Greenpeace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

3 Ways to expose the Dirty Lie

Facebook

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

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

Twitter

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

Delicious

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

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

Here’s how to help:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today the big news is that BP thinks it has finally managed to cap the well that has spewed as much as 184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Now, of course, we’re all waiting anxiously to see if the cap BP placed over the well will be able to contain the oil, or if it will spring a new leak and begin gushing even more oil into the Gulf.

It’s great that BP might at last have stopped the bleeding. But compare this to another less-noted bit of news: It was announced today that China has officially overtaken the USA as the world’s leading investor in renewable energy.

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

Nothing could paint a starker picture of the state of energy in America. Fossil fuels companies and their lobbyists have a stranglehold on our energy policy, and we’ve failed miserably to move off of their dirty product even as reckless companies like BP and Massey Energy have destroyed lives and livelihoods across the nation in their pursuit of profits. We’re reduced to hoping a thoroughly negligent oil company has finally managed to contain a disastrous leak — which nonetheless has already done untold damage that will affect the Gulf region for decades — as our global competitors quietly pass us by in ushering in the coming clean energy revolution.

We’re falling behind. Renewables are the way of the future, no matter how many fossil fuels lobbyists there are trying to convince our elected officials otherwise. China knows this, and is aggressively pursuing renewable energy.

When will we wise up?

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the wake of the unconscionable decision earlier this week by a federal judge in Louisiana to lift the deepwater drilling moratorium, it's good to see Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is talking about taking action. But what we really need is Congressional action to ban offshore drilling.

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

The Obama Administration should renew its efforts to enforce a ban on new drilling activities. This certainly means that Secretary Salazar should reissue the moratorium with further clarification and justification, and President Obama should appeal the court ruling to the 5th circuit as his administration has promised.

At the same time, Congress needs to enact a drilling ban into law — the moratorium should not have been allowed to lapse in the first place and Congress should take immediate action to ensure that no new drilling occurs.

In order to stop fossil fuels tragedies like the BP Deepwater Disaster once and for all, we need to leave behind the dirty energy of the past and move aggressively toward the clean energy of the future. No more fossil fuels and nuclear energy. We must replace them with clean renewable energy and efficiency technology.

Sign our petition calling on Congress to:

• Enact an immediate ban on all new drilling and phase-out all remaining drilling;
• Remove liability limits for energy-related activities in accordance with the principal that the polluter must pay;
• Improve regulation and oversight of energy-related activities to ensure maximum protection of the public health and the environment;
• And end all subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy and invest in clean renewable energy, efficiency technology, and infrastructure development.

A federal judge in Louisiana stood with the oil industry today and issued an injunction lifting the Obama Administration’s 6-month moratorium on new offshore exploration and existing drilling operations in deep water. Despite the fact that as much as 60,000 barrels of oil continue to pour into the Gulf of Mexico every day, the judge called the moratorium “arbitrary and capricious.”

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

It would appear there was nothing terribly arbitrary about District Court Judge Martin Feldman’s ruling, however. According to Mother Jones, the most recent financial disclosure forms filed by Judge Feldman show that he held several thousand dollars’ worth of Transocean stock as recently as 2008. Transocean, of course, owned the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig, which blew up on April 20th, 2010, killing 11 workers and leading to the massive environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. Feldman also owned stock in several other oil companies.

The Obama Admin’s moratorium suspended drilling at 33 existing deepwater wells and barred any new deepwater drilling permits from being granted. Given the rhetoric happily bandied about by Big Oil types claiming that their technology is far too advanced to permit a catastrophe on the order of, oh, say, the BP Deepwater Disaster from ever occurring, the moratorium was at best a middle-of-the-road solution. It’s quite clear that as oil grows scarcer, the solution is not to drill in ever-more remote and difficult-to-reach places but to aggressively transition off of the dirty stuff and on to clean, green renewable energy.

Download the report (PDF)

We recently released a report, Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook, that shows exactly how we could do that while leaving dirty, dangerous fossil fuels behind.

Judge Feldman’s ruling was issued in response to a suit filed by several oil companies claiming that they were being unfairly impacted due to the BP Deepwater Disaster. The oil industry’s gross negligence led to the current disaster and many more like it in the past, however, and now they’re trying to pretend that the US federal government has somehow created the current crisis with its moratorium. But it was the oil industry that produced generic cut and paste emergency response plans, relied on a dead technical expert to answer calls, and assured the government that walruses that have not existed in the Gulf for millions of years would not be affected by their operations. This is not a circus and these people can not be allowed to act like clowns pointing their finger at the government and pretending they are not the ones who engineered this disaster.

We have to stand up together against the inordinate influence of Big Oil. The oil industry and other dirty fossil fuels industries can’t be allowed to hijack our energy policy any longer. Help call for an energy revolution by joining a Hands Across the Sand event near you this Saturday.

Most Americans recognize the BP Deepwater Disaster as the environmental catastrophe that it is and support all efforts being undertaken to hold BP accountable for the damage the company’s negligence has caused to Gulf Coast ecosystems and the livelihoods of Gulf Coast residents. But not Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas.

Proving just how out of touch he is with the American public — and how deeply he is in the pocket of corporate polluters like BP — Rep. Barton this morning decried what he sees as a “tragedy of the first proportion” — not, incredibly, the devastation being wrought in the Gulf, but the fact that a corporation like BP should be held accountable for the malfeasance and violation of public trust that caused that devastation by paying into an escrow account to compensate Americans impacted by the oil spill.

It’s really just mindboggling that any elected representative of the people of the USA should be standing up for little ol’ BP at a time when millions of Americans’ livelihoods are being destroyed. But that is exactly what Rep. Barton did.

See for yourself Rep. Barton’s shameful — and shameless — testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning:



Even a fellow Republican lawmaker is calling on Rep. Barton to step down from his post as the ranking minority member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Many other Republicans have already attempted to distance themselves from Barton’s statement directed to BP CEO Tony Hayward that he is “ashamed” of President Obama’s efforts to hold BP accountable.

But the term “shakedown” has been getting thrown around by a lot of conservative and pro-corporate politicians lately to describe the $20 billion escrow account BP will be creating to compensate Gulf Coast residents affected by the tragedy. So it’s hard to imagine Barton is alone in feeling that the needs of BP should come before the needs of impacted Americans. Makes you wonder: What other politicians elected to represent us are actually more concerned about looking after their corporate donors even in a time of tragedy?

We the people should not stand for this. Since Barton apparently has more sympathy for a rich and powerful CEO of a foreign company than he does for his fellow Americans — whom he was elected to represent — then he absolutely should step down. And every single politician elected to represent Americans should be calling for him to do so.

If we’ve learned anything from the BP Deepwater Disaster, it’s that we can’t afford not to transition to clean renewable energy and get off of dirty fossil fuels pronto.

The American public knows that: 71% of Americans now support regulating greenhouse gas emissions according to a new poll. And some 72% oppose new offshore drilling according to another. So the fact that the Senate defeated Alaskan Sen. Lisa Murkowski's pro-coal, pro-oil, anti-regulation, anti-envronment bill by such a narrow margin is a bit of a shock.

Let me just say straight out that it's certainly good news that the Senate voted the right way. But it should have been a blowout, not 53 to 47. The Senate is, obviously, well behind the public in terms of being in touch with reality about America’s energy future.

With images like those in this video making headlines on a daily basis, it's beyond me how 47 Senators could still vote on behalf of Big Oil to preserve the status quo:


You can read our full response to the vote on Senator Murkowski’s Dirty Air Act for more. And if you still think that oil spills are just somehow a regrettable side effect of what is otherwise a completely necessary reliance on oil as an energy source, you haven't checked out our Energy [R]evolution report yet, which shows how we can leave fossil fuels behind while transitioning to a sustainable energy economy.

At the end of the day, of course, it’s not what’s on the scoreboard that matters but whether you have another loss or win in the standings. We chalked up another win for the environment yesterday, but you can bet the fossil fuel industry’s other champions are already lining up to finish the task of gutting the Clean Air Act on behalf of big polluters that Murkowski started.

The next attack against the Clean Air Act in the Senate will likely be launched by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, a coal country Democrat who has the support of other Democratic Senators that actually voted against Murkowski’s Dirty Air Act. So stay tuned, given the deep pockets of our fossil fuels opponents and their allies in Congress, it’s going to take plenty of teamwork to chalk up the next victory for the environment.

The best way to stop oil spills from happening is pretty simple, actually: Leave the oil in the ground where it belongs.

If you think that's not possible, or that it would mean shivering in the dark, or that millions of people would have to go without energy and jobs, you'd probably be forgiven for thinking that. That's the line that Big Oil and King Coal have been feeding us. But it's wrong on all counts.

Read more and download the report (PDF)

We teamed up with more than 30 scientists and engineers from universities, institutes, and the renewable energy industry to create our new report, Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook. The report lays down a blueprint for how we ensure our emissions peak by 2015, as the Nobel prize-winning IPCC says they must if we’re to avoid runaway global warming, while phasing out nuclear and fossil fuel energy. It shows how we can provide about 96% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2050, and in the process create 1.1 million jobs in the renewables sector alone by 2030.

Why a [r]evolution? Moving from the dirty fossil fuels of the past and onto the clean, green renewable energy sources of the future requires an evolution AND a revolution. (And yes, electronics geeks, that’s the symbol for [r]esistance there as well.)

We need a [r]evolution because business as usual is not going to stop the tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil spilling into our waters, scores of workers losing their lives to accidents in coal mines around the world, or the countless other disasters we are all facing due to our reliance on dirty energy.

Despite all the evidence that we’re paying far too high a price for our dependence on fossil fuels, Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski is trying to roll back the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — a critical tool in making the Energy [R]evolution a reality.

Your Senators can help jumpstart the energy revolution by defeating Murkowski's Dirty Air Act and having the courage to end our dependence on coal and oil. Write to them now.

This post is by Molly Dorozenski, a Greenpeace USA media officer who is on the ground in Louisiana bearing witness to the impacts of the BP Deepwater Disaster and oil spill.

Last Friday, I found myself in Pensacola, Florida getting ready to greet the oil as it hit Florida’s white sand beaches. But just as I arrived, we started hearing reports that the oil had arrived in unprecedented amounts in Barataria Bay, and the barrier islands that served as breeding grounds for the area’s birds.

The very first photographs of oil-covered pelicans had started to hit the newspapers. As BP’s latest attempt to stem the oil flow seemed to be succeeeding, we were seeing the beginning of the worst effects of the oil spill we had seen yet — plainly suffering wildlife that cannot be protected or rescued fast enough.

River Shay walks his dog Smash in the front yard of his Grand Isle, Louisiana house planted with crosses with the names some of the marine life, seafood dishes and recreational activiites that are being lost due oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico. © Jose-Luis Magana/Greenpeace View more images of the oil spill on Flickr

Grand Isle is a vacation and weekend fishing spot for Louisianans, a long pretty stretch of sand scattered with small motels and cottages with cheerful names and marinas at either end. What would be a place of leisure has been totally transformed — a newly-erected symbolic graveyard for everything this community has lost, courtesy (they say) of BP and the federal government: “Sandcastles,” “Seafood Gumbo,” “Sea Turtles” “Redfish” — dozens of white crosses with different labels. Down at the marina, there are folks who have been coming to Grand Isle for years — they can no longer fish or swim, but they’re coming here anyway. They’re dumbstruck. The beaches of Grand Isle are patroled by BP and closed to the public — you can see the workers from a walkway at Grand Isle State Park where locals and media have lined up to watch oil shoveled endlessly into bags.

A little ways off by boat — not more than a 10-minute boat ride — you can visit Queen Bess Island, home to the endangered Brown Pelican, a bird that has recovered from past population problems related to pesticides. When we visited, the island was surrounded by booms and boats couldn’t get very close, but you could count probably 10-15 pelicans that were partly or fully covered in oil. Many of them would not survive the night. Since we’re not trained to rescue them ourselves, we called in what we had seen to wildlife rescue — we know that teams are going back and forth to the islands, but it’s frustrating to see no rescue teams there. You just feel helpless.

At Grand Terre, a bigger nearby island, the beach was covered in oil.  It was on the sand, and there were thick pools of it along the edge in the water. Dirty sorbent booms had washed up on the shores, totally saturated in oil. Again, we saw no BP workers — where are the 20,000 workers that President Obama says are out here cleaning up this mess? And aren’t we all tired of cleaning up after dirty energy? When will we have an energy policy that protects the things we love from catastrophes like this? This has to be the moment of change, unless we want to see this and feel like this again and again.

The locals here know that it’s going to be a long time, decades, before Grand Isle is the place that they remember. This is the new Gulf Coast. You can’t clean it up much at all, and the little that could be done isn’t being done fast enough. As the oil spreads through the Gulf tainting the waters, the islands, and the wildlife, BP and the President stand up at press conferences and tell us they’re doing all they can. But we’ve seen the truth and it’s not pretty — it’s a failed energy policy, a failed response, and a failure of humanity.

From the Gulf Coast to the West Coast to the East Coast, Greenpeace activists are out in full force to send the Obama Administration a message: Ban Arctic Drilling!

As the BP Deepwater Disaster and oil spill has made plain for all to see, we desperately need to move away from dirty, dangerous fossil fuels like oil and toward clean, green renewable energy. Unfortunately, even as the Gulf continues to fill up with filthy crude oil, the Obama Administration is intent on going ahead with more offshore drilling, a move that will prolong our addiction to oil rather than end it.

In fact, despite the moratorium the administration said it had placed on all new offshore drilling permits, we have now learned that the Interior Dept.’s Minerals Management Service has actually approved several new offshore drilling permits since April 20th, when BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank, leading to several million gallons (and counting) of oil being spilled. Worse yet, most of these new permits were given the same environmental exemptions as BP was given for the Deepwater Horizon.

And of course, the administration is so far allowing Shell to move ahead with its plans to drill in the far more ecologically sensitive Arctic region this summer. As you might have seen already, several of our activists sent a loud and clear message to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar earlier this week when he was down in Louisiana by painting “Arctic Next?” on a Shell support ship soon to be headed for the Arctic.

But we didn’t stop there. Salazar was called before the Natural Resources Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives today, and our activists were there with a similar message: “Salazar: Ban Arctic Drilling.” Like the painting on the Shell ship, the signs these activists were holding were painted with some of the dirty crude that has been spewing into the Gulf of Mexico for the past month.

Here’s an awesome photo of Sec. Salazar and Deputy Interior Sec. David Hayes turning around to read our activists’ signs:


We had a message for Salazar’s boss, too. President Obama was out here in the Bay Area today campaigning on behalf of Sen. Barbara Boxer, and several of us went down there to send the exact same message to the Pres. Here’s a pic of Obama’s motorcade whizzing by our banner:


So, Obama and Salazar have gotten our message, we know that much. But that doesn’t mean our work is done. We need as many folks as possible to be hammering this message home. Help stop the next oil spill: write to Sec. Salazar right now and tell him to stop Shell’s plans to drill in the Arctic.

So what if the waiter spit in your soup? The amount of spit is tiny compared to the amount of soup in your bowl.

So what if there’s arsenic in the water? The amount of arsenic is tiny compared to the amount of water in the municipal supply.

So what? Well, I for one wouldn’t want to eat that soup or drink that water, despite assurances that the good stuff is in more abundance than the bad stuff. Would you?

Incredibly, this is basically the argument being advanced by BP CEO Tony Hayward, who recently told the UK Guardian of the BP Deepwater Disaster oil spill in an attempt to play down the impact of the oil spill on Gulf ecosystems: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Some 5 million gallons of oil have spilled so far — and that’s based on conservative estimates of the rate at which oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. And BP has reportedly used an “estimated 400,000 gallons” of dispersant — itself a highly toxic and dangerous substance — to try and cover its tracks.

Several attempts by BP to stem the flow of the oil have failed, so Hayward is touting the use of dispersants as a major success by BP because it has kept the oil from washing ashore in “large amounts.” Of course, as we’ve been reporting, this is only a good thing for BP, because images of the oil washing up on beaches and coating wildlife such as sea birds who are currently nesting in the delicate ecosystems of the Gulf’s shoreline would compound the damage to the company’s already beleaguered public image.

In reality, the dispersant and the oil are both toxic and are both poisoning fish, which the seabirds need to eat. Funny thing about an ecosystem is that everything is interconnected, and you can’t do harm to one part without effecting the rest. But that, apparently, is no concern of Tony Hayward’s.

The truth is, Gulf Coast communities and ecosystems will be dealing with the effects of this oil spill for generations to come. The real extent of the damage won’t be known for some time, but it’s sure to be disastrous. Livelihoods are already being lost, dolphins and other marine mammals are already turning up dead on beaches — and it’s only just begun.

Try as he might, there is no way for Tony Hayward to minimize the impact of his company’s negligence in this case. And it’s only a matter of time before the next oil spill — which could be even more disastrous if it occurred in a place that is far more fragile and hard to reach, such as the Arctic. It’s time Congress took serious action to end our reliance on dirty fossil fuels and usher in a new era of clean, green renewable energy.

The Kerry-Lieberman climate bill has finally been released, and it appears that all the delays gave polluter lobbyists ample time to really do their dirty work on the bill. It's now what you might call more of a "dirty energy bailout" bill than anything else. Greenpeace cannot support the bill unless several key weaknesses are changed, as outlined in this press statement.

Why is it a dirty energy bailout? It incentivizes offshore drilling — at a time when a disastrous oil spill is still pumping over 200,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day. It would subsidize coal at a time when most folks are asking how we can limit the damage coal is doing to our communities and the environment in the aftermath of the terrible explosion at a mine in West Virginia. Earthtrack has a good breakdown of the subsidies for dirty energy industries.

Never has the time been more ripe for making the case to America that we need to transition off of the dirty fossil fuels of the past and toward the clean, renewable energy sources of the future. Instead, Kerry and Lieberman’s American Power Act will actually prolong our dependence on destructive, dirty fossil fuels.

The bill does nothing to address our addiction to oil, but would endanger more of our coastlines with catastrophic oil spills like the BP Deepwater Disaster — all for a miniscule amount of oil, as you can see in the graphic to the right. Clearly the cure for our oil addiction is not more offshore drilling, but to aggressively move into renewable energy.

 Perhaps the biggest boon to the dirty energy industries, however, is the weak emissions targets called for in the bill. Dirty energy purveyors are desperate to evade regulation of their carbon emissions so that they can keep pumping millions of tons of global warming pollution into our atmosphere free of charge. And with the emissions reductions called for in this bill – roughly 4% below 1990 levels by 2025 — they will essentially get to do just that.

To add insult to injury, this bill literally guts the EPA’s authority to regulate dangerous greenhouse gases at a time when global concentrations are rapidly becoming critical. Also, even if the states decided to set tough emissions standards, the bill would preempt them from setting tougher emissions standards than the federal government. This “climate bill” guts key provisions of the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s authority to enforce proven legislation that is designed to protect Americans from some of the most dangerous pollutants.

It’s time to get serious about national energy policy. A truly visionary energy and climate bill would spend $54B on electric cars, smart grid technology, and public transportation instead of nuclear madness. It would level the playing field to allow clean energy technologies to compete in the marketplace on an equal footing with fossil fuels, not throw money at mythical technologies like carbon capture and sequestration.  

A clean energy policy truly deserving of the name would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide substantial incentives for transforming our economy with clean, renewable energy technologies and in the process generate new green jobs on a national scale. This is how leaders respond. Now is the time for Congress to act with a comprehensive, science-based plan to take America into the 21st Century and provide real international leadership.  

Even with opposition from Americans for Prosperity, Glenn Beck, American Petroleum Institute, the Chamber of Commerce, and all the other climate deniers, the American people still know that we need to find solutions to global warming. All we need is leadership and to clear the dirty energy lobbyists out of town. You can take action right now to call on Congress to provide that leadership and pass a bill that doesn’t hand out giveaways to the fossil fuels industries.

UPDATE: It's extremely important at this point that we do everything we can to prevent the next oil spill from ever happening. Take action now to tell Congress: No drilling, no coal, clean energy now! And if you want to do even more, check out this post I put up over on our Grassroots Blog to find toolkits for holding rallies in your community, writing letters to the editor of your local paper, and more: Want to help prevent the next
catastrophic oil spill?

Our team on the ground in Louisiana has sent us a number of new ways you can get plugged in to the animal-rescue and clean up efforts if you're in the Gulf region. There are 6 Ways to Help posted at that link, including how to report oiled wildlife (they recommend you don't try to help the wildlife without a trained expert), who best to donate to, and this bit on volunteering:

Tristate Bird Rescue & Research is coordinating on-the-ground volunteer efforts. Several other groups are helping to organize volunteers to help cleanse birds and otherwise protect both wildlife and human populations along the Gulf Coast. Our favorite ... is The National Audubon Society, which is helping connect volunteers with the best government or non-profit agency doing work related to the oil spill response. (But there are many many many others.) The government also has a volunteer hotline at 1-866-448-5816.

In general, organizations are urging people not to travel to volunteer.

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation are also great places to check out for ways you can help.

We're all horrified and saddened beyond words by the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf. If you find yourself actually close enough to lend a hand in mitigating the impact this disaster will have on the Gulf's coastline and wildlife, there's a volunteer info hotline you can call: 1-866-448-5816. That number also works if you want to report an oiled shoreline.

A website has been set up to help manage the response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster: www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com. You can also find numbers to report oiled wildlife or discuss oil spill-related damage, plus find updates on the cleanup from the Coast Guard, on that site.

The website of Mobile Baykeeper also has this:

According to consultants working for BP, the best thing we can do right now to prepare for oil making landfall is to clean up the shorelines. The less garbage and debris on shorelines the easier they are to clean up. We know the weather is not going to be friendly, but if you can get to your favorite shoreline today or tomorrow you can help speed up the clean up process.

DO NOT remove any live plants. Simply remove any garbage, large shells, drift wood, etc. Debris should be removed to the extent that wave and tides can reach.
 
Plans are being made to train and organize volunteers for cleanup efforts in the days and weeks to follow. We will let you know when we hear further details about this.

If you're in or near the Mobile Bay, Alabama area, they are a good resource to get in touch with as well.

As the tragedy in the Gulf unfolds, lots of people are asking what they can do. If you're in the Gulf region, there are a number of ways you can get involved in the clean up effort, which you can find here.

If you're not in the area, the most important thing right now is to help make sure this never happens again. Take action now to tell Congress that pending climate legislation must not contain any provisions that would expand offshore drilling and continue our dependence on fossil fuels.

There are also a few toolkits that you can use to take action in your own community. These toolkits will guide you through how to write a letter to the editor of your local paper, and how to hold a rally and tell Congress that its time to wake up and ban new offshore drilling. The third is some basic messaging and info that you can have at your disposal.

• BP Deepwater Disaster Letter to the Editor Toolkit
• BP Deepwater Disaster Organize a Rally Toolkit
• BP Deepwater Disaster: Field Message and FAQ

Click here to check out all of our blogs and photos, find the latest news, and take action to prevent the next oil spill

You can also bookmark the page linked from the image to the right and keep checking back for the latest news and ways to get involved and take action.

We CAN prevent the next oil spill if we speak up loud enough to make President Obama and Congress listen. But it will take all of us speaking out together.

If you're looking for even more ways to get involved and help make a difference, consider joining the Greenpeace Activist Network.

Yesterday, White House energy advisor Carol Browner made it very clear that President Obama remains committed to opening new areas of America’s coastlines to drilling for oil, despite the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Lessons from the BP Deepwater Disaster, which continues to spew as much as 5,000 barrels of oil — 200,000 gallons — into the Gulf every day, will be “folded in” to the Interior Department’s review of new leases, she said.

This morning, however, White House senior advisor David Axelrod was on TV saying that in the wake of this catastrophic oil spill, "All [President Obama] has said is that he's not going to continue the moratorium on drilling but... no additional drilling has been authorized and none will until we find out what happened here and whether there was something unique and preventable here."


Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - A view of the Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana where oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead continues to spread. Ships work on containing the oil on the surface of the water, which could make landfall as early as today. Photo by Sean Gardner/Greenpeace

That’s certainly welcome news, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. President Obama needs to reinstate the moratorium on offshore drilling to ensure a disaster like this doesn't threaten any more coastal communities and ecosystems. Because despite assurances from the oil industry that new technologies have made “accidents” that result in oil spills less likely, the BP Deepwater Disaster shows that’s simply not true. It’s not a matter of if another spill will occur, but when — and where.

Unfortunately, Shell has already been awarded a lease to do exploratory drilling in 2.7 million acres of the Chukchi Sea, off of Alaska’s northern coast, within prime hunting grounds for the Inupiat people and a critical migration route for endangered bowhead whales. Shell just received a key permit for the project from the EPA last month, and plans to go ahead with drilling there this summer even though this is a very fragile ecosystem where conditions would make cleanup so difficult that the Coast Guard has described a major oil spill there as a “nightmare scenario” that it does not have the capacity to deal with.

The Gulf, by contrast, may be the one place on earth where authorities are prepared to deal with oil spills, with plenty of manpower and spill response equipment close at hand. We’ve seen how difficult it has actually been over the past week, though, as all attempts to stop the spill from making landfall have so far failed. I shudder to think what it would mean if this had happened in the remote, pristine waters of the Arctic.


A ship cuts through some of the oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico after a BP-leased oil platform exploded on April 20 and sank after burning. Eleven workers are missing and presumed dead. Photo by Sean Gardner/Greenpeace

The Obama administration’s commitment to offshore drilling amounts to no less than a decision to endanger our coastal ecosystems with the risk of catastrophic oil spills, which is especially worrisome because there seems to be little to no commitment from companies like BP and Transocean, who leased the Deepwater Horizon oil rig to BP, to prevent oil spills like this from occurring. Transocean actually lobbied the Minerals Management Service, which oversees the lease of our coastal waters to oil companies who do the drilling, to exempt the Deepwater Horizon rig from certain safety requirements because it was a “marvel of modern technology” and, according to the company, virtually immune from a spill of this magnitude. Yeah, not so much, Transocean.

Unfortunately, President Obama seems all too willing to swallow the oil industry’s lies and distortions hook, line, and sinker, even to the point that he’s repeated the myth that Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any oil rig spills because oil rigs these days are simply too darn fail-safe. In defending his plan to open our coastlines to drilling, Obama said, “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.” Yeah, not so much, Mr. President.

Hopefully the very real catastrophe we are witnessing in the Gulf will open our president’s eyes to the reality of the oil industry, and he will act in time to prevent this from happening in the Chukchi Sea as well. No matter how the industry’s PR machine spins it, oil is intrinsically a dirty business, and there is no technological fix for that fact. President Obama needs to reinstate the moratorium on offshore drilling immediately and take decisive action to replace dangerous and dirty fossil fuels with safe and clean renewable energy.

We’ve just released the latest version of our Cool IT Leaderboard, and Cisco has leapt to the top of our list of global tech companies leading the way toward a cleaner, greener high-tech future.

Other companies seem, shall we say, unable to decide if climate solutions that reduce energy wastage and carbon emissions are a significant business opportunity (to say nothing of the morally right thing to do) or a mere marketing strategy.
 
Cisco doubled its score from the previous version of our leaderboard by demonstrating the effectiveness of its solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, Ericsson made a strong debut in the second place spot.

You can download the Cool IT Leaderboard version 3 as a PDF, if you like.
 
The IT sector has the potential to quickly design and implement technologies that achieve greater energy efficiency and cuts in carbon emissions. But as the IT sector grows, its growth must be powered by clean energy sources rather than dirty 19th century technologies like coal. Which is to say, the industry must ensure that its own growing carbon footprint doesn’t negate the impact of the solutions it’s offering.

To that end, please join me and nearly a quarter million other activists worldwide in telling Facebook to use 100% renewable energy, not dirty coal.
 
Our report, "Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change," shows that the rise of cloud computing represents a major challenge to the otherwise positive climate contributions of the IT sector. The report finds that the “cloud” – comprised of cloud computing services such as social networks, video streaming, email, and photo storage, as well as the telecommunications networks that give us access any time and anywhere to data stored in centralized data centers rather than on our computers’ hard drives — is poised to gobble up three times as much energy in 2020 as it currently does today.

The data centers running the cloud draw electricity from the grid to run the servers that bring us Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, and YouTube to our laptops, iPhones, or tablet computers. With these amazing technological achievements, IT companies are remaking our society. They are to the 21st century as fossil fuel companies were to the past — they have the power to shape the economy and, in turn, the future of our climate. So while Microsoft, Google, IBM, and other Leaderboard companies must use their considerable political influence to lead the transformation to a clean energy economy backed by smart grids and smart technology, they also need to be mindful of their own share of climate pollution.

A California company called Sungevity is offering to put a comprehensive solar system on the White House for free. If President Obama is seriously committed to curbing emissions and preventing runaway climate change, there is simply no better way to show the world that commitment than to run his own house — the seat of the most powerful government in the world — on clean, green solar energy.

The company sent a letter to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama telling them that “we need a bold statement from the First Family saying that clean energy works, saves money, creates jobs, and is something ‘I want for my home.’”

Sungevity also has a petition online that you can sign to show your support for solar energy and urge Obama to accept the company’s offer to donate and install a solar system at no cost to the Obamas or American taxpayers.

(An astute reader has pointed out to me that it's not just Sungevity offering the solar system to the White House, but a "group of solar manufacturers, installers, and solar advocates from across America." Read more here.)

The White House of course had solar panels once before: A 32-panel system was installed in 1979 by President Carter, who said, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of the road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest adventures ever undertaken by the American People.” It was of course an example of the road not taken — at least so far. Reagan removed the panels in 1986, but Obama has a chance to rectify that drastically shortsighted mistake.

Urge Obama and the White House to go solar now!

We've just posted a new video we put together of our Climate Crime investigative team up in NYC searching for secretive billionaire oilman David Koch.

Check it out:


When we first launched our report, Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, we asked folks to go over to the Koch Industries Facebook page and communicate their concerns about Koch's funding of climate denial and opposition to clean energy legislation directly to the company. Well, it turns out the Kochs can dish it out — to the tune of about $25 million since 2005, no less — but they can't take it. They promptly pulled their Facebook page down rather than have to listen to our concerns.

Before they pulled their page down, however, Koch posted a response to our report in which the company claims to have "long supported science-based inquiry and dialogue about climate change." If that's the case, why are they hiding behind their front groups who do their climate denying for them? And why won't they respond to our letter asking them to participate in a debate and answer some questions about their funding of climate denial?

I happened to notice that Koch Industries quietly put its Facebook page back up this past weekend. And surprise, surprise — their response to our report is still posted, but all of the comments we left for them before they scurried into hiding have been deleted. I guess they're only for "dialogue" when they can secretly participate. So why not head over to the Koch Industries Facebook page and repost your comment, or post a new one? One good reason not to is that then you're on record as "liking" Koch Industries (Facebook recently changed from having people "fan" a page to "liking" it, in case you don't know). So you can always unlike them after you post your comment.

Go ask Koch: "If you're truly for an open dialogue, why won't you respond to Greenpeace's offer to join them in a debate? And why did you erase all the comments concerned citizens wrote on here previously?" Post the link to our report as well (www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries), so that other folks who visit the page can get the full story, not just Koch's version. Their response to our report is the second post on their page.

If you prefer not to "like" Koch Industries on Facebook even temporarily, you can always just go to www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries and use the social networking tools on that page to help expose these climate criminals.

You can also read more over on Huffington Post.

Our own Rolf Skar was on the Brian Lehrer Show last night, talking about our campaign telling Nestle to stop using palm oil made from Paradise Forests destruction in its products. Specifically, he was discussing the nearly 100,000 new "fans" Nestle now has on Facebook thanks to Greenpeace's awesome online activists, and Nestle's bumbling response to the feedback those new "fans" were offering.

If you want to get in on the action, you can tell Nestle to protect rainforests and remove Sinar Mas' unsustainable palm oil from their supply chain right now.

Here's the video:

Facebook Battleground: Nestle's Vs. Greenpeace from Brian Lehrer Live on Vimeo.

My colleagues down at Greenpeace Argentina ran this full-page ad in the Washington Post today to call on Argentina's president, Mrs. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, to rethink her administration's support for dirty coal energy. Pres. Kirchner is in Washington, D.C. this week meeting with Pres. Obama.

The Argentinian government is building a coal-fired plant in Patagonia, in the south of Argentina, as part of a broader investment in the supremely dirty fossil fuel. But as the ad points out:

Global warming is a threat to the existence of the Andean glaciers. These glaciers are the main source of water for many communities in Argentina and the rest of South America. Glaciers are the most important water reserve for future generations of Argentinians. But they are disappearing. The situation will only get worse if more coal plants are built.

By investing in new green jobs and promoting wind power in the Argentine Patagonia, your adminstration has the chance to provide a clean, efficient, modern and decentralized energy supply to your people.

It's time to reidrect our investments from dirty and expensive sources of energy, such as coal, into a clean and renewable future.

If Mrs. Kirchner is swayed at all by the ad, maybe she can put in a word with President Obama. Instead of opening more of our coastlines to offshore drilling, he could and should be supporting policies to kickstart an energy revolution right here at home and leading the way for the rest of the world. You can drop President Obama a line right now and tell him that it's time for America to break our oil addiction, if you're so inclined.

Our Climate Crime Unit is still hot on the trail of the world’s most wanted climate criminals: Charles and David Koch.

Today they responded to a climate emergency outside the David H. Koch Theater in NYC, but they were too late. A dead polar bear was foud on the scene.

You might recall that last year a number of polar bears were spotted in Washington, D.C. panhandling for less climate change, not spare change. Seems they were down on their luck because global warming is melting their Arctic home.

No word yet on the exact cause of death in today’s tragedy, but one thing is certain: The climate denial funded by Charles and David Koch is delaying action to stop global warming and usher in a clean energy economy, all but dooming more polar bears to a similar fate of homelessness and death thanks to runaway climate change.

David Koch spends a lot of money on fancy exhibits and theaters to whitewash his real legacy: From 2005 to 2008 alone, David and Charles Koch funneled some $25 million to a network of climate denial front groups.

You can read more about the Koch’s Web of Dirty Money and Influence at www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries. Our Climate Crime Unit was passing out Wanted posters for the Kochs today to help bring them to justice, and you can help too by following that link and using the tools provided to help spread the word.



You can also find links to our report, “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine,” which exposes the role of oil conglomerate Koch Industries and its owners Charles and David Koch in obstructing clean energy and climate policy by funding climate denial organizations, lobbying federal legislators directly, and spending buckets of cash through their PAC to support candidates for federal office. David and Charles – who tie for 9th richest man in America – are the two principal shareholders of Koch Industries, an oil supply and refining company that is one of the largest private corporations in the US.

Yesterday, we delivered a letter to David and Charles Koch seeking a response to some unanswered questions and offering an opportunity for the Koch brothers to explain their funding of organizations that distort climate science and oppose climate and clean energy policies.

“Given your interest in an “intellectually honest debate,” are you willing to participate in an open debate at the National Press Club on your role in funding climate denial organizations and think tanks?” asked Kert Davies, director of our PolluterWatch project, in the letter, which was delivered to David Koch’s Manhattan office.

We'll let you know how Koch responds.

The first major deadline of the Zero Deforestation Agreement signed by JBS/Bertin, Marfrig and Minerva — Brazil's largest slaughterhouses — has come and gone, and the companies all failed to meet their obligations under the agreement.

You might recall that we released the report “Slaughtering the Amazon,” last year to expose the links between cattle ranching in the Amazon region and deforestation. You might also remember that following the release of the report and the campaign we ran afterward, big supermarket chains such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, as well as international shoe companies like Nike, Adidas, Clarks, Geox, and Timberland, made it clear to their suppliers — which of course are none other than Marfrig, Minerva, and JBS/Bertin (JBS and Bertin used to be separate, now they have merged) — that they would not purchase leather or meat from the Brazilian slaughterhouses unless the companies could prove they were not sourcing from newly deforested areas.

Smoke from manmade forest fires deliberately set to clear land for cattle and farming rises above the Amazon. ©Greenpeace/Daniel Beltrá

All of which resulted in the Zero Deforestation Agreement signed on October 5, 2009. (You can read more about the "Slaughtering the Amazon" report release and campaign right here on the GPUSA blog.)

The major slaughterhouses of Brazil showed insufficient progress to comply with the first step in the Zero Deforestation Agreement, which required the registration and mapping of all ranches supplying Amazon cattle directly to the slaughterhouses (these ranches are known as the "fattening farms"). This is especially important because without knowing which ranch supplies which slaughterhouse, and exactly what the boundaries are of each ranch, there is no way to determine who is responsible for newly deforested Amazon and hence which cattle to keep out of the supply chain.

Despite missing their deadline, each of the companies did make significant progress, and reaffirmed their commitment to stopping deforestation of the Amazon by cattle ranchers. All three slaughterhouses have asked for an extension of three more months to finish the job.

While these companies were dragging their feet, some 94,888 acres (38,400 hectares) of the Amazon were deforested, according to Imazon, a Brazilian NGO that independently monitors Amazon deforestation.

The folks at PolluterHarmony have done it again! They've made another successful love (of money) match!

The happy couple — Charles, a "secretive bilionaire," and Blanche, a US Senator with an environmental record that is "exactly what [he] was looking for" — have recorded a new testimonial video for PolluterHarmony:


How they find time for each other is a mystery to me, since Charles keeps such a busy schedule of obstructing clean energy and climate policy by funding climate denial organizations. But he also spends lots of money directly lobbying federal legislators like Blanche, and his PAC spends quite a bit to support candidates for federal office — again, like Blanche. So I guess they probably share a lot of $pecial moment$ after all.

Sure enough, since 2009 Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) has received $11,000 from Koch’s PAC, making her the top recipient of Koch PAC money in the US Senate during this election cycle. Senator Lincoln is also the top recipient of campaign contributions from the oil & gas industry, taking $255,650 during the 2009-2010 cycle.

All that extra special attention seems to have swept Senator Lincoln off her feet: Earlier this year she supported legislative efforts to protect big polluters like Charles’ Koch Industries by blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from using the Clean Air Act to address global warming pollution. That’s a sweetheart of a deal for Charles, since Koch Industries owns oil refineries in Texas, Alaska, and Minnesota.

If you want to share the love Charles and Blanche have found, go to www.greenpeace.org/KochIndustries and do so with the tools we’ve provided.

You can view Polluterharmony’s other success stories at PolluterHarmony.com, including a recent profile of the relationship between another major oil CEO, “Rex,” and his partner in offshore drilling, Governor "Bob McD."

You might recall that a couple weeks ago our squad of climate crime scene investigators was on the hunt for a secretive billionaire named David Koch.

Well it turns out Koch has accomplices. Lots of them.

David Koch's chief partner in crime is his brother and fellow secretive billionaire Charles. But these two are not acting alone. They are the dons of a massive climate crime family. From 2005 to 2008, the Kochs handed out almost $25 million to groups actively opposing clean energy legislation, carbon emissions regulations, and other environmental policies — groups like the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity, among many, many others.

To give you a frame of reference for that $25 million number: ExxonMobil only gave about $8.9 million to similar groups during that same period of time. You could say that the Koch Family has really muscled in on Exxon’s climate denial racket.

So we’ve launched a new report entitled “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine” to make the Kochs and their cronies as notorious as Al Capone.

Here’s how you can help:

• Link the word “Koch” to our report, which can be found at www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries. Put up as many links as you can, everywhere and anywhere you can put up links. Help us make sure that when someone Googles “Koch,” the top search result will be our report about how they’re spreading anti-climate propaganda and misinformation via a vast web of think tanks, astroturf organizations, and other groups.

• Just as importantly, post links on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks! There are buttons on www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries to make this easy for you. When posting to Twitter, use the hashtag #Koch. And make sure to use the keyword “Koch” when posting on Facebook or any other OSN. Google can’t index content on these sites, but they have become significant search venues in and of themselves, so we want to make sure folks searching for “Koch” on these platforms find our report too.

Now for the really fun part! Go to the Koch Industries Facebook page and become a fan. True to their secretive nature, Koch Industries won't let you post anything on their Facebook page, but you can comment on their posts. So leave a comment saying "I am not a Fan of Koch Industries' funding of right wing think tanks and climate denying front groups" and a link to our report (www.greenpeace.org/kochindustries).

Koch Industries has been erasing some of our comments on Facebook so far today, so let’s post so many they can’t erase them all! I suggest you scroll down to the seventh post they have, which is all about Koch's “commitment to environmental excellence,” whatever the heck that means. (Koch Industries has a terrible environmental record, by the way.)

After leaving a comment, you can unfan Koch Industries if you want, so that no one thinks you actually like the polluting, climate-denying fat cats who control the company.

Whatever you do — post to your website or blog, on your Facebook or Twitter, or just retweet a link to this blog post — you can rest assured that you’ve helped make the world a little bit safer by exposing these climate denial kingpins and their accomplices in climate crimes.

The world's attention was focused on Copenhagen last December when world leaders met to discuss a global climate treaty. And as climate legislation is still slowly making its way through Congress, global warming continues to be big news. All of which, of course, has whipped climate deniers into a seething, frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy.

You've probably noticed that climate deniers have been in full attack mode lately. But you might not know that while climate science as a field of inquiry has been around for over a century, the climate denial industry is relatively new, having only been around a couple decades.

In the past century we’ve certainly deepened our knowledge of how the global climate works, and the basics of climate science have been more or less understood and accepted during that time. Andy Revkin at the NYT wrote a good blog post back in January about when “the real number crunching” began on carbon emissions and how they might impact the global climate. That was all the way back in the ‘50s, so around 60 years ago. This video, as an example, is from 1958:


It wasn’t until the past 20 years, when the urgency of stopping global warming became more and more widely recognized, that there was all of a sudden “doubt” about climate science. Conveniently, these doubts arose just as lawmakers the world over began considering regulations on carbon emissions that would deal with the climate crisis — and would also adversely impact the bottom lines of fossil fuels companies, energy providers, and other big polluters who are making a killing while dumping millions of tons of carbon pollution into our atmosphere every year.

These doubts about climate science were of course completely manufactured by dirty energy companies, their lobbyists, and their pals at various institutions that make up the Great Climate Denial Machine. These polluter barons are more than happy to continue poisoning and polluting the atmosphere as long as they can keep profiting from their unsustainable business models. Our own Cindy Baxter at Greenpeace International wrote up a report called Dealing in Doubt to tell the entire sordid tale of the 20-year campaign to block progressive climate and clean energy legislation through a deliberate campaign of lies and misinformation.

The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory has been widely corroborated by decades-worth of data compiled by research institutions across the globe. Climate deniers know they can't attack the science head on, so the only thing left for them to do is muddy the debate by sowing enough doubt to justify further delays. Dealing in Doubt lays out exactly how they've done that for the past 20 years. It's worth a read for anyone who wants to understand how we got where we are in the climate debate, and wants to help forge a path toward a clean energy future by countering the lies and misinformation of the climate denial industry.

Check out the video from the Climate Crime Scene we declared last week when our activists went in search of billionaire oilman and major funder of the climate denial industry David Koch:

Several Greenpeace activists/emergency responders were on the scene of yet another climate crime today, this time in search of billionaire oilman David Koch. As the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History unveiled its new David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, our activists rolled up in our green emergency vehicles and passed out "Wanted" posters for David Koch and his brother Charles. The two are responsible for spending millions of dollars to lobby against climate action and fund climate denial.



“Who the heck are the Kochs?” you might be asking, and I don’t blame you. They’re a pretty secretive duo, even though they are the principal shareholders of Koch Industries (it's pronounced like "Coke," by the way), an oil supply and refining company that is one of the largest private corporations in the US.

Though they like to brag about being “the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” the Kochs do not why away from meddling in public affairs all the same. Koch Industries is among the biggest lobbying spenders in the oil industry and Koch’s political action committee (PAC) spent more on contributions to federal candidates since the 2006 election cycle than any other oil-and-gas sector PAC.

The Kochs also funnel millions of dollars through their three “charitable” foundations to a whole bunch of the worst climate deniers, like the Cato Instititute and the Heritage Foundation. From 2005 to 2008, the Koch foundations gave over $24.8 million in funding to climate denial groups, outdoing even ExxonMobil, which gave about $9.1 million to similar organizations over the same period of time. You can see the recipients of Koch’s dirty fossil fuel money and the exorbitant sums each has received over the years by visiting www.greenpeace.org/kochmoney.

You’ve probably even seen or heard of their handiwork before, though you may not have known who was behind it. The “Hot Air Tour,” which aims to spread climate denial talking points and misinformation about global warming through a touring hot air balloon, was launched by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP). David Koch is the founder and chairman of AFP, which, not coincidentally, has receieved some $5 million from Koch foundations.



Plenty more fun and interesting facts about how the Kochs spend their money to buy influence on Capitol Hill and ensure that we delay action on global warming long enough for them to rake in several more billions of dollars can be found in this factsheet (PDF).

How can you help counter the Koch’s influence on the climate debate? Help us shine a light on their funding of climate denial by using the buttons at the top of this post to share this story on Facebook, Tweet it, or send it to your friends and family.

David Koch’s oil money may get his name on an exhibit at the Smithsonian, but together we can ensure that the true Koch family legacy is known as one of environmental crimes, lobbying to block clean energy, and funding global warming denial front groups.

Barbara Stowe is the daughter of Irving and Dorothy Stowe, two of Greenpeace's founders and most dedicated activists. When she heard the news that the Obama Administration was considering supporting a proposal to reintroduce commercial whaling, she took action here on the GPUSA site and wrote the following letter to the President. I found it inspiring, and thought you might, too.

Dear President Obama,

I listed my citizenship on this message as Canadian. However, I hold dual USA/Canadian citizenship. My family was born in Rhode Island, and my mother still avidly follows US politics. My brother and I still vote in US presidential elections, and we were thrilled at your candidacy. We were glued to the TV for months watching the build up to the election, even though we live in Canada.

My parents were among the main founders of Greenpeace. Our house was the organization's (only) office during the first five years of its existence. My mother, at 89, still serves at times as a kind of social ambassador for Greenpeace, and my brother and I serve with her. My late father, a fervent activist who also worked pro bono for the NAACP, among other causes, unfortunately did not live to see this new millenium, but I know he would have held the highest hopes for your administration. I hope you will see fit to do all in your power to save the whales.

I tell you quite frankly that in the early seventies, when Greenpeace was in its infancy, I did not "get" why some members were agitating to save the whales. I thought we should stick to our first goal: stopping nuclear testing worldwide. (I applaud your efforts to denuclearize). It took, for me, standing on the deck of a Greenpeace ship, staring into the eye of a humpback whale, which was equally staring at me, to change my opinion. It doesn't take personal contact for everyone. Austria, a landlocked country, has fought tirelessly within the IWC to increase the protection of whales.

For years, Greenpeace and the United States government have played instrumental roles in securing a moratorium on commercial whaling through the IWC. Despite refusal to honor the moratorium by Japan,  Iceland, and Norway, the moratorium has proven to be the most  important whale conservation agreement in history.  Several whale populations have slowly begun to recover, and some are no longer in the imminent danger of extinction they were just a few decades ago.

Mr. President, I am deeply concerned about reports that the USA is championing a deal that would undermine the moratorium and secure the future of commercial whaling. From the campaign platform you shared with Greenpeace, I know you share my view that commercial whaling has no place in the 21st century.  I was grateful for your pledge to help bring this outrageous and unnecessary practice to an end.

I urgently call on you to ensure that the US opposes any deal that would legitimize commercial whaling by granting quotas to Japan and its whaling allies. Instead, I urge you to support Australia's proposal, which would end whaling in the Southern Ocean once and for all. There is very widespread and bi-partisan American support for whale conservation, and millions of Americans are counting on you. I am counting on you.  Most of all, the whales are counting on you.

Sincerely,
Barbara Stowe
Vancouver, BC
Canada

Barbara is one of over 30,000 activists who have sent a message to the president. You can take action too and tell President Obama to say NO to commercial whaling.

We're very excited to bring you the new Greenpeace USA Grassroots Blog. You'll get to hear directly from Greenpeace staff organizers and their top activists and volunteers about the work the Student Network, Activist Network, and Field Team are doing to build a greener, more peaceful future. And most important of all, you can check this blog regularly to find out how you can get involved too!

Hope you find this blog useful. See you in cyberspace...

In a stunning instance of what can only be called collective cognitive dissonance, a small working group of the International Whaling Commission has just proposed we reinstate commercial whaling in order to save the whales.

UPDATE: Click this link to tell President Obama, Say no to commercial whaling!

Make no mistake: This proposal has nothing to do with saving whales, but is instead all about protecting the whaling industries of just a few obstinate countries who insist on destroying these amazing creatures. This proposal is the most serious threat to the moratorium on commercial whaling that we’ve seen since Greenpeace fought for and won the moratorium in the 80s.


Greenpeace activists witness the killing of whales in the Southern Ocean by the Yushin Maru and the Kyo Maru No.1 ships of the Japanese whaling fleet. © Greenpeace / Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

While some US officials have been insisting that they are not supporting the proposal, we are very concerned about reports that the U.S. IWC Commissioner is not only supporting it but in fact pushing other countries to support it as well. The US position will be clarified at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in St. Petersburg, FL next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Greenpeace vehemently opposes the proposal because:

1. It would allow whaling to take place in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary. Not only would the killing of whales there continue, it would be legitimized.
2. By legitimizing all whaling, the proposal would secure the future of whaling instead of seeking to phase it out. With a single stroke, this proposal would reverse nearly three decades of progress in protecting endangered whale species.
3. It will set interim quotas – the number of whales each country is allowed to catch – based on political need, not scientific evidence. Nothing could be more disastrous to fragile whale populations than caving to political pressure rather than listening to scientists about the best way to protect healthy whale populations.
4. Adding insult to injury, the proposal would pass the costs of regulating whaling on to all members of the IWC, meaning that the taxpayers of even anti-whaling countries will be forced to support whaling operations.

You can read the full proposal for yourself online here.

We’re aiming to kill this atrocious, unscientific proposal before it even gets voted on, which will be at the IWC’s annual meeting in June. We’ll need your aid and support if we’re to achieve that goal, though.

The first step? Get the word out about this proposal to reinstate the slaughter of whales for commercial purposes. Post a link to this blog on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or on your own blog.

We're working on an action alert that you can use to fax President Obama and tell him you expect him to reject this proposal and help save the whales instead of the whalers. The ironic thing about all this is that the United States has a long history of advocating for whale conservation. If you really want to send the president a message right away, you can sign our petition urging the Obama Administration to continue the U.S.'s legacy of protecting whales.

Rest assured that we'll have more for you to do very soon. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, no doubt.

UPDATE: Click this link to tell President Obama, Say no to commercial whaling!

Vinuta Gopal, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace India, just sent the following out in an email. I think it lays out the issue quite well, and figured I'd share it here.

The media has been buzzing about the IPCC's Himalayan glacier controversy.

The international climate panel headed by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for a ground-breaking report on climate change. Several small errors have now surfaced in the 3,000-page report.

If you're wondering what the news reports mean for climate change, here are some answers. Please spread the word to your family, friends, and co-workers.

1. Do the U.N. climate panel's errors mean there is no threat from climate change?

No, the dire threat from climate change is not in question. The panel's errors were only related to the intensity of climate change. There are in fact only two real mistakes that have been found so far and neither necessitate any change to the basic premise of human-induced climate change.

For over two decades, scientists have consistently found that climate change is happening, and it's caused by human activity.

2. Why is there so much furor about these errors?

Over the past 20 years, the U.N. climate panel has been attacked again and again by the fossil fuel industry and by politicians who are determined to discredit climate change science and continue on an unsustainable development pathway which would ensure dire consequences for this earth.

3. Are the Himalayan glaciers melting or not?

In 2007, the U.N. climate panel reported that Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035. The specific year turned out to be based on a flawed study, and the panel has corrected the error.

The Himalayan glaciers are retreating, but the exact rate of retreat is still uncertain. India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh was one of the first to argue that the 2035 forecast was "not based on an iota of scientific evidence," but he confirms the Himalayan glaciers "are indeed receding and the rate is cause for great concern."

4. Who will be impacted by climate change?

Everyone. Lesser developed countries and small island states will be hit hardest and fastest.

But rich nations are not immune to the violent weather, drought, disease, famine, mass migrations, and wars that will be caused if we don't stop climate change.

5. What is Greenpeace’s call on climate change?

The science is clear. Climate change is real, is happening now and is caused by people. The solution is clean energy, smart use of our power and forest protection.

Since lots of people are wondering about the media stories, please forward this mail to your family, friends and co-workers.

Thanks a billion!

Vinuta Gopal
Climate Campaigner
Greenpeace India

P.S. If you want more details, check out this thorough analysis at RealClimate.org.

Maybe you read the post the other day by anti-nuclear activist and Greenpeace senior advisor Harvey Wasserman entitled "Obama's atomic blunder." In case you missed it, or have always been more of an auditory/visual learner, you can watch this video of Harvey on Democracy Now! discussing President Obama's misguided plan to fund new nuclear reactors.

We launched our new PolluterWatch project to expose the work our elected representatives are doing at the behest of polluter lobbyists and their clients in the big oil, big coal, and other big polluter industries.

And as you might have seen, we launched PolluterHarmony.com a couple days ago — just in time for Valentine’s Day! pHarmony, as we like to call it, uses “a unique compatibility algorithm” that matches polluters and politicians based on their love of dirty energy, their past environmental violations, and their ability to ignore the public health interests of real people.

Now we need your help to hold climate criminals accountable.

Big corporations know that the public doesn’t trust them, so they funnel millions of dollars to front groups who do their dirty work for them. And no one plays the front-group-and-junk-science game quite like Exxon Mobil and its CEO Rex Tillerson. That’s exactly why we started PolluterWatch: to hold people like Mr. Tillerson accountable.



We can’t outspend a company like Exxon on fancy ad campaigns and promotional blitzes, but we can educate the public about polluters’ influence-peddling and propagandizing. Then we can demand accountability for them and the lobbyists and politicians who’ve worked with them to confuse the debate on climate policy and undermine attempts to regulate emissions in the U.S. — all to protect Exxon’s profits at the expense of the planet.

Help us get started by putting up “Wanted” posters for Mr. Tillerson in your hometown.

The idea is a simple one: Download our short one-page toolkit and print out a few copies of the Wanted poster we’ve created for Rex Tillerson. The toolkit contains a black and white version of the wanted poster, to make it easy to print. But you can download the color version as a PDF, if you want that one. And remember to use recycled paper!

Put these posters up around your town, then take pictures and post them to your Facebook, MySpace, or Tumblr. Or TwitPic them, or put them on your blog, or start a blog right here on our site and post them there to share with our activist community. Just make sure you use the keyword “polluterwatch,” or put the hashtag #polluterwatch in your tweets, so we can find them.

We need to make sure that everyone in our communities knows who is really responsible for stalling progress on global warming. Because until people start putting names and faces with the groups who are undermining our future, we’re not going to be able to separate their propaganda from the truth and stop global warming. Take action today!

Despite the tough economic times we’re living in, wind power continues to expand around the globe. According to the Global Wind Energy Council, the worldwide wind power capacity grew by 31% last year, adding 37.5 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy to the global mix. This just points out all the more clearly that it ain't just the answer to our climate woes that is blowing in the wind.


Spain's Maranchon Wind Farm is the largest in Europe with 104 generators, and is operated by Iberdrola, the largest wind energy company in the world. © Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá

As we continue to search for ways to foster an economic recovery, the incredible growth of wind power capacity around the world shows that wind energy is not just the right choice for saving the climate, but also for creating jobs and putting folks back to work.

The American Wind Energy Association reports that the US didn't do too shabby itself, installing a record-breaking 10,000 megawatts (MW), or 10 GW, of new wind power capacity in 2009. This brings total wind capacity in the US up to 35 GW. But according to the GWEC, China contributed a third of the global wind power expansion last year, marking the fifth straight year in which the country at least doubled its capacity for generating power from the wind. China is now producing more than 25 GW of power from the wind, up from just over 12 GW the year before. Kinda puts our 10 GW increase into perspective. For a country that prides itself on innovation and forward-thinking, the US can and should do better.

Here we are in America still fighting for our first large-scale offshore wind project, Cape Wind. If you haven’t already, sign our petition calling on Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to approve Cape Wind and help get us on the path to a clean, green future.

But even if we were to go all in for wind power tomorrow, how would we get that clean energy from the point of production to the point of consumption? Glad you asked! It just so happens we have just released a report describing how global electricity grids can sustain high levels of renewable energy. The report is called Renewables 24/7, click that link and you can download the whole thing as a PDF.

Hard as it is to believe, Cape Wind still faces an uncertain future.

But Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has said he will decide whether or not the project goes forward by February 12th — and he wants all of us to weigh in. You can sign our petition calling on Secretary Salazar to approve the project and show your support for Cape Wind right now. We'll send our petition with all of your signatures (over 12,000 so far — let's hit 15,000!) over to the Department of the Interior.

In case you don't already know all of this by heart, here's why you should support Cape Wind: The offshore wind project would be great for Massachusetts. Its 130 wind turbines would generate up to 420 megawatts of clean, green electricity – enough to replace the current power plant, which burns oil. This would reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions by 734,000 tons per year, which by some estimates is equivalent to taking 175,000 cars off the road.

Cape Wind would also be great for the United States of America. As the only offshore wind farm likely to be approved and built during President Obama’s first term, the completion of Cape Wind would go a long way toward showing the world that we're serious about cleaning up our act and converting to a clean energy economy. America needs to lead the world in solving global warming, and projects like Cape Wind are exactly how we can begin to do that.

The most recent snag is the concerns about the historic and cultural value of Nantucket Sound. These concerns obviously need to be properly addressed, and it seems like they can be met while still allowing this vital clean energy project to move forward. Because the thing is, the impacts of unchecked global warming — including sea level rise that would all but erase the region’s current coastline — are the far greater threat not just to Cape Cod but to the entire world. Building this first-of-its-kind wind farm in the US will be an important step towards tackling the climate crisis we’re facing right now and saving Cape Cod.

So please take a minute and sign our petition to Secretary Salazar and let him know that you support clean energy and Cape Wind. When you're done doing that, there's a link directly to a form on the Department of the Interior's website where you can submit a personal comment (or go here).

The announcement of Apple's new iPad, made today by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at an event right here in San Francisco, included a report on the tablet device's environmental stats: Happily, the iPad will be free of PVCs, BFRs, arsenic and mercury. It's very exciting to see that Apple is continuing its industry-leading policy of eliminating toxic chemicals from its products, once again proving that these dangerous substances don't belong in our electronics.

But while Jobs also made the claim that Apple is the industry leader in mobile technologies, he didn’t mention that mobile devices are growing increasingly dependent on cloud computing power, or the fact that the energy powering the cloud can have a big impact on the green cred of mobile devices like the iPad.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, “cloud computing” refers to devices that have little or no processing power and storage of their own, but instead connect to the internet and run web-based applications and access media stored on web servers (as opposed to applications and media stored on your computer's hard drive). Google Docs and Gmail, photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube – these are all part of “the cloud.”

While the rise of cloud computing means we get lots of cool new toys – more powerful smart phones and other high-tech gadgets like the iPad – data storage and cloud computing power are the single largest driver of new electricity demand worldwide. We launched our Cool IT Challenge precisely because tech companies have a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions, not just in the sense that they're responsible for emitting lots of greenhouse gases but also because they have the potential to play a big part in solutions to climate change.

You can see how all the consumer electronics stack up against each other in terms of green cred on our latest Guide to Greener Electronics.

As a leader in mobile technology, Apple now joins the ranks of big data center users like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM. These companies are building data centers around the globe at alarming rates, and where they choose to build these new data centers can have a huge impact on important decisions about energy policy. For example, we're seeing Google and Apple build data centers in places in the US where there are fights over coal power expansion, and their data centers are being used as justification by politicians and utilities to expand dirty energy power stations.

It's great that the iPad is green. Now Apple and other players in the cloud computing sector must be aggressive advocates for renewable energy to ensure that the cloud powering their products is itself fueled by clean, green energy, not the dirty fuels of the past.

We don't want our fancy new green iPads to be connected to a brown cloud.

Image credit: Gizmodo (via Flickr)

Ensuring polluter profits are safe from pesky environmental regulations sure is hard work. Just ask Senator Lisa Murkowski, who had to have polluter lobbyists and former Bush administration officials Jeff Holmstead and Roger Martella help write the Dirty Air Act, which she introduced yesterday in an attempt to block the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Greenpeace activist and “PolluterWatch TV” correspondent Aliya Haq thought that Murkowski and her polluter lobbyist allies might be too busy devising new ways to gut the Clean Air Act and protect pulluter profits to properly thank one another for the roles they each played in getting the Dirty Air Act introduced on the Senate floor yesterday. So she dropped by their offices with flowers and cards:

There’s more about Murkowski’s working relationship with big polluter lobbyists, and the $50,000 she had their clients donate to her campaign fund even while Martella and Holmstead were helping write her legislation, over on PolluterWatch.

 

Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski is switching tactics in her attempts to gut the Clean Air Act on behalf of big polluters. Her amendment to strip the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act caused an uproar when it was revealed that two polluter lobbyists had helped write it. Now Murkowski has introduced a resolution to roll back the EPA's endangerment finding altogether, and she has the support of 35 other Republicans – as well as three Democrats.

Murkowski offered a “resolution of disapproval” yesterday that, if passed, would essentially be a Congressional veto of the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, which was a necessary first step before the agency could begin to regulate those emissions. The Murkowski amendment would have stripped that regulatory capability from the EPA, and per the Senate's rules would have required 60 votes to pass. The resolution, on the other hand, only requires 51 votes.

The "resolution of disapproval" Murkowski has now introduced may be a different tactic, but it’s just another attempt by the Senator and her polluter lobbyist pals to gut the Clean Air Act and let King Coal and Big Oil off the hook.

The three Democratic Senators who have supported the resolution Murkowski offered on behalf of big polluters – Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska – have all taken substantial campaign donations from the same polluter lobbyists who helped write the Murkowski amendment and their clients, as we detailed in a report issued earlier this week.

As you can see from these latest developments, it’s extremely important that we keep reminding our Senators that they were elected to represent us, not big polluters. Take action right now to tell your Senators that you expect them to protect your health and wellbeing, not the profits of polluters.

Last week it was revealed that Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska worked with big polluter lobbyists to draft the Dirty Air Act — a.k.a. the Murkowski amendment — which would strip the EPA's authority to regulate global warming pollution from stationary sources like coal plants, oil refineries, and factories, authority granted to the agency by the Clean Air Act. This move to protect the profits of polluting industries instead of the planet is unaccpetable, and we are asking everyone to write to their Senator now to urge them to vote against Murkowski's big polluter amendment.

Murkowski’s spokesman, Robert Dillon, is now claiming that they have secured a Democratic cosponsor for the Dirty Air Act. Kate Sheppard, an investigative reporter from Mother Jones, speculated that five Democrats were the most likely to have partnered with Murkowski on the amendment.

All of these Democrats have a history of taking polluter campaign cash, so today we sent a letter to each of them asking them to make it clear where they stand. We also released a report detailing the campaign contributions that these five Democratic Senators have taken from the lobbying clients of Jeffrey Holmstead and Roger Martella, the DC influence-peddlers accused of funneling campaign cash to Senator Murkowski at the same time that they were pushing and helping write the Dirty Air Act.

• Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Mary Landrieu has directly received $152,668 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Blanche Lincoln, who is the Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee and has jurisdiction over clean energy legislation moving through the Senate, has directly received $139,766 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Jim Webb of Virginia (letter PDF)
  Since 2005, Senator Jim Webb has directly received $25,700 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Byron Dorgan of North Dakota (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Byron Dorgan has directly received $119,446 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Ben Nelson of Nebraska (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Ben Nelson has directly received $65,770 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.

All told, these five Senators have directly received $503,350 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees, since 1997. Read the full report here.

We can’t let polluter lobbyists and their allies in Congress gut the Clean Air Act. Take action now to tell your Senator to vote NO on the Murkowski amendment.

*Note: All data for this report comes from FEC records obtained by www.opensecrets.org. Contributions received from Jeffrey Holmstead, Roger Martella, the PACs and employees of Bracewell Giuliani, Sidley Austin, the National Alliance of Forest Owners, the Alliance of Food Associations, the Ameren Corporation, Arch Coal, CSX Corporation, Duke Energy, Edison Electric, the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, Energy Future Holdings, Mirant Corporation, the Portland Cement Association, Progress Energy, the Salt River Project, and Southern Company were all included in this report.

When I wrote "big polluters are now on the offensive to protect their profits, and their allies in Congress are only too happy to help them," I was actually under the assumption that Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski was just taking her cues from polluter lobbyists. But it turns out that she actually worked with lobbyists who represent "some of the worst polluters in the nation" while writing the amendment she was planning to propose next week that would strip the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, according to Brendan Demelle over at DesmogBlog.

Update: Politico has some new revelations about how deeply involved the lobbyists were in writing the Murkowski amendment. According to the article, they "led" a meeting in which they "walked Senate staffers through the details of the amendment."

Our own Kert Davies has a great quote in Demelle’s post, which also sheds some light on just why Murkowski might be in bed with corporate polluters whose interests are definitely not those of the people Murkowski ostensibly represents:

"This Murkowski rider should be called the Protect Dirty Polluters amendment, especially since we now know that it was written by polluter lobbyists," Kert Davies, Director of the new PolluterWatch project at Greenpeace, told me today.

"If this amendment passed, it would be a get out of jail free card for the worst polluters from Big Oil and Big Coal," Davies said.

And who better to deliver this gift to the carbon barons?  A darling of the Carbon Club, Sen. Murkowski has received $470,000 in campaign contributions from dirty energy and mining interests since 2005, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This just points out the obvious: Big polluters hold an inordinate amount of influence over our elected representatives. Our pockets may not be as deep as theirs, but we have the numbers – and we need to push back hard. Only overwhelming grassroots demand for climate solutions can overcome corporate polluters' money.

Sign our petition to call on the Senators who were elected to represent you to vote in your interest, not in the interest of corporate polluters.

We sent a letter to Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate’s ethics panel, stating, “We think the public deserves at least an inquiry from the Senate Committee on Ethics into the depth of the relationship between Senator Murkowski’s staff and these two lobbyists.” So there’s obviously more to come on this story. Stay tuned. And in the meantime, sign our petition and help us push back against the polluter lobbyists.

In July 2008, Greenpeace and Cascadia Wildlands Project filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service alleging that the agency had violated environmental laws in the planning of four logging projects in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, one of the chief habitats of the rare Islands wolf. Today, the two groups, along with the Tongass Conservation Society, have again filed suit to protect the Islands wolf. We're asking a federal court to stop the so-called Logjam timber project from moving forward.

The Logjam project would allow logging of 3,422 acres on Prince of Wales Island, which has already been subject to heavy logging since the 1950s. In order to move an estimated 73 million more board feet of timber out of the area, 22 miles of new roads would be built. This means that yet again the Forest Service is allowing an ill-conceived timber project to move forward despite the fact that it greatly imperils wildlife like the Islands wolf, the wolves’ primary prey, Sitka black-tailed deer, and local salmon populations.

The following series of images shows the character of the forest already impacted by previous logging (plus natural fragmentation and lower quality forest), followed by the same shots with logging unit boundaries drawn in by hand by our own intrepid Alaska-based forest campaigner, Larry Edwards, as accurately as possible from project maps.



You can check these images out in a larger format here. Read a whole bunch more about the lawsuit and the environmental laws that are violated by the Forest Service's flawed environmental impact statement (EIS) here.

Last month, even as the Copenhagen climate talks were sinking further and further into chaos, a bit of welcome climate news came our way when the EPA finally issued its official ruling that greeenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare. This finding compels the agency to regulate those emissions.

Predictably, big polluters are now on the offensive to protect their profits, and their allies in Congress are only too happy to help them.

The Senate will soon vote on the “Murkowski amendment,” so called because it was proposed by Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski on behalf of big polluters. (The vote is currently scheduled for January 20th, but that can change.) The amendment was proposed as what’s called a “rider” to a completely unrelated bill – a bill that has nothing to do with the climate whatsoever, but instead is intended to raise the ceiling on US public debt. This is a blatant and concerted effort by polluting industries and their allies in Congress to gut the Clean Air Act and delay efforts to reduce GHG emissions. We’ve got to stop them.

We can’t let polluting industries lock us in to several more years of dirty fossil fuels. We need policies that will move us toward taking the actions necessary to stop global warming and kickstart an energy revolution, not policies that strip us of one of the key tools we have available for reining in emissions. You can help by writing to your Senator and letting them know that you expect them to represent you, not polluters, and that you expect them to vote against Murkowski’s big polluter amendment.

The eleven climate activists who made history when they pulled off a banner hang at Mount Rushmore last July appeared in court today for sentencing. They all pled guilty to the charge of "Climbing Mount Rushmore" and received a fine of $460 each. They will also perform 50-100 hours of community service in the National Park system depending on their individual sentences. The judge requested that some or all of that service be performed at Mt. Rushmore.

There had been three additional charges originally brought against the activists – Basil Tsimoyianis, Brian Jenkins, Cy Wagoner, Hope Kaye, Jessica Miller, Joe Smyth, Madelaine Gardner, Mary Sweeters, Matt Leonard, Noah Mace, and Simran McKenna – but those were all dismissed. The charges against Greenpeace were also dropped.


One of the activists, Matt Leonard, was sentenced to 2 days of jail time because he has a history of standing up for what he believes in through civil disobedience. It's disappointing that he'll be going to jail for standing up for the climate, but all the more reason not to let the message the Rushmore Eleven were trying to send to President Obama get lost in the noise. I'll let Matt tell it as he told Democracy Now! right after the event: