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Five Reasons We're Joining the People's Climate March |
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Saturday, 20 September 2014 12:28 |
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Excerpt: "People will be marching with a wide range of views and agendas, but as we prepare for this momentous and powerful event, here are five reasons the two of us will hit the streets of New York on Sunday."
Sandra Steingraber and Wenonah Hauter at a Cove Point rally in July. (photo: EcoWatch)
Five Reasons We're Joining the People's Climate March
By Wenonah Hauter and Sandra Steingraber, EcoWatch
20 September 14
 n Sept. 21, we join tens of thousands of people from across the country in the historic People’s Climate March in New York City. We’re thrilled to be marching alongside a diverse spectrum of Americans to demand meaningful action on climate change—the pivotal issue of our time and one on which millions of lives and future generations hinge.
People will be marching with a wide range of views and agendas, but as we prepare for this momentous and powerful event, here are five reasons the two of us will hit the streets of New York on Sunday.
1. Climate change requires bold, immediate action from political leaders.
Studies indicate we are now fast approaching climate tipping points, after which extreme changes in global temperatures will no longer be preventable, setting us on a collision course with disaster. Temperature increases, for example, trigger dust storms and sooty Arctic wildfires that are darkening the snowfields of Greenland. In turn, darker snow absorbs more heat, and further increases air temperatures, triggering even more dust storms and wildfires. The result is a feedback loop of runaway warming. We can still intervene and avoid many such tipping points, which lie just ahead, but we can’t do so via delays, half-hearted efforts, or individual lifestyle changes alone. Current climate science warns that to have a “good” chance—that is, somewhat better than 50-50 odds—of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius requires a very rapid, system-wide transition off all fossil fuels, leaving most coal, oil, and gas underground. On Sunday we’ll be marching to call on our elected leaders—at all levels of government—to take bold and decisive action in line with the science before it is too late.
2. President Obama needs to be a climate leader – and climate leaders don’t promote fracking.
We appreciate President Obama’s recent decision to use executive action to address climate change, but the initiative he recently proposed—a set of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules to regulate power plants—are not nearly ambitious enough to solve the problem. Because these rules promote a switch from coal to fracked natural gas, they may even be counterproductive. Studies show that drilling and fracking operations leak methane, a super-charged greenhouse gas. So do pipelines and all the other pieces of infrastructure that process and carry the fracked gas. At best, only 40 percent of these leaks are fixable. A rapid build-out of fracking means an exponential increase in methane leaks, making natural gas at least as bad for the climate as coal—and maybe even worse, particularly in the critical short term. Further, the proposed rules also are overly modest in the goals they set for carbon dioxide reduction. These small cuts aren’t enough to make any substantial progress. On Sunday, we’ll be taking that message to New York City. We have also launched a petition with actor and activist Mark Ruffalo telling President Obama that any climate change solution cannot include fracking.
3. New York is a base camp for the fight against fracking and climate change.
For the last four years, we’ve both been deeply involved with the state-wide coalition, New Yorkers Against Fracking in the efforts to ban fracking in New York. We have seen the movement grow—following the lead of grassroots groups who first sounded the call for a ban—from a place where fracking was all but inevitable to a place where Governor Cuomo recently acknowledged us as the most powerful mass movement in the state. It continues to be a David and Goliath struggle, but we’ve shown we can change the outcome through organizing, persistence and holding elected officials directly accountable for their actions. Those are the elements of our slingshot. When people come together, our collective power can beat back corporate interests, even big oil and gas. On Sunday, we’ll be marching to celebrate the power of organizing and to encourage people across the country to carry the never-give-up fighting spirit from New York’s anti-fracking movement to communities across the country.
4. The solutions to the climate crisis are within our reach. We seek to build the political will to implement them.
We often hear that we need to work within the system on incremental reforms in order to allow time for solutions to be developed, and that bold change is not feasible. Meanwhile, according to this worldview, natural gas obtained via fracking can serve as “bridge” or an “exit ramp” to allow time to transition to renewables. We are marching on Sunday to say that we don’t have time for metaphorical construction projects. And none are required. We can and must make the transition to renewable energy now—not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now – but now. That’s what the science mandates. The Secretary General of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization has warned, “The laws of physics are non-negotiable. We are running out of time.” By that, he does not mean “let’s build bridges out of fracked gas.”
Here’s the good news: an economy based on renewable energy is both economically and technically feasible. Solar is growing exponentially, wind resources are vast, and we possess the know-how to become more energy efficient. Professor Marc Jacobson at Stanford University and The Solutions Project has outlined a national plan to make this happen and state plans are in the works for all 50 states.
5. We can’t stop in New York—we need to take action in communities across the nation.
Finally, we’re marching to recruit people into the anti-fracking wing of the climate change movement and to encourage marchers to take what they’ve learned in the streets of Manhattan back home with them. We can only achieve bold, meaningful action to address climate change if we organize and build power in our communities and use that power to confront fossil fuel projects, challenge their investors and pressure our elected representatives to act on our behalf. The energy and inspiration we siphon from the People’s Climate March can help us continue the hard but critical work of organizing in frontline communities. There are anti-fracking measures on the ballot in multiple communities across the country and literally hundreds of state and local efforts happening across the country. And on Oct. 11, we’ll have a second opportunity to reunite. That day, people from around the globe will come together to call for a ban on fracking and a swift energy transition as part of third international Global Frackdown, the international day of action to ban fracking.
No matter how fracking and climate change impact you and your community, let’s march together in New York, take inspiration and energy back home, and work together to fight for a sustainable and vibrant future.
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It's About More Than Football |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7500"><span class="small">Jim Wallis, Sojourners</span></a>
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Saturday, 20 September 2014 12:25 |
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Wallis writes: "Athletes - at the professional and college levels - have been engaging in these violent crimes against women for a long time and regularly get away with it - we all know that. The National Football League, in particular, has taken little or no action against violence against women by its players."
Ray Rice. (photo: Rob Carr/Getty Images)
It's About More Than Football
By Jim Wallis, Sojourners
20 September 14
 hen Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was suspended for only two games for beating his fiancée (now wife), it became a dramatic public example of the lack of accountability for professional athletes. Only when a video came out showing Rice punching his fiancée so hard it knocked her unconscious, and then dragging her limp body from the casino elevator, did the NFL take further action. As new incidents of domestic violence and child abuse come out, many are calling for Commissioner Roger Goodell to resign or lose his job.
But this epidemic is about so much more than Goodell, whose lack of leadership is typical in professional sports. It's about more than one team, one league, or sports in general.
Studies show that one in four American women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime. And when you add rape and stalking, we're talking about one in every three women. Athletes -- at the professional and college levels -- have been engaging in these violent crimes against women for a long time and regularly get away with it -- we all know that. The National Football League, in particular, has taken little or no action against violence against women by its players.
This sends a very clear message to children in this country, boys in particular, who aspire to be athletes, or those who simply see these athletes as role models. The time has come to flip that message and make it one of zero tolerance.
Any professional athlete who assaults a woman should be immediately suspended -- no sports, no contract, no money, and banished from the team and its games. And we should impose similar rules for college and high school football and every other sport. The message of zero tolerance for violence against women -- with a focus on athletes -- must be made absolutely clear. By watching what happens to the professional athletes they often look up to, younger athletes will learn that such behavior is totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated anymore. They must learn by watching.
As Christians, we believe in grace, mercy, forgiveness, and second chances. We believe in repentance and redemption. And men who assault women should be called to repentance by the faith community and helped to find redemption for their sins by changing their attitudes, behavior, and lives -- and by offering community service that undermines violence against women. However, repentance and redemption do not come in lieu of punishment for their actions.
Women and men are created in the image of God with equal value. People of faith must proclaim this message -- to NFL Commissioner Goodell and all those in positions of power, including in our own churches. Violence against women -- domestic violence in any form -- is unacceptable.
Zero tolerance of violence against women must be established and enforced and without hesitation -- at every level of athletics and in every place that hallows power and money over justice, commerce over ethics, and institutional defense over decency.
We, as people of faith, need to send the message.
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FOCUS | Julian Assange: Google Is the Privatized NSA |
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Saturday, 20 September 2014 09:10 |
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Excerpt: "Julian Assange described to Sky News how Google is essentially a privatized NSA, and discussed his new hope that he will be able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London soon."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange being interviewed by Sky News. (photo: Sky News)
Julian Assange: Google Is the Privatized NSA
By Sarah Hewson, Sky News
20 September 14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIE-NuQI1o
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Climate Change You Can Believe In |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=14990"><span class="small">Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company</span></a>
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Saturday, 20 September 2014 07:30 |
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Excerpt: "Just as Sunday's big People's Climate March and next week's UN global summit on climate converge here in New York City, the nation and world are experiencing weather of an intensity that should rattle the stubborn false convictions of even the most fervent climate change denier."
The largest climate march in history will be highlighted by a massive march in New York City on Sunday, September 21st. (photo: Reuters)
Climate Change You Can Believe In
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
20 September 14
 ust as Sunday’s big People’s Climate March and next week’s UN global summit on climate converge here in New York City, the nation and world are experiencing weather of an intensity that should rattle the stubborn false convictions of even the most fervent climate change denier.
Terrible flooding in India and Pakistan, the worst in more than a century, with heavy monsoon rains, 500 lives lost and hundreds of thousands left stranded… thousands of wildfires ignited by severe drought in California and the West… flashfloods in Arizona… the punch of a hurricane pounding Mexico’s Baja coast, the strongest in nearly fifty years, battering locals and trapping tourists in their hotels without electricity.
We know it’s important not to confuse day-to-day weather patterns with climate, which measure variations of things like temperatures and humidity over long periods of time, but it’s clear that these disasters are made more powerful by global warming. The pain is only going to get worse for us and for future generations, unless we act now. Our governments must reduce those carbon emissions that are heating up the atmosphere before it’s too late.
But up to now, world leaders have refused to give global warming the crisis treatment that’s needed, even as the evidence mounts day by day. A draft report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the vast amounts of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere will have “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts,” and that we’re already seeing the effect in heat waves, floods and rising sea levels. Another UN report, this one from the World Meteorological Organization, says that amounts of carbon dioxide — the gas that traps heat in our atmosphere — are increasing even faster than scientists predicted, more than in the last 800,000 years at least. The accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers has crunched the numbers and spots an “unmistakable trend” that puts us just twenty years away from catastrophe. “In a highly globalized economy,” they write, “no country is likely to be spared as the impacts of climate change ripple around the world…”
If for some reason you don’t believe the scientists and the accountants, listen to the birds. Last week, the National Audubon Society reported that of some 650 bird species studied in the United States and Canada, “more than half are… at risk from global warming.” The study’s chief author, Gary Langham, told The New York Times, “The notion that we can have a future that looks like what our grandparents experienced, with the birds they had, is unlikely.” Imagine a world without birdsong.
But climate change deniers persist in telling us it just ain’t so, like the tobacco industry claiming for decade after decade that nicotine wasn’t addictive or that cigarettes couldn’t kill you. It’s been more than a decade since Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, once chair of the US Senate’s committee on the environment and public works, told us that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” He still says he thinks so and so do many of his allies.
Slick public relations and advertising campaigns are underwritten to fool the public and smear the truthtellers. Foundations and think tanks have been created by industry just to create doubt and hammer away against the overwhelming evidence of climate disruption. Last year, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that between 2002 and 2010, via two right-wing groups, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, billionaires had given nearly $120 million to more than 100 anti-climate change groups. And the progressive Center for Media and Democracy revealed that a web of right-wing think tanks called the State Policy Network, affiliated with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and funded to the tune of $83 million by companies including Facebook, AT&T and Microsoft, was pushing a had right agenda that includes opposition to climate change rules and regulations.
A new study from two groups, Forecast the Facts Action and the SumOfUs.org, says that since 2008, businesses have given campaign contributions to the 160 members of Congress who have rejected climate change that amount to more than $640 million. That includes Google, eBay, Ford and UPS; in fact, 90 percent of the cash came from outside the fossil fuel industry.
Many of the naysayers are not in total denial; they either say climate change is happening more slowly than we think — the so-called “lukewarmers” — or they insist that global warming actually is good for you! Here’s a headline from the conservative Heartland Institute: “Benefits of Global Warming Greatly Exceed Costs, New Study Says.” And here’s a statement responding to that new UN report on carbon dioxide from Chip Knappenberger, assistant director of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science. Cato has received funding from the Koch brothers — much of whose billions have come from fossil fuels — and Exxon Mobil. We should, Knappenberger said, be proud of those greenhouse gases and “applaud our progress in energy expansion around the world,” and he noted a previous statement of his in which he exulted that the rise in carbon dioxide “is cause for celebration.”
Much of this has little to do with the reality of science, some has to do with fundamentalist religious beliefs but most has to do with, you guessed it, money and politics. A study by the journal Climatic Change finds that the more wealthy Republicans are, the more likely they are to think that rising global temperatures are non-existent or no big deal. After all, the industries that are causing the problem — especially anything to do with the extraction or use of fossil fuels — are making them filthy rich. And many of them actually believe further climate change could be good for business. Those melting icecaps and glaciers are opening up waterways in the north, you see. And the defense contractor Raytheon Industries sees big profit opportunities because “climate change may cause humanitarian disasters, contribute to political violence and undermine weak governments.” We’re not making this up.
So intense is the political and corporate opposition to the concept of manmade climate change — despite a majority of Americans who accept it as reality — that some of the more rational officeholders and local governments quietly are trying to work around the resistance, preparing for the worst without mentioning the dreaded words climate change or global warming. In Grand Haven, Michigan, AP reports, officials are preparing for heat waves and storm erosion without saying anything about you-know-what. In Florida, communities are taking steps to protect towns against rising sea levels without getting into a fight over what’s causing them. In Tulsa, Oklahoma — where Senator Jim Inhofe used to be mayor — flood control and drought prevention are sought in the name not of warming but of disaster preparedness.
Meanwhile, some of the media finally are coming around, catching up with public opinion. Once enslaved to the notion of having to give equal weight to both sides despite the overwhelming evidence supporting climate change, they’re changing their tune. A few months ago, the independent BBC Trust said that the British broadcaster was giving “undue attention to marginal opinion” when it came to airtime for climate deniers and should adjust accordingly. The Los Angeles Times announced it would no longer print climate change denial letters to the editor – contrast that with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, which last year ran more anti-climate change letters than any other major newspaper. And last month, The Washington Post, long criticized for the space given such climate deniers as columnist George Will, ran a week’s worth of climate change editorials, declaring, in the words of its editorial page editor, “an existential threat to the planet.”
So we have to ask, how long will we allow the climate deniers the prominence and weight that lets them give our political leaders cover to run and hide from reality?
Two men in Massachusetts decided: No longer. This past May, they used their lobster boat – the Henry David T., as in Henry David Thoreau – to block a coal freighter from docking at a Massachusetts power station. They turned themselves in and faced charges that could have resulted in two years in jail and thousands of dollars in fines.
But last week, the local district attorney, Sam Sutter, stood on the courthouse steps and announced that he had dropped the criminal charges. “Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced,” he said. “In my humble opinion, the political leadership on this issue has been gravely lacking.”
He then announced his intention to be at the People’s Climate March in New York.
Pope Francis would say “Amen” to that. “Safeguard Creation,” he warned, just around the same time the Henry David T. was blocking that coal freighter. “Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us!”
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