How simple is this environmental destruction?
It couldn't be much simpler than Bill McKibben explained.....if you care, please read the Rolling Stone's article:
350.org co-founder Bill McKibben just
published an article in Rolling Stone about President Obama and the Keystone XL
tar sands pipeline that I hope you can take some time today to read.
It’s an important reflection on President
Obama’s climate legacy thus far, and essential reading as we all prepare for the
home stretch of the fight against Keystone XL. You can
read it here, and after you do please give your feedback on
what our next steps to stop the pipeline should be:
It comes down to this: The President’s actions
speak louder than his words. And it’s time for our actions to speak louder
too.
In this article, Bill starts a conversation
that needs your input.
For the past two years we’ve been pushing
President Obama to reject Keystone XL based on the strength of his climate
promises: though infrequent, when he speaks about climate change the
President can do so with clarity and moral force.
But as time has gone on, those words have
been undermined by actions like supporting the southern leg of Keystone XL,
cheerleading fracking wells and auctioning off huge chunks of the west to the
coal industry. In response to these things, our movement has pushed itself to
new heights: from the Tar Sands Blockade taking to the trees of Texas to resist
the southern leg of Keystone XL, to courageous actions against fracking
nationwide and a unified front against coal exports across the West.
Now we need to push ourselves a little
further. Since the President’s climate speech this summer where he laid
out a climate test for Keystone XL — “the net effects of the pipeline’s impact
on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project
is allowed to go forward” — a series of revelations have raised alarms.
Despite the weighty evidence that Keystone XL is the key to unlocking the tar
sands, we’ve learned that big oil got to hand-pick the companies in charge of
the first Keystone review — a review that concluded (unconvincingly) that the
pipeline wouldn’t impact the climate. Today we found out that one of those
companies is a dues-paying member of 5 big oil front groups pushing to approve
Keystone. At the same time, the President is keeping a key aide who opposes
Keystone XL from having any input on the pipeline.
Bill’s article clearly addresses the President’s record on the
big climate issues of his two terms, and lays down a challenge to us, the
grassroots climate movement, to push the President harder than
ever.
In 2014, 350.org will be taking up that
challenge. But to do so, we need to chart a course together. After you read
Bill’s article, I hope you can offer your feedback on what we can do together
next year to put the pressure on President Obama like never before.
350.org’s power lies entirely in the
collective strength of our grassroots network -- your input and ideas will shape
what comes next.
Can you take some time to read Bill McKibben’s
article on the President and the pipeline?
Click here to read the
article
Some ideas are already in the works, others
are dreams on the horizon. Between now and the start of 2014 we need to look
within ourselves and decide what kind of courage we are willing to show to stop
Keystone XL and keep the fossil fuels in the ground, where they can’t do any
more harm to our climate and communities.
For the past two years, this movement has
risen to every challenge with grace and courage. As the President’s decision
approaches, I know that we will rise again.
Many thanks,
Duncan
Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story
The president has said the right things about climate change – and has taken
some positive steps. But we're drilling for more oil and digging up more carbon
than ever
December 17, 2013 9:00 AM ET
Two
years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the White
House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we carried featured
quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: "Time to end the tyranny of oil"; "In my
administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow."
Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then,
there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely
tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the
two years since, it's looked more and more like they were right – that in our
hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof
of how he really feels.
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy,
a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass
Saudi Arabia as the planet's biggest oil producer and Russia as the world's
biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we've begun
to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We
are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming
machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon
brakes, America is revving the engine.
You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has driven that
boom, and in part you'd be right. But that's not what Obama himself would say.
Here's Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last year, in a speech that
historians will quote many generations hence. It is to energy what Mitt Romney's
secretly taped talk about the 47 percent was to inequality. Except that Obama
was out in public, boasting for all the world to hear:
"Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open up
millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We're
opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We've
quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We've added enough
new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some. . . . In fact,
the problem . . . is that we're actually producing so much oil and
gas . . . that we don't have enough pipeline capacity to transport all of it
where it needs to go."
Actually,
of course, "the problem" is that climate change is spiraling out of control.
Under Obama we've had the warmest year in American history – 2012 – featuring a
summer so hot that corn couldn't grow across much of the richest farmland on the
planet. We've seen the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape
Hatteras, North Carolina, and the largest wind field ever measured, both from
Hurricane Sandy. We've watched the Arctic melt, losing three quarters of its
summer sea ice. We've seen some of the largest fires ever recorded in the
mountains of California, Colorado and New Mexico. And not just here, of course –
his term has seen unprecedented drought and flood around the world. The typhoon
that just hit the Philippines, according to some meteorologists, had higher wind
speeds at landfall than any we've ever seen. When the world looks back at the
Obama years half a century from now, one doubts they'll remember the health care
website; one imagines they'll study how the most powerful government on Earth
reacted to the sudden, clear onset of climate change.
And what they'll see is a president who got some stuff done, emphasis on
"some." In his first term, Obama used the stimulus money to promote green
technology, and he won agreement from Detroit for higher automobile mileage
standards; in his second term, he's fighting for EPA regulations on new
coal-fired power plants. These steps are important – and they also illustrate
the kind of fights the Obama administration has been willing to take on: ones
where the other side is weak. The increased mileage standards came at a moment
when D.C. owned Detroit – they were essentially a condition of the auto
bailouts. And the battle against new coal-fired power plants was really fought
and won by environmentalists. Over the past few years, the Sierra Club and a
passel of local groups managed to beat back plans for more than 100 new power
plants. The new EPA rules – an architecture designed in part by the Natural
Resources Defense Council – will ratify the rout and drive a stake through the
heart of new coal. But it's also a mopping-up action.
Obama loyalists argue that these are as much as you could expect from a
president saddled with the worst Congress in living memory. But that didn't mean
that the president had to make the problem worse, which he's done with stunning
regularity. Consider:
• Just days before the BP explosion, the White House opened much of the
offshore U.S. to new oil drilling. ("Oil rigs today generally don't cause
spills," he said by way of explanation. "They are technologically very
advanced.")
• In 2012, with the greatest Arctic melt on record under way, his
administration gave Shell Oil the green light to drill in Alaska's Beaufort Sea.
("Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic
opportunities it presents," the president said.)
• This past August, as the largest forest fire in the history of the Sierra
Nevadas was burning in Yosemite National Park, where John Muir invented modern
environmentalism, the Bureau of Land Management decided to auction 316 million
tons of taxpayer-owned coal in Wyoming's Powder River basin. According to the
Center for American Progress, the emissions from that sale will equal the carbon
produced from 109 million cars.
Even on questions you'd think would be open-and-shut, the administration has
waffled. In November, for instance, the EPA allowed Kentucky to weaken a crucial
regulation, making it easier for mountaintop-removal coal mining to continue. As
the Sierra Club's Bruce Nilles said, "It's dismaying that the Obama
administration approved something even worse than what the Bush administration
proposed."
All these steps are particularly toxic because we've learned something else
about global warming during the Obama years: Most of the coal and gas and oil
that's underground has to stay there if we're going to slow climate change.
Though the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 was unquestionably the great
foreign-policy failure of Obama's first term, producing no targets or timetables
or deals, the world's leaders all signed a letter pledging that they would keep
the earth's temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius. This is not
an ambitious goal (the one degree we've raised the temperature already has
melted the Arctic, so we're fools to find out what two will do), but at least it
is something solid to which Obama and others are committed. To reach that
two-degree goal, say organizations such as the Carbon Tracker Initiative, the
World Bank, the International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, HSBC and just about everyone else who's looked at the question,
we'd need to leave undisturbed between two-thirds and four-fifths of the
planet's reserves of coal, gas and oil.
The Powder River Basin would have been a great place to start, especially
since activists, long before the administration did anything, have driven down
domestic demand for coal by preventing new power plants. But as the "Truth Team"
on barack obama.com puts it, "building a clean future for coal is an integral
part of President Obama's plan to develop every available source of American
energy."
And where will the coal we don't need ourselves end up? Overseas, at record
levels: the Netherlands, the U.K., China, South Korea. And when it gets there,
it slows the move to cleaner forms of energy. All told, in 2012, U.S. coal
exports were the equivalent of putting 55 million new cars on the road. If we
don't burn our coal and instead sell it to someone else, the planet doesn't
care; the atmosphere has no borders.
As
the administration's backers consistently point out, America has cut its own
carbon emissions by 12 percent in the past five years, and we may meet our
announced national goal of a 17 percent reduction by decade's end. We've built
lots of new solar panels and wind towers in the past five years (though way
below the pace set by nations like Germany). In any event, building more
renewable energy is not a useful task if you're also digging more carbon energy
– it's like eating a pan of Weight Watchers brownies after you've already
gobbled a quart of Ben and Jerry's.
Let's lay aside the fact that climate scientists have long since decided
these targets are too timid and that we'd have to cut much more deeply to get
ahead of global warming. All this new carbon drilling, digging and burning the
White House has approved will add up to enough to negate the administration's
actual achievements: The coal from the Powder River Basin alone, as the
commentator Dave Roberts pointed out in
Grist, would "undo all of
Obama's other climate work."
The perfect example of this folly is the Keystone XL pipeline stretching
south from the tar sands of Canada – the one we were protesting that November
day. The tar sands are absurdly dirty: To even get oil to flow out of the muck
you need to heat it up with huge quantities of natural gas, making it a
double-dip climate disaster. More important, these millions of untouched acres
just beneath the Arctic Circle make up one of the biggest pools of carbon on
Earth. If those fields get fully developed, as NASA's recently retired senior
climate scientist James Hansen pointed out, it will be "game over" for the
climate.
Obama has all the authority he needs to block any pipelines that cross the
border to the U.S. And were he to shut down Keystone XL, say analysts, it would
dramatically slow tar-sands expansion plans in the region. But soon after taking
office, he approved the first, small Keystone pipeline, apparently without any
qualms. And no one doubts that if a major campaign hadn't appeared, he would
have approved the much larger Keystone XL without a peep – even though the oil
that will flow through that one pipe will produce almost as much carbon as he
was theoretically saving with his new auto-mileage law.
But the fight to shut down the pipeline sparked a grassroots movement that
has changed the culture of environmentalism – but not, so far, the culture of
the White House. For me, the most telling moment came a month or two ago when it
emerged that the president's former communications director, Anita Dunn, had
taken a contract to flack for the pipeline.
The reason for fighting Keystone all along was not just to block further
expansion of the tar sands – though that's required, given the amount of carbon
contained in that expanse of Alberta. We also hoped that doing the right thing
would jump-start Washington in the direction of real climate action. Instead,
the effort necessary to hold off this one pipeline has kept environmentalists
distracted as Obama has opened the Arctic and sold off the Powder River Basin,
as he's fracked and drilled. It kept us quiet as both he and Mitt Romney spent
the whole 2012 campaign studiously ignoring climate change.
We're supposed to be thrilled when Obama says something, anything, about
global warming – he gave a fine speech this past June. "The question," he told a
Georgetown University audience, is "whether we will have the courage to act
before it's too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world
that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your
grandchildren. As a president, as a father and as an American, I'm here to say
we need to act." Inspiring stuff, but then in October, when activists pressed
him about Keystone at a Boston gathering, he said, "We had the climate-change
rally back in the summer." Oh.
In fact, that unwillingness to talk regularly about climate change may be the
greatest mistake the president has made. An account in
Politico last
month described his chief of staff dressing down Nobel laureate and then-Energy
Secretary Steven Chu in 2009 for daring to tell an audience in Trinidad that
island nations were in severe danger from rising seas. Rahm Emanuel called his
deputy Jim Messina to say, "If you don't kill Chu, I'm going to." On the plane
home, Messina told Chu, "How, exactly, was this fucking on message?" It's rarely
been on message for Obama, despite the rising damage. His government spent about
as much last year responding to Sandy and to the Midwest drought as it did on
education, but you wouldn't know it from his actions.
Which
doesn't mean anyone's given up – the president's inaction has actually helped to
spur a real movement. Some of it is aimed at Washington, and involves backing
the few good things the administration has done. At the moment, for instance,
most green groups are rallying support for the new EPA coal regulations.
Mostly, though, people are working around the administration, and with
increasing success. Obama's plan to auction Powder River Basin coal has so far
failed – there aren't any bidders, in large part because citizens in Washington
state and Oregon have fought the proposed ports that would make it cheap to ship
all that coal to Asia. Obama has backed fracking to the hilt – but in state
after state, voters have begun to limit and restrict the technology.
Environmentalists are also taking the fight directly to Big Oil: In October, an
Oxford University study said that the year-old fight for divestment from stock
in fossil-fuel companies is the fastest-growing corporate campaign in
history.
None of that cures the sting of Obama's policies nor takes away the need to
push him hard. Should he do the right thing on Keystone XL, a decision expected
sometime in the next six months, he'll at least be able to tell other world
leaders, "See, I've stopped a big project on climate grounds." That could, if he
used real diplomatic pressure, help restart the international talks he has let
lapse. He's got a few chances left to show some leadership.
But even on this one highly contested pipeline, he's already given the oil
industry half of what it wanted. That day in Oklahoma when he boasted about
encircling the Earth with pipelines, he also announced his support for the
southern leg of Keystone, from Oklahoma to the Gulf. Not just his support: He
was directing his administration to "cut through the red tape, break through the
bureaucratic hurdles and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it
done."
It has: Despite brave opposition from groups like Tar Sands Blockade,
Keystone South is now 95 percent complete, and the administration is in court
seeking to beat back the last challenges from landowners along the way. The
president went ahead and got it done. If only he'd apply that kind of muscle to
stopping climate change.
This story is from the December 19th, 2013 - January 2nd, 2014 issue of
Rolling Stone.
Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/obama-and-climate-change-the-real-story-20131217page=3#ixzz2nmMIOsZx
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![Last week the @[18468761129:274:The Huffington Post] asked: is it cool to wear fur again? Joe Namath's display pretty much gives us our answer. But it's the power of celebrity, even in the form of an elderly football star, that is driving the current boom in fur fashion. The furrier that sold Namath his coat says that his "phone is ringing off the hook" (w new customers) since the Super Bowl.
How celebrity culture is fueling the fur boom, record fur prices, and of course the trapping industry:
http://huff.to/1aY37S6
Photo: Reuters
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