulo organized by Greenpeace, where each of the companies declared the adoption of environmental and social standards to ensure their products are free from cattle raised in newly deforested areas of the rainforest.

Measures include the monitoring of their supply chains and clear targets for the registration of farms that both directly and indirectly supply cattle as well as measures to end the purchase of cattle from indigenous and protected areas and from farms using slave labor. “This is an important step in the fight to stop the destruction of one of the world’s most critical rainforests and vital to helping tackle climate change,” said Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon campaign director.

The Brazilian cattle sector, which occupies 80 percent of all deforested areas of the Amazon, is the country’s leading carbon polluter.

As the press release quoted above notes, this is not just a victory for the Amazon, but a victory for the climate as well. Deforestation is responsible for more global carbon emissions than all the planes, trains, and automobiles in the world combined.

I’m personally very glad to see that these companies have agreed to help safeguard the rights of indigenous communities as part of the deal. For more info, read the full list of minimum criteria these companies have committed to, and the full press release.

Teams from professional disaster relief agencies are now firmly in place in Samoa. With the agreement of local authorities, the Esperanza has left the area and returned to our campaign in the Pacific Ocean.

We were close by when the tsunami hit and were able to help immediately. For three days we transported and donated supplies of fuel, water, medicine and food, and carried out aerial surveys with our helicopter.

Before departing Samoa we offered our assistance to the nearby island nation of Tonga, but it was not needed.

We are thankful we were on hand to support the people of Samoa and our thoughts remain with them, as well as with American Samoa and Tonga, as they begin to rebuild their communities.

The Esperanza had previously been in Samoa just this past July. This was certainly not the way the crew had imagined going back, but they are very happy to have been of service to the many brave Samoans they met back then.

We have now returned to the high seas, where we’re campaigning to create a global network of marine reserves covering 40% of the world's oceans (read the Defending Our Pacific blog for more). Such a network would give protection to vulnerable areas like the high seas pockets between Pacific islands’ national waters, which are currently being overfished by foreign fleets and threatening the health of the tuna stocks and therefore the livelihoods of local communities.

Like the rest of the world, we were shocked and saddened when we heard the news about the tsunami that had hit the Samoan islands. And because of our proximity to the affected areas, we were in the unique position of being able to offer aid very quickly.
 
The Esperanza was sailing to support Pacific countries in oceans conservation when the earthquake that caused the tsunami hit. We immediately offered assistance and equipment to the people of Samoa, and our offer was accepted by the Samoan authorities. We have medics, engineers, technicians, and logisticians on board the ship as part of the 34-strong crew. We will provide whatever help we can, under the direction of the Samoan disaster relief teams.
 
We have put our campaign on hold and are currently in Samoa doing whatever we can to help. I am sure you will all understand that we will be too busy to post any further blogs for now.

Every morning the first mate comes around at 7:30 and wakes us up. That gives us a half hour to grab some quick breakfast before we do our ship cleaning duties at 8:00. I'm not much of a breakfast person anyway, though, so many mornings I just go out to this one spot towards the bow of the ship and drink some tea. Just thought I'd share this short video I shot to give you an idea of what it's like out here.

So far on this tour we’ve done a lot of work to highlight the destructiveness of fish aggregating devices (or FADs) – and we’ve even confiscated a few as well, as there was a 2-month ban on their use in the high seas that evidently did not stop many commercial fishing vessels from using them. There's a pile of five of these things on our deck. One member of the crew described them to me as looking like giant, rusty crayons, but they're nothing nearly as benign as that.

The use of FADs results in the bycatch of many juvenile tuna and other species like sharks, turtles, and reef fish, contributing to the depletion of fish stocks and threatening vulnerable marine life.

To really show the diversity of marine life being threatened by FADs, our divers captured some footage and we’ve put together this short video:

Ahoy there! I’m blogging from the Greenpeace ship Esperanza out here in the Pacific. We’ve just embarked on the second leg of the Defending Our Pacific 2009 tour, which is aimed at getting all four of the high seas pockets you see on the map below (marked in orange) designated as marine reserves – which is to say, closed to ALL fishing.



We left Port Vila, Vanuatu just a few days ago, and are currently in transit, headed back out to the high seas to continue our quest to stop the pillage of international waters by longline and purse seine fishing vessels.

A transit generally means a bit of down time, so I’m taking it upon myself to document some ship life for you. Check out these pics:


Our captain, Madeleine (with binoculars), and second mate, Nadia, on the Espy's bridge, charting a course out of Port Vila Harbor.


After taking my turn on "whale watch" yesterday evening, I stepped out onto the deck and noticed this high seas sunset. Pretty nice, eh?

For a bit of recent history, check out the blog posts by Mary Ann (here, here, and here), the intrepid webbie who I have replaced onboard (actually I only replaced her as webbie, she’s still onboard as a deckhand and is taking care of our waste and recycling in the role of "chief garbologist" — a noble and selfless job, I can tell you, having helped with the compost yesterday morning). As you can see from the blogs, the first leg of the tour was spent patrolling the first and second high seas zones to help enforce a temporary ban on fish aggregating devices (FADs) – highly destructive devices that catch EVERYTHING indiscriminately. FADs are commonly used by purse seine fishing vessels. We took direct action against those violating the ban. For instance, you can see the crew hauling a FAD we confiscated up on to the Espy here:



On the second leg of the tour, we’re going to continue searching out the pirates and the pillagers, and stand in solidarity with the Pacific island countries who are seeking a closure of the high seas pockets. We are also pushing for the implementation of sensible, sustainable fishing practices rather than longlines, purse seines, FADs, and all the other highly destructive fishing practices that are currently in use. Stay tuned.

Check out video of a press conference the team over at CROC just did. They're getting pretty desperate. They claim to have been endorsed by a "prominent environmental organization:"


There’s a bunch more of this type of insanity going on over at TheCROC.org. They have an “Earned Devastation Calculator” that lets you compute how much environmental devastation you’re “entitled” to based on the good things you’ve done for the environment. (Then you can Tweet the results or sending them to Facebook. It’s utterly shameless.)

A few days ago I wrote about carbon offsets, the push from corporate polluters to include them in the  American carbon market that would be created by ACES, and why that’s such a bad idea. I also posted the PSA from a new organization called the Carbon Regulatory Offset Committee (CROC), which advocates expanding the offset program to individuals.

CROC is not promoting the voluntary offsets you might purchase to offset the carbon emissions from flying in a plane or powering your home. CROC is determined to give Americans the “right” to do harm to the environment in return for the good things they do for the environment – using the very same logic coporate polluters use when they argue that they should be allowed to continue dumping carbon emissions into our air in exchange for purchasing offsets to protect forests somewhere else in the world. The bottom line is that emissions must come down. Corporate polluters shouldn’t be able to buy their way out of it with offsets – which aren’t even a reliable trade-off by any measure.

Not only do offsets allow polluters to continue business as usual, but they’re difficult to measure reliably – especially over the long-term. In fact, the largest auditor of clean-energy projects in the world was just suspended by UN inspectors "after it was unable to prove its staff had properly vetted projects that were then approved for the [European] carbon-trading scheme."

Of course, the folks at CROC responded with a blog titled “The UN needs to take a chill pill."

If you do something good for the environment, does it make any sense that you should then be entitled to do something bad to the environment?

Of course it doesn’t. And yet that is basically what corporate polluters are pushing for as climate legislation makes its way through Congress. Rather than making required pollution cuts, they want to use “carbon offsets,” which would essentially allow them to continue their dirty, polluting business as usual while outsourcing green jobs and cleaner skies elsewhere…mostly overseas!

Amazingly, despite the fact that offsets could totally undermine our efforts to combat global warming –letting polluters increase greenhouse gas emissions for years to come – there is now a group out there advocating carbon offsets be made available to individuals, so that regular folks can also be entitled to do something bad to the environment if they do something good for it. The group is called the Carbon Regulatory Offset Committee (CROC). Check out this video from their charismatic spokesman, Carl Cordova:


Offsets work like this: rather than making required emissions reductions, polluters outsource their obligations – paying others to protect forests overseas, for instance. The flaws in this scheme are manifold. Aside from allowing polluters to evade their responsibility to reduce their emissions as quickly as possible in order to prevent runaway global warming, offsets are difficult to measure and verify.

How much forest, a living ecosystem that is constantly changing, do you have to protect to equal a ton of carbon? How do you make sure it gets protected over the long-term? If it burns in a totally natural forest fire, does it still count as an offset? Most importantly, how do you make sure the same amount of deforestation doesn’t just happen somewhere else instead?

You really need to check out TheCROC.org to appreciate just how insane offsets are.

One week from today, the largest live film event in the world will take place for the global premiere of The Age of Stupid. As you no doubt have inferred from the many tweets and blogs we've posted, Greenpeace has partnered with the filmmakers to promote the film, mobilize moviegoers, and make the global premiere a green event to be remembered for all time.

The Age of Stupid has been called a docu-drama-animation hybrid, which probably means nothing to you, but there it is. It's also been called "the next, far hipper An Inconvenient Truth." The movie stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the global warming-ravaged world of 2055, watching archive footage from 2008 and desperately wondering: Why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance?

Here's a sneak peek at one of the coolest animations from the movie:

On September 21st, communities around the world will be gathering in movie theaters, community centers, stadiums, and even on beaches where makeshift screens will be set up so that people can view the movie and be inspired to call on their leaders to act.  In New York City, a "green carpet" premiere will take place, with celebrities arriving by sustainable transportation (bike, rickshaw, train, boat, etc.). There are also several cities around the US having "simulcast" events, you can find locations and buy tickets here.

To give you a small taste of what you might expect at the premiere events, as well as the reason we think this movie is so important, here's a video of Eric Philips, polar explorer on board the Arctic Sunrise, which was used to open the Australian premiere of the film:

As you have no doubt heard by now, a variety of conservative organizations led by a Big Oil industry group are staging Astroturf rallies around the country to "protest" global warming legislation. What you may not know is that a self-proclaimed eco-friendly company, Verizon, is co-sponsoring a rally in West Virginia. And not just any rally, but the "Friends of America" rally, which is organized by Massey Energy, a union-busting coal company that's a major force behind mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

Verizon is always asking, "Can you hear me now?" So call Verizon and make sure they can hear YOU. Tell them that their support of this global warming denial rally is unacceptable. Here's what to do:

1. Call 908-559-2000 (Verizon's executive offices - you can probably leave a message)
2. Tell them you have a complaint you want to register with the company. If you're a customer of Verizon, mention that fact.
3. Here's what to say:

I just heard that Verizon is a sponsor of a rally THIS LABOR DAY in West Virginia that is denying the reality of global warming and obstructing climate solutions. This is outrageous and unacceptable. Global warming is important to me because XXXX. I demand that Verizon withdraw sponsorship of this rally immediately.

You can also mention that unless Verizon pulls out of this rally, you will (choose whichever applies to you):

a. Drop your Verizon service (or will likely drop your service)
b. You will tell your friends to drop their Verizon service
c. You will never be a Verizon wireless customer

If that first number doesn't work, try these:

845-365-7700 Verizon Executive Services
908-717-3115 Verizon Escalation Hotline
240-568-2459 Verizon Executive Relations
908-559-7000 Verizon headquarters

After you make the call, you can go here and let us know how it went. Thanks for taking the time to make your voice heard and let Verizon know that we can hear them, and we don't like what we're hearing!

Last Thursday, the Esperanza left Suva, Fiji and embarked on the Defending Our Pacific 2009 tour. During the two-month tour, the Espy will patrol international waters in the Central and Western Pacific Ocean and help ensure that international tuna fleets adhere to the two-month ban on purse seine fleets using.

I realize that was a lot of technical speak and campaign jargon, and that I should really explain what all that means, but there is a much more pressing matter at hand: The tour has already scored its first victory against the commercial fishing fleets who are brazenly violating the ban and using highly destructive FADs!

But I’ll let our webbie onboard the Espy, Mary Ann, tell the story:

FAD Watch (And It’s Not About Trendy Fashion)

Date: Tuesday, 31 August 2009
Location: High Seas Area 1, Western Pacific Ocean
Weather conditions: Sunny day, clear skies, light breeze
Objective: To look out for FADs

A few days ago, we arrived in the High Seas of the Pacific. Since yesterday, we have been on constant watch, scanning the horizon by day, the radar by night, diligently on the look-out for FADs and fishing boats.

Up in the bridge, Gabriel (one of our dive team, and resident shark expert) was the first to go on FAD watch at 8 in the morning. And, lo and behold, you guessed it … he spotted the very thing we were looking for — a FAD!

What’s a FAD, you ask? For the unfamiliar, FAD stands for Fish Aggregating Device. Like a magnet, FADs are designed to attract tuna into an set area. The fish are then caught by industrial purse seiners. These devices not only attract tuna, but also a host of other species such as sharks, turtles and other fish.

These FADs float at sea until they have attracted a sizable enough population of tuna. Once enough tuna are attracted, the fish and all other accumulated marine life is scooped up in a huge net, in one fell swoop. It’s a very wasteful way of fishing.

The irony of the situation is that we have found this FAD right in the middle of a two-month ban, from 1 August to 30 September. The ban was declared by the Pacific Tuna Commission, which manages tuna fishing in the international waters of the region.

So there I was walking around, a sleepy zombie, until I snapped awake when someone told me we’d found a FAD. There was a general hubbub going on around me. Deckies were by the inflatables, getting ready to launch them. The divers were checking their dive equipment and gearing up in the wet room. Breakfast was a distant memory of wolfing down one buttered toast as I hurried to catch the action. It was the same general excitement when I went up the bridge, the campaign team were complete and two binoculars were trained on the bobbing FAD.

The African Queen (one of our inflatable boats) sped to the bobbing FAD. Our divers soon discovered that schools of fish had already gathered around it.

As well as sharks, some of them juvenile too!

Normally, these FADs act like deadly fish magnets. But these critters were spared the usual fate that befalls the marine life lured to them. Instead, it was the FAD itself that we fished out of the water. It turned out to be a floating drum, looking very much like a huge brown crayon, caked with rust, barnacles and containing some small fish annoyed to be (temporarily) taken out of the water.

Finding this FAD was both good and bad at the same time. Good, because we were able to find one and confiscate it, but bad because this is a wasteful practice used by industrial fishing companies to increase their tuna catch, and despite the ban in place, we still found one. If the use of FADs continues, tuna stocks face a grim future in the region, and other marine life (such as sharks and turtles) will continue to become the unintended casualties of industrial fishing.

For Gabriel, the reward for his early-morning FAD spotting was the chance to get into the water with some of his sharky friends, and to know they are — at least for now — safe from harm.

-Mary Ann

Images: © Greenpeace/Hilton

I’m especially excited about this tour because, in addition to the many great stories and amazing images I’m sure we can expect for the next two months, I get to take over from Mary Ann at the end of September as the onboard webbie!!! (In case my gratuitous use of triple exclamation points doesn’t convey this to you: I’m ridiculously excited.)

Mary Ann will keep posting updates here throughout the next month, until I take over. So keep tuning in right here to the GPUSA blog for more updates, more amazing images, and more successes in defending the Pacific!

There's been a lot of chatter about the American Petroleum Institute's astroturf campaign to oppose climate legislation ever since the story first broke. Of course, plenty of conservatives, global warming deniers, and representatives for Big Oil have tried to defend the astroturf campaign, claiming that they are just helping facilitate legitimate grassroots activity by scheduling a series of rallies in cities where Big Oil has a strong presence.

But according to Public Citizen folks who managed to get into the campaign's kickoff event in Houston earlier this week, the word "rally" doesn't even come close to describing what's going on here. It's more like a "company picnic," according to citizensarah of Public Citizen.

Check it out:

Though the Netroots has gotten the message loud and clear: these are really just company picnics, not uprisings of real grassroots support, there has still been some hedging on the part of the traditional media — who is still reporting that “many of the people attending the demonstration were employees of oil companies who work in Houston and were bused from their workplaces.“

But the truth is that the Houston rally was attended ONLY by energy company employees and retirees (at least that’s the way they wanted it). It’s no big surprise that a few rabble-rousing enviros were kicked out, but when even those that oppose cap and trade were turned away — that should raise major red flags about the true nature of these events. This isn’t even Astroturf anymore, this is asphalt.

But don’t take my word for it, listen to the anti-cap and trade folks from Freedom Works that were [excluded] from yesterday’s rally:

When you've got funding from giant multinational corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP, and you aren't even allowing the general public to attend your events — even when they agree with you, for crying out loud! — then there really is nothing legitimately grassroots about your campaign. Sorry.

If you too are fed up with the deceitful and manipulative tactics employed by Big Oil and want to see a real, intelligent debate about climate policy take place in this country, write to Big Oil now and tell them to stop the lies.

Today in Kogelo, Kenya, local activists worked with Greenpeace's Solar Generation to install solar panels on the Senator Barack Obama School as well as the house of Mama Sara, President Obama's grandmother.

"I am very pleased that my home has been improved thanks to solar energy and I'll make sure my grandson hears about it," Mama Sara said. Let's hope President Obama not only hears about it, but is so moved by the benefits that solar energy has in store for his grandmother’s community that he takes the action necessary to kickstart a global energy revolution!


Created with flickr slideshow.

The solar installations are part of a renewable energy workshop hosted by Solar Generation. The Kibera Community Youth Programme and members of Nyang’oma Kogelo participated.

Like many other countries in Africa, Kenya is on the front lines of climate change impacts. A drastic reduction in rainfall in recent years has brought on a drought that has worsened the country’s preexisting agricultural problems caused by poor land use and desertification. The drought has also made Kenya’s large-scale hydro power generators unreliable.

All of which makes solar energy an especially good investment for Kenyans. Solar installations strengthen the economy and protect the environment while ensuring a reliable and clean supply of energy for a part of the world where paraffin oil – which, when burned, releases toxins and carcinogens – is still in widespread use.

The solar industry is ready and able to deliver the needed capacity. There is no technical impediment to powering Kenya with clean, green solar power, just political barriers.

Industrialized countries are largely responsible for the climate crisis, and it’s time we took responsibility for that. The developed world should be helping developing countries like Kenya leapfrog the dirty fossil fuels of the past while giving them access to the clean energies of the future with which to continue their economic development. Greenpeace is calling for rich countries to contribute $140 billion annually to support climate adaptation, mitigation, and forest protection in the developing world.

With just 15 weeks left to go until the decisive UN climate talks in Copenhagen, we are urging world leaders to emulate the innovative young people of Kibera and Kogelo and translate their climate rhetoric into action in Copenhagen.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock (Aug. 15 to 18), Treehugger.com has been running a series of articles about the spirit of protest born in the 60s and how it has shaped activism today. I wrote a brief history for them about the role rock musicians have played in Greenpeace activism over the years, starting with the benefit concert by Joni Mitchell and James Taylor that started it all, up to today when Anti-Flag is helping us organize young punk rockers at the Warped Tour.

One thing I didn't touch on in the piece that came up in my research, which I think is really awesome, is that Allen Ginsberg was an "early advisor and mentor" to Greenpeace. I'm a big fan of Ginsberg's poetry, so it made me pretty proud to find this out, and I thought I'd share this picture of Ginsberg reading "Plutonian Ode" at a disarmament rally back in the 70s.

I'd also like to give a little plug to the fantastic book in which I found much of the info for the Treehugger piece as well as both pics you see here on this post. It's by Rex Weyler, a journalist and one of the first Greenpeace activists, and it's called Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World.

Here's a little taste of the many photos awaiting you on the Treehugger post. This is my personal favorite: Jerry Garcia playing to a sold-out crowd at a Greenpeace benefit concert right here in San Francisco, on Pier 31, in front of the Greenpeace ship James Bay:



The story of how this benefit concert featuring the Jerry Garcia Band came about and was pulled off in just five days is pretty fascinating. You can get a bit of it from my Treehugger post, but you'll have to pick up Rex Weyler's book to read the whole thing!

Photos © Rex Weyler

This morning, several Greenpeace activists laid down some astroturf (the real kind) in front of the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the American Petroleum Institute (API), and erected a sign that read "CLIMATE FRAUD, FUNDED BY BIG OIL." The sign and astroturf were also accompanied by the logos of oil giants ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron, all of which are members of API.



The action was meant to protest the US oil industry’s plans to have oil company employees attend anti-US climate action rallies while masquerading as concerned “Energy Citizens.” This Energy Citizens campaign is an attempt to use a tactic known as “astroturfing,” in which they give the appearance of a genuine grassroots movement while hiding the fact that it is actually a well-funded effort coordinated by large multinational corporations with a vested interest in preventing any new regulations of their dirty energy business.

The astroturf got laid pretty thick today in my hometown, Houston, where the first Energy Citizens rally occurred (showing just how non-grassroots this campaign is, Chevron apparently bussed many of its employees to the event).

The API memo (available here, along with Greenpeace's response to API), leaked to colleagues of mine here at Greenpeace last week, called on the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest oil companies to “indicate to your company leadership your strong support for employee participation in the rallies.” The API’s President, Jack Gerard, further warns the world’s oil barons to treat the memo as “sensitive,” arguing that “we don’t want our critics to know our game plan.”

Had it not been for the leaked memo, these Energy Citizens events might have been just another of Big Oil’s dirty tricks intended to thwart real public debate on global warming policy. But by recognizing what we’re up against and mobilizing a response, we can ensure that the debate about how best to kickstart a clean energy revolution is not sullied by purveyors of dirty energy.

The concern here absolutely needs to be what’s best for the environment, not what’s best for the oil industry’s bottom line. Global warming is the most pressing environmental crisis of our time. But that doesn’t phase Big Oil, or many other dirty energy providers, for that matter. So far this year, over  $82 million has been spent on corporate lobbyists to argue against climate change legislation, not only by Big Oil, but also by King Coal and gas companies across the US.

Whether you support the Waxman-Markey legislation or not, it is imperative that you get involved, get vocal, and be part of the real grassroots movement calling for science-based policies to deal with the severity of the climate crisis. Let’s make sure Big Oil’s employees are offered new employment opportunities as part of a green energy revolution so that they no longer have to fear for their job if they refuse to attend some bogus “Energy Citizen” rally.

The WSJ recently reported that Big Oil, eager to avoid new regulations of its dirty energy supply, is going to take a cue from the health care reform protesters who have resorted to intimidation tactics like shouting down members of Congress at their in-district town hall meetings.

Click this button to get involved and make your voice heard!

Early confirmation of Big Oil’s plans came in the form of a memo from the American Petroleum Institute (API) that was leaked to colleagues of mine here at Greenpeace. According to Kevin Grandia, writing on Huffington Post, the memo details how, “Taking a page from the playbook of Astroturf campaigners currently crashing health care town hall events across the country, API hopes to similarly sully productive communications between Congressmembers and their actual constituents at public events scheduled for the coming weeks.”

Greenpeace does not support the Waxman-Markey bill that API is attempting to "organize" against, but that’s no reason to let bullies hired by API dominate the debate and drown out rational voices calling for science-based climate policy. So it’s more important than ever that we keep the pressure up and make as loud a call as possible for an aggressive response to global warming.

Greenpeace has organizers around the country who’d be happy to help you get involved with actions and protests in your community. Check out greenpeace.org/volunteer to find an organizer near you, or to sign up to get more information from one of our national organizers if you’re not near one of our field organizers.

The important thing is just that we all get out there and make sure that corporate-backed astroturfers don’t hijack this debate. The time for real global warming policy is now, let’s make it happen.

This video from Green For All spells it out pretty nicely, I think:



Read more about "why the Senate must pass bold climate legislation this fall, and why we need a vibrant movement based in low-income communities and communities of color" on the Green for All blog.

We're all still riding high on the big victory for ancient forests today thanks to Kimberly-Clark's new policy that sets the goal of getting 100% of the fiber for Kleenex and the company's other products from sustainable sources. Just wanted to share a couple cool videos with all of you so you could share in the good times.

The first is a funny little video we made about making up with the company:


This one, courtesy of my colleagues in Canada, has some beautiful shots:


I love the smell of recycled tissue in the morning. Smells like... victory.

Thanks in great part to all of the emails and calls activists like you sent to the company, Timberland has announced a new policy agreement with Greenpeace that will help ensure the leather used in its boots and shoes is not contributing to new deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest or global warming. The policy will not only guide Timberland’s leather procurement from Brazil to ensure it’s not supporting deforestation, the policy also sets a deadline for Timberland suppliers to publicly commit to a moratorium on cattle expansion in the Amazon.



Timberland worked with Greenpeace to craft a policy that will require its leather suppliers to commit to a moratorium on purchasing any cattle raised in newly deforested areas within the Amazon Rainforest. Given the cattle industry is Brazil's top source of greenhouse gas emissions and the largest driver of deforestation in the world, a moratorium on cattle expansion is a critical component of any Zero Deforestation policy in Brazil that aims to reduce forest-related greenhouse gas emissions. Brazil has committed to achieving Zero Deforestation by 2015.

Thank Timberland for stepping it up a notch with its suppliers to help eliminate Amazon destruction from the leather sector in Brazil. Every step counts in the fight to save the Amazon and our climate!

Today Greenpeace was glad to be part of the announcement that the Amazon Soy Moratorium has officially been extended to July 2010. This is a crucial piece of Amazon protection, so its extension is welcome news indeed.

Approximately 100 km (62 mi) above Manaus, in Brazil's Amazonas state, the Anavilhanas is the largest river archipelago in the world with over 400 islands. © Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá

The Soy Moratorium is essentially a commitment not to trade soy from areas in the Amazon Biome that were deforested after July 24, 2006. The moratorium is enforced by the Soy Working Group (abbreviated as GTS based on its Portuguese name), which was established in 2006 to implement the moratorium and is made up of representatives from the soy growing and exporting industry as well as various NGOs, including Greenpeace, WWF, and the Nature Conservancy.

Originally, the Soy Moratorium was an initiative of the private sector and various environmental and conservation NGOs, but the Moratorium received the support of the Brazil's Minister of Environment, Carlos Minc, who formally joined the initiative last year. Thanks to the Soy Moratorium, soy is no longer the chief driver of Amazon deforestation. That distinction belongs to cattle ranching, which is responsible for 80% of deforestation in the Amazon. Greenpeace is calling for a cattle moratorium to match the protect the Amazon.

Prior to the Soy Moratorium, large swaths of Amazon were clearcut for soy plantations, while tiny islands of intact rainforest such as this one were left behind to meet lax government standards. © Greenpeace

Read more about this great news here, as well as what the GTS says about the new challenges it is facing in monitoring deforestation and flagging new soy plantations for the industry groups to add to their Do Not Buy lists.

Responding to concerns that its demand for leather is fueling deforestation of the Amazon and contributing to climate change, Timberland has taken a major step toward protecting the Amazon rainforest today. While the company's announcement of a new policy is a positive and welcome step, Timberland needs to put its foot down and tell Bertin, one of Timberland’s leather suppliers and one of the dirtiest companies in Brazil, that it will no longer purchase leather made from Amazon destruction, period.

Bertin supports the deforestation and burning of the Amazon to graze cattle. According to our report, “Slaughtering the Amazon,” that’s not all that’s wrong with Bertin:

Greenpeace has identified hundreds of ranches within the Amazon rainforest supplying cattle to Bertin’s slaughterhouses in the Amazon state of Pará. Where Greenpeace was able to obtain mapped boundaries for ranches, satellite analysis reveals that significant supplies of cattle come from ranches active in recent and illegal deforestation. Trade data also reveal trade with ranches using modern-day slavery. Additionally, one Bertin slaughterhouse receives supplies of cattle from an illegal ranch occupying Indian Lands. (p. 66)

The Brazilian Federal Prosecutor based in Para State has opened a billion-dollar lawsuit against Bertin and other cattle companies for illegal deforestation. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private lending arm of the World Bank, has withdrawn a $90 million dollar loan to Bertin. It’s time for Timberland to take the next step and let Bertin know that it will cancel its contract if Bertin doesn’t stop supporting Amazon deforestation and global warming.

Please write to Timberland now and thank them for taking the first step, but ask them to put their foot down once and for all by establishing a policy of accepting absolutely no leather from Bertin until Bertin commits to a moratorium on any new deforestation for cattle expansion. If Timberland does not take a hard line with suppliers who are destroying the Amazon and our climate for cattle, who will?

Yesterday I posted about an amazing victory for the Amazon, that being Nike's precedent-setting new policy to ensure that its demand for raw materials to make shoes isn't contributing to deforestation and global warming. I also wrote about the fact that the other companies we've been urging to establish such protections have not taken meaningful steps to do so, and specifically mentioned Timberland and the automated response they’re sending to everyone who emails them about their lack of a policy to protect the Amazon.

Although Timberland is responding to the emails they're getting from concerned consumers and activists, and in that response they mention an interest in engaging with Greenpeace, Nike and Timberland are in drastically different places. It's actually been rather disappointing to see Nike, a true sustainability leader, move forward with a policy to protect the Amazon, while Timberland, a company that is more than happy to tout its environmental record, has failed to make similar commitments. Timberland buys leather for its shoes from one of the nastiest slaughterhouses in Brazil, Bertin. Yet Timberland has refused to do anything beyond recommending to Bertin that they follow the law and stop illegally deforesting the Amazon and using slave labor.

The bottom line is, we need to stop deforestation altogether, not just what's currently considered "illegal." And to stop Amazon deforestation, we need to stop the expansion of cattle. Cattle expansion is not only destroying pristine rainforest that is critical to the health of the planet, but the emissions from the deforestation are contributing to global warming and therefore wreaking havoc on our climate.

Fire season has started in Brazil. Acres upon acres of Amazon are going up in flames right now (as much as an acre every 8 seconds, according to our report), while Timberland sits on its proverbial hands and just makes recommendations about the illegal actions of its suppliers. Brazil’s federal government is suing Bertin to the tune of $1 billion. The IFC canceled a $90 million contract with Bertin. The slaughterhouse giant Marfrig has committed not to support cattle expansion into the Amazon. Yet Timberland can’t decide if the shoes you’re wearing should or should not have come from cattle raised on acres and acres of land that has been cleared in the Amazon?

Timberland is parsing words about what’s legal or illegal while knowing that anything that happens in the middle of the rainforest as big as the Amazon is difficult to track or enforce. There is no good system of knowing what is legal or illegal on the ground in the middle of the rainforest.

But that's not what it's about. It's not about what’s legal and illegal, it's about what's right and wrong. Is it wrong to set acres of the Amazon rainforest on fire to raise cattle for your Timberlands? Is it right for Timberland to pressure its suppliers until they agree not to unnecessarily destroy the Amazon — which releases many tons of greenhouse gas emissions, making Brazil the world's fourth largest emitter?

Timberland says they want to engage, but the company has made no meaningful progress or overtures.

So, Timerbland, we’re looking at you. Where you at?

Not to toot our own horn, but here at Greenpeace, we’ve run our share of successful campaigns. Still, I think we’ve all been pleasantly surprised by the speedy response to our report, “Slaughtering the Amazon.”



The latest success in our campaign is Nike’s announcement today that it has established a new policy to ensure that its demand for shoe leather is not contributing to Amazon deforestation and global warming (read the Greenpeace press release here). You can help us thank Nike for protecting the Amazon and the climate. This is a huge victory, as it sets a great precedent to be followed by the other shoe companies named in our report, many of whom continue to greenwash their own corporate policies rather than take meaningful action.

I’ll say more about that in a bit. But I think, for now, I want to continue with the positivity. With that in mind, thought I’d run down a quick list of the biggest successes our campaign to save the Amazon has had:

• On June 1st, we released the “Slaughtering the Amazon” report, and the very next day, the Public Prosecution Office in Brazil’s Para State announced that it was opening a billion-dollar lawsuit against several farms and various companies operating there, including one slaughterhouse owned by Brazil’s cattle giant Bertin, a company named in our report as one of the major corporations backed by the Brazilian government who are purchasing hides from cattle ranches involved in deforestation of the Amazon, as well as engaging in slave labor practices and other crimes. That same day, the environment minister of Brazil said that he agreed with our report and echoed our assertion that the Brazilian government should not be funding Amazon destruction.

• On June 12th came news that several major grocery store chains in Brazil, including Wal-Mart and Carrefour, had banned beef purchased from the ranches accused by the Para state prosecutor’s offfice of being involved in illegal deforestation.

• The very next day, June 13th, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private lending arm of the World Bank, announced that it was withdrawing a $90 million dollar loan to Bertin.

• Then, on June 22nd, the world’s fourth largest beef trader, Marfrig, announced a moratorium that would prevent the company from buying cattle raised in newly deforested areas within the Amazon.

As you can see, the move by Marfrig came after the “Slaughtering the Amazon” report had really thrust an international spotlight on Marfrig, Bertin, JBS and other leading cattle companies who are driving Amazon deforestation and climate change, as well as companies like Timberland, Adidas, Reebok, and Clarks who buy cattle products from those cattle companies.

Like I said before, these shoe companies continue to be evasive rather than talk with Greenpeace about how they can ensure that their demand for leather isn’t fueling Amazon deforestation and climate change. Even if you’ve already emailed them once, you can email these shoe companies again and tell them you expect them to ensure they’re not part of the problem.

One thing I’d like to note: After you take action, you’ll most likely get an automated response from Timberland — a response that amounts to nothing more than pure greenwashing. But this post is already gone on long enough, and like I said, I’m more in the mood to dwell on the good things going on right now. So I’ll write about that more in the next couple days. Just wanted to say: Don’t be fooled by Timberland’s greenwashing in the meantime.

You might have read in a previous post ("Something afoot in the Arctic") that the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise, is currently at the Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland as part of a 3-month expedition. The crew on board the Arctic Sunrise, which includes many respected scientists, is examining the effects of climate change on the Arctic. Specifically, they're bearing witness to the imminent loss of a 100 sq. km. ice island that is part of Petermann glacier. This video serves as an introduction to the ship tour and what they've found so far.

Check out Greenpeace activist and organizer Mary Sweeters talking with Bill Moyers about last week's Mt. Rushmore action and the lack of leadership on global warming from President Obama. After promising to "restore science to its rightful place" in his inaugural address, President Obama is all but ignoring the science and listening to the fossil fuels industries instead. We need him to be a leader. Also appearing with Mary is Erich Pica, Director of Domestic Programs for Friends of the Earth.

Tune in to Bill Moyers Journal tonight and check out an interview he did with Mary Sweeters, one of our activists who was involved in last week's Mt. Rushmore action. In most areas, the show airs at 9:00 pm local time on PBS. But if you're not sure which channel or what time the show airs where you live, you can find out here.


Photo by Robin Holland.

Mary talks about working as an organizer in Chicago and what she's hearing from everyday Americans about climate change, and why she ultimately decided that the only way to inspire President Obama to leadership was through civil disobedience.The interview also covers a wide range of other topics — from grassroots organizing to the lack of leadership from President Obama on global warming. Mary is joined by Erich Pica from Friends of the Earth. Don't miss it!

By now, F-gases are probably no longer the worst greenhouse gas that you’ve never heard of. But if the EPA would just approve non-F-gas refrigerants for use in the US, we could all go back to not needing to know anything about them. There are some signs that this might soon be the case.

Just in case you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a brief backgrounder: F-gases are a group of industrial gases that include hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). The "F" in F-gas is for Fluorine, the element common to them all. HFCs and HCFCs are commonly used today in refrigeration and cooling units in North America.

Why should we phase them out? F-gases are extremely potent greenhouse gases. They were originally called the “environmental alternative” to CFCs, the ozone-depleting refrigerants (such as Freon) that were phased out starting in 1989 when the Montreal Protocol went into effect. But F-gases are not an “environmental alternative” at all — in fact, they’re responsible for some 17% of cumulative greenhouse gases currently in our atmosphere (as of 2005). Some F-gases actually have a Global Warming Potential (GWP) value that is thousands of times higher than carbon (check out this chart on the EPA’s website for more info).

But the EPA has not approved F-gas-free refrigeration for sale in the United States. The main refrigerant alternative to HFCs and HCFCs is Hydrocarbon (HC). Greenpeace developed the first ever Hydrocarbon-based refrigeration technology, called GreenFreeze, in 1993 to prove the technology could work, then prototyped it and took over 70,000 orders to help persuade a manufacturer to start actually mass-producing them. Today over 300 million domestic refrigerators using the GreenFreeze technology have been purchased by consumers across Europe, Asia, and South America.

Obsolete regulations, however, are still keeping them out of the North American market. But there have been some recent signs that that is slowly changing.

The EPA recently determined that HFCs contribute significantly to global warming. This will hopefully help ease the applications pending at the EPA for non-HFC refrigerants through the approval process.

There are certainly plenty of companies hoping to break open the domestic US market for green refrigerators and coolers. Ben & Jerry’s has rolled out some GreenFreeze-based ice cream freezers at several of its scoop shops thanks to a “market test” allowance granted by the EPA, and Pepsi and Coke have both announced they’re going to use the technology in refrigerators and vending machines.

Meanwhile, Bosch is introducing a GreenFreeze refrigerator in Mexico, making it the first green fridge available in North America. So, now the race is on for companies to be the first manufacturer of non-F-gas refrigerators in the United States and Canada. GE has applied to the EPA for a permit to make and sell refrigerators that use isobutane as their refrigerant, hoping to roll them out by 2010.

Whoever is first to bring green refrigeration to the States will undoubtedly make a pile of green to reward them for their efforts.

These images pretty much speak for themselves.



If you want to send your own message to President Obama, sign our petition now.

And check out Matt Leonard, one of the climbers, on Democracy Now!

We just posted this amazing new video – shot by our team in the field at yesterday’s banner hang on Mount Rushmore – to YouTube. Check it out, there’s some cool behind-the-scenes footage, and then you can see just how windy it was. Our climbers get tossed around pretty good. Just goes to show how incredible of a job they really did.



In addition to heaps of praise and words of encouragement, we’ve been getting a lot of flak from people who were upset that we would deface a national monument. My response to them is twofold: First, there are already climbing leads established on the rock, which the park employees use to clean the monument. Our climbers used those leads and were extremely cautious not to do any harm to the monument, and in the end they did not do any damage.

Second, all of the sanctimonious claims about our disrespect for what Mount Rushmore represents are completely baseless. We have utmost respect for the accomplishments of the great leaders who built this country, that’s why we chose it as the site for issuing our challenge to President Obama to be a leader on global warming. But Mount Rushmore was built on a mountain stolen from Native Americans. Adding insult to injury, we then carved a bunch of white people’s faces into it. So you gotta ask yourself: What does Mount Rushmore really represent?

For the record, a member of the local Oglala Sioux tribe has published an op-ed praising our action.

And our larger point still stands: If President Obama wants to be considered equal to the pantheon of great American leaders depicted on Mount Rushmore, he needs to start providing real leadership on global warming, the greatest challenge of our time.

The president is currently meeting with the rest of the G8 leaders in L’Aquila, Italy. Yesterday they held a press conference to announce that they were setting a target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. But that is not what real leadership looks like – that target had already been endorsed by 109 nations even before the G8 announcement.

Plus, as worthy as this long-term goal is, the truly critical issue is that President Obama and the rest of the world’s leaders still have not laid out an adequate roadmap for how we’re going to get there. In other words, they haven’t set short-term goals that are ambitious enough to get us to the long term goal of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have clearly stated that the United States and other industrialized countries must cut their emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. But the Obama Administration, like Congress, continues to promote short-term emissions reductions targets that fall far short of what science demands.

We can’t continue to put off for tomorrow what science tells us we need to do today. While the 2 degree commitment would appear to recognize the severity of the crisis we're facing, the Obama Administration and the G8 have failed to provide any plan for staying below this critical threshold. Sign our petition now and ask Obama to be a leader on global warming, not just here in America but for the world as well.

After successfully deploying a banner 65 feet tall by 35 feet wide, our climbers have come down and have been taken into custody by authorities. But they got our message out loud and clear:



Our brave climbers rappelled down the face of Mt. Rushmore today to issue a challenge to President Obama: If he wants to get his face on this monument, he needs to be a true leader on global warming, not a politician.

The 60-foot tall heads on Mt. Rushmore represent four former presidents, all brave leaders who rose to the challenges of their times. For instance, there’s George Washington, our country’s first president. He’s known as the “Father of His Country” because when the American colonies were in crisis, he stepped up and led our forces in the Revolutionary War.

Obama now has the chance to lead our forces in an energy revolution. But instead of leading on global warming, Obama’s playing politics. He said it was time to “restore science to its rightful place” in his inaugural address, but sat back and watched as science was all but stripped from the Waxman-Markey climate legislation altogether at the behest of the fossil fuels and energy industries.

The worst part about this weak legislation is that it will not only keep America heading towards a full-speed, head-on collision with runaway climate change, but it will provide the cover for other developed countries to shirk their obligations to reduce emissions as well. President Obama needs a strong, science-based piece of legislation so that he can go to Copenhagen in December, when the next round of UN climate talks are scheduled to take place, and push for what science demands: 25 to 40% cuts in emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 to 95% cuts by 2050. Anything less and we’re headed for disaster.

So we took this opportunity, as Obama meets with the other G8 leaders in L’Aquila, Italy, to send President Obama a message: “America honors leaders, not politicians. Stop Global Warming.” You can take action too, by signing our petition calling on Obama to be a leader on climate change policy in the US and internationally.

Three Greenpeace climbers have hung a banner on the face of Mount Rushmore to issue a challenge to President Obama: "America honors leaders, not politicians: Stop Global Warming.”

Watch it live in our streaming video: www.greenpeace.org/rushmore

This is just one of several actions Greenpeace has staged today as world leaders gather in L'Aquila, Italy for the G8 meeting.

Global warming is an environmental crisis the likes of which we’ve never faced before, but so far, our leaders seem content to play politics with the issue. Yet, given the powerful forces who are actively working to delay action, addressing it adequately will require bold leadership, not political dealing. The banner hang on Mount Rushmore is intended to press President Obama to be a leader in establishing science-based global warming policy not just here in the U.S., but also internationally at the UN climate change discussions to be held in Copenhagen this December.

The science is clear on the fact that we need to reduce our emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80-95% by 2050.  If we do less than that, we risk crossing a tipping point that will bring about the worst impacts of global warming – devastating floods, droughts, wildfires, and storms. 

Unfortunately, the House of Representatives recently passed a climate bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), that sets targets far below those mandated by science — largely because the fossil fuels industries were allowed a huge amount of influence in revising the legislation. The bill is so weak that it may actually spur a new generation of dirty coal and dangerous nuclear plants.

The excuse we’re given is that this legislation is all that is politically feasible.  But the climate doesn't care about what's politically feasible. If we don't take action in line with the science, we face catastrophic climate change.

In President Obama's inaugural address, he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." ACES, which will soon be voted on in the Senate, falls woefully short of that mark. Sign our petition now to call on President Obama to honor his commitment to restoring science by being a true leader, not a politician.
 

Check out this slideshow of some pretty incredible images from Italy, where Greenpeace activists are holding protests at four different coal-fired power stations. The message is simple: As the G8 leaders meet in L'Aquila Italy, we're calling on them to take the urgent actions necessary to stop runaway climate change.

“The G8 heads of state must break the deadlock in the climate negotiations and stop blaming developing countries for their own inadequate climate policies,” said Greenpeace USA Executive Director, Phil Radford, on site at the G8 meeting in L’Aquila, Italy.

This Reuters article, published yesterday, does a great job of laying out the progress we’ve made so far in stopping deforestation in the Amazon thanks to our report, “Slaughtering the Amazon.”

SAO PAULO/RIO DE JANEIRO, June 29 (Reuters) - In a victory for conservationists, Brazil's huge cattle industry is bending to demands to curb destruction of the Amazon forest after heavy criticism of its leading role in deforestation.

Reforms by Brazil's big slaughterhouses could move the industry toward increased productivity and away from the practice of burning trees to clear land in the world's largest rainforest, industry officials and conservationists say.

…

In the past month, since the release of a 40-page Greenpeace report detailing links between Brazil's meatpackers and deforestation, the World Bank has withdrawn a $90 million loan to one firm. And supermarket chains said they would stop buying beef from 11 producers in the Amazon state of Para.

Big beef firms announced steps to ensure their cattle come from legal ranches. Beef exporters pledged not to accept meat from illegally deforested areas and to set up an electronic tracing system to guarantee the animals' origin.

"There have been very good decisions," said Andre Muggiati of Greenpeace, whose report used satellite data to show that beef for Brazil's domestic market and exports often comes from farms with recent deforestation.

"Now it is about implementation of deals. You have to monitor these commitments. If not, you lose it."

Like my colleague Andre says, making a commitment and following through on that commitment are two different things. We’ll be monitoring the situation in the Amazon closely to ensure that those companies who have committed to making changes actually follow through.

We’re still waiting to hear back from several of the shoe companies named in the report as to what they plan to do to make sure that the leather in their shoes is not coming from Amazon destruction. If you haven’t taken action yet, write to Nike, Adidas, Timberland, Geox, and Clarks right now and tell them to support solutions to deforestation and global warming. And if you’ve read any of the PR spin these companies have put out in the wake of our report release, you can read our responses here.

President Obama vowed to “restore science to its rightful place” in his inagural address. And then earlier today he said, "Now is the time for us to lead…. We cannot be afraid of the future. And we must not be prisoners of the past."

The Waxman-Markey climate legislation, however, will not do what the science says is necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change. In fact, House Democrats have worked extensively with the coal industry to edit the bill, which has translated into weakened emissions targets and massive offsets, in addition to several other critical shortcomings. Instead of leaving coal in the past – as the dirtiest of fossil fuels, it certainly has no place in a sustainable future – the coal industry now stands to reap significant rewards from the American Climate and Energy Security Act as it’s currently written.

That is why Greenpeace opposes the bill in its current form. Read our statement here.

The President must deliver on his campaign pledge to set climate policy based on science, not politics. Without President Obama’s leadership, corporate polluters will continue to highjack this process and ensure that we continue business as usual rather than implement policies to combat climate change.

Here are some of the key shortcomings of the bill:

• The Nobel-prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that to avoid the worst climate impacts, the United States and other industrialized countries must cut their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The short-term target in this bill is only a 4% reduction by 2020.
• The already weak targets set by the bill are further undermined by 2 billion tons per year of allowable offsets. That number is so large that the amount of available offsets will exceed the actual pollution reductions required under the cap until at least 2026—meaning it will be more than a decade before polluters would have to make real cuts in their emissions.
• Coal -fired power plants are the single largest source of global warming pollution in the US. In order to tackle climate change, we need to begin phasing out coal immediately. Far from phasing-out coal plants, however, Waxman-Markey will spur the growth of a new generation of coal-fired plants, locking in this dirty energy source for decades to come and sinking tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into the myth of carbon capture and sequestration – an untested, and unproven technology that is decades away from full-scale deployment even by the most optimistic estimates.
• Worst of all, the Waxman-Markey bill will actually remove the President’s existing authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act—authority recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. At a time when we need should be pursuing every available means to stop global warming, Congress should not be throwing one of the most powerful tools at the President’s disposal.

We are calling on President Obama to move beyond rhetoric and deliver on his commitments to “restore science to its rightful place” and to lead the world in addressing climate change.

As the world’s largest emitters gathered in Mexico for the US-led Major Economies Forum, several of my colleagues staged a banner hang to call on the United States to take the lead on climate action. A banner reading "Save the Climate, Act Now!" was unfurled in Cuernavaca City, where the meeting is being held. Leadership is urgently needed to achieve a climate-saving treaty at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December and, sadly, that leadership has so far not been provided by the Obama Administration.

We're calling on the Obama Administration to make serious commitments to deep mid-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to provide long-promised funds for developing countries to adapt to climate change, bypass the dirty energy sources of the past where possible, and protect the world's forests. The 16 other major emitters — Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom — must see that the US is serious so they will take the necessary action, too.

A very special edition of the International Herald Tribune has hit the streets today. It's dated "Saturday, December 19, 2009" — the day after the UN climate talks end in Copenhagen — and it reports the news we're hoping to see that day. Check it out:

(Click the image to view the online version of the paper; click here to download a low-res PDF.)

Personally, I'm especially fond of José Chingu's piece on the Amazon.

In response to the U.S. Global Change Research Program report released by the White House today, Greenpeace USA Climate Campaign Director Damon Moglen issued this statement:

The White House report on climate change is a stark confirmation of what scientists have been saying for years: unless we dramatically curb our emissions, the world will face unprecedented climate disruptions that will lead to drought, flooding, rising seas, food insecurity and mass displacement. But it begs the question: are the President and Congress taking the action necessary to avert this crisis?

As the report makes clear: ‘Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices [we] make today.’ With international climate negotiations veering off course and an inadequate global warming and energy bill moving through the House, the time has come for President Obama to move from words to deeds and commit to doing what is necessary to avoid runaway climate change.

To minimize the risk of truly catastrophic climate change, scientists say we must take action to keep global temperature rise as far below 2 degrees Celsius as possible. Today’s report confirms that to stay within this threshold, we must take aggressive action now and that ‘earlier cuts in emissions would have a greater effect in reducing climate change than comparable reductions later.’ It is troubling that, even as this report was being finalized, senior Administration officials refused even to commit to a 2 degree limit on warming and argued that the world should emphasize long-term action over the near-term targets most important to head off climate change.

The Nobel-prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that to avoid the worst climate impacts, the United States and other industrialized countries must cut their emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Yet the targets being developed by Congress, and supported by the President, fall far short of this goal. If we are to avert climate catastrophe, the President must deliver on his campaign pledge to set climate policy based on science, not politics.

To do so, President Obama must commit the United States to keeping global warming as far below 2 degrees as possible, and lead America and the world in meeting that target. We call on the President to use every tool at his disposal, both within and outside Congress, to create U.S. climate policy with scientific integrity, and to take that policy to Copenhagen in December as evidence that the U.S. will do what it takes to solve the climate crisis.”

Specifically, the President must commit the United States to:

• Keeping global temperature increases as far below 2 degrees as possible;
• Achieving real emission reductions of at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020;
• Eliminating offsets that undermine real emission reductions; and
• Providing the substantial international funding necessary to stop emissions from deforestation and help developing countries adapt to unavoidable climate impacts and leapfrog the dirty energy sources that would further exacerbate the problem.

Today’s report is a clarion call that the President and Congress must do much more, and more quickly, to respond to the climate crisis. We urge them to heed that call.

There’s a lot going on in the world these days. We’re facing environmental crises the likes of which mankind has never faced before: global warming, shocking rates of deforestation, dead zones and overfishing in our oceans, massive amounts of toxic e-waste being dumped in poor countries.

The only rational reaction to these crises, as far as I’m concerned, is to take action. Now is not the time to get depressed or feel hopeless. Now is the time to do whatever we can to build a clean, healthy, and sustainable future for all life on Planet Earth.

Greenpeace is on the frontlines of the fight to build a sustainable future, and we need you to join us. The environmental crises we’re facing are immense, but together we can solve them. It will take all of us working together, though.

That’s why we’d like to invite all of you to join us on June 17th for a Greenpeace volunteer meeting. Our field organizers are hosting these meetings in 20 cities across the country. Go here and search the drop-down menu for a city near you, then fill out the form to let us know you’ll be attending. The local field organizer in your community will be in touch to let you know the details of the meeting. (You can also visit www.greenpeace.org/volunteer and look for an organizer near you on our handy Google map.)

If you don’t see a city in the drop-down menu that is within roughly 30 miles of where you live, though, don’t worry! You can still get involved! Either click the link on that same page, or simply go here, then give us your info, and we’ll be in touch to let you know how you can help build a green and peaceful future.

Cool action today staged by my colleagues over at Greenpeace Italy.

As part of our efforts to get popular shoe brands Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Timberland, Clarks, and Geox to refuse to buy leather that comes from Amazon destruction, several activists demonstrated in front of a Geox store on one of the busiest pedestrian shopping streets in Milan. Not only did they stand outside the store wearing shirts and holding signs that said “Geox: Save the Climate, Let the Amazon Breathe,” but they also set up a huge Geox shoe that shot out smoke to give the impression that it was burning the Amazon, simulated by tree props underneath the shoe.

Check it out:





Perhaps the coolest thing about the action was the participation of passersby, many of whom posed for pictures with a message for Geox:





More photos in GPItaly’s Flickr.

Want to send a message yourself? Take action now and tell top shoe brands to protect the Amazon and the climate.

Cattle ranches are the leading cause of Amazon deforestation. Tropical forest destruction generates more greenhouse gas pollution than all the world's trains, planes, and cars put together. Urge Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Timberland, Clarks, and Geox to refuse to buy leather that's killing our future.

Brazil's minister of the environment, Carlos Minc, held a press conference today in Brasília to discuss fluctuating deforestation rates in the Amazon. During the press conference, Minc mentioned Greenpeace's “Slaughtering the Amazon” report, calling it an important study and saying that he personally agrees with its overall recommendations, especially the need to trace the origins of meat products and our demand that the Brazilian government stop financing economic activities linked directly to deforestation.

From Reuters:

Minc said he agreed with a Greenpeace report on Sunday that Brazilian beef fueled destruction and that the government was complicit by funding it.

"This ministry shares the (report's) view. Cattle ranching today is the main culprit of deforestation," Minc said.

Eleven meat packers, 20 cattle ranches and 72 suppliers would be banned from receiving government funds earmarked to rescue the beef industry, which is in trouble due to the global financial crisis, Minc said.

They raised and bought cattle from illegally deforested land, he said.

"We can't have public money financing deforestation," said Minc, who complained last week about a lack of government support in carrying out his environmental agenda.

But wait, there are more updates from the Amazon!

We’ve just received this from our colleagues in Brazil:

The Public Prosecution Office in Para State has sent the supermarket chains Carrefour, Wal-Mart and Pao de Acucar (controlled by the French group Casino) a recommendation to stop buying meat from animals raised in illegally cleared areas in the Amazon rainforest region. The prosecutors warn that if the companies disobey, they could be fined up to US$ 250 per kilo of product. Another 72 national companies that buy cattle products also received the recommendation.

The Prosecution Office also opened a billion-dollar lawsuit against 20 farms, a Bertin slaughterhouse, and another 10 companies of the cattle sector that operate in Para State, accusing them of avoiding forest regeneration in illegally deforested areas that were the object of previous fines. The lawsuit asks for the retention of the farm owners’ goods as well as payment of fines and compensation for environmental damage to society, seeks to establish an embargo of any activity in the areas that were illegally cleared, and demands the recovery of 557 thousand hectares to be reforested with native species. Because they bought cattle from these farms, slaughterhouses and tanning companies are considered co-responsible.

This past weekend, we released our report “Slaughtering the Amazon,” which exposed the supply chain by which these slaughterhouses and tanning companies who are responsible for Amazonian deforestation are supplying the demand for raw resources to make a variety of consumer products, from beef to boots. Our investigation found that popular name brands like Nike, Adidas, and Timberland could be using leather made from cattle raised on illegally deforested Amazon land.

The demand for cattle products leads to deforestation, and deforestation releases tons of CO2, leading to climate change. Write to these shoemakers now and urge them to be a partner in finding solutions to deforestation and global warming.

For the past three years, my colleagues here at Greenpeace have been investigating the cattle industry in Brazil. Our new report, “Slaughtering the Amazon,” is the product of that investigation.

The cattle industry is Brazil’s chief source of CO2 emissions and is also responsible for 80% of deforestation in the Amazon, making it the largest single driver of deforestation anywhere in the world. Our investigation exposed the Brazilian government’s complicity in bankrolling the companies responsible for deforestation in the Amazon, as well as several top name shoe brands – such as Adidas, Nike, Reebok, and Timberland – whose demand for leather may be supporting cattle ranchers that are illegally slaughtering the Amazon. Write to these shoemakers now and tell them to protect the Amazon and the climate.



Forests are vital to stabilizing the world’s climate because they store such large amounts of carbon. There is about one-and-a-half times as much carbon stored in the Earth’s forests as there is in its atmosphere. It is estimated that the Amazon alone stores somewhere from 80 to 120 billion tons of carbon. If the Amazon were destroyed, it would release some 50 times the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. All of which means that if we are to curb global CO2 emissions, we have to save the Amazon. And that means we have to deal with the cattle industry in Brazil. Read more here.

Yesterday we released a new report, “America’s Share of the Climate Crisis: A State-By-State Carbon Footprint,” to highlight the United States’ responsibility for taking the lead to solve global warming given our disproportionately large role in creating the problem. Using data from the World Resources Institute's Carbon Analysis Indicators Tool, the report examines each state's carbon dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuel combustion from 1960 to 2005 and compares those emissions to 184 other countries.

It's a pretty staggering report. For instance, my home state, Texas, would rank as the 6th biggest polluter in the world if it were its own country. There's also this fact: "The combined historic emissions of just seven states—Texas, California, Illinois, New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—totalled 96,517 MtCO2, more than any other country in the world, including China (92,950)."

Read more and download the report so you can check your state's emissions numbers. Congress may be blowing it with the climate legislation, but the EPA's endangerment finding gives it the ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Write the EPA now and tell them you want them to issue strong new rules to control global warming pollution.

Today we launched the “Cool IT Challenge”, a campaign to turn IT industry head honchos like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Intel’s Paul Otellini, and Michael Dell into advocates for strong global warming policies and providers of effective global warming solutions. (The video at the bottom of this post does a good job of explaining the campaign.) There are two main reasons why this campaign is so cool:

1. A peak in global emissions by 2015 followed by a rapid decline to as close to zero emissions as possible by 2050 is crucial to protecting the climate, and the IT industry has claimed to have the potential to cut 15 percent of total emissions via tech solutions like a smart grid. Many tech leaders have already established initiatives to green their own companies, but if they then turn around and help society as a whole implement solutions to get more energy efficient while still using all the fancy new technologies we’ve come to rely on (and some new ones we haven’t even heard of yet, hopefully!), who knows how big of a contribution the IT inudustry could make to stopping global warming.
2. This campaign was just made for the web. Check out the website, it’s got lots of cool features to play with. For example, you can place bets on which IT industry leader will be leading the pack at the end of the summer when we re-evaluate them all. And more games are coming soon! Plus there’s plenty of ways to invite your friends to play with you (yeah multiplayer action!), dig into our assesment scores for each industry leader (currently in first: IBM’s Samuel Palmisano, with a paltry 29 out of 100 — come on IT big wigs, you can do better!), email these IT leaders and urge them to be climate leaders, and, if you’re a blogger, get your blog added to our featured links list by linking to our page with the most creative content!

We’ve ranked the IT leaders that are part of the challenge based on five criteria: Public Climate Speech; Political Advocacy; Climate Solutions; Own Emissions Targets; and Renewable Energy Use. Check out the site now, find out how the IT leaders are measuring up, and place your bets!

The head of our global warming campaign, Damon Moglen, sent the following update out to our supporters yesterday stating our reasons for withdrawing our support from the Waxman-Markey climate legislation, America's Clean Energy and Security Act.

Here's Damon's statement:

In these last weeks, the first piece of legislation attempting to seriously address global warming was introduced in Congress. The bill - authored and introduced by Representatives Waxman and Markey - started off as a good first step toward solving the climate crisis.

But following pressure from an all-out $45 million lobbying push by the coal, gas and oil industries, the bill looks very different today than it did two weeks ago. That's why I want to let you know where Greenpeace stands on the bill.

Unfortunately, we simply can't support this bill in its current state. Here are a few of the reasons why:

• The bill calls for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by less than 4-7 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Even with supplemental reductions elsewhere in the bill, that's way short of the 25-40 percent cuts that leading scientists call for.
• The biggest polluters would receive hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies. This is unacceptable. Taxpayers should not foot the bill for dirty industries hoping to continue business as usual.
• Given all of the carbon "offsets" that the bill offers to dirty industries, they could avoid reducing their greenhouse gas emissions for more than a decade. By that time, it could be too late to stop the worst impacts of global warming.
• A new generation of dirty coal-fired power plants will be supported through some $10 billion in ratepayer subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration (or CCS) - an unproven technology that doesn't even exist yet.
• The bill sets a renewable electricity standard that would achieve less than states are likely to accomplish on their own.

All together, this bill simply does not do what the science says is necessary to avoid the worst effects of global warming and to rescue the climate. And for us here at Greenpeace, that has always been the bottom line.

This moment requires bold leadership from President Obama and Congress, and Greenpeace fully intends to demand just that. We'll be in touch over the coming weeks and months to let you know exactly what's needed to rescue the climate. In the meantime, I want to personally thank you for your activism and commitment to this important issue. I'm looking forward to working with you.

Sincerely,
Damon Moglen
Greenpeace Global Warming Campaign Director

Yesterday Greenpeace held a rally in Virginia outside of the first of two EPA Endangerment Hearings that will take place this week. These hearings come about a month after the EPA announced its conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels endanger human health and welfare –  which by law gives the EPA the right to regulate those emissions under the Clean Air Act. The EPA's endangerment finding is a good sign that the Obama Administration might be willing to regulate greenhouse gases should Congress fail to act. The Administration is holding these public hearings through June as part of the public input process.

We showed up to yesterday’s hearing with banners reading, "The Science is Clear,” “Rescue the Climate,” and stood outside the hearing facility for all to see. From blocks away volunteers could be heard chanting: "EPA: today is the date. Rescue the Climate before it's too late!" We got honks from cars passing by and waves and shouts from supporters on foot. It was clear we didn't go unnoticed.  

With the same industry lobbyists inside the hearing as have been inside Congressional offices this spring, it's more important than ever that we are representing the movement and always reminding the media, the public, and elected officials that there is a human face to the impacts of climate change.

The next hearing is in Seattle on Thursday. We’ll be there too. Check back for an update!

Greenpeace, along with Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen, today released a joint statement expressing deep concern with the direction the Waxman-Markey draft bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), has taken. Here is the statement in full:

We are extremely troubled by the reports coming out of the Energy and Commerce Committee last night on additional compromises to the already flawed American Clean Energy & Security Act. The world needs real leadership from Congress and the Administration to address global warming – action that will enable us to transform our economy with clean, renewable energy technology, new green jobs and show leadership internationally. If reports are true, the compromises being struck on the bill undermine these goals.

For more info, you can also read Greenpeace’s original statement on the Waxman-Markey draft bill, and read Friends of the Earth’s assessment.

One of our main criticisms from the outset was that the draft bill was largely silent on how it would allocate revenues from the sale of pollution permits within the cap and trade scheme proposed by the bill. This money should be used to build clean energy generation capacity and new infrastructure such as a smart grid. Instead the discussion draft contained giveaways and loopholes for the coal industry and its mythical “Clean Coal.”

The bill has, according to reports, become significantly worse in this respect over the past week or so. Bloomberg recently reported that Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is offering as much as an estimated $40 billion in free pollution permits to “utilities, refiners and manufacturers.”

President Obama initially called for 100% of pollution permits to be auctioned off, and his budget calls for as much as 83% of the revenues to be given back to middle class taxpayers to help pay for higher energy costs. If we give as much as 55% of the permits away for free – as is apparently being discussed – it’s unclear how Obama could afford to pay for such a middle class tax break. Such a giveaway is especially appalling given the example we have to learn from: The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme originally gave away so many permits that pollution permits were trading for as little as 1 euro cent, providing no incentive for polluting industries to clean up their act. Now apparently the fossil fuels industries – who have spent some $45 million lobbying against the bill – are succeeding in convincing House Democrats to make the same mistake.

(UPDATE: Joe Romm over on ClimateProgress.org argues that it was not the giveaway of permits that caused the price to crash: "The EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) had too many total permits. That was why the price crashed, not because those permits were given away for free.  If the EU had auctioned all the tons, the price still would have crashed as soon as everybody realized there were too many in the market." I apologize for missing this nuance. It was an oversight, not an attempt to mislead. But the simple fact (and the overall point I was trying to make) still remains: Waxman-Markey was already flawed when it was first introduced as a discussion draft, and the industries creating all the pollution that will be regulated by the bill have had an inordinate amount of influence in shaping it since then.)

There are also reports that the giveaway to companies researching Carbon Capture and Sequestration, a totally unproven technology still decades away from large-scale implementation (if it even proves viable at all) and therefore a dangerous distraction from real global warming solutions, could be as much as $10 billion. And the emissions targets contained in the bill get worse and worse. The bill originally called for roughly the equivalent of what science says is necessary to avert the worst effects of global warming: 25 to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. But the baseline being used now is 2005, and the bill is said to only aim for reaching 17% by 2020.

Even worse, the conservative Democrats who have been most instrumental in watering down the bill are apparently attempting to get that target reduced even further, to 6% of 2005 levels by 2020.

Right now, these roughly 10 or 12 conservative Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, all of whom have received substantial campaign contributions from the fossil fuels industries, are standing in the way of real progress in combatting global warming. It’s absolutely inconscionable. If America doesn’t have a strong plan in place by December, the rest of the world is unlikely to be willing to commit to any kind of bold action in Copenhagen during the UN climate talks.

Who are these Dems, you ask? Check out this Guardian roundup, it has all the dirt on the Dems in bed with the dirty industries who are more worried about protecting their profits than the wellbeing of the entire planet.

Waxman expects to bring the bill before the full House Energy and Commerce Committee for markup by next Monday. There will be more info on what you can do to stand up with Greenpeace and the movement to stop global warming very soon, I promise…

We’ve launched a new iPhone app version of our Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide. The app, created for us by 3rd Whale, makes it easy to find the paper products that are easiest on the Earth. Our experts evaluated over 100 brands and only recommended those that: contain 100% overall recycled content; contain at least 50% post-consumer recycled content; and are bleached without toxic chlorine compounds. We also rank so-so products that “could do better” and warn you off products that “should be avoided.”

The app has functions that allow you to browse by product category or search by brand name, as you can see from this screen-grab to the right.

If you download the app, please be so kind as to rate it!

And I swear, recycled TP is not as bad as some companies would have us think. I’ve been using it for years, and my bum is no less sensitive than the average joe’s. No need to be harsh on your rear to be kind to the ancient forests of the world! Don’t believe me? Just check out this video where a FOX news anchor – yes, FOX – couldn’t tell the difference between recycled and regular toilet paper.

Just thought I'd share this video from our action outside the Dept. of the Interior last Friday following Sec. Salazar's announcement that he's going to just let global warming doom all polar bears.

As always, we'd greatly appreciate it if you could favorite our video on YouTube!

 

Sec. Salazar has announced he won't rescind the "polar bear special rule," which exempts global warming from protections afforded polar bears by the Endangered Species Act. If we're going to save the polar bears and stop global warming, we can't let Salazar off the hook for this travesty. Please call Sec. Salazar today and tell him how disappointed you are.

Making a call is easy, fast, and extremely effective. Simply follow the steps below:

1) Call (202) 208-7351 between the hours of 9am and 5pm ET. If you can't call then and don't speak to a person, skip step #2 and leave the message below.

2) The phone will be answered by a staff person in Secretary Salazar's office. Tell them your name and city and state you are calling from, and then tell the staffer you are calling to leave a message with Secretary Salazar about the Endangered Species Act and polar bears. You will then be asked if you would like to use the Interior Department's comment line, politely say no, and say that you would prefer leaving your comment with the staff person you are speaking with so that he/she can give that message to the secretary directly.

3) Leave your message. Here's a sample:

"Hi, My name is ______ and I am calling from ______. I am extremely disappointed that the Secretary did not take action to strike the polar bear special rule from the Endangered Species Act. This means that polar bears are not protected from global warming, which is the primary threat to their long term survival. Please give the Secretary the message that I am calling to express my disappointment that he did not take action to protect the polar bear from global warming."

4) Let us know that you made the call by clicking the button below.

We can't let Salazar continue to bend to industry pressure. Please call his office today.

I wrote earlier in the week about the Waxman-Markey draft bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), which is stalled in sub-committee. Well, there has already been a lot of activity on that bill, and on global warming legislation in general, in the past couple days. So an update is definitely in order.

ACES, of course, would create a cap-and-trade scheme to lower our emissions and spur investment in renewable energy. Cap-and-trade means capping emissions and selling, or trading, emissions permits, forcing industry to pay for their pollution. The revenue from the sale of these pollution permits could then be used to invest in renewable energy generation and infrastructure, like a new “smart” electricity grid, as well as help developing nations bypass the dirty energy economy altogether in favor of a clean energy economy. One of the main problems with the ACES bill, which I didn’t actually point out in my last post, was that the bill did not have much to say about where revenue from the cap-and-trade scheme would go.

But Rep. Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, has introduced a new bill based on a different idea that addresses the problem of where the revenues would go. His approach is being called “cap-and-dividend,” because he wants to give all of the proceeds from the sale of pollution permits directly back to tax-paying Americans, essentially as a dividend on the investment of tax-payer money into America’s energy infrastructure.

A cap-and-trade scheme would require us to ratchet down the number of pollution permits available – the point being to eliminate emissions as much as possible as quickly as possible – so it will inevitably drive up the cost of energy. These increased costs will of course be passed on to consumers. President Obama’s budget proposes to use as much as 83% of the revenues from cap-and-trade to pay for a middle class tax cut to help offset the higher energy costs. Hollen’s proposal to pay Americans back directly through dividends on the investment of tax money is an intriguing notion, perhaps easier to sell to the American people than a tax cut because of its simplicity.

Not surprisingly, there are many industries trying to get a piece of the pie as well. Even less surprisingly, there is already a shady, deliberately non-transparent industry group running radio ads in opposition to ACES in the districts of several moderates on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. (Least surprising of all? This group is affiliated with another group that gets funding from ExxonMobil.) Check out Climate Progress for all the details, insofar as they have emerged, about the American Energy Alliance, the front group running the ads and repeating the same debunked lies about the likely costs to taxpayers of a cap-and-trade scheme.

Whether or not cap-and-dividend ends up catching on as the solution, it’s important to consider all options. We need all honest, thoughtful ideas to be on the table for debate. And then we need to push our lawmakers to consider all of these proposals and decide what’s right for the world. Because our opponents are not interested in honest, thoughtful debate. The fossil fuels industries will be funding tons of PR efforts like these deliberately misleading radio ads in the coming months, and their aim is not to debate but to stop any bill aimed at reducing pollution and ushering in a new era of clean renewable energy, period. We need to step it up, speak out, and let our Reps know that we demand strong global warming legislation now, or they’re going to listen to the fossil fools and their shady front groups instead.

According to E&E Daily (subscription required, sorry), there is still some deep-seated unease among Democrats about implementing solutions to global warming:

So far, the [House Energy and Commerce] committee's Democrats have struggled to reach consensus as about a dozen moderate and conservative lawmakers from the South, Rust Belt and Intermountain West resist the aggressive path that Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, set out in a 648-page draft proposal.

The Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee met with Obama this week, but of course not many details have been released publicly about the meeeting. It is being reported that Obama asked them to reach consensus and bring the bill out of committee by Memorial Day, so that they could turn their attention to health care.

This debate happening right now is quite possibly the most important debate we have ever had. Right now, a handful of moderate Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are all that stand between us and a full House debate on the strongest global warming bill yet. You can bet those moderates are hearing from the fossil fuels industries. We need to make sure they hear from us. Get involved and tell Congress why you care about the environment and want them to pass legislation to stop global warming.

From where I’m sitting – my desk in San Francisco – global warming is by far the biggest threat posed by our continued reliance on fossil fuels. But for many communities around the world, global warming would probably not be listed as the most pressing concern. Grave as the climate crisis may be, the pollution caused by the mining, transporting, refining, and/or burning of fossil fuels is by far the dominant concern in these communities, which skew heavily to poor, disadvantaged, and minority communities – those who will be hit hardest by global warming all the same.

For instance, tribal people in the Ecuadorian Amazon have been dealing with the fallout from what’s been described as “the largest environmental disaster of this new century” for over 4 decades now. Between 1964 and 1990, oil and gas giant Texaco dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Amazon waterways and 916 waste pits, many of which overflow into streams. Hundreds of square miles of the Amazon rainforest have been polluted.

Texaco was bought by Chevron in 2001. Thus Chevron has inherited the mess Texaco made in the Amazon. Several of the tribes who rely on the Amazon for their livelihood brought a suit against Chevron in 1993, seeking redress for their polluted watercourses and the abnormally high cancer rates they’ve experienced, in addition to other health problems.

Chevron has tried everything to quash this suit. In 2003 they asked that the trial be moved to Ecuador, where they no doubt figured they could buy their way out of a guilty verdict. They lobbied the Bush Administration to threaten Ecuador with cutting off trade relations if the trial proceeded unfavorably for the American corporation. Amazon Watch recently caught Chevron paying off bloggers to attack the Ecuadorian courts on the company’s behalf. Chevron even went so far as to produce a fake online newscast, complete with a former CNN news correspondent, as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign.

But some times facts have a habit of being irrepressible and immutable, no matter how much PR money a company spends to bury or rewrite them. 60 Minutes did an exposé last Sunday, May 3rd about the fact that "Powering American cars with Amazon crude has left a toxic legacy”:


Watch CBS Videos Online

The Ecuadorian tribes are seeking $27 billion in damages. Of course Chevron will appeal endlessly and delay paying this money as long as they can, taking a page from Exxon’s playbook in dealing with the Valdez spill (which, by the way, was around 10.8 million gallons, far smaller than the 18 billion gallons alleged to have been spilled in Ecuador’s rainforest). But still, a ruling against the company would set a powerful precedent for fossil fuels companies being held accountable for their actions. It would be a huge victory not just for the tribal people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, but for the communites around the globe that are being poisoned and oppressed by the inordinate amount of money and power we’ve handed to unscrupled companies like Chevron because of our dependence on fossil fuels.

It’s not just developing countries where this type of thing happens. Right here in the Bay Area there are environmental justice groups battling a Chevron oil refinery expansion, which will result in more pollution in their community. And it’s not just oil companies. People in West Virginia and other Appalacian communities have seen their homes and local ecosystems destroyed by mountaintop removal, the supremely destructive coal-mining practice. New Mexicans in the Four Corners region of the state recently got some good news when the EPA canceled the permit for a new coal plant that was to be built there, but they still have to deal with the pollution from two others.

Of course there are countless other examples all over the world of people fighting for their lives and livelihoods against environmental injustice. Whether you live in one of these exploited communities or not, you have a stake in the outcome of this trial in Ecuador. We need to break our addiction to fossil fuels and build a sustainable energy economy to avert the worst affects of global warming. But unless everyone benefits from the clean energy future, there is no true sustainability. And for everyone to benefit from clean energy, we have to clean up the mess leftover from all these years of using dirty energy.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), a draft bill released by Henry Waxman and Ed Markey that is currently being debated in the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee (full text here as PDF), is not perfect. But as a comprehensive piece of climate and energy legislation, it is a cause for some hope. The bill would set science-based emissions reduction targets, ramp up renewable energy standards, and provide money to stop international deforestation, to name a few of its highlights.

However, the bill's shortcomings include some two billion tons of pollution offsets, enough that we wouldn’t have to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels whatsoever in order to meet the emissions reductions the bill calls for. And there are billions of dollars included for the coal industry, purveyors of the dirtiest fossil fuel around, whose only “green” cred is so-called Carbon Capture and Sequestration — a totally unproven technology that is really just a false hope and a dangerous distraction.

Read our full analysis of the bill here.

Of course, the fossil fuels industries are fighting tooth and nail to get even more handouts and to weaken emissions targets as much as possible so that they can coninue business as usual. Not surprisingly, they’ve got some members of Congress nervous. President Obama has made global warming a signature cause, and is reportedly headed down to Congress tomorrow to try and move things along:

President Obama puts his political chips on the line tomorrow when he meets with House Democrats wrestling with legislation to overhaul U.S. energy and global warming policy.

The bill is stuck in subcommittee because of concerns from about a dozen Democrats with strong ties to the coal and gas-and-oil industries, and many predict a push from the popular new president may shove the measure along in the legislative process.

This entire NYT piece, "Risks, rewards abound as Obama enters House climate debate," is well worth the read, as it examines the many political considerations at play in this debate.

Obama’s involvement is a good sign, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a stronger ACES is a sure thing. The only thing that will guarantee Congress does the right thing for the planet rather than for their large donors in the fossil fuels industries is you and me. We have to hold our elected representatives accountable. If you want to help, tell your Rep right now why you’re part of the movement to stop global warming.

We’ve gotten a lot of inspiring stories submitted so far. Who knows, maybe your story could be the one that inspires a member of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee to do the right thing and support a really strong bill that will kickstart the energy revolution and stop global warming.

Our "Break the Addiction" video is up for a Webby Award, and today is the last day to vote!

If you want to vote for our video, go to http://pv.webbyawards.com/ and follow these steps:

1. Click on the "Register now to vote!" button on the right and register to vote (It’s free and easy, but you need to use a working email address in order to confirm your registration)
2. Click on “Online Film & Video + Vote Now"
3. Scroll down and click on “Public Service and Activism”
4. Vote for “Breaking The Addiction” (yeah they got the name wrong...)

It's just that easy! For bonus points, you can also use the handy button to share your vote on Facebook.


Winners will be announced May 5th. Props to Brian Thompson, who put this video together for us.

Thanks for your support, and hope you enjoy the video!

We’ve been saying all along that nukes are not the answer to global warming: they’re too expensive, too risky, and new reactors take far too long to bring online. We need a clean energy economy now, not 10 years from now. Our Energy [R]evolution report shows how we can meet our growing energy needs and help rebuild our economy entirely without building new nuclear energy plants (or new coal-fired plants either, for that matter).

According to a Wall Street Journal blog post, it turns out the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) agrees with us:

FERC Chairman: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Nukes

Forget everything you’ve heard from people like energy secretary Steven Chu and Exxon boss Rex Tillerson about the need for a mix of energy sources this century. The U.S. doesn’t need any new nuclear or coal-fired plants. It can do the job with just renewable energy and natural gas.

Yes, that is Greenpeace’s energy blueprint. It’s also the line of Jon Wellinghoff, the new chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the nominal head of the U.S. power system.

Speaking at a conference yesterday, Mr. Wellinghoff said the U.S. can make do without new nuclear or coal plants, Green Wire reports: “We may not need any, ever,” he said.

And yesterday the WSJ had another blog post up pointing out the similarities between our stance on coal and nukes and Mr. Wellinghoff’s. Yesterday, you might recall, was also our new boss’s first day on the job. Phil Radford spent the first half of his first day on a 140-foot construction crane helping to hang a banner across the street from the Major Economies Forum at the State Department, and the second half in jail for his part in this daring non-violent action. The WSJ blogger, Russel Gold, after first pointing out that both Radford and Wellinghoff oppose nuclear and coal, proceeds to ask, Who is the real radical: “The guy inside the political power corridors – or the one dangling from a crane above them?”

Now, given that he’s writing for the Wall Street Journal, I have a feeling Russel Gold is probably trying to undermine the credibility of Jon Wellinghoff, not demonstrate how our position on global warming solutions – which were once very much on the fringe, especially when we started working on the issue in the 90s – have become mainstream.

Of course the answer to Gold’s question is: neither! They’re both realists. There’s nothing radical about opposing nuclear power: at $12 to $18 billion per plant, even MidAmerican Holdings, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (Buffett, if you’re not familiar, is one of the world’s most successful investors, known as the “Oracle of Omaha” for his investing acumen), withdrew plans to build a new nuclear power plant because it was not economically viable (citation available in this PDF).

And Congressman Ed Markey has even said that, “by the time we reach the switch being pulled for the first nuclear power plant to be generating their first 1,000 megawatts we will probably have 150,000 megawatts of renewables 10 years from now.” Here’s hoping we do have that much renewable energy capacity by then, because if not, we will have failed to avert the worst effects of global warming.

Every one of those $12 to $18 billion we spend on a new nuclear plant is a dollar we don’t spend developing renewable energy generating capacity, or the smart grid needed to get that energy to the marketplace. These technologies are ready to start producing energy now, not 10 years from now. What’s so radical about wanting to implement a solution that will actually solve the worst environmental crisis of our time, rather than throwing money away on false solutions?

"Global warming is an issue that concerns all of us... If our leaders can find the time and the money to bail out the banks, then they can certainly bail out our planet. It's simply too big to fail."

There was a rather interesting (if you want to call it that) story in the New York Times today about how the Global Climate Coalition, "a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels," ignored its own scientists' findings that human activity is causing global warming. These findings date back to the early 90s at least. Of course this is not surprising: The auto, oil, and coal industries, to name a few, are still by and large trying to obstruct legislation that will regulate their ability to pollute our atmosphere, even well after all legitimate debate on the issue is over.

These corporate polluters don't need to "win" the debate, of course, just sow doubt and confusion, in order to delay action on global warming. And they've done that quite well, often aided and abetted by journalists who are compelled to present both "sides" of an argument, no matter how illogical one side might seem, and are surprisingly easily duped by the hacks on the payrolls of groups like the Global Climate Coalition.

Greenpeace's own Glenn Hurowitz wrote a blog for the Huffington Post about how journalists are still being duped on a daily basis by these same industries:

The amazing thing about this story is not that industry deceived journalists about the threat of climate change, but that journalists are still buying industry deceptions to this day - just different ones.

Having finally lost the battle about the reality of climate change, these same industries and their backers in Congress have come up with a different deception: that bold action on climate change would somehow negatively affect the economy.

In fact, there's overwhelming evidence showing that climate change is causing hundreds of billions of dollars in drag on the U.S. and world economies as a result of drought, flood, sea level rise (Hurricane Katrina alone caused more than $100 billion in damage), and greater spending on hot-weather accoutrements like air conditioning. NRDC estimates the damage from just four impacts at $2000 per family every single year. And that number doesn't even consider, for example, the $167 billion annual health care costs attributable to regular old cancer-and-asthma inducing coal fired power plants.

Nevertheless, many journalists, including even many at The New York Times (here and here (h/t Joseph Romm) for instance) repeat as received truth the industry's latest myth that continuing to spew pollution is somehow good for the economy.

I'm sure the oil and coal industries have a memo somewhere that will come out in 15 years showing that, in fact, their economists knew the environmentalists were right all along: a clean energy economy will in fact boost GDP, create millions of new clean energy jobs, and save consumers money on their electricity bills.

But until that memo comes out, they're going to continue peddling totally concocted junk economics about dirty energy to reporters - and impede the creation of the clean energy economy.

It's time for journalists to learn from experience that no matter what your instincts or how slick and knowing the industry flacks seem, they cannot be trusted. They can't be trusted when they say tobacco is safe, they can't be trusted when they deny the need for seat belts, they can't be trusted when they deny the dangers of climate change, and they most certainly can't be trusted when it comes to the new green economy.

Just thought I'd share this video put together by our awesome video crew. It's from the Windy City action we did on Earth Day — when we erected six wind turbines in downtown Chicago to show what the clean energy future will look like.


If you're on YouTube, we'd appreciate it if you could favorite the video, as always!

As I’m sure you know, tomorrow is Earth Day. But this year, we’re getting started a day early. (Besides, it’s already Earth Day in places like Japan, Fiji, and New Zealand.)

With the Copenhagen Climate Conference coming up in December, every day needs to be Earth Day this year. We're mobilizing people to join our fight to force the world’s governments to act against runaway global warming, and we made this video, “Inspring Action,” to help recruit.

If you want to help, send the video link to 5 friends, favorite it on YouTube, and become a climate activist by signing up with Greenpeace.

Over 300 activists assembled today to participate in an act of civil disobedience in Charlotte, North Carolina to protest the massive new coal-burning power plant Duke Energy is building at Cliffside. It was the latest and biggest in a string of actions that have been carried out since the Capitol Climate Action in March, which unleashed a wave of grassroots activity aimed at stopping new coal plants from being built and ushering in a new era of clean energy in America.

After the estimated 300-400 activists rallied in front of Duke's Charlotte headquarters, 44 were eventually arrested, including Jim Warren of NC Warn; Bo Webb and Mike Roselle from Coal River Mountain in Appalachia; Larry Gibson and Mike McCoy-from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth; and several Rutherford County residents who live near the site where construction of the Cliffside plant is already underway. They are likely to be charged with second-degree trespass.

Duke Energy made an especially good target because the company’s CEO, Jim Rogers, likes to tout his company’s commitment to addressing global warming even while the company is building a coal-fired plant that will keep North Carolina hooked on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel around, for the next 50 years.

But climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions aren’t even the only reason why we need to transition off of dirty fossil fuels like coal and onto clean energy sources like wind and solar. The coal mining practice known as mountaintop removal, for instance, is incredibly destructive, capable of completely destroying whole eco-systems; mining in general is dangerous for miners and their families; and the burning of coal has several serious impacts on public health.

And of course let’s not forget the little problem of storing all the highly-toxic coal ash that is left over.

There’s also the fact that investing in renewables instead of coal would create more jobs and help revitalize our ailing economy. Read more about today’s action and the environmental, health, and economic costs of coal here.

The demonstration in Charlotte, NC was organized by a coalition of over a dozen environmental, faith-based, and social justice groups, all of whom are calling on Duke Energy and the state of North Carolina to cancel construction of the Cliffside coal power plant. The plant is predicted to cost $2.4 billion and emit an estimated six million tons of carbon dioxide every year for the next 50 years. Similar protests have happened at coal plants in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and other states. Several more are planned for this summer. You can view more pictures here.

The Capitol Climate Action was the catalyst for this new wave of climate activism. We can’t sit around and wait for solutions, we have to go out and make them a reality. And we simply can’t stand for decisionmakers like Jim Rogers delaying action while greenwashing their own activities.

Greenpeace’s field organizer in North Carolina, John Deans, put it best: “It’s absolutely hypocritical for Rogers to talk about sustainability and responsibility when Cliffside locks in dangerous climate pollution for another 50 years. If they really want to protect the planet and create jobs, they’d invest in wind and solar power instead of more polluting energy.”

Activists in Charlotte, NC have just reached Duke Energy HQ! They're there to protest the company's Cliffside coal-fired power plant, which is currently under construction and will only prolong North Carolina's reliance on the dirtiest fossil fuel around, coal.

Follow updates in real time on Twitter!

And if you couldn't be in Charlotte today but want to make your voice heard, you can call Duke Energy and tell them to "Stop Cliffside!" yourself:

Duke Energy
1-800-488-3853

This is an open thread, so let us know in the comments if you made a call and what response you got, or just tell us what you're seeing out there in the field.

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!

A couple weeks ago, we released a video called “What's inside your box of Kleenex?” Kimberly-Clark doesn't have a policy for using recycled content in their consumer paper products, which include Kleenex as well as Scott, Cottonelle, and Viva. Even worse than not using recycled content, the company sources some of its wood pulp from virgin forest, including some of the last remaining ancient Boreal forests in North America. That’s the dirty secret about what’s inside every box of Kleenex: ancient forests.

Kimberly-Clark has launched a big marketing campaign to try and tell consumers that it "Feels good to feel" their tissues. But with virgin forest in every box, Kleenex comes with more than a feeling. So we made a video to get the word out:


If you’re a YouTube user, please favorite the video! And if you want to let Kimberly-Clark know that you won’t be using their products until they start using recycled content, please take action now!

Time is running out. There are now only 22 days and 21 hours left for Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to rescind the Bush regulations that eviscerate the Endangered Species Act protections for polar bears by allowing federal agencies to disregard global warming impacts when planning or approving projects (read more here).



Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice – critical habitat for polar bears, who rely on the ice for hunting and breeding grounds – continues to melt at alarming rates thanks to global warming.

Salazar has been traveling the country holding hearings on whether Americans think it makes sense to drill the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), and it just so happened that he had a stop in San Francisco this morning. So we trooped on out there, brought a couple polar bears with us, and stood outside of the venue demanding Salazar take action to save our furry friends.

But don’t think we ignored the issue of drilling the OCS. Oh no, friends. We were joined by folks from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Surfrider Foundation, and many other local activists later in the day at a big rally to let Salazar know that drilling the OCS is a fool’s quest. Not only would it threaten our coastlines with oil spills and all kinds of industrial disturbance that is harmful to wildlife like polar bears and coastal ecosystems at large, but opening more land to drilling would only serve to prolong our addiction to fossil fuels.

With a stroke of his pen, Salazar can simultaneously rescind the dangerous Bush regulations limiting the scope of the Endangered Species Act and prod America to step up our efforts to stop global warming. Join us in urging Salazar to do the right thing: Sign the petition now!

Images © Greenpeace / Diana Silbergeld

On March 2nd, over 3,000 people took to the streets of Washington, DC for the Capitol Climate Action. We surrounded the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant, which supplies Congress with dirty energy, shutting it down for four hours. Our message was simple: We need to end the stranglehold dirty energy has on Congress and start building the clean energy economy of the future.

The protest was a huge success – Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to the Architect of the Capitol (cool title, huh?) ordering him to switch the Capitol Power Plant off of coal by the end of the year. It was a major victory, but it was only the beginning.

The thousands who marched in the streets of DC that day have gone home and started grassroots campaigns to kick coal out of their communities, as well.

On April 20th, a coalition of activists will be protesting Duke Energy’s proposed Cliffside Coal Plant in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can check out the coalition, get the scoop on Cliffside, and RSVP for the event at StopCliffside.org.

Greenpeace will be there on the ground with the Stop Cliffside coalition. Just try and watch this video and not want to join us:

Here at Greenpeace we work a lot more to influence global warming policy than we do to promote individual lifestyle choices. But this recent HuffPo article, “The Breathtaking Effects of Cutting Back On Meat,” is an excellent reminder that our personal choices really do have an impact on the planet:

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

• 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
• 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
• 70 million gallons of gas--enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
• 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
• 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

• Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
• 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
• Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

Of course lifestyle choices alone can’t deal with the scope of the global climate crisis. It’s incredibly important that we stay active and keep telling our elected representatives in no uncertain terms that we expect them to deal with global warming and kickstart an energy revolution. But being the change we want to see is also a very powerful way to make a difference.

If you want to know more about how industrial agriculture is contributing to global warming, check out this report: “Cool Farming: Climate impacts of agriculture and mitigation potential” (you can download the full PDF, or the summary). Deforestation to clear land for cattle grazing is also a huge contributer to greenhouse gas emissions; read more about that in our report, “Amazon Cattle Footprint.”

We also have a page in our Green Living Guide that deals with food choices. The page is called “On your plate.” It’s full of good tips, like this one: “According to author John Robbins in his book The Food Revolution, you could save more water by not eating a pound of California beef than you could by not showering for an entire year.”

So no need to forego showers! (Seriously, please don’t.) Whether you go vegetarian for life, for a day, or just eat less meat in general, you can make a huge reduction in your personal carbon footprint.

Our colleagues over at GreenpeaceSEASIA (Southeast Asia) have put out a comic book entitled Nuclear Meltdown: A Message from the Darkness: "an advocacy comic book about the perils of nuclear power and how the youth can make a difference in making the world a better place."

I just think this is really cool, especially because the point is to show youth activists that they can make a difference. Here's a little more info:

The comic book was developed by Indonesian artists with storyline by Greenpeace Southeast Asia Nuclear Campaigner Tessa de Ryck. In the story, two teenagers, Cosmo and Luna, go back in time to the year 2009 in a race to save the planet from the devastating effects of climate change and nuclear power.

Read more and download your copy on the GreenpeaceSEASIA website!

Okay, so you won't really become a star. But you can become an extra in the remake of a classic George Romero horror film from 1973, The Crazies, which is currently in production. And you're guaranteed to be seen in the theatrical or DVD release of the film!

In the movie, the residents of a small Iowa town start going crazy after they're infected by an unknown substance that leaks into their water supply. No, the substance is not coal ash, pesticide runoff from factory farms, or mercury pollution from power plants, as horrifying as those substances are. It's something far more "mysterious," I'm willing to bet.

So how do you support Greenpeace and get in the movie at the same time? Just go to this eBay auction and place a bid. The winner of the auction gets a featured walk-on role in the movie as an infected person, PLUS the comfort of knowing that the proceeds from the auction will benefit Greenpeace. We will in turn use the money to fund our work aimed at preventing people from getting infected by dangerous toxic substances, mysterious or otherwise.

The climate talks in Bonn, Germany have come to an end, and by all reports we sure could have used some of that leadership on global warming policy that Obama keeps promising us. According to my Greenpeace colleagues who were there, the presence of the Obama Administration and the reengagement of the United States was generally a good thing that created a much more positive atmosphere, but virtually no progress was made on key issues and critical decisions that need to be made.

Greenpeace USA deputy campaigns director Carroll Muffett had this to say:

The diplomats and negotiators in Bonn have been treading water for two weeks, while back in the real world ice caps have continued to melt at alarming rates and flash floods have devastated parts of Australia. As it stands, this exact same meeting will be repeated in June. Heads of State must now inject leadership and direction into the talks in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

Read our full response: "As Bonn Negotiations Conclude, U.S. Climate Leadership Still Missing".

You might recall Tim DeChristopher as the environmental activist and University of Utah economics student who staged an inspired one-man act of civil disobedience last December. When the Bush Admin was auctioning off some of Utah’s most pristine wildlands to oil and gas companies on December 19th, 2008, DeChristopher threw a giant monkeywrench in the process by bidding on several of the parcels even though he had no intention of actually buying them. In the end, DeChristopher won 22,500 acres of land near two national parks, Arches and Canyonlands, and drove the prices for several other parcels up by thousands of dollars. (This HuffPo piece has more.)

DeChristopher did this with full knowledge of the potential consequences. It was a truly courageous act. He put himself on the line and was willing to take whatever punishment came down, all for the greater cause of protecting our planet and attempting to stop pillagers like oil and gas companies, as well as their allies in the Bush Admin, from prolonging our dependence on dirty fossil fuels.

Late last week we got news that DeChristopher has been indicted by a federal grandy jury on two felony counts of “auction-rigging,” as well as being slapped with hefty fines by the U.S. Attorney’s office and by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which ran the auction. Bidder 70 is now facing up to 10 years in prison and over $800,000 in fines for standing up for the Earth at the BLM auction.

But the damage that would be done to Utah’s wildlands and wildlife by oil and gas exploration, compounded by the damage that would be done to the Earth by prolonging our addiction to dirty fossil fuels, far outweighs the damage DeChristopher is alleged to have done by interfering with this reckless auction. For that reason and that reason alone, these charges and fines should be dismissed, if there is any justice in the world.

And then of course there’s the fact that Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, ordered a review of 77 of the parcels auctioned off in December, including all of the parcels “won” by DeChristopher, making those parcels ineligible for lease. If even the Obama Administration thinks these auctions were not proper, what harm can DeChristopher be said to have done whatsoever? He simply used the only means available to him to stand up for what’s right.

You can read more and follow new developments in this story on DeChristopher’s website. And check out this interview he did with Democracy Now!

President Obama is in Prague today for the EU-US Summit. As Obama was addressing a crowd of thousands, six Greenpeace activists scaled the Nuselsky Bridge and hung a banner that read, "Bail out the climate."


© Greenpeace/Ibra Ibrahimovie

Another banner was deployed at Prague's Nustle Bridge, within view of the venue hosting Obama's speech. This banner was addressed to Obama and read, "Lead the change on climate."

Meanwhile, half a world away, the Wilkins Ice Shelf was breaking off from Antarctica. The two actions in Prague today aimed to alert world leaders to the fact that patience is wearing thin for their endless delay on global warming while we're seeing the drastic effects of rising global temperatures every day.

Obama accepted our challenge to lead in his speech. Read more here.

You can also check out a great behind-the-scenes video of the banner hang here (Czech language site, but of course video is universal).
 

According to reports, the ice bridge connecting the Wilkins Ice Shelf to Antarctica has shattered.

This is a glaring example of global warming having drastic impacts on our planet. The Wilkins Ice Shelf only began to break up, or “retreat,” in the late 1990s. Scientists say it has been “very stable” since the 1930s, but believe it to have been stable for far longer than that. Per the British Antarctic Survey: “It is probable that the current reduction in ice-shelves in the region has no precedent in the last 10,000 years, and certain that this minimum has not been reached at any time in the last millennium.”

The collapse of the ice bridge has been expected for some weeks. Cracks in the ice bridge were first spotted by researchers last week using satellite imagery. The loss of the ice bridge puts the entire Wilkins Ice Shelf at greater risk of total collapse.

This dramatic event underscores the real and pressing need for global action to combat global warming. Greenpeace USA deputy campaign director Carroll Muffett puts it this way: “The breakup of this ice shelf is in vivid contrast to the glacial pace of the international climate negotiations, where governments are trying to avoid acting responsibly - and bickering about who’s at fault." You can read the rest of the Greenpeace’s reaction here.

More info on the breakup and its import via the BBC:

An ice bridge linking a shelf of ice the size of Jamaica to two islands in Antarctica has snapped.

Scientists say the collapse could mean the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of breaking away, and provides further evidence for rapid change in the region.

Sited on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Wilkins shelf has been retreating since the 1990s.

Researchers regarded the ice bridge as an important barrier, holding the remnant shelf structure in place.

Thanks to all of our letters and phone calls, the U.S. House and Senate passed President Obama's budget last night - with language that puts cap and trade legislation in the agenda for this year!

This vote is an important step forward because members of Congress who have never before supported action on global warming are now on record supporting an agenda for the year, including a cap on global warming pollution.

The work of Greenpeace and all our volunteers and activists was crucial in passing the budget and defeating efforts to strip global warming from the bill. Thanks to all of you for your efforts!

Via ThinkProgress, we learn the shocking news that Republican House minority leader John Boehner issued a press release that grossly misrepresented the cost-per-family of Cap-and-Trade proposals as estimated in an analysis done by MIT in 2007. Well, an MIT professor who was one of the authors of the study, John Reilly, wrote a letter to Boehner explaining his mistake:

It has come to my attention that an analysis we conducted examining proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Report No., 146, Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-Trade Proposals, has been misrepresented in recent press releases distributed by the National Republican Congressional Committee. The press release claims our report estimates an average cost per family of a carbon cap and trade program that would meet targets now being discussed in Congress to be over $3,000, but that is nearly 10 times the correct estimate which is approximately $340. […] Our Report 160 shows that the costs on lower and middle income households can be completely offset by returning allowance revenue to these households.

Unsurprisingly, that didn't stop the National Republican Congressional Committee from sending that same figure out in several more press releases. This is what we're up against, folks. The dirty energy industries and their allies in Congress will stop at nothing to stop the coming clean energy revolution from happening.

You can read the full letter from Prof. Reilly, who affirms that "green economy legislation" is urgently needed, and read more about this story at ThinkProgress.

This blog post by George Monbiot on the Guardian website would be pretty funny if it weren't, you know, so dreadfully serious an issue...

Here is the text of the G20 communique, in compressed form.

"We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don't possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth's living systems. Now we're going to spend another $1.1 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times.

Oh - and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don't have any definite plans as yet, but we'll think of something in due course."

The whole post is well worth the read, but the situation is not pretty. You might laugh. You might cry. In a nutshell, Monbiot says, "The G20's strategy for solving the financial and economic crisis, in other words, is detailed, innovative, fully costed and of vast scale and ambition. Its plans for solving the environmental crisis are brief, vague and uncosted."

Yikes.

On March 31st Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity sent a letter to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notifying the agency that we will sue in 60 days if they fail to list the ribbon seal under the US Endangered Species Act.

The ribbon seal is one of four ice-dependent seal species in Alaska whose sea ice habitat is literally melting out from underneath them because of global warming. Greenpeace and CBD were successful in forcing the Bush administration to list the polar bear under the ESA due to global warming. This notice letter begins the same process for the ribbon seal. Read more here.

If the NOAA ignores the letter, then we will sue in 60 days. Let's hope the Obama administration does things differently than Bush on global warming/ESA issues.

There’s obviously more to come on this story. Stay tuned…

Right now the people of Vermont have the unique opportunity to close down Entergy’s aging nuclear reactor, Vermont Yankee, and choose safe, clean renewable energy for their community instead. The Vermont legislature has given itself the authority to reject the relicensing of the reactor in 2012.

So last Saturday, the 30th anniversary of the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, we launched our Nuclear-Free Vermont Tour. The Rolling Sunlight, our solar-equipped, biodiesel-fueled truck, will be visiting farmer’s markets, universities, film screenings, and galleries across the state. The crew will be talking to Vermonters about the energy sources they want to use in their home state, as well as demonstrating the practical uses of solar energy by powering the sound systems at events, making treats like hot chocolate for the crowds, and other fun ways to utilize the energy generated by the Rolling Sunlight's 256 square feet of solar panels.

Read more about the Nuclear-Free Vermont Tour, and view a slideshow of images from the kickoff of the tour here. The tour has been covered in the local press, here and here. You can also read our nuclear expert's blog on Huffington Post, "Remembering the Three Mile Island meltdown."

Hey, remember when we announced that Ben & Jerry's was bringing climate-friendly refrigeration technology to the U.S.? Well, thanks to the tireless efforts of our Greenpeace Solutions crew, Pepsi is now bringing green soda machines stateside.

These refrigerators and vending machines utilize what we call the GreenFreeze technology — refrigeration and cooling technology that eliminates the use of highly potent greenhouse gases like HCFCs and HFCs. Greenpeace developed the technology in 1992 and then open-sourced it. We have made no money off of the sale of the technology, even though, since March 15, 1993, when the first GreenFreeze refrigerator rolled off the assembly line, over 300 million units have been sold in Europe, Asia and South America by leading brands including Whirlpool, Bosch, Panasonic, LG, Miele, Electrolux, and Siemens.

The Greenpeace Solutions team has been working with various businesses and industries to bring this technology to the U.S. because the group of chemicals commonly used as refrigerants — the aforementioned HCFCs and HFCs, which are more commonly called F-gases because they all contain Fluorine — were responsible for some 17% of the greenhouse gases collected in our atmosphere as of 2005.

So we now have green ice cream coolers and green soda vending machines here in the States... You thinking what I'm thinking? Green root beer floats!

Saturday, March 28th, is the 30th anniversary of the reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The nuclear industry is currently trying to portray itself as making a comeback, and working hard to paint nuclear energy as an environmentally friendly solution to global warming. So it's that much more important to remember what really happened that day:

Radiation leaked from the damaged reactor for days as government regulators scrambled to get radiation monitoring equipment into surrounding communities. The Governor of Pennsylvania eventually ordered an evacuation of pregnant women and children. The accident at Three Mile Island sent the nuclear industry into a tailspin. Already staggering under the weight of over $100 billion dollars in cost overruns, the meltdown showed Americans that not only was nuclear power expensive — it was also dangerous. The nuclear industry turned a multi-million dollar asset into a multi-billion dollar liability overnight, and demonstrated that both the government and industry were thoroughly unprepared for the accident and its aftermath.

But now that memories of the meltdown and the ensuing panic have faded, the nuclear industry and those in their employ are claiming that Three Mile Island was really a success story and that the radiation was contained.

Of course, this episode in American history was anything but a success story for the nuclear industry, no matter how hard they try to rewrite history. Read our nuclear expert's takedown of the nuclear industry's PR spin in his HuffPo blog post.

Check out this headline from Scientific American. Sure sounds familiar...

Nice to have an administration that gets it:

Renewable Energy Could Solve Economic, Environmental and Social Problems
New EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, among others, touted renewable fuels as one solution to a variety of problems
By Douglas Fischer

ASPEN – Shifting the United States to clean-burning renewable fuels has the potential to cut through a thicket of thorny social ills and solve long-standing problems across the entire spectrum of American life, from manufacturing to national security to clean water, the country's top environmental cop said on Wednesday.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson spoke before 150 scientists, lawyers, industry executives, activists and others gathered at this alpine town for a three-day conference on the country's energy future.

She said weaning the country from fossil fuels remains a top priority of the Obama administration because it offers such a broad suite of solutions across all aspects of American life: rewarding innovation, discouraging pollution, investing in jobs and encouraging energy independence.

"It's extraordinary to be at a time where one answer answers so many extraordinary big issues," she said.

What a difference an election makes, eh?

All of our work to stop global warming comes down to what happens in the next week.

President Obama has sent his budget to Congress, and it proposes a cap and trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions, while also allocating money to move America away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past and toward the clean, renewable energy sources of the future (what we like to call an Energy [R]evolution 'round these parts).

Time is of the essence here. Further delay could be disastrous, leading to catastrophic droughts, wildfires, floods, and sea-level rise. Obama’s budget is the best shot we have of passing strong global warming legislation in 2009. We must take action to make sure it passes.

Because of course the powerful fossil fuel industries will be fighting this tooth and nail. They know what the coming energy revolution will mean for their core businesses, and they aren’t going down without a fight. They want to see cap and trade and funds for building a clean energy economy stripped out of the budget. To ensure a green and peaceful future, we can not let them win this fight.

Congress is likely to vote on this in the next week. That’s why it’s so important that we take action right now and tell Congress to keep limits to global warming pollution and funding for a clean energy economy in the budget.

Greenpeace China launched a 10-month global warming campaign with a couple of really cool projections today (pics below, or view the slideshow). The campaign is meant to highlight the urgency of the global climate crisis and the impacts global warming will have on the world. In the next ten months GP China will hold a series of events to call attention to the massive impacts from global warming in China. You can expect many more Greenpeace events in other countries, as well, including right here in the U.S.A., as we lead up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December.


Beijing, China, March 23, 2009. Greenpeace China projected a message onto Yong Ding Gate that read in English:“Time is Running Out to Stop Global Warming” and also projected Chinese versions. Greenpeace China is calling on the Chinese government for strong climate rescue actions. Greenpeace China also asked China President Hu Jintao to personally attend the Copenhagen Climate Summit and work with world’s leaders to come up with a binding treaty to stop global warming. © Su Li/ Greenpeace

Hong Kong, China, March 23, 2009. Greenpeace activists project a message on to the side of Government House in Hong Kong's financial district, urging the Hong Kong Chief Executive, Donald Tsang, to attend a key United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen this December, instead of just sending along a few junior officials, as has done in the past for previous international climate change conferences. Greenpeace is also calling for the Hong Kong Government to bring into legislation a comprehensive climate change policy with specific carbon dioxide emissions reduction targets for the city, in line with the requirements set under the Kyoto Protocol agreement. © Alex Hofford/ Greenpeace

The US and China are both critical to an agreement in Copenhagen, and criticial to addressing global warming on a global basis. China has, for the past several years, been the latest in a series of excuses used to delay action on global warming by many American politicians, but the reality is that China is already investing in renewable energy. It's also important to remember that while China recently surpassed the US in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, China has 1.3 billion people to our 300 million. Per capita, Americans emit four times as much greenhouse gas emissions. Unless we're able to reach a deal in Copenhagen in December, those 1.3 billion people will soon be burning fossil fuels at the rate we do, and that would be catastrophic.

There's also an important economic reason to work with China to address global warming. China is building wind energy at a stunning rate and making massive investments in other renewable energy sources. If the US doesn't stay competitive with China in innovation and implementation of solutions to global warming, then, in addition to facing the specter of unchecked climate change, we run the risk of letting China get ahead economically and technologically.

As we get close to December and the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, expect us to be sending the message loud and clear: Both China and the US have to do more and have to work together to stop global warming. Greenpeace is calling on President Obama and China's President Hu Jintao to not only lead their own countries but to work together to lead the world.

As the Obama Administration continues to make great strides in reversing the trajectory of the Bush years with regard to global warming policy, we have released the new U.S. scenario of the Energy [R]evolution report. The Energy [R]evolution U.S. Scenario is a blueprint for how America can stop global warming and build a sustainable clean energy economy at the same time, while leaving behind dirty and dangerous energy sources like fossil fuels and nuclear.



Despite the ongoing financial crisis, Obama is making the global climate crisis a priority for his administration. That’s probably because, as the Energy [R]evolution states, “According to the University of Massachusetts’s Political Economy Research Institute, investments in wind and solar power create 2.8 times as many jobs as the same investment in coal; mass transit and conservation would create 3.8 times as many jobs as coal.” The Energy [R]evolution U.S. Scenario would create 14.5 million more new jobs by 2050 than would be created if we continued to rely on fossil fuels. So kickstarting an energy revolution would also help rebuild our economy.

Obama gets it. A couple of recent news items demonstrated yet again that the Obama team is serious about tackling global warming. The first was the leaked news that:

The Obama administration is fast-tracking its response to the Supreme Court's 2007 climate decision with plans to issue a mid-April finding that global warming threatens both public health and welfare, according to an internal U.S. EPA document (pdf) obtained by Greenwire.

This is important because an “endangerment finding,” as this is called, requires the EPA to establish regulations for limiting the danger of whatever it is they’ve determined poses a threat. In this case, that would mean the EPA would regulate greenhouse gas emissions. While EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says she will not establish regulations right away, but instead “hold back on new emission rules to sync with a final endangerment finding and other fast-moving environmental policies,” this is still a very welcome development.

The other bit of good news was that:

The Obama administration is aggressively reworking U.S. trade policy to more strongly emphasize domestic and social issues, from the displacement of American workers to climate change. …

During the campaign, Obama said he generally supports free-trade policies but also signaled a tougher approach that is only now beginning to be outlined. Both in [President Obama's nominee as U.S. trade representative, Ron Kirk's] testimony yesterday and in a policy statement issued by new Obama appointees at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the administration vowed to make tougher labor and environmental standards prerequisites for trade deals. …

The trade representative's office also stated that trade policy must now contain a new element of "social accountability," including on issues such as climate change. "We should aim to make trade a part of the tool kit of solutions for addressing international environmental challenges," the statement said.

This is also really significant because it shows that Obama is not only going to tackle global warming here at home, but that he also recognizes the need for his administration to lead the way globally. (And the fact that his administration will strive for broader “social accountability” in global trade agreements – not just in regard to environmental issues but also the labor practices of those countries America does business with – is a pretty nice goal, too. We certainly haven’t heard anything like that for the better part of the last decade.)

As much as we welcome and applaud these moves by the Obama Administration, now is no time to get complacent. Obama is calling for us to return to 1990 emissions levels by 2020, whereas climate scientists have clearly indicated that that is too slow a pace to mitigate the worst types of havoc global warming will wreak on our planet. We need stronger mid-term targets of 25 to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.

But without overwhelming support from Americans like you and me, it will be extremely difficult – even for Obama – to strengthen these targets. You can take action now to tell Congress we need an energy revolution in America. And don’t forget to check out the Energy [R]evolution report to find out how we can build a sustainable clean energy economy here at home.

We’re at a make or break point here, folks. Let’s stay active.

Our colleagues in Europoe carried out a terrific action today. To protest the European Union's failure to commit funds for climate mitigation in developing countries, 340 Greenpeace activists from across Europe converged on a meeting of EU Finance Ministers in Brussels this morning. They blockaded entrances, padlocked themselves to gates, and refused to leave until the ministers put real money on the table. This is a really great follow-on to the Capitol Climate Action last week, and really helps add to the sense of global urgency around the climate crisis.

Not surprisingly, the action produced some very powerful images:


Greenpeace blocks ‘easy way out’ for EU finance ministers. Hundreds of Greenpeace activists from across Europe blocked the exits of the Brussels building where EU finance ministers are discussing funding for developing nations to tackle climate change. Activists displayed banners in several languages asking EU politicians to “Sav€ the Climate” and “Bail out the Planet”. The Greenpeace activists ‘sealed’ the building and called on ministers not to come out without money on the table to tackle climate change, rather than to continue dishing out billions of taxpayers’ money for failed banks and carmakers. © Greenpeace / Philippe Reynaers


Police move in to make arrests. © Greenpeace / Philippe Reynaers

This is what democracy looks like:

Over 2,500 clean energy activists came out today for the Capitol Climate Action and participated in the largest act of civil disobedience on global warming in American history. The crowd heard from James Hansen, Vandana Shiva, Wendell Berry, Gus Speth, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and many more committed environmental leaders. All five entrances to the Capitol Power Plant were shut down for over 4 hours. You can read all about it here, as well as view the unedited footage from our live streaming video coverage.

If you couldn't make it to DC today, you can still make sure Congress hears from you: Call your Rep. now! And you can check out some pics:

2500+ folks have turned out to protest the stranglehold dirty fossil fuels have on our Congress. You can watch it on live streaming video, as well as follow our live blog and real-time Twitter updates, here!

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!

We're well into cold and flu season by now, meaning lots of tissues are no doubt getting used and thrown away every day. We've been working for years to let folks know that they should not use Kimberly-Clark products—like Kleenex, Scott, Cottonelle, and Viva, among other brands—because the company is literally wiping away ancient forests to make their disposable products.

We've asked you to avoid K-C's brands, and now we'd like to tell you which products you can use with a guilt-free conscience. Brands like Green Forest, Seventh Generation, and 365 are made from recycled material, aren't wiping away ancient forests, and don't use toxic chlorine compounds. Find more brands that are recommended, which can do better, and which should be avoided at all costs in our Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide. Flip through it online or print it out and keep it in your wallet, purse, or fanny pack. It'll come in handy when you're at the store.

And if you want to help us get the word out, post this neat little widget anywhere you can—your Facebook or MySpace profile, your blog or website. Click the "Share" button in the lower right-hand corner to grab the embed code or to add it to your preferred social network with the click of a button. So easy!

President Obama’s selection of Steven Chu to be his Secretary of Energy was greeted with much enthusiasm by many environmentalists, including us. This interview pretty plainly spells out why:

In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama's cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration's plans to combat it.

Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation's leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.

Sounds dire indeed, but we have time to fix it. Precious little time, as it turns out, which is really why the Obama team is so welcome to anyone interested in the health and well-being of our planet.

As Mr. Chu pointed out in this interview, global warming is a threat to pretty much everything we know and love, yet many people choose to remain blissfully unaware of this threat. But, at long last, we have a White House that gets it. Our task now is to build the movement that will support President Obama’s attempts to stop global warming. The dirty fossil fuel industry has deep pockets, you can bet they’ll be fighing each and every measure designed to stop global warming so they can protect the cash flow they stuff those deep pockets with. Only overwhelming and undeniable popular demand for solutions will give the Obama Administration and our allies in Congress the mandate they need to override the special interests and do what’s right for the world.

To whit: if you’re anywhere near DC, or you can get there by March 2nd, you should take part in the Capitol Climate Action (if you like, RSVP here).

If you can’t make it to DC, there’s still plenty you can do to take action and show Congress that we the people support global warming solutions. The important thing is just that we all get involved and do whatever we can. Tell your friends, tell your family. Let’s make sure that the energy revolution starts right here and right now.

Indian company TATA is building a new port at Dhamra, which is dangerously close to a sea turtle nesting site at Gahirmatha, on the Orissa coast. Greenpeace India has a petition set up so you can let TATA know how you feel about their decision to imperil this guy:



Here's more about the situation from Greenpeace India:

Consider this… Olive Ridley turtles rely on an inexplicable, in-built navigation system that guides them, when it’s time for them to reproduce, back to the precise coast on which they were born.

Now consider something else… The proposed Tata port at Dhamra threatens a nesting site that is amongst the last honeymoon suites for the remaining Olive Ridleys, a highly-endangered species that swims all the way here from places as far away as Australia and the Philippines.

When you consider these two facts together, it seems only logical that Tata would reconsider its decision to build the port at Dhamra, and build it in an area that’s less ecologically sensitive. It seems especially logical when it’s Tata we’re talking about.

After all, Tata has grown from a national giant into an international player, while constantly highlighting it’s stated commitment to the principles of social upliftment, environmental justice and sustainable development. The Tata brand is ubiquitous, present in hundreds of products used by millions of Indians every day.

Help Greenpeace India tell TATA to live up to its stated principles and save the turtles!

Dr. James Hansen is an internationally-recognized climate scientist, one of the world's preeminent experts on global warming. In the video below, Dr. Hansen calls for Americans to take part in the Capitol Climate Action on March 2nd at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington DC. This plant is providing dirty energy to Congress, which is why it's the target of what's expected to be the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming in US history.

Dr. Hansen warns that unless we stop burning coal, the country's largest source of global warming pollution, young people will inherit a dramatically different world than the one we know and love today. For more info on the action, visit www.CapitolClimateAction.org. For more info on dirty coal, go here.

Susan Sarandon lent her voice to this PSA asking everyone to join us at the Capitol Climate Action in Washington, DC on March 2nd, 2009. Thousands of people will come together that day in a multi-generational act of civil disobedience at the Capitol Power Plant — a plant that powers Congress with dirty energy and symbolizes a past that cannot be our future.

Along with various other entities, we filed a federal lawsuit in 2002 to force two U.S. agencies to address the global warming implications of their financing activities abroad. We’re glad to report that the suit was settled on February 6th — more than six years after the suit was originally filed — and that the resolution of the suit establishes important legal precedents related to global warming.

We joined with Friends of the Earth and the city of Boulder, Colorado to file the suit in August 2002, and were later joined by the California cities of Arcata, Santa Monica and Oakland. Our complaint alleged that the Export-Import Bank of the United States (ExIm)and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) illegally provided more than $32 billion in financing and insurance to fossil fuel projects over 10 years without assessing whether the projects contributed to global warming or impacted the U.S. environment, as they were required to do under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The fossil fuel projects financed by the two agencies from 1990 to 2003 accounted for nearly eight percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly one third of total U.S. emissions.

In August 2005, a federal judge found that we — “the Plaintiffs” as they say in legalese — suffered economic and other damages from climate change and therefore had standing to sue under NEPA, opening up the courthouse doors for the first time to those injured by climate change. Testimony from the case, which successfully asserted that climate change is real and caused by human activities, later informed the Mass. v EPA decision, in which the Supreme Court held that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Under the settlement agreed to on Feb. 6th, the Export-Import Bank will begin taking carbon dioxide emissions into account in evaluating fossil fuel projects and create an organization-wide carbon policy. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation will establish a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with projects it finances by 20 percent over the next ten years. Additionally, both agencies will commit to increasing financing for renewable energy.

The settlement represents an important victory in the continuing campaign to hold both agencies accountable for their contributions to climate change, and sets a valuable precedent for demanding accountability of major financial institutions on the issue of global warming in the future.

If you're into this sort of thing, you can read several legal documents related to the suit here. Reactions from all of our fellow plaintiffs can be found in this press release.

Most everyone who visits this site or reads this blog with any regularity has probably already heard about the Capitol Climate Action – a massive direct action targeting the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. This plant no longer generates electricity, but it does supply other forms of energy to the Capitol building, such as the heat that makes the Capitol building inhabitable during the winter. And it uses coal, the dirtiest fuel available, for producing that energy. It’s perfectly symbolic of the inordinate amount of influence the coal industry has on our decisionmakers.

If you want to help us send our message – “Coal out of Congress!” – but you can’t make it to D.C. on March 2nd, you can still get involved by hosting or attending a house party on February 12th. You'll be able to join a conference call with Mike Clark, interim executive director of Greenpeace USA, and Matt Leonard, Capitol Climate Action coordinator, to get the latest details on the action itself as well as find out how you can get more people from your community involved.

And you can even make sure your voice is represented in our nation’s capitol on March 2nd by creating a pinwheel with your name and a personal message on it. Activists in D.C. will use these pinwheels to set up a temporary “wind farm” on Capitol Hill on the day of the action. You’ll be helping show Congress what America’s clean energy future looks like! So get on it: Sign up to host or attend a house party on Feb. 12th.

According to the American Wind Energy Association, the wind energy industry installed “8,358 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity (enough to serve over 2 million homes)” in 2008. To achieve this growth, the wind industry now employs 85,000 people. This is not only a 70% increase over the number of wind jobs that existed in 2007, but it also means, as this CNN article points out, that the wind industry now employs more people in the United States than coal mining. I’m not sure how big a milestone this latter point actually is — it will be a much bigger deal when the wind industry employs more people than the entire coal industry, not just coal miners — but it’s a hopeful sign nonetheless. We’re getting there.

The global economic crisis has hit renewable energy developers and financiers as hard as any other industry, however. Towards the end of 2008 development of renewable energy really took a nosedive because the money simply wasn’t there any more. Now more than ever, we need an extension of the renewable energy tax credits, which were allowed to expire last year.

Thankfully, the Obama administration and Congressional leaders are “looking at including as much as $25 billion of energy tax credits in the economic stimulus package in an effort to bolster renewable energy projects, fuel-efficient cars and biodiesel production,” according to the Washington Post. The article goes on to say that:

The main elements under consideration include a two-year, $8.6 billion extension of the production tax credit for renewable energy, an item that favors wind power projects. Obama advisers are considering a proposal from the wind and solar industry that would make those credits refundable or count them against past taxes because many financial firms that provided capital for those projects no longer have taxable income and can't use the credits.

If these provisions make it into the stimulus plan, and the plan then gets passed with these provisions more or less in tact, it would go a long way towards getting the energy revolution off the ground. There’s lots more to do, but this would be a good start.

If you want to know more about the environmental impact of the economic stimulus package, you’re in luck! We just published a report all about it (executive summary here).

Since the economy first started going sour, we’ve repeatedly made the point that we could alleviate our economic woes by implementing effective policies to kickstart an energy revolution and combat global warming. We’ve highlighted reports showing that renewable energy creates more jobs than fossil fuel energy. We’ve pointed to anecdotal evidence showing that renewable energy reinvigorates dying communities and gives the people who live in them a renewed sense of purpose and patriotism. We even put out a blueprint for how to get all this done. If done right, the economic stimulus could be the energy revolution's shot heard 'round the world.

This Houston Chronicle article provides a great snapshot of the state of our MusicWood campaign (and it’s in my hometown paper, no less! Yeah H-town!):

Musicians are always singing about social change. Now their guitars are getting into the act.

Martin Guitar Co. has just unveiled one of the greenest guitars to date: the D Mahogany 09, an acoustic guitar made entirely from wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

Finding certified mahogany for the neck and certified spruce for the top and internal braces was the big challenge. Other sustainable woods were available, but they would have changed the tone of the guitar.

Very risky, in guitar circles.

“Nontraditional woods have what I suppose is a nontraditional sound,” said Dick Boak, spokesman for the 166-year-old Pennsylvania company. “And as green as the music community is, they’re very conservative when it comes to their instruments.”

Or, as Houston musician Lise Liddell put it: “Some people think their animals are people. We think our instruments are.”

Good guitars are typically made from old-growth spruce, rosewood, ebony and mahogany. It takes time for a new guitar to find its sound.

[…]

The best-case scenario is a guitar made from old-growth wood that’s had decades to mellow with age. Like wine.

“The great thing about a Martin guitar from, say, 1941, is that it’s going to sound better today than when it was made,” Spencer said. “I guess that’s the beauty of tonewoods. They just sound sweeter as they get older.”

But it’s hard to find tonewoods in sustainable species.

So a few years ago, Greenpeace got together with the heads of Martin, Gibson, Taylor and Fender — four companies synonymous with great guitars — to talk about wood. In particular, the environmental group wanted to discuss Sitka spruce, which is often used to make the soundboard, or top piece of an acoustic guitar. Once these trees reach a certain size — which can take 90 to 250 years — their wood lends great tone and projection to guitars, violins, pianos and other instruments.

But a lot of Sitka spruce grows in Alaskan forests that are rapidly being cleared for construction and other purposes.

Scott Paul, Greenpeace’s forest-campaign director, said the organization asked the guitar-makers to consider the environment.

“We’re aware that you are all buying your spruce from one company in southeast Alaska,” he said, recalling the meeting. “This company is logging at a rate that if things don’t change, they’re going to run out of wood in our lifetime.”

Relatively speaking, these guitar companies use a very small portion of the Sitka spruce logged by Sealaska, the Alaskan company in question. But Greenpeace figured that high-profile guitar guys could have a big impact on the public and on the logging companies. Greenpeace was right, and the Music Wood campaign was born.

“We brought the top guitar executives to southeast Alaska on a tour of the region,” Paul said. “We put these guys in the same room with guys from the logging company. We figured something would happen. The logging company is looking for new ways to stay profitable, and the guitar guys want old-growth wood forever.”

The logging execs really took to the guitar CEOs.

"It seems like everyone in America was in a band in high school,” Paul said. “All these guys are high-end craftsman. People just love them.”

The goal of the Music Wood campaign is to help the music industry use wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Wood certified by the global nonprofit comes from forests that have been audited for good management practices.

Today, Sealaska has taken the first steps toward certification. Gibson is FSC-certified and produces FSC guitars, though they’re mostly electric and don’t use Sitka spruce.

Climate scientists have long reported that Antarctica is one of the few places on the planet where climate change is linked with cooler temperatures. Many global warming skeptics pointed to cooling temperatures in Antarctica to bolster their arguments that global warming is not happening. It’s now looking like these skeptics will no longer have Antarctica in their arsenal of arguments against global warming:

Antarctica study challenges warming skeptics

Challenging warming skeptics who note that parts of Antarctica have gotten colder, researchers on Wednesday reported that overall the continent has gotten warmer since the 1950s, and that even those colder spots would be warmer were it not for the ozone hole.

"Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming," said study co-author Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. "Now we can say: No, it's not true ... It is not bucking the trend."

And as if to underline the fact that Antarctica is warming, news has come out that the Wilkins ice shelf is on the verge of completely collapsing:

Antarctic ice shelf at risk

The vast Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica is on the brink of collapse, scientists have warned.

It is held in place by a 25-mile long strip of ice that has shrunk to about 500m wide at its narrowest point and could collapse at any time.

In total, about 15,500 sq miles of ice shelves have been lost, changing the maps of Antarctica in one of the most dramatic signs of climate change.

Glaciologist David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said it is miraculous the shelf is still there.

The Wilkins once covered 6,178 sq miles but lost a third of its area and is now the size of Jamaica, but once the ice bridge collapses, sea currents are likely to sweep away much of what is left.

[…]

The change is widely blamed on heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.

In total, about 15,500 sq miles of ice shelves have been lost, changing the maps of Antarctica in one of the most dramatic signs of climate change.

Ocean sediments indicate that some shelves had been in place for at least 10,000 years.

The Wilkins ice shelf is part of the Antarctic Peninsula in Western Antarctica, the part of the continent that has long been known to be warming. But it’s still a pretty drastic reminder of the ramifications of unchecked global warming, and how urgent it is that the US pass strong legislation to control global warming pollution. Antarctica may be a long way from us here in the United States, but the impacts of Antarctic melting affect us all.

For the second time in less than three weeks, a coal-burning power plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has leaked toxic coal ash into a nearby watercourse. This time, it was at the Widows Creek Fossil Plant in northeastern Alabama. TVA claims to have contained the leak, and has confirmed that some gypsum spilled into Widows Creek, but according to this report by the Environmental Integrity Project, this new spill contained "even more toxic metals" than the spill at a TVA plant in Tennessee last month. The Widows Creek plant is located on the Guntersville Reservoir, which lies along the Teneessee River, the same river polluted by the massive spill at TVA’s Kingston power plant in Harriman, TN last month.

The ruins of a home destroyed by a flood of coal ash slurry from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant is surrounded by debris Dec. 29, 2008 in Harriman, Tenn. An earthen dam holding a containment pond broke Dec. 22, 2008, unleashing a billion gallon flood of toxic sludge into the Emory River and surrounding homes. © Greenpeace / Wade Payne

Clearly there has been a drastic failure of safety protocols at TVA, and there needs to be an investigation to establish exactly what has gone wrong. Some responsible adults must then implement safety measures to protect the public, since TVA seems incapable of doing so.

However much toxic material has been dumped into Widows Creek, this second spill points out once again the even larger problem: coal is and can never be a clean source of energy. We tend to focus much more on the degradation of ecosystems caused by the mining of coal, especially the horribly destructive mining practice known as "mountain top removal", as well as the huge amounts of CO2 emissions from the burning of coal that contribute to global warming. Coal ash has emerged in the past few weeks, however, as yet another drastic example of why there is no such thing as “clean coal.”

Congress passed legislation in 1977 that, for the first time, forced coal plants to install “scrubbers” on their smoke stacks to remove some of the more dangerous elements from the smoke they were pouring into the atmosphere – things like mercury that had been linked to health problems in people living near the coal plants. But when these elements are scrubbed from the smoke, they must go somewhere, and that somewhere ends up being the ash left over from the burning of the coal. This ash is then “stored” in unlined ponds or pits near the plants. About a decade ago the EPA proposed regulating these toxic ash lagoons, but the coal industry lobby killed the idea.

This lack of oversight has had dire consequences for the environment, as we’ve seen all too clearly the past few weeks. There is reason to hope these spills will lead to better oversight, however. From a post by our own Kate Rooth over on Coal-is-Dirty.com:

[Today’s spill] comes after yesterday’s Senate Environment and Public Works committee hearing at which TVA President and CEO Tom Kilgore admitted that the plant had earlier leak problems. The committee promised close scrutiny of the disaster and the potential for future federal environmental regulations as a result.

In 2000 the EPA decided against designating ash as hazardous. However last year they EPA identified 67 coal ash storage sites in 23 states that had caused or were suspected of causing contamination. Sen. Barbara Boxer said she plans to press Lisa Jackson, nominee to head EPA, on this issue during the confirmation hearing next week. For statements from the hearing visit the committee website.

It couldn’t be any clearer, at this point, that as long as we’re burning coal to meet our energy needs, we need to regulate every single phase of the process to force the industry to clean up its act as much as possible – from the mining to the burning to the leftover waste products, every step of the process is dirty as can be and needs to be closely monitored by responsible public servants.

Of course, the real solution is to stop burning coal and instead produce our energy using clean renewable sources like wind and solar. There is and never can be such a thing as “clean coal” when every step of the process of using coal as an energy source is hazardous and dirty. So-called “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (CCS) technology, which has no more Earthly existence than so-called “clean coal” and yet is the basis of the green claims being made on a daily basis by the coal industry, is no kind of solution. CCS is really an absurd idea, since it essentially involves pumping an odorless, invisible gas underground and hoping it stays there permanently -- especially when you consider that we’d be entrusting this process to an industry that can’t even ensure their giant pits of toxic sludge don’t spill into nearby rivers. Read more about CCS in our report, False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won't save the climate.

This second spill underscores the need for Renewables Now! Check out this slideshow of pictures from the coal ash spill at TVA’s Kingston plant, and help spread the word that coal is dirty by posting the pics anywhere you can. You can also take action right now and tell the EPA to help stop global warming by regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Feel free to put in your own language about ensuring there are no more ash spills at TVA facilities or any other coal plant.