All too often those debating the solutions and proposed actions to tackle global warming fail to challenge the assumptions. While it’s important to deal with emissions it can be argued that the root causes of emissions lie farther upstream and can more effectively deal with the challenges we are facing. Cutting emissions is good. Investing in clean energy and cutting emissions before the fuel is readied is better. Read on.

The Carbon Logic Problem Statement | Grist. by Ken Ward

An acclaimed mountaineer, a Baptist minister and a distinguished economist were stuck in a pit. The mountain climber said, “Stand back boys, I’ll have us out in a jiffy,” but the walls of the pit were loose shale and she couldn’t gain purchase. Then the minster raised his arms high and in a deep sonorous voice called for deliverance but after an hour of prayer he too admitted defeat. Finally, the economist stood, brushed dirt of a shabby Harris tweed jacket and said, “This is easy. First, assume a ladder.”

Environmentalists are trying to get out of a deep pit too, and in our push for Waxman-Markey we are acting like the mountaineer, minister and economist. We support ACES because, well, it’s there, and we are accustomed to moving doggedly forward for the best we can get. We also hope for deliverance via a gentle greening, where fossil fuels wither away and a sustainable future of vegetable gardens, strong local communities and good jobs blossoms. Finally, we have invested in what may be termed serial delusional assumptions.

• In the beginning, we thought that Enron and others aiming to cash in on carbon trading (as they did in the sulphur market) would out-muscle fossil fuel giants.
• We believed that techno-policy crafted by tuned-in elites could be quietly slipped into place, avoiding a flat-out messy and risky political slug-fest.
• We were convinced that major corporations like BP, GE and WAL*Mart were honest in their pledge to shift away from fossil fuels and had both the means and will to do so.
• We had faith that a solid majority of the American public, properly educated, would support effective climate action, so long as we did not offend sensibilities with Chicken Little predictions.
• Finally, we now assume we can fix broken policy somewhere down the line, so anything is better than nothing. More »

Check out episode 9 of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

Check out episode 7 of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

Check out episode 6 of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

Check out episode 5 of the 10 day adventure of RAN and Substance educating and mobilizing people to stop the Tar Sands, with rock bands Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere

In order to create controversy over the cause or even the reality of Global Warming, Big Oil, Big Auto and Big Coal promoted the idea that there was a debate and that the evidence linking the burning of fossil fuels to accelerated climate change was inconclusive and wrong. Environmentalists have long decried this practice while Industry denied it. Now it seems there’s proof that this is indeed the case, and that the fossil-fuel dealers and addicts were buying time to maintain profits while the world slowly began to burn.

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate – NYTimes.com.

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups. More »

It wasn’t that long ago (I think we can count it in months actually) that the terms ‘nationalize’ and ‘banks’ just wouldn’t ever have been found in the same sentence. Ever. Check out this whole article in the NY Times entitled: “Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look”. One small excerpt:

“In an interview Sunday on “This Week” on ABC, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, alluded to internal debate when she was asked whether nationalization, or partial nationalization, of the largest banks was a good idea. “Well, whatever you want to call it,” said Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California. “If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization.”

Yes, some people do. Namely, most of the other people in the world when faced with the government owning the majority share in a company. What does this mean for the banks? Citi and Bank of America lead the pack as poster children for the declining financial sector. Ken Lewis has some serious egg on his face as the train-wreck that is Merrill Lynch pulls up to the station, and Citi is hiving itself off into smaller and smaller chunks to keep it’s head above water. Both are desperately in need of more government intervention to avoid collapse. Whatever we call it, let’s spend some serious time thinking about what kind of conditions should be placed on any public money for the private banks.

How will an Obama Administration handle Native Rights issues in the face of fossil fuel expansion? That’s the question raised in a good article from by Joe Friesen in the Globe and Mail today. Several northern Indigenous leaders will soon visit the President Elect to ask for support in battling dirty oil development on their traditional territories. According to the article,

They will ask Mr. Obama to put pressure on the Canadian government and the TransCanada and Enbridge pipeline companies to agree to a revenue-sharing deal for native people.

Friesen also provides background on seven Native American members of Obama’s transition team including several beltway veterans and a new positon for Wizipan Garriott, the first ever “First Americans public-liason officer” for an incoming administration.

A wave of major coal and oil developments within Native Lands in the US and Canada will no doubt keep the team busy. Aside from controversies in Canada, TransCanada also faces lawsuits from Native communities South of the boarder claiming that the company failed to conduct proper environmental reviews. In Arizona, Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe members are taking direct action to oppose proposed coal mines.

Obama’s team should show leadership on Indigenous rights by embracing the delegation from the North and strongly enfocing US treaty obligations. It should also move to reverse the course set by the Bush Administration by endorsing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People–already signed by 143 members of the United Nations (but not the US and Canada).

Excerpt from former RAN staffer, Dan Firger, who is sitting in on the Bowoto v. Chevron trial happening in San Francisco. See full post here.

Opening arguments in Bowoto v. Chevron began early Tuesday morning in federal district court in San Francisco, and it became clear within the first few minutes that company lawyers are worlds apart from Mr. Bowoto and his co-plaintiffs on almost every important factual element of the case.

Leaving Judge Illston’s courtroom, I was ready to write up a blow-by-blow account of who said what, but the SF Chronicle had already summarized the day’s arguments in a great article, and the facts in dispute are relatively straightforward. Were the protesters who occupied Chevron’s oil platform unarmed? Did Nigerian military personnel shoot first and ask questions later? These are questions the jury will answer after hearing testimony from both sides over the coming weeks.

Instead, I thought I’d reflect a bit upon what I believe to be the most important legal question at issue in this case, one whose resolution will likely have a big impact on the ability of plaintiffs to win human rights lawsuits in the future.

The primary legal battle being fought here – and part of the reason so many scholars and activists around the world are watching — has to do with the uncertain standards used to determine so-called aiding and abetting liability for corporations in human rights cases.

Among other defenses, Chevron insists that when Larry Bowoto and other protestors posed a threat to company workers on an offshore oil platform, they did the right thing by calling in the Navy for backup. Payments to military personnel notwithstanding, Chevron says it shouldn’t be held liable for the killings and torture that soldiers carried out on its behalf because it never intended for anyone to get hurt. Lead defense counsel Bob Mittelstaedt began his opening argument with a strong statement that set the stage for this line of reasoning. “This was not a peaceful protest,” he said. “It was an illegal invasion.” To Chevron, the case boils down to the simple question of whether a company has the right to “call the police” when its workers are endangered…..

Since the state of the law is so unsettled on this point, the decision in Bowoto is likely to have a big impact on the way future human rights lawsuits are litigated. Chevron knows this, of course, which is why careful observers of this case should pay extra-close attention when its lawyers use phrases like “didn’t intend” or “couldn’t have known” to describe the company’s involvement in the Nigerian military’s brutal attacks on the plaintiffs. Beyond the immediate goal of avoiding liability for these despicable acts, Chevron is pursuing a larger strategy as well, one that would lead to keeping cases like this one out of court, once and for all.

Sometimes, it seems, it turns out that law is war by other means.

From former RAN staffer Daniel Firger who is in the Bowoto v. Chevron courtroom this week in San Francisco

Nigeria’s Delta State is not a good place to be an environmentalist. In fact, it’s not a very good place to be a Nigerian. Delta State is quite a nice place for oil companies though; since oil was found there in 1956 multinationals like Chevron and Shell have extracted billions of barrels of crude — currently, between 1.8 and 2.5 million barrels a day — from across the oil-rich Niger River Delta, leaving a destitute and despoiled landscape in their wake.

As of 2004, oil accounted for 98% of Nigerian exports and almost half of GDP, yet despite record prices, almost three quarters of Nigerians still live on roughly $1 per day. Some of Nigeria’s poorest communities are clustered around the platforms, pipelines, and refineries that dot the mangrove forests and rich estuaries throughout the Niger Delta and other oil producing communities. For decades, oil companies’ pledges to improve their lot have gone unfulfilled. Instead, local villagers were bequeathed a toxic environment and a legacy of violence and human rights abuses.

On Monday, a handful of these villagers will finally get their day in court, when the case of Bowoto v. Chevron goes to trial.

In 1998, Larry Bowoto and about 100 other community members staged a peaceful protest at one of Chevron’s offshore oil platforms, demanding a meeting between company representatives and village elders to negotiate for the job training and education programs they had been promised in exchange for the severe environmental harms they had been forced to endure. They were unarmed, and after receiving word that Chevron would attend a meeting in a nearby village the following day, they prepared to leave the platform peacefully.

Before they could do so, three company helicopters carrying Nigerian military personnel swooped down on the platform and opened fire, killing two people and injuring several others, including Bowoto. Allegedly acting at the direction of Chevron, soldiers detained and tortured several other protestors, after which company personnel paid them for their services.

Bowoto and his co-plaintiffs filed their suit in 1999 in United States District Court in San Francisco. After nearly a decade of legal wrangling, the case now stands as an important milestone in the history of international human rights law: for the first time, a U.S. company could potentially be held liable in U.S. courts for gross human rights abuses committed in their overseas operations.

I will be in the courtroom this week to witness this historic trial as it begins. Although I have no connection to Nigeria and no ties to the plaintiffs, it’s important for me to be there because I’ve seen this kind of story before.

For the past several years, I’ve worked as a volunteer legal advisor in Ecuador and the U.S. on a case that raises similar issues. Starting in the 1960’s, Chevron pumped oil out of the Ecuadorian Amazon and, in the process, recklessly dumped billions of gallons of toxic wastewater and oil sludge directly into rivers, streams and unlined earthen pits across a region the size of Rhode Island. Once one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots and home to half a dozen isolated indigenous tribes, Ecuadorians now call the area a “Rainforest Chernobyl” due to the prevalence of cancer clusters and birth defects among those still bathing, fishing, and drinking the polluted water.

While the Ecuador case is proceeding in a dusty Amazonian courtroom, attention is now turned to San Francisco, where Chevron’s lawyers will do their best to disprove Bowoto’s arguments about the company’s complicity in human rights abuse. Depending on what happens, this trial may open the door to justice for more victims of corporate malfeasance around the world, or it may make their claims much harder to hear. Either way, my colleagues in Ecuador and human rights advocates worldwide are waiting for news from the trial.

I’ll be blogging from the courtroom this week. Stay tuned….