Palm oil day laborer in Sumatra, Photo by David Gilbert/RAN

Fortunately the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took into consideration the complexity of the issue in its latest ruling about biofuels derived from palm oil. Late last week, the EPA excluded palm oil biodiesel from the U.S. renewable fuel standard—a small yet significant reprieve for Indonesia’s rainforests, where palm oil plantations are a major cause of rainforest destruction.

The EPA found that biofuels derived from palm oil aren’t a good choice for the climate because, once the carbon footprint of palm oil production is factored in, they can no longer meet the 20% emissions-reduction standard for biofuels.

It’s encouraging that the EPA sees the terrible toll the industrial production of palm oil biodiesel has on the environment. Indonesia is already the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after China and the U.S. Some 85% of Indonesia’s emissions result from clearing rainforests and draining carbon-rich peatlands, activities driven heavily by the rapid expansion of the palm oil industry.

Widely considered a “clean” agrofuel, palm oil has more environmental implications to consider than just the emissions it produces when burned. According to the Center for International Forestry Research, biodiesel from palm oil grown on peat has a 200 year carbon debt. This means it would take 200 years of production for these palm oil plantations to replace the carbon lost from land conversion. And once you consider the amount of fuel used for palm oil cultivation and transcontinental shipping, palm oil can be one of the worst fuel sources for the climate.

Looking at the harsh and immediate realities of today’s climate science, it’s clear that a 200-year turnaround is 200 years too late. There are already too many demands on Indonesia’s rainforests coming from the palm oil industry.

Becky White and the Secret Mission have just released this catchy and hilarious protest anthem/call to action track and music video — featuring RAN’s own Executive Director Rebecca Tarbotton on violin — called “Man Up!” The song calls on people to gather at the White House on November 6 to persuade President Obama to make the right decision and oppose the disastrous Keystone XL Pipeline project, the fate of which is being decided by his Administration right now.

The movement to stop this massively destructive pipeline has brought together a wide array of unlikely allies and has exploded into a national political force to be reckoned with in a very short amount of time. Please check this out and share it widely to spread the word on this crucial and time-sensitive issue!

The White House. Nov 6. Be There.

These are the final moments before President Obama makes a decision to approve or reject the construction of the dirty and dangerous Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. On November 6, exactly one year before the election, thousands will come together to completely encircle the White House in an act of solidarity to convince President Obama to make the right decision to reject the Keystone XL.

More than 4000 have already signed up to participate. This is fantastic, but we need thousands more!

Please don’t stay at home this Sunday wondering whether your presence would have made a difference. Come stand with us for clean energy, for human rights, for all of our futures. Sign up now!

“So many lives are on the line right now. The system is crashing. It’s crashing economically and it’s crashing ecologically. The stakes are too high right now for us not to make the most of this moment.” — Naomi Klein at Occupy Wall Street

Driven by relentless and ill advised palm oil expansion, Kalimantan’s carbon rich but relatively unproductive peatlands are being rapidly drained and burned. Across Indonesia, peatland destruction is releasing up to a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year – equivalent to emissions from 200 large coal power plants – in addition to fomenting wide social conflict and destroying critical habitat for orangutans, tigers and other species. Yet economic activities on peat contribute less than 1% to Indonesia’s GDP.  Emissions from sparsely populated rural Central Kalimantan alone now exceed those of Jakarta, a sprawling traffic-choked mega-city of more than 10 million people.

Smoke Over Indonesia Photo: Creative Commons

From September 20-22, Central Kalimantan played host to the annual meeting of the Governor’s Climate and Forest Task Force (GCF).  The GCF brings together California with 15 tropical forest states from the Brazilian Amazon, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia and Nigeria covering 20% of the worlds tropical forests to promote the development of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) mechanisms in carbon markets. Ironically, with heavy smoke from peat fires disrupting flights in and out of the province, the meeting almost had to be relocated to Jakarta.

REDD was initially promoted by industrialized countries as a quick, easy and cheap way to address climate change under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as part of a wider fossil fuel emissions reduction agreement, but prospects for such a new international agreement have declined precipitously since the debacle at the Copenhagen Conference of Parties two years ago. While the urgency and importance of protecting peatlands and tropical rainforests is undeniable, at the same time, the true challenges and complexities of trying to define and implement REDD payment mechanisms on the ground at the sub-national level were in full display at the GCF meeting.

Suwido Limin shows dam constructed to restore drained peatlands and slow GHG emissions

At the formal level, the outcomes of the GCF meeting were fairly straightforward.  Delegates agreed to accept the Brazilian state of Matto Grosso and Madre de Dios in Peru as new members. The next GCF annual meeting will be hosted by the state of Chiapas in Mexico. The GCF established a new fund, with $1.5 million in seed money from the U.S. State Department, to assist with state capacity building. Efforts to expand GCF membership in Europe were endorsed.

Discussions among stakeholders and rights holders in the GCF side events and corridors profiled some of the greater challenges and controversies. Perhaps foremost among these is the need for rights based approaches to promote durable and just forest stewardship and green development, which was put forward forcibly by Indigenous and forest community organization participants.

A strong statement was delivered to the GCF meeting by forest dependent community representatives from Aceh, Papua, Central Sulawesi and Kalimantan calling for, “guarantee on people’ full involvement and representation in every process and stage, especially in the project’s decision-making processes…rights and access to complete and comprehensive information…the right to manage and to utilize the forest and resources within it, which we have inherited from our ancestors…every decision concerning the benefits for the people should be defined by the people themselves.” Underlying and supporting this perspective, including from many GCF delegates, is a growing recognition that durable forest stewardship can only be achieved with full involvement, understanding and support of the forest dependent communities themselves.

As Odigha Odigha (a Goldman Environmental Prize winner who RAN worked closely with in the 1990s), representing Nigeria’s Cross River State put it, “The people in the forest are the ones that must fully understand what REDD is because they have the final responsibility, not people in London, not people in Washington.” Similarly, the former Governor of Papua strongly emphasized community rights and empowerment in his proposals for promoting low-carbon green development pathways in Indonesia’s most heavily forested province.

The GCF delegates have largely returned home, but here in Borneo the peat smoke remains.  Yet, reasons for optimism in Central Kalimantan can still be found in some locally led initiatives. Native Dayak, Sudwido Limin, is not waiting for REDD to take action.  At the tropical peatland research center that he established, Sudwido showed us how they are damming up drainage canals in abandoned peatland areas, restoring forest cover and fighting peatland fires in a community based approach.  The methods they are developing could be widely applied, and combined with a strict prohibition on further peatland conversion would go a long way to leashing in Indonesia’s soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Jakarta, are you listening?

Click Image to watch RAN's Lafcadio Cortesi on ABC's program "Paper Tiger" on Foreign Correspondent

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has just aired a damning exposé called “Paper Tiger” about the devastating deforestation caused by the pulp and paper industry in Indonesia. The program is called Foreign Correspondent and it is a sort of Aussie 60 Minutes.

The piece features compelling footage of logging giant APRIL mowing down vast expanses of Sumatra’s primary rainforests and creating an “ecological Armageddon” in order to feed their paper mill in Riau, which is the largest such mill in the world.

RAN forest campaigner Lafcadio Cortesi and I spent a half day with the ABC film crew when we were in Sumatra last month. Quotes from Laf’s extensive interview with them are featured throughout the program.

This great investigative piece includes emotional pleas from lifelong farmers about to lose their land to APRIL’s clear cut logging and shows motion detector camera shots of critically endangered Sumatran tigers just days before their habitat was bulldozed for a paper plantation. It documents both government corruption and explosions of violence resulting from the social conflict surrounding APRIL’s forest destruction. This maddening footage is interspersed with snippets of blatant greenwashing and callous disregard from APRIL’s Director of Operations, David Kerr.

Lafcadio explains the carbon implications of logging peatlands to ABC film crew

The show is a half hour long, but it makes for gripping viewing and offers a strong introduction into the urgent forest crisis underway in Indonesia. I wrote a blog post about this portion of our trip entitled “A Rainforest Apocalypse? People, Peat And Promises For A New Direction“.

Watch the exposé here. You can also read some uplifting news about Indonesia in my post entitled “From the Field: Inspirational Agroforestry at the Corner of Nature.”

The smoke hanging over Pekanbaru

If you think this title sounds hyperbolic, you probably have not visited Sumatra lately. Before traveling here, I had heard stories about the oceans of oil palm that have been planted where rainforest once stood. But I was not prepared for this.

The first sign that something is terribly wrong came before our plane even landed. From 30,000 feet over the Java Sea between Jakarta and Sumatra, there was no sign of land or ocean below. Just a sickly haze stretching to the horizon.

Global climate change is usually an abstraction — a concept that must be imagined or made academic to understand. But here, it’s in your face, tangible and acute. Incredibly, Indonesia has become the world’s third largest carbon polluting country, behind only the US and China — and 80% of those emissions are the result of deforestation.

Stepping off the plane in Pekanbaru, the capital city of the Province of Riau, the assault on my eyes and nose and lungs was immediate. I actually had to suppress an initial panic that I would suffocate from the smoke. Our friends here later told us we were lucky to land at all, as air traffic would likely be cancelled again for lack of visibility. Shipping traffic from Singapore is sometimes similarly interrupted by the intensity of the smog. Our hosts laughed a little uncomfortably, explaining that before the vast deforestation of the past decades there used to be two seasons here: the wet season and the dry season. Now, they said, there are four: the wet season, the flooding season, the dry season and the smoke season.

This land was once rainforest, but has now been cleared, burned, planted, harvested and burned again

The acrid air is the smell of burning peat. It is the smell of palm oil plantations expanding deeper into the heart of what’s left of Sumatra’s once vast lowland jungles. Sumatra’s forests have been so lush, so wildly productive, for so many millennia unbroken, that their photosynthesis has processed immense amounts of carbon out of the air. The trees have quite literally breathed the atmosphere in, sinking its carbon through eons of leaf litter, forming massive reservoirs of underground organic material that has actually built land dozens of miles into the sea.

These steamy, amphibious ecosystems swarm with a cornucopia of life. Elephants and orangutans, tapirs and tigers and every manner of bird and beetle the human imagination can fathom. The truth is, no one has any idea how many species used to live here. Scientists estimate maybe half the species in these forests have yet to be described to science, and with most of these forests now suddenly gone, we will never know what’s already been lost.

These unusual deposits are called peat domes, and Sumatra’s are among the deepest in the world. To make this land fit for industrial palm oil and pulpwood production, however, it must first be cleared and drained, marring the natural landscape with a matrix of massive canals. Exposed to the air, the peat begins to decay, and when it ignites, it smolders in unstoppable fires that open the flood gates of the reservoir, releasing catastrophic quantities of carbon back into the tropical air.

The clearing of these forests has been so fast and merciless, the land and its people are in a distinct state of shock. Both are still reeling from the ongoing assault while struggling to pick up the pieces. Already, what is forever lost is devastating. Many wildlife biologists consider the remaining populations of endemic Sumatran Rhino to be the living dead. Their habitat is too sparse, too fragmented and too disturbed, their numbers too few.

RAN forest campaigner Lafcadio Cortesi walking through decimated forest that is set to become a palm plantation

Yesterday I was able to visit a peat forest for the first time, and to witness the advancing edge of its destruction firsthand. To get there, we traveled ten hours through the night from Riau to Jambi Province, then four hours by car over horrendous dirt roads to South Sumatra. From there we rode motorcycles on thin trails through a barren palm oil plantation to the edge of the peatlands. We continued by foot on a rough trail along a canal dug by illegal loggers to remove logs from the forest. We arrived at the forests edge, battered, sweaty and spent.

Thrilled to see tall trees still standing, I could hardly suppress tears at the tragic effort it took just to reach them. Monkeys howled in the distance. An electric blue butterfly swirled around me. Spiderhunters, dollarbirds, and bulbuls flit overhead while giant crested treeswifts carved gracefully through the air. Then, as if on cue, a chainsaw began to roar just out of sight, followed quickly by the terrible sound of trees crashing through trees to the ground.

A few days ago we watched video footage of an 18 month-old Sumatran tiger slowly dying in a trap set by a pig hunter on an Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) acacia plantation a few hours from our hotel in Pekanbaru. He was one of the last of his kind. 150 breeding pairs are estimated to remain in the wild. These majestic animals have been pushed to desperation in their search for the basics of food, habitat and mates amidst a biological desert of palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

This peat forest took days of travel to reach and was falling as we watched

I would like to tell a happier story, but not at the expense of the truth. Indonesia is at a critical tipping point. But, as severe as the destruction is, all is not yet lost. Taken as a whole, a recent estimate puts Indonesia’s forest loss at 49%. Orangutans still swing freely through the canopy of forests in Borneo and new species of lizards and birds continue to be described to science in West Papua. There remains some hope for the struggling Sumatran populations of pygmy elephants.

And, as communities across Indonesia are struggling to regain their livelihoods and the future livelihoods of their people from being sacrificed for quick profit by companies turning the rainforest into international commodities, there are signs the government is turning around.

Feeling discouraged and distraught after our disheartening trip to the forest, we returned last night to the hopeful news that the Indonesian government has announced a potentially major new direction in forest policy.

Declaring the establishment of a new 89,000 hectares of community-managed forest lands and the enforcement of a decade-old provision of forest law that requires the government to identify areas within the national forest estate that are in conflict with existing forest community land rights, Presidential advisor Pak Kuntoro said that Indonesia’s president supports protecting the land of indigenous communities and that “this is our chance to untangle our convoluted past and make a lasting difference.”

People in the know seem to think the government may be serious this time. After his speech, Kuntoro said to Reuters, “Paradigm shift is imperative, from exploitation to sustainable and responsible use of natural resources.”

Indeed. More power to him.

via marchonblairmountain.org

I’ve been part of the movement to end mountaintop removal for five years now.

In 2008, RAN and I helped organize blockade actions against Dominion Energy which was building a new coal fired power plant in Wise, VA. In 2009 and 2010, we worked in solidarity with Appalachian and direct action groups in southern West Virginia taking action on mountaintop removal sites. During that same time, we waged a campaign to end mountaintop removal against the EPA and Wall Street banks like Chase and PNC Bank.

Last fall, we participated in Appalachia Rising, which brought thousands of Appalachians, friends and allies for a mass march and direct action in Washington D.C. 120 of us were arrested doing a sit-in in front of the White House. Now our friends in Appalachia are organizing a mass march, rally and action at Blair Mountain.

Blair Mountain is the site of the 2nd largest insurrection in U.S. history (after the Civil War.) The battle took place in 1921 and saw 8,000-10,000 miners fighting for union rights take up arms against the coal industry’s gun thugs. Now coal companies have stripped Blair Mountain of it’s historical landmark status and want to strip mine it.

A coalition of environmental, labor, student, community and activist groups have come together to stop the strip mining of Blair Mountain.  Beginning on June 4th, a march will begin that will retrace the steps of the 1921 march.

March on Blair Mountain Logistics

1) Attend the March, Rally AND Day of Action

Participants that plan to attend The March should arrive in Charleston, WV on the afternoon or evening of June 4th to be shuttled to Marmet, WV. Our Orientation Day will begin the following morning in Marmet, WV–it is critical that participants attend this Orientation Day in order for us to have a safe and effective march. Marchers will move out Monday morning and, over the next five days, march 50 miles to the town of Blair, WV, arriving on June 10th. The following morning, on June 11th, The Rally and Day of Action will begin in Blair. Shuttles will be available to take participants back to their vehicles in Charleston once the event is over.

• Register for the March
• March Event Schedule
• Things You Should Know for the March

2) Attend just the Rally and Day of Action

Participants that plan to attend just The Rally and Day of Action should arrive in Logan, WV on the morning of Friday June 10th if they are able. Beginning at 1pm on June 10th, we will be hosting a Training Day in Logan, WV so that participants will be prepared for the events the following day. If you need to arrive on the evening of June 9th, or the morning of June 11th, accommodations will be available. Again, we strongly encourage those that are able to attend the Training Day on the 10th.

• Rally Info

Hope to see you there!

While I welcome Bank of America’s continued acknowledgment that reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions is critical for combating the climate crisis, Bank of America must move quickly beyond commitments to reduce the carbon footprint of direct energy consumption by their offices and set ambitious targets to address the much larger carbon footprint of Bank of America’s financing of coal and other dirty energy.  The climate footprint of Bank of America’s financing activities is estimated to be one hundred times larger than the size of its operational carbon footprint.

By profiling efforts to address  the GHG emissions from their internal operations while quietly  ignoring the GHG impacts of the billions of dollars that the bank provides each year for the extraction and burning of dirty fossil fuels like coal, Bank of America is at risk of misleading the public as to the  true climate impacts of the company’s business.

As just one example, since 2009 Bank of America has provided financing for ten of the largest utilities operating coal-fired power plants, the biggest source of domestic GHG emissions, including participating in a $750 million bond issue for Duke Energy which is building the controversial Cliffside coal power plant. The 800 MW plant will emit over 240 million tons of CO₂ over its expected “useful” lifetime, equivalent to the emissions from adding one million new cars to the road each year. Bank of America financing relationships in the U.S. power sector alone contribute to the release of more than 10% of total US emissions.

Bank of America should immediately commit to developing a more robust climate policy that includes: shifting the balance of financing in its utilities portfolio from dirty power sources, like coal, to cleaner, renewable energy.

Unfortunately, like any classic Disney tale, there is a darker side to this story, one that Disney does not want you to hear. Disney’s paper buying practices are driving some of Earth’s most iconic animals towards extinction, and so far the company is doing nothing about it.

Disney is the largest publisher of children’s books in the world, producing over 50 million books and 30 million magazines a year in the US alone. Last year, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) hired an independent lab to conduct tests on the fiber found in children’s books published by the top ten US publishers. Nine of the ten tested positive for fiber linked to Indonesian rainforest destruction, Disney included. See Turning the Page on Rainforest Destruction: Children’s Books and the future of Indonesia’s rainforests.

RAN approached each of the companies before releasing the incriminating data to allow each a chance to address this serious problem. In the year that followed, RAN worked closely with these companies and eight of the original ten have now established commitments not to source their paper from controversial Indonesian fiber. Seven of the ten have agreed to specifically avoid purchasing from the notoriously destructive logging and paper companies APP (Asia Pulp and Paper) and APRIL (Asia Pacific Resources International Limited) altogether.

Sadly, Disney has lagged behind its peers and to date has offered only empty words that do nothing to ensure the company is not still purchasing paper driving rainforest destruction.

Indonesia is a real life Magic Kingdom, home to some of the most biologically and culturally diverse forest ecosystems on Earth. With only 1% of the planet’s land area, Indonesia’s rainforests are home to 16% of all bird species, 11% of all plants and 10% of all mammals. This wealth of life includes endangered tigers, orangutans and elephants, the real life characters featured in Disney’s Jungle Book.

Reckless logging, largely driven by demand for cheap paper products and palm oil, has threatened all of this by causing one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation. The carbon emissions from this large scale deforestation has made Indonesia the world’s 3rd largest greenhouse gas polluting country, behind only the US and China.

Indonesia’s forest products industry is internationally renowned for its corruption and high rates of illegal logging, as well as for its devastating impacts on biodiversity, forest communities and the climate. The vast majority of Indonesia’s pulp and paper — approximately 80% — is controlled by two large and controversial suppliers: APP and APRIL. Over the past decade both have become infamous for their widespread, rapacious demolition of Indonesia’s rainforests and communities.

It’s time for Disney to realize that rainforest destruction is no fairy tale. Rainforest Action Network is putting Disney on notice, and we hope you will join us to get the company to align its practices with the values it espouses and embeds in the stories it tells. Bulldozers and chainsaws have no place in the habitat of endangered species or in the production of storybooks for children. It’s time for Disney to stop doing business with nefarious bad actors like APP and APRIL and to adopt a comprehensive policy that can guarantee parents that reading bedtime stories to their kids will not make them unwitting participants in tiger and orangutan extinction.

Because in the end, it was Disney who helped many of us learn for the first time, it’s a small world, after all.

Got hope and change?

Supply-sider David Stockman was full of it in 1981 when the Reagan Revolution swept the country. Stockman, a rising star in GOP politics, became Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and quickly began looking for ways to curtail the dreaded “welfare state.” And while I don’t agree with his pro-business, slash-and-burn economic philosophies, what Stockman found out very quickly was that beltway politics (both Democrat and Republican) undercut any attempt to change business as usual. You can get the details in his memoir “The Triumph of Politics.”

Similarly, the reality of D.C.’s climate politics have triumphed over any sort of legislative action to curtail climate change. Last summer, the climate bill died an irrelevant death in the halls of a legislative body bought and sold to a new Gilded Age of Corporate America. And remember, it was struck down even though the end product had loopholes for corporate giveaways large enough drive a heavy haul through.

Still, to hedge their bets the Sith Lords of dirty energy spent $121 million in 2009-2010 to flood D.C. with lobbyists to kill the climate legislation. And to keep things interesting in the 2010 election cycles, the oil side of the business spent $19,588,091 on the U.S. political process. And the coal side of things spent $10,423,347.

Do we really think we can outspend or out lobby these amounts of money?

The Big Greens are telling us that an embattled Lisa Jackson and Environmental Protection Agency are our best hope (there’s that word again) for saving the planet from King Coal and Big Oil’s doomsday economy.

Does anyone really believe this bullshit anymore?

If we look at what Obama is actually doing and NOT what he says, the state of play comes into a lot sharper focus. A couple of recent examples exposing the administration’s real energy politics include:

• Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that they’d be opening up big tracts of public land for coal mining. Salazar even exaggerated the volumes of coal, to where the coal companies called bullshit on him.
• Peabody Energy and Arch Coal are racing to build coal export terminals on the Washington coast to export the dirty black rock to Asian markets. The Dept. of Interior just green-lighted these port expansions by opening up the Powder River Basin coal tracts.
• Despite the Japanese nuclear meltdown (a FUCKING nuclear meltdown!), Obama’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission extended the license of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. When announcing the opening of Powder River Basin coal tracts, Salazar even told us that nuclear power was a part of America’s energy security future.

It’s time to build power and work for solutions beyond what Obama, Al Gore, or Lisa Jackson can do for us. Any sort of dramatic shift on the fossil fuel doomsday economy (i.e. a real revolution) is not going to be led by those sitting in comfortable, coal-powered, air-conditioned offices in Washington D.C. It’s going to be led by those of us in towns, cities and communities all over North America. And not necessarily in liberal bastions like San Francisco or Seattle, but in red states and conservative rural areas where the real damage is being done.

A global movement of climate justice organizers and direct actionistas has been building People Power against the root causes of climate change for quite some time. In North America, our fight to stop climate change and fossil fuel extraction is happening right now all over the country:

• Appalachia: Activists have risked life, limb, and liberty for years to stop mountaintop removal, and are doing it again at the historic site of the Battle of Blair Mountain in early June.
• Utah: Tim DeChristopher is most likely going to prison for stopping an illegal land auction that would have drilled for oil and gas in pristine wilderness. Since his initial action, he co-founded Peaceful Uprising, which has built a multi-generational multi-issue group to organize direct action on climate and extraction in the reddest of the red states. Look for more from them.
• Montana and Idaho: Concerned people are putting their bodies on the line to stop tar sands heavy haul shipments to Alberta. A long history of environmental resistance has existed in this region. Now Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming and other mountain regions are becoming active again.

Right now the path is very clear. The world is in upheaval and people power has taken a lead. Dictatorships have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Popular uprisings are still happening in Yemen, Libya and Syria. European anti-austerity movements have emerged in Greece, Iceland, France, the UK and more. The U.S. labor movement’s rank and file has begun to challenge corporate power in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and beyond.

At this point, we’re on our own. The political establishment manifesting as the Democratic Party and the Big Green non-profit industrial complex won’t show any spine until we’re in the streets mobilizing them. We need to throw down with big, brash, sustained, and completely anti-establishment action campaigns.

Who’s in?

Little Village Environmental Justice Organization rally to shut down dirty coal power plants in South Chicago

Research shows that carbon offsets aren’t working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stall global warming. That’s why RAN has founded the Climate Action Fund.

In theory, a carbon offset is a reduction in emissions of carbon or greenhouse gases made in order to compensate for or to offset an emission made elsewhere. Rather than reduce its own pollution, for example, a business would pay someone somewhere else in the world to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and then take credit for their contribution.

Sounds good, but does it really work?

A recent report estimates that of the $700 million dollars that are invested in carbon offsets around the world, offset buyers

are often buying vague promises instead of the reductions in greenhouse gases they expect. They are buying into projects that are never completed, or paying for ones that would have been done anyhow, the investigation found. Their purchases are feeding middlemen and promoters seeking profits from green schemes that range from selling protection for existing trees to the promise of planting new ones that never thrive. In some cases, the offsets have consequences that their purchasers never foresaw, such as erecting windmills that force poor people off their farms. Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and – in many cases – not worth their price.

Stanford University researchers found that up to 2/3 of offsets in international markets are not delivering any additional reduction in emissions compared to business as usual, which means that buyers are getting ripped off and the offsets are doing nothing to slow climate change. The attempt to “buy” our way out of climate change has left us with a corrupt system with little accountability where very little is done to reduce emissions.

At RAN, we began the Climate Action Fund (CAF) to take a fundamentally different approach. Starting with our own organization, we calculate the annual carbon emissions associated with our operations, including travel. We then apply an internal price — effectively a tax — on that carbon. These modest revenues are then invested directly in frontline community groups that are organizing against the extraction and combustion of dirty fossil fuels in the first place.

The Climate Action Fund is also open to individuals and businesses that want to participate in CAF-supported efforts to tackle the root causes of climate change. The CAF contributes 100 percent of donations directly to community organizations that are fighting to protect land and people, as well as to keep millions of tons of CO2 in the ground.

Rainforest Action Network is inspired by the work these frontline community groups are doing and honored to be able to support and promote their amazing work. We hope to be able to get more and more progressive organizations and companies involved with the CAF and learn how to green their business, reduce their carbon footprint and make direct contributions to groups on the frontlines of the battle to end our addiction to dirty fossil fuels and reduce dangerous carbon emissions contributing to climate change.

Get started with Climate Action Fund!

Click image for Facebook RSVP page.

Big Coal has big plans for the West.

Coal companies are already digging out tens of millions of tons of coal from the ground in Wyoming and Montana. Not only do they want to continue to feed coal-fired power plants in the U.S. with their filthy energy, but they also want to grow their profit margins by exporting it to Asian markets. And the quickest way from Point A to Point B is via ports along the Pacific Northwest coastline.

Seems like a no-brainer if you are sitting in Ambre Energy, Arch Coal or Peabody Energy‘s cozy boardrooms. Too bad for them, there are large progressive and environmentally conscious populations in those states that have a difference of opinion with them on this matter.

On Feb. 23, RAN will be teaming up with some of the folks from Peaceful Uprising in Salt Lake City to carry this message to the front door of Ambre Energy’s North American offices.

Ambre has received permits from the Cowlitz Count board to begin construction on a new coal port terminal in Longview, Washington. They want to develop the western states even more into an extraction zone and transportation corridor. We’ll be there to tell them that we’re not going down without a fight.

If you are in Salt Lake City on Feb. 23rd, come join us for a lively protest against coal exports.

Here’s the details:

Stop Western Coal Expansion!

Rally at Ambre Energy’s HQ in Salt Lake City

Stop King Coal’s Dirty Energy Exports for Profit.

WHAT: Stop Western Coal Expansion; Rally at Ambre Energy’s HQ
WHERE: Ambre Energy’s North American Headquarters; 170  S. Main Street; Salt Lake City, UT
WHEN: Wednesday Feb. 23 at Noon
CONTACT: Jennifer at jennifer@peacefuluprising.org; Scott at sparkin@ran.org

Join Rainforest Action Network and Peaceful Uprising as we take action to reclaim our future from King Coal.

Ultimately, several official inquiries into the matter cleared the climate researchers of any wrongdoing. Several newspapers even printed retractions, but the damage was done. Many folks came away feeling the credibility of the field of climate science had just been dealt a serious blow, and the world’s leaders had the cover they needed to commit to nothing more than a non-binding political agreement in Copenhagen — an agreement that most agree will do nothing to deal with the enormity of the problem it purports to address.

This week, a for-real climate scandal emerged: Pat Michaels, a prominent climate denier and senior environmental studies fellow at the Cato Institute, testified before Congressman Henry Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee in February 2009 that only about 3% of his funding came from the dirty energy industry — but then last August Michaels publicly admitted that he actually gets more like 40% of his funds from Big Oil.

Our friends over at Greenpeace USA just broke the story that Rep. Henry Waxman is now calling for an investigation into whether or not Michaels deliberately misled Congress when he lied about the sources of his funding.

Of course, none of this should really surprise anyone. During that particular congressional hearing, Michaels was the only “expert” who stated that climate change was not a serious issue requiring congressional action, and that regulation responding to what he called “overestimated” global warming scientific data could have a “very counterproductive effect.” As Waxman wrote in his letter to the new Republican Committee Chairman Fred Upton calling for an investigation, “Among the scientists who testified before this Committee on the issue of climate change in the last Congress, Dr. Michaels was the only one to dismiss the need to act on climate change.” Unless Michaels has access to totally different data from the rest of us, it was pretty obvious he was being paid to downplay the severity of global warming.

Now, I’m not saying that all climate deniers are funded by dirty energy industries… just that I can’t fathom why anyone would advocate doing nothing in the face of a crisis as dire as global warming if they weren’t being paid handsomely to do so. I’m not surprised at all to find out Pat Michaels is no exception to that rule. Hell, being a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Michaels is on the dirty industry payroll.

Help blow this story up — this is an actual climate scandal, unlike “Climategate.” It’s being called Skepticgate. Tweet it (#Skepticgate), post about it on Facebook, blog it, whatever you can do. Force the media to pay as much attention to this real climate scandal as they did to the bogus climate scandal pushed by dirty industry-funded hacks.

Last week, RAN’s coal finance campaign released its latest report, “The Principle Matter: Banks, Climate & The Carbon Principles.” The report shows that despite adopting the Carbon Principles — once a much heralded “new path” for the banking industry — what we’ve seen in practice is still just “business as usual.”

Along with releasing the report to the media, RAN activists decided to hand-deliver copies of the report to six of the big banks that have signed onto the Carbon Principles. (We also held an event outside of Duke Energy’s coal-fired power plant in Cliffside, NC to highlight the types of investments banks should NOT be making.)

Bankers at Citi, Chase, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley have now received copies of the report. They’ve officially been put on notice: It’s time that Wall Street quit playing nice with Big Coal.

Last year, Wall Street and international banks took the unprecedented step of shifting away from mountaintop removal coal mining. Now it’s time that they move away from dirty energy completely. Tell the Banks to Quit Funding Dirty Coal.

Here are some pics from our deliveries:

]]> http://understory.ran.org/2011/01/27/putting-wall-street-on-notice/feed/ 0 http://understory.ran.org/2011/01/24/the-trial-of-bidder-70/ http://understory.ran.org/2011/01/24/the-trial-of-bidder-70/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:19:12 +0000 Scott Parkin http://understory.ran.org/?p=11103 “At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, governments and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.” — Edward Abbey

In December of 2008, college student Tim DeChristopher (aka “Bidder 70″) entered into a Bureau of Land Management auction and bid on millions of dollars in oil and gas leases. Tim’s action monkey-wrenched the plans of oilmen and the Bush Administration to develop those leases for profit in the last days of their regime.

Subsequently, Tim was charged with two felonies and, after a long legal process, finally has a court date on February 28. The federal government (yeah, that’s Obama) has made it clear that they are using Tim’s case to intimidate any activists effectively fighting back against the destruction of the climate, the earth and the people living on it.

While Tim is inside facing down the federal government, many others will be outside in solidarity. If you’re able to make it to Salt Lake City, the last weekend of February, please join Peaceful Uprising (the group Tim co-founded) as we call out the wanton destruction of the planet at the hands of corporations and the system that puts us on trial for resisting it.

It’s time to take risks and make sacrifices for this issue. Tim and many others around the world have taken the first step, but climate activists in the U.S. now need to step up and do more than click “send” on an email or post an article on Facebook.

Watch this video of Tim from the RAN offices:

Leave it to the folks at Rainforest Action Network to make anything fun. As an intern with RAN, my job is basically to do whatever task I’m presented, so when Hillary Lehr asked the interns, Lindsay, Lola, and I, to do our own Roar at the Store at the local Barnes & Noble, I thought, “Yeah, I can hand out a few pocket guides and help spread the word.”  When she mentioned someone wearing our full Tiki the Tiger costume, however, I became way more excited about the idea of our own roar and volunteered right away.

Really, who wouldn’t want to spend two hours dancing in a tiger suit, especially for such a good cause! I got some funny looks on the bus as we made our way to the store, but as soon as we took our positions outside and began handing out the awesome Rainforest Safe pocket guides, we got a much better reception and the fun began!  Although we hadn’t brought an awesome boombox or radio, I was blessed with the ability to entertain myself easily and was able to dance to the beat in my head.  Thanks to my super sweet moves, the pocket guides were going like hot cakes!

People would slow down or stop by to read my sign or take a picture with me, and it gave Lindsey and Lola a chance to explain what we were about and how children’s books can play a part in destroying the rainforest.

What I learned from my day as Tiki the Tiger is that participating in actions can be fun! I was nervous about going out on the street and “bothering” people, but when you’re having fun with it, others have fun with it, too! That great day turned out to be one of my favorite days with RAN.

King Coal’s domestic options are soon going to be limited after Obama and Lisa Jackson drop the big one on greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, with a possible loss in profits, Mr. Peabody’s coal company needs a new place to sell their dirty black rock. Currently, Asian markets are more than willing buyers of all things coal. The industry just needs an efficient way to get it there, but the only West Coast port exporting coal is Vancouver, British Columbia. So King Coal wants more outlets for Powder River Basin coal.

In Longview, Washington, an Australian company, Ambre Energy, has proposed a coal export terminal to ship coal from the Powder River Basin (Montana, Wyoming) to Asian markets. The Cowlitz County Council has approved the terminal. The state of Washington has come out against it, but the project is still moving forward.

The revolving door between private and public sectors spins faster than Barry Allen in a meth lab as King Coal’s top lobbyist, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, traveled to Washington (state) this month to promote the Longview coal termial and coal producer interests.

And what’s Schweitzer’s selling? Nothing less than 2011′s real prize — JOBS! Jobs building the terminal. Jobs working at the terminal. Jobs working in the coal mines and moving coal to market. In the current economy, the false dichotomy of jobs vs. the environment will always see employment come out on top, and industry preys upon those fears.

Other coal companies such as Peabody Energy also have plans to build more coal export terminals on the northwest coast. Exporting coal to overseas markets will be the emerging environmental struggle.

But don’t think this means East Coast coal sources are off the hook. The Appalachian and mid-western coal barons aim to export lots out of East Coast ports like Norfolk as well.

Fortunately, the Northwest region has a recent serious history of environmental resistance. Oregon, Washington, Northern California, Idaho and Montana have all seen decades of strife over logging and mining.

This fight is just beginning.  Who’s in?

In a conference call last week reported today by Politico, API previewed a national advertising campaign supporting the TransCanada KeystoneXL oil pipeline set to launch in January. Critics including Senator Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) are concerned that the pipeline risks contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest and a critical source of drinking water for Midwestern states.

According to reports from the call, API will focus its message on energy security. “Every barrel we import from Canada will replace oil from less secure sources” said API’s Cindy Schild, according to the Oil and Gas Journal.

A report commissioned by TransCanada themselves, however, shows those claims to be false. According to the report from Purvin & Gertz, the supply from the KeystoneXL pipeline would primarily displace domestic oil flowing into Midwestern refineries (see chart below).

Oil imports from KeystoneXL would displace domestic oil in the Midwest, not foreign oil.

Meanwhile, new demand from Gulf Coast refiners enabled by the new pipeline would constrain supplies available to Midwestern refiners, pushing oil prices up for Midwestern consumers. According to the report, after KeystoneXL

Midwest demand for Canadian heavy crude would exceed the available supply and the market price of Cold Lake Blend would be approximately $6.55 per barrel above the 2008 price level at Patoka. (p.27).

The report also describes the real economic basis behind support for the pipeline: big profits for the oil companies.

In summary, if the Keystone XL Pipeline causes the USGC price discount to be eliminated, the annual revenue increase to the Canadian producing industry is estimated at $2.0 billion (U.S.). In addition, if the Keystone XL Pipeline causes the Midwest price to rise above USGC parity, the annual revenue could increase by another $1.9 billion to reach approximately $3.9 billion (U.S.). (p.29)

What we found out is that fractals are:

A. Very cool

B. Are becoming a valuable tool in measuring things that were once thought to be unmeasurable, such as the exact length of a coastline or the carbon stocks of a rainforest.

You can watch the entire episode on PBS’s website, but if you want to skip right to the part where it talks about rainforests it is near the end, starting around the 44 minute mark.

Sidenote: The episode was partially funded by ExxonMobil and and the David H. Koch Foundation, two organizations known for their funding of climate change denying organizations, yet this episode repeatedly refers to global warming as an accepted scientific fact. An interesting contradiction, don’t you think?

Would you give these little guys up for a bar of soap?

Most of us practice personal hygiene at least every couple of days, and because many contain synthetic chemicals, a portion of those end up in our bodies and in our earth.  For the last few months, I’ve been trying to green-up my beauty routine.  If I wouldn’t put something in my body, why would I want to put it on my body?  Standing in the body care aisle at the local Whole Foods, however, I ran into a problem.

Palm Oil.  It is literally in every single soap on the shelf, and because it doesn’t always have to be labeled as such, even “vegetable oil” makes me nervous. Palm Oil is the number one cause of deforestation in Indonesia, where giant swathes of forest are cleared for plantations.  Endangered species like the Orangutan and the Sumatran Tiger (of which there are less than 500 in the wild) are losing their habitats at a terrifying rate, and if it isn’t stopped, the only place we’ll be able to find them will be zoos.  Until palm oil production is sustainable and destruction-free, I’ll be purchasing products without it.

After scouring the Bay Area for palm oil free soap, my search finally paid off. While wandering aimlessly at GreenFest in San Francisco, I came across Diggin’ Livin’ Farm and Apiary‘s booth and was drawn in by the promise of palm oil free soap.  Jackpot! I bought a bar of the Bioregional Mint” for $6, as much as I’d been paying anywhere else.

After using the product and doing some research on Diggin’ Livin’ Farms, I’m excited to say that I have found my rainforest-safe soap! The soap smells great and keeps skin soft, which is really all I was looking for.  The makers, the McEwen family, are dedicated to getting the word out about palm oil and rainforest destruction, even going so far as to sponsor an “adopted” orangutan, Kesi.  Kesi, who lost her mother and her left hand on a palm oil plantation, lives at the BOS Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rescue Center and is funded partially by the purchase of Diggin’ Livin’ products.

What better time to make greener shopping choices than the Holiday season?  These destruction-free soaps can be purchased online and will make a great eco-and-orangutan-friendly stocking-stuffer.  I know a few lucky people who will be getting soap from me!

Have you voted for your favorite spoof Chevron ad yet?

November 3rd was a bittersweet day. The day after the midterm elections, we found out that Prop 23 — the so-called “Dirty Energy Proposition” that was funded by Texas oil companies Valero and Tesoro along with the billionaire oilmen Koch brothers — had gone down in flames, which was most certainly good news. But Prop 26, Chevron’s stealth attack against California’s environmental regulations, had snuck through.

There’s room for debate about what Prop 26 will mean for California’s global warming law, AB32. There was some fear before the election that it could be even more damaging than Prop 23, which would have suspended implementation of the state’s landmark climate bill indefinitely. On the other hand, Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board has since said that all plans and regulations under AB32 are “on track” despite passage of Prop 26.

But one thing is indisputable: Prop 26 will make it harder to hold California’s biggest polluters accountable in the future — and that’s exactly what Chevron was counting on when donating $4 million to help pass it. The company’s California refineries in Richmond and El Segundo are two of the top ten biggest emitters of industrial carbon pollution in the state.

Currently, these types of dirty, polluting operations are charged fees by the government in order to pay for the social and environmental damage they cause. Prop 26 reclassified all those fees as taxes, however, so they now require a two-thirds vote in the state Senate in order to be passed. And as we all know, there is no getting certain legislators to vote for anything called a “tax” no matter how necessary it may be to ensure clean air, drinkable water, and healthy communities.

This is exactly the reason why Chevron tried to keep its support for Prop 26 quiet — the company knew damn well that Californians would reject its attempt to evade paying its fair share for its pollution. Because not only does Prop 26 make it harder for the state to hold Chevron accountable for its pollution, it also ensures that the taxpayers of California are now going to have to foot the bill Chevron refuses to pay.

For the record, this is a company that made $167 billion in profits last year. Of course, the company also pollutes. A LOT. Its Richmond and El Segundo refineries emitted nearly 4.8 and 3.6 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution in 2008, respectively, making them the 6th and 9th biggest industrial sources of emissions in the state.

The Richmond refinery emits the equivalent of the carbon emitted annually by 926,725 cars, the El Segundo refinery the equivalent of 696,863.0324 cars (based on this conversion rate). And the fine people of California will now be paying for the impacts those emissions have on the environment, because Chevron refuses to clean up after itself in California, just as it refuses to clean up its mess in Ecuador.

But there is still reason to find some comfort in the election results. Defeating Prop 23 wasn’t the only victory on November 2nd: Richmond’s Green Party mayor, Gayle McGlaughlin, was returned to office despite a million-dollar smear campaign run against her by — you guessed it! — Chevron. Given the amount of pollution Chevron’s Richmond refinery is responsible for, it’s probably no wonder that McGlaughlin, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, and other allies were able to beat back the Big Oil behemoth.

The election results were most definitely a mixed bag. But we can all take heart from the successful mobilizations against Big Oil’s attempts to railroad California’s energy and environmental policies. The local mobilization against Chevron in Richmond and the statewide mobilization against Prop 23 show that the people still have the power when they choose to exercise it.

Chevron’s $4 million support for Prop 26 really puts the lie to their bogus new greenwash campaign. The company thinks we’re stupid enough to believe it’s a responsible corporate citizen even while it refuses to take responsibility for its pollution in Richmond and Ecuador and is actively seeking to forestall any attempts to make the company pay for the environmental damage it has done.

Luckily we have just the place for you to vent your frustration with Chevron’s greenwash.