INSIGHT
On Labor Day, How We Can Give Both Workers and Our Environment a Chance
Kimberly Freeman Brown and David Foster
This Labor Day, America is facing a dizzying array of problems, none more acute than the twin crises of how poorly we treat our workers and how appallingly we treat our planet. In case anyone believes these issues are distinct and need to be addressed separately, let’s remember some of this year’s grisly headlines:
• ”Massey Accident, Worst Since 1970, Claims 29 Miners”
• ”Families bid farewell to 11 men killed in Gulf rig explosion”
• ”5 workers killed in explosion at Middleton, Conn., power plant”
While the environmental and labor disasters at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, the BP oil rig, and the Kleen Energy natural gas plant have topped the news, the everyday struggles of working people have continued unabated.
Struggles such as the construction worker forced to work more hours for less pay, building outdated structural designs in dangerous conditions. Or the tomato picker breaking her back in a hot, pesticide-soaked field, gathering vegetables destined for a supermarket shelf. Or the factory worker forced into an ever-faster production line that spits out toxic byproducts, putting his health and safety at risk with little or no health care benefits.
These conditions are the reality faced by millions of America’s workers. But we do not have to accept them as the cost of doing business in this country. There is a better way.
Years ago, labor and environmental advocates realized that in order to preserve our environment and create jobs in America, investing in a clean energy economy was critical. Today, green jobs are growing, and America’s workers must benefit from the full potential and promise of the green economy.
There are a select number of forward-thinking employers already paving the way toward a green economy. They are collaborating with their employees as equal partners, respecting their decision to join unions, and creating good, green, union jobs — where workers receive family-sustaining wages, fair benefits, safe workplaces, and retirement security.
Green builders such as Oregon-based Gerding Edlen Development are paving the way. Having led the first LEED-Platinum certified renovation of a building on the National Register of Historic Places, Gerding Edlen sees its highly-trained, union workforce as key to its success. As CEO Mark Edlen says, “Union workers bring the skill set, creativity, and workplace safety the company needs to execute such complex projects: that’s why Gerding Edlen uses union labor.” Not surprisingly, the firm has topped the Oregon Business Journal’s annual list of the best green companies to work for two straight years, and has been voted one of Oregon’s most admired companies at least four years in a row.
In the agriculture industry, Eurofresh is transforming vegetable production through its sustainable growing practices. Food safety is a top priority at the Arizona-based company, which credits the union-led orientation and training programs for raising production standards. All of its produce is greenhouse-grown, reducing land and water use, and is certified pesticide residue-free — protecting the health of consumers, workers, and the environment.
Perhaps most exciting of all, the new clean energy economy is bringing good manufacturing jobs back to the United States. United Streetcar, a subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, is building the first American-made modern electric streetcars in almost 60 years. And the company is doing more than easing congestion and reducing pollution through its streetcars through good, green jobs in Oregon — its dedication to using U.S. suppliers is reigniting an entire industry. United Streetcar today produces the first modern streetcars to comply with “Buy America” provisions: 70 percent of its trams’ components are domestically produced, and the company is striving to use entirely U.S.-made components. As a result, orders with United Streetcar create or save jobs at vendors across America, from manufacturers of fiberglass and flooring to seats and wheel sets.
All of these environmentally-responsible innovators are exciting, and they are made possible by the skill and expertise of America’s union workers. Together with their forward-thinking employers, these employees are proving that we can build a win-win economy in which businesses thrive, the planet prospers, and workers share in the success they help create.
This Labor Day, as the country reels from one labor and environmental disaster after another, the United States needs the leadership of pioneering employers like these — visionaries who recognize that in the 21st century, respect for workers, respect for the planet, and respect for the bottom line are, in fact, one and the same.
Kimberly Freeman Brown is Executive Director of American Rights at Work Education Fund, an educational and outreach organization dedicated to promoting the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain collectively, which just released its new report The Labor Day List: Partnerships that Work.
David Foster is Executive Director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a national partnership of nine U.S. labor unions and two of America’s largest environmental organizations — uniting nearly nine million members and supporters — that is dedicated to expanding the number and quality of jobs in the clean energy economy.
This article was published originally in The Hill’s Congress Blog.
In the Midst of Gulf Disaster, New National Ocean Policy Gives Hope for Our Seas
I have always loved the oceans. My father was a Navy man and one requirement he had for us growing up was that we had to live near a body of saltwater. I was raised listening to foghorns by night and being chased by horseshoe crabs by day.
The oceans are filled with so much life and variety — nearly all of it hidden from our sight. This makes the process of learning about the seas an endless series of surprises, a constant discovery of secrets. Like a lot of us, I always thought the oceans were infinite, vast and forgiving of what we were doing to them. They seemed somehow indestructible.
Now we know that’s not true and these same features that make the oceans wonderful — their mystery and other-worldliness — have also worked to their disadvantage. Life beneath the surface is often out-of-sight and therefore out-of-mind. As a result, we tend to forget a rather important fact: we depend on the oceans for our survival regardless of where we live or what we eat. After all, our oceans generate most of our oxygen, regulate our climate, and directly provide a critical food source for much of our population. We cannot prosper unless the oceans prosper, too.
But as the oil disaster continues to ravage the Gulf of Mexico and the people who depend on it, we are being reminded daily of the often-forgotten value of these resources, and our responsibility to protect them. That’s why I was filled with hope today when President Obama announced he is creating the first-ever comprehensive national policy — like a Clean Air or Water Act — to protect our oceans. It is now clearer than ever that our country needs this to protect our oceans from the threats they face. If we had a policy like this in place before the Deepwater Horizon rig sunk — not only would we have better able to respond, an accident like this might not have happened there are at all.
This is the most significant action any U.S. President in history has ever taken for our seas. It will help make our oceans stronger and healthier, and help them fight off the myriad of threats they face today. It will help clean up the pollution that contaminates our beachwater, protect endangered species, keep the seafood we love on our plates, and make the oceans more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
My recent film, Avatar, took viewers to a magical place called Pandora, where the residents fight to save the natural world they depend on for survival from destruction at the hands of humans who have invaded their planet. You may not know that I also recently narrated a short documentary film called Acid Test, produced by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which looks at the fight to save our oceans right here on Earth. While we can see the impacts that the oil disaster is having on the Gulf and its residents, Acid Test explores a less visual secret our seas have kept from scientists for too long — a phenomenon called ocean acidification — and what we must do to protect them from this new threat.
For decades, we’ve known about the link between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Only recently did scientists begin to realize that carbon dioxide emissions, about one quarter of which dissolve in the ocean and turn into acid, threaten dramatic changes from the bottom to the top of the food chain. Called ocean acidification, this process puts coral, shellfish and some plankton at direct risk and threatens repercussions to the fish, birds, dolphins and whales that depend on them for food.
If our oceans are to survive acidification, there are two critical steps we must take. First and foremost, we must cut our carbon emissions and transition to a clean energy economy routed in efficiency and renewable power. And second, we must make our oceans as healthy, and therefore resilient, as possible in the face of the coming impacts — President Obama has set us on that path today.
The creation of a national policy shows us there are solutions, and we can achieve them. It fills me with promise for a future of healthy oceans. And, in the face of the oil disaster and ocean acidification, it leaves me with hope that this generation, and those that follow, will still be able to share in the wonder of the sea for years to come.
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Big Oil Makes War on the Earth
If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil — and just know that you’re not alone. In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.
Even as I was visiting those distant and exotic spill locales via book, article, and YouTube, you were going through your very public nightmare. Three federal appeals court judges with financial and other ties to big oil were rejectingthe Obama administration’s proposed drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico. Pollution from the BP spill there was seeping into Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. Clean-up crews were discovering that a once-over of beaches isn’t nearly enough: somehow, the oil just keeps reappearing. Endangered sea turtles and other creatures were being burnt alive in swaths of ocean (“burn fields”) ignited by BP to “contain” its catastrophe. The lives and livelihoods of fishermen and oyster-shuckers were being destroyed. Disease warnings were being issued to Gulf residents and alarming toxin levels were beginning to be found in clean-up workers.
None of this would surprise inhabitants of either the Niger Delta or the Amazon rain forest. Despite the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, Americans are only now starting to wake up to the fate that, for half a century, has befallen the Delta and the Amazon, both ecosystems at least as rich and varied as the Gulf of Mexico.
The Niger Delta region, which faces the Atlantic in southern Nigeria, is the world’s third largest wetland. As with shrimp and oysters in the Gulf, so its mangrove forests, described as “rain forests by the sea,” shelter all sorts of crustaceans. The Amazon rain forest, the Earth’s greatest nurturer of biodiversity, covers more than two billion square miles and provides this planet with about 20% of its oxygen. We are, in other words, talking about the despolation-by-oil not of bleak backlands, but of some of this planet’s greatest natural treasures.
Flaming Mangroves
Consider Goi, a village in the Niger Delta. It is located on the banks of a river whose tides used to bring in daily offerings of lobsters and fish. Goi’s fishermen would cast their nets into the water and simply let them swell with the harvest. Unfortunately, the village was located close to one of the Delta’s many pipelines. Six years ago, there was a major spill into the river; the oil caught fire and spread.
Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth, International, visited soon after. “What I saw” he reported in a recent radio interview, “was just a sea of crude, burnt out mangroves, and burnt out fishponds beside the river… All the houses close to the river were burnt… It was like a place that had been set on fire in a situation of battle, of war. The people were completely devastated.”
Nigeria’s biggest oil producer, Royal Dutch Shell, insisted that it cleaned up the village, but Bassey just laughs. “One thing about oil incidents: you cannot hide them. The evidence is there for anybody to see. This was in 2004; I’ve been there two times this year. The devastation is still virtually as fresh as it was then. You can still see the oil sheen on the river. You can see the mangroves that were burnt, they’ve not recovered. You can see the fish ponds that were destroyed. You can see the fishing nets and boats that were burnt. They’re all there. There’s no signs of any clean-up.”
Though the local inhabitants are still there, struggling for survival, notes Bassey, they can’t depend on fishing anymore. “The last time I went there, there was a little boy who came with a plastic container… [He and his father had gone] to look for shrimps all night. And what they came back with was a paltry quantity of crayfish that could barely cover the bottom of the plastic container…The container was covered with crude and the crayfish itself was covered in crude oil. So I was wondering what they were going to do with it, and he said they were going to wash the crayfish, and then they would feed on it.”
Now people in Goi have to buy fish from traders. The fish are not very fresh, and often smoked. More important, buying fish is a luxury, given that 70% of Nigerians subsist on less than a dollar a day.
Fifty years ago, Shell sank its first 17 wells in the Delta. The rest is history written as nightmare: unparalleled government corruption, ecocide, impoverishment. One estimate puts spills in the Delta over the past half century at 546 million gallons — nearly 11 million gallons a year. If it’s hard to wrap your mind around those figures, maybe this is easier to grasp: more oil is spilled from the Delta’s pipeline maze each year than has been lost so far in the Gulf of Mexico.
Through photographs, you can glimpse life in the Delta under the shadow of big oil. Derelict shacks slouch on river banks amid an extravagance of garbage and waste. Children bathe in lifeless ponds. People live and work in the heat and amid toxins released by flames roaring from flare stacks. Flaring is universally agreed to be wasteful, but is also a way of maximizing oil production on the cheap. Much of the gas burned could be used productively, but in places like the Niger Delta big oil just doesn’t want to spend the money necessary to reclaim it. The flames belch toxins and methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The U.S. prohibits such flaring. Officially, Nigeria does, too, and scheduled its first “flare-out” for 1984. To date, however, its governments still keep eternally postponing the deadline for stopping the practice.
The sheen, sludge, and slime of crude oil that Americans living on the Gulf coast are just beginning to get used to have been omnipresent facts in the Delta for so long that most people know little else. Average life expectancy in the rural Delta, says Bassey, “has never been lower than it is now” — 48 years for women, 47 for men, and 41 if you escape subsistence farming and petty trading by becoming an oil worker. In other words, years shaved off lives are the personal sacrifice those in the region make to big oil.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Nigeria nationalized its oil, but Shell still ruled production. The state organized large public works projects and long-term plans for development, only to abandon them under powerful international financial pressures — the “free market” doing what it does best when truly unchecked. Nigeria’s leaders have raked in $700 billion in national oil revenues since 1960. One percent of Nigeria’s population, in other words, has pocketed over 75% of its energy wealth. In part thanks to the unwanted sacrifices of the Nigerian majority, America’s gas tanks remain well-filled at relatively reasonable prices, since 40% of U.S. crude oil imports come from the Delta.
Indigenous inhabitants of the Delta like the Ogoni people have suffered disaster without even the oil-money equivalent of trickle-down economics touching their lives. “In recovering the money that has been stolen from us I do not want any blood spilt, not of any Ogoni man, not of any strangers amongst us,” Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigeria’s legendary nonviolent activist, told an audience of his people in 1990. “We are going to demand our rights peacefully, nonviolently, and we shall win.” The movement he launched adopted the tactics of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, promoting divestment from Shell and staging peaceful demonstrations.
Shell soon took notice. So did Nigeria’s military government, which also felt threatened by a movement in the Delta region dedicated to regaining some share of pillaged local wealth. In 1995, that government hanged Saro-Wiwa and eight other nonviolent leaders. A case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Saro-Wiwa’s son and other plaintiffs resulted in a $15.5 million out-of-court settlement by Shell, a veritable drop in the bucket for the giant company.
Since Saro-Wiwa’s execution, a rebellious spirit has spread widely in the region, but his pacifist approach has long since been rejected. The rebel Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has become remarkably disruptive and powerful through sabotaging pipelines, kidnapping foreign oil workers, and even piracy. It has, in fact, come close to bringing the oil industry to a standstill there. Shell has shut down its major operations in the Delta, where 36% of young people interviewed in a 2007 World Bank study showed a “willingness or propensity to take up arms against the state.”
Tropical Crudities
Oil corporations have penetrated vast parts of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. Consider just one part of that Amazonian immensity, the Oriente region of Ecuador in the Amazon basin. Humberto Piaguaje of the Secoya people still remembers how life there used to be. With a staggering abundance of birds, plants, animals, and foliage, with streams and tributaries winding through a humid lushness to the Amazon River, the region seemed like a blessing rather than something that could be owned by anyone.
“Own” wasn’t even a notion: the endless stretches of rain forest were literally common wealth. The oil beneath the ground, says Piaguaje, was “the blood of our grandparents — our ancestors.” The rain forest was a university that conferred its knowledge on those who lived there and their shamans. Its medicinal plants made it the people’s hospital; its vegetables and animals made it their marketplace.
For Texaco, however, the jungle invited domination. Emergildo Criollo of the Cofan people remembers how it all began. In 1967, when he was eight years old, a helicopter suddenly appeared in the sky. He’d never seen anything like it and thought at first it was some strange bird. Later, even stranger sounds came from within the jungle itself as Texaco set up shop. Within six months, the first oil spill appeared in a stream near where his family lived. After he grew up, Criollo lost two children: an infant stopped developing after he was six months old, and an older child who bathed one day in the oil-polluted river, swallowed some of the water, and later began vomiting blood. He died the next day. Criollo sums up his sorrow in 13 stark words: “They came and spilled oil, they contaminated the river, and my children died.”
In its first 25 years, Texaco pumped 1.5 billion barrels of oil out of the Oriente region. According to one estimate, the company discharged 345 million gallons of pure crude oil into Ecuador’s rainforest and waterways. In 2009, Amazon Rights Watch reported that the company, by its own estimates, had dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater directly into the environment. Next to its hundreds of wells, Texaco dug into the forest floor at least twice as many unlined waste pits. That it intended the filth from the pits to flow into forest streams is clear, because it installed drainage pipes that allowed for just such run-off. “Pits,” by the way, is a euphemism for oil-sewage swamps, as is evident both in this photograph and this video.
Forty years of oil exploration and production have translated into the slow poisoning of Oriente’s land, its people, its animals, and its crops. With no other water source, local tribes are forced, as in the Delta region in Nigeria, to use contaminated water for drinking, bathing, and cooking. A Harvard medical team and Ecuadorian health authorities have described eight kinds of cancer that result from this sort of contamination. Birth defects are legion in the region, as are skin diseases, which torment even newborns.
In 1993, 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians brought a class-action lawsuit against Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001 to become Chevron-Texaco, the world’s fourth-largest investor-owned oil company). “60 Minutes”called it “the largest environmental lawsuit in history.” The plaintiffs are seeking $27 billion in compensation for their suffering and for the restoration of their world. The lawsuit is still pending.
Last month, some Ecuadorian indigenous leaders visited the Gulf Coast to show solidarity with another indigenous people, the Houma of Louisiana. A joint group then took a boat tour through bayous where the Houma have fished for generations. Mariana Jimenez, from Ecuador’s Amazon, reached over the side of the boat into gray water, grasping a handful of once-verdant marsh grass. It drooped lifelessly in her hand, leaving dark brown blotches of crude oil on her palm. “I see it,” she said. “It’s just like Ecuador. They talk about all the technology they have, but when there’s a situation like this, where’s the technology?”
“I think all of this is a terrible contamination for the Houma people,” commented Humberto Piaguaje. “It’s a cultural contamination. Their fishing and shrimping that was their livelihood is ending now. They need to be asking BP for compensation for the next generation.”
Big Oil Blowback
Here’s the simple, even crude, lesson these ambassadors offer: whether Americans like it or not, we are all connected in new ways — and not ways the advocates of “globalization” once promised — now that we’ve entered what resource expert Michael Klare calls the age of extreme energy. Think of it as a new kind of blowback.
Our addiction to oil is now blowing back on the civilization that can’t do without its gushers and can’t quite bring itself to imagine a real transition to alternative energies. Humberto Piaguaje might say that the wound BP gashed in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico has unleashed the wrath of the Earth’s millions-of-years dead.
Put another way, corporations presume that it’s their right to control this planet and its ecosystems, while obeying one command: to maximize profits. Everything else is an “externality,” including life on Earth. “What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident,” says Nnimo Bassey, “is that the oil companies are out of control. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet.”
Think of oil civilization in its late stages as a form of global terrorism.
Ellen Cantarow is a journalist whose work on Israel/Palestine has been published widely for 30 years including at TomDispatch. She is now working on climate change and big oil, which have much to do with the Middle East, Israel, and Palestine, as well as the rest of the planet. Recent phone conversations with her stepdaughter Kim — she and her husband have a scuba-diving business in the Florida Keys — led indirectly to this story. To catch Cantarow discussing what led her to this piece, listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or to download it to your iPod, here.
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Jean-Michel Cousteau
talks to media after he and his expedition team were turned away by the U.S. Coast Guard after arriving at the Breton Island National Wildlife Sanctuary to document the effects of oil on marine life in the Gulf of Mexico
by Jacqui Goddard for Times Online
Jean-Michel Cousteau, one of the world’s leading ocean explorers, has spoken of his “frustration at the human species” over the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and called for it to become a catalyst for political, industrial and environmental change.
Describing the slick as “the worst oil accident anywhere on the planet”, the 72-year-old son of Jacques Cousteau, the pioneering underwater ecologist, said that the consequences for Man and nature would be monumental. “The sad side of the human species is that we talk a lot and take very little action until we have a catastrophe on our hands,” he told The Times.
“I don’t want to call this doomsday. I want to believe we can sit down with decision-makers and industry and government and convince them that there’s a better way to manage our life support system. We can do the good thing or we can keep destroying it.”
He added: “I hope that this is the kick in the butt that’s going to make our decision-makers change the way they operate.
“It’s also a kick in the butt for those industries that are making a huge amount of money to invest that money, not just talk about it as they all do, in renewable energy.”
Mr Cousteau’s father, who died in 1997, was a marine conservation trailblazer who raised awareness of the fragility of the planet and its oceans and the devastating effects of pollution, via 120 documentaries and more than 40 books. Jean-Michel Cousteau continues his father’s work through his California-based Ocean Futures Society, whose mission is to explore the seas and fight for their protection.
After witnessing the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster 21 years ago, in which 11 million gallons of oil leaked into the sea off Alaska, he had hoped for change. But a lack of regulation and oversight of the oil and chemical industry meant that a new disaster had been waiting to happen, he said.
Remnants of the slick could ultimately reach Europe by travelling in the Gulf Stream, he believes. “So BP, your oil is coming home,” said Mr Cousteau, who visited Louisiana last week.
Dismissing remarks from BP executives that the scale of the spill was tiny compared with the size of the sea and that the Gulf of Mexico would be cleaned up and “fully recover”, Mr Cousteau said: “To make such a statement is totally unacceptable. We have to see behind the dying bird, we have to understand the consequences of this that we can’t see. Nature is more complex than we can imagine. I know the ocean well enough to know that I don’t know it at all.”
His father once described the sea as a “universal sewer” and Man’s “global garbage can”.
“Towards the end of my father’s life he was telling me that we really need to be punished, we really need an emergency, if we are to get something done,” said his son. “What would my father say now? I think he would say, ‘I told you so’.”
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Robert Kuttner
Co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect
BP and the Bankers
Question of the Day: What do the oil catastrophe and the Wall Street collapse have in common?
Three big things, I’d say.
In both cases, a powerful, politically protected industry invented something that could not easily be repaired when it broke. We seem to be entering an age when complex technologies, whether financial or physical, sometimes literally have no solutions when they go haywire in unanticipated ways. We thought this might happen with nuclear power (and it still could); but for now deepwater drilling is the bigger menace.
Secondly, in both cases the proverbial ounce of prevention was not applied. Had existing laws been enforced, and had the political process not corrupted the regulatory process, these man-made calamities didn’t need to happen. In the case of the oil disaster, which is fast becoming the worst single environmental catastrophe ever, America’s long-term failure to move away from dependence on carbon fuels combined with pure short-run political capture. By now, we should have been at the point of energy conversion where high risk, mile-deep undersea wells were not used at all. But even so, this blowout would have been averted had existing laws been enforced.
It’s the same story with the financial collapse. We didn’t need these exotic, doomsday financial instruments. And had the regulators not been in bed with the industry, the crisis would have been headed off at any of several earlier stages. But the worst common element is this: both crises are teachable moments that our president could be using to transform public opinion. Yet despite these gifts from the progressive gods, President Obama seems congenitally unable to rise to the occasion.
It appeared, in the end game of the health reform effort and at moments in the financial reform fight, that we were seeing sparks of the Obama whom we so admired on the campaign trail. But Obama’s performance in the oil disaster seems a case of one step forward, two steps backward.
If ever there were a moment to make clear that our energy future cannot be left to the energy industry, and to rally the public on behalf of a long term shift away from carbon fuels to renewable sources, it is now. Will we ever have a better, more graphic villain than BP? Will we ever have the public more on our side? Will we ever have Republicans with dirtier hands?
In the late sixties and early 1970s, the environmental movement burst on the national stage because the environmental assaults of that era were immediate and undeniable — from oil spills to smog to the Cuyahoga River catching fire. Thanks to the victories of that era, environmental damage has become less palpable and pyrotechnic.
Global climate change, the ultimate menace, is gradual, insidious, ineluctable, contested, and seldom vividly symbolized. By contrast the BP blowout is immediate, tangible, and terrifying. Even the Limbaughs and the Becks cannot deny what is dominating TV week after week, and the right is making a fool of itself by lurching from attacking the president’s daughter to blurting out that “accidents happen.”
There is more than a germ of truth, however, in the right’s argument that Obama was slow off the mark to get on top of this crisis, just as he was pitifully slow to clean house at the Minerals Management Service he inherited from Bush. And if the administration does not pick up its game, the Tea Party right will make the Gulf catastrophe Obama’s fault, just as it has made the slow pace of recovery and the bank bailouts Obama’s fault.
I have been in a number of conversations, as a journalist, a public lecturer, privately, and as author of the new book A Presidency in Peril, in which Obama loyalists urge me to cut the president a little more slack. It’s only sixteen months into his presidency. He is still learning. He did, after all, deliver health insurance reform. In that battle, with two outs in the ninth inning, he discovered his inner partisan and fought for a Democrats-only bill, and prevailed.
And he is about to deliver financial reform, right?
But in both cases, the credit goes more to legislative leaders who would not let the bills die and to progressive lobby groups such as H-CAN and Americans for Financial Reform. There is still a furious fight over key provisions in the House and Senate reform bills, and in many cases Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is weighing in on behalf of weaker rather than stronger measures.
With the spotlight off legislative floor action, and a lot of the deals being made in backrooms, the financial industry hopes to gain back ground that it lost as public opinion shifted in favor of tougher reform measures.
The financial reform battle is an epic David-Goliath contest. The banking lobby spends more in a day than Americans for Financial Reform’s annual budget. The leadership of AFR combined with the actions of courageous senators such as Maria Cantwell, Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, and a couple of dozen others, shows how public opinion could be rallied.
But imagine how much more reform we could get if the President of the United States clearly weighed in on behalf of David rather than Goliath.
This could also be a defining moment in the fight for a clean energy future if President Obama used it as such.
Time is running out for this president to lead. If he continues temporizing rather than leading, the moment passes, and the Republicans pick up substantial numbers of seats in Congress. The window closes, both for transformative progressive reform and for a successful Obama presidency. Even worse, the initiative passes to a truly lunatic rightwing.
I would say to the loyalists: Yes, this president faces multiple challenges that are really hard, as well as a fiercely obstructionist Republican Party and a grass-roots right in league with a media machine. But all crisis-presidents faced obstacles and the great ones turned them to opportunities.
The other day, one of the president’s enthusiasts told me that Obama has been very successful in terms of the agenda that he set out to achieve. Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it. A president has to play the hand history dealt him.
Robert Kuttner’s latest book is A Presidency in Peril. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos.
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Was the Gulf Oil Disaster a Result of a BP Big Whig Party?
Submitted by louise hartmann
The Times-Picayune reported that an oil worker who survived the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, that killed 11 people and started a disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, said a key safety measure was not being implented on the rig.
Lawyer Scott Bickford said his client claims a column of mud was being removed from an exploratory well before it was sealed with a top cement cap — a move he described as “human error” that may have in turn failed to prevent the deadly explosion.
A statement from cement contractor Halliburton, reported by the New Orleans newspaper, confirmed the top cap was not installed. The column of heavy mud is one of the core defenses relied upon by drillers to prevent explosions.
So they cut corners to get the job done quickly. Here’s a question. Have you ever worked in a place where the bigwhigs were coming to town and you had to quickly get everything ready for them?
Remember that there were six senior British Petroleum executives on the oil rig at the time of the explosion, celebrating a recent safety award the company had gotten. Getting senior executives out to an oil rig all at the same time is something that requires some coordinating and planning.
What if the drillers and Halliburton were told that the executives were going to be there on April 20th for the party, and therefore they had to hurry to get the job done? And therefore they skipped the time-consuming step of putting the mud plug in and went straight to the cementing process, apparently the fatal mistake that let the giant methane bubble rush up and explode the rig?
Was this entire disaster the result of a hurry-hurry-up because the big shots were flying out by helicopter and the riggers had to get things done “stat”? Who were these six executives? How far out was their visit planned?
Did Halliburton and Transocean cut corners because they were either explicitly told to by BP or implicitly pressured to by BP because the executives were on their way out for the party?
And why is nobody talking about who these executives were, and nobody is telling the life and family stories of the eleven workers who died in the rig explosion?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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Rough Water
The Likely Removal of Four Dams on the Klamath River Will Mark the Largest Dam Decommissioning in History. An Unlikely Alliance of Farmers, Fishermen, Ranchers, and Indians Made It Happen.
By Jacques Leslie
photo courtesy Robert Dawson, www.robertdawson.com
Maybe the Klamath River basin would have turned itself around without Jeff Mitchell. Back in 2001, at the pinnacle of the conflict over the river’s fate, when the Klamath earned its reputation as the most contentious river basin in the country, Mitchell planted a seed. Thanks to a drought and a resulting Interior Department decision to protect the river’s endangered fish stocks, delivery of Klamath water to California and Oregon farmers was cut off mid-season, and they were livid. They blamed the Endangered Species Act, the federal government that enforced it, and the basin’s salmon-centric Indians who considered irrigation a death sentence for their cultures. The basin divided up, farmers and ranchers on one side, Indians and commercial fishermen on the other. They sued one another, denounced one another in the press, and hired lobbyists to pass legislation undermining one another. Drunken goose-hunters discharged shotguns over the heads of Indians and shot up storefronts in the largely tribal town of Chiloquin, Oregon. An alcohol-fueled argument over water there prompted a white boy to kick in the head of a young Indian, killing him.
Mitchell sports two long black braids that instantly establish his identity as a Native American – in fact, he’s a leader of the three-tribe confederation known as the Klamath Tribes of Oregon. In the midst of the conflagration, when Indians weren’t exactly a welcome sight in farming territory, Mitchell knocked on farmers’ doors to express his condolences for their waterless plight. His intent was to “help the farmers to understand that the tribes weren’t going to leave them isolated through this ordeal,” and to explain that he could sympathize because his tribe had endured comparable trials. On his way to a conversation with approachable farmers in the back of a restaurant, he had to walk through the main dining room, filled with less hospitable farmers who’d been idled by the water cut-off. “Everybody just stopped and stared at me, and some of those stares were pretty icy,” Mitchell says. “That was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done.” If his gesture registered, the evidence at the time was scant – most farmers thought reconciliation with Indians was an unimaginable, even subversive idea.
It’s possible, too, that the Klamath basin would have arrived at an agreement to restore the river without Becky Hyde. Distressed by the Klamath system’s drastic environmental decline, she and her husband Taylor moved their cattle ranch in 2003 to a badly eroded, thoroughly overgrazed parcel of stubble straddling the Sycan River, a Klamath tributary. If restoration could be done here, it could be done anywhere, they figured, and immediately set to the task. Like virtually all the basin’s other residents, the Hydes are not wealthy, and the production constraints they placed on the land to promote its health – including cutting their herd to a fraction of its former size – dramatically reduced their ranch’s potential income. They also designed a conservation easement that obligated future owners to continue promoting the land’s recovery; then, stunningly, they turned over trusteeship of the property to the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, effectively sharing the land’s stewardship with the Native Americans who’d once lived on it. Like the farmers, most Klamath ranchers chiefly viewed Indians as threats to their water supply, and the Hydes’ act leapt across the Indian/rancher chasm. One of Becky’s rewards was a death threat.
A farmer repesentative said: “My friends are my enemies and my enemies are my friends.”
Maybe the agreement announced in January to take down four dams on the Klamath, opening the way for river restoration, would have happened without Troy Fletcher, or Steve Kandra, or Greg Addington. Fletcher, a leader of the Yurok tribe, was notorious among farmers for his vitriolic denunciations of them, but at a meeting of basin leaders in 2005, he suggested that both sides stop attacking each other in the media – and, surprisingly, the farmers agreed. That led to an end of public recrimination and the beginning of trust-building. Kandra, a farmer who filed a lawsuit against the US Bureau of Reclamation over the 2001 water cutoff, turned around a few years later and worked toward reconciliation with the tribes, provoking outrage from fellow farmers. Addington, who heads the farmers’ association, endured fierce criticism for his conciliatory negotiating stance. Basin allegiances became so jumbled, he said, “My friends are my enemies, and my enemies are my friends.”
None of these courageous acts was indispensable, but together their impact was incalculable: At a time when cooperation among basin inhabitants seemed far-fetched, they introduced the idea that reason and compassion could overcome hatred. It’s now clear that Mitchell, the Hydes, Fletcher, Addington, Kandra are pathfinders whose concern for the watershed’s well-being has opened the way for the world’s biggest dam removal project, the key component of one of the world’s largest and least likely river restoration plans.
Only a few years ago, the Klamath embodied the failure of legal and political systems to resolve natural resources disputes; now, it stands as an example of how to step past confrontation and negotiate. The agreement united farmers, tribespeople, commercial fishermen, electric utilities, even Warren Buffett and George W. Bush. Back in 2002, a comprehensive deal on river restoration was a long shot. Today it’s a fact, and dam removal, though not certain, stands a better-than-even chance of taking place.
If it does, the effort to revive the river and its gravely depleted salmon runs would comprise what Steve Thompson, the US Fish and Wildlife Service representative in negotiations with the utility that owns the Klamath dams, has called “one of the most amazing restoration projects in the world.”
Says Patrick McCully, executive director of the Berkeley, California-based anti-dam nonprofit International Rivers, “To see that dams of such size can be brought down, that these concrete monuments that people view as permanent parts of the landscape can be temporary parts of the landscape – I think that is hugely significant.”
The prototypical river starts in high mountains, descends quickly through canyons, then spreads out across marshes at its mouth. By that standard, the Klamath River is geographically backward, for it originates in the high, flat Oregon desert and negotiates steep, picturesque canyons near its mouth in California. Though its length is modest – a mere 254 miles, a tenth of the Mississippi’s – it once contained the Pacific Coast’s third most productive salmon fishery, trailing only the salmon runs on the Columbia and Sacramento Rivers. Remoteness is the Klamath’s burden and its saving grace: Thanks to a constantly shifting sand bar at its Pacific Ocean mouth, it is largely unnavigable and, probably as a result, no big city or industry occupies its shores.
For most of the last 1,500 years, the river supported a sustainable salmon economy. Salmon were at the heart of all the Klamath’s tribal cultures, and Indians were careful not to over-harvest them. Each summer, the lower Klamath’s Yurok and Hoopa tribes blocked the upstream paths of spawning salmon with barriers; then, after ten days of fishing, they removed the barriers, allowing upstream tribes to take their share. As the salmon completed their lifecycle, dying in the waters where they’d been spawned, they enriched the watershed with nutrients ingested during years in the ocean. Among the beneficiaries were at least 22 species of mammals and birds that eat salmon. Even the salmon carcasses that bears left behind on the riverbanks fertilized trees that provided shade along the river’s banks, cooling its waters so that the next generation of vulnerable juvenile salmon could survive.
“We tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work. …The big issues were still out there,
and we still had to resolve them.”
Salmon’s biological family may have started in the age of dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They’ve survived through heat waves and droughts, in rivers of varying flow, temperature, and nutrient load – but they were as ill-prepared for Europeans’ arrival as the Indians themselves. Gold miners who showed up in the mid-nineteenth century washed entire hillsides into the river with high-pressure hoses and scoured the river’s bed with dredges. Loggers dragged trees down streambeds, causing massive erosion, and dumped sawdust into the river, smothering incubating salmon eggs. Cattle grazed at the river’s edge, causing soil erosion and destroying shade-giving vegetation. Farmers diverted water to feed their crops.
The dams were the crowning blows. Between 1908 and 1962, six dams were built on the Klamath. The tallest, the 173-foot-high Iron Gate, is the farthest downstream, and definitively blocked salmon from the river’s upper quarter – after it was built, the river’s salmon population plummeted. In addition, the dams devastated water quality by promoting thick growths of toxic algae in the reservoirs. For Klamath basin farmers, however, the dams were deemed indispensable, as they generated hydropower that made pumping of their irrigation water possible.To the farmers, the potential loss of the dams’ hydropower was considered no less crippling than an end to Klamath-supplied irrigation.
About a third of the farmers in the area are descendants of World War I and II veterans who won national drawings for Bureau of Reclamation “Klamath Project” homesteads on drained wetlands; others simply responded to the Bureau’s invitations to settle the 350-square-mile expanse of land spread across south-central Oregon and northeastern California. As Addington, executive director of the Klamath Water Users Association, puts it, “People showed up from New Jersey, having won a homestead, and went ‘Holy cow, what did I just get myself into?’”
In addition to eking a living from the fields, the farmers built homes, schools, churches, whole towns. Even now, the sort of large-scale corporate farming that reigns in California’s Central Valley is unknown in the basin. Farms are modest, family owned, and generate incomes estimated at less than $15,000 a year. Not unreasonably, the farmers assumed that in return for turning swamps into productive acreage, they were owed cheap water and power in perpetuity.
For most of the last century, the farmers were oblivious to the damage that dams and water diversions caused downstream, while the tribes and commercial fishermen quietly seethed. The annual salmon run, once so abundant that people caught fish with their hands, was roughly pegged at more than a million fish at its peak; in recent years it has dropped to perhaps 200,000 in good years, and as low as 12,000 – below the minimum believed necessary to sustain the runs – in bad years. Spring Chinook, which once comprised the river’s dominant salmon run, entirely disappeared. Two fish species – the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker – that once supported a commercial fishery, were listed as endangered in 1988. Coho salmon were listed as threatened nine years later.
All this has had a devastating impact on the tribes. Traditionally able to sustain themselves throughout the year on seasonal migrations of the river’s salmon, trout, and candlefish, tribal members suffered greatly as the runs declined or went extinct. For four decades beginning in 1933, the tribes were barred from fishing the river even as commercial fishermen went unrestricted. Members of the Karuk tribe once consumed an estimated average of 450 pounds of salmon a year; a 2004 survey found that the average had dropped to five pounds a year. The survey linked salmon’s absence to epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that now plague the Karuk.
The 2001 cutoff left farmers without irrigated water for the first time in the Klamath Project’s history. Over the next four months, many farmers performed repeated acts of civil disobedience, most notably when a bucket brigade passed pails of banned water from its lake storage to an irrigation canal while thousands of onlookers cheered. The protests attracted Christian-fundamentalist, anti-government, and property rights advocates from throughout the West; former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage likened the farmers’ struggle to the American Revolution.
Many of the Latino farmhands who had worked the farms left, and surrounding communities languished. Some farmers went bankrupt, and one committed suicide.
A year later, it was the tribes’ and fishermen’s turn to experience calamity. According to a Washington Post report, Vice President Dick Cheney ordered Interior Department officials to deliver Klamath water to Project farmers in 2002, even though federal law seemed to favor the fish. Interior Secretary Gale Norton herself opened the head gates launching the 2002 release of water to the Project, while approving farmers chanted, “Let the water flow!” Six months later, the carcasses of tens of thousands of Chinook and Coho salmon washed up on the riverbanks near the Klamath’s mouth, in what is considered the largest adult salmon die-off in the history of the American West. The immediate cause was a parasitic disease called ich, or “white spot disease,” commonly triggered when fish are overcrowded. Given the presence of an unusually large fall Chinook run in 2002 and a paucity of Klamath flow, the 2002 water diversion probably caused the die-off. Yurok representatives said that months earlier they begged government officials to release more water into the lower river to support the salmon, but were ignored.
photo courtesy Earthjustice In 2002, low water levels on the
Klamath led to the largest adult salmon
die-off in the history of the American West.
The die-off deprived many tribes-people of salmon and abruptly ended the river’s sport-fishing season, but its impact didn’t fully register until four years later, when the offspring of the prematurely deceased 2002 salmon would have made their spawning run. By then the Klamath stock was so depleted that the federal government placed 700 miles of Pacific Ocean coastline, from San Francisco to central Oregon, off limits to commercial salmon fishing for most of the 2006 fishing season. As a result, commercial ocean fishermen lost about $100 million in income, forcing many into bankruptcy. Even more devastating, a precipitous decline in Sacramento River salmon led to the cancellation of the entire Pacific salmon fishing season in both 2008 and 2009. The Klamath basin was in a permanent crisis.
It turned out that desperation and frustration were perfect preconditions for negotiations. “Every one of us would have rolled the others if we could have,” Fletcher, the Yurok leader, says. “We all tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work – we might win one battle today and lose one tomorrow, so nothing was resolved. We spent millions of dollars on attorneys, plane tickets to Washington, political donations, but it didn’t make any of us sleep any better, because the big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them.”
Negotiations among 26 organizations representing farmers, tribes, fishermen, government agencies, and environmental groups got serious in 2005. Over the next few years, negotiators put in 80-hour weeks attending hundreds of daylong meetings. The hardest part of the negotiations was establishing trust. Over meals and in bars, farmer negotiators learned how the loss of salmon had devastated the tribes, and tribal negotiators learned that the farmers considered themselves basin stewards, too.
“What it comes down to is that our values aren’t much different from each other,” Fletcher said. “The farmers are from hard-working, honest rural communities, and I feel way more of an obligation to work with those guys than I do radical environmental groups from outside the area.” By “radical,” he had in mind Portland-based Oregon Wild, one of two environmental groups that were dropped from negotiations after opposing concessions to farmers.
At first, the idea of rapprochement among the Klamath’s angry stakeholders seemed improbable. For one thing, PacifiCorp, the utility that owns the four Klamath dams – and is owned in turn by a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., multi-billionaire Warren Buffett’s holding company – showed no interest in dam removal. Instead, PacifiCorp applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a 50-year renewal of its licenses, which expired in 2006.
That process turned into an opportunity for dam opponents when FERC ruled in January 2007 that PacifiCorp would have to install fish ladders and screens on the dams as a condition of renewal. Since the ladders and screens would cost an estimated $350 million, as much as $150 million more than dam removal, PacifiCorp was forced to consider removal as a cheaper option. When PacifiCorp challenged FERC’s ruling on the grounds that salmon habitat upstream from the dams was irreversibly destroyed, a judge instead concluded that the river contained 58 miles of potential upstream habitat, lending more credibility to dam opponents. PacifiCorp also revealed that after relicensing it would raise Project farmers’ electricity bills 17-fold on average. Since the farmers depended on cheap electricity to power their irrigation pumps, the planned rate hike gave them a reason to consider removal.
Earthjustice Farmers in the Klamath basin need free or cheap water in order to
afford farming there.
In January 2008, the negotiators announced the first of two breakthrough Klamath pacts: the 255-page Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement. In it, most of the parties – farmers, three of the four tribes, a commercial fishermen’s group, seven federal and state agencies, and nine environmental groups – agreed to a basic plan. It includes measures to take down the four dams, divert some water from Project farmers to the river in return for guaranteeing the farmers’ right to a smaller amount, restore fisheries habitat, reintroduce salmon to the upper basin, develop renewable energy to make up for the loss of the dams, and support the Klamath Tribes of Oregon’s effort to regain some land lost when Congress “terminated” its reservation in 1962.
This was a seminal moment, a genuine reconciliation among tribal and agricultural leaders who discovered that the hatred they’d nursed was unfounded. “Trust is the key,” says Kandra, the Project farmer who went from litigant to negotiator. “We took little baby steps, giving each other opportunities to build trust, and then we got to a place where we could have some really candid discussions, without screaming and yelling – it was like, ‘Here’s how I see the world.’ Pretty valuable stuff. The folks that developed those kinds of relationships got along pretty good.”
Still, one crucial ingredient was missing: Unless PacifiCorp agreed to dismantle the dams, river restoration was impossible, and the pact was a well-intentioned, empty exercise. But PacifiCorp now had compelling reasons to consider dam removal. Not only was relicensing going to be expensive, but Klamath tribespeople were becoming an embarrassing irritant, in two consecutive years interrupting Berkshire Hathaway’s annual-meeting/Buffett-lovefests in Omaha with nonviolent protests that won media attention. Also, the Bush administration, customarily no friend of dam removal, signaled its support for a basin-wide agreement. Negotiations between PacifiCorp and mid-level government officials began in January 2008, but made little progress until a meeting in Shepherdstown, West Virginia four months later, when for the first time Senior Interior Department Counselor Michael Bogert presided. As Bogert recently explained, President Bush himself took an interest in the Klamath “because it was early on in his watch that the Klamath became almost a symbol” of river basin dysfunction. To Bush, the decision to support dam removal was a business decision, not an environmental one: The “game-changer,” Bogert said, was the realization that because of the high cost of relicensing, dam removal made good fiscal sense for PacifiCorp. That fact distinguished the Klamath from other dam removal controversies such as the battle over four dams on Idaho’s Snake River, whose removal the Bush administration continued to oppose.
According to Dean Brockbank, PacifiCorp’s chief negotiator, until the Shepherdstown meeting a settlement seemed “far-fetched”; afterward, as a result of the Bush administration’s involvement, it was in the “realm of reality.” But PacifiCorp still had concerns; for example, that dam removal could subject it to liability claims if the sediment behind the dams proved toxic. When Bogert assured the utility that the agreement would absolve it of liability, the chances of a settlement soared. After the tribes balked at PacifiCorp’s proposed target date for dam removal – 2028, so it could reap a last bounty of hydropower revenue – the utility agreed on 2020, and the path to the agreement was cleared.
In November 2008, when then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced a detailed agreement in principle with PacifiCorp to take down the dams, he acknowledged that he customarily opposed dam removal, but that the Klamath had taught him “to evaluate each situation on a case-by-case basis.” In September 2009, Kempthorne’s successor, Ken Salazar, announced that PacifiCorp and government officials had reached a final agreement. PacifiCorp and the many signers of the earlier Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement then ironed out inconsistencies between the two pacts in a final negotiation that ended with a final deal in January 2010.
When the agreement was announced, Becky Hyde said, “I think part of what this does is to set up governance for this whole river basin that’s never been here, kind of what John Wesley Powell wanted to do a long time ago – set up a governance structure based on watersheds rather than other boundaries.
“The more profound thing is the relationships across the basin among parties who traditionally have not had the opportunity to get together. It’s the start of a new way of being in a place, and I think ultimately for fish and for communities, it’s just the right thing to do. I hope twenty or thirty years from now there will be young people in this basin who have really no idea what happened here – they just live in a place that’s so much healthier. They don’t live in a fight; they live in communities that are getting along and taking care of the place.”
photo courtesy Robert Dawson, www.robertdawson.comThe Hoopa and Yurok tribes once had an entire economy built on the
salmon runs. Today, tribespeople still rely on fish from the river.
According to the agreement, the US Congress and California and Oregon legislatures must allocate about a billion dollars to carry out the river’s restoration. Of that amount, at least half would consist of funds already being spent on basin fisheries. The plan’s supporters argue that the remaining $400 to $500 million, can be justified as one-time expenditures that will restore the river, remove the dams, and help stabilize the basin’s economy, in contrast to the continuing stream of funds, already over $100 million, spent patching up the basin in emergencies. Most of the cost of actual dam removal will be borne by PacifiCorp’s customers, who will pay a two percent surcharge on their electricity bills to raise $200 million. In case dam removal proves more expensive, California voters are being asked to approve a $250 million Klamath bond measure as part of a $11.4 billion package of water laws on the November 2010 ballot. The package is highly controversial for reasons having nothing to do with the Klamath, and its approval is uncertain – it’s the biggest reason that Klamath dam removal is still not guaranteed. (For its part, the Oregon legislature has already approved the deal.)
Even if the agreement is carried out to the last detail, it is uncertain to what degree the Klamath will recover; climate change and the continuing diversion of water from some tributaries will almost certainly limit salmon’s comeback. It’s also an open question whether the basin’s improbable and still-incomplete success can be duplicated in other resource disputes, as environmental groups hope. In the end, what propelled the Klamath’s stakeholders through endless meetings and setbacks was a shared devotion to the land that is not always a feature of such disputes. “The depth of energy in the fight was an expression of love of place manifested as enmity,” says James Honey, program officer for Portland-based nonprofit Sustainable Northwest, which facilitates stakeholder reconciliation in the basin. “Now that love of place has been flipped over to a better end.”
Jacques Leslie’s book, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for its “elegant, beautiful prose.” Contributors of Spot.Us helped fund this report.
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Scientists Agree Mountaintop Removal Mining is Destroying Appalachia
Obama administration should take note and follow science on pending permits -
Scientists Brief Media on Mountaintop Mining Impacts from UMCES on Vimeo.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Keynote Speaker Solar Power International 2009
Green Gold Rush:
A vision for Energy Independence, Jobs and National Wealth
First Step to Grasping the Critical Issues of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen -
by Carol McClelland, Phd Founder Green Career Central
From December 7th through December 18th the United Nations Climate Change Conference will be taking place in Copenhagen. Approximately 10,000 people will gather from countries around the world to discuss, negotiate, and create an agreement about what the world is going to do about climate change. Some of the attendees are government officials, while others work for governmental agencies, or non-governmental organizations. The third contingent at the event will be the media.
Although people have been referring to the conference in Copenhagen in broad brush terms for some time, it’s important for you to understand the purpose of the meeting and the key issues being addressed. I’ve developed this quick overview to give you a head start in tracking developments during the meeting.
United Nations Climate Change Conference
Although this group meets on an annual basis, with the last two meetings being held in Bali and Poland, this meeting in Copenhagen is demanding the world’s attention for several reasons.
Recent scientific findings tell us that rising temperatures are due to our industrialized ways, and that we must find ways to reduce greenhouse gases to ensure that average temperatures do not continue to rise.
The Kyoto Protocol, the first carbon emissions agreement signed by a collection of countries from around the world, is expiring in 2012. A new framework must be developed now so that when the Kyoto Protocol ends there’s a structure in place to guide countries toward a more sustainable future.
Countries, especially developing countries, are already seeing the effects of climate change. To avoid wide scale disasters in these countries, efforts must be made now to help them adapt to climate change in ways that are sustainable.
Although this meeting is not expected to result in a detailed solution, the leadership group stresses that the group must come to agreement on four key issues:
“Ambitious emission reduction targets for developed countries” – For industrialized countries the focus will be on defining their targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists recommend “a goal of 25% to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.”
Late last month President Obama indicated a target “in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.” Notice the year defining the amount of reduction shifted from 1990 to 2005, which means this target is less stringent that the goal recommended by the science. Other developed countries have established targets of 20% for the EU, to 40% for Norway, based on 1990 emissions levels. China, a key player in these deliberations, recently stated that it will “reduce its ‘carbon intensity’ by 40-45 percent by the year 2020, compared with 2005 levels.” Beware, carbon intensity (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of GDP) is not the same as cutting carbon emissions overall.
***As you can see, at the moment understanding these goals is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. Throughout the negotiation process you can expect various countries to nudge their numbers this way and that until, hopefully, an agreement is reached.
“Nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries” – For developing countries the focus shifts. Developing countries are striving to grow economically to help their citizens move out of poverty and into a sustainable living situation. Although their contribution to the current climate situation is negligible, forecasts based on projected economic growth and population growth in these developing countries indicate their impact global warming is likely to increase significantly. This trend is especially true for countries that depend on coal and carbon-based fuels.
Countries in this situation are struggling to develop and concerned that making efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions will have detrimental effects on their overall growth. Developing countries are willing to make an effort to reduce emissions, but they want support (financial and technological) from developed countries.
***This push-pull between developing and developed countries will likely show up in the debates regarding this point.
“Scaling up financial and technological support for both adaptation and mitigation” – To address the needs of developing countries, reliable funding sources and cooperative sharing of technological advancements must be built into the framework developed during the Copenhagen meetings.
In addition immediate funds must be provided to help developing countries adapt to changes that are occurring right now. Waiting until 2012 for the funding framework to kick in may be too late. The longer developing countries are left alone to struggle to adapt to the effects of climate change, the more expensive the relief effort will be in the long run. According to the United Nations, “it is estimated that one US dollar invested in anticipatory measures can save up to 7 US dollars in future relief costs.” See this fact sheet on adaptation for more information about this topic.
Think of it this way, for the most part developing countries are bearing the brunt of current climate changes in their region. In addition, they are likely to continue to experience extreme weather, water shortages, shifts in seasons, and rising waters as a result of increasing temperatures well into the future. The residents of these countries didn’t contribute to, or cause, this situation, industrialized countries did.
***Finding an equitable way to work cooperatively toward a sustainable lifestyle for all global residents is what’s at stake in this agreement.
“An effective institutional framework with governance structures that address the needs of developing countries” – To implement these changes, provide funding, and create organizations to help developing countries make the necessary changes, new structures will need to be created. It is critical that these new structures be effective, trackable, and verifiable.
***All parties must work together as partners in this cooperative, collaborative effort.
For more details on these four issues, read this fact sheet on Copenhagen deal published by the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
What to Expect
In a broad sense, the purpose of the Copenhagen meetings is to come up with goals and structures that allow all countries to grow in ways that are environmentally and socially sustainable. Given that we are starting with an extremely uneven playing field, it’s critical that all parties find ways to participate in the inevitable give and take of the negotiations. As residents of the planet we cannot afford to have key parties walk away from the table. It’s critical that solid, well thought out decisions be made during the coming weeks. What happens in Copenhagen has the power to influence the state of the Earth for a long time to come.
At this point there is no way to predict what agreements will come out of these meetings or how these decisions will impact the green economy locally or globally. The best thing you can do at this juncture is to be aware of the issues. Pay attention to the news. Listen for indications of how various decisions are likely to impact your target industry. Invest some time in understanding the issues at hand. You never know when you’ll be asked to make comments about these topics. The more you understand the more prepared you will be to provide credible, cogent answers to your networking contacts, potential employers, and future colleagues and coworkers.
Key Issues to Watch in News from Copenhagen
The interplay between developed and developing countries.
The mix of focus on mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to prevent temperatures from rising) and adaptation (dealing with current and future changes due to climate change).
The battle between paying now versus paying later. Although times are tight, delaying action will only increase the ultimate price of both mitigation and adaptation.
The opportunity for a new era in technology – from Technology Cooperation to Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs) that allow countries to grow while simultaneously reducing their emissions. See this fact sheet on Technology for more information about these concepts.
Copyright © 2009 Transition Dynamics Enterprises, Inc.
Business making it easier to be green
By Noah Griffin
“PLASTICS” is the one-word career advice offered to Dustin Hoffman in the1967 movie “The Graduate” before he drives madly across California to rescue Mrs. Robinson’s daughter from a socially arranged “plastic” marriage. No less mission-oriented is the company: Ecospan. The Larkspur-based biomaterial-science company is intent on crossing the “bridge to a greener future.”
Its goal is to save the environment from petroleum-based plastics and replace them with reduced carbon footprint material called bio-plastics.As a product, bio-plastic is indistinguishable from the petroleum-based alternative but is produced from plant-based resins, a 100-percent
renewable, sustainable and fully compostable raw material.
Ecospan founder and chairman, Greg Hoffman of Tiburon, has the background to lead the charge away from oil-based plastics.
He has worked in the “green zone” for nearly a decade on environmentally friendly transportation, as well as investing in early-stage polystyrene
replacements. Hoffman’s concept of using existing plastic manufacturing equipment to produce bio-plastics is now launching in the marketplace – a natural progression stemming from an environmentally concerned mindset.
From his Larkspur offices, Hoffman oversees an international team of dedicated scientists, in partnership with an Asian agro-conglomerate that
produces consumer-product components as wide ranging as electronic parts, credit cards, cups, cosmetic cases, shopping bags and Advertisement packaging.
Questions remain as to whether alternative environmentally conscious product can remain a viable priority in a recessionary market.
Hoffman is betting the United States, in partnership with other countries, can provide leadership in maintaining the environment as a non-negotiable priority in good times and bad.
He is on record as stating: “Saving the environment is not an economically based option, subject to whether or not we’re in recession, it is an
imperative, a necessity if we are to survive in a world whose very existence depends upon a sound environment.”
Ecospan could not be based in a better setting. Marin is one of, if not the most environmentally conscious areas in the nation. From how we view growth issues to sustainability, saving the marshlands, habitat and wildlife concerns, all occupy the local consciousness to a degree unheard of elsewhere.
The bio-material feedstocks used in the production of bio-plastics reduces
the oil-based carbon footprint by three times.
Having a private entity offering the public solutions to common problems
eases the burden on the government and its frayed purse strings.
Going green must be a non-negotiable recession-proof priority There’s no question that as Kermit the Frog says: “It’s not easy being green.”But environmentally, there are few alternatives. Ecospan is providing one.
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Not long ago my husband and I went to see Thomas Friedman, a best selling author and NY Times columnist speak about his most recent book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, which is a follow up to his previous book, The World Is Flat: The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. We enjoyed his presentation which was full of vivid examples, memorable images, and humorous lines.
The Problems
According to Friedman, America has lost its way over the last decade or so. His entire book is about, as he put it, how America can gets its groove back. His ideal solution is that the U.S. should become a world leader in the green innovation and technology that’s needed to tackle the world’s largest problems, which all stem from the fact that the world has become:
Hot: As you can guess, this part of his book is about the climate crisis due to global warming.
Flat: Straight from his last book, The World Is Flat, this term refers to the fact that far more people on the planet have high paying jobs that allow them to achieve the American standard of living.
Crowded: The world’s population is growing exponentially which is going to tax all the resources on the planet.
With the world in this three-pronged predicament, five significant global problems have arisen:
Ecological and Natural Resources, Supply and Demand. Increasing demand for raw materials such as timber, water, and minerals is putting undue stress on the earth’s ecosystems.
Petrodictatorships. As the price of a barrel of oil decreases, the pace of freedom increases, and vice versa, in countries such as Russia, Iran and Nigeria. By continuing to purchase oil from these countries we are contributing to the problem.
Climate Change. As the average temperature of the earth increases, look for the weather to become more extreme. Friedman prefers to think of this as global weirding rather than global warming. In a way he is correct. All weather patterns are going to become more extreme. Hot will become hotter, but cool will become colder. Wet and dry, the same thing. Weather patterns will shift dramatically with as little as one degree of temperature increase.
Energy Poverty. A large portion of the world’s population lives without electricity. No electricity means no access to the world’s knowledge. Ignorance through lack of learning creates large scale problems.
Biodiversity Losses. The world faces a mass extinction larger than when an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Currently we are losing one species every 20 minutes, primarily due to loss of habitat. As the climate changes, animals will have to search for new habitats, but they are unlikely to evolve rapidly enough to survive the abrupt shift in their habitat. (The SF Chronicle just had an article showing how bird populations will be impacted by shifts in their habitat. Read this to get a feel for how this will affect the entire ecosystem.)
The Solution
Not one to despair over such large problems, Friedman sees one solution to these five problems:
cheap, abundant, clean, reliable electrons
His hope is that our country will use the power of innovation, technology, government and businesses leadership to produce electricity that satisfies these requirements. He refers to this new industry as Energy Technology, or ET, the next generation of Information Technology, or IT.
The Reality
As it stands now, the rest of the world is a step ahead of the U.S. Of the top 30 clean tech companies in the world, only 6 are American companies. If we don’t take action now, we’ll lose our place as an innovative force in the world.
What we need is a bold revolution to solve the climate crisis… a Green Revolution, so to speak. He described the current green effort as a party where everyone gets to continue enjoying life without making a commitment or sacrifice. A party, a change in lifestyle, is not enough! We need to take a stronger stand to get done what needs to get done. As he put it… a Revolution isn’t a revolution unless someone gets hurt. There will be losers in this new world, the outdated, dirty, carbon based businesses that continue to contribute to the problem.
The Action
The ultimate goal of the green revolution is that the word green disappears from our vocabulary. It can happen as the current green standards become embedded into our everyday lives such that it’s the norm, rather than the exception.
To accomplish the goal of becoming an innovator in the chase for cheap, abundant, clean, reliable electrons, we need to create what he calls an Ecosystem for Innovation. To explain this Friedman used an analogy of a rocket on a launching pad. The technology and innovation bubbling up in entrepreneurs right now is the base of the rocket exploding with energy. For the momentum to be directed and focused, we need the second set of engines to ignite and the astronauts in the capsule to steer us toward the goals. Unfortunately, at this moment, the astronauts in the capsules (read politicians in Congress) are in disagreement about the flight plan.
That flight plan, the system of rules, standards, regulations, incentives and pricing, is essential to create the necessary infrastructure for this Energy Technology explosion. If we are committed to this goal, we need to focus our attention on getting leaders in all levels of government who believe in the cause and are willing to take action. One of Friedman’s take away lines was… Don’t change your light bulbs, change your leaders!
This is a critical moment in our history on planet earth. The next great global industry, Energy Technology, is just beginning to take shape. We must act now to reduce the world’s carbon output. We must all take a part in turning the national conversation to issues associated with cheap, abundant, clean, reliable electrons!
Our actions can’t wait. The word later must leave our vocabulary. There is no later when it comes to addressing climate change.
If we all start now, we have just enough time to solve this.
If you would like to read this book for yourself,
click on the image of the book above.
Copyright © 2009 Transition Dynamics Enterprises, Inc.
