Our world leaders haven’t yet apologized for their climate failure in Copenhagen so Greenpeace and the global tcktcktck campaign have done it for them in these advertisements at the Copenhagen airport:
“I’m sorry,” the text of the ad reads. “We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… We didn’t.”
Some of the so called world “leaders” depicted are Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev and others.
Maybe he liked the city? Either way, President Barack Obama announced today that he will attend the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December. The climate summit is held between 7-18 December and is the last chance we have to take action against “the greatest threat the world has ever faced”.
“U.S. President Barack Obama will go to Copenhagen for a U.N. climate change meeting on December 9, hoping to add momentum to an international process despite slow progress on a domestic bill to cut carbon emissions”, Reuters reports.
“Obama planned to make a visit at the beginning of the climate negotiations in Denmark, an administration official told Reuters on Wednesday, before picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in neighboring Oslo.”
With him to the climate summit Obama has a pledge to cut emissions in the USA with 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, 30% by 2025, 42% by 2030 and 83% by 2050. But these numbers are much lower than those proposed by the EU and other industrialised countries such as Norway.
This past weekend around 50 000 people from around Germany protested in Berlin against nuclear energy. The demonstrators protested against threats from the current right wing government to extend a deadline for the country’s 17 nuclear reactors.
“In Berlin an estimated 50,000 people have joined a demonstration against nuclear power in the run-up to the German general elections.
The rally was headed by a convoy of 350 tractors, which drove past the office of Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports.
Back in 2001 the former Social Democratic chancellor, backed up by the Greens, pushed through a new legislation in 2001 that would phase out nuclear energy from Germany within two decades. But the Social Democratic and Green government lost the election in 2005 to a right-wing coalition consisting of the current Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats.
Angela Merkel, who successfully blocked a strong climate deal for the European Union last year, now wants to scrap the nuclear phase-out legislation that the SPD pushed through in 2001. This is similar to what is happening in Sweden after a coalition of right-wing parties won the recent election there. According to Merkel, Germany “cannot phase out nuclear energy as quickly as some imagine.”
John Hocevar, from Greenpeace’s flagship the Rainbow Warrior, writes about the assault on the Greenpeace staff blog:
“We are in Valletta Harbor in Malta. We learned that there were two vessels here owned by Fuentes, the tuna tycoon who controls over half the bluefin catch in the Mediterranean. We decided to board the vessel to inspect the cargo and documentation. Three women, Emma, Rita, and Liz, were the first to volunteer.
After the vessels refused our polite request to allow us access, Emma stepped on board to press the point. She was immediately attacked – they punched her, pulled her hair, picked her up and threw her overboard. One person hurled a large wooden pallet which whistled by our heads, and another tossed a full bucket of paint into one of our boats. If either of those had hit their intended targets, someone could have been seriously injured, but fortunately no damage was done.”
This all reminds me about the video which shows peaceful environmental activists who were protecting an old-growth forest in Tasmania, Australia, being violently attacked by timber workers.
This past Friday the House of Representatives in USA voted yes to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, a cap-and-trade energy bill, by a vote of 219 to 212. This historic climate change bill will require limits on pollution responsible for man-made climate change and it will help USA create a green economy, if it also gets thumbs up in the Senate.
“After a tense debate, in which the margin of success or failure never moved beyond a handful of votes, the House of Representatives passed the most sweeping climate change policy ever considered by Congress early Friday evening, the Huffington Post reports.
The outcome had remained up in the air up until the actual vote, with the White House and the president himself engaging in a heavy lobbying campaign aimed at restoring Democratic Party unity that seemed to be fracturing.”
President Barack Obama said in his weekly address that this new bill will help “create green jobs, ensure clean air for our children, move towards energy independence and combat climate change.”
“Having spent the last three years living in China, I and all of my Chinese colleagues became somewhat accustomed to what we referred to as “China bashing” by some of the international media. You know the sort of thing: the over-the-top, almost hysterical cry of “China’s eating up all the world’s resources!” Since China is now one of the world’s largest manufacturing centres, the claim was applied to almost anything – timber, coal, or even the cobalt used to make our cell phone batteries. To a certain degree, therefore, there is a kernel – but not much more – of truth to the claim.”
Stark highlights the fact that most of the production that generates the waste and pollution in China comes from factories (many owned by Western corporations) producing products intended for and consumed by the Western markets. We in the West have outsourced our dirty factories to (often) un-democratic countries with shameless low wages and with a political and justice system that lacks even mediocre environmental regulations. So why is the mainstream media blaming these developing countries for the increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions when it is actually our consumption that is the root of the problem?
Today it’s Earth Day, a day intended to inspire awareness and gratitude for the environment. And could you find a better way to celebrate the Earth than becoming a climate activist? No, I think not.
“We’re mobilising 3 million people to join our fight for the climate, to force governments to act against runaway climate change. Help us reach our goal! Become a climate activist by signing up for free so we can send you action alerts and, about once a month in most countries, our newsletter.”
24 yours after the deadly attack by the French secret services against Greenpeace’s flagship the Rainbow Warrior it seems France and its nuclear industry is once again caught up in a major scandal involving Greenpeace.
A week ago the French media reported that the largely state-owned French electricity company EDF has been caught spying on Greenpeace France. Two senior EDF officials have been indicted in a French court. Now investigators are looking into “fraudulent intrusion” into the computers of nuclear campaigners in the Greenpeace office in Paris.
“Greenpeace is a non-violent environmental organization,” said Pascal Husting, director of Greenpeace France. “The fact that we are being treated like terrorists because we dare to question nuclear energy shows just how frightened the nuclear industry is of transparency and a democratic debate.”
In a genius attempt to stop the construction of a third runway at the Heathrow airport in the UK the TV impressionist Alastair McGowan has bought a piece of the Heathrow third runway site along with Emma Thompson, Zac Goldsmith and Greenpeace.
If constructed the third runway would make Heathrow UK’s single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s expected that the airport would emit nearly 27 million tonnes of CO2 every year. A sum that is equivalent to the emissions of 57 of the least polluting countries in the world combined. But McGowan, Thompson, Goldsmith and Greenpeace hopes to stall or even stop the third runway completely by dividing up the plot to people around the world.
“The government would use its powers to issue compulsory purchase orders for the plots but lawyers said yesterday that the existence of thousands of owners would make this process time-consuming and expensive. Similar tactics have been used successfully to protect tropical forests.”
Greenpeace says they will “resist all attempts at compulsory purchase and will represent millions of people from across the world at any planning inquiry.” And that their “lawyers are now examining ways in which all of our owners can act as a legal obstacle to plans for a third runway at our busiest airport”. So far over 5000 people have signed up for a piece of the plot.
Just days after Al Gore and a bunch of environmental organisations launched a “Reality Coalition” campaign to tell the American public that there is no “clean coal” they might have gotten their best advertisement, ever.
Last month a coal ash dam in Harriman, East Tennessee, USA, ruptured and sent out billions of gallons of toxic sludge across a 300 acres big area, even knocking one home off its foundation. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) these coal ash damns can reach up to 1,500 acres and contains heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium which the federal agency considers to be “a threat to water supplies and human health.”
“This spill shows that coal can never be ‘clean,’” said Kate Smolski, Senior Legislative Coordinator for Greenpeace. “If the Exxon Valdez was a symbol of pollution 20 years ago, the Tennessee Coal Spill of 2008 is the symbol of it today.”
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24 yours after the deadly attack by the French secret services against Greenpeace’s flagship the 
