Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time (link to petition)

New York Times 3/31: “The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

“The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.” … (full story here)

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TAKE ACTION: Send a letter via 350.org

Obama: Take a Stand Against Offshore Drilling: “Choosing to drill offshore is a huge concession to the oil companies, and a symbolic step away from a carbon-free future–a future with a safe climate, a future at 350.  Let’s join together and let President Obama (and Senators from many of the affected states) know that we’re paying attention, and we’re outraged.” (full letter here)

Rachel Smolker: We Cannot ‘Techno-Fix’ Our Way to a Sustainable Future

Excerpt from Mobilization for Climate Justice site: “This week, California will host the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies. The conference follows hearings last week in the US House of Representatives and a report from the UK Committee on Science and Technology, as well as a recent report from the Government Accounting Office, all following on the heels of earlier reports from the Royal Society.  In short, there is a lot of high level interest in the topic…

“The technologies for “climate intervention”(aka, geoengineering) fall into two broad categories: Carbon sequestration and solar radiation management. Ocean fertilization falls into the former. The idea is to dump iron particles into ocean waters to stimulate plankton blooms. The plankton absorb CO2, and when they die, (hopefully) carry their carbon to the ocean floor to remain sequestered. There are many known risk factors, including one newly discovered and described just last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This study revealed that the kinds of plankton that are stimulated by iron fertilization include those that produce domoic acid, cause of shellfish poisoning in humans and lethal to marine animals. Oops.” (Full article here)

TAKE ACTION! Help Copenhagen climate change activists falsely accused of terrorism

From Links – International Journal of Socialist Renewal:  “In Copenhagen, Sydney-based climate justice advocate Natasha Verco, as well as US activist Noah Weiss, faces charges under Denmark’s ‘terrorism’ laws. Verco faces up to 12-and-a-half years’ jail for her role in organising protests against the United Nations Copemnhagen climate summit in December.

“The two activists appeared in court on March 18 … Verco was arrested while riding her bike on December the 13 ahead of a national day of action she was helping organise the following day.” (full story here)

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TAKE ACTION: Complete this form with your name and information to send a letter to the Danish government (scroll down to bottom of page)

Excerpt: “As a concerned citizen, I am writing to express my concern at the decision of the Danish government to bring charges against individuals arrested during the peaceful protests in  Copenhagen during the COP 15 last December.” (find form here)

Ian Angus – After Copenhagen: Can We Save the World?

Ian Angus, editor of Climate and Capitalism, gave this talk on March 26, at O Clima Farto de Nós? (Is the Climate Sick of Us?), a conference organized by the Left Bloc and the European Left in Lisbon, Portugal.

Excerpt: “We can and must build mass democratic movements against the climate vandals. Mass climate emergency movements in every country are the only force with the potential to force the politicians into effective action against greenhouse gas emissions. That is the only way to win time for the earth and humanity.

That is the most important task we now face.” (full article here)

Video: Jonathan Neale of the Campaign Against Climate Change (UK)

From Climate Change and Trade Unions blog:

‘Jonathan Neale of the Campaign Against Climate Change explains why Copenhagen failed and the sort of movement we need to build.’

Click To Go To Video Page

FI: Make the Cochabamba gathering a new stage in the fight for an anticapitalist response to climate change

The 16th World Congress of the Fourth International

Denounces the caricature of an agreement that 25 major polluting countries reached on the sidelines of the Copenhagen climate summit; the agreement sets aside the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities … it is tailor made for the interests of big capital and capitalist appropriation of resources. It represents a grave threat for the workers of the world, for the poor, for peasants, women and indigenous peoples, as well as for ecosystems;

Celebrates the initiative taken by Bolivian president Evo Morales to hold a peoples’ summit on climate and the rights of Mother Earth in order to make the voices of indigenous peoples heard; and to develop a common response to the imperialist policy of dividing up the world and the atmosphere between the big powers. We call on all political and social forces in struggle against exploitation and oppression to support the Cochabamba gathering and participate as far as possible… (full statement here)

Fourth International: Capitalist Climate Change and Our Tasks

International Viewpoint – The climate change that is underway is not the product of human activity in general but of the productivist paradigm developed by capitalism and imitated by other systems that claim to be alternatives to the former. Faced with the danger of a social and ecological catastrophe which is without precedent and is irreversible on a human timescale, the system, incapable of calling into question its fundamental logic of accumulation, is engaged in a dangerous technological forward flight from which there is no way out…

[Climate change] is mainly due to the fact that the capitalist system, guided by considerations of short-term profit and superprofit, has based and continues to base its development not only on the exploitation of labour power but also on the plundering of natural resources, in particular finite and non-renewable reserves of cheap fossil fuels… (continued here)

Oscar Reyes: After Copenhagen

What came out of Copenhagen? Oscar Reyes assesses the outcomes of the UN climate conference, and suggests much of the process was flawed from the beginning.

Excerpt: “To tackle this divide requires a more fundamental rethink in the basic framework of the terms in which global climate negotiations are conducted. Some of the stumbling blocks are intrinsic to the UN negotiating process itself, whose intergovernmental bias pits one country or bloc against another, with each defending a conception of ‘national interest’ that reflects elite class interests above the needs of the whole population. Amongst other things, this results in the exclusion of Indigenous Peoples and forest communities from formal participation in discussions on deforestation, even as negotiators seek to parcel out and commodify their lands in the form of ‘forest carbon.’ “ Read More

Monthly Review: What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster

For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival… | more |

Democracy Now! – The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters

‘Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters…”

‘We’re also joined from Washington, DC by journalist Christine MacDonald. She used to work for one of the groups discussed at length in Johann Hari’s article. She worked for Conservation International, or CI. But she’s since written a book criticizing CI, as well as other environmental groups, for taking stances she suggests have been heavily influenced by corporate donors and partners. The book is called Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.’