Author Archives: AbelSVBXuzcfe

These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

by AbelSVBXuzcfe Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Twenty-one young people from around the country filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Tuesday accusing the federal government of violating their rights by contributing to climate change through the promotion of fossil fuels.

The plaintiffs, who range in age from 8 to 19, filed their complaint in US District Court in Oregon. The complaint lists numerous defendants, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Defendants have for decades ignored their own plans for stopping the dangerous destabilization of our nation’s climate system,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint, which was filed with the help of the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. “Defendants have known of the unusually dangerous risk of harm to human life, liberty, and property that would be caused by continued fossil fuel use and increase carbon dioxide emissions.”

While setting new policies to reduce carbon emissions, the Obama administration has often touted an “all of the above” approach to energy policy that includes oil, natural gas, coal and renewable energy, the complaint continues. By continuing to promote the development and use of fossil fuels, the federal government violated their constitutional rights, the young plaintiffs allege.

“What we are providing is an opportunity for them to participate in the civic democratic process and go to the branch of government that can most protect their rights,” said Julia Olson, the lead counsel on the case.

Olson, a public interest attorney, has been working closely with plaintiff Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 15, since 2011. It was Martinez who originally asked Olson to prepare the case against the United States government.

Martinez, who serves as the youth director for Earth Guardians, spoke before the United Nations General Assembly in June and demanded world leaders take action against climate change. It was his third time addressing the United Nations.

Climate change threatens the forests surrounding Martinez’s home in Boulder, Colorado, and will lead to a scarcity of water, the complaint says. Another plaintiff, 18-year-old Alexander Lozak, said that extreme drought conditions are threatening the Oregon land that his great, great, great, great, grandmother first farmed.

“The health and bodily integrity of his family and their farm, which they rely on for food and as a source of income—as well as for their personal well-being—increasingly are harmed by climate change caused by Defendants,” the complaint says.

The youngest plaintiff, 8-year-old Levi Draheim, said he can no longer swim in the river near his home in Indialantic, Florida, because of an increase in bacteria and fish die-offs.

In response to the complaint, the Environmental Protection Agency defended its work to confront climate change, which it described as “the biggest environmental challenge we face.”

“That’s why President Obama launched the Climate Action Plan and why EPA is taking action with our Clean Power Plan: to give our kids and grandkids the cleaner, safer future they deserve,” Laura Allen, deputy press secretary for the EPA, said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “We have a moral obligation to leave a healthy planet for future generations.”

“A child born today will turn fifteen in the year 2030—the year when the full benefits of the Clean Power Plan will be realized,” Allen added. “The actions we take now will clear the way for that child—and kids everywhere—to learn, play, and grow up in a world that’s not only clean and safe, but full of opportunity.”

In early August, Obama called climate change “one of the key challenges of our lifetime.”

“We’re the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it,” the president told an audience at an event in the White House’s East Room, where he unveiled new regulations on emissions from power plants.

But in the eyes of Olson and the plaintiffs, that’s not enough. They are asking for a court order to force Obama to immediately implement a national plan to decrease atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million—a level many scientists agree is the highest safe concentration permissible—by the end of this century. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already hit 400 parts per million.

“It’s really important that the court step in and do their jobs when there’s such intense violation of constitutional rights happening,” Olson said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read More:  

These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton

by AbelSVBXuzcfe Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This article originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Notwithstanding the Washington Post‘s inevitable jokes about “fedoras, flannel shirts and beards” outside Hillary Clinton’s campaign office “in the midst of hipster-cool downtown Brooklyn,” there actually is no such thing as “hipster-cool downtown Brooklyn.” Downtown Brooklyn is a warren of architecturally undistinguished office buildings and sterile windswept plazas. And so it was on a charmless little patch of sidewalk near the new campaign headquarters that a group of about 20 activists with 350 Action, an affiliate of 350.org, held signs and chanted on Monday afternoon urging Clinton to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. The signs played on a slogan used by Clinton’s supporters—”I’m ready for Hillary”—by tacking an extra phrase onto the end—”to say NO KXL.”

How the 2016 contenders will deal with climate change


Jeb Bush on Climate Change: “I’m a Skeptic”


Marco Rubio Used to Believe in Climate Science


Rand Paul Is No Moderate on Global Warming


What a Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Mean for Global Warming


Scientists: Ted Cruz’s Climate Theories Are a “Load of Claptrap”


Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment


How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World


Jim Webb Wants to Be President. Too Bad He’s Awful on Climate Change.


Martin O’Malley Is A Longshot Presidential Candidate, and a Real Climate Hawk

In a comment that cut to the heart of the contradiction embedded in Clinton’s record—embracing both cuts to carbon emissions and increases in fossil fuel production—Duncan Meisel, an organizer with 350, said, “If you want to stop carbon pollution, keep carbon in the ground!”

Reporters in attendance strained to hear the unamplified speakers over the steady hum of idling buses across the street. What the event lacked in grandeur, though, it made up for in topical importance. Clinton herself has called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face.”

And yet climate activists have good reason to be worried about Clinton’s Keystone stance. In recent years, she has refused to take any position on the pipeline, but in 2010, when she was secretary of state, she said, “we are inclined to” approve it. Says Ben Schreiber, Friends of the Earth’s climate and energy program director, “It was inappropriate for her to make comments about the merits of the proposal when there wasn’t even an environmental impact statement.”

And that’s just one of the many reservations some environmental activists have about Clinton’s past record and current positions. In interviews, they also complain that she promoted fracking abroad as secretary of state, she has ties to Big Oil, and she favors pro-corporate trade agreements. Several of these issues have been gathering steam. Recent reports on large donations to the Clinton Foundation from oil companies have led to criticism from green groups. “This cash connection between the Clintons with natural gas and Big Oil is sincerely troubling,” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Last week, a coalition of more than 100 environmental and local anti-fracking groups sent a letter to Clinton calling on her to “acknowledge the inherent dangers in shale development and stand with us.”

None of the biggest national environmental organizations—such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV)—signed the letter to Clinton, nor did those three groups respond to queries for this story. “National green groups have their own dance to do with Democratic candidates,” says one environmentalist who asked not to be named discussing other organizations. Withholding criticism allows for friendlier relations with—and, they hope, better access to—Clinton, and more influence over policy development in her campaign and in a future White House. The big groups might believe that this will ultimately mean better outcomes for climate policy than public confrontation. After all, if the Democratic frontrunner tells environmentalists to take a hike and wins without them, then they’re really doomed.

Whatever the reason, Clinton was warmly received when she spoke at an LCV dinner in New York last fall. Upon Clinton’s campaign announcement on Sunday, LCV issued a cautiously optimistic statement that listed her climate bona fides from her time in the Senate and State Department while noting that she must lay out specific climate action plans in her campaign platform. The group praised Clinton for having supported cap-and-trade and an international climate accord, but one could detect a hint of uncertainty from LCV as to how much Clinton will emphasize climate. “We welcome Secretary Clinton to the Presidential race, and encourage her to build on her long record of environmental leadership by making climate change a top priority of her campaign,” said LCV President Gene Karpinski.

He should have been pleased to see what Clinton campaign chair John Podesta tweeted on Sunday:

As ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum noted, to make climate and clean energy one of the campaign’s top three issues would be unprecedented for any major party nominee. “The Podesta tweet is a sea change, that would not have happened in 2008,” says Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesperson for 350.

Still, 350 and other aggressive green groups are openly ambivalent about Clinton. Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity both signed the anti-fracking letter to Clinton. “Our concerns about Clinton are some of the same concerns we have with President Obama as well,” says Schreiber. “We’re quite concerned about fracking, and the fact that she was actually advocating for other countries to frack as part of her role at State.” Another aspect of her State Department tenure that worries greens is her support for free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would allow transnational corporations to challenge environmental regulations in signatory nations.

Climate hawks won’t all be such cheap dates any more. Some of them are demanding not only that Clinton say she will limit emissions and promote renewables, but that she commit to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Says Kelly Mitchell, Greenpeace’s climate and energy campaign director, “Hillary Clinton needs to show that she would meet this challenge with the leadership required of our next president—that means standing up to the fossil fuel lobbyists, taking serious steps to keep coal, oil, and gas in the ground, and putting the United States on a path to 100 percent renewable energy.”

Visit site: 

Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton