End Fossil Fuel Subsidies

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Climate Hawks & #HR3242

On Wednesday, four climate hawks in the Senate made a solid push to bring this critical and urgent issue into focus for our nation's lawmakers.

Senators Sanders, Udall, Whitehouse, and Franken got right to the heart of the matter and confronted the special interests that are being so successful in making it look like there's confusion about the science - just enough to ensure the status quo.

See the highlights in this video:



In light of the "deniergate" scandal that broke this week, it's heartening to see some in Congress trying to bring climate solutions to the fore.

Other positive, exciting news from DC is the introduction of HR 3242 - the "Save Our Climate Act" - which puts a price on carbon, and uses revenues to go toward deficit reduction and dividends for the public -- starting $160 per person and rising to $1,170 per person.

Learn more about the bill here and click here to quickly and easily voice your support for it to your representatives.

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PowerShift 2011

I wasn't able to make it down to DC for PowerShift 2011 - but have had a great time following the action via livestreams and various twitter accounts.  Here's a quick sampling of some of the great videos and photos coming out of this movement:

Recap:




Taking it to the Streets:

Press Coverage: 

Coverage in the Washington Post, LA Times, New York Times, HuffingtonPost, CNN, Politico,The Nation.


Bill McKibben's Speech:




Al Gore's Speech: 




Van Jones's Speech:




Shutting Down BP Station: 



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The American Clean Energy Party

Earlier this month, Eban Goodstein shared an idea to create the American Clean Energy party - ACE - in this article on grist.org.

The entire article is worth the read, as it's a compelling idea.  Goodstein lays out 3 main components that the ACE party would be built around:

1) The American Permanent Fund: Every year, each American family receives a check for $1,000, and rising. The source? A fee on big polluters

2) Clean energy leadership: Thirty billion a year to capture global leadership in the clean energy technologies that will rewire the world.

3) Green collar jobs, today: A large-scale loan guarantee program to finance energy efficiency retrofits of state, city, and federal buildings -- putting millions of Americans to work.

The aim of the party would be to run ACE-endorsed candidates in the primaries of both major parties, with the intention of shifting the debate to the most critical issue of our time - the climate crisis.

I like the concept for a lot of reasons - it will work to engage more people in the political process; it would be built around a positive vision for an energy-independent, safe, secure, clean-energy future; and it holds promise to provide the common ground needed to move past the counter-productive, divisive, partisan stalemates that are so common in our political culture these days.

ACE isn't a party yet - just an idea.  But it is an idea that has legs.  So stay tuned, and share the idea --hopefully, the right people with the necessary resources will come together to make something like ACE a reality soon.

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Write a Letter, Be Counted

Before the holidays, I wrote about an emerging campaign called The Million Letter March.  The concept is to get as many people as possible to write a personalized, hard-copy letter to their representatives, encouraging them to show some leadership on climate action, and work to recognize the true costs of emitting greenhouse gases by putting a price on carbon.

With the new Congress, much of the focus is still on ideological, political bickering.  A strong showing of personalized letters will show that there is support for climate action - and doing so through this project which tracks the letters, will help show the collective impact of many people understanding the importance of moving on this issue.

It will take about 5-10 minutes to write and print your letter, record it in their system and put a stamp on the envelope.  So please go to www.millionlettermarch.org and click "Write Your Letter" at the top of the column on the left.  They have some sample text if you're looking for inspiration - below is a copy of what I sent.  It's not necessary to make every point about why pricing carbon is important - national security, health, driving innovation, saving lives, protecting ecosystems, creating jobs, etc. etc. - but make one or two that are particularly important to you and send it off!!

Dear Senator,

Please do everything in your power to put a price on carbon.  Climate disruption from greenhouse gas emissions is already wreaking havoc on people in the US and around the world, and the longer we wait to take meaningful action, the worse it will get.  The economic impacts of this disruption will be enormous. More importantly, there is no way to put a price on the hundreds of millions of lives that are at stake, or on a species, or a place.  

We must do everything in our power to eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. I support the Million Letter March Principles, found at www.MillionLetterMarch.org, and would welcome a carbon tax.  We need to adopt a science-based target of 350 parts per million atmospheric concentrations of CO2, and take the most sensible and effective measures of getting there. 

Putting a price on carbon immediately is a necessary first step.  Luckily, it is also one that will drive innovation, produce entire new industries, and create millions of jobs. 

Please support a price on carbon through fair, effective climate legislation. Thank you, and I look forward to your response. 

Sincerely, 

Georges Dyer

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Solar Road Trip

On this Tuesday night (Sept. 7, 2010), the Solar Road Trip will stop in Boston.  Second Nature has teamed up with Unity College, 350.org, Students for a Just and Stable Future, and others to help promote this exciting trip. 

Carter solar panels on the cafeteria of Unity College
(image source: huff-po)

Author Bill McKibben and a team of students from Unity College in Maine travel to Washington D.C. to deliver one of the original Carter panels to President Obama, asking him to reinstall solar on the White House, and to follow this symbolic gesture with substantial legislative action.

Second Nature President Tony Cortese will speak, along with Bill McKibben and other leaders, about the importance of taking action on climate and energy.  This should be a major press event, and a strong showing of supporters will go along way to raise the profile of these efforts – please join us on Tuesday night!

Here are the details of the event:

• Date: Tuesday, September 7
• Location: Old South Church, Copley Square, Boston
• Schedule:
  
  • 5:30pm - Bicycle pedal-powered climate rock band, Melodeego
  • 6:00pm - Guest Speakers, including Bill McKibben (of http://www.350.org), Tony Cortese (of http://www.secondnature.org), representatives from Students for a Just and Stable Future and Interfaith Power and Light
  • 7:00pm - Screening of "A Road Not Taken," new documentary that tells the story of the original Carter White House solar panel installation.

Please forward to anyone in the Boston area who might be interested.

And if you didn’t catch Bill McKibben on Letterman Tuesday night, watch the clip here.

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The Glorious Mess

In this recent piece for Yale e360, Eric Pooley, deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek and author of The Climate War gives a great analysis of the current status of a national climate bill this year (near dead).

While the disastrous downsides of this failure to act are many, this quote sums up pretty well what we're looking at for next steps, and why it is about as far from a strategic and effective approach as we can get:

Welcome to the “glorious mess” — Michigan Rep. John Dingell’s phrase for the tangle of regulation and litigation that will follow when Congress fails to act. We are about to experience precisely the sort of costly, protracted, plant-by-plant trench warfare the cap was intended to avoid. Since the utilities and the manufacturers weren’t willing to cut a deal, this is what they get. The fragile period of compromise and cooperation between environmentalists and big business may now be coming to an end. Green groups that have invested time and money into the legislative process are now putting on their war paint and returning to the courts, with a renewed focus on stopping new coal-fired power plants and shutting down the oldest and dirtiest ones.

I remain hopeful that good sense will prevail, that we will be able to remove poisonous partisan politics from this issue and realize that this is one we're all in together, and we're way overdue in responding to.  My optimism also leads me to believe (or at least hope) that maybe the glorious mess won't be quite as messy as suggested above - the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, and the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) are getting more and more established, and looking into linking.  These states and provinces account for nearly 40% of US GHG emissions, and are taking important steps in internalizing more of the true costs of carbon emissions and driving the investments in better design, efficiency upgrades, and product innovation that will not only reduce emissions but also spark economic activity and create jobs.

State and regional precedent is important for federal policy, and now I expect NGOs, businesses, and local and state government to refocus energy on effective programs that will set that precedent while reducing emissions and creating jobs at the same time.

Sector-wide approaches continue to lay the ground work.  Hundreds of colleges and universities are demonstrating real leadership, educating students, driving research, eliminating their own emissions, and engaging with communities to create solutions.  Through the ACUPCC hundreds have publicly reported comprehensive climate action plans on how they will do this.  ICLEI continues to help municipalities ramp up progress, and the C40 Cities initiative has the world's most influential cities stepping up and trying to out-do each other in the most productive ways possible.

It's painful to dwell on the missed opportunity the Senate's inaction represents, but it's possible it will open up more unexpected opportunities that will enable us to avoid the worst impacts of climate disruption.

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C-Level Leadership

Leadership for sustainability is critical for maintaining and fostering a decent quality of life on this planet for as many of its inhabitants as possible.  This leadership needs to come from everywhere - citizens, government, business, religion, education, etc. - and from all levels - the boss, the workers, the students, the moms, the kids, etc.

The recently released McKinsey Global Survey on how companies are managing (or not managing) sustainability stresses the importance of active C-Level leadership in avoiding the risks and taking advantage of the opportunities that the sustainability challenge presents for every organization.  They state:

Companies where sustainability is a top item in their CEOs’ agendas are twice as likely as others to integrate sustainability into their companies’ business practices. This suggests that senior executives who want to reap the benefits of incorporating sustainability into their companies’ overall strategies must take an active role in the effort.

This is something we stress all the time in our work with college & university presidents through the ACUPCC - and a central theme of the Leading Profound Change (pdf) resource we developed with presidents and chancellors on how exactly to take an active leadership role in this process on an ongoing basis.

It's also why the lack of such leadership from the other "C-level" - Congress - is so disheartening.  I won't go into details on why, because others have done so more eloquently than I would be able to in recent days, but I would highly recommend taking the time to read the following:

• "Who Cooked the Planet?" by Paul Krugman on who has the real motive to create confusion and ensure inaction; 
• "The Senate Punts Recklessly on Energy and Climate" by Mindy Lubber, who shows that most companies - and investors - are looking for the clarity and innovation-sparking constraints that a price on carbon would provide, and that inaction is sending jobs and sustainable development opportunities abroad, while discouraging investment and leaving capital on the sidelines; and
• "What 7 Republicans Could Do" and "We're Gonna Be Sorry" by Thomas Friedman 

In "We're Gonna Be Sorry" Friedman shares a story that ran in The China Daily the same day news that the Senate would not pursue a bill before the August recess was released, and that clearly shows how this inaction and lack of leadership is ceding power and moral authority to China (and undermining one Massachusetts Senator's rationale for inaction):

“BEIJING — The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target. The decision was made at a closed-door meeting chaired by Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission ... Putting a price on carbon is a crucial step for the country to employ the market to reduce its carbon emissions and genuinely shift to a low-carbon economy, industry analysts said.”

He also cites a hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who wrote:

Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Finally, in "What 7 Republicans Could Do" Friedman notes:

What if the G.O.P. said: We will support a carbon tax provided one-third of the revenue goes toward cutting corporate taxes, one-third toward cutting payroll taxes for every working American and one-third toward paying down the deficit. The G.O.P. would actually help us get a better energy policy.  Surely there are seven Republican senators who can see this. Aren’t there?

Hopefully there will be - this is the kind of thinking needed to get past partisan politics and implement smart policies that will benefit all of us.  But it is going to take a heavy push from all of us to encourage our Senators to see that and to actually take up a real charge on passing a climate bill this year after the August recess.

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40 Years & Obama's Chance

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) have created a quick video that brings home the point about how long we've been trying to break our addiction to oil and create systems that use much less energy, so our demand can be met by safe, clean, renewable, and sustainable sources of energy.

After 40 years we have what may very well be our last chance to put the policies in place that will make such a shift possible before irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption becomes unavoidable.  This will require great leadership from Obama, but also from each of us - call you Senators today and let them know you support strong climate legislation that helps to internalize the true costs of carbon and correct the artificial market distortion that makes fossil energy seem cheaper than it really is.  And sign EDF's petition calling for strong leadership from Obama to help make this happen.

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Post Hopenhagen...

There's lots of continued fall-out, analysis, despair, and renewed hope and energy in the aftermath of the Copenhagen negotiations in December. I won't spend too much time diving too deep into my own thoughts and analysis but suffice it to say, it fell far short of what we need, but had some very hopeful silver linings, most importantly so many heads-of-state getting in the same room and getting more serious about this - particularly those from the US and China.

On that note, check out a must read from Guardian reporter, Mark Lynas, who was in the room and in this article exposes the barriers the Chinese delegation presented in making sure no real targets came out of Copenhagen. In my view this a pretty solid case for imposing a carbon tariff on Chinese imports, which is not normally the kind of isolationist approach I'm a fan of, but would have some ancillary benefits of protecting American jobs and addressing some of the "we-can't-price-carbon-cause-it'll-make-us-less-competitive" arguments.

Also, get involved with the latest 1Sky campaign: The just-passed international climate talks in Copenhagen show the critical need for the U.S. to take bold action on climate and energy in the New Year. Next Tuesday, January 12 people all across the country will flood Senate offices with phone calls to urge support for strong climate and clean energy legislation in 2010. Sign up at http://www.1sky.org/call-in to join this effort and make your voice heard!

Finally, in our work at Second Nature, many people have been saying how Copenhagen's results have prompted them to refocus on the local efforts, and set precedent for real action that will make the federal/international agreements easier to make. The signatories of the ACUPCC (American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment) have been doing so for 3 years now, and making great strides - about 500 have completed and publicly reported their GHG Inventories, and over 130 have submitted plans for pursuing climate neutrality in operations and incorporating climate and sustainability into the educational experience. These are all available at www.acupcc.org/reportingsystem - see if you're school has signed and if they're up-to-date on their progress. For a great breakdown of what happened in Copenhagen, how colleges were involved, and what it means in the context of the ACUPCC, check out this article from Sarah Brylinsky at Dickinson College.

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Clean American Energy

Good new ad from the League of Conservation Voters:

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