Finding your way to Climate Ground Zero is easy if you know where you’re going.  Well, even then I’ve learned that Google will lead me astray from time to time. But in terms of what CGZ is, well, I thought I knew.

I didn’t have a clue.

Well, maybe that’s unfair.

I knew what was going on in the mountains of Appalachia, I knew that people were fighting a powerful company that is extracting coal and destroying mountains and communities, and I knew that Climate Ground Zero refers to where the main battle for our global climate is going on – here in the heart of Coal Country, in the US where we produce the lion’s share, per capita, of the world’s greenhouse gases and half of that comes from coal. I knew that this battle is seriously heating up. But I didn’t know how serious.

Of course it’s serious that a company is mining coal with machines bigger than office buildings and tremendous amounts of explosives, carried daily in tankers that rip along these narrow two lane highways.

And of course it’s serious when people’s families are endangered, their homes destroyed by floods caused by the mining, and the mountains that sustain so much life, so much diversity, are being wiped out for corporate profit. In this area that is stunningly beautiful, terrible things are indeed happening.

Since 1991 Massey Energy has led the pack in the race to take all the coal available from the once-hallowed mountains of Appalachia. They have systematically led the charge and taken the lion’s share of profit in the most efficient form of coal mining available, Mountaintop Removal.

The EPA continues to grant the permits that allow this company to employ far fewer workers than ever before in the history of coal mining. An underground mine used to employ as many as 500 workers. Now these operations can employ as few as 19. More »

After a long and bumpy ride, we arrived at Larry Gibson’s property. Larry hosts an annual 4th of July party, and this year Massey workers showed up drunk and threatening violence. Larry knew they were coming, and knew they had started drinking at 9 a.m. to build up the nerve to finally show up around 7 pm. The only reason there wasn’t violence was because there were several people with video cameras filming them. After the incident, Larry made repeated calls to the State and Federal government, and many calls to local law enforcement, West Virginia’s State Troopers. The FBI finally showed up 5 weeks after the event took place. They told him that no federal laws were broken, despite video footage of a man threatening to kill and woman and her two kids. According to the FBI, they “have the right to express themselves.”

Larry was preparing for a big Labor Day party, and he was fairly certain there would be violence. He had hung a “Coal keeps West Virginia poor” sign on the patio, right next to his “Friends of the Mountains” sign, and when we arrived he noticed it had been torn down. He was clearly shaken because he hadn’t noticed that anyone had entered his property. While we were there, he put in calls to try to arrange security for the upcoming event, but he didn’t sound hopeful that the police would be of any help. In fact, he has had no call backs for his request for state law enforcement support. Since the incident on the 4th the State Troopers came once to see what the fuss was about, didn’t take a statement and did not give Larry their names when he asked.

Because of his activism, Larry has experienced 136 acts of violence. His property and neighbors’ property has been shot up (we saw bullet holes), and his dog was hung on his porch and almost killed.

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Yesterday, we met with Judy Bonds from Coal River Mountain Watch who won the Goldman Prize for Excellence in Protecting the Environment in 2003. During our visit at the Coal River Mountain Watch office, the phone rang constantly and people kept coming in to ask Judy questions. She’d already done two interviews that day and said she was a little brain dead, but it was clear she was used to telling her story and had it ready anytime someone was willing to listen.

Judy told us about how she was the eighth generation of her family to live in Appalachia. She told us about how Appalachians have a tradition called “tending the commons,” which meant taking care of the hills and the hollers for the common good. It was a traditional practice for people to help spread ginseng seeds (and other medicinal herbs) so that the “’seng” would propagate on down the mountain. Someone had a question about this on my last blog post, and yes, according to Judy there were absentee landholders who did hold legal rights to these lands and ultimately sold them to the coal companies. When the coal companies put up fences everywhere, this practice (and the abundance of ginseng) was brought to a halt.

West Virginia still grows half of all of the ginseng currently sold in the world, but the incredibly lucrative plant isn’t nearly as prevalent as it used it be. Appalachia is also home to many other medicinal herbs, including black cohosh and goldenseal. There’s a real treasure trove of herbs that grow at higher altitudes on the mountains that are being destroyed. In addition, Appalachia has more than 150 different types of trees – it’s the seed source for many varieties of trees in North America.

Judy told us she was working as a waitress when they first started blowing the mountains up. She told us about Appalachians’ connection to the landscape and told us that walking through the holler makes you feel like you’re being hugged by the mountain. She described walking through the holler with daughter, while her grandson played in a nearby stream. Suddenly, her grandson called out “What’s wrong with these fish?” and held up a dead fish in each hand. Judy immediately started yelling “get out of the water!”

That’s when it clicked for her that, if the fish were being poisoned, the land and the people must also be experiencing some serious side effects. Since then, she’s been speaking out against the destruction of the Appalachian landscape and culture.

It hasn’t been easy for her. Since she started this work, her life has been threatened and she’s been run off the road so many times that she won’t drive with her kids in the car. Despite the incredibly stress and constant threats to her property, her family and her life, Judy isn’t going to quit. She’s fighting for everybody’s life and health, and for the culture they share.

I was also very moved when Judy told us how much she appreciated RAN’s work to stop mountaintop removal. She said that the corporate campaigning to cut off the financing, our support for local actions and our efforts to raise the profile of the issue beyond Appalachia were all helping. I was very glad to hear that, but I left feeling such a deep sense of awe and appreciation at everything this woman and Coal River Mountain Watch are doing to protect their homes, their communities and their culture.

The t-shirt I got at Coal River Mountain Watch sums it up so well: “Save the Endangered Hillbilly: Stop Mountaintop Removal.

This morning, we were lucky enough to go on a flyover of mountaintop removal (MTR) sites. The good folks at Southwings Aviation offer these trips as a way to help publicize to the outside world what’s really happening in Appalachia, and our pilot/tour guide Tom was a fountain of knowledge about the issue. Branden got the front seat, because the front window opens and he’s the guy with the good camera. Me and Sue sat in back and took lesser pictures with our lesser cameras through the window.

The first thing that you notice: It is truly beautiful here. Appalachia is green and lush and mountainous and it seems like it goes on forever. And then… it doesn’t. What we couldn’t see from the roadway was apparent from the air. Mountaintop removal coal mining is tearing a hole in the heart of this beautiful forest. In fact, it’s tearing lots of holes. Everywhere we looked, we saw another ugly sore on the landscape – coal mining operations or areas that have been blasted out that aren’t even being mined yet.

While we were flying, one phrase kept going through my mind. “Tikkun Olam” – it’s Hebrew for “to heal (or repair) the world” and it means that we all have an obligation to help restore the world and its inhabitants to a state of wholeness. It’s a concept that often gives meaning to my activism, but nowhere have I felt it more profoundly than here in Appalachia. We were given a region so beautiful that (we learned today) its name comes from a Native American word for “endless mountain forest.” And what do we do? We blast the tops right off of those mountains, trash the trees, and poison the rivers! We’ve got a lot of healing work to do here.

In the afternoon, we had a wonderful visit with Judy Bonds from Coal River Mountain Watch . She told us how she was the eighth generation of her family to live in Appalachia and about how Appalachians have always been connected to the landscape and cared for the commons – until the coal companies came in and laid claim to all of the commons. She had so many important things to say and stories to tell, and if Branden doesn’t write about it, I’ll tell you some of it tomorrow. Now it’s after midnight and we’re meeting with Goldman Prize-winner Maria Gunnoe in the morning, so I’d better call it a day.

Oh, by the way, we stopped by Climate Ground Zero and heard that the tree-sitters’ bail was reduced from $25,000 each to $1000, and the two of them were on their way over to the Climate Ground Zero house this evening after spending a night enjoying the relative peace and quiet of their jail cell.

I’ve been a fan of Chris Jordan’s photographs for quite some time. No other work that I’ve seen captures the sheer magnitude of our culture’s dark side in a way that is extremely powerful, very personal and unmistakably quantifiable. Chris has taken on some provocative topics over the years, showing us how one hundred million toothpicks equate to the number of trees cut in the U.S. to make junk mail every year to a layout of 65,000 cigarettes equaling the number of teenagers in the U.S. who become addicted to cigarettes every month.

Inspired by the tragedy of mountaintop removal in Appalachia, Chris’ latest work shows us in a very provocative way just how much coal we consume each day.

Check it out on Grist.

A group of folks has come together in Toronto to help push the campaign to clean up RBC forward. Here’s their report on a recent confrontation with bank Executives over the bank’s financing of the tar sands. Check out the video on YouTube

Five activists with the Rainforest Action Network attended the Investing in Water conference at University of Toronto to confront RBC’s Director of Corporate Environmental Affairs, Sandra Odendahl, on RBC’s financing of tar sands developments in Alberta.
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I really don’t like Big Coal.

I don’t like it when they blow the tops of mountains. I don’t like it when their power plants pollute local air and water. I don’t like when coal ash waste poisons whole communities. I especially don’t like how Big Coal is responsible for 42% of global carbon emissions causing catastrophic climate change.

So today, I joined hundreds of friends and got ARRESTED in a peaceful civil disobedience at Duke Energy’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Duke Energy is building a new coal fired power plant in Ciffside, NC. If built, the plant is predicted to emit six million tons of carbon dioxide every year for the next 50 years.

All over the country, people like me and you are taking action against big coal. We are all stepping it up and taking more risks to stop Big Coal’s destructive behavior. Protests as far away as California, or as nearby as the mountains of West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The movement to quit coal and stop global warming is sweeping the nation.

It’s time to step this fight against Big Coal and climate change up.

A few hours ago hundreds of protesters converged on the headquarters of Duke Energy in Charlotte NC to demand a stop to the construction of the Cliffside Coal-fired power plant. This is just the latest in the growing wave of civil disobedience that is building around the country demanding that we get America off coal – the number one cause of global warming pollution in the US. Duke Energy stands out as one of the most hypocritical utilities – on the one hand professing to care about the climate, and on the other, continuing to pursue the construction of two conventional coal-fired power plants. Citi and Bank of America both have outstanding financial relationships with Duke – and this protest, coming on the eve of Citi’s shareholder meeting and just a week before Bank of America’s, underscores the escalating reputational risk associated with their continued support of dirty coal.

Stay tuned for a report and photos from the ground from Scott Parkin.

Next Wednesday, Feb 11th, CEOs from the first eight banks to receive funding from the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) will testify before congress to explain how they spent billions of taxpayers dollars in the bailout so far. These 8 banks are Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, State Street, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of New York Mellon.

Check out the Reuters article here

Only $350 billion of TARP’s $700 billion has been spent so far, and the Obama administration and Congress want to ensure that the banks are spending their bailout money wisely, before they give out the other $350 billion.

Questions asked by the U.S. House Financial Services Committee are likely to revolve around issues such as executive pay, dividend payments and whether banks are using the money for consumer loans.

All of these questions around financial responsibility and responsible lending sure beg the question of why banks are still financing dirty energy with hundreds of millions of dollars going to coal and oil projects every year. These projects aren’t safe investments in our future; they are clinging to out-dated and irresponsible energy infrastructure in this country. As the US economy continues to stumble, and government struggles end the crisis, shouldn’t we be looking to fix aspects of the economy that are broken – not just prop the system back up the way it was?

What questions would you ask the CEO’s of 8 of the largest banks in the world if you had the opportunity?

The new administration is up to its eyeballs trying to pull off an economic stimulus package that will genuinely stimulate the economy while also (to their credit) meeting another critical need – to jumpstart the transition to a green energy system. I don’t envy them that job, not for one second – particularly because at the same time, officials charged with overseeing the bank bailouts (otherwise known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program) are struggling to figure out how to hold the banks accountable for spending that money in a way that has broad benefits. It would be a crying shame if all the bailout money used by the banks went to finance the old carbon intensive fossil fuel infrastructure, thereby undermining the laudable intentions enshrined in the economic stimulus package. A fact that is apparently not lost on HSBC for one (bank). Bill Becker, writing on Climate Progress says:

On January 19, HSBC Global Research issued an analysis of the economic stimulus packages passed or pending in 15 nations, including the United States. It found that these countries plan to invest more than $3 trillion to stimulate their economies over the next decade. Only about 14% of that amount will be invested in green technologies – defined by HSBC as low carbon power, energy efficiency, water treatment and pollution control.

The amount of green investment ranges from 0% in Poland (a country stubbornly dependent on coal) to 69% in South Korea. China plans to dedicate 34% of its stimulus package to green initiatives; the stimulus package approved by the European Union invests 14%. Overall, HSBC calculates, about $432 billion is earmarked for green investments among the 15 nations it studied, with about 50% of that amount expected to be invested in 2009.

The United States? By HSBC’s calculation, 16% of the proposed $825 billion stimulus package targets green investments. One of the key questions Congress must ask, and answer quickly, is whether that’s sufficient stimulus for a new energy economy and sufficient evidence of U.S. leadership. Put another way: How much of our children’s money will we spend on life-support for the old carbon economy and how much will we invest to build the new one?

Stimulating a green economy will require more than a disbursement of the one-off stimulus package – it will require a long-term redirecting of public and private capital into renewables and energy efficiency.