Category Archives: Posts from Anne Petermann

by | January 1, 2013 · 9:00 am

2012 Top ten articles on Climate Connections

Note: The following are the top ten articles from Climate Connections from 2012, based on the number of views each story received. Several articles were written by GJEP, or were sent to Climate Connections by the original authors. They are posted in reverse order, from number 10 through number 1.  Our blog received a record 270,000 visitors in 2012 from over 200 countries.

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Happy New Year,

-The GJEP Team

10. Three responses to Bill McKibben’s new article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” (July 24)

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director of GJEP, Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch, and Keith Brunner, GJEP Communications Associate

Bill McKibben, in his new Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” does an effective job at summarizing the hard and theoretical numbers that warn us of the devastating impacts of continuing to burn the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves–yet it somehow falls short of its stated goal to help mobilize a new movement for climate action.  Continue reading here

9. Breaking News: Secret US military testing of radiological materials on poor and minority communities (September 24)

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director of GJEP, and Orin Langelle, GJEP Board Chair

During an interview we conducted last week in St. Louis, MO, Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor gave us a long description of research she had conducted into a major military cover up of the use of U.S. citizens as test subjects for military experiments related to the Cold War.
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by | December 11, 2012 · 1:44 pm

On Not Attending the UN Climate Conference in Doha

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC

Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC at the Durban Climate COP in 2011.  Photo: Langelle/GJEP

For the first time since 2004, Global Justice Ecology Project did not sent any representatives to the annual UN Climate Conference (COP).  There were numerous reasons for this decision, one of which was a letter sent to us by Ms. Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) “suspending” three Global Justice Ecology Project activists from participating in Doha.  The list includes Lindsey Gillies, Keith Brunner and me–Global Justice Ecology Project’s “Head of Delegation.” We were officially banned from participating in any of the UNFCCC negotiating sessions in 2012 as well as any future sessions unless we sign a document agreeing to their terms to abide by their special “code of conduct” for observers.  Right.

Figueres page 1

Figueres page 2

Our crime?  Direct action.   Unpermitted, disobedient direct action in both Cancun and Durban designed to highlight the mounting repression against non-corporate observers.  (We also worked for over a year to help organize the amazing Reclaim Power action and Peoples’ Assembly at COP 15 in Copenhagen, which exposed the ineffectiveness of the UNFCCC and called for people to take their power back–though the letter did not mention that).

Over the years we have watched the UNFCCC become more and more like the World Trade Organization that we and many anti-corporate globalization organizations rose up against in the latter 1990s and early 2000s.

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by | October 26, 2012 · 4:45 pm

As international talks stall, Romney, Obama omit climate change from debates

Note: Free Speech Radio News interviewed Executive Director Anne Petermann of Global Justice Ecology Project for this story.  –The GJEP Team

October 23, 2012. Source: Free Speech Radio News

In the final debate between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, the conversation veered from Middle East foreign policy to education to the upcoming threat of a budget sequester. But despite a campaign season marked by droughts, natural disasters, resource-driven conflicts and failed global carbon negotiations, both candidates were completely silent on climate change. Some environmental experts say the increasingly unstable climate will impact nearly every major issue the next president must tackle, including key decisions in US foreign policy. FSRN’s Alice Ollstein reports.

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by | September 6, 2012 · 9:00 am

Rio Earth Summit: tragedy, farce, and distraction

By Anne Petermann, September 2012.  Source: Z Magazine

As I flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on June 12 for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)—the 20-year anniversary of the historic “Rio Earth Summit”—I read an article in the Financial Times titled “Showdown Looms at OPEC After Saudi Arabia Urges Higher Output.” The article explained that Saudi Arabia was urging OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to increase their output of oil in order to ensure that the global price of oil would not exceed $100 per barrel in order to “mitigate the risks that high oil prices pose to the global economy.”

The article pointed out that ensuring the health of the global economy requires expanding oil production. This, as we know, will worsen the climate crisis. The takeaway message of the article, therefore, is that the global economy will only thrive by destroying the life support systems of the planet.

At the Rio Earth Summit, this was also the underlying logic of the so-called “green economy” proposals that have polarized and paralyzed the talks since the first preparatory meeting for Rio+20 in May 2010.

According to Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, who wrote about the Rio+20 summit’s preparatory meetings for the Guardian back in March 2011, “Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries…and suspicions are running high that the…‘green economy’ is more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old ‘greed’ economy.”

At the Rio+20 summit, industrialized countries and multinational corporations, accompanied by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, led the push for development of the green economy—that is, to use the very ecological devastation caused by global capitalism to create markets in so-called “environmental services” by turning them into tradable commodities. These new markets would help prop up the global economy in a greenwashed version of business as usual.

“Environmental services,” provided by intact natural ecosystems—which include such things as the storage of carbon, the purification of air and water, and the maintenance of biodiversity—would be given a monetary value in the market, enabling them to be purchased and supposedly protected. In reality, however, it would allow companies to destroy a biodiverse ecosystem in one area, by purchasing the protection of an equivalent ecosystem.

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by | June 27, 2012 · 2:44 pm

Audio: Earth Minute – corporations try to advance the green (greed) economy in Rio

Global Justice Ecology Project partners with Margaret Prescod and the Sojourner Truth show for weekly Earth Minutes and weekly Earth Segment interviews.

To listen to or download this week’s Earth Minute on KPFK’s Sojourner Truth show, click on Earth Minute 27 June 2012.

Text from this week’s Earth Minute:

Last week, government leaders convened in Rio de Janeiro for the UN’s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development.  One of the goals: develop a Green Economy built on so-called “green growth” basically–a greenwashed version of the same Greed Economy that has trashed communities and ecosystems to enhance the profits of a very few.  In response, social movements, Indigenous Peoples, organizations and Southern countries stood fast in Rio to oppose this Greenwash Economy.
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by | June 20, 2012 · 7:14 pm

Rio+20 Photo Essay: Peoples’ march takes over the streets of Rio

by Anne Petermann, reporting from the streets of Rio, 20 June, 2012

Occupy activists march in Rio. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

“Against the dismantling of national environmental policy.” Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Indigenous 11 Year old Ta’Kaia Blaney of British Columbia protests the tar sands. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

La Via Campesina, the international movement of small farmers, had a large presence in Rio at the Peoples Summit. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

“Against Amazonian Genocide. Xingu (Afro-Brazilian freedom fighter) Lives Forever.” Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Can’t have a march in Latin America without Che. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Funeral for Brazil’s national environmental policy. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

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by | June 15, 2012 · 7:59 am

Rio+20 Alternative Peoples’ Summit opens today: People of the world vs. the “green economy” and global economic foreclosure

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Today is the opening day of the Cupola dos Povos–the alternative Peoples’ Summit for Environmental and Social Justice in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

It was pulled together by Brazilian groups and is being attended by social movements, Indigenous Peoples, activists and organizations from all over the world who are coming together to identify real solutions to the multiple and rising crises we face as humans on planet Earth.  The summit was organized in direct opposition to the official UN circus known as the Rio+20 Conference for Sustainable Development.  More aptly it would be called the Rio+20 Conference for the greenwashing of Business as Usual.

As I flew to Rio on 12 June, I read an article in the Financial Times titled “Showdown Looms at OPEC After Saudi Arabia Urges Higher Output.”  The article explained how Saudi Arabia is urging OPEC to increase their output of oil in order to ensure that the global price of oil does not exceed US$100/barrel in order to “mitigate the risks that high oil prices pose to the global economy.”

The insane logic of expanding oil production in the face of mounting climate chaos in order to help rescue the global economy accurately reflects the mindset behind the negotiations around the UN’s Rio+20 Earth Summit, set to start next week here in Rio.
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by | June 14, 2012 · 1:51 pm

KPFK Audio: GJEP’s Anne Petermann reports from Rio on the Rio+20 Earth Summit and Alternative Peoples’ Summit

Today as the official negotiations continue in preparation for the upcoming Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development–also known as the Rio+20 Earth Summit–KPFK’s Sojourner Truth show interviewed Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) Executive Director Anne Petermann, who is on the ground in Rio about the Rio+20 summit, which starts on 20 June, as well as the alternative Peoples’ Summit, which starts on 15 June.

To listen to the 15 minute interview, click here: Rio+20 interview with GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann on KPFK

Global Justice Ecology Project will be in Rio to report on and campaign around both the official UN meetings and the alternative Peoples’ Summmit, from 15 June to 23 June. Stay tuned to this blog for daily news and reports.  Beginning Tuesday, 19 June GJEP will be partnering with the Sojourner Truth show to provide daily interviews on the events in Rio.

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by | April 18, 2012 · 8:00 am

This Week’s Earth Minute: GE Tree Field-trials Destroyed by Protesters in New Zealand

Global Justice Ecology Project partners with Margaret Prescod’s Sojourner Truth show on KPFK–Pacifica Los Angeles radio show for a weekly Earth Minute on Tuesdays and a weekly 12 minute Environment Segment every Thursday. In this week’s Earth minute, Anne Petermann makes clear that, “if the government won’t stop GE trees, it appears some people are prepared take matters into their own hands.”

To listen to the Earth Minute, click here: http://bit.ly/IMCn71

The full text of this week’s Earth Minute:

In New Zealand, a field trial of genetically engineered trees was destroyed by protesters, who broke through two security perimeters to access them over Easter weekend.  Damage was estimated at over $400,000 New Zealand dollars.

The field trial was planted last year by Scion, a forestry research venture that is partnered with US-based GE tree company ArborGen.  ArborGen has petitioned the US government for permission to sell hundreds of millions of genetically engineered eucalyptus trees for planting across the US south.

But there is widespread public opposition to GE trees–which Scion clearly understood by their high level of security. GE trees are potentially disastrous, and once they escape into a natural forest, there is no calling them back.

The good news is there are no commercial-scale plantings of genetically engineered trees anywhere in the world, except for a small plantation in China.  GE trees are still one disaster we can stop.  And if the government won’t stop them, it appears some people are prepared take matters into their own hands.

For more information on GE trees, visit nogetrees.org.

For the earth minute and the sojourner truth show, this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project

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by | April 10, 2012 · 11:30 am

New Report on Illegal Logging: Exposing forest ‘untouchables’ is as important as ever

Note: The idea that the World Bank is releasing a report on combatting illegal logging is like the CIA releasing a report on combatting torture.  Through its Structural Adjustment Programs and other tactics used to force developing countries to exploit and export their resources, the World Bank has eroded efforts to protect forests, paved the way for replacement of forests with tree plantations, disenfranchised forest dependent communities and Indigenous Peoples that have historically taken care of forests, and most recently are pushing forest offset schemes under the umbrella of climate mitigation that will exacerbate all of the above.

There is likely good information in this report identifying some efforts to curtail illegal logging, but remember that any real effort to address the underlying causes of illegal logging will require a fundamental restructuring of society that includes eliminating one of the great contributors to illegal logging: the World Bank.

–Anne Petermann, for the GJEP Team

Cross-Posted from Environmental Investigation Agency

April 5, 2012

“Every two seconds, across the world, an area the size of a football field is clear cut by illegal loggers.”

This was the opening statement of a new report launched last week in Washington DC by the World Bank. Justice for Forests: Improving criminal justice efforts to combat illegal logging PDF recognises that funds generated by illegal logging are “unregulated, untaxed and often remain in the hands of organised criminal gangs”, and that through the use of the criminal justice system, more can be done to address the complex issues of illegal logging.

It’s true, over the many years that EIA has exposed the real situation on the ground in East Asia, naming names and exposing the ‘untouchables’, that we have yet to see any real justice regarding those who continue to plunder the forests for their own gain and end up extremely wealthy and powerful, with very high-level connections to decision-makers. In fact, in some cases it’s the decision makers themselves who have managed to get to a position of power using funds from illegal logging.

Abdul Rasyid

In Indonesia, we have exposed various individuals who are heavily engaged in forest crimes.Abdul Rasyid and his nephew Sugianto, from Tanjung Lingga, were responsible for illegally logging Tanjung Putting National Park, in Central Kalimantan, and the kidnapping and assault of EIA and Telapak investigators. While Sugianto went to court to face assault charges, neither were ever found guilty of plundering Tanjung Putting, nor of the kidnappings.

Ali Jambi, caught at home on hidden camera (c) EIA

Ali Jambi, who controlled the ramin smuggling trade and was named as one of the illegal bosses in Indonesia by the Ministry of Forestry; despite being investigated by the Indonesian police, had fled to Singapore and was conducting his illegal practice from there.

And there’s Marthen Renouw, a high-ranking police officer who built up a position of power over a period of 29 years in Papua. His authority included the city of Sorong, the main centre for the illegal logging business in the province, and he was under investigation over a series of suspicious transactions involving five bank accounts. Investigations proved Renouw had received funds from an illegal logging syndicate. Charged under anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws, he was acquitted of all charges after the key witness against him went on the run.

As these few examples show, corruption does not just take place in the forests. The judiciary systems of many countries are no longer places where justice is found. Systemic corruption of the police, prosecutors and judges ensure those with sufficient resources can literally get away with it.

The World Bank acknowledges there are no quick fixes for combating corruption and that without an effective criminal justice system, all the current policies do not work. In most cases, we find it is those on the ground who are caught in the act of smuggling or logging who are arrested. Usually the poor or vulnerable. The main actors behind this crime remain untouched.

And while civil society plays an important role in monitoring the forests and exposing those behind the crimes, little is being done to properly address the more complex issues that demonstrate corruption. Following the money is one such act, and working in a coordinated approach between domestic and international enforcement should work. But this takes courage and a show of political will, something that can only occur when anti-corruption activists find their champions within government and are given the support needed to ensure those who are getting away with it feel the heat.

Justice for Forests outlines many productive steps in strengthening criminal justice systems but acknowledges that, without the current preventative measures taking place and support in combating corruption in the forestry sector, these alone cannot solve the complex issues of illegal logging.

Exposing those behind this crime is as important now as it was 12 years ago.

Faith Doherty
Head of Forests Campaign

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