Category Archives: Green Economy

by | 2012-10-19 · 10:30

Poster: REDD + Indigenous Peoples = Genocide

Note: The photos in the upper right and lower left of this poster were taken in the indigenous village Amador Hernandez on the border of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve by Global Justice Ecology Project Board Chair Orin Langelle during an investigative trip to Chiapas, Mexico with GJEP’s then-Communications Director Jeff Conant.  The trip was organized in March 2011 to identify and expose the impacts on the indigenous communities in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico that would be caused by the California-Chiapas-Acre (Brazil) REDD agreement, which was announced at the Cancun climate talks in December 2010.  The series of events this week in California against REDD (also see previous blog post)  feature Orin’s photography as well as GJEP’s film “A Darker Shade of Green: REDD Alert and the Future of Forests.”  For more, go to no-redd.com

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle, REDD

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by | 2012-10-03 · 12:00

Eulogy for Barry Commoner

By Phil Bereano, Profesor Emeritus, University of Washington, October 2, 2012  

Note: The following was received by GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann via email and will be read during the UN’s Cartagena Biosafety Protocol meeting today.

-The GJEP Team

Photo: Los Angeles Times

On behalf of the green NGOs participating in the 6th Meeting of the Parties to the UN’s Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, in Hyderabad, India (regulatng the cross-bundary movement of GMOs), I am introducing the following statement at the Wednesday morning plenary:

We have learned yesterday of the death of Barry Commoner–a great American scientist and, as the New York Times called him, the “lifeguard” of Planet Earth–this past Sunday, in New York City.

One of the first individuals to push for a greater involvement of scientists and other technical workers with society’s problems, he co-founded the Scientists Institute for Public Information in 1963 to provide relevant information to journalists and citizen activists. This effort to help empower citizens increased the quality and authenticity of public decision-making. Citizens were thus emboldened to become watchdogs, monitoring governmental and corporate activities and joining collectively to correct them; he insisted that civic society had the right to demand accountability. Commoner’s critique of capitalism’s heedless pursuits of profits regardless of external cost had a profoundly moral basis. He saw social justice concerns linking environmentalism, gender equality, issues of racial harmony, controlling militarism.

In our own field of biosafety, Commoner was, in the words of the Times, “a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause”. He was associated with the Council for Responsible Genetics, the world’s first NGO to take up the issues of genetic engineering (in the 1980s). In February of 2002, he authored one of the most profoundly important articles for laypeople on the subject of genetic engineering, “Unraveling the DNA myth: The spurious foundation of genetic engineering” (Harper’s Magazine)which exposed “the Central Dogma” that somehow DNA was solely determinative of an organisms life.

In 1970 at the time of the first Earth Day, Time magazine featured him on its cover as the “Paul Revere of Ecology,” referring to the American Revolutionary who warned citizens of danger from approaching British troops. Yes, Commoner sounded some of the first alarms over biosafety; we in the NGO community remember him with pride as we continue to respond to threats to the Earth’s well-being.

Phil Bereano
Prof Emeritus
Uiversity of Washington
& Washington Biotechnology Action Council

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Filed under Events, Genetic Engineering, Green Economy, Media

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by | 2012-09-26 · 14:36

KPFK Sojourner Truth Earth Segment and Earth Minute: Occupy Monsanto and resistance to REDD+ in Chiapas

KPFK Sojourner Truth Earth Segment: Kathleen Logan Smith of Missouri Coalition for the Environment

Interview begins at 7:06: http://archive.org/details/Sojournertruthradio092012

Kathleen Logan Smith, Executive Director of Missouri Coalition for the Environment, discusses Occupy Monsanto in St. Louis and the week of actions targeting Monsanto on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall St.

Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with KPFK’s Sojourner Truth show for weekly Earth Minutes every Tuesday and Earth Segment interviews every Thursday.

KPFK Sojourner Truth Earth Minute: Amidst opposition, governors meet in Chiapas to discuss REDD+

KPFK Sojourner Truth show: Updates from Tar Sands Blockade

KPFK Sojourner Truth show followed up Tuesday with Ron Seifert, who was featured on last week’s Earth Segment, about new developments around the ongoing Tar Sands Blockade in East Texas, which is using direct action to prevent the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Continue reading →

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Earth Minute, Earth Radio, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Genetic Engineering, Green Economy, Indigenous Peoples, REDD, Tar Sands

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by | 2012-09-06 · 09:00

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.

Continue reading →

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20

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by | 2012-08-29 · 15:00

Rainforest Roulette? – new briefing on REDD and markets from Rainforest Foundation UK

By Chris Lang, August 29, 2012.  Source: redd-monitor

A new briefing by the Rainforest Foundation UK argues against creating an international carbon market to finance REDD. The briefing is released just before a UN meeting in Bangkok, that will discuss potential options for financing REDD.

The policy briefing, which is available below, is structured around five main critiques of trading forest carbon:

1. It is highly questionable whether a forest carbon market will reduce the cost of tackling climate change or generate billions for forest protection.

2. The proposed forest carbon market is distorting ‘readiness’ preparations for REDD so that they are more focused on creating a tradable asset than outcomes that are beneficial for forests, forest peoples and biodiversity.

3. The ownership of forest carbon – the underlying asset of the proposed market – is contested and unclear, and its trade is particularly susceptible to fraud.

4. Potential REDD emissions reductions credits may not represent genuine reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, due to inflated baselines and leakage. Trading them in an offset market could lead to increased total global carbon emissions, and prolong existing heavily polluting activities.

5. Alternative financing options and approaches exist and are viable.
Continue reading →

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Filed under Carbon Trading, Climate Change, False Solutions to Climate Change, Forests, Green Economy, REDD, UNFCCC, World Bank

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by | 2012-07-26 · 15:30

Audio: KPFK Sojourner Truth show Earth Segment on Quebec’s Plan Nord and Innu opposition

Keith Brunner of Gears of Change discusses the Plan Nord, a massive development plan for northern Quebec that includes dams, mines and other industrial development.  He also discusses the opposition to this plan by the Innu People who live in the region, and a delegation of Innu that are coming to Burlington, VT to protest the New England Governors’ conference, where Quebec’s Premier will also attend.

Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with KPFK’s Sojourner Truth show for weekly Earth Minutes every Tuesday and Earth Segment interviews every Thursday.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Earth Radio, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Hydroelectric dams, Indigenous Peoples

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by | · 10:12

La Via Campesina at Rio+20: The people of the world say “No to the Green Economy”

For a week throughout the People’s Summit, Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant farmers, mobilized in Rio de Janeiro to say “No to the Green Economy” and to reinvigorate the process of building new alliances thanks to plenaries, social movements’ assemblies, street demonstrations to show the real needs and aspirations of our peoples.

Download the article in PDF format.

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20, Solutions

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by | 2012-07-24 · 12:40

Three responses to Bill McKibben’s new article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”

The following three pieces, by Anne Petermann, Dr. Rachel Smolker, and Keith Brunner were written in response to Bill McKibben’s new article in Rolling Stone magazine, titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math: Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – make clear who the real enemy is.”

The System Will Not be Reformed

Response by Anne Petermann

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.

While the article is full of facts and figures and the future they portend, it falls into several traps common to US-based environmentalists, which undermine its movement-building objective.

The first and most obvious trap is relying on math to mobilize a movement. Environmentalists, often worried about attacks on their credibility, or afraid they will be labeled “emotional” by industry, tend to focus on statistics, mathematical analyses and hard science to make their case.  Unfortunately statistics like “565 Gigatons or 2,795 Gigatons” do not inspire passion.

While McKibben is focusing on Gigatons and percentages and degrees Celsuis, however, corporations like Shell are running multi-million dollar ad campaigns with TV commercials that feature families having fun, hospitals saving lives, children getting good educations, because of fossil fuels.  Coal = energy security; natural gas = maintaining the American way of life.  And as Dr. Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch points out below, some of these very same companies are moving into the bioenergy realm–wreaking yet more havoc on communities and ecosystems in the name of supposedly “clean, renewable energy.”  They are playing both sides of the field in the effort to ensure Americans do not feel their way of life is in any way threatened–ensuring them that they can have their cake and eat it too.  For while China may have surpassed the US in total annual carbon emissions, the US still leads, by far, the per capita release of CO2 emissions.

Continue reading →

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Rio+20

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