President Barack Obama gave a speech at MIT on Friday and pushed for US leadership on clean energy on Friday, as international deadlines for climate change mitigation loom and a growing number of Americans questions the science of global warming.
At a speech at MIT, Obama said the US faces stiff competition from other countries to develop clean technologies that will power the 21st century (see video clip). “The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy … and I want America to be that nation,” Obama said.
The US is also facing challenges at home. On Thursday, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that only 57 per cent of Americans believe there is solid scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 per cent in 2007.
Since public perception of climate change is more messed up than ever, we have our work cut out for us. First of all, we have tomorrow’s climate action day. Click on the 350 above for more information on that. You still have time to get involved (if you are reading this before the 25th!). It’s called the Day of Climate Action this Saturday, October 24, everywhere. Please join us in the spirit of 350, wherever you are. (Find an action near you at 350.org.)
Some people are using October 24th to protest what the government has come up with to fight climate change.
Groups Use 350’s Big Day to Fight Cap-and-Trade
International day of climate action on Saturday opposes market-based approaches to capping global warming emissions.
350.org is taking a big-tent approach to activism on its International Day of Climate Action this Saturday, inviting anyone who wants to help to join a climate-change demonstration, or create one of their own.
That open invitation means not everyone will be pushing the same message. In fact, a trio of groups will use the day, and the number 350, to highlight their opposition to market-based approaches to capping global warming emissions. In other words, to oppose cap-and-trade, the mechanism integral to the clean energy bill in Congress and to the United Nations approach.
Those groups-Rising Tide North America, Carbon Trade Watch, and the Camp for Climate Action-recently launched 350reasons.org, a collection of reasons why they oppose emissions trading. At climate-day events on Saturday they’ll be handing out pamphlets (sorry, “zines”), detailing some of those reasons. They’ve also promised a “video report,” to be released soon. They’ve essentially taken a no-compromise approach to climate action, preferring to defeat a flawed plan rather than see it succeed and hope it can be fixed later on.
“We’re trying to say there’s no way to reach 350 parts per million through carbon trading,” said Rising Tide’s Brihannala Morgan, a U.C. Berkeley graduate student. “It’s a false solution.”
Maybe, maybe not. Unfortunately, instead of giving us something all the environmentally-inclined can get behind, the Senate and Congress has given us a very debatable quasi-solution to energy and climate mitigation. It’s very corporate, it’s very much friendly to coal and natural gas and even oil drilling. But, it’s being supported by some. First, the opposers, which includes PDA, who Grist forgot to name.
On October 21, Progressive Democrats of America finalized a months-long process with their endorsement of direct carbon pricing, with revenue recycling as the preferred method for reducing carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Read the statement here.
Among the 350 reasons [it's being opposed]:
• Carbon Trading means more coal. The site notes that the Waxman-Markey energy bill passed by the House included not just cap-and-trade but provisions to allow 43 new coal plants.
• It perpetuates the dominance of rich countries over poor.
• Carbon trading is based on an ideological belief in the omnipotence of the market.
• Carbon markets are fundamentally undemocratic.
I don’t vouch personally for any of those points except the first one. It certainly does mean more coal. But that’s not because of cap and trade. It’s because that was written into the bill as a valid source of energy for the future, when it clearly is not. In fact, all coal plants have to be closed by 2020 or at the latest, 2030.
Climatologist James Hansen opposes cap-and-trade. He says the proposed UN plan is “guaranteed to fail.”
Unless he can really see into the future I don’t take any claims like “guaranteed to fail” seriously. He’s not an economist.
Actually, the group has 450 reasons at the moment, Morgan said; it’s working to edit them down.
350.org founder Bill McKibben says the point of Saturday’s events was never to choose specific policies, but to build a broad movement demanding that leaders reverse the rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. For too long, he said, the climate problem has been a debate between experts-scientists, economists, and policy wonks.
“There’s been no movement to back them up, no counter-pressure big enough to stand up to the unrelenting pressure from vested interest,” he said last week. “We’re helping provide the popular part of that movement.”
While 350.org doesn’t take positions on specific policy strategies such as cap-and-trade, it shares the sense of urgency of the no-cap-and-trade groups. For that matter, most people working to push a climate bill through Congress share the same sense of urgency. Most readily admit that any bill that can pass through Congress will be too weak to stop climate change. But they would prefer to get started rather than to insist on a perfect bill.
“We have to start some place and we have to start now,” Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, said in response to a Rising Tide campaign last month.
350.org organizers say they’re OK with off-message groups joining Saturday’s events.
“We encouraged lots of different groups to join,” said May Boeve, a 350.org partnerships director. “We’ve cast a very large net.”
Those groups will include churches, performance artists, and extreme athletes. They will include Chinese businessmen holding a black-tie gala in Shanghai, an odd partner for the 350reasons.org groups critical of corporate influence.
When I asked McKibben about how to engage the ‘no-compromise’ types last week, he said it was too soon to fight over plans. No legislation would be sufficient until the public was making more noise on the climate emergency.
“It’s too early to make calls on what happens with the legislation, because we haven’t built a movement to push that process as hard as it needs to be pushed,” he said. “Politicians aren’t feeling pressure either in Washington or in Copenhagen to do more than the minimum. We need to provide that pressure.
“Another way to say that is, we need to give people who want to do the right thing some room to do it. Barack Obama has not laid his cards on the table yet. We need to give him some maneuvering room, to show him that people have his back, not just here but all over the world.”
The question, then, seems to be whether 350reasons.org and the like will amplify the pressure on political leaders, or fracture it.
**The main problem with Maria Cantwell and John Larson’s bills is that they don’t provide for clean energy and clean green jobs.
We need those things, so maybe they can come in the form of amendments.
ACTION ALERT FROM PDA
350 ppm Is the Goal in Copenhagen
Call Now
President Obama will attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, in December, where negotiations will be undertaken to fight catastrophic climate change.
We are grateful that we don’t have to convince this president that accelerated climate change, caused by humans, is a real threat to life on earth.
We also have our work cut out for us.
President Obama has let Congress proceed with cap and trade as the primary mechanism to combat global warming. We (and most economists) think there is a far superior way to address rising carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere–direct carbon pricing with revenue recycling.
Let President Obama know that we hope he will lead the world in setting the crucial target of 350 ppm as the upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and will entertain the better mechanism for achieving those goals–direct carbon pricing (gradually increasing carbon fees imposed upstream on coal, oil and gas producers) with revenue recycling to households.
Click on GO in the Call Now box, above right, for the phone number and talking points.
Here is the statement from PDA describing their reasoning. I voted for it, and I think it’s a better way forward than cap and trade.
However, cap and trade is better than nothing in terms of going to Copenhagen with a firm statement of our intentions FOR ONE MAIN REASON which is explained below.
Today on Democracy Now, one of the guests was the Australian scientist Tim Flannery, chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council and author of the international bestseller The Weather Makers. Here’s an exchange with one of the show’s hosts:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And yet, there are some members of the environmental movement here in the United States who question the use of the cap and trade as a means of addressing the problem. Could you respond to those concerns?
TIM FLANNERY: Sure. Look, cap and trade, by itself, is not enough, but it is essential in terms of these international negotiations. And one way of showing that is to look at the alternatives. Just say the US went with a carbon tax. That would leave the President in a position where he’d be going to Copenhagen and saying, “Look, we’ve got a carbon tax, but we’ve got no idea really what it’s going to do in terms of our emissions profile.” So, countries would just say, “Well, what are you actually pledging to? What are you—how are you going to deal with your emissions?” You know, the only method, really, to allow countries to see transparently what other countries intend to do and then share the burden equally is through a cap-and-trade system. So it’s not enough to deal with emissions overall, but it is an essential prerequisite for any global deal on climate change. . . . .
The US—I know the bill isn’t perfect. I know there’s a lot of giveaways in it, and I know a lot of people aren’t happy about provisions for subsidies for nuclear power and so forth. But we just have to get moving on this. We have to empower the president of the most powerful nation on earth to be able to negotiate and lead. And cap and trade is really about that.
And besides, I really do have faith that that system will bring about the reductions of 14 or 17 percent below 2005 levels that it pledges. It’s a comprehensive bill. In the agricultural area, it is really good. It does things that no other nation has really looked at doing.
So, could I just make a personal plea to Americans to support this bill? Imperfect as it is, it is a first absolutely essential step for this country to engage and lead and empower others in other parts of the world. “
Source – DemocracyNow!
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