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Friday 02 April 2010

by: Christine Shearer, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

A few weeks ago, 12 states joined in an ongoing lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to block regulation of carbon dioxide, citing faulty scientific data. If we are to judge by an All Headline News report, the faulty data amounts to a misquote in a scientific report and a deliberate misreading of "statistically significant" as "no significant warming." Unfortunately, drawing upon fabricated and exaggerated data to "disprove" climate change is just the latest in a long history of corporate attacks on scientific research to avoid regulation. You may have noticed the pattern: corporations and their supporters say the science is out, then throw out a variety of different studies, researchers and bits of information that "proves" the science is out. These tidbits of supposed evidence never end and that is exactly the point: to get people arguing about the data and not doing something about the problem.

Tracing history, social scientists have identified this tactic, what some have called the "scientific certainty argumentation method," or a SCAM. As science historian Naomi Oreskes pointed out, science is not about certainty, it is about doing rigorous research that can be verified and replicated, establishing areas of consensus and building upon the findings for greater understanding. By demanding absolute certainty as the only acceptable standard for acknowledging global warming, climate change "skeptics" are deliberately ignoring the overwhelming evidence, stacking the deck in their favor since none of the chips are on their side.

This tactic has a long history. In the early 1900s, scientists had accumulated evidence that lead was a neurotoxin, leading to an international ban on its use. The US, however, was not part of this ban. Instead, US manufacturers added lead to gasoline and paint, promoting its use and spreading the toxin throughout the country. Their argument? Prove to us that lead is harmful. By demanding nothing less than 100 percent scientific certainty as a basis for regulation, they were able to keep their products on the market for decades. The same is true of asbestos. And that is why so many areas are still tainted with the stuff and so many became ill and died from their use.

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Thursday 01 April 2010

by: Yana Kunichoff, t r u t h o u t | Report

In the wake of President Obama's announcement of his plans for large-scale offshore drilling, Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) is laying the groundwork for urgent climate change legislation - and the fault lines of the Senate climate debate are becoming clear.

Kerry, along with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), is currently working on the unenviable task of constructing a climate bill that will have enough support to overcome a GOP filibuster, but also not alienate progressives and environmental groups. The main issues of contention are pollution permits, pre-emption, offshore drilling, natural gas versus coal and fees for oil companies.

President Obama's release of new national offshore oil-drilling plans Wednesday could jeopardize the votes of ten key Democratic senators from coastal states who have strongly opposed any plans to drill in American waters. Obama's plan would open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling and end a moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast.

"Drilling off the Virginia coast would endanger many of New Jersey's beaches and vibrant coastal economies," said Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) in a press release Wednesday. "Giving Big Oil more access to our nation's waters is really a Kill, Baby, Kill policy: it threatens to kill jobs, kill marine life and kill coastal economies that generate billions of dollars. Offshore drilling isn't the solution to our energy problems, and I will fight this policy and continue to push for 21st century clean energy solutions."

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Tuesday 30 March 2010

by: Hervé Kempf   |  Le Monde

Clothes do not make the man, of course, but a fine appearance inspires respect. That's why it was so critical that the idea of degrowth, so cheerfully reviled by the "growthist" toadies, was hosted in a place imbued by thought. During March 26 to 29, the second conference on economic degrowth was held at the beautiful University of Barcelona.

Opened by the rector, organized by the Catalan capital's Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), the conference brought together over 500 researchers and activists from many European and American countries. We now know that décroissance is called degrowth in English, decrecimiento in Spanish, decreixement in Catalan, and decrescita in Italian.

Why does the word arouse so much interest? Because it poses the radical questions at the heart of ecology once again, questions that the rationales of sustainable development, green growth, and green capitalism have dulled.

By choosing to be "realistic," many environmentalists find themselves green-washing an economic system that is not changing its rationales of human and biosphere destruction. Radicals, growth objectors assert that the crisis at the outset of the third millennium cannot be resolved by continuing along the paths followed since the 19th century.

Freedom of thought against dogma may redeploy itself under this standard, the program of which was defined by another important conference, in Paris, in 2002: "Unmake development; remake the world."

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Tuesday 30 March 2010

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t | Report

On Monday, March 22, Van Jones and Billy Parish appeared together for a presentation entitled "Challenging America: Achieving Sustainability and Justice Through the Green Collar Economy" at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The former Obama administration Green Jobs Adviser, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and author of "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems" and the Yale drop-out founder of the Energy Action Coalition and Clean Energy Corps provided a demonstration of the signature mix of inspirational vision and practical rigor that characterizes both men's work in support of environmental responsibility, diversity, social justice and democracy.

Billy Parish began his presentation by asking whether Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil and David Richmond were present in the hall. No one stood up.

"Brother Billy" - as Van Jones occasionally referred to him - proceeded to provide a rough sketch of his own trajectory from the safety and predictability of a privileged background to the decision to come "off the tracks" and plunge into committed organizing. He compared being alive now to coming of age at the cusp of the agrarian or industrial revolutions - or in the late 1950's, as the civil rights struggle was poised to take off. He described the green economy revolution as the only way to reconcile the crisis in resource availability and the social justice requirement to provide jobs for all the billion people poised to enter the global job market over the next three years. A steady-state economy will exhaust global resources of every kind and provide only 300 million jobs for those billion people, while transforming every system on which our economy depends "from how food is grown and processed, to how energy is delivered, to how we do the laundry" could create jobs for all.

Parish cited specific initiatives in Northern Arizona - the creation of green affordable housing for Navajo elders and a local burger restaurant that serves sustainably raised local food only - as examples of what needs to happen and can happen. He closed his prepared remarks with the reinvocation of the four young African-American freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina who entered the Greensboro Woolworth's and sat down on stools previously reserved exclusively for whites and pointed out that, "Acts of courage inspire courage," that we have a very small window only to reverse climate change, and, finally, that "every single one of us is part of the problem. Every single one of us can be part of the solution."

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Tuesday 30 March 2010

by: Joshua Frank and Christine Shearer, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

If you were told that a coal-fired power plant near your home was going to invest $500 million to upgrade the facility in order to reduce the amount of harmful air pollutants it spews, you would probably think to yourself that it was about time they did something. Air would be cleaned and the risks of pollution-oriented diseases would be reduced. Certainly this has been the position the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken throughout the years, with a brief time-out during the most recent Bush administration.

In November of 1999, at the tail end of the Clinton era, the United States Department of Justice on behalf of the EPA charged seven major US utilities with violating the New Source Review (NSR) requirements of the Clean Air Act. The lawsuits were based on the fact that these power companies had updated their plants without installing the most up-to-date pollution reduction equipment, claiming that these pollution machines had been operating for years without proper emission controls.

In all, 17 power plants across the country were targeted by the EPA and all but one ended up being settled. The companies paid millions and most ended up installing scrubbers at their facilities, a technology that reduces the amount of sulfur dioxide released as coal is burned. Most recently, Obama's EPA has picked up where President Clinton's left off and filed a suit against Westar Energy for failing to abide by NSR requirements at their Jeffrey Energy Center coal plant in Kansas.

Sulfur dioxide is a chemical compound that is released in the burning of coal. It contributes to the formation of acid rain and has numerous negative health effects, including breathing problems, respiratory illness and the aggravation of existing heart and lung disease. Groups most affected by sulfur dioxide exposure include the elderly and children.

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Monday 29 March 2010

by: Stephen Leahy  |  Inter Press Service

Montpellier, France - After the failures in Copenhagen to agree on a new climate protection treaty, and more recently at the Doha meetings on trade in endangered species to prevent bluefin tuna from going extinct, indigenous forest communities may offer examples of sensible governance for shared resources on a small planet.

Hundreds of poor Mexican Zapotec indigenous farmers have become owners of a multi-million-dollar diversified forest industry, offering an important model of a community-based enterprise that supports local people and conserves the natural environment, says David Barton Bray, a professor and associate chair in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University in Miami.

The farmers of Ixtlán de Juarez, a forest community in the Sierra Norte mountains of central Mexico, utilise their strong traditional community values and communal ownership of more than 21,000 hectares of pine and oak forest to run a successful business that benefits the entire community.

There is no private property, and rather than establishing a business to maximise profits, the people of Ixtlán, and in other Zapotec communities of Mexico with similar forest-based enterprises, focus on job creation, reducing emigration to cities and enhancing the overall well-being of the community, Bray told participants at the Smallholder and Community Forestry conference here in Montpellier.