Tag: Fossil Fuels

To address the climate emergency, foundations must spend big on movements

MARGARET KLEIN SALAMON – Philanthropy has a unique and critical role to play in addressing the climate emergency. By acknowledging the calamity we face and adjusting their operations, philanthropies can lead society into the “emergency mode” necessary to avert disaster. The time for half-measures, white papers and panel discussions is over. Philanthropy must act now, boldly and decisively, to help save our planet for future generations.

A major win against factory farming points to a powerful new direction for the climate movement

NICK ENGELFRIED – Small farmers in Oregon, backed by a coalition of animal rights and climate activists, secured a big legislative victory over industrial factory farms, providing inspiration for wider action. “Part of our philosophy is you cannot only oppose or restrict the bad actors, although that is important,” Alice Morrison said. “You also have to lift up folks doing things that align with good stewardship of the land. Any solution to factory farming will be more viable if it puts forward that kind of positive vision.”

‘Appalling Betrayal’: New Report Details Dozens of Trump Rollbacks Perpetrated Under Cover of Covid-19

BRETT WILKINS – “Nearly 200,000 Americans are dead and more than 6 million have been infected with Covid-19 because of the administration’s disastrous response, but Trump’s top priority is showering giant corporations with deregulatory special favors,” says Matt Kent of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

How the Youth-led Climate Strikes Became a Global Mass Movement

NICK ENGELFRIED – It began as a call to action from a group of youth activists scattered across the globe, and soon became what is shaping up to be the largest planet-wide protest for the climate the world has ever seen. The Global Climate Strike is the result of a whole new generation taking bold action and could be the turning point for grassroots resistance to fossil fuels.

Trump’s Climate Demands Roil U.S. Allies

ANDREW RESTUCCIA – President Donald Trump’s abrupt turnaround on U.S. climate policy is fueling tension with several of America’s closest allies, which are resisting the administration’s demands that they support a bigger role for nuclear power and fossil fuels in the world’s energy supply.

The Impossibility of Growth Demands a New Economic System

GEORGE MONBIOT – To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible. Economic growth is an artifact of the use of fossil fuels.

How is the Use of Fossil Fuel Like Slavery?

ROBERT C. KOEHLER – The money system we live under, as Charles Eisenstein points out in his book Sacred Economics, is backed by growth: the necessity for more money. It’s called profit. We understand wealth, then, to be not a state of spiritual balance with ourselves and our environment, but as something that endlessly and forcefully accumulates, to no end except sheer linear growth. Our allegiance to such growth bequeaths us a moral system that justified (and continues to justify, with different terminology) slavery; and that excuses us from looking after the future. Knowing this may be the key to deciding to grow up.

How to Tap Latent Conservative Support for Climate-Change Policy

SEAN MCELWEE – Both last month’s Senate Climate Talkathon and Tom Steyer’s $100 million dollar pledge to back environment-friendly candidates indicate the same thing: Democrats are getting serious about global warming again. But even when Democrats have managed to close ranks behind previous legislative efforts like Waxman-Markey, Republicans have stymied them. Can the left forge a coalition to tackle the problem?

Together We Drew The Line

DAVID OSBORN – Saturday (July 27, 2013) we drew the line. Some 800 people came together from across the region including Vancouver (WA), the Tri-Cities, Astoria, Eugene, Bellingham, Vancouver (BC), Seattle, Portland and Hood River to demonstrate our unity in opposition to the oil, coal and gas terminals proposed throughout the Northwest and our commitment to take action such that none shall pass through our region.

Environmental Groups Whistling Past the Graveyard?

HEATHER RODGERS and SAMANTHA COOK – Environmental groups have long warned that America’s ravenous consumption of fossil fuels is not sustainable as a matter of public health or econmic health — either on a national or planetary level. But on the heels of a boom in domestic natural gas production — most of it the result of the adoption of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — their opponents are in the ascendency. The conservation and convert-to-clean-fuels messages of the environmentalists are increasingly deridedas out of touch, unrealistic, and harmful to the economy.