Greenpeace

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: