Governments from Around the World Meeting in Lima, Peru to Lay Foundation for Addressing Climate Change, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Sends U.S. EPA Letter Opposing Climate Change Regulations
Building on the groundswell of worldwide climate action, and in preparation for concluding its Framework Convention of Climate Change in Paris in 2015, the United Nations and its participating governments from around the world have begun meeting 1 December, 2014 in Lima, Peru, and scheduled to close on 12 December, 2014, to lay the foundation for an effective new, universal climate change agreement in Paris in 2015 while also raising immediate ambition to act on climate change in advance of the agreement coming into effect in 2020.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has this year warned against rising sea levels, storms and droughts as a result of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, and highlighted the many opportunities of taking climate action.
Last week, the UN Environment Programme underscored the need for global emissions to peak within the decade and then to rapidly decline so that the world can reach climate neutrality – also termed zero net emissions – in the second half of the century.
Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Climate Convention said:
“Never before have the risks of climate change been so obvious and the impacts so visible. Never before have we seen such a desire at all levels of society to take climate action. Never before has society had all the smart policy and technology resources to curb greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience. All of this means we can be confident we will have a productive meeting in Lima, which will lead to an effective outcome in Paris next year.”
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker submitted comments this week in opposition of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan, which proposes increased regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emission from Wisconsin’s power plants in Wisconsin. Walker’s letter claims that the proposed regulations would have a detrimental effect on Wisconsin’s manufacturing-based economy, as well as household ratepayers.
Walker says the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Public Service Commission of Wisconsin have spent months reviewing the rule and seeking input from those who would be affected since its proposal in June of this year.
Governor Walker has asked the EPA to reconsider the rule based on the impact the rule will have on the cost and reliability of electricity, not only to Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector and the 455,000 people it employs, but on every ratepayer in the state and the nation.
In Lima, governments meeting under the “Ad Hoc Work Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” (ADP) need to define the scope and the type of contributions they will provide to the Paris agreement, along with clarity on how finance, technology and capacity building will be handled.
Countries will put forward what they plan to contribute to the 2015 agreement in the form of Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) by the first quarter of 2015, well in advance of the Paris conference in December of next year.
The Lima conference needs to provide final clarity on what the INDCs need to contain, including for developing countries who are likely to have a range of options from, for example, sector-wide emission curbs to energy intensity goals.
Ms. Figueres welcomed the leadership of the EU, the US and China, who have publically announced their post-2020 climate targets and visions.
“It is hugely encouraging that well ahead of next year’s first quarter deadline, countries have already been outlining what they intend to contribute to the Paris agreement. This is also a clear sign that countries are determined to find common ground and maximize the potential of international cooperation,” she said.
“Countries are working hard to increase emission reductions before 2020, when the Paris agreement is set to enter into effect. Pathways on how to accomplish this will also be a key issue before nations in Lima,” she added.
Governments need to work towards streamlining elements of a draft agreement for Paris 2015 and explore common ground on unresolved issues in order to achieve a balanced, well-structured, coherent draft for the next round of work on the text in February next year.
In addition to progress made to date towards a Paris agreement, the political will of countries to provide climate finance is increasingly coming to the fore.
At a recent pledging conference held in Berlin, Germany, countries made pledges towards the initial capitalization of the Green Climate Fund totaling nearly $ 9.3 billion USD. Subsequent pledges took this figure to $ 9.6 billion, so that the $ 10 billion milestone is within reach.
“This shows that countries are determined to build trust and to provide the finance that developing countries need to move forward towards decarbonizing their economies and building resilience”, Ms. Figueres said.
In the course of the 2014, governments have been exploring how to raise immediate climate ambition in areas with the greatest potential to curb emissions, ranging from renewable energy to cities.
As part of the “Lima Action Agenda”, countries will decide how to maintain and accelerate cooperation on climate change by all actors, including those flowing from the Climate Summit in September, where many climate action pledges were made.
“We have seen an amazing groundswell of momentum building this year. One of the main deliverables of the Lima conference will be ways to build on this momentum and further mobilize action across all levels of society. Society-wide action in concert with government contributions to the Paris agreement are crucial to meet the agreed goal of limiting global temperature rise to less than two degrees Celsius, and to safeguard this and future generations,” Ms. Figueres said.
As climate change impacts worsen and impact the poor and most vulnerable, governments urgently need to scale up adaptation to climate change. The conference needs to agree on how National Adaptation Plans of developing countries will be funded and turned into reality on the ground. Countries will also work to agree a work program for the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, and elect the members of its Executive Committee.
Governments will work to scale up and coordinate the delivery of climate finance and of the various existing funds. A focus will be on identifying ways to accelerate finance for adaptation to climate change. Governments will also recognize the initial capitalization of the GCF, which is expected to reach USD $ 10 billion by the close of the Lima conference.
Countries meeting in Lima will further work to provide support to avoid deforestation. Several developing countries are expected to submit information which would make it possible for them to obtain funding for forest protection.
Governments meeting in Lima are expected to clarify the role of carbon markets in the 2015 global agreement and set a work program for next year to design and develop operations for implementing new market mechanisms.
As part of the efforts by countries to accelerate pre-2020 climate action, the secretariat is organizing a fair 5, 8 and 9 December in Lima to showcase how action is being scaled up and how many countries and non-state actors are taking action and setting an example.
IPCC Releases Final Report on Global Warming and Climate Change
In a word: “dire” – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The window of opportunity for doing something positive about it – closing. The time to start action on quickly reducing human causes releases of greenhouse gases – NOW!
From the Huffington Post (November 3, 2014):
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Climate change is happening, it’s almost entirely man’s fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.’s panel on climate science said Sunday.
The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s giant climate assessment offered no surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three reports released in the past 13 months.
But it underlined the scope of the climate challenge in stark terms. Emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous.
The IPCC didn’t say exactly what such a world would look like but it would likely require a massive shift to renewable sources to power homes, cars and industries combined with new technologies to suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The report warned that failure to reduce emissions could lock the world on a trajectory with “irreversible” impact on people and the environment. Some impacts already being observed included rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.
The science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the report’s launch in Copenhagen.
Amid its grim projections, the report said the tools are there to set the world on a low-emissions path and break the addiction to burning oil, coal and gas which pollute the atmosphere with heat-trapping CO2, the chief greenhouse gas.
“All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.
The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that most of the warming seen since the 1950s is man-made. The IPCC’s best estimate is that just about all of it is man-made, but it can’t say that with the same degree of certainty.
Today only a small minority of scientists challenge the mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity.
Global Climate Change, a NASA website, says 97 percent of climate scientists agree that warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.
The American public isn’t as convinced. A year-old survey by Pew Research showed 67 percent of Americans believed global warming is occurring and 44 percent said the earth is warming mostly because of human activity. More recently, a New York Times poll said 42 percent of Republicans say global warming won’t have a serious impact, a view held by 12 percent of Democrats and 22 percent of independents.
Sleep-deprived delegates approved the final documents Saturday after a weeklong line-by-line review that underscored that the IPCC process is not just about science. The reports must be approved both by scientists and governments, which means political issues from U.N. climate negotiations, which are nearing a 2015 deadline for a global agreement, inevitably affect the outcome.
The rift between developed and developing countries in the U.N. talks opened up in Copenhagen over a passage on what levels of warming could be considered dangerous. After a protracted battle, the text was dropped from a key summary for policy-makers — to the disappointment of some scientists.
“If the governments are going to expect the IPCC to do their job,” said Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author of the IPCC’s second report, they shouldn’t “get caught up in fights that have nothing to do with the IPCC.”
The omission meant the word “dangerous” disappeared from the summary altogether. It appeared only twice in a longer underlying report compared to seven times in a draft produced before the Copenhagen session. The less loaded word “risk” was mentioned 65 times in the final 40-page summary.
“Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts,” the report said.
World governments in 2009 set a goal of keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) compared to before the industrial revolution. Temperatures have gone up about 0.8 C (1.4 F) since the 19th century.
Emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.
“This report makes it clear that if you are serious about the 2-degree goal … there is nowhere to hide,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “You can’t wait several decades to address this issue.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report demands “ambitious, decisive and immediate action.”
“Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids,” Kerry said in a statement.
The IPCC said the cost of actions such as shifting to solar and wind power and other renewable sources and improving energy efficiency would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.
Pachauri said that should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting “all species that live on this planet” at peril.
The report is meant as a scientific roadmap for the U.N. climate negotiations, which continue next month in Lima, Peru. That’s the last major conference before a summit in Paris next year, where a global agreement on climate action is supposed to be adopted.
The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what. Rich countries are calling on China and other major developing countries to set ambitious targets; developing countries saying the rich have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC avoided taking sides, saying the risks of climate change “are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.”
AP: By KARL RITTER
Posted: 11/02/2014 7:35 am EST Updated: 11/03/2014 12:59 pm EST
IPCC Sounds Fresh Alarm as Fossil Fuel Interests Tighten Grip on Congress
The leading international network of climate scientists is urging a rapid shift away from fossil fuels, just as allies of coal, oil and natural gas industries in the United States appear poised to tighten their grip on Congress—where opposition to cleaner energy is already entrenched.
That outcome of Tuesday’s midterm election would spell trouble for advocates of a strong international climate accord. Treaty negotiations are supposed to pick up in the next few months and culminate in Paris just over a year from now.
This weekend, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a synthesis report that sums up its years-long review of the climate crisis and what to do about it. The report called for the near-complete elimination of fossil fuel-burning by the end of the century. This, it said, is what is needed to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the most severe risks of man-made changes to the world’s climate.
Nothing could be further from the agenda of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the coal-state Republican who on the eve of the election appears to have significantly better than even odds of becoming the next majority leader. (Though, as the IPCC might put it, until the last votes are tallied any forecast of which party will prevail deserves only “medium confidence.”)
Even if the Republicans don’t gain a majority in the Senate on Nov. 4, they are likely to gain strength in that chamber as well as in the House—an election outcome that would undermine President Obama’s entire climate agenda, not just his influence in the Paris talks.
From the Keystone XL pipeline decision and so-called “war on coal,” to a carbon tax and the very foundations of climate science, Congressional Republicans have opposed Obama on anything having to do with global warming from his first days in office.
Just last year, on the day the IPCC released one of three exhaustive treatments that formed the basis of this week’s synthesis report, McConnell co-sponsored an amendment to block the EPA from regulating fossil fuels in electric power plants, the largest single source of carbon emissions in this country.
His co-sponsor, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, offered another amendment at the same time. It would have prohibited the administration from participating in international climate negotiations “unless the U.S. offers an addendum to the latest IPCC report stating that anthropogenic climate change is a scientifically unproven theory.” Inhofe, who reportedly aspires to be chairman of the environment committee in a Republican Senate, calls the whole IPCC enterprisea “conspiracy” and “a hoax.”
Their ascent would alarm participants in the climate talks who agree with IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, that the climate crisis could be solved if action is quick and decisive. “All we need,” Pachauri said as he released the new synthesis report, “is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change.”
Emissions must fall by 40 to 70 percent between 2010 and 2050, and then to zero by 2100, he explained at a news conference.
Those are fighting words to anyone committed to defending the coal industry in Kentucky, the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma, or campaigning in any fossil fuel stronghold—from the Marcellus shale to the Bakken light oil play. And it helps explain why the politics of carbon are a feature of so many swing elections in states like West Virginia, Colorado, Louisiana and Alaska.
The contrast between this increasingly partisan American political divide and the increasingly solid international scientific consensus could hardly be starker.
“The scientists have done their jobs and then some,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has tracked the negotiations for decades. “Politicians can either dramatically reduce emissions or they can spend the rest of their careers running from climate disaster to climate disaster.”
Other environmental advocates, too, issued statements emphasizing that the synthesis report—including its summary for policymakers, expressly designed to guide them toward early action —was as significant politically as it was scientifically.
“The report is alarming and should be a wake-up call to government leaders,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, a group that encourages businesses to show leadership on climate issues. Her statement called on them to “ramp up the pressure…especially in Washington.”
“The critical missing link is the oil and gas industry, which is doing its best to thwart concrete action,” she said.
The Sierra Club’s Michael Brune aimed a jibe at the Koch brothers and their favored candidates, saying that “we don’t have any more time to coddle fossil fuel billionaires or politicians who will eschew responsibility at every corner.”
Big environmental groups have spent heavily in this campaign, too—$85 million on state and federal races, according to Daniel Weiss of the League of Conservation Voters, including $40 million on just six key Senate races. And in the closing days, they were knocking on millions of doors to bring out a green vote.
The organizations released results from a Hart Research Associates poll taken in late October in swing states suggesting that the climate issue could break in their favor.
“The survey suggests that Republican candidates are losing ground as a result of their climate science denial and opposition to climate pollution reductions,” Hart reported. “This is true among independent swing voters, and particularly among women and younger voters.”
But only about 40 percent of those surveyed said they had heard much of candidates’ views on climate. A majority had heard about energy issues, but far more about abortion, jobs and Obamacare.
Earth’s About to Lose What Little Chance It Had – Unless We Act Now!
Who’s Gonna Stand Up
Neil Young’s Who’s Gonna Stand Up (and Save the Earth)
Protect the wild, tomorrow’s child
Protect the land from the greed of man
Take down the dams, stand up to oil
Protect the plants, and renew the soil
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?
Who’s gonna take on the big machine?
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
This all starts with you and me
Damn the dams, save the rivers
Starve the takers and feed the givers
Build a dream, save the world
We’re the people know as earth
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?
Who’s gonna take on the big machine?
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
This all starts with you and me
Ban fossil fuel, draw the line
Before we build, one more pipeline
Ban fracking now, save the waters
And build a life, for our sons and daughters
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?
Who’s gonna take on the big machine?
Who’s gonna stand up and save the earth?
This all starts with you and me
Who’s gonna stand up
Who’s gonna stand up
Who’s gonna stand up
Who’s gonna stand up
Who’s gonna stand up
Who’s Gonna Stand Up (and Save the Earth)?
(full orchestra & choir version)
Start here. Sign “Conserve NOW Petition to President Obama, U.S. Congress, Wisconsin Governor Walker and Wisconsin Legislature to Enact and Fund Climate Change Legislation” (September 16th post on this blog) or;
I’ve also started the petition “U.S. Congress: Enact and Fund Legislation to Pay Families and Individuals who Use Less Fossil Fuel Energy Annually on Changeorg
Will you take 30 seconds to sign it right now? Here’s the link:
Here’s why it’s important:
Using money that now goes to subsidize the fossil fuel industries (coal, oil, natural gas), instead offer that money to those who limit their driving, flying and household use of fossil fuel devived energy. This would helpslow global warming and sea level rises and would negate the need for raising the minimum wage and foodstamps.
You can sign my petition by clicking here.
.
Thanks
Frac Sand Rush Threatens Wisconsin, Minnesota Towns, Advocates Warn
Victoria Trinko hasn’t opened the windows of her Wisconsin home in two years — for fear of the dust clouds billowing from a frac sand mine a half-mile away.
“This blowing of silica sand has not abated since the inception of the mine in 2011,” Trinko, a farmer and the town clerk for Cooks Valley, Wisconsin, said during a media call on Thursday highlighting an industry proliferating alongside horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Frac sand is an essential ingredient in the process of natural gas drilling.
Trinko is among residents, advocates and scientists warning of risks posed by the frac sand boom — from heavy truck traffic and sleep-stymying lights and noise. At least one truck hauling silica sand travels a road by Trinko’s home every three minutes. When HuffPost spoke with Trinko in 2012, she had just been diagnosed with asthma — and her doctor suggested the condition was pollution-related.
The industry is concentrated in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Rising demand, however, threatens to expand frac sand mining into New York, Massachusetts and 10 other states, according to a report
released Thursday by the Civil Society Institute’s Boston Action Research, a human rights advocacy group, in partnership with the nonprofit Environmental Working Group and other environmental health advocates.
On top of the burgeoning rush for natural gas, the appetite for frac sand has been inflated by the recent discovery that using more sand per well increases fracking yields. An energy consulting firm estimated that fracking companies will blast nearly 95 billion pounds of frac sand into wells this year — an increase of almost 30 percent over last year, exceeding predictions. The number of frac mines have more than doubled in the last decade, with Wisconsin and Minnesota now hosting a total of 164 active facilities, according to the advocacy report. An additional 20 mines have been proposed in the two states.
Deanna Schone of Glenwood City, Wisconsin, lives near one of the proposed frac sand mines. She told HuffPost that city council members had “made their intentions known” in early September that they will allow the mine to proceed in a location about a half-mile from both her home and her kids’ school.
“We heard at the beginning that this was going to happen very quickly. That’s very much what happened,” said Schone, noting that most decisions seemed to have been made “under the table” before the public caught wind. In an effort to protect residents in regions not yet experienced with the frac sand boom, she offered some advice: “Talk to your local government. Do you have zoning? What are types of things that you could do to at least slow down the process?
“Once attorneys and big money are involved, it’s an uphill battle,” Schone added, as she stood outside her home and watched two young deer eating acorns off her kids’ basketball court. “This is part of why we don’t want to live in an industrial area.”
An interactive map published with the new report shows that more than 58,000 people live within a half-mile of existing or permitted frac sand mining sites across a 33-county span in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as a small corner of Iowa. Twenty schools also fall within that half-mile range.
Rich Budinger, president of the Wisconsin Industrial Sand Association, highlighted his industry’s own list of “facts about frac sand mining in Wisconsin,” and offered a broad critique of the advocates’ publication.
“The groups behind this report have a definite political and social agenda against sand mining, so their conclusions are not surprising,” Budinger wrote in an email to HuffPost. “But their conclusions also fail to offer an accurate picture of sand mining in Wisconsin and the industry’s major contributions to the state’s communities and economy.
“There is no scientific evidence that ambient respirable crystalline silica that may be associated with sand mines poses a health risk,” said Budinger, referring to the frac sand dust that tops advocates’ concerns. He added that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and other regulators “require air permits and fugitive dust control plans, which limit emissions and off-site impacts from dust.”
Crispin Pierce, a professor of environmental health at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, has been studying these potential health impacts for the last five years. He offered a different take during the media call.
The state regulatory agency, Pierce explained, requires fewer than 10 percent of the 140 frac sand operations in Wisconsin to monitor their emissions — and not the fine particulate matter and silica that he said are the “most dangerous components” of those emissions. Further, the state asks the companies to monitor themselves.
Of tests conducted by the industry and by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, none have detected levels of pollution that exceeded federal standards, Pierce said.
“To overstate the certainty that these issues are causing problems is to dilute their importance,” said Pierce. But he underscored “some real concerns,” including “potential long-term exposures and increases in cardiovascular disease, premature death and lung cancer,” as well as threats to water availability and quality.
A television station in Chippewa County, Wisconsin, reported last week that heavy rains had washed fine particles off a frac sand mine site and clouded a local waterway. Because state regulations for the mines are vague and “open to interpretation,” mining companies can get away with the pollution, an engineer with the county suggested.
Illinois is among the most recent states facing a potential surge in strip-mining for frac sand. While its deposits remain largely untapped, that’s changing fast, said Ashley Williams, a resident of Ottawa, Illinois.
She mentioned a battle HuffPost first covered in 2012, which continues over Mississippi Sand’s proposed mine near the entrance of Starved Rock State Park. The bluffs, canyons, waterfalls and wildlife found there entice more than 2 million visitors each year.
The 425-million-year-old rock formations also contain some of the nation’s highest quality frac sand, which has drawn the mining companies. Environmental groups, with help from lawyers and students at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, are fighting multiple mining permits around the state, including the one now held by Mississippi Sand.
“They’re descending on our community like sand sharks,” said Williams, “and it seems like there’s no end in sight.”
Conserve, NOW! Planet Earth Needs Our Help Now More Than Ever
On this Labor Day (September 1, 2014) Community Radio Station WORT-FM, 89.9 will broadcast a special program on its weekly show “The Access Hour”, from 7:00 to 8:00 PM. The Labor Day show is called: “Planet Earth: It Needs Our Help Now More Than Ever!”. The show can be heard live on radio in the listening area – south central Wisconsin including Madison, Wisconsin where it originates. The show can also be listened to anywhere in the world at http://www.wortfm.org. All earthlings are invited to listen in then, or on the archive of the WORTFM.org website at their convenience.
The program will consist of both music and dialog, appropriate to issues that confront many of us and those important to all of us and future generations.
Accordingly, I have initiated a petition drive to demand our federal and state legislative leaders to take immediate and major actions that will jointly confront these issues. If you wish to read and sign the petition, please do so. It’s sorely needed. Please send me an email to MTNeuman@gmail.com requesting it and I’ll forward the link to use for signing the petition.
The program being advanced advocating is designed to minimize our fossil burning before it’s too late, by telling our government to establish a program that provides positive financial incentives – supplemental income – for all individuals and families who burn less fuel annually: (1) by driving less or no miles (more $ for not at all); (2) by not flying in that year; and (3) by using less fossil fuel derived energy in heating, cooling and using electricity derived from burning fossil fuel in the year than the average household in a year. Money can be earned by doing (1), more by doing (2) and even more by doing (3), yearly,
Money used to finance this program could come from a number sources:
1) Money the U.S. Department of Transportation and states SAVE (billions of dollars) by not paving even more lanes of highways and bridges on the landscape with cement and asphalt (both require fossil fuel burning) to accommodate more driving of motor vehicles;
2) Money the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration would SAVE (more billions of dollars) by requiring the commercial airlines pay air flight controllers, instead of the federal government (U.S. citizens) providing these employees for the exclusive financial interests of commercial airlines and aviation fuel suppliers.
3) Money from levying a tax on all carbon emitted by electrical power generation plants in the U.S. which burn fossil fuels (more billions of dollars), and emitted by the transportation sector (jets, cars, motorcycles, trucks, trains and buses, work vehicles and fossil fueled equipment, and recreational vehicles, including but not limited to ATVs, motor boats, snowmobiles, jet skis).
4) Money from other extravagant federal expenditures, such as the billions of dollars paid to private defense contractors, at home and abroad, and also the billions of dollars of subsidies the U.S. government (American taxpayers) presently awards to the fossil fuel industry (coal, oil, natural gas) operating in the U.S..
Only individuals and families in the U.S. who conserve energy (emit fewer greenhouse gases) by driving less (or no) miles; by not flying; and by using less fossil fuel derived energy in their home during a year would earn the REWARDS.
More detailed information on this proposal can be viewed on the Conserve, NOW! post of August 16. 2014.
Airlines Make Big Profits But the Federal Government Pays Many of their Costs and the Atmosphere Receives the Airplane Pollution
In a story last month published in USA Today (7/24/2014), “Several airlines announce record profits“, American Airlines, which was in bankruptcy court last year and merged with U.S. Airways in December, announced the company’s first dividend since 1980, based on record quarterly profits of $1.5 billion.
United Airlines, the only major U.S. airline to lose money in the first quarter, announced second-quarter income of $919 million, an increase of 51% from the same period a year earlier.
Southwest Airlines, the largest carrier of U.S. passengers which began its first international flights July 1, also reported record quarterly net income of $485 million or 70 cents per diluted share, which beat analysts’ expectations of 61 cents. Southwest is offering workers a one-time bonus of $200 each to thank them. And JetBlue Airways announced its 17th consecutive quarter of profitability.
The next time you hop on a plane to go on an exotic vacation, or to give an important presentation at some far off land or distant conference, or go on an unnecessary (or necessary) business trip, or fly to see the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Rose Bowl, or maybe just go pay a visit to someone you haven’t seen for awhile, know that the ticket price is really just a fraction of the “true” cost of traveling by jet airplane.
Over the past five years, the Obama administration has repeatedly called for cutting fossil fuel subsidies in the form of tax breaks and other incentives. But the amount of money the federal government forfeits through subsidies has increased steadily over that time period, reaching $18.5 billion last year, according to a new report from the environmental group Oil Change International.
That total is up from $12.7 billion in 2009, largely because oil and gas production has increased in the United States. Next year, domestic oil production is expected to reach the highest level since 1972. The Obama administration regularly touts its “all of the above” energy strategy, which includes increased oil and gas production.
The Oil Change report includes a variety of subsidies in its accounting, including tax breaks, incentives for production on federal lands (such as royalty fees that haven’t been adjusted in 25 years) and tax deductions for clean-up costs. And if state subsidies for oil, gas and coal production are also included, the total value climbs to $21.6 billion for 2013.
A 2011 study by the consulting firm Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI) estimated the total historical federal subsidies for various energy sources over the years 1950–2010 in the U.S.. The study found that oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period. Oil, natural gas, and coal benefited most from percentage depletion allowances and other tax-based subsidies, but oil also benefited heavily from regulatory subsidies such as exemptions from price controls and higher-than-average rates of return allowed on oil pipelines.
In September 2009, Obama and other G20 leaders pledged to phase out fossil fuel subsidies to help curb global warming. Obama also called for eliminating subsidies in 2012 and 2013. And the administration’s 2015 budget proposal again calls for a major cut to fossil fuel subsidies.
But Congress so far hasn’t acted to cut the subsidies. The report argues that as long as those incentives remain in place, the federal government is “essentially rewarding companies for accelerating climate change.”
“We’re spending more taxpayer dollars every year to fund fossil fuels that we can’t afford to burn, according to climate science,” said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International. “Subsidizing fossil fuels at this point is climate denial.” [article by Kate Sheppard, “Federal Government Still Spending Billions To Subsidize Fossil Fuels”, Huffington Post, 7/9/2014]
Essential Air Service (EAS) is a U.S. government program enacted to guarantee that small communities in the United States, which, prior to deregulation, were served by certificated airlines, maintained commercial service. Its aim is to maintain a minimal level of scheduled air service to these communities that otherwise would not be profitable. This came in response to the Airline Deregulation Act, passed in 1978, which gave U.S. airlines almost total freedom to determine which markets to serve domestically and what fares to charge for that service.[1] The program is codified at 49 U.S.C. §§ 41731–41748.
The United States Department of Transportation (DOT) subsidizes airlines to serve rural communities across the country that otherwise would not receive any scheduled air service. As of November 1, 2013, the Essential Air Service subsidized 160 communities, of which 43 were in Alaska, whose guidelines for service are separate and distinct from the rest of the country. The decision as to what degree of subsidized service a community requires is made based on identifying a specific hub for the community and from there determining the number of trips, seats, and type of aircraft that are necessary to reach that hub.
The budget for EASs increased from $131.5 million in 2011 to $214 million in 2012 to $234 million in 2013 and to $241 million in 2014.
The true cost of flying includes the consequences of burning the fossil fuels which end up in the earth’s atmosphere. Consider also the uses of the land, wetlands or other uses that the airport and its runways and taxiways that your plane uses must have replaced and the other impacts the airport and its uses have on the surrounding environment. Finally, consider the costs and materials that are obtained for building the airport and airliners and the impacts of the many service vehicles operating at each airport and the impact of their emissions on the environment, too. Also consider the impacts of mining, drilling, and transport of fuel to the airport, possible fuel pipeline construction, and the potential for fuel spills, contamination of land and water resources, and the potential for fuel explosions associated with operation of the airport, transportation of the fuel, as well as the possible environmental effects associated with manufacturing airliners like the one you are flying that regularly use the airport. Most of these types of impacts are very real and can impose significant negative consequences to people, animal life and our environment but seldom do they have any recognized monetary cost thus they they go unpaid for by those who profit from the public’s use of the airplanes and the airport.
Ignorance, or purposefully ignoring negative, nonmonetary environmental effects of flying to exotic locations may seem blissful, at first; but when the environmental effects of millions of people doing the same things, but when many millions of people are flying daily, at different locations throughout the world yet in the same atmosphere are considered collectively, and over time, the consequences upon our atmosphere and therefore our planet can be very significant, dangerous and ultimately catastrophic, especially when combined with the billions of other sources of fossil fuel burning being done irrefutably caused our planet and oceans to warm, causing sea level rise, and ocean acidification, and increased severity of extreme weather events, ignorant over the cause and effect of burning fossil fuels and global warming is not only dangerous but foolhardy.
Yes, those jet airplanes and propeller driven airplanes burn significant volumes of fossil fuels every day in the world, in flight, taking-off and landing, thereby adding significantly to the increasing concentration of of the gas “carbon dioxide” (CO2) and other greenhouse gases that end up in the Earth’s atmosphere, daily, thus contributing to the increasingly grave rate of global warming.
Data from a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article by Joe Taschler of the Journal Sentinel Aug. 9, 2014
“Airlines seeing friendlier skies as profits rise
Airlines may be making record profit again but who is realy paying for most of the cost?
Airlines are making money again, with U.S. carriers reporting record profits for the second quarter of this year, but don’t look for them to use that money to add flights or upgrade service.
Where airlines once burned through cash the way a jumbo jet burns fuel, these days they are content to stay in a financial holding pattern.
The profits are either given back to investors, in the form of dividends or stock buybacks, or used for expansion, said Jay Sorensen, president of IdeaWorks, a Shorewood airline industry consulting firm.
“I don’t think the latter is going to happen, in terms of expansion,” he said. “Airline management is going to push back against that because that’s what got them into trouble in the first place.”
Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly all but said as much in a July 24 conference call to discuss the company’s second quarter earnings.
“Right now, the demand is very strong and it is balanced very nicely with the supply of seats,” Kelly said. “We’re going to manage our growth very carefully so that we don’t upset that balance.”
Southwest, the market share leader at Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport, reported record second-quarter profit of $465 million and set records for full planes and passenger fare per mile. Revenue rose 8%. In July, the airline’s planes were 86.7% full.
Those numbers certainly are strong, but the recent past continues to haunt airlines, leaving them gun-shy about spending money.
“The only other thing that I think needs to be mentioned here is that we’ve lived through a brutal decade where every balance sheet in the industry was stressed and most went bankrupt. So you just can’t extrapolate 2014 into infinity,” Kelly said.
“We do want to make sure that we err on the side, financially, of being conservative and being very well prepared for the unpredictable,” he added. “The unpredictable’s happened a lot to us in 43 years.”
More service cuts
Among other carriers, American Airlines, only eight months removed from bankruptcy, said it will pay its first dividend in 34 years, a cash payout of 10 cents per share.
American reported net income of $864 million in the second quarter. Excluding special charges related to taxes and bankruptcy and merger costs, the profit was $1.5 billion, a quarterly record for the carrier.
So will it put any of that money into additional services? No. Actually, it’s cutting some in-flight meals.
The carrier, in the process of merging with US Airways, will stop serving free meals to first-class and business-class passengers on flights shorter than 2 hours and 45 minutes, beginning Sept. 1.
American now serves full meals on flights longer than two hours. The change is being made as part of the US Airways merger and is meant to keep consistent policies between the two airlines.
The airlines will continue to serve snacks such as fig bars, pretzels, fruit and cookies on shorter flights. Passengers in the economy sections can buy meals on flights longer than 2 hours and 45 minutes.
“We have to make sure our customers have a consistent experience, no matter what airline they choose,” American Airlines spokesman Casey Norton said.
Making up ground
To be fair, American is doing things to bolster its business using the profits it earned in the quarter.
The carrier will spend more than $2.8 billion on debt and aircraft lease prepayments, $1 billion to buy back shares and pay $600 million toward additional pension contributions.
All of those moves make sense.
“When you run an organization that was bankrupt or operating with poor financial results, it becomes threadbare. They need to make capital investments. They need to consider salary increases or profit-sharing increases,” Sorensen said.
“Hallelujah, they are making money,” he added. “They need it.”
Still, the timing of the meal service cutbacks was poor.
“That’s not the message that should be given right now,” Sorensen said. “The message should be that, ‘We are profitable. We are maintaining or improving the product for the consumer.'”
Four carriers, Southwest, Delta, American/US Airways and United, control more than 80% of the domestic airline market. All four serve Milwaukee.
With so much of the industry concentrated with a few carriers, it hasn’t made attracting new service to Mitchell any easier.
Attracting more air service is a top priority for Mitchell management, Harold Mester, public relations manager for the airport, said in an email.
“We meet with airlines on a regular basis, including frequently hosting airline executives in Milwaukee. We also invest significant resources into promoting Milwaukee as a cost-effective alternative for air carriers looking to serve the Chicago market,” he said.
The airport also has an air service incentive program to help offset the costs of new or expanded service from Milwaukee, he added.
Still, the airport has made some gains. “We now have year-round nonstop service to Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which were previously served on a seasonal basis,” Mester said.
Southwest is adding service to Cancun, and Frontier recently added some Florida service.
Adjusting to a new order
The Milwaukee County owned and operated airport is adjusting to the new order in the airline industry and its status of no longer being a major airline hub.
“Milwaukee’s air service is resetting in the wake of the airline industry’s new business model that parked feeder planes and moved to full-size mainline jets,” Mester said.
That new model also means that, if planes aren’t full, they won’t be flying a particular route for long.
It’s the butts-in-seats model. If there are not enough butts, the seats go away.
At Southwest, for example, trips flown in July were 113,099, down 3.7% from 117,402 in July 2013. Year to date, the airline’s trips flown as of July was 740,080, a 5% drop from 779,508 in 2013.
“Air service is largely ‘use it or lose it,'” Mester said. “Growth in population, employment, industry, commerce, conventions and tourism are the biggest factors that create demand and result in more air service.”
Industry watchers don’t expect things to change much.
“The industry is happy to bask in the glow of making money for once,” Sorensen said.
While touting green technology, and lobbying the federal government on environmental policy, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt have put 3.4 million miles on their private jets in recent years, polluting the atmosphere with 100 million pounds of carbon dioxide. Their trips, according to flight log data I analyzed, included single-day jaunts and brief corporate meetings, but also what appear to be hundreds of exotic vacation destinations.
Perhaps someone should introduce them to Google Hangouts?
Few Americans would care that a successful tech company with substantial travel demands and nearly $60 billion in revenue over the past year maintains a fleet of private jets that guzzle fuel by the millions of gallons. But Google uses campaign contributions to strong-arm federal lawmakers into hamstringing everyone else with restrictive environmental regulations, while Google execs cavalierly jet off to exotic vacation spots around the globe on the taxpayers’ dime.
In a story by Justin Bachman, 7/23/2013, Bloomberg News lays out the arguments being made to get Uncle Sam out of the business of directing airplanes. This debate is hardly new, although the meat cleaver Congress took to the federal budget in January has given the proposal new impetus and appears to have made leaders of the labor union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, ready to discuss fundamental changes.
STORY: Some Air Traffic Controllers Watch Over Empty Skies
The Federal Aviation Administration cut $637 million from its $16 billion budget this fiscal year as a result of the sequester and faces similar cuts in the year beginning Oct. 1. In April, the traveling public felt the first effects of the reduced funding with furloughs hitting some 50,000 FAA employees and touching off about 2,300 flight delays. Days later, after heavy press coverage and outrage from airlines, Congress passed legislation allowing the agency to transfer funds to end the furloughs.
The basic change would be to fund traffic control not with taxes but through a “fee for flight”—a twist on the medical profession’s fee-for-service model—collected by a government corporation or a public-private partnership of some sort. About two-thirds of the costs of operating the U.S. air-traffic system derive from excise taxes on airline tickets and jet fuel, Bloomberg News reported. And with appropriations from Congress serving as the basis of long-term capital projects, the FAA’s ability to complete a transformation to a satellite-based routing system—as well as other large, capital-intensive efforts—has been called into question.
“The idea that you pay for $20 billion dollar infrastructure projects out of annual operating cash flow is nuts,” Robert Poole Jr., a co-founder of the libertarian Reason Foundation and a long-term advocate of moving ATC out of the federal government, said at the June conference. “You wouldn’t run any business that way.”
STORY: The GOP Plan to Get Air Traffic Safety on the Cheap
Dozens of countries, including Australia, Canada, and Germany, have relinquished the management of flight traffic to various private and public-private organizations in a bid to increase efficiency, lower costs, and boost safety. Funding air traffic control through fees also allows the agency in charge to issue bonds and pay for large projects, Poole has argued. Many of those agencies even enjoy investment-grade credit ratings.
There’s also the matter of public safety and bragging rights: For decades, the U.S. has boasted the safest air traffic system, and some foresee that title being supplanted by other nations that operate their airspaces differently. Others, however, argue that controllers should be government employees and that privatization could compromise safety. “I do know that the current system is broken and this conversation needs to start to happen,” Rinaldi said.
The federal budget sequester may advance an old proposal that was once broadly unthinkable: privatizing the U.S. air traffic control system.
In a story today that’s well worth reading for anyone who flies, Bloomberg News lays out the arguments being made to get Uncle Sam out of the business of directing airplanes. This debate is hardly new, although the meat cleaver Congress took to the federal budget in January has given the proposal new impetus and appears to have made leaders of the labor union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, ready to discuss fundamental changes.
“My organization has pivoted,” Paul Rinaldi, president of the controllers union, said at a symposium in June on modernizing air traffic control in response to the deep budget cuts. “If we do not mature, have this discussion, find a way to sustainably fund this system properly so that we can modernize it, we are going to fall way behind the world.” (A video of the panel discussion on FAA funding can be viewed here.) The union has not advocated any particular approach or called for air traffic control to be privatized, hoping instead to foster a wider, public discussion of the issue.
British Columbia Declares A Local State Of Emergency After Massive Mine Waste Spill
A massive mining waste spill caused by a breach in a tailings pond has prompted a local state of emergency in part of British Columbia.
The Cariboo Regional District announced the emergency declaration on its Facebook page Wednesday, saying it was doing so in order to “access additional capacity that may be necessary to further protect the private property and government infrastructure in the town of Likely.” Likely is the name of one of the small B.C. towns placed under a water ban after about 2.6 billion gallons of water and about 1.18 billion gallons of “metals-laden fine sand” spilled from a tailings pond into nearby creeks, rivers and lakes.
The spill happened following years of warnings to Imperial Metals about Mount Polley’s tailings pond from the British Columbia Ministry of Environment and an environmental consulting group. Environment Canada has opened an investigation into the spill, trying to figure out what caused the tailings pond to breach in the first place. A clean-up plan and report on the spill, which must include a section on long-term impacts to the local environment, is due from the company by Aug. 15, and the company must also submit a plan for how to stop tailings from spilling out of the pond by August 13.
“This spill is unacceptable. Canadians expect companies to operate in a responsible manner that protects the environment,” Ted Laking, the Director of Communication for Canada’s Minister of the Environment, said in a statement.
Imperial Metals president Brian Kynoch said this week that, despite the fact that the spill prompted water bans in B.C., the water that came from the tailings pond was “very close to drinking water quality.” Though it’s not yet certain what exactly was in the tailings pond (the first water tests are expected Thursday), which held the waste of the mining operation, the CBC noted that in 2013, Mount Polley mine disposed of arsenic, lead, nickel, selenium, mercury, and other compounds on-site.
Megan Thompson, an aquatic ecologist and limnologist at a Canadian environmental consulting firm, told ThinkProrgress in an email that, based on her ongoing study of a breach in a tailings pond at the Obed coal mine in Alberta that occurred last year, the mining company president may not be too far off in his assessment — the water may be fairly clean, but the solids in the tailings pond likely aren’t.
“One thing I learned from the Obed spill was that the water held in the tailings pond above the tailings sediments appeared relatively clean,” she said. “At Obed, the solids appeared to be the more contaminated component of the spill, and from what I hear in the news, this may also have been the case at the Mount Polley Mine.”
Thompson said there are “many things in the tailings that could impact lakes and rivers, especially if those substances did not naturally occur in the aquatic systems prior to the spill.”
“Even a change in pH can have serious impacts, if it’s big enough,” she said.
Tailings from copper and gold mines differ from those of tar sands mines because they typically don’t contain harmful substances like PAHs and naphthentic acids, Thompson said. But if they contain something like mercury, which tends to stick around in an ecosystem for a long time and doesn’t decrease in toxicity like naphthentic acids do, the impacts could be long-lasting. Recovery of the stream bed and banks could take as little as 10 years, she said, but any long-lived toxins present in the tailings could cause the recovery of the stream itself to take longer. The sheer force of the spill, which downed trees in its path, could have killed fish, and the solid material in the tailings that reached Quesnel Lake will settle to the bottom, burying the organisms in the benthic zone.
Residents of Likely, B.C., which was put under a water ban, are worried about the long-term impact of the spill: to the region’s waterways, to the salmon, and to their economy, which does rely on its fishing and outdoors industry.
“People are not happy,” Scott Saunderson, an Edmonton resident who regularly camps in the region, told the Vancouver Sun. “They never should have built that mine here in the first place.”
Candidate for Wisconsin Governor Declares Opposition to Huge Open-Pit Iron-Ore Mine in Northwestern Wisconsin
The company Gogebic Taconite (GTAC), has already purchased the mineral rights for 21,000 acres of the Penokee Range in Ashland and Iron Counties, Wisconsin, and has proposed a what the Sierra Club says would become the largest open-pit iron-ore taconite mine in the world. The mine would be 22 miles long, 4 1/2 miles long, 1/2 of a mile wide and up to 1,000 feet deep.
Located in the area of the Bad River in northwestern Wisconsin, which is part of a vast, water-rich ecosystem that President John F. Kennedy described in a speech he delivered in the area in 1963 as “a central and significant portion of the freshwater assets of this country”, the proposed mine’s impacts are of great concern to the adjacent Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, who’s 125,000+ acre reservation is located on the south shore of Lake Superior, the largest fresh water lake of the world in geographic size.
Although claiming to have no interest in circumventing Wisconsin’s formerly strong environmental protection mining laws, GTAC representatives later worked behind the scenes, reportedly with Republican legislators and Governor Scott Walker, to gut Wisconsin’s mining laws. According to former Trec Bicycle executive Mary Burke, who is currently the leading Democratic candidate for Wisconsin Governor, “By letting mining companies write their own rules, Scott Walker’s policies have put Wisconsin’s public health and great outdoors at risk.” Burke’s website states further: “That’s why Mary opposes the GTAC mine – the approach the Governor, legislature and industry took didn’t balance protection of our natural resources and public health with the need for job creation. Our precious natural resources are one of Wisconsin’s greatest assets.”
EARTH DAY ACTIONS – Madison, Wisconsin, and Washington DC
Madison, Wisconsin
As part of an organizing action of Global Climate Convergence and Wisconsin Wave, University of Wisconsin students, professors, teachers and other members of Madison area community marched down Madison’s State Street on the 44th Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, 2014, with the purpose being to add to the public’s growing awareness and concern regarding the grave environmental threats and social injustices going on around them. The continuing and reckless mining and overuse of the earth’s valuable natural resources, often primarily for the profit of a few, was a common theme expressed at the march in posters and verbal forms. There was an overriding concern about the overuse of fossil fuels, metals, sand and gravel, to the great harm being inflicted upon the earth’s clean water and limited atmosphere, which are showing signs everywhere that they have reached the limit of sustainability for all of the earth’s future populations.
As reported in a April 23 article by Dana Kampa in The Daily Cardinal, titled “Madison environmental, social justice advocates converged on Earth Day” to “Protect our Water–Reject the Mines and Pipelines!”, mining in Wisconsin was cited as one of several significant environmental issues the protesters voiced concerned about.
Wisconsin used to be an environmental leader. It was the home of naturalist and writer Aldo Leopold; it was the first state in the country to ban the use of DDT as a pesticide on farmland; and it was the birthplace and home of U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, who founded Earth Day in 1970 and was instrumental in waking up the nation’s awareness of the damaging ecological, health and economic costs of air and water pollution and the need for tough federal and state laws and regulations to minimize it. The State of Wisconsin did just that in the decades that followed, maintaining and protecting its natural resources throughout the decades that followed.
But natural resource protection in Wisconsin took an about face in Wisconsin in November 2010 with the election of Republican Governor Scott Walker. After passage of a bill into law that allows for significant environmental degradation from ore mining in the state, an environmentally sensitive area of northern Wisconsin could ultimately become the home of the world’s largest open-pit iron ore mine. Wisconsin’s once strong environmental laws and regulations have been weakened, and environmentally conscious people throughout the state are rising up and taking notice.
The mine is proposed to be built by Gogebic Taconite and is currently undergoing review for development in the Penokee Hills, despite the fact that the mine would destroy a vast, water-rich ecosystem that President John F. Kennedy in 1963 called “a central and significant portion of the freshwater assets of this country” after his visit there.
The $1.5 billion mine would initially be close to four miles long, up to a half-mile wide and nearly 1,000 feet deep, but it could be extended as long as 21 miles. It lies in the headwaters of the Bad River, which flows into Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Six miles downstream from the site is the reservation of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, whose livelihood is threatened by the mine. Environmentally conscious citizens of Wisconsin are protesting, as evidenced by the Earth Day march in Madison.
The protesters also voiced strong concerns for the overall degradation being inflicted on Wisconsin’s landscape by frac sand mining, as well as the human health concerns which occur over time when people breath in silica sand fragments, and the noise and dust from the various digging, processing and trucking of the sand from the mining sites to drilling sites, located out-of-state, mostly in North Dakota. But student marchers also expressed major concerns about the overall future and well-being of the entire planet earth, as its oceans are warming, becoming more acid, while sea levels are arising, from melting ice and snow on land masses and due to the thermal expansion that occurs when water warms, and as the air at the surface continues its record warming. The adverse effects on people and animals from the increasing weather extremes associated with the warming (longer and more dangerous heat waves, worse flooding in some areas and larger areas of drought in others; more and higher coastal flooding with stronger and stronger storms); in other words, more devastation of human and animal life and real estate as the earth continues to heat up. Property and life insurance rates the world over are rising as a result.
The protesters began the march at Madion’s Monona Terrace building, which is Madison’s Convention Center (designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright), and marched past the Wisconsin’s State Capitol Building, and then down State Street, where they convened at the UW campus Library Mall.
At the mall, several speakers referenced the latest projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), citing numerous examples of recent environmentally injurious governmental decisions of late, not just by our own state senators and representatives in the Wisconsin Legislature, but by current Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker.
As most Wisconsinites know, Wisconsin has tens of thousands of individual and families living in poverty in the state, most who have been been able to just barely get by on the low income jobs they’ve been working up to now. Yet just this last November, the U.S. Congress voted to end the 2009 Recovery Act’s modest monetary increase in food share benefits (food stamps), by its failing to continue funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for poor individuals and families, cutting the funding source of the food budget for many thousands of Wisconsin individuals, families and their children on November 1, 2013. This action by our Congress resulted in a benefit cut for nearly every household receiving food share benefits. For families of three, the cuts amounted to $29 a month — November 2013 through September 2014, totaling a $319 for families of three for that period.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that the cut amounted to “a serious loss, especially in light of the very low amount of basic SNAP benefits available”, and that “without the Recovery Act’s boost, SNAP benefits will average less than $1.40 per person per meal in 2014”. Unfortunately, it is individuals and families eligible for receiving SNAP funding – a large percentage who are Blacks of African and American descent who live in Milwaukee or Dane (Madison area) counties, as well as many thousands of rural preschool age children, and minority families who have children enrolled in public elementary, middle or high schools throughout Wisconsin – who were hurt the most by the November 2013 federal SNAP program cut. Studies show these are the times of human life that are most essential for the child to receive proper nutrition – when their bodies demand the largest amount of good food to grow properly and function well while in school as well as play. When children of any race are deprived of good, nutritious food in their preschool and school age years they are more likely to be more anxious and distracted in school and elsewhere, and they are thus more prone to act in ways get them into trouble in school and elsewhere.
Studies show that when deprived of good, nutritious food at a very young age (2 – 6 years of age), any child, regardless of their race or ethnicity, will be impaired for life as those years are key in proper brain development. When family poverty results in these young children being fed less than nutritious food, or not enough food, during the ages of 2 to 6 years of age, it saddles these young children with impaired mental capabilities, making it more difficult for them to succeed when they enter school, and ultimately reduces their ability to compete for good grades and reduces their chances of succeeding in school and the work place, which can increase their risk of getting into trouble with the authorities and land in prison. To generate this sequence of events for children of families having limited income, in a country as wealthy as the U.S., is an American tragedy of intolerable proportions. Yet, inflationary food pricing brought on by likely global-warming-caused drought in large portions of the western United States, southwestern California in particular, over the past 3 years, and the harsh political decisions affecting Wisconsin’s poor families by our Wisconsin political representative have made this situation worse, especially for the large African-American and Latino populations living in and around Wisconsin’s two largest urban areas – Milwaukee and Dane Counties in particular.
Many who marched this Earth Day (Tuesday) in Madison claimed that they were totally outraged by the fact our own U.S. Representatives and Senators in the Congress have hugely shirked their responsibilities as government employees and public office holders by their continued refusal to initiate or act on legislation to significantly bring down annual U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) to the atmosphere, both by each individual state, as well as the country as a whole, and fund the development of community strategies to adapt existing and needed infrastructure to handle higher flood waters and drier and hotter condition affecting water supply and air conditioning during heat waves for those who can’t afford it; while creating alert systems and emergency response networking as extreme weather events become more extreme and potentially deadly,as is predicted in the coming decades due to human-caused global warming.
Not only is there now clear evidence of global warming, nearly everywhere, but studies also show the warming is likely to accelerate, the longer countries, such as the high carbon dioxide emitting, or those projected to become high annual greenhouse gas emitters: United States, Canada, China; India; Australia; European counties; Southeast Asia countries, Brazil, and many of the more prosperous South and Central American countries that rely heavily on the tremendous greenhouse gas emitting aviation industry, as well as the many countries having large numbers of military transport vehicles, ships and aircraft and who them on a regular basis, for training purposes and in war, and the very lucrative cruise and airline tourist industries, all who continue to fail at drastically cutting their annual GHG emissions, to the detriment of future decades.
Scientists the world over have already essentially issued a RED ALERT and sounded the alarm bells on the looming state, national and worldwide threats that are now becoming reality as rapid global warming becomes reality. Economists have reported that major industries which depend greatly on a stable climate are unlikely to prosper when they begin to experience heavy losses as they already have because of increasingly severe droughts, unusually fast and heavy rainfalls causing terrible flooding.
It is a fact that every time someone on the planet burns fossil fuels, whether the fuel is gasoline that gets burned up in a car or a lawn mower, ATV, boat jet ski, snowmobile; or if its diesel fuel for running a truck, train, bus or generator, or whether its aviation (jet) fuel from a plane; or natural gas, oil, propane or any other fuel source burned in one’s furnace; more carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, where it mixes with the other GHG’s already present in the atmosphere.
During their march down State Street in Madison, participants chanted phrases such as “keep the oil in the soil, keep the coal in the hole,” “people power, not corporate power” and “beat back the frack attack, we’re gonna say no mine, GTAC” to promote their individual and collective goals.
Trudi Jenny, a 350 Madison member, said she thought the main message of the march was to “protect our waters.” She said she opposes climate disruption and pipelines.
“We hope that [people attending the rally] learn to become active in the climate change arena,” Jenny said.
Jenny also said she hopes people will write to their congresspeople about creating legislation to keep the planet healthy, promote a carbon tax and oppose a pipeline coming through Minnesota, and support divestment from fossil fuel industries.
Madison Action for Mining Alternatives member Carol Buelow said frack sand mines need more regulation, and bills altering iron mining regulation need to be repealed.
“I think people need to pay attention to the threats to our environment and do what they can to stop them,” Buelow said. “[Iron and frack sand mining] are very destructive to the environment, and they’re very poorly regulated, if at all. The state is doing a totally inadequate job of protecting the environment.”
Environmental advocate Brandi Browskowski-Durow, a public school teacher and University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education graduate student, said she wants to see more environmental education in schools.
Browskowski-Durow added one of her biggest concerns about the frack sand mining industry is the development of silicosis, which is the accumulation of fine sand in the lungs.
“Right now, [the government is] allowing permits to be more lenient, especially in Wisconsin, and that’s not going to be good for future generations,” Browskowski-Durow said.
Self-described “raging granny” Rebecca Alwin said she thought the rally was a convergence of issues and uniting of progressive groups.
“Raging grannies typically don’t like walking this far, but I’ve got my good walking shoes on,” Alwin said.
Multiple peace marshals walked with the group to help the large group comply with the law and stay safe around traffic.
After the march, several speakers voiced their environmental concerns in a rally.
Federation of United Tribes spokesperson Larry Littlegeorge said he would like to see a complete stop to sand mine construction. He said he got involved when he heard about the potential creation of a 5,000-acre sand mine.
Littlegeorge connected his current concerns to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act moving all Native Americans west of the Mississippi River.
“Now in 2014, we have another forced removal,” Littlegeorge said. “The Federation of United Tribes is commissioned by the elders and their beliefs to stand up and be accountable for the rights of Mother Earth and for the people who are not in harmony and balance with one another.”
Speakers then led a traditional Native American dance, encouraging people to join hands in a line that eventually converged in the center of Library Mall.
350 Madison spokesperson Beth Esser addressed climate change policy for future generations, specifically her children at the rally.
“Like every parent out there, I want so many wonderful things for their future, but most importantly, I want a healthy, vibrant planet for them to live on,” Esser said. “The time has come to move beyond changing light bulbs.”
Esser also spoke of the fossil fuel divestment program on UW-Madison campus.
“If it is wrong to wreck the planet, surely it is wrong to benefit financially from doing so,” Esser said. “Together, we can put people, planet and peace over profit.”
Finally, Carl Whiting spoke of the No Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance’s opposition to building a pipeline through the Midwest to transport crude oil with civil disobedience.
“It’s high time we all got together, celebrating our collective vision for a healthy planet and flexing our collective muscle,” Whiting said. “All of us here are deeply concerned about the future, and rightly so.”
A rally coordinator said despite the smaller-than-expected turnout, the positive energy of the crowd was encouraging and empowering.
More Info:
For more information about the Global Climate Convergence in Wisconsin, go to https://wisconsinwave.org/global-climate-convergence-wisconsin-0
Regarding Earth Day news in Washington DC, USA Today journalist Paul Singer, who gives weekly reports to Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Central Times” show on Congressional activities, said nothing special for Earth Day was happening there, and that Earth Day is seldom celebrated in the nation’s capital, as it is perceived mostly as an celebration only by Democrats.
Our Children’s Future is being Sabotaged by the Failure of U.S. Congress and Wisconsin Politicians to Act NOW to Reduce Greenhouse Gases
Things have gone real bad for our natural and human environment in Wisconsin, and especially for poor Black children in the state, under the governorship of Scott Walker. There may still be time to fix things, but scientists the world over say now that “major action is needed and fast” – from everyday people, from all businesses, and especially from all current and acting government officials. It is morally wrong for them not to act now, both meaningfully and without delay, for the sake of today’s children. It is they who will face the brunt of global warming impacts as this century progresses.
The effects of rising greenhouse gas concentration level in the atmosphere are latent and slow to develop. But once they do – and they are beginning to do that now – those effects are long-lasting. Decades and centuries, not just years. And more warming also creates chain reactions, producing positive feedbacks that lead to more warming;for example, reducing snow and ice cover at the poles leads to a reduction in albedo (reflection of Sun’s rays back out to space). Because less of the Sun’s radiation is reflected, more is absorbed by the darker (than snow) ocean, thus warming the ocean waters, which causes more snow and ice on the ocean to melt, reducing albedo at the poles even more, warming the water even more and so on. This has already been measured as happening now.
Another example of the positive feedbacks of more warming is that the Permafrost region, which covers one-fifth of the earth’s surface, is now thawing. The thawing of eons of organic material in the Permafrost causes the production and release of methane gas, which is another greenhouse gas (in addition to carbon dioxide and several others) that has 37-times the heat absorbing power of carbon dioxide in the earth atmosphere. This will add to the warming that is already occurring. Add the additional warming will cause even more methane to be released by the thawing Permafrost region. And so on. This dangerous compounding and reoccurring effect has already started as well.
It’s time to Conserve, Now! – for all children living today, and especially for those who follow them. Maybe by that time humans will find a way to safely combat the warming temperatures and rising oceans. But there is much yet that has to happen. The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are out, and farming and consumption as practiced in the U.S. must change in many ways. Researchers say climate change has already cut yields of wheat and corn, reducing gains achieved by better farming technology. Meat and dairy production consumes vast amount of fossil fuel derived energy, and animal waste adds more methane to the atmosphere.
Making matters worse, world population is expected to hit nine billion by 2050. The world’s population needs to be reduced, not allowed to grow more rapidly. To do that, aid and education will need to be given to countries having out of control population explosions. We are morally obligated to help them on this for the sake of all humanity. Future and distant future populations need to be given a chance. To achieve that, all the world’s countries need to drastically reduce all activities causing the most greenhouse gases to be emitted by their people and industries, while everyone should be encouraging activities that will sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (growing plants and trees, primarily). Some of this is starting now and such initiatives should be amplified in number and be heavily financed by countries that have historically deforested the world while burning up the most fossil fuels.
There should be only a minimum number of fossil fuel development projects developed, and only the most clean and energy efficient fuel should be taken from the earth for combustion. The goal should be to obtain as much power from wind, solar and and renewable energies as possible.
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