The Broken Legs of the Biggest Elephant in the Room, the US Climate Bill
A brilliantly written article by Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, writing for the NY Times and Huffington Post. Wasserman recognizes the US Senate climate bill for what it was, born to fail. This is not to say we don’t need legislation to fight dangerous climate change. We need a strong, simple, equitable bill, and we need it now.
“Cap and Trade” Would Make Getting to Zero Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Impossible
Jean Matlack, one of our trusted 350.org organizers in Maine, recently wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Bangor Daily News which was published on April 13. Her letter, titled “Cap and Dividend might work”, stresses the importance of passing effective climate legislation in the U.S. as soon as possible, and goes on to explain why the cap-and-dividend approach, proposed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, could fit the bill (no pun intended). Please take a moment to read her letter, posted below, and consider writing a Letter to the Editor of your own local newspaper. We can’t afford to stay silent when it comes to solving the climate crisis, so now is the perfect time to get your ideas and opinions published.
Exciting News on the Clear Act: Weekly Policy Update from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network
March 29-April 2 Overview: Despite the U.S. Congress being on recess this past week (and next), interest in and support for the cap and dividend/CLEAR Act approach to climate legislation continues to grow. Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter wrote positively about what he calls cap-and-rebate in his latest column. Mother Jones magazine carried a story on its website blog about The Other Climate Bill. Senator Susan Collins was interviewed by Clean Skies News; during the interview she suggested that the CLEAR Act could be paired with legislation, The American Clean Energy Leadership Act, passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. On Tuesday, March 30th, in what is probably the first such action in the country, the Santa Rosa, Ca. City Council unanimously passed a resolution in support of the CLEAR Act. And at the end of the week, on Good Friday, the Philadelphia Daily News came out with an editorial supporting the CLEAR Act.
The CLEAR Act: A Clean, Green and Clear Choice
It’s time for the climate movement to come together, right now, to defend the best option that we have to get decent, badly-needed legislation on climate passed this year, and to push back against the fossil fools. Passage of the CLEAR Act would be a definite step forward, a political tipping point, not the end game but a victory for sure.
Is Cap and Trade Really Dead? Part III
Different models of carbon cap legislation serve different interests. Videos of Parts 4 and 5 of The Real News Network’s coverage of Carbon Cap Legislation. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who is also associated with the PERI Institute
Is Cap and Trade Dead? Part II
Continuing with our coverage of pending Cap-and-Trade and Cap-and-Dividend legislation, here are three videos from the Real News Network on different models of Carbon Cap legislation and the corruption that could be caused by Carbon Offsets and Trading. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He’s associated with the PERI Institute, the Political Economics Research Institute. The Real News Network has yet to publish the final one, but we will post it as soon as we get it.
Let us hope a better understanding of this issue will precipitate a new effort on the part government in the Western World to enact honest, equitable, and effective measures to reduce and remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
Is “Cap and Trade” Really Dead?
Sadly, many large environmental organizations – as well as Goldman Sachs, big oil and big coal – have also been pushing for the adoption of Cap and Trade legislation, citing concerns that this may be the only politically possible solution for controlling carbon emissions. They have ignored the fact that the flawed multi-billion dollar economic infrastructure Cap-and-Trade would create will be impossible to dismantle once it is shown – and it will be – as disruptive, inefficient and dangerous. But President Obama is going for an energy bill alone, so Cap-and-Trade is dead, at least for now.
James Hansen Against Cap and Trade with Offsets
The proposed climate bills in Congress are loaded with goodies for special financial and corporate interests. These bills would cheat the American public – again. Cap-and-trade was designed in part by Wall Street, which is eager to exploit a trading market expected to grow to two trillion dollars. The revolving door between Washington and Wall Street helped bring the scheme about. Yet Washington appears intent on choosing a path defined by corporate greed. Unless the public gets engaged, the present Administration may jam down the public’s throat just such an approach, which, it can be shown, is not a solution at all.
A Message from James Hansen on Hope of Cutting Global Carbon Emissions
Is it feasible to phase out coal and avoid use of unconventional fossil fuels? Yes, but only if governments face up to the truth: as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, their use will continue and even increase on a global basis. Fossil fuels are cheapest because they are not made to pay for their effects on human health, the environment, and future climate.
Intergenerational inequity is a moral issue.
Mobilizing for Climate Justice
The Mobilization for Climate Justice was founded to link the climate struggle in the U.S. to the growing international climate justice movement, with an eye toward building for actions around the Copenhagen climate summit and beyond. Its objective is to provide a justice-based framework for organizing around climate change that opens space for leadership by representatives of communities in the U.S. that are most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry.
The increasing urgency of the climate crisis has clearly hit a nerve among people of many walks of life, all around the world. While the outcome of this fall’s events remains highly uncertain, it is clear that such a flowering of creative and determined popular responses is precisely what is needed to reverse decades of willful inaction by the world’s elites and reach beyond the limits of politics-as-usual.
