Thousands of people from Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. are calling for a science-based cap on global warming pollution in 2009.
If you love it, then you better PUT A CAP ON IT… Enjoy the video!
Lead Vocals: Gabbi Winick
Lyrics by: Kirsten Collings
Cross-posted from: here
Typically, the health care industry, the automotive industry, and the energy industry have teamed up with Republicans on major issues in Washington. For many years, these alliances have derailed health care reform, bold fuel economy standards, and significant legislation to combat climate change. It would appear these special interests have done a complete 360.
President Barack Obama gathered at the White House with the health care industry on May 11th announcing a commitment to cut 2 trillion in costs in 10 years. A week after, Obama appeared with the major car companies, announcing an increase of fuel economy standards of passenger cars to 39 mpg by 2016. Days later, a climate change bill passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. The bill was supported by energy companies including Duke Energy and Excelon. Well, this is a change. Contrary to what Obama would have us believe, the change is smaller in reality than it’s written on paper.
For some strange reason, the Republicans have decided to stop making sense. Their arguments over health care, fuel efficient cars, and global warming amongst other issues are so blatantly irrational, they’ve reduced their party to an irrelevance. Even worse, they’re attempting to legislate as though the American people have given them control of the entire government. Not surprisingly, big business bolted. Their once reliable and seemingly rational ally lost all sense of reality. Facing the prospect of universal health care, strong fuel economy mandates, and a tough cap on greenhouse gas emissions, they crossed the isle.
This involved making compromises and meeting Democratic lawmakers halfway on major issues. In their eyes, corporations would rather bite the bullet than swallow the grenade. Democrats would prefer easily won battles over hard fought wars. Why expend your political capital on a single issue you might lose on when you can make it appear to the public you’ve won big while holding hands with longtime opponents?
The new 39 mpg fuel economy standards by 2016 may appear bold. Compare them to the rest of the world. China’s average cars had to meet a standard of 35.8 mpg in 2008, nevermind passenger! In Japan and the EU, the standards are even greater right now. Somehow, some way, our automakers will find the “technological innovation” to meet the standards in 2016 that foreign companies are meeting right now. In order to get off foreign oil, we must do better.
Consider the climate change bill. The most effective way to manage a cap and trade bill is to auction off 100% of the pollution permits, as President Obama originally called for. This forces the polluting industries to pay, and then the revenues can be returned to the American people to offset higher energy costs. On the condition that companies such as Excelon and Duke Energy support the bill, the vast majority of the permits are being given away for free to the polluters. Democratic lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce Committee such as Rick Boucher of Virginia have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the coal industry. Not surprisingly, he has led the charge on weakening the bill, and will continue to do so in a way that threatens to render it ineffective at preventing catastrophic climate change.
Since the EPA has declared carbon dioxide is a health hazard, the executive branch has the authority to regulate the pollutant if it so chooses. If Obama truly wanted a strong climate bill, he could use this possibility to bully lawmakers and big business into supporting a stronger bill that places American interests above the coal interests. The alternative to a weak climate bill could be the EPA taking matters into its own hands. Obama has been very hands off, fine with allowing the coal industry to write the bill.
The battle over health care will come soon in Congress, and progressive advocates will face their own hardships in achieving meaningful legislation. How $2 trillion dollars in savings would be achieved was left to the imagination of the public. As the AP noted “the specifics, industry officials said, would come later.” When put into context, the specifics of the fuel economy standards and the climate bill are far from welcome.
The small steps President Obama is taking on these issues are far preferable to the backwards thinking of the previous administration. What’s not right is painting the picture to the American public that Washington is taking major steps to confront global warming, energy independence, and health care. This is simply a political game being used to keep the approval ratings steady. It’s working, and Obama along with the Democratic party will likely be reelected in 2010 and 2012. Much to Rush Limbaugh’s dismay, Obama will succeed. But given the monumental challenges we face, and the half-hearted measures being used to confront them, will we?
WASHINGTON, May 21, 2009
Cross-posted from: here
Our relationship with China moving forward is going to be extremely crucial when it comes to forging a new global climate treaty. The Chinese and the US are by far the worlds two largest polluters, together responsible for somewheres around 50% of global warming emissions. Any global treaty that doesn’t involve both the US and China is an empty treaty. This stalemate has been the tale of global efforts to tackle climate change. The US won’t act unless China will act. China won’t act since the US won’t act, and it’s still a developing country using coal to industrialize. China says the US needs to act as well, and that there needs to be compensation for adaptation and technology transfer needed. It’s a situation where these two carbon behemoths need to sit down and hammer out an agreement between themselves. I’m aware there are a number of summits between the two countries going on this year, leading up to the final forging of a new treaty in Copenhagen in December.
The personnel that President Obama is appointing to negotiate with China on the climate issue are some of the most important appointments of his administration. We now are about to have our ambassador to China. It’s the Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who also happens to be a Republican. I’ve written before about how not all Republicans are bad on environmental and energy issues, just most of them. Jon Huntsman appears to be one of the Republicans who gets it. Huntsman added his state to an ambitious regional greenhouse gas initiative effort in the West to reduce emissions 15% below 2005 levels by 2020. If you want to get an even better idea of Huntsman’s entire body of work when it comes to energy, check out his priorities on energy security. The additional thing that impressively stands out to me is a renewable electricity standard that will get Utah 20% of it’s power from renewables by 2025.
I find it fittingly ironic that with all the partisanship in DC, all the bickering on tv with conservative talk show hosts, and a climate debate that has consistently seen Democrats on one side, and Republicans on the other….our best chance of achieving a global climate treaty this year may come down to a Republican Governor from Utah. I don’t know if that offends the environmentalists or the Republicans more, but I think it’s a good thing. This shouldn’t be a bipartisan issue, and Jon Huntsman’s record is testament to that.
Here’s the article: here
“This is 2009. We’ve got 41 years in this deal, and we shouldn’t be so worried about the first 10 years.”
—Congressman Mike Doyle, Environment and Energy Daily, May 7, 2009
I had no plans yesterday morning as I woke up and turned on my computer to spend the afternoon in the D.C. office of Congressman Mike Doyle. But then I read this line in an article on the status of efforts to cobble together a piece of climate legislation in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
I remember my physical reaction as I read these words, my head shaking back and forth, some trembling and an upwelling of deep, livid anger. “This is the last straw,” I remember thinking.
And involuntarily in my head, I began singing the words to the Bob Dylan song, Masters of War.
I discovered Bob Dylan and Masters of War in the summer of 1968. I was 18 years old, home from college after my freshman year at Grinnell College. I was working on the Presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy. I had begun doing so after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4th. Then on June 6th, Kennedy was assassinated. All summer, as I worked on the maintenance staff of a local college, the words to Masters of War kept going through my head over and over as I despaired over the state of the world, the state of my country.
“You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins.”
And that’s why I went to Mike Doyle’s office at 2 pm yesterday and told Pat Cavanaugh, his energy staff person, that I was a long-time climate activist on the 18th day of a hunger strike (www.fastingforourfuture.org) for strong climate legislation and that I wasn’t leaving until I met with Doyle.
I’ve done sit-ins before. I and two other people did one in 2002 in New Jersey when I was a Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate. We sat in the offices of one of my opponents, Frank Lautenberg, to protest his refusal to allow myself and other “third party” candidates to be part of any debates. After nine hours, we won, and about a week later a nationally-televised C-Span debate was held that included all six candidates who had qualified for this particular race.
And in December of 2007, at the tail end of the long climate emergency fast I did that fall, 20 of us occupied the Capitol Hill office of Senator Mitch McConnell after he led the Senate Republicans in their stripping out of anything and everything having to do with renewable energy from a House-passed energy bill. Two of us, my wife Jane Califf and I, were arrested after spending the day in McConnell’s office because we refused to willingly leave at 6 pm when the office was closed.
But as I sat in Doyle’s office, no one with me, none of the press people who I called showing up to find out what was happening, thinking about what was going to happen at 6 pm, wondering if I had been too impulsive, wondering what would happen if I was arrested–because I was very clear that it was either talk with Doyle or that–wondering, wondering. . . after two hours of sitting, into the office comes Mike Doyle.
I’d never met the guy, so at first I didn’t know it had happened when he arrived. But when he sat down across from me and said something like, “I’m Mike Doyle, what’s up,” I knew it was game time. And for the next half hour I had the most intense, in-your-face, no-holds-barred discussion with an elected official I have ever had.
Doyle’s no dummy, and I have to acknowledge that he’s a strong debater. I didn’t get him to change his mind about the efforts that he and Rick Boucher have been leading to weaken the “discussion draft” of climate legislation Henry Waxman introduced on March 31st. The way Doyle described it, he was doing the bidding of Waxman, carrying water for him by going to the blue dog Democrats to find out what was necessary in order to get a bill out of committee. He also said his main thing was the 15% free emissions permits for steel, cement, aluminum and other energy-intensive industries during a 10-15 year transition period. But when I asked him why he was then supporting the idea that 40% of the permits would be given free to coal companies/utilities (local distribution companies), the best answer he could give was something like this, a very revealing answer:
“If you return money directly to the American people for them to use to pay for higher energy costs in the transition period, they’ll spend it on things like flat screen TV’s. By giving free emissions permits to utilities they can then pass on the savings directly to consumers.”
I wasn’t and am not convinced. Giving money to profit-making coal companies like Duke Power and Peabody is going to end up helping consumers? Please. All it will do is delay the urgently-needed shift from fossil fuels to renewables and efficiency.
By the end of our half-hour discussion, the decibel level had been dialed down several notches, we were agreeing that we wished President Obama was giving much stronger leadership on this issue, and he was telling me that there was some interest among Energy and Commerce committee members in what was being discussed within Ways and Means (carbon tax and/or cap and dividend approaches). As we shook hands and parted company, I thanked him for being willing to talk and he commended me for being a gentleman.
Sometimes you just have to act upon what you feel is right. And it is right to feel outrage over the power that corporate polluters in both parties have over our political process. It’s time to blow the whistle and shine the spotlight on those liars and deceivers.
This morning, Governor O’Malley signed into law legislation to combat global warming and create green jobs in Maryland. The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act, SB 278/HB 315, mandates the strongest economy-wide reduction in global warming pollution of any climate bill in the country.
“This is a landmark moment for Maryland and sends an urgent message to the federal government,” said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “Maryland has done all it can do, now it’s time for Congress to enact a nationwide cap on carbon.”
The bill requires the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25% below 2006 levels by 2020 and directs the Maryland Department of the Environment to craft a plan and a timeline to achieve that goal. With this bill, Maryland joins six states in enacting a legally binding goal for emissions reductions. Maryland’s short term target is the strongest of all the states with legislative commitments to reduce pollution.
Governor O’Malley’s signing of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act today was the culmination of years of sustained efforts from dedicated citizens, business leaders, environmental groups, and religious and health organizations.
The diverse coalition that formed to raise awareness of Maryland’s climate bill — called the Alliance for Global Warming Solutions — included the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Environment Maryland, the Maryland Student Climate Coalition, the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Lutheran Office on Public Policy, Maryland League of Conservation Voters, the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club, and other groups.
The bill signed today is similar to last year’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which did not make it out of the 2008 General Assembly session. The bill that eventually passed was a result of a series of facilitated talks between stakeholders. Leaders within the Maryland climate movement spent several months participating in talks to work out an effective, fair agreement with union and business leaders.
Cross-Posted from HERE
I’ve been blogging consistently about the climate bill written by Congressmen Markey and Waxman which is being considered by the Energy and Commerce Committee. Right now, the bill is in sub-committee and about to be marked up and negotiated on. Although the short term target of 20% by 2025 is not strong enough, moderate and conservative Democrats on the committee are looking to weaken the bill. Right now the main compromise looks as though it’s going to be on emissions targets and permit allocations. Excerpt below..
“The talks suggest that utilities that distribute electricity from coal-fired plants are making progress in their efforts to get free access to 40 percent of the emissions permits, underscoring the challenge lawmakers face in seeking strict limits on carbon dioxide and other contributors to warming.”
Of course, allocating permits to polluters for free really defeats the purpose, which is to make the polluters pay for polluting. The risk of selling permits for free is that utilities raise prices anyways on consumers, but the government has not sold enough permits to offset this increased cost by spending the revenue on energy relief. In otherwards, people are not going to fare any better under 40% permits sold for free than 100% sold for a price. In fact, they may fare worse. It also means it will be harder to hit reductions targets.
However, Congressman John Dingel has predicted a bill will pass in some form because of the fact that the EPA has deemed greenhouse emissions a health hazard, and can exercise the authority to regulate them if Congress does not. In otherwards, if the EPA wanted to right now, they could set their own rules for polluters with their own targets without needing the Congress. Here is what was said regarding this in the article I posted last week…
“EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson cautioned that regulations are not imminent and made clear that the Obama administration would prefer that Congress address the climate issue through a broader “cap-and-trade” program that would limit heat-trapping pollution. But she said it was clear from the EPA analysis “that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations” and steps are needed to curtail the impact. Even if actual regulations are not imminent, the EPA action was seen as likely to encourage action on Capitol Hill. It’s “a wake-up call for Congress”
Cross-Posted from: here
Ordinarily, we don’t think of religion and global warming solutions mixing all that well. However, I’ve noticed in recent years more and more of a voice from the religious community regarding the moral imperative to stopping catastrophic warming. I personally just had a meeting with some members of the Saint Andrews Episcopalian Church in College Park last Monday, where we discussed the issue, and them attending the town hall meeting with Congressman and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer which I’m helping to organize. I’ve also seen in the news recently about how evangelicals, especially younger ones, consider climate change to be an important issue.
Today, I’m focusing on Catholics. There is a website called the Catholic Climate Covenant, which is run by the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change. The CCCC “was launched with the support of both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. The Catholic Coalition on Climate Change supports and complements USCCB’s Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development (formerly, the Department of Social Development and World Peace) and the bishops’ Environmental Justice Program. The Coalition is a membership organization consisting of twelve national Catholic organizations that offers advice and assistance in implementing its programs.”
The Coalition sends regular updates to its growing database of interested Catholics and others of goodwill to keep them informed of its activities and current events. Find the recent and previous updates from CCCC atwww.catholicsandclimatechange.org.
They had an Ad in the New York Times a couple days ago about the need for climage change solutions. On top of this, the pope mentioned in his Easter message the danger of runaway cliamte change. On top of all this, they made the video below on their website about the need for adaptation and mitigation funding for the poor who will be disproportionately affected. This is the explanation on the youtube video’s page…
“After decades of steady progress in reclaiming and advancing the Catholic Churchs efforts to embrace an ethic of environmental stewardship, the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change is ready to launch an unprecedented and historical campaign to take responsibility for our contribution to climate change and do what we do best: be advocates for those who will be left out of the public policy debate on climate change.”
Amen
Cross-Posted from: here
Lobbyists trying to stop the climate bill that is.
$450 million: Amount spent on lobbying and political contributions by
opponents of global warming action in 2008.
52: public spokespersons engaged by polluters and the ideological
right to spread disinformation about global warming online and in the
media.
2,340: Number of paid lobbyists working in Washington on climate
change in 2008.
7 in 8: Proportion of climate lobbyists advocating against climate
action.
$45 million: Amount spent on global warming denial advertising by the
coal industry in 2008.
——————————————————————————————————
As I’ve said before, there is a climate bill being considered in Congress right now, which you can read more about here. I think the people should have a say too. Google your Congressman’s name, and give their office a call saying you want them to support the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Write a letter to the editor supporting Congress to cap carbon and help spark the shift to a clean energy economy. The best thing though, is to just show up. Below is an opportunity for people to have their voice heard inside the halls of Congress. These kinds of activities are also going on Friday in the same place, although the big push is Thursday. If the above numbers indicate anything, it’s that we all need to find a way to have our voice heard on this one. 2 million votes beats 2,000 lobbyists.
RSVP to theteam@energyaction.net or the Facebook event
What: This Thursday’s Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Capitol Hill
Who: The representatives debating the specifics to include in the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, Lobbyists for the utility companies and some of the biggest polluters, testifying before the committee and asking that the permits to pollute be given away to them for free, and hundreds of young people like us reminding the representatives that this is not an option and it is not what we voted them into office to do.
When: Thursday, April 23rd @ 8AM – The hearings are happening all week, but we want to focus our energy when the oil/coal lobbies are presenting. I know 8am is early but if we want to get into the actual hearing room we need to arrive early because the corporate lobbyists paid “supporters” will be sure to get there early to receive the cash.
Where: Rayburn House Office building, Room 2123 (Click here for a map)
Why: At Power Shift, we flooded the halls of congress for the biggest clean energy lobby day in history to demand bold climate legislation for a more sustainable future. We told our representatives what we wanted and they heard us, but will they follow through? This is a chance to show congress that we mean business – our mere presence on the Hill will speak volumes. Come get in the hearing, call constituents in the home districts of those members on committee, pay a visit to their offices, and be outside the office building to rally.
RSVP to theteam@energyaction.net or the Facebook event
Questions? Contact Ethan: Ethan@chesapeakeclimate.org, 202-631-1992