Meanwhile, more and more companies and business groups (Apple, Exelon, PG&E) are dropping their membership in the Chamber and public opposition to the Chambers’ climate change denial is growing. The latest opposition is coming from the high tech sector, where the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and Silicon Valley Joint Venture are running an ad campaign against the Chamber for its opposition. And the Chamber is on the run, having been forced to backpedal on its claims to be the voice of the business community; last week the Chamber claimed to ‘represent’ 3 million businesses, but this week it quietly reduced that number to ‘300,000’ members. Investors are calling for companies that they own shares in to drop their membership in the Chamber, and local Chambers are formally distancing themselves from the US Chamber’s opposition to action on climate change.

As well they should. The Chamber of Commerce is behind the times: most companies have caught up with modern public values on climate change. For nearly ten years, the Carbon Disclosure Project has been surveying the leading global companies for their responses on climate change. In the most recent report issued earlier this year, 82% of the world’s largest 500 companies responded to the questionaire on their carbon emissions, 68% are reporting and tracking their emissions, and 51% have disclosed emissions reduction targets, all to report to investors representing over $55 trillion in capital investments. These companies are implementing global action plans for a carbon-constrained world, but the US Chamber of Commerce representing many if not most of these companies is heading in the opposite direction.

Here’s a note to Corporate America: every single company that claims to be taking climate change seriously yet continues to support the climate-change denying Chamber of Commerce, companies like Cargill, Microsoft (MSFT), Toyota (TM), FedEx (FDX) and Ford (F) – it’s time to come clean.

The US Chamber of Commerce is a national embarrassment, and corporations that continue to support this institution are standing in the way of progress in stopping climate change. It’s time for Chamber members to change or leave.

Today marked one of the final days of the Bangkok UN Climate Negotiations. With the end of this intersessional in sight, the International Youth Delegation (IYD) has officially declared “No Confidence” in the road to Copenhagen.

With youth delegates from over 30 countries engaging in the Bangkok process, the IYD cited pathetically weak targets from the North, alarm that a second commitment period in the Kyoto Protocol will not be secured, and a lack of guarantees for protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests, in its Declaration. The current text of the draft climate deal is so weak and so full of “false solutions” (measures like offsetting that actually make the problem worse) it is unacceptable.

Youth delegates representing each continent addressed the U.N. today, detailing the urgency of the crisis as it affects their communities currently, telling stories of their hope and organizing alongside their denunciation of the state of play in the UN Negotiations.

This week the Annex 1 (rich countries), attempted to kill the Kyoto Protocol (KP). We are nearing upon the end of the current KP term, and a lack of renewing it means that the world would lose the few legally binding international climate agreements it has (as insufficient as they are). The excuse is that the United States will not sign, and therefore the whole thing should be scrapped and an entirely new deal can be struck on its own. It is lunacy to think that this will yield a stronger outcome, and the G77 (the rest of the world) countries are furious. We have always known the US wont sign the KP; the world cannot continue to wait for the US to get on board. In Bali, the U.S. already committed to setting comparable targets to other Annex 1 countries, so the world could deal with the U.S. in the LCA (Long Term Cooperative Action).

This all amounts to a shell game: more dirty delaying tactics from self-interested countries who are content to strip away basic attempts at an international agreement (for example “compliance” – meaning that the U.S. would have international oversight of its targets, or “top-down target setting” – meaning the international community sets carbon targets together based on science, rather than each countries independently setting their targets based on what their fossil fuel extraction industries dictate).

Allowing the U.S. to drag the world out of existing legal obligations is disgraceful. These negotiations are going backwards.

Make no mistake: Our future is being held hostage to interests that have consistently thumbed their noses at the international community and their obligations to the rest of the world. This process has been polluted by self-interested corporations and nations looking to profit off of our crisis. They have been pushing false solutions that exacerbate rather than fix the problem. Not only are the targets set by rich countries weak, but they are deceptive. Rather than representing actual emissions reductions, they contain unacceptable proportions of offsets, which do not reduce emissions, and displace the burden back onto the developing countries of the world.

In the meantime, further language on Indigenous Rights is being removed and diluted from the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) text. “Rights” are being defined as “right to participate,” as opposed to “rights over land and communities”, and existing UN language (such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or UNDRIP, and the principles of Free Prior and Informed Consent or FPIC) is far from being adopted. This has led to major protests all week and this morning youth supported the Indigenous Caucus in a “No Rights?? No REDD!!” demonstration on the front steps of the U.N.

The youth will not accept a dirty deal.

Rights-based language in the text (including UNDRIP and FPIC), no offsets, limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees C and 350 ppm of c02, unconditional legally binding targets for Annex 1 countries of at least 40% reductions by 2020, and a LOT of money for adaptation and technology transfer are just some of the baseline components that must be in the text to even begin to sensibly move forward. Regardless of what governments decide, youth across the world are continuing to organize social movements to build meaningful solutions in their own communities, working on local, national, and international levels. Our hope for the future is in the power of civil society to reshape what is perceived as politically possible.

See the video of the press conference here:

The report also finds that if we don’t take action to rein in the rapid global expansion of agrofuels we will in fact be making these problems worse. Particularly when expanding in rainforest regions, the carbon debt accumulated by agrofuels will take decades or sometimes centuries to pay back.

April 2009: Activists protest agrofuels in California

Read the full report at: http://ran.org/fileadmin/materials/comms/mediacontent/reports/Agrofuels_White_Paper.pdf

cross posted from Grist.

Remember when the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund were constantly making global headlines for their fierce opposition from people’s movements around the world? Well, international Finance Institutions (including the World Bank) are rearing their ugly heads again – this time with the U.N. as their vehicle.

Today, more than 50 social movements, trade unions, environmental groups and NGOs from 17 countries issued a statement at the United Nations in Bangkok, where UNFCCC climate negotiations move into their fifth day.

The groups, which include several large international networks, said that rich countries should acknowledge their historical responsibility and the “ecological and climate debts” they owe to developing countries. “Deep, drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, through domestic measures is part of reparations,” the statement said. “They took much more than their fair share of atmospheric space, and in the process denied the people of developing countries – the people of the South – their rightful share. They must give it back.”

photo: Janet Redman

And they’re right. As colleagues here in Bangkok talk about their newly-homeless families from the floods earlier this week in the Philippines, it is undeniable that the economic prosperity of the North is the gift-that-keeps-on-giving to the South – this time around in the form of devastating climate change. Tom Pickens from Friends of the Earth described it like having a fancy four course meal in an expensive restaurant – and then forcing someone walking by on the street outside to pay.

Reparations for these debts, according to Fabrina Furtado from Jubilee South, also include the “complete restoration of territories and ecosystems, reconstruction of basic infrastructure, recovery of social rights, and the restoration of the well being of the peoples of the South.”

Reparations must come from public sources.

The groups decried alleged attempts by Annex 1 (Northern) countries to “avoid taking full responsibility” for the consequences of their excessive emissions. In their statement, groups expressed strong opposition to giving any role in climate finance or climate programs to the World Bank, regional development banks and other international financial institutions – and emphasized the need for “a new global fund.”

These views are similar to those of the G77 plus China group, a bloc of more than 130 developing countries in the climate negotiations that considers the World Bank inappropriate for channeling developed countries’ financial obligations under the Convention – largely because of its undemocratic and unaccountable governance structure.

The group’s critique of the World Bank and related financial institutions goes even further. Elena Gerebizza of the Italian NGO Campaign for the Reform of the World Bank said, “The World Bank and other international financial institutions are in large part responsible for the current economic, financial and climate crises. We cannot expect them to play a positive role nor to contribute to real solutions.” “On the contrary,” she added, “these institutions have been pushing false solutions, such as the expansion of the carbon market, which increase financial instability and take away space for serious thinking about real solutions for the climate crisis.”

Whew. United States, ready to listen yet?

Too bad it’s such a disappointing day for climate in the US. Today Senators Boxer and Kerry released their first draft of the Senate climate bill, a companion to the House ACES bill passed this past June. It calls for the US to reduce emissions by 20% of 2005 levels by 2020. By comparison, island nations and the world’s least developed countries are calling for 45% emissions reduction from 1990 levels by 2020.

And it gets worse. The Boxer-Kerry draft bill subsidizes carbon capture and storage, a massive, scientifically uncertain boondoggle for coal fired electricity generators. The draft also repeats the most perverse problem in the House ACES bill by authorizing 2 billion tons of CO2 reductions to be achieved through offsets, instead of real emissions reductions.

Part of those offsets will come from a new, dangerous forest carbon market. The sellers of forest offsets will be tenure holders who are not required to operate with the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous peoples. In fact, the forest offsets may not even guarantee the protection of the forest from future logging. The bill would create from scratch a new, risky
commodities market for carbon that could quickly become the largest market in the world, yet offers few specifics on how that market would be regulated.

To be fair, there are some safeguards for forests as well, requiring an increase in carbon stocks for forest offsets. And the ‘Supplemental Emissions Reduction Fund’ is also in the billp; this was the bright spot in the House ACES bill. If executed effectively, the fund could create a marketplace firewall between forest carbon and fossil carbon emissions reductions, and help forest countries to overcome their deep governance problems. The Boxer-Kerry draft bill also offers important incentives to plug in vehicles, renewable energy, and energy efficiency – tackling head on some the US’s lowest hanging fruit in addressing climate change.

But unfortunately, that won’t be enough to stop climate change. While the world is waiting for the US to step up to the plate, the US is still at home wrestling with its coal and oil demons.

The residents of Minneapolis/St. Paul are living near the fancy headquarters of Cargill, the very corporation that is leveling rainforests in Papua New Guinea to expand their palm oil plantations.
What a realization.

Matilda Pilacapio, human rights and environmental activist from Papua New Guinea

It was a deeply significant experience to hear Matilda Pilacapio’s powerful and poignant personal narrative of Cargill’s rainforest destruction in her community. It was heartbreaking to hear the devastation of traditional ways of life, of matrilineal land ownership, of communities held together by forest subsistence being ripped into unsustainable cycles of brutal plantation work, dismantled family structures, polluted rivers, lost ecosystems, undrinkable water, and deceptive contracts that trick people into giving up their ancestral land. It was sobering to hear that the corporation responsible for these atrocities is in the Twin Cities area, and that the people of Papua New Guinea and everywhere are counting on us to take action in our own communities to literally change the world. It was inspiring to realize that we can.
The positive aspect of globalization is that it has united people and information. We live in a time where it is possible to make ripples that reach literally around the world by affecting the corporations and institutions that are in our communities. What an incredible amount of agency we have as Americans.
It has never been clearer to me that as Americans, we have an opportunity (and a responsibility) to use that agency.
After Matilda’s lectures and slides of the effect of oil palm in Papua New Guinea, people would ask, “What can we do?” “I am hoping that you all will set up a strategy with RAN” Matilda said. Now, students and community members are stepping up to start a RAN- Twin Cities chapter. People have already started to raise awareness about oil palm and participate in Global Days of Action with 350.org to highlight the connections between Big Agriculture, deforestation, and climate change. In spite of being busy students, activists, and parents, people are making time to work on this important issue, largely because of the power of Matilda’s words! We are meeting tonight to figure out specifics of how community members want to make a difference here, and I am so excited and honored to see the brilliance of people here stepping it up in their own backyards to protect the land of people like Matilda and the climate we all share.

Hillary V Lehr is the Grassroots Action Manager for the Rainforest Action Network’s Forests Program.

Too many forest fires to even participate in climate talks? It is not looking promising for those in Bangkok that want to use the current momentum behind climate negotiations to curtail deforestation and deforestation’s associated carbon emmissions.

The dreaded climate fluxuation El Nino has officially descended upon Indonesia this year. Memories of the 1997 El Nino fire season remain fresh in Indonesian’s minds as a disaster for their forests, the global climate, and Indonesia’s national pride.

Some see this year’s already horrible fires in South Sumatra as a sign of climate change itself.  Widely cited projections for Indonesia done by the WWF show that Sumatra will have much more intense dry seasons under future climate scenarios, leading to greater intensity and  extent of forest fires. South Sumatra, ground zero for Indonesia’s pulp-and-paper and timber operations, run by industry giants Sinar Mas and Raja Garuda Mas (now officially pontificated as ‘Royal Golden Eagle’), has been struggling with widespread fires the past few months.

Many experts point to changes in land use – associated with the logging and palm oil industries – that increase forest landscapes propensity to burn as a key factor in these fires. In the Sumatran province of Riau alone, 1.6 million hectares of peat and forests are expected to burn this year. These kinds of massive fires are what place Indonesia as the world’s third largest contributor to climate change. Peat lands are the world’s most carbon rich organic material,  when they burn the climate suffers.

Conservationists on the ground say that many of the 2,500 fires spotted this year by NASA have been set illegally by oil palm and pulp and paper companies. This is deforestation in its most damaging form, bad for ecosystems, forest peoples, and the climate. The smoke is so thick, and visibility so curtailed, that the Jambi and Riau airports have been repeatedly shut down this year.

South Sumatra Forest Fires in 2009

RAN’s own Margaret Swink is at the Bangkok meetings, and artfully shows just how high the stakes are for Sumatra’s forests leading up to a post-Kyoto climate treaty in 2012. As climate change makes South Sumatra region even drier during the dry season, and multinational industrial agribusiness makes forests more likely to burn, the negotiators at Bangkok can not even come up with an acceptable definition of ‘forest’.  Yikes.

David Gilbert is a RAN research fellow. He has lived and worked in the rainforests of the Amazon and Indonesia. David has a special interest in how conservation and indigenous right activities can be mutually reinforcing.

The Waxman-Markey bill acknowledges the USA’s connection to Indonesia and PNG’s tropical forests in defining their use as a tool to reduce climate change. Waxman-Markey is a milestone in the development of a mandatory market that encompasses forest carbon, and its effects will surly be felt on the ground in tropical forests worldwide.

The 1200 page bill, passed by the House and facing a battle in the Senate, specifically mentions REDD credits, and allows for their use in two contrasting ways.

First,  the bill allows for 1 billion tons of CO2 reductions to come from internationally generated REDD offsets.  A polluter will be allowed to use  a maximum of 15 % REDD credits to meet their emission reduction obligations in 2012, increasing to 33% by 2050.  The major threat with this proposed system is that REDD, as well as other offsets provisions, will let polluters off the hook for a significant portion of their emissions reduction obligation well into the future.

Second, 5% of credits reserved by the government (decreasing in later years to 2%) will be used to generate a fund for Supplemental Emissions Reductions from Reduced Deforestation and build capacity to generate additional international deforestation offsets in the future, with the goal of achieving additional emission reductions equivalent to 10% of US emissions reduction (Waxman and Markey’s summary of all special allocations from carbon credits is available HERE). This fund-based approach is a much more promising opportunity to protect forests, and in order to be as effective as possible, it should be increased in the Senate bill to from 5 to 15% of carbon credits allocated.

The climate negotiations in Copenhagen are fast approaching, and many think that, to be taken seriously there, the USA needs to send a strong signal that they are capable and willing to regulate carbon. The Senate passing a stronger climate bill than Waxman-Markey would undoubtedly be that signal. In addition to sending a strong message to the international community on being committed to emissions reduction, the bill would, assuming a hypothetical carbon price of USD 15 per ton, create a $15 billion fund for conserving the world’s forests.

Surly, USD 15 billion will boost many current forest management efforts across the tropics. Rightfully so, as David Niebauer, a clean energy attourny in SF, CA, points out, as tropical deforestation contributes to 20%  of all human CO2 emissions.

The problem with the potential forest offsets market in Waxman Markey is that with all of this potential supply, large volumes of cheap REDD  offset  credits could flood the market and deflate the domestic price of carbon. A lower price of carbon means less financial incentive for coal powered utilities and other heavy emitters to stop polluting and invest in and clean technologies and green jobs domestically. Without a firewall between forest and fossil carbon, everybody loses.

-- The Proportion of Illegal Logging in REDD Nations in 2007, a Measure of the Challenge --

On the other hand, the the conservation challenges inherent to protecting the world’s tropical habitats from deforestation mean that eliminating carbon emissions from Indonesia, the Amazon, and the Congo is going to cost quite a bit more than USD $15 billion. As the figure above shows*, all key REDD candidate nations have deeply rooted problems with illegal logging, one of the toughest conservation challenges to stem.

Expanding the US’s Fund approach in the Senate Bill, and getting a strong REDD deal in Copenhagen, will be two essential first steps to addressing this challenge.

*Thanks to the REDD-Monitor for the graphic.

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org

As we enter climate week, with President Obama poised to give his first big speech on climate change, and just before climate negotiations in Bangkok, i thought it might be a good idea to see what the ‘father of global warming’ thinks about our Administration and all things climate.

Below is an excerpt of the interview, for the full thing  click here!

Kate Davison/Greenpeace

You’ve had more experience than anybody in trying to translate the connection between science and policy. How do you feel President Obama is doing on the climate?

Well, I am disappointed that he has not become a little more involved. He seems to be letting the politics just play out, and perhaps planning to be a judge in the compromises. But it’s a case where we clearly need leadership. And he is still our best hope in achieving that.

What is clear is that we have to phase out the coal, and the place you would start is to say we are going to have a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants. Because when you look at the science, what we’ve shown is that if you phase out coal emissions within 20 years, then you can keep the peak CO₂ at something between 400 and 425 ppm. But that is critically dependent on phasing out the coal emissions on that sort of timescale. If you’re going to do that, you would not build any new coal-fired power plants.

But to put a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, Obama would have to contend with the coal state senators and the coal lobby.

Yeah, it’s a nontrivial task. But he could do it, and he is the only one who could do it. Without that, it is just going to be this horse-trading that we’ve seen. And you just keep adding more and more bad things to the bill.

But anyway, you should have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. That is very clear. And mountaintop removal [coal mining], which I understand is only about seven percent of our coal, obviously should be the place you start. I had hoped that the new administration would recognize this and would ban this practice. But again, they seem to be in a position of compromising, of making it a little more difficult but allowing the practice to continue. If [Obama] decided to exert leadership on this, he could. He is articulate enough to explain that to the American public. But so far he is not doing that.

This, of course, is dependent on REDD being incorporated into a post-Kyoto climate treaty in 2012.

Perhaps based on the expectation that USD 15 billion will begin streaming into the country, Indonesia and the UNDP have teamed up to create the Indonesia Climate Change Trust Fund, officially launch Monday, September 13.

While living in Aceh, Sumatra, I was involved in designing a project design document for a REDD pilot project. My hope was that a local level REDD trading scheme could allow the maximum percentage of carbon revenues to arrive directly to forest communities and forest managers for their efforts to reduce illegal logging and palm oil expansion, as well as compensation to cancel industrial logging concessions.

But as REDD policy has matured, it has become clear that Indonesia’s government will have a central role in all REDD trading.  Allowing Jakarta to control all REDD payments poises the danger that Indonesia’s forest peoples, whom have a long history of being at best overlooked and at worst brutally oppressed by Indonesia’s central government, will loose out yet again. Just recently, a coalition of Indonesia’s Indigenous peoples expressed serious concern about the threat carbon trading poses to their forests and livelihoods.

The talk of 15 billion dollars for forest conservation projects is an exciting one; forest conservation money is tight in Indonesia, and too often forest managers are stretched too thin and local people overlooked in Indonesia’s top conservation priority forests; in one National Park I visited in West Kalimantan, Taman Nasional Kutai, there were just 4 park rangers on duty at any one time.

But according to the UNDP, climate change funds will be used for: “The energy, forestry, transportation, waste management, agriculture, maritime and fisheries, water resources and health sectors…”

That sounds great, but lets think through the numbers a bit.

Indonesia could potentially gain a total of USD 15 billion per year from REDD, which is about 1.6% of Indonesia’s GDP.

This USD 15 billion will only come if Indonesia eliminates it’s 1.87 million hectares a year of forest destruction from now into perpetuity. Permanently ending Indonesia’s massive oil palm plantations, industrial logging’s clear cutting, illegal logging, road building, and forest encroachment will not be easy, and definitely not cheap.

So possibly, if Indonesia’s notorious corruption doesn’t siphon off too much of the USD 15 billion into private bank accounts, there will be an extra 1.6% in spending available to the government. But if these revenues are split between 9 different sectors, is it reasonable to think that all deforestation will be halted in Indonesia?

It seems that in the rush and excitement of creating a new industry, carbon trading, even the top-level of Indonesia’s government and the UNDP have forgotten that REDD carbon credits must be generated by on-the-ground conservation of forests.

Since hearing about the Climate Change Trust Fund this week, my thoughts have continued to return to an anonymous text message I received a few times while living in Sumatra.: “We, the common people, are poor. The politicians use our forests to get rich, and keep us living with nothing.”

David Gilbert is a Research Fellow at RAN. He has worked in the tropical forests of the Amazon and Indonesia, with a special focus on forest conservation and indigenous rights. He can be reached at davidgilbert@ran.org